Traveling furniture exhibition 1953

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The 1953 furniture traveling exhibition represented an attempt to establish the socialist planned economy in the furniture industry. It took place as a direct reaction of the GDR party and state leadership to the events of June 17, 1953 .

event

The GDR Ministry of Light Industry was instructed in the summer of 1953 to present a traveling exhibition with modern living room, bedroom and children's room furniture at 25 selected locations and to research the public's opinion on these design studies using a questionnaire.

Class struggle at the kidney table - the background

A referendum on the design of furniture and furnishings in the GDR in the summer of 1953 was - from today's perspective - perhaps the least important topic that the political leadership had to deal with, but the measure corresponded to the state doctrine of the time , a purposeful departure from the bourgeois way of life and western influences.

The campaign started with the traveling exhibition thus had three goals:

  1. the defusing of the highly explosive domestic political situation, which has been accompanied by waves of arrests and reprisals since June 17, 1953, by apparently responding to the demonstrators' demands for more democratic participation, which should also be combined with corresponding foreign propaganda
  2. the overcoming of petty-bourgeois and / or Nazi-specific habits and attitudes through the socialist order of values ​​and a corresponding ideal of beauty in the area of ​​living and functional furniture
  3. the prevention of a (creeping) Americanization of the population ( American way of live ) z. B. also through the adoption of American home furniture and / or design principles in interior design

As early as 1952 in Stalinstadt , the first socialist test- tube town in the GDR, a residential complex with samples of the envisaged socialist living culture was built and given to selected residents for testing and assessment. An observer from the Ministry of Light Industry reported in November 1952 from the EKO's residential area in East Berlin : "That the furniture presented did not meet with unanimous approval, as it was perceived as too delicate, the polished surfaces too sensitive ..." In response to this In the first test series, a nationwide survey was arranged.

In West Germany, the Gelsenkirchen baroque began to establish itself in everyday culture around the same time . This furniture style, rated as bourgeois, decant, should by no means be adopted into socialist living conditions.

Public reactions

With an initial evaluation of the visitor books in Eisenach , the local cultural functionary Artur Büttner established that the presented pieces of furniture from the GDR furniture companies had been received with great satisfaction and interest by the population. The furniture show demonstrates a progressive and socialist furniture design oriented towards human needs, which would now again be based on the classic models - furniture from the heyday of the Renaissance and the Baroque .

Strict departure from the Bauhaus style

The further development of industrial design - known today as the Bauhaus style - in the GDR cultural elite at the time - as the following evaluation of a Munich furniture presentation from 1953 shows.

Designer chair by Arne Jacobsen - 1950

“The first impression you get when faced with furniture like this is that a brain has captured a perhaps contemporary momentum, which then froze in improvisation. Most clearly recognizable in what is presented to the visitor as a “chair”. Comparable, for example, to a poem that begins with iambi of a classic character and ends with knittel verse, translated into the architecture of the “modern space”, it looks like this: Made of fine African wood and too narrow for the inexpressible part of the body, on four raw legs made of aluminum sheet. The formula for this solution is speed + cheap + uncomfortable. An unreasonable expectation that one would only accept with some skepticism, even when exporting to exotic countries. But we too are told that this is the new objectivity, the second after the first died after 1918 so objectively (and obeying the laws of logic). A kind of time style, taking speed into account, paying homage to the fleeting glimpse, only practice and the changeable. There is nothing solid about this seating, not an eye-catcher for the eyes in need of rest, not a hint of the imagination of a real artist. You stay cold, feel factual in the midst of factual matters, stride as if on eggs through a trellis made of glass with which bare-liquid pallet tables are covered, and feel like porcelain in an elephant house. Or the other way around. The legs are so thin, but they carry, they are made of iron. Iron or sheet metal are cold. Aluminum gives the illusion of being in a laboratory. With the sweep of the snobbish wave, this furniture lacks reference to people who have a soul. The tea room looks dead and misappropriated, two chairs made of wood humiliated into a wave shape with iron legs, the pallet table with the same frame and a top made of raw beech. "

- The addiction to the primitive

Web links

References and footnotes

  1. ↑ Thea Schwinge: How do we want and how can we live? Ed .: Kulturbund der DDR , Kreisverband Eisenach. Eisenach 1953, p. 141 f .
  2. ^ Structure West / Structure East - The planned cities Wolfsburg and Eisenhüttenstadt in comparison. In: dhm.de German Historical Museum - Online. Retrieved March 12, 2009 .
  3. ^ A b Artur Büttner: Furniture traveling exhibition one way or another? Ed .: Kulturbund der DDR, Kreisverband Eisenach. Eisenach 1953, p. 168 f .