Journal of Design History Vol. 19 No.

doi:10.1093/jdh/epl001

The Form of Socialism without Ornament

Consumption, Ideology, and the Fall and Rise of Modernist Design in the German Democratic Republic
Eli Rubin
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Industrial designers who inherited the Bauhaus legacy experienced a dramatic reversal of fortunes in the socialist German Democratic Republic. The height of the Stalinist era in the Soviet Bloc, 19501953, meant a near complete shutdown of modernist and functionalist design and architecture. However, modernist designers found a niche later as the East German economy needed to mass-produce goods without sacricing quality and with a particular modern appeal, in order to keep up with the shifting and competitive context of the Cold War and to satisfy the postwar generation of East German consumers. Eventually, heirs of Bauhusler Mart Stam, such as Martin Kelm, found their way into positions of considerable power in the economic planning bureaucracy. The strange conuence of modernist designers and post-Stalinist socialism leads to one of the central questions of the article: is modern design at least partiallyinherently well-suited for the socialist command economy?
Keywords: consumer productsEast GermanyfunctionalismkitschornamentPlanned Economy

In 1950, less than a year after the founding of the German Democratic Republic, the industrial designer Mart Stam, who had studied at the Dessau Bauhaus in the 1920s and 1930s, returned to East Berlin to found the Institute for Industrial Design at the College of Applied Art in Berlin-Weissensee1. Like many others who held left-wing views before the war, Stam saw in the newly founded socialist republic a chance to build the kind of utopia that had informed his design philosophy as a member of the Bauhaus. Along with many others in the socialist intelligentsia, including the playwright Bertold Brecht, he was soon to be deeply disillusioned by the Stalinist reality of the GDR. His aesthetic vision of egalitarian, functional modernism was shared by many of his students, and although he left the GDR, many of them stayed, in limbo. Twenty years later, these same students, who

had stayed true to Stams original vision, found themselves in positions of considerable economic and political power as industrial designers, with profound inuence over the production of consumer goods and architecture and thus the aesthetic meaning of everyday life in East Germany. The intervening twenty years, from 1952 to 1972, are the focus of this article, and it is my contention that the initial downfall and the subsequent rise of a Bauhaus-informed design philosophy in the planned economy of East Germany speaks as much to an understanding of East Germany as it does to the nature of the Bauhaus legacy.2 When Stam returned, the edgling East Germany was still largely a product of Soviet military occupation. In the previous ve years since the end of the war, Soviet occupation authorities had been eager to suppress anything that referred aesthetically to 155

The Author [2006]. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Design History Society. All rights reserved.

Eli Rubin

German nationalism, especially art and architecture that was informed by vlksich sensibilities. In this context, many former Bauhusler were welcomed back to East Germany. At the same time that Stam arrived in the GDR, other former Bauhusler or designers who had worked or studied at the Bauhaus or the related Deutscher Werkbund before the war were filtering back to East Germany. Marianne Brandt, who was briey leader of the metal workshop at the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau and who worked with Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius from 1928 to 1929, arrived rst in Dresden at the College of Visual Arts in 1949 and then two years later moved to Stams Institute of Industrial Design as a designer and lecturer.3 Franz Ehrlich, who studied and worked at the Bauhaus in Dessau with the artist El Lissitzky, and worked on designs with Gropius, Poelzig and Mies van der Rohe, found his way back to Dresden to help plan the reconstruction of the city. Ehrlich had been arrested in 1934 for high treason and had spent the entire 12 years of the Third Reich in various incarcerations, from Buchenwald to a disciplinary battalion at the end of the war.4 Selman Selmanagic, originally from Yugoslavia, who studied architecture and woodwork with Ludwig Hilbersheimer and Mies van der Rohe at the Dessau and Berlin Bauhaus from 1929 to 1933, and who worked for the anti-fascist resistance during the war as an employee of the state lm studio UFA, moved to Hellerau to become one of the main designers there.5 Horst Michel, an interior architect and freelance designer since the 1920s, who had not formally studied or worked at the Bauhaus but who had worked with Bruno Paul from 1929 to 1933, in 1951 founded and led the Institute for Interior Design at the College of Architecture and Construction in Weimar.6 And nally, there was Karl Mller, who had not formally worked with any of the main Bauhaus or CIAM gures such as Paul, Gropius, or Mies van der Rohe, but who had advocated serial, reproducible design for metal products since the 1930s. Mller had been a professor of metal design at the College for Art and Design at the Burg-Giebichenstein in Halle. The Burg, as it came to be called, would be the focal point of design in the GDR, although through out the Third Reich and the early years of the GDR it remained a small school mostly devoted to traditional arts and crafts, at which Mller had been somewhat of an outsider.7 It was his continued

presence, as will be discussed below, that would provide a crucial bridge between the past and the future of design in the GDR. As these designers and architects scattered throughout the GDR, they conglomerated around these four poles: Mart Stams Institute of Industrial Design in Berlin-Weissensee,8 the Burg school in Halle, Horst Michels Institute for Interior Design in Weimar,9 and Dresden where a number of designers including Brandt were based.10 In the early years of the GDR, almost all design was being practised at educational institutions such as these, and almost all in these four places.11 However, these designers, architects and artists were largely without any real power when it came to control of the economic means of production. Virtually none of the SAGs (Sowjietisch Aktiengesellschaft, or Soviet state-owned factories), later called VEBs (Volkseigene Betrriebe, or Peoples Own Factory, factories run by the East German state) employed product designers. This meant that decisions on product design were made mostly by workers and engineers, who were more concerned with solving technical problems of production rather than any particular aesthetic or cultural agenda, and the early products of East German industry attested to its total lack of concern for the consumer. The heirs of the Bauhaus, the Bauhusler, were limited largely to putting on exhibitions, such as the one that Stam organized in 1952 at his newly founded Institute dedicated to displaying what he considered to be kitsch, objects of poor taste churned out by modern industrial means for cheap gain.12 Stams real legacy in East Germany, however, was not exhibitions, but rather the cadre of students he trained, such as Martin Kelm, Gnter Reissmann and Albert Krause.13 These students were schooled in the aesthetic of modern functionalism, or cool rationalism as Stam termed it, and taught how to blend modern style with an overriding concern for mass production and modern technology. Nonetheless, Stams students had to endure several years of ofcial hostility towards their design ideas. The rapidly deepening crisis of the cold war in the early 1950s put an end to Stam and his new class of students ideas about developing a modern, functional style. By 1953, the East German communist party, the SED, had launched a propaganda campaign against West Germany, which the SED claimed was

