Vortrag Rudolf Fischer, Dresden: So wollen wir wohnen. Anleitungen zum Wohnen in Deutschland 1920 bis 1965

In the organizer's words:

Lecture on the occasion of the awarding of the Applied Arts Research Prize 2025

Immediately after the end of the Second World War, a group around Hans Scharoun and Lilly Reich formed in the Berlin Werkbund with the aim of propagating "beautifully designed" avant-garde furniture to the general public through exhibitions and thus influencing consumer behavior. The first major furniture show of the early German Federal Republic was the Cologne Werkbund exhibition "Neues Wohnen" (New Living) in 1949, which was both a great success and the starting point for fierce battles over direction. The protagonists took up the controversial discussions about tradition and avant-garde that had already taken place in the Weimar Republic, but now the focus was on the housing needs of the post-war period, flanked by the complex social and political structures of the Cold War. "A single well-formed cane armchair can create comfort," wrote Juliane Roh in 1954 as a representative of an avant-garde concept.

Almost at the same time, a strong reactionary current could be felt in the originally functional GDR housing discourse. In the context of the East Berlin exhibition "Besser leben - schöner Wohnen" (Better Living - More Beautiful Living) in 1953, the hostility towards formalism also found its way into GDR furniture design.

The lecture will trace these virulent discourses using high-circulation publications on modern living ("Wohnratgeber" such as "Die schöne Wohnung", 1930-1967) - from the Weimar Republic to the 1960s. For decades, living guides were continuously understood as instructions for living and thus had a decisive impact on the private sphere of the home.