Plastic hens and Snow White’s coffin
More than 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Vitra Design Museum is showcasing German design from 1949-89. Viewed through the prism of time, both the disuniting elements and the shared features become especially apparent.
Hibou Pèlerin
For many years, Hibou Pèlerin has been winging his way to cultural and historical exhibitions. For the Swiss National Museum’s blog, Pèlerin picks out one or two pearls and showcases them here.
Gehry’s building currently forms the backdrop for a somewhat less glamorous design product which nonetheless also has, in its own way, a signature. We're talking about a petrol blue Trabant car. Unlike Gehry’s architecture, for this vehicle – a downright pitiful specimen from today’s perspective – 1989 was the final curtain call. The fall of the wall and the dissolution of the GDR also meant the end of the road for the unpretentious Trabant. The ‘Trabi’, as the nickname shows, had for years been the virtually unreachable object of the desires of many GDR citizens. It represented a little slice of individual freedom in a state that dominated every aspect of its citizens’ lives.
Von der «Formgestaltung» zum «Design»
Here and there the exhibition organisers also play with ‘(n)ost-algia’ effects, such as brightly coloured GDR plastic eggcups in the shape of hens, and Birkenstock eco-sandals dating from the 1970s. Both are cult items today.
Parallel universes of consumerism in the 20th century
As a result, the historical distance allows both design worlds to appear as varieties of an epochal style that is, as a whole, modernistic. From the vantage point of the smartphone generation, ‘Snow White’s coffin’ has as great a claim to museum-piece status as the GDR Trabi. Both have their roots in a world of yesterday in which ‘design’ was instrumentalised not only for the imperative of utility but also for national, not to say nationalistic, purposes. These days, on the other hand, electronics, sport and luxury item corporations use their polished marketing machinery to establish global trends in no time at all.
Abundance and scarcity
In the Soviet occupation zone from which the German Democratic Republic emerged, in contrast, a bitterer wind was blowing: the Soviet Union exacted compensation with reparations for the losses sustained in the war. This meant that many of the industrial systems, factories and facilities still remaining were stripped down and transported eastwards. Aid here – bloodletting there. This asymmetry was to intensify still further later on. Only where raw materials were concerned did the GDR have the advantage of direct oil supplies from the USSR, which gave the petrochemical industry and especially plastic production a boost. The bitter irony is that in the GDR industrial sector, which otherwise was characterised by shortages and ideological spoon-feeding, there was certainly cutting-edge design. Unfortunately, it rarely percolated down to the country’s own citizens. One example is the clever ‘Garden Egg Chair’ plastic outdoor folding seat, with its pop aesthetic. It was designed for export to the West, to bring in the much-needed foreign currency.
Designing a national identity
While the Federal Republic of Germany adopted the Prussian eagle for its ID card, the GDR had to come up with something new. The ring of rye, hammer and compass (the latter symbolising the intelligentsia) in the nation’s coat of arms and on its coins represented the classes on whose shoulders the state rested, according to socialist doctrine. While the D-mark consisted of a relatively heavy copper-nickel alloy, the Ostmark was minted from the much lighter aluminium. Accordingly, it felt ‘cheaper’ and less inspiring of confidence. The most sparing use of materials, the use of alternative materials – this theme was to continue to dominate ‘design’ in the GDR, with necessity often making people inventive.