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an Americanized puppet of international monopoly capitalism. A central part of this propaganda campaign was an attempt to prove to East and West Germans that the GDR was the true or authentic Germany. This attempt ruled out any cultural embrace of international, cosmopolitan or modernist trends, especially in art, architecture and design. Kurt Liebknecht, head of the East German architectural association, or DBA, led a vicious assault on what he and other Party elites called formalism, which was in reality any art, architecture or design resembling the Bauhaus or the CIAM.14 This attack had begun at the 3rd Party Congress of the SED in 1950, when the Party proclaimed that formalism was foreign to the people (volksfremde) and even hostile to the people (volksfeindlich), that the Bauhaus style was international and cosmopolitan and a weapon of imperialism.15 Formalism, they ofcially declared, was form without ornament. Instead, anti-formalists declared that art, architecture and design in East Germany should draw upon past German styles, in a way that served the workers and the farmers. Their slogan was socialist in content, national in form. Even the term industrial design itself was taboo, and Mart Stam was compelled to change the name of his school from the Institute of Industrial Design to the Institute of Applied Art.16 Cultural work in East Germany ought to imitate Rococo, baroque, renaissance, Chippendale (although for reasons never made clear, not Biedermeier).17 Rather than conceiving of East Germany as a chance to build a new society, the Party at this point conceived of the goal of their ideology as returning the cultural heritage of Germany back to the workers and the farmers, inging open the doors of the palaces and art museums and aristocratic salons to those who had been oppressed and exploited by the owners of this heritage for so long. This was in large part a point of view inherited from the nineteenth-century Socialist movement. To discredit the Bauhaus and West Germany, Liebknecht and his allies pointed to the fact that the Bauhaus legacy in West Germany was linked to the United States and its cultural foreign policy after the war. The Bauhaus and the CIAM had been elements of the German past favoured by the US occupation authority; they represented precisely the kind of internationalist liberalism from the Weimar era that the United States wanted to retrieve from the

German past, as evidenced by the American High Commands joint underwriting of the Ulm Institute, the successor to the Dessau Institute stranded on the eastern side of the border.18 In addition, many of the former Bauhaus members, or Bauhusler, most famously van der Rohe, had emigrated to the United States where their ability to transfer a modernist vision of architecture satised the demand for cost-effective mass architecture with a dose of sophistication, such as van der Rohes Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. The CIAM and Bauhaus styles tted the needs of American capitalism, though much of the West German design discourse at Ulm or among the members of the West German Design Council made it clear that they viewed American mass production as particularly corrosive.19 Nonetheless, the connections between former Bauhusler or modernists and the great imperialist class enemy, the United States, was easy enough to draw for the East German Party leaders. Architecture was a particular target for the antiformalists because of its high visibility to visitors from the West as well as because it posed the chance to reect the industrial and material superiority of socialism.20 The Stalinallee project, begun in 1951, which was led largely by Soviet architects and intended to show West Berliners the ability of communism to quickly marshal resources in the service of magnicent and dominating architectural projects, soon came to be the dening statement of this early anti-formalist vision. The anti-formalists, led by Liebknecht, rejected pure functionalism in apartment design, the degeneration (Entartung)21 of formalism, and the inhumanity and complete break with national heritage that this style entailed. The verdict from the DBA also criticized the Bauhaus-inuenced Deutscher Werksttten in Hellerau, a furniture design and production factory, because function cannot be the single determining element in furniture design. They are building, as before, simple, cold, cubist (kastenartige) furniture .22 Furthermore, the international style of rectangular, efcient, prefab housing blocks going up in West Germany in the 1950s provided a clear example of what the antiformalists in the Party and the DBA did not want in the GDR. Such an architectural development broke with the national tradition, proving that it was the FRG that was the inauthentic state, as Ulbricht himself thundered. 23 At the Moscow

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All Unions Building Conference in 1954, Ulbricht claimed that the box-homes that are being built in West Berlin, Frankfurt am Main, in Stuttgart and Hamburg were based on the American model, this fact made clear West Germanys role as an American protectorate, even in the area of housing construction.24 This cultural deep freeze forced Stam back to the Netherlands at the end of 1952,25 and many of his students migrated to ideological ghettos such as the Burg-Giebichenstein school of art and design in Halle or the Institute of Interior Design in Weimar where they existed far from the centre of economic, political and cultural decision-making in Berlin. Yet, at the same time that this reaction was reaching its apex, two simultaneous crises developed in the GDR which would lead to the declining influence of Liebknecht and his allies by showing how out of touch their cultural vision was with the realities facing the Party. The rst of these crises was a deep and systemic housing crisis in East Germany, resulting from the physical and economic devastation of the war. In 1954, at the same Moscow conference where he had denounced cubist architecture, Ulbricht promised to build 100,000 apartments by 1959. By 1955, however, it was clear that this was an impossible goal; the housing crisis could not be solved using the present architectural and design aesthetic. The Stalinallee model was far too expensive, there were not enough of the building materials used, such as marble and hardwood, and even the labour was lacking.26 By 1956, Nikita Khruschev, now in power in the USSR, famously proclaimed that the socialist housing industry needed to nd ways to build better, faster and cheaper.27 That same year, the ban on formalism was ofcially lifted, and the Ministry for Construction in the GDR started turning to the very formalists that the Party had denounced a few years prior, to help them build functionalist, no frills housing blocks. Among these was Gerhard Kosel, a former student of Bauhaus architects Bruno Taut, Ernst May and Hans Poelzig who had pioneered functionalist, modern mass housing in the 1920s and 1930s. Kosel would soon take over the leadership of the DBA from Liebknecht. The switch to serially-produced, modern housing blocks worked wonders for the GDRs housing programme. Initial attempts at the programme, begun in the town of Hoyerswerda,

