‘A Final Solution for Humanity’? Modern Design and the Ambivalence of Redemption in Post-War West Germany

IF 0.2 Q2 HISTORY
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引用次数: 0

Abstract

During the Third Reich, a modern shape of everyday objects was propagated as realising a German nation defined as an organic and racial entity. What happened to this cultural nexus after 1945? Historical scholarship has emphasized above all that modern design went on to be successfully framed as a cultural good that redeemed West Germany from the Nazi past. This redeeming opposition between the political meanings of modern design before and after 1945, however, appears less clear-cut if one acknowledges the structure of denial in post-war discourses by focussing on the silences, omissions and discrepancies in various publications. Such an analysis exposes how the coding of modern design as ‘timeless’ together with its promotion in the context of the Marshall Plan made it possible to blur any historical understanding of how the underlying notions of everyday aesthetics had been intertwined with racially loaded ideas of the German people. This obscurity in the context of a not yet decolonized West facilitated the continuing influence of at least some aspects of modern design’s more troubling political legacies.
“人类的最终解决方案”?战后西德的现代设计与救赎的矛盾
在第三帝国时期,日常用品的现代形状被传播,实现了德意志民族作为一个有机和种族实体的定义。1945年后,这种文化联系发生了什么变化?历史学者最强调的是,现代设计后来被成功地塑造成一种文化产品,将西德从纳粹的过去中拯救出来。然而,如果人们通过关注各种出版物中的沉默、遗漏和差异来承认战后话语中的否认结构,那么1945年前后现代设计的政治意义之间的这种救赎对立就显得不那么明确了。这样的分析揭示了现代设计的编码是如何“永恒”的,以及它在马歇尔计划背景下的推广,使得对日常美学的潜在概念如何与德国人民的种族观念交织在一起的历史理解变得模糊。这种在尚未去殖民化的西方背景下的默默无闻,至少在某些方面促进了现代设计更令人不安的政治遗产的持续影响。
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来源期刊
Cultural History
Cultural History HISTORY-
CiteScore
0.70
自引率
0.00%
发文量
23
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