hfg ulm

René Spitz The View behind the Foreground

The Political History
of the Ulm School of Design

1953–1968

Edition Axel Menges

René Spitz

hfg ulm
The View behind
the Foreground
 hfg ulm
Edition Axel Menges René Spitz The View behind the Foreground
The Political History
of the Ulm School of Design

1953 –1968
© 2002 Edition Axel Menges, 6 Preface
Stuttgart /London
8 Introduction
ISBN 3-932565-17-7 10 What is meant here by political history of the HfG?
13 Characterization and significance of the HfG
All rights reserved, 19 Statistical remarks
especially those of translation 29 Sources
into other languages. 33 Latest research about the HfG

38 Prehistory
40 The Scholls, the White Rose, Otl Aicher
Retouching 43 The American policy of democratization
Helmuth Flubacher, Waiblingen 44 Denazification, JCS 1067
Thorsten Hesselink, Cologne 46 Democratization
47 The founding of adult education centers
Printing 52 Zook Commission, JCS 1779
Druckhaus Münster GmbH, 53 Reeducation under OMGUS
Kornwestheim 56 Zero-hour literature, Hans Werner Richter
58 Studio zero, old and new universities
Binding 60 Reorientation with HICOG
Ernst Riethmüller & Co. GmbH, 63 Max Bill
Stuttgart
66 Founding
November 1949 through April 1953

Editing 136 Excursus

Nora Krehl-von Mühlendahl, Design in the Federal Republic
Ludwigsburg during the 1950s

Translation 152 The rectorship of Bill

Ilze Klavina, Minneapolis April 1953 through March 1956

Design 190 The governing boards

Büro für Gestaltung, Christoph
Burkardt, Albrecht Hotz, Oliver
Wörle, Offenbach am Main 280
March 1956 through December 1962
Excursus
Education policies in the Federal Republic
during the 1960s

302 The rectorships of Aicher, Maldonado and Ohl

December 1962 through December 1968
305 Otl Aicher
December 1962 through September 1964
339 Tomás Maldonado
October 1964 through September 1966
360 Herbert Ohl
October 1966 through December 1968

404 HfG publications

422 Index of names

426 Abbreviations
This publication was supported by 427 List of references
434 Bibliography
Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und 440 References
Halbach- Stiftung
 Preface
6 One recurrent theme in medieval philosophy is
the individual’s sense of being a gnome compared
to the great minds of the Fathers of the Church.
However, the belief is that though a dwarf, one is
still sitting on the shoulders of these giants and
can therefore see a little bit further than they.
Of course we are dwarves sitting on top of
gigantic libraries. But we can see no further than
those who sat here before us. We merely see dif-
ferent piles of books.
Now a new addition to these piles lies before
you. Rightly, you wonder: Was there a need for
this book? Behind this question is a pragmatic one
addressed to the author: “What makes you tick?“
I met Otl Aicher in the late eighties when I was
running an advertising agency in Munich together
with two friends. Those who had ever experienced
the way Otl Aicher tended to treat his clients inevi-
tably wondered how a person can reach such pro-
fessional prominence that he can sacrifice person-
al considerations to the absolute quality of his
work.
How did Otl Aicher gain this prominence? When
he was appointed chief designer for the 1972
Olympic Summer Games in Munich he was cata-
pulted to the foremost ranks of international de-
signers. Why was he given the job? This is how
I stumbled upon the history of the Hochschule für
Gestaltung (HfG), the Ulm School of Design. Why
was the HfG established, why is it no longer in ex-
istence? In existing literature, these questions have
hardly been asked or satisfactorily answered – an
answer can be found only if one does not disre-
gard the hard facts of life: money, position, power,
the protective zones of institutions, spheres of in-
fluence.
Every investigation develops a life of its own; in
some cases it becomes drearier, while in others it
remains exciting. In the course of the years I spent
on this study I have learned a great deal – from
people and about people. That is why this thick
report about the results of my study is, for the
most part, simply a putting together of the pieces
of a jigsaw puzzle handed to me by many people.
I am much obliged to all of them, and it would only
be polite if you, dear reader, rather than skip the
list below of those who helped me, took note of it
benevolently.
First, let me thank my academic teacher and
Ph.D. adviser, Professor Harm Klueting, who guid-
ed my compelling thirst for knowledge into disci-
plined, methodical channels and gently kept me
from leaving them. Without his encouragement I
might not have bowed under the yoke of scientific
accuracy and levelheadedness. For years, at the
humanities department of the University of Co-
logne, he was my adviser as I worked on the dis-
sertation on which the text of this book is based.
My thanks to Professor Jost Dülffer as well for his
penetrating criticism.
I thank all contemporary witnesses I was able to
interview or correspond with for their interest and
patience: the late Inge Aicher-Scholl, who twice
took the time to tell me all the things she had so
often told before; the late Max Bill, whose interest
in my study I found very encouraging; John Boxer,
who in a matter of minutes gave me a living dem-
onstration of American helpfulness and hands-on
determination; Hans Conrad and Hilary Hatch-
Conrad for their great help and for the many in-
comparable photos; Susanne and Gerhard Curdes,
who in a long conversation opened my eyes to
how much information is available in written sour-
ces if one knows how to read between the lines;
Katja Dohrn; Charlotte Erbe; Hans Frieder Eych-
müller; Günther Grzimek; Ernst Hahn; Erhard M.
Löwe; Rolf Müller for his report from the perspec-
tive of an HfG student; Herbert Ohl for his report
from the perspective of the last rector of the HfG;
Harry Pross for a conversation with a broad hori-
zon; Dieter Rams for a number of suggestions;
Toni Richter for her memories, interest, and help;
Thorwald Risler for the many conversations and for
his wonderful moral support; Anneliese and Han-
nes Rosenberg for their photos; Johannes Rother;
Claude Schnaidt for a stimulating conversation
with unusual perspectives; Günther Schweigkofler
for his report from the perspective of the Geschwis-
ter-Scholl-Stiftung; Lothar Späth for his report
from a political perspective; Manuela Tattenbach
Thun.
Also I would like to thank all my colleagues at
various universities who have written academic
studies on the HfG or related topics and from
whom I received valuable suggestions: Elke Am-
berg, Jörg Crone, Michael Erlhoff, Hans Frei, the
late Joachim Heimbucher, Beryl Natalie Janssen,
Andreas König, Barbara Schüler, and Werner Zin-
kand.
My special thanks to the staff members of the
archives and institutions, of whose services, in al-
most all cases, I made excessive use: the staff of
the HfG archive, especially Christiane Wachsmann
and Marcela Quijano; the Bauhaus archive; Kurt
Hochstuhl (Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart); Eugen
Specker and Eva Herrmann (Stadtarchiv Ulm);
Sabine Cofalla (Akademie der Künste Berlin); Mar-
grit Brandel (Max-Planck-Institut für Bildungsfor-
schung); Ms. Rebel (Archive of the Technische
Hochschule Darmstadt); Dr. Bradler (archive of the
Landtag of Baden-Württemberg); Rudolf Kerscher
(Fritz-Thyssen-Stiftung); the Bundesarchiv Koblenz
and the branch office in Berlin-Zehlendorf, the for-
mer Berlin Document Center; the archives of the
Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund, Landesverband
Baden-Württemberg, the Landesgewerbeamt
Stuttgart, Südwestpresse Ulm, the Technische
Hochschule München (Weihenstephan), the Histo- 7
risches Institut of the Deutsche Bank, and the
Stadtarchiv Recklinghausen.
I’d like to thank tax consultant Elmar Frings for
helping me to understand the audit reports of the
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung. My thanks to the late
Eberhard Stauß for his independent judgment. I’d
like to thank Jakob Bill for his patience, Albrecht
Hotz and the Offenbach Büro für Gestaltung for
their patient and precise design work, Ilze Klavina
for her patient and precise translation work and
Axel Menges for his interest in this topic. Thank
you to Olaf Kiel, Gerhard Curdes, Rainer Wick, Her-
bert Lindinger, Fritz Stuber, and Max Graf for addi-
tions they made and corrections they suggested
after reading the dissertation. Thanks to Margret
Stone-Macdonald for the two photos of her father.
And who finances cultural freedom? These days,
possibly only a patron such as Berthold Beitz.
Without his interest and the support of the Krupp-
Stiftung, particularly of Horst Dieter Marheineke
and Thomas Kempf, this book could not have been
published. That would have meant that those to
whom I begrudged victory would have been right
in the end:
I thank all those who resented my project and
tried to thwart it, because through their arrogance
and thoughtlessness they kept me alert and hard
at work. I thank all the people who openly ob-
structed my work and prevented its publication,
because they constantly spurred me on to in-
crease my efforts and to find new ways of reach-
ing my goal. I thank all those who responded to
me with lack of understanding, because they for-
ced me to focus on those passages that could still
be misconstrued, and because they made me
more aware of those statements that had not been
formulated clearly enough.
In conclusion, in a spirit of conciliation I should like
to thank my friends, my family, and especially my
parents for putting up with my eccentricity and
providing me with the reassuring security that is
imperative for such a study.
Most of all I thank my wive Anke Landsberg.
I dedicate this book to her. Anyone else would
have sent me packing.
In memoriam Fred Jaeger
Cologne, July 2000
Photo: Hans Conrad Photo: Ulrich Rothfuss
Archive: Rothfuss

Photo: Hans Conrad

 Introduction
10 What is meant here by political history of the HfG?
The Ulm School of Design (Hochschule für Gestal-
tung Ulm) constitutes the subject, objective, and
limitations of this study. The school gained inter-
national renown and became famous among co-
gnoscenti under its acronym HfG, which is why it
will be referred to that way in this book. The HfG
was a unique institution.
This opinion is merely trite unless it is made
clear why the school was unique and what makes
it different from other institutions that – for what-
ever reason – can be compared with it in an at-
tempt to discover why each of them is special.
We do not know much about the HfG. This study
hardly alters that fact.
Those who devote their time to studying the
HfG soon arrive at an unpleasant conclusion: Facts
are treated as though they were mere opinions,
and vice versa: In lieu of an analysis of reality as
the sum of hard, inescapable facts, there is instead
a flight from reality.
Until now, in discussion about the HfG, there
has been a dearth of publications whose object
has been to represent the hard facts of its history.
There are several reasons for this, only one of
which is the dispersal and inaccessibility of many
sources. However, known statements by some for-
mer HfG members are – legitimate – expressions
of opinion that in the final analysis cannot be re-
futed. The fact that there are no statements by the
silent majority appears to indicate lack of interest.
One of the simplest insights that were taught at
the HfG is the fact that the result of an undertaking
depends on the circumstances under which it was
carried out. If external circumstances are changed,
a different output is obtained, to adopt the jargon
of the HfG. If we wish to grasp the unique nature
of the HfG, we need to know about its external cir-
cumstances. That is why the central focus of the
present study is on the framework within which
the HfG carried out its work.
Other questions are directly derived from this
inquiry. Why was the HfG established (and what
were the external circumstances)? Under what cir-
cumstances did it exist? Why is the HfG no longer
in existence? Was it external circumstances, per-
haps, that led to its “death”? Were there one or
several murderers, to continue the metaphor and
at the same time to quote one of the most fre-
quently expressed verdicts, or was it suicide may-
be? – A conjecture that is almost as frequently
thrown into the ring of semi-public discussion and
is then left there. Whereupon the participants in
the debate attack each other.
Wouldn’t a short paper in a pertinent journal have
sufficed for a few figures and data regarding the
external framework? What justifies such a long
study about the political history of a school that
was concerned with design? Initial research
showed that the few figures and facts published
to date, whose sum total may be enough for a
meager essay, are inexact. 1 One can rely neither
on their exactitude nor on their completeness or
their correctness. The complexity of the topic only
evolved in the course of the study. For a better
understanding of the HfG, simple facts need to be
corrected, the complicated connection between
the institutions that circled like planets around
their sun, the HfG, must be clarified, the roots of
the HfG’s founders and the motivating forces that
moved them must be shown, and readers need to
be reminded of political and cultural events in Ger-
many at the time. It is not possible to differentiate
sharply between politics and design at the HfG.
This is because of the special way things evolved
(here we touch upon one of the most important
special features of the HfG, which distinguishes it
from all other schools of design): Design, at the
HfG, was understood as a means of influencing,
i. e., improving, the individual and society as a
whole. Design was considered to be a means –
essentially prepolitical – of accomplishing political
goals.
Of course this study is by no means a complete
history of the HfG. To put it metaphorically: What
is of interest here is the administrative director of
the Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung (Hans and Sophie
Scholl Foundation), not the department head of
the building department. However, this separation
of interest was always abandoned if, say, the ad-
ministrative director expressed his views on ques-
tions of design (which did not happen), or the de-
partment head spoke on questions of school ad-
ministration (which happened very often).
Therefore, in this study, the concept of the polit-
ical encompasses several aspects of the history of
the HfG viewed partly chronologically, and partly
systematically. From this account of the political
history of the HfG, readers may expect the history
of an institution orientated by contemporary
events and supplemented with sporadic referen-
ces to connections with politics, society, and the
culture of the time. The HfG is in the center, but is
not the protagonist.
The first part of the book will discuss the Scholls
and the sociopolitical and humanistic views and
motives of Otl Aicher and the Ulm circle around
Inge Scholl; the founding of the Ulmer Volks-
hochschule (VH) (the Ulm Adult Education Center)
as part of a logical and consistent continuation of
the resistance against National Socialism; the re-
education policy of the United States of America,
and, finally, the democratization of West German
society.
The major part of this study is devoted to the HfG
from its founding to its closing, and focuses on the
following aspects:
the inner organization of the Geschwister-
Scholl-Stiftung (GSS) – the sponsoring organ-
ization of the HfG – and its committees;
the people in charge of the HfG, and its commit-
tees;
the financing of the foundation (which financed
the HfG with this money);
ties to the city of Ulm, to the ministries in Stutt-
gart and Bonn, and to other sources of income.
Finally, references to “politics at large,” events in
the Landtag of Baden-Württemberg, in the minis-
tries in Stuttgart, in the Bundestag, and in the
Bonn ministries serve to place occurrences at the
HfG in their sociopolitical context; the cultural,
social, and politico-cultural and -educational back-
ground must not be omitted, even if it could be
mentioned only briefly here.
The study concludes with a reliable and accurate
account – a few sections of which are even com-
plete – of data and figures, an account that is vi-
tally important for us to begin to appreciate the
uniqueness of the HfG, and that may serve as a
basis for future research by art historians and for
a discussion of the significance of the HfG.
The limits of the study were not fixed at the outset,
but were only established in the course of doing
the research.
At its beginning the study extends beyond its
time frame, because the history of the HfG does
not begin with the first classes on 3 August 1953,
and would be incomplete without its prehistory.
The history of the founding of the HfG, starting
with November 1949, is here portrayed as its im-
mediate prehistory, because as of that time the
actions and intentions of the founders aimed at an
institution that more closely resembled the HfG
than the Ulm Volkshochschule (Adult Education
Center) from which it developed. Consequently
this study is roughly structured as follows: the
roots of the HfG – the history of its founding – the
actual history of the HfG. Here, unlike most of the
studies to date, where the individual phases of
the development of Ulm design determine the
account, division into periods is done according
to types of rectorship and rectors’ terms in office
at the HfG: The rectorship of Max Bill was followed
by a period of rectorship committees, and finally
the periods when Otl Aicher, Tomás Maldonado,
and Herbert Ohl were rectors. The study abruptly
breaks off on 31 December 1968, for everything
that follows from that point on is part of the imme-
diate history of the HfG’s successor institution,
which, as the University of Stuttgart’s Institut für 11
Umweltplanung (Institute of Environmental Plan-
ning), eked out a suspiciously short existence.
The geographic boundaries of this study are
those of the Federal Republic of Germany and are
a given, at least if the reader takes into account the
fact that there was neither time nor leisure nor the
means for an in-depth comparison of the HfG with
schools of design in other countries or continents,
however instructive and productive such a com-
parison might be.
The thematic limits of this study have already
been indicated. Of necessity, there needed to be
areas of focus, and consequently omissions as
well. That is why no mention is made of the stu-
dent self-government 2, the courses in filmmaking,
or references to art history or architectural history.
Further remarks concerning the contents are not
necessary if we keep in mind the following consid-
erations regarding the method of the study.
This history is not the history of the HfG, at least
not in the sense of claiming to be the only valid
history of the HfG. Such a history of the HfG could
not be written, since everyone who was a student
or teacher at the HfG experienced a different his-
tory. This is a platitude, but one that we keep for-
getting.
Architecturally speaking, the HfG was a cool and
severe spatial installation on Kuhberg that was “in-
cluded in historico-cultural studies as an icon of
postwar modernism “. 3 In addition, the HfG was a
living focal point at which many factors and lines
came together: The lives of important international
designers and thinkers intersected here and inter-
wove with political, sociopolitical, and social ideas
and ideals. Today, many people regard the HfG as
the laboratory of quite a number of classic figures
involved in modern product and information de-
sign – the part of it that endures.
This history of the HfG, driven by interest in ar-
chitecture, social psychology, or art history, is not
the subject of this book. Perhaps it is astonishing
that daily life at the HfG, of all topics, gets short
shrift here, but those who want to read about that
aspect of HfG history must wait for the book to be
written – by former inhabitants of Ulm or in close
collaboration with them. This, however, should not
blind them to the fact that the history of the HfG
is finished and that the stories of those who were
part of that history can describe only one of a hun-
dred perspectives. Authenticity must not be con-
fused with truth.
That is why the same insight is true for the history
of the HfG as that which applies to the historiogra-
phy of any institution: None of those who formerly
belonged to the HfG will find their history in this
study. To put it bluntly, one might think the history
 Introduction
12 represented here never took place just this way.
At any rate, none of those involved in the HfG (i. e.,
not only students, faculty, and staff, but also the
large number of those who supported the Ge-
schwister-Scholl-Stiftung) perceived it this way.
This is the story of the HfG as reconstructed by a
historian 30 years after its closing. It is the story
of an abstraction.
Then what still needs to be told? How does one
legitimize the writing of a history that no one expe-
rienced in just this way? Much ado about nothing?
Perhaps of all aspects it is the one chosen here
that is particularly important, in that it allows new
and brighter light to fall upon the many other per-
spectives on the HfG. Here, the HfG is looked at
from the outside.
If it is true that none of those involved in the HfG
experienced the history portrayed here this way,
then that implies that no one at the time had a
comparatively comprehensive knowledge of
events in and around the HfG, in the foundation, in
the foundation committees, in the government
departments, between those who belonged to the
HfG. Only the sources that, to a large extent, have
become available now (for the first time) make
this perspective possible today. One might say the
perspective was not possible until the sources be-
came available. But the simple fact is that behind
it is the integral method of the science of history.
The historian’s only achievement consists in inte-
grating various – ideally all possible – pieces of
information about the HfG.
Those who belonged to the HfG and the foun-
dation all spent only a limited time period at the
HfG and working for it. No one was active and
involved in it from 1950 until 1968, from start to
finish. Inge Scholl, Otl Aicher, and Max Bill are
leading figures who were part of the project the
longest, then faculty members such as Tomás
Maldonado and Walter Zeischegg, and also studio
heads such as Paul Hildinger and Josef Schlecker.
No one had as profound an influence on the HfG
as Otl Aicher.
Yet the same is true of the trio of founders as is
true to an even greater degree of the other former
members of the HfG: They have (or had) detailed
knowledge of some events that was not recorded
in the sources, because they took part in the life of
the HfG. And it is no doubt the abundance of such
details that constitutes the history of the HfG as it
Hans Scholl
born 22 Sept. 1918,
executed 22 Feb. 1943.
Archive: HfG (59/0252/4)
Sophie Scholl
born 9 May 1921,
executed 22 Feb. 1943.
Archive: HfG (59/0253/4)
might be written by a former participant. Where
individual short time periods and above all special
areas of interest are concerned, the former mem-
bers have a deeper knowledge than that presented
here.
Accordingly the historian has only one legitimate
reason for his work: He reports on the entire dura-
tion of the HfG’s rise and fall. Moreover he does
so from a perspective that none of those who be-
longed to the HfG have.
And here again the information from scattered
sources, from documents that are more or less se-
cret or kept under lock and key, is so dense and
complete that it enriches the stories of former mem-
bers by adding an extremely important dimension
– in all due modesty –, one that remains closed to
them: that of politics, money, power, influence,
decisionmaking power.
Because this is a fundamental methodical problem
for historians writing contemporary history, some-
thing that Rolf Schörken stated in technical jargon
in the same context about a different topic is also
true of this study: “What was perceived at the time
must not be confused with the results of historio-
graphy; today, 40 years later, we know incompar-
ably more about that period than contemporaries
saw themselves. […] These reflections do not rule
out the possibility that the contemporary, in some
respects, always knows more than the historian.
There are connections that are hard to establish
when events are reconstructed later from sources,
because sources only receive their true impor-
tance against the background of the total view
that living in a given period provides.“ 4
An important example for this fundamental di-
lemma is given by Gerhard Curdes, who pointed
out that while the dissatisfaction of many students
with the reality of their academic studies in the
early 1960s can hardly be documented, it was
nevertheless one of the driving forces for the inner
conflicts that began in 1961.
When all is said and done, this history is there as
a basis that makes it possible to discuss the HfG
objectively. Facts must not replace opinions, but
make it possible to form opinions in the first place.
The fact that in the process a number of errors will
be set straight without a lot of fuss may in the end
contribute to demythologizing the HfG. But pre-
sumably the exact opposite will be the case: Per-
haps the achievements of the HfG will seem even
higher and more unattainable and distant once
readers have learned about the difficult conditions
under which they were accomplished.
In other words, to bring this thought to its conclu-
sion, this is by no means the truth about the HfG.
There are as many truths about the HfG as there
were people who experienced it and were commit-
ted to it. This is only the truth of the conditions and
circumstances of the HfG that no one to date has
been familiar with, and that only those who know
how to read it can learn from.
Characterization and significance of the HfG 13
The history of the HfG is a small segment of the
advanced history of industrialization (seen from
an economic point of view) or of the modern age
(seen from a cultural and sociological point of
view). 5 Industrialization made it possible and at
the same time demanded that industrially manu-
factured goods in daily use be uniform, standard-
ized. Objects that until then had been individually
made by craftsmen were now mass-produced and
increasingly designed exclusively by experts.
Modern industry in its development was accom-
panied by utopias and reforms that created a close
link between its social and its ethical mission: for
example, the South Kensington movement in Eng-
land that led to the founding of the original art
industry schools; or the English arts and crafts
movement. The champions of these movements
were not just interested in bringing about an im-
provement of mass-produced goods. In the final
analysis society was also to be improved in the
process. Socialism was the preferred political
stance of reformers such as John Ruskin or Wil-
liam Morris, who pursued their goal of “a social-
istically aesthetic Gesamtkunstwerk of society“ 6.
European movements like de Stijl in the Nether-
lands or the German Werkbund 7 in the early 20th
century further developed ideas on shaping the
modern world. They strove for the improvement of
the quality of all consumer goods, demanding a
rejection of fashionable design premises. And they
looked for possibilities for factory-made products
that would no longer look like those produced in a
craftsman’s workshop (or rather: that would not
look as though they had been produced in a work-
shop). From the simple demand “Form follows
function” arose a complex edifice of ideas, func-
tionalism, which adopted a moral undertone. The
form of an article of daily use, claimed the reform-
ers, should be developed out of itself, out of its
function. The design tradition of craftsman-made
objects should not be applied to industrial produc-
tion. If form and function corresponded, and the
object was manufactured so that the material and
the production method were in harmony, they
said, one could speak of the “truth” of the object.
Products designed according to such criteria, with-
out curlicues and ornamentation, not only arose
from new, strict aesthetic concepts, but this new
order of the world of forms was also supposed to
represent the necessary consequence of an inner
system of values: “The Werkbund believed in the
humanizing effect of form. […] Their faith in a
technological and positive reason , with utility writ
large, was unbroken.“ 8 Leading designers of indus-
trial products at the beginning of the 20th century
simultaneously ran schools of what is now called
design: Peter Behrens directed the Düsseldorf
Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Arts and Crafts),
 Introduction
14 Richard Riemerschmid headed the Cologne Werk-
schulen, Henry van de Velde was the director of
the Weimar Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Arts
and Crafts). In 1919 his successor, Walter Gropius,
transformed it into the Weimar Bauhaus, which
later continued its existence in Dessau, and finally
in Berlin, until it was closed by the National Social-
ists in 1933. 9 The Bauhaus is considered to be the
place that has had the strongest influence on 20th
century design. Here the political demand that so-
ciety should be transformed through design was
linked with the moral imperative that industrially
manufactured products need to be good products.
At the Bauhaus the idea of functionalism formu-
lated by the Werkbund was put into action. As
though there had been no tradition before the
Werkbund, its leading designers tried to go back
to zero where design was concerned, and to de-
velop the form of an object primarily from its func-
tion.
After World War II the idea of functionalism be-
came the basis of the campaign Die gute Form
(Good Design), which the Swiss Werkbund carried
out, with good response, between 1949 and
1969. 10 Switzerland’s Max Bill, a former student
at the Bauhaus, who had made a name for himself
as an architect, product designer, sculptor, painter,
and publicist, gave a talk on beauty as function
and based on function at the 1948 conference of
the Swiss Werkbund. The Werkbund thereupon
commissioned him to organize a special exhibit for
the 1949 Schweizerische Mustermesse (Swiss
trade fair) in Basel, combining two exhibitions: an
assembly of high-quality Swiss products and an
exhibit by Max Bill on the fundamental principles
of design that would “show the principles of pure
functional form organized systematically, and be
directed at both producers and consumers.“ 11 The
result was Max Bill’s photo exhibit Die gute Form.
It gave its name to the prize Gute Form, which,
starting in 1952, the Swiss Werkbund annually
awarded to select products exhibited at the Swiss
trade fair in Basel.
The selection criteria for this prize represent the
summation of functionalism, although an official
nomenclature did not exist as yet. Peter Erni lists
the essential characteristics of Good Design: The
form and color of the object must be restrained;
there must be no noticeable adherence to the
principle that nature abhors a vacuum; embellish-
ments or decoration and any unnecessary details
at all must be rejected. “It has been manufactured
with optimal operational economy and structured
by economizing the means employed. When the
object is used, there is no wasted energy. Prior to
starting production, production methods have
been analyzed, resulting in the object becoming
what it is. In using this object there is to be no
sense of flaws or missing features. It promises the
highest imaginable practical value. Nothing about
this object is too much, nothing is too little. […] It
is handy, practical, it promises if not happiness,
then at least years of convenience and comfort.
[…] It makes no claim to be more than it appears
to be, but neither does it claim to be less. […] It
embodies conscious asceticism and is an unremit-
ting manifest demonstration against garish forms
[…]. This appliance is mass-produced and hence
reasonably priced. It claims to be classless.“ 12
Practicality, sturdiness, materials made to last,
and affordability had for a long time been the cri-
teria used to evaluate technical equipment. Why
should these criteria not be applied to consumer
goods as well? Other factors from the world of
technology – engineering, to be precise – were
methodical efficiency, measuring the economy of
all means employed and thus producing, with min-
imum means, the largest yield – the best result.
This efficiency was to be true both for the manu-
facture of the product and for its daily use: Keep-
ing use of materials, production time, and phases
of operation down to a minimum was considered
to be a virtue. An additional aspect of use is that
an object be what is now called “user-friendly”.
This refers to clarity, organization, and ease of
orientation presented by the surface of the prod-
uct. Its operation is self-evident, and ideally it
serves as its own operating instructions.
Thus all aspects of Good Design are planned so
as to optimize its utility. Even the strict aesthetics
have utility, because the consumer can surround
himself with his products for a long time since
they do not go out of fashion. Then what is consid-
ered to be “bad design“, as the antithesis of Good
Design? Here some key words are terms such as
trash, kitsch, trendy, profiteering, or sham. First
and foremost an object ought not to be trendy,
strive for effect, be striking at all costs, flashy; on
the other hand, it should not be rustic – belying its
industrial origins, pretending to be handmade; and
finally any resort to the past should be avoided.
Styles that are typical of “bad design“ are such
movements as neoclassicism, rustic style, or fu-
turism, and the infamous Gelsenkirchener Barock
(Gelsenkirchen Baroque) 13 is also included in the
list of taboos.
Behind the idea of Good Design is an openly ex-
pressed suspicion: Whatever is decorated on the
outside conceals inner unsuitability and imperfec-
tion. It is a credo that ugliness on a small scale
leads to ugliness and poor quality on a large scale.
In the final analysis this worldview is based on an
Enlightenment utopia that the beautiful, being
good, produces good human beings; readers may
recall Schiller’s Letter on the Aesthetic Education
of Humankind. The social goal behind the ideal of
Good Design “implies an unspoiled social order,
democratic, rational, clear, and transparent, with-
out guile and tricks, knowing no misguided emo-
tions. Typically the ideal is conceived shortly after
the Second World War, just after the second social
catastrophe of our century.“ 14
Max Bill, by the way, always set great store by
his interpretation of functionalism: It is part of the
function that “every object has an aesthetic com-
ponent. […] Good design is something that, to all
intents and purposes, is not contestable, let’s say,
for practical and moral reasons.“ 15 Since he had
left the HfG in 1957, he emphasized that the HfG
now pursued a functionalism in which the aesthet-
ic component had receded into the background,
while he himself was convinced that “the totality
of functions that needed to be fulfilled […] should
form a harmonic whole and thus give an aestheti-
cally flawless overall impression“. 16
The history of the founding of the Ulm School of
Design directly coincides with the beginning of the
campaign Good Design. (Incidentally it is striking
that the HfG and Good Design are synchronous,
they even end surprisingly simultaneously: merely
a duplication of events or a clear sign of the times?)
From the perspective of design history, and of art
history in the broader sense, the HfG, like the cam-
paign of the Swiss Werkbund, is classified as part
of the tradition of functionalism. 17 Thus the HfG
was referred to as “a new bastion of functional-
ism“ 18 or labeled with the term “neofunctional-
ism“. 19 Bernd Meurer, a former student at the HfG,
has pointed out that a number of approaches are
subsumed under the term functionalism, while
only one of these approaches predominated at
the HfG: “Function was a central theme at Ulm
[…]. Art historians, however, use the term func-
tionalism to denote mutually exclusive principles
of design: Design that bases its formal laws on
elementary geometry; design which regards func-
tion as the relationship between cause and effect;
or, design that interprets function as the dynamic
interdependence of facts and processes. Art histo-
rians place these three definitions in the same cat-
egory. The first definition was of no importance
whatsoever at Ulm, the second remained in con-
flict with the third, which was the dominant inter-
pretation of function in the school.“ 20 Possibly this
way of formulating things is exaggerated a poste-
riori – the debate between the factions pro and
contra Bill seems to be protracted as a result of
such accounts. Thus another former HfG member,
Margit Staber, a good friend of Max Bill’s, rejects
such design-history distinctions in her comments
and emphasizes the broad perspective: “The HfG,
too, had its phases; yet no matter how violently
the debate between different schools of thought
fluctuated, they were all strictly speaking function-
ally determined stages, and only the opinions on 15
how this functionality was to be implemented
were at variance with each other.“ 21 – Whenever
the term functionalism is mentioned in connection
with the HfG, there is mostly an undertone that
implicitly or explicitly indicates that the form of
functionalism that developed at the HfG was par-
ticularly strict, rigorous, and radical. Thus Wolf-
gang Ruppert called the platform of the HfG “the
cultivation of asceticism”. 22 Even earlier Abraham
Moles, a former faculty member at the HfG, had
referred to this way of improving the world
through self-castigation: “The idea of functionality
included a certain asceticism of function, first in
the way it was implemented, but also in a refusal
to encourage a proliferation of functions that
would necessarily end up being unproductive.“
However, this theory and practice of censoring
what was unproductive at the HfG, claimed Moles,
was “inevitably“ – a term that is puzzling to a his-
torian – in conflict with a civilization of affluence
and superfluity, so that it seems natural for him to
transfigure the end of the HfG as well, blaming it
on an automatic process and referring to the insur-
mountable power of trends of the times: “The the-
ory of functionalism could no longer be heard in
a society of overconsumption. This society was
more interested in creating new needs than in sat-
isfying the basic needs in a perfect way and di-
recting its efforts toward analyzing what is truly
fundamental. This is the philosophical basis of
functionalism; through economic power play, the
search for what is needless gains the upper hand
over the search for function. […] In my opinion it
is this crisis of functionalism, even more than the
politico-economic struggle, that, in the historical
context of the German economic miracle, contrib-
uted not only to the closing of the school, but
above all to its breaking up into other institutions
that are scattered all over the world, from Brazil to
Japan, from the US to Israel, where it continues to
exert its influence as an essential component of
Western thinking.“ 23
The HfG was in existence from 1953 until 1968. It
was an institution of learning outside the Federal
German educational system:
Firstly, the HfG had a private, not a public spon-
sor – the Geschwister Scholl Foundation, created
in 1950. The latter financed the HfG, or, to be pre-
cise, it organized the financing of the HfG with
funds that came from private industry and public
moneys – and here city, Land, and federal funds
gained decisive dominance as the years went by,
creating a dependence that the founders had in-
itially intended to avoid.
Secondly, while the HfG called itself a Hoch-
schule (College) of Design, its college status was
disputed. At least, it was not an academic institu-
 Introduction

16 One flew over Kuhberg: tion, though at times it did conduct academic 17
Otl Aicher on the road research and development, which justified its sta-
approaching Kuhberg tus as an institution of higher learning in the eyes
from the direction of of those who determined cultural and educational
Ulm on 2 August 1955. policies and distinguished it from a technical col-
lege or a state school of engineering. In the sixties,
the administration at the Stuttgart ministry of edu-
cation and the arts considered it on the same level
as the Baden-Württemberg colleges of art and
music. Nevertheless, at the Ministry, it was the
department for art, not the department for institu-
tions of higher learning that was responsible for it.
The HfG issued a diploma, which however was not
recognized on a governmental level, although
those who had the diploma were highly regarded
by industry because of their qualifications.
Thirdly, the HfG was neither a college or school
of arts and crafts nor a college of art, although its
most important sphere of activity – product design
and information presentation – had been the do-
main of such institutions at the time of its found-
ing and for a long time thereafter.
Fourthly, for training in design, previous experi-
ence in the arts, or arts and crafts, was traditional-
ly expected. However, the HfG expressly did not
subscribe to this policy.
Fifthly and above all, the HfG was different from
all contemporary centers of design education in
that here (with varying degrees of intensity) there
was a striving to create design that was grounded
in the liberal arts and natural sciences, instead of
pursuing the traditional approach of intuitively ar-
tistic design.

The work of the HfG concentrated on the visual

and verbal presentation of information, including
film, on designing industrially manufactured prod-
ucts, and on industrialized building. The signifi-
cance of the HfG is due to the coming together of
several factors: The combination of the subjects
taught there was as unique as its instruction meth-
od, as the theoretical and practical results of its
work, and as its influence on experts in the field
worldwide.
Unlike other institutions of learning, it thus
pursued a wide spectrum of goals: It trained de-
signers, it practiced design, it worked out theories
of design, and it developed methods of design.
Something that is appreciated today is that it
shaped not only the modern professional image
of the designer but also the professional image of
the design teacher. In connection with the HfG’s
instruction method and the teamwork involving
designers together with technicians and business
people, it is customary to speak of the Ulm model
or Ulm concept. But the tangible results of the
work at the HfG, in the form of product design and
information presentation have also gained accep-
tance: They are said to have that special Ulm style.
 Introduction
18 At the HfG there were four departments. The most
influential ones were the two departments of
product design (initially called product form) and
visual communication (initially called visual de-
sign). The departments of building (called archi-
tecture until 1956/57, building until 1958/59 and
industrialized building after 1959/60) and infor-
mation had secondary importance. Instruction in
the information department did not begin until
1954 and stopped again after 1965; the depart-
ment merged with the Institut für Filmgestaltung
(Institute of Film Design). The department of city
planning had only been in the planning stage, but
was never implemented.
In the largest department, that of product de-
sign (249 registered students, an average of 42
students per academic year), the faculty and stu-
dents were concerned with the design of products
for industrial manufacture, for mass consumption,
and for public institutions. Gui Bonsiepe, a student
and later faculty member at the HfG, said of the
work in this department that “technology qua
technology“ had been made visible. Outstanding
examples are the stackable tableware of the Ro-
senthal company, designed by Nick Roericht to
be used in cafeterias and large-scale catering es-
tablishments, or the passenger cars of the Ham-
burg elevated railroad. “Functional design was to
be the trademark of an appropriate relation to in-
dustrial objects, an outward image of the modern
age, not merely a modish style, an image that
clearly stood out amid the normalcy of the con-
sumption landscape.“ 24 – The Institut für Produkt-
form (Institute of Product Form), which, merely as
a formality, in keeping with the nonprofit character
of the foundation, had been declared to be the
actual purpose of the foundation, became a reality
in 1958, as the Institut für Produktgestaltung
(Institute of Product Design). Here several faculty
members – from the three departments of product
design, visual communication, and industrialized
building – worked in their development teams on
private-industry and public commissions.
The second largest department, building (170
registered students, an average of 28 students per
academic year), focused on a very limited seg-
ment of architecture: Here the concern was pri-
marily construction using industrially prefabricated
components. Of course, hardly any of the projects
were actually implemented by those who had
commissioned them. One of the few exceptions
is Max Graf’s diploma project, the Oberstufen-
schulhaus (upper-school building) of the Pestaloz-
zidorf (Pestalozzi Village) in Trogen (Switzerland)
of 1959/60.
The visual communication department (158
registered students, an average of 26 students per
academic year) was only slightly smaller than the
department of building, but far more influential.
This is where, primarily, information systems were
created and theoretical groundwork was laid for
them. Typical of this work were projects that pro-
vided signs for a subway system to guide users, or
created a unified graphic image for companies and
agencies, from business cards and letterheads to
the company’s motor vehicle fleet and advertising,
e. g., the concept created for Lufthansa.
The department of information had the lowest
number of students (an enrollment of 25, an aver-
age of 5 students per academic year for the period
from 1954/55 through 1965/66). It admitted the
last two students in 1962. This department studied
the linguistic means of mass information, the pro-
fession of journalism, and mass media.
Finally, a film studies program began in the aca-
demic year 1961/62 initiated by Alexander Kluge
and Edgar Reitz in the department of visual com-
munication (27 enrollees, an average of 12 stu-
dents per academic year for the period from
1961/62 until 1967/68). This program developed
into the autonomous Institut für Filmgestaltung
(Institute of Film Design), an incorporated associa-
tion that is still in existence today.
The organization of studies changed as the years
went by. The first entrance requirement was not
graduation from secondary school, but for the
most part training in a trade or equivalent skills
and experience. Those who were interested in
studying at the HfG had to fill out a lengthy ques-
tionnaire that would reveal the applicant’s person-
ality and education level in detail. Those admitted
to the school first had to complete a probationary
quarter. When they had successfully met this re-
quirement, they were still not definitely admitted,
for it was not until the end of the first year of stud-
ies that the department heads decided which of
the students were accepted into their depart-
ments.
Modeled on the Bauhaus, studies up to and
including the academic year 1960/61 began with
the Grundlehre (fundamentals), a first year of
studies during which basic knowledge of the indi-
vidual subjects considered indispensable was
taught. The basic courses had to be passed by all
beginning students. “In the early days the basic
course content was not specialized. The students
were supposed to receive a sort of general educa-
tion in design. In the late fifties, assignments that
had direct practical application began playing an
increasingly greater role; there was a clear tenden-
cy toward more specialized training.“ 25 In the
1959/60 academic year the school began to phase
out the basic courses; on 30 January 1961 the
inner senate of the HfG abolished the term Grund-
lehre in favor of the term first year of studies. By
the 1961/62 academic year this development had
led to the abolition of the concept of the funda-
mentals. After that, the first year for beginning stu-
dents started in the departments from day one.
The entire program was divided into quarters.
The first quarter began on October first of each
year. There were no classes during the fourth quar-
ter, which was intended for the students’ practical
work in industry. Attendance at events planned at
the HfG was obligatory and was strictly controlled.
The small number of students at the school and at
events they had to attend over the school year
made it easier to check attendance and increased
pressure on the students. Studies could be con-
cluded, but not necessarily, by completing a Dip-
lomarbeit (thesis project leading to a diploma) that
consisted of a practical and a theoretical section.
Statistical remarks
First, some remarks about enrollment: During the
15 years of its existence, a total of 637 students
enrolled at the HfG. 26 Sorted according to the
length of their studies, there are the following
three categories:
238 did not stay more than 1 year,
173 were at the HfG for up to 3 years,
226 completed their studies within the expec-
ted 4-year period (in individual cases and, as a
rule, in the film department, total time was 5
years).
This means that the (bare) majority of students en-
rolled at the school studied at the HfG for a year at
most.
Two conclusions can be drawn from this fact:
on the one hand a high fluctuation of students was
typical for the HfG, while on the other hand it is
debatable whether this majority can even be re-
garded as “former Ulm students“, and whether
these students themselves identify with the HfG.
Please note: Because this study focuses only on
the history of the HfG, yet many students contin-
ued and often completed their studies at the HfG’s
successor institute, the Institut für Umweltplanung
(IUP), the figures quoted also include all those stu-
dents who began their studies as of the academic
year 1965/66 but were able to spend a maximum
of 3, 2 or 1 year(s) at the HfG. This is how we get
the seemingly inexplicable fact that 231 students
enrolled at the HfG completed their studies with a
diploma, but only 226 completed their studies in
the prescribed period of time. If we ask how many
students continued their studies at the IUP, we
discover that 53 of all 231 diplomas were obtained
by students who began their studies in 1965/66 or
later, and therefore completed their degree at the
IUP.
Two additional footnotes regarding the enroll-
ment: Firstly, only 97 women enrolled at the HfG.
The women students at the HfG concentrated pre-
dominantly in the departments of visual communi- 19
cation (42) and product design (31). The depart-
ment of building was downright shunned by the
women – only 7 women students enrolled here. In
the two small departments of information and film
they were proportionally strongly represented. –
Secondly, the enrollment figures show how very
international an institution the HfG was. A total of
278 foreigners made up 44 percent of all those
enrolled – an incomparably high proportion that
enrollment figures at other German colleges or
universities did not even come close to. Roughly
speaking, the proportion of foreigners in the stu-
dent body of Baden-Württemberg institutions of
higher learning averaged between 5 and 10 per-
cent for the Land as a whole, while at the HfG it
was between 30 and 50 percent. This circum-
stance indicates that there was international inter-
est in the HfG from the very first academic year,
and also shows that the HfG was regarded highly
throughout the world. Over the years, this brought
an ever-increasing share of international students –
51 and 63 percent of total enrollment at the end –
to the HfG. The predominant number of foreign
students (219 out of 278) came from 10 countries:
Switzerland (93), USA (25), Japan (20), Austria
(16), Britain (13), the Netherlands, Italy (12 each),
Brazil, Sweden (10 each), and Argentina (8). The
dominance of Switzerland cannot be overlooked:
Its nationals made up a third of all foreign gradu-
ates and 15 percent of all those enrolled. More
often than average, the Swiss were interested in
the building department, so that the number of
Swiss students in that department represented
something unique about the HfG. Another fact
that is striking is that two-thirds of those enrolled
in the building department (108 out of 170) came
from foreign countries. With a 38 percent share
each in total enrollment, the departments of prod-
uct design and visual communication were also
characterized by the international atmosphere typ-
ical of the HfG.
However, enrollment figures do not allow one to
draw conclusions about actual conditions while
studying at the school, as the distribution of length
of time spent at the HfG shows. Thus from the
number of students per academic year we see
that five years after the first classes began, for
the first time, 100 persons were studying at the
HfG; the mathematical average was 107 per aca-
demic year. Only once, in the next to last academic
year, the HfG reached the complete number of
students, 150 (152, to be precise), for which it had
been designed. The preponderance of the product
design department continued for the entire 15
years and stabilized during the second half at
roughly 50 students per year. The average number
of students in the building department fluctuated
at around 30, while enrollment in the visual com-
 Introduction
20 munication department was slightly below that.
No more than 10 students studied in the informa-
tion department in any one year. – The proportion
of women in the student body was around one-
fourth in the first three years, and then fell to an
average value of below 15 percent, but never
dropped below 10 percent. The proportion of for-
eign students was at its highest in the first aca-
demic year, with almost 50 percent (10 out of 21),
but never dropped below 30 percent and on the
average fluctuated around 40 percent. Thus these
proportions roughly correspond to enrollment fig-
ures; there is no recognizable statistical signifi-
cance.
Now, a few remarks regarding the faculty at the
HfG, who were called Dozenten (lecturers) and
not professors. What was important for correctly
assessing the students is even more true of the
lecturers: A majority of them were at the HfG only
for a short time, perhaps only on a single occa-
sion. Guest lecturers came from all over the world
for a lecture, a course lasting several weeks, or
only one quarter. That is why it is incorrect to de-
scribe all lecturers who were employed on a regu-
lar basis along with guest lecturers as “former Ulm
faculty“. Nikolaus Sombart, for example, Hans
Magnus Enzensberger, Anton Stankowski, Richard
Buckminster Fuller, or Johannes Itten surely did
not immediately identify themselves as members
of the HfG on the strength of their flying visit to
Ulm, which was also true of short-term students
like Ferdinand Alexander Porsche. But their pres-
ence and fluctuation in toto is an important char-
acteristic of the HfG.
The total of 282 lecturers – including only five
women, Käthe Hamburger, Gisela Krammer, He-
lene Nonné-Schmidt, Helga Pross, and Elisabeth
Walther – can be divided into roughly three
groups, if we consider the uninterrupted term of
their lectureship (which refers not to the sum of all
quarters that a lecturer taught at the HfG, but sim-
ply the longest uninterrupted period). Over half of
all lecturers were employed at the HfG, on an un-
interrupted basis, for only one or two quarters. A
second group of lecturers spent one continuous
year at the HfG. That means that almost three-
fourths of HfG lecturers taught at the HfG for one
year at most. Finally, the third group included the
remaining 30 percent of the lecturers, who remained
in Ulm for more than a year. This group included
the exceptions Otl Aicher, who – except for a five-
quarter sick leave in 1964/65 and 1965/66 –
taught at the HfG without interruption; the special-
ists heading the workshops, Paul Hildinger and
Josef Schlecker, who taught every year (not every
quarter); Tomás Maldonado, who lectured continu-
ously from the second to the next to last academic
year; Herbert Ohl from 1955/56 until the end; Wal-
ter Zeischegg with two two-year breaks from the
first through the last academic year.
The number of lecturers who taught during any
one academic year rose continuously from an ini-
tial 18 to 76 in the 1964/65 academic year, and
then dropped to a final 63. A look at these statis-
tics, which come closest to the reality in any one
academic year, clearly shows that there were basi-
cally two groups of lecturers: those who taught
the entire academic year, and those who taught
only for one quarter (or once within a quarter). The
proportion of one-quarter lecturers fluctuated be-
tween just under 30 percent and over 50 percent,
while the proportion of those who taught all year
was between 35 percent and over 70 percent. The
proportion of lecturers who taught two quarters,
on the other hand, was only between one percent
and just over 20 percent.
An additional characteristic of teaching reality at
the HfG can be derived from the statistical ratio of
lecturers to students per academic year. Thus in
the first year a total of 18 lecturers were available
for 21 students, a mathematical ratio of 1 to 1.2.
And even if the number of students is compared
only with the number of lecturers who taught at
the HfG the entire year, the result obtained is 1:1.6.
Of course, those values were no longer reached
during the years that followed, but the least favor-
able lecturer-student ratio was 1:2.8. The mathe-
matical average was 1:2.2. If one takes into ac-
count only the lecturers who spent any one year
without interruption at the HfG, the highest ratio
obtained is 1:7.2, and the average is 1:4.6. At
1:2.3 the fundamental ratio of all lecturers to all
registered students (including the 17 previous HfG
students who taught at the HfG after completing
their studies) is extraordinary. In other words: The
pedagogical concept planned at the founding of
the HfG – establishing as favorable a teacher-stu-
dent ratio as possible (so as to provide optimum
training for a small number of students) – was
actually turned into a reality.
These numerical proportions, which were not
attained at any other German institution of higher
learning, become even better if one considers that
many lecturers taught in several departments. For
instance, the six students of the information de-
partment, during the 1957/58 academic year, had
the good fortune of being taught by eight lectur-
ers. Statements in this connection must, however,
be regarded in the light of probability, for unfortu-
nately the material on which these statistics are
based does not indicate in which departments the
lecturers actually taught during which academic
year, only in which departments they taught alto-
gether.
To sum up, it is possible to conclude that a typical
HfG student was either in Ulm for a short time or
held out to the end and graduated with a diploma.
Figuratively speaking this is also true of the lectur-
ers: Either they stayed for one or two quarters, or
they stayed for years. That is why two trends were
typical for the HfG: high fluctuation and, at the
same time, stability and continuity.
Those who think of themselves as former mem-
bers and for whom the HfG was not merely an epi-
sode, whose life, thinking, and actions were influ-
enced by their time at the HfG will probably recog-
nize themselves in the two groups of students and
lecturers who had staying power, a total of 314
persons – no doubt too “hard“ a standard for a
group of people that can only be judged according
to “soft“ criteria.
Another piece of evidence to support the idea
that, with all the typical fluctuation, more long-
term developments must also have been charac-
teristic for the HfG is the previously mentioned fact
that 17 former students taught at the HfG after
graduation. Here, the most prominent example is
Claude Schnaidt, who began his studies in the
building department in 1954/55, graduated four
years later with a diploma and taught at the HfG
the very next year – in fact, with only one inter-
ruption from that time until the end. During the
school’s last two years he was deputy rector, and
he would probably have followed Herbert Ohl as
the rector if the HfG had still been in existence
then. This example clearly shows that instances of
hidden and unexpected continuity can be tracked
down in the HfG’s history if a future opportunity
presents itself to investigate such questions.
In order to assess accurately the effect of the HfG
on the theory and teaching of design, and design
itself, it is necessary to compare it to national and
international centers of education, to investigate
its influence on these institutions, and to inquire
into the biographies of members of the HfG. Be-
cause no such study exists, and it would have
been unreasonable to undertake it as part of the
present study, the following comments may be
considered to be only the first rough outlines
toward answering two questions on how to char-
acterize the HfG: What was so special about the
HfG? And what makes it the most important
design institution in the history of the Federal
Republic of Germany, and one of the most influen-
tial worldwide?
The special features of the HfG are concentrated in
its educational theory. Here are five comments on
this point:
1. Part of the educational theory of the HfG, for
example, is the fact that from its very beginning
it was conceived as a training center for a limit-
ed number of students, for a creative and dem-
ocratic elite that was to receive intensive atten- 21
tion. This consciousness of being an avant-
garde shaped the entire institution and those
who belonged to it. Nor was the concept aban-
doned as time went by, so that the consistently
small number of students represented an oddity
in the landscape of German institutions of high-
er learning. Moreover a large part of these se-
lect few came from all over the globe. The fac-
ulty was also consistently international in its
orientation at a time when intellectuals lamen-
ted the national “stuffiness“ of the Adenauer
era. Herbert Ohl, the last rector of the HfG, in
this connection recalled “the consciousness that
created Ulm“, and spoke about the fact that
admission criteria alone ensured that only a
special type of people were accepted to study
at the HfG: “Free of the system, unbiased, task-,
not prestige-oriented, committed to serving
society as a whole and thus also the national
economy“, is how according to him students
and faculty felt from the day they first arrived
at the HfG. 27
2. One result of the pedagogical convictions of the
HfG founders, which can be experienced even
today, was the college grounds, which Max Bill
had modeled on the American campus, and
which promoted a compact college life. Here,
the apartments of students and faculty crowded
around the core of the college: auditorium, bar
and cafeteria, lecture rooms for theory, work-
shops for practice. The very architecture impres-
sed the contemporaries “as a manifesto, as
construction that proclaimed the policy of this
college of design: transparent rationality, use of
fundamental forms, clarity of structure, seriality.
One feels that this architecture intends to orga-
nize relationships.“ 28 Moreover, the program-
matic complex of buildings forced all those who
belonged to the HfG to grapple continuously
with the practical and theoretical questions of
design, with current projects and controversies.
This climate of mutual proximity was typical of
life at the HfG and, depending on each person-
ality, was perceived as stimulating competition,
oppressive rivalry or unbearably provincial, mo-
nastic confinement.
3. When we speak of the HfG’s educational theory,
what is usually meant is the so-called Ulm
model or Ulm concept. 29 To put it in a nutshell,
it is really an attempt to do away with the tradi-
tional division of higher education into research
and teaching by combining it with a third com-
ponent. Otl Aicher called this element develop-
ment, and the essential points of this pedagogi-
cal model also go back to him. By development,
he understood the manufacture of prototypes
that were practical and ready to go into produc-
tion, for government and private-industry cli-
 Introduction
22 ents. In principle this pedagogical model would
make it possible for “designers to work as a
team with scientists, business people, and tech-
nicians“ 30 in the HfG and outside it, while hither-
to design had been practiced in hierarchies:
“The designer [is] no longer [to be] the artist as
an authority, but an equal partner in the deci-
sion-making process of industrial production“. 31
Otl Aicher associated three goals with his con-
cept: Firstly, a monitoring cycle was to be es-
tablished which would be possible immediate-
ly to check whether the abstractions of theory
worked in practice. The findings would allow
corrections to be made and the theories to be
developed further, and set the monitoring cycle
in motion again. Secondly, development would
be carried out together with students under the
guidance of the faculty, so that the former did
not receive a one-sided theoretical training. And
thirdly, development work would help finance
the school. Beginning in 1958, the implementa-
tion of projects for private and government cli-
ents was concentrated in the Institut für Pro-
duktgestaltung (Institute of Product Design),
and within this framework several faculty mem-
bers ran development teams that were referred
to by numbers and abbreviations. Otl Aicher’s
development team, called E5, designed the vis-
ual image of Lufthansa, to mention one exam-
ple. The development team led by the Dutch-
man Hans Gugelot, which worked for the Braun
company, came to be the best known. These
products became world-famous, and their pro-
gressive design made them very successful.
However, this marriage of research and theory,
usually thought of as opposites, had its price:
The considerable sums of money that flowed
through the hands of the faculty members who
were involved gave rise to conflicts that spilled
over outside the institution. This meant that the
school played one more argument into the
hands of its own opponents to be used against
the constant trouble spot that was the HfG. The
general public perceived only an inextricable
tangle of financial, pedagogical, theoretical, and
sociopolitical lines. That is the subject of this
study. – The Ulm concept could be put into
effect only with limitations; the practice did not
agree with the beautiful theory: “Both for peda-
gogical reasons (the work on industry orders
was not sufficiently varied) and because of the
confidentiality that was required, the concept of
the totally open studio that had been in effect
until then – with all second- and third-year stu-
dents working on such orders and learning in
the process – was abandoned. The develop-
ment teams had already become separate offi-
ces disconnected from teaching, with freelance
or permanent staff, where, among other things,
students could perhaps be employed, although
independently of their other studies“. 32 Hans
Gugelot and his development team pulled out
of the HfG in 1962 and founded an institute that
was organized as an association and was con-
nected to the Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung only
in terms of personnel, not institutionally. –
Tomás Maldonado, an important champion of
the HfG, violently criticized the terminology that
had become customary: “There was never such
a thing as an Ulm concept, and above all there
was never only one Ulm concept. There were a
number of Ulm concepts, because Ulm was a
very articulated assemblage of people of many
different types. We had different opinions. […]
Another element of this composite Ulm concept
is the Bill concept. There is also an Aicher con-
cept, a Maldonado concept, and so forth.“ 33
Without discussing this criticism and going into
his motives, it is necessary simply to remind
Tomás Maldonado of his own words: “There is a
rule which, on this and other occasions, would
be worth remembering: Do not force a protag-
onist to assume the role of the historian. In my
opinion, the protagonist is at best, and not al-
ways, a useful chronicler of facts that he expe-
rienced first hand. It is, however, rare that an
active participant be a reasonably trustworthy
historian of the events he was part of.“ 34
4. From the start it was the goal of the HfG’s edu-
cational theory not only to train the students to
be designers, but to strengthen and to refine the
development of their personalities by means of
wide-ranging ideas relating to the liberal arts
and sociology. The last thing an HfG education
aimed to turn out was a highly specialized ex-
pert without a horizon and with absolutely no
interest in the minor and major problems of the
world. At the HfG, the social responsibility of the
designer for the products he had shaped and for
the people who had to use them was central:
“In contrast to the predominantly practical arts-
and-crafts programs offered at vocational arts
and crafts schools, the Ulm model of studies,
right from the start, went beyond the scope of
a merely practice-oriented training program for
designers.“ 35 If design and science were to join
forces, there was a need for competent general-
ists who could grasp larger social connections
and who therefore required “broad general
knowledge embracing technical, industrial, his-
torical, [and] sociological areas to an equal
degree“. 36 However, the HfG was only partially
able to turn its long-range cultural and educa-
tional goals into a reality. The training of a dem-
ocratic elite also remained “a utopia, which, to
be sure, was never completely lost from the
image that those involved in the HfG had of
themselves“. It is likely that, as Wolfgang Rup-
pert believes, the reason the HfG did not attain
these goals was the limited number of students
at the school. 37 – In keeping with its compre-
hensive educational goal, the HfG avoided a
direct confrontation with the consumer- and
brand-name products industry. For instance, in
visual communication attention was devoted
not to advertising for fashions, detergents, or
candy, but to campaigns for street traffic safety
or healthy nutrition: “Things like nostalgia, plan-
ned obsolescence, pop art, advertising as secret
seduction or disposable products were never a
part of the Ulm platform.“ 38 Technological prod-
ucts and public commissions determined Ulm
thinking, and much of what still eludes the argu-
ments of the HfG because it is unabashedly a
consumer or novelty item, or a throwaway arti-
cle nevertheless does affect people’s daily lives.
Claude Schnaidt, the last vice-president of the
HfG, points out that there was definitely another
life that contradicted the worldview of the HfG;
of course, in his bitterness and disillusionment
he sees a causal connection with the end of the
HfG that grossly exaggerates the historical real-
ity: “The fabulous profits made by selling kitsch
help explain why this Ulm school needed to be
liquidated: A school that was interested in rais-
ing utility value, in designing durable goods, in
reducing waste.“ 39
5. In 1975 Otl Aicher first posited that the history
of the HfG could be divided into eight phases,
while the Institut für Umweltplanung (Institute
of Environmental Planning) of the University of
Stuttgart represented a ninth, concluding,
phase. 40 He structures the history of the HfG
according to prevailing programmatic tenden-
cies, but does not refer to specific time periods:
After the founding (1) and collaboration with
Max Bill (2), he claims, the Ulm model was
developed (3). The phases that followed were
dominated by technological design (4), cyber-
netic design and positivism (5), and by value-
determined design (6). After the discovery of
content (7) and program design (8) the HfG was
closed, and in the aftermath (9) a model for
academic pedagogy had perished at the same
time. Since then, many accounts of the HfG’s
history have been governed by Otl Aicher’s in-
terpretation. 41 Regardless of how this perspec-
tive is to be evaluated today, the bottom line is
that the reason the HfG is so important to the
history of design is that its platform gave design
a scientific foundation. The trend to move de-
sign from the artist’s studio into the lab has sub-
sequently become a self-evident component of
design teaching at colleges and universities for
applied science: “Training in design-related sub-
jects was now seen more as ’education in both
the arts and sciences’. […] Schools in the Fed-
eral Republic of Germany began to refer to 23
themselves as ’(Fach-) Hochschulen für Gestal-
tung‘ [specialized colleges for design] (Offen-
bach, Bremen, Schwäbisch Gmünd).“ 42 Howev-
er, the curriculum of the HfG in individual years
clearly revealed more offerings in the sciences
than is customary today: Studies in perception
or ergonomics were just as much part of the
program as course offerings in sociology, psy-
chology, mathematics, or statistics.
Assuming that today we are living in the middle of
a transition from an industrial society to a service
and information society, then the HfG was at the
beginning of this historical process, and made a
significant contribution to the image of both forms
of society.
In an international survey of design since 1945
the HfG is introduced as follows: “The most impor-
tant school of design of the decade, unequalled in
significance even since its closing in 1968“, and a
few pages later we read that the HfG was “the sin-
gle most influential school of design in this cen-
tury after the Bauhaus“. 43 Bernhard Bürdek sees
the HfG (where he himself studied) as the “most
important new institution founded after World
War II“. 44 Why was the HfG one of the most impor-
tant and most influential design institutions in the
world? Again, five explanations why this was so.
Firstly, the members of the HfG did pioneering
work as regards basic research, theory, method,
and establishing the scientific framework of de-
sign 45: “The area of design methodology in partic-
ular is unthinkable without the work of the HfG
Ulm. Systematic thought about ways of looking at
problems, methods of selection and synthesis, jus-
tifying the choice of design alternatives – all this
has today become the common repertoire of the
design profession. The HfG Ulm was the first
school of design that very consciously aligned it-
self with the intellectual tradition of modernity.“ 46
What is meant by this tradition of modernity is the
attitude that each problem needs to be solved
from within itself. Behind this is the conviction that
the world is feasible, since the modern world is a
technological one, created by human beings. The
HfG kept to this principle so uncompromisingly,
and so consistently bore in mind the social, tech-
nological, and aesthetic aspects of a task when
seeking solutions that its profile was “clearer, more
real, more radical and comprehensive “ than that
of all other schools of design. 48 In giving design a
scientific foundation it was far ahead of its time,
and subsequently ran into the fundamental “long-
term conflicts of the modern industrial age […]
that [arise] as the real environment is given form
and the material culture of the world we live in is
industrially manufactured“. 49 Herbert Lindinger, a
 HfG administrations
1953 –1968 47

Rectorship Governing board Rectorship

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9. 10 11. 12 13
7. VIII. 1. IV. 3. VIII. 18. IX. 5. IX. 14. III. 14. III. 7. III. 1. X. 1. X. 7. VI. 1. X. 1. X. 10. XI.25. IV. 30. V. 1. X. 20. XII. 1. X. 30. IX. 14. XII. 1. X. 30. VI. 6. X. 1. X.
1951 1952 1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 25

.............................................................................
Max Bill

Hans Gugelot

Tomás Maldonado *

Otl Aicher

Friedrich Vordemberge- Gildewart

Hanno Kesting

Horst Rittel

Herbert Ohl

Gert Kalow

Rudolf Doernach

Christian Staub

Rector or chairman of the governing board

Vice rector or deputy chair of the governing board
Member of the governing board
.................... Planned Claude Schnaidt

