Elke Koch-Weser Ammassari What do I owe to the Ulm School of Design?
As one of the very few students at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm (HfG) who chose the Information Department and even graduated from there, I too was asked to contribute a retrospective essay to this volume. This task presents a challenge that is difficult to meet, as almost 60 years have now passed. And in my case, the by no means linear or predictable Ulm study programme has been followed by a professional, academic life that has received many very important impulses from what I learnt at Ulm, but hardly a truly systematic body of knowledge related to a clear professional goal.
This "review" of my time as a student from 1955 to 1959 therefore attempts to examine this contradiction, which perhaps does not only affect me personally, and in doing so it would like to explore the objective framework as well as the subjective world of expectations in which my experiences can be categorised. First and foremost, as a contribution to the compilation of historical data, it will draw on events and experiences, judgements and moods that I have often taken verbatim from the letters I sent to my parents living in faraway Brazil to report very regularly and in detail on events and on how I have been. I also consulted a lot of lecture notes that I had kept and looked through my written and visual work. In the often tedious reconstruction of now distant events, the conversations I had in Frankfurt, Florence and Rome with my friend Ilse Grubrich-Simitis were particularly helpful. Her contribution as a graduate of the Information Department can also be found in this volume. After all these years, we set off together on a journey into our shared HfG past – tentatively at first, but then with determination and finally gratefully rewarded. However, this is not just a report, but rather an attempt to shed light on the contrasting and often even contradictory events of that time from today's perspective in order to analyse them as far as I can. As I looked back, I soon came across a number of unanswered questions.
Right at the beginning of my research, it seemed necessary to understand more precisely how the HfG project came about in the early German post-war era and under what conditions it was realised. Of course, those of us involved in the "Ulm Experiment" knew from the outset that Inge Aicher-Scholl wanted to keep alive the memory of her two siblings who were executed by the Nazi regime by founding the university and that the American High Commissioner John J. McCloy and representatives of German industry had provided the necessary funds for the enterprise. But only now have I learned more about the social context and the history of the founding initiative, thanks to commendable archival and documentary work.1 I believe that initially highlighting some key points here will make the developmental phases and later problems of the school as well as my ambivalent relationship with it more understandable.
After the end of the war, the city of Ulm was obviously a highly interesting area for reconstruction, both socio-politically and culturally. Above all, the still young Otl Aicher, later Inge Scholl's husband, immediately endeavoured with extraordinary personal commitment to persuade the city's inhabitants to cooperate actively and to promote a broad, solidary commitment among them to jointly revive the lost liberal, democratic values. Well-known personalities, such as Romano Guardini in particular, were invited to give lectures, and Aicher succeeded in mobilising the key intellectual personalities of the local public, of private institutions, and of the cultural sector for a radical new beginning.2 The Ulm Adult Education Centre [Volkshochschule], founded in 1946 under the direction of Inge Scholl, gained great renown in this process, attempting to quench the thirst for knowledge of both the older and younger generations. Many other citizens' initiatives that similarly tried to influence life in the city also became significant in this context (initiatives that, by the way, were already trying out bottom up development strategies based on participation and social capital, which were only studied scientifically much later).
Interestingly, almost simultaneously and with similar objectives, the Group 47 was founded under the aegis of Hans Werner Richter as an association of writers. Here, too, the focus was on overcoming the 1945 "zero hour" in the search for new values by developing tolerance and an ability to give and receive criticism. Together with Alfred Andersch, Hans Werner Richter published the magazine Der Ruf [The Call], as an instrument of enlightenment and education and especially to stimulate discussion and opinion-forming. However, at the time of an intensifying international political confrontation the magazine promoted the interlocution between East and West and it did not conceal the left-wing position of its editors when it occasionally criticised the occupying powers. It had to cease publication in the same year, 1947, at the instigation of the Information Control Division of the American occupation authorities. Group 47, which increasingly included the youngest, most experimental German-language authors, nevertheless continued to develop and over time gained a considerable international recognition.3
The desire of the Aicher-Scholl couple to found a "school" in addition to the adult education centre with its Thursday lectures initially developed in friendship and agreement with Hans Werner Richter. Initially, it was to be an evening school focussing on political education, in memory of the Scholl siblings' Nazi resistance. Situated in the centre of the city, it was to involve all residents of Ulm – "just like the train station". But how could such a project be financed? The plan was soon changed and a "Hochschule" [editor's note: in German, "Hochschule" is an umbrella term for all higher education institutions] was considered as part of the re-education programme of the allied powers, for which resources could be hoped for. In the context of the financing problem, however, a completely different objective emerged. Otl Aicher, himself a graphic designer and typographer, had been inspired by Max Bill's innovative concept of Gute Form [Good Form]. With a decidedly moral claim, the Swiss artist, designer, and architect endeavoured to create beauty in the design of everyday objects, which should be determined by the material and function.4 Aicher had contacted the former Bauhaus student and in many respects he now rejected the socially reformist school concept previously agreed with Hans Werner Richter, in which Richter had already been designated as the school's rector. There was an ideological break and, it appears to me, a fundamental reorientation. It was decided – now with Max Bill as spiritus rector and future responsible person, to accommodate the Americans and to revive the old Bauhaus idea. They now wanted to build a school, no longer in the heart of the city, but far outside, in the American campus style, in a completely modern new building on the Kuhberg [editors note: "cow hill", one of the hills of Ulm]. The desire to do something culturally and politically relevant directly with and for the citizens of Ulm thus evaporated. Instead, the opportunity to appeal to a broader, even international, group of students thanks to a Swiss artist like Max Bill seemed more enticing. Under these conditions, it was finally possible for the Aicher-Scholl couple to secure the necessary start-up capital from the American side, especially since Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus founder who had emigrated to Harvard, was immediately willing to officially support the project. In a letter to the authorities and financiers overseas he announced to act as a guarantor. To the best of my recollection, the process outlined here, i.e. the complete reversal of the initial founding intentions, was surprisingly never discussed at the time of my studies. Only a few of us students were aware of the original, socio-politically committed objectives. However, it can be assumed that the founders of the school were left with a discrepancy that influenced the later disputes. As a historical background, this discrepancy should have become a topic, at least in the Information Department, but this did not happen. Today I suspect that this background and the double soul of the project explain why this department was the most problematic at the HfG – in other words, why it had difficulty getting off the ground, why it repeatedly dissatisfied us students and why it was ultimately only able to graduate a few students. With this in mind, I will now try to answer the following questions in retrospect:
- Under what circumstances did I decide to attend the HfG and how did I get accepted?
- How did my studies develop in the basic year and in the Information Department?
- What happened and what occupied us, and me in particular, outside of study time?
- What impact did what I learnt in Ulm have on my further studies?
- What role did the inspiration from Ulm play in my later academic activity?
1. Under what circumstances did I decide to attend the HfG and how did I get accepted?
I was still two years away from my A-levels when my parents, in Brazil, heard about the Ulm School of Design project for the first time. It must have immediately made sense to them. They had emigrated from Germany soon after Hitler came to power, bought land in the Brazilian jungle and, after a very difficult start, built up a profitable coffee fazenda. In deciding to emigrate, they had followed my grandfather, a former member of the Reichstag, leader of the Democratic Party and minister in the Weimar government, who had gone into exile to the same place in 1933 after his book Und dennoch aufwärts [And yet upwards] was burned at the infamous Nazi book burnings. He was waiting to return to Germany after the war to take part in the reconstruction, but he died in his place of refuge shortly before the end of the war.5
After the end of the war, like other politically and/or racially persecuted German refugees who had landed there, my family intensively delved into the events of the resistance movement, thanks to the increasing flow of news. As a result, not only the tragic fate of the Scholl siblings, but also the Ulm initiatives of Otl and Inge Aicher-Scholl in particular came into the focus of their interest. The local parents-in-law of Peter Wackernagel, the director of the municipal theatre in Ulm, who worked closely with the couple, played a mediating role. Abroad, the founding of the School of Design in 1953 aroused great curiosity. This was not only the case for my mother, who knew the Bauhaus idea well from the Weimar years and had danced enthusiastically at Bauhaus parties. Architecture had become an exciting topic in Brazil at the time – thanks to Oscar Niemeyer's sensational "modernist" buildings in his own country and his winning the competition to build the United Nations headquarters in New York with Le Corbusier (whose own project had not won the award).
So my parents thought that two of their daughters, who had a gift for manual work and were not without artistic talent, should try to be accepted into the inaugural class of 1954 and the following year in Ulm. And since it was known that the chosen rector of the school, Max Bill, would be coming to São Paulo 6 to participate at the Biennale, my mother travelled there to find out more. And what she heard confirmed her belief that the school was a very promising enterprise for young people. My sister and I, who had spent no more than six months in Europe until then, liked the idea, but probably also due to a lack of knowledge of study alternatives in Germany.
