ABSTRACT
In the first fifteen years of the German Democratic Republic’s (GDR) existence cultural politicians attempted to define a suitable approach to the design of objects for the domestic realm. This approach, rooted in an anxiety to shape an alternative, distinctly socialist idea of the modern home, drew on the doctrine of socialist realism and rejected modernism. During the same period, the industrial design community of the GDR continued to support a modernist approach to design, which manifested itself in the large-scale emergence of professionally designed mass-produced objects for domestic use that followed a modernist idiom. This divergence between official rhetoric and design practice points to a significant conflict which will be the focus of this essay.