* From 5 Sept. 1955 and 14 March 1956

Tomás Maldonado was both acting rector and
chair of the governing board
 Introduction
26 former student and later instructor, recapitulates
the “search for foundations and systems“ under-
taken at the HfG, and the predominance of reason
in Ulm, arguing that mankind had just survived fas-
cism, remembered as an attempt “to rob human
beings of their reason, deliberately enslaving them
by means of symbols and irrationality. We, on the
other hand, believed in the feasibility of this world,
in all that was rational, and in the possibility of re-
connecting to the tradition of the Enlightenment.
[…] Basically the whole Ulm experiment is based
in the Enlightenment movement, i. e., it is an at-
tempt to create an organic connection between
society and culture on the one hand and science
and technology on the other. […] The fact that the
rational was given preference in Ulm unavoidably
led to a preference for mathematical thinking in
designing as well.“ 50 The claim is made that this
was another reason that the HfG favored subjects
that allowed designers to indulge uninhibitedly in
being rational, while fashion or fads could be
excluded.
Secondly, many of the products developed in
Ulm influenced international design, and “until the
end of the seventies former ’Ulm people’ deter-
mined what good design was supposed to be in
the Federal Republic“. 51 This was evidenced even
while the HfG was still in existence by the large
number of international awards given to its faculty
and students. The Ulm style was disseminated by
this contemporary international recognition: Al-
though it had been part of their policy that design
would not be done from the point of view of style,
the HfG (much as they hated to admit it) became a
trendsetter where style was concerned. Ulm style
is considered to be “an aesthetics of asceticism,
of rejecting the ’superfluous’, ornaments (and gim-
mickry) in order to make visible the ’truth‘ of an
object in its form. A radicalized functionalism“. 52
The reason for this might lie in the fact that what
was taught at the HfG was a doctrine of design –
design using scientific methods and subject mat-
ter, so that the quality of design, rather than being
seen as something arbitrary, was taken to be some-
thing that could be very exactly determined. “Ex-
periments involving factor and form analysis re-
place subjective judgment. Function and beauty,
long after the closing of the HfG, are seen as meas-
urable quantities. […] Henceforth high-quality
design cannot revert to a minimum of rationally
ascertainable design features, function categories,
and checkable aesthetic effects.“ In the course of
the HfG’s existence, the balance point between
science and intuitive talent fluctuated between the
poles. Ultimately Otl Aicher vehemently objected
to the scientific method dominating over creative
(or artistic) talent. The quality of a design, for him
– at least since about 1960 – always proved to be
in the design, not in the theory. 53
Leading schools of design
in the 1950s and 1960s
according to: Ulmer Forum 5 /1968, 14
Thirdly, at the HfG the professional image of a de-
signer as we know it today was created: “Around
1970, the emergence of degree courses in design
at various German colleges is an indication of the
fact that, finally, a professional profile had begun
to evolve. This, in no small part, was one of the
Ulm school‘s major achievements.“ 54 In addition
to two other institutions in Chicago (New Bau-
Chicago
haus, Institute of Design) 55 and London (Royal
College of Art) 56 until well into the sixties it was
the only place worldwide where such a program
was offered. Toward the end of the sixties, when
the HfG dissolved, approximately ten schools in
Germany (arts and crafts colleges and academies)
also adopted the Ulm approach.
Fourthly, the HfG appears to be a melting pot
that produced a large number of design profes-
sors. 57 They found employment in their native
countries, to which they returned after their time
at the HfG, and in Germany, in the colleges and
universities for applied science that arose starting
in the late sixties in a wave of new foundations.
About 80 former members of the HfG taught or
are still teaching as professors in Germany, with
approximately the same number teaching a-
broad. 58 These roughly 160 former HfG associates
correspond to about 18 percent of a total of 902
HfG members (637 students, 265 lecturers), even
if this circle of persons is drawn as wide as pos-
sible, counting all registered students and guest
lecturers. Former associates of the HfG in Germa-
ny, for instance, received professorships in design
in Berlin, Hamburg, Hannover, Essen, Kassel,
Offenbach, Darmstadt, Pforzheim, Schwäbisch
Gmünd and Munich. Thus the significance of the
HfG can also be deduced from the fact that the
disciples who carried out its mission continued
successfully to take its teachings further afield:
“Through them, particularly during the curriculum
reform of the seventies […], the ideas of Ulm were
incorporated in the respective curricula“, molding
German design education. 59 The result of this mul-
tiplication of Ulm teachings in Germany “is a uni-
form picture, rather rational in tone, of Federal Ger-
man design“ 60 – at least until the late seventies.
Abroad, Ulm influences were not reflected only in
lectureships: Institutes and projected institutes in
India, Cuba, Mexico, Brazil, France, and Chile are
mentioned that were founded or were supposed to
be founded under the influence of Ulm. 61 This list
is not complete. The Club off Ulm has taken it
upon itself, among other things, to collect the bio-
graphies of former HfG members, and not until
the work has been successfully completed can
complete statements be made. 62 The account of
what became of Ulm outside of Ulm is a story all
to itself.
And fifthly: Even if the former unity of German
design disintegrated some time ago, the HfG still
exerts influence through the broadened concept 27
people have today of the culture of articles in daily
use and of daily life: Culture, the HfG believed, is
not only something one puts on Sundays and that
touches only few areas of life, but the sum total of
all objects and daily activities. Indeed, today the
entire world of products is permeated by design,
London Ulm even if the objects involved are often of a type that
would not live up to Ulm criteria: “If you look at
today’s reality, the fact is that we no longer have
design only in the home, but also in sanitation, in
farming, schools, computers. That’s partly thanks
to the HfG.“ 63
Contemporary and present-day critiques of the
HfG’s work culminate in a questioning of its high
moral demands, which addressed more than the
usefulness of the products. Behind the demands –
or rather, in their center – were human beings,
who had to live up to the same strict demands.
In 1951 Raymond Loewy, one of the first world-
renowned American designers (to be sure, his
concept of design is diametrically opposed to the
Ulm design concept) published his book Never
Leave Well Enough Alone, which appeared in Ger-
many in 1954 in German translation, titled Häß-
lichkeit verkauft sich schlecht (Ugliness doesn’t
sell).This slogan has since become a hairsplitting
argument for designers. It overlooks the funda-
mental problem that there is no generally binding
idea of beauty. Ugliness in the sense of Good
design, for instance, sells very well: A chair in Gel-
senkirchen Baroque style has a much larger mar-
ket than Max Bill’s Ulm stool. In 1957 there were
an awful lot more buyers for hi-fi systems dis-
guised as living-room furniture than for the techni-
cal appliances of the Braun company. Inge Scholl,
in a 1981 thank-you letter to Erwin Braun referred
to their famous radio-phono combination Phono-
super SK 4 as a “signal“ to the public and as
“proof“ that the HfG theory was correct: “Schnee-
wittchen [the model was nicknamed ‘Snow White’s
coffin’; transl. note] had stopped trying to make a
good impression, had been stripped of all the dig-
nified ponderousness of an imitative tradition of
forms. The gentleman in white tie and tails had
turned into a slim consumer item. It embodied
cheery, practical casualness. […] The device was
suddenly able to make visible the college’s inten-
tion. It brought public recognition and receptivity.
This jettisoning of dead weight, this renunciation
of prestige, this easygoing attitude in the face of
middle-class ideas of interior decoration, where
technology was disguised as something else,
overcame the reproach that the HfG was guilty of
asceticism and purism.“ 64 Yet the very fact that
Snow White’s coffin did not become a mass prod-
uct and did not enjoy blanket distribution refutes
the HfG’s design theory at least in its claim to
 Introduction
28 democratize and improve society through design
and to raise the living standard of the population at
large.
As soon as the living standard of the majority of
the population had risen to undreamt-of heights
thanks to the Federal German economic miracle,
people had no desire for good design as the HfG
defined it; also, the price they were expected to
pay for the quality of good products was too high
for them. The HfG could not refute the criticism
that had already been laid at the door of the Bau-
haus: that paradoxically a small, educated, and
well-to-do elite – usually called snobbish – in-
dulged in using products intended for the broad
mass of the population because they were in favor
of the Enlightenment-based ideas of democratiza-
tion that are behind this special type of design.
“The explicit social goal of historical functionalism
was to do away with social differences through
well-designed products for everyday use that was
elevated to a standard. This continued to be one of
the great utopias of the twenties of our century.“ 65
Christian Borngräber quotes an opinion from 1952
that graphically illustrates the “reserve of the pop-
ulation“ as regards design, and specifically modern
furniture: “’It’s too severe. It demands too much of
a person who’s exhausted after a day’s work […].
Modern man, who’d like to flop down in an arm-
chair wearing his drab sports coat, looks pitiful in a
severe modern space.‘“ 66 The HfG pursued a social
goal that society could not live up to in reality;
society certainly did not give up its need to create
a good impression in favor of the “truth“ of a prod-
uct.
During a discussion at the Internationales De-
sign Zentrum Berlin (Berlin International Design
Center) on the occasion of the 1987 HfG retro-
spective, this conflict erupted once more. The
assistant editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zei-
tung, Clara Menck, who had cast a critical eye on
the HfG in her articles, was quoted as saying “that
a person who is not an ascetic and not a revolu-
tionary ’demands more of his environment than
flawless functioning‚ that he needs the so-called
superfluous things as desperately as the essen-
tials.‘“ 67 Herbert Lindinger acknowledged that,
while it was true that a rationally planned world
could also lead to disaster, this only meant that
“setting up the methodical, the rational as an ab-
solute“ should not be raised to the level of a dog-
ma – “but it is also quite certain that the reverse,
i. e., imagining and planning the world only in
emotional terms – leads to nothing but chaos.“ 68
Mathias Schreiber, assistant editor of the Frank-
furter Allgemeine Zeitung, again restored the cor-
rect sequence to the arguments and presented the
definitive justification of modern design: “I really
must say that it’s a lie that the world has been
deprived of its soul by modernism, or by modern
art. The world has lost its soul, and modernism has
tried to respond in a cool, clear, linear art form.
And so now we have people saying, ‘You’ve objec-
tified the world.‘ Why, that’s completely untrue.
The objectification has taken place, it is a fact. […]
Simplicity, reduction is not moral sterility, nor is it
dour, soulless monasticism; on the contrary, it’s
really an aesthetics of luxury. Many critics of mod-
ernism have not understood this dialectic yet. […]
It just isn’t true that the rationalists have ruined
the world. The purveyors of kitsch have always re-
mained in power.“ 69
One needs to take a step back, stop focusing on
the HfG and look at the entire spectrum of design,
within which the HfG represents only one position,
to recognize not only its lack of importance to a
large part of society, but also the presumptuous-
ness of quite a few designers and design histo-
rians. In an international design history, for exam-
ple, it says that functionalism triumphed in the fif-
ties as the universal modern aesthetics: “Function-
alism remained the dominant aesthetic standard of
the postwar period until the 1960s“. 70 Unfortunate-
ly, that is not true – the converse is correct. Wolf-
gang Ruppert rightly reminds us that after World
War II the representatives of aesthetic modernism
were in the minority, “supported only by a small
middle-class group who formed an elite in matters
of taste“. True, as leaders of public opinion they
managed the trick of organizing “a counter-public
opposed to the prevailing taste“. But even within
this modernism movement the HfG occupied only
one position, albeit an important one. The stereo-
type that represents the fifties is not Snow White’s
coffin or the Ulm stool, it is an arrangement con-
sisting of a kidney shaped table, cone-type lamp,
and asymetrical vase in front of a Picasso wallpa-
per, something to which the HfG was very strongly
opposed. And it was precisely “these forms, typi-
cal of their period, [that] were in a hopeless out-
sider role in the face of conventional perception
and the buying patterns of the average consum-
er.“ 71 Gert Selle is of the opinion that the design
of the fifties – he does not speak of the sixties –
in Germany “was not modern because it referred
back to a large extent to old functional and aes-
thetic product models“. By and large, when refer-
ring to Germany in the fifties, says Selle, he is
forced to speak of a “stagnation or moratorium in
design development“, characterized by a mixture
of four elements: reverting to Bauhaus modernism,
borrowings of American developments, interna-
tional avant-garde fashions, and the German de-
signers’ own ideas. 72
Surveys by the Allensbach Institut für Demosko-
pie (Institute of Public Opinion Research) begin-
ning July 1954 have repeatedly explored the opin-
ion of the Germans on questions of taste. Those
who were questioned were shown drawings of
armchairs, pots and cans, cabinets, tables, lamps,
living rooms, and houses. Most interesting are the
drawings themselves, which of course were se-
lected with the purpose of recording a representa-
tive cross section through the Federal German rep-
ertoire of taste. Here, there is no design as defined
by the HfG; instead, the respondents could state
their preference by means of illustrations labeled
with the attributes “modern“ (i. e., stylish), “Werk-
stätten-Stil“ (studio style) (relatively clear and
functional), “altdeutsch“ (“German Renaissance”),
and “Gelsenkirchener Barock“ (“Gelsenkirchen
Baroque”) (equally ornate). Apart from the fact that
the method was questionable, in that individual
themes were chosen randomly and there were no
real alternatives, a look at these questionnaires
sharpens our awareness of how untimely the HfG
was: far ahead of its time in theory and practice of
design, methods and theory of education, but at
the same time sociopolitically indebted to the uto-
pias of the twenties. 73
Sources
This study is essentially based on an evaluation of
existing written sources. A few conversations with
former members of the HfG, with the HfG’s cham-
pions from the Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung, gov-
ernment departments, politicians, and scientists
were largely for information, for these were not
interviews, conducted as a kind of oral history to
be evaluated later in a methodically impeccable
manner. The conversations (including some with
Inge Aicher-Scholl, Max Bill, Hans Conrad, Susan-
ne and Gerhard Curdes, Michael Erlhoff, Karl-Heinz
Krug, Herbert Lindinger, Rolf Müller, Herbert Ohl,
Harry Pross, Dieter Rams, Toni Richter, Thorwald
Risler, Anneliese and Hans Rosenberg, Claude
Schnaidt, Günther Schweigkofler, Lothar Späth,
Rainer Wick, and Wilhelm Vossenkuhl) expanded
my horizons and often prompted me to rethink
previous interpretations. But my knowledge of the
HfG’s history is fed by written, not oral sources.
This written record is full of gaps, and that is sur-
prising, for gaps would make sense in the case of
much older institutions. The following five gaps are
certain:
1. Even the Ulm sources on the founding history
were not preserved at the HfG in their entirety,
for two reasons: one, because the preliminary
work of Max Bill and his secretary Eugen Gom-
ringer was partly carried out from Zürich, and
partly because Max Bill, after leaving the HfG in
1957, took back with him to Zürich, among oth-
ers, files on the founding history. Secondly,
there are also references to the fact that Otl
Aicher and Inge Aicher-Scholl privately kept
documents referring to the earliest foundation-
related work. 74
2. It is possible that during the disputes in the 29
years of rectorship by committee files were
removed from the rector’s office. Possibly this
is also true for 1963, when the Parliament of
Baden-Württemberg accepted the motion to
check into whether the HfG was eligible for
aid. 75
3. In 1963, when in the Parliament of Baden-Würt-
temberg the motion was accepted to check into
whether the HfG was eligible for aid, the files in
the rector’s office seem to have been “purged“.
4. As of the summer break of 1968, the HfG was in
the process of disintegration. By then, the book-
keeping department and the administration had
stopped working in an orderly fashion for some
time. Starting in the latter part of 1968, most of
the documents were taken down as trash to the
basement, where water destroyed part of them.
Fred Hochstrasser estimates that about half of
all files up to the beginning of the seventies be-
came unusable and were therefore trashed. 76 In
about 1972 or 1973, Hans Eugen Specker, the
director of the city archive of Ulm, drove to the
HfG in order to take over the remaining files,
drawings, and mock-ups for the city archive.
There he discovered open cabinets, everything
in confusion, and free access to all the things
for which no one claimed responsibility any-
more and that now became objects of desire for
curio collectors and nostalgic passersby. 77 The
files were just as accessible and could be pur-
loined (demonstrably, this happened to the val-
uable library). Later, it was possible to transfer
a considerable number of files to the Bauhaus
archive; these came from the HfG’s rector’s of-
fice, and it is open to speculation how complete
they are.
5. Hartmut Seeling’s years of activity looking
through the HfG files are documented by the
fact that ever since, in countless folders, slips
of paper remind us that he “took out dupli-
cates“. With a flourish, these slips of paper cer-
tainly do supply the date and signature, but
make no reference to the documents that were
removed; it is also not clear whether the origi-
nals of these documents are even still available
in the HfG archive.
The documents that were produced in the
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung, in the HfG, in the
government ministries, in the Gesellschaft der
Freunde der Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung (Society
of Friends of the Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung), and
by individual participants represent the sum total
of the sources. Most of these documents were
stored at the HfG and constitute the basis of the
collection of files in the present HfG archive. How-
ever, this collection has gaps (see above) that
were only partially filled thanks to the circum-
 Introduction
30 stance that documentation was stored in govern-
ment offices and by private parties. Thus these
gaps already occurred at the time of the transfer,
or else before the setting up of the HfG archive in
January 1989. Since the HfG archive has been in
existence, this collection of files has been secured,
examined, and made available to researchers. The
collection regarding the political history of the HfG
is still very extensive. Without the excellent and
incomparable support of the archivists, Christiane
Wachsmann and Marcela Quijano, and their staff,
this study would have lacked its foundation.
There are over 50 meters of files in the HfG
archive. 78 A large part, roughly half, refers to or-
ganizational, financial, and overlapping topics that
are combined here under a political perspective.
There has not yet been time to list part of the files.
I used for my study; like the documents that have
already been numbered, they have been listed in
detail in the list of sources. As of the summer of
1996 – after I concluded my studies of the docu-
mentation – the HfG archive has also included the
work contained in Otl Aicher’s estate.
A large part of the files from the office of the
rector of the HfG can be found in the Berlin Bau-
haus archive – remarkable but true – and the cir-
cumstances under which the files came into the
archive’s possession are extremely suspicious.
Even though it is regrettable that this extensive
collection of important resource material, much of
which exists only at that location, is not part of the
HfG archive, it is still very encouraging that these
sources have been accessible to the public in such
an exemplary manner. The collection in the Bau-
haus archive that relates to the history of the HfG
is divided into the actual collection that was listed
in 1991 in a detailed systematized catalogue by
Elke Eckert, and the collection of all the docu-
ments that the Bauhaus archive acquired after the
catalogue went to press. 79 Of the collection, a total
of 24,900 sheets of paper in 469 folders, I con-
sulted groups 1 (in toto), 2.1 through 2.4, and 2.8
for this study, i. e., folders 1 through 170 and 419
through 465. In addition, I was able to refer to let-
ters from Max Bill’s correspondence with Walter
Gropius, which is stored in Berlin as a separate
collection within the Gropius papers, numbered
68/1–18 (copies of the originals from the Busch-
Reisinger Museum of Harvard University, Cam-
bridge, Mass.).
The Principal State Archive in Stuttgart contains
the sources related to HfG history that originated
in the Stuttgart government ministries. (Under the
overall control of the ministry of education and the
arts, the ministry of trade and commerce, the min-
istry of state, and the ministry of finance were also
involved in financing the HfG.) 27 files (Nos. 62
through 87) refer to the history of the HfG or of the
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung – a total of 8 consec-
utive meters of files in collection EA 3/203 that
I was able to make use of without restrictions after
the administration of the archive of Baden-Würt-
temberg generously agreed to shorten the waiting
period. – A few HfG-related documents that origi-
nated in the Parliament of Baden-Württemberg,
and many items relating to the parliament were
patiently placed at my disposal by the archive in
the Parliament building.
The city archive of Ulm had originally taken over
the document collection that has been kept there
since the opening of the HfG archive. Initially the
HfG archive was also incorporated into the city
archive. More recently it became part of the Ulm
Museum. Thus the city archive itself now has only
a small HfG document collection of its own, num-
bered 310/21 and E410, as well as eleven folders,
part of the Pfizer collection (the estate of Ulm
Mayor Theodor Pfizer) relating to the history of the
HfG. I had access to the essential documents con-
tained in these collections, listed under H. Pfizer.
The Bundesarchiv Koblenz (Federal Archive of
Koblenz) has a handful of documents from the cor-
respondence that developed between Inge Scholl
and Hans Bott, as well as that between Hans Bott
and Theodor Pfizer, kept in the collection of the
papers of Federal President Theodor Heuss; I was
able to study these few documents, listed as B
122/376. In addition, the documentary estate of
Klaus Dohrn, once the chairman of the executive
board of the Gesellschaft der Freunde der Ge-
schwister-Scholl-Stiftung (GdF) (Society of Friends
of the Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung), is presently
being transferred to the Federal Archive of Kob-
lenz. There is reason to look forward to this mate-
rial with interest, but unfortunately among the doc-
uments that arrived in Koblenz by the time I con-
cluded my study there was nothing from the peri-
od during which Klaus Dohrn worked on behalf of
the HfG.
The local branch of the Federal Archive in Ber-
lin-Zehlendorf, the former Berlin Document Cen-
tre, helped me with a document relating to the
biography of Inge Scholl.
The sum total of the private archives represents an
extremely valuable addition to the official archives,
for in Ulm many carbon copies were made as a
rule. Whatever has not been preserved in the files
of the original institutions often survived as a copy
in another location. The archives of the Südwest-
presse, the Südwestfunk, and Bayerischer Rund-
funk gave me access to their extensive collection
of newspaper reports about the HfG, allowing me
to gather reliable information about the course of
events. Furthermore, I tried to find sources that
originated with members of crucial committees
within the Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung and those
connected with it.
1. The mayor of the city of Ulm was an ex officio
member of the Verwaltungsrat (administrative
council) and the Stiftungsrat (foundation’s
council). The president of the Land Central Bank
of Baden-Württemberg was an ex officio mem-
ber of the administrative council. Both Theodor
Pfizer (the mayor) and Otto Pfleiderer (the presi-
dent of the Land Central Bank) were in office for
the entire duration of the HfG. Theodor Pfizer’s
estate has been secured, but Otto Pfleiderer’s
estate was unfortunately destroyed a few years
after his death. 80 The irreplaceable gap this
caused is a particularly hard blow both because
Otto Pfleiderer had been so painstaking and
because he had continuously worked in support
of the HfG over 15 years.
2. Up to 31 March 1959 founder Inge Scholl (Inge
Aicher-Scholl after 6 June 1952) was the only
Vorstand (managing chairperson) of the foun-
dation. Her activity has been very well docu-
mented in the documents contained in the HfG
archive, the Bauhaus archive, and the Haupt-
staatsarchiv (Principal State Archive). – From
1 April 1959 on, Thorwald Risler was geschäfts-
führender Vorsitzender (managing chairman) of
the three-member Vorstand (executive board),
which also included Max Guther and Inge Ai-
cher-Scholl. Thorwald Risler put his papers,
about half a consecutive meter, at my unre-
stricted disposal. – Part of Max Guther’s docu-
mentary estate is being stored privately, while
another part is in the archive of the Technische
Hochschule Darmstadt (Darmstadt Technical
College), where there are another six file folders
(shelf mark 71/5), temporarily numbered 12
through 14, 16, 17, and 19, containing the later
papers of Max Guther. The portion of the estate
relating to the founding history of the HfG is
unfortunately not among these documents, but
perhaps it has been preserved in private hands.
– After 24 February 1964 Inge Aicher-Scholl
and Max Guther were no longer members of
the foundation’s executive board. They were re-
placed by Walter Erbe and Hans Zumsteg. Wal-
ter Erbe’s posthumous papers are kept in the
archive of the University of Tübingen (shelf mark
246) and comprise 358 items, adding up to a
total of about 19 consecutive meters. 81 Because
the archive found no documents referencing the
HfG listed among these – in contrast to numer-
ous other cultural and educational institutions
and organizations – and therefore no extensive
collection of documents about the history of the
HfG with surprising discoveries is to be expect-
ed – and moreover since the active collabora-
tion of Walter Erbe on the executive board of
the foundation was quite limited, I decided not
to search these papers for individual docu-
ments. – Hans Zumsteg remained a member of
the executive board of the foundation until the 31
end of the HfG; finally, he was the sole board
member. Privately none of his papers have
come down to us 82; I did not succeed in finding
out whether the foundation, which continued in
existence after the end of the HfG, has in its
possession documents relating to his activity
as chairman of the executive board. – On 1 Jan-
uary 1965 Friedrich Rau replaced Thorwald Ris-
ler as managing chairman of the foundation’s
executive board. He continued in office until 30
September 1967, and after him the position
remained vacant. Friedrich Rau, too, has kept
no documents from his HfG period.
3. The members of the Beirat (advisory board)
(1951–1963) came from the close circle of
founders and friends around Inge Scholl, Otl
Aicher, and Max Bill. Otl Aicher himself, like Max
Bill, was a member of the advisory board. – Otl
Aicher’s extensive estate has been kept in the
HfG archive since the late summer of 1996. His
papers relating to the history of the HfG repre-
sent only a fraction of the archive. – Max Bill’s
even more voluminous estate is being taken
care of by his heirs, but unfortunately the docu-
ments were still not in condition to be analyzed
while I was doing my research. – Hellmut Be-
cker, attorney for the foundation and a close
friend of the Aichers, was a member of the ad-
visory board, the administrative council, the
foundation’s council, and the executive board
of the Society of Friends until 31 December
1964, when he resigned from all his Ulm posi-
tions subsequent to moving from Kressbronn
am Bodensee to Berlin and concentrated on
planning the Max-Planck-Institut für Bildungs-
forschung (Max Planck Institute of Educational
Research). At this time he sent his files, which
had accumulated since 1950, to Theodor Pfizer
for the Ulm city archive, pointing out how happy
people would be if researchers could go back to
a comparable collection of source material on
the founding history of the Bauhaus. 83 In spite
of his departure, he was repeatedly consulted
regarding the HfG even after 1964, and again a
three-quarter shelf of files was the result. This
source material was kept in Hellmut Becker’s
office at the Max Planck Institute until his secre-
tary, Margrit Brandel, allowed me to access it
after his death on 16 December 1993, and I was
able to have them transferred to the HfG ar-
chive. – Like Max Bill, Günther Grzimek was
initially a member of the advisory board, then of
the foundation‘s council until the end of the
HfG. The papers in his estate are in the care of
the Technische Hochschule München (Munich
Technical College) in Weihenstephan; in folders
9, 10, and 11 there is some source material
relating to the history of the HfG, which I was
 Introduction
32 able to examine. – The papers of advisory board
members Hans Frieder Eychmüller and Walter
Zeischegg are part of the HfG archive and I was
able to look through them there. – I was not
able to get any reliable information about Mar-
cia Kahn’s and Peter Wackernagel’s member-
ship on the advisory board; if they were ever
members, then only until 1953, for they were
not invited to the foundation’s first general
meeting on 24 April 1953. Because in the abun-
dant source material after 1953 there has been
no reference to their continued participation in
the work of the foundation, I decided not to
track down these sources. – Fritz Pfeil worked in
Iran beginning in 1958, and died there in the
sixties. He left no usable source material.
4. The Gesellschaft der Freunde der Geschwister-
Scholl-Stiftung e.V. (Society of Friends of the
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung) was created in
1952 in order to organize the financing of the
foundation through private means and projects
commissioned by industry and by the public
sector. Originally this was to be a way for indus-
try to express its participation in the goals of the
foundation. The Society of Friends appointed a
few of the members of the administrative coun-
cil and the foundation’s council. Roderich Count
Thun was managing chairman of the Society of
Friends from 15 December 1952 until 11 April
1961; he resigned from this position to move to
Costa Rica, his wife’s native country. In the
course of this move he destroyed many docu-
ments. These also include those documents
that came about in connection with his support
of the HfG. 84 This loss is as serious as the gap
created by the destruction of Otto Pfleiderer’s
papers. – On 11 April 1961 the executive board
of the Society of Friends was increased to five
persons. The banker Klaus Dohrn became the
chairman. During the sixties the situation as
regards source material about the Society of
Friends deteriorates, and thus it is not clear
when Klaus Dohrn resigned his position and the
society was dissolved, but it was certainly not
until after 31 December 1968. The documents
in Klaus Dohrn’s estate have reached the Feder-
al Archive of Koblenz only in part, and his widow
was kind enough to put a few papers at my dis-
posal, for which I am grateful; the documents
came out of Klaus Dohrn’s activity on behalf of
the Society of Friends regarding the founda-
tion. 85 No doubt in the future a few more details
here and there can be cleared up when the part
of his papers that deals with the HfG has been
tracked down. In addition to Hellmut Becker and
Roderich Count Thun, Erhard M. Löwe and
Johann Dietrich Auffermann were members of
the executive board of the Society of Friends
starting 11 April 1961. The manager Erhard M.
Löwe, in spite of his office, did not become
active in the Society of Friends, and therefore
has no papers relating to the history of the
HfG. 86 Unfortunately the heirs of Johann Diet-
rich Auffermann have given me no information
about his estate.
5. The foundation’s administrative council was
constituted on 24 April 1953 and held its 22nd
meeting on 11 November 1963, meeting for the
last time on 28 November 1963 as part of the
3d general meeting of the foundation. In addi-
tion to the mayor of Ulm (Theodor Pfizer) and
the president of the Land Central Bank of Ba-
den-Württemberg (Otto Pfleiderer), the current
chairman of the Baden-Württemberg federation
of labor unions took part in its deliberations ex
officio. Also at the meeting were five govern-
ment representatives: officials of the federal
ministry of the interior (Karl Gussone, Paul
Hübinger, and Mr. Rothe) – occasionally ob-
served by Helmut Döscher and Walter Weiß-
wange of the federal ministry of housing con-
struction; of the federal ministry of economics
(Franz Frank and Walther Hinsch); of the Baden-
Württemberg ministry of education and the arts
(Wolfgang Donndorf, Günther von Alberti, and
Hannes Rettich); of the Baden-Württemberg
ministry of finance (Günther Boulanger); and of
the Baden-Württemberg ministry of trade and
commerce, observed by the current presidents
of the Baden-Württemberg Trade Supervisory
Office (Karl Hipp, Edgar Hotz, Adalbert Seifriz,
Josef Alfons Thuma). Finally, the Society of
Friends sent six delegates to this committee. –
The Land chairmen of the German Federation of
Trade (Otto Burrmeister, Wilhelm Kleinknecht,
and Richard Knobel) have unfortunately left no
documents relating to their membership in the
administrative council. 87 – The federal ministries
have kept no papers about the participation of
their officials on the administrative council and
the foundation‘s council. This too is regrettable,
and means that many points will never be clari-
fied. – The papers of the representatives of the
Baden-Württemberg state ministries are stored
in the Principal State Archive in Stuttgart. The
Land Trade Supervisory Department has no sep-
arate documents of its presidents in their func-
tion as members of the administrative council. 88
– In addition to Hellmut Becker and Roderich
Count Thun the following persons represented
the Society of Friends on the administrative
council: the publisher and assistant founder Bri-
gitte Bermann-Fischer, the journalist Helmut
Cron, the bankers Karl Max von Hellingrath, Karl
Klasen, and Karl Schmölder; none of them have
left papers specifically relating to the HfG.
6. The foundation‘s council was a result of a
change in the foundation’s charter following
which the areas of responsibility of the advisory
board and of the administrative council were
reorganized and combined in the new commit-
tee. The latter included representatives of the
same five ministries as those in the administra-
tive council, as well as the mayor of the city and
six members nominated by the Society of Friends;
all told they were the already mentioned Hellmut
Becker, Max Bill, Klaus Dohrn, Günther Grzimek,
Max Guther, Otto Pfleiderer, and Hans Zumsteg.
The writer Hans Werner Richter was closely in-
volved in Inge Scholl’s, Otl Aicher’s, and Max Bill’s
founding plans. His widow has in her possession
a handwritten copy of the documents gathered by
the founders of the HfG as material for one of the
most important meetings with the American staff
of the High Commissioner’s office, on 12 July
1950 in Stuttgart. The main reason this copy is of
interest is because, of the voluminous bundle of
papers, Toni Richter limited herself to those sec-
tions that basically originated with her husband. –
Following Ms. Richter’s suggestion, I turned to the
Berlin Akademie der Künste (College of Fine Arts),
where Sabine Cofalla was preparing an edition of
selected texts from Hans Werner Richter’s corre-
spondence. This allowed me to study Hans Werner
Richter’s correspondence with Otl Aicher and Inge
Scholl. – Ms. Richter also referred me to friends of
hers, Anneliese and Hans Rosenberg, who hap-
pened to have written a report on Inge Scholl at
the end of 1949 for the supplement of the Neue
Zeitung. For this research they took several out-
standing photos showing Inge Scholl, Otl Aicher,
and Hans Werner Richter in reconstruction-era
Ulm.
The former faculty and students of the HfG
hardly ever came into contact with the foundation.
Except in special cases, they have only a few iso-
lated written documents relating to the political
history of the HfG – as I indicated, I deliberately
excluded oral testimony. Of course I was very
interested in the contemporary photos of former
members of the HfG, seeking to deepen visually
the impression I gained from the history. As one of
the first students at the HfG, Hans Conrad made it
his hobby to photograph life at the HfG until well
into the late nineteen fifties, recording countless
details. His photos are of inestimable documentary
value for those who wish to picture the HfG in ret-
rospect.
Very early on, Joachim Heimbucher sent me a
copy of his dissertation. – Werner Zinkand and
Hans Frei worked on the history of the HfG in the
eighties. They focused on Max Bill’s role in the
HfG. My conversations with them gave me valu-
able suggestions, and also they both placed their
collection of selected sources relating to the HfG’s
history at my disposal. – Likewise, Johannes Ro-
ther let me have the results of his bibliographical 33
research for a planned, but unfortunately unfin-
ished study about the HfG.
Latest research about the HfG
Up till now research about the HfG has been
prompted by a different interest than the present
study.
The first reflection on the history of the HfG after
its closing is by Claude Schnaidt, who as early as
1969, in issue no. 143 of the French architectural
journal L‘architecture d‘aujourd‘hui, dealt with the
recent past and who, in this all but ignored article,
sees the HfG as a victim brought down by repeat
offenders, the very same people who 25 years
earlier had been guilty of crimes against the young
Scholls, whose tradition the HfG followed. 89 In
1975 and 1983 he was heard from again with a
mixture of method-related demands and sub-
stance-related theories. 90
The next to work on the history of the HfG were
Joachim Heimbucher and Peter Michels. 91 They
had begun their studies at the HfG and completed
them at the Institut für Umweltplanung (Institute
of Environmental Planning) with an unpublished
thesis about the Bauhaus, the HfG and that same
IUP. In the final phase of the HfG Joachim Heim-
bucher appeared as a negotiator on behalf of the
students, and his commitment found its expres-
sion in his judgments and the language he used in
1971 – only those who were not scarred by events
at the time can afford to write about them sine ira
et studio (without anger and partiality; transl.
note). It is to the credit of the two authors that
they published several important document s
relating to HfG history as part of their thesis.
In 1971 there was an initial attempt, by Wolf-
gang Pohl, to explain the influence of the HfG on
the curriculum of the Hochschule für Bildende
Künste Hamburg (Hamburg College of Fine Arts). 92
Individual aspects of the department of product
design, the basic program and Ulm style were dis-
cussed by Petra Kellner and Holger Poessnecker in
1978. 93
1982 marked the appearance of an HfG synop-
sis organized as an exhibition by Nick Roericht,
a prominent German product designer who had
studied and taught at the HfG. 94 It was the first
overall view of events in Ulm and the world out-
side, which deepened the entire body of knowl-
edge about the history of the HfG: a direction, as
I said above, that this study does not pursue.
Some of the references contained in the HfG syn-
opsis are like gems for a hunter of details, others
are plagued by typos, for the lengthy publication
lacks systematic accuracy. However, that hardly
detracts from its significance for focusing attention
on the HfG. Unfortunately there has been neither a
continuation nor a corrected new edition.
 Land governments
in Baden-Württemberg
and federal governments
1945 –1968

1946 1947 1948 1949 1950 1951 1952 1953 1954 1955 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 35

24. IX. 24. XI. 19. XI. 9. III. 4. III. 15. V. 26. IV. 26. IV.
Land government Appointment Elections Elections Elections Elections Elections Elections Elections

Minister-president Reinhold Maier, Gebhard Müller, Kurt Georg Kiesinger, Hans Filbinger,
DVP CDU CDU CDU

Minister of education Theodor Heuss, Theodor Bäuerle, independent Gotthilf Schenkel, Gerhard Storz, Wilhelm Hahn,
and the arts DVP Wilhelm Simpfendörfer, SPD CDU CDU
CDU

Minister of finance Reinhold Maier, Heinrich Köhler, Edmund Kaufmann, Karl Frank, Hermann Müller, Kurt Angstmann, Robert Gleichauf,
DVP CDU CDU DVP FDP/DVP CDU CDU
Theodor Heuss,
DVP

Minister of economics Josef Andre, Hermann Veit, Eduard Leuze, Hans-Otto Schwarz,
CDU SPD FDP/DVP SPD
Heinrich Köhler,
CDU

Politico-cultural committee Hermann Wild, Hermann Wild, Karl Brachat, Karl Brachat, Karl Brachat, Karl Brachat,
DVP DVP CDU CDU CDU CDU
Robert Leibrand, Franz Wiedemeier, Walter Krause, Hans-Otto Schwarz, Gottfried Haase, Willi von Helden,
KPD CDU SPD SPD SPD SPD

Finance committee Josef Harter, Alex Möller, Alex Möller, Alex Möller, Kurt Angstmann, Fritz Helmstädter,, Hans Frank,
CDU SPD SPD SPD SPD SPD SPD
Alex Möller, Eduard Fiedler, Franz Wiedemeier, Hermann Person, Hermann Person, Hermann Person, Hugo Geisert,
SPD BHE CDU CDU CDU CDU, CDU

14. VIII. 6. IX. 15. IX. 17. IX. 19. IX.

Federal government Elections Elections Elections Elections Elections

Federal chancellor Konrad Adenauer, Ludwig Erhard, Kurt Georg Kiesinger,

CDU CDU CDU

Minister of the interior Gustav Heinemann, Robert Lehr, Gerhard Schröder, Hermann Höcherl, Paul Lücke, Ernst Benda,
CDU CDU CDU CSU CDU CDU

Minister of finance Fritz Schäffer, Rolf Dahlgrün, Franz-Josef Strauß,

CSU FDP CSU

Minister of economics Ludwig Erhard, Kurt Schmücker, Karl Schiller,

CDU CDU SPD
 Introduction
36 Shortly thereafter there appeared four disserta-
tions 95, two of which, in art history, are devoted to
the Bill era; their authors consider the politico-his-
torical aspect of the history worthwhile before giv-
ing their erudite and painstaking attention to the
topics that actually interest them. Hartmut See-
ling’s dissertation is only mentioned in order to
warn all interested parties not to pay attention to
it, for the author does not live up to the self-ap-
pointed task of writing the standard work on the
HfG; the result of his decades of work in no way
meets research standards such as care, accuracy,
system, verifiability, method, and ability to write
clearly. To add insult to injury, available source
material has been impaired as a result of his activ-
ity. – Finally, it is necessary to mention Norbert
Korrek’s Weimar dissertation 96, a study whose area
of interest is similar to the focus of this book.
However, the very limited selection (for practical
reasons) of documents utilized, and the author’s
interpretation of the facts, biased by a rigid politi-
cal outlook, limits the insights one might have
hoped to gain, considering the conscientious
treatment of the selected material.
Today, the results of this study are out-of-date.
It should be clear to all those who have come to
be convinced of immanent progress in academic
work that this is not a condemnation but a fact
that overtakes every academic publication. That is
why I hope that the many errors that also adorn
my study as gnats do a candle will be tracked
down and eradicated as soon as possible by future
researchers. – The unpublished master’s thesis of
Werner Zinkand, also investigating Max Bill’s role
at the HfG, is interesting primarily because he was
still able to study and describe material from the
prehistory of the HfG that has since been lost with-
out trace. 97
In 1987 Herbert Lindinger, also a prominent mem-
ber of the HfG, published the catalogue for the
important Berlin exhibition about the HfG. 98 Sev-
eral editions were published and translated into
many languages, which is why it is the most
influential publication worldwide about the HfG.
Here, the projects accomplished by the HfG are in
the forefront, and the few politico-historical state-
ments in the catalogue have been fertile breeding
grounds for the myth that has formed around the
HfG. It is this catalogue that includes a dictum that
has since become widespread – the allegation that
the Parliament of Baden-Württemberg closed the
HfG in November 1968. This is a legend that could
be tolerated with much good will as being the
crass interpretation of former members of the HfG
were it not for the obligation to be exact, and for
the suspicion that when the blame is laid else-
where the author builds up a myth whose radiance
makes his own biography appear in a brighter light
– an enhancement that most of the personalities turns out that the debate is actually not about any- 37
from the HfG era do not need. thing as tangible as design, but about unassailable
In addition to Claude Schnaidt, Joachim Heim- metaphysics. The problems, it is said, were brought
bucher/Peter Michels, Nick Roericht, and Herbert into the school from outside. But no man is an
Lindinger, several other former members of the island, and the founders of the HfG took up the
HfG have made statements since 1968 regarding cause of being active in the world without fear of
the history of the HfG. 99 Three journals – it is char- conflicts. In what isolation from the world did
acteristic of the international interest that two are many live on Kuhberg in Ulm, one wonders, if such
Italian and one is Swiss – devoted one issue each a statement can be considered an argument for
of their publication to the HfG: In number 15 of their own innocence? They retort that the times
Archithese (Niederteufen, 1975) there are contri- were opposed to the HfG – after all, the Zeitgeist
butions by Otl Aicher, Claude Schnaidt, Kenneth is considered to be an invincible force that brought
Frampton, and Herbert Ohl, who time after time about the end of the HfG. But the times were also
influenced the interpretation of HfG history 100, and against Inge Scholl when together with Otl Aicher
in number 19 of Rassegna (Milan, 1984) Tomás and Max Bill she founded the HfG. They did not
Maldonado and Martin Krampen among others submit but had their way, and the HfG came into
published their premises. 101 – Martin Krampen, in being. What had happened to this will power when
1986, published a volume in which, beside his the HfG was closed, what caused it to falter? –
own views, those of Harry Pross and Abraham
Moles are also included. 102 – Heiner Jacob’s essay In recent years young researchers’ interest in the
in the Journal of Design History influenced the HfG, its projects and supporters has increased a
master’s thesis of Dominic Stone. 103 – Also worth great deal. The HfG archive was largely used as
reading are the oral statements of former HfG the first and most important place to begin their
members which are already documented in the search, but also as a center for distribution and
above-mentioned proceedings of the symposium exchange of information. 106 Moreover, under the
upon the opening of the Berlin HfG exhibition, direction of Christiane Wachsmann and Marcela
even if these contributions cannot be treated as Quijano, this was where important exhibitions as
direct sources. 104 – Lastly, Rolf Müller and Peter well as informative catalogues on various aspects
von Kornatzki, with their succinct account of the of the HfG’s history were regularly created. 107
department of visual communication (from Otl
Aicher’s perspective) have provided an outstand-
ing example – one that is proof in itself – for the
quality of education at the HfG. 105
When, after reading the contributions of former
HfG members, one has digested the many details
of life at the HfG and the valuable insights gained
as part of training at the HfG, one is often left with
a stale aftertaste. Often one feels pride in the fact
that the HfG was privately sponsored, but at the
same time one senses, reading between the lines,
hurt feelings because in the end there were not
sufficient public funds. That is why the public
backers are always the ones to be blamed. The
assumption that the HfG was always a thorn in the
side of the Baden-Württemberg ministry of educa-
tion and the arts is absurd, and sometimes it
seems that what is actually meant is the ministry
of finance, so that polemically one might draw the
conclusion from this confusion that many HfG
members were basically inexperienced in the ways
of the world and incapable of telling the difference
between finances and culture. The Ulm jargon,
which puzzled even contemporaries, is still in
vogue, and it seems that the dividing line between
finding the exact term for new facts, and self-adu-
lation swathed in the befuddling vapors of insider-
hood, has shifted in favor of the latter. This certain-
ly does not illuminate the facts, and in the end it
 24 June 1948
Archive: AKG

6 Sept. 1946 15 Sept. 1949

Archive: Landesbildstelle Würt- Archive: dpa
temberg (LBW 20/52)

1945 1949

4 - 11 Feb. At the Yalta 1 April Unification of

Conference, Stalin, the three Western
Roosevelt, and Church- occupation zones.
ill decide to partition
Germany into four 4 April North Atlantic
occupation zones and Treaty (NATO) is estab-
to set up an Allied Con- 20 June 1948 lished in Washington.
trol Council. Archive: dpa
23 May Proclamation
9 May Unconditional of the Federal German
capitulation of Germa- Constitution.
ny.
7 Sept. The Bundes-
5 June The Allied 1946 tag and Bundesrat are
forces take command constituted.
of supreme govern- 5 March Denazifica-
mental power in Ger- tion laws. 1947 12 Sept. Theodor
many, which is parti- Heuss is elected feder-
tioned into four zones, 22 April Forced coali- 20 June 1948 1 Jan. The British and al president.
while Berlin is divided tion between the SPD Archive: AKG American zones are
into four sectors. and the KPD in the combined into one 15 Sept. Konrad Ade-
Soviet Zone to form the zone with a uniform nauer is elected federal
17 July – 2 Aug. Pots- Sozialistische Einheits- economic administra- 1948 chancellor by the Bun-
dam Conference be- partei (Socialist Unity tion. destag.
tween Stalin, Truman, Party). 20 March The Allied
and Churchill /Attlee; 11 Apr. The Saarland Control Council meets 21 Sept. The statute
Germany loses its terri- 6 Sept. The Stuttgart is economically incor- for the last time. of occupation for the
tories east of the Oder- address by U.S. Secre- porated into France, Federal German
Neiße Line. tary of State Byrnes while remaining politi- 20 June Currency Republic goes into
introduces the turn- cally autonomous. reform in the three effect.
about of the U.S. policy Western zones; each
towards Germany. 5 June Address by inhabitant receives 60 7 Oct. The GDR is
U.S. Secretary of State deutsche mark. established.
1. Oct. End of the Marshall at Harvard, in
Nuremberg Trials of the which he expounds his 24 June- 12 May 1949
chief war criminals. plan to restore the Berlin Blockade by the
European economy to Soviet military admin-
23 Oct.- 16 Dec. First financial soundness. istration as all land and
general assembly of water connections to
the United Nations. the city are closed off.
 Prehistory
40 The Scholls, the White Rose, Otl Aicher
Like no other German educational center, the HfG
was based on a moral justification.
One, it was founded on the experience that
even a society that had counted itself among the
civilized nations had degenerated into barbarism
and inhumanity, employing the technology of the
modern age in a highly rationalized manner and
with uncivilized cruelty. The moral to be derived
from this shattering realization could only be that
history must not be allowed to repeat itself. Two,
the HfG was among the direct successors of the
student resistance against National Socialism that
centered in the group The White Rose around
Hans Scholl: heroism that arose from youthful
innocence, idealism, and the radical act of risking
the utmost for one’s own convictions – and
losing.
The HfG was founded on the conviction that it
was necessary to learn a lesson from the immedi-
ate past of National Socialism: A better society
had to be created through educating each individ-
ual to be a good person, which would prevent a
recurrence of German fascism. It was a moral obli-
gation to the Scholls, if their death was not to have
been meaningless. No one could call into question
this obligation without being suspected of still
subscribing to National Socialist delusions. At the
same time there was the shining example of the
Scholls, who with their lives had stood up for what
was good and had fought against evil. The de-
signers’ part in improving society was that they
would improve human beings through good
design.
In addition to their eldest daughter Inge, Robert
Scholl and his wife Magdalene had four other chil-
dren: Hans, Elisabeth, Sophie, and Werner. 108
From 1917 on, Robert Scholl was the mayor of
Ingersheim-Altomünster an der Jagst; from 1920
until 1930 he was the mayor of Forchtenberg am
Kocher. In 1930 the family moved to Ludwigsburg,
and in 1932 to Ulm, where Robert Scholl ran a tax
service and accounting agency. His daughter Inge
received her training in his agency. In 1942 some-
one informed against the critical and independent
Robert Scholl, and he was sentenced to four
months in prison.
The story of the White Rose has been written
many times and in great detail. 109 One of its most
important aspects is how deeply rooted its mem-
bers were in the liberal and Christian, humanist
educated middle class, which they expressed in
appeals to the educated sections of the popula-
tion. In Hans Scholl’s view, they were especially
responsible because their mental horizon ought to
extend far enough that they should not entertain
any illusions about the unconstitutional National
Socialist state. The silence and passivity of the
intellectuals carried all the more weight: They
failed because there was no protest, no action, no
commitment on their part. 110
Hans Scholl, the “leading figure“ 111 of the White
Rose, had belonged to the free youth movement
like most of its members; he himself had been a
member of the D. J. 1.11., the Deutsche Jungen-
schaft vom 1.11. (founded 1 Nov. 1929, this Ger-
man youth organization was similar to the Wander-
vogel and the Boy Scout movements and was
dedicated to social change; transl. note), and had
therefore been imprisoned for several weeks in
1937/38. 112 One legacy of the worldview of the free
youth movement was that Hans and Sophie Scholl
saw their protest “not as a conspiracy but as a rev-
olution based on convictions“. 113 Accordingly, in
contrast to most other resistance groups, they
were not interested in distributing power and influ-
ence for the period that would follow National
Socialism.
The motives for their resistance grew out of their
need to defend values such as personhood, free-
dom, human dignity, individuality, and self-deter-
mination. “Christian and moral indignation at the
violent crimes against Jews and Poles in the East,
and at German occupation policies in the occupied
countries“ 114 was just as much a part of their
stance as their rejection of the totalitarian regime
in Germany itself, which had suppressed all politi-
cal, intellectual, artistic, and religious freedom and
the autonomy of the sciences and of law. They
fought against a perverted, totalitarian, unconsti-
tutional state and against the forced pressure into
collective thinking under National Socialism, but
also against the way the nation had become iden-
tified with the state, against the political loyalty of
the masses, against widespread opportunism and
smug fellow travelers among the population.
“Enthusiasm, adaptation, and partial resistance in
daily life under the National Socialist regime had
become fused into a multilayered complex, so that
in 1945 hardly anyone, in good conscience, could
advocate moral rigorism“ 115 – Inge Scholl and Otl
Aicher were among the few who could and also
regarded it as their duty.
The “spiritual mentors“ (Christian Petry) of the
Munich students are considered to be the Catholic
publicists Carl Muth, the publisher of the Catholic
literary-philosophical journal Hochland, which was
banned in June 1941, and Theodor Haecker, a phi-
losopher and Kierkegaard interpreter, the author of
Was ist der Mensch? (What Is Man?), which has
been shown to have deeply influenced the thinking
of the young Scholls. 116 It was from them that the
members of the White Rose received the motiva-
tion to combine the values of a living Christianity
or, to be precise, of a progressive Catholicism, with
familiar idealistic-philosophical ideals. They felt
committed to the moral, Christian-Western respon-
sibility of defending the freedom of the individual
“Hans thought as he 41
talked. His was a rhe-
torical existence, one
devoted to dialogue
and dialectic. He gained
insights like a revolving
searchlight at the top of
a lighthouse. He gained
his insights in this shift-
ing and reflected light.
These insights were
clear, but not categori-
cal. He was an homme
de lettres. And when he
was not writing, he’d be
reading; that, too, was
something he did as a
dialogue, and when he
wasn’t reading, he’d be
engaged in conversa-
tions.”
Otl Aicher, Innenseiten
des Kriegs, p. 83.
Photo: unknown
Archive: HfG (59 / 0252 /3)
Enlargements of this against the totalitarian state. Their goal was the “the ’defense of human beings as human beings’,
and the following pho- defense of the idea of Europe, “in other words, [and] the restoration of the moral foundations of
tograph of the executed everything relating to the history of ideas and phi- politics“ 119: “First and foremost they were con-
Hans and Sophie Scholl losophy of religion that was evoked in the first four cerned with saving human sovereignty, with
hung in the HfG rector’s flyers (distributed by the group, transl. note) and defending a free society and its human achieve-
office. that was implied in the term ‘Western culture’“. 117 ments […]. They were concerned with resisting
Unquestionably the protest of the White Rose against the looming danger of a new barbarism,
was highly political, not merely moral and idealis- against the legalization of genocide, against a
tic, if we understand a political person to be one piratical, elitist doctrine regarding race and the
who reflects about the community in which s/he state. […] What needed to be done was to defend
lives, and about the society of which s/he is a that which the human race had in common, and
member. 118 Law as the most important protection place it above the interests of one’s own nation.
against despotism, order worthy of human beings, […] In this rigorousness of thought, the discovery
and language as a means of communicating about of Christianity had a decisive role. It came about
political matters had been corrupted by the Na- for my sister and brother at the same time as they
tional Socialists. That is why the Scholls’ resist- developed political autonomy. […] They felt that a
ance against the totalitarian state coincided with dialogue between the modern world and religion
 Prehistory
42 was possible. […] There could be a connecting
line between Expressionist painters, modern theol-
ogy, and political action.“ 120
The resistance of the White Rose reached its
peak at the moment when Hans, a medical stu-
dent, and Sophie Scholl, a student of biology and
philosophy, flung the last copies of their sixth flyer
into the air well from the top floor gallery of Mu-
nich University on 18 February 1943; the building
caretaker, Jakob Schmied, observed them in the
act, detained them, met with no resistance, and
handed them over to the Gestapo (Geheime
Staats-Polizei; Nazi‘s Secret Service). The so-called
Volksgerichtshof (People’s Court) hurried to Mu-
nich from Berlin; on 22 February 1943 the Scholls
and Christoph Probst were condemned to death by
Roland Freisler and executed that same day. It is
presumed that Hans and Sophie Scholl had hoped
that the spectacular, violent end of the White Rose
would set off an effective signal. They had been
confident that a student revolt would break out, so
that their death would not be meaningless. Yet
they proved to be mistaken – the students seemed
to be paralyzed, the islands of the spirit of resist-
ance were isolated. By going through with the exe-
cution the National Socialist state sent its oppo-
nents an unmistakable message what the balance
of power in Germany actually looked like. On 27
February 1943 Inge Scholl, her parents, and her
sister Elisabeth were arrested as jointly liable for
the crimes of Hans and Sophie Scholl; the young-
est brother Werner was spared, as he was a mem-
ber of the Wehrmacht. Elisabeth was released two
months later for medical reasons, Inge and her
mother five months later. They retired to a farm in
the southern part of the Black Forest; the father
remained in prison until November 1944, and then
followed his family.
On the day of Hans and Sophie Scholl’s arrest,
Otto Aicher 121, nicknamed Otl, the former class-
mate of Werner Scholl, who had been the young
Scholls’ close friend since the fall of 1939, tried to
warn Hans Scholl that their cover would be blown.
The Ulm informer Albert Riester had drawn the at-
tention of the Gestapo to the students and bragged
after the war that he would have had Hans Scholl
arrested on that very day, 18 February 1943, if
events at the university had not made this unnec-
essary. 122 Otl Aicher was one of three Württemberg
university students who had refused to join the
Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth). This is why he had not
been allowed to take his Abitur (graduation from
secondary school). When he rang the doorbell
outside Hans Scholl’s apartment on 18 February
1943, Hans was already being taken into custody
by the Gestapo. It was only by a lucky chance that
the Gestapo failed to discover Otl Aicher’s con-
tacts with the young Scholls, for whose resistance
he had supplied important ideas and suggestions.
He deserted from the Russian campaign and also
went into hiding in the Black Forest until the war
was over. 123
The White Rose was significant for the HfG from
three points of view:
First of all, Inge Scholl, the surviving sister of the
executed students, was one of the leading found-
ers. The name Scholl had the best of reputations
in the circles who, for instance, wanted to promote
“the other Germany“ 124 in the United States (John
J. McCloy, Shepard Stone), or who had them-
selves belonged to this other Germany. The pro-
tective shield of the name Scholl meant that it was
not expedient for the opponents of the project in
the years when the HfG was founded to attack the
plans with arguments that were anything but ob-
jective. Anyone who lapsed into the realm of the
personal, polemics, or slander could have been
suspected of being a National Socialist sympathiz-
er, for the White Rose has always been a perfect
symbol of extreme personal and moral integrity.
This was shown by the 1951 denunciation cam-
paign, as a result of which the suspicion of the
government ministries and even of John McCloy’s
colleagues concentrated on Otl Aicher’s alleged
Communist leanings, while no suspicion was at-
tached to Inge Scholl’s name.
Secondly, Inge Scholl and Otl Aicher retained
the fundamental political stance and Christian con-
viction they had shared with Hans and Sophie
Scholl. The original outlines for the Geschwister-
Scholl-Hochschule are far more explicit in this re-
spect than the later plans for the Hochschule für
Gestaltung. The religious and ethical fire of the
White Rose flyers and their humanistically formed
ideals also reappear in these first outlines, as does
the political unconditionality that a critic might call
naiveté. Both the White Rose flyers and the early
plans of the founders of the HfG characteristically
combine a striving for political autonomy with a
Christian worldview, humanistic educational ide-
als, and rigorousness of thought; both link art,
intellectual history and pragmatic politics, and
Christian principles.
Thirdly, there is yet another way the founding
of the HfG (as well as the earlier founding of the
Ulmer Volkshochschule [Ulm Adult Education Cen-
ter]) by Inge Scholl and Otl Aicher may be inter-
preted: After the end of World War II they devoted
their entire energy to demonstrate that the death
of the sister and brother, of the friend had not
been in vain. They drew the obvious conclusion
from the lessons of the past and strove to educate
better human beings in the future, to help create a
society in which the crimes of National Socialism
would no longer be possible. “The motto of the
‘White Rose’ was to assume political responsibil-
ity“ – for the survivors their death continued to be
“Sophie’s face was the 43
kind of face I like. Her
haitstyle was the kind of
hairstyle I like. Her body
was the kind of body I
like. […] Her dark,
bobbed hair fell to the
side toward which her
head was tilted.
Sophie was quieter
than her sister Inge and
maybe as shy as I was.
That was why I hadn’t
held her in such con-
tempt and ignored her
the way I had her domi-
nant sister when they
wore the dark brown
vests of the Bund Deut-
scher Mädels [National
Socialist organization for
girls; transl. note]. Inge
was the leader. Sophie,
on the other hand, was
self-assured and content,
austere almost to a
fault.”
Otl Aicher, Innenseiten
des Kriegs, p. 57.
Photo: unknown
Archive: HfG (59 / 0252 /3)
a reminder to “assume their political responsibility have been incomparably more difficult to clear the
in such a way that morals and politics would not first hurdles. It would definitely have been possible
diverge irreconcilably, that legality and legitimacy to run a college of design that had a political pro-
would not be played off against each other.“ 125 file; but the specific authenticity for students and
faculty would have been lacking – being part of an
It is difficult to assess the exact meaning of the institution that had a direct connection with Hans
White Rose for the history of the HfG. One did not and Sophie Scholl. In any event the HfG would
have to be a family member or close friend to have been different, and that means that the White
share Hans and Sophie Scholl’s views – but cer- Rose is not an arbitrary element in the HfG’s histo-
tainly the personal motivation in Inge Scholl’s and ry, but an integral part of its identity.
Otl Aicher’s case could hardly have been more
intense, and no doubt this was also a reason for The American policy of democratization
their staying power, which in turn was one cause The United States had had to intervene by force
of their success. Presumably a college of design of arms in World War II in order to safeguard the
could have been founded if, for instance, someone European balance of power, and peace and free-
like Max Bill had met someone like Otl Aicher who dom in the world. German aggression must never
was not a friend of the Scholl family. But it would recur again. How could the Allies prevent this? The
 Prehistory

