David Oswald Foreword and introduction
The texts collected on this website were written around 2014 and published in 2015 in a limited edition. The story of the creation of this book, which is now out of print, can be read below, in the foreword to the first edition. Shortly after the book was published, there were complaints that it was only available in German. It was immediately clear to us that an English and also a Spanish publication would be worthwhile, but at the time it was impossible for us to provide or finance the translation work. As important as the topic and content is from our point of view, it still remains a niche topic with which book publishers can hardly make any money.
Some contributions, for which we had the copyright, have been available online for some time. Also available is an English-language journal article based on our text on the history of the department. The download numbers of these articles show great international interest, especially from Latin America. My first short conference contribution on "The Department of Information" from 2012, was previously the only text on this topic available in Spanish (thankfully translated by Eugenio Vega) – to date, it is the text with the highest number of clicks and downloads.
In recent years, conversations during trips to Argentina and Chile encouraged me to make our work more widely available. At the end of 2022, the ‘club off ulm e.V.’, the original initiator of the retrospective series, disbanded for reasons of age. Almost simultaneously, ChatGPT was released for public use, a language-based artificial intelligence that, surprisingly, can translate quite well without having explicitly "learned" it. Dedicated translation programmes, such as DeepL, also made huge leaps in quality due to advances in AI. I tried out a few translations with these tools. The results seemed good enough to me to use an AI-based translation as the basis for a multilingual republication of the book. However, the automatic translations were and are far from error-free. The AI does make perfect sentences in terms of spelling and grammar, but there are regularly logical "misunderstandings" in terms of content. Often, text passages that seem unambiguous to a human with some technical and contextual knowledge are, objectively speaking, surprisingly open to different interpretations. To find these errors, one must understand both languages at least very well and be familiar with the subject matter. I felt confident enough to do this in English, but not in Spanish. So the present website will go online with a largely complete German version, an almost complete English version, but initially only a few Spanish texts.
Unless otherwise indicated, the German-language texts are unaltered original texts. The English-language texts are my revised and corrected translations based on DeepL and ChatGPT translations. [As of 2024, DeepL translates more precisely and closer to the original from German to English, while ChatGPT translates more freely and often more fluently, so that factual-scientific texts were usually better translated by DeepL and journalistic-everyday texts from ChatGPT required less correction effort.]
I started the proofreading with Gui Bonsiepe's retrospective and quickly realised that I had significantly underestimated the amount of proofreading required for texts of this quality and complexity. More complex grammatical references, semantic nuances and allusions, rare idioms and metaphors are hard work for AI – as they are for human translators. Our favourite part of Gui Bonsiepe's text was the translation of the phrase "to use language criticism to address the consequences and interests of ideological dance around the egg". Whether human or AI – if you don't know this idiom, you can't know that it's not the eggs that are dancing, but ideologues around the eggs …
Due to these rather high demands on the translators – in terms of expertise and time required – the Spanish-language version is still quite incomplete. Gui Bonsiepe's text was corrected by his wife Silvia Fernandez, who speaks Argentine Spanish as her mother tongue but no German. Gui Bonsiepe supported her in the (obviously not uncommon) cases where his German original text had to be used to correct the Spanish ChatGPT translation. Eugenio Vega (see above) kindly agreed to translate the journal article "Writing as a Design Discipline" that Christiane Wachsmann and I had written based on one of the book contributions into Spanish. This had already been available in German and English translation by the end of 2015.
