Erdmann Wingert Walking off track over the Kuhberg – Memories of a time of contradictions

Erdmann Wingert, Student at the HfG Ulm from 1959 to 1961. Photo: unknown
Photo: private

Wasn't his name Heinz, my quiet neighbour, who bent over his designs at the table next to me? I'm not sure, after more than half a century has passed. But one thing I still remember: He solved all the tasks we were given in that one year of basic teaching better than I did.

It wasn't necessarily a proof of his talent, because what I managed to produce was at best mediocre. Even my application portfolio hadn't been well received: nude drawings and watercolours, playful compositions freely inspired by Paul Klee, jagged city motifs in the style of Lyonel Feininger. The cross-section of my four semesters at a Hamburg art school had apparently not convinced the admissions committee of the HfG. Their moody response in institution-specific lowercase affirmed that I had been admitted only conditionally.

I learned to agree to their assessment. For as much as I tried, using drafting pen, ruler, and compass to graphically represent the function of certain processes, like the traffic flows at an intersection or even the movement of a slow waltz, the more apparent my limits became. My neighbour Heinz performed such exercises quickly and finely, he even took the time to make a model of an armchair out of wire and black fabric, hardly larger than a hand, obviously a playful extra amidst the deeply thought-out and precisely circled mandatory exercises, deepened and elevated by lectures in which the mathematician Horst Rittel scattered enigmatic signs and rows of numbers on the blackboard.

No, that was not my world, although I had gotten used to the pale concrete ambience of the school after a few months and even began to feel at home. To this day, the memory takes me through Max Bill's multi-segmented architecture nestled into the slope of the Kuhberg: past the wave-shaped bar leading into the canteen, before that the terrace from which we viewed the Danube Valley and, on foehn days, the rosily shimmering snow peaks of the Alps [editor's note: foehn is a warm downslope wind from the Alps]. I still recollect the dreamlike walk: through bright halls, where broad stairs branching off at every corner lead to lecture halls and workshops, the product design wing where, among other things, clock-faces, spectacle frames, precision scales, and stackable cups free of any decor were created, next door the institute of the already famous Hans Gugelot, who was designing an armchair for an international competition sponsored by a renowned Italian furniture company amidst his circle of disciples. The fact that my quiet table neighbour wanted to participate provoked derisive amazement among the established product designers.

They were the majority at the HfG, demand was high, the students almost elbow to elbow in the spacious lecture halls. In the communication wing, however, barely two dozens of future graphic designers were scattered between seminar rooms, a type workshop, and a photo lab. The loneliest position in this wing, however, was held by Dolf Sass, the only remaining student of the Information Department, which was originally intended to spread the product philosophy of the school through mass media. This narrowly focused educational goal was apparently one reason for the department's weakening numbers, even though it had seen better days when a handful of students under Bernhard Rübenach, the radio play director at SWR [editors note: Southern German Radio], had designed a complete radio program, among other projects. It decorated the concrete wall of the classroom in the form of a mosaic of colourful squares. What impressed me particularly were the white spaces reserved between the blocks of news broadcasts, concerts, features, radio plays, and commentaries. They marked two-minute breaks in which there was to be nothing but silence. The purpose of this measure was to free the listener from the continuous stream of sound, even at the risk that they might thereby become disloyal to the station. Certainly a serious and honourable attempt, though one that no program director then, as now, would have agreed to.

But where else, if not at an institution like the HfG, would have been the place to play out such ideas? They were not the only reason that dispelled my doubts about being in the right place in the Information Department. Rübenach, with whom I had completed a three-month internship in the radio play department during the semester break, was the one who encouraged me to trade a half-hearted career as a graphic designer for that of a writer. His feature about the HfG, broadcast by the SWR in 1958 under the title "The Right Angle of Ulm" [Der rechte Winkel von Ulm], had given me hope before my start on the Kuhberg that I would find a creative and at the same time avant-garde alternative to my old-fashioned art school.

Yet Rübenach had portrayed the HfG as it had presented itself to him in the era of the sculptor, designer, and architect Max Bill, who still represented the Bauhaus concept: aiming for an educational tuning into a total work of art in which art and craft would be united within the framework of architecture. But the term art had been removed from the curriculum by his successors and replaced with a plethora of scientific disciplines. Even in the prelude to the actual studies, the basic teaching year, I felt overwhelmed by all these theoretical subjects, including methodology, combinatorics, epistemology, physiology, psychology, sociology, and, to top it all off, semiotics, which the Argentine Tomás Maldonado murmured in a jumble of German and English over our heads. The study of signs remained for me a riddle wrapped up in more than one enigma.

