The Authority of Everyday Objects: A Cultural History of West German Industrial Design

The Authority of Everyday Objects: A Cultural History of West German Industrial Design Paul Betts. University of California Press, 2004. 348 pp., 51 illus. £32.50 cloth. ISBN 0–520–24004–9. The Authority of Everyday Objects is a history of post-1933 design in Germany and begins, as you would imagine, with a reassessment of Nazi design practices, or rather, with design practices during the Nazi period. The reassessment of the Nazi period is one of the founding themes of the book, and Betts provides us with a vivid account of what may have seemed like an oxymoron—‘Nazi modernism’. This is the other side to the story of ‘blood and soil’, the vicious closing of the Bauhaus, and the more usual image of Nazism as anti-modern in both spirit and letter. Here Betts shows us a less obviously Gothic culture, one that could reflag the objects of the Werkbund and the Bauhaus and repurpose them for the deathly aims of Nazi society. For Nazism the ‘purity’ of modernist design could be made to signal a ‘biological’ Germanic purity; a racist orchestration that positions modernist designs as unwitting players in the margins of the historical catastrophe of the holocaust.