After a stay of several months in the United States, my sister Frauke was accepted in Ulm in 1954 with the goal of joining the Department of Product Form 7. I myself, on the other hand, interested in history and particularly curious about modern media from the sidelines, applied a year later with the aim of joining the Information Department. This department was planned in Ulm, but for the time being it did not yet exist, and there was no official programme for it. But that didn't seem to be a problem, because in the first year all students had to attend the compulsory basic course anyway. However, the admission requirements for the chosen department had to be met when entering the school. And so, during my first visit to the HfG and a tour of its imposing, raw concrete facilities, which blended fantastically into the landscape, I was advised by Max Bill to complete a five-month internship at the well-known modern art publisher Percy Lund Humphries in London after completing my external A-levels at a grammar school in Mainz. There, in the graphic and layout department, highly esteemed by him and headed by Herbert Spencer, there was much to learn in preparation for my studies.
The time in London provided the best possible introduction to the completely new European living conditions. I was given a good active insight into the publishing company and was allowed to take part in the typographic work for practice. In my free time, I was constantly and enthusiastically visiting museums and the theatre and also got to know a lot of very interesting people. After my stay in London and before my studies began, I was given the welcome opportunity to travel from Munich to Florence for a week, where I was able to indulge in the art of living and art history with a competent introduction. In a letter to my parents, I wrote: "My dream country Italy!", without realising that I would later spend most of my life there.
2. How did my studies develop in the basic year and in the Information Department?
In autumn 1955, the school was inaugurated, naturally with a lecture by Walter Gropius. When I arrived, the administrative and teaching rooms were ready and I was able to move into a pretty, spartanly furnished little room in the residential tower. As a newcomer from a rural background, considerably spoiled by the vibrant cultural offerings previously experienced in London and Italy, I was immediately dismayed by the great distance of the HfG from the city of Ulm, which threatened to hinder my active exchange with the everyday world of Germany, which was still completely unknown to me. There were no public transport connections to the school, nor were there any planned. So everyone had to walk up from the tram terminus to Kuhberg – even at night and in the wind – unless they were one of the very few car owners. Isolation, and not just in the spatial sense, was and remained a fact of life. Hence, the Schwäbische Donau-Zeitung acknowledged the progress of the school's buildings designed by Bill, in the same time noted that while the sense and purpose of the school had long been known and eagerly followed by interested circles both domestically and internationally, there was still widespread confusion among the Ulmers about its objectives.8 The difficulty therefore persisted in finding a fruitful mode of planning dialogue and cultural collaboration with the city's inhabitants regarding this ambitious project. I will now try to reconstruct the educational path that the HfG offered me in those early years.

2.1 The foundation course
I started the foundation course [first year of design basics] together with 30 mostly somewhat older fellow students, including only six female students. It soon became apparent that I was the only candidate for the future Information Department, and at first that seemed quite pointless. In my very first letter home I wrote about the HfG protagonists at the time. On the occasion of the newcomers' reception party, I provided what seems to me to be a very apt portrait: "Wüst [not nice, rude, wild], seeing Bill dance. Very fanatical, a little bent, forehead bent forward, rhythmic – with the thin Evi – looked great!", and on the other hand the brief note: "Yesterday's Bense lecture, Man in the Technical Age - incredibly interesting." Obviously my initial impression was a decidedly positive one.
At the beginning of the lessons at the end of October 1955, Hans Curjel, a cultural critic from Switzerland, presented the pedagogical principle of the school to us, following on from the Bauhaus tradition, and with the help of Tomás Maldonado, he anchored it in the ideas of Georg Kerschensteiner's "activist school", Maria Montessori's methodology and John Dewey's maxim of "learning by doing". However, it was emphasised that the slogan "work school versus book school", which largely applied to the Bauhaus, was not ours. I wrote home: "One by one we had to explain to [Curjel] where we were from, what we had done and what we were looking for here. It was interesting to see the different faces to the statements! Then he distributed work assignments. First, we were asked to make an 'overview of the last 50 years' in 14 days. To do this, groups were formed to deal with architecture-sculpture-painting, product form, pedagogy and ways of life. A lot of time is given to us, but also a lot is expected."
Tomás Maldonado, "the dark, long, lanky Argentinian, head of the basic course, is quiet, friendly and nice…. He advises us on the papers and gave us brief bullet points today." For example, biologically or technologically speaking, he says, "life includes philosophy, sociology, politics, literature, music or energies and materials. Read: Sigmund Freud; Norbert Wiener: The Human Use of Human Beings; Bense's contributions to philosophy between two wars; Lukàcz: The Destruction of Reason, as well as works on the history of modern literature. Difficult for many who have had little education – let's see. I'm in 'Pedagogy'. Key points: Loos, Gropius, Van der Velde, Moholy-Nagy, Albers, Klee, Bill. I have two thick Moholy-Nagys lying here."
Truly an interdisciplinary, challenging and extremely wide-ranging programme for novices. There was also an interesting series of lectures by Hans-Joachim Firgau, who dealt with important topics such as "social obligation", "concepts of freedom" and "the state" from a holistic, socio-psychological and gestalt-philosophical perspective. The determination of a "rational attitude" not restricted by taboos for the purpose of defining "morality", situated between the individual and society, seemed very important to him. And he warned against a flattening softening of such issues with Spengler's phrase: "Optimism is cowardice" – please note, at our after all strikingly forward-looking institution. At the same time, he also provided self-reflective arguments and critical reflections on his own way of looking at things, which certainly corresponded to Aicher's basic ideas and initial objectives.
Regarding Max Bense, I wrote home that although he was actually a physicist, he was more important and better known as a logician and that he had given an overview of the characteristics of micro- and macrophysics with the most important atomic discoveries of recent decades, Planck, Heisenberg, etc. in the higher grades. "All just briefly, of course, in principle." In our basic course, on the other hand, he raised the key philosophical question: What is knowledge? It was about different orders of languages; about abstract languages, formalised propositional logic and about rational, verifiable thinking, to finally end up (via Kant and Husserl to Whitehead) with the concept of structure and the modalities of aesthetic perception. The assignment was an essay on the topic "Application and definition of the rationalist way of thinking". I felt completely overchallenged! But that didn't dampen my curiosity and fascination.
Initially, our practical work plan included: "Always Baravalle in the morning: draw curves and spirals based on mathematical formulas and, in black and white, either with an emphasis on spiral surfaces or on symmetry." When I look at the sheets today, I am amazed at the truly enormous precision of these works, and I am fascinated by the titles: Logarithmic Spirals as Orthogonal Trajectories or The Lemniscate and Pascal's Snail as Inversion of a Hyperbola. I further reported: "This daily 3½ hours, until 12 o'clock. Then lunch, break until 2 o'clock; then workshop. We were in metal this week (each workshop one third of the basic course). We were given an iron plate and told to grind it square and straight. An incredible test of patience – I only slowly learned it. First there was always too much and then immediately too little again; three corners were quite right-angled, then the fourth was always wrong."
Although I enjoyed working by hand, the expectations were sometimes almost agonisingly high for people like me who were not trained in craftsmanship and inexperienced in using circular saws and soldering irons – as was also the case later in the wood and plaster workshops.
The lessons with Hermann von Baravalle were followed by a colour theory course with the former Bauhaus student Helene Nonné-Schmidt, which focused on visual training. With her, we had to paint predefined fields on a sheet of paper or tiny punched-out and glued-on round patches with carefully graded and mixed watercolours. The tasks to be solved were, for example, Determining the effects of different brightness values with complementary colours or Triplane overlapping of adjacent complementary colours. This was time-consuming, highly accurate, painstaking work, the perfect results of which one would still like to frame. In the same manner, we basic course students continued working with the architect Hans Gugelot, who was supposed to prepare us technically for a possible future designing of objects in his course Constructive Representation Methods. Again, it was all about tasks that were completely standardised for everyone, such as Three-sided pyramid on an inclined plane or Three spheres inside each other and each touching the next larger one or Two-point perspective. On top of this, Otl Aicher gave us typographical expertise, and we learnt about the development and characteristics of typefaces, about correction symbols and printing processes.
It should be noted that in the basic course, apart from the predetermined work cycles of the mornings, no time was reserved for the individual creative moment. Our own inventive ideas when confronting the tasks remained unnoticed, hidden behind the abstract problems of optimal re/production. And I suspect that none of us students insisted on systematically developing our own concepts (for example in the form of excellent sketches – like those created by the young Le Corbusier travelling in Italy).
As a counterweight to all the practical exercises, Eugen Gomringer, "concrete poet" and secretary to Max Bill, offered a historically and interculturally extraordinarily wide-ranging course on comparative literature and art history, from Dante to Surrealism. And finally, there were two further lecture series, which were unfortunately too short, that were particularly relevant to my interests in the Information Department and provided inspiration for my post-Ulm studies. Firstly, Helge Pross gave us an insightful and wide-ranging overview of the history of sociology and then dealt specifically with the various forms of family as an institution and its problems in modern society.9 And secondly, Hellmut Becker came to talk about empirical research methods in the European tradition on the one hand and in the more recent American social sciences on the other. He focussed in particular on the dynamics of formal and informal groups and the sociometric methods to be applied in this regard.10
While most of the basic course lecturers mentioned above focussed exclusively on theory and others exclusively on practice, Tomás Maldonado was the only one who, from the very beginning, tried to unite these two perspectives productively with original approaches. He was always striving to find useful concepts and rules that could then be of use in solving creative tasks. His starting points were perception theory and gestalt theory, topology and semiotics. On their basis, he formulated a series of principles (e.g. of form, conciseness, continuity or common destiny, the figure-ground relation, experience or movement) and working hypotheses. Corresponding practical tasks then prompted us to draw complicated and aesthetically immediately very attractive Peano surfaces and Weierstrass curves, to invent rotation-sliding-mirroring, to deal with various compositions according to principles of equilibrium and even to try, experimentally comparing, to achieve inaccuracy through accuracy. In short, Maldonado's course, which spanned both basic course semesters, cautiously provided a little leeway for self-directed creative needs.