were so successful that by 1959 the Peoples Chamber (Volkskammer28) passed a resolution calling for the construction of a minimum of 100,000 apartments annually. This resolution then became the basis of the housing programme of the third FiveYear-Plan (which subsequently became the SevenYear-Plan, 19581965), which called for a total of 750,000 apartments to be built by 1965, covering the entire housing needs of all citizens in the GDR.29 Most of the apartments would be built as settlements (Siedlungen) in prefabricated satellite cities, mostly in rural farmland surrounding the decaying city centres. A second event dramatically shook the foundations of the GDRthe uprising of 17 June, 1953. The uprising consisted mainly of workers upset with high work quotas and a low standard of living, and the irony of workers revolting against a state run by a workers Party shocked and embarrassed the SED leadership to its core. Until that point, the SED had conceived of the people as existing for the statethe uprising caused a complete change, leading the SED to see the state as existing for the people, especially in terms of providing a higher standard of living, including consumer goods. From that point on East Germany left Stalinism and began a transformation to what historian Konrad Jarausch calls the welfare dictatorship.30 By the Fifth Party Congress in 1958, General Secretary Ulbricht was staking the success of German communism on creating a consumer economy to rival the so-called economic miracle in West Germany. He boldly, and wrongly it turned out, predicted that East Germany would surpass West Germany in per-capita consumption by 1961.31 The two trends, mass-produced block housing and increased consumer goods production, crossed paths in the area of furniture and house wares, because along with new and modern apartments, East German citizens were going to need to buy things with which to furnish them. The traditional aesthetic of furniture, whether imitative of baroque, rococo or Grunderzeit, was thoroughly impractical for these new apartments. There was no way to turn out hundreds of thousands of furniture units to keep up with the production of apartments by relying on a craftbased production model. The design of the new furniture had to be modern, both for the practical needs of mass production, but also to t the spirit of the new apartments. These had been scientifically designed, each room calculated for precisely how

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much space an average family would need, the kitchens designed for supreme efciency, drawing from Grete Lihotzkys original Frankfurt Kitchen. The apartment models even bore technological sounding names, such as Q5 or the most common, P2these were machines for living, as Le Corbusier had originally envisioned, which happened to t nicely with the needs of the socialist economy. Antique or historicized furniture and domestic objects simply would not t; they belonged to another time, and another economy. The former Bauhusler Selman Selamangic and Franz Ehrlich provided the modern socialist apartment with their model of functional, multipurpose, space-saving furniture that they had designed at the VEB Deutsche Werksttten in Hellerau. Initially denounced as cubism and degenerate by Party leaders, the Hellerau furniture exploded in popularity, once introduced in the early 1960s. People wrote in to magazines, government bureaus and television stations asking how they could get Hellerau furniture. The streamlined, functional furniture was not only a matter of aesthetic or functional preference, however; because its design was so basic, Hellerau was able to streamline production as well, reducing their number of models from 80 to 5, producing far more for far less than traditional furniture makers. By 1960, Hellerau designed furniture was hailed in the press, with headlines such as every 21 minutes a living room32 fulfilling Khrushchevs dictate to produce better, cheaper, faster. The Hellerau furniture sets, including the most popular, named intecta, became so widespread as to be synonymous with everyday life in the GDR, and the model was copied throughout the Eastern bloc, especially the dual function sleeper sofas and shelf-wall units called Schrankwnde. The illustration shows the variability of what were essentially the same pieces. Also, the wood used was all pressed wood laminated with polyester resin. These were the three basic colours and styles available to GDR citizens [1].33 The rush to produce consumer goods did not full the bombastic promise that Ulbricht had made, and one reason the GDRs economy, termed Volkswirtschaft (peoples economy)34 ran into problems was that it suffered from an inefcient use of resources. This inefciency was of course exacerbated by the lack of materials, owing to the embargo against the communist bloc. There was not enough alumin-

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Fig 1. Photo spread of intecta furniture set (Kultur im Heim 19685, p. 5)

ium, cotton, rubber, steel and especially natural wood. To some degree, the regime tried to solve this with a massive investment in synthetics, called the Chemistry Programme, begun in 1958, which sought to synthesize what it could not nd naturally. Plastics, especially, became an omnipresent feature of life in the GDR, from polyester clothes, which most people wore, to plastic laminate used for most of the oors and surfaces in the new modern apartments. Plastics represented a major way for industrial designers to participate in creating a new aesthetic, as design Horst Redekers pamphlet Chemistry Brings Beauty from 1959 argued.35

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Enter the Bauhaus-informed industrial designers who had been languishing in forgotten corners of the country such as Halle and Weimar: for example, former Stam students Martin Kelm and Gnter Reissmann. In their years of ideological exile, Kelm, Reissmann and others such as Manfred Heinzte and Albert Krause had taken up positions as faculty members at the school of art and design in Burg Giebichenstein in Halle. Kelm and Reissmann founded their own auxiliary institute, the Institute for Design and Development, in a small abandoned courtyard in a crumbling building in Halle, more a bare bones studio than anything else. 36 There Reissmann and Kelm developed a number of designs for industrial, mass-produced household items, from silverware to kitchen appliances to vases and many others. Their designs were notable not only for their aesthetic message of form that followed function, but of the care with which they took to incorporate into their designs their idea of where the modern socialist economy and society were heading [2].37

Fig 2. Sprelacart (a polyester-laminate-surfaced wardrobe), on display in the P2 in East Berlin. The title reads Glimpse into the Future (Kultur im Heim, 19653, p. 40)

It was Reissmann who made the rst public breakthrough of functionalism in consumer objects for everyday use, presenting a set of silverware stripped of all reference to baroque or rococo, at the 4th German Art Expo in Dresden in 1958. While other areas of the exposition, namely in painting or sculpture, still reected the cheap imitation of past styles, Reissmanns silverware was a bold statement not only on how East Germans were going to be eating but on a major shift in the very raison detre of East Germany and the communist world: rather than redistributing the spoils of the past, a new world was going to be built, and the foundation of that new world was to be economic rationalism. The Art Exposition provided crucial feedback from consumers and visitors concerning what kind of aesthetic and material world they wanted for a government that had no market mechanism to gauge what consumers desired. The responses to Reissmanns pieces were overwhelmingly positive, as were the responses to other functionalist pieces at later Exhibitions, such as a set of cylindrical porcelain vases designed by Burg School designer Hubert Petras, presented at the V Art Exhibition in 1962. When these pieces were denounced as formalistic by the ofcial Party organs, the Party had to register a tide of angry letters sent in by ordinary East Germans defending functionalist modernism as exactly what they wanted and needed.38 It was Kelm, however, who took full advantage of this happy conuence of aesthetic modernism and economic rationalization and modernization. In 1962, four years after starting the Institute for Design and Development, he returned to Berlin to found the Central Institute for Design, an advisory body within the Ministry of Culture. The Ministry of Culture had no ability to control economic production in East Germany, but it did confer ofcial government status on Kelm, and the Central Institute was the rst ofcial government body dedicated to industrial design. The Central Institutes agship journal, form + zweck (form and purpose) became the font of design philosophy in the GDR, and sought to advance the cause of aesthetic functionalism as a solution to the Volkswirtschaft and the larger project of socialism.39 The connection between modernist design and the project of state socialism in East Germany was fundamental, as Kelm argued in form + zweck. The goal of producing a modern consumer society under socialism was neither crass production according

