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    Designing One Nation

    The Politics of Economic Culture and Trade in Divided Germany, 1945-1990

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    Author(s)
    Schreiter, Katrin
    Collection
    Sustainable History Monograph Pilot (SHMP)
    Language
    English
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    Abstract
    "This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International License. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations, thanks to a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, as part of The Sustainable History Monograph Pilot.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."
    URI
    https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/39995
    Keywords
    general & world history; urban economics; political science & theory
    DOI
    10.1093/0190877308.001.0001
    Publisher
    Oxford University Press
    Publisher website
    https://global.oup.com/
    Publication date and place
    New York, 2020
    Grantor
    • Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
    Imprint
    Oxford University Press USA
    Series
    Oxford Scholarship Online,
    Classification
    European history
    Cold wars and proxy conflicts
    Regional / urban economics
    Decorative arts
    Politics and government
    Pages
    287
    Rights
    https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
    • Imported or submitted locally

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    License

    • If not noted otherwise all contents are available under Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

    Credits

    • logo EU
    • This project received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 683680, 810640, 871069 and 964352.

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