Throughout my basic year studies, I repeatedly had severe doubts about whether the decision to study at the HfG was the right one for me. I thought that the theory on offer was generally not structured systematically enough. In addition, the lecturers tended to simply ignore the fact that many of us lacked a solid knowledge base to understand the problems correctly and thoroughly. And most of the exercises lacked a perspective that was deliberately realistic and imagination-enriching, which was particularly important to me and was completely excluded here.
From May 1956 onwards, my friend Ilse Grubrich, a former Waldorf pupil who was plagued by similar doubts, and I could be sure that our promotion to the second year was by no means automatic. But now we were undecided about the choice between the Information and Visual Communication departments. We discussed this with Tomás Maldonado, who had been a member of the rectorate since Max Bill's resignation as rector in March of this year, and I then wrote to my parents: "[…] he thought we should just start in one of the two departments, you can still switch. And we would exaggerate about previous education. After all, the school doesn't want to educate average people – they should be people with an overview, who grasp things completely, who have the personality to run something, be it a publishing house or a TV station. He doesn't want to send some mid-level employees out into the world, who are naturally expected to have all the small-scale practical knowledge."
But how do you get such jobs, we asked ourselves. We were attracted by a modern, highly innovative Information Department, which I in particular hoped would deal with the new media of film and television. Professional efforts in this direction were already being made by Detten Schleiermacher, a temporary fellow student knowledgeable in theatre and film, and by Enno Patalas, a frequent visitor in Ulm, an employee of the magazine Filmkritik, and later the long-term director of the Film Museum in Munich. However, their efforts could not quite come to fruition.11 The manner of the future head of the Information Department, Max Bense, was also discouraging. We disliked "his jokes, his egocentricity, ignoring others and not responding to arguments if they do not suit him". On the other hand, I thought (burdened by gender problems) again: "…that one [in the information department] can work without becoming a second Bense or a bluestocking and 'despised' intellectual… What is tempting is that something is always going on with him." And on this point I noted on 8 June 1956: "Today, after a long and heated discussion, the opinion turned again: Bense, Schleiermacher, Patalas, Ilse and I over coffee in the room. [Bense] has something planned, there's an insane amount of work, he doesn't want it to be as lax as elsewhere in the whole school. He always thinks it's horrible, calling itself Hochschule, but he has nothing to say in the other departments. And he will get us jobs later, as he has done for every one of his students in Stuttgart so far. You just have to conform to his system."
So my first year of study ended with unconditional admission to the Information Department, but my confusion persisted. I was granted three-months of time for thinking it over at the beginning of the next academic year. As a prerequisite for possible admission to the Visual Communication department, I wanted to do an internship in the photo lab.
I spent the summer months in Paris. Bill had arranged a stage for me with the Brazilian delegation to UNESCO, where I was allowed to attend meetings of certain working groups and do some work in the press office. Bense's assistant, Elisabeth Walther, helped me to rent a room. I took part in language courses at the Alliance Française, visited the theatre and the wonderful museums, got to know the Max Ophüls family through Detten Schleiermacher, danced in Existentialist Caves in the evenings and read Proust's "A la recherche du temps perdu" in the Jardin des Tuilleries.
2.2 The Information Department
When we returned to the HfG in mid-October 1956, the Werkbund [editor's note: an influential association of artists, architects, designers and industrialists founded in 1907] conference awaited us, this time organised on the school's premises. Curious to get to know the HfG, a large number of Werkbund members attended and listened to the lectures by the authorities. Bense spoke ("very good, only strange that he read off, as he can only speak freely when walking up and down, but was now tied to the microphone") and Bill. This was followed by a "lecture by the head of the Swiss Werkbund and a discussion, sometimes very heated. Bill didn't restrain himself enough – the German Werkbund went against him. Some only wanted to create by feeling only – the students whistled, justified, but probably unwise. Today, the whistling was already in the newspaper." I remember very well that the question was whether you had to bring certain artistic or literary talents to be trained as a designer or whether it was a question of skills to be learnt. In this sense, two fronts clashed here, which soon brought the Bauhaus into the discourse. There, at least for a time, painting ambitions were cultivated parallel to teaching, while at the HfG, with a few exceptions, these were actually only realised very privately. However, the Werkbund had some influence on the Stuttgart sources of financial support, and so they wanted to avoid public disputes. Another difference to the Bauhaus was also discussed, namely the fact that the HfG, in the Institute for Product Form, worked on commissions from outside. This was intended to give some students the opportunity to make a name for themselves under the supervision of a lecturer. However, the result was that inefficiently managed work coordination and scheduling in time-bound competitions led to overwork among the student employees, which made them angry. As a result, this profitable commission method was also questioned.
I began my second year of study with the aforementioned internship in the photo lab, which was run by a capable master craftsman, Wolfgang Siol. He taught me the craft and tricks of the trade, both when working in the darkroom and in studio photography (portraits of people or advertising photos of consumer goods), which made extensive use of lighting effects. It was a very special privilege to have had the well-known Magnum photographer Ernst Scheidegger as a teacher. Like Werner Bischof and Robert Capa, with whom he was friends, he had already documented life in the most distant countries, which were hardly travelled at the time. He therefore brought with him an interest in the conditio humana, which had previously been neglected at the HfG due to the widespread preference for structures as subjects. I kept my photo series of the circus and its children's audience or of prospective shoppers in front of enticing shop windows.
In the meantime, the Information Department had also been opened, not without planning conflicts. It is reported that Aicher had included "market analysis, advertising psychology, calculation and advertising policy" in a curriculum ("Lehrplan Otl 1", around 1950). In Bill's opinion, however, "the texting (information) department" should be dedicated to "the verbal self-portrayal of the school".12 Bense, at least initially supported by Maldonado, had more ambitious, much broader, theoretically orientated ideas. And so, probably as a compromise between these positions, an articulated study plan emerged, which finally convinced me that the Information Department was the right choice for my further studies after all.
This department launched its activities with only five students and with an unexpectedly enticing programme that the head of department, Max Bense, had set up with the support of the Technical University Stuttgart, where he taught. The initial timetable included photography on Monday and Tuesday mornings, Monday afternoon student presentations from all departments on the topic "Cultural History of the 20th Century", and Tuesday afternoon lessons with Max Bense ("Morphology and Topology"). On the other days, we practiced writing, first for three months with Hans Magnus Enzensberger, who came from the Radio-Essay Studio of the Süddeutscher Rundfunk [Southern German Broadcasting], and later with the writer and literary critic Albrecht Fabri. With Enzensberger, we had to reformulate the school prospectus. We also had to write a radio play about an aeroplane that crashes over the ocean; we discussed all the possible content and stylistic options. At Fabri, on the other hand, we worked on translating from French, including the very clever maxims of La Rochefoucauld. I was given the task of writing a critique of Jünger's translation of the Comte de Rivarol's aphorisms. On the following three days, I was scheduled to study literary theory with Käte Hamburger, sociology with Erich Franzen and, again with Bense, aesthetics and information theory.

I would like to emphasise that two different, parallel ideological perspectives were represented in the department from the very beginning. Bense's approach was Cartesian. He advocated a positivist approach derived from the natural sciences and referred to the latest scientific achievements of information theory and cybernetics. Bense was primarily interested in the structural composition of material and ideational objects of knowledge, and he was concerned with strictly formalisable, neg/entropically ascertainable relations. Käte Hamburger and Erich Franzen, on the other hand, favoured a clearly humanistic and historicist perspective, in which it was not permissible from the outset to ignore life-world influence, that is psychological, socio-political and cultural factors. While Bense taught us to measure "information" and to analyse texts on the basis of statistical distribution functions of elements, the German philologist Käte Hamburger was concerned with the Orestes problem (focussing on the characters of Iphigenia and Electra) in literature – from Aeschylus to Euripides, Goethe, Sartre, Camus, Giraudoux and O'Neill. She took us through existential philosophy as a source of interpretative cues, applying highly rigorous analytical methods as well.13 In keeping with Hamburger's theme, the literary critic and social psychologist Franzen began by talking about the development of the theatre and explained what significant steps in the development of the occident were represented by the concepts of audience, stage space, and curtain. Franzen's manner immediately suited me well and I was very impressed by his personality. This is how I described him: "A very distinguished man, fabulously cut face, very intellectual, good tall slim figure, somewhat suffering, grey!" And another time: "He is very sage: very likeable and hypersensitive. When Bill comes into the student lecture, thick skinned and with his red tie on top, mentally his [Franzen's] hair stands on end. It even led to a pointless little argument." In any case, he was demanding: Ilse and I once asked him for advice regarding our ambivalent career aspirations. It was not very encouraging for us, he said laconically, if you hadn't read all the literature between the ages of 16 and 19, then you wouldn't get round to it and it would be hopeless. What was important for me in Franzen's lectures was, for example, the conceptual clarification of "culture" in comparison to "civilisation", lectures on ideology, public opinion, and propaganda, as well as explanations on the sociology of literature. With him I had to prepare a paper on "Baudelaire and sociology", taking Sartre's essay into account. In view of their contrariness, the long simultaneous presence of Bense and Franzen at the HfG still amazes me today. In particular since Franzen was an avowed pessimist. As a humanities scholar, i.e. a non-natural-scientist, he was concerned about the fate of science that had surrendered to the "deification of reason" since Descartes. He feared that society, with its drive towards abstraction and a desire to quantify and calculate everything, would have less and less use for the freely creative artist.