44 Ernst Baron von Weiz- i. e., the elimination of National Socialist organiza- of a total of 1.39 million questionnaires. The result 45
säcker (25 May 1882 – tions and the removal of all National Socialists was that more than 160,000 dismissals were or-
4 August 1951), state from every walk of public life, as they had already dered and just under 60,000 more were recom-
secretary of the Foreign declared in February 1945, in the communiqué of mended. 140 But although these figures seem ex-
Office as of 1938. In the the Yalta Conference, referring to one of their war cessive, only a minority of NSDAP members on
summer of 1939 he objectives. 133 The American military government the whole was affected by these measures. Because
warned the British gov- for Germany (since 1 October 1945: Office of Mili- the American directives (contrary to what happened
ernment in vain of Hit- tary Government, United States, abbreviated as in practice) threatened every NSDAP member,
ler’s war plans. In OMGUS, with headquarters in Berlin) basically there was the danger that fellow travelers might
1943–45 he was the carried out denazification 134 in three stages: First it show their solidarity with the punished activists
German ambassador to ordered the dissolution of National Socialist organ- because they had every reason to fear that the
the Vatican. In 1949 he izations and the repeal of National Socialist laws. party members’ dismissals were only the begin-
was condemned to Secondly it sought to punish all persons whose ning, and that their own existence was also at risk.
7 years in prison at the individual guilt could be proven. 135 This is how the Parallel to denazification the Americans began
“Wilhelmstraße Trial” in trial by the Allies of the chief war criminals before their first lesson in democratizing Germany: They
Nuremberg, then par- the international court in Nuremberg came about, organized the first local elections. Lucius D. Clay
doned in October 1950. followed by twelve subsequent Nuremberg trials justified this to the undersecretary of state in the
Hellmut Becker de- by the Americans, and further proceedings before Defense Department, John J. McCloy, with the
fended him at the trial, Allied military and special courts; German judiciary words, “If the Germans are to learn democracy,
during which this pic- proceedings followed from this prosecution. Third- I think the best way is to start off quickly at the
ture was taken. ly, OMGUS initiated the political purge that must bottom.“ 141 This quotation gives the impression
be differentiated from these legal proceedings, for that at this early date the American commander
A contemporary the purge “is the means power politics uses to es- in chief had a very simplistic understanding of
account is found in: tablish a new ruling class; its function is at least to democratization – as if, let’s say, an understand-
Margret Bovari, Der eliminate the representatives of the old regime and ing of democracy could be learned and taught in
Diplomat vor Gericht, to place politically reliable people of their own per- a “crash course“ 142 like a language.
Berlin/Hamburg 1948. suasion in key positions.“ 136
Beginning with the late summer of 1945 the influ-
Photo: unknown Initially the military government carried out the ence of Americans who criticized this denazifica-
Archive: AKG political purge at its own discretion and without tion practice grew. With the law regarding the
experience gained from the history of the Weimar sevelt’s death, did not, to be sure, adopt the infa- German participation. In the first weeks this basi- elimination of nationalism and militarism, referred
Republic showed that a military defeat in itself did mous Morgenthau plan which had provided that cally consisted of the local military commanding to as the Befreiungsgesetz, OMGUS gave in to this
not guarantee future security. Politically and social- Germany would be kept at the low level of a de- officers discharging top administrators (head offi- pressure and transferred the implementation of
ly things must not go on as before in Germany; industrialized agricultural state in order to prevent cials, district administrators, and mayors). In the denazification to German authorities, reserving
people had to become different, and society had a third world war caused by Germany. 129 Neverthe- summer of 1945 they intensified their measures only overall control for itself. On 5 March 1946 the
to change for the better. That was why, since less the harsh tone 130 and punishing influences “in response to the strong pressure of public opin- law was promulgated. 143 Now the determining fac-
1942, there had also been speculations in Great were clearly evident, particularly where sociopoliti- ion in the US“ 137, so that the civil service in Germa- tors for a person’s guilt or innocence were no
Britain and the United States as to what was to be cal and cultural matters were concerned. In Article ny threatened to collapse. With Military Law no. 8 longer formalities, such as the fact that someone
done with a defeated Germany and how German 14, JCS 1067 ordered that in essence all educa- of 26 September 1945 the political purge was ex- had been an NSDAP member, or the date he had
society and politics would need to be changed for tional institutions were to be closed immediately tended to all sectors of the economy. Its terms, become one, but rather each person’s individual
a fundamental societal transformation to occur after the end of the war so that the entire educa- which led to the dismissal of the people involved, accountability. The “free judicial discretion that the
after a military victory by the Allies. 126 It was in the tional system could be purged of all National So- were henceforth completely undifferentiated. 138 Germans were expressly granted“ 144 provided the
Allies’ own interest that Germany should become cialist and militaristic influences. “The transforma- “It excluded Nazi party members from private as necessary leeway to separate harmless fellow
a peaceful state, for there was a sense that an ag- tion was purely negative: All vestiges of the Na- well as public employment in any capacity above travelers from dangerous rabble-rousers. With the
gressive and troubled Germany could soon jeop- tional Socialist state were to be eliminated as an the level of common labor.“ 139 As a result of ex- help of this law a denazification court procedure
ardize world peace once more. important precondition for democratic reconstruc- panding the categories of persons who faced dis- was created. The entire population had to be reg-
tion.“ 131 missal, and of the cut-and-dried bureaucratic way istered, because everyone over 18 years old had to
Denazification, JCS 1067 In the Potsdam Agreement the four victorious dismissals were implemented, there was the dan- fill out the infamous questionnaire. On the basis of
The final version of the directive of the US Joint powers established the goals they planned to pur- ger that the intentions of the denazification process this questionnaire, people were assigned to one of
Chiefs of Staff JCS 1067 of 26 April 1945, the sue after their victory in Germany. 132 They summar- would be counteracted and that a personnel crisis five categories (“main offenders” to “exonerated”).
general guideline for American occupation policy ized these in the formula, “Denazification, deindus- would occur in the civil service and in the econo- By means of this procedure “denazification and
up to 1947 is still informed, like the Potsdam trialization, demilitarization“. At the very least this my: “The conflict between the minimum require- rehabilitation [merged] into one and the same pro-
Agreement 127 of 2 August 1945, with the views of summarized what would no longer be tolerated in ments of a viable civil service and the all-inclusive cess. […] In their judgment practice the courts
U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau Germany, since the Allies placed the major part of grounds for dismissal that was already paralyzing granted most of those involved the often cited
Jr., and his president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, that the blame for past German aggression on that the civil service to a large extent now threatened right to political error and without exception im-
the Germans should be severely punished and configuration: no National Socialism, no industrial to overwhelm the entire economy.“ By the end of posed mild sentences.“ 145 The second amending
weakened so that no further danger could come cartels, no militaristic society. November 1945 the special branch of the military law relating to the Befreiungsgesetz of 25 March
from Germany. 128 Harry S. Truman, who became By denazification the four victorious powers government that was in charge of these matters 1948 in the end resulted in something “like an
president on 12 April 1945 upon Franklin D. Roo- understood the eradication of National Socialism, had processed more than three-fourths of a million amnesty for the heavily incriminated“. 146
 Prehistory
46 Thus denazification in the American occupation
zone in essence ended in 1948. Taking stock it
needs to be said that the practice of political purg-
ing had developed into a large-scale rehabilitation:
“In the lengthy process of denazification the per-
sonnel of the National Socialist dictatorship had
more or less dissolved into nothing.“ 147 The idea
behind the denazification policy and its high moral
standards had not been able to hold their ground
against reality. Clemens Vollnhals concludes un-
equivocally that denazification failed and sees the
reasons for this in the fact that Directive JCS 1067
was initially too cut-and-dried, in the Americans’
grave political and psychological mistakes, and in
the dilemma that only Germans could answer the
crucial question as to who was a fellow traveler or
an activist, while the military government did not
want to leave the implementation of denazification
up to the Germans. 148 Once the responsibility had
been transferred to German authorities – the “fel-
low-traveler factories” (Lutz Niethammer) – the
victims of National Socialism were left with their
helpless indignation, because there was no inten-
tion to expiate the crimes. Instead of forcing a
general catharsis and a sharp break with the past
as a precondition for a new beginning, the many
little and big wheels that were part of the structure
of the National Socialist state were rehabilitated
and integrated in the new polity. No doubt this
was fundamental for a new stable state in which
all energies concentrated on reconstruction, for it
would not have been possible to found a democ-
racy if millions of former Nazis had been branded
as lepers for the rest of their lives. Yet under these
circumstances not only actual National Socialists,
but conservative and left-wing opponents of Na-
tional Socialism as well refused to accept the com-
prehensive political purge. Anyway, those who
were directly affected by the purge more com-
monly felt self-pity and scorn for the procedure
than repentance and insight.
Democratization
The denazification of German society would only
have made sense if the gaps it caused had been
filled by positive counterparts.
Even during the war, the U.S. Defense Depart-
ment and State Department had had conflicts with
the Treasury Department about the fundamental
ways, means, and goals of occupation policy. In
the end what prevailed was the missionary convic-
tion that only a democratic Germany, with demo-
cratic forms of government and patterns of behav-
ior, would be peaceful, because “democracy was
the best and most humane form of society“. 149 This
combination of business and pleasure – from the
American perspective – required fundamental
institutional and mental changes in a defeated
Germany.
The complex of goals, plans, and actions that
sought such fundamental and radical changes was
referred to by U.S. and German officials by such
terms as democratization, reeducation or reorien-
tation; to make a clean semantic distinction, reed-
ucation might be called the means the Americans
initiated to achieve the intended democratization.
At any rate these terms meant teaching an entire
nation a new way of seeing itself as a society. 150
Apart from denazification, this initiative is con-
sidered to be the “most spectacular initiative of
the entire occupation period“. 151 Germany, the late-
comer among nations, was finally to become a
modern pluralistic constitutional state, with separ-
ation of powers, free and independent elections,
and representative seats in parliament, a state in
which public officials respected human rights. But
that was only the institutional part of the delibera-
tions, for “in the widest sense this policy […] also
included an examination of traditional norms, the
elimination of nationalism and militarism, the erad-
ication of authoritarian thinking, and the disinte-
gration of other supposedly typical German behav-
ior patterns through an overall reform of society
analogous to [the Americans’] own democratic
experience and traditions.“ 152 In other words:
Democracy was to become so deeply rooted in
Germany as a political culture and way of life that
it could not be swept away by the next domestic
crisis. The memory of the Weimar Republic had
still been present in people’s minds when the
majority of Germans rejected the parliamentary
system and sought their social salvation in author-
itarian patterns of behavior and in a leader figure.
If after 1945 a repetition of this luckless republic
was to be prevented, society must change: The
Weimar period did not offer a positive orientation
for the future. However, some Americans who later
became important for the democratization policy
had not forgotten that foreign policy-related and
economic burdens during the interim between the
wars had been a contributing factor in curtailing
the Weimar Republic’s chances of developing, and
in damaging the reputation of the unsuccessful
democracy in its own country. The mistakes of
1918, they felt, must not be repeated. 153
The initial “punitive phase“ 154 of the American oc-
cupation policy lasted until 1946/47. The phases of
transition depend on the observer’s perspective.
The Cold War began. The Truman Doctrine gained
a foothold, as a result of which the growing influ-
ence of the Soviet Union in Central Europe was to
be checked and the Western European countries
would have to remain the allies of the U.S. Accord-
ing to this conviction, however, Western Europe
could be held only by means of Germany, or at
least its Western occupation zones; suddenly
yesterday’s enemies were needed as the allies of
tomorrow. As we saw, with the Befreiungsgesetz
of 5 March 1946 the denazification policy slid into
German hands. Soviet propaganda set in and
wooed the public, particularly young people. On
21 August 1946 the State Department published
the directive of the State-War-Navy Coordinating
Committee, SWNCC 269/5, entitled Long Policy
Statement for German Reeducation. 155 This was to
help open doors – for the first time after the previ-
ous restrictive handicaps – to “a positive, future-
oriented democratization policy” that would make
possible the rebuilding of the destroyed country. It
is true that the directive appeared to have hardly
any more of an effect on the actual occupation,
but a first step had been taken in a new direction.
Now there was also a comprehensive definition of
the principles of reeducation (in the minutes of the
Potsdam conference and in JCS 1067 there are
only set phrases and generalities), for SWNCC
269/5 demanded the “integrity and freedom of the
individual, the right and obligation of all citizens to
participate responsibly in the democratic adminis-
tration of the polity, free exchange of views and
information, and international understanding and
tolerance toward other cultures and races as a
basis for the reorientation of the German people.
The directive also made it clear that the reestab-
lishment of political and cultural life must be pri-
marily the work of the Germans […].“ 156 On 6 Sep- 47
tember 1946, in his legendary “Stuttgart speech”,
Secretary of State James F. Byrnes publicly de-
clared his support for these corrections of Ameri-
can occupation policy, which were a reaction to
the conflict with the Soviet Union. 157 He appealed
to the population, asking them to participate ac-
tively in the democratic reconstruction of a free,
independent German state.
The founding of adult education centers
The collaboration of the Germans with the military
government that James F. Byrnes had called for in
Stuttgart was perceived as an urgent need by edu-
cators.
The first actions of OMGUS had, in accordance
with section 14 of Directive JCS 1067, been to
Arne Torgersen in con-
versation with the
queen of Norway, 1946.
Photo: unknown
Source: Arne Torgersen, … Nach
ihnen, Herr General! Humanitä-
re Abenteuer eines Norwegers,
Stuttgart 1971.
close all institutions of learning, to revoke all Na-
tional Socialist Gleichschaltung (enforced political
conformity), and to fire incriminated teachers. As a
result the number of teachers dropped once more,
for the third time, having been decimated by the
National Socialists and the war.
The next measures, as early as 1945, addressed
the first steps toward rebuilding the educational
system. In September 1945 Göttingen University
was the first to open, with all schools represented.
On 1 October 1945, 6,477 elementary schools
 Prehistory
48 were opened again in the American zone; there,
14,176 teachers taught at least 1.2 million stu-
dents. 158 The secondary schools resumed classes
at the end of November. 159 The directive Reopen-
ing of Universities and Other Institutions (27De-
cember 1945) authorized the general reopening
of the universities. Finally adult education centers,
too, were reopened following the 28 December
1945 order from OMGUS headquarters to the mili-
tary governments of the Länder of Hesse, Bavaria,
and Württemberg-Baden. 160
While this did mean that the legal prerequisites
for people to study and teach at schools, univer-
sities, and colleges again had been met – that is,
if the buildings could still be used and teaching
materials were appropriate – , there was an acute
shortage of teachers everywhere. What is more,
the education departments of the American mili-
tary government were hopelessly understaffed 161,
so that the Americans had to rely on collaborating
with Germans who wanted to create a new educa-
tion system. One statement went so far as to say
that “they [had] no choice but to rely on German
initiatives. In the American zone, on 8 May [1945;
author’s note], only ten education experts were
available.“ 162
The soldiers of the 27th division of the US Army
marched into Ulm on 24 April 1945, ending World
War II for the town on the Danube. 163 The local
commanding officer immediately appointed a
mayor, Hermann Frank, who was replaced by Karl
Eychmüller after only three weeks; four weeks
later, on 7 June 1945, the position was given to
Robert Scholl “at the suggestion of a few citizens
of Ulm“ 164, and his term of office began on 9 June
1945. 165
After the war Ulm was largely an expanse of
rubble. “Where houses had stood at one time,
there were now bomb craters filled with water;
there were hardly any streets anymore, only paths
through the rubble, but the 500-year-old Gothic
cathedral had survived the severe bomb raids.“ 166
A total of about 9,000 homes were destroyed by
Allied air raids on 17 December 1944, almost 50
percent of the prewar number; the old part of town
in particular was hardest hit. In addition, only
about 25 percent of industrial plants, workshops,
and business premises survived the war. The town
lay buried under about 1.2 million cubic meters of
debris. 167 The Germans’ National Socialism had
destroyed the inner and external values of their
own society. “Nowhere in the autobiographies is
there the slightest doubt that defeat was truly
total. This was everyone’s direct experience, and
there was no way to evade this insight. The defeat
was so complete and the shock so lasting that
reality in all its undeniability caught up with the
world of delusion that Nazi propaganda had built
up in the last years of the war, and brought it
crashing down.“ 168
In its Handbook for Military Government in Ger-
many, dated December 1944, the military govern-
ment had put together – to be used in cooperation
with the Germans – white, gray, and black lists of
persons who had worked in the German education
system. Those who appeared in the white lists
were considered suitable for responsible positions
because of their strength of character, courage to
stand up for their beliefs, professional experience,
and political reliability. 169 Robert Scholl’s nomina-
tion as mayor of Ulm must be seen in a compar-
able context, transferred to a political plane. 170
Otl Aicher was one of the Germans who, directly
after the end of National Socialism, by dint of tre-
mendous efforts, wanted to begin a cultural initia-
tive. Like many, he felt the time had come to enter
into dialogue with his contemporaries about the
recent past. He had a sense of mission and the
ideal qualifications as far as the cultural and politi-
co-educational ideas of the Americans were con-
cerned: In spite of his youth he had an education
in philosophy, and because of his past he had an
impeccable reputation. He was the first person in
Ulm 171 to receive permission to organize a public
lecture on 16 August 1945 – only a few weeks
after the end of the war – and to put up posters
advertising it in the ruined city: “The two [Inge
Scholl and Otl Aicher; author’s note] planned
together to bring speakers to Ulm, to tell what they
had been forbidden to tell during the deadening,
wasted years of the Nazi reign. It was Otto who
wheeled through the nightmarish wreckage of
Southern Germany on a bicycle to find their first
speakers. There was no hall in Ulm where such
lectures could be held, but one church remained
undamaged and in it was a meeting room.” 172
The first to speak in this meeting room of the
Martin-Luther-Kirche (Martin Luther Church) was
the theologian and philosopher Romano Guardini,
whom Otl Aicher knew personally and who re-
mained his and Inge Scholl’s friend for as long as
he lived. 173 Romano Guardini’s lecture about truth
and lies was followed by eight more in the series
Religious Lectures on a Christian Worldview (with
Werner Becher, Josef Bernhart, Gregor Lang, Felix
Messerschmid, Theodor Steinbüchel, and Fedor
Stepun). 174 The goal of the lectures was to inform
the population about the past years of Nazi rule
and to encourage them to seize the opportunity
that now presented itself to make a new start as a
society. In Ulm, as in many places in Germany, it
was thus not political but cultural life that was the
actual source of the new beginning (though, con-
trary to the hopes of the initiators, there was no
new beginning after all). The response on the part
of the Ulm public was so great that the American
cultural officer proposed to Otl Aicher in the fall of
1945 that this series of lectures should be devel-
oped into a permanent cultural institution. The for-
mation of a modern center for adult education in
Ulm was in keeping with the politico-cultural inter-
est of the military government that German society
should reform itself on its own with American help
and guidance and under American supervision.
“During the occupation we were constantly re-
minded how important adult education was for
democratization“ 175, for it was adults that had to
educate the young in the ways of democracy if a
democratic Germany was to have a continued
existence in the future.
In Ulm there had already been a night school
for adult education from the end of World War I
until 1933 176; of course this was basically a small
group of what seem to have been a chosen few,
and can hardly be mentioned in the same breath
as the Ulm Volkshochschule (Adult Education Cen-
ter) that was founded in 1946. The system of Volks-
hochschulen (community colleges), which in its
function of providing a liberal education for adults
had been destroyed in 1933, experienced an enor-
mous boom after the end of the war. At the same
time as in Ulm many adult education centers were
opened all over Germany; in Berlin alone, for in-
stance, 25 were started by April 1946, and even in
November 1946 the trend of founding such cen-
ters still continued. 177 The first adult education
center in occupied Germany was started in Nu-
remberg in December 1945. In the fall of 1947
the British occupation zone had over 205 adult
education centers 178, and in the fall of 1949 there
were about 250 of these institutions in the Ameri-
can zone. 179 As in Ulm, the initiative for developing
the adult education centers all over Germany –
even in the Soviet zone – came from individual
Germans. 180
But Otl Aicher refused an offer to found the Ulm
adult education center because he wanted to
study in Munich at the Akademie der Bildenden
Künste (Academy of Fine Arts). He proposed to
Inge Scholl that she should take on this task. After
thinking it over for a month – she was planning to
study history and sociology – she agreed. Never-
theless Otl Aicher remained very closely involved
in the undertaking. Later Inge Scholl emphasized
that he was the actual intellectual driving force
behind the adult education center during these
early years, while she went to work and translated
the ideas into action 181: “Otl was the one who in
the first years of the adult education center nego-
tiated with the liveliest university professors, had
discussions with them, awakened their curiosity
and enthusiasm for our cause, and elicited the
right topics from them.“ 182 He broke off his sculp-
ture studies after two semesters because this form
of cultural activity did not satisfy him. He asked
himself “whether a culture and an art did not com- 49
promise themselves if they ignored the real human
problems of a postwar period”. 183 He rejected –
partly because violence had been aestheticized in
the Third Reich – preoccupation with “pure” aes-
thetics, aesthetics that was not for a specific pur-
pose. Rather, it was his conviction that aesthetics,
education, and democracy were closely connect-
ed. He was interested in creatively dealing with
concrete tasks that presented themselves, for
instance, in Ulm. Say, for example: How should
the destroyed old part of town be designed again
in an efficient manner? Was it right to reconstruct
everything as it had been before the war, or should
new paths be pursued and new solutions sought?
It was to questions like these that he devoted him-
self on a city planning team he headed at the Ulm
Adult Education Center, which had meanwhile
been founded and opened on 24 April 1946. 184
The new Ulm Adult Education Center ran evening
events focusing on the education of the adult pop-
ulation of Ulm. It was sponsored by an association.
Inge Scholl was the director of the institution. She
was assisted by a board of trustees that initially
consisted, among others, of Elisabeth Walser,
Helga and Herbert Wiegandt, Hermann Wild, Kurt
Fried, and Otl Aicher. 185
In their first catalogue there are a few referen-
ces to Inge Scholl’s, Otl Aicher’s, and their friends’
and comrades-in-arms’ “humanistic or Reform
Catholic roots“ 186, their pedagogical views and
their educational and sociopolitical goals 187:
Because of the breakdown caused by National
Socialism, they felt, it was necessary to take the
risk of starting from the beginning again. The Ger-
mans, they believed, should not simply continue
with what had been there before the Third Reich,
for the society of that time had not known how to
prevent the National Socialists: “We must pursue
completely different paths if a spiritual reconstruc-
tion is to be successful.“ “The German catastro-
phe, from the start and at its core, was the result
of wrong thinking, and a new future can therefore
only begin by rethinking things. […] We are strip-
ping away all that does not endure. Until now radi-
calism has been power-oriented, which is why it
has been unobjective, destructive, and menda-
cious. We must counter this with the uncondition-
ality of the objective, the genuine, and the true, an
unconditional, scientific cleanness. […] The Ulm
Adult Education Center would like to do its part in
replacing false radicalism with the unconditionality
of the beautiful and the good, the true and the
healthy.“ “The vessel that is man has spilled its
contents and wants to be refilled“.
After the regime of inhumanity the meaning of
a new educational institution did not consist in the
accumulation of knowledge as an end in itself, but
 Prehistory
50 rather – in addition to sharing university research
results – primarily in education that led to a human
attitude not oriented toward the kind of utility that
can be directly put to practical use: “Instead of
wisdom and scientific knowledge, far too many
people seek nothing but information and skills that
will help them be successful in making a living.
[…] I wonder if today it’s not the ordinary people,
more than anyone else, who feel that we need the
wisdom and knowledge for life, for ourselves, for
our own growth, and not to make a living?” “The
university serves research and teaches how to do
research. The adult education center, on the other
hand, wants to pass on the established results of
research. […] The adult education center, as we
said earlier, would like to connect academic learn-
ing, knowledge, and education with life.”
Classes at the adult education center, according
to the humanistic ideal, were to be comprehensive
and help people deal with the present in order to
establish a democratic culture that would keep
alive some of the spirit that had given rise to the
young Scholls’ resistance: “University comes from
universitas. That means: universality, commitment
to an all-around education that is at the same time
an integrated whole and a bright light like an inner
star that illuminates all thought and action for
those who have received it.“ “An adult education
center is not about job training but about educa-
tion.“ “We, however, seek an education for the
present, a new education – indeed, an education
that is open to the future. In it we want to experi-
ence our time, our lives, and our history. At the
same time we do not disregard the past; we are
under an obligation to live with a heritage en-
trusted to us by Athens, Rome, Paris and Florence,
Vienna and Weimar.“
It was a particularly important concern for Inge
Scholl and Otl Aicher to join together culture and
civilization, since they had observed that in the
past a great difference had existed in society be-
tween how people regarded highly valued “after-
work and Sunday culture” and everyday “civiliza-
tion” or "workaday culture”, which was held in low
esteem: “When we speak of ‘civilization’, we mean
things like electric light and express trains. But
when we say ‘culture’, many of us think of an eve-
ning at a concert when everyone dresses up. […]
Thus culture has become a religion for people who
consider themselves to be especially smart and
refined.“ Looking back in 1953, Inge Aicher-Scholl
commented even more specifically on the gap she
had observed “between life and culture, between
material civilization and so-called ‘spiritual’ val-
ues”: “Right from the start, you see, we included
areas like city planning, architecture, economics,
technology, sociology, and politics in our work.
Our idea of culture was the formation of life in all
Otl Aicher with a model
of the Ulm Cathedral at
a meeting of the urban
planning group at the
Ulm Adult Education
Center, circa November
its breadth, in the personal as well as in the social 1949. 51
sphere, in the workaday world as well as in leisure Photo: Hannes Rosenberg
time.“ 188 Archive: Rosenberg (754/11)
The pedagogical plan behind the Ulm Adult Edu-
cation Center was based on the following catego-
ries of offerings:
1. series of lectures on a specific topic,
2. courses offering general education and handi-
craft skills, and
3. teamwork.
The strived-for combination of theory and practice
was ideally achieved in the teams, which dealt
with concrete tasks such as the aforementioned
city-planning team working on the rebuilding of
Ulm, or the manufacture of functional, inexpen-
sive, and aesthetically appealing furniture. The lec-
tures and their central topics were particularly at-
tractive and brought many listeners to the center
in the first years.
A list of temporary lecturers at the Ulm Adult
Education Center includes, among others, Kurt
Fried, Romano Guardini, Marie Luise Kaschnitz,
Carl Orff, Gerhard Ritter, Carl Schmid, Franz
Schnabel, Johannes Spörl, and the rectors of the
universities of Munich and Tübingen, Karl Vossler
and Theodor Steinbüchel. In 1950 Beth Burchard,
quoted above, reported that the Adult Education
Center had a very ambitious catalogue “that reads
like a German who‘s who“. 189 The immediate and
widely noted success of the Ulm Adult Education
Center was evidenced especially by the fact that
an amazingly large number of prominent scien-
tists, politicians, artists, and publicists gave pres-
entations here. If one compares the Ulm center
with other adult education centers, one finds that
“nowhere else is there an education so effective
and so thoroughly rooted in principles as in the
Ulm Adult Education Center“. 190 The reason for this
success must be sought for in the personalities of
Inge Scholl, Otl Aicher, and their colleagues 191, in
“their political attitude toward the period of the
Hitler regime, which was beyond all doubt“ 192, and
even more in the authenticity of their commitment
to a new societal beginning and “political univer-
salism, not mere tolerance, but cooperation“ 193. At
any rate, other reasons, such as especially attrac- certain drop in membership, but in 1953 Inge could demonstrate – especially to American au-
tive pay, have to be ruled out. 194 Rather, the cen- Scholl was able to express her pride that, after the thorities – that they were capable of running such
ter's founders appear to have set in motion an labor unions, the center – with 2,500 members an institution and of developing it into a city’s in-
interplay between first-rate speakers and critical, out of a population of 70,000 – represented the tellectual focus. 195 Secondly the center was also
interested listeners, where visiting speakers felt largest association in Ulm. the institutional background upon which the HfG
drawn by the audience’s reputation for quality, The Ulm Adult Education Center was presum- could fall back in its initial stages. The tasks re-
and vice versa. ably the most important precondition that made it lated to the founding of the HfG were done in the
Between 2,000 and 3,000 members financed possible for Inge Scholl and Otl Aicher together rooms of the Adult Education Center, and in Au-
the center up to 70 percent with their monthly with their friends to successfully found yet another gust 1953 the first HfG course was taught there.
membership dues, which allowed them to attend educational institution, the HfG, later on. For one, And thirdly, the work at the Adult Education Center
all events. In 1948 the currency reform caused a by pointing to the Adult Education Center they was based on convictions that played just as
 Prehistory
52 prominent a part in formulating the platform of the
HfG. Eva von Seckendorff’s summary describing
the first HfG catalogues is just as true of the Ulm
Adult Education Center: “The central point of the
educational plan was ‘universality’: according to
the authors, specialization that was oriented exclu-
sively toward practical needs, without universal
education, led to the spiritual desolation of fas-
cism. It was not that they were opposed to spe-
cialized professional education as a necessary
prerequisite for the technological progress they
aspired to – but all citizens were supposed to be
able to reflect on the conditions and consequen-
ces of their actions with the help of as broad a
knowledge as possible”. 196 –
Every time one looks at this topic, one is left
with a feeling of amazement that the Ulm Adult
Education Center, with views and goals that had
been shared by many other cultural initiatives, was
successful even after most of the others, which
had started the same way, had again vanished
from the scene. What is more, it is surprising that
with the founding of the HfG, which was based on
the same standpoint, it was possible to success-
fully establish an additional project.
Zook Commission, JCS 1779
In the summer of 1945, when the German univer-
sities quickly reopened to get young people off the
streets, many professors and assistants who were
teaching were not “clean” enough for OMGUS, so
that a thorough purge seemed to be urgently called
for. This raised some dust among the American
public because it showed up the deficits of the
U.S. occupation zone’s education policy, which
had been “notoriously neglected” 197 up to that
point.
There were several reasons for this negligence.198
For example, there were differences of opinion
between officials in Washington and in Germany.
The American cultural officers were inadequately
prepared for their work, lacking motivation and
qualifications. Their image of Germany was very
sketchy, and in turn they took their bearings from
a liberal American ideal of democracy and society:
“The negative perception they tended to have of
Germany, as an authoritarian, hierarchical caste
society that was disposed to collectivism, strongly
encouraged American reformers and reeducators
to emphasize liberal and egalitarian aspects of
their own traditions. Apart from a self-righteous
moralizing rigorism, the reform program of [the]
United States military government did have a
strong accent of liberalism American style.“ 199
Wolfgang Benz offers the example of the Army’s
1945 political indoctrination film Your Job in Ger-
many, where the following statements are made
about German teenagers and young adults: “These
are the most dangerous, German youth. Children
when the Nazi party came to power, they know
no other system than that one that has poisoned
their minds, they are soaked with it.“ 200 – More-
over one must not forget how few positions were
authorized, or that the military government had
been repeatedly restructured both centrally and
in the Länder. Until May 1946 the job of demo-
cratization was carried out by two separate sub-
divisions; not until after that date were they com-
bined into an education and religious-affairs
branch. However, under OMGUS this branch was
merely ranked as a subdivision of the hierarchy:
“The inability of the education staff to achieve di-
vision status until 1948 was a confirmation of the
tendency of military government leadership to
underestimate the importance and complexity of
education reform“. Researchers reproach the
American commander in chief, General Lucius D.
Clay, in particular, for not recognizing the opportu-
nities presented by demo- cratization until some
time in 1947. The motivation of the higher-ranking
officers to reform the education system, they
claim, was still weak in 1945 and 1946, and it is
said of Lucius D. Clay that in 1946, urged by the
Department of Defense to request more money
for teaching materials for 1947, he replied, “We
still believe full bellies to be a first requisite to
recapture minds.“ 201 It took until March 1948 for
a separate education and cultural relations divi-
sion to be set up “in accordance with Order no. 6,
OMGUS, of 18 February 1948, effective 1 March
1948“. 202 This division was located in Berlin from
March 1948 until the summer of the same year;
then, until March 1949, it was in the Nuremberg
Justizpalast (palace of justice), and finally moved
to Bad Nauheim. The organization of the appropri-
ate agency of the military government for Würt-
temberg-Baden developed even more chaotical-
ly 203, for between September 1945, when the
Americans set up six divisions that were the coun-
terparts of the government departments in Stutt-
gart 204, and September 1949, when jurisdiction
was transferred to the provincial commissioner’s
office, the Office of Military Government for Würt-
temberg-Baden changed its structure at least nine
times. It was amazing, and probably lucky as well,
that the director of the education and religion divi-
sion remained the same from start to finish: Major
John P. Steiner, who later played an important part
in the founding of the HfG as well. 205 From an initi-
al staff of three his division, contrary to the usual
tendency, even grew to over 15 (30 June 1947),
then to 20 (30 June 1948), and finally to 27 (30
June 1949).
When the deficiencies of American attempts at
democratization had become public knowledge, a
ten-member commission, named the Zook Com-
mission after its head, George F. Zook, toured the
American occupation zone between August and
September 1946 and submitted its report, the so-
called Zook Report, to the State Department on 21
September 1946. 206 This report was a “stock-tak-
ing“ of the work done by the American military
government of Germany in the education system
since the occupation of Germany. From the study
results, the authors drew conclusions that they
formulated as recommendations “for the future
organization from the special perspective of re-
education“. 207
It doesn’t come as a surprise that these educa-
tors found the actual causes of German fascism
primarily in the following shortcomings of the Ger-
man education system: in the traditionally two-
track school system; in the way students had been
educated to trust authority and the state unques-
tioningly; and in the lack of liberal teachers, of a
liberal education leading to a democratic way of
life, and of a democratic school system, with par-
ent participation. 208 The Zook Report “marked the
start of a drastic change“ 209 in the education sys-
tem of the American zone, because its authors,
in essence, proposed that the policy of penalizing
the Germans should be abandoned and instead
cooperation between the Americans and the Ger-
mans should be increased. All educational institu-
tions were to be organized democratically and
were to teach their students “to participate in a
democratic society”. 210 Adult education, too, was
to be more strongly integrated in democratization
measures.
In January 1947 OMGUS rewrote the recommen-
dations of the Zook Committee as directives. 211 The
job description of the education officers changed
correspondingly when the new Directive JCS 1779
was passed on 15 July 1947 212: “In comparison
with the vague statements of JCS 1067, and fol-
lowing the recommendations of the Zook Report,
the new directive clearly formulated [the policy],
including the guidelines regarding reeducation,
in accordance with the wishes of the Americans
[who advocated] reconstruction.” 213 Reeducation
was now considered to be a factor in the democ-
ratization of Germany on a par with other factors,
but in the months that followed it was also in-
creasingly used as an instrument of anticommu-
nism: From then on reeducation measures were to
immunize the Germans not only against National
Socialist, but also against Communist ideology. 214
If these reforms of the education system were to
have a chance to succeed, they needed to be sup-
ported out of conviction by the Germans them-
selves, and not be forced. Moreover they needed
to be “an integral part of a general program of
reform that included a fundamental change and
improvement of the basic economic conditions,
for, after all, it was considered to be self-evident
that political democracy is viable only where the
basic necessities of life are guaranteed.“ 215
Reeducation under OMGUS 53
The terms reeducation and its German translation
Umerziehung refer to the idea of redefining the
“spiritual and cultural values of the German peo-
ple“ during the American occupation. 216 The goal
of reeducation was to “make clear to the Germans,
on an intellectual and emotional level, the underly-
ing ideas, principles, and attitudes of democratic
coexistence“. 217 The usage was not clearly defined,
so that we might understand democratization to
refer to the goal and reeducation to refer to the
means of getting there. Through reeducation the
(adult or young) student was to be convinced by
his American teacher that the democratic way of
life was the one to be preferred. The lost demo-
cratic tradition in Germany was a starting point for
this process, though a weak one.
The idea that the population of a conquered
state can be led to a democratic attitude and to
a liberal/democratic form of society by means of
pedagogical measures is based on the Americans’
unshakable faith that the world can be changed,
on their trust in the effectiveness of human educa-
tion and on “the conviction that human beings are
perfectible“. 218 The missionary idea was that the
“victorious [American] nation wanted to show the
vanquished nation the way to a better political
future“. 219
There are interpretations which point out that one
should “by no means […] assume that occupation
policy developed in a linear fashion in the direction
of reeducation“ 220, for “the Americans [gave] abso-
lute priority to economic unification, lowering
costs, collaboration with France, a market econo-
my, anticommunism, and the containment of the
Soviet Union“. 221 Possibly this is an exaggerated
viewpoint and the representation of an artificial
alternative, for a democratic Germany was the sine
qua non for an economically stable Germany, rec-
onciliation with France, a Western European
accord, and finally a limit to far-reaching Soviet
influence. Without a doubt, however, one cannot
make generalizations about American reeduca-
tion, because during the occupation period the
motives behind U.S. policy changed and the
Americans pursued a wide range of interests that
determined their actions and political goals. Some
of these interests dominated their actions only at
times, as the example of denazification shows. As
we know, that was contingent on the mood of the
American public and on the configuration of for-
eign policy decisions. No matter how important
reeducation was for US policies regarding reedu-
cation and Germany, the Americans did not lose
sight of their interests. John Gimbel sees a demo-
cratic Germany as only one goal among several.
He explains that the reason people had the im-
pression that the reeducation policy had prece-
 Prehistory
54 dence is that “the Americans gave reasons for and
justified the principles and methods that were ob-
viously meant to help them achieve fundamental
American objectives in highly idealistic terms. […]
Hence the persistent belief that the realization of
American ideals is the actual goal of occupation
policy.“ 222
The main attention of reeducation was aimed at
the German education system. 223 The (failed)
reform of the school system was one of the most
notable attempts to adapt American expertise as
regards democracy to German circumstances:
“Especially in American discussions during the
war, the education system played a central part.
Hitler had proved that the success of an ideology
largely depended, among other things, on its ac-
ceptance by young people.“ 224 That was why a
radical reform of the entire education system was
considered to be the pivotal point in the democra-
tization of Germany. Only if the young, “who, in the
opinion of the Americans, had been especially vul-
nerable to National Socialist ideology, [could be]
won for democracy”, Germany would continue to
be a democratic, dependable, and peaceful state
within the Western world. 225
Before the Zook Report had been restated, in
the spring of 1947, as new directives, the OMGUS
reeducation specialists had limited themselves
largely to closing, reopening, and denazifying insti-
tutions of learning. Now, for the rest of 1947, they
increased their efforts. In Directive JCS 1779 reed-
ucation is described as one of the primary means
of creating a democratic and peaceful Germany.
One of the central statements reads as follows:
“They will see to it that the authorities in the Ger-
man Länder accept and implement education pro-
grams intended to develop a healthy democratic
education system, in which every student accord-
ing to his talent has the same opportunities.“ 226
Reeducation was to affect not only curricula, but
also teaching methods and the organization of
both individual teaching institutions and the entire
system. But as early as 1948 the fundamental po-
sition was revised once more: Instead of giving the
Germans orders, they were now expected to con-
vince them. 227 Not until July 1948 did OMGUS try
to coordinate the activities of all divisions that
were involved in reeducation. 228
By this time, however, it was much too late for a
fundamental reform of the institutions and curric-
ula of the education system: “The initial élan was
gone, and so was the receptivity of many Germans
for new ideas and concepts“ 229; the old German
universities seemed to have been transported back
into the time before 1933. 230 A 1948 American
study, in a tone of resignation, speaks of the same
difficulties and challenges that educators had
been complaining of in vain for the last three
years: “But the reform of German education in-
volves much more than the elimination of Nazism;
it involves the creation of a democratic philosophy
of education, a democratic plan of school organ-
ization and democratic practices, because German
education never was democratic. […] There was
before Hitler and now is a sincere minority of Ger-
man liberal educational leaders who have the
democratic point of view. They are the people who
have supplied for the most part the leadership in
the school reform movement, which is making
increasing teachers [sic] and shows real promise
for the future. […] Perhaps the basic difficulty in
the reform of German education is in the fact that
the philosophy of German education is inconsist-
ent with democratic principles. It is also inconsist-
ent with modern educational psychology. Since
real progress is dependent upon changes in the
philosophy and psychology of teachers, this con-
flict might be regarded as a basic difficulty. A sec-
ond basic difficulty is involved in the lack of inter-
est or concern about research on the part of the
typical German educator. As a result, there is little
inclination to submit their philosophical assump-
tions and psychological beliefs to objective investi-
gation.“ 231 These special difficulties were intensi-
fied still more by the basic tendency of many Ger-
mans “to put the blame for the desperate postwar
situation exclusively on the victors. There was a
widely held view that everything would quickly
improve greatly if only the Germans could take
their destinies in their own hands again. […] Con-
fidence in the Western occupying powers contin-
ued to decrease. While in September 1946, ac-
cording to American surveys, 43 percent still felt
that the Allies were promoting the reconstruction
of Germany, in January 1948 only 30 percent of
those surveyed expressed this view.“ 232
In addition to the reform of the education sys-
tem, the Americans devoted themselves to reed-
ucation with the help of a profusion of programs:
policies regarding the press, radio, and informa-
tion, control of theater and music, exchange pro-
grams, information about modern American cul-
ture and lifestyle, and organization of political
events, discussions, exhibitions, and question-
and-answer sessions. The lectures organized by
Otl Aicher from August through December 1945
on the immediate past and on dealing with the
near future were possible only because, so short a
time after the war, the Americans urgently intended
to inform the German population about the last
years, confront them with National Socialist atroc-
ities, and prevent possible feelings of resignation
and apathy. At the same time, in the late summer
of 1945, “a movement began to spread in the
Western zones that, under the aegis of the ‘cultu-
ral renewal’ program, advocated those same vol-
untary ‘cultural changes’“. 233 To be sure, the con-
cerns of this movement were basically diametrical-
ly opposed to the interests of the Americans. In
the face of the enormity of the catastrophe that lay
behind them, these zealous proponents of culture
retreated to a past that was sublime beyond all
doubt. Goethe, Beethoven, Hegel, and Luther were
very popular when it came to creating undisput-
able values and symbols. Hand in hand with this
went a retreat from politics, back to the “inner” val-
ues. But “that type of ‘cultural renewal’ was not
what the Americans had in mind. For one, this Ger-
man cultural movement turned primarily to the
past and created nothing new itself, and secondly
and more importantly, it was not able to create the
synthesis between culture and politics that the
Americans had propagated, pointing to their own
form of society as an example. That synthesis was
to take place roughly as follows: Politics, for citi-
zens, would become part of their personal cul-
ture“ 234 – their retreat from politics as part of a cul-
tural movement of inwardness was exactly the
opposite of what the Americans wanted to happen
in Germany.
OMGUS had established local liaison offices
throughout the entire occupation zone. On 26
August 1945, 49 officers and soldiers were work-
ing in Ulm; their number quickly dropped to 38 by
6 January 1946; only 8 were left on 30 June 1946,
and finally, in June 1948, there were 5. 235 From the
very beginning the local liaison officers looked for
“contact on all levels to local functionaries“. 236 It is
true that initially this contact was strictly limited to
persons whose politics and character appeared
reliable to the Americans. Only later did they ex-
pand the circle of those whose advice they lis-
tened to. Because of his past and his personality,
Otl Aicher was one of the few in Württemberg who
had access to the officers immediately after the
American invasion, although he was not a func-
tionary. 237 The Americans’ contact with individuals
to whom they transferred responsibility was in line
with the idea that priority should be given to sup-
porting the cultural projects of individual persons.
In American discussions, the image was frequently
used that over the past years the Germans had
suffered from an illness. Thus therapy required not
only the patient’s insight but also his voluntary and
active cooperation. However, the American cultu-
ral officers were also confident “that the Germans
themselves would spontaneously set in motion a
process of democratization and reform in educa-
tion. Therefore it was strongly recommended to
the US officers involved in reeducation that they
take up and support what the Germans themselves
proposed.“ 238 The example of the lectures organ-
ized by Otl Aicher shows that the projects of indi-
vidual, politically irreproachable persons were ap-
proved. If it turned out that the project was in ac- 55
cordance with the American reeducation policy
and accepted by the population, there were no
obstructions to continuing support, as can be seen
in the case of the promotion of the Ulm Adult Edu-
cation Center. As early as 1945 one of the discus-
sion topics was that in the reeducation process,
the Americans would have to rely on projects by
individuals: “The American conviction that after a
phase of ‘management by non-Germans’ reedu-
cation would have to be taken in hand by the Ger-
mans themselves for it to have a lasting and deeper
effect was first formulated for education and the
arts on 4 September 1945.“ 239 It was clear to the
responsible specialists that they could only offer
suggestions and that as far as content and struc-
ture went the reform of the educational system
had to come from the Germans themselves. 240
Incidentally, reeducation was one of the few
measures upon which all four victorious powers
could initially agree. 241 In the case of Directive no.
54 of the Allied Control Council of 25 June 1947,
a binding education directive for all zones was
even passed. 242 While it no longer affected the
actual policy, the fact alone that it had been ac-
complished is quite amazing, for “it is common
knowledge that the views of the victorious powers
regarding the substance and nature of democratic
ideas diverged significantly“. 243
To many Germans, any form of publicly decreed
education seemed to lack credibility, since not
very long ago they had been exposed to years of
state Nazi propaganda. Another reason they were
suspicious of the American measures was that the
Morgenthau Plan was notorious and had met with
inner resistance, even though it had hardly any
effect on reeducation. Besides, Germans consid-
ered themselves to be superior to the Americans
where culture was concerned (less so when it
came to economic and technological, or political
matters): “Only one out of three teenagers and, as
it says in a report, even fewer adults were of the
opinion that the Germans could learn very much
from the Americans in the realm of education.“ 244
It is not surprising, then, that as early as March
1946 the general feeling was, “We’re sick and
tired of anything that smacks of ‘education’ (or
‘reeducation’, for that matter).“ 245
Furthermore, reeducation had to struggle with
a serious dilemma: Democracy had to be put into
effect by a military government, in other words by
means of methods that included compulsion or
were sometimes undemocratic. The risk was that
tolerance – typical for a democracy – would be
reduced to absurdity. Also many Germans initially
appeared to have become involved in reeducation
not from a genuine interest, but only because they
had the impression that the military government
had ordered the population to participate in partic-
 Prehistory
56 ular programs. OMGUS was only making a virtue
of necessity when it concentrated on promoting
the projects of individual Germans, referred to as
a “Munchhausen trick”: “Through their own reedu-
cation they were to grab themselves by the hair
and pull themselves from the bog of National So-
cialism.“ 246 But there was still the fundamental
contradiction: The military government gave with
one hand what it took back with the other. A well-
known example is the revocation of Hans Werner
Richter’s and Alfred Andersch’s publishing license
for their periodical Der Ruf: “The goal of practicing
democracy in public political debate presupposed
the possibility of free speech. In principle Germans
certainly were granted free speech, but this free-
dom was at the same time considerably curtailed:
Those who dared to go too far in their critique of
Allied policies risked losing their allotment of pa-
per or at the very least risked having it curtailed.
For the time being, democratic freedoms contin-
ued to be administered in careful doses.“ 247
Zero-hour literature, Hans Werner Richter
One of the lecturers at the Ulm Adult Education
Center 248 was Hans Werner Richter. He will be re-
membered in postwar history as a political publicist
and literary figure. Together with Alfred Andersch,
from August 1946 until April 1947, he published
the periodical Der Ruf – unabhängige Blätter der
jungen Generation (The Call – Independent Paper
of the Young Generation), whose objectives were
primarily political and only secondarily literary. 249
Like the new foundation of the Ulm Adult Educa-
tion Center, Der Ruf is another outstanding exam-
ple of the atmosphere of change that character-
ized cultural life “particularly in the first years after
the war“ and that “was an expression of a new –
albeit often vague – political consciousness“. 250
Hans Werner Richter and Alfred Andersch con-
densed it into the unconventional political concept
that in the future a humanistic socialism must find
acceptance, an ideology based on the freedom of
the individual: “strict opposition to the political and
pedagogical mistakes of the occupying powers,
use of criticism as a democratic weapon, a decla-
ration of belief in a radical interpretation of de-
mocracy that in its yearning for freedom reached
the utmost limits of individualism“. 251 They vehe-
mently rejected traditional orthodox Marxism as
op-posed to “socialism with a human face” (Al-
fred Andersch) that a new European elite was to
create.
At zero hour, one of the most widely used con-
temporary metaphors for the end of the war, all
Germans saw the balance sheet of the past twelve
years of despotism. In the face of the ruined cities
and a society whose values and points of refer-
ence had been destroyed, the intellectuals had
hoped that at zero hour the Germans would have
the strength for moral change and a radical re-
newal: “The moral, intellectual , and ethical heap
of rubble that a truly ‘lost’ generation has left
behind for them [for the young generation; au-
thor’s note] has been growing until it is insur-
mountable and appears to be larger than the one
visible in reality. […] At the sight of it any possibil-
ity of establishing a link to the past, any attempt to
start where an older generation left off in 1933
when it abandoned its continuous course of devel-
opment to capitulate in the face of an irrational
adventure, seems like a paradox. Today the young-
er generation feels that the only way out of the
distorted view of life, the violent experiences they
endured and were shaken by, appears to be spirit-
ual rebirth by beginning, absolutely and radically,
all over again.“ 252
Landscapes covered with rubble – the outward
appearance of Germany – and a society produced
by the breakdown – its inner image: This was the
tabula rasa (another metaphor frequently used to
characterize the situation). Germany, says one au-
thor, has reached rock bottom in every respect,
and the point where “existence starts, is also
where literature starts“. 253 From this point on, free
from all burdens now that everything had been
destroyed, there opened up the rare opportunity
for a fresh start for Germany, a chance to develop
into a country of freedom, humanism, science, cul-
ture, truth, and peace. All mistakes made in the
past which had led to the catastrophe of National
Socialism could now be corrected, the Germans
could finally learn from history, could establish
connecting links with the weak liberal and demo-
cratic traditions of the German past and critically
question the motivation of all actions, while servil-
ity, faith in authority, unquestioning obedience to
authority figures, militarism, and antisemitism
must be eradicated once and for all.
Many intellectuals who were published in Der Ruf
or in Frankfurter Hefte hoped that Germany would
find and follow the third way, that of a truly social-
ist democracy, between the two unloved super-
powers. The fact that people abroad accused Ger-
many and set themselves up as judges felt like
a hypocritical diversion tactic to Hans Werner
Richter and many other writers, meant to salve
their own bad conscience, because for all those
years the many reports by exiles and refugees
that warned and asked for help had not been
taken seriously. As Richter saw it, the Allies were
to blame for not having intervened earlier against
their own better judgment. If they now con-
demned the Germans with their thesis of the col-
lective guilt of all Germans, there was the threat of
meting out revenge instead of justice. Instead of
lumping all Germans together with a conqueror’s
arrogance and audacity, Hans Werner Richter de-
manded, the Allies should punish the guilty for
their personal failure and for the crimes they had
actually committed so that they would be able to
have insight into their behavior.
Der Ruf took a political position, in which “left-
wing Catholic, reform socialist and critical liberal“
movements shared the common viewpoint "that
with the Third Reich fascism, the traditional mid-
dle-class social order, and the capitalist form of
production had been destroyed and must now be
replaced by new, more humane forms.” Hans Wer-
ner Richter shared his reflections not only with
many intellectuals 254, but, as we have seen, with
the founders of the Ulm Adult Education Center.
But the members of the Ulm circle are the last
people who can be accused of standing by and
doing nothing, something most of the other
spokespersons of “rock-bottom (Nullpunkt) think-
ing“ 255 were blamed for: “The existentially tinged,
pompous image of a radical start from scratch
often lifts the concepts of zero hour out of their
actual social connections. The actual conditions
under which actions take place and the interests
of contemporaries are left behind; concepts move
in the ahistorical space of what is universally hu-
man, calling for a ‘new mankind’. Hardly ever is
there an attempt to connect concepts with pres-
ent-day reality.“ 256 Here, the working teams at the
Ulm Adult Education Center were an exception.
From the very start, Der Ruf had been conducting
a discussion about the renewal and reopening of
the universities, from which, it was hoped, a spirit-
ually reoriented elite would emerge within a few
years to be the cornerstone of a new society. “It
was everyone’s fondest hope that a renewed Ger-
man university could at least help to show the way
out of the omnipresent cultural and social plight;
its reformed teachings could become the deter-
mining Zeitgeist of tomorrow and help shape an
attitude of mind in future politicians, teachers,
priests and clergy, and many parents that would
make it impossible for the past ever to be repeat-
ed again.“ 257 Karl Jaspers had started discussions
when, in his keynote address at the opening of
Heidelberg University’s school of medicine on 15
August 1945 he developed “the idea of a univer-
sity whose objective was once again a ‘whole per-
son’, a universally educated person“. 258 He pub-
lished papers on the topic in Der Ruf as well, em-
phasizing that it was necessary to “take back the
university to the original universitas litterarum, a
university that represented universality“ 259 – an
idea that Inge Scholl and Otl Aicher had of course
been pursuing in the Ulm Adult Education Center.
However, among students there was as little inter-
est in reforms as among university teachers and
among the officials of the ministries for education
and the arts. What happened was that “the col-
leges and universities were revived following Wei- 57
mar-period models“. 260 One indication of the mood
among students is the fact that on 2 November
1946 no more than 50 out of 7,000 registered stu-
dents in Munich remembered the victims of the
student resistance movement at a commemoration
ceremony in the great hall of the Ludwig Maximi-
lian University. 261 That is why Der Ruf demanded
that middle-class students, “who so obtrusively
[determined] the anachronistic scene at German
universities“ 262, must be roused from their apathy
through competition, as young people from other
classes of society were given access to the institu-
tions of higher learning. At least temporarily, the
article suggested, the Abitur should no longer be
used as a university entrance requirement. But
nothing at all was done along the lines of these
reflections. In November 1946 Nikolaus Sombart
noted with resignation that “German universities
had gone back to the ‘old outdated models’“. In
issue no. 12, February 1947, the editors of Der Ruf
had “anachronistic hopes” that socialist counter-
universities would be founded 263 – a reference to
the fact that Hans Werner Richter was willing to
assist in founding an educational institution in
which his sociopolitical ideas could be turned into
a reality.
The first issue of Der Ruf was published on 15
August 1946; there was a new issue every fort-
night until 1 April 1947, a total of 16. Starting with
issue no. 4 more than 100,000 copies were sold.
With their mistrust of parties and ideologies, their
own characteristic views regarding the form of the
future economy and reparations, the authors of
Der Ruf followed no party line. They criticized the
Western Allies’ thesis of the collective guilt of the
Germans and the “hypocritical undertones and
contradictions of the American democratization
program“ 264, and also criticized “the socialist prac-
tices of the Russian military government’s dogmat-
ic Marxism“ 265. When, on 1 April 1947, Hans Wer-
ner Richter published “one of his sharpest attacks
on the American occupation policy“ 266 and ac-
cused it of being primarily concerned with restor-
ing the economy, the Information Control Division
of the military government shortly thereafter tem-
porarily withdrew Der Ruf’s publication license. 267
This ban has been condemned in the literature as
a shortsighted subordination of the democratiza-
tion program to the politics of the day, because
the political tendency of Der Ruf had not changed
since the first issue. 268
Again, in September 1947 Hans Werner Richter
was denied permission to publish a new satirical-
literary magazine Der Skorpion, a successor of Der
Ruf. "What was to be done with the many fine arti-
cles that no one would now get to read? Then a
simple solution occurred to Richter: Why, the au-
 Prehistory
58 thors could read their articles aloud to each other
and then talk about them. The meeting, which
Richter improvised rather than actually organized,
was, as literary histories tell us, the ‘birth’ of ‘Grup-
pe 47’.“ 269 Subsequently, thanks to the organiza-
tional talent of Hans Werner Richter, Gruppe 47,
considered “until its end in 1967 ‘the literary cen-
ter of the avant-garde of those years’“, came into
being. 270
It should not come as a surprise that fifteen
years later Hans Werner Richter set great store by
the fact that it was not literary figures who had
created a group so important for postwar German
literature, “but rather politically committed journal-
ists with literary ambitions“. 271 The members of
Gruppe 47 also identified with the tradition of
“zero-level” thinking. The emotional impact of a
fresh start, of the zero hour, was part of “the liber-
al tradition that believed in human freedom of de-
cision and action and in choice free from repres-
sion, led by reason.“ 272 In 1947 every one of these
parameters was sadly restricted, and that is what
constituted the challenging fascination, but also
the hopeful naiveté of this utopia. The “third alter-
native” 273 they dreamed about continues to be one
of the biggest and longest-lasting sociopolitical
illusions of the postwar period, and with the help
of the Gruppe 47 forum it went on long after it was
first formulated.
Regarding the idea of a European humanistic elite,
Hans Werner Richter in a brief summary said that
he and the members of Gruppe 47 had started
with the idea that before there was a democrati-
zation of German society, a “democratic elite
needed to form in the area of literature and jour-
nalism”: “Their basic concept was that a demo-
cratic ‘elite’ would be formed. Their assumption
was that democracy is a method of human social
life that is most difficult to put into practice. […]
First the teachers, then those they would teach;
first the formation of democratic elites, then the
reeducation of the masses. They believed that
democratic thinking could only be passed down
from above to those below, not from below to
those above, and especially not if people again felt
subservient – this time toward the occupying pow-
ers.“ 274 This view was also advocated from the first
plans for a Hans and Sophie Scholl College in the
beginning of 1950 until the pedagogical rough
draft for the HfG. Inge Scholl and Otl Aicher never
denied, on the contrary, they defended as a con-
viction the fact that high educational standards
depend on rigorous selection and a favorable
faculty-student ratio. 275
Six weeks after their first meeting Gruppe 47
met on Saturday, 8 November 1947 and Sunday, 9
November 1947, in Herrlingen near Ulm. 276 The 17
participants included Inge Scholl. On Sunday eve-
ning her father, the mayor, invited the writers to
dinner “in the town hall of the half-ruined city of
Ulm, a building towering solitary above a waste-
land of rubble“ 277. After the meal Alfred Andersch
read his essay Literatur in der Entscheidung (Liter-
ature in the balance), the only essay ever read
aloud to Gruppe 47. 278 Because the original reason
for the meetings was to prepare Skorpion as the
successor publication of Der Ruf, the hundred
copies of the trial issue were distributed on these
two days. 279
Gruppe 47 became the authority among critical
voices warning that a historical opportunity had
been missed. Its members saw themselves in a
Federal Republic that had not had the courage to
make a new beginning, but had instead chosen to
continue questionable traditions, and they viewed
the development of their society in the light of the
dictum that “restoration [was] characteristic of the
times” (Walter Dirks). In spite of everything, in
spite of congenital defects and failings and the
oppressive claustrophobia of the Adenauer era
that made their life in the Federal Republic so
unbearable, they felt they were the conscience of
the nation and pointedly clung to the unrealized
potentials of their zero hour.
Studio zero, old and new universities
The merger of the three western occupation zones
had been prepared by the agreement between the
American Secretary of State and the British For-
eign Secretary, on 2 December 1946, to establish
the British-American Zone. 280 Half a year later, on
5 June 1947, the American Secretary of State,
George Marshall, in a speech at Harvard Univer-
sity, discussed the essential features of the Mar-
shall Plan that were named after him. 281 Foreign
policy after the beginning of the Cold War began
to take to task the democratic reform of German
society because Germany would now need to be
tied to the West permanently and firmly in order
to “strengthen the Western alliance in a possible
confrontation with the Soviet Union and to prevent
a return to circumstances between the wars. This
meant that from the U.S. perspective a German
seesaw policy or the neutralization of Germany
that could only end in Soviet dominance had to be
ruled out on principle.“ 282
On 3 April 1948, American President Harry S.
Truman signed the Foreign Assistance Act, after
which financial aid flowed to Germany via the Eco-
nomic Commission Administration (ECA).
Otl Aicher, Inge Scholl, and several of their
friends who had already made their appearance
when the Adult Education Center was founded –
including Helga and Herbert Wiegandt, Elisabeth
Scholl, her husband Fritz Hartnagel, Herbert Hohen-
emser – met in 1948 “in a small group, perhaps
once a month, and discussed texts by individual
participants“. 283 There are grounds for the assump-
tion that the experiences of Gruppe 47 had occa-
sioned this unusual type of private meetings. The
group called itself Studio Null (Studio Zero).
At least two sources document this group. One,
probably the earlier of the two, emphasizes the
“legacy of Hans and Sophie Scholl and their group“:
“Studio Zero is simply an attempt to erect a com-
pletely new, better structure on the cleared site
after the Scholls’ first objective, the elimination of
despotism in Germany, has been achieved.“ 284 The
tenor of the text is very general, and is worded as
an appeal. Otl Aicher, Inge Scholl, and Herbert
Hohenemser, in the face of “economic hardship
and renewed flare-ups of nationalist and cultural
reaction“, aimed to fight against the growing res-
ignation they observed in their fellow men. They
wanted to grasp the “positive opportunities of this
era”, translate new proposals into action, boost the
courage of like-minded contemporaries with their
energetic example, and not give way without a
struggle to the forces who believed in restoring old
models. This unpublished appeal gives some indi-
cation of the Ulm mentality, their resistance to a
general disillusionment among German intellectu-
als in all areas of culture: “The initial optimism –
even though not really well developed – soon
turns to resignation. The scope of action, which
people felt was there only recently, seems to have
disappeared again.“ 285
The second document is dated 16 August 1948.
This is about a concrete concern: the setting up of
an “educational institute”, a “cultural center” that is
to be called the new school. 286 An idea that had
already made its appearance in Gruppe 47 around
Hans Werner Richter served as the starting point
for the plans: Democracy, it was felt, could only
become a form of government in Germany, and
over and above this, a way of life if it was not con-
structed from the top down as was happening at
the moment; rather, “a democracy […] must start
with the common people. Democracy is only gen-
uine if it implies the self-government of the peo-
ple.“ The school would devote itself to “dealing
with practical problems“, since this would be a
way of awakening political consciousness, which
would “get rid of servility and give people confi-
dence in their own initiative“. Its scope was to in-
clude four stages; the first two (technical college,
the natural sciences) were to deal with the world,
while the last two (general education: from philos-
ophy to art; culture, understood as a process of
formation and education) were to focus on the
individual. There was no attempt to deny the sim-
ilarity to the work of adult education.
It is not certain whether Hans Werner Richter
was involved in this project. At the very least the
resemblance to his ideas is striking, especially
because as early as February 1947 Der Ruf had ex- 59
pressed a demand that new institutions of higher
learning should be founded and take a stand
against the tendency to serve up a mere rehash of
the old institutions. One other detail is remarkable
because it played a role in the early planning
stages of the HfG: Otl Aicher already had his eye
on a site for the new school, the former Wehr-
macht fort on Kuhberg, a short distance outside
Ulm. Only Max Bill’s energetic protest made him
change his mind about his intention to use the site
and what was left of the building as the core of a
new college, creating something new from the old.–
This first tangible attempt by Inge Scholl and Otl
Aicher to extend the sphere of activity of the Adult
Education Center institutionally failed as a result of
the Allied currency reform on Monday, 21 June
1948: “The devaluation thwarted [their] plans.“ 287
No further details are known about this. Presum-
ably the problems the adult education center
encountered because of Operation Dog first had
to be solved before it was possible to consider a
second educational institution. Now what little
money people had became valuable, because
they could use it to buy goods they had had to
do without for such a long time. Who could spare
money for education if they could get butter for it?
The adult education center lost 800 students, and
had to cope with the devaluation of its reserve
funds. 288
The Soviet government reacted to the currency
reform in its own way: With the beginning of the
blockade of Berlin on 24 June 1948 it intensified
the East-West conflict.
The American educators who wanted to reform
German colleges and universities under the aegis
of OMGUS found fault with many factors that in
their view contributed to these institutions not
breaking with the state of affairs they had inherited
from the Weimar Republic: conservative profes-
sors who yearned for the past; the world and the
perspective of the ivory tower (i. e. distance from
reality and from practical experience); the numeri-
cal weakness and lack of importance of the social
sciences; overspecialization, and an emphasis on
purely technical competence; oligarchic rule of full
professors in the university senate; the isolation of
students, and the distance between students and
faculty. At any rate, by the summer semester of
1947 as many as 77,507 students were registered
in Germany. For the most part they studied under
inadequate conditions: The buildings were in ruins
or damaged; there was a total lack of student
housing; while there was a general shortage of
teachers, and many of those who did teach were
superannuated to boot, there were too many stu-
dents. 289
 Prehistory
60 The report of the Zook Commission had already
been the topic of discussions in June 1946 during
the Marburger Hochschulgespräche (Marburg
Discussions about Higher Education), and in No-
vember 1946 at the first gathering of university
presidents of the American Zone, in Heidelberg.
The modernization of curricula, changes in the stu-
dent body, and the democratization of universities
continued to be topics that had timeless relevance.
Nothing could change that fact, not even the study
commission for university reform in Hamburg –
i. e., in the British Zone – which presented its ex-
pert opinion on university reform, the so-called
Blaues Gutachten (Blue Report) in 1948. 290 While
this summary of 95 recommendations triggered
violent debates, the reform of the educational
system continued to be a burden that the military
government passed on to its successor, the High
Commissioner’s department, for that agency to
deal with in the years to come: “The founding of
the Freie Universität Berlin (Free University of Ber-
lin), the outstanding example of American univer-
sity policy, should thus not be mistaken for an
especially active overall university policy by
OMGUS.“ 291
Reorientation with HICOG
The Constitution of the Federal Republic of Ger-
many was proclaimed on 23 May 1949, and took
effect on the next day. A few weeks later, on 1
July 1949, John J. McCloy arrived in Germany to
become the military governor, and soon thereafter
took office as the American high commissioner. 292
John McCloy, married to the German American
Ellen Zinsser (a distant relative of Konrad Adenauer
– her grandfather had emigrated from Germany in
1848), was a man who believed in balance, per-
sonal dialogue, and mediation; not least he was a
friend of Germany and an authority on European
culture. He had studied at Amherst College, had
gotten to know Germany in 1919 as a soldier of the
Allied occupying forces, graduated from Harvard
University Law School, and, since 1921, he had
been practicing law on Wall Street. As a partner in
a law firm he had spent 1930/31 in Paris and had
then commuted between New York and many
European countries until the outbreak of World
War II. Because of the knowledge he had gained
in the process, particularly of the German military
and espionage system, he was appointed under-
secretary of state in the Defense Department in
1941. In February 1947 he rose to the rank of the
president of the World Bank. In July 1949 he re-
signed this post when US President Harry S. Tru-
man asked him to become the first high commis-
sioner in Germany. From the start John McCloy felt
his function was to convince, not to dictate. 293
In the hotel on Petersberg, the seat of the Allied
High Commission high above the Rhine, he and his
British and French colleagues, Sir Brian Robertson
and André François-Poncet, handed the Occupa-
tion Statute to Konrad Adenauer, who accepted it
as the Federal Chancellor of the civil government
coalition elected on 14 August 1949. 294 At 12:15
p.m. authority for the American Zone passed over
from the US Department of Defense to the Depart-
ment of State and thus from OMGUS to HICOG
(High Commission for Germany).
At the end of 1948 OMGUS organized a confer-
ence that partially initiated the transfer of authority
to its successor institution HICOG. At this confer-
ence, which met in Berchtesgaden from 7 through
12 October 1848, representatives of the Education
and Cultural Relations Division discussed the fu-
ture of their reeducation program – and it was al-
ready obvious that this future was not in the hands
of OMGUS. They arrived at ten general principles.
These included a reemphasis of the idea that the
reform could be carried out only by the Germans:
“Education must not restrict itself to the cultural
heritage of the past, but must also include teach-
ing social behaviors. […] Instead of promoting a
structural reform, as it had until then, the educa-
tion program was to focus more strongly on intel-
lectual, moral and spiritual renewal.“ 295 Finally,
expressions such as reeducation (Umerziehung),
which could be misunderstood and had no credit
among Germans, were to be avoided: „In the days
of OMGUS (military government) the objective
was generally referred to as reeducation […]. The
word had an arrogant and slightly naive ring to it.
Under HICOG (high commission) it became ‘reo-
rientation‘. It was more than a change of label.
Reorientation terminated political and educational
reform by military fiat. It not only permitted but
called for the participation of men and women,
and particularly of youth, throughout the whole
spectrum of German society.“ 296
The directive of the Department of State to John
McCloy of 17 November 1949 formed the basis
of American policy in the Federal Republic; it re-
mained in force until the Bonn Convention was
signed in May of 1952 and superseded Directive
JCS 1779. The objective continued to be the de-
mocratization of German society, but circumstances
had changed. 297 The new concept of reorientation
suggested that the original, overly ambitious stand-
ards had been given up in favor of moderate and
unpretentious expectations. Nonetheless what
was important for the Americans was the whole
person, a new attitude: “‘The reorientation of the
German people towards democracy is the basic
purpose of your government’s efforts to help de-
velop and strengthen democratic government in
Germany and to prepare the integration of Germa-
ny in the European community of nations‘. […] The
new policy – ‘to advise and assist the German
Exposés for a
Geschwister-Scholl-Hochschule
(Hans and Sophie Scholl College)
1949 –1950
Date Title
8. Dec. 1949 Die Ulmer Volkshochschule gilt als eine people with respect to democratization‘ – by no 61
der besten Volkshochschulen in Deutschland
[The Ulm Adult Education Center is considered means meant that the original objective had been
to be one of the best adult education centers in Germany] abandoned. McCloy fully agreed with this view
Dec. 1949 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung and at the beginning of 1950 argued that now that
zur Errichtung einer Geschwister-Scholl-Schule
[Hans and Sophie Scholl Foundation the Federal Republic had been founded, in view of
to establish a Hans and Sophie Scholl College] the East-West conflict, ‘a reorientation of the Ger-
Dec. 1949 Exposé zur Gründung einer man mentality (mind) was necessary’.“ 298 To
Geschwister-Scholl-Hochschule ( Arbeitstitel )
[Exposé to found a achieve this goal HICOG directed its efforts largely
Hans and Sophie Scholl College (working title)] toward implementing political, social, and educa-
4/ 26 Jan. 1950 Geschwister Scholl Hochschule tional projects together with German forces for
[the yellow program]
Feb. 1950 Geschwister Scholl Hochschule reform. These projects were to prevent the authori-
An active school for science, art and politics in Germany tarian, hierarchical social order of the German
( a project ) Empire and the Weimar Republic from finding a
20 March 1950 Geschwister Scholl Hochschule
31 March 1950 Geschwister Scholl Hochschule foothold in Germany once more. It was not yet
April 1950 Geschwister Scholl Hochschule possible to tell how lasting the first democratic
May 1950 Entwurf beginnings would be; there was widespread
Anhang zum Ausbildungsprogramm
Beantwortung der Fragen von John P. Steiner doubt. – In the Occupation Statute matters related
[Draft to education were not included in the reserved
Appendix of the educational program rights of the Allies: They became the sole respon-
Response to John P. Steiner’s questions]
May 1950 Wie kann die Geschwister-Scholl-Hochschule sibility of the Germans. In section 3 the Allies
beim Aufbau eines freien demokratischen Volkes mithelfen? made a vaguely worded proviso: “The occupation
[How can the Geschwister-Scholl-Hochschule authorities, however, reserve the right, acting un-
help build a free democratic nation?]
Spring 1950 Suggested report for proposed der instructions of their governments, to resume,
Geschwister-Scholl-Hochschule in whole or in part, the exercise of full authority if
2 May 1950 Geschwister Scholl Hochschule/Ulm they consider that to do so is essential to security
Graduate School of Design
8 May 1950 Geschwister Scholl Hochschule ( engl.) or to preserve democratic government in Germany
[incl. Ausgangspunkt/point of departure] or in pursuance of the international obligations of
12 July 1950 Geschwister Scholl Hochschule their governments. Before so doing they will for-
[handwritten version incl. 3 diagrams]
1 August 1950 Geschwister-Scholl-Hochschule mally advise the appropriate German authorities of
Vorentwurf des Antrags an HICOM [!] their decision and the reasons therefore.“ 299 Since
[preliminary draft of application to HICOG] the path to the legislative competences was thus
7 August 1950 Geschwister-Scholl-Hochschule
1950 Was will die Geschwister-Scholl-Hochschule? blocked, HICOG could succeed in changing any-
[What does the Geschwister-Scholl-Hochschule want?] thing in the German educational system only by
1950 Entwurf zu einem Exposé für das Forschungsinstitut convincing the German authorities.
[Draft for a Exposé for the research institute]
1950 Wissenschaftliche Arbeit an der Geschwister-Scholl-Hochschule HICOG consisted of eight agencies: one each
[Scientific work at the Geschwister-Scholl-Hochschule] for economic, political, public, and employment-
1950 Merkblatt related matters, and a legal affairs department;
Auf welche Weise kann der Aufbau der
Geschwister-Scholl-Hochschule unterstützt werden? there was also the military security council, news
[Note service, and administration; and finally, the office
How can the organization process of the managing secretary and the liaison office
of the Geschwister-Scholl-Hochschule be supported?]
30 Sept. 1950 Geschwister-Scholl-Hochschule that maintained contact with the kreis resident
Entwurf für Werbebroschüre officers. At the end of 1950 HICOG employed just
[Geschwister-Scholl-Hochschule under 900 Americans and 2300 Germans in its
sketch for a promotional brochure]
Frankfurt am Main headquarters; the total figure
for Germany was around 1400 Americans and
6200 Germans. The majority of the German em-
ployees (1500) worked in the administration. 300
It was not only the structures of OMGUS and of
HICOG that were different; official channels also
differed considerably. OMGUS had primarily been
a military organization, official channels took a
long time, its way of working was cumbersome,
and the bottlenecks were narrow. HICOG, on the
other hand, was primarily a civilian organization
with informal communication channels. Of the
agencies in operation, the Office of Public Affairs
was the largest with 142 American and 3345 Ger-
man employees (at the end of 1950). It consisted
of the following divisions: information services,
 Prehistory
62 press and publications, HICOG publications, radio,
film, exchange programs, education and cultural
relations, community activities, American cultural
institutes, government institutions, publicity. 301
From 1950 on, Inge Scholl’s proposal, dis-
cussed in detail below, was handled by the edu-
cation and cultural relations division 302, whose
staff, in 1950–53, was very involved in supporting
the Freie Universität Berlin (Free University of Ber-
lin). During this period it received DM 7 million,
almost half of the regular budget of the education
branch. 303 Its other responsibilities were
to improve the quality of student life (student
dormitories, student centers, job opportunities
during semester breaks, student organizing in
the general student council and in the student
administration);
to improve relations between students and pro-
fessors (pilot projects, exchange program);
to introduce the study of political and social
science in university curricula (in particular, sup-
port for the Hochschule für Arbeit, Politik und
Wirtschaft (University for Work, Politics, and
Economics) in Wilhelmshaven);
to spread the study of liberal arts at the univer-
sities: “The recent movement to educate man,
not merely as a professionally trained expert but
also as a cultured human being, is worldwide in
scope but has particular significance for Germa-
ny. As has already been pointed out, the special-
ized nature of German universities and course
offerings did not encourage a broad under-
standing of the problems of society or a deep
social concern on the parts of the professors
and students“ 304;
to promote the study of American culture, lan-
guage, and history.
These were the functions covered by the ordinary
budget. In addition the division also took care of
special projects that were not financed out of this
budget but from the special projects fund. Support
for the HfG was one of these.
After a short term when Ralph Nicholson headed
the Office of Public Affairs, Shepard Stone became
its deputy head at the end of 1949; after a few
months, he replaced Ralph Nicholson.
Shepard Stone, a graduate of Dartmouth Col-
lege, had studied at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Uni-
versität in Berlin from 1929 until 1933; among oth-
ers, he attended lectures by Theodor Heuss, and
in mid-January 1933 received his doctorate after
working with Hermann Oncken. 305 In Berlin he also
married a German woman. As an American soldier
he landed in Normandy and, for a brief period in
1945, was given the job of licensing the first
newspapers in the OMGUS district information
services command. Finally he worked as a deputy
editor of the Sunday edition of the New York
Times. In the fall of 1949, John McCloy wooed
him away from this job; originally Shepard Stone
was supposed to come to Germany for only three
months. He was keenly interested in the issues of
youth and media in the young Federal Republic,
was very familiar with Germany and its culture,
knew both the people and their mentality, counted
among his friends influential personalities, intellec-
tuals, and politicians, kept in contact with them,
particularly those who were to the left of Ade-
nauer. “McCloy and Stone quickly grew together
into a highly efficient team. From then on, Stone’s
[…] function was to be a close adviser to McCloy
as well as his press secretary and media policy
adviser, who had a considerable number of per-
sonnel at his disposal.“ 306.
In August 1949 Dr. Alonzo Grace, later the first
head of the HICOG division for education and cul-
tural relations, invited the West German university
presidents to a conference in Bad Nauheim. He
inquired as to the most pressing problems of the
universities and was told that there was a particu-
lar shortage of student dormitories and assembly
rooms, scholarship funds, and exchange programs
with institutions abroad. In the opinion of the
president of Munich University at least 60 per-
cent of the 120,000 students lived in completely
unhealthy conditions, lacking clothing and food,
social contacts, and common rooms. Small groups
of reactionary student associations were trying to
turn back the clock and reestablish traditional
ideas of isolated, antiquated, and anti-democratic
organizations; moreover, East German propagan-
da accused West Germany of neglecting its stu-
dents. 307
John McCloy was impressed by this statement
when he spoke to West German university presi-
dents in Heidelberg on 4 November 1949. He
would try to raise money for dormitories and stu-
dent centers, he promised. This was the start of
the special projects program, and its first project
was the HfG: “When the high commissioner had
ascertained that such capital expenditures were
legally possible, he became enthusiastic; and, in
subsequent discussions with his staff, his original
idea was broadened to include the possibility of
grants for projects such as community centers and
youth hostels. A general program aimed especially
at helping youth was soon visualized. DM 50 mil-
lion from GARIOA (Government and Relief in Oc-
cupied Areas) counterpart funds and $ 1 million
from funds which had been appropriated but not
committed were set aside. In order to find out
more precisely what need there was for such
expenditure in West Germany, the high commis-
sioner asked John H. Boxer of the Office of Public
Affairs to make a survey at the beginning of Janu-
ary 1950.“ 308
John McCloy called together two more confer-
ences in late 1949, where the agenda was the
long-term objectives of American policy and their
implementation in Germany. On 12 and 13 Janu-
ary1949 the kreis liaison officers met in Frankfurt.
John McCloy and Shepard Stone spoke to them
and emphasized how important they felt it was to
win over the young to democracy in order to per-
manently reform social structures. 309 – Also in
December a meeting of HICOG staff members was
scheduled in Bad Nauheim to address education
and reorientation issues. A catalogue of 57 points
summarized the results of this conference as the
objectives of the new HICOG education program;
39 of these dealt with general elementary and
secondary school education (“equalizing educa-
tional opportunities“, “democratizing the school
structure“, “democratizing school administration“,
“broadening participation in school affairs“, “social-
izing and enriching the curriculum“, “improving
learning materials, methods of instruction and
guidance“, “adapting the schools to changing con-
ditions“), while another 18 were related to the uni-
versities and the training of teachers.
These last 18 objectives included the following:
ensuring that students represented a broader so-
0cial base, developing existing universities, creat-
ing new institutions, greater flexibility of the edu-
cational system, scholarships, and support for gift-
ed low-income students by the state and by pri-
vate institutions and sponsors. 310 These points
were not new by any means, they’d been around
for years, and thus the outline documents one
aspect of the continuity of American politics. All
participants agreed that “the education program
was just as important for democratic renewal
toward creating a peace loving Germany as eco-
nomic reconstruction. The heart of this program
[…] must be the creation of social structures that
would cause people to reject a slavish trust in
authority and in the state, and the promotion of
individual abilities within the framework of a
responsible education toward social community. It
was imperative to support existing attempts at
reform.“ 311
It was precisely at this point, on 8 December
1949, that Inge Scholl wrote her first letter to
Shepard Stone asking him to help her with the
founding of a new reform-oriented school that she
and her friends were planning. The school, she
wrote, would be a liberal and modern adult educa-
tion center for young people and was intended to
counter the danger of renazification in Germany.
Perhaps, she suggested, Stone was surprised that
a school of all places would take on such a task,
but education, she felt, really did offer enormous
opportunities.
If one looks at the train of thought being pur-
sued in Shepard Stone’s very agency, these lines
read as though Inge Scholl were carrying coals to 63
Newcastle, unwittingly of course. To an extraordi-
nary degree, the project that Inge Scholl presented
in the weeks that followed satisfied the American
ideas of democratization that had been fostered
and constantly promoted in past years, but hardly
translated into action. For that very reason alone
the Ulm project was a great exception: The school
that was being planned would bring politics into
everyday life, teach democracy, provide a home,
like an American college, to an international com-
munity of teachers and students, develop a model
of an academic institution that in terms of German
circumstances was completely reformed, devote
itself intensively to social sciences and public
opinion research, participate in exploring the mass
media, information and the presentation of this
information.– No matter which entry point you
picked, Inge Scholl and her friends were battering
doors that were already open. While in the rest of
Germany the Americans had doors slammed in
their faces whenever they spoke of a reform of
educational institutions and curricula, in Ulm the
embodiment of the American politico-educational
ideal suddenly appeared on the horizon. While
there was widespread resignation because every-
where else there seemed to be a return to the old
order, in Ulm a small group tried with great vigor
and a lot of commitment not to build on the same
old past but to create something new at a time
when there was a feeling that “the Germans were
beginning to lose their receptiveness or had al-
ready lost it“. 312
Max Bill
Hardly had the Ulm Adult Education Center opened
when, in May 1946, a special issue of the monthly
journal Werk, the mouthpiece of the Bund Schwei-
zer Architekten (Association of Swiss Architects),
the Swiss Werkbund, and the Schweizerischer
Kunstverein (Swiss Society for the Promotion of
Fine Arts) published an issue devoted exclusively
to “design in industry“. 313 The issue included a de-
tailed report by Egidius Streiff about design in
Swiss industry; Sigfried Giedion wrote about
streamlined style and industrial design in the US,
and almost at the end a designer summed up, in
less than three pages, his experiences designing
industrial products. The author of this article was
the Swiss Max Bill, born in 1908, a student of the
Bauhaus, architect, sculptor, painter, publicist, and
designer of exhibitions that dealt with the connec-
tion of architecture, consumer goods, and daily
life. Among other things, he had been responsible
for the Swiss pavilion for the 1936 Milan Triennale.
In the front section of the issue there was a pic-
ture of the travel typewriter Max Bill had designed.
He explained his basic requirements regarding the
design of any industrially manufactured product
 Prehistory
64 and how he applied these in designing the “body”
of this particular typewriter. He wanted the object
to be functional and in keeping with the material
used; the products should be “not only technically
correct and ‘beautiful’ according to some unmoni-
tored taste”. The person who commissioned the
project would have been happy to get a stylish
streamlined form, but for Max Bill that was “out of
the question, for all American toasters, cars, refrig-
erators, and kitchen appliances […] are forms
superimposed on the mechanism that have pre-
cious little connection with what’s inside, a fash-
ionably elegant extra, intended just for the season,
that’s all“. These economical objections – that the
design should not soon become obsolete again –
convinced the customer, writes Bill, while he did
not voice his “artistic and moral scruples“. With
this and two other examples Max Bill showed his
somber determination to “do what was most sim-
ple”. In the meantime his relationship to his Bau-
haus experiences had become ambivalent, for “all
that we valued as pure functionalism, what was
then dubbed ‘technical style’” had in the mean-
time moved “far into the background [of his work],
though without losing its fundamental importance.
The primary interest, however, was in the aesthetic
design of a functional form, or, perhaps even more
to the point, in the design of a form that was not
antifunctional, but as practical and as beautiful as
possible. These are questions that have to do with
experience and judgment, it’s a matter of tracing a
harmonic curve, of balancing proportion and vol-
ume exactly, and these are just as important as
pure function.“ At the same time Max Bill did not
want to lose sight of his “social postulate“ that
even the cheapest model of a hairbrush was to be
technologically satisfactory and “beautiful and rea-
sonably priced“.
Otl Aicher reacted to the article with great inter-
est and contacted Max Bill, for at the Ulm Adult
Education Center there was also a team that was
dealing with product design: “From the very begin-
ning the VH [Adult Education Center] course offer-
ing had set store by practical design, based on the
conviction that the design of articles in daily use
needed to be improved in order to improve the
taste of the uneducated public“. 314 But Inge
Scholl’s and Otl Aicher’s first personal contact with
Max Bill did not take place until two years later:
When a delegation from the Ulm Adult Education
Center traveled to attend a course for adult educa-
tion teachers in Switzerland in May of 1948, Inge
Scholl and Otl Aicher tried to engage Max Bill as a
guest lecturer. 315 Shortly before, in March 1948,
another article by Max Bill, this time on exhibition
design, had appeared 316; six months later, on 23
and 24 October 1948, the Swiss Werkbund held
its yearly meeting in Basel and Max Bill addressed
the plenary session on the topic of Beauty gener-
ated by function and as function. 317 In his lecture
Max Bill combined three concerns. Firstly, he pre-
sented his notion of design: “Almost in vain we
look for the simple, functional, and beautiful chair,
beautiful china, functional and generally usable
door handle, the functional and beautiful lamp.“
He was not trying, he wrote, to justify the search
for new forms and modes of expression after the
fact as social responsibility. Nothing had ever been
created merely out of a sense of social and moral
responsibility. Concentrating on function alone
was also no help in trying to achieve the “fusion of
engineerlike rationalism and constructive beauty”:
It was precisely in technology, “where functions
are revealed in their purest form“, that forms often
changed according to the taste of prevailing fash-
ion even though the functions had remained un-
changed. “We should no longer have to demand
functionality, it ought to go without saying. Beauty,
however, is less self-evident“, although of course
it is on a par with function, “equally a function”. –
Secondly, Max Bill pointed out how difficult it was
to explain to industry clients “why it was necessary
to give their products a beautiful form“. That is
why he proposed that “within the Swiss trade fair
the cultural factor of production should be repre-
sented by a special exhibit and by labeling exem-
plary items“. As a result of this suggestion he ac-
tually put together and designed a special exhibi-
tion for the Schweizerischer Werkbund at the next
trade fair in Basel, entitled Die gute Form (Good
Design), a summing-up of his thoughts on design
and the designing of exhibits. Finally he commented
on the training of professionals who even then, as
industrial designers, were overlaying all products
with streamlined forms, which happened to be the
vogue at the time. This new profession, claimed
Bill, would soon appear in Switzerland as well, so
that there was still time to make every effort to
organize the training in accordance with the views
of the Werkbund. In principle such a profession
was desirable in that basic consumer goods could
be designed in such a way “that this beauty itself
becomes function“. For “in the future mass-pro-
duced consumer goods will be the standard for a
country’s cultural level. Thus, when all is said and
done, the designers of these goods are respon-
sible for a large part of our visual culture […]. We
are faced with an education problem that may not
be very extensive in terms of personnel, but is of
extraordinary significance in terms of its cultural
repercussions; an education problem that has
never been solved in its totality and that the ‘Bau-
haus’ had hardly begun to address. There is no
school today that provides the kind of training we
need to demand today […].“ At this time, Max Bill
also had concrete ideas what the training of de-
signers should look like if it were to meet his ex-
pectations and put into effect the idea of Good
Design, “from pins to household furniture”, “in its tour to Bern, then to Constance, opening in the 65
every area of consumer goods production down to Ratssaal on 13 August 1949. 326 From there Inge
the house itself, including cars, trains, ships“. The Scholl and Otl Aicher took charge of the panels, to
existing colleges of applied art and technical col- be exhibited in Ulm in October of 1949. August
leges were unsuitable, could at best serve as foun- 1949 also saw the publication of the special issue
dations “for something new”, for Bill had in mind of the journal Werk on Good Design; in addition to
“the sort of mixture of academy and polytechnic Max Bill’s lecture from October 1948, there were
school” that the ‘Bauhaus’ strived for. Yet in such three contributions by other authors on the same
a school the education of the personality would topic. 327 Otl Aicher was no doubt particularly inter-
have to be emphasized much more, for it is obvi- ested in the article in which the president of the
ous that the designers of industrial products, in Swedish Werkbund, Gregor Paulsson, spoke about
addition to having extensive knowledge, must also social responsibility in teaching industrial arts.
be true artists, but also artists who are immune to
the idea that painting pictures or making sculp-
tures is more important or valuable than producing
good appliances of perfect beauty.“
Max Bill’s versatility – his article on mathematical
thinking in the art of our time appeared in March
1949 on the occasion of his exhibition with Georges
Vantongerloo and Nikolaus Pevsner at the Kunst-
haus Zürich 318 – also impressed Inge Scholl and Otl
Aicher. Aicher’s father wanted to have Max Bill
design a house for him, and the initial plans had
progressed by October 1948. 319 Otl Aicher discov-
ered Max Bill’s residence in the Italian journal
Domus: “The issue is now making the rounds at
Studio Null.“ 320 In the 1949 calendar of the Adult
Education Center Bill was praised for his versatility,
but also for his “down-to-earth unconditionali-
ty“. 321 A letter from Otl Aicher to Max Bill dated 9
February 1949 shows what a model he was to the
people in Ulm at this time: „Bill has become a
standard for us, like meters.“ 322 After13 March
1949 the range of topics in the correspondence
between Max Bill and Otl Aicher expanded to
include the efforts of the city planning team at the
Ulm Adult Education Center. 323 But the two also
exchanged letters on philosophy, particularly Hei-
degger, or jazz; Otl Aicher repeatedly asked Bill to
visit Ulm again in order to discuss the various top-
ics.
On 10 May 1949 Max Bill sent Otl Aicher the
sixteen-page prospectus of the photo show Good
Design. 324 The photo panels hung at eye level as a
continuous strip of pictures on a curved, spare lat-
tice that formed four bays. Each addressed a sep-
arate topic: Forms in nature, science, art, technol-
ogy, Forms of planning and architecture, Forms of
vital commodities and forms of various appliances
and utensils and of traffic engineering technology.
A visitor got an overview of design, from everyday
objects to the extraordinary: A painting by Fried-
rich Vordemberge-Gildewart, a sculpture by Max
Bill, buildings by Henry van de Velde, traditionally
woven household baskets, an Eero Saarinen arm-
chair, folding chairs, a ski boot, a transmission
tower, and the passenger steamship Prince Bau-
douin were exhibited. 325 The exhibition continued
 1950

