Politics by Design: The German Democratic Republic (GDR)
The ‘Politics by Design’ series explores how political and socio-economic environments influence various forms of design that occur within them.
Background
Looking back nowadays, life in the German Democratic Republic (commonly known as East Germany) is somewhat of an enigma for most people who didn’t actually live there during its existence from 1949 to 1989 under the communist regime of the SED (Socialist Unity Party). A divided Germany was trying to re-build itself after the Second World War, and the relatively secluded GDR — heavily influenced by the USSR — took a very different approach from the West.
Much of what we hear today about the GDR is focused on the secretive state police (the ‘Stasi’) and life for the citizens under constant surveillance. This of course played a direct role in how certain products were designed or modified to accommodate the activities of Stasi members and public informants (more on that later), but the political backdrop of the GDR provides a much broader field of investigation into the everyday objects used by the general public. The social aspirations of the SED to become a self-sufficient manufacturing and cultural powerhouse, combined with economic limitations and a lack of supply due to an early restriction on imports and exports, resulted in unique challenges and opportunities for designers at the time.
Designers also had to be wary of assimilating Western forms too closely or any school of thought which could be construed as a “weapon of imperialism”, and which would therefore be rejected by the state who controlled all types of production. One of the earlier clear examples of this was the sudden dismissal of Bauhaus designer and architect Mart Stam in 1952 from his post as Director of the Art Academy in Berlin-Weissensee. All designers were under strict scrutiny in their work and the consequences for dissent or undermining the prevailing ideology were serious, resulting in imprisonment or worse.
Throughout the entire GDR period, the outputs of industrial design seem to have originated from a constant struggle between a state-imposed requirement to design within quite specific constraints and a set of consumers who — due to limited choice or availability and questionable product quality— began to express stronger preferences for the Western market ethos that was so anathema to Eastern ideals at the time. A new focus on producing goods for export and the creation of the Office for Industrial Design (AiF) in 1972 changed the design landscape in the latter half of the GDR era, though design decisions were still made centrally and led by ideology and the socialist planned economy. These products then increasingly became unaffordable for the average GDR citizen who remained resigned mostly to cheaper goods.
Nonetheless, a certain nostalgia for East German products remains today, and aspects of Ostalgie (a pun on the words Ost meaning East and Nostalgie meaning nostalgia) have grown massively in popularity especially with millennials who didn’t experience life in the GDR, but also with former GDR citizens who spent their childhood on the eastern side of the Wall. On the whole, any given collection of these products most likely contains a fascinating array of objects designed simply and functionally, mixed in with kitsch ornaments and decorative nationalist memorabilia which we can imagine adorned the walls and shelves of many a pre-fab concrete apartment.
Here is merely a small sample of the many products designed in the GDR. There will always be more than one narrative on the relative merits and pitfalls of these products, and on the authenticity of memories of life in GDR itself. However, I aim to explore just a few of these that I think have interesting stories, and I hope to bring to light some aspects of how this political environment shaped product design quite so heavily.
Trabant 601
Perhaps the most iconic of all East German industrial products is the humble ‘Trabi’. This was designed to be a car for the people, much like the Western VW Beetle. It was cheap to produce, had a body made of hard Duroplast plastic, and its two-litre, two-stroke engine had a maximum speed of 100 km/h. Duroplast was made from recycled materials including pressed cotton fibres, synthetic resins and and old cloth rags. This is telling of many materials used in the GDR: recycling was prominent and materials were often synthetically produced from all sorts of collected textiles and other substances. However, this was primarily due to a lack of available resources rather than for environmental reasons. In the case of the Trabant, Duroplast was used as a replacement for metal which was difficult and costly to obtain.
Part of the car’s iconic notoriety is due to the fact that in hindsight it pretty accurately reflects the fate of the GDR itself. When it launched, it was hailed as a great engineering feat by the East and a symbol of national pride, producing a car at scale for the masses and a product to rival that of Western nations. In reality, the car quickly became known for its terrible ride quality, cramped interior, unreliable engine (and in fact nearly every other moving and non-moving part) and loud, smoky exhaust. On top of that, customers had to register to purchase one and could be on a waiting list for between 1 and 15 years before they got it!
Zeha sports shoes
The Zeha brand started in the late 20th century and was already well established by the time the GDR was formed. Traditionally a leather shoe manufacturer, founder Carl Haessner adapted the line of shoes in the 1950s with the launch of a trainer. By the ’60s and ’70s the Zeha product line had diversified further to become the brand of choice for athletes and sports people all over East Germany.
At the time, Zeha shoes were ridiculed by Westerners donning the likes of Adidas, Nike and Puma. They were seen as inferior quality and unstylish, and just another example of the shortcomings of Soviet bloc manufacturing and — by extension — its ideology.