Disagreements were often hushed up or dealt with subliminally. Sometimes, however, they surfaced dramatically. This was particularly the case in the early spring of 1957, when Max Bill left the school, allegedly due to "irreconcilable differences of opinion". Two-thirds of the students, led by the "Billists", i.e. in particular those who worked for him in the Product Form Department and/or came from the Zurich area, protested against the resignation with a resolution. Another group, the "Latinos" from South America, France, Italy and French-speaking Switzerland, were more reserved. I myself thought that Bill's decision to withdraw was out of the question, given the difficulties that had already existed for some time in the management of the HfG. I recognised that Bill's departure meant a loss in some respects. I thought that Max Bill probably saw things most clearly, even if he was the most intolerant. Bense, whom Bill had appointed at the time on the basis of shared interests in constructivist "concrete art" (one as a scientist, the other as an artist), initially stood by Bill. But the dispute was lead so harshly that Bense also ultimately distanced himself.
The school's leadership following Bill’s departure, the triumvirate of Aicher/Maldonado/Vordemberge-Gildewart, took significantly different intellectual paths. The logical-philosophical and cultural-historical lessons were dropped. Instead, courses that focused on theory of science or operations analysis, as well as those that centred on the methods of empirical social research, gained in importance. This led to a major change of lecturers in the Information Department during my second year of study. I wrote to my parents: "Unfortunately, Franzen and Hamburger were removed from our department because they didn't do things quite the way Bense had envisioned. They won't be replaced, because we have to have more time to write, which is right, but we've lost all the likeable Bense counterweight."
Both had returned from emigration after the Second World War, and I therefore believe that they were personalities who corresponded to Otl Aicher's earlier, humanistically orientated values and also to his goal of getting a new generation on the socio-political path. But then Bense also left the school. His assistant, Elisabeth Walther, stayed on for a while to formulate definitions for encyclopaedias with us.
Three new lecturers were appointed in their place. Firstly, in autumn 1957 Fabri was replaced by Gert Kalow, a writer and journalist. I wrote home: "Fabri had seemed so worn out to me from the beginning […], dissatisfied with himself and his situation, he struggled over every word and couldn’t get any of us to write freely and spontaneously. Well, we learnt from him to look at texts critically. Kalow has a much more real approach – he quickly gets us over our writing blocks. Sets tasks, gives only 1/2 hour, chases you, then analyses every sentence of every piece and gives the next topic. A bit nerve-wracking, but as a journalist you have to be able to write quickly, at least. He's a pleasant personality and good at criticism."
I would like to emphasise that two different, parallel ideological perspectives were represented in the department from the very beginning. Bense's approach was Cartesian. He advocated a positivist approach derived from the natural sciences and referred to the latest scientific achievements of information theory and cybernetics. Bense was primarily interested in the structural composition of material and ideational objects of knowledge, and he was concerned with strictly formalisable, neg/entropically ascertainable relations. Käte Hamburger and Erich Franzen, on the other hand, favoured a clearly humanistic and historicist perspective, in which it was not permissible from the outset to ignore life-world influence, that is psychological, socio-political and cultural factors. While Bense taught us to measure "information" and to analyse texts on the basis of statistical distribution functions of elements, the German philologist Käte Hamburger was concerned with the Orestes problem (focussing on the characters of Iphigenia and Electra) in literature – from Aeschylus to Euripides, Goethe, Sartre, Camus, Giraudoux and O'Neill. She took us through existential philosophy as a source of interpretative cues, applying highly rigorous analytical methods as well.13 In keeping with Hamburger's theme, the literary critic and social psychologist Franzen began by talking about the development of the theatre and explained what significant steps in the development of the occident were represented by the concepts of audience, stage space, and curtain. Franzen's manner immediately suited me well and I was very impressed by his personality. This is how I described him: "A very distinguished man, fabulously cut face, very intellectual, good tall slim figure, somewhat suffering, grey!" And another time: "He is very sage: very likeable and hypersensitive. When Bill comes into the student lecture, thick skinned and with his red tie on top, mentally his [Franzen's] hair stands on end. It even led to a pointless little argument." In any case, he was demanding: Ilse and I once asked him for advice regarding our ambivalent career aspirations. It was not very encouraging for us, he said laconically, if you hadn't read all the literature between the ages of 16 and 19, then you wouldn't get round to it and it would be hopeless. What was important for me in Franzen's lectures was, for example, the conceptual clarification of "culture" in comparison to "civilisation", lectures on ideology, public opinion, and propaganda, as well as explanations on the sociology of literature. With him I had to prepare a paper on "Baudelaire and sociology", taking Sartre's essay into account. In view of their contrariness, the long simultaneous presence of Bense and Franzen at the HfG still amazes me today. In particular since Franzen was an avowed pessimist. As a humanities scholar, i.e. a non-natural-scientist, he was concerned about the fate of science that had surrendered to the "deification of reason" since Descartes. He feared that society, with its drive towards abstraction and a desire to quantify and calculate everything, would have less and less use for the freely creative artist.
Disagreements were often hushed up or dealt with subliminally. Sometimes, however, they surfaced dramatically. This was particularly the case in the early spring of 1957, when Max Bill left the school, allegedly due to "irreconcilable differences of opinion". Two-thirds of the students, led by the "Billists", i.e. in particular those who worked for him in the Product Form Department and/or came from the Zurich area, protested against the resignation with a resolution. Another group, the "Latinos" from South America, France, Italy and French-speaking Switzerland, were more reserved. I myself thought that Bill's decision to withdraw was out of the question, given the difficulties that had already existed for some time in the management of the HfG. I recognised that Bill's departure meant a loss in some respects. I thought that Max Bill probably saw things most clearly, even if he was the most intolerant. Bense, whom Bill had appointed at the time on the basis of shared interests in constructivist "concrete art" (one as a scientist, the other as an artist), initially stood by Bill. But the dispute was lead so harshly that Bense also ultimately distanced himself.
The school's leadership following Bill’s departure, the triumvirate of Aicher/Maldonado/Vordemberge-Gildewart, took significantly different intellectual paths. The logical-philosophical and cultural-historical lessons were dropped. Instead, courses that focused on theory of science or operations analysis, as well as those that centred on the methods of empirical social research, gained in importance. This led to a major change of lecturers in the Information Department during my second year of study. I wrote to my parents: "Unfortunately, Franzen and Hamburger were removed from our department because they didn't do things quite the way Bense had envisioned. They won't be replaced, because we have to have more time to write, which is right, but we've lost all the likeable Bense counterweight."
Both had returned from emigration after the Second World War, and I therefore believe that they were personalities who corresponded to Otl Aicher's earlier, humanistically orientated values and also to his goal of getting a new generation on the socio-political path. But then Bense also left the school. His assistant, Elisabeth Walther, stayed on for a while to formulate definitions for encyclopaedias with us.
Three new lecturers were appointed in their place. Firstly, in autumn 1957 Fabri was replaced by Gert Kalow, a writer and journalist. I wrote home: "Fabri had seemed so worn out to me from the beginning […], dissatisfied with himself and his situation, he struggled over every word and couldn’t get any of us to write freely and spontaneously. Well, we learnt from him to look at texts critically. Kalow has a much more real approach – he quickly gets us over our writing blocks. Sets tasks, gives only 1/2 hour, chases you, then analyses every sentence of every piece and gives the next topic. A bit nerve-wracking, but as a journalist you have to be able to write quickly, at least. He's a pleasant personality and good at criticism."
Secondly, Franzen was replaced by the sociologist Hanno Kesting. The latter had taken part in one of the first German rigorous empirical research projects on workers in the Ruhr area 14 and was therefore a thorough expert on industrial society, which, in those years seemed to be threatened by the possible consequences of automation. I thought Kesting was "calm, certainly diligent and exact, likeable. He will certainly proceed more systematically than Franzen, which is necessary to create a basis of knowledge. Franzen brought 1000 details, very interesting illustrations, clues that were perhaps not so useful to us without a basis."
Thirdly, Bense was replaced by Horst Rittel, who initially taught philosophy of science with us. What I found particularly exciting was that "he compared different epistemological approaches and showed which working hypotheses they each lead to and how these can be combined in models." His aim was to develop a systematic theory of behaviour, based on the American model, which would capture actors and fields of action, rules of the game, decision-making processes and the negotiation of compromises in a regulatory scheme.15 Building on this, he then also devoted his teaching to mathematical operations analysis. He referred to the increasingly complex functions of modern data processing systems (from Hollerith systems to Electronic Data Processing Machines) in the service of purpose-determined optimisation procedures. I particularly appreciated his very efficient teaching method, i.e. his systematic approach and his step-by-step control of our learning success.