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to the uneducated whims of the market, as was the case (he believed) under capitalism, nor the raw provisioning or quota-fullment of the economic planning bureaucracy in the GDR. Rather, industrial designers, guided by the basic ideas of the Bauhaus, needed to be part of the economic planning apparatus in order to create a new socialist personality through the aesthetic meaning of the consumer world of everyday life. In his dissertation The Meaning of the Design of Industrial Products in the Developed Social System of Socialism Kelm stated that by simply producing for material needs Consumption in socialism is not simply a matter of needing something and getting it, but rather a process by which the socialist personality is created40 (authors emphasis). Kelm used his belief that functionalism aided the Volkswirtschaft to work the levers of power inside the Party. Kelm enlisted the help of Gnther Mittag, the Secretary of Economics in the SEDs Central Committee and one of the highest-ranking members of the Politburo. Serving as Kelms dissertation committee Chair, Mittag argued to his Party comrades that Kelm was advancing no less than a recreation of the aesthetic meaning of everyday life that would contribute to the creation of the new socialist personality. Mittag vouched for Kelms Party credentials, claiming that the work of the Central Institute for Design was in keeping with the dictates of the 7th Party Congress. Mittag argued to the other members of the Central Committee and the Politburo that Kelms dissertation was in fact more genuinely in keeping with Lenins ideas about how to create the socialist personality than any previous consideration of consumption and product design in the GDR [3].41 Kelm used the Central Institute to provide Mittag with numerous studies showing the benecial effect on the economy that occurred when designers were present in VEBs and had some control over the economic decision-making process. A series of plastic, stackable trays designed by Burg School and Central Institute designer Hans Merz in 1959 had proved to be very popular indeed, and provided some of the evidence Kelm needed to persuade Mittag to take up the cause of industrial design with the all-powerful Ministers Council. Kelm was able to show Mittag that the plastic trays, designed for schools, ofces, restaurants, the military and even home use, had risen in sales from 773,000 Marks in 1959 to 2.3 million Marks in 1963. More importantly, the trays proved

competitive for export, rising from 33,800 to 62,900 in exported units between 1960 and 1963, earning its producer, VEB Auma, special favour with the regime.42 With the power of a heavyweight such as Gnther Mittag backing him and his ideas, Kelm and his Central Institute could exert considerable inuence over other branches of the government, for example, having multiple laws passed requiring all VEBs to employ designers.43 The inuence of the Central Institute, and Kelm, grew greater in 1965, when it was moved from the Ministry for Culture to the German Ofce for Measurement and Product Testing, or DAMW. This shift was far more signicant than it may initially appear. The DAMW was a direct part of the powerful Ministers Council, and it had legal control over what goods could be made and what could not. This was more than inuence; this was control. Kelm and his allies from the ideological ghetto in Halle now had the power to reject certain products, ostensibly because of poor quality, but also because they did not conform to the design aesthetics of the Central Institute. As a member of the DAMW, and thus the Ministers Council, Kelm now had power over other ministers of the economy, and was elevated to the position of State Secretary, making him almost untouchable by any aesthetic criticism. Kelms elevation was the spearhead of a drawing together of industrial designers and the economic planning apparatus. This drawing together intensied yet further once Ulbricht was replaced in 1972 with Erich Honecker, who was much closer to Kelm personally (partially because Kelm was married to Honeckers personal secretary.) That same year the Central Institutes name was changed to the Ofce of Industrial Design, completing its transition from an institute, only partially empowered, to an actual legal branch of the economic planning apparatus. The nal coup was in June 1973 when a law was passed by the Ministers Council which required all factories not only to hire designers, but to outsource their industrial designing work only to the Ofce for Industrial Design.44 The result of this drawing together of power in the hands of former Burg and Berlin-Weissensee designers was that a single aesthetic vision of modern industrial design in the service of the socialist planned economy was enforced throughout the Volkswirtschaft, at least where the bureaucracy functioned as it was

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Fig 3. The kitchen as a machine for living in East Germany: the Ratiokcke modern kitchen, one of the more impressive achievements of modern industrial design and economic planning in the GDR. (Kultur im Heim 19681, p. 4)

supposed to and did not succumb to intransigence and inertia. The rival design and artists group to the Central Institute/Ofce for Industrial Design, the VdBK, the Union of Visual Artists, which had maintained more of a focus on traditional handicrafts and usually distanced itself from industrial mass production, found itself completely out of power. Individual artists and members of the VdBK were forced to supplicate at the ofces of the Ofce of Industrial Design for a licence even to seek contracts through the Ofce, often to no avail. By the mid

1970s, the formalists, mostly former students of Mart Stam and other Bauhusler, once on the receiving end of the anti-formalists totalitarian control over the economy and much of the cultural sphere, now held a similar degree of power [4]. It is worth considering, nally, what this kind of power meant. The planned economy of socialist satellites such as East Germany was not airtight by any means. In many industries the traditional sentiment for handicrafts or kitschy knick-knacks resisted the Ofce of Industrial Designs vision, as did the need

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Fig 4. A polystyrene watering can, by Dresden and Berlin-Weissensee student Klaus Kunis, a ubiquitous piece of everyday design in the GDR in the 1960s, mass produced at the VEB Glas-bijouterie in Zittau

to export to Western countries for hard currency, where the demand was for unique or traditional goods from Saxony or Thuringia, such as rococo Meissen porcelain, pre-dating the GDR.45 In addition, even though the Ofce of Industrial Design was able to exert so much control over the production bureaucracy in the GDR, the bureaucracy itself was terribly dysfunctional, often unable to translate designs into products, and the ever deepening economic crises of the socialist bloc after the mid 1970s meant that options for design and production were ever more limited in the GDR. Still, what power these designers had was considerable. Many of their designs became omnipresent xtures in the everyday life of the GDR during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Many former East Germans still have these products in their P2 apartments to this day. The Hellerau furniture sets are a prime example of this, as are the modern kitchens, the Ratiokche designed as part of the factory for living, replete with scratch resistant plastic surfacing [3]. What lay behind this drive for aesthetic control? Was Martin Kelm simply a megalomaniac, or was there more to the rise of modern design in the GDR? Part of the answer lies in the connections that East German industrial designers drew between kitsch, the meaning of consumption in a socialist society, and their critique of capitalism. For many designers, not only Kelm, their overriding goal was a battle against kitsch. From the very beginning of modern design in East Germany, at the founding of the Institute of Industrial Design in Weissensee, Mart Stam had