Interestingly, the Zeha brand is living a new life today. Now known as Zeha Berlin, the upmarket shoes are sold at boutiques in Tokyo, New York and the fashionable Kurfurstendamm in Berlin. Current co-owner Torsten Heine (who bought the rights to the brand with his business partner Alexander Barré a few years ago) describes the shoes as ‘retro design with high-quality manufacture.’ He says that “about 40 years of the brand is from the G.D.R… and that definitely influences the style”. The revival of this shoe draws from the design of the original sports shoe, but using modern production techniques and high-quality materials they appeal to both a generation for whom this is a symbol of their childhood, and another who have now grown up in a Western consumerist society but are attracted to the novelty and retro style of products from the former GDR — albeit for a much higher price.
Zeha shoes provide an example of how individual and collective memories and experiences of GDR products can differ vastly. Whilst the rest of the world — and also many former-GDR citizens today — mocked the production quality of Eastern goods, Heine claims that “East German stuff wasn’t flashy but it was good quality and former Easterners as well as Westerners are buying into it for that reason.” Whether this is supposed to be a remark on the current quality of the brand to boost its reputation or it is genuinely reminiscent of the original shoe design, it serves to show the complexity of dealing with a historical view of the GDR. There is always more than one narrative.
Plattenbau housing
In a similar fashion to most industrial design practices in the GDR, the approach to housing was based on some critical factors: producing housing for the masses at a low cost and without reliance on ‘imperialist’ Western architectural designs, particularly eschewing any designs that bared similarity to those associated with the Nazi era. The result was a series of ‘Plattenbau’ (slab house) apartment blocks, which were prefabricated concrete structures of approximately 5–10 stories. They were cheap to build and could be produced and constructed rapidly at scale.
These structures were hugely popular. They were modern, newly-built apartments with the latest mod cons, including plumbing that didn’t leak, and heating and electricity that worked pretty reliably. Many young couples were keen to get married and move out of their old ‘Altbau’ family homes into these new concrete blockhouses. A large proportion of Plattenbauen provided housing for workers. And again, the popularity of these homes likely wasn’t due to any outstanding design quality, rather the fact that they simply offered a better option to the existing homes of many, and people had little other choice.
Parallels can be drawn between the functional, aesthetically imposing designs of GDR Plattenbau and the brutalist architectural movement (after all, the term brutalism derives from the French béton brut meaning ‘raw concrete’). The use of concrete and other raw materials, the rigid structures and collision of massive forms give striking similarities. However, whilst brutalism emerged as a reaction to existing architectural forms and signified a return to function and honest use of materials as core foundations for architectural design, the Plattenbau of the GDR were produced in this manner due to the limited availability of materials, the constrained economic situation and the need to produce at scale.
I can’t help but think that the idea of designing a set of new housing structures which forced most citizens lived in close-quarter communities and adopt similar living standards throughout the country, with few distracting visual features and a focus on the functionality of individual blocks coming together to form a whole, was very appealing to ideological industry leaders and politicians pushing the Soviet agenda into central and western Europe.
Whilst many iconic brutalist structures are today greeted with mixed emotions — revered in some circles, despised in others — the Plattenbau structures are largely disliked. This may partly be because some of the industrial East German towns and cities taken over by Plattenbau-esque housing have been eerily quiet since the Berlin Wall came down and migrants fled across the border; the housing blocks remain as a ghostly reminder of a lost time and broken ideals, or for many as the painful memories of a life under authoritarian rule.
In the mid-2000s architect Hervé Biele rose to some prominence by proving Plattenbau buildings could be demolished and the materials recycled to create modern homes that resulted in construction cost savings of up to 40%, could be built within a week, and which brought a considerable improvement in the environmental impact of construction. Ironic, then, that recycling was such a critical part of industrial design in the GDR .
Furniture and interior design
Since the GDR spanned four decades, furniture styles of course changed over that time. General impressions of furniture designs of the time are that function was very much at the heart of the design requirements, which resulted in simple, cheap designs with muted colours and little decoration. But as time went on furniture styles seemed to diversify and can be seen as a form of product where more personal preferences could be expressed for those who could afford it, especially in the privacy of the home (though in the GDR, you could never tell exactly how private your home really was).
Furniture design, as with many other types of design, is supposed to reflect not just the needs of the contemporary consumer but their very ideals. In the GDR, these ideals for the people were stated pretty clearly from the powers in command, and designers were under no illusions how important it was to reflect this in their designs. The result of this was to give GDR furniture a very strong identity.
The “new man” was a guiding theme in the German Democratic Republic. New men (and women) were supposed to be efficient, equal, well-educated and healthy. How to create furniture and interiors that reflected these ideals? The answer is simple: form had to follow function, practical aspects took centre stage, with no scrollwork or other gratuitous frills to distract from the piece of furniture itself. Following this premise, a simple but elegant style was created. This was the credo of furniture makers in the GDR, and many designers across the globe still adhere to the same principles. — Redaktion, www.centralberlin.de
Whether the furniture and interiors designed in the GDR are generally simple and functional is of little doubt. Whether they are elegant is a matter of taste and context, and there are divided schools of thought on whether this holds true.