More teachers then joined the teaching staff. Among them was the editor Bernd Rübenach, who worked at Mainz Radio. He taught the history, law, and organisational forms of broadcasting. He worked with us to construct a radio programme divided into information versus entertainment and extended over the seven days of the week. He also introduced us to the methodology of Audience Studies originating from the USA.
In co-operation with Kesting and Rittel, an internal survey based on around 80 interviews was planned and prepared for the Mainz radio station, which was to offer us the opportunity to apply the methods and techniques of empirical social research in its various phases. At the beginning of our fourth year of study in October 1958, the HfG also engaged someone to give lectures on modern literature for the Information Department. It was the "broadcasting star Joachim Kaiser, supposedly a young genius… a clever, probably somewhat irritatingly conceited young man, a leading figure in the evening studio of Frankfurt Radio". When we sent our radio play "Der Koffer" (The Suitcase), written under the direction of Kalow and Kesting, to various radio stations, he was very positive and sent us a detailed critique and a list of the discrepancies we had to correct, so that the manuscript could soon be delivered. And finally, Lucius Burckhardt, sociologist, national economist and art historian, descendant of the great Jakob Burckhardt, also taught us in our final year of study. He gave a course on "Architecture in the 20th Century" and another on the "Development of Perspective", starting with Giotto's Cappella della Arena.16
Many of us students – especially those who did not yet have any professional experience – made efforts to enrich their education by gaining insights into the working world. The aim was to gain new knowledge, learn foreign languages and sometimes even earn some money. Those who attended the Information Department naturally had to be particularly interested in the world of radio and television. In the spring of 1957, Max Bense and Hans Magnus Enzensberger arranged for my friend Ilse and me to spend several weeks as interns at Süddeutscher Rundfunk [Southern German Broadcasting] in Stuttgart. In the renowned radio essay department, we got to know Alfred Andersch and Helmut Heißenbüttel, both members of Group 47, and were very kindly provided with organisational and technical information as well as short text writing assignments. We also browsed through the archive to compare and study examples of texts that had already been broadcast. On the other hand, we were accommodated in the Current Affairs department at the television station, were allowed to write texts for short films or do an interview for the evening show in the state archive; we could observe preparations for programmes. This experience certainly helped me to gain a less exaggerated, i.e. more realistic, picture of the professional activities in television. During the summer of the same year, I was back in London, grateful for the opportunity to broaden my horizons in the big city after my year of study in the secluded ivory tower of Ulm. I worked again for the graphic designer Herbert Spencer, but this time not in the publishing house, but for a small wage in his highly respected private typographic studio.
To supplement my insight into the media scene with experience at a newspaper, in June 1958 I also did an internship at the Hamburger Abendblatt, where I wrote texts for the local chronicle, film reviews and observed how a newspaper is made in terms of form and content. Comparable to the Bild-Zeitung [editor's note: Germany's biggest tabloid paper] of the same publishing house, this paper provided a good opportunity to learn about the profit-oriented revenue strategies of modern mass media.
Following the HfG diploma regulations, the necessary first steps towards the final examinations soon had to be taken. As this was the first cohort of "informants", some important decisions had to be made, which Aicher, Kaiser, Kesting and Maldonado discussed with us in detail in December 1958. According to my letter to the parents, they explained to us firstly that the diploma from the HfG was of course not equivalent to a doctorate and that in our future professional world decisions would be made on the basis of performance. Secondly, they said that our education had been compromised by the fact that in the (now abolished) basic course the subject matter had been very "general" and that in the following year of study the "movement" had really hindered productive theoretical and practical work. Strictly speaking, we only had one full academic year in the Information Department. Therefore, an extended lecture programme and further practical training seemed necessary. Either we could apply for an additional fifth year of study or we could postpone the preparation of the diploma thesis in favour of further participation in class. We three candidates, Gui Bonsiepe, Ilse Grubrich and I, opted for the second solution. We accepted Maldonado's suggestion and applied to the Rector's Board for a dispensation from the practical part of the diploma thesis that was actually planned.
In my opinion, the fact that the commission approved the request was due to a certain incident: in the summer of 1958, the "Society of Friends" had opened a large exhibition on the history of the HfG, which was widely criticised. The Information Department had been responsible for the texts for this exhibition. According to my letter at the time, the Society had said that the exhibition "was marvellously consistent in its terminology and in its systematic and analytical working methods, but that it was 'incomprehensible' for the average visitor. So it will probably only be presented in the halls of the school (+ the day before yesterday on TV) and not on tour."
An elaborate, radical revision was then undertaken, but of course the result could no longer be included in the diploma examination. This also applied to the results of the empirical study at Mainz Radio, as it was believed that there was no longer time to carry it out. I personally felt particularly sorry about this because I wanted to integrate the data analysis and its results into a thesis on broadcasting in West Germany. I therefore had to change my plans for the empirical part of this thesis. I chose a comparative study of the organisation of the broadcasting stations and a content analysis of the news programmes of the nine German broadcasting stations on three key political events (the Hungarian and the Algerian crises and the victory of the Christian Democrats in the Bundestag elections). The provisional title I submitted was: "Nachrichtenübermittlung im Rundfunk in Westdeutschland" [Communication of News in West German Broadcasting], and Horst Rittel was to be the supervisor for my thesis.
So our last semester in the Information Department turned out to be the most strenuous, because we had to combine attending lectures, giving presentations and producing publishable texts with detailing thesis project's definition and collecting material. And finally, we also had to prepare for the final oral examination, which we were told was academically exemplary and rigorous. Ilse and I had the advantage of having many folders full of carefully typed lecture notes. This was very helpful for learning and quizzing each other.
However, decisions also had to be made in preparation for what would happen after the upcoming completion of the 4th academic year. Kalow wanted Ilse and me to start our careers soon. He advised us to go to America for a year as foreign correspondents or to some other unusual country – Brazil would be good for me, as I could speak the language there and would be able to work on many topics. He suggested: "Produce letterhead stationery, develop all kinds of topics (features for radio, articles for cultural sections or feature pages, reports for magazines) and send them around with references to prominent former lecturers. We immediately listed a number of topics that would be suitable and for which far too little sensible material is available. A funny idea. Perhaps the two of us together. Division of the subject areas. According to Kalow, having international experience greatly increases chances here, and it would help avoid a trainee period."
In the meantime, I had already applied for a one-year Fulbright scholarship to deepen my Ulm studies in the United States.
Our oral examination took place in June 1959. It was the first colloquium of the Information Department. Only three candidates presented themselves: Gui Bonsiepe (whose review is also included in this volume), Ilse Grubrich and myself. Gert Kalow examined Practical Writing, Hanno Kesting Sociology, Tomás Maldonado Semiotics, Joachim Kaiser History of Literature, Horst Rittel Information Theory, Mathematical Operations Analysis and Theory of Science. Total time 40 minutes. Ten of these could be used for a short introductory presentation. I chose a sub-area of the diploma thesis: "The Regulatory Bodies of Broadcasting since 1945" and tried to show how this topic could be approached with instruments of state theory on the one hand and operations analysis on the other. Apparently, the entire faculty was very impressed by the results of our examinations and particularly praised their originality and independence. In any case, I noted that we students from the Information Department, together with a Dutch product former, had reached the top of the ranking of all final year students at the HfG that year.
This success naturally fuelled our aspirations for the future. When I was accepted for the Fulbright scholarship by the American embassy a little later, I was hardly interested in the idea I had previously discussed with Ilse in a conversation with the advertising director of BRAUN to perhaps develop a project there as a freelancer.17
Now it was all about preparing for the United States. My curiosity was great, even though my expectations were by no means entirely positive. On the contrary, Joe McCarthy's Cold War-strengthening measures sometimes made me fear that I would "only find the negative confirmed" over there. But I stuck to my idea of continuing my studies there and began to prepare myself well for the New World with relevant reading.18

3. What happened and what occupied us, and me in particular, outside of study time?
Some of us students felt very confined on Ulm's Kuhberg right from the start and tried to escape to another city at the weekend as often as possible, as long as it was compatible with our studies. Good friends of my family lived in Munich, so I often took the opportunity to visit them and take part in the cultural life there.
General participation in special cultural events in Munich was also sometimes recommended by the lecturers. Soon after I started my studies, there was a memorable occasion there: a large Picasso exhibition (even Guernica and Women from Algiers were shown) and the famous photo exhibition The Family of Man were shown at the same time. For a Bill seminar, both were to be visited, to later answer the question: "Which exhibition had a stronger effect on you and why – taking into account the exhibition method?" I travelled there with a student who was also from Brazil and had a car. Upon return, we quickly paid a visit to Tomás Maldonado: "…our tall, dark, quiet, Buddha-like Argentinian head of the basic course. He had just moved into the teacher's habitation, the little grey lunar resident box. We had a chat – they are so hospitably Southern. Nice idea, certainly a housewarming gift: a large hemispherical straw food basket full of colourful fruit, vegetables and eggs on the floor to pass around. Mrs M. was a well-known mannequin as Countess Schweinitz, is pretty, blonde and still quite young – always very elegant, not too extravagant – in Kuhberg violets."