dened his goal as the creation of a new German style, one cleansed of kitsch.46 Kitsch was dened not merely as bad or coarse taste, but as anything that wasted the resources of the Volkswirtschaft.47 That is, porcelain gurines depicting angels or gnomes or other sentimental forms were kitsch, not because angels or gnomes are inherently wrong, but because porcelain was needed for more important, more functionally necessary ends, such as eating wares. Any porcelain plates, however, that were designed in a wasteful way, for example with excessive ornamentation, were also kitsch, including Meissen plates. On countless magazine pages, exhibitions and television shows, designers engaged in the battle against kitsch by attempting to educate East Germans into understanding modern design and why they should not buy kitsch. A more effective route to eliminating kitsch than persuasion was economic controlas many designers noted, if no kitsch is produced, no kitsch can be bought. Gaining control of the DAMW and a seat at the Ministers Council meant that Kelm and his allies could effectively prevent bad, kitschy designs from being produced, and thus prevent people from buying them. After all, if the only things people in the Volkswirtschaft could buy were functionalist, tasteful, useful modern designs, eventually their entire existence would be dened by this aesthetic, and the old vestiges of unwanted tradition would fade as their physical traces disappeared from everyday life. And what then? One might ask if there is not some similar hidden desire among designers in the free market to have that kind of control: after all, if your design vision is worth buying, it is inherently superior to other designs, and as such, would it not be better for everyone if you could control all the furniture or all the desk lamps produced? There was, for many of the Burg and Ofce of Industrial Design members, more than simply the validation of seeing their preferred aesthetic radiate into an aesthetic regime of everyday life at stake in this battle for political and economic power. Breaking citizens of their attachment to sentimental and wasteful things was crucial to their critique of capitalism, which, many believed, thrived on the psychological irrationality and false consciousness of consumers. Making East Germans go cold turkey from their Grunderzeit and baroque furniture and forcing them to adopteven as an acquired taste the Bauhaus-inspired functionalism was for these

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designers a sine qua non of moulding the collective socialist personality and severing all sympathy for the false illusion of capitalism. This connection, between the production of kitsch and capitalisms supposedly sinister hypnosis of the oppressed masses, had been made before after all, by both the Bauhaus and the Frankfurt School.48 The significance of controlling peoples tastes through controlling the availability of certain products is perhaps best highlighted in an interview with several designers and architects on the issue of kitsch and socialism published in Kultur im Heim in 1964. Among those interviewed by the magazines editor, Werner Stterlin, were the architect Jakob Jordan, who participated in a number of the modern housing projects and Burg school member Albert Krause. What makes this particular discussion so fascinating is its linkage of psychoanalysis with a critique of aesthetics in a capitalist society to produce a rationale for the legitimate use of the apparatus of a totalitarian planned economy by industrial designers. Jordan, responding to Stterlins discussion of kitsch, psychology and capitalism, explained the connection between the pathology of taste and the importance of correcting it in a socialist society:
I believe [the existence of kitsch] has much more to do with the capitalist world, measured by the fast development of productive powers in technology and also culture, that disturbed concepts that had previously remained stable. Whereas the technological development rashly raised the material wealth of the society and created leisure possibilities for the people to enjoy [this wealth], it is the duty of the socialist cultural revolution to use this acquired wealth and time for the perfection of human life. Against this there are retarding moments in the form of ingrained habits, mistakenly called needs in many areas but denitely in the area of ones surroundings. The kitsch-need (Kitschbedrfnis) is a symptom of the deformation of the aesthetic consciousness. As long as the cause, the deformation of consciousness is not sublimated (aufgehoben), it will always manifest itself. This is how I explain to myself the existence of kitsch, and I think that one has to dismantle this in order to free the human being from it.49

So Jordan argued that while economic conditions were responsible for this pathology, simply producing correct products would not by itself alter peoples consciousness, but rather that consciousness had to be altered through direct means of education and re-education to overcome the retarding moments

and ingrained habits. For Krause as well, even though taste was determined by use, and use was determined by economic transaction and process, the mind of the consumer needed guidance. He noted that the kitsch drive (Kitschtrieb) is an emotionally based need. And we will need the help of psychologists along with aesthetic experts and cultural scientists. Note here that Jordan was not in any way a member of the Partys old guard, and Krause was not even a member of the Party, yet both of them found little obstacle in sliding from their design philosophy into a critique of the capitalist society of the West that contained little trace of the coerced and formulaic language of the usual Party propaganda. Martin Kelm and others began their careers as designers with little power to inuence the world around them other than through making prototypes, putting them on display, having their designs taught in classes and covered in the press. They ended up as petty tyrants able to change drastically the design of hundreds of thousands of goods with the stroke of a pen from a government ofce. They for the most part belonged to the Party, with exceptions such as Krause. But were they more committed to socialism or to modernism in design? Absolutely, they used socialism as much as socialism used them: the powersthat-were were not committed to the Bauhaus legacy in an aesthetic sense, but they found that in order to establish the kind of modern consumer economy they needed for their regimes own legitimacy, the Bauhaus vision was what they had to turn to. They needed a consumer economy but did not want, and could not afford, their limited resources to be wasted on the whims of fashions and fads, of worthless kitschy trinkets and luxury items. The designers of the Central Institute dovetailed perfectly with this same vision. The larger point to draw from the story of modernist design and architecture in the GDR is that the Bauhaus legacy did not only live on in liberal, democratic and capitalist societies after the Second World War. It lived on in the communist world as well though in somewhat different form, and in fact found itself particularly well suited to the aims of communist dictatorships that sought to shape society through control of economic production and to some extent consumption. Much has been written about the notion of fascist aesthetics, going back to at least Walter Benjamin, but comparatively little has

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considered whether modernism and functionalism had a role in constituting a kind of communist aesthetic, at least as it appeared after the early 1960s. It is the suggestion of this article that at least part of the Bauhaus legacy contained a moment of economic totalitarianism, which provides the key to understanding how Mart Stams disciples rose from enforced obscurity to positions of powerful control in the German Democratic Republic. This is not to conate modernism or functionalism in any way with state socialism. However, the antipathy to uncontrolled mass-production, especially with regard to the proliferation of kitsch, in pre-war capitalism, which formed much of the Bauhaus mission, found new life in the same kind of anti-capitalism during the years of the second German Dictatorship. The strength of conviction concerning the link between taste and morality that lived on in the industrial design community of East Germany was easily translated into the acceptance of totalitarian power over the choices of citizen consumers in the power structure of the command economy.