The ‘Sitzei’ is an example of Eastern product design ideology venturing closer to that of its Western cousin, but again with the limitations that designing in the GDR brought. The attempt is to create something unusual and visually striking, colourful enough to act as a focal point of a room but also practical enough so as not to take up too much space, of which there was often precious little in the homes of many. The material is cheap synthetic plastic and by creating something with more focus placed on form, the function of the chair has actually suffered. Uncomfortable, hard to move around and fit with other furniture, and an effort to open and close the lid each each time, the chair manages to fail at some of the primary objectives a chair should have. Having said that, the retro-futuristic style and use of shiny coloured plastic in a semi-spherical form is not dissimilar to more established modernist design classics such as Eero Aarnio’s Ball Chair.
It is interesting to compare the design ideologies of a constrained socialist society such as the GDR with that of a more open-market, consumerist one. ‘Form follows function’ was coined by American architect Louis Sullivan well before the GDR existed, and this maxim has been highly influential throughout the 20th and 21st centuries worldwide. We can easily picture the furnishings on display in Weimer’s image Garderobe (taken in Karl-Marx-Stadt, now know as Chemnitz) in a modern Ikea catalogue. Critics quick to cast scorn on all and any products to emerge from the GDR should pay attention to this fact. It is undeniable that political and socio-economic environments influence various forms of design that occurs within them, however the question is now whether those designs should be embraced or discredited because of that environment. We may disagree with the ideology of the the Eastern Soviet bloc and the practices of regimes such as those in the GDR to enforce this ideology on its citizens, but is it possible to separate these background factors which informed the design process (at all stages and across industries) from the outputs of those processes themselves? If not, then products designed in the GDR are doomed to a space on the lower shelves of history, best put out of sight. But if we can make this distinction, and judge products by their own character in isolation from the context in which they were designed, then there is something to be said for the simplistic and functional ambitions of a vast array of GDR products.
Graphic design: posters & flyers
Graphic design in the GDR often used bright, solid colours and simple geometric patterns. Bold, sans-serif and coloured fonts took pride of place.
Themes such as nature and the outdoors appeared frequently. Trips to the countryside and outdoor activities were hugely popular in the GDR. Camping, hiking and swimming all took place regularly and family holidays to lakes and dachas in the country were the most common, especially as travel abroad was very heavily restricted and aroused suspicion of the authorities.
Imagery depicting family values was often used to promote the family unit and solidarity. The image below shows a young, happy family surrounded by high-tech products with the caption ‘Because giving gifts gives pleasure’. The image is a magazine cover for the company ‘Genex’, which was established in the GDR for Western Germans (and even outside Germany in Denmark and Switzerland) to order goods which would be imported to relatives and friends in the East.
Another common theme was the promotion of the worker, particularly in industry and agriculture. The poster below features a young worker driving a combine harvester with the caption ‘GDR: socialist state of workers and farmers’.
Products of surveillance
The Stasi Museum at the former headquarters at Normannenstrasse contains a rich collection of products used by Stasi agents and informants (known as informeller Mitarbeiter or ‘informal collaborators’) for mass surveillance. The Stasi used a plethora of techniques to gather intelligence on millions of citizens, and the GDR is still often referenced as the most notorious police state in modern history, inflicting physical, mental and emotional harm on countless people both during the era of their power and ever since.
To put the scale of the Stasi’s activities into context, in 1992 (after the GDR had collapsed) the Stasi records were made public. This included 180km of case files, 35 million other documents, photos, sound documents, and tapes of telephone conversations. It is estimated that at the height of their dominance there were 97,000 people employed by the Ministry for State Security with an additional 173,000 informants, which was a ratio of about 1:5 Stasi agents and informants to citizens. This resulted in a extraordinary depth and breadth of intelligence data.
There are clearly ethical considerations when dealing with products such as those used by the Stasi for surveillance. This article is less about whether the products should (or more likely shouldn’t) have been designed, and more about how they were designed and the wider impact of having these items so deeply embedded into the everyday design of GDR products. The effort involved in creating such a mass of surveillance equipment and the way it has been integrated into everyday products is worth some exploration.
The mundanity of the objects above serves to highlight how deeply the Stasi presence infiltrated the lives of GDR citizens. An entire industry was dedicated to researching how people used common products, and then re-designing them to facilitate a specific set of needs — this description can be applied pretty universally across different all types of design, yet in certain contexts it can take on a whole new meaning.
The example of the interior door above demonstrates how the Stasi invaded the private lives of individuals in order to collect intelligence, and is a stark reminder of the fear and uneasiness of people’s daily lives in the GDR. Planting listening devices in homes and work places was a common practice, and a wide range of devices was designed to fit into the many potential hiding places identified by Stasi agents.
The examples in this article are a small snapshot of the many types of design that occurred in the GDR. Without doubt, the political backdrop heavily influenced the work of designers and placed unique constraints on them. Some of these designs are symbolic of the desires of the socialist state, whilst others reflect the contrasting needs and ideals of the people it strictly governed.