Clarifying the rights of use, on the other hand, was easier than expected, with the vast majority of authors immediately agreeing. The HfG Archive and the respective authors were also able to grant the rights of use for the majority of the illustrations. Thanks also to Florian Aicher, who manages the rights of use of Otl Aicher's estate. In the case of Elke Koch-Weser Ammassari and Fred Weidmann, who unfortunately are no longer alive, the daughters and the widow respectively granted the rights of use. I came to an agreement with Margit Staber-Weinberg and Ilse Grubrich-Simitis shortly before their deaths. Ilse Grubrich-Simitis unfortunately only gave her consent for the re-publication of the original German text; she did not trust a machine translation, even if it was corrected by humans. This is entirely understandable, given that she was responsible for the science department at Fischer Verlag for decades and absolute linguistic precision was never negotiable for her. For me, this is another example of the uncompromising attitude of "the Ulmer" when it comes to quality, which always leaves me ambivalent: On the one hand, I admire the consistency, but on the other hand, I am amazed at the compulsiveness. Just a few days before her death, she made me rewrite our copyright agreement because she insisted on single quotation marks to be appropriate for this document.
Foreword book edition 2015]: The Keystone
The previous volumes of the "HfG Ulm Retrospectives" series have been published at surprisingly regular intervals of two years each. Following the volumes on the Building Department (2006), Product Design (2008), Visual Communication (2010) and Film (2012), this series will now be completed and finalised in 2015 with the Information Department. With the reviews of the Basic Course published in 2011, the series comprises six volumes with a total of over 150 personal memories of former HfG Ulm students.
In the foreword to the first volume, the initiator of the retrospective series, Gerhard Curdes, evoked the potential of these documents for an "in-depth examination of HfG didactics" and called for an examination of the "invisible Ulm" 1 - in contrast to an HfG reception that is characterised by the depiction of the same products over and over again. Also the Information Department has remained invisible in the reception of the HfG. It is one of the facets of the HfG that are difficult to access in illustrated books and exhibitions, it can hardly be explored without an effort of thought. Thus, although this department has always been dutifully mentioned in the HfG literature for the sake of completeness, it has never been systematically analysed to date.2
Another factor may have been the small number of students in the Information Department. There were only 15 in total who entered the department after the foundation course, seven of whom graduated with a diploma. Another eight began their studies with the aim of studying in the Information Department, but left after the basic course.
The invisibility of the department becomes apparent when you look at the publication that has strongly coined the HfG image until today: The chapter on the Information Department in the widely circulated volume "The Morality of Objects" 3 takes up only 0.03% of the page count. It consists only of long quotations from HfG brochures, welcoming speeches, teaching programmes, and the magazines "output" and "ulm". You will search in vain for a text on the history and significance of the department.
Our editorial work was motivated by the desire to at least minimise this information gap left in previous publications about the HfG. We started from the following hypotheses: - The emergence and development of the Information Department is closely linked to the prehistory of the HfG. It can be interpreted as the last stubborn remnant of the initial plans for a school for political education.
- The effect that the department and its lecturers had on the intellectual climate of the entire HfG and the design discourse that emerged there is still underestimated today and has not been addressed enough.
- The Information Department is evidence of the holistic concept of design at the HfG, which encompasses all areas of "industrialised life", also including – in contrast to the Bauhaus – verbal communication and the media.
This is the first time that the editorial team of a "Retrospectives" volume has managed without HfG graduates. No one of the former Information Students felt able to take on the work. Gerda Müller-Krauspe, who had already edited the Basic Course volume, deserves our thanks for her insistence on completing the series and thus giving our project the decisive initial Impulse. She motivated Petra Kellner to take on this task in summer 2012. Gui Bonsiepe put me in touch with her - I had written a conference paper about the Information Department independently of the Rückblicke project.4 Christiane Wachsmann initially joined us only as a contact person in the HfG archive. It soon became clear that she also have had a special interest in the Information Department for a long time. So in September 2012, the three of us decided to take on the editorial work together.
At the risk of sounding self-pleasing, the composition of the editorial team was a stroke of luck. Not only did the collaboration work well on a personal level, the project also benefited from the different backgrounds and expertise:
Petra Kellner had worked on the very first comprehensive documentation of the HfG, the HfG Synopsis from 1981, which was created on the initiative of Hans (Nick) Roericht and against which exhibitions about the HfG have to be measured to this day. She also knows the subject matter from her collaboration on Gerda Müller-Krauspe's book about women at the HfG Ulm 5 and is well connected with former Ulm students.