Appendix of design-related institutions in the GDR

Burg-Giebichenstein College for Art and Design, Halle: applied arts college that produced the core of modernist designers in the GDR, including Kelm, Reissmann, Petras, Krause and several others. Central Institute for Design (Zentralinstitut fr Formgebung): the rst ofcial state design bureau, created as part of the Ministry of Culture in 1963, with Martin Kelm as director. Central Institute for Design (Zentralinstitut fr Gestaltung): the new, more powerful design bureau created when the original was moved from the Ministry of Culture to the DAMW in 1965, making it a branch of the Ministers Council, and making its director Martin Kelm a State Secretary. DAMW: Deutsches Amt fr Messwesen- und Warenprfung (German Ofce for Measurements and Goods Testing). This was an extremely powerful ofce under the Ministers Councilmeaning it answered to no other interests than the most powerful in the state and therefore held sway over individual industriesresponsible for inspecting the quality of industrial production in the GDR. Through the DAMW, the Central Institute-Ofce for Industrial

Design was able to stop production of kitsch by proclaiming it low quality. DBA: Deutsches Bauakademie (German Architectural Academy). This was the state-run architectural association in the GDR, and provided much of the architectural design for state building projects in East Germany. Institute for Design and Development (Institut fr Entwrf und Entwicklung): a small design studio set up in a vacant back courtyard or Hinterhof apartment near the Burg School in Halle by Martin Kelm and Gnter Reissmann in 1958. The Institute produced much of the innovative, modernist work that later became the blueprint for economic planning throughout the GDR. Institute of Industrial Design/Institute of Applied Art, College of Applied Art (Institut industrielle Gestaltung/ Institut angewandte Kunst, Hochschule angewandte Kunst), Berlin-Weissensee: Design institute founded in 1950 at the College of Applied Art in the north-east section of Berlin by Mart Stam, name changed in 1953 when the concept of industrial design was considered politically suspect. Institute for Interior Design, College of Architecture and Construction (Institut fr Innengestaltung an der hochschule fr Architektur und Bauwesen), Weimar founded by former Bruno Paul student Horst Michel in 1951. Ofce of Industrial Design (Amt fr industrielle Formgestaltung): the new name of the Central Institute for Design as of 1972. The change corresponded to a Ministers Council law passed in 1973 requiring all factories to hire industrial designers approved by the Ofce of Industrial Design. The Ofces new status thus gave its director, Martin Kelm, almost dictatorial powers over design aesthetic in the GDR. VdBK: Verband der Bildenden Knstler (Union of Visual Artists). This was the alternative organization to the Central Institute-Ofce of Industrial Design, which remained affiliated with the Ministry of Culture and therefore had little power in economic decision making. Designers who remained in the VdBK generally did not work in modernist and Bauhaus-inspired themes, but focused on folk art and more traditional aesthetics.
Eli Rubin Assistant Professor, Department of History Western Michigan University

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Notes
1 There are a proliferation of East German design-related institutions, governmental as well as academic, mentioned in this article. For reference please see appendix to this article. 2 The most authoritative account of East German industrial design is Heinz Hirdinas Gestalten fr die Serie: Design in der DDR 19491985. Dresden: VEB Verlag der Kunst, 1988. Hirdina was a designer in the GDR at the time, however, and so the book is more of a primary than a secondary source, and despite being a remarkable account has not been translated into English and remains fairly unknown outside Germany, and to some extent within Germany as well. 3 Hirdina, p. 371. For more on Brandt, whose work at the Bauhaus receives less attention that it should, see Klaus Webers exhibition catalogue, Die Metallwerkstatt am Bauhaus. (Published in conjunction with the Ausstellung im Bauhaus-Archiv, Museum fr Gestaltung, Berlin, February 9April 20, 1992. Berlin: Kupfergraben, 1992.) A good source on the history of the Dresden academy in the GDR is Rainer Beck and Natalia Kardinar, eds., Trotzdem. Neuanfang 1947 : zur Wiedererffnung der Akademie der Bildenden Knste Dresden. (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1997). 4 Hirdina, Gestalten, p. 373. 5 Ibid., p. 388. 6 Ibid., p. 383. 7 Johannes Langenhagen, Zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der Sektion Produkt- und Umweltgestaltung im Bereich Produktion in 75 Jahre Burg Giebichenstein 19151990. Beitrge zur Geschichte, ed. Renate Lckner-Bien (Halle: Hochschule fr Kunst und Design, Burg-Giebichenstein, 1990), p. 235. 8 For more on Stam and his return to Weissensee, see Ebert, Hildtrud (ed.) Drei Kapitel Weissensee. Dokumente zur Geschichte der Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weissensee 19461957. Berlin, 1996, as well as Simone Hain, spezisch refomistisch bauhausartig mart stam in der ddr 19481952, form und zweck 1992. 9 The Weimar Institute is not covered in as much depth here as the Berlin-Weissensee and especially the Burg-Giebichenstein Institutes, mainly because the leader of the Weimar Institute, Horst Michel, made his most lasting impact on GDR design nationally, whereas the most important work done by people associated with the Berlin-Weissensee and Burg schools was done in conjunction with the artistic and design communities there. For more on the Weimar school see Institut fr Innengestaltung an der Hochschule fr Architektur und Bauwesen Weimar, ed., Industrieformgestaltung: Beispiele aus der Arbeit des Instituts fr Innengestaltung an der hochschule fr Architektur und Bauwesen Weimar. 10 For more on the Dresden circle, and their response to the formalism debate, see Rainer Beck and Kardinar Natalia (ed.) Trotzdem. Neuanfange 1947. Zur Wiedererffnung der Akademie der bildenden Knste Dresden. (Dresden, 1997). 11 Renate Luckner-Bien, Geschichte und Gegenwart. Die Burg Giebichenstein nach 1958 in Burg Giebechenstein. Die hallesche Kunstschule von den Anfngen bis zur Gegenwart (Halle: Begleitbuch zur Ausstellung Staatliche Galerie Moritzburg Halle, 1993), p. 67. 12 Hirdina, Gestalten, p. 39. 13 Ibid., p. 38.