Erdmann Wingert, Peter Beck, Hannelore Schneider, Robert Hohnstock and Susanne Stich, 1959/60. Photo: Walter Eichenberger.

It seemed to me to be a very German trait, this addiction to getting to the bottom of every matter until there was a risk of perishing in the process. The brooding over fundamentals, the constant invocation of reason, the scepticism towards intuition and spontaneity shaped us. Even on the outside. When I returned to my family circle for a few vacation weeks after the first half-year, my spiritualized appearance, emphasized by plain black-grey clothing and closely cropped hair, prompted the cry of horror from my Aunt Gertrud: "My God, the boy looks like a monk!"

Apparently, like nearly all the students on the intellectual magic mountain, I had been shaped by the elitist inbreeding of an institution that took nothing as a given. But it turned out that the constant mental process over all the phenomena of everyday life could also be tormenting. After a year of basic teaching, the scientific broadsides made me a easy target. Without the encouragement from Bernhard Rübenach and the vice-rector Gerd Kalow, I probably would not have stayed, as I likely would not have been allowed to advance beyond the basic year. Kalow, however, who then with Rittel and Maldonado formed the triumvirate of the rectorate and wanted to rejuvenate the depleted Information department, thought that I had the prerequisites to become a useful member of the department. "You're far too talented to be a line drawer in visual communication."

That's the kind of thing you like to hear when, like me, you've spent a year wandering through a foreign world. In Kalow's seminars, I felt a bit more at home. Even in his first lecture, I perked up: "Language is the body of the spirit!" he declared at the beginning of his introductory lecture to the group, a Goethe quote that didn't seem to fit at all with the muse-lacking attitude of the school, let alone with the mission of the Information Department, which was called upon to explore the conditions of mass communication media. I no longer remember if my fellow students shared my enthusiasm for the poetic metaphor – and because remembering is always a kind of invention, I assume that Dolf Sass, who had proven himself a master of the gloss in our writing exercises, let loose a few gently taunting remarks about the literary program of our mentor.

Dolf Sass was the longest-serving member of the department, finally liberated from loneliness, a subtle character who smilingly kept out of the ensuing disputes between the new fellow students. Among his advantages was that he was married to the actress Sabine Werner, through whom we became claqueurs at the municipal theatre. It must have been in 1961 when she played a prostitute in the play "The Hostage" set in a Dublin brothel alongside Hannelore Hoger. As we learnt from Dolf Sass, the Irish author Brendan Behan would have written the wild spectacle in the brief period of the day when he was no longer completely drunk anymore and not yet fully drunk. It was full of obscene and blasphemous dialogue and songs, which caused an unparalleled scandal in the bourgeois, pietistic city of Ulm. Director Peter Zadek, who had just moved from Brecht's theater at Schiffbauerdamm [in East Berlin] to Ulm in time before the building of the Berlin Wall, became instantly famous and infamous through the production. At the premiere, we sat shoulder to shoulder in the back row, clapping against the boos of the dignitaries in the front row. It was no use, even though the magazine "Theater heute" named the production the performance of the year, because soon after Zadek had to leave, and with him a large part of the ensemble. What remained was the insight that theatre could arouse unexpectedly strong emotions.

What a contrast to the programmatic routine of our school, from which I had increasingly said goodbye anyway! Responsible for my staying, however, was Gert Kalow, our well-read and eloquent mentor, who fundamentally saw no difference between journalism and literature. Significantly, he used the style theory of a poet as a didactic basis: Ezra Pound's "ABC of Reading" dealt, among other things, with the importance of nouns, attributes, and verbs, which culminated in an exercise in which we first deleted every noun from a text, then every verb from a second, and finally every attribute from a third. The obvious yet surprising insight was that the text without nouns was incomprehensible, without verbs lifeless, and without attributes often better. The purpose of these and similar exercises was to "take away the innocence of writing," to drive out the tendency to formulate off the cuff, to observe the discipline of weighing words and using them like building blocks for a precisely defined subject. To this day, this advice inhibits and assists me in writing – and perhaps also the students I let play through these exercises.