15 Feb. The number of

unemployed in the Fed-
eral Republic exceeds
2 million.

9 May Schuman Plan

of the French govern-
ment to establish a
joint agency for Ger-
man and French coal
and steel production.

25 June- 27 July 1953:

Outbreak of Korean
War, causing a growth
spurt of the German
economy: Many Wes-
tern countries concen-
trate on arms produc- 24 May 1952
tion; the Federal 1953 Archive: AKG
Republic establishes
itself on the world mar- 20 Jan. U.S. President
ket as a producer and 1951 Eisenhower takes the
exporter of capital oath of office; he sup-
goods. 18 April Founding of 1952 ports U.S. claims to
the European Coal and worldwide leadership
12 July Transmission Steel Community ( Coal 4 Jan. Broadcast of and does not shrink
of the first German and Steel Pool) with the first daily TV news from a confrontation
experimental TV pro- France, Italy, and the program. with the Soviet Union.
gram after WWII. Benelux states: the
25 June 1950 next stage in the inte- 1 March Return of 27 Feb. The London
Archive: AKG 9 Oct. Minister of the gration of Germany Heligoland to the Fed- Agreement on German
interior Gustav Heine- into the Western world. eral Republic of Ger- External Debts regu-
mann resigns in protest many. lates Federal German
against Adenauer’s 2 May The Federal external liabilities in
rearmament policy. Republic becomes an 10 March The Soviet the pre- and postwar
equal member of the Union proposes a period.
26 Oct. Dienststelle Council of Europe. peace treaty with a
Blank, which will later neutral Germany ( Sta- 5 March Stalin dies,
become the Foreign 28 Sept. German Fed- lin memorandum). and is succeeded by
1949 Ministry, is estab- eral Constitutional Nikita Khrushchev.
lished. Court is constituted in 26 May Signing of .
22 Nov. Petersberg Karlsruhe. the Bonn Convention,
Agreement between 26 Oct. The French which regulates rela-
the Federal German government’s Pleven tions between the Fed-
government and the Plan to establish a eral Republic and the
High Commission European defense Western Powers, re-
regarding reduction of community. placing the Occupa-
terms of occupation. tion Statute.
27 Nov. Beginning of
regular TV broadcasts 27 May Signing of the
( Nordwestdeutscher Paris Treaties regarding
Rundfunk, Northwest the European defense
German Radio). community, an addi-
tional basis for German
sovereignty.

