Margit Staber-Weinberg I wish I had kept a diary back then! – "Information" at the HfG

The title for these more than fragmentary memories appears as a sigh in the report I gave for the 50th anniversary of the hfg at the "club off ulm" in 2003.1 The glorious days of Ulm are irretrievably gone and long past, and without any nostalgic embellishment, it can be noted that the Ulm study years were marked by the godsend of generously available and never-returning time: there was no breathless hectic like in today's "jumble valley" ["Durcheinandertal"],2 that would have opposed the recording of daily routines with the respective study plans, the network of teachers and students. It was only much later that it dawned on me that I had been involved in a pedagogical event of the century, with highs and lows of a special kind. Throughout the study years, a scrapbook of documentary value could have been compiled, in word and picture. Written by hand, presumably, visualized with small sketches and blurry snapshots. The computer world announced itself as an imminent dream of the future, without knowing how to deal with it.

 

One lived the day, every day intensively – but not taking the day as it comes. An experience already was the covered path with views of the landscape from the four-story residential tower (for students, women and men together) to the cafeteria, the classrooms, and workshops – architecture composed into the sparse hilly landscape at the southern foot of the Swabian Alb. The austere quality of the rhythmically unfolding, cubically structured concrete buildings resonate as a counterpart of well scaled human made work to nature. No, I'm not going into raptures. But you have to bear in mind that for the young, eager people coming out of the ruins of post-war society, participating in the Ulm design experiment firstly triggered the amazement of taking part in every respect. You absorbed the creative energy of the moment; you did not think of having to record the chronicle of events for posterity. At least, this is how I justify the state of mind in the magical circle of the hfg during my study years, detached from the everyday world all around. In the insightful book "Selbstbehauptungen – Frauen an der hfg ulm" [Self-Assertions – Women at the hfg ulm] by Gerda Müller-Krauspe [also a HfG Ulm alumna, editor's note], you should read the chapters "Living and Working Place" and "Building Complex / Architecture." 3 Yes, the author, commenting with dry wit, comes to the conclusion that the first courses had developed a very special, almost incestuous relationship with the buildings and facilities of the school. And she relates this to the fact that classes had already started long before the school building opened, sometimes under adventurous, provisional conditions in the city of Ulm. Therefore, the appropriation of the untouched, brand-new facility, which many students had helped to build and furnish, was like an initiation of the promised place. Finally there, where they so desperately wanted to be!

 

"Learning by doing" leads to the educational design methods from which the Ulm experiment originated and which, after a few years, triggered those bitterly fought methodological disputes that in retrospect seem like splitting hair. Because ultimately, all who came here so hopefully wanted to achieve, research and develop the same thing. – Before I open the drawer of my HfG memories at this point, let me digress about the motivation that led a young woman from a conservative middle-class milieu in the Ulm area, completely unprepared, to this place which seemed exotic in her family's understanding. At home, culture meant reading books, ideally classical literature up to the 20th century, with authors like Thomas Mann; occasionally one would go to the city theater, which was also an opera house, where Herbert von Karajan had begun his career as a conductor in the early 1930s. Fine arts were not a topic, and Concrete Art even less so. The word Design, which Max Bill did not like at all and which he opposed with his ideal of "Umweltgestaltung" [environmental design], was unheard of. The Abitur [A-levels] was completed dutifully, with good grades, nothing else was up for discussion. And what now? There was a smouldering, vaguely tangible desire that a new era was dawning and how could we participate and contribute to it?

 

The Nazi era had gone down in smoke and ashes, an iron grid of suppression descended in the fathers' generation, only to re-emerge just over one generation later with the laborious establishment of Holocaust awareness. As a grammar school pupil, I had attended the Ulm Volkshochschule [adult education centre] founded by Inge Aicher-Scholl in 1945, particularly the so-called "Thursday Lectures" 4 which carried ideological weight fell on interested ears. As in other German cities, an "America House" had been set up under the re-education programme of the American occupation forces, whose library opened a fascinatingly unknown gateway to the world. This is probably where my love of Anglo-American literature comes from, which continues to this day. I actually wanted to study languages, quite naively I imagined that I could achieve something through language. I looked around at the University of Munich. A solid, traditional study was not to be.