It's questionable whether our fellow student Alfons Maria Poss benefited from them. His idol was Ernest Hemingway, who composed his prose largely from nouns, thus letting his disciples breeze through this style exercise. Alf Poss came from a well-situated family in Ulm, his brother owned an English sports car and a fairy-tale beautiful wife, about whom we all dreamed in our monastic seclusion on the Kuhberg. Alf was blessed with a phlegm that occasionally made him fall asleep when we read our texts aloud. I only remember one occasion when he lost his temper. That morning he arrived late, looking pale and confused, and reported that he was a bit disoriented after taking a detour through the grounds of the former concentration camp on the Kuhberg against his usual habit. As he entered the dip leading to the entrance of the concentration camp, he saw a farmer's wife raise an axe over a chopping block and behead a chicken.

Like all HfG students, he was a child of war, well protected and well provided for, but the legacy of our parents, who were all more or less entangled in the atrocities of the Nazi era, weighed on us. In memory of the Scholl siblings, Max Bill had placed the school on the Kuhberg right next to the concentration camp, where, among hundreds of other regime opponents, the Social Democrat Kurt Schuhmacher had also suffered. I suspect that a beheaded chicken wouldn't have normally disturbed Alfons Poss, but the execution took place at a site where people in his hometown were tortured and killed. It was the year 1961 when he got lost on the grounds of the former concentration camp, the time when Adolf Eichmann was on trial in Israel. Perhaps this also triggered the idea for his theatre play, which caused a scandal at the end of the 1960s under the title "Two chickens are slaughtered" [Zwei Hühner werden geschlachtet] when it premiered on the municipal stage in Essen, a scandal which was on a par with the Ulm hostage drama.

Not that the gentle, rather apolitical, and even devout Alf Poss had populated his play with whores, blasphemers, and terrorists. On the contrary, his play was completely non-sensual, featuring six actors in consecutively numbered roles who delivered breathless tirades non-stop, which would probably have caused perplexity rather than outrage among the audience if two cackling chickens had not been decapitated on the open stage at the bitter end. The bloody act triggered an outcry from almost all animal rights activists in Germany, as well as a media controversy about the limits of literary freedom, which warranted the most hopeful expectations for the future of this young playwright who had evidently struck a nerve. I don't know if he ever buried those hopes, but I've never heard from or read about him again.

This was different with Herwig Birg, whom I kept encountering whenever he published one of his countless books predicting the downfall of Germany in incisive diction and compelling logic. I believe our Herwig, this unpretentious-looking boy with a round childlike face, was the only one among us information students who could follow the mumbling series of formulas by Rittel, and he effortlessly nailed the language exercises imposed on us by Kalow.

These were tasks that at first glance demanded anything but poetic empathy, which did not seem to correspond at all to the Goethe quote that language is the body of the spirit. But if taken literally, this body must possess some kind of anatomy that needed to be discovered. Kalow conscripted us to solve these and other tasks with a method that was entirely in the spirit of the HfG: whether in the production or communication sector, every design idea started with a list that needed to be broken down and ticked off before it could be realised. So one day he appeared with an object that was supposed to commit us to the core business of the journalist profession: to inform.

The object was a clothes peg, which we had to describe so that even a tribe that has always walked around naked would understand its use. It probably went as usual with such exercises: While I was still wasting thoughts on peripheral phenomena such as the nakedness of the tribe, Herwig Birg had hacked his twenty lines into the machine and fulfilled all the criteria that Kalow had prescribed without any frills. They were limited to questions about the shape, colour, price, age, material, function, and handling of the object – the style of language played at best a minor role in exercises of this type.

Ah, the lists! They were on every table of every department! I'm sure one of them was also in Hans Gugelot's institute, probably with similarly unemotional criteria lined up as for the description of our clothes peg. It was said that for the design of the ultimately functional chair in his institute, test subjects of various sizes and weights were even made to sink into soft plaster forms to determine an average value from the measured indentations that would assign an appropriate sitting position to every body type.

At least Herwig Birg would have understood such procedures, perhaps even then shaping his initial insights into the nature of demography, which also relies on average values. Each time I encountered his Cassandra calls in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and other papers over the past decades, these moments came to mind: How we sat wrapped in clouds of smoke clouds in front of our typewriters, discussing the maxims of this institution, which had subscribed to the primacy of reason and contradicted all common formalities. If I had been told back then that our Herwig Birg would become the most influential apocalypticist in the Federal Republic of Germany, I probably wouldn't have been surprised. Nor that left-wing critics would push him to the far right, because his arguments for the downfall of Germany seemed to occupy the same terrain as later those of Thilo Sarrazin. Or was it Sarrazin who borrowed from Herwig Birg, who feared the worst losses of German efficiency due to the immigration of unqualified foreigners? Under the title "Germany's Exit from its Demographic Future," Birg complained, for example, that "our country is teetering downhill because the parents who could bring about stable development are not even being born."

