One of the most stubborn traits of most things is that they do not have political beliefs and certainly do not want to pass them on.

Whether a coffee cup with a playful flower pattern was designed by a designer with progressive, conservative or even no convictions is not only impossible to tell from this cup.

It can also be completely irrelevant to those who drink from this cup (in order to possibly push themselves for the next political argument).

One of the most stubborn characteristics of all ideologues, however, is that they resist this knowledge.

Claudius Seidl

Editor in the features section.

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In the early fifties, for example, on the occasion of cups without a pattern and on the assumption that such a cup is not only a container for liquids, but also for an attitude, a violent dispute arose in the GDR, which one today on the one hand bizarre and on the other hand, in a tricky way, appears contemporary. It was about formalism, which did not mean the school of thought founded by Viktor Schklowskij and Roman Jakobson in the early years of the Soviet Union; Rather, formalism was any aesthetic that now, after the war and Nazi rule, wanted to continue where Bauhaus and classic modernism had to end: with architecture without ornaments, design without frills, with simple everyday objects from industrial production. It was about,that the working people had the fruits of their labor; not to put them off with painted flowers

Walter Ulbricht's taste officers (who had been inspired by Comrade Stalin) complained that all of these were just the expressions of international capitalism, or at least the aesthetic aberrations of intellectuals who lacked class consciousness.

The people wanted bay windows, cornices, ornaments.

And the cups in the cupboards of the GDR should be patterned.

At least for the time being, modernity lost this dispute - which aesthetically was the bad luck of the GDR.

And it was a personal misfortune for Mart Stam, the Dutch architect and designer who was the most prominent modernist in the GDR in the late forties and early fifties.

And who is only known to a larger audience as the inventor of the cantilever chair, although he deserves to be world-famous.

More luxurious than porcelain

Stam had designed the Hellerhofsiedlung in Frankfurt in the twenties, a row of houses in the Stuttgart Weißenhofsiedlung, the ultra-modern tobacco factory of the Van Nelle company in Rotterdam. In 1930 he went to the Soviet Union, where he was involved in planning the new cities of Magnitogorsk, Orsk and Makiyivka. He left the Soviet Union when he saw the inhumane conditions under which the forced laborers had to live (and often die) in the salt flats of Kazakhstan.

He remained a communist, however, and in 1948 he went to the GDR, first to Dresden, where he headed the University of Fine Arts, then in 1950 to Berlin-Weißensee, as rector of the University of Applied Arts. A small exhibition in the Berlin Museum of Things documents this time. And at the same time tries to illustrate how Stam failed due to the socialist conditions.

The point was not that the avant-garde forced its forms on the narrow-minded philistines. Stam was concerned with the exact opposite: precisely because mass industrial production made the manufacture of everyday objects cheaper, all the more resources could be invested in their development and design. And Stam, together with his people, practically conducted research in order to find the ideal, i.e. useful, practical and humane form of things. Their nature called it, somewhat grandiose, Stam, who was convinced that a tea service made in this way offered the working people a greater luxury than the most precious, but unfortunately impractical Meissen porcelain. The consequence was that working in a team was more important to him than his own authorship.His employees draw for most of the exhibits.

The dispute with the opposite sign

It is difficult to determine today whether the working people came to appreciate this luxury.

Comrade Ulbricht, in a letter to the new, loyal management in Weißensee, rated the return to ornament and jewelry in 1954 as "significant progress in artistic creation".

Stam left the GDR in 1952.

And it took at least ten years (and the persistence of Stam's students who stayed) until the modern age slowly arrived in the GDR.

But that today wherever there used to be the GDR, the dispute is being conducted with the opposite sign;

that now East Modernism is being torn down and new bay windows, cornices, and flowers are to mark the final overcoming of socialism: This gives the exhibition and the review of the formalism dispute a wonderful topicality.

Today, as then, the taste judgment believes that the flowers and ornaments are beautiful and the simple shapes are ugly, without justification.

The early years.

Mart Stam, the institute and the industrial design collection.

At the Museum der Dinge, Berlin, Oranienstrasse 25-30 August.

The catalog costs 36 euros.