14 Liebknecht was the nephew of the KPD leader Karl Liebknecht, and although he studied with modernist architect Hans Poelzig before the Nazi takeover, he apparently radically changed his ideas while spending the years 19371945 in the USSR with many other future SED leaders such as Ulbricht. Once the tide turned against his ideology he was replaced as head of the DBA in 1961 by Gerhard Kosel, who was a radical proponent of standardized mass housing. 15 Hirdina, Gestalten, p. 43. 16 Michael Suckow, Industriedesign in Luckner-Bien 75 Jahre, pp. 470471. 17 Hirdina, Gestalten, p. 46. 18 Paul Betts, The Authority of Everyday Objects: A Cultural History of West German Industrial Design (Berkeley; University of California Press, 2004), p. 14. 19 Ibid., p. 10. 20 The most authoritative account of architecture in East Germany is Joachim Palutzkis Architektur in der DDR (Berlin: Riemer, 2000). 21 Petra Gruner, P2 macht das Rennen. Wohnungsbau als soziokulturelles Programm, in Luwig, ed., Tempolinsen und P2, 88. This translation deserves special mention, because Entartung can be translated as degeneration or alienation. In the context of the Nazi cultural programme, it was used specically to refer to art or architecture that had lost touch with traditional Aryan, Nordic or Hellenic-Roman civilization. Anything that was utopian, urban, or excessively modern, whether musical, such as jazz or swing, popular entertainment such as Disney cartoons, or metal and glass architecture, or even at roofs (a fundamental of Bauhaus architecture and criticized by Hitler himself because Nordic roofs had to be slanted, because of snowfall) was judged to be cosmopolitan, Jewish or communist. Such representations of modernity, regardless of how useful they proved to be to capitalism, offended the mystical and holy sense of the Volk held by Nazis and other radical right wing groups in Germany, who saw the architecture, the lifestyle, the fashion, the food, etc. of the Volk as one and the same as the actual eugenic heritage carried by the blood of the Volk. Thus, the term degeneratein the sense of not simply having lost touch with tradition but actually having lost touch with a biological or organic lineagecame to apply to forms of modern architecture that rejected tradition. The Bauhaus was a direct target of the Nazis and the various vlkisch right wing groups who found the so-called formalist or functionalist or even international style to be an abomination. That the Party-backed architects in the DBA attacked the same target, using the same terminology, I think, lends more evidence for an argument that historians need to rethink the relationship between the Third Reich and the GDR, not from a political, but a cultural angle. For an excellent overview of the architecture of the Third Reich see Kathleen JamesChakraborty German Architecture for a Mass Audience (London: Routledge, 2000). 22 Gruner, P2 Macht das Rennen, p. 88. 23 See Jrg Roesler, Politik, konomie und Industriedesign in Ostdeutschland. Deutschland Archiv 28 (1995), p. 1136. 24 Palutzki, Architektur in der DDR, p. 117. 25 See Holger Barth, Thomas Topfstedt et al., Vom Bauknstler zum Komplexprojektanten. Architekten in der DDR. (Erkner: Dokumentenreihe des Institut fr Regionalentwicklung und Strukturplanung, No. 3, 2000).

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26 Gruner, P2 Macht das Rennen, p. 89. 27 Palutzki, Architektur in der DDR, p. 116. 28 The Volkskammer, although its delegates were elected in supposedly democratic elections, was essentially a rubber-stamp congress, and the laws it enacted were usually handed down from the Central Committee or the Politburo. 29 Palutzki, Architektur in der DDR, p. 139. 30 Konrad Jarausch Beyond Uniformity: The Challenge of Historicizing the GDR in Jarausch, ed., Dictatorship as Experience: Towards a Socio-Cultural History of the GDR (New York: Berghahn Books, 1999). 31 Ulbricht in Protokoll der Verhandlungen des V. Parteitages der Sozialistischen Einheitspartei Deutschlands (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1959), p. 68. 32 Alle 21 Minuten ein Wohnzimmer Mbel und Wohnraum 19601, 21. Also Wohnraumkultur trotz Standardisierung? Mbel und Wohnraum 19601, p. 3. 33 Marc Schweska and Markus Witte Revolution aus Tradition? Das Montagembelprogramm Deutsche Werksttten (MDW) in Neue Gesellschaft fr Bildende Kunst, ed., Wunderwirtschaft, p. 82. Also see Betts, The Bauhaus in the German Democratic Republicbetween Formalism and Pragmatism in Jeannine Fiedler and Peter Feierabend, eds. Bauhaus (Knemann Verlag, 1999). 34 The similarity of the term Volkswirtschaft to the term used by the Nazis, Volksgemeinschaft (Peoples Community) is important to keep in mind. Both terms present a kind of collective to which the wills of individual citizens were subordinated. In the case of the GDR, the collective was an economic project, rather than a racial community. This is not to say that political economy did not also play an important role in the Third Reich (or that there was no racism or antiSemitism in East Germany, which there was) and for some the difference between a racially versus an economically based collective is signicant. In both cases, however, the logic of the collective pervaded most aspects of life, and so a common theme of totalitarianism is normally drawn between the Third Reich and the GDR. For the purposes of this article, the needs of the economic collective, the Volkswirtschaft, have an impact on questions of aesthetics, design and architecture, much the same way that the health of the racial community, or Volksgemeinschaft, affected questions of architecture, art and design under Hitler. 35 Redeker, Chemie bringt Schnheit. Berlin: Institut fr Angewandte Kunst, 1959. The term was borrowed from the slogan of the Chemistry Programme, Chemistry Brings Bread, Wealth and Beauty. The Chemistry Programme and the resulting wave of plastics that rolled over the land (as form + zweck editor Jorg Petruschat described the inux of plastic consumer goods in the wake of the Chemistry Programme in the 1960s and 1970s) helped create a momentary consensus among the population that the autarkic economic project of the GDR could deliver a modern, streamlined, consumer society. This thesis is developed more fully in Eli Rubin, Plastics and Dictatorship in the German Democratic Republic: Towards an Economic, Consumer, Design and Cultural History (Ph.D Dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2004) and Rubin, The Order of Substitutes: Plastic Consumer Goods in the Volkswirtschaft and Everyday Domestic Life in the GDR in David Crew, ed. Consuming Germany in the Cold War. See also Ray Stokes, Plastics and the New Society: The German Democratic Republic in the 1950s and 1960s in David Crowley and Susan Reid, Style and Socialism, pp. 6580, and Silvia Rckerts Sprbare Modernegehemmter Fortschritt: Plaste in der Warenund Lebenswelt der DDR in Andreas Ludwig, ed. Fortschritt, Norm, Eigensinn (Ch. Links, 2000) pp. 5373. 36 Suckow, Industriedesign, p. 474. 37 Gnter Reissmann in interview with the author, April, 2002, Berlin. 38 The criticism of Petras cylinders was made by Manfred Hagen in the Party organ Neues Deutschland, see Hagen Hinter dem Leben zurck, Neues Deutschland 10.4.1962. The guest books to the conference were overwhelmed with support for Petras, with comments such as I saw the exhibit of industrial design and liked it. The article from Mr. Hagen is too subjectively colored. He does not take into consideration enough the requirements of industrial form under socialist conditions. See Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfeld (Barch-BL) DR 1 (Ministerium fr Kultur) V. Deutsche Kunstausstellung: Vorbereitung, Durchfhrung p. 81, Bemerkungen zu den Gastbchern. 39 See Jorg Petruschat, Quer: form + zweck in Simone Barck, Martina Langermann and Siegfried Lokatis, eds., Zwischen Mosaik und Einheit (Ch. Links, 1999), pp. 269276. 40 Barch Dahlwitz-Hoppegarten (BarchDH) DY 30/IV A2/2.021/376 Bro Gnther Mittag, Gutachten zur Dissertationsschrift von Martin Kelm Die Bedeutung der Gestaltung industrieller Erzeugnisse im entwickelten gesellschaftlichen System des Sozialismus 3.12.1969, p. 2. 41 Ibid. 42 Barch-BL, Stiftung Archiv der Parteien und Massenorganisationen (SAPMO) DY 30/IV A 2/2.021/366 Bro G. Mittag Bericht zum konomischen Nutzen der Industrieformgestaltung VVB Plastverarbeitung, VEB Auma. 43 An example was the law from 1965 passed by the Ministers Council entitled The Law About the Rights and Duties of the Peoples Own Factories that required all VEBs to employ industrial designers. 44 BarchDH DF 7 82 Press release from Martin Kelm to Pressamt regarding the Ministers Council decision, Massnahmen zur Verbesserung der Arbeit der Ministerium, VVB, Kombinate und Betriebe sowie des Handels fr die Erhhung des Niveaus der Gestaltung industrieller Erzeugnisse. For more on the actual specics of the newly minted Ofce for Industrial Design (AiF) and its achievements after 1972 with its new powers, from Kelms point of view, see Kelm, Designfrderung in der DDR in Amt fr industrielle Formgestaltung, ed., Design in der DDR, (1986?) pp. 1022. Also see Silvia Rckert, Alltag und Kultur in der DDR. Probleme musealer Darstellung (Diplomarbeit, Fachhochschule fr Technik und Wirtschaft Berlin, 11.11.1999), p. 40. 45 See Manuel Schramms excellent book on consumption in Saxony, Konsum und regionale Identitt in Sachsen 18802000: Die Regionalisierung von Konsumgtern im Spannungfeld von Nationalisierung und Globalisierung (Stuttgart; Franz Steiner Verlag, 2003). 46 Hirdina, p. 38. 47 The use of the term kitsch by East German designers is fraught with problems, as is our attempt to understand its usage. The literature and discourse on kitsch is long, as numerous attempts have been made to dene it, and defend it, and in multiple contexts, which have led to a very fragmented sense of what

