‘There are a lot of misconceptions about East German design and we want to rectify some of that. With no set agenda at the onset, research for the exhibition started with an exploration of the differences, before identifying a more nuanced design narrative than the received binary stereotypes of East and West. As Philip Kurz, director of exhibition co-producer the Wüstenrot Foundation, says, the walls of divisions were immaterial as well as material, and ‘if we are completely honest, have not completely vanished’.Īs a non-German, Vitra Design Museum curator Erika Pinner says she perhaps benefited from an outsider’s perspective. Perhaps some of the similarities should be of no surprise – after all, some of the leading designers of the time had studied together at Bauhaus, and maintained contact despite the divide.īut even more than 30 years after the wall came down, perceptions of the GDR are hard to shift.

Rather than highlight just the well-covered differences, this new show is more interested in the parallels and crossovers that existed despite the very different political regimes and economic conditions. However the reality, says VDM director Mateo Kries, was ‘much more complicated and interesting’. The resulting show, German design 1949-1989 – Two Countries, One History, challenges the popular but lazy stereotypes that have prevailed – that of the sleek, functionalist and sophisticated designs of West Germany and the cheap, tacky and generally all round inferior output of the GDR, perhaps best personified by the Trabant car, the butt of so many jokes. How appropriate then that it should host the first exhibition to look at German design in both the East (German Democratic Republic) and the West (Federal Republic of Germany) during the four decades of separation.

The Vitra Design Museum was founded in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall came down ahead of German reunification in 1990.

Off the Wall by Günter Rubitzsch