How to Set a Table (and Other Things): On the Aesthetics and Politics of a Postwar West German Film about Domestic Work

Domestic space became highly visible in West German media of the 1950s. A wide variety of exhibitions, advice books, journals, and films about proper housekeeping, good design, and the perfect spatial layout aimed to educate a large audience on how to furnish their homes and live in them. More than just promoting certain types of furniture and household goods, these home representations were about the production of knowledge regarding the spatial constitution of subjects, bodies, and gender. This article examines the aesthetics and politics of the narratives and images these media produced,focusing on one educational film from 1952, The Well-laid Table, produced by West Germany's leading educational media institution, the Institut für Film und Bild in Wissenschaft und Unterricht. In a close reading of this film, I analyze the spaces, objects, and figures the film portrayed, asking how the story of an idyllic postwar family home, the visualization of “good” design, the staging of a highly choreographed performance of housework, and a female body were interlinked and what meaning this elaborate domestic setting produced.