 

There were rumours and reports of the emergent university project that was to be realized on the outskirts of Ulm. It was to be quite different from traditional, university paths. Max Bill's name came into play. The "Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung" ["Scholl Siblings Foundation"] was founded in 1950. After much back and forth about the character of the new school, initially with a political, civic democratic tendency, a teaching model emerged with the intention of "training young people to solve design tasks in modern civilization" 5 (quote from brochure). That was it; that's where I wanted to be, even though it was quite unclear how my not particularly practical talents would work at a design school. I wanted to get away from what felt like an increasingly narrow province, and – lo and behold! – as if by magic, the provincialism vanished on the spot at Oberer Kuhberg ["upper cow-hill" the name of the hill the HfG was located at in Ulm, editor's note] in the air of what seemed to me to be exciting new educational horizons. It was heard that there would also be an "Information" subject as part of the study programme at the Ulm School of Design. A balm for the soul of a young woman who was still looking for a life plan. I plucked up courage, went and applied, filled out the demanding questionnaire, which handed out in the school's first years, about my cultural, political and democratic self-understanding, more intuiting than clearly defining the answers. Unfortunately, I do not have a copy of this document, which seems rather strange in today's data protection context.

 

I can no longer remember the details. Nor do I recall what was discussed, trembling with excitement, in a personal interview with the seemingly overpowering cult figure of Max Bill. I had the A-levels required for admission to the Information Department. As a practical prerequisite, I could show a modest traineeship at the Schwäbische Donau-Zeitung ["Swabian Danube Newspaper"] with the bonus that its publisher Kurt Fried, legitimised by his Jewish origins, was a supporter of the HfG in the sceptical cultural circles of Ulm, and also a collector of post-war art with a focus on concrete geometric art. That went down well. I'm still surprised that I met the requirements. It probably helped that I was a woman. Equal rights were part of the "Ulm" idea before the wheel of gender equality began to turn. And I might add that from then on, this has remained a matter of course for me in my later professional work without feminist overzealousness. To be fair, it has to be added that women have always had it easier in the cultural education sector than in other fields of knowledge.

 

 

I cannot and do not need to recount the founding story, nor its continuation until the bitter end in 1968. There is literature on this with different perspectives of the protagonists and the changing and fiercely conflicting doctrinal opinions. I studied at the hfg from 1954 to 1958, and after the one-year basic course, studied and graduated with a diploma in "Information". Hence, it was the first, early phase under Max Bill's intellectual influence. He initially failed with his vision of updating the Bauhaus idea, which he used as the ideal media-effective label, and he turned his back on the institute after a few years in 1957. My subject did not survive long and was merged with the "Visual Communication" department [editor's note: this is historically not entirely correct, see Background and Development], which was an obvious decision from the outset. The basic course, inspired by the "preliminary course" at the Bauhaus, also fell victim to the increasing scientification of the design process. I have many positive memories of the basic course and still consider the basic design experience it imparted to be a useful tool for entering creative professions. I remember the fascination of an image that appeared out of nowhere in the photographic darkroom. And I still have some prints made here of photographs of the ominously pointed plaster cube that was painstakingly created in the school workshops according to Bill's assignment. The challenge was to deal with volume in space. I placed my pitiful result on the harvested fields behind the school buildings with the fading Ulm cathedral tower in the distance and put it in the camera's sights. No quickly taken, precise photograph from a smartphone today could evoke a similarly processual experience of something that one has created step by step with your own hands. The alienating effect of my sculptural inability also earned me the praise of a solution that made a virtue of necessity and also incorporated a geographically local perspective.

 

There was no rambling in free imagination, but inventive inspiration was given free rein. From the very beginning, a methodical approach was applied, and the justification of successive steps of thought and realisation almost became a cult. Being able to experience and explore the colour theory of Josef Albers on the one hand and Johannes Itten on the other triggered an invaluable visual sensitisation. We were hardly aware of how internationally highly esteemed theses artists were, who dealt with us bunglers and set aesthetic standards. We hardly realised which artists, who were already highly respected internationally at the time, were working with us bunglers and setting aesthetic standards. The best example: Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart, who was brought to Ulm by Max Bill and who, working in "Visual Communication", was not my teacher. But his aura radiated as a master of balanced harmony in both his painting and his typography, without compromising the purity of either sphere. Much later, I was a member of the jury for the scholarship for young artists of the most diverse stylistic tendencies, which was set up by his widow Leda. And I visited Josef Albers several times in his beautiful house and studio near New Haven (Massachusetts) and wrote about his painting on the theme of "Interaction of Color." When I moved to Zurich, I was able to visit Johannes Itten occasionally in his studio outside the city with a view of the Limmat valley, where he talked with undiminished intensity about the spirituality of colour. As a curator at the Haus konstruktiv museum in Zurich, I showed his colour theory. The breathing exercises he introduced at the HfG to release inner forces remain unforgotten. Itten's apparent esotericism was mockingly ridiculed, and yet he managed to dispense internal tensions and to tune the group of students to the inherent dynamics of colour relationships.