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kitsch actually is. Drawing off classic works of aesthetic philosophy by Kant and Nietzsche, authors such as Hermann Broch and Ludwig Giesz have attempted to dene kitsch in terms of philosophical notions of aesthetic judgement. Karsten Harries has argued that in fact kitsch is more than bad art, it is bad taste in a moral or ethical sense, and it is this connection that I believe is most helpful here in assessing the role of kitsch in the planned socialist economy of the GDR. Bad taste in an aesthetic sense and bad taste in a moral sense often overlap, for example a fashion outt replete with the skins and furs of endangered species with extremely expensive jewellery to boot, and we often consider this kitsch or gaudy. Here morality, economics, and the praxis of everyday life combine to form a category of aesthetic judgement that is clear to all but the most unaware, often including the person intentionally violating the category. Most discussions of kitsch, however, take place assuming a Western, capitalist context, and Robert Solomons defence of what Harries originally designated sweet kitsch (mawkish, but harmless, art that one might never choose for ones own home but cannot feel threatened by in others) as divorced from ethical considerations is a plausible defence only in a free market society. That is, the question here comes down to whether other peoples aesthetic judgement or lack thereof is in any way a threat to you yourself. If not, it is not an ethical question, merely aesthetic, at which point, as Solomon argues, any disapproval of kitsch becomes elitist, condescending and thus it becomes itself the ethical problem. Obviously, if the kitsch involves the use of endangered wildlife, it remains an ethical question, and one could argue similarly if it contributes to making important religious, cultural or historical concepts empty, such as a plastic Jesus or a plastic Elvis. But in a planned economy, where the purchases of all consumers affect all other citizens, because the collective is essentially an economic collective, a Volkswirtschaft, and aesthetic judgements are driving consumption and thus production and thus the allotment of resources that are to be used ideally for the good of the whole, the personal tastes of each citizen happen to be very much the business of every other citizen, and the state as well. So, Solomons defence of kitsch does not apply here, and the connection of ethics and morality to kitsch is key to understanding why it was of such concern to the state and the industrial designers who worked for the state. For more on the connections between kitsch and aesthetic judgement and ethics and morality, see Ludwig Giesz, Phnomenologie des Kitsches (Munich; Wilhelm Fink Verlag 1971), Karsten Harries chapter on Kitsch in his The Meaning of Modern Art (Evanston; Northwestern University Press, 1968); Hermann Broch, Notes on the Problem of Kitsch in Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste, Gillo Dores, ed. (New York: Universe Books, 1968), Kathleen Higgins, Sweet Kitsch in Matei Calinescu (ed.) Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham; Duke University Press, 1987); Robert Solomon, On Kitsch and Sentimentality in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 491 (1991) pp. 114, Thomas Kulka Kitsch and Art (University Park; Penn State University Press, 1996), Janet McCracken, Taste and the Household: The Domestic Aesthetic and Moral Reasoning (Albany; State University of New York Press, 2001). 48 An excellent example of this critique of kitsch and capitalism can be found in Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimers essay The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception in Adorno and Horkheimer, eds. The Dialectic of Enlightenment, John Cumming, trans. (New York: Continuum, 1991). 49 Was ist eignetlich mit dem Elfenriegen? Eine Runddiskussion der Redaktion Kultur im Heim Kultur im Heim 61968.

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