The pathos of everyday objects: West German industrial design culture, 1945-1965

This dissertation is above all a cultural history of West German industrial design. It attempts to uncover how and why commodity aesthetics emerged as a principal site for articulating a certain West German cultural identity. Indeed, the postwar period gave rise to a new West German "design culture" comprising a vast network of diverse interests, including the state and industry, architects and designers, consumer groups and museums, together with educators and womens' organizations, who all identified design as a vital means of West German economic recovery, social reform and cultural regeneration. Given that it rested at the crossroads of commerce and culture, industry and aesthetics, as well as production and consumption, industrial design became a highly contested site of political struggle precisely because the stakes were nothing less than the very shape and significance of West German modernity.; Of primary importance is that this design culture was not simply concerned with converting design into profitable export revenues, but rather strove to establish a socially responsible West German industrial culture in the wake of Nazism and the war. How and why design became a key crucible for renegotiating past and present remains the heart of this project. The project to define a suitable "Made in West Germany" design iconography was therefore inseparable from the larger Cold War campaign to create a new West German cultural identity as a bulwark against Nazi irrationalism, American commercialism and East German communism. More than merely another installment in the historical intersection of aesthetics and politics, the story behind these allegedly unimportant design products is on closer inspection a complex reconstitution of German modernism itself. Recounting the story of this postwar design culture is then an attempt to indicate the extent to which the contradictions of West German cultural liberalism were inscribed in the very form of its everyday objects.