24 June First issue of

the Bild-Zeitung.
 Founding
November 1949 through April 1953
68 In this chapter, more than in others, it will be nec-
essary to speak of outlines, jottings of ideas, and
rough drafts. That is because in the years1949
through 1953 the work of the HfG founders con-
sisted primarily in creating ideas, developing, pre-
senting, explaining them, negotiating, and con-
vincing. The HfG founders, with their goal in mind,
took different paths, doubled back sometimes, put
up with detours, and left tracks that cannot always
be interpreted with certainty today. The reason the
outlines, notes, plans, and summaries left from the
HfG founding days are interesting and are dis-
cussed in somewhat greater detail here is that
they show how the HfG gradually became more
concrete and approached completion. In them it
is possible to recognize the founders’ original
motives, incentives, convictions, and intentions
that were lost, covered up in later statements, or
taken for granted as obvious.
It is Inge Scholl’s first letter to Shepard Stone
on 8 December 1949 that marks the phase of the
prehistory which leads directly to the HfG. 328 This
distinguishes that phase from preceding years, for
while previously only vague objectives and plans
that had no immediate consequences can be rec-
ognized, from the moment Inge Scholl contacted
Shepard Stone, an uninterrupted series of actions
led to the first day of classes at the HfG. However,
the fact that the line of development was direct
must not, in hindsight, be taken to mean it was
straight. In the section that follows I have traced
the wavy line of historical development.
Why did Inge Scholl turn to Shepard Stone? 329
Inge Scholl and Otl Aicher had evidently already
been making efforts for some time to “broaden the
starting points of the Adult Education Center by
founding a new school“. 330 In order to implement
this plan they jumped at every opportunity to find
an anchorage for their project: “In order to launch
our project, we had to be constantly on the look-
out, evaluate all opportunities, start a large number
of undertakings that might have seemed hopeless
at the moment, all of which meant a lot of busy-
work.“ Inge Scholl and Otl Aicher were not discour-
aged by the failure of their Studio Null plans in the
Hans Werner Richter
at the Ulm Adult Educa-
tion Center circa Febru-
ary 1950. HAP Griesha-
ber’s tapestry, the
“Ulmer Tuch”, is in the
background.
Photo: Hannes Rosenberg
Archive: Rosenberg (753/36)
late summer of 1948 and these activities were a
direct outgrowth of preceding events: “As early as
spring 1949 an outline had to be worked out for
Mrs. Bermann-Fischer; around Easter I brought it
to her personally in Frankfurt before she left for the
U.S., and went over it with her. She planned to
keep a lookout in the U.S. for financial sources for
us.“
Hans Werner Richter, in a shortened version of
his memory of the founding history of the HfG,
stated that the idea for a new institution of learn-
ing that would be devoted to political and cultural
issues and the interconnection between them
came up during a conversation between Inge
Scholl, Otl Aicher, and himself. 331 Since 18 Octo-
ber 1949 he had been the organizer of a series of
politico-literary events at the Ulm Adult Education
Center 332, and after one of the first evenings they
went to the Ulm pub Junger Hase, where the idea
of a new college first developed – the suggestions
of Gruppe 47 and Studio Null were still unre-
solved, of course.
On 18 November 1949 – that is, shortly before
or soon after this conversation at the pub with
Hans Werner Richter – Inge Scholl met with Arne
Torgersen, who was working for the relief organ-
ization Norwegian Aid for Europe. 333 This organ-
ization ran an artists’ retreat in Höchenschwand
near St. Blasien in the southern part of the Black
Forest which was apparently to be transferred into
other hands. Inge Scholl had been recommended
for the job of running the retreat by the painter
HAP Grieshaber, who had created the Ulmer Tuch
(Ulm Tapestry) of the Adult Education Center.334 The
fact that Arne Torgersen actually met the director
of the most interesting adult education center in
Germany indicates that he expected she would
also broaden the content of the existing institution,
or at least that he was open-minded regarding
changes and new suggestions.
Was there, then, an opportunity to widen the
sphere of activity of the Adult Education Center?
At the same time the Ulm Adult Education Center
was still in a difficult financial situation; the conse-
quences of the currency reform were a serious
problem because “many members can’t even
afford the minimal monthly fee and we have to
waive our last source of income”. If no more
money could be collected in Germany, “our only
hope is to find people in the outside world who
can help us”. 335 There was talk of preparing an
“American project“, somebody mentioned the
“spiritual ERP”, the European Recovery Program,
which became famous under the name Marshall
Plan.
At any rate, Inge Scholl was interested. She first
made it clear that she would be willing to take over
the retreat center if it was moved close to Ulm. At
the second meeting (20 November 1949) Alice
Zuckmayer also took part, and now Inge Scholl
proposed that “this retreat center should be com-
bined with a kind of daytime adult education cen-
ter that she had had her eye on for years. […] Mr.
Torgersen immediately drops the idea of the ar-
tists’ retreat center. Ways to implement the plan
are discussed.“
Inge Scholl’s account of the incident looking
back some four weeks later seems very con-
densed. Presumably things did not happen quite
as suddenly. For a document by Inge Scholl rec- 69
ords that the idea of an artists’ retreat center might
also be very easily combined with the Ulm Adult
Education Center. As late as 18 December 1949
the conversion of the fortress tower on Kuhberg in
Ulm into a retreat center is the subject of a con-
versation with the head of the Ulm city planning
office, Max Guther. It is therefore likely, though not
important, that the about-turn in the deliberations
of the Ulm group and also for Arne Torgersen
actually dragged on somewhat.
The reflections that Inge Scholl and Otl Aicher put
in writing in the period of just under three weeks
from 18 November 1949 (first meeting with Arne
Torgersen) and 8 December 1949 (first letter to
Shepard Stone) show surprisingly many begin-
nings of ideas that were pursued further in the
years that followed and were in part translated in-
to action. First, however, some comments as to
their intentions, their arguments, and their frame
of reference.
They took up an idea of Arne Torgersen’s that a
place of rest and contemplation be made available
to intellectuals and artists for several weeks at a
time. From the very beginning the most striking
characteristics of this retreat center were interna-
tionalism and the mutual exchange of ideas and
stimulating suggestions with the Adult Education
Center. The most important word they used in their
presentation was the term “crystallization (or fo-
cal) point; on the one hand the Adult Education
Center is presented as the only crystallization point
and the most hopeful enterprise in Germany, while
on the other hand the planned retreat center is to
become a “crystallization point of the anti-Nazi
spirit of leading cultural figures and artists”,
“where the true European and democratic spirit
can find itself and regain calm and self-posses-
sion“. Other key concepts were mentioned:
indebtedness to the resistance, and commit-
ment to the objectives, of Hans and Sophie
Scholl;
a new Bauhaus was needed, and there was no
better place for it than in the vicinity of the Ulm
Adult Education Center, we read as early as
November 1949;
a foundation is to be established with two divi-
sions, a representative and an executive one 336;
a printing shop for training refugees 337 is to be
turned into several workshops for industrial
design (“commodities, textiles, architecture“)
that could work together with industry and be
self-supporting;
the entire network of activities would provide
the fertile ground for a new school that would
educate an elite of young personalities in all
professions for all Germany;
 Founding
70 the fort on the upper Kuhberg, a former concen-
tration camp, was felt by them to be the ideal
place for the retreat center.
Finally, a note recording a conversation between
Inge Scholl, Otl Aicher, and Romano Guardini on
28 November 1949 is worth commenting on; it
records that “this new school” must simply start
out from the present: “no platform, no party line ,
and no big names“. If the plan was not too rigidly
defined, this would guarantee “that youth would
Inge Scholl
circa November 1949
in front of the logo de-
signed by Otl Aicher for
the Ulm Adult Educa-
tion Center.
Photo: Hannes Rosenberg
Archive: Rosenberg (752/22)
[find] its own style”. The most important thing was
that the school would remain “the business of the
younger generation”.
Now, some brief comments on the planned fi-
nancing of this complex plan, various versions of
which emphasized different areas, such as an ex-
pansion of the Adult Education Center; the artists’
retreat center; workshops for industrial design; a
new school, for it was the question of financing
that forged the link to Shepard Stone. The initial
sums of money were to be raised through benefit
events by prominent artists (Wilhelm Furtwängler,
Eugen Jochum, Carl Zuckmayer). This German
self-help, the planners felt, would impress people
abroad and inspire them to support the project.
Arne Torgersen promised DM 20,000 toward the
running of the retreat center in the first year, and
Odd Nansen, the founder of the Norwegian Aid for
Europe, is said to have authorized DM 180,000
from Norway for the workshops. The phrase spirit-
ual Marshall Plan was mentioned (again), mean-
ing that international financial help must promote
not only material but also intellectual and artis-
tic life in postwar Germany. And one must not
forget that Brigitte Bermann-Fischer, the wife
of the publisher Gottfried Bermann-Fischer
(who had signed on the writer Carl Zuckmayer),
“is at present doing her best in America to get
funds that will help such an example of a viable
type of school to materialize. She believes, as
we do, that the universities at one time started
just as modestly as this adult education center
[…].“
Brigitte and Gottfried Bermann-Fischer knew
Shepard Stone from their exile in the U. S., when
the latter was still acting editor of the Sunday edi-
tion of the New York Times. In 1988 Inge Aicher-
Scholl recalled: “In early December 1949 Mrs. Ber-
mann-Fischer wrote from the US that we should
immediately contact McCloy’s new adviser, Mr.
Shepard Stone, who had been informed about us
and our plans and was very interested. We were
still thinking of getting private help, that is to say,
a private foundation in the US.“ 338 At the same
time it was probably important that Shepard
Stone, too, had been briefed on the background
of the Ulm group: “He knew our history“. 339
In her first letter to Shepard Stone Inge Scholl
requested a personal conversation about her plan
to set up a new, modern school that went beyond
the limitations of the existing adult education cen-
ter – there is not a word about the retreat center.
What key phrases were used? First of all, the adult
education center, whose sphere of activity must
be expanded, not only to a “cosmopolitan interna-
tional meeting place”, but to a “focal point for the
Other Germany”; she conjured up “the danger of
renazification” – a catchword that also described
the fears of HICOG staff concerning the fragility of
the young German democracy 340 – and in contrast
to this menacing development pointed to her
brother and sister’s spirit of resistance; the young-
er generation in particular, she said, demanded
such a school; personalities such as Brigitte Ber-
mann-Fischer and Carl Zuckmayer, and the con-
nection with the Norwegian Aid for Europe would
vouch for the earnestness and the practical imple-
mentation of the plan.
The attached outline has so far not been definitely
identified. It might have been a three-page untitled
paper 341 that develops a plan to establish an ar-
tists’ retreat center. But this center is by no means
one of the foremost arguments, it only serves as
a starting point for attaching additional workshops
for industrial design. More important is the objec-
tive mentioned at the outset, the founding of a
“new Bauhaus” to be modeled on the Adult Edu-
cation Center and will create a new international
connection between industry, art, and political
activism. Again, amazingly, after initial funding
with foreign help – to be exact, the Norwegian Aid
for Europe – “the work” is to be financially self-
supporting.
However, there are at least three other undated
outlines that summarize similar statements regard-
ing the planned institution and must have been
written during the same weeks. 342 One includes
the comment that the “foundation” of the school is
to be built “from concerts by Wilhelm Furtwängler
and Eugen Jochum and through lectures by Carl
Zuckmayer, as well as an endowment of the Nor-
wegian Aid for Europe“. 343 The above-mentioned
“short summary of preparatory work for the found-
ing of the Geschwister-Scholl-Hochschule“, writ-
ten at the end of December 1949, refers to the
same intention, which was soon given up again,
however.
Like the other outlines on this subject, this one
contains no concrete references to the planned
project: “A type of daytime adult education center”
is to be established which, as an “international
meeting place”, is intended to help promote “ac-
tivity that deals with present-day tasks and prob-
lems”; “the faculty is to consist of the most gifted
writers, journalists [and] artists, particularly those
of the younger generation”. From this one can de-
duce, firstly, the intended organization of the
school as a continuation and extension of the suc-
cessful Ulm Adult Education Center, a day-time
adult education center. In the second place these
statements allow us to draw conclusions about the
focus of the curriculum, which can be deduced
from the makeup of the faculty. Subjects relevant
to the present, like publicity, journalism, and art
were to be taught, though contents were not spec-
Otl Aicher, Inge Scholl,
and Hans Werner Rich-
ter in front of the ruins
of the Ulm city hall,
circa February 1950.
Photo: Hannes Rosenberg
Archive: Rosenberg (756/07)
ified further. The authors understood education in 71
the humanistic sense and expected it to be univer-
sal, exactly as they had demonstrated at the Ulm
Adult Education Center.
In the first part, whose tenor is very general and
focuses on principles, Inge Scholl and her circle
expressed their views on pedagogical methods in
a nine-point statement: A cultural and political
education relevant to present needs should “re-
place an academic education”; young people
should be offered a model that made it possible
to transform Hans and Sophie Scholl’s position
into a way of dealing with present-day problems;
a “democratic elite” must be trained who would
not be narrowly specialized but whose “political,
intellectual, and human outlook” would have integ-
rity. They mentioned such subjects as “publicity,
politics, sociology, city planning, industrial design“,
“workshops, studios, and ateliers“ were to be at-
tached to the college. In one of the out-lines this
first section is preceded by an extra paragraph that
comments on why Inge Scholl even wants to set
up another educational institution after founding
the Ulm Adult Education Center: It is because
inquiries have poured in from young people all
over Germany “who would like to study at this
Adult Education Center“. 344 Each of the outlines
has a second part with ideas on implementing the
plan: The school is to be set up in stages – a print-
ing shop would be built up as a focus point and
meeting place with the money of the Norwegian
Aid for Europe. This printing shop is to be the core
unit of the school, from which it will evolve as
more money is available. The school, which is “an
experiment”, is to develop from a “meeting place”,
the first thing to be planned, “modeled on the Ulm
Adult Education Center“ and attached to the pro-
posed printing shop, offering “artists and writers
working space and at the same time provide an
opportunity for refugees to be trained and to
work”. There were also data about potential clients
and about Otl Aicher’s office for visual communi-
cation. The school would admit as students those
to whom academic education was denied. Lastly
there was a statement that seems to be meant for
American ears: “The political and intellectual situa-
tion in Germany creates a certain urgency, and it
appears to be necessary to ask other countries as
well for donations. A spiritual ERP is as important
for Germany today as the economic one.“ This ref-
erence to the Marshall Plan in particular does not
occur in any other outline or in later documents
and indicates that the document must have been
written at a very early date.
Inge Scholl’s moral reputation, her pedagogical
skill as the director “of one of the best adult edu-
cation centers in Germany”, and the memory of
her siblings’ resistance were brought to bear in
 Founding
72 these and subsequent drafts as a shield against
possible attacks. The organization, curricula, and
educational theory of the planned institution would
continue to be unclear, and not only for the Ameri-
can target group. 345 The Ulm planning team obvi-
ously followed the advice of Romano Guardini,
who demanded that “the school must not have a
rigid program, [but] the starting point must be to-
day’s situation. It must not be restricted to a par-
ticular camp, but be open to everyone.“ 346
What happened in the last three weeks of 1949?
Of course the Short summary regarding prelim-
inary work toward founding the Geschwister-
Scholl-Hochschule mentioned earlier dates from
the end of December 1949, so that the develop-
ment is described from the perspective at that
time. 347 However, several terse notes that resem-
ble the minutes of a meeting show that the project
did not develop in a straight line. A series of per-
sonal conversations by Inge Scholl and Otl Aicher
continued (18 November and 20 November with
Arne Torgersen, 24 November with Theodor Pfizer
and Max Guther, 28 November with Romano Guar-
dini, 29 November with Clemens Münster, the
Munich Radio culture and education editor). On 11
December 1949 they met the Zuckmayers, and it
is then that they seem to have adopted the name
Geschwister-Scholl-Hochschule (Hans and Sophie
Scholl College) as the best title for the project. On
18 December 1949 they again discussed their plan
with Max Guther, and the summary of this inter-
view mentions the artists’ retreat center as the
only discussion topic. Presumably, then, before
the first meeting with Shepard Stone the artists’
retreat center was still part of the total plan. How-
ever, this part of their ideas was soon dropped.
Inge Scholl’s first conversation with Shepard
Stone, followed by one with his colleague Fred
Boerner, took place on 20 December 1949 in
Frankfurt am Main, at the former headquarters of
the American military commander, which served
as the headquarters of the high commissioner until
that office moved to Bad Godesberg. Inge Scholl
was accompanied by Irm Lindström, who was
involved in the Adult Education Center. 348 Ex post
facto this meeting may be regarded as the deto-
nator that produced the igniting spark. In Inge
Scholl’s “Summary”. However, possibly for tactical
reasons, it is included as only one of many activ-
ities toward the realization and concretization of
her plan for a school.
Inge Scholl, for her part, drew up minutes
detailing conversations with the two Americans. 349
Either she wrote these minutes in a euphoric
mood, or Shepard Stone and Fred Boerner were
simply “crazy“ about the plans. There was Stone’s
obvious despair “about conditions in German
schools and universities“, and at the same time
there was the high esteem in which he held all
questions of education. But if it was not possible
to carry out a fundamental large-scale reform of
the educational system in Germany, then perhaps
it was preferable to promote individual pilot pro-
jects. This was the premise underlying the special
projects fund, the so-called “McCloy Fund“: “He
spoke of a fund that was intended for special
things, and other resources; he plans to talk about
it with another important American from the min-
istry of education (Mr. Read), whom he wants to
fill with enthusiasm for our plans.“ 350 How much
the project was based on personal relationships
is clearly shown by the fact that Fred Boerner
wanted to arrange a meeting with the high com-
missioner’s wife, Ellen McCloy.
In order to work on the project with John Mc-
Cloy himself as well as in the Education and Cul-
tural Affairs Division of the Office for Public Affairs,
several documents were initially still needed: a
report about the achievements of the Adult Educa-
tion Center, a one-page biography of Inge Scholl,
an account of what had been undertaken to date
on behalf of a Geschwister-Scholl-Schule, and “a
very concrete and detailed outline“.
Possibly the Summary is one of the documents
needed for this new, second outline, written at
the turn of the year and based on the first outline
already sent to Shepard Stone. At any rate, it is
surprising how strongly the Summary focuses on
a new school, a Geschwister-Scholl-Hochschule,
based on the Adult Education Center. The sum-
mary hardly indicates the institution's objectives,
for its platform was that it was not fixated on a
rigid platform. What mattered was the common
human element. The faculty was to include Hans
Werner Richter, who helped prepare the outlines,
and members of Gruppe 47 (if it is possible to say
that Gruppe 47 had members). Immediately after
her return from Frankfurt, Inge Scholl told Richter
about the new prospects, which she felt were very
promising: “Now we must definitely go full speed
ahead in this matter. Construction has to start in
spring.“ 351
The new, second outline that Shepard Stone was
promised by 4 January 1950 is probably the yel-
low program named after the color of its cover
page. 352 Max Bill received it on 26 January 1950,
and it is unlikely that Inge Scholl and Otl Aicher
together with Hans Werner Richter and their as-
sistants revised it again within a few days’ time.
There is every indication that at first the yellow
program was used as a working draft and sent
out: The director of the department for women’s
issues at the commissioner’s office for the Land
of Bavaria received a copy of the second outline
on 8 January 1950. If the yellow program was not
identical with the second outline, then Max Bill
would have received a third outline on 26 January
1950, and Inge Scholl would surely have noted it
in her cover letter that he was receiving a com-
pletely new, just revised version.
Inge Scholl and Otl Aicher wrote the yellow
program at the turn of 1949/50 in close agree-
ment with Hans Werner Richter, with whom they
were still planning to discuss their revised and
expanded plan in detail before giving it to the
Americans 353. This program consists of 28 hand-
written oblong pages. Inge Scholl herself included
a very brief summary in her letter to Theodor
Romano Guardini Heuss, dated 27 January 1950, in which she also
(17 Feb. 1885–1 Oct. enclosed a copy of the program: “We’re talking
1968), Catholic theolo- about a free school for culture and politics that is
gian and religious phi- to become a focal point for liberal German and
losopher. In her book European youth by offering a number of important
“Im Geiste der Gemor- subjects that have so far received too little atten-
deten…” Die Weiße tion. By working positively for peace it intends to
Rose und ihre Wirkung continue developing resistance, as expressed by
in der Nachkriegszeit, people like my brothers and sister, and to educate
Paderborn/Munich a young democratic elite“. 354
2000, 269 ff., Barbara The yellow program sketches the basic ideas
Schüler describes his that had matured by the beginning of 1950 and
role as a mentor of the were included in the plan by Inge Scholl and her
Ulm Adult Education circle. By way of a fundamental and comprehen-
Center. sive critique of current-day German society in gen-
Photo: unknown eral and its youth and educational system in par-
Archive: AKG ticular, they propose a solution: the establishment
of a free institute independent of state influence,
because they intended to do without public fund-
ing. The institute was to be self-supporting thanks
to donations and its own income. It was to have
an international orientation against resurgent na-
tionalistic forces that the authors claimed had re-
gained strength, since even the universities – for
lack of educational reform – had already turned
into “cells of a new conservatism”. The outline
does not make clear whether they were already
thinking of a college or whether they still had in
mind an adult education center. They planned that
activities at the school would focus on all ques-
tions of politics and culture, and hoped that edu-
cating responsible professionals for politics, press,
radio and film would have maximum influence on
social development. These politico-journalistic
subjects would be complemented by subjects in
applied arts (photography, advertising, industrial
design and city planning) in order to reconcile cul-
ture and civilization. In connection with this point
the authors also wondered whether “possibly” a
second Dessau Bauhaus should be established.
The institute would educate only a few selected
young people who qualified on the basis of their
personalities, not on graduation from an academi-
cally oriented secondary school. Its educational
objective – as with the curriculum of the adult
education center – was to train cultured persons
with a general education who shone on the hori-
zon of the educational firmament, their personal- 73
ity and character firm and resolute, their judgment
critical and independent, trained in theory, in a
specialty, and a craft. The young were to be in-
stilled with liberal and upright views, like those of
the young Scholls, in order to deal with contempo-
rary issues. There was still no detailed curriculum
in the form of a program that one would expect of
a new educational institution's founders. Pedagog-
ically the Ulm circle expected teachers and learn-
ers to work together, thus establishing a parallel
with American educational ideals. Of course the
Ulm group believed that the American reeducation
program – and no wonder, considering Hans Wer-
ner Richter’s commitment – was a total “failure”, be-
cause, although well-intentioned, it was perceived
as the propaganda of the occupying forces, like an
American schoolmaster armed “with the cane of
the conqueror’s authority”. In reality many Germans
also considered themselves to be culturally supe-
rior, so that, according to the authors, huge seg-
ments of society closed their minds to the objec-
tives of democratization and political interest.
The lack of concrete details and the outlines’
insistence on principles did not bother the Ulm
group much in the months that followed either,
but soon became a method. Writing to Hellmut
Becker, for example, Inge Scholl made no secret
of the fact that the yellow program said “hardly
anything that was concrete” 355. The common de-
nominator of the planned canon of subjects was
the intention to educate people in all the profes-
sions which “to a great extent shape and influence
the general public“, but which had so far been
neglected by educational institutions. However,
they had by no means developed a feasible, ap-
propriate pedagogical program based on this anal-
ysis, merely a manifesto.
The 27 January 1950 letter, quoted above, from
Inge Scholl to Theodor Heuss contains information
on the planned financing. While the first plans only
mentioned that the budget would be DM 200,000
and that the site would be put at the school’s dis-
posal, the budget was now quoted as being about
DM 1.2 million: “Both [Mr. and Mrs. McCloy; auth-
or’s note] were so impressed by the plan that Mc-
Cloy promised me sizable financial support that
might amount to approximately two-thirds of the
required funds. I hope to raise the rest, about DM
400,000, through donations in Germany.” 356 This
meant that the sum that had been envisaged only
four weeks earlier had increased sixfold; thus the
project – at least from the organizers’ point of
view – moved into a completely new dimension.
This must be seen in connection with the support
promised by John McCloy, whose promotion of
the project seems like a catalyst.
The analysis of the outlines shows that the
organizational increase of the project was by no
 Founding
74
From lower left, the
inner circle of the Ulm
Adult Education Center:
Inge Scholl, Herbert
Wiegandt, Sven Anker
Lindström, Hans Werner
Richter, Otl Aicher, Irm
Lindström, Hans Rupp,
and Peter Wackernagel
(circa November 1949).
Photo: Hannes Rosenberg
Archive: Rosenberg (753/03)
means paralleled by an expansion of its content –
the project still involved the course offerings of the
daytime adult education center, though now within
the organizational framework of a college.
In January 1950, it is thus possible to summarize
what Inge Scholl, Otl Aicher, and their friends had
set in motion during the last six weeks of 1949:
After the first promising contacts with Arne Torger-
sen they got in touch with Shepard Stone at the
American high commissioner’s office. In quick
succession they developed, from a suggestion
made by the Norwegian Aid for Europe, a plan for
an educational institution whose sociopolitical
foundation remained indebted to the adult educa-
tion center, but whose work was to take place on
a broader basis (workshops, internationalism). The
key word Bauhaus had been spoken, and industri-
al design had been envisaged as an objective. The
separate outlines, some of which cannot be reli-
ably dated, weave a dense texture, and in the sub-
sequent year many threads can be followed up,
some are dropped, a few remain until 5 December
1950, the day of the founding of the Geschwister-
Scholl-Stiftung.
It makes sense to look at 1950, the year that will
be examined now, from the perspective that the
essential strands of the action result in the found-
ing of the Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung as the legal
sponsor of the HfG. First, it turns out that even by
the end of 1949, the Ulm group had visualized cer-
tain unique organizational characteristics exactly
as they were later implemented when the founda-
tion was established. Among these was the very
idea of having a foundation as the sponsor of the
planned institution, and the plan to divide the
foundation into two – an executive and a repre-
sentative division. Second, Inge Scholl and Otl
Aicher actually began the work of establishing
the foundation in January 1950.
If establishing the foundation is seen to be the
determining process for 1950, this does not mean
that the curriculum component of the founders’
plan fell into oblivion. On the contrary, it is neces-
sary to keep in mind that the foundation and the
college (the planned Geschwister-Scholl-Hoch-
Inge Scholl and
Hans Werner Richter in
front of Ulm Cathedral,
circa February 1950.
Photo: Hannes Rosenberg
Archive: Rosenberg (754/32)
schule as well as the actual Hochschule für Ge-
staltung) represented two sides of the same coin,
inseparably linked to each other from the very be-
ginning. And it is not a far-fetched interpretation
of the project’s development if we identify Inge
Scholl with the foundation, while Otl Aicher is
identified with the college. The role of the founda-
tion would be to guarantee the independence of
the college and protect it from undesirable outside
influences. This idea was the core of the bipartite
institution. – As they looked back, a number of
contemporary witnesses may have been tempted
to conclude that the implementation of this idea
provided the explosives that caused later detona-
tions and destruction. But I cannot help seeing a
counter-argument. Regardless of how attractive
the idea of two institutions with separate functions
is, those who pursue it cannot overlook the fact
that every institution develops a life of its own.
To meet the goal of its founders, the foundation
would have had to admit to its committees only
persons who tend to be conservative, not people
who continue to develop the institution. Fortunate-
ly that did not happen: The foundation and the
HfG developed magnificently. The price was that
in the course of historical progress an idea was
destroyed through being implemented.
The foundation was to serve the college. During
1950, the HfG founders put in concrete form plans
regarding the HfG’s curriculum (to be used in ne-
gotiations with HICOG and German officials), for
it was the college the founders were actually inter-
ested in, and they organized the foundation. And
now, an account of progress in both matters in
turn. First, I shall address plans for the college.
The year began with the beat of a kettledrum, an-
nounced by a short roll of drums.
It is simply amazing that Inge Scholl and her fellow
fighters, with a proposal as vague as theirs, had
such great success with the American officials. It
was surely not the Ulm group’s good will alone –
something the HICOG education experts missed
elsewhere in Germany for the most part. Other im-
portant factors were Inge Scholl’s personal charis-
ma, her persistence and steadfastness. Whatever
the case may be, after Inge Scholl and Otl Aicher
discussed their revised outline (the yellow pro-
gram) with the HICOG staff during the first week
of January 357, the high commissioner became per-
sonally interested in the Ulm project. Shortly after
the discussion of the yellow program in Frankfurt,
during the first preparatory session of HICOG staff
on 11 January 1950, the primary functions of the
planned Mc Cloy Fund were discussed. 358 At the
same time John H. Boxer, who worked for Shep-
ard Stone’s division, informed himself as to which
projects were worth promoting. 359 To do this he
contacted Ministerial Counselor Hans Bott, the 75
personal adviser of President Theodor Heuss, who
was to be the future German contact person for all
projects that were to receive money from the Mc-
Cloy Fund.
On 17 January 1950 Inge Scholl met with Ellen
and John McCloy, Shepard Stone, Fred Boerner,
John H. Boxer, James Morgan Read, and John P.
Steiner 360 – that was the roll of drums. Shortly
thereafter Inge Scholl informed Max Bill about
this meeting: “He [Shepard Stone; author’s note]
arranged an invitation to McCloy’s private home
in Bad Homburg and also invited several influen-
tial people in public affairs and education. They
asked questions, I replied – the mood was fantas-
tic, and at the end people told me it was a won-
derful thing, and said there was every reason to
hope that financial help would be forthcoming.” 361
Now the beat of the kettledrum: The impression
Inge Scholl made on John McCloy was so positive
that he mentioned her in his Boston speech of
26 January 1950. 362 In it the high commissioner
spoke of the need for expanding support for Ger-
many in order to bring to fruition certain hopeful
beginnings that were already visible: “To succeed,
however, we Americans must now redouble our
efforts to solve the German problem. […] In partic-
ular, we need your support in the field of educa-
tion and the spiritual development of the country.“
Here, John McCloy gave two examples to show
there was reason for his hope that Germany would
not relapse into Nazism: One example was the
steadfastness of the population of Berlin during
the Soviet blockade, to which McCloy devoted a
short paragraph. Then he added five paragraphs
about Inge Scholl. The way John McCloy pre-
sented Inge Scholl to his public is characteristic:
He introduced her as the sister of the “two mar-
tyrs“ and as the woman who after the war had
founded an evening adult education center that
had proved to be very successful. Her success
was based on her toughness and her charisma:
“She had little or no money, there were no rooms
available in that badly damaged city, there were
no teachers. But the girl had an idea and she nev-
er gave up. […] By the power of her example and
spirit she is able to find lecturers and teachers
[…].“ John McCloy concluded his remarks with
three sentences that show how captivated the
high commissioner was personally by the young
woman from Ulm and her sense of mission: “Last
week this girl with a mission came to my house
near Frankfurt. At the dinner table she told us
about her plans to expand the school to a day
institution, where students would be welcomed
from the rest of Germany. I have not the power to
describe her voice and her manner.“ 363
In Germany the front page of the Neue Zeitung
of Saturday, 28 January 1950 informed readers
 Founding
76
The Podium, an open
stage of the Ulm Thea-
ter, opened in February
1950 with a production
by Peter Wackernagel
and sets by Otl Aicher.
Photo: Hannes Rosenberg
Archive: Rosenberg (759/08)
about Inge Scholl and her project. Other publica-
tions soon followed suit – though not always as
benevolently. An editor of the Ulmer Nachrichten,
Albert Riester, spread a negative mood in Ulm.
That would not have been worth mentioning had
it not been for the fact that an unchallenged accu-
sation was brought against the same editor by
Inge Scholl that the Gestapo had cheated him of
the dubious fame of being a leading participant in
the persecution of her sister and brother. 364
There are two reasons for writing about these facts.
Firstly: About a year later the same man caused
considerable problems for the entire Ulm project
through a denunciation campaign, and permanent-
ly damaged the reputation of the foundation and
the HfG. And what is interesting about this is, one,
that when the plans first became public knowl-
edge he torpedoed them and, two, that Inge
Scholl at this early point in time was already able
to state that the man had been a Gestapo collabo-
rator and had participated in persecuting her sister
and brother. This statement by Inge Scholl thus
gains a special credibility it might not have had
at the later date, when everything was at stake in
Ulm.
Secondly: The history of the establishment of
the foundation and the founding of the HfG is a
success story. At the same time, people often
overlook that success did not come automatically,
but had to be fiercely contested; it wasn’t even
merely a matter of clearing obstacles, but of find-
ing their own way in the first place. The founders
of the HfG blazed their own trail, often struggling
on the brink of an abyss, and that is why such
abysses need to be shown wherever they opened
up – even if they were successfully overcome in
the end.
Max Bill was kept informed of what was happen-
ing. On the same day that John McCloy gave his
Boston talk, which Inge Scholl had not heard about
yet, she sent a stack of papers to Zürich. Here
she summed up the results of her meetings with
HICOG and estimated that building could begin in
summer. For this to happen, a concrete curriculum
listing all fields of specialization needed to be sub-
mitted to the Americans as soon as possible. The
yellow program, she wrote, was still the basis for
her negotiations, which did not have to be explained
to Max Bill, for “besides you were often there
when we discussed this“. 365 A few days later they
met for a talk 366, for Inge Scholl and Otl Aicher not
only valued Max Bill’s experience and thoughts on
pedagogy and on the project’s curriculum, they
also wanted to persuade him to be the architect
of the college buildings.
Inge Scholl now introduced Max Bill to the peo-
ple at HICOG, saying that he wanted to take an
active part in the project: “He is a former Bauhaus
student and was enthusiastic about our report on
the development of plans for the school. I have
persuaded him to come and teach industrial de-
sign, and I believe that’s a great success.“ 367
From then on Inge Scholl and Otl Aicher involved
Max Bill in their founding plans much more. One
cannot speak too highly of Max Bill’s importance
to the founding of the HfG. I suggest that it is
owing to Max Bill’s participation that the plan for
a design-based college of politics, whose presi-
dent was to be Hans Werner Richter, evolved into
the design college with a political basis whose first
rector became Max Bill. At the next meeting with
several assistants of the HfG founders, scheduled
for 16 December 1950 in Meersburg near Lake
Constance, Max Bill was one of the participants.
Here he stopped being one of the large circle of
prominent consultants and became a member of
the inner circle of the planning group.
Perhaps it is chance: No sooner had Max Bill come
to the fore than the estimated financial costs were
raised. But on later occasions it can be proved that
Max Bill raised the budget in order to assure that
the institution would have an adequate financial
basis right from the start. A short look back shows
budget estimates up to that point: At first there
was talk of approximately DM 200,000, a sum that
would be raised by Norwegian Aid for Europe for
the retreat center and the printing shop. 368 The
sum rose by small increments: on 11 December
1949 Carl Zuckmayer mentioned a sum total of
DM 300,000, and at the meeting with Stone on
20 December 1950 the sum in question was DM
250,000 as the American contribution, plus about
DM 100,000 in German donations. 369 Then came
the great leap, just over the DM 1 million, first
mentioned on 17 January 1950 in a conversation
with John McCloy 370; the figure given to Theodor
Heuss was DM 1.2 million 371, and after Meersburg
Max Bill expanded the framework by one decisive
item. At DM 1,627,500, the new budget included,
as Inge Scholl wrote to John H. Boxer, an addition-
al half-million marks to guarantee operation for
the first five years. 372 A few days later, on 2 March
1950, in a communication to Odd Nansen, she 77
raised this sum for the first five years to DM 2 mil-
lion.
It seems almost ironic, or at least bitter that the
Ulm group had proposed this item – the financing
of operating costs – themselves. The item soon
became the most important demand of the Ameri-
cans. In later developments it proved to be the
Achilles heel of HfG financing. An additional item
is worth noting if we keep in mind how the HfG
ended: Inge Scholl wrote to John H. Boxer, “If the
school has proved its worth in this startup period
[of five years; author’s note], it will be able to go
on existing and be assured government assist-
ance.“ In contrast with the outlines, a completely
new point of view is revealed here: not the abso-
lute freedom of an institution that supports itself
by means of donations, sponsorships, and its own
income, but a private school that also receives
support from the public sector. While the idealistic
starting point of an autonomous and self-sufficient
school originated among the Ulm group, this prag-
matic consideration that the state should be asked
for support – including operating expenses – was
no doubt Max Bill’s idea.
In the founding history of the HfG, Max Bill does
not only stand for a realistic view of financial mat-
ters. His name is also associated with the concen-
tration of the curriculum on design-related issues.
He personified the Bauhaus and brought it to Ulm.
One must not overlook that the word Bauhaus
had already been spoken before Max Bill was
asked to come on board in mid-February. During
the first deliberations in November 1949 argu-
ments for a new Bauhaus were quoted, how it
could only be established in Ulm – modeled on
the Adult Education Center, whose work was also
aimed at the design of daily objects. 373 Also, Max
Bill himself was familiar to the public of the Adult
Education Center. 374
After Meersburg, Inge Scholl asked Max Bill for
details of the organization of the Dessau Bauhaus,
not as a model for her own foundation, but in or-
der to get new ideas for her own project. 375 Max
Bill answered that the Bauhaus had been a state
school and therefore information about its organ-
ization was unnecessary. But “if things work out, it
would be fabulous, and my only worry is whether
people will want to be 20 years beyond the ‘Bau-
haus’ (not behind it, mind you, but ahead of it!).“ 376
Thus it wouldn’t be Max Bill’s fault if the work of
the Bauhaus was not continued. Inge Scholl urged
him to help them with the program as quickly as
possible: “There’s no way we can put together the
curriculum without you […]. And what is more we
have to give detailed particulars of estimated
costs.“ 377
On 28 February 1950, at the HICOG headquar-
ters in Frankfurt, the special projects board of the
 Founding
78 McCloy Fund was constituted. 378 The fund had
DM 50 million at its disposal – GARIOA (Govern-
ment Appropriations for Relief in Occupied Areas)
matching funds, or, to put it plainly: gifts from the
American taxpayer. This money was to be distrib-
uted to projects that met four criteria: The projects
should represent solutions to pressing German
problems; they must receive at least an equal a-
mount of money from German sources; there had
to be a guarantee that they would continue in ex-
istence after receiving HICOG support; and finally
the projects needed to be of inherent specific val-
ue in reeducation to justify the American contribu-
tion. 379
The members of the board of directors of the
McCloy Fund were, among others, John McCloy,
Benjamin J. Buttenwieser, James Morgan Read
(director of the Education and Cultural Relations
Division), John H. Boxer (a staff member of the
Office for Public Affairs and secretary of the board
of directors) 380 and, later, Michael P. Balla (John
Boxer’s successor as the secretary of the board of
directors). 381 They agreed that they were not inter-
ested merely in spreading the reputation of the
United States as a benefactor by giving one-time
donations. The Germans must be helped to help
themselves. Therefore care should be taken that
support by HICOG would simply help a project to
stand on its own two feet – today this is called
startup financing – but as soon as this had been
done, it was supposed to run by itself. For this to
happen it was necessary to have strong backing
among the population.
In the course of correspondence informing Max
Bill about Inge Scholl’s and Otl Aicher’s publicity
and organizational trips that took them to Frankfurt
and the Rhineland (the governmental and industri-
al region of West Germany), he received a new
draft proposal on 20 March 1950 with a request to
correct it ruthlessly. 382 Inge Scholl and Otl Aicher
had drawn it up together with Hans Werner Rich-
ter and possibly with the help of others, during the
past week. 383 Soberly it is limited to barely three
pages, so that many essentials are missing for lack
of space alone: the long prehistory of the Adult
Education Center, the criticism of the reeducation
policy, the passionate and enthusiastic style. As a
supplement Inge Scholl added a list of ideal candi-
dates for the board of trustees, but more about
that later. At the end of March 1950, where was
the planned college as far as its curriculum was
concerned? How far had it moved away from the
yellow program in the past three months?
The basis of the planned Geschwister-Scholl-
Hochschule für Politik und Kultur (the Hans and
Sophie Scholl College of Politics and Culture) was
still formed by the “experiences and points of
departure of the Ulm Adult Education Center“.
The outline focuses on two educational goals:
“Education toward independent civic thinking and
cultural assimilation of technology“ – these did in
fact continue to be the sum total of the HfG’s
goals, and there is reason to think that both were
achieved as far as possible. The students were to
be trained in modern professions, not as special-
ists, but with a broad horizon; they were to learn
not only theory, but also get their hands dirty in
attached workshops; in a total of seven areas,
which until then had not been taught at all, or
taught inadequately in Germany, although they
“are especially important for life in our times“:
“press, radio, film, photography, advertising, in-
dustrial design, city planning.“
Hadn’t the Ulm group gotten something mixed
up? What about politics as an area of specializa-
tion? In the yellow program – “College of Culture
and Politics” – it was still listed in first place and
described at length. Now, however, under the title
"College of Politics and Culture” we find the first
sign of a drastic change in the program, which
could hardly be more explicit, namely that at a col-
lege of politics, politics was no longer to be taught
as a separate subject – and no longer in a separ-
ate master class. This decision stemmed from Otl
Aicher’s and Hans Werner Richter’s understanding
of politics and of the educational goal of a political
seminar: They wanted to teach individual social
responsibility and independent thinking, which are
expressed in everything people say and do. These
objectives could also be observed as a subtext in
the subjects listed above, which essentially already
resembled the departments of the HfG. Moreover
they wanted to remain concrete: “One reason we
eliminated politics as a subject is because there is
no such profession as politics. […] [We do not
want to] create institutions in which no concrete
profession can be taught.“ 384 From then on we
must consider the fact that the college of politics,
at first formally and later for tactical reasons as
well, gave way to the school of design, but that
the politicization of the design courses actually
meant that the original goals were continued in
different circumstances.
It was Hans Werner Richter, closely linked since
the end of 1949 with Inge Scholl and Otl Aicher
and the school project they shared, who was the
originator of the general political ideas. Otl Aicher
tried to condense them and to translate them into
a plan that was feasible in his opinion. He looked
for the solid ground on which political education at
the school might be able to stand, one that would
be more solid than a vague, general, political edu-
cation, he looked for a profession “in which politics
could be anchored as a general subject“. 385 Two
solutions occurred to him. On the one hand he
wanted to affiliate “something like a sociological
lab” with the institution, an institute of social sci-
ences in which political questions would be
examined “exactly”. The thought remained with
him for a long time to come; soon he even added
an institute that was to research design-related
problems, and became highly important later, par-
ticularly for tax reasons – the future Forschungsin-
stitut für Produktform (Research Institute of Prod-
uct Design). Otl Aicher’s second idea was that stu-
dents at the planned school might be trained as
“social work consultants”. He gave Hans Werner
Richter this suggestion to work on so that the lat-
ter with his wide expert knowledge could address
the question as to what other job outline could be
used as an educational goal. They were under time
pressure, and if Hans Werner Richter had no satis-
factory proposals to offer, the plan would simply
turn into “something that can’t be avoided – a cul-
tural school with a touch of politics about it – a
continuation of the Bauhaus […]“. Otl Aicher
couldn’t have expressed things more clearly to
Hans Werner Richter. Under time pressure it was
more important to set up a school with concrete
professional goals, even if it was limited to design
issues, than for the entire project to miss out on
HICOG funding.
It is worth considering what importance Inge
Scholl and Otl Aicher on the one hand, and Max
Bill on the other hand, assigned to design and pol-
itics for the project that was being planned. For
even then the Bauhaus not only had the interna-
tional reputation of representing the Other Germa-
ny that had resisted National Socialism, but it was
considered to have prepared the way for modern-
ism – and both elements, the political and the pro-
A demonstrative Otl
Aicher, circa Novem-
ber 1949.
Photo: Hannes Rosenberg
Archive: Rosenberg (758/23)
79
fessional, were within reach combined in the per-
son of Max Bill, ready to help implement the school
plans. Because we know that only a few years
later there was a rupture between the Ulm group
and Max Bill we may well ask whether they only
used Max Bill and his prestige or whether the end-
ing of their relationship had other causes.
There is no doubt about it: Otl Aicher’s interest
in all questions relating to designing a man-made
environment was genuine. The work teams at the
Adult Education Center demonstrate that, as does
his taking the initiative in meeting Max Bill. We
need only recall the admiring description introduc-
ing Max Bill in the 1949 Adult Education Center
calendar. Also, the idea of continuing the Bauhaus
tradition, in whatever form, probably came up in
Ulm before Max Bill was engaged. However, Otl
Aicher was just as genuinely interested in the
comprehensive political education of youth, the
domain of Hans Werner Richter, who remembered
that Otl Aicher was originally to head the design
department, while he himself was to be in charge
of political subjects. Did Otl Aicher give priority to
one subject over the other? Probably not, for he
still pursued the vision of a school that would be a
kind of universitas, a place dedicated not only to
educating the spirit, intellect, and character, but
also to practical training. An almost monastic
ideal! In his 25 March 1950 letter to Max Bill he
demands that the school should rest on three
poles: “individual, society, design. […] I believe
that is the most striking thing about the whole
thing. Not culture, nor politics alone, nor education
alone. There are plenty of schools for each of
these individual areas. What is new is their living
 Founding
80 integration.” 386 Today it is obvious: What was polit-
ical about Aicher’s plans (on Richter’s foundation)
was later integrated in the HfG in such a way that
design was “politicized”. The social significance of
design as well as the designer’s individual respon-
sibility continued to be the dominant themes of
the HfG, so that Otl Aicher’s idea with its three
cornerstones – character building, society/politics,
and design – was actually implemented, though
on an altered scale. The wealth of classes on polit-
ical, historical, and sociological issues at the HfG
speaks for itself. 387
Inge Scholl and Otl Aicher had no intention of
using the good name of the Bauhaus for their pur-
poses merely as publicity. They pursued some, but
by no means all of its goals and therefore wanted
to complement the design courses with courses in
journalisms/politics. But this brought with it the
undeniable advantage that it was possible, by
building on the Bauhaus reputation, to promote
their own project, even though it was to be dis-
tinctly different from the Bauhaus. President Theo-
dor Heuss, for instance, a prominent member of
the German Werkbund, sympathized with the aims
of the Bauhaus. Inge Scholl wrote to him on 27
March 1950: “The idea is to continue the Dessau
Bauhaus tradition in a form that meets the needs
of our situation today. That is why we want to add
politics and journalism to the design-related sub-
jects (design, commercial art, city planning), and
later, if this works, gradually introduce classes in
radio and film as well.“ 388 Requests for support at
first continued to be made in that particular se-
quence: connection to the Bauhaus, a school
based on the adult-education model, courses in
design, added courses in politics and journalism,
with radio and film looming in the distance. 389
Max Bill’s view of politics as a separate subject
of instruction was clear: In spite of all the political
and social significance he attached to design, de-
sign for him had priority over the political in edu-
cation. 390 He wanted to educate designers who
had a political background and a sense of social
responsibility – as did Otl Aicher – but certainly
not political persons with skills in the arts, in com-
plete contrast to Otl Aicher. At the end of March
1950 Max Bill was not stating this view as firmly,
so that discussion of the ranking and role of poli-
tics as a subject of instruction at the Geschwister-
Scholl-Hochschule did not take place until June
1950.
Hans Werner Richter was still being considered as
the future rector of the institution and as the head
of a department that was to be devoted to (lin-
guistic) information. That in itself indicates that he
had a considerable influence on the plans for the
Geschwister-Scholl-Hochschule. As a result of the
written discussion between him and Otl Aicher on
the rank of the political at the new college, the lat-
ter made a comprehensive statement on the topic
at the end of March 1950. 391 His 27 March 1950
letter is a clear expression of the struggle to find
the right way and the right goal, which all steps
taken by the Ulm group had in common. Otl Ai-
cher’s arguments, as always, were based on his
zero-point thinking. He did not by any means feel
he was standing on firm ground; rather, he looked
for support in finding his bearings: How was he to
judge the present, and what conclusions could be
drawn for the future based on history?. He was
disturbed that many people had already returned
to things as usual and thought and acted as they
had before the National Socialist period. He him-
self was still questioning everything that people
had once considered to be right: “I believe we’re
faced with a zero-point situation; although we
don’t know what is to be done, we do have good
intentions to roll up our sleeves and get to work.“
In coping with the current situation he refused to
follow past teachings, worldviews, or schools of
thought: “I think it’s a typically German difficulty
that we start with theory first and then try to make
reality conform to it.“ He shared this pragmatism
more with Max Bill than with Hans Werner Richter.
In view of his doubts and the way he seesawed
between searching for what was right and the
need to act, it comes as no surprise that Max Bill,
who knew exactly what he wanted, had the upper
hand over Otl Aicher at critical moments. Otl Ai-
cher had already adopted Max Bill’s view of things
and defended it against Hans Werner Richter, say-
ing that while the new school was not supposed
to be a copy of the Bauhaus, “[w]e want to do for
our time what [the Bauhaus] did for its time. We’re
thirty years ahead.“ The result of this progress was
that design, politics, and personality building at the
future college became equally important means
toward the goal of understanding “life today” in all
its forms .
Hans Werner Richter now sensed that the politi-
cal element in the plan for the college – i. e., his
contribution – was coming under pressure, caused
by Max Bill in the final analysis. Quickly Otl Aicher
sent a second letter in which he asked Hans Wer-
ner Richter not to take his previous remarks per-
sonally and not to take offense. 392 But in actual
fact there seems to have been an interval of silence.
It was not until 24 June 1950, three months later,
that Inge Scholl wrote again after they “hadn’t
heard from each other for a long time”, but never-
theless they were including Hans Werner Richter
“in [their] plans as always” 393 – a remark that
makes sense only as an apology, for if his partici-
pation had been a fact and self-evident, this sen-
tence would also appear to be superfluous.
Up till now it was assumed that his participa-
tion ended suddenly on 25 April 1950 when Shep-
Otl Aicher’s posters for
the Thursday lectures at
the Ulm Adult Educa-
tion Center:
June 1947, December
1947, and April 1949.
Photo: Hannes Rosenberg
Archive: Rosenberg (751/30,
751/22 and 751/12)
ard Stone had a cocktail party at his house in Bad
Homburg, planned as an opportunity to discuss
the college plans informally. In the literature there
are accounts of how Hans Werner Richter was
snubbed by the Americans to such an extent that
they first negotiated with Otl Aicher and Inge
Scholl while the other helpers (including Max Bill
and Hans Werner Richter, between whom there
was no love lost) had to wait elsewhere and were
only asked to join the negotiations by and by – all
except Hans Werner Richter, who understood this
vote against him very well and who felt bitter
about his Ulm friends’ lack of support. 394 But the
dates have been confused. 395 As will be shown,
the sources clearly document that until 12 July
1950 Hans Werner Richter was actively involved in
planning the Geschwister-Scholl-Hochschule and
it was not until shortly thereafter that he abruptly
stopped participating 396; not until then did Max Bill
come to the fore with all his strength, and as of 9
November 1950 the baby was given a new name:
Hochschule für Gestaltung (School of Design). 397
John P. Steiner, the head of the education branch
at the Office of Public Affairs of the high com-
missioner for Württemberg-Baden in Stuttgart, re-
corded his thoughts on the 25 April 1950 meeting
two days later in his letter to Inge Scholl.398 He had
proposed that the new project should grow out of
the Adult Education Center instead of being set up
directly as a separate institution. The Ulm group
had rejected this proposal. In his letter John P.
Steiner accepted this decision and continued to
endorse support for the Ulm project, even though
the design aspect of the plans for the college had
become visible side by side with the political as-
pect. Today, it is difficult to understand how exact-
ly one is to visualize the two aspects side by side;
even the Americans found it hard to define the
main idea behind the Geschwister-Scholl-Hoch-
schule, because the school’s founders had “until 81
that time not yet described […] its nature and
structure clearly”.
Thus though there was as yet no clear definition
as to what the Ulm group really wanted, John P.
Steiner at least described for them what interest
linked the office of the high commissioner with the
founding of the college and what was expected of
the project. In the context of the reorientation poli-
cy, the Geschwister-Scholl-Hochschule, speaking
in general terms, was to make a contribution to the
democratization of the political consciousness of
German society. Specifically the Americans hoped
the specialization, which they had repeatedly criti-
cized, and the competitiveness driven by jealousy
and lone-wolf behavior existing in German institu-
tions of learning would be overcome. “My govern-
ment is interested in supporting projects that help
build up a responsible government in Germany –
a form of government in which citizens want to
take on full responsibility for the actions of their
government. We are looking for a government in
which personal freedom and integrity are guaran-
teed for each individual. We are ready […] to help
every institution in every way possible if this insti-
tution promises it will achieve these goals. […] We
believe it is essential in creating a free society that
problems should be solved with reference to other
problems and in consideration of various problems
that beset this society. I therefore ask: How will the
institute you are planning help rebuild a free and
democratic people? How would you achieve col-
laboration with already existing institutions? In
what respect could your experiment bring about a
change in the philosophy and practice prevalent in
the German educational system?“ In addition to an
answer to these questions, John P. Steiner wanted
Inge Scholl to submit “a definitive, clearly argued
application” together with evaluations of this pro-
ject by “well-known German education experts
and influential citizens”, with commitments regard-
ing donations, with a clear “definition” of the pro-
ject and with a curriculum. In the application “you
are to state your contribution and the contribution
you are requesting from my government”.
This letter plainly and clearly places the Ulm
plan within the coordinates of the American de-
mocratization program as a project meant to con-
tribute to the reform of the German educational
system, and not to serve only as a model institu-
tion. The staff at HICOG expected their promotion
of the Ulm project to achieve other goals beyond
this: the democratization of society, the education
of democratically minded young people, the re-
construction of Germany. They expected contribu-
tions from the Ulm plan to most of the elements
that were part of the democratization measures,
and Inge Scholl did not contradict them. The fol-
lowing key phrases summarize American expecta-
 Founding
82 tions: reformed curriculum, student dormitory,
courses in sociology and political science 399, col-
lege campus, community of teachers and learners,
experience-based education toward democracy,
model against renazification, new professions for
the young.
The democratization of Germany that was to result
from all these (and more) measures was a very
important goal for John McCloy. In the beginning
of March 1950 he had had to defend his policy
before Congress and the Senate when he pre-
sented a draft of the HICOG budget for the coming
fiscal year: $18.5 million of a total of $30 million
were slated for the Office of Public Affairs, and a
lion’s share of that sum in turn went to the Educa-
tion and Cultural Relations Division. “He consid-
ered this aspect of occupation […] to be so impor-
tant that he gave the senators a detailed explana-
tion of the primary goals of his program: democ-
ratization of German society, containment of com-
munist and ultranationalist groups hostile toward
democracy, support of the American policy of
European integration and economic reconstruc-
tion, establishment of friendly relations between
the US and a reconstructed Germany.“ 400 True,
John McCloy’s draft was authorized to a large
extent; however, he also experienced public pres-
sure and the assessment by American observers
“that developments followed an all too familiar
pattern, that National Socialism was gaining pres-
tige again, that the Germans would never change
and that you couldn’t trust them“. 401 The New York
Times published a confidential HICOG study dated
February 1950 titled Report on Nationalism in
Western Germany, in which the Germans were
portrayed as politically apathetic and indifferent. 402
In rebuttal, McCloy expressed his conviction that
positive, alternative forces in Germany had to be
encouraged and strengthened, for the opportunity
of the century to change the German mentality
had arrived. He was determined to devote all his
energies to that goal. Upon his return from the
United States, on 20 April 1950, John McCloy
passed Internal Directive P-1, which summarized
in twelve points the HICOG program up to the
summer of 1952, which was at this point described
in detail. 403 In his report on the second quarter of
1950 to the American secretary of state he wrote
on the subject in his characteristic, realistic, but
always confident way of putting things: “In the
light of Communist pressure from the East, the
problems of democratization needed special at-
tention. While we were forced to realize that reor-
ientation from a traditionally authoritarian to a dem-
ocratic way of thinking in Germany was a slow
process at best, we could nevertheless observe in
the entire Federal territory signs of an awakening
consciousness and a wish for civic rights, democ-
ratization of local government, education, employee-
employer relations and other spheres of life. In the
US Zone this process was constantly promoted
through exchange programs, incentives to civic
action and through the information media. There
were examples of regression, which shouldn’t
come as a surprise in a country where twelve
years of Nazi indoctrination have been followed by
five years of occupation, only two of which have
been spent under relatively normal economic con-
ditions.“ 404
In the meantime the board of directors of the
McCloy Fund had agreed that the entire sum of
DM 50 million must be distributed among the vari-
ous departments before funds could be allocated
to individual projects. The largest share (12 million)
was to be spent for youth projects, 10 million each
for education and universities, followed by West
Berlin (5 million), health (4 million), public welfare
(2 million), culture (2 million) and school children
(1 million), as well as a reserve of DM 4 million. 405
The next significant conference between the
founding team around Inge Scholl, Otl Aicher, Max
Bill, and Hans Werner Richter and the Americans
took place on 12 July 1950. During the less than
three months that had elapsed between the meet-
ings in Bad Homburg (25 April) and Stuttgart (12
July), Inge Scholl, Otl Aicher, Hans Werner Rich-
ter and Max Bill had continued working on the
Geschwister-Scholl-Hochschule project as a col-
lege of politics whose focus was still politics,
though Max Bill urged that design be given equal
prominence. It is pointless to go into all the details,
for the principle that the Ulm group followed was
expedient accommodation, which Inge Scholl
described as follows: “To my mind the syllabus
and the program will change from week to week,
because it would be funny if we didn’t keep add-
ing new ideas and eliminating old, outdated loose
ends.“ 406
The correspondence with Walter Gropius that
Max Bill began on 2 May 1950 regarding the col-
lege project and that he conducted with Inge
Scholl and Otl Aicher dealt with politics in relation
to design in the program of the planned school. 407
Max Bill introduced the project to Walter Gropius
as a new Bauhaus, but one that would not be a
repetition, but instead needed to go in new direc-
tions based on the experiences of the Adult Edu-
cation Center. A foundation was being planned;
the school would not be a state institution. Its goal
was to educate an elite that would become politi-
cally effective on a democratic basis. “For us and
also for the American authorities, political educa-
tion, side by side with courses on technical sub-
jects and the humanities, is crucially important.“
And just as new and very real professions were to
be created for those qualified in design, the found-
ers also tried to find, for students engaged in poli-
tics, the solid underpinnings of new job descrip-
tions that did not yet exist. They also sought ways
of connecting the individual subjects through new
institutes that would teach the insights gained
jointly: “For example, to the department of ‘politi-
cal methodology’ we have added the ‘Institute of
Public Opinion Research and Statistics’, in which
architects, city planners, and advertising people
etc. can work on their investigations. The enclosed
outline represents a curious balance between the
formal dominance of political subjects (“methodol-
ogy of politics, press/ broadcasting, publicity, visu-
al design, product design, architecture, town plan-
ning“; subjects with general educational value:
sociology, economics, politics, psychology, philos-
ophy, contemporary history), and the educational
program that vehemently goes back to the Bau-
haus. 408
At the same time, on 8 May 1950, in her letter
to Odd Nansen, Inge Scholl presented a variant of
this relationship between politics and design: The
main part of the letter consists of political reflec-
Brigitte Bermann-
Fischer, circa 1950.
Photo: Oschatz
tions and rationale for founding a new college
whose goal is “the creative person who thinks
politically and is familiar with modern methods,
and who with social responsibility and his own
creative talents designs the lifestyles of our tech-
nological and industrial age “. 409 Indeed, this ob- 83
jective suited a college of politics very well, she
said, but politics was to be merely the foundation
and not the goal of the education: “In its educa-
tional goal the school limits itself to design-related
professions inadequately developed by existing
educational institutions or not taught yet.“ Putting
things succinctly, during the same period, she
wrote to another correspondent: “We want to pick
up where the Bauhaus left off, though we intend to
add modern general education, politics, and jour-
nalism to the purely design-related subjects.“ 410
Thus it comes as no surprise if even today as we
weigh the arguments we are occasionally in the
dark about what the Ulm group specifically imag-
ined.
Otl Aicher preferred to think concretely and
always to stay close “to the object” 411 of his think-
ing, in order not to lose sight of reality while rumi-
nating. He believed that political education should
also lead to political professions. In March he con-
ceded to Max Bill that politics as a subject of in-
struction would be cut, but simultaneously ex-
pressed his uneasiness about this decision, be-
cause political education without politics as an
educational goal would lead to results that were
as vague and had as little binding force as he had
observed in arts education at the academies. The
planning of a sociological institute was the com-
promise, as long as it was not possible to teach a
concrete profession of “politician”.
On 16 May 1950 Max Bill called into question
these developments. 412 He could not bring himself
to like the idea that the educational objectives of
the planned college would be professions in poli-
tics as well as in design. “[The fact] that political
training is necessary, not as a subject, but rather
as general education“ was his biggest concession
to the practicability of having design and politics
side by side in the curriculum and faculty: “I am
still convinced that we must train not politicians
but citizens who have a profession and think po-
litically.“
That is why he wrote to Inge Scholl that the
planned departments of politics, press, and adver-
tising were basically the same thing, and that he
wanted to combine them in a new department of
information. 413 Otl Aicher defended his view with
the image that people needed politicians just as
much as traffic needed traffic police: “Social life
does not function on its own. […] We need the
politician as a kind of traffic cop, as a chairman
who organizes societal life and allows it to func-
tion. […] Without a doubt a politician today needs
to know just as much as a lawyer. Should he not
learn it before even setting out on his career?“ 414
Max Bill refused to accept this and remained
stubborn. He gave priority to design over the polit-
 Founding
84 ical and knew he was in agreement with Walter
Gropius, who had analyzed the situation from afar
with keen insight. Walter Gropius doubted that the
two could coexist side by side peacefully and pro-
ductively at a college of politics and design: “There’s
bound to be a struggle over who will be in charge,
the teacher in politics or the teacher in the arts.“ 415
He clearly realized that the initiative to found a col-
lege “comes from political interest and not from
artistic design.“ As an example of the functioning
subordination of politico-journalistic subjects to
design-related ones he mentioned the Institute of
Design in Chicago. 416 Though this was grist to the
mill of Max Bill, he felt he owed Walter Gropius an
explanation that graphically portrayed the situation
at the time as the tactical muddle it was: “I myself
tend toward a general, not a specialized political
Hans Werner Richter
and Inge Scholl at
Marktplatz 9, the ad-
dress of the offices of
the Ulm Adult Educa-
tion Center, circa Febru-
ary 1950.
Photo: Hannes Rosenberg
Archive: Rosenberg (760/27)
education […]. However, until now I haven’t paid a
lot of attention to this department of political
methodology because I personally am convinced
that it will fall into oblivion before it has even ma-
terialized. However, the American officials have
their hearts set on this political education, on press
and radio etc. That emerged very clearly at a con-
ference we had about 3 weeks ago in Frankfurt.
Artistic design holds absolutely no interest for
these people. […] However, since we want the
money from the Americans that they would other-
wise distribute to the outmoded schools, let’s
not go out of our way to give extra emphasis to
those things that they’d prefer not to see.“ 417 For
this reason Max Bill, too, held on to a minimum
of political and journalistic education, though it
had less importance for him than the depart-
ments of product design, architecture, and city
planning.
This tactic of Max Bill’s – to submit to HICOG
plans for a college where the teaching of politics
predominated only until their subsidy had been
authorized – was confirmed by Inge Scholl shortly
afterward, on 5 July 1950: “There’s one thing you
mustn’t forget, Bill: to make a distinction between
things that definitively have to be taken seriously,
and the documents that the Americans demand
immediately. Of course time is too limited for us
to agree, across a distance of 150 kilometers, on
the final plan in the form in which it will be imple-
mented. […] That’s just it, you’d have to write vol-
umes of letters in order to give an ongoing de-
scription of the situation here, which keeps chang-
ing constantly.“ Thus, she insisted that they hurry
so that the first quarter-million, which was slated
to be spent by HICOG by the end of that fiscal
year, could be used for the first construction work
as part of the step-by-step planning. 418
A week after this letter by Inge Scholl, on 12 July
1950, there was a meeting in Stuttgart that marks
the high point and at the same time a turning point
in the development of a Geschwister-Scholl-Hoch-
schule. It was a high point in that the plan for a
college dominated by the political, which was fun-
damentally based on Hans Werner Richter’s col-
laboration, was articulated for this deadline in its
most extensive and detailed form to date. At the
same time this meeting was also a turning point,
because shortly thereafter Hans Werner Richter
left the group of college founders and the project
was continued with design given precedence.
It is impossible to determine how large a share
tactics and conviction had at this point in Inge
Scholl’s and Otl Aicher’s college plan, which pro-
posed that courses in politics and journalism
would predominate. From the briefing papers for
closer collaborators it can be seen, however, that
classes in the design-related subjects (visual de-
sign, product design, architecture, and city plan-
ning), as well as the most essential workshops,
were to begin at once, while the political ad soci-
ological subjects were “for the time being” rele-
gated to the background of “general education”
together with economics, contemporary history,
psychology, and philosophy. 419 For the step-by-
step development of the college they expected
DM 600,000 in American funds over the next two
years, while DM 900,000 would be collected from
German sources.
Basic course –
training programs –
general education
In the Stuttgart home of John P. Steiner, Am Bis- 85
politics marckturm 4, on the evening of 12 July 1950, the
gathering included, on the German side, not only
Inge Scholl, Otl Aicher, Max Bill and Hans Werner
political Richter, but also the attorney Hellmut Becker, Ulm
methodology city planning director Max Guther, the Stuttgart
writer and a friend of Max Bill, Dieter Keller, and,
sociology press economics as a token representative of German industry and
radio commerce, a director of the Württembergische
urban planning
Metallwarenfabrik (a hardware factory). The Ulm
group had assembled this rather heterogeneous
basic course
circle of people because they wanted to convey to
advertising the HICOG staff that a broad spectrum of the Ger-
architecture information man public was behind their plans. 420 No doubt
the American “ideal of a nonpartisan interest
group“ was also behind these expectations. 421
product photo HICOG was represented by staff members James
design film
contemporary philosophy
Morgan Read and John P. Steiner, who appeared
history in Stuttgart with other colleagues. 422 Max Bill pre-
sented them with his architectural blueprints, and
they received an extensive outline based on docu-
psychology ments that had on 8 May 1950 been given to Odd
Nansen as well, and that differed from the latter
only in the finer points. The outline had been worked
out in detail: from the general motives and ratio-
nale for the new college, to the political, cultural,
pedagogical and professional goals in such sub-
jects as political methodology, press/radio, adver-
tising/information, photo/film, product design,
architecture, and city planning with the specific
degree programs, and finally to the building, facul-
ty, budget, and organization. 423 It was impressive.
Judging by the sequence of the subjects and the
sociopolitical and politico-cultural argumentation
the Americans couldn’t help concluding that this
was a political college of a new type, whose initia-
tors wanted to provide their students with a com-
prehensive personal education and professional
training. The proposed educational methods em-
phasized the rejection of specialization and hi-
erarchy. Any remaining misgivings were to be
eliminated by an enclosed list of pledged contri-
butions, a total of DM 511,000, and expert’s re-
ports by Carl Zuckmayer, by the state secretary of
the Bavarian ministry of education and the arts,
Dieter Sattler, and by Nobel Prize winner Werner
Heisenberg.
Education toward freedom, tolerance and
democracy was a recipe that was to the taste of
the HICOG staff, particularly given the political cli-
mate of the period 424. On one hand American dis-
cussions about the resurgence of nationalism in
Germany put pressure on HICOG policy to show
results; on the other hand a few weeks earlier,
with the Pentecost gathering of Freie Deutsche
Jugend (Free German Youth) – 400,000 young
people had assembled on command for a large-
scale demonstration in Berlin to serve as a cover-
up for a Soviet attempt to capture Berlin – the
 Founding Various fundamental
pedagogical principles
86 ensnarement of West German youth had started.
On 25 June 1950 the Korean War began when
North Korean troops crossed the 38th parallel. This
attack plunged the West into a crisis of political
and military self-confidence vis-à-vis the Soviet
Union and its allies. This also marked the begin-
ning of the controversy around the rearmament of
Germany. In strategic considerations, the enemy of
1945 was needed as an ally against what was per-
ceived to be superior Soviet strength, and there-
fore it was also crucial to win over the Germans
themselves, especially the young, as friends and
Organization helpers. Of course it was the young, more than
Lecture other age groups, who had “a considerable aver-
Authority of the teacher sion to American policy. Forty-seven percent of fif-
and of the material teen- to nineteen-year-olds rejected it, and only
Mass processing
Examinations 38 percent supported it. […] Mistrust and a
Supervision ‘count-me-out’ attitude were prevalent.“ 425
Certificates of class attendance One single page that came out of the Stuttgart
Rigid syllabus and scheduling
From theory to practice meeting succinctly records the results, which turned
Knowledge out to be amazing enough. It was agreed that
HICOG would make available DM 1 million to the
project if its initiators succeeded in furnishing
proof within the next three months of a second
DM 1 million from German sources and assure
that annual operating costs would be covered. 426
Half of this German contribution was expected
from the Land and the federal government, the site
of the school was assessed at DM 300,000, and
the city of Ulm was expected to contribute DM
100,000. The remaining DM 100,000 were to be
raised through private donations and payments on
the part of industry.
This result, sober though it sounds, was actually to
provide an excellent foundation not only for an
immediate campaign to raise donations and subsi-
dies, but also for legal, personnel- and construc-
tion-related matters. But now that HICOG was
serious about the project and cleared the way to
implement it on an international and not merely
regional level, Max Bill, too, decided to do the job
Free community properly. On 18 July 1950 he gave Inge Scholl an
Free form of instruction ultimatum to accept certain conditions under
Discussion which he was now willing to devote all his ener-
Teachers only gies to their common cause. 427 Firstly, he objected
in auxiliary capacity
From practice to theory to the college being named after Hans and Sophie
Working independently Scholl, though he agreed that the foundation
Personal interest should be so named, and instead proposed “Bau-
Incentive
Enjoying the work haus Ulm”. Hans Werner Richter, who had made
Going deeper himself responsible for the political program of a
Unfolding of personal talents Geschwister-Scholl-Hochschule, was also to be
Experiential learning
instead of dead facts dropped from the project. Max Bill saw him as a
Teaching framework “failure”, with poor command of the German lan-
in lieu of a syllabus guage, full of resentment and lacking creativity.
Independent critical judgment
With this appraisal Inge Scholl was given an early
example of how quick Max Bill was to pass judg-
ment, something he did often and at the drop of a
hat, and in slanderous terms. Honor where honor
Otl Aicher,
circa November 1949.
Photo: Hannes Rosenberg
Archive: Rosenberg (758/17)
was due: Max Bill now claimed the position of rec-
tor in place of Hans Werner Richter, and also the
position of the chair of all design-related depart-
ments and the position of head of the department
of architecture; we must not forget that he had
also been designated as the architect of the build-
ings. Inge Scholl as the head of a “board of direc-
tors“ (which means the head of the legal sponsor-
ing body) was to be responsible for “moral” lead-
ership and responsibility, while Otl Aicher as her
deputy was to maintain contact with local author-
ities. Finally, two additional demands by Max Bill
are remarkable. He wanted the program applica-
tion that had to be submitted to HICOG in a few
days to be purged of all “literary and philosophical
frills. The program must be boiled down to the
most essential things.“ For him, essential meant
concentrating on continuing and further develop-
ing the Bauhaus: “The more Bauhaus people are
at the school, the sooner there is a guarantee that
1. there is agreement as regards ideas; 2. the basic
pedagogical principles are present; 3. the flaws in
the development of the Bauhaus are not repeated;
4. new ideas are generated based on old experi-
ences.“ Finally he emphasized his position that the
college, right from the start, was also, and espe-
cially in need of public subsidies. In this regard he
had a different understanding than Otl Aicher of
the freedom and independence of an institution
such as the planned college vis-à-vis the state.
Max Bill’s views on this question were based on
self-confidence and pragmatism rather than on
principles and ideology.
Inge Scholl’s response was amazingly independ-
ent and free. 428 She would not accept his ultima-
tum and pointed out to him how undiplomatic his
behavior had been. Because of his experience and
ability, she said, he would be given everything that
he demanded anyway. But his determination to
get his own way showed the Ulm group some-
thing questionable about him as a person: “I think
we can continue collaborating only if there is a
basis of friendly, open teamwork […].“ The author-
ity necessary at the college could not be demanded,
she said, that was created as colleagues worked
together in the formational phase. Up to this point,
of course, Hans Werner Richter had also been part
of planning, and as for personnel decisions, which
might later prove to be a hindrance, they didn’t
want to go into that at all. However, Inge Scholl’s
introductory remark does show how far removed
Hans Werner Richter already was from the center
of the founding team at this time: “Up till now the
school has been supported by you, by Otl, and by
me.“
The last proposal for a Geschwister-Scholl-Hoch-
schule is the official application to HICOG, which
has come down to us as a German draft version
dated 1 August 1950 and as an English-language 87
original dated 7 August 1950. 429 It was much
shorter than the discussion outline that preceded
it on 12 July 1950, for the extensive sociopolitical
rationale and arguments for the new college were
absent, as Max Bill had wished. Only a few sen-
tences remained to suggest the principles so
beloved by the Ulm group, and in these state-
ments they argued primarily with regard to the
pedagogical and politico-educational goals to be
pursued by the project: The result of the special-
ization of “today’s schools“, which were oriented
“one-sidedly either toward professional training or
general education or political education“, was that
education was geared to producing only profes-
sionals, intellectuals, or politicians, people “so lim-
ited that they kept society from developing in a
healthy way”.
The Ulm group’s response to the self-imposed
narrowness of the institutions of learning with their
mass operation was the model of a college in
which “life is seen as an integral whole and rela-
tionships between professionally oriented, socio-
political, and cultural factors“ would be estab-
lished. The educational programs that together
formed “a self-contained complex of subjects
referred to as design“ were the same eight as in
the earlier outline, and the statements on general
education, curriculum and educational goal had
hardly been changed in the meantime. “The goal
of the work and education at this school is the
creative person who thinks politically and is famil-
iar with modern methods, and who with social
responsibility and his own creative talents designs
the lifestyle of our technological and industrial
age.“ By declaring that the political, literary, and
journalistic part of the program was a component
of the college’s mission to teach design they kept
all doors open. The HICOG staff recognized in the
outline their ideas regarding urgent needs for re-
form in the German education system and were
able to decide in good faith to promote a college
that intended to play a part in democratization and
political education. At the same time the founders
of the college were able to begin by setting up
those departments that were necessary to form
the college itself, because they made possible the
college’s own output (product design, architec-
ture, visual design). Further development could
help determine how political education would later
be implemented.
In their studies, Eva von Seckendorff and Hans
Frei show that the program the founders of the
Ulm college presented in their application to the
Americans resembled the New Bauhaus in Chica-
go far more than it did the Bauhaus in Dessau:
“The overturning of the canon of subjects advo-
cated by Gropius and Bill and the integration of
politics in general education correspond to a large
 Founding
88
Inge Scholl,
circa November 1949.
Photo: Hannes Rosenberg
Archive: Rosenberg (758/04)
extent to the program of the ‘Institute of Design’
(ID) that Gropius had recommended as exem-
plary.“ 430
The budget was set at DM 1,986,000, as agreed
on 12 July 1950. This figure comprised only the
cost of building and setting up the college, whose
campus was to consist of teacher residences, a
student dormitory, classrooms, and workshops.
This sum of just under DM 2 million would no
longer include ongoing operating costs during the
first years. There was no mention of the fact that
initial operating costs had been guaranteed, but
HICOG soon brought up the subject again and
made it one of the basic requirements for paying
out the American support. In lieu of a guarantee
there was a financial plan for operation during the
first years. It is based on the assumption that 150
students would register at the college. Expenses
(for salaries, administrative and operating costs)
were estimated at DM 433,000 as opposed to an
income of DM 291,150, so that an annual subsidy
of almost DM 150,000 was considered necessary.
This sum was to be collected from the Land
(DM 50,000), the city (DM 30,000), American
funds (DM 40,000), and from the supporting as-
sociation of the foundation (DM 25,000).
The application clearly indicates how the complete
freedom of the college the founders had initially
strived for, a freedom that was to be expressed in
economic autonomy as well, was given up in favor
of a more realistic financing plan. While the latter
offered the undeniable advantage of making pos-
sible large-scale planning, the founders also had
to accept a fact that proved to be a disadvantage –
the college became dependent on government
financing. Again and again, the driving force be-
hind budget increases was Max Bill, who was not
satisfied with small solutions, neither in program-
related, nor organizational, nor architectural mat-
ters.
The foundation envisaged as the sponsor of
the college was to have four components: an
executive board, an advisory board, an adminis-
trative council and a board of trustees. The list of
candidates contains both the names of persons
who actually did later become members of one of
these bodies (Hermann Josef Abs, Otl Aicher, Hell-
mut Becker, Max Bill, Helmut Cron, Kurt Deschler,
Walter Gropius, Romano Guardini, Karl Max von
Hel-lingrath, Odd Nansen, Inge Scholl, Roderich
Count Thun, Henry van de Velde, Walter Zeischegg,
Carl Zuckmayer) and of persons who no longer
appeared later (advisory board: Fritz Hartnagel,
Gustav Hassenpflug, Dieter Keller, Sven Anker
Lindström, F. Neidenberger, Hans Werner Richter,
Ernst Scheidegger, Vera Meyer-Waldeck; adminis-
trative council: Hanns Becher, Heinz Kluge, F. P.
Hellin, J. Fr. Muth, G. Schmitz).
Following this description of the project’s program
development, from its beginnings as a day-time
adult education center, to the yellow program and
the many others that succeeded it and variants
thereof, to the official application to HICOG, here
now is a look at the organizational side.
urban planning
The planned college would have needed no
sponsor, but from the start Inge Scholl and Otl
Aicher wanted to shield the new institution from
undesirable external influences by means of a
legal entity. The project itself, after all, was to be sociology
free and independent. Even in the early conversa-
tions that Inge Scholl and Otl Aicher had with Arne
Torgersen, the word “foundation” is mentioned;
the foundation was supposed to be provided by
residential building
Norwegian Aid for Europe, and there would be two
committees, one of them “executive” and the other
“representative“. These preliminary plans contain
the core of the Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung that
was founded later, for its advisory board was the
actual acting body and the board of trustees was
intended as a committee in which prominent peo-
ple in Germany and abroad would support the
school. Of course, at this early date there was not
yet any question of a college, but Carl Zuckmayer,
Romano Guardini, and Herbert Read, who had
been listed among others as ideal candidates as
early as 20 November 1949, remained loyal to the
project and became members of the board of trus-
tees. Other prominent people on this list are Alvar
Aalto, Prince Lennart Bernadotte, Albert Einstein,
André Gide, Werner Heisenberg, Karl Jaspers,
Eugen Jochum, Erich Kästner, Jules Romain,
Eleonor Roosevelt, and Thornton Wilder.
The funding that the Ulm group expected first
from Norwegian Aid for Europe, then from the
American high commissioner’s office and from
German donors and companies needed a “receiv-
ing organization“. 431 That is why even at an early
date the Ulm group linked its need for protection
and ideal of freedom for the planned college with
the practical consideration that the sums would be
obtained in the form of endowments or were to be
received by a legal entity that could guarantee that
donations were tax-deductible. An added factor in
the months that followed was the uncertainty of
the financial backers, who wanted to give financial
help only to an institution whose independence
and practical reliability vouched that the funds
would be used as intended.
The first work on the legal basis for an associa-
tion, and then a foundation, was done in early
1950 by Inge Scholl’s father together with Fritz
Hartnagel, her brother-in-law, who was just con-
cluding his term as a law clerk 432, and Hans Jürgen
Söhring, who was also teaching courses on every-
day legal issues at the Adult Education Center.
Inge Scholl asked Max Bill for all available informa-
tion on the organization of the Bauhaus as a point
Politics and
political structure
of departure 433, but he did not think much of this 89
retrogression: “The Bauhaus was not a foundation,
press
radio but a state school. The structure of the Bauhaus
therefore doesn’t have much to do with our inten-
tions, as far as organization is concerned. Besides
propaganda I think a foundation is more appropriate.“ 434 Based
public education information
instruction on his experience and business acumen, Max Bill
contemporary history
recommended that a company be founded in ad-
dition to the foundation that would look after “the
business transactions of the institute“ – no doubt
politics economics because he had a premonition of the trouble that
might be in store if the needed and hoped-for big
industrial orders had to move through the entire
institution – and also that a “circle of friends” be
image formed, an organization of supporters and bene-
film factors. “The latter two institutions existed at the
Bauhaus as well. They proved to be worthwhile.“ It
industrial
shouldn’t be too hard to guess that these sugges-
products tions led to the later development teams and in-
stitutes at the HfG as well as the Gesellschaft der
Freunde der Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung (Society
of Friends of the Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung).
In his letter of 22 March 1950 to Inge Scholl, Max
Bill criticized the development of the entire project
up to that point, starting with the program, going
on to the faculty, the architecture, the organization
and the negotiations of the Ulm group, and con-
cluding with the board of trustees as envisaged so
far. 435 With his energetic criticism, always touching
the sore points, he pushed the entire project in the
direction that has already been described. He did
not want to found a college with “all the important
and old gentlemen” Inge Scholl and Otl Aicher had
introduced to him. He diagnosed the fact that the
Ulm group relied too much on prominent names
that they had picked at random, assuming that if
the spread was broad enough they would score a
maximum number of hits, and he considered this
state of affairs to be symptomatic of the current
status of the project as a whole: “I don’t particular-
ly like the composition of the board of trustees; in
a number of places you could just as well have a
completely different set of names. The committee
comes from a period of development before the
war […]. However, I don’t want to interfere in this
matter, I’d just like to state that I would have gone
about things very differently.“ Max Bill demanded
that instead of the broad range advocated by the
people in Ulm, they should envisage the goal as
clearly as possible and work toward it carefully:
“[…] Always remain clear and hard where your
basic principles are concerned. If you start making
concessions by even so much as a centimeter,
you’ve lost and you might as well give up at once.
[…] And never be satisfied with doing something
right, it’s always got to be the best, the most pro-
All 3 diagrams based on a sketch by Otl Aicher gressive. Anything else is not worth the trouble in
in the memo for the 12 July 1950 Stuttgart meeting. this line of work.“
 Founding
90 Otl Aicher did not accept this criticism and set
Max Bill straight on 25 March 1950 about the
sound and promising steps taken by the Ulm
group: “[…] Don’t worry about the retrogression.
In tactical questions Inge drives better than I can
drive a car“. 436 If they were forced to raise half the
money from German sources, when it was urgent-
ly needed everywhere “for refugees, for housing
construction, for a theater in crisis, for neglected
and homeless youth, for the unemployed, for ski
jumps, and God knows what“ by “an industry that
has other worries“, and if they were then finally
allowed to call on those people who could provide
them with funds, then prominent names simply
offered support and security and helped with the
decision. “Of course that’s how you get a board of
trustees that isn’t a political platform. But is that
necessary? We need people who can evaluate
what we’re doing to some extent and who approve.
What we then do ourselves is our business.“ The
quotation clearly and concisely expressed how Otl
Aicher imagined the relationship of the planned
college to the board of trustees as a miniversion of
the foundation: The foundation was there to make
possible the work of the independent college. On
30 March 1950, to help Max Bill understand this
goal, he returned to the topic he had touched on
in his preceding letter: “I think there are two things
we need to keep separate: 1. the foundation and
2. the school.“ 437 In contrast to the Bauhaus the
board of trustees was to be part of the foundation
and not the college, and its sole purpose was to
impress government ministries and industry and
convince them of the seriousness of the undertak-
ing : “For the school itself there is no need to cre-
ate a good image. The work and its quality shall be
our image. […] So once more: Don’t worry that
old fuddy-duddies might interfere in our affairs.“
“Institutional structure“ was to prevent this inter-
ference in the day-to-day work of the planned
institution. Otl Aicher wanted it to be completely
autonomous. “The school is to be shaped by the
faculty, students, and administration.“ He envi-
sioned the decision-making and supervisory body
of the foundation – still referred to here as the
Circa November 1949.
Photo: Hannes Rosenberg
Archive: Rosenberg (758/10)
“foundation‘s council“ – as a group of like-minded
and “trustworthy” persons, “in other words, the
actual founders and sponsors of the school”, a cir-
cle of friends of the Ulm group who oversaw the
budget and the purpose of the foundation, and
supervised the faculty.
Since the end of March 1950 Inge Scholl had
been pursuing contact with the ministry of educa-
tion and the arts in Stuttgart 438, the supervisory
agency that had to authorize the foundation. On 5
April 1950 she received the first draft of the foun-
dation’s bylaws from Ferdinand Sieger, a Stuttgart
attorney who was not only the attorney for Brigitte
Bermann-Fischer, but also had his office near the
Stuttgart Schloßgarten, so that he could occasion-
ally “talk through the whole issue in detail with the
minister of education and the arts [Theodor Bäuer-
le; author’s note] and the consultant in charge [Mr.
Hochstetter; author’s note]”. He promised them
that the bylaws would be authorized within two
weeks of submission. However, the Ulm group
were put off by Ferdinand Sieger’s demanding
ways, and his views differed in essential points
from those of the founders: “It cannot be denied
that if people have some say in an organization
(though to a very limited degree), they might feel
a lot more generous.“ That was precisely the kind
of situation Otl Aicher wanted to prevent. There-
fore Ferdinand Sieger’s further efforts did not pre-
clude the Ulm group from looking for another legal
advisor for their project.
Who knows what would have become of the HfG if
Inge Scholl had not met Hellmut Becker? Of course
this question could be asked about all those who
collaborated and helped with the Ulm project
when we try to assess each person’s importance.
In every case, the HfG would have been a different
institution. However, this is particularly true in the
case of Hellmut Becker. In the 18 years that fol-
lowed, his personal interest in cultural matters,
particularly in education policies, and quite specif-
ically in educational institutions that enriched the
bleak Federal German landscape with their free
and wild blossoms, coupled with his extensive
contacts, was to give the HfG legal backing that
seemed to be custom-made for the Ulm group.
Hellmut Becker was the son of Carl Heinrich
Becker, the Prussian minister of education and the
arts in 1921, and, between 1925 and 1930 during
the Weimar Republic, a trendsetting and reform-
oriented politician who concerned himself with
cultural and political matters. 439 Hellmut Becker
attended secondary school at the boarding school
Schulen Schloß Salem, studied law, and gradu-
ated in 1943 with a doctorate in law. Max von Ba-
den, the last imperial chancellor, had founded
Salem in 1920 together with his private secretary
Kurt Hahn. 440 In the fall of 1945 he invited a num-
ber of prominent people to Salem to hear Friedrich
Georg Jünger, who read a text by his brother Ernst,
and to discuss, directly after the end of the war, a
fresh start in cultural terms. 441 Hellmut Becker,
who was involved in the reopening, was among
the guests at Salem, as were Alexander Mitscher-
lich 442 and Thorwald Risler. Hellmut Becker went
on to make his name, in 1946, by defending the
undersecretary of the foreign ministry, Ernst Baron
von Weizsäcker, the father of one of his school-
mates, in the so-called Wilhelmstraßenprozeß
(Wilhelmstrasse Trial), one of several trials OMGUS
conducted following the Nuremberg Trials by the
joint Allies against prominent leaders in trade, in-
dustry, and politics. 443 It is in this connection that
Inge Scholl apparently first contacted him. 444
When Inge Scholl turned to Hellmut Becker in the
spring of 1950 because she was looking for an-
other attorney who could help her work out the
bylaws of the foundation and channel their author-
ization through the ministry of education and the
arts of the Land of Württemberg-Baden in Stutt-
gart, he was just beginning to work as a consultant
with cultural organizations, private schools, and 91
scientific institutions. In subsequent decades he
became an unrefuted specialist in this field, and
went on to serve and advise cultural organizations
until the mid-sixties. Among them were the board-
ing schools Salem, Birklehof and Odenwald-
schule, as well as the famous zoological station
of the Dohrn family in Naples 445, and, last but not
least, Alexander Mitscherlich’s Institut für Psycho-
analytische Medizin.
In March 1950 his first essay had just appeared
in Merkur, titled “Who will finance cultural free-
dom?“ – a question that is terrifyingly prescient if
one keeps in mind the history of the HfG. For some
time Hellmut Becker had been the legal consultant
of the independent Schule Birklehof in Hinterzar-
ten, which was supported by two associations,
one of which was the legal sponsor, while the
other was an “association of founders and friends“.
The Ulm group had something similar in mind for
their foundation when they wanted to have it exist
in an electric field between a representative and
an executive pole. The exact legal relationship be-
tween individual entities – executive board, foun-
dation‘s council, board of trustees, and administra-
tive director – now needed to be defined in such a
way that the college’s founders’ goals (autonomy
of the college; engagement of prominent interna-
tional faculty; administration of subsidies and
donations reflecting financial and fiscal expertise)
were fulfilled.
Inge Scholl could take the time to change to a
different lawyer because the project was first
handed around from department to department
at the Stuttgart ministry of education and the arts,
and nobody felt responsible for it. The department
of national education referred the matter to the
department of colleges and universities 446; here
the project was greeted with interest and approval,
primarily because the project in question was nei-
ther a university nor a college 447; for a while, both
departments dealt with the matter. Inge Scholl at
first did not give in when Max Bill urged that the
project be organized under the name of Geschwis-
ter-Scholl-Stiftung 448. On 8 July 1950 she filed
the foundation charter with the ministry of educa-
tion and the arts and requested that it be author-
ized pursuant to Section 80 of the German Civil
Code.449 She expected the process to be concluded
within a very short time. 450
This draft of the bylaws was not yet authorized
by the ministry. Instead, corrections and reworked
bylaws went back and forth; it was not until the
fifth version of the bylaws, dated 5 December
1950, was submitted that the minister of educa-
tion and the arts authorized the foundation. The
versions can be divided very simply into two
groups: The versions between 8 July 1950 and
25 October 1950 address the setting up of a Stif-
 Founding
92 tung Geschwister-Scholl-Hochschule 451, while
the last two versions of 9 November 1950 and 5
December 1950 aim at establishing the Geschwis-
ter-Scholl-Stiftung 452. Inge Scholl had three rea-
sons for renaming the foundation: Firstly, she in-
dicated that Max Bill had urged this change, sec-
ondly she had taken into consideration a sugges-
tion by the department of “colleges and univer-
sities” at the ministry of education and the arts,
who wanted to reserve the name “college/univer-
sity” for the “classical colleges/universities”. Third-
ly – and this was the deciding factor – “the pur-
pose of the foundation was expanded in Section
3“ for tax reasons. 453 More about this later.
A detailed discussion of the development of indi-
vidual drafts of the bylaws does not bring any in-
sights that are worth noting. The basic intentions
are stated from the very beginning, and there are
few substantial changes during the five months
that follow, between 8 July 1950 and 5 December
1950. The foundation’s bylaws at first consisted of
18, then 20, and finally 21 sections. The purpose
of the foundation (sections 1–3) 454 originally was
to set up and run the Geschwister-Scholl-Hoch-
schule. Against the wishes of the ministry of edu-
cation and the arts, the Ulm group refused to work
out a definitive school agenda for the bylaws be-
cause they “envisaged the very opposite: a flexible
development of the school“. 455 After 9 September
1950, as was mentioned above, the purpose of the
foundation changed, so that the main focus as the
primary purpose of the foundation on 9 November
1950 and on 5 December 1950 was the Institute
of Product Design the group planned to found,
while the school appeared only as an appendage
of the necessary laboratories and workshops. –
From the beginning an executive board, an adviso-
ry board, and an administrative committee were
planned as entities of the foundation (sections 4–
11); the board of trustees, too, initially was to
become an entity of the foundation, but that body
lost this status in the course of negotiations. In-
stead, an additional foundation entity was intro-
duced: the general meeting of the foundation. As
for the details: The advisory board (sections 6–9)
was to be in control of the foundation and the col-
lege equally. It was intended to be the central
body of the foundation, in which the Ulm circle
around Inge Scholl and Otl Aicher was to institu-
tionalize itself. The founder appointed the first
members of the advisory board, which was to con-
sist of at least nine persons including the execu-
tive board, from the circle of those who were sub-
stantially involved “in the planning and preliminary
stage of founding” the college. 456 In the future only
those people who identified with the goals and
ideas of the college and its founders could become
members of the advisory board. The advisory
Hans Curjel, Henry van
de Velde, Max Bill (and,
outside the picture,
Johannes Itten) at the
opening of the exhibi-
tion Around 1900 at the
Zurich Museum of Arts
and Crafts; (28 June–
28 Sept. 1952).
board determined the foundation budget and
appointed the executive board, who belonged to
the advisory board in any case. – The executive
board (section 5), consisting of one or three mem-
bers, was considered to be primus inter pares. It
conducted the business of the foundation and
could call on the services of an administrative
director, who was, however, an authorized agent
of the executive board and not part of the founda-
tion. The executive board submitted to the author-
ity of the advisory board. – The administrative
committee (section 10), according to the intention
of the Ulm group, backed by Hellmut Becker, was
to become a body in which at least nine represen-
tatives of the sponsoring association, which was
yet to be founded, were to meet about once a
year. The Ulm group intended this entity to provide
pro forma supervision by generous donors from
the private and public sector. The group would be
vested only with the right to veto the budget, mak-
ing sure that finances were administered correctly.
Nothing terrified the Ulm circle more than that the
administrative committee would “be granted the
right to have a say in the inner organization of the
school” and “that the school would be subject to
outside influences or even the interests of certain
business circles”. 457 To be sure, it was important
for the ministry of education and the arts that the
administrative committee have adequate opportu-
nities to bring their influence to bear on the bud-
get. The first authorized bylaws of 5 December
1950 did not provide for this, but in subsequent
years the Stuttgart officials achieved more than
that when the bylaws of the foundation were re-
vised. The revision reversed the balance of power
within the foundation, for the advisory board lost
its dominant position, and was replaced by the
administrative council, the expanded successor of
the administrative committee, with the decisive
powers to intervene in matters that included, and
specifically affected, the college’s inner structure .
The delegates of the sponsoring association from
the private sector also gradually became powerful
representatives of their own interests; to what ex-
tent these were justified is a matter of personal
opinion. – Lastly, the general meeting (section 11)
was planned from the start as a joint meeting of
the advisory board and the administrative commit-
tee, only initially not as an independent body. Its
task was to decide on matters concerning the
foundation itself, i. e., changing the bylaws and
dissolution of the foundation. – The only and main
responsibility of the board of trustees (section 12)
consisted of representation; its members were
selected with the expectation that their prestige as
internationally renowned personalities would help
the college gain recognition, and that they would
express “their confidence” in the work of the col-
lege “by the fact that they belonged to the board
Photo: Ernst Hahn of trustees”. – For managing the college itself sep-
Archive: HfG (Depositum
90/41.1)
arate college bylaws were promised (section 13),
but in fact they were some time in coming.
After these remarks on the authorized bylaws of
the Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung, which have
somewhat anticipated the chronological course
of events, I shall now return to the moment when
Inge Scholl submitted the official request for Amer-
ican funds, back to 7 August 1950. Inge Scholl
reported to Shepard Stone, her patron at HICOG,
why the Ulm group felt such a hurry about setting
up a college program: They wanted a decision
from the board of directors of the McCloy Fund at
the earliest possible date, because, she said, the
German funds could not be collected until Ameri-
can commitment was absolutely assured. 458 After
the request had been submitted there was nothing
to do but work on the bylaws of the foundation
and hope.
Max Bill felt optimistic about the situation. 459 He
claimed he had the management of the project
“almost completely” under control, after a “vehe-
ment“ confrontation with Inge Scholl and Otl Ai-
cher – the letters of 18 July 1950 and 25 July 1950
may have been only the tip of the iceberg. He
claimed that even earlier, in the very “animated”
session on 12 July 1950 in Stuttgart, when he had
presented his architectural plans and the Ulm
group and Hans Werner Richter had presented 93
their curriculum plans to the Americans, the latter
had not only promised their basic support, but had
also agreed to pay half the estimated sum for the
establishment of the college: “That was more than
we had expected.“ After this, with the help of the
comments of Walter Gropius, he torpedoed politi-
cal methodology as a subject and with it, Hans
Werner Richter. He was successful: Politics now
became a subject included under general educa-
tion. With Shepard Stone’s and John McCloy’s
help, he felt, the decisive HICOG body would
authorize the project.
After the Ulm group had hurried to submit their
request, the proposal at first remained in Ulm on
the desk of the district liaison officer in charge,
John F Capell. 460
The board of directors of the McCloy Fund had
placed the actual responsibility of funding the col-
lege in the hands of the HICOG personnel – the
district liaison officers – who acted as liaison with
the German population. 461 It was their job to help
German applicants if they wanted their projects to
be sponsored by the McCloy Fund. They also had
to judge whether these projects met the important
criteria. The procedure in the case of Inge Scholl’s
application was atypical, because the initial idea
had not come from the locality for which the Ulm
officer was responsible, but from all the way at the
top, and he was now supposed to give his expert
opinion on the matter. A great deal of work was
expected from him – as would be true for any dis-
trict liaison officer in this situation. The type of
local problem was to be described in detail with
an underpinning of statistical data, in addition to
information about the specific goals of the project,
an impeccable financing plan, not to mention doc-
umentation of successes to date. There would also
need to be legally binding commitments to finance
the project from donors and fiscal authorities,
statements on long-term goals from a German and
an American perspective, and German references.
Then the project (like every other project that
wanted to be sponsored by the McCloy Fund) was
to be passed on to the responsible Land commis-
sioner, where boards of directors for the McCloy
Fund were also being set up. The Ulm group had,
of course, already drawn up most of these docu-
ments because it was in direct contact with HICOG
headquarters, but they still needed a statement
from John F. Capell.
Perhaps he felt he had been passed over? It
took him three weeks to produce his expert opin-
ion. He interviewed 13 “leading personalities“ from
Ulm to arrive at his opinion. On 28 August 1950, in
a five-page paper, he compiled those statements
that seemed essential to him. In his commentary
on the project John F. Capell does not conceal the
 Founding
94 fact that the expert opinion was too much for him.
In the categories that were familiar to him of the
American “reorientation program as far as organ-
ization of forums, public discussion of current top-
ics, youth discussion groups, and town hall meet-
ings are concerned“, he found no pigeonhole that
fit exactly. 462 He also criticized the fact that Inge
Scholl had not discussed her project with the Ulm
general public, but had always consulted only a
“clique“ of close friends from the Adult Education
Center, and that the group of her advisers included
no citizens of Ulm or of Württemberg. The persons
introduced by her had no experience running a
school. The prominent citizens of Ulm he had in-
terviewed were for the most part not only skeptical
toward the project, but opposed to it. This opposi-
tion did not stop at party boundaries: Members of
the local council who belonged to the CDU (Chris-
tian Democratic Union), DVP (German National
Party), FWU (Free Voters Association of Ulm, a lo-
cal political party), and SPD (German Social Dem-
ocratic Party) spoke in negative terms. Among
them were Franz Wiedemeier, a member of the
Württemberg-Baden Parliament and leader of the
CDU in the Ulm local council, who referred to the
plan as “absurd”, Guido Guendisch, who belonged
to the finance committee of the Württemberg-
Baden Parliament, as well as Kurt Fried, who re-
jected Inge Scholl and Otl Aicher as unqualified for
the job of running a school. 463 Only three of the
people interviewed welcomed the project and felt
it was worth supporting. Without exception, there
were two reasons for rejecting the project. Firstly,
the sponsors of the project, especially Otl Aicher
but also Inge Scholl, were incapable of managing
such an institution. Secondly, there was no need
for such a college, or for a new college at all in
Württemberg-Baden, let alone in Ulm; the univer-
sities had no money as it was, so that it was pref-
erable to support existing institutions.
After giving his expert opinion, John F. Capell,
taking his time apparently 464, passed on the appli-
cation to his superiors in Stuttgart. There, too, peo-
ple took their time so that the matter could mature
in peace. It was not until the beginning of October
that James Morgan Read at HICOG headquarters
in Frankfurt am Main received the application of
the Ulm group from Stuttgart. But in Frankfurt
there were still doubts as to the earnestness and
seriousness of the college project. Obviously the
Americans did not completely trust Max Bill’s
promise, for he felt compelled to declare that he
had agreed to work on the project “definitively”,
“through thick and thin”. 465 They wanted to have
another talk with him, and a great deal seemed to
hinge on this interview for the entire project. This
attitude again clearly shows the extent to which
HICOG staff made the implementation of the col-
lege project contingent on Max Bill’s participation.
It had already become evident to them that he was
the man of action in the group of college founders,
and that only his participation guaranteed that the
plan would be put into effect permanently, while
they regarded Inge Scholl and Otl Aicher more as
idealists who had bitten off more than they could
chew when they picked this project. On 1 October
1950 Max Bill again complained of how limited
were the founders’ ideas, particularly those of Otl
Aicher. 466 On the one hand his criticism referred to
the financial basis of the whole project: “Inciden-
tally, we must be aware of the fact that Otl’s 1.7
million is no good to us, we need at least two mil-
lion.“ On the other hand his criticism referred to
the Ulm group’s ideas and intentions. He found
fault in particular with the way Otl Aicher restricted
himself to German problems without looking
beyond German borders. Shortly before, in the
September issue of the Ulmer Monatsspiegel, a
publication of the Adult Education Center, Otl
Aicher had published the short essay Education
has its disadvantages, in which he contrasted his
ideal of a culture of action with an education and
tradition that had become fossilized and projected
this view on modern youth. 467 Max Bill now re-
proached him for thinking extremely “nationalist-
ically” and for not being able to leave the cage of
his background, and to shake off “the whole pack
of nationalist lies” as though it did not exist. “Why
these eternal analyses of the German soul, why
these sentimentalities, and then the comparisons?
A positive piece of work has no need of that any-
more […].“ Inge Scholl also felt the pressure of
this burden of ideas, lugging the ballast of culture
and education, unable to think simply in new
ways, free from all assumptions: “With our tradi-
tion, we really do drag along all sorts of rub-
bish“. 468
Perhaps it was not only cultural, educational and
intellectual traditions that threatened to drain the
energy of the Ulm group. Their activities also side-
tracked them. For instance, on October 2 and 3,
1950, there was a Congress for the Social Educa-
tion of Students and Liberal Arts in Tübingen 469,
whose participants wanted to continue pushing for
the reform of higher education and referred back
to the Blaues Gutachten (Blue Report) of 1948.
According to them, new “political catastrophes”
could only be avoided if higher education was
made accessible to “parts of the population who
were economically disadvantaged“ and if German
colleges and universities no longer produced spe-
cialists, but rounded personalities. The Congress’s
demands for more money for larger faculties, in-
stitutes, classrooms, and scholarship funds were
linked with a recommendation that the college
system of the Anglo-Saxon countries be estab-
lished in some localities (“social education”) and
Posters by Otl Aicher:
On the left, the theater
playbill announcing the
opening of the Podium
in February 1950;
next to it, posters about
the Thursday lectures at
the Ulm Adult Educa-
tion Center in Decem-
ber 1948 and Novem-
ber 1949 respectively.
Photos: Hannes Rosenberg
Archive: Rosenberg (759/30,
751/08 and 751/24)
that a fixed part of university studies be devoted
to liberal arts. Among institutions that were exem-
plary in this respect, the Congress included the
boarding school Birklehof.
During these days, as the fall of 1950 set in,
the rupture between Hans Werner Richter and the
planning team around Inge Scholl must have taken
place. The documents do not mention a specific
date, but it was between 12 July1950, the Stutt-
gart meeting that Hans Werner Richter helped pre-
pare in part and in which he also participated, and
26 September 1950. From the end of 1949 until
26 September 1950, Inge Scholl’s and Otl Aicher’s
letters to Hans Werner Richter are written against
the background of the work they share on the
plans for the Geschwister-Scholl-Hochschule. This
correspondence ends as of 26 September 1950.
Since the end of March things had gotten quieter,
whereas in the past Otl Aicher, Inge Scholl and
Hans Werner Richter had had long discussions.
His participation at the Stuttgart meeting seems
almost like a dutiful reminiscence of their begin-
nings. Looking back, Inge Aicher-Scholl and Hans
Werner Richter emphasize different aspects as
they recall their separation. According to Hans
Werner Richter there was a meeting with the
HICOG officials in the fall of 1950 at which besides
himself Inge Scholl, Otl Aicher, Max Bill, Brigitte
Bermann-Fischer and Shepard Stone among oth-
ers waited in the anteroom. While the others who
were present went to the meeting, Hans Werner
Richter remained behind: “He had not been asked
in, and he probably also sensed that here some-
thing else was developing, a different concept
than the one he had strived for. He returned to
Munich. In the years that followed, the plan for a
political college turned into the Hochschule für
Gestaltung (School of Design), with which Hans
Werner Richter had nothing to do anymore“. 470
Inge Aicher-Scholl, on the other hand, in a note
written on 2 July 1988 emphasizes that Hans Wer- 95
ner Richter remained in the lobby of Ritter’s Park-
hotel in Bad Nauheim, while the others went on to
the “party”, “and declared he had no business
there, nor could he be of service; he preferred to
stay away“. 471 According to Inge Aicher-Scholl,
others who took part in this meeting were Franz
Josef Schneider, Carl Zuckmayer, Toni Wyss-Ver-
dier, and Hans Jürgen Söhring. The lines written
by Hans Werner Richter express the deep personal
hurt of someone who was kicked out, a man who
had been so deeply committed to his ideal of a
school that combined politics, social science, and
liberal arts, that was dedicated to the “education
of young people into a democratic elite”; now, in
the summer of 1950, he felt the strong opposition
not only of Max Bill and the American staff of
HICOG, but also of Brigitte Bermann-Fischer. In
her reminiscence Inge Aicher Scholl chooses to
deny this deep hurt; rather, she touchingly praises
Hans Werner Richter’s human greatness, the way
he tactfully and discreetly submitted and avoided
all conflict in the spirit of a cause they had all be-
lieved in once: “He calmly, amicably, and without
the slightest sign of anger tells me that the division
of the college into two parts, a visual one with Bill
and a verbal-political one with him at the head,
has become a problem for him. He says he’s
decided to withdraw completely, particularly since
he certainly can’t get along with Bill in the saddle.
It was a fair declaration, which I accepted. (Per-
haps I subconsciously felt the same, possibly my
turn toward the visual had already taken place,
with or without Bill.) I still recall to this moment
HWR’s [Hans Werner Richter’s; author’s note]
noble and amicable attitude. He did not want to
disturb something that was in the making.“ On 26
September 1950 Inge Scholl tried to maintain con-
tact with Hans Werner Richter and informed him
in general terms, as someone who was no longer
involved, that they had redrafted their plans and
were now climbing the bureaucratic ladder from
the bottom: “Hans Werner, we definitely have to
see each other soon and talk so we can stay in
touch […].“ 472
On 5 October 1950, in a letter to Max Bill, Otl
Aicher proposed that Walter Dirks should take “the
still vacant position” that had opened up when
Hans Werner Richter left. 473 Walter Dirks, the pub-
lisher of the monthly magazine Frankfurter Hefte,
had just published an essay there that blazed the
trail in the historical evaluation of the postwar era.
Its title – the “restorative character of the [post-
war] era” – has since become a slogan, leading
topic, and grounds for discussion for many publi-
cations. 474 Inge Scholl promptly begged Shepard
Stone to read it and remarked that it expressed
something like the philosophy of the school. 475
 Founding
96 By “restoration“ Walter Dirks meant the “reestab-
lishment of the old world“, a situation that was the
very opposite of the expectations of the “disciples
of the school of zero-point thinking“ 476: In 1945
“Germany’s intellectual and literary elite […] opted
for a radical renewal, a rebuilding of the state,
society, and economy from the ground up, and
instead only saw a reconstruction, in which too
much of the fatal past seemed to make itself
felt.“ 477 In the nineteen fifties, all those who like
Inge Scholl, Otl Aicher, Hans Werner Richter, and
Walter Dirks had advocated the goals of a demo-
cratic, humanistic, perhaps even socialist state felt
that “the bourgeois-capitalist form of the Federal
Republic was nothing but a caricature of their illu-
sions at ‘zero hour’“. 478 Walter Dirks summarized
this disillusionment in his thesis of the restoration
and thus provided a handy slogan for all who shared
the critical philosophy of the left-to-liberal intelli-
gentsia. Regardless of what academicians say
about the meaningfulness of this dictum, Walter
Dirks with the term ‘restoration’ touched a raw
nerve in the intellectuals and culturati of his time.
That is why the fact that Inge Scholl and Otl Aicher
so insistently urged Shepard Stone to read this ar-
ticle so that he could understand their own ideas
better throws a bright light on the way they de-
fined themselves. – However, Walter Dirks never
did join the project; the documents do not provide
further information on the subject.
On 17 October 1950 Hellmut Becker informed the
founders of the Ulm college in detail about the fis-
cal aspect of setting up a foundation. It was nec-
essary to create a form of organization that would
make it possible on the one hand to receive the
American endowment of DM 1 million and on the
other hand to collect the German donations and
subsidies from the private and public sector with-
out loss. Not only must the organization receiving
the money be exempt from corporation tax, but
also contributions by the companies had to be
completely tax-deductible. This was the most im-
portant condition for guaranteeing that sufficient
donations could be received from German industri-
alists.
That is why the bureaucratic obstacle course
turned out to have the following eight hurdles: The
bylaws of the foundation had to be such that after
they were authorized by the Württemberg-Baden
minister of education and the arts it would (1) be
recognized by the Ulm revenue office as an ex-
panded nonprofit and academic research institu-
tion (2); the foundation would thus be exempt
from paying the corporation tax. This in turn was
the basic precondition for nonprofit tax exemption
(3) that must be granted to an institution so that
donations made to it would be completely tax-
deductible; (4), the Württemberg-Baden ministry
of finance must then also recognize the foundation
as an expanded nonprofit and special academic
research institution. The Stuttgart ministry of fi-
nance must then (5) submit the foundation’s appli-
cation with the ministry’s endorsement to the fed-
eral ministry of finance. The federal government
must also approve the application (6), and so must
the Senate of the Federal Parliament (7). The pro-
cedure must at long last be concluded by a notice
published in the Bundesanzeiger (Federal Ga-
zette) (8).
The ministers of finance of the Länder had agreed
that the status of nonprofit tax exemption was to be
granted only to institutions in which academic ac-
tivity consisted primarily of research. For example,
universities were denied this tax-exempt status,
for in the opinion of the ministers of finance, uni-
versities were primarily engaged in teaching. Of
course, individual research institutes at certain
universities were able to get tax-exempt status.
The “senselessness of this separation of research
and teaching by the financial bureaucrats“ 479,
to quote Hellmut Becker, could, however, be cir-
cumvented in that individual research institutions
were set apart from the institution as a whole, and
were then – as institutions devoted to research –
granted nonprofit tax-exempt status. This is the
route Hellmut Becker proposed for the Ulm col-
lege as well.
A short outline dated October 1950 on “Aca-
demic work at the ‘Geschwister-Scholl-Hoch-
schule‘“ promptly lists a sociological-psycholog-
ical institute of public opinion surveys and statis-
tics, names the fields of research of the depart-
ments of product design, architecture and city
planning, and states that the focus of “academic
research” is in the areas of sociology, psychology,
statistics, economics, and cultural history. 480 And
this fiscally tricky situation is no doubt also the
reason that since the beginning of October the
drafts, and finally the authorized version of the
foundation’s bylaws also, state that the purpose of
the foundation was to run a Research Institute of
Product Design, which made the college appear to
be merely an appendage of the research institute,
in contrast to the actual intentions and later reality.
As for their true intentions, Inge Scholl, Otl Ai-
cher, and Max Bill listed these in two drafts of a
publicity brochure that documented the project’s
status for its friends and potential donors. 481 Peo-
ple they spoke to about the project attached im-
portance to the list of regular faculty members
who were expected to set the course of the future
college. That is why Otl Aicher thought of putting
together a list of persons who would constitute
the organizing committee of the college. 482
The first internal comments on the college pro-
ject by the ministry of education and the arts are
similar. 483 Even though it was imperative that “a
long-perceived gap in the educational system”
should be filled by the planned Geschwister-
Scholl-Hochschule, Ministerial Counselor Rupp
of the department of “universities and colleges”
felt strongly that the faculty should be considered
more important than the legal and financial aspects
of the founding: “Inge Scholl alone can’t carry off
the whole thing. Therefore we should find out at
this point who is prepared to teach at the school.
This would also make the school’s program much
clearer to the public than any long written state-
Gotthilf Schenkel (SPD)
(19 July 1889–10 Dec.
1960), Württemberg-
Baden and Baden-
Württemberg minister
of education and the
arts, 1951–53.
Photo: unknown
Archive: Landesbildstelle Würt-
temberg (LBW 77/82)
ments.“ While his wishes for legal changes were
met by the bylaws draft of 25 October 1950 and
he in fact supported the application, there were
still concerns regarding the name of the project.
The ministry was anxious that the project not be
referred to as a college, so as not to encroach on
the rights of those institutions of learning that
worked primarily in academic areas and so as not
to raise any false hopes in “future visitors of the
planned undertaking“ about their educational
opportunities. In the years that followed, the offi-
cials then in charge had a different point of view
and identified the HfG as a college of a special
type.
Inge Scholl seemingly fell in with these con-
cerns when she stopped entitling the bylaws “Stif-
tung Geschwister-Scholl-Hochschule” (Geschwis-
ter Scholl College Foundation) and instead entitled
it “Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung“ (Geschwister
Scholl Foundation). She felt sure at any rate that
“[i]f we feel like it, we’ll call the school a college all
the same“. 484 While the officials at the ministry of
education and the arts approved most of the pro-
ject and welcomed it, they would have preferred to
put it on an equal footing with the adult education
centers, no doubt because they were uncertain of
how to deal with this type of institution, which ap-
peared to be “very much geared to American cir-
cumstances“ and went beyond the scope of the
usual categories. In any case, graduating from this 97
school would not automatically permit “admission
to regular state examinations”. Finally one must
not overlook that it was because of the uncertainty
about “whose responsibility [in the ministry] it
was” that it took so long to process the authoriza-
tion of the foundation in a timely manner. It was
feared that the planned institution would “sooner
or later have to be financed out of the public cof-
fers” and that the plan “[would] end with great dis-
appointment as soon as American funds dried up“.
When the term college was removed from the
submitted 5 December 1950 version of the by-
laws and the sentence that students, by complet-
ing three or four years of study, would receive
“training for a profession in the abovementioned
areas” had been struck, minister of education and
the arts Theodor Bäuerle authorized the Geschwis-
ter-Scholl-Stiftung. 485 This was done by official
direction, dated 13 December 1950 with the ex-
press notation that it was not possible “to subsi-
dize the foundation or the school planned by it
with government funds or to promise support for
the future.“
The year ended successfully as the board of direc-
tors of the McCloy Fund, at its 19 December 1950
meeting, decided to grant Inge Scholl DM 1 mil-
lion for the Geschwister-Scholl-Hochschule pro-
vided that she accept two conditions: She had to
establish proof that there were sufficient funds for
the continuous operation of the college for the first
three years, as well as public and private financial
contributions of at least DM 700,000. Proof had to
be produced by 31 March 1951. 486 If one adds the
plot of land to the sum, the sum total requested by
the project was DM 2 million. Now the long period
of waiting for a binding promise by HICOG was
over. But that did not mean that the college found-
ers, headed by Inge Scholl, could relax. On the
contrary, now that the Americans had defined the
objective, the struggle for the German contribu-
tions began.
At the same meeting the board of directors of
the McCloy Fund also decided that the district liai-
son officers were to accept no new projects. 487 The
entire sum slated for aid, a total of DM 50 or 54
million respectively was thus allocated within this
one year. The sum funded 473 projects, including
36 student dormitories, 20 vocational schools, 13
elementary schools, 12 adult education centers, 10
boarding schools, 6 secondary schools, 4 research
institutes, 3 teachers’ colleges, 2 libraries, 1 radio
station, and 1 student loan institution. Over half of
the expenditures went to educational projects, and
John McCloy and the fund’s board of directors
believed that one of the best ways to democratize
the schools was to improve the students’ social
life: “Except for members of the student corpora-
 Founding
98
Reinhold Maier (DVP)
(16 Oct. 1889–19 Aug.
1971), minister-presi-
dent of Württemberg-
Baden, 1946–52, and
Baden-Württemberg,
1952–53.
Photo: unknown
Archive: Landesbildstelle Würt-
temberg (54151)
tions [sic] which were beginning to revive after the
war, German students were lone wolves eating in
restaurants and living in scattered rooms. It was
felt that if the idea of residential community life
were introduced into the German universities there
would be a better chance of producing democratic
leaders. Therefore first priority was given to stu-
dent centers. Next came the provision of common
eating facilities and dormitories. The easiest idea
to ‘sell‘ to the German universities was that of stu-
dent dormitories because of the very bad living
conditions.“ 488 Schools that followed a reformed
curriculum received subsidies, as did institutes
that focused on sociological issues, which in the
opinion of the HICOG staff had been criminally
neglected in Germany up to that time.
The DM 1 million grant given to the Geschwister-
Scholl-Stiftung was the McCloy Fund’s fourth larg-
est endowment. The HfG was listed as Special
Project no. 1 – a reference to the fact that Inge
Scholl had contacted Shepard Stone when the
McCloy Fund was still in its infancy. One might
also see this as an indication of the project’s high
priority for John McCloy and Shepard Stone. It is
remarkable how important these many individual
projects and initiatives were for them, given John
McCloy’s three overriding tasks during the next 18
months until his departure from Germany: the eco-
nomic, military, and political integration of Germa-
ny in the Western, democratic community of states
associated with the key words Schuman Plan, Ple-
ven Plan, and Bonn Convention/General Treaty.
“Like a vast impassable terrain, 1951 lay before
us“, Inge Scholl reported a year and a half later in
her first circular letter to the friends and support-
ers of the Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung. 489 Within
the first ten weeks of that year, by 15 March 1951,
four hurdles had to be cleared:
the Württemberg-Baden ministry of finance had
to sell the plot of land on Kuhberg in Ulm, val-
ued at DM 300,000, to the foundation;
the foundation had to furnish proof of DM
700,000 in public and private donations and
payments in kind. Inge Scholl was concerned
whether HICOG would recognize all the pay-
ments in kind as meeting this sum;
in order for private funds even to be contri-
buted, the foundation needed to be recognized
as being particularly worthy of promotion and
thus entitled to tax relief;
lastly, it was necessary to find a way of guaran-
teeing operating expenses for the first three
years.
The delays of the previous year had, as Inge Scholl
saw it, hurt the foundation, because – for instance
– industry interest had in the meantime focused
on the newly founded Arbeitsgemeinschaft für
Formgebung des Bundesverbandes der Deut-
schen Industrie (Association for Design of the
Federal Union of German Industry) since it was
believed that the foundation would not be estab-
lished after all. 491 The idea of design was now in
the air, and talked about more in public. In March
1951, for example, the Stuttgart Landesgewerbe-
amt (Württemberg-Baden Trade Supervision De-
partment) opened the exhibition Industry and Arti-
sans Create New Household Appliances in the
U.S. with exhibits selected by New York’s Museum
of Modern Art. The HICOG commissioner’s office
for Württemberg-Baden participated in organizing
the event, which subsequently toured Europe. The
president of the trade supervision department
commented on the exhibition along the same lines
as the founders of the HfG: “Not that we should
copy these things. But we must recognize the spir-
it of functionality, usefulness and economy that
results in a clarity of design and also represents
the basic conditions and prerequisites for the
design of our own modern commodity articles.“ 492
The HICOG deadline was quite urgent, and the
fact that it was so soon gives rise to three conjec-
tures. Either John McCloy’s colleagues felt the
project had reached such a point of maturity that
this period of time would present no problem. Or
it was part of their modus operandi – something
Inge Scholl had already criticized earlier – that
they would first urge applicants to hurry, only to
let the project mature on a desk later. Lastly it can
be assumed that John McCloy was urging his staff
in the background because his policy needed to
bear its first fruit and time was running out.
The college founders’ tasks in 1951 were closely
interlinked. They depended on each other to such
an extent that the hurdles could not be cleared
separately, one after the other, but all had to be
tackled simultaneously. The three federal minis-
tries involved not only made their subsidies contin-
gent on the other ministries’ release of funds, but
also on the fact that the Land and the federal gov-
ernment would support the foundation and that
operating costs for the first years would be cov-
ered. The Württemberg-Baden Trade Supervision
Department in Stuttgart had similar expectations:
The prerequisite for its assistance was support
from the ministry of education and the arts. Only
the city of Ulm had no preconditions. This is when
Inge Scholl became familiar with the modus oper-
andi of the federal and Land ministries’ bureaucra-
cy that was to rob her of a great deal of energy
during the following years and was one reason
that the whole project’s implementation was slowed
down considerably: Every government agency
demanded to see the preliminary work of another
agency before it would take action itself.
That year there was far less need than in 1950
for the group of founders to discuss the program
of the Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung for the planned
school of design. There was still internal agitation ,
but this hardly became public knowledge. They
repeatedly had to present their program in closed
meetings, and ventured into decisive parliamen-
tary bodies: into the head department of the Ulm
Municipal Council, into the politico-cultural com-
mittee of the Württemberg-Baden Parliament, and
finally, in the form of minutes, into the fiscal policy
committee, or rather into the Parliament itself.
The result was a shifting of the guidelines for
1951. Whereas in 1950 discussion of the program
and debates with HICOG were still in the forefront,
attention now focused on pushing through the
plans in the government agencies of the city of
Ulm, the Land of Württemberg-Baden, and the
federal government.
The first hurdle for the year 1951 had been tackled
by Hellmut Becker as early as 28 December 1950,
when he applied to the German federal govern-
ment to have the Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung rec-
ognized as being entitled to special tax privileg-
es. 493 This recognition meant that companies and
private individuals could use their donations and
payments in kind to the foundation as tax write-
offs – the sine qua non for the foundation. The
procedure consisted of five steps:
1. the foundation needed to be recognized by the
tax office of Ulm;
2. it needed to be declared a nonprofit by the
Württemberg-Baden ministry of finance, which
required a recommendation from the ministry of
education and the arts;
3. an administrative order needed to be passed by
the federal government;
4. the Senate of the Federal Parliament needed to
give its approval;
5. a notice needed to be published in the Bundes- 99
anzeiger (Federal Gazette).
This sequence of events had already been fol-
lowed twice for other matters and had proved to
be cumbersome and costly. A third administrative
directive would therefore actually no longer be
passed, and the entire procedure would be given
up. But the foundation could not afford to wait
until this complicated procedure was replaced by
a simplified one. Fortunately the Ulm case was not
the only urgent one. Thus the whole thing was
resolved after all, and this was the good news: that
the third administrative directive was in the offing.
The bad news for the founders of the college,
however, was that this process would not be fin-
ished by 15 March 1951. Hellmut Becker was
already informed on 11 January 1951 that the
meeting of tax experts from the various Länder
would take place at the end of January, so that,
if everything went smoothly, the federal govern-
ment could pass the cabinet submission in Febru-
ary and the Senate could express its approval at
the end of March. 494 It was impossible to meet
HICOG’s deadline (15 March 1951).
Inge Scholl’s next errand, in the middle of Janu-
ary, took her to the ministry of education and the
arts in Stuttgart, because the Württemberg-Baden
ministry of finance required an expert opinion in
order to grant her foundation nonprofit status.
Here, as in subsequent negotiations, the founders
of the college pushed the school of design they
were planning into the background while they
emphasized the importance of the institute of
product design. The foundation, they said, would
set up a research institute and, solely to supple-
ment it, establish a college as well. 495 In his 24
January 1951 expert opinion Ministerial Counselor
Dr. Rupp approved the foundation’s objectives so
that the ministry of finance could declare the
organization a nonprofit in good conscience. 496
Thus nothing stood in the way of further proceed-
ings until the Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung – after
the notice in the Bundesanzeiger for 6 June
1951 497 – finally gained special recognition on 30
June 1951 within the framework of the third
administrative directive. 498 At this point, the foun-
dation was running ten weeks behind HICOG’s
ten-week deadline.
The federal ministry of the interior also required
a position from the ministry of education and the
arts concerning the foundation’s plans, because
on 8 January 1951 Inge Scholl had submitted an
application for support with funds from the Federal
Youth Plan. 499 On 21 February 1951 minister of
education and the arts Gotthilf Schenkel (SPD,
German Social Democratic Party), personally is-
sued it.500 Hellmut Becker provided backup through
 Organs
of the Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung
and of the Society of Friends
490
1951–1968