This also applies to Christiane Wachsmann. As a member of staff and former director of the HfG Ulm archive, she worked full-time at the Hochschule für Gestaltung for many years. And from the very beginning, she was particularly interested in the otherwise neglected Information Department - her background in literature, journalism and as head of the writing workshop at the Ulm Adult Education Centre explains this interest. She is the author of the first text to deal systematically with the Information Department,6 for which she compiled a wealth of material and conducted interviews with former students and lecturers from the department back in 1991. The present volume has benefited enormously from this preparatory work, which dates back over two decades. Thanks to Christiane Wachsmann, we also had competent and authorised access to documents from the HfG archive - combined with her knowledge of privacy policy and copyright issues, this was an advantage over previous retrospective editorial teams that should not be underestimated.
In the beginning, I was probably the one on the editorial team who knew the least about the HfG. I had been a student and employee of Gui Bonsiepe in Cologne,7 but neither the HfG Ulm nor the Information Department were a major explicit topic at the time. The then emerging interactive media were much more exciting topics for teachers and students at the time. Rather, Ulm was present as an attitude in the form of a constant background radiation.8
In 2011, I began teaching in a degree programme that combined verbal and visual communication, among other things.9 Dissatisfied with the marketing-heavy curricula, I began researching similar interdisciplinary degree programmes and possible "historical role models". I asked Gui Bonsiepe in several emails about the content and curricula of the Information Department.
On his advice, I travelled to Ulm to research in the HfG archives. Fascinated by the complex of topics that came to light and in view of the obvious research gap, I decided to process the material into a contribution for a design history conference.10
Back to the retrospectives. The series has obviously developed a lot. The first volumes solely were collections of personal retrospectives by former students, most of them club-off-ulm members. These volumes were therefore often perceived as internal publications of the club off ulm. The Film Department volume already was a different story. The personal retrospectives of former students were supplemented by portraits and interviews with former lecturers, and even editorial texts by external (non-ulm) film critics and historians were integrated. What is hardly noticeable due to the small number of graduates from the film department is the enormous increase in the "retrospectives rate": in the volume of the construction department, only one in eight of the former students contributed a review. In the Film volume and in the Information volume, more than half of the former students have contributed a review or portrait.11
This increase is not only due to the motivational skills of the editors. With each issue, it became clearer that the content is not about nostalgic self-portrayal. Rather, it became clear that this form of "living historiography" contributes to a nuanced and differentiated HfG history. The dispute between the well-known HfG wings shines through at times in the personal retrospectives, even if they were formulated with half a century's distance to the events. However, the retrospectives as a whole make it impressively clear that - to use the usual clichés - there was not only the Bauhaus-influenced Bill-Ulm, the art-free Aicher-Maldonado-Ulm or the scientific Rittel-Ulm. If there is a truth about Ulm, it emerges in the blurred overlaps of the many subjective retrospectives of all those involved.12
The editorial team thanks [2015]
Our thanks naturally go first to all the authors, especially those who have reported on people who have already died. The editors received valuable information from multiple background discussions. We would like to thank Gunhild Bürgel, Ulrich Bürgel, Walter Eichenberger, Kirsten Kalow, Marianne Kalow, Gisela Kasten, Gerda Müller-Krauspe, Walter Müller, Frieder Nake, Hans Roericht and Ursula Wenzel. We would like to thank the HfG Archive and Dr Martin Mäntele for their support with the research and during our working meetings there. Florian Aicher, Peter Beck, Christian Dettwiler from the Ernst Scheidegger Archive, Alfred Jungraithmayr and René Spitz (photos by Hans G. Conrad) provided additional photographic material. We would like to thank Susanne v. Bülow (Studio Loriot), Lu Decurtins, Eugen Gomringer, Tilmann Krumrey, Michael Krüger, Martin Loew, Daniel Meister and Dagmar Meister-Klaiber, Walter Müller, Ursula Rauch and Horst Rasch, Bernd Rauschenbach of the Arno Schmidt Foundation, Deutsche Lufthansa AG, S. Fischer Verlag and ZEIT for permission to reprint texts and illustrations. Fischer Verlag and the ZEIT. Ursula Wenzel has kindly digitised and edited the majority of the photographic material.