We also had an immigrant in the Information department, called a refugee in the language of the time: Harald Kaas had made it to West Germany from Bohemia after the war, how and by what routes, he kept to himself, perhaps because there was not much to tell, after all, he was the youngest in our group at twenty-one. That he appeared at least a decade older was not just due to his thick-lensed glasses and thinned forehead, but resulted from his staggering omniscience. He seemed to have absorbed entire libraries in his young years and could reproduce them on demand, print-ready and rich in quotations. Whether Goethe or Grass, Brecht or Benn, Musil or Enzensberger, everything German literature from the classics to modern times had to offer was available at a keyword, but he did not stop at referencing. His judgment about the value or worthlessness of a work or poet was never up for debate, and if a discussion did arise, it threatened to come down on the interlocutor like a guillotine.

Kaas could hate profoundly, and this not only affected those who despised and ignored his idols, but also institutions such as the Kuhberg School, including its hostility to art and ignorance of sensitive and traditional matters. He sparkled with hatred when he referred to these "minuscule writers, right-angle souls, and cup-stackers". Particularly the obligatory lowercase writing infuriated him, which in the form of serif-less and consequently undecorated grotesque type dominated the typographical appearance of all the school's publications. To his satisfaction, an exercise in the so-called torture chamber of HfG lecturer Dr. Perrine, where we let short texts in different typefaces light up in a peep box and determined the reading duration of a series of test subjects, confirmed him. It turned out that serif typefaces in conventional mixed-case were the easiest to read. On the other hand, texts in our house's own lowercase grotesque were the hardest to decipher. Was it then still a surprise that eventually not the famous Gugelot, who operated with scientific and technical systematics, received the chair prize from the Italian world company, but a debutant? Heinz was the winner, my quiet table neighbour, who had developed his design almost offhandedly and intuitively during the basic teaching.

For Kaas, such contradictions were at best trifles that were suitable for fuelling his mockery of the HfG maxim that form should follow function. Far from it! But he was most malicious when it came to "lukewarm left-wing liberals". In such moments, his eyes sparkled, a sardonic smile distorted his saliva-dripping lips, while he jabbed a nicotine-yellow index finger at his opponent. Occasionally, he scattered his invectives against our faculty and their outrageous dogmas in the form of leaflets, which he let flutter through the canteen and stairwell. They were noted with a shake of the head and without consequence.

But there was also a Kaas who, far from all blind rage, wrote clever and finely differentiated texts, including vivid stories thoroughly interwoven with autobiography. Some of them, which I later found in his story collection "Clocks and Seas" [Uhren und Meere], I knew from our Ulm days. Even then, I encountered disturbing, hard-to-interpret sentences, which I valued as poetic metaphors when he read them with a rolling R and a Slavic-sounding tone: "The conspiracy of things remained my secret, which I shared with the unknowing who accompanied the knowing like shadows." Or a sentence that hinted that things were not well with him: "I could not deny that my soul was overflowing with meanings that had detached themselves from the signs like falling leaves", a linguistic image that now seems to me to reflect the desire to give shape to the post-war world of ruins – just as the Ulm School of Design aspired to do with the best of intentions. That Harald Kaas suffered from schizophrenia, I only learned from the obituary that his publisher Michael Krüger wrote after the suicide of the equally uncomfortable and inspiring friend. "Beyond positive knowledge, there was a dimension for him, which we, the normals, could only surmise or read about in his highly poetic stories."

Actually, my memories of the companions from the Information department would be exhausted if I hadn't been one of the few who, after the off track path over the Kuhberg, had embarked on a counter-directional path through the press world – colliding with the HfG once again. Under the leadership of our mentor Gert Kalow, we had not only ventured into literary heights, having written juvenile poems and precocious essays, but I had also tried my hand at cultural critical pamphlets about anything and everything, which Kalow graciously received, and which I subsequently sent to the editor-in-chief of the magazine Konkret. Ulrike Meinhof, not yet submerged in the RAF underground [editor's note: "Red Army Fraction" a militant left German terror group], immediately responded that the theme of my texts seemed somewhat arbitrary, but might find a right to exist in the cultural section of her paper. Little did I know that working for this left-wing magazine, which I later learned was financed by the SED [editor's note: the Eastern German communist party], would sequentially open doors for me at magazines like Spiegel, Stern, and Zeit. First at Spiegel, to which I had sent a couple of work samples, whereupon Rudolf Augstein let me know that he found my themes somewhat arbitrary, but as a freelance contributor in the cultural section, they would take a chance with me. Kalow accepted it when I said goodbye to him and the HfG, but grumbled cautiously because soon after, Kaas and Birg also left, leaving him with only Sass and Poss.