1952 1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 101

24. VI. 1. IV. 24. II. 1. I. 3. VII. 1./4. X.

Executive board Inge Aicher-Scholl

Thorwald Risler

Max Guther

Walter Erbe

Hans Zumsteg

Friedrich Rau

Werner Ruch
as authorized representative

1 24. IV. General meeting 2 3 4 12. VI.

5. 6Gen. 7 28. XI. General meeting
24. VI. 6. III. 27. /28. II. 17. XI. 29. IX. 19.VII.5.X.
Advisory board Otl Aicher Otl Aicher + Max Guther
Inge Aicher-Scholl Inge Aicher-Scholl + Thorwald Risler
Hellmut Becker Hellmut Becker
Max Bill Max Bill
Hans Frieder Eychmüller Hans Frieder Eychmüller
Günther Grzimek Günther Grzimek
Marcia Kahn Fritz Pfeil
Roderich Count Thun Roderich Count Thun
Peter Wackernagel walter Zeischegg
Walter Zeischegg

1. VII. 1. IV. 16. I. 16. VIII. 1. VI.

Administrative director Günther Schlensag Günther Schweigkofler Hans Jörg Gert Krappe Klaus Fischer
Fischer
interim

24. VI. 3. X. 13. III. 30. VIII.

Board of trustees Hermann Josef Abs + John J. McCloy + Max Bill + Inge Aicher-Scholl
Otto Bartning + Hellmut Becker
Walter Gropius
Romano Guardini
Odd Nansen
Herbert Read
Ignazio Silone
Henry van de Velde
Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker
Carl Zuckmayer