Introduction [to the book edition 2015]
In this volume, the history of the Information Department is divided into four sections: its founding history and the three phases of its existence, which also categorise the former students into three "generations". These three generations have each experienced a distinctly different Information Department.
The contributions of the individual sections are preceded by brief chronologies of the corresponding periods. Institutional developments, changes in the teaching staff, and teaching topics are summarised here. The section on the history of the department also begins with such an overview. The editors then provide an in-depth introduction to the history and development of the department. The prehistory of the HfG, which is important for the conception of the Information Department, is also discussed here.
The first generation of five students joined the Information Department in 1954 and 1955. Four of them completed their studies with an HfG diploma. Fortunately, these four have agreed to write a personal retrospective. They form the basis for this volume of retrospectives and bear witness to the most stable phase of the department under the leadership of Max Bense. In the retrospectives of the first generation, it becomes clear that Bense, with his philosophical and scientific background and the topics of (philosophical) aesthetics and the theory of language, art, and science, ensured an enormously high intellectual standard. Of course, the other lecturers, many of whom were placed at the HfG by Bense, also contributed to this. The chronology at the beginning of the chapter provides more detailed information on this.
The first Information student, who was the only one to begin her studies in 1954, was also the first to submit her completed retrospective: Margit Staber-Weinberg. She had a head start, as she had already collected some memories of her student days for a lecture she gave in 2003 to mark the 50th anniversary of the HfG. She is closest to Max Bill's idea of information, according to which the department's task should primarily be the journalistic communication of design topics. However, her contribution goes beyond the professional, combining it with personal and historical contexts.
As is customary in the retrospective series, the contributions are organised chronologically by first year and then alphabetically. The chapter on the first generation therefore begins with this text by Margit Staber-Weinberg.
The second contribution is by Gui Bonsiepe. His text reflects that he spent the longest time in Ulm of all the alumni, remaining at the HfG as an assistant and lecturer until 1968. He is also the only one who remained professionally involved in design after graduating from the Information Department. Accordingly, his retrospective alternates between department-specific topics, brief personal interludes and a general and political HfG perspective.
The following retrospectives by Ilse Grubrich-Simitis and Elke Koch-Weser Ammassari were written in close dialogue with each other. Their descriptions benefit from diary-like letters that Elke Koch-Weser wrote to her parents living in Brazil at the time. Particularly, the depiction of the numerous guest lecturers' classes provides a welcome corrective to the dominance of department heads Bense and Kalow in the editor's texts.
The often unsystematic design of the teaching programme already led to uncertainty and dissatisfaction in the first generation. Ilse Grubrich-Simitis describes the perceived shortcomings of a teaching programme that often seemed thrown together at the time - subsequently linking many Ulm influences and contents positively with her career. Initially, when she was supervising a scientific publishing programme, it were the specific topics that refered to HfG times. Later, it was the interdisciplinarity that has become a matter of course in Ulm. And finally - after a professional reorientation - it was the work attitude: "engaged patience, rationality, […] precision" and the ability "to endure uncertainty in the face of great complexity over long periods of time".
Elke Koch-Weser Ammassari's contribution also shows how fruitful the confrontation with contradictory viewpoints of lecturers, which is often experienced as a lack of concept during studies, can be. It is probably no coincidence that she embarked on an academic career that combines these perspectives and bridges the scientific cultures: the humanistic of the arts and the numerical of the natural sciences.
The chapter on the first generation concludes with a transcription of a curriculum for the Information Department published by Max Bense in 1956 and two in-depth texts. In the first, David Oswald attempts to categorise and demystify Max Bense's often misunderstood "information aesthetics" from today's perspective. In the second text, Christiane Wachsmann portrays Gert Kalow, who taught the first generation as a guest lecturer before he took over as head of the department at the time when the second generation was forming, introducing his practice-orientated ideas of "language as a subject".