This passage in a letter from November 1955 shows quite well, firstly, the informal but always aesthetically mindful style that was cultivated in Ulm, and secondly, that there was also a certain "latino" way of life there, which created a special in-group cohesion among some students.
Soon afterwards we were able to see the original production of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess in Munich, and Detten Schleiermacher managed to get tickets for some of us through the press. Another time, a few Information students went back to Munich to hear a lecture by the Italian Adriano Olivetti, known as a very far-sighted social reformist industrialist who had recognised the importance of good design early on.
Smaller and larger festivals were organised at the HfG with a certain regularity. There were various reasons for this. Firstly, in view of the school's isolated location, they were intended to lure the students out of the residential tower and bring them together with the lecturers living on the Kuhberg over music and wine. Secondly, they provided an opportunity to develop competitive ideas for party organisation and to implement them together practically. And thirdly, the intention was to generate revenue to make small purchases that would benefit everyone.
One of the first festivities I took part in was organised by our basic course, with the advice "little money". The decorations were limited to stretching wires in the canteen and hanging newspapers over them to bring the high ceiling down a little. The rule was: "Girls with hats – men with beards". As production material we often used iron turnings and wood shavings, strips of felt and paper, as well as painted horsehair. The music ensemble was made up almost entirely of students: Guitar, saxophone, plus piano or bass. Proper drums were added a little later. Gugelot sang à la Duke Ellington. In my parents' letter I wrote: "You can improvise fabulously, great! I helped at the bar, which has now been curvedly built in the cafeteria."
However, I particularly like to recall the carnival parties that were celebrated every year on Saturday and Tuesday on the Kuhberg. I experienced these double festivals four times and was able to observe how the scale grew and how guests from a very large area of southern Germany wanted to take part. The development of the basic idea as well as the organisation, invitations, decoration and service required a lot of preparation and a great deal of hard work. In January 1956, I saw a "big problem" here because: "…the desire, enthusiasm, initiative is generally lacking. A few, always the same ones, organise; the others are ungrateful, criticism is found, but no suggestions. So many act as if it's work, not pleasure… Problem, the few girls. If one or the other cancels, I don't feel like it today, it affects many, many boys. Maybe that's the reason why almost everyone here is living parallel lives. The many parties of the early days have also stopped, everything has become more tired and really, you always have enough, you look forward to peace and quiet and seclusion outside of school hours."
The theme of the two parties that year was "this time without". A special attraction was the Opium Bar in a small room on the way to the residential tower: "dark, with ultraviolet light. Strips of mosquito netting (from the Americans) hung ghost-like from the ceiling and glowed eerily in red and green fluorescent colours. Entrance, a red car tyre, hung with strings like cobwebs. It was later destroyed so that everything inside was not too locked up and unobserved. The teachers served, the students were just supposed to have fun." The net profit was between 1000 and 1500 marks. I myself had a Medusa costume (this time without a petrifying look) in which hardly anyone recognised me.
A year later, in 1957, "ungenau durch blau" [editor's note: "unprecise through blue", a parody on the title of a basic design exercise by Maldonado – "blue" in German is an idiom for "drunk".] was chosen as the carnival theme. 5000 balloons hung down from the ceiling, illuminated in bright colours. I thought the uniform decorative structure was a success. However, one wondered whether it had created enough atmosphere, as the austerity had certainly rubbed off on the general behaviour. There were two bars and two bands. But only 400 guests turned up, whereas we had expected 600. The next day, four of us travelled in the car of a fellow American student to the concluding Munich carnival. We weren't very enthusiastic about the commercial events in the city, which was spoilt by the remains of the parade, but I found the trip "relaxing after the eternally bourgeois Ulm."
The 1958 carnival was then launched in grand style with a well-thought-out "propaganda campaign". A poster with the central motif "Q-Berg" [editor's note: which reads in German homophone to Kuhberg, "cow hill"] was posted far and wide, and a few days before the celebration, a poster-covered cow was led through the city of Ulm by two snobbishly elegant students. The decoration of the canteen and the other rooms consisted of thousands of cardboard egg palettes hanging from the ceiling. This time there were four bars and four music bands (from Stuttgart, Switzerland, Ulm and the HfG). Admission 9 and 6 marks. On the two evenings, 1000 visitors. "Ilse and I don't want to be funny, tawdry, or half-naked like many – but elegant. We make completely identical, confusable costumes. A black sack, very tight à la Italy, only slightly cut out… High black shoes, headgear: simple black hat, full of cheap glittering pearls, sewn with sequins, letting chain ends hang into the face. Very colourful and unrecognisable behind the curtain… The headgear must be the highlight."
In my estimation, our costumes were then "the most beautiful, certainly the most successful". The proceeds from the parties were to finance a party room and bar for the students outside the residential tower.
And finally, my last two carnival parties in 1959, which were attended by over 1000 people, I wrote: "The details of the parties were nice. Overall, they were very mass amusement for the sake of making money, since the Red Cave is now finally supposed to be realised. Ilse's and my costumes were the same both times, decent for the "information sisters". The first time, Ilse's was pink and mine was light blue: empire petticoat-like dress with a thick flounce, black stockings and a white tulle pot hat with a wreath of paper roses in various shades of pink and blue… The second time, the black sack dress from the previous carnival was modified slightly and a very strict, black, flat cylindrical hat with white artificial flower antlers was added, which earned us the metaphor of a young German genius 'deer in the snow'.
It soon became apparent that the success of our carnival appearances was an objective one, with Ilse and I being invited twice by the fashion house Walz, the most expensive and fashionable store in Ulm, to perform as models in the grand Jahn Hall. We skilfully negotiated the payment that benefited us and then presented highly elegant model dresses, modern sack dresses, tailored suits and coats. "Everyone had a changing girl; very well made up, a little black, a little blue, a little red – we really looked almost unrecognisable, very fashionable indeed. The review also said: 'a touch of the big world'." Soon afterwards, we were invited by the fashion house again. This time the show took place in the stadium, on the occasion of the riding and driving show. We were driven in in luxury cars, had to present the gowns over enormous distances and then drove out again. But the whole thing was badly organised, the wind blew my big black hat around the arena, a few professional mannequins gave us appraising looks: "We were so angry that we swore never to do it again, even though there was a huge, expensive show to inaugurate a new shop." We had enough!
There is no doubt that the chronicle shows that we Ulm school students not only studied, but also learnt to organise our leisure time together. And this happened in lively exchange with the lecturers and with the involvement of a wide-ranging, sympathizing circle of friends.
4. What impact did what I learnt in Ulm have on my further studies?
The reconstruction of my study period in Ulm, based on many documents, showed that in the early years of the Information Department, two quite different perspectives faced each other in its teaching. On the one hand, there was the humanistic, historicist and socio-politically committed approach (represented by Hamburger, Franzen and Burckhardt) and, on the other hand, a formalising and quantifying approach committed to the natural sciences (represented above all by Bense and Rittel). Between these positions (which C. p. Snow characterised in 1959 as The Two Cultures), both Maldonado with semiotics and Kesting with empirical social theory gained importance in various respects. Maldonado referred in particular to Charles Morris' syntactics, semantics and pragmatics, and Kesting to Lazarsfeld's methodologies of social research as well as to Parsons' structural functionalism. Undoubtedly, all our lecturers offered us original ideas and the latest theories in their own fields. However, theories were often presented in a less academic manner, i.e. often unsystematically and, in particular, without the necessary attention to propaedeutics. This made the learning process more difficult and often hindered the implementation of scientific findings in practice. Moreover, the theoretical discourses were mostly offered unidirectionally. That is, there was a lack of interdisciplinary networking and joint critical discussion. I don't think it was really clear to any of those involved how all the knowledge imparted would be useful to us learners in a later career in the rapidly transforming media world. Or perhaps we, the concerned students, had just asked the wrong question? In any case, I reported home: "Gui [Bonsiepe], Ilse and I invited Franzen round in the evening. He is the one who always criticises all the abstraction, reason-oriented formalisation of actions and representations, that too little consideration is given to the human, to experience. In my opinion, he hits the sensitive, unrecognised point of the university. He says, read a lot. Universities can hardly offer you the same content as books. Only methodical work, thinking, that's what he learnt from professors. Then he says that you can only learn journalism at a newspaper, or that you can only achieve something by working in broadcasting. Information theory etc. is of no use to us…. And having worked for Bense, he says, is not necessarily a good credential (for almost all newspapers)."
But what did he mean by the term "methodical work"? His train of thought presumably implied a categorical concept of rigorous acquisition of knowledge. However, I was primarily concerned with the search for a critical synthesis of the various knowledge contents and the possibility of a meaningful professional application. In any case, the Ulm degree programme did not provide me with a conclusive answer to this challenge.