 

The synergy between workshop work and the humanities subjects, which were pooled under the label "cultural integration", provided the basis for further training in the individual subjects during the basic course year. The publication of the "club off ulm" series on the basic year from 1953 to 1960 6 provides a great deal of informative material in the form of individual reports, characterising the teaching personalities involved and also showing how individual the experiences were in the respective phases in Ulm. The introduction to the book, entitled "vorab" [beforehand], also contains some interesting statistics. For example, that 94 of the enrolled students only completed the basic course, 24 of whom were women, approximately a third. The unusually international mix in these early years of the HfG was also remarkable. Between 1953 and 1960, the proportion of foreign students was 38 per cent. I can think of a fellow student from Trinidad with his contagious cheerfulness in his amiable, dark face, or a red-haired man from Ireland with a rosary in his pocket; the South American continent was strongly represented, which had to do with Max Bill's close relationship to Brazil. After all, Tomás Maldonado came from Argentina. As a flagship for Ulm, he developed a concept of the basics course and published the first monograph on Max Bill.7 This internationality did well in the post-war period in Germany, which was opening up and breaking out of claustrophobic seclusion.

 

It was the name of Max Bill that acted as a magnet, as did the aura of a resurrected Bauhaus hovering over the institute. – Max Bense also came into action with seminars in the philosophical and semiotic context, already in the basic course, concentrating his intellectually ambitious edifice of ideas to the "information aesthetics" that became his epistemological programme. I still have all his books in my library, especially his early texts. In a small volume of aphoristic style published in 1948, I read this sentence as I flipped through it: "Philosophy is immanent pleasure of thinking." 8 This is precisely what he, driven by an igniting inner fire, placed in the hearts of his students and implanted in their strained little grey cells. He was to become the spiritus rector of the Information Department and built up the teaching programme, he taught at the HfG from 1954 to 1958, and again in 1966. The first publication in his "Aesthetica" series was published in 1954.9 Elisabeth Walter, who taught alongside her Stuttgart colleague (and later husband) in Ulm from 1956, should not be forgotten. She played a key role in the transfer of "information-aesthetics" concepts. Her habilitation lecture in 1962 at the University of Stuttgart dealt with the foundation of sign theory by Charles Sanders Peirce. She wrote about her work at the HfG in the catalogue book "ulmer modelle – modelle nach ulm" 10 She discreetly substantiated the professor's theses with spirited physical exertion. The theoretical approach of generally understanding art and design as sign languages, which have their own reality and levels of meaning, remained formative. These levels can be researched and evaluated.

 

I have always enjoyed text editing as a service, and to this day, the handling of language acquired in Ulm has ironed out various conceptual mistakes. I also understand it as a functional way of thinking that establishes the best possible relationship between the subject under discussion and the intended readership. The dictum of the scholar Bense, who was never at a loss for drastic directness, is unforgotten: when dealing with abstract content, always imagine dealing with apples and pears. – Together with Abraham Moles, [Max Bense] the professor of philosophy and philosophy of science at the University of Stuttgart (previously "Technische Hochschule Stuttgart") is regarded as the father of information aesthetics. Controversial from the start, and somewhat forgotten today. It would probably be more accurate to understand it as a conceptual approach to understanding the rationally decipherable in aesthetic processes. More than half a century later, this analytical approach should be reconsidered according to the current state of art and design philosophy. After all, Max Bense always emphasised that creative content could only be explained up to a certain point by a "mathematical way of thinking". This term, which has become a widely misunderstood buzzword of Concrete Art, is known to have originated with Max Bill: and the two Ulm Masters of the Universe were in complete agreement on this concept of creatively innovative transgression of boundaries, which leaves calculation behind. Nothing stood in the way of acting out inventive fantasy on the basis of logical structures.

 

The starting point for Max Bense – and the so-called Stuttgart Group that emerged around him at his Stuttgart chair – was the avant-garde forum for experimental literature in those years. Bense is also regarded as a theorist of concrete poetry built from word combinations. This was a good match with Eugen Gomringer, the pioneer of this newly emerging literary genre, who acted as Max Bill's secretary in the early Ulm years. The proximity to literature also characterised Bense's lectures; he himself wrote very beautiful concrete poems and also published them, for example in the volume "Die präzisen Vergnügen" [The Precise Pleasures], which were published in 1964. Some of them are aphorism-like, flowing sentences. Like this one: "Knowing that what is said is all that is to be said." 13 The spirit of the Austrian-English philosopher of analytical rigour, Ludwig Wittgenstein, wafted through our heads. We went through the oh-so-sparse sentences of his "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" 14. Bense's philosopher's heaven ranged from Decartes to Hegel to the cybernetics of Norbert Wiener. And one day in the summer of 1955, the man from America stood before the school's knowledge-thirsty general public as a guest speaker, lecturing on "Artificial Grammars for Universally Applicable Languages". The book "Cybernetics" 15, published in 1948, had encouraged Bense's information aesthetics. We were presented with intellectual food that was hard to chew. It was often exhausting, there was a lot we didn't understand and yet we grasped that thinking is as an open, interactive playing field of the human mind capable of learning. A school of life.