The second generation began their studies in 1958. At this time, the existence of the department was repeatedly called into question due to the low enrollment, the lack of a fully committed director, and the emergence of the new Film Department. The fragile state of the department was reflected in a significantly higher rate of students switching or dropping out. Even today a greater uncertainty and critical distance towards the HfG is evident in the retrospectives of this generation. Despite the circumstances at the time, the distance and criticism in the retrospectives of this period is expressed in a fondly critical manner – for example, in Erdmann Wingert's retrospective, which is probably best described as "classic quality journalism". Thankfully, he has also recorded his memories of fellow students of his generation who have already passed away.
There are also former Ulm students in whose work, at first glance, no traces of the HfG appear to be detectable - at least none that are visible. One such person is Fred Weidmann. But he also reports a strong influence and that he learnt from "the best of their time". After two years in Ulm, he switched to sociology - only to later produce pretty much the exact opposite of the concrete art favoured in Ulm at the time.
Distance and criticism of the HfG may also lie behind one or another refusal to respond to the editors' inquiries, but thankfully there were few. It is also pleasing that Sabine Sass has written a contribution about Dolf Sass, who passed away in 2009. Since she lived on the Kuhberg with her husband for a time, she can also provide insights into the HfG era. In HfG brochures, the close cooperation between verbal and visual communication was repeatedly asserted. Dolf Sass was one of the few who truly lived this cooperation.
Some alumni from the second generation have already passed away, others could no longer be located at the available addresses. As far as possible, these individuals are honored in short portraits based on archive material and information from other alumni or relatives. This was successful in the cases of Jürgen Freuer, Dolf Sass, Alf Poss, and Harry Kaas.
The third and final generation consists of just three students. Among them is Hanna Laura Klar (then "Hannelore" Waller), who, without ever officially changing departments, completed her studies in the Film Department. She made herself available for an interview. She still produces "life history films" today, a documentary film method that was taught in Ulm.
The last information student was Peter Michels. He initially left the HfG to study journalism in Berlin. After the closure of the Ulm School, he returned to the Institut für Umweltgestaltung [Institute for Environmental Design] to take his diploma examination. He died in 2011, and the retrospective on his life was compiled by his companion and the editors. With him, a circle closes, as Michels worked throughout his life as a critical and enlightening journalist. As the last graduate of the department, he thus corresponds exactly to the image that Inge Scholl, Otl Aicher and Hans Werner Richter had of graduates of the planned Geschwister-Scholl-Schule at the end of the 1940s.
Note on spelling and punctuation
The career paths of the former information students are much more varied than those of the other departments, the latter aiming for more clearly defined job profiles. Due to the wide range of disciplines in which the former information science students are now located, we as editors have dispensed with the usual guidelines in terms of text form, footnote and citation formats. Against this background, uniformity seemed less important to us than documenting the diversity that actually exists. Thus, narrative texts with a classic journalistic style are juxtaposed with more scholarly texts with detailed references and notes.
When examining the retrospective texts, we also noticed differences in spelling and punctuation. Here, too, it seemed appropriate to allow for individual diversity. Thus, reformed and unreformed German spelling is now found alongside traditional Swiss spelling - including the rewriting of the alliteration vowels with Ae, Oe and Ue that was previously necessary due to the Swiss typewriter keyboard. We also considered such traditional tool traces from the pre-digital era to be worth preserving, as they make us aware of the changed materiality of text work. We have also retained mixed forms, such as the combination of new German spelling with the "guillemet" inverted commas common in Romance languages - as a visible sign of a multicultural biography. As is common practice, verbatim quotations or transcriptions of original documents are reproduced in the spelling of the time.
We have also not intervened in the question of whether to use the gender-neutral "Studierende" or the linguistically more attractive "Studenten". Even the editors themselves did not want to agree on a term, so that both terms may appear in our texts.
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