Günter Höhne (journalist)

Günter Höhne (left) visiting Finland in 1986 with Professor Yrjö Sotamaa.

Günter Höhne (born April 18, 1943 in Zwickau ) is a German journalist and design expert on East German design between 1945 and 1990. Höhne's collection with thousands of objects and archival materials on the history of design in the GDR, which he had compiled over twenty years, was published in the summer of 2012 by of the new collection in the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich .

Life

After Höhne had completed his education as a teacher at the Grossenhain Teacher Training Institute from 1959 to 1962 and then worked as a teacher and school director until 1968, he worked from 1968 to 1979 as an editor and reporter at Radio DDR in Berlin. During this time he studied journalism as a correspondence course at Leipzig University and then got a job as a literary editor at the cultural-political weekly newspaper SONNTAG . Later, from 1984 to mid-1989, he was editor-in-chief of the design journal form + Zweck in East Berlin, published by the Office for Industrial Design (AIF) . Until the AIF was dissolved at the end of 1990, Höhne worked as a design journalist with the German Design Council in Frankfurt am Main , among others . With a series of seminars and workshops he carried out preparatory work for designers from the new federal states for their work under the conditions of the social market economy . After the fall of the Wall , he began working as a freelancer for a Berlin advertising and media agency for a short time, and then worked as an advisor as an editor and department head at the national Berlin daily newspaper Neue Zeit until 1994 when developing various subject areas. After all, he was responsible for architecture and design in the features section until the end . After Neue Zeit discontinued its publication in 1995, Höhne began working as a freelance journalist. Günter Höhne lives in Berlin today .

Design collection

Höhne's design collection consists of more than a thousand objects from the time of the Soviet occupation zone and the GDR. After 1990 he had collected what was exemplary in GDR design and which had become rare in the meantime. It also includes many bequests from well-known GDR designers. Over the years, he has collected almost 18 tons of GDR products that serve as archive material and are shown in Munich. Further parts of his collection are shown in the Grassimuseum Leipzig , in the Werkbundarchiv - Museum der Dinge (Berlin), in the Saxon Industrial Museum ( Chemnitz ), in the Stadtmuseum Halle (Saale) , in the Museum of Thuringian Folklore Erfurt and in the Documentation Center for Everyday Culture of the GDR ( Eisenhüttenstadt ).

Honors

• 1993 Bremen Prize for Design Journalism
• 2007 Honorary Prize of the Lilienthal Design Prize of the State of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania

Publications

• Penti, Erika and Bebo Sher: The classics of GDR design. Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, 2001, ISBN 3-89602-320-9 .
• DDR design. Komet, Cologne 2006, ISBN 3-89836-587-5 .
• DDR design wrapping paper. Komet, Cologne 2007, ISBN 978-3-89836-633-5 .
• Product cult (ur) - The GDR design book. Komet, Cologne 2008, ISBN 978-3-89836-800-1 .
• The big lexicon: GDR design. Komet, Cologne 2008, ISBN 978-3-89836-676-2 .
• The divided form - German-German design affairs 1949–1989. Torch bearer, Cologne 2009, ISBN 978-3-7716-4421-5 .
• GDR design: culture in the home. Komet, Cologne 2013, ISBN 978-3-86941-297-9 .
• DDR design: work, leisure, travel. Komet, Cologne 2014, ISBN 978-3-86941-331-0 .
• Apartments for everyone: From life in a prefabricated building. Komet, Cologne 2014, ISBN 978-3-86941-352-5 .

Web links

• Christa Petroff Bean. on the website Überholt + Unequaled: Designer of the GDR.
• Günter Höhne: GDR Industrial Form - History of East German Design

Individual evidence

1. ^ Biography Günter Höhne ( Memento from March 4, 2013 in the web archive archive.today )
2. ↑ East design expert celebrates web anniversary. In: Free Press. 17th January 2013.
3. ^ Günter Höhne. In: Industrieform DDR. Retrieved October 28, 2016 .