In September 1959, I began my studies as a Fulbright Scholar in the Department of Communication at Michigan State University (MSU). A complete M.A. and Ph.D. programme in Communication was only available at very few universities in the USA at that time. And what attracted me to this one was the strong international focus on developmental phenomena in the "Third World," the presence of many foreign students, and the extensive research conducted at the Communication Research Center, where one worked as a graduate assistant and also got paid for it. In many cases, these were research projects initiated by external clients that dealt with important political, social, or cultural issues and were intended to provide guidance in the decision-making process. The first project I was involved in was a large, regularly repeated readership study commissioned by the Hearst Corporation, which produces many newspapers and weekly magazines. The aim was to find out the behaviour, interests and attitudes of readers in order to attract advertising clients and identify lucrative sales strategies. In Ulm, Bense had talked to us about digital codes and Rittel and Kesting about Hollerith cards. But here we were now dealing with enormous amounts of data that concerned the characteristics and expectations of the recipients of information, which had been almost completely ignored in Ulm. To analyse this data, we were allowed to use MISTIC, one of the largest American computer systems of the time.19 Following our instructions, computer scientists produced ad hoc programs by plugging countless colourful spaghetti-like cables into a room-sized computer. It's hard to imagine this today, spoilt as we are by the availability of ready-made software of all kinds and enormously powerful microchips.
Another project I worked on involved a survey (at the time of the Cold War) on the willingness to use nuclear fallout shelters on campus in an emergency. The aim was to identify typologies of people based on their different opinions, expectations and co-operative versus antagonistic intentions, as well as their socio-demographic characteristics (gender, age, educational level, occupation, social status, milieu, etc.). Another research project was about the empirical analysis of the functionality of the "bussing service" in the southern states of the USA, where racial discrimination still prevailed at the time. This service had been introduced for the redistribution of pupils to foster integration in previously exclusively "white" or "black" schools. This was about human rights that were not guaranteed, and I was confronted with contrasting ideological orientations and the blatant manifestation of massive social conflicts.
Research tasks of this kind fascinated me immensely – obviously in line with Otl Aicher and Inge Aicher-Scholl's initially mentioned original, socially committed Ulm endeavours. But in order to work on such topics thoroughly in the future – whether as a researching scientist or as an investigative journalist – I first had to systematically acquire the necessary foundations.20
Firstly, in order to utilise the increasingly diverse possibilities of data analysis and to correctly interpret the empirical evidence (taking into account rigorous validity and reliability criteria), I first of all had to acquire the necessary statistical knowledge.
Secondly, I knew a lot in the sense of Shannon and Weaver about the transmission of syntactically conceived information (Bense), about Wiener's and Ashby's cybernetic regulation and control processes (Rittel) and about sign dimensions in Peirce, Morris and Ogden and Richards (Maldonado). Certainly, each of these approaches made a justified claim to a certain generalizability from the technical to the human world. But it was David Berlo, with his very stimulating lectures and the successful book "The Process of Communication – An Introduction to Theory and Practice"21 who explained interpersonal and mass communication as highly complex phenomena to be considered specifically. According to his model, different competences and attitudes, expectations and knowledge prerequisites on both the sending and receiving sides had to be studied both in the "small group" and in medial message transmissions. Social-systemic and cultural variables had to be included in the theories. The positivist behaviourist stimulus-response paradigm prevalent in America at the time was by no means sufficient; rather, the meanings and purposes of messages should also be captured using social-psychological concepts.
Thirdly, my methodological knowledge of the conventional structure (in English terminology, the design) of a scientific research project was inadequate. In this context, I was particularly interested in a cycle of lectures by Richard Rudner on the subject of the Philosophy of Social Science.22 This dealt with deduction and induction, the definition of concepts and their operationalization, the formulation of hypotheses with their empirical justification, description-explanation-prediction in scientific research and the special logical structure of causal reasoning. The following authors were presented as important: Max Weber on the problem of objectivity in the social sciences, Hempel and Oppenheim on the special features of historical research, Tarski on the semantic concept of truth and Hempel on the logic of functional analysis. I also worked intensively on social stratification, intercultural communication, cultural anthropology as well as language studies (especially on children's language learning – we were already studying Noam Chomsky at the time –, bilingualism and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which I was already familiar with from Ulm).
On the basis of such studies, I then chose two different objectives for my master's thesis in 1961. On the one hand, in the spirit of George Herbert Mead's symbolic interactionism, I focussed on the phenomenon of role identification using the example of magazine readers and the photographs of male and female models shown in advertisements. On the other hand, a statistical Q-method developed by William Stephenson was to be used for data collection, which does not aim at the factor-analytical reduction of variables in a matrix, but at the typological classification of a stratified sample of people. As I said, the topic of segmenting the readership had received far too little attention at the HfG (here with reference to the diversity of users or consumers of a designed, material and immaterial product).
In the following year I also completed my Ulm diploma thesis and submitted it to the HfG under the title: "The Organizational Forms of the West German Broadcasting Corporations as Models of a General State-Theoretical Diagnosis and Their Consideration Using Some Organizational Analytical Methods" [Die Organisationsformen der Westdeutschen Rundfunkanstalten als Modelle einer allgemeinen staatstheoretischen Diagnose und ihre Betrachtung unter Anwendung einiger organisationsanalytischer Methoden]. The question I investigated was to what extent the juridical form of the "institution under public law" [Anstalt öffentlichen Rechts], in whose supervisory bodies interests, selected in accordance with the statutes, confront each other, is able to ensure a neutral power [pouvoir neutre]. In other words, whether regulated representation and communication processes of this kind – in contrast to those prevalent in American commercial organisations – are more likely to guarantee "objective reporting". Particularly important to me in preparing this work were the methodological approach taught by Horst Rittel in Ulm, the historical-philosophical insights gained in Hanno Kesting's seminar on Hegel, and a supervised reading course on "Propaganda During the Nazi Era" conducted in the USA.
During my stay in Michigan, among the Fulbright Graduate Assistants present at the same time, I met Paolo Ammassari, my future husband, an Italian political scientist at the University of Florence. He had come to the USA to work on a comparative study on the situation of automobile workers in Detroit and Turin and to earn a Ph.D. in sociology and anthropology. After our marriage, I continued my studies, teaching assistantship and research work at the same university. My goal was now also the Ph.D., and so I attended further lectures and passed my final examination for the doctorate in 1964, majoring in Communication and minoring in Statistics and Sociology. After returning to Europe, we first went to Trento, where a new university had just been opened with the first sociological curriculum and degree in the country. There, in particular methodology and techniques of empirical social research were to be taught, which was a pioneering decision for Italy. Paolo Ammassari was appointed for this, as he had specialised in this field in the USA. Three years later, we chose Rome as our home. At the Università di Roma "La Sapienza," my husband first took the chair for "Methods and Techniques of Empirical Social Research" in the Faculty of Statistical, Demographic and Actuarial Sciences, and later as a full professor, the one for "Theoretical Sociology" at the Faculty of Political Science.
A few years later, I myself was appointed to the Chair of Social Statistics at the Faculty of Statistics.
Like us, our two daughters have always cultivated multilingualism and cosmopolitanism. Adriana is a doctor, an Aids specialist and, in addition to her clinical work, has a strong international commitment in the scientific field. Savina, with a degree in political science from Italy and a Ph.D. in Development Studies from the University of Sussex, is currently [editor's note: 2015] working as a Monitoring and Evaluation Advisor in Yangon (Myanmar) on behalf of the United Nations after a long period of development work in Africa and Asia.
I later met former Ulm lecturers rather by chance on various occasions in Rome. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, together with Umberto Eco, took part in a seminar at the Goethe Institute; Gert Kalow was a guest at the German Academy Villa Massimo for a few months; I met Max Bense together with Elisabeth Walther over an espresso in the Via del Corso, and with Joachim Kaiser and his wife I took a walk through Ostia Antica. Only with Tomás Maldonado did I have several particularly warm nostalgic reunions over the years in Milan, also in the presence of Ilse Grubrich-Simitis and Gui Bonsiepe.
In later life, my study time at the HfG has largely receded into the background, unlike my sister Frauke, who, with former study friends from the Ulm era, intensively took care of the HfG's legacy and occasionally reported to me about it. However, I owe the HfG my friendship with Ilse Grubrich, which has lasted to this day and which then extended to our life partners Paolo Ammassari and Spiros Simitis, with their own intellectual and cultural horizons.
5. What role did the inspiration from Ulm play in my later academic activity?
As a prelude to my professional activity in Italy, I decided to dedicate my Ph.D. dissertation, which was to be submitted to the Department of Communication (MSU), to the topic of cultural change in southern Italy, drawing on my primary interests in cultural history and modern media from my early days in Ulm. In connection with numerous development projects in the "Third World", modernisation theories with corresponding multifactorial indicators and indices had been developed in America at the time, particularly by Alex Inkeles. Based on such theories and using customised measuring instruments, I wanted to investigate cultural change in a rural area of Apulia. The population there was experiencing a radical change in lifestyle and psychological attitudes, expectations, and aspirations as a result of the advent of television and the introduction of new values and behaviours by relatives working as migrant workers in northern Europe. Everett Rogers, widely known for his research on the diffusion of innovations in various developing countries, was kind enough to act as my supervisor. I chose middle school children as the target group for my study. Questionnaires were used to collect data, and the statistical representativeness of the sample of respondents was ensured by a multi-stage structured selection procedure. The originality of the work lay in the application of a then very advanced method of data analysis: I had formalised the independent and dependent variables on which the hypotheses were based in causal models in order to be able to calculate the respective direct and indirect effects under controlled conditions. The structure and execution of this work reveals quite well both the influence of Ulm's multifaceted acquisition of knowledge and the primarily analytical, quantitatively orientated additional American findings.23 Similar cumulative influences can also be seen in my subsequent research projects and publications in Italian, English or German. The topics that I have dealt with professionally over the years have centred on different but meaningfully interlinked issues.
