Fred Weidmann The HfG, Ulm and Germania.
It is indeed a long story, beginning in 1956 in Zurich. At the age of 18, I was interested in Max Bill and the "Concretists", who were very popular at the Kunsthaus Zürich, in the feuilleton and in galleries, while at the same time attending the cantonal commercial school and anatomy classes at the Kunstgewerbeschule in the evening.
1957, Abitur/Matura [higher education entrance qualification] and immediately off to the USA on a scholarship, majoring in journalism and anatomy for future physicians. This was with a renaissance conception of an artist's education. Before Ulm, two solo exhibitions in the American province were formative, both of which were sold out. I hid figurative elements in the splash chaos like Jackson Pollock. When I came to Ulm, I still wanted to become an artist – with the best possible training.
In September 1958, it was after the start of term in Ulm, I found out about the HfG from the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. I wanted to continue my studies and to contribute there. After an intensive dialogue with the school's management, I was accepted: To my surprise, there was no further admission procedure. I was the ideal candidate for the "Information" department. Maldonado was already in Bill's place, Bonsiepe was doing his dots. This initially gave me hope that you could also paint at the HfG. [editor's note: Weidmann probably refers to Bonsiepe's way of painting at the time. The HfG programme abstained completely from fine art. However, some of the lecturers painted privately.]
As a 20-year-old Swiss, I had already travelled a lot, had actually found my way to the HfG following in Max Bill's footsteps, had visited the Louvre and the Guggenheim Museum, but Germany and its culturally and historically tense times overwhelmed me much like the racial prejudices of the Americans in their country.
Everything designed had to be functional, that was also my conviction, but the merciless eradication of the representative, ornamental, and agitating artist could not be justified by functionality. The child had fallen into the well with denazification. I hadn't expected Makart, but Vordemberge-Gildewart couldn't fill the gap. Regarding Ulm functionalism: I found a deceitfully sky-blue cigarette packet with a symbolic Gaulish helmet, for example, more functional than a tobacco-brown one with a white stripe, as we had designed it with a lot of pathos. Nobody in the city would have bought our product.
I had come to Ulm partly because, from a distance, it seemed like the American system of teaching art at universities was most likely realised in Ulm. I found the reality to be rather sectarian Bauhaus-like with a strong tendency towards industrial servility. It simply wasn't the revolt I was longing for - as a spoiled son of an entrepreneur, that was from where I came from.
There were friendships among the students. Marcel Herbst, with whom I shared a room in the students' residence tower, was a very valuable friend to me. He had a clear view of the spectrum of social reality, which I had lacked. Thanks to him, I came to East Berlin, got to know Wolf Biermann and the Brecht Theatre. Manfred Eisenbeis was not in my year, but I became friends with him, perhaps because he took the side of reason in every situation. Here's a story: many years later, when my son was studying at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, Manfred Eisenbeis was the rector there. When he introduced himself, he hugged him as if he was seeing an old friend. I regret that our lives have taken such separate paths. The exchange of our points of view would certainly have influenced my path. A silk tie by Susanne Eppinger still hangs in my wardrobe today.
Ulm, at the end of the 1950s, was incredibly ahead of its time. You have to remember that there was no chair of sociology at any university in Switzerland at the time. An important sociologist taught in Ulm. Fascinating mathematics, information theory, cybernetics, social psychology, even semiotics, all the exotically new and fascinatingly promising things you could at least get to know there. Or, if a young person had their sights set on a future career, they were very well placed. Most students had learnt a profession and knew what they were looking for. You didn't even have to be recruited by the industry, you grew directly into the projects and networks.
I think I was the only one who had only been a student in his life. The HfG, because it was nothing like an academy of art, became my initiation in essential ways. I experienced the adult world. I was very impressed by some of the lecturers, Horst Rittel, who introduced me to the theory of science and information theory, and Hanno Kesting, the sociologist, who gave me the feeling that a person with a sociopathic attitude would be better equipped with a degree in sociology than with a degree from Ulm. Both university graduates whispered, off the record, that the programme in Ulm had none of the weight of a German university education.
I avoided the guardians of the Ulm rectangular style. But that didn't matter, as there was so much to learn all around. Valuable was the insight into the outside world. The HfG had a good nose for guest lecturers from the business and creative world. There I learnt about procedures and quality standards in a wide range of professions from the best of their time. Frei-Otto made soap bubbles and Olympics-nets with his students.
Regarding the basic year and the Information Department: We were far too few for separate lessons to be worthwhile for us. At the HfG, you could pick up on everything if you showed an interest. If necessary, you could make a photo report on the work of the product designers or simply sit in with the architects. With Gert Kalow, the film-maker Vesely, the literary critic Kaiser, you were right in the middle of a circle of lecturers who were inconsiderate of first-year students and nobody asked about the student's rank.
What did Ulm bring me? Directly useful for my later life were the criteria for good writing, for quality in photography, good film editing, knowledge of design and architecture, an introduction to the who's who in these fields, then the already mentioned settings of course by Rittel and Kesting.
Indirectly, however, Ulm has been hugely significant for my life. I considered the backwards and towards Dessau looking belief in progress to be sectarian and outmoded because it lacked the deference to art history, so I had to live a life as an Ulm renegade. If I designed a chair, it was certainly not with square planks, but in adoration of my wife's beauty. After Ulm, I would never have been able to study at an art academy (after all, I wanted to become an "artist"), the only way was through the humanities. Thank you Ulm, this chalice passed from me. Even as an illusionist painter today, I have to admit that I was wrong in my assessment of the cultural-historical significance of square-worshipping functionalism. The HfG has prevailed worldwide and that is more than a matter of taste. Strictly block-like buildings are growing right outside my front door. In nature, only salt crystal makes such cubes. An alien would think they had salted the continents. I'd rather see soap bubble-like structures in Munich's skyline.
When I left the HfG, I burned all the bridges behind me, not because I had any accusations to make, not because I thought there would be stagnation, it was all so exciting in Cologne and the rest of the world that I was completely absorbed in the new worlds. There was no room for looking back.
In the autumn of 1960, I was already in Cologne as a student of sociology at the Faculty of Economics. Ten years of university life followed. Cologne was the Mecca of empirical social sciences and, thanks to Hans Albert, a hotspot for the theory of science. I felt at home there, it was the "Information" department in depth. I worked with Erwin K. Scheuch on a Harvard project until I graduated with a degree in economics in the social sciences: secondary analysis of survey research. I was also a part-time assistant to Prof Wilhelm Menning, Art Education, Kettwig University of Education. After graduating, I became a research assistant at the Institute for Communication Research and Phonetics (IKP) at the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Bonn. Gerold Ungeheuer was my honoured teacher, institute director and doctoral supervisor there (alongside René König, who taught sociology in Cologne). I wrote three research reports at the IKP:
The first, in January 1967, was a long-term study on the network behaviour of our 22 institute colleagues: "The social process as an information-processing system, an experimental study" [Der soziale Prozess als informationsverarbeitendes System, eine experimentelle Studie].
The second, Helmut Richter and Fred Weidmann: "Semantically induced communication conflicts among speakers of the same language" [Semantisch bedingte Kommunikationskonflikte bei Gleichsprachigen], Buske, Hamburg 1969, (2nd ed. 1975).
The third as a dissertation: "Foundations of a Sociology of Communication" [Grundlagen einer Kommunikationssoziologie], Buske, Hamburg 1972. With a provocative analysis of the theoretical foundations of sociology, I did not qualify for the teaching profession. Freedom without institutional ties was luring.