I had only just delivered three contributions to Der Spiegel when I found myself standing in front of closed doors with a fourth. Ominous figures in leather coats shielded the editorial office, Augstein, as an intimidated colleague informed me on the street, was in prison, all Spiegel employees had been driven out of the editorial office by the police, a takeover by Franz Josef Strauß [editor's note: the conservative Minister of Defence] was looming, and with it the end of press freedom. Fortunately, the opposite happened. Nationwide, there was solidarity with Spiegel, the "armoured vehicle of democracy," especially from Stern and Zeit, which resided under the roof of the press house at Hamburg's Speersort and had granted asylum to the displaced colleagues in their rooms. It was the moment when editor-in-chief Henri Nannen decided to burden his Stern, this pleasure boat, with a political cargo. What could be more obvious than to intercept and poach a young Spiegel employee who was wandering through the Stern editorial office in search of his editor?

I hesitated a few weeks before I agreed, not least because of the astonishing salary Nannen offered, but I only lasted half a year on the pleasure boat padded with soft topics, where I had to edit a serial novel and write contributions for the so-called "hairdresser edition," i.e., the part that contained the TV program in the current issue and had to be filled with timeless texts in the reading circle version. "We'll see each other again," Nannen said as I left for the Zeit editorial office, which was within shouting distance and had asked me if, as a former student of the HfG, I would be willing to write an experience report about this so excitingly avant-garde and recently so fiercely troubled institution. A Spiegel article, published in the spring of 1963, had made public the "cold war on the Kuhberg" and quoted my by then ousted lecturer Gert Kalow as a key witness: "The 'Ulm style,' which characterizes the climate within the college, consists of unfriendliness, envy, coldness, mutual hatred, and inability to talk to each other."

I only remember a few details of my research. One of them had apparently touched me so deeply that I kept it in mind. It was about a circular, head-sized moon that a basic teaching student had cut out of vermilion red cardboard and, obviously in protest against the ubiquitous concrete grey, glued to the window next to his worktable. Promptly, a stern notice from rector Otl Aicher reached him, ordering the removal of this garish element that caricatured the visual identity of the school. When the student insisted on being allowed to give his workplace a personal touch, a disciplinary warning letter followed. A marginal note, certainly. But it hinted at the bizarre accusation of desecrating a monument and shed light on Aicher's petty and authoritarian claim to power, which not only indoctrinated students but also sorted out lecturers who did not dance to his tune. Alongside Kalow, Rittel, and Perrine, he would have put more than forty of them out the door, reported Spiegel, including such prominent contemporaries as Max Bense, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and Walter Jens.

In this viper's nest, I was anything but welcome, my reputation as a former member of the defiant Information Department led to fears that I would side with the rebellious students and lecturers. Nevertheless, or perhaps precisely because of that, Aicher granted me an audience, which, however, was one-sided because I hardly got a chance to speak. The reason for this was not only Aicher's breathless eloquence, proven in countless controversies, but also the fact that I liked him. I knew that he had stood up against the Nazi regime at the risk of his life and, alongside his wife, the sister of the executed Scholl siblings, had enabled the founding of the HfG. Moreover, I had come to appreciate him as a teacher, admiring how nimbly and elegantly he managed to conjure up templates of our drawing and writing exercises on the board. All the more the question arose why exactly a creative talent like him would try with all his might to drive any artistic impulse out of the school and instead fit it with a corset of scientific disciplines.

Heaven knows what I wrote in the text, still in Ulm, after my interviews! At least I remember Kalow's reaction, whom I visited on my return trip to Hamburg in his residence, the Heidelberger Brückentor high above the Neckar. "Surprisingly balanced," he found the piece, which thereafter the Zeit editorial also graciously accepted and promised to devote half a page of their broadsheet to it, only to announce shortly afterwards that the article would not be published. Inge Aicher-Scholl had, in conversations with Marion Dönhoff, forcefully and convincingly questioned my objectivity and competence.

"I told you so", Henri Nannen exclaimed when I returned to his editorial office.