17. XII. 11. IV.

Executive board Roderich Count Thun Klaus Dohrn ( chair)
of the Society of Friends of the Erhard Löwe ( deputy)
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung Roderich Count Thun ( deputy)
Johann Dietrich Auffermann
Hellmut Becker
 Founding
102 his contacts, which included people at the federal
ministry of the interior. 501
Originally the sum the group of founders
requested from the Federal Youth Plan was
DM 500,000 for construction 502, the total costs of
which were to be just under DM 1.7 million. 503 In
the beginning of March they raised their construc-
tion cost estimate to DM 2 million, pointing out
that the rate of price increases had driven up costs
since the plan was initially drawn up. 504 Estimated
operating costs for the first three years provided
for a yearly budget of DM 480,000 itemized as fol-
lows:
DM 290,000 income by the institution itself,
DM 100,000 from the Baden-Württemberg
Trade Supervisory Office in Stuttgart,
DM 80,000 from the federal ministry of eco-
nomics, and
DM 10,000 from the planned Gesellschaft der
Freunde (Association of Friends). 505
Each student would then have required a subsidy
of about DM 1,900 per academic year. Of course,
this budget draft was based on the unrealistic
assumption that 150 students would pay registra-
tion and tuition fees as well as rent from the first
year on. That this was so was no secret to the offi-
cials in the ministries and to HICOG staff: Financ-
ing still had to be revised.
However, in mid-April 1951 Inge Scholl, Otl
Aicher, and Max Bill were still sure that their
financing plan would work out, believing that the
backing of the Baden-Württemberg Trade Supervi-
sory Office would assure funds for maintenance in
the coming years. 506 Even when during a meeting
in Bonn on 20 April 1951 they had to put up with
the fact that the federal government did not want
to participate in subsidizing operating costs, they
were able to chalk up one success: Both federal
ministries “are seriously considering giving us a
one-time financial contribution”. The officials still
clung to the reservation that “what is involved is a
research institute. We simply still need concrete
documentation. […] It makes no sense for us to
say sensibly in private that the whole thing has to
grow out of the experiment, out of the actual work.
We’ll never get away with that at the government
agencies.“ 507
Now a preliminary decision by the federal minis-
tries had to be urgently submitted to scrutiny by
the end of May, for on 15 March 1951 the deadline
set by HICOG had passed and the second one, 30
May 1951, could also not be met. While the Ameri-
cans still refrained from meting out the conse-
quences, they urged that the conditions should be
met in due form. Inge Scholl took seriously the risk
involved if the agreed-upon requirements were
disregarded. 508 The American fiscal year, which
applied to HICOG as well, would end on 30 June
1951. 509 By that date the board of directors of the
McCloy Fund had to have allocated its funds. The
pressure also increased among members of the
HICOG staff who had championed the extraordi-
nary Ulm project that was now in danger of being
crushed by the mills of German bureaucracy. As
late as the beginning of April, in his quarterly
report, John McCloy referred to how nerve-wrack-
ing it was to resist Eastern tactics to influence
public opinion: “The communists continued their
propaganda with unabated intensity. Bitter, primi-
tive, extravagant, and subtle, it takes every imagin-
able form and at the same time continues to be
forceful and pernicious.“ 510 He was not a man to
admit so simply that he was beaten in the struggle
for the minds and hearts of the Germans, but in
order to go on with that struggle he needed bas-
tions of democracy in Germany. On the other
hand, his colleague James Morgan Read 511, the
head of the education division at HICOG’s Frank-
furt headquarters, sounded resigned in a radio
address given at the beginning of May 1951. The
Neue Zeitung of 9 May 1951 published his accu-
sation against German universities that “they were
not able to do justice to the ‘most urgent social
and political problems of our time’. As a particular
defect of the university system he mentioned the
‘conservative attitude of the universities, lack of
contact with the public, and the absence of liberal
arts programs’. The decline of the universities from
their ‘worldwide pre-eminence’ in the 19th century
was a result not only of National Socialism, but
also of the fact that social and political changes in
the 20th century had been ignored. He expressly
regretted that proposals by the 1948 study group
on the reform of higher education had not been
implemented in the American Zone, since they
could have produced a significant change in the
university landscape and in relations between the
university and the public.“ 512 A few days later, in
the middle of May 1951, the situation seems to
have reached crisis proportions as James Mor-
gan Read’s tension was vented when he openly
showed his deep distrust and personal dislike of
Otl Aicher. Inge Scholl told Hellmut Becker of her
deep disappointment at this behavior and consid-
ered putting a stop to the whole undertaking: “It’s
not about my personal relationship with Otl, but
about his basic position. The whole thing depends
not on me, or in the final analysis on Bill, but on
Otl, because in addition to his unusual talent he
also has the human strength and greatness and
the endurance that the school needs. […] I won-
der if this is not a real warning to make a clean
sweep, to distance ourselves from the Americans
and the money, and to call it a day while we can
still do it in a fair manner and while there’s still
time.“ 513
Things did not come to that point. Inge Scholl
swallowed her anger and, on 23 May 1951, re-
ceived a third and last deadline for 31 August 1951
from the special projects committee. 514 During
these three months all negotiations finally had to
be concluded with binding declarations.
They could not count on the Baden-Württem-
berg Trade Supervisory Department for operating
expenses, as Inge Scholl and Max Bill were to dis-
cover at their meeting with the agency’s president,
Edgar Hotz, on 28 May 1951. Instead of the ex-
pected DM 100,000 annually they received only
the weak promise that the office would come out
in favor of this support with the Land – that is, if
the ministry of education and the arts approved of
the plans, if the 1.7 million could be collected for
construction, and if the second half of operating
costs was raised. 515 The college founders had to
look for another source for the needed operating
funds and took the direction suggested by Edgar
Hotz: They turned directly to the Land of Württem-
berg-Baden.
Max Bill met with Land minister of education
and the arts Gotthilf Schenkel, and managed to
win his sympathy for the college plans and to
wring the first concessions from him. While the
ministry of education and the arts, he said, could
not give any money, he would bring his influence
to bear on the difficult minister of finance, Karl
Inge Scholl
between her parents
Robert and Magdalene,
circa November 1949.
Photo: Hannes Rosenberg
Archive: Rosenberg (747/09)
Frank 516, to obtain Land funding if the Trade Super- 103
visory Office was behind the project. 517 At the next
meeting on 13 June 1951 Gotthilf Schenkel even
expressed his intention to let the foundation have
the total subsidy needed for the first three years of
operation. 518 Now, after a long bleak period, light
finally appeared at the end of one of the four tun-
nels through which the Ulm project had to be
channeled.
Inge Scholl immediately tried to take the minister
at his word and asked him to announce his inten-
tion to the federal ministry of economics. She had
estimated the Federal subsidy for construction at
a total of DM 300,000, the city’s subsidy at a
magnanimous DM 150,000, and the share from
the private sector at DM 250,000. 519 On 15 June
1951 the federal ministry of economics requested
the binding declaration from the Land of Württem-
berg-Baden that they would pay the Geschwister-
Scholl-Stiftung an annual sum of DM 190,000 for
the next three years; if so, the federal ministry of
economics would subsidize the construction of the
college to the tune of DM 200,000 520; the addi-
tional DM 100,000 of the federal ministry of the
interior also hinged on the letter of intent of the
minister of education and the arts, which Inge
Scholl, with utmost tactical skill, had transmuted
into a guarantee by the Land. And on 25 June
1951 Ludwig Erhard indeed did receive the de-
sired confirmation from Gotthilf Schenkel that he
would “make every effort to get the Württemberg-
Baden Parliament’s consent to undertake paying
a regular subsidy of DM 190,000 for a period of
three years“. 521 What it all boiled down to more
and more was that the entire financing packet de-
pended on the consent of the Land where the in-
stitutions of the foundation would be located –
a question of honor?
In fact, in her negotiations and reports Inge
Scholl also linked the financial offer of the McCloy
Fund with the future location of the foundation’s
institutions: She claimed that Frankfurt am Main
in particular, but also Düsseldorf, Hamburg, and
Stuttgart had made serious offers to set up the
planned college along with the institute in their
city. 522 These offers gave her an opportunity to
remind the Land of Württemberg-Baden of its
moral duty toward the city of Ulm, and the Ulm
Municipal Council also soon made this commit-
ment its own. Over and above that, Theodor Pfizer
drew attention to the fact that Ulm, a medium-
sized town, needed such attractive institutions in
order to hold its own as the center of its surround-
ing area. Also one must not forget that compared
to its competitor cities, Ulm was able to offer the
right milieu for setting up the foundation, after the
Ulm Adult Education Center had already done the
groundwork for years. 523
 Founding
104
Hermann Wild (DVP)
(27 Feb. 1884–15 Dec.
1962), chairman of the
politico-cultural com-
mittee of the Württem-
berg-Baden Landtag,
1946–52.
Photo: unknown
Archive: Landesbildstelle Würt-
temberg (89/21a)
The cabinet of Württemberg-Baden Minister-presi-
dent Reinhold Maier (DVP, German National Party)
first gave its attention to the plans of the Geschwis-
ter-Scholl-Stiftung on 29 June 1951. In his sub-
mission the minister of education and the arts em-
phasized that the money from the McCloy Fund
must be secured for the Land, because other
Lands of the Federal Republic were trying to get it.
He hoped that Ulm in particular, “a town severely
destroyed, will be given considerable impetus by
the work of the foundation“. The financing of one-
time expenses was more or less assured, so that
the “McCloy million […] was dependent on the
granting of the DM 190,000 for the first three
years“ – a view that showed that the minister pre-
sented the hope of the college founders as though
it were a fact. In a few short words he summarized
the nature of the planned institutions and listed
their characteristics in the following opportune
sequence: “The research institute wishes to bring
the design of articles of daily use into harmony
with their material, their construction, their intended
purpose, their affordability, and their social signifi-
cance. The School of Design is to be devoted pri-
marily to design problems of daily life and of in-
dustry and trade (the design of articles of daily
use, advertising, packaging, photography, lifestyle,
architecture, city planning). The planners have in
mind an institution that is to take up the tradition
of, say, the former Bauhaus of Dessau and contin-
ue it in accordance with today’s requirements.“ 524
However, the ministerial council’s basically posi-
tive attitude did not lead to the legally binding
commitment that the Land would bear the costs
of maintenance for the first three years. The rea-
son given was that the constitutional branch for
this was the Württemberg-Baden Parliament. So
as not to fall out with HICOG, the ministry of edu-
cation and the arts was of course to thank the
American high commissioner politely for HICOG’s
generosity, but as for the rest it was to work out
the plans with the foundation to a point where the
government could hold its own with them in the
Parliament. 525 The Minister-president wanted to
gain time, time that Inge Scholl no longer had. He
feared defeat in the Parliament’s finance commit-
tee, for in those days everything in Land politics
revolved around the question whether and under
what circumstances the Southwestern state would
be formed from the Lands of Baden, Württemberg-
Baden, and Württemberg-Hohenzollern. Every
matter of concern to the government, as a basis
for negotiations, could be misused and become
clay in the hands of the disputing politicians.
Inge Scholl had no choice but to take the bull by
the horns. She pressured the Württemberg-Baden
government: Because of the ministerial council’s
basically positive attitude, she said, the foundation
had now “refused other offers and committed it-
self completely to Württemberg”. If the cabinet
were to change its position again, the project
would be paralyzed for years to come, and John
McCloy and the German and international person-
alities who were the project’s promoters would be
compromised. 526
It was now the turn of the city of Ulm. On 10 July
1951 Inge Scholl applied for support of the foun-
dation, using the already familiar arguments and
calculations that concluded with the economic
consideration that “the institutions planned by the
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung […] would eventually
be of considerable importance for the economic
development of Germany“. In addition to the social
and cultural responsibility of the designers, who
materialized the age of technology in its day-to-
day details, she emphasized how far behind the
times German products were in terms of export-
ability 527: They had to be sold in a world market
from whose development Germany had been cut
off for 15 years.
The main division of the Ulm Municipal Council
reviewed Inge Scholl’s application on 24 July 1951.
She had wisely refrained from naming a specific
subsidy amount. Theodor Pfizer proposed that the
construction of the college should be promoted by
developing the construction site – a payment in
kind estimated at a minimum of DM 245,000, al-
most DM 100,000 more than provided for in pre-
vious calculations. Moreover the mayor proposed
that the college should be supplied with coal, gas,
water, and electricity – at a cost of an estimated
DM 40,000 annually – for the same length of time
as the Land would subsidize the project. There
were no objections to this motion. The financing
did not worry the municipal politicians, because
the city wanted to take advantage of a loan desig-
nated for a specific purpose by Württembergische
Girozentrale (Württemberg Clearinghouse of Cen-
tral Banks) 528 and therefore did not have to put off
any urgent expenditures. Also the development of
Kuhberg would have to paid for anyway if it was
identified as a development area. Thus it was seen
as an investment in the economic and cultural
attractiveness of the city. But the Ulm municipal
council members also cited the international
dimension of the project as a whole, its signifi-
cance – possibly equaling that of the Bauhaus –
and, last but not least, “a certain moral obligation
toward the Scholl family” in their recommendation.
Unanimously they decided to recommend that the
municipal council support the Geschwister-Scholl-
Stiftung. 529
With this dazzling, unexpectedly high subsidy by
the city toward construction and operating costs,
the Ulm group again visited the federal minister of
economics. Ludwig Erhard had demanded that the
city pledge a subsidy of DM 100,000 530, and now
he received a pledge of two and a half times that
amount. The federal ministry of the interior togeth-
er with the federal ministry of housing construc-
tion wanted to make available DM 100,000 if the
federal ministry of economics also supported the
foundation. 531 That meant financing was assured,
Hellmut Becker stated confidently, not mentioning
that the subsidy of the Land was uncertain, adding
that now everything depended only on a declara-
tion by the federal ministry of economics that it
would grant an additional DM 200,000 for con-
struction. 532
The plans were disputed within the ministry.
Ludwig Erhard himself probably could not quite
manage to work up enough enthusiasm for the
matter. He doubted that the institutions of the
foundation would be self-supporting in the long
run, and there was a risk “that because of the new
institute, funds available for research, already very
limited, would be further splintered“. In a survey
of experts apparently only Otto Bartning, the presi-
dent of the Bund Deutscher Architekten (Associa-
tion of German Architects), and the manager of
the Württemberg-Baden Werkbund, Heinrich
König, put in a good word for the foundation. 533
The ministry had at its disposal a fund consist-
ing of Marshall Plan moneys reserved for research.
A subcommittee of the review board for the selec-
tion of research projects, the so-called Committee
of Eight, had been formed. On 11 July 1951, at the
last conference to discuss the application of the
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung, the representative of
the ministry, Walther Hinsch, dared to come for-
ward as a supporter of the foundation’s intentions
and encountered considerable resistance. In the
reserved language of officialdom the minutes stated
that the objections of committee members “re-
ferred to the objective necessity of the enterprise
and above all to its financial security. First and
foremost there were doubts whether the concerns 105
of the Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung were of a type
that could be financed with ERP funds.“ 534 Such
being the case, it might even be considered a suc-
cess that Walther Hinsch was to ask HICOG for yet
another extended deadline and to pass on to the
committee details regarding teaching, research,
faculty, and proof of donations. 535
HICOG almost never granted deadline extensions:
Instead of Friday evening (31 August 1951) the fol-
lowing Monday evening (3 September 1951) was
irrevocably considered to be the terminal date. The
Americans were obviously tired of the inertia and
undecisiveness of German officials, who for over
half a year had passed around in a circle the re-
sponsibility for their decision. Three times HICOG
staff had moved up the deadline, but that had not
made it easier for the Germans to come to a deci-
sion, and a further extension would have caused
them to lose credibility without improving the situ-
ation. They now forced the ministries in Bonn and
Stuttgart to put their cards on the table.
There was a nerve-wracking race against time
that would have been unnecessary under reason-
able circumstances. The Committee of Eight did
not meet again until 1 September 1951. Seven
members agreed to subsidize the foundation
under the conditions that in the future neither reg-
ular nor exceptional federal budgetary funds
would be asked for and that the remaining DM
1.5 million would be collected for the construc-
tion. 536 Only the representative of the federal min-
istry of finance refused his assent, for he believed
that at the end of three years, operating costs
would be up to the federal government. He was
only willing to release the DM 200,000 and thus
get the project under way if the Württemberg-
Baden government would also make a commit-
ment to Parliament to give subsidies once the first
three years were up. He demanded a resolution on
the matter by the cabinet that was to meet on the
following Monday. 537 That Monday night, 3 Sep-
tember 1951, HICOG’s deadline expired, so that
the Old Maid had again been passed on to the
next player; the government under Reinhold Maier
had to take it upon itself to decide the fate of the
foundation plans. However, the council of minis-
ters did not want to be pinned down, and wriggled
out of the stranglehold imposed on them by the
federal ministry of finance by sending the ministry
a teletype message that the government of Würt-
temberg-Baden had no intention of using federal
funds for operating expenses incurred by the foun-
dation. 538 That meant minister of education and
the arts Gotthilf Schenkel had had his way despite
the minister of finance, Karl Frank. While the gov-
ernment had given no guarantee for the founda-
tion, it was enough for the federal ministry of
 Founding
106 finance to agree in good conscience to a one-time
subsidy from ERP funds. HICOG received the cabi-
net’s statement that same evening and for the
time being they contented themselves with the
hodgepodge of provisos and stipulations. The
deadline was considered to have been met; for
the moment the first version of the foundation
charter was accepted – the version issued on 28
June 1951 by General George P. Hays, the deputy
of John McCloy. 539
An interim balance sheet after this partial victory
by the founders of the college – and it must be
considered a great success that they fulfilled
HICOG’s conditions “by the deadline” in spite of
resistance and obstructions – shows the following
picture:
construction of the college complex with class-
rooms, workshops, student dormitory, and teach-
ers’ apartments was for the most part estimated
at DM 1.7 million, and also at DM 2 million in
communications with HICOG;
the value of the land was set at DM 300,000;
in addition to the DM 1 million from HICOG the
foundation expected
DM 200,000 from the federal ministry of eco-
nomics and
DM 100,000 from the Federal Youth Plan,
DM 245,000 in payments in kind from the city
of Ulm,
DM 245,000 from unspecified private sources
and
DM 20,000 from Norwegian Aid for Europe, a
total of DM 2.11 million (including the site). 540
The subsidy for ongoing operating costs total-
ing DM 190,000 was to be approved by the
Württemberg-Baden Parliament, and the city
would make available payments in kind of up
to DM 40,000 annually.
All those who were part of the founders’ group
must have realized that their financial structure
was supported by shaky columns. If a single col-
umn broke, the entire construction would collapse
and presumably bury the plans under it, for the
supports were tied to each other with ropes of
interdependency. The Americans began to check
whether the structure could bear the weight. The
weakest factor was the subsidy from the Land, of
which the founders were the least sure. The feder-
al ministries would probably forget about their res-
ervations. And above all the letter from the minis-
ter of education and the arts that the Württem-
berg-Baden government would support the subsi-
dy before Parliament in the next three years was
not enough for the McCloy Fund’s board of direc-
tors. 541 If the government wanted to shift respon-
sibility for the subsidy to the Parliament because it
was the appropriate constitutional branch, then
Parliament must simply approve – or deny – the
subsidy.
The chairman of the politico-cultural committee
was Professor Hermann Wild (DVP, German
National Party), the retired teacher of an Ulm sec-
ondary school, a member of the board of trustees
of the Ulm Adult Education Center who had al-
ready learned about the foundation plans as a
member of the Ulm municipal council at the meet-
ing of the main division on 24 July 1951. He intro-
duced the matter to the committee: “He wants to
do more for us personally – a success I couldn’t
have imagined in my wildest dreams a year ago.
Curiously enough, Wild is one of the most conser-
vative people in Ulm, but especially in the last few
years he has touchingly worked in support of
modern development in Ulm […].“ 542 In the com-
mittee he met “considerable scepticism and also
[…] definite resistance“. The representative of the
ministry of finance felt very negative about the
matter, because the Württemberg-Baden govern-
ment had agreed not to apply for any federal funds
for maintenance costs after the first three years. 543
Immediately after this declaration the minister of
finance stated “that unless the budgetary situation
improves substantially, the Land of Württemberg-
Baden is not in a position to grant any subsidies
for the above-named institute in this and in the
next fiscal years“. 544 At the next committee meet-
ing Hellmut Becker, Max Bill and Otto Bartning
were to give reports in order to persuade the gent-
lemen. It was particularly the representatives of
institutions of higher learning who had to be won
over, because they could oppose the plans regard-
ing one sensitive point: The crucial question in the
committee was “whether a new school needed to
be founded for our idea“. 545
When Hermann Wild left the meeting of the politi-
co-cultural committee, he received a confidential
report from the Land security office on 18 points
that the office had adopted – unexamined. 546 The
report concerned the copy of a libelous document
that had now found its way to Parliament as part
of a smear campaign.
The fact that people were not always sympa-
thetic to the plans of Inge Scholl and her helpers
surprised no one. However, this defamation was
not about her cause, but about the people who
were behind it: the Scholl family and Otl Aicher.
The denunciations were the work of Ulm resident
Albert Riester who, as Inge Scholl reported 547, had
bragged that as a student he had had a leading
part in the persecution of her brother and sister,
whom he would have had arrested on the same
day if they had not fallen into the hands of the
Gestapo on 18 April 1943 as a result of the leaflets
they had distributed. It was reported that he had a
criminal record for continually receiving stolen
goods and had worked with the American Coun-
terintelligence Corps – not an isolated instance.
Klaus Barbie, the head of the Gestapo, was the
most prominent of the former National Socialist
agents with whom this intelligence service had
collaborated after the end of the war. In the sum-
mer of 1949 Albert Riester was appointed the edi-
tor of the Ulmer Nachrichten. He used this plat-
form repeatedly to manipulate public opinion
against the foundation’s plans, the last occasion
being 14 December 1950, when in a long article
he disseminated false figures and data and added
fuel to fears “that the education provided at the
college would be only superficial and that the
planned institution would be overrun by amateur-
ism“. 548 By June of 1951, he had become unac-
ceptable to the Ulmer Nachrichten after a criminal
action by the Ulm department of public prosecu-
tion based on the suspicion that in 1939 he had
caused a Jewish businessman to be judged by the
[National Socialist] People’s Court.
The smear campaign seems to have gone on for
some time, for as early as January 1951 Inge
Scholl had contacted the chief public prosecutor
regarding this matter. 549 Now, in mid-September
1951, when the financing of the founding plans
seemed to be assured to the point where HICOG
Alex Möller (SPD)
(26 Apr. 1903–2 Oct.
1985), chairman of the
finance committee of
the Württemberg-
Baden Landtag, 1950–
52, and of the Baden-
Württemberg Landtag,
1952-61.
Photo: unknown
Archive: Landesbildstelle Würt-
temberg (LBW 73/15)
staff considered that their deadline had been met,
the informer sent out reams of his papers to minis-
tries and government agencies that were involved
in Ulm, Stuttgart, and Bonn, as well as to industrial
firms and associations. In them he disseminated a
malicious demagogical mixture of calumny, half-
truths, innuendoes, and invention that distorted
reality. For example, in an aside he claimed that Otl
Aicher was “the proposed second director of the
‘Hochschule für Gestaltung’ [School of Design]
and of the research institute of production (cf. the
new ‘Technische Hochschule für Werkkunst’ 107
[Technical College of Industrial Design] in Dresden,
the Soviet Zone). Apart from the fact that there
was to be no institute “for production”: For this
sort of “comparison” with the Dresden college
there was only one reason to mention an institu-
tion that was located in Communist East Germany,
and that was to establish a relationship between it
and plans for the Ulm college and to denigrate the
latter solely through this alleged relationship,
which, however, was nonexistent. 550
At the meeting of the board of trustees of the
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung on 26 September
1951 (incidentally, the only meeting of this body
that ever seems to have taken place), Inge Scholl
refuted all allegations. But that did not get rid of
the accusations. In a second wave charges tended
to be made against Otl Aicher and the Ulm Adult
Education Center 551, because Inge Scholl and her
father were more or less unassailable. In the
months that followed, Theodor Pfizer, Hermann
Josef Abs, and Hellmut Becker worked hard trying
little by little to limit the damage. 552 At the time it
was almost impossible to estimate the extent of
the damage; even today one can only hazard a
guess. The federal ministries recoiled and began
to have objections on political grounds 553, and
industry kept its distance. 554 The first cost the
foundation time, while the second cost them
money because valuable contacts with the private
sector, with Hermann Josef Abs as the intermedi-
ary, became useless.
One example for this is the Wirtschaftsvereini-
gung Eisen- und Stahlindustrie (Trade Associa-
tion of the Iron and Steel Industry), which was en-
meshed in the campaign in a very dubious way,
as was shown in 1952. 555 Inge Scholl had been
very warmly welcomed when she first spoke to
them on 15 June 1951, and on 15 August 1951
she was led to expect that she would get all the
steel needed for the construction of the college
building free of charge. Max Bill’s architectural
blueprints after that were based on this promised
donation, quoted as at least 365 metric tons. At
the same time, however, the trade association
instructed the private consulting firm for industrial
safety, Rudolf Gosekuhl in Essen, to make inquir-
ies. Through a middleman in the management of
the Stifterverband der Deutschen Wissenschaft
(Founders’ Association of German Science and
Research) (an institution beyond all reproach), this
firm happened to come across Albert Riester, who
was working for an organization not otherwise
specified, Erste Legion, in Cologne. Thus it hap-
pened that the Wirtschaftsvereinigung Eisen- und
Stahlindustrie accepted Albert Riester’s slander as
fact, that it printed warnings against the allegedly
Communist Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung in its
Wirtschaftliche Nachrichten and moreover passed
 Founding
108 them on to the federal ministries of economics
and the interior as well. “These slanderous accu-
sations would doubtlessly not have been believed,
simply because of the way they were worded, if
they had not been passed on by the Wirtschafts-
vereinigung Eisen- und Stahlindustrie. At the time,
representatives of the Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung
were told that the accusations came from such a
prominent authority that in spite of their obvious
unlikelihood they had to be examined very careful-
ly.“ The foundation found out about the denuncia-
tions only because some were also leaked to Her-
mann Josef Abs, and as a trustee of the founda-
tion he immediately raised the alarm. – When Hell-
mut Becker resolutely found the source of the de-
nunciation and demanded an official retraction by
the trade association, the association, at the begin-
ning of January 1952, pretended to be willing to
cooperate, but asked the foundation not to initiate
legal proceedings against the association and its
informants. By August 1952 the anger had cooled,
and the industry representatives were now sur-
prised by the size of the requested donation, and
also could no longer remember their promises and
bluntly rejected all damage claims. The re- quired
steel, they said, must be paid for at the normal rates.
To the derision of the foundation, on 31 October
1952 the donations committee of the trade associ-
ation approved a DM 2,000 contribution. 556 The
Ulm group decided not to sue, presumably since
they were afraid that then they might become
known as communists among the general public.
From a long-term perspective, the smear cam-
paign fueled the suspicion that was voiced over
and over again, explicitly or implicitly: The HfG,
rumor had it, was a Communist or even “cultural
Bolshevist” institution. For this reason, besides
showing a lack of understanding for a different
concept of culture, the defamations were a reason
for the reluctance manifested in 1968 in the Ba-
den-Württemberg Parliament and cabinet to allow
an independent institution the freedom to do as it
liked and to promote it. Accusing the foundation of
communism masked the real reasons for rejecting
the HfG.
It is pointless to lament about the mood in a
country and the spirit of an era that doubtlessly
made it possible for the undermining activities of a
shady person to succeed in rendering Inge Scholl
and the foundation despicable in the eyes of vari-
ous institutions. The informer knew his job: The
Cold War only provided the setting. If his nasty
assertions had not met with a response in an at-
mosphere permeated with the fear of communism,
he would have invented other libelous accusa-
tions. 557 Hellmut Becker later published a graphic
memoir of these days: “At the federal ministry of
finance the representatives of the Geschwister-
Scholl-Stiftung were supposed to sign a paper that Shepard Stone, 109
they would never again approach the federal gov- circa 1950.
ernment with financial requests if they received Photo: unknown
the appropriate sum now. During the openly con- Archive: Moselle Kimbler
ducted conversation Otl Aicher asked […], ‘But
what happens when the Russians come?‘ That
was meant to be a joke to point out that the de-
mand – never again – had something peculiarly
irrational about it. But the statement was inter-
preted in a communist sense, and the misgivings
on the part of the Germans that now suddenly
appeared against the long-dead Hans and Sophie
Scholl because of their alleged connections to
communism were more than embarrassing. In this
period of redbaiting only a man like Shepard Stone
had the courage to push all that aside when he
gave his authorization.“ Hellmut Becker told this
anecdote as an example of Shepard Stone’s unbu-
reaucratic, unideological help, but it casts light not
only on the overwrought mood, but also on the
anxiety and insecurity in Germany before the real
background of the Korean War, Soviet aggression,
the Berlin blockade, East German propaganda, and
domestic unrest in the face of the conflict between
reunification and rearmament, neutrality and orien-
tation toward the West, pacifism and a European
defense contribution.
It is most important not to underestimate how
persistent the suspicions were. As late as June
1953 someone told Hellmut Becker: “The cam-
paign is in full swing. […] I’ve heard whispers from
an American authority that Bill was a Red.“ 558
In this connection even the infamous American
“Communist hunter” Joe McCarthy is supposed to
have snooped around after John McCloy, which is
why Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung files are said to
have been sent to him. 559 While the foundation In the Parliament of Württemberg-Baden these a new institute would undermine existing (and
was rehabilitated as far as the ministries were con- machinations made no difference. Here two therefore “proven”) institutions at a time when
cerned, it failed in many cases to be rehabilitated groups barred the way of the college founders. funds were already scarce.
among the private sector. Even in 1954 the foun- First, there were the opponents who rejected Behind this was doubt whether a new college
dation’s administrative director, Günther Schlen- the plan for financial reasons. Therefore it was was even necessary, regardless of all the promises
sag, had reason to complain that the Mannesmann important, for instance, to refute fears that the that this college would be self-supporting. Alex
group was not considering making a donation after foundation would incur a deficit, such as those Möller, the leader of the SPD (German Social
all: “As I see it, the reason they give for their nega- voiced by the Ulm auditing office regarding the Democratic Party) in the Württemberg-Baden Par-
tive reply suggests that the Wirtschaftsvereinigung cost projections of the Geschwister-Scholl-Stif- liament and chairman of the finance committee,
Eisen und Stahl is at the bottom of this again. With tung: “It is of crucial importance for the entire bud- was one of those who had to be persuaded that
the other steel plants, too, we’ve observed time get whether […] 150 students can be registered the HfG was a politico-cultural necessity. The retir-
and time again that they first appear quite positive every year. […] If this does not happen, the ex- ing special advisor on higher education at the min-
toward us, and then there’s a sudden refusal“. 560 pected income would fall significantly.“ Other istry of education and the arts, Dr. Rupp, launched
Most of the firms in the iron and steel industry points of criticism were the unusually generous an attempt to open doors for Inge Scholl: “What
continued to be unimpressed by John McCloy’s teacher-student ratio – 26:150 – a result of the Miss Scholl wants is something totally new, for
demonstrative show of confidence when he pre- school’s educational philosophy; a rise in costs which only certain parallels can be found in history
sented the American check on 23 June 1952, just since 1950; and the fact that depreciations had – at the Dessau Bauhaus and the Werkstätten Hel-
as they were not impressed by the statement of not been taken, which would probably cause ac- lerau. […] What Miss Scholl and her group have in
the Stuttgart chief public prosecutor and the re- tual preliminary expenses to climb far above DM 2 mind cannot be achieved by attaching a new insti-
sults of the special investigation by the American million. 562 Another argument related to financial tute to one of the existing colleges or academies
counterintelligence corps that Shepard Stone policy was not really financial, but rather political of art.“ 563
communicated to the federal ministry of the inte- in nature, because it cloaked a politico-cultural The only opponents of the foundation whose
rior on 24 March 1952. 561 position, and had already been presented in Bonn: cause was completely lost were those who made
 Founding
110
Wilhelm Simpfendörfer
(CDU) (25 May 1888–
4 May 1973), Baden-
Württemberg minister
of education and the
arts, 1953–58.
Photo: unknown
Archive: Landesbildstelle Würt-
temberg (LBW 83/29)
no secret of the fact that they rejected the funda-
mental beliefs of Inge Scholl, Otl Aicher, Max Bill,
and Hellmut Becker. This view was espoused by
those representatives of established colleges and
universities in Württemberg-Baden who believed
that there was nothing about the new college
plans that they themselves had not already put
into effect, and if there was, then it was only be-
cause of lack of money, so that any new founda-
tion would endanger existing colleges. These
opponents believed funding for existing schools
should be increased significantly before even con-
sidering a new foundation. Thus the president of
the Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart
(Stuttgart Academy of Fine Arts) was enviously
concerned about status, finances, and autonomy,
which added a personal note to his arguments:
“In view of this situation we need to ask whether
the Land of Nordwürttemberg-Nordbaden can
afford 2 academies (Karlsruhe and Stuttgart), 2
technical colleges (Pforzheim and Schwäbisch
Gmünd) and subsidies for the Ulm school when
the first-mentioned schools are still not adequate-
ly equipped to meet their expenses. If the Land of
Württemberg-Baden gives even part of the funds
requested for the Ulm school, we must urgently
demand that the school, like all other institutions
of higher learning, be placed under the supervi-
sion of the state.“ 564 Richard Döcker, the head of
the department of architecture at the Technische
Hochschule Stuttgart (Stuttgart Technical College),
added his thoughts to this view of things. The plans,
he claimed, “by their very nature and content“ rep-
resented “a school of architecture“, and “every-
thing that they show in their schematic diagrams
has long been taught in the architecture depart-
ments of the technical colleges – and at least since
the end of the war in Stuttgart and Karlsruhe – […]
with the sole exception of the field of ‘product de-
sign’ (as they call it), and that hasn’t been taught
up till now simply because no budget has existed
for it.“ He added that pursuing the plans under
these circumstances must be “described as
thoughtless or amateurish, or as unnecessary“. 565
True, this was a bit much, but those who repre-
sented this view were not in the majority, even
among the representatives of institutions of higher
learning. 566 That was why it was important to win
over the wavering, the undecided, and uninformed
to the college plans. Max Bill staked out the terri-
tory and followed up his reaction to Richard
Döcker’s letter with criticism of the Ulm group:
“[…] This embittered old grouch, who is totally
untalented but extremely conceited and arrogant,
shares the blame for the fact that architecture in
Germany doesn’t amount to anything. Once again
it just goes to show that the funny diagrams, if
they get to the right place, that is, someplace
where people know something about them, can
wreak tremendous havoc. I am seriously consider-
ing pulling out of this whole affair, because what
we have now instead of financing is total confu-
sion.“ 567
Let us return once more to the background of John
McCloy’s policy in Germany, for the next important
meeting for Inge Scholl and Otl Aicher took place
in Ulm on 8 October 1951, when they again had to
submit to more critical questioning by the HICOG
staff.
The result of Parliamentary elections in Lower
Saxony a few months earlier, on 6 May 1951, had
aroused international consternation and uneasi-
ness. The extreme right Sozialistische Reichspartei
(Socialist Reich Party) had obtained 11 percent of
the votes and had moved into Parliament with 16
seats. People might well wonder how democratic
the Germans had really become. A few weeks later
John McCloy took the sting out of these fears. In a
26 June 1951 radio address he explained the sig-
nificance of Germany for the United States; he
also described the position of Germany between
Communist totalitarianism and democracy as well
as the progress reached in democratizing Germa-
ny. 568 The Federal Republic, he said, had become
the border zone of the free peoples of the West.
In his opinion there was every indication that “the
population of the Federal Republic regards itself
as belonging to the West“. There was one thing
he wanted to make really clear: “A democracy is
not created by fiat, and does not take shape just
because its formation is ordered by law. It must
develop through education and, when you come
right down to it, through self-education.“ Even if
the traditional authoritarian way of thinking was
still present in every sphere of life, even if democ-
racy in the sense of “a living manifestation of soci-
al life” had not been established yet, a start had
been made. That is why HICOG had “gone to a lot
of trouble to promote this development at every
level of German social life – in the schools and
universities, in the labor unions, in church and pri-
vate organizations, on the radio and in the press,
as well as in the area of politics and administra-
tion. […] Increasingly in the press and radio, in
schools and adult education centers, in civic asso-
ciations and cultural clubs, and in some political
parties and in the parliaments, courageous men
and women are emerging who are trying to point
the way toward a democratic life. Our policy is to
help them.“ In conclusion John McCloy stressed
that locally limited solutions could no longer be
genuine solutions anywhere in the world; every-
where it was necessary to look for the international
connection. – Back in Germany, on 17 August
1951, John McCloy handed Berlin Mayor Ernst
Reuter a check for DM 5 million for the construc-
tion of a memorial library. It was by far the biggest
project within the Special Projects Fund. In the
same city, two weeks later, there was the largest
mass parade to date by the organized youth of
East Germany. One and a half million uniformed
blueshirts, members of the Freie Deutsche Jugend
(Free German Youth), had been transported to Ber-
lin for propaganda purposes. The high commis-
sioner commented on the event with mixed feel-
ings: “You feel discouraged at the thought that it’s
possible to get so many young people to Berlin
and then have them march in a parade as support-
ers of Communism and the Stalinist doctrine.“ 569
Again, a few weeks later, in October 1951, “McCloy
worried about the political development of Germa-
ny as well. ‘If the stabilizing influence of Adenauer
were no longer there and economic conditions
changed for the worse in the next few years’, he
feared, ‘it is not inconceivable that we could see
a strong nationalism developing in Germany.‘“ 570
Here is another reference to the activities of the
HICOG staff members who were involved with
questions of education: Since John McCloy began
to devote himself intensively to youth around the
turn of the year in 1950/51 and redoubled his
efforts to overcome the young people’s reserve
and weariness with ideology in order to fill them
with enthusiasm for American democratic ideals,
the education experts of the Land commissioners’
offices, led by Shepard Stone, had been discuss-
ing plans for bringing this about. The result of this
work was HICOG Directive M-4, which was pub-
lished on 26 October 1951. HICOG again declared
its support of democratization, emphasizing three
levels of youth activities: 1. educational and com-
munity programs, and civic activities, 2. economic
assistance, and 3. ideological and political educa-
tion programs.
The goal of this policy was to work with youth
organizations to discover the relationships be-
tween individual freedom and social responsibility,
strengthen active resistance against any form of
totalitarianism from the right or the left, and win
over young people to active support of a defense
of the Western world, foster interest in democratic
organizations, institutions, and civic work, gain an
insight into the American way of life, strengthen
connections between Germany and the West in all
areas, and especially look after homeless and
unemployed young people.“ 571
This is the background against which we must
view the exhaustive questioning that Inge Scholl
and Otl Aicher were once again forced to undergo
on 8 October 1951. The HICOG staff wanted to
know point-blank why American taxpayers should
have to spend $1 million for the project. They
questioned all relevant aspects of the project: the
pedagogical concept, the canon of subjects, the
curricula, the faculty, the professional prospects of
the future designers, the intended influence of the 111
HfG on the political development of Germany, the
inner organization of the college and the founda-
tion, the financing. In short, they needed a justifi-
cation of the whole application. 572 In the end
HICOG was convinced, but it was obvious that
even if the HfG was undoubtedly dear to John
McCloy’s and Shepard Stone’s heart, the Ulm
group, in spite of the fact that they were favored,
did not have an easy time of it by any means.
Back to the financial planning, which was not at all
as confused as Max Bill feared; the only thing that
was missing were legally binding commitments.
Inge Scholl’s official application, on 22 November
1951, to the ministry of education and the arts for
an annual subsidy of DM 196,000 was based on
the (unaltered) figures she had been working with
for months. These presumed total construction
costs of DM 1,703,000, and a planned income of
DM 1,810,000. Budget planning had become more
realistic because now a first startup budget with
20 students for the period between 1 April 1952
to 1 October 1952 had been drawn up, to be fol-
lowed by a second phase with 80 students (up to
31 March 1953). As of 1 April 1953, it is possible
to infer, 150 students were to be taught at the col-
lege. 573 The ministry of education and the arts
included the subsidy by the Land in its supple-
mentary budget, which Parliament had to pass
after the third reading.
By now, however, it was the end of November.
HICOG still expected the declarations of intention
to be followed by written documents; Parliament
had to make the first move, but in the meantime
the imminent formation of the south-west state
prevented a regular parliamentary resolution. Franz
Wiedemeier, who as chairman of the Württem-
berg-Baden parliamentary group of the CDU
(Christian Democratic Union) and second chair-
man of the finance committee was the direct
counterpart of Alex Möller – and familiar with the
plans of the Ulm group because he was also the
chairman of the Ulm CDU – explained the mud-
dled situation to Inge Scholl:
The politico-cultural committee was meeting in
a few days, on 29 November 1951;
if the committee was to support the founda-
tion’s plan, the plan would have to be referred
for discussion to the plenary session;
the plenary session of the Württemberg-Baden
Parliament would then have to pass the plan on
to the finance committee, which, however, had
its last meeting on 5 December 1951;
on 9 December 1951 the Württemberg-Baden
Parliament plenary session was scheduled to
vote on the southwest state; Parliament would
not convene again until March 1952, its compo-
 Founding
112 sition changed by elections, as the constituent
assembly of the southwest state Baden-Würt-
temberg.
The impasse was caused by the fact that be-
tween 29 November 1951 and 5 December
1951 no plenary session was scheduled. The
finance committee could therefore no longer
discuss the motion of the politico-cultural com-
mittee, if there should be one, during this par-
liamentary term. 574
The Ulm group had no choice but to take this road,
even if it was a dead end. They held the Land gov-
ernment responsible for this delay and again
stressed the government’s moral obligation, be-
cause the foundation had made a commitment to
Ulm, although the city of Frankfurt am Main had
again shown strong interest three weeks earlier. 575
This reminder achieved its purpose. At the session
of the politico-cultural committee, on 29 Novem-
ber 1951 Edgar Hotz, the president of the Land
trade supervisory office emphatically spoke up for
the foundation plans and in particular emphasized
the free and autonomous form of the institution’s
organization. 576 Max Bill had been prepared for the
committee members to focus on four issues:
“Aren’t other schools already doing the same
thing? […] Isn’t the project too big […] and isn’t
there a danger of spreading yourself too thin? […]
Are you sure you have appropriate teachers? […]
Isn’t the faculty too large as compared to the num-
ber of students?“ Knowing his pithy way of speak-
ing, we can assume he found the right words to
describe how necessary, conclusive, and novel
their plans were. Concerning the last question In-
ge Scholl recommended that he respond with the
pedagogical counterclaim that the number of
teachers should be related not to the number of
students, but to the desired result, and then, of
course, the school would need as many teachers
as had been planned. 577 His success can be meas-
ured by the fact that the politico-cultural commit-
tee made a motion, as had been hoped – and
unanimously at that – that the government should
propose to the Parliament that it promote the foun-
dation and appoint representatives from the minis-
tries for the “administrative council”. 578
That body, by which they probably meant the
administrative committee of the foundation, had
not convened yet. That whole trying year the
organizing of the foundation had made little pro-
gress, but what little progress there was impor-
tant.
At the beginning of the year Inge Scholl drew
up for Gotthilf Schenkel a list of personalities pro-
posed for the administrative committee of the
foundation: the energetic attorney Hellmut Becker;
Brigitte Bermann-Fischer, the publisher who had
become a personal friend; two influential bankers,
Karl Max von Hellingrath from Munich and Karl
Klasen from Hamburg; the president of the Lan-
deszentralbank (Land Central Bank) of Stuttgart,
Otto Pfleiderer; and Roderich Count Thun, a manu-
facturer and philanthropist who was a friend of
hers. 579 It was the latter two in particular who grew
to be strong supporters of the foundation in the
first years of its existence.
Since 1 June 1951 the close core group around
Inge Scholl and Otl Aicher had been calling itself
the organizing office of the Geschwister-Scholl-
Stiftung, including, among others, the product
designer Walter Zeischegg and the graphic artist
and photographer Ernst Scheidegger. They were
part of the group of the first collaborators who
became instructors at the HfG.
The heart of the foundation was to be the advi-
sory board. Inge Scholl, the founder, appointed its
members on 22 June 1951. Beside herself the
advisory board consisted of her circle of close
friends and helpers: In addition to Otl Aicher and
Max Bill there were Günther Grzimek, Marcia Kahn,
Roderich Count Thun, Peter Wackernagel, and
Walter Zeischegg. 580
The advisory board convened on 24 June 1951.
All members of the advisory board were present,
and they appointed Inge Scholl the managing
chairperson of the foundation. Then they approved
the board of trustees as Inge Scholl had planned.
Its members were Hermann Josef Abs, Otto Bart-
ning, Walter Gropius, Romano Guardini, Odd Nan-
sen, Herbert Read, Ignazio Silone, Henry van de
Velde, Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, and Carl
Zuckmayer. 581
Then, in September 1951, the foundation hired
a secretary. Nothing unusual, one would think, but
it is worth mentioning because Johanna Rösner
stayed in her position until the end of the HfG and
with her reliability and sound judgment repre-
sented one of the few calming influences in the
entire ensemble up there on Kuhberg. It is thanks
to her care, rectitude, and dependability that
countless details of political life at the HfG and in
the foundation have come down to us.
On 31 December 1951 Inge Scholl thanked her
benefactor Shepard Stone for his help with re-
strained optimism: “We won over (I almost said
overcame) the federal government, the city of Ulm,
and the Land of Württemberg-Baden and got them
to support us financially and morally, and also got
a considerable sum in private donations and a
contribution from the Norwegian Aid for Europe.
[…] The fact that we are setting up something
completely new and also want to create new insti-
tutions, in a country where people stick to the
good old ways, sometimes brought us almost
insurmountable difficulties“. 582
The year had ended, as had the previous one,
with successes, although they represented only
a moderate harvest after an enormous amount of
work, and a lot more remained to be done in the
coming year. It is true that the federal ministry of
the interior had given its definitive consent on 25
October 1951 to make available DM 100,000 for
construction 583; and Gotthilf Schenkel, on 3 De-
cember 1951, had recommended that his col-
league, minister of finance Karl Frank (FDP/DVP,
Free Democratic Party/German National Party) put
Kurt Angstmann (SPD)
(30 June 1915–12 Feb.
1978), chairman of the
finance committee of
the Baden-Württem-
berg Landtag, 1961–66,
and minister of finance,
1966–68.
Photo: unknown
Archive: Landesbildstelle Würt-
temberg (LBW 73/7)
the former Wehrmacht terrain on Kuhberg in Ulm
at the disposal of the Geschwister-Scholl-Stif-
tung 584; while the federal minister for the Marshall
Plan, Franz Blücher (FDP/DVP),on 28 December
1951, finally petitioned the ECA special mission for
Germany to authorize DM 200,000 for the founda-
tion from ERP funds of the 3d ERP phase. 585 But as
expected, the Parliament of Württemberg-Baden
in its plenary session on 5 December 1951 merely
referred the 29 November 1951 request of its pol-
itico-cultural committee to the finance commit-
tee. 586 Here it was put in cold storage, not to be
thawed out until the following spring.
In conclusion, a few more comments on curricu-
lum- and program-related development during
1951. For the most part the Ulm group promoted
its project with the help of two documents:
an outline from June 1951 587 and
two consecutive pages, the first printed infor-
mation of the foundation. 588
Here, they were acting contrary to the intentions
of Max Bill, who would have preferred to distribute
nothing rather than these documents, since he felt
they were full of errors. Inge Scholl and Otl Aicher
probably agreed with him, but needed printed pro-
motional material for industry and government
officials.
Regarding the first of these documents, the new 113
program of June 1951 in standard-size oblong for-
mat was titled as follows: “Geschwister-Scholl-
Stiftung / School of Design / Research Institute of
Product Design“. Otl Aicher’s diagrams on the
canon of subjects elucidated the text, as did
sketches of Max Bill’s planned architecture, Even
the title makes it clear that Hans Werner Richter
with his politico-literary concerns had missed the
boat. He himself no longer appeared in the pro-
gram, not even as an instructor. That Walter Dirks
was intended for the moment to take the place
vacated by Hans Werner Richter is explained by
the reference that Otl Aicher, Inge Scholl, Max Bill,
Hellmut Becker, and also Walter Dirks had agreed
to meet on 17 and 18 February 1951, also inviting
Theodor Pfizer to introduce him to the “closer cir-
cle of collaborators”. 589 Walter Dirks, however, did
not fill the gap left by Hans Werner Richter’s de-
parture; he does not appear in the source mate-
rial at all. As Max Bill had already announced, with
the person of Hans Werner Richter the socio-polit-
ical ideas gradually vanished from the program
also. He reported to Walter Gropius on 9 March
1951: “Above all, I’ve always wanted to get rid of
‘press/radio‘. That has now happened, so that in
the future we shall have only ‘visual design/infor-
mation’.“ 590 In that category, he included such
subjects as visual design, product design, archi-
tecture, and city planning, while the liberal-arts
component was put in the category “information”,
and anything that had to do with press, radio, and
advertising was pushed into the background.
“Political methodology“ was integrated with gener-
al education, where it was not to last very long ei-
ther. On the other hand this did not mean that they
completely gave up the idea of working to improve
society. Quite on the contrary, the HfG retained
this missionary zeal, although Max Bill had shifted
its sphere of activity away from the theoretical to
the practical design of the material environment
(based on theoretical knowledge). For of course
the idea of Good Design defined an object not
only in its aesthetic, but also in its moral dimen-
sion, and Max Bill was convinced that one of the
two aspects implied the other, that there was
“only a quantitative difference between ethics and
aesthetics”. 591 Otl Aicher made a last attempt in
April 1951 to save the original range of the plans
for the college: “[…] And then I’d like to ask you to
think over the matter of press and radio one more
time. I’m opposed to taking them out. […] We
shall regard your decision in this matter as defini-
tive.“ 592 As a matter of fact, Max Bill definitively
answered in the negative on 17 April 1951: “I am
definitely against expanding beyond the program
we shortened in Ulm [when Bill stayed there at the
beginning of March; author’s note]. We would
get stuck in senseless dilettantism. That doesn’t
 Founding
114 mean we couldn’t take the risk of expanding
later.“ 593
With the June 1951 program and the two printed
sheets the Ulm group intensively solicited dona-
tions, which were now tax-deductible, from trade
and industry in the summer of 1951. Hermann
Josef Abs arranged a number of contacts for
them. 594 In his accompanying letters Hellmut
Becker emphasized four points: the views of Hans
and Sophie Scholl that their sister Inge stood for;
the success of the Ulm Adult Education Center,
which was to be expanded; the importance of
product design in order for German products to be
internationally competitive; the Bauhaus tradition,
which had set standards before the war that the
new school now wanted to continue. 595 In this way
he emphasized the economic necessity of the in-
stitutions, while hardly hinting at the politico-cultu-
ral mission. It should come as no surprise that the
response to this solicitation was mixed, especially
in the private sector, because its representatives
for the most part had different ideas of what cul-
ture was and how it ought to be promoted. That is
why it is interesting to hear the opinion of a critic
who was less concerned with the economic argu-
ments than the cultural ones. The reason the writer
Erich Kuby gave for rejecting the plans was the
fundamental argument that they were provincial,
an argument the Ulm group specifically – not Max
Bill – was to hear repeatedly from contemporary
intellectuals and liberals as the years went by until
1968: “You’re not in tune with the times – that’s
the sound of 1924, or an Ulm variant of it. […] It
immediately sounds superficial, cheap, and smells
of Mr. McCloy’s million. […] It’s improvised, and
without talent. The German language has the
words wursteln [muddle] and schlampen [do a
lousy job] for untalented improvisations. – And
then there’s something provincial about the whole
thing – that’s in there too.“ 596
Quite different, naturally, was Walter Gropius’s
reaction, and this was important for the whole
plan, because the college founders in their inter-
action with HICOG primarily counted on his expert
authority. But in March 1951 he reacted doubtfully
to the organizational fanning-out of the original
plans into a Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung, a col-
lege, and a research institute. This led to intention-
al or unintentional misunderstandings and rumors
that were reported to him and that he openly ex-
pressed to Max Bill: “It almost looks to me as
though there are two parties wrestling with each
other, one under Inge Scholl and the other under
you.“ 597 Max Bill immediately successfully rejected
this interpretation, but did not conceal the difficul-
ties, or the advantages either, that resulted from
Inge Scholl’s and Otl Aicher’s different mentality in
implementing their shared intentions: “The ‘School
of Design’ and the ‘Institute of Product Design’ are
to be under my direction, while Inge Scholl and
her friend Otl Aicher are to manage the school
externally, mainly as regards the financing. […] I
am still in the process of negotiating another hur-
dle: The Ulm people (Scholl + Aicher) are Roman
Catholic. They go to Mass. […] Well now, the ne-
gotiations she has to conduct at present, where
the end result is supposed to be not just sympathy
but real money, have one disadvantage: People
want to know a bit more about the school. That’s
why I must make my appearance fairly often so as
to be better able to explain that we’re not talking
about an ‘institute in memory of Hans and Sophie
Scholl’. Naturally I’m the one who can explain that
much better. On the other hand the combination of
‘sentimentality and reality’ is the basis of our
appeal for financing.“ 598
Finally, I’d like to cast some light, dim though it
may be, on an episode that will help us under-
stand the HfG and its “myth”.
In the course of his correspondence with Wal-
ter Gropius, Max Bill asked him on 22 November
1951: “Could we, if we wanted to, call the Ulm
School of Design ‘Bauhaus’? Walter Gropius agreed
on 28 November 1951 with one proviso, which he
had gained from his experience with Laszlo Moho-
ly-Nagy and with the New Bauhaus – Institute of
Design in Chicago: “I know of a lot of people who
stress the point publicly that they have been stu-
dents of the Bauhaus, even if they went through it
only for a very short time. For the best example
close to yours, I give you the Institute of Design in
Chicago. Against my warning, Moholy used the
word Bauhaus for the institute first because he
thought it might help him in this country to have
that bridge to the past. […] I would personally not
be against your using the name Bauhaus Ulm […].
I leave it to your decision because you have to
carry the brunt now, and I want to be helpful.“ 599
In March and April of the following year Max Bill
tried to win over Inge Scholl and Otl Aicher for this
name, but without insisting on it rigorously: “We
had, as you know, discussed in Ulm that we wanted
to use the term ‘Bauhaus‘. It’s true that we hadn’t
clarified things completely; however, today I’m all
for it. […] There would be only one other point in
time where it would be possible for us to ‘rebap-
tize’ the school, namely on the day of its opening.
That wouldn’t be bad either.“ 600 Inge Scholl was
about to give in to him: “I very much lean toward
your view that we should immediately decide on
the name Bauhaus.“ 601 It was probably because of
Otl Aicher’s resistance that the HfG did not call it-
self Bauhaus Ulm, and today Walter Gropius’s
description fits both the situation of its former
members and the name HfG. With the accentua-
tion that was characteristic of him, Otl Aicher re-
capitulated the situation: “Naturally we also real-
ized at the time what sort of a political aura a
school would acquire if it called itself ‘Bauhaus
Ulm’. But ‘prestige’ was a word that had a rather
negative sound. We wanted to do what was right
without speculating on public effect and recogni-
tion. And our intention was not to create a second
Bauhaus, no repetition. We wanted to be different
from it, deliberately.“ 602
In the Landtag, 1952 began the homework for
which there had not been enough time in the pre-
vious year. A reminder: On 9 December 1951 the
plenary session had voted whether the three
southwestern states Württemberg-Baden, Baden,
and Württemberg-Hohenzollern should join to-
gether into a new Land, the southwest state Ba-
den-Württemberg. What with all the parliamentary
procedure in this affair, the foundation’s applica-
Gebhard Müller (CDU) tion had reached an impasse, since the finance
(17 April 1900–7 Aug. committee of the Württemberg-Baden Parliament
1990), minister-presi- was no longer able to discuss it before this vote. It
dent of Baden-Würt- was highly debatable whether the finance commit-
temberg, 1953–58. tee delegates were willing to bring themselves to
Photo: unknown make a clear statement by the end of January,
Archive: Landesbildstelle because in the spring of 1952 the Parliament of
Württemberg (54152)
the new Land was to be elected, and hardly any-
one wanted to assume responsibility for a long-
term financial obligation at the eleventh hour. Thus
even in 1951 there were fears that the binding
consent of the Landtag would only be given under
the newly elected cabinet of the new southwest
state – and that is exactly what happened.
On 8 January 1952 the finance committee of
the Württemberg-Baden Parliament dealt with the
motion that the deputies of the politico-cultural
committee passed on 29 November 1951 and in
which they demanded that the foundation be pro-
moted. The representatives of the DVP (German
National Party) opposed the Ulm project and thus
dissented from the views of their parliamentary
group colleague Hermann Wild, who as the chair-
man of the politico-cultural committee clearly and
distinctly supported the plans. The opponents
gave three reasons for objecting: firstly, money
was generally short; secondly, the need to rehabil-
itate the technical universities in Stuttgart and
Karlsruhe as well as Heidelberg University, on
which the scarce funds needed to be concentrated
before something new could be started; and third-
ly, because the subsidy would not remain at the
level proposed at present, but would increase in
the future. It was cheaper and therefore better to
support and develop existing institutions than to
take on a new burden. The foundation could only
be promoted if the Association of Friends guaran-
teed to take care of financing the project. – Most
of the representatives of the other parties (CDU,
SPD, and GB/BHE) (Christian Democratic Union,
Social Democratic Party, Gesamtdeutscher Block/
Bund der Heimatvertriebenen und Entrechteten – 115
All-German Block/Union of Displaced Eastern Ger-
mans and of the Underprivileged) urged that the
Land government should discuss the subsidy –
DM 200,000 per year – as quickly as possible, so
that the public should not get the impression that
the ministry of finance wanted to delay the whole
thing. They pointed out that otherwise the Land of
Württemberg-Baden would indeed lose the Ameri-
can million, because the city of Frankfurt am Main
was already on its mark and that the McCloy Fund
money would then be spent for a student dormito-
ry there. The industry’s serious interest, as pre-
sented to the politico-cultural committee by Edgar
Hotz and the representatives of trade and industry,
also convinced the deputies of the practical nec-
essity of the HfG plans. A year before, the Milan
Triennale had demonstrated to the entire world
that Germany was a generation behind in the de-
sign of its export goods. Besides – the deputies
were told – the majority of the representatives of
the Land’s technical universities and academies
had indicated that they did not regard the HfG as
competition, but as a valuable addition, as long as
it was not supported with money that would be
subtracted from their budget. However, it went
without saying that the bylaws of the foundation
needed to be changed in such a way that the min-
istries would receive seats and votes in the future
administrative council (still referred to as an ad-
ministrative committee). Now, though, a decision
had to be made, for in view of HICOG deadlines
and the approaching formation of the southwest
state, every delay meant the end of the project. –
But the committee merely agreed upon a weak
proposal that the government should study how
the foundation could be sponsored by the Land
and industry. It was to report its findings to Parlia-
ment. 603
Kurt Angstmann (SPD) informed Parliament, at
its 16 January 1952 session, about the discussion
in the finance committee, and recommended that
the proposal be accepted. A government study, he
said, showed “what funds are actually available or
may be regarded as secured, how large are the
obligations the Land can incur and under what
conditions, and can then report to Parliament and
leave the final decision up to it.“ 604 The proposal
was accepted, and immediately minister of educa-
tion and the arts Gotthilf Schenkel set about form-
ing a commission composed of representatives of
the private sector and of the ministries. 605 The
director of the museum Neue Sammlung (New
Collection) München, Günther Baron von Pech-
mann, wrote a vehemently approving testimonial
for the Ulm group: “It is undeniable that here a
great idea, modern in every respect, is struggling
to materialize. […] Since the former Bauhaus in
Dessau was dissolved[…] nothing like it has been
 Founding
116 undertaken in Germany.“ He saw the new and
modern aspects of the pedagogical concept (the
layout of the campus, the way teachers and stu-
dents lived, studied, and worked; research and
experiment on the one hand, practical workshops
on the other; teachers who were at the same time
researchers, practitioners and educators; back-
ground training and education as the basis for
creative work; developing a sense of cultural re-
sponsibility in designing buildings, apartments,
and consumer goods). 606
In the opinion Günther Baron von Pechmann
gave as chairman of the technical committee on
education at the Association for Industrial Design
of the National Association of German Industry,
he had a very different, economic, focus. Together
with Jupp Ernst, the director of the Werkkunst-
schule Wuppertal, and prominent designer Wil-
helm Wagenfeld, he emphasized the importance
of promoting export and the international compe-
titiveness of German industrial products. At a time
when in England the Council of Industrial Design
(affiliated with the Board of Trade) had been driv-
ing government promotion of schools of design
since 1944, as had the Institut d‘Esthétique Indus-
trielle in France (founded in 1951), the significance
of these questions must be properly appreciated in
Germany as well. 607 In contrast to these favorable
opinions, there was the negative expert opinion of
Richard Döcker, the head of the department of
architecture of the Technische Hochschule Stutt-
gart (Technical University of Stuttgart), who hoped
that he, not the HfG, would receive state funding
for the teaching of design . 608 While he regarded
the HfG as tough competition, the founders of the
HfG strongly stressed how different their plans
were from the Technische Hochschule. 609 In Ulm
designers were not to specialize as heretofore in
working with a small number of materials, but the
entire field was to be taken care of by a team that
worked together closely; theory, experimentation,
workshops, development, and practical work were
to be coordinated according to their ideas. Archi-
tecture was also an integral component of the
overall concept. Finally, at the HfG, in contrast to
the Technische Hochschule, they wanted to back
up technical training with courses in sociology,
economy, and social psychology and give students
a sense of interrelationship, while the graduates of
the Technische Hochschule were specialists. Even
if the Technische Hochschule wanted to accom-
plish all this, expenditure in terms of material and
personnel would be just as great. “Design is such
a new field that it requires a new type of school
and a pedagogical form of a special type.“ That is
why they took the liberty of performing an experi-
ment, with rigorous selection of the most talented
people, low student-teacher ratio, close collabora-
tion between students and teachers, communal
living and studying. They felt these pedagogical
innovations were important for their patrons Henry
van de Velde, Gregor Paulsson, and Walter Gropi-
us, and that this was why the HfG would attract
teachers who did not want to be restricted to one
department of a technical university.
All these arguments, like those that had been
exchanged in the finance committee, were now no
longer new. Nor did new arguments for or against
the HfG appear on the negotiating table in 1952.
The political discussion was bogged down that
entire year. Inge Scholl’s application, still not set-
tled, outlasted the political transformation of the
Land into the southwest state of Baden-Württem-
berg, and the handing over of the American check
by John McCloy. Minister of finance Karl Frank
(FDP/DVP) 610 remained unimpressed by this event
and prevented the HfG from starting work in what
was left of 1952. He would not be persuaded by
anyone, not even a respected economic expert like
the president of the Landeszentralbank 611. He
would not accept the pedagogical, technical, and
general reasons that had been presented for
founding an autonomous new institution instead
of affiliating it to the Technische Hochschule. At
the end of the year he even had to be outvoted in
the cabinet, and he did not give up his vehemently
expressed rejection during the time that followed,
which maneuvered him, in the spring of 1953, into
the unpleasant situation of demanding that Parlia-
ment reject part of his own budget.
However, it would be unfair to jump on his be-
havior. Karl Frank put his cards on the table. He did
not conceal his conviction that, as he saw it, the
HfG was superfluous, while he deeply believed the
traditional universities of the Land, particularly the
Technische Hochschule Stuttgart, could take on its
tasks just as well if not better. But if this was his
politico-cultural conviction, he also had the right
to fight against the HfG plans as long as he did it
according to democratic rules. Besides, as the
minister of finance he felt it was his duty to submit
the financial consequences of the project to rigor-
ous scrutiny. And indeed, as an opponent he was
more apt to notice the weak points of the financing
than were the friends of the HfG. This must not be
interpreted to mean that history proved he was
right, for that would be like confusing cause and
effect.
The interpretation that the HfG closed because
its financing collapsed did in fact encourage peo-
ple to claim they’d known it all along, because it
created the impression among HfG opponents that
what happened in 1968 was precisely what the
minister of finance had warned against back in
1952. This circular argument – a kind of self-ful-
filling prophecy – was actually occasionally used
in debates regarding the end of the HfG by its
political adversaries.
In the meantime one must not forget that the rep- HICOG, Special Project no. 1 DM 1,000,000 117
resentatives of trade and industry made things (letter dated
easy for the minister of finance: On the one hand 29 December 1950)
they repeatedly affirmed their serious interest in federal ministry DM 200,000
the HfG plans, while on the other they refused to of economics, ERP funds 618
make funds available unconditionally. (letter dated
As long as the industrialists’ statements were 3 September 1951)
not followed by action, Karl Frank refused to regard federal ministry DM 100,000
them as anything more than lip service. Two exam- of the interior (letter dated
ples: During a conversation between the president 17 August 1951)
of the Land Trade Supervisory Office and industri- development payments DM 245,000
alists on 16 January 1952 no binding declarations by the city of Ulm
were made. 612 (resolution of the
A second instance: The joint venture group of main department
the Württemberg-Baden chambers of industry and of 24 July 1951)
commerce, at their 56th plenary session on 29 donations and payments DM 180,000
January 1952 discussed an annual subsidy of DM by trade and industry
200,000 to DM 300,000, but put the decision off (diverse legally binding
until “the associations, and the Land Association promises)
of Württemberg-Baden Industry in particular, have Norwegian Aid for Europe DM 20,000
also declared they are ready to proceed corre- (letter dated
spondingly. Above all, they said, it was necessary 27 August 1951)
______________
to make it clear that the Federal Association of
German Industry recognizes the Geschwister- total DM 1,745,000
Scholl-Stiftung as the institution that implements
efforts already initiated by BDI (Federal Associa- But the remittances were a long time coming be-
tion of German Industry) to promote industrial cause, of course, the last obstacle – the govern-
design.“ 613 ment subsidy for ongoing operation – still needed
It was just as Gerd H. Müller, Dr. Rupp’s succes- to be overcome. Valuable time was lost. Not only
sor as the special university advisor at the ministry was the credibility of the project damaged, but ris-
of education and the arts, had predicted at the ing prices increased original cost estimates, and
beginning of the year: It was “practically impos- as a result there were renewed doubts as to the
sible to obtain firm promises of a continuous sub- solidity of the financial planning. Moreover, the
sidy from industry[…]“. 614 Finally a promoter of the subsidizing ministries used the interruption to
Ulm project tried to persuade Federal President push through a change in the foundation’s by-
Theodor Heuss to act as an advocate of the HfG laws that would ensure more influence for them.
plans with the minister of finance: “Would it be Basically the change involved two demands by
possible for you to say something appreciative the federal ministry of economics, which the other
and encouraging to Dr. Frank for this synthesis of federal and Land ministries endorsed; if these
Werkbund and Württemberg, of Bauhaus and demands were not met, the authorized funds
Guardini? […] Without a doubt an independent would not be disbursed: An administrative director
college with workshops and practical work has was to be hired for the foundation, and the exist-
quite a few advantages as compared to the ing administrative committee was to be replaced
appendage of a technical university.“ 615 by a administrative council, which had a voice in
But here the Ulm group had reached the limits hiring and in financial questions. 619 The demand for
of their political support. Theodor Heuss responded an administrative director was not new; for some
on 22 February 1952: “Until I see the intellectual time, Inge Scholl had already been negotiating
and artistic power that could create something with possible candidates. But as a result of the
similar to what Gropius managed to do in Dessau, delays of the project as a whole, Friedrich Rau,
with that strange mixture of romanticism and ra- with whom the foundation had already reached an
tionalism, I’ll continue to regard this business as agreement, no longer wanted to rely on nonbind-
more artificial than artistic.“ 616 ing promises and instead accepted his election as
the registrar of the University of Frankfurt am
A new variant of sitting things out and handing Main. 620 (After 1965 Friedrich Rau finally joined the
around responsibility was now on the agenda. foundation, but then as managing chairman of the
Politically the trio of founders had cleared almost executive board.)
all the hurdles; the balance sheet of the financing The constant uncertainty did not leave Max Bill
of construction had been almost unchanged for cold either. On 11 January 1952 he asked for infor-
half a year, as follows: 617 mation: “I’d be interested in knowing why there
 Founding
118
Otl Aicher’s posters for
the Thursday lectures at
the Ulm Adult Educa-
tion Center:
September 1948,
November 1948, and
March 1949.
Photos: Hannes Rosenberg
Archive: Rosenberg (751/16,
751/18 and 751/11).
hasn’t been any headway after everybody acted as
though things were in perfect order.“ 621 Told about
what was going on, he warned of increasing gov-
ernment influence and urged haste without dis-
cussing the Land government investigation: “As
for state supervision, we have to be very careful.
I am also of the opinion that there’s already plenty
of intervention when people discuss how much
money they’re giving us and what for. However,
I believe we’ll be able to get around this business
once the state financial source makes up its mind,
because both things are independent of each
other […]. If they go on investigating for a long
time, we’ll have beards and wigs the next time we
meet.“ 622 A few weeks later, on 17 March 1952, he
demanded that the plans finally be brought to a
conclusion, even if it involved force, since govern-
ment agencies had to be compelled to make deci-
sions with press reports if need be: “What we
need now is a forceful and exact blow.“ The shift-
ing of responsibilities within the foundation com-
mittees caused him more and more headaches:
“I’m a little worried about the new conditions from
Stuttgart. We’ll never get anywhere on those
terms. I’m of the opinion that we have to stick very
firmly to our original intentions.“ Here, Max Bill
overlooked the fact that his rejection of changes
in the foundation’s bylaws, in view of the other
delays at the time, could be misused as an excel-
lent alibi that would permit state agencies to dis-
sociate themselves from their promises again.
Hellmut Becker, on the other hand, tactically
skilled, recognized the opportunity offered by a
change in the foundation’s bylaws to show the
absurdity of the ministries’ objectives: If the foun-
dation’s new entity, the future administrative coun-
cil, was quite large, and its members were skillfully
chosen, the representatives of the ministries might
in actuality always be in the minority. If, moreover,
the council only had veto power, but not initiative
power in the making of appointments, there would
be no reason to fear that the HfG would need to
give up its independence, while the demands of
the ministries would formally have been met. On
21 March 1952 Inge Scholl proposed just such a
body to the Stuttgart ministry of education and the
arts 623, and Hellmut Becker in the meantime reas-
sured Max Bill: Now that the foundation is still
fighting for the subsidy, it would be better not to
“kick up a row”, “but rather try […] to outmaneuver
the government agencies tactically. You can see
that right from the start I have planned that the
committee they want should be nonviable, by get-
ting a whole lot of government agencies involved
in it, who of course never come at the same time.
As for the rest, the ratio of votes in this committee
would virtually be 8:4, if we can assume that the
representatives of free enterprise, specialists, and
the city of Ulm can be counted as being on our
side from the outset. […] For it is one of the pecu-
liarities of Württemberg that every institution that’s
involved in any kind of trouble arouses suspi-
cion.“ 624 Shortly thereafter, on 27 March 1952,
Inge Scholl also tried to get Max Bill to trust Hell-
mut Becker’s course of action: His way was the
right one “to really achieve a degree of freedom
[…] especially since the Americans, of course,
keep insisting that the school must remain inde-
pendent.“
In the spring of 1952 there was no longer any
sign of progress. The ministries in Bonn were prac-
tically paralyzed, like a rabbit facing a snake that is
spraying the poison of communism. The minister
of finance insisted that only the future cabinet of
Baden-Württemberg would be able to decide on
the Land’s subsidy for the operating expenses of
the HfG. 625 Then John McCloy took the initiative in
order to bring the HfG plans to a satisfactory con-
clusion, or rather beginning. On 27 March 1952
Max Bill received news from Inge Scholl that the
check would soon be handed over. The high com-
missioner’s motive, the reason he had encouraged
the project despite all the difficulties, is again of
interest: “Shepard Stone told me that McCloy
would say a few words; the important thing about
the whole thing for McCloy, he said, was the
memory of my brother and sister, i. e., the fact that
a living and future-oriented creation would now
emerge from that. […] I have the impression that
publicizing this handing over of the check will
remove quite a few difficulties we are still strug-
gling with, and that we will be off to a good start
with another fund drive.“ 626 Before they got to that
point, John McCloy gave his full attention to the
Ulm group’s plans for one last time.
In November 1951 HICOG headquarters had
moved to Bad Godesberg (the suburb Mehlem).
The HICOG staff had thus moved back into the
immediate proximity of the Federal Republic’s
political center. In the second half of his period of
office in Germany John McCloy wanted to acceler-
ate the tempo once more and to effect as many
practical results as possible, so that the direction
Germany had taken toward a sovereign democrat-
ic, western state would become irreversible. The
HICOG budget for 1952 was DM 102 million. Of
this amount, 48 million were slated for the public
affairs program, and here again the lion’s share
was to go to education- and training-related
work. 627 The major tasks of integrating Germany
economically, politically, and militarily, as John
McCloy saw it, could be permanently and success-
fully resolved only if a broad democratic base
existed in Germany.
On 21 January 1952, addressing the University
of Freiburg, he unfolded his ideas on education,
and reminded the students of their obligation to
come up with new ideas. 628 He held up Ralph
Waldo Emerson as a model for them, who more
than a hundred years earlier taught that “both stu-
dents and scholars need to learn to make the facts
their own and to speak up fearlessly for truth, for
freedom, and for the rights of the individual, and
to participate in the daily life of the community.
Emerson encouraged the young scholars of his
day to develop new ideas, gain new convictions,
and then courageously and actively disseminate
them.“
Certainly, he added, the present personal situa-
tion of most students was difficult and full of priva-
tion, but that did not mean they must forget their
visions and their future or content themselves with
trivial results: “It would be dangerous and regret-
table if young European students and scholars, un-
der the pressure of anxiety about profession and
livelihood, were to neglect their higher obligations
toward the community.“ German scientists, he
went on, must leave the classic ivory tower and
put away the specialist’s blinders in order to tend
to societal duties. In place of national boundaries,
they now had a European horizon: “European stu-
dents and European scholars today have the im-
portant task of going beyond their specialized pro-
fessional skills and recognizing their obligations
toward the community. Accordingly they should
be a living example of practicing democracy in
thought and deed.“
John McCloy challenged the students and pro-
fessors to remember humanistic values and at the
same time become politically active in order to
defend these values: “At a time when reactionary,
nihilistic, and totalitarian forces want to put the
human spirit in chains once again, the inactivity of
young, free Europeans would not only, as Emerson
said, be the opposite of freedom – it would be tan-
tamount to suicide. […] The real danger according
to our studies lies in the apathy of millions of Ger-
mans, in the fact that they don’t realize they have 119
to be personally involved in defending their free-
dom.” Liberal arts, as introduced at Freiburg Uni-
versity with American help, was, he felt, an impor-
tant step forward in German academia. The col-
lege campus made possible communal living and
mutual learning by teachers and students, an aca-
demic community as a model for living in society.
This structure of university studies combined the
humanistic ideal of education with social commu-
nity and prepared the students to be active citi-
zens. John McCloy appealed to German politics
not to let the reform of the German university sys-
tem fail because of an alleged shortage of funds:
“But if the universities clearly realize that they need
such ‘colleges’ in order to carry out their tasks,
then the German people and its government agen-
cies must find the necessary funds.” The close
contact between the university and the general
public, the Landtag, churches, labor unions, cham-
bers of commerce, and the press “is without doubt
an excellent way of keeping the university from
being isolated from the political and economic life
of its surroundings.” For the American high com-
missioner, the greatest threat for the future of Ger-
many lay in the indifference of the German popula-
tion, in its political lethargy, although people no
longer had reason to fear they would be punished
for expressing their views. In contrast to this he
was impressed by the selfless and unconditional
involvement of young people who had risked
everything for their convictions: “The memory of
Hans and Sophie Scholl should inspire and spur on
all students today.”
In January 1952, like Max Bill, the HICOG staff
must have had the impression that the Land’s sub-
sidy was signed and sealed. On 15 January 1952
Inge Scholl had disseminated calculated optimism
when she wrote to Michael P. Balla: “The Land-
tag’s finance committee also recently showed a
very positive attitude toward our cause. We can
now rely firmly on the question of a continuous
need for a subsidy being securely anchored.” 629 A
week later minister of education and the arts Gott-
hilf Schenkel also professed to John McCloy that
the contribution of the Land to continuous mainte-
nance was already settled: “In the meantime, Mr.
McCloy, I’d like to thank you with all my heart that
through your generous endowment you made this
project possible. I am convinced, as are the com-
mittees of the Landtag, that the project will be of
great significance for our country and its future
development.” 630 Following this, it seems that at
HICOG headquarters in Bad Godesberg-Mehlem a
new staff member, George A. Selke, was assigned
to work on the Ulm proposal. Inge Scholl regarded
it as yet another step toward turning the HfG into a
reality: “I have the impression that he regards our
 Founding
120 cause as his own […]. Now the tempo of how we
finish dealing with the Americans practically de-
pends on Selke. Besides, he will be the American
representative who will be one of the people in-
vestigating the financial administration as long as
development and setting up are going on. […]
After this meeting [on 29 February 1952 in Ulm;
author’s note], if I understand correctly, I am sup-
posed to come directly to McCloy to receive from
him the closing words, document or something of
the kind.” 631
Inge Scholl actually did receive a new foundation
charter 632 from John McCloy at a subsequent
meeting with him on 7 April 1952 633, but its defin-
itive version had not been drafted yet. Until that
happened, the high commissioner again expected
Inge Scholl and her friends and sponsors to com-
pletely convince him. This is why he handed her a
series of questions 634 that had to be answered by
29 April 1952. 635 Obviously he wanted to make
sure for the last time what the concept was so that
he would be forearmed against attacks that would
be directed against him as the one politically re-
sponsible if the wrong decision was made. Primar-
ily he was concerned with the political level of the
HfG in the tradition of the American reeducation
themes. How and to what extent, he asked, could
the educational theory of the school influence
An American in Ulm:
The Wochenschau
(weekly newsreel)
spreads the news all
over Germany.
public life in Germany? How would students be
enabled to disseminate the skills they learned and
the ideas of the foundation? What could one ex-
pect to gain from the curriculum for the working
population’s standard of living? Could the founda-
tion’s work help to close the gap between politi-
cally active people and intellectuals? Could one
assume that the work of the foundation would
have a pioneering effect on other institutes, the
economy, politics, and mass media? Was it pos-
sible for a mere 150 students to exert such an
John J. McCloy
hands the DM 1 million
check to Inge Scholl
at the Ulm city hall on
23 June 1952.
Photo: unknown
influence? How could this type of an elite group
be effective in the public sphere as designers and
advertisers? What justified his giving one of the
highest subsidies to the foundation? And finally:
Couldn’t the project start with DM 500,000? 636
Max Bill was visibly indignant about this cata-
logue. He probably had the impression that the
discussions of the last two years had passed by
the high commissioner without a trace: “Mr. Mc-
Cloy is apparently not very well versed in questions
of art and culture. He can’t imagine that culture
and politics are very closely connected and that
the influence does not go one way only, from poli-
tics to culture, but perhaps the reverse influence is
even deeper. I’m trying to get him to realize that in
the way I answer the questions. […] I think he sim-
ply wants to protect himself in case Congress later
Inge Scholl next to Ellen
McCloy; in the picture
on the right, Ulm Mayor
Theodor Pfizer appears
on the very left.
Photos: unknown
Archive center: City archive Ulm
(53–40–83)
accuses him of having given money to a totally
pointless institution in Germany. […] It seems
important to me that he should get the impression
that the things we want to develop in Ulm for daily
use are very closely connected with raising the
standard of living and creating a culture of the
age of technology, and that these things alone
have political significance.” A few days later, on
18 April 1952, Max Bill sent his answers to Inge
Scholl and Walter Gropius. Inge Scholl was able
to add “the foundation’s point of view” to this
“personal perspective as the rector of the school”,
before she sent on the documents to the high
commissioner.637 Max Bill hoped that Walter Gropi-
us would communicate his support to John
McCloy. 638
Max Bill’s answers are very much to the point – a
comprehensive school program that he formulated
as the designated rector of the HfG and that docu-
ments his militantly presented demand that he
alone is to be responsible for the curriculum and
educational methods of the Ulm project. 639 In
responding to John McCloy he argued that if the
school were turned into a reality this would above
contribute to raising the standard of living in Ger-
many and as a result would influence public life.
It was blue collar workers in particular who would
profit from good housing conditions, furnishings
and appliances – products “that really meet their
needs, in other words, that are good, functional,
inexpensive, and beautiful”. Furnishings for small
rooms should be adapted to these conditions,
while at the moment they were designed for older,
larger homes. The students were to disseminate
the new concepts not only by their own example,
but also by their participation in public life and by
what they created – objects adopted as cultural
products by leading strata of society, so that the
latter would begin to think about the ideas behind
them. Because it was the express platform of the
school to educate a cultural elite that would be
publicly active “for the benefit of the community”,
this elite would cast its spell on other intellectuals.
According to Max Bill, the institutions of the foun-
dation were to exert influence on public life, while
he also aimed to have other institutes adopt the 121
teachings of the HfG “if they don’t want to risk
becoming superfluous.” He gave the Bauhaus as
an example: Its basic course had been adopted in
one form or another by every leading school in
Germany, Holland, England, Switzerland, or in the
US, though only from a decorative point of view.
You could tell, he said, how progressive the HfG’s
program was by just looking at the positive reac-
tions or, for that matter, at attacks against it. He
predicted that the number of students was not
related to their influence. He pointed out how sig-
nificant was the influence of the dozen former
Bauhaus students in the US. By the way, the fact
that many Bauhaus people had been taken in by
communism showed how important a well-planned
political education was, something the Bauhaus
had lacked. Therefore he felt that a major goal of
the school was to mobilize politically those cultu-
ral forces that had until now stood by passively.
He strove to train designers as responsible citizens
and designers of products that would be better,
cheaper, and more beautiful, and that would en-
hance the quality of life; to educate advertisers
and journalists who would live and work as re-
sponsible citizens and honest reporters. He summed
it all up by saying, “The reason our technological
age is so strife-torn is that cultural responsibilities
were not dealt with on the same premises and
with the same methods as technical problems.
However, people do not live in the technical prob-
lems, but in houses, cities – they work in offices,
workshops.” For him the American million was the
absolute minimum in support; below that amount
he saw no sense in starting the HfG. Therefore,
with his answers, Max Bill took up the ultimate
goals of the American democratization policy,
looked for the international connection, and was
very good at striking just the right note that met
with the strongest American response.
Two more of Inge Scholl’s and Otl Aicher’s outlines
were used to prepare for the meeting with John
McCloy. They complemented Max Bill’s visionary
themes with other perspectives. One seems to be
a cursory information sheet for those sponsors of
 Founding
122 the HfG plans who were necessary as representa-
tives of the public sphere. Here the Ulm group
obviously stuck more closely to practical reality: In
the foreground of this paper are the HfG’s place in
the present situation of the Federal German educa-
tional landscape and a more detailed explanation
of the teaching program and instructional goals of
the HfG. 640 The second outline looks at the HfG
plans against the background of Inge Scholl’s and
Otl Aicher’s work at the Ulm Adult Education Cen-
ter 641: Their high regard for the role of education in
bringing about a change in German society; their
attempt to arouse political interest and civic com-
mitment in the population; their ability to see con-
nections; their pedagogical flair; their love for
questions involving practical design; their sense of
“increasing cultural powerlessness”, a result of the
separation of politics and culture in Germany and
of the “political failure of the intellectuals”.
The last important meeting between the HfG
founders and its promoters at HICOG took place
on 29 April 1952 at 1:00 p.m. at the home of John
McCloy in Bad Godesberg. The Ulm group and its
cohorts gathered two hours earlier at the Adler
Hotel 642. Max Bill, Hellmut Becker, and Inge Scholl
(Otl Aicher was apparently not there) were accom-
panied by several representatives of the public:
Hermann Josef Abs (the president of the Wieder-
aufbaubank (Reconstruction Bank), and founda-
tion trustee), Otto Bartning (president of the Bund
Deutscher Architekten, (the Association of German
Architects), and trustee of the foundation), Arno
Hennig (member of the Federal German Parlia-
ment, and chairman of the politico-cultural com-
mittee of the SPD), Heinz Küppers (member of the
federal board of the German Federation of Labor
and chairman of the cultural affairs committee of
the German Federation of Labor), Theodor Pfizer
(the mayor of Ulm) and Otto Pfleiderer (president
of the Baden-Württemberg Land Central Bank).
The other side was represented by John and Ellen
McCloy, Shepard Stone, George A. Selke (in charge
of supervising the foundation’s finances), Max M.
Kimental (in charge of financing projects in Shep-
ard Stone’s office), and an American lawyer. “It
was obvious that Mr. McCloy was impressed pri-
marily by the fact that here political forces that are
normally so divergent worked together to create
something new.” 643 The result was satisfactory all
around: The high commissioner informed Inge
Scholl that he would now approve the entire sum
and would finance the preplanning. She still saw
one danger looming ahead – the American presi-
dential elections, in which John McCloy as a Re-
publican would take up office at the side of Dwight
D. Eisenhower: “He’s going to fly to Washington
soon to speak before Congress about his policy
towards Germany. […] If the Democrats are al-
ready attacking him now, it is possible that he
might have a fit of frugality for political reasons
[…].” But he was going to have all decisions final-
ized within a month, and then all they needed was
the subsidy of the Land, “which had basically been
promised by the cabinet”. 644
John McCloy kept his word. Not a month had
passed when, on 27 May 1952, the American
foundation document for Special Project no. 1a
for DM 75,000 was issued. 645 The funds were ur-
gently needed for organization costs and salaries
incurred in setting up the HfG. The check reached
Ulm on 7 June 1952, the HfG project was begin-
ning to become a reality 646 – and on the same day
Inge Scholl and Otl Aicher got married. 647
When, on 23 June 1952, John McCloy person-
ally traveled to Ulm to solemnly present the check
for the remaining DM 925,000 to Inge Aicher-
Scholl at the city hall and to sign the deed of do-
nation, there was once more a flurry of excitement
in the international daily press. Thus the history of
the founding is framed by two actions by John
McCloy that attest to his intention to work actively
to bring about the desired changes in Germany:
In January 1950 he expressed his sympathy for
Inge Scholl and his interest in the experiment for
which he had declared his support in his Boston
speech, while now in June 1952 he handed over
the check. Between these two events were the
challenging yet at the same time supportive
words of the high commissioner himself and of
his staff.
Inge Aicher-Scholl had already given the press
a text of which one third dealt with her siblings’
resistance. The founding of the Ulm Adult educa-
tion Center, it said, is “in a way a legacy of my sib-
lings, far-reaching, as true enlightenment always
is”. Out of this work, the document continued,
arose the plans “for a place for work and teaching
that views and deals with the cultural, social, and
political tasks of our time in connection, and that
imparts to its students a ‘humanitas’ that is appro-
priate for our mechanized world. Students should
thus be offered thorough training in modern pro-
fessions, combined with a contemporary general
education. […] In this way we hope to help create
a more hopeful and constructive attitude among
the young and to use the moral impetus of the
resistance to benefit the tasks we face today.“ 648
The high commissioner also alluded to these roots
of the HfG plans. His first impression had had a
lasting effect on how he viewed the Ulm project.
Thus the memory of Hans and Sophie Scholl and
the hope that their worldview would endure deter-
mined the tenor of John McCloy’s speech in Ulm:
“During my three years in Germany I have partici-
pated in many extraordinary events. […] I am fully
aware of what I am saying when I state that noth-
ing during these years has satisfied me more than
the donation I am about to bestow. […] The Amer-
ican people love freedom and democracy, and
honor those who risk their lives for freedom. […]
Inge Scholl and her friends have now founded the
School of Design. This school wants to teach ways
of promoting democratic life in Germany. This
school is an experiment. It is something new, with
new ideas and new methods. Over it all, however,
reigns the spirit of Hans and Sophie Scholl. […]
The Federal Republic and the youth of this country
can have no better tradition than that of the young
Scholls. As long as their spirit shines in Germany,
the German contribution to the European commu-
nity will be democratic, liberal, and good” – an
unmistakable sideswipe at the persistent opposi-
tion of government officials and politicians who
believed that the weal and woe of Federal German
education depended on going back to the tradi-
tional education system. 649
Anyone who sums up the work of John McCloy,
Shepard Stone, and their staff at the office of the
high commission cannot help being amazed how
well the HfG project fit in with American ideas of
reform. If one compares it with John McCloy’s
statements in his address to the University of Frei-
burg, one is struck by the many points of corre-
spondence: the courage to risk something new,
the international orientation, the focus on human-
istic values, aiming for political effectiveness, the
community of teachers and learners. However,
that cannot have been the only reason for John
McCloy’s and Shepard Stone’s continuous sup-
port. John H. Boxer, who had taken part in the
meetings from the start, remembered Inge Scholl’s
personal charisma, which cast a spell on all partic-
ipants. 650 However, the moral credit she was in-
itially given was soon pushed into the background
in view of the shared goals to transform through
education the authoritarian, nonliberal, and slav-
ishly submissive attitude in Germany into indepen-
dent thinking and political discernment. In con-
trast the role of Max Bill seems ambivalent – as
an internationally known expert, he enjoyed the
confidence of the HICOG staff, but at the same
time as a visionary man of action he was good at
interpreting the boundaries of the project more
and more broadly and thus increasing its signifi-
cance. –
Taking stock of his work in Germany 651, John
McCloy recalled the uncertainty: Had the Germans
learned anything from their past or would they
again decide on seesaw politics? With the Stalin
note (10 March 1952) the Soviet Union had made
the tempting offer to reunify Germany as long as
it remained neutral in order to prevent the integra-
tion of Germany into the Western community of
states, and thus presented to the population the
fake choice between German and European unifi-
cation. John McCloy left Germany with some 123
degree of optimism that it would withstand the
Eastern threats of military strength and the ad-
vances of the propaganda offensive. On 26 May
1952 Konrad Adenauer and the foreign ministers
of the US, France, and England signed the Bonn
Convention that ended the Occupation Statute
and meant “yet another stage on the road to inte-
gration in the West” “at the end of which stood
complete sovereignty ”. 652
The 23 June 1952 document for Special Project
no. 1 for DM 925,000 to the foundation spells out
the terms of the donation: Essentially these were
the German matching fund (at least DM 700,000
in German funds, payments in kind from the city of
Ulm worth DM 245,000), and the government
subsidy for one year’s operation costs, a minimum
of DM 200,000. Also, the money was to be used
by 31 December 1953, and any remainder was to
be given back. 653
A week later, on 30 June 1952, the Land com-
missions stopped their work – they were trans-
formed into consulates general. The foundation
was accountable to the head of the Division of
Cultural Affairs (George A. Selke) in Bad Godes-
berg. John McCloy concluded his mission in Ger-
many on 21 July 1952, when he and his family
returned to the United States. There he became
the chairman of the board of directors of the
Chase Manhattan Bank. Shepard Stone left Ger-
many at the same time. From 1953 on, he was the
director of the overseas section of the Ford Foun-
dation (John McCloy was the chairman of its exec-
utive board during the same period). He retired in
1973, but returned to Berlin once more in 1974 to
found the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies,
which he directed until 1986.
The appearance of the great sponsor John McCloy
and his wife in Ulm was good publicity and pro-
vided Inge Aicher-Scholl with a welcome opportu-
nity to send a circular letter to all the new friends
she had made in the meantime and to the sup-
porters of the college project. 654 This first circular,
dated 30 June 1952, was also sent out in an Eng-
lish version (15 September 1952). 655 It also served
to prepare for the founding of an association of
friends and supporters, and to hold together those
who were interested. As she looked back at the
work that had already been done, two aspects
seemed particularly noteworthy to her as far as the
reaction of German officialdom was concerned.
First, it had been to the Ulm group’s disadvantage
that they wanted to create something completely
new and not continue an existing tradition. For in
the few years that had elapsed since the end of
the war the originally widespread acceptance of
making a radical new beginning had vanished:
 Founding
124 “If we had wanted merely to expand or reconstruct
something that was already there, we would have
been spared a lot of trouble. As it was, we could
only refer people to a good plan and a couple of
people who wanted to turn it into a reality.” In
1952, it had become a rare occurrence for some-
body with cultural commitment to start all over
again from scratch. In fact, Inge Aicher-Scholl had
told Shepard Stone something similar half a year
earlier. – Secondly, she spoke of the planned inde-
pendence from government influence that the new
institution would enjoy. With obvious satisfaction
she reported about similar views represented in
the Württemberg-Baden Parliament – for that was
hardly ever to be the case again: “Asking for public
funds for an independent institution required that
the politicians and bureaucrats who were involved
change their thinking. It was all the more encour-
aging that, for example, in the politico-cultural
committee of the Stuttgart Landtag the represen-
tatives of all the parties wanted to make their ap-
proval of the state subsidy contingent precisely on
the fundamental independence of the school. The
deputies declared that in the hands of the state
the institution would simply become an institution
like others that already existed elsewhere. What
was new, they felt, could only grow from a combi-
nation of free initiative and government financial
assistance.”
You’d have thought that the handing over of
the million-mark check would have given the HfG
plans in Stuttgart new thrust. Far from it. Inge
Aicher-Scholl had warned Max Bill as late as 13
June 1952 against impatient actions: “Various
people have been urging us not to take any action
at the moment, since the government is totally
preoccupied with itself.” 656 For the time being she
had no choice but to thank minister of education
and the arts Gotthilf Schenkel and his staff mem-
ber Gerd H. Müller for their support and help 657
and to bide her time until the political climate in
the Land allowed a last sally.
The latest developments were that in April 1952
a discussion started up between the ministry of
education and the arts and the ministry of finance
about documents regarding the HfG that Gotthilf
Schenkel had submitted to the cabinet. For the
first year of its operation he would provide a subsi-
dy of DM 200,000, and DM 300,000 each for the
coming two years – i. e., a total of DM 800,000. In
return for this, representatives of the government
agencies would have a right of veto for all financial
matters regarding the foundation. 658 Because gov-
ernment circumstances were unresolved, the min-
ister of finance used them as a pretext for refusing
to decide about the HfG “until an overview of the
southwest state’s 1952 budget [was] possible”. 659
On 23 April 1952 the Württemberg-Baden council
Isometric drawing of Max Bill’s
architectural plan for the main building
of the HfG
of ministers under Reinhold Maier adopted the Photography 125
same view and – two days later – postponed the
decision to form a new Land government. 660
In the meantime, in fact, there had been no Metal Woodwork- Plaster
workshop ing shop workshop
base for continuing to process the matter in Parlia-
ment, since the new Federal Land of Baden-Würt-
temberg would be created in the foreseeable fu-
ture. 661 Section 118 of the Federal Republic’s By- Department of
laws (the so-called Neugliederungsgesetz, or visual communication
Reorganization Law) contained provisions estab-
lished especially for the formation of the south-
west state. According to these a plebiscite was
planned in the four voting districts of North and
South Baden, and North and South Württemberg.
If the majority in all four districts as a whole and in Department of
each of three districts decided on the merger, the information
southwest state would be formed. The 9 Decem-
ber 1951 plebiscite actually did produce this result:
69.7 percent of those who were entitled to vote,
and the majority in each of the districts of North
Baden and North and South Württemberg voted
for the southwest state. Only in South Baden the
majority (62.2 percent) voted against the merger. Connecting passage
to student high-rise
Following this, on 9 March 1952, the constitu- and to studios
ent Land assembly was elected (which at the
same time assumed the function of a Landtag
after adopting the Baden-Württemberg bylaws
on 11 November 1953 and constituted itself as Admin- Dining hall,
the first Parliament of the Land of Baden-Württem- istration, bar
berg on 19 November 1953). The constitutive ses- rector,
library,
sion of the constituent Land assembly took place lobby,
on 25 March 1952. The Federal Chancellor lost foyer
his majority in the Federal Council through the
election that resulted in a coalition of the SPD,
FDP/DVP and GB/BHE + DP, which made up the
Lecture hall
first provisional government. This government for-
med on 25 April 1952. On the same day the con-
stituent assembly proclaimed the law about the
provisional exercise of state authority in the south-
west state of the Federal Republic, the so-called
transitional law. It regulated the dissolution of the
Land Parliaments and governments of the three
prior Lands, the transfer of the functions of a
Landtag to the constituent Land assembly, and
designated that the provisional name of the new Department of
product design
federal Land should be Baden-Württemberg.
Through the law, the new cabinet was constitu-
tionally given freedom of action ending the con-
stitutional existence of the Länder of Württem-
berg-Baden, Württemberg-Hohenzollern, and Department of Heating/physical
Baden. The new federal Land came into existence industrialized building plant
at 12:30 on 25 April 1952. Again Reinhold Maier
was the minister-president in Stuttgart. His cabi-
net, with one ex-ception, was identical with the
council of minis-ters of the Land of Württemberg-
Baden. For the HfG plans, this meant that the min- Main entrance
isters in the crucial departments of education and
the arts, finance, and economics had remained the
same. Patio
 Founding
126 In 1952 the foundation published the first printed
brochure 662 (the year before there had been only
two printed standard-size pages 663, but otherwise
only outlines). Inge Scholl and Otl Aicher sent their
rough draft to Max Bill in the spring and asked him
to make changes as he saw fit. His alternative draft
664
of 12 April 1952 was, for the most part, adopted
for the final printed version, an additional indica-
tion of how much he dominated the program of
the future HfG at this point – or at least its repre-
sentation in public.
The square brochure consisted of four pages
made up of a sheet printed on both sides and
folded in the middle. It did not give the HfG found-
ers much room, and so the text was kept some-
what general and brief. The very second sentence
of the introduction states that the HfG is a continu-
ation of the Bauhaus, expanded by courses in
those areas to which no importance was yet at-
tached when the Bauhaus was in existence. This
is followed by a very short overview of the teach-
ing program: the basic courses, the departments
(information, visual design, product design, archi-
tecture, city planning), and general education.
Finally there were a few sketchy sentences on the
Institute of Product Design: “The institute will take
on orders from the private sector and carry out its
own research and design work. It will work out the
fundamentals for the design of technically correct,
functional, and aesthetically pleasing products.
Thus it will fill a need of the economy: Because of
developments in the world market it is necessary
to coordinate technical, aesthetic, and economic
factors. […] Qualified designers will be trained in
the course of collaboration between the college
and its Institute of Product Design.” The state-
ments regarding the “steering committee” of the
foundation (Inge Aicher-Scholl, Otl Aicher, Max
Bill) and the “administrative council” were not
quite correct because the first committee was not
a constitutional entity of the foundation (“steering
committee” was merely a catchy name for the trio
of founders) and the second group was still the
foundation’s seven-member administrative com-
mittee, which was not transformed into the admin-
istrative council (14 members) until 1953. –
On 10 July 1952 Inge Aicher-Scholl sent this
brochure to Hans Bott, who as an assistant depart-
ment head in the office of the federal president
was in charge of HICOG special projects, with a
note saying that it had “just come off the press”. 665
This brochure also includes Max Bill’s intention
of setting up studios for artistic work (as a contin-
uation of the departments of visual design and
product design for particularly gifted students). In
an unprinted outline, presumably also from the lat-
ter half of 1952, Max Bill spoke more plainly: “I am
still convinced that art has primacy for creative de-
sign[…]. I am also convinced that the mass pro-
duction of consumer goods should not be accom- Miscellaneous DM 140,200
plished by incapable painters and sculptors, ‘bad nonpersonnel costs
artists’, but that responsible, real artists should be
part of the team working on producing these Sum total income DM 217,170
goods. […] Having said that, I have also indicated Sum total expenditures DM 452,000
______________
to a certain degree what the Ulm school is sup-
posed to be about. We regard art as the highest Subsidy requirements DM 234,830
stage of expression and strive to make life into a
work of art. […] We don’t want to encourage so- The important items of income were affected by
called ‘freelance’ artists, but to train artists who, the number of students (fees and rents) and lec-
because of their own performance, are truly free. turers (rents). To generate this income, in turn, the
[…] We hope that we can come up to the expec- HfG campus with its classroom and residential
tations people have of us: to give a permanent buildings needed to be completely furnished. The
home again to the homeless Bauhaus spirit.” 666 foundation’s lack of money may have started at
But it was precisely this prioritizing of art over all this point. But it would be wrong to believe that
other educational goals of the HfG that Otl Aicher the foundation’s later fundamental financial diffi-
rejected. Nevertheless, this is what happened, for culties were caused solely by this miscalculation,
in the foundation’s brochure, it was Max Bill’s which was based on optimistic assumptions.
views that were implied. There is no doubt that Inge Aicher-Scholl was
caught in a catch-22 situation between a realistic
In the fall of 1952 Inge Aicher-Scholl braced her- view of things which surely must have told her not
self for the remaining hurdle in Stuttgart. On 4 to draw up such a budget, and the calculated opti-
October 1952 she sent Gerd H. Müller at the min- mism that wanted a functioning balanced budget.
istry of education and the arts a new budget, cal- Also the entire project was burdened by the self-
culated for one school year with full enrollment imposed claim, which had been elevated to a plat-
(150 students). form, that the school would largely forego govern-
Because the state had raised teachers’ salaries ment assistance, so that time and time again the
by 20 percent and the foundation had to adapt to ministries were pacified with only minimal subsi-
the change, the foundation’s subsidy requirements dies. Otl Aicher and his wife still clung to their vi-
had also increased. 667 However, a look at budget sion of “financing routine maintenance from pri-
figures dated 4 October 1950 for a normal year vate sources”. 668
with 150 students shows that this calculation still One should by no means assume that Inge
depended on full enrollment: Aicher-Scholl was frivolous when it came to
finances. Thus, on 11 September 1952, she had
Income already sent a private communication about the
Student fees DM 40,500 other financial problem, construction costs, to Max
(150 students Bill, informing him that funds for the building were
at 9 months each at DM 30): DM 200,000 short. DM 1,950,000 were available
Registration fees DM 2,500 to them, while the building plus workshops and
(50 new students teaching materials would cost DM 2,150,000. She
at DM 50 each) asked him to economize on building and equip-
Fees for material DM 11,250 ment costs, while she would at the same time
(150 students come up with additional donations, and try to in-
at DM 75 each crease the mortgage (previous projection: DM
Commissions and licenses DM 20,000 300,000). 669 At the end of 1952 she even got into
Students’ rents DM 54,000 a violent argument with Max Bill over her desire to
(150 students economize. He wanted to limit the capacity of the
at DM 30 each per month) HfG to a mere 100 students maximum “while
Lecturers’ rents DM 22,200 keeping the same number of teachers! for that is
(1,000 sq. meters at DM 1.85) an item we cannot economize on. […] To put it
Miscellaneous DM 16,720 simply, we need that third million. […] We should
Payments in kind from city DM 50,000 definitely not cover up the situation.“ 670 Was that
the brazen demand of an idealist? Probably not –
Expenditures just an assessment of reality, for a look at the sta-
Teachers’ salaries DM 190,800 tistics shows that it took the HfG eight years to
Master craftsmen’s salaries DM 52,800 admit more than 100 students. Nevertheless it was
Visiting lecturers’ salaries DM 35,000 absurd for Max Bill to expect Inge Aicher-Scholl to
Administration, library, DM 33,200 rework the plans once more at this point. He had
custodian been at the helm long enough to have a good
measure of responsibility for seeing that they now 127
managed within the estimated sum of money. Inge
Aicher-Scholl told him so in no uncertain terms on
Christmas 1952: “But when in your letter you men-
tion a total construction cost that is far more than
double your original figure, it’s completely beyond
the limits of my comprehension.” She wanted him
to plan the building in such a way that as many as
150 students would be able to study there one
day, as it could be expanded step by step: “At any
rate I would stick to 150 students as the optimal
full enrollment. That way we’ll have a school that’s
going to be under constant construction for the
next few years and for which we have to continue
begging from door to door in the name of God.”
Maybe they could make virtue out of necessity
and combine their need to economize with the
need to produce, as quickly as possible, demon-
strable and tangible proofs of success: “That is
why I’d like to ask you to consider whether we
shouldn’t regard the building even more than be-
fore as an area where the school can demonstrate
its practical achievements. […] I could see where
we could produce enough chairs, tables, furniture,
sanitary facilities, fittings, light fixtures, etc., for the
building alone that we wouldn’t need to be scared
of justifying ourselves to the Land. But I’d like to
point out that a man like Zeischegg can’t do this all
on his own and that it won’t work at the pace he’s
working at.” For the moment she saw no opportu-
nities for coming up with new money in Germany:
“We’ve become a lame duck that won’t get any
moral credit until it shows it can swim.” The fol-
lowing February, she expected Shepard Stone as
the representative of the Ford Foundation, and
she was already beginning to dread this encounter:
“I was perfectly aware of what he meant by teas-
ing me that we were the first project of the McCloy
Fund, but the last one to be concluded.“ 671
Back to the Stuttgart ministries. In his new cabinet
presentation on 20 October 1952, Gotthilf Schen-
kel took over Inge Aicher-Scholl’s draft that a sub-
sidy of DM 235,000 for regular maintenance was
necessary for a normal school year. In the six-
month startup period alone DM 80,000 would be
needed. When the minister of finance expressed
his fear that the subsidy would be necessary even
after the first three years, Gotthilf Schenkel asked
him to consider that “if the school is really to de-
velop successfully, ongoing subsidies from indus-
try can also be expected, but furthermore the
school’s successful work will have such a positive
effect on the development of our regional industry,
especially on its foreign sales, that the relatively
modest government subsidy can then be easily
justified.” If this did not happen, the ministry of
education and the arts would propose on their
own accord that the state subsidy be cut. Gotthilf
 Founding
128
Max Bill’s architectural Schenkel was against the school’s becoming affili-
model of the HfG cam- ated with an existing institution (technical college
pus still shows three or academy) or the HfG’s functions being taken
high-rises with studio over by another institution. 672
apartments between It should be no surprise that the minister of
them. Only one high- finance did not want to endorse this view: “I be-
rise was actually built. lieve it’s definitely possible and attainable without
Photo: Hans Conrad major difficulties and expenditures for the func-
tions in question to be dealt with within the frame-
work of a technical college. […] The Land has 2
large technical universities, 3 state schools of
architecture, and 3 academies of art. […] The
founding of a new institution of this type would
substantially add to the financial burden of this
Land. […] First of all it is not certain that the re-
quired amount would not increase, because the
foundation’s budget starts from the assumption
that the institute and school would have maximum
enrollment. […] It is by no means a proven fact
that the work of the school would have such a
positive effect on regional industry and export that
the high government subsidy would be easily justi-
fied.” The loss of the American million and of fed-
eral funds (DM 300,000) would be regrettable, he
added, but would have to be “put up with in order
to protect the Land from expenses that in all prob-
ability would not achieve their purpose and that
were so large they would not be justified by the
previously mentioned contributions.” 673 Karl Frank
was frankly opposed, not to the promotion of de-
sign in general, but to its realization in the form of
the HfG. Now the founders paid for having con-
stantly emphasized the economic aspect for the
ministries. This argument invited their opponents
to reduce the HfG plans to a simple cost-benefit
calculation. However, the crucial reason that even
the minister of finance could not have evaded, and
that so deeply impressed the HICOG staff, was
absent from this calculation: the fact that the
school was rooted in the resistance of Hans and
Sophie Scholl, its holistic pedagogy, an education
whose goals were to develop the personality, for-
mation of free opinion and independent thinking
in order to teach students to act responsibly and
courageously. In the calculations of the minister of
finance, which were driven by the idea of rebuild-
ing the old institutions, this sort of commitment to
draw morals from the past for the future was miss-
ing. Whether he would have agreed to discuss
these politico-cultural goals is another matter.
But if the purpose of the HfG was presented to
him merely as the promotion of exports, he could
afford to doubt the success of this undertaking:
“I am well aware that the foundation raises prob-
lems that are worth discussing and may to some
extent be of real significance. But I feel it’s a mis-
take to tackle this multitude of problems all at
once and even to believe that addressing them can
produce speedy and direct economic benefits for
regional industry and export. The overall planning
of the project that is laid out in the foundation’s
publicity brochure lacks the sort of clarity and lev-
elheadedness without which it is impossible to
achieve economic success.” No doubt there were
plenty of counterexamples to show that enthusi-
asm, idealism, and visions are the basis of eco-
nomic success and cultural progress. On the other
hand it was undeniable that up to that point Inge
Aicher-Scholl could indeed show only meager as-
sistance from German industry. Since October 1952,
in addition to the donations for construction, she
had obtained twelve full scholarships from the pri-
vate sector, each financing the education of a stu-
dent for three years (cost per student: DM 5,200).674
The minister of the interior, Fritz Ulrich (SPD),
corroborated Karl Frank’s suspicion regarding the
financial prospects of the HfG. The development
costs of DM 245,000, which were supposed to be
defrayed by the city of Ulm, would not be suffi-
cient, he claimed, and neither would the remaining
DM 1.5 million for the construction of the HfG
buildings – a calculation that Inge Aicher-Scholl
also played up. Besides, the city would have to
obtain a loan for this, although it was deep in debt
as it is and had to raise DM 675,000 a year for
interest and debt repayment. Finally, the annual
DM 50,000 payments in kind could also not be
delivered under these circumstances. If the city
took on burdens like the HfG, “the Land would
have to help out if no other public or private funds
or foundation funds were available for this pur-
pose.” 675
His fellow SPD member Hermann Veit, the min-
ister of economics, contradicted his fears as re-
gards financial policy and agreed with the views
of the minister of education and the arts by point-
ing out how promising and inclusive the training at
the HfG would be: “The […]syllabus in the area of
design will represent only a relatively small seg-
ment of the school’s broad-based curriculum. […]
However, I am of the opinion that because of the
economic significance of its objectives in the areas
of design and export, the planned school in Ulm
should be granted a limited subsidy for a limited
period. Also, in the interest of the Land, I feel it is
indefensible not to take advantage of the sum of
DM 1,745,000 that has been made available for
the construction of the school.” In order to take the
sting out of the sort of confrontation between the
HfG and the Stuttgart Technical University's archi-
tecture department that Karl Frank was engaged
in, Hermann Veit also demanded that chairs for
design be established at a technical university of
the Land and that an institute be attached for re-
search contracts from industry and government,
so firmly convinced was he of the importance of
design for the economy. In this respect he re-
garded America and England as models, because
design was promoted there with much more gov-
ernment funding. It would be best, he felt, that the
person who held the chair at the technical univer-
sity should simultaneously also teach at the HfG
and at the foundation’s Institute of Design, so as
to increase the mutual benefit. 676
The broad horizon envisaged by the HfG plans
made the minister all the more determined not to
change his mind, for that was precisely where he
saw the crux of the project’s inefficiency and su-
perfluity. Apart from design, there were already
established colleges ready to take on all the other
functions; meanwhile, the HfG-specific back-
ground in the humanities and social sciences
would not directly result in promoting export:
“In addition to the problem of design, you see,
the foundation’s plan provides for a large number
of other goals whose pursuit can neither be of
direct economic benefit nor be described as irref-
utably necessary and urgent in the interest of the
Land. […] The attempt to check spiritual fragmen-
tation and to create a new human being must in
my opinion be left to the manifold already existing
state cultural and teaching institutions.” On the
other hand, if a chair was established at the Stutt-
gart Technical University in Richard Döcker’s de-
partment, “there would be a guarantee that the
problem [of design; author’s note] would be ad-
dressed seriously and exhaustively from the per-
spective of its economic significance” – and for
an unlimited number of students, in fact, while the
HfG would be content with a maximum of 150.
Incidentally, he was also not satisfied with the veto
right provided for in the foundation’s new charter
making it possible to “take measures that seem 129
necessary in the interest of the Land in the face of
resistance by circles interested in the school.” He
was confident that it would be possible for the
Land of Baden-Württemberg to keep the American
million and the federal government’s DM 300,000
through negotiations without having to found the
HfG:
“Of course, this solution would basically be lim-
ited to the problem of design and would thus re-
quire self-denial on the part of the initiators of the
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung.” 677
It is superfluous, actually, to point out that the
German agencies hardly paid attention to Ameri-
can deadlines anymore. This behavior of federal
and Land officials was quite blatant and, because
it was not an isolated incident but a permanent
state of affairs, it was a continual provocation and
insolent disregard of respect for the donors. The
cabinet should actually have submitted its final
decision by Friday, 14 November 1952, because
the federal ministry of economics needed to allo-
cate its DM 200,000 subsidy, which it in turn had
obtained from ECA (Economic Commission Ad-
ministration) funds, by the end of October. 678
Walther Hinsch, the HfG’s friend at the federal
ministry of economics, had sent a timely reminder
that the Stuttgart ministers’ decision was due
because he feared that otherwise the entire pro-
ject would fail if the promises came tumbling
down one after another like dominoes . 679 But
Stuttgart clocks ticked at a more leisurely pace,
and so 18 November 1952 eventually arrived.
About time – for on this day the council of minis-
ters decided to back the HfG against the minister
of finance, with the following proviso:
1. DM 800,000 were to be made available to the
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung to operate the HfG
during the first three years as a one-time contri-
bution and without entitlement to follow-up
payments ;
2. after three years there would be a study to
gauge the success of the HfG;
3. embodied in the modified bylaws of the foun-
dation should be the veto right of the ministry
of education and the arts regarding personnel
decisions that extend beyond one year or that
would cause an expenditure of more than
DM 10,000;
4. the future charter of the foundation should in-
clude a clause that in case the foundation was
dissolved 1/5 of its assets would go to the fed-
eral government, 2/5 to the city and 2/5 to the
Land of Baden-Württemberg. 680
The reasons the cabinet gave for its decision were
that the HfG was to serve the objective of develop-
ing industrial production, and especially of en-
 Founding Bernhard Rübenach, “White boxes stacked The buildings descend The dominant impres-
Der rechte Winkel von on top of each other, the slope step by step sion is one of graceful
Ulm, p. 23 ff. spread out, with only like terraces. Not one of animation, of ambigu-
one vertical accent, the views resembles ousness. […] From no
the high-rise. Delicate, another. Walking around point is there an overall
slender against the dark the buildings is like set- view of this building.
clusters of trees, a slen- ting them in motion. Even an aerial photo-
der fortress, its skeleton There is not one point graph hides the fact
white concrete, lots of that is meant to be a that it is on an ascend-
glass. […] central façade. […] ing slope.“

