Designing One Nation

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The histories of East and West Germany traditionally emphasize the Cold War rivalries between the communist and capitalist nations. Yet, even as the countries diverged in their political directions, they had to create new ways of working together economically.

In Designing One Nation, Katrin Schreiter examines the material culture of increasing economic contacts in divided Germany from the 1940s until the 1990s. Trade events, such as fairs and product shows, became one of the few venues for sustained links and knowledge between the two countries after the building of the Berlin Wall. Schreiter uses industrial design, epitomized by the furniture industry, to show how a network of politicians, entrepreneurs, and cultural brokers attempted to nationally re-inscribe their production cultures, define a postwar German identity, and regain economic stability and political influence in postwar Europe. What started as a competition for ideological superiority between East and West Germany quickly turned into a shared, politically legitimizing quest for an untainted post-fascist modernity. This work follows products from the drawing board into the homes of ordinary Germans to offer insights into how converging visions of German industrial modernity created shared expectations about economic progress and living standards. Schreiter reveals how intra-German and European trade policies drove the creation of products and generated a certain convergence of East and West German taste by the 1980s.

Drawing on a wide range of sources from governments, furniture firms, industrial design councils, home lifestyle magazines, and design exhibitions, Designing One Nation argues that an economic culture linked the two Germanies even before reunification in 1990.

"Designing One Nation explores how East and West Germans negotiated their country's postwar division at the juncture of economic and cultural politics. It is especially concerned with historical interconnections between the two Germanies in industrial design, economic structures, corporate ethos, trade, economic foreign policy and consumer culture, all of which are subsumed under the term "economic culture." It shows that post-war reconstruction, as envisioned and realized by a network of politicians, entrepreneurs, and cultural brokers, did more than to modernize the respective parts of Germany. Rather, through the national re-inscription of their material culture, here explored in the realm of interior design and furniture production, the two German states pursued an unprecedented effort to regain economic stability and political influence in post-war Europe's order. Significantly, what started as a Cold War competition for ideological superiority quickly turned into a shared, politically legitimizing quest for an untainted post-fascist modernity. Following products from the drawing board into the homes of ordinary Germans, this book thus offers unique insights into how converging visions of German industrial modernity created shared expectations about economic progress and living standards. The resulting economic culture linked the two Germanies together and acted internationally in a pan-German interest"--

"Katrin Schreiter makes brilliant use of material culture and industrial design to help us understand the Cold War in a new way. Unlike most studies, her work points to the essential connectedness of West and East Germany. Her work is also a powerful argument for the centrality of material culture, consumption, and industrial design to politics and even foreign policy." -- Eli Rubin, Western Michigan University

"This is a landmark study in the history of postwar German material culture. Schreiter gives us a tangible, even tactile sense of how East and West Germany championed differing aesthetic values while collaborating surreptitiously in the manufacture of household goods. Design history and international relations intersect here in a thoroughly original and carefully researched analysis." -- William Glenn Gray, Germany's Cold War

"Through its new look at furniture design, this book contributes critically to a growing body of scholarship re-examining the Cold War Germanys as economically and culturally intertwined. Artfully moving between East and West German cases and embedding individual living rooms in the complex nexus of international trade, Schreiter has crafted an integrated history of aesthetic and institutional commonalities across the Iron Curtain. She offers significant insights into how diplomacy and politics of trade between the two Germanys influenced and were shaped by European integration, thereby suggesting Germany's halves converged culturally even before national reunification." -- Katherine Pence, Baruch College, City University of New York