Initially – inspired by Hanno Kesting's lectures, particularly those based on Paul Lazarsfeld's teachings – I was concerned with data collection and the design of empirical studies. I was concerned with the development of instruments and reliable measurement methods for recording subjective phenomena at an individual level, such as the perceived trustworthiness of a political candidate or satisfaction with one's own opportunities in life. The problem here was the transformation of what was initially qualitative data into data that could be analysed quantitatively and statistically.24 At a societal level, however, the task was to add subjective dimensions to primarily quantitative, welfare-state-related objective indicators, which, summarized in synthetic indices, allow comparative examination of development trends.25 Then, building on these studies and on the basis of a broad-based survey, I intensively studied the relationship between lifestyle and leisure activities in Italy, a country whose highly stratified social system was undergoing rapid change in the 1970s, provoked by rural exodus, industrialisation, educational growth and media influences.26
Deepening this kind of research work, it was possible to draw on perspectives originating from Helge Pross' teaching [editor's note: in Ulm], particularly those focussing on decisive gender differences. This happened while working on a multi-faceted project funded by the National Research Council (CNR), which focussed on comparative research into the social status of women in northern, southern and central Italy. Among other things, the project focussed on family composition, professional careers, equal or unequal opportunities and the reproduction of stereotypical gender profiles as they are passed on in the family circle, by schools and also through audio-visual media.27 This research dedicated to women led to the question of the roles of men and women based on time allocation patterns. In order to record the consequences of gender-specific stress and related coping strategies, it was important to determine the time organisation of all members of a sample of households. Data of this kind, which is now collected internationally at great expense with the help of diary records (time budgets), is relevant from a socio-political point of view when determining professional working hours, shop opening hours or when defining the palimpsest of television programmes.28
However, I was not only concerned with the collection of empirical data and the statistical analysis of very large data sets. There was also room for other, historical and epistemological perspectives, where knowledge gained in Horst Rittel's seminars on the philosophy of science proved useful. On the one hand, in collaboration with colleagues at the Università di Torino, I was interested in the transfer of European, especially Italian, social science knowledge to Latin America in the 19th century, at the time when the first sociological theories and approaches to key social problems were being established. I had the task to study such developments in the case of Brazil, in the period from independence to the Second World War. This brought me a welcome re-encounter with the country of my birth and, not least, led to very exciting research experiences in Brazilian libraries, especially the magnificent State Library in Rio de Janeiro, which dates back to the imperial era.29 On the other hand, I was interested in the implications of linguistic structural and semantic peculiarities and their influences on sociological conceptualisations and definitions – returning, so to speak, to the linguistic curiosity awakened during my studies in Ulm. The reason for this was that I was commissioned to supervision the translations for the bilingual publication of the Sociological Yearbook ["Annali di Sociologia – Soziologisches Jahrbuch"] by the Università di Trento. Interdisciplinary translation seminars held in this context produced fascinating results concerning the barriers and misunderstandings in scientific communication.30
In parallel to my scientific research, as I have already mentioned, I devoted myself to lecturing as a professor of "Social Statistics" at the university and gave courses on "Techniques of Communication Research" at the Scuola di Giornalismo e Comunicazione (LUISS), a prestigious private university in Rome. I was also a member of commissions such as the expert commission that helped ISTAT (our central statistical bureau) to design the first major periodic data collection dedicated to the behaviour of families, or the one in charge of implementing the university reform at my university, which, in collaboration with the Ministry of Education, tried to introduce the rules of the Bologna Process 31 as soon as possible.
If I now try to summarize retrospectively what guidelines and inspirations the study in the Information Department at the Ulm School of Design provided me on my further path, I would first like to highlight the term "method" as the most striking key.
Regardless of the goal you came to Ulm with, i.e. whether you wanted to study product design or architecture, visual communication or information – everyone learnt one thing for sure: to approach the respective subject with a highly developed awareness of methods (in the sense of the modern concept of problem solving) and to solve the tasks with sometimes meticulous systematics. This involved the correct and precise formulation of questions, the analytical structuring of complex thought processes and the rigorous, practical realisation of ideas and concepts. All procedures were to be programmed, controlled and carried out in well-organised teamwork. The declared pedagogical aim was to help each student build up a transferable body of methodological knowledge and experience. Reading through the various volumes of retrospectives [editor's note: prior to this volume on the Information Department, alumni of all other HfG departments already had published collections of retrospectives], one can indeed gain the impression that the graduates of the various departments have paid the greatest tribute to the HfG with regard to this point – training in methodical thinking and acting.
With regard to my personal gratitude, I would like to emphasise the following three aspects in particular:
a) The international orientation.
Certainly in the 1950s there was hardly any other school that was attended by such a high percentage of foreign students and that enjoyed such curiosity arousing prestige around the world, from South America to Japan. Despite its completely isolated location on the Kuhberg, the HfG was a cosmopolitan, yet strongly self-referential community of lecturers and students. The members of this community spoke many languages and brought different cultures with them. Despite the conflicts that flared up again and again, much discussed in the press, they were willing to engage in a common experiment. I myself had always seen growing up between two worlds, the German and the Brazilian, as a positive thing and now experienced the additional cosmopolitanism as a real enrichment. My experiences in Ulm have certainly contributed to the fact that, as an academic representative of the rector of my university for almost 20 years, I have helped many Erasmus [exchange] students to prove themselves internationally, to explore other ways of life and to develop new perspectives, also concerning their own country. In addition, Paolo Ammassari and I have done our utmost for decades to promote increasingly global scientific cooperation. My husband was at times Vice President of the International Sociological Association (ISA) and also President of the much older Institut International de Sociologie (IIS), which was founded in Paris in 1893. A Chinese delegation of sociologists took part for the first time in the World Congress he organised in Rome in 1989 (regrettably coinciding very unfortunately with the Tiananmen Square massacre). After his death, as IIS Vice-President – together with Erwin Scheuch (Institute for Social Research, University of Cologne) and Shmuel Eisenstadt (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) – I insisted on organising one of the next congresses in Tel Aviv to help overcome the fascist shadows over the Institute from the time of the Second World War.
b) The disciplinary transversality.
In a document that I found among my Ulm papers, the Information Department is given the following objective: "Training the next generation for the linguistic tasks in the fields of radio, television, press, film, publishing and advertising." It is striking that the rapidly gaining importance of television was completely ignored at my time at the HfG and did not appear in everyday life at all. Initially excluding film as well, the audio-visual era had apparently not yet begun in Ulm. But it had been recognized that very different disciplines could provide keys to address the problems that the students of this department would one day have to deal with. Although I personally did not enter any of the professions intended for us young people, I always recognised that we needed interdisciplinary approaches to solve our increasingly complex social problems. Thus, twelve years ago, together with colleagues from universities in five European countries, I initiated an international, interdisciplinary doctoral program under the title "European Ph.D. in Socio-Economic and Statistical Studies" (SESS.EuroPhD). Since my retirement, this programme has been continued – under my presidency, but coordinated at the Berlin Humboldt University – and it continues to attract doctoral students not only from Europe with the offer of a joint degree.
c) The innovative thinking approaches.
The Hochschule für Gestaltung was a very courageous endeavour and we still have to be grateful to the founders today. But the Information Department's programme certainly lacked coherence in my time. One reason was that many lecturers came from out of town to give their lectures, and they often only took on their teaching assignments for a relatively short time. This meant that there was always a lot of turnover and there was little opportunity for exchange and joint programme development. In retrospect, I think it would have been helpful to have a detailed framework in which the different perspectives could have been systematically categorised. Humanists and neo-positivists, for example, differ in their ontological, unverifiable premises and, as a result, inevitably in their epistemological conceptualisations, hypotheses and validation strategies. And if one then moves from theory to empiricism, then the qualitative versus quantitative observation methods and also the explicative (regression analysis) versus explorative (analysis des données) techniques of data processing will have to look different. Comparative studies of the results (of analyses carried out with ever new approaches or paradigms) are of course permissible and even enriching. But suitable concepts and instruments must not be lacking in order to reliably determine the differences and guarantee a constructive order.
Finally, I would like to point out once again that the Department of Information and the Hochschule für Gestaltung as a whole have often been equated with an – albeit short-lived – experiment. Seen in this light, we students in the Information Department from the 1955 to 1959 cohort were probably the (now more or less satisfied or critical) guinea pigs. Inge Scholl and Otl Aicher, pedagogically orientated and committed to civil rights, would certainly have imagined the development differently at the beginning. Personally, I now regret that they turned so far away from their original ideals. Ultimately, ideological conflicts made teaching and learning at the HfG difficult, because in the epistemologically fundamental subject-object relationship, humans as such often risked losing out. And this especially in his self-reflective, meaning-seeking and idiosyncratic creative capacity. However, one also easily forgot what the founders of the university knew all too well from the war years, the humans sometimes dangerously irresponsible, irrational complexity.
I have recalled Erich Franzen's courageous warnings on this critical point, which I carefully recorded at the time. Käte Hamburger certainly thought the same. I myself did not seek further contact with Ulm later, because for me the experiment was concluded in every respect.
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