 

Professor Bense was not concerned with the history of philosophy, but with philosophy as a vehicle of thought for the philosophy of science. In other words, we struggled to understand how thought processes take place, how they are structured and interpreted. You could call it a comparative study of ideas. Of course, the argumentation of formal logic was part of the technical know-how of our learning programme. We got closer to the point when, in the sense of our distinguished scholar, we defined aesthetic processes as sign processes. Semiotics, the study of the meaning of signs, became a fashionable science in the 1960s and 70s, which also took up the codes and meanings of architecture and design. The term semiotics followed that of semantics. Semantics, as a sister to linguistics, deals with the relationships between language symbols [editor's note: semantics actually deals with meaning, the relationship between signs is the field of syntax]. A broad field opened up, which in Europe was popularised in particular by Umberto Eco for an intellectually alert design community. His thrilling crime novel "The Name of the Rose" (1982), interwoven with dark secrets, introduces a semiotic-semantic search for monastic everyday life in the Middle Ages.16 The book became a worldwide success and could have served Max Bense as a test case for his pedagogical spiritual exercises.

 

We were thus prepared for speculative thinking about the world of the aesthetically "made", i.e. what people ingeniously design for people and what would occupy us in various ways in our later professional practice. What can be measured in these processes, and what cannot? Us? We were the five upright people from the beginnings of the Information Department, who enjoyed the today unimaginable privileges of a kind of collegium privatissimum with the downside that nobody could escape into noncommittal mere presence. We were challenged.

Looking back at my time in Ulm, the minimal numbers of the Information Department still astonish me. With me at that time were Ilse Grubrich Simitis, Cornelia Vargas-Koch, and Elke Koch-Weser Ammassari, as well as the only man at the hen party, Gui (Georg) Bonsiepe, who later pursued an increasingly design-scientific career. Not uncommon, he continued to work as a lecturer at the HfG after graduating. I will leave it to those who were involved in the second phase of what was still a precariously experimental branch of study to describe how the Information Department was reoriented after 1958 and which personalities were involved. With Tomás Maldonado a forward-looking optimism for the scientification of teaching methods was launched. These essentially related to the broadly and vaguely defined field of design. Clearly calculable solutions based on algorithm-controlled computer programmes, how nice! If only we didn't get stuck in structures and systems along the way. I think that the operationalisation of creative processes tried out in Ulm should not be understood as an direct continuation of Max Bense's rational, analytical and relativizing way of thinking.

 

The theoretical approach of understanding art in particular and design in general as sign languages that have their own reality and levels of meaning remained influential. Hence the intrinsic reality of the artwork. And this is what we had to deal with. There was also the writer and translator Albrecht Fabri, who did not hold back with his subtle critical judgement of our more or less skilful language exercises. And Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Only slightly older than us, he taught us something that could be called Creative Writing in the American sense. All of them, whom I have mentioned, sharpened our sense of language and instilled in us a justifiable scepticism towards hollow phrases. – All these exercises helped in composing a simple advertising text.

 

Memories are selective, they include and exclude. Everyone who was there arranges their own HfG Ulm network in retrospect. Depending on who you ask, other personalities, other emphases will emerge. Here is another small teaching example – Bense par excellence. Take a text by Kafka and rewrite it on different levels of modality. We permutated, varied and combined the short prose piece "Der plötzliche Spaziergang" [The Sudden Walk] and transferred it to other linguistic worlds, such as a poetry or advertising style. In such language games, the manipulative possibilities of language are conveyed unsurpassably well. Moreover, language decodes itself as a multi-layered, highly manipulative sign system. Bense's exercises had consequences. A seminar that I was preparing for an elective at the Zurich School of Arts and Crafts (today: "Hochschule für Gestaltung") was supposed to deal with reading a daily newspaper in this sense. In the end, it didn't take place. A seminar at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna was supposed to offer something "museological". I thought to myself, whether architects or jewellery designers, everyone at some point has to create a catalogue. So I lugged a suitcase full of art and design catalogues from Zurich to Vienna. We analysed them, looked at the structure, visual appearance, handling, legibility, content, and sustainability of the messages conveyed. And finally, we designed an own fictitious catalogue based on the criteria we had identified. For me, these were the fruits of Bense's seemingly so theoretically abstract, intellectual cuisine. Seemingly unrealistic intellectual Glass Bead Games triggered invaluable insights for us future "word workers" – a definition by Gert Kalow.17 I repeat myself: logical thinking was one thing, the methodical handling of the incessant flow of information as it is reflected in thoughts, images and statements was another. Recognising the pitfalls on the path from information to communication was a third.