130 hancing the competitiveness of German export
and “making up for the lead a number of other
countries had gained in the last two decades in
the area of working out functional and beautiful
designs for durable consumer goods”. 681 But the
ministers did not share the view of the Ulm group
that the exertion of government influence was
incompatible with peak cultural performance. 682
Even minister of education and the arts Gotthilf
Schenkel could not change that, even though the
majority of the council of ministers followed his
recommendations and he had championed the
HfG’s cause with all his energy. Inge Aicher-Scholl
thanked him for this and emphasized that it was
primarily because of his efforts that the HfG could
become a reality. 683
If the Landtag approved the budget, the foun-
dation could finally receive money in the spring of
1953 to get to work on the HfG organization and
buildings. But their real work would not begin until
afterward, for in the spring of 1956 the three-year
subsidy by the Land would run out, and if the Land’s
subsidy was to be extended, the request already
had to be submitted a year earlier: In other words,
Parliament and the ministries would have to con-
vince themselves of the success of the HfG’s work
as early as spring 1955! 684
Organization around the HfG was brought to a
close when seven people in the Ulm circle – Ingela
Albers, Kurt Deschler, Hans Frieder Eychmüller,
Fritz Hartnagel, Irm Lindström, Roderich Count
Thun and Herbert Wiegandt, all good friends of
Inge Aicher-Scholl and Otl Aicher – met on 17
December 1952 to found the incorporated associ-
ation Gesellschaft der Freunde der Geschwister-
Scholl-Stiftung (Society of Friends of the Geschwis-
ter-Scholl-Stiftung). Count Thun was elected man-
aging chairman of the society. The society’s pur-
pose was on the one hand to represent the foun-
dation’s interests – in accordance with the wishes
of the HfG’s founders these interests were identi-
cal with those of the HfG – in public and to pro-
mote them, to set up and maintain contacts with
industry and politicians, to serve as a gathering
point for like-minded people who were interested
in design, and collect donations. On the other
hand the Society of Friends designated those
members of the future administrative council who
were freely available and not representatives of the
government agencies. These independent mem-
bers were expected to be particularly united and
firm in their support of the ideals and goals of the
HfG and to defend them, if need be, against the
representatives of officialdom. 685 The Society of
Friends was registered in the Ulm register of soci-
eties on 30 December 1952. The ensemble that
consisted of the foundation, the Society of Friends,
the college, and the institute was now all set for
the performance until 1968.
The interim balance sheet at the turn of the year
1952/53 read as follows: months of total confu-
sion. Hellmut Becker had been warning for weeks
that if construction did not start by 1 March 1953
and the school building was not ready for occu-
pancy by fall 1953, the foundation must presum-
ably “lose even its most benevolent friends and
supporters […], since they are beyond the culmi-
nating point of confidence in our startup work and
therefore unfortunately to some degree in our
cause as well.“ 686
Even if everything else was at a standstill, there
was still something happening in the city of Ulm.
Mayor Theodor Pfizer in particular again did his
utmost to ensure that the founding phase could
finally come to a close. Even prior to this time the
municipal council had backed the project. The year
before, on 7 January 1952, the main department
of the municipal council had requested that a loan
of DM 250,000 should be obtained from the Würt-
tembergische Girozentrale and the money used to
support the foundation. 687 The municipal council
agreed to this request on 15 January 1952. 688
Now, almost a year later to the day, on 13 Janu-
ary 1953, the main department again decided that
a request to promote the foundation should be
submitted to the municipal council. 689 Theodor
Pfizer made it clear to the deputies that now it was
really important to observe the American deadline,
which was supposed to extend up to 20 January
1953, so that the foundation would not have to
return the funds that had been approved and
received up to this point. What was required now
were irrevocable and legally binding commit-
ments. The proposal included the familiar items:
first, to contribute DM 245,000 for the construc-
tion of the HfG buildings (in accordance with the
main department’s decision of 24 July 1951),
financed by a loan; second, to contribute to the
ongoing operating expenses of the HfG with pay-
ments in kind for the same length of time as the
Land also made money available for this – i. e.
three years for the time being – up to DM 40,000
at the beginning and up to DM 70,000 per year
later; also lesser subsidies to buy land on the
upper Kuhberg, which were necessary so that the
federal government could realign the boundaries
of its adjacent property.
Three days later, on 16 January 1953, Inge
Aicher-Scholl had the opportunity to plead her
case before the municipal council in person. 690
She chose fundamental arguments that explained
her cultural and pedagogical ideas; on the other
hand, the economic aspect was left out of consid-
eration for the most part: “We began with the pro-
found question whether it is possible to integrate
technology into our culture. […] Will this world,
the people of our century, be absolutely material-
Photo: Otl Aicher 2. 8.1955
Archive: HfG (090/27)
ized by technology, turned into unfeeling robots
or managers or officials – or shall we succeed in
bringing into harmony the civilization created by
technology with culture, with the human spirit, and
in fusing them into a unified whole? […] From the
very beginning we realized that we do not want to
educate specialists, but human beings with broad
horizons, who can see the connections in life. That
is why general education is such a crucial part of
our program.” Hence also the intention to educate
the students in a way that corresponds to practical
life: with workshops instead of lecture rooms. Fi-
nally she appealed to the local patriotism of the
Ulm delegates: This experiment that was to be
neither a college of commercial art nor a university
was even now promoting the name of Ulm all over
the world and would do so all the more once the
HfG had finally started its work!
Her appearance was a sweeping success – the
municipal council accepted the main department’s
proposal. 691 The CDU in particular was committed
to the plans, and that was important because one
parliamentary party floor leader, Franz Wiedemei-
er, was also the second chairman of the finance
committee of the Baden-Württemberg constituent
assembly. 692
Since 18 November 1952, when the cabinet de-
cided to subsidize the HfG, the minister of finance
was no longer the most important contact person
for the HfG founders who had to be convinced
of their cause; the contact person was now the fi-
nance committee chairman of the Land’s constitu-
ent assembly, Alex Möller, who, of course, was
also the leader of the SPD faction in Parliament. 693
For now it was necessary quickly to take the cabi-
131
net’s consent at face value. Gerd H. Müller, as
recently as Christmas Eve 1952, had asked the
ministry of finance to have the first installment of
the Land’s subsidy totaling DM 60,000 for the first
quarter of 1953 included in the 1952/53 budget –
the finance committee had to approve this money
ahead of time, because Parliament had not yet
voted on the entire budget. 694 But it would have
been too easy – the minister of finance did not
want to make even this concession. He persisted
in his view that “these were one-time, not regular,
expenditures”.
That meant that the HfG was still not able to get
any money, because the complete DM 800,000
subsidy had to be included in the 1952/53 Land
budget. The Ulm group had to wait until the entire
Land budget was adopted.
It was hardly conceivable, but once more an Amer-
ican deadline could not be met. 695 January 20,
1953 passed by, George A. Selke was understand-
ing, but at the same time requested that all the
required documents should finally be gathered, for
how was he to send a credible report to America
that Project no. 1 was truly welcomed by the Ger-
mans in view of the whole complicated mess in
Ulm? 696
Although there was nothing to be decided, Inge
Aicher-Scholl and her advisors felt it would be
wise to have her project discussed in the finance
committee in order to find out what the commit-
tee’s fundamental views were on approving the
subsidy. Alex Möller, the chairman, had been the
one who came up with this idea, and he wanted to
make sure that this would not mean that the HfG
 Founding
132
Shepard Stone, Ralph would beard the lion in his den. 697 But regardless
A. Burns, John McCloy of this precaution: This was the stamping ground
and Konrad Adenauer of the minister of finance, and he again demon-
signing the Fulbright strated his unmistakable stance by taking the un-
agreement between usual step of sending a detailed description of the
the Federal Republic project from his perspective to all members of the
of Germany and the committee. 698
United States to pro- The reason he gave for such extensive docu-
mote cultural and mentation was that the cabinet had expressly told
pedagogic exchange him they would represent his disapproval in the
on 18 July 1952. finance committee. In 13 pages he summed up
Photo: unknown the past year’s entire discussion, and with this text
Archive: Dartmouth College he almost managed to win over the committee to
(Neg. # Shepard Stone ’29)
his way of thinking. When the discussion took
place on 12 March 1953, there was a bitter strug-
gle for votes, “and the pros and cons crossed party
lines”. 699 With only a bare majority the committee
decided to support the government’s proposal: 10
members were for the project, 7 against, and 7
abstained. The negative memorandum of the min-
ister of finance had had an effect, “and presum-
ably it was difficult for wavering members to vote
against the minister of finance.” 700
The news that reached Ulm from the ministries in
Bonn was also only partly encouraging. It was true
that on 26 January 1953 the federal ministries of
economics, housing construction, and the interior
had sent their final authorizations for a total of DM
300,000 to be made available to the foundation
for the HfG. 701 But now began the red tape: The
money could be used only for “research in the area
of consumer goods production”, or rather, to be
precise, “to purchase scientific instruments and
laboratory equipment for the newly built Research
Institute of Design”.
However, the crux of the matter was that Inge
Aicher-Scholl had arranged for almost all equip-
ment and apparatus to be donated, but urgently
needed money for construction. The version of the
federal minister of housing construction was to
give the foundation “a research contract in the
area of design (architecture, city planning, public
housing). Therefore my memorandum should by
no means be interpreted to mean that these funds
are being made available for the construction of
the school.” 702
Again it was up to American influence, now per-
sonified by George A. Selke, to break down this
resistance piece by piece. Inge Aicher-Scholl
implored him for help: “I’d be very grateful to you
if you would help us in this matter, and I’m sorry
to trouble you, but you have held your helping
hand over the Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung for
such a long time already that I thought I could
take advantage of it one more time.” 703 By mid-
April 1953 this hurdle had also been cleared, and
the federal funds could now be spent for the con-
struction of the HfG. 704
A brief look at the architectural situation shows
that the estimates of the actual construction costs
had started to fluctuate. The constant delays had
been costly. The development office and the first
staff members finally needed to be paid, and be-
sides costs were rising but subsidies were not. At
least the foundation was getting interest on the
American million. On 4 March 1953, according to
an internal financial statement DM 1,700,000 were
available for construction (of these, DM 1,116,000
were for the actual building, i. e., not counting
workshops, the outside plant, and salaries). 705 That
means that during a good year the Ulm group had
over DM 50,000 less, while at the same time costs
had gone up. In the course of these days, as a
result of conversations with Max Bill, it turned out
that if the school was built according to existing
plans, construction costs would be approximately
DM 1,900,000 (the school building: DM 1,335,000;
student apartments in a high-rise tower, studios,
a caretaker’s apartment, and 12 apartments for
teachers: DM 511,760), while a little under DM
1,200,000 were actually available. 706 There were
only two solutions, both of which had to be imple-
mented simultaneously: New money must be bor-
rowed (as a mortgage on the residential buildings
and as credit for their construction), and the ex-
pensive interior must be completed by the school
as part of its work. 707 Max Bill did not see it in such
dramatic terms: “The sum for completing the inter-
ior is enough to cover about 1/2 of the interior
work. If you add part of the installation costs
(maybe the printing shop), we still have a small
reserve. I don’t see anything alarming about this
calculation […].” 708
Even at this early date, in the spring of 1953, an
additional difficulty, which later had fundamental
consequences, was in the offing. Max Bill traveled
a great deal and had a lot to do, but he did not put
in an appearance in Ulm as often as the situation
called for. At the time it meant that the founda-
tion’s development office, but especially the con-
struction office, which was just taking shape,
lacked a driving and motivating head who could
sum up the situation at a glance. The working
pace of designer Walter Zeischegg and local
building site manager Fritz Pfeil, with C.W. Voltz as 133
his second in command, left much to be desired,
and once again it proved to be true that time was
money. In Ulm they lacked both, and this pressure
affected the working atmosphere.
Now to a completely different topic, the alteration
of the foundation’s bylaws: It is placed at the end
of this chapter, for at the end of this development
the formal appointment of Max Bill took place;
from being the designated rector of the HfG, he
became the actual rector, and this is to be the
topic of a new chapter.
The reason for changing the foundation’s by-
laws, of course, was the fact that on 18 November
1952 the cabinet wanted to support the founda-
tion only with the proviso that the influence of the
ministries would be strengthened. Originally this
had been the wish of the federal ministry of eco-
nomics, but soon the Baden-Württemberg minis-
try of education and the arts and ministry of eco-
nomics sided with the federal ministry. There was
even a discussion whether a new preamble should
be written. However, Hellmut Becker firmly re-
jected the idea and also convinced the special
adviser in the ministry of education and the arts,
Gerd H. Müller to do so: “[…] In my opinion we
should avoid anything that might give rise to the
misinterpretation that we no longer believe the
sacrificial deaths of Hans and Sophie Scholl are
relevant, or that we even want to dissociate our-
selves from them. […] It’s an unfortunate fact that
even today wide circles of the population no longer
like to be reminded – and less so every day – of
the long years when our nation was bereft of free-
dom, when human dignity was held in contempt,
and of how small was the number of Germans
who were resolute in rejecting the tyranny of that
regime.” 709
In order to change the foundation’s bylaws, a
resolution from the general meeting was required.
This entity consisted of the members of the ad-
ministrative committee and of the advisory board.
The advisory board had not met since it was con-
stituted on 24 June 1951, and the administrative
committee had not even been constituted, for the
Society of Friends had not yet nominated its mem-
bers. That had to be rectified now. On 20 April
1953 the first meeting of the Society of Friends
since the organization’s founding took place. 710 The
sole purpose of this meeting was to designate the
nine members of the administrative committee so
that the general meeting could convene:
Hellmut Becker (the foundation’s attorney),
Otto Burrmeister (federal chairman of the
Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund, German Fed-
eration of Labor),
Helmut Cron (journalist),
 Founding
134 Max Guther (head of the Ulm planning depart-
ment and building control office),
Karl Max von Hellingrath (banker),
Karl Klasen (banker),
Theodor Pfizer (mayor of Ulm)
Otto Pfleiderer (president of the Stuttgart Lan-
deszentralbank),
Roderich Count Thun (manufacturer and man-
aging chairman of the Society of Friends).
At the same time the meeting of the Society of
Friends decided that the following seven persons
were to represent the Society in the foundation’s
administrative council if the general meeting
should resolve to change the bylaws:
Hellmut Becker,
Brigitte Bermann-Fischer,
Otto Burrmeister,
Helmut Cron,
Karl Max von Hellingrath,
Karl Klasen,
Roderich Count Thun.
The invitation to the members of the general meet-
ing poses a puzzle regarding the composition of
the advisory board.711 On 22 June 1951 Inge Aicher-
Scholl had appointed Otl Aicher, Max Bill, Günther
Grzimek, Marcia Kahn, Roderich Count Thun, Peter
Wackernagel, and Walter Zeischegg as its mem-
bers. Now, on 20 April 1953, Marcia Kahn and
Roderich Count Thun were no longer included on
a hand-written list for invitation to the general
meeting; there was a question mark next to Peter
Wackernagel’s name, and the names of Hans
Frieder Eychmüller and Fritz Pfeil had been added
to the list of those invited. The same changes
occur in the minutes of the general meeting, so
that it must be assumed that in the meantime the
composition of the advisory board had changed.
However, there are no further details regarding the
reasons for these changes; apparently no constitu-
tional resolution was passed either, and because
the documentation is not transparent we may
safely assume that there was no prior advisory
board meeting; presumably this was an oversight,
because the Ulm group still lacked experience in
procedural questions.
The general meeting discussed a draft for a
change in the bylaws that had been prepared as
far back as 19 September 1952. This proposal was
adopted almost in its entirety; in the interim, only
three points had been changed, of which the two
important ones were further concessions to the
Land of Baden-Württemberg: in lieu of the chair-
man of the administrative council (old draft) it was
now the representative of the ministry of education
and the arts who could exercise veto power in
appointments to office (new bylaws, Section 10.3);
where previously in the case of the foundation’s It appointed the executive board (re-election 135
dissolution its assets were to be distributed in of the executive board 1959),
equal parts to the city of Ulm, the Land, and the it passed the HfG bylaws (1962), and
Federal Republic (old draft), the Federal Republic it was necessary for changing the foundation’s
was now to receive only one-fifth, while the city bylaws (1963).
and Land would each receive two-fifths (Section
20.3). The ministry of education and the arts as the
But the most important change in the bylaws supervising authority did not find fault with the
was that the former administrative committee was composition of the general meeting of 24 April
transformed from a token body into the founda- 1953, and so the bylaw change passed by that
tion’s controlling, initiatory body, the administra- body went into effect on 6 June 1953. 712 Immedi-
tive council. Its power was based on the fact that ately after the general meeting the administrative
vested in the council was the initiative to plan the council of the foundation was constituted. 713 Theo-
budget; it would also control the executive board’s dor Pfizer was elected chairman, and Otto Pfleide-
management of the budget (Section 17.1, formerly, rer became his deputy. The administrative council
this was the role of the general meeting). It was asked to be informed about the progress of con-
now up to the administrative council whether it struction and about gaps in financing: Inge Aicher-
took on the management of the foundation or con- Scholl explained that close to DM 440,000 were
fined itself to leaving day-to-day business to the still needed to cover construction costs, which
executive board so that the administrative council were roughly DM 2.2 million. 714 The members of
could restrict itself to occasional monitoring. The the administrative council seemed to be confident
administrative council was precisely the strong, and trusted that this money could in fact be raised
external statutory body that Hellmut Becker and through donations, loans, and spending cuts.
Otl Aicher had not wanted. Even its composition Effective 1 April 1953, Max Bill was appointed the
made no difference: According to Hellmut Becker’s school’s rector, head of the department of archi-
theory the representatives of the ministries were tecture, and temporary head of all other depart-
always to remain in the minority, but in actual fact ments whose chair was vacant. 715
the members from the ministries were quite con-
scientious about their obligatory attendance, while
those members from the private sector sent by
the Society of Friends were absent much more
frequently. Still, things never got to the point
where the administrative council exhausted its
possibilities; after 1963, the foundation‘s council
was based on its powers, and in the end the mem-
bers intervened in daily business to a far greater
degree. – The administrative council, totaling 14
members, consisted of the following:
One representative each from
the federal ministry of economics,
the federal ministry of the interior,
the Baden-Württemberg ministry of education
and the arts,
the Baden-Württemberg ministry of economics,
the Baden-Württemberg ministry of finance;
the mayor of the city of Ulm,
the president of the Baden-Württemberg Lan-
deszentralbank (Land Central Bank), and
7 representatives designated by the Society of
Friends.
The advisory board, intended to be an entity that
would cover the executive board’s back and that
consisting predominantly of Inge Aicher-Scholl’s
and Otl Aicher’s friends, was now marginalized by
the administrative council. It would have lost its
significance altogether if it had not combined
three additional powers:
 Excursus Design in the Federal Republic
during the 1950s
136 However important the HfG was for
design in the Federal Republic, it was
not the only institution that sought to
“sharpen the aesthetic conscience of
the nation”. 716 For instance, there was
Die Neue Sammlung (The New Col-
lection) in Munich, the most exten-
sive design collection to date in Ger-
many; or, beginning with 1950, there
was the German Werkbund as an
umbrella organization, and the Rat für
Formgebung (Design Council), cre-
ated as a foundation in 1951 follow-
ing a resolution by the German Bun-
destag. But that just about exhausts
the list of the most important institu-
tions, and here the special position
of the HfG becomes obvious. While
the other institutions were concerned
with indirect promotion and public
acceptance of design (collecting
design and awarding prizes), the
work of the HfG created the founda-
tions for design per se.
Immediately after the end of the
war the predominant theme in de-
signing household articles, appliances,
and furniture was, “First, let’s go for
totally simple, makeshift stuff”. 717 But
even in the early fifties more people
could afford to exchange household
articles designed in the style of “new
simplicity” for objects manufactured
from the new “stylish synthetics” that
were “in almost provocative contrast
with the gray, dreary, monotonous 137
furnishings immediately after the
war”. 718 The style of the notorious
kidney-shaped tables and cone
lamps quickly became a fashion that
spread rapidly because many peo-
ple felt a need to shed their memo-
ries of the postwar period, and be-
cause an in- crease in purchasing
power allowed them to give in to
this need. “During these years [after
1955; author’s note] not only solid,
old-fashioned furnishings but also
hardedge functional items were
‘out’” 719 The first stood for “a histori-
cizing need for ornamentation that
dates back to a bygone era”, while
the second, with its reduction to
the barest essentials, its rejection
of the superfluous, and its “sheer
technical functionalism”, reminded
people of privation directly after the
war. 720
Fashionable built-in obsolescence,
the latest thing, also made its ap-
pearance in homes, not all of them,
but in about a fifth of German house-
holds, as Jost Hermand estimates. 721
Synthetics were discovered as a sub-
Dieter Rams was a
young architect when
he joined Braun, Inc. in
the summer of 1955.
His first designs include
the automatic slide pro-
jector PA 1 that was
created in 1956 parallel
to the Schneewittchen-
sarg (“Snow White’s
coffin”).
(Photo: advertising insert in
form 6/1959)
 Excursus

138 stance that could be easily molded, Braun, Inc. was to 139
so that from now on the design of a Germany what Olivetti
door handle or of a table was no was to Italy: the nation-
longer dependent on the object’s al figurehead for func-
function and the limited moldability tional product design.
of the material, but solely on the Marcello Nizzoli made
message that people were trying to the largest contribution
convey. In the fifties the message to Olivetti design. One
was, “Anyone, if only they worked of his early designs,
hard enough, could afford ‘good an adding machine,
taste’.” 722 Stylish product design Summa, circa 1940,
using plastics, however, also meant became a big seller;
that the fashion could change. Then this 1960 Summa
the old objects were thrown away, prima 20 was one of its
because their value was in their fash- many successors, huge
ionable design and not in their use- numbers of which clat-
fulness and their durability. A “throw- tered away in German
away mentality” appeared. offices as well.
The HfG had nothing in common (Portrait eines Industrial
with this attitude. It espoused the no Designers: Marcello Nizzoli,
in: form 14/1961, 22 ff.)
longer fashionable principles of a
design that wanted to create durable,
functional, and lasting articles for
industrial mass production with mod-
ern but appropriate material. After
1958 the HfG devoted itself to
systematizing design and to design-
ing in systems. In actual fact it was
unavoidable that the search for the
function of products carried on in
Ulm could also be seen as a style The son of King
(i. e., an attitude), and that therefore Gustav VI. of Sweden,
at some point HfG products suddenly Prince Sigvard Berna-
became part of a trend – and soon dotte, ran a design
went out of fashion again. agency in Copenhagen
after 1949 together
with Danish designer
Acton Bjørn, and later in
Stockholm and New
York as well. One of
their best-known
designs is the type-
writer Facit Pi, 1958, in
direct competition with
Olivetti.
(form 8/1959, 41)

Swedish modern 1959:

A laminated wood chair
by Bruno Mathsson.
“The average quality of
Swedish interior design
is higher than in other
countries.“
(form 8/1959, 32 ff.)
 Excursus If a social history of industrial product
design and advertising in the Federal
Republic were to be written, no more
than a brief digression would prob-
ably be devoted to the HfG’s role in
that history. Even the kind of design
that did not coincide with Ulm design
concepts – for example, all that the
Rat für Formgebung, the Werkbund,
and the leading arts and crafts
schools stood for – even this might
get no more than a sidelong glance
140 A wall clock by Max Bill in such a study. The attempt by Ger- 141
without numerals, his man manufacturers, after their first
solution of the problem unsuccessful and mockingly received
“of combining easy appearances at international trade
readability and bal- fairs (New York 1949, Milan 1951),
anced proportions bet- to return to the design standards of
ween surfaces and world markets, did not lead, in the
lines.“ 1957/58 design fifties, to a boom of the type of prod-
for Junghans, in collab- uct design that was practiced by the
oration with Eva Pfeil. HfG. 723
(Margit Staber, Zu neuen At the beginning, I already point-
Gestaltungen von Max Bill, in: ed out that the market for all that is
form 4/1958, 21 ff.)
“poor” design – or rather, no design
at all – but could merely be de-
scribed as “styling” (Otl Aicher) to
distinguish it from design, is far big-
ger than the market for those objects
that are consistently and almost ex-
clusively mentioned when we speak
of the history of design. From a de-
sign perspective, styling is not even
“a fashionable variant of giving a
functional form to that which is use-

Industrial design edu-

cation USA was the title
of an exhibition at the
Stuttgart Land Trade
Supervision Department
from 24 Feb. through
9 March 1958 showing
the work of eight Amer-
ican students on the
topic Erziehung zum
Entwurf (“Design edu-
cation“).
(form 6/1959, 33 ff.)
 Excursus
142
The twelfth Milan Trien-
nale (16July–4 Nov.
1960) addressed the
topic School and home,
“… and the premise is
that all schools to date,
including modern ones,
are not the schools that
children need.“
(Felix Beheim, Sechzehn Länder
suchen ein Thema, in: form
11/1960, 2–3). Pictured are
“questionable arts and crafts
from Italy“.
The French exhibition
room of the twelfth
Milan Triennale made
critics shudder: “In the
display case there is
craftwork, including a
monstrance.“ 143
(Margit Staber, XII Triennale
Mailand, in: form 11/1960, 4 ff.)
ful – as it was occasionally called –,
but its very opposite, because it
invents sensational shock effects to
stimulate the desire to buy while it
subordinates serviceable quality.” 724
By fifties styling we might therefore
understand all design whose objec-
tive was merely to change the exteri-
or and not the structure or function of
products: “Thus while ‘styling’ gave a
boost to cosmetics, the Ulm objects
– and the HfG itself – were meant to
be a surgical intervention that would
radically change the use, handling,
concepts, ways of perceiving, and all
contexts of these objects. Conse-
quently they wanted to transform
society, lead people to a self they
had only imagined, and give rise to Arne Jacobsen became
democracy.” 725 famous because of his
It is in the nature of things that chair, nicknamed “ant“
even the design stance of the HfG, (1951/52), which is
which opposed fashions, could itself omnipresent today, and
become a fashion. The Ulm school, still light-footed. The
too, was aware of this dilemma, 1957 design pictured
because they were confronted with here does not deny its
it as the work of the development relationship to its older
teams met with increasing success, brother, also made of
design grew in popularity, and buyers laminated beech. The
became more sensitive. This is an- manufacturer Fritz Han-
other factor that distinguished the fif- sen presented it at the
ties from the sixties. Hans Gugelot 1957 Milan Triennale.
addressed this aspect, for instance, (Curt Schweicher, Undicesima
in his talk at the World Design Con- Triennale di Milano, in: form
1/1957, 14 ff.)
ference in Tokyo in June 1960: “The
designer is a constructor who in-
cludes the human being as part of a
system. This aspect is not a factor in
commercial art, for there the product
is given the latest fashionable ap-
pearance by styling it. Here lies the
danger of the popularization of de-
sign that is taking place today. And
we are all at risk to a large extent,
that is, if we want to work primarily
and full-time only with sales promo-
tion in mind; and we’re especially at
 Excursus

144 “Here there’s been an It used to take several 145

attempt to more or less devices to perform
get away from school operations that a com-
furniture and provide puter now combines
children with something into one. That is why
of the familiar environ- calculators and espe-
ment of home. The cially typewriters were
classroom furniture is the bread and butter of
not a bunch of devices, industrial designers.
but free-standing tables Marcello Nizzolibegan
and chairs such as designing a large num-
might be used by chil- ber of models for
dren at meals and for Olivetti in 1948, includ-
play. On the other hand ing this 1953 Studio 44.
in a classroom equip- (Portrait eines Industrial
ped in this way children Designers: Marcello Nizzoli, in:
form 14/1961, 22 ff.)
must feel as though
they were in an archi-
tect’s office.“
(Margit Staber, XII Triennale
Mailand, in: form 11/1960, 4 ff.)

risk when the name of a designer

has become so popular that the qual-
ity of a product ceases to be a prior-
ity, that is, when the designer’ name
is enough to sell this product.” 726 –
This analysis is even more true today.
In 1962, when the HfG had been
in operation for almost a decade and
had long since dedicated itself to
systematizing design and making it
more scientific, and began from this
lofty standpoint to find the balance
between art and mathematics, Inge
Aicher-Scholl first took stock of vari-
ous design trends that had invaded
the Federal Republic: “In the postwar
period, the collaboration between
businessmen and artists produced a
proliferation of commercial art – ab-
stract wallpaper, “organic” flatware
and vases, kidney-shaped tables and
streamlined tools, brightly painted
houses and ice-cream parlors, the
whole flood of modern kitsch that
has penetrated even farm kitchens
and from which there is almost no
escape. The students of Klee design
the wallpaper, the students of Mon-
drian are in charge of typography, the
 Excursus
146
A wall clock by Max
Bill with numerals. The
“character of the exact
timepiece“ is created by
the fact that the “full
hour can be indicated
only when the hour
hand is positioned at
60.“ Designed in
1957/58 for Junghans
in collaboration with
Eva Pfeil.
(Margit Staber, Zu neuen
Gestaltungen von Max Bill, in:
form 4/1958, 21 ff.)
Braun table fan HL1.
Design: Braun design
department 1960/61.
Cost: DM 44. What the
critics said: “The appli-
ance as a whole is very
functional: Operating
ratio, weight per unit of
power, flow diagram,
quiet operation – all
that is outstanding. […]
and it is only only in the
frame that a clever pro- 147
duction idea triumphs
over all principles, no
matter how noble; the
result is irresistibly
funny.“
(Günther Fuchs, Ein Meister-
werkchen mit liebenswerten
Unvollkommenheiten,
in: form 16/1961, 26–27.)
students of Moore practice on flat-
ware. Just a few years ago it was tra-
dition that bothered us: the country
house thatched with straw with its
copper lanterns, Gothic madonnas,
and Biedermeier furniture. Today the
museum of modern art has expanded
to include the department store. That’s
the general situation.” However, all of
this was no reason for her to give up
her original intention to help improve
society by means of improved de-
sign: “In a society where property
conditions have been equalized, peo-
ple’s tendency to puff themselves up
with material objects becomes less
attractive. [The opposite has hap-
pened; author’s note.] Possibly peo-
ple will again be able to afford to be If only five products
normal and make critical choices. could embody Scandi-
Then the time would have come for navian design, this chair
the designer to carry out his social would be one of them :
function. The designer’s standards The egg by Arne
would have social consequences. As Jacobsen, designed in
long as there are still enough design- 1957/58 for Fritz Han-
ers who are interested in the product sen, a shell made of light
and its utility value and commodity molded material, uphol-
value instead of loading the objects stered with foam and
with new artistic values as a first with a roller unit of pol-
step in boosting sales. The designer ished aluminum.
would then be one of the many soci- (form 8/1959, 22)
etal arbiters who work out scales of
values without which all economic
activities remain empty of mean-
ing.” 727
 Excursus
148
In 1960 Hans Eckstein,
the head of the Muse-
um Die Neue Samm-
lung in Munich, put
together a selection of
exemplary German
products that traveled
as an exhibition through
the United States “and
that can be considered
to be representative of
the striving for form of
German crafts and
industry.“ One of these
products was this fold-
ing chair by Egon Eier-
mann, “which thanks to
its good and stable
construction [has]
already become world-
famous. It is comfort-
able and can be easily
stacked.“
(Erich Pfeiffer-Belli, Gute Form
aus Deutschland,
in: form 10/1960, 38 ff.)
149
Primary rocks of elec-
tronic data processing,
designed for Olivetti by
Ettore Sottsass 1960.
(In: form 11/1960, 4 ff.)
Today we wonder whether design
can achieve this illusion that “you
become civilized by using the good
china” (Christian Petry): “Had the
moral demand made on everyday
objects been too exacting? Until late
into the fifties, designers judged their
work according to moral categories.
Everyday things were expected to be
efficient, without vanity, without
trickery and deception. […] Werk-
bund designers saw themselves as
the ‘conscience of the nation’.” 728
Not only because of the position it
took on design, but also as an educa-
tional institution, the HfG stood out-
side what was normal in the Federal
Republic of the fifties. The education-
al tasks addressed by the HfG were
usually associated with the so-called
Werkkunstschulen (arts and crafts
schools). These, for the most part,
became institutions of higher learn-
ing. The arts and crafts schools were
a great deal more down-to-earth
about their teaching of arts and crafts
and visual arts than the HfG, which
from the start had emphasized its dif-
ference. A clear indication for the
fundamental distinction between arts
and crafts schools and the HfG is the
fact that in 1968 the question was
raised whether the HfG should be
incorporated in the Staatliche Inge-
nieurschule Ulm (Ulm State School
 Excursus

150 151

Alexander Girard and

of Engineering) – there was never
any suggestion of an Ulm school of
arts and crafts. At the same time the
HfG insisted that it should be nation-
alized as a college – the arts and
crafts schools did not claim to be
colleges. They saw their task as
“training a new generation of young
people who were artistically talented
and skilled in handicrafts and techni-
cal work for all design-related profes-
sions in the trades and industry, peo-
ple who were independently capable
of formally correctly designing prod-
ucts in commercial art, crafts, and
industry in accordance with the re-
spective specifications of the materi-
al, technology, and function of the
product that was to be designed. In
addition to providing advanced train-
ing in the trades and technology and
in the principles of business manage-
ment, the most important task of the
arts and crafts school is to make stu-
dents aware of what harmonious
design is all about.” 729
Die Gute Form (“Good
Design“), the Swiss
Werkbund’s promotion
campaign since 1949,
gave an award in 1951
to this “desk lamp mov-
able in all directions“.
The reasons: “the sim-
plest arrangement of
reflector and holder for
the incandescent bulb,
movable arm, and
heavy base. Stand or
screw base.“ B.A.G.
Bronzewarenfabrik
Turgi, factory design.
(Margit Staber, Die Gute Form,
in: form 14/1961, 45 ff.)
Eero Saarinen could
find no appropriate out-
doors chair for their
recently designed
house. That is why
they asked their friend,
architect and designer
Charles Eames, to
design a chair that
could be used both
indoors and outdoors
and mass-produced.
Previously Eames had
already developed a
laminated wood chair
and a plastic chair. His
aluminum chair is today
an icon of classic mod-
ernism for offices,
reception areas, and
formal home interiors –
and, as he says himself,
while it is an expensive
outdoors chair, it is at
the same time an inex-
pensive indoors chair.
The illustration shows
the photograph that
originally introduced the
chair to Germany.
(Hannes Schmidt, Sitzmöbel aus
Aluminium, in: form 9/1960, 58)
 1954

26 Feb. The govern-

ment coalition passes a
1953 constitutional change
to justify Federal Ger-
2 June A Eurovision man military sovereign-
broadcast shows the ty and rearmament .
coronation of Queen
Elizabeth II. 25 March The Soviet
Union determines that 1956
17 June The popular the GDR has full sove-
17 June 1953 uprising in East Berlin, reignty. 1 Jan. The first volun-
Archive: AKG triggered by the dem- teers of the Bundes-
onstrations of Berlin 17 May Racial segre- wehr report for duty at
construction workers, gation is abolished in the barracks.
spreads to large parts U.S. schools. 1955
of the GDR, develops 18 Jan. The East Ger-
into a revolt against the 4 July Germany beco- 25 January The Soviet man Parliament deci-
government and occu- mes the world cham- Union declares that the des to convert the Peo-
pation forces, and is pion in soccer. state of war with Ger- ple’s Police quartered
suppressed by the many is ended. in barracks into the
Volkspolizei (People’s 17 July Federal Presi- National People’s
Police) and the Soviet dent Theodor Heuss is 27 Feb. The Bundes- Army.
17 June 1953 military. reelected. tag ratifies the Paris
Archive: AKG Treaties.
23 Oct. Signing of the
Paris Treaties: The Fed- 5 May The Paris Trea-
eral Republic joins ties go into effect: Ger-
NATO, the Occupation many becomes a sove-
Statute is lifted, and reign member of the
the Saar Statute is set- Western European
tled. Union and of NATO.

14 May Warsaw treaty

about the alliance of
Eastern European
countries (Warsaw
Pact).
14 May 1955
Archive: AKG 8-13 Sept. In Mos-
cow, Adenauer arrang-
es the start of diplo-
matic relations and the
release of about
10,000 prisoners of
war.

17 June 1953 12 Nov. The first offi-

Archive: AKG cers of the Bundes-
wehr (West German
Armed Forces) receive
their commissions.

8 Sept. 1955 12 Nov. 1955

Archive: AKG Archive: dpa

The rectorship of Bill
April 1953 through March1956
154 It is debatable whether Max Bill’s rectorship be-
gan on 1 April 1953. What is indisputable is the
fact that his contract of employment with the
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung went into effect on
1 April 1953, and this formal criterion was the
decisive factor in determining when his term in
office began. In fact Max Bill had already been pri-
mus inter pares within the founding group for a
long time. That is why there are also good reasons,
from another, .e. g., a pedagogical perspective, to
have the Max Bill era start earlier. Of course one
could just as easily say that this phase did not
begin until the first day of classes at the HfG on
3 August 1953.
At any rate it was symptomatic that Max Bill’s rec-
torship began with the rector’s absence. Between
April and June 1953 that cosmopolite was travel-
ing in the interest of art and design, a journey that
took him to Brazil, Peru, the U.S. (2nd International
Design Conference in Aspen, where Max Bill read
a paper) and the south of France (the meeting of
the Congrès Internationaux d‘Architecture Mod-
erne CIAM in Aix-en-Provence).
Perhaps Max Bill had intentionally chosen to be
absent from Ulm during these days, but certainly
The Bauhaus teaches he didn’t mind the fact that he could not be roped
in Ulm: into doing diplomatic services yet. This was Inge
Aicher-Scholl’s province, and now everyone would
Walter Peterhans see whether her active lobbying of the Stuttgart
(taken in October Landtag deputies would pay off.
1953), Helene Nonné- The third reading of the Land budget for 1952
Schmidt (beginning of on 29 April 1953 was the plenary session of the
1955) and Josef Albers constituent Land assembly of Baden-Württemberg
(20 June 1955). that was critical for the HfG. 730 The budget draft
Photos: Hans Conrad contained the first installment of DM 60,000 out
of a total DM 800,000 earmarked for the founda-
tion from 1953 through 1955.
The minister of finance opened the discussion with
his unusual request to Parliament to strike this
item from its own budget. The former president of
the Land Trade Supervisory Office, the Social
Democrat Albert Pflüger, agreed with him: “If you
want to raise the funds provided here for the sup-
port of trade and industry, you should use them in
the institutes that we already have in the Land
trade supervisory offices for promoting trade and
industry, and not for some institution of which
we’re not sure how it will develop.” The idea of
cultural restoration obviously had both supporters
and opponents in every party. But the minister of
education and the arts was opposed to this posi-
tion, and he urged people to support the promo-
tion of new projects: “We’ve examined this matter
very thoroughly, but today it has progressed to the
point that the question is no longer whether this
institute is coming or not, but simply where it will
be built – in Frankfurt, if we’re foolish enough to
reject it, or in Ulm. […] By the way, I want to stress
that the mere prospect of this new Bauhaus has
already had an extremely stimulating effect. Since
this project was first mentioned, a sudden resur-
gence of interest in all questions related to indus-
trial design has been observed in all the colleges
and universities of the Land and elsewhere.“
Subsequent speakers again explained why the
foundation must be supported: for the sake of the
city of Ulm, in memory of Hans and Sophie Scholl,
to give the experiment a chance, to take a limited
risk for a new idea, to promote export, to make up
for the design gap between Germany and other
countries. Gotthilf Schenkel and the advocates of
support didn’t exactly cover themselves with glory
when they lowered themselves to the finance
minister’s level of argumentation, pointing out
almost greedily that there was a full million and
three-quarters to be had for the asking, and if the
Land did not act quickly, the project would simply
be implemented in Frankfurt. The curriculum of the
HfG was not under discussion (the Bauhaus was
mentioned, but that, in the meantime, could be
considered to be a traditional institution), and yet,
of course, it was precisely this curriculum that was
the reason the HfG was to be founded.
A roll-call vote ended the debate. The advocates
of the HfG, 42 in all, were in a clear majority com-
pared to 23 opposing votes and all of 16 absten-
tions. Had the silent majority allowed itself to be
infected by Walter Erbe’s daring, or did it simply
not want to give up the donations that were avail-
able? His colleagues from the FDP/DVP parliamen-
tary party predominantly opposed supporting the
HfG, while a large part of the SPD parliamentary
party voted for it. It is true that 30 delegates were
absent when this vote was taken, almost all of
them belonging to the CDU or the FDP/DVP. If all
had attended, this would have meant fewer votes
or even a negative result for the HfG. Note also
that the opponents of the HfG included not only
the interim minister of finance, but also Kurt
Angstmann (SPD), who was to be in office during
Hans Filbinger’s first government between Decem-
ber 1966 and June 1968, i. e., in the HfG’s highly
critical phase. It is equally noteworthy that the
minister-president himself, Gebhard Müller, was
unable to decide on a clear position and ab-
stained.
At the final count, after almost four years of self-
sacrificing and hard work by the Ulm group, the
result was positive, and that was all that counted,
at least until the next vote. On the following day
the art division of the ministry of education and
the arts took overall control of matters relating to
the HfG within the Stuttgart ministries. What this
meant for the Ulm group was that at the same
time they gained an especially interested and
committed champion of their cause in the person
of Wolfgang Donndorf, the official in charge. 731
In the face of all resistance, Inge Aicher-Scholl,
Otl Aicher, and Max Bill had now finally managed
to push through the construction of the HfG build-
ings, so that classes could begin. Here are a few
more comments on these two points – the peda-
gogical and architectural development of the
school. Both were partly connected.
At least a year earlier, on 17 March 1952, Max
Bill had proposed that the Stuttgart designer Wil-
helm Wagenfeld should be appointed head of the
department of product form and the Institute of
Product Design, so that he, an unconventional per-
son with a mind of his own, would put no obsta-
cles in the way of the Ulm project, and instead
could be won over.732 Hellmut Becker had supported
this idea, surmising that Theodor Heuss would
then be directly on the side of the foundation, for
the federal president considered Wilhelm Wagen-
feld to be the “only man who in his opinion could
establish such a school in Germany”. 733 He was
not appointed to that position; instead the Austri-
an Walter Zeischegg assumed this task.
The HICOG staffer George Selke soon thereaf-
ter, in August 1952, proposed to Inge Aicher-
Scholl that she turn to HICOG in the near future
and request that they assume financing for several
teachers who would teach at the HfG for two to
three months each as part of an exchange pro-
gram from America. 734 Max Bill had reacted
promptly urging that the two former Bauhaus
teachers Walter Peterhans of the Illinois Institute
of Technology, Chicago, and Josef Albers of Yale
One of the first photo-
graphs taken by Hans
Conrad of the early
days in Ulm:
Otl Aicher, Fritz
Querengässer, and
Walter Zeischegg
before classes began
at the HfG, taken on
21 June 1953.
155
University, New Haven, be engaged. 735 Another
former Bauhaus member, Helene Nonné-Schmidt,
was discussed as well. In the beginning of January
1953 Walter Peterhans agreed to be a guest lec-
turer in Ulm. Max Bill informed him about his rea-
sons for employing the former Bauhaus teachers
in Ulm: He wanted to make sure “the team does
not consist of nothing but young, enthusiastic,
unknown quantities. My idea is that there must be
a few people there who know what happened [in
the past] and what is supposed to happen.“ 736 And
a few weeks later, on 13 March 1953, it was cer-
tain that the first basic course at the HfG would be
offered starting in August: “Mr. Bill is thinking that
the introductory course (basic course) should be
structured in such a way that for the time being
three persons – Peterhans, Nonné-Schmidt, Albers
– take turns teaching the introductory course one
after another, together with a teacher yet to be
designated, who will then become the sole person
to teach the introductory course.“ 737 During his
travels abroad Max Bill looked for a suitable candi-
date for the position of teaching this introduction,
because he was not willing to hand it over to Otl
Aicher or to teach it himself. In Argentina he ran
into Tomás Maldonado, whom he believed capable
of doing the job and invited in 1954 to come work
in Ulm. This man then played a central part at the
HfG.
The first students had already been admitted prior
to 30 April 1953: three in the department of prod-
uct design, whose workshops, together with the
Institute of Product Design, were to be the first to
grow and contribute to the development of interior
design. Walter Zeischegg’s assistant during the
development period was Josef Schlecker, who
later managed the workshops. The same proce-
dure was followed in the office of architectural
development: Fritz Pfeil, who as the local site man-
ager had been working since 1 February 1953 to
implement Max Bill’s plans, was designated to be
a future teacher; the first student, of course, one
who already had a degree, worked in the construc-
tion site office, two or three others were to be
taken on in May. Concerning studies in the (still
largely fictitious) departments of architecture and
 The rectorship of Bill
156 product design at the Langmühle in Ulm, Inge
Aicher-Scholl reported to HICOG: “The students
are given tasks that arise from the building and
furnishing of the school buildings on the upper
Kuhberg. General education courses are temporar-
ily being taught by the Ulm Adult Education Cen-
ter.” 738 At any rate, after 14 May 1953 the HfG had
guidelines for the length of postgraduate studies-
course. 739 Accordingly Fritz Pfeil, Walter Zeischegg,
and Otl Aicher were the temporary heads of the
departments of building (architecture), product
design, and visual design. The students paid an
enrollment fee (a one-time sum of DM 50), a tui-
tion fee (DM 90 per quarter), and DM 15 for their
insurance and department-specific fees for their
material; in turn they received DM 1 per hour for
their assistance, a maximum of DM 200 a month.
From faraway New York, on 3 July 1953, Max
Bill intervened in the first negotiations as to who
was to have the job of teaching the political sub-
jects: “Just now Harry Pross came to see me. He’s
pretty impressive.” 740 Harry Pross appeared to be
very interested in this job and described how he
pictured the courses in sociology and political sci-
ence: “I could imagine that besides dealing with
basic political concepts and ideologies it would be
necessary to give a lot of attention to the sociology
of the city. I feel the sociological analysis of the
great novels of the 18th and 19th centuries is an-
Johannes Itten, the
foremost champion of
the early Bauhaus,
director from 1938 to
1953 of the Zurich Arts
and Crafts Museum and
School, with student
Max Graf (1954).
Photo: Hans Conrad
other way of preparing students like yours espe-
cially for their chosen career.” 741
In the summer of 1953 the Ulm group finally felt
prepared to begin classes officially. As the core
teaching units, the provisional curriculum for the
first academic year (1 August 1953 through 30
June 1954) listed the first basic course of the HfG
and, parallel to it, the work of the departments of
building (architecture) and product design on the
building and its interior. Under Rector Max Bill the
following teachers worked as full-time lecturers:
Otl Aicher, Hans Gugelot, Helene Nonné-Schmidt,
Fritz Pfeil, Walter Zeischegg, and, of course, Max
Bill himself; visiting lecturers were Josef Albers,
Max Bense, and Walter Peterhans; master crafts-
men in charge of the workshops were Paul Hil-
dinger, Otto Schild, and Josef Schlecker. 742
Classes at the HfG began with the first basic course,
taught by the former Bauhaus teacher Walter Pete-
rhans, on Monday, 3 August 1953, the traditional
Ulm Schwörmontag (a local Ulm holiday; transl.
note), in the Adult Education Center building at
Marktplatz 9. As previously planned in March, after
Walter Peterhans this basic course was directed by
Josef Albers and Helene Nonné-Schmidt. 743 And
as early as 11 August 1953, the two authorities
Hugo Häring (the former director of the Reimann-
Schule für Gestaltung (Reimann School of Design,
Ludwig Mies van der
Rohe, a central pro-
ponent of modernism,
and his friend Hugo
Häring, the most impor-
tant theoretician of
organic design in Ger-
many, during a visit
on Kuhberg in Ulm on
11 August 1953 be-
fore ground had been
broken for the first
building.
Photo: Hans Conrad
Berlin) and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (the last
director of the Bauhaus Dessau, Berlin) paid a visit
to the budding HfG. 744
It was the beginning of August 1953. The HfG had
started classes, but where was the school building
that was supposedly fundamental for the unique,
novel pedagogy of the HfG? The fact that classes
had started might be interpreted as premature,
and that suspicion might not be too far off, for the
founders of the HfG finally had to demonstrate that
the HfG really did exist if they still wanted to appear
credible. But the tangible proof that a college
exists, after all, is its building, and Ulm still did not
have one.
After a change of personnel at HICOG 745 new
turmoil brewed for a few weeks, because the man
now in charge of the project, James E. Hoofnagle,
recognized hardly any of the previous proofs that
the conditions for the foundation had been met.
He told the foundation laconically: “In view of
the situation you describe we believe that the
foundation has not met the conditions – obtain-
ing or securing funds from other sources – that
are the prerequisite for using the grant.” 746 The
new man first had to be acquainted with the sit-
uation, and this was naturally “a bad thing since
we cannot begin construction before we produce
the documents that are now demanded and
Class at the Ulm Adult before the American funds are finally released .“ 747
Education Center: To cast new light on this confusion was the first
front row, Almir Mavig- task of the administrative director of the Geschwis-
nier and an unidentified ter-Scholl-Stiftung. This position, which had been
student; back row, created as a result of Shepard Stone’s request in
Helene Nonné-Schmidt, 1950, had been held by Günther Schlensag since
Christine Sztankovitz and 15 June 1953. The thirty-year-old lawyer had
Gerhard Gehle, in the worked for the Tübingen state chancellery of the
basic course of Helene Land of Württemberg-Hohenzollern from Febru-
Nonné-Schmidt, the ary 1946 through October 1951; subsequently he
widow of the head of had edited the Juristenzeitung and read manu-
the Bauhaus advertising scripts in the legal administration of a publishing
department; June 1954. house. 748 It was Stuttgart ministry officials who
Photo: Hans Conrad had recommended him to the Ulm group, who
hoped he would provide them with good contacts
to bu-reaucracy. 749 At its second meeting, on 8
June 1953, the administrative council confirmed
Günther Schlensag’s appointment. 750 As soon 157
as the misunderstandings on the part of James E.
Hoofnagle were cleared up, building on Kuhberg
could finally begin.
At its third meeting, on 7 September 1953 the
foundation’s administrative council 751 repeated its
resolution that the cornerstone must soon be laid
if at least the school building exterior was to be
finished by winter 1953/54, so that the interior
work could then start. Even the DM 50,000 of the
federal ministry of housing construction were
available meanwhile: “The research assignment
would be to build housing for the college’s teach-
ers and students, and in the process to try out cer-
tain structural innovations. Contrary to customary
conditions for research funds, these could be
invested in toto in paying for construction.” 752 On
the following day, 8 September 1953, construc-
tion began. 753
Not a week had passed before Günther Schlen-
sag urgently asked Max Bill not to treat Ulm mere-
ly as one of his many worldwide way stations, but
to stay there on a more regular basis and for
longer periods. His presence was urgently required
for practical and pedagogical reasons: “I feel the
mood in the building department and in the
department of product design is very tense. While
that’s no reason for me to get into a panic, I have a
growing sense that your continual presence in Ulm
The first basic course:
standing, Walter Peter-
hans (head of the Bau-
haus photography
department from 1929
through 1933) and Otl
Aicher; seated on the
left, Eva-Maria Koch,
photographed on
27 Oct. 1953.
Photo: Hans Conrad
– if that is at all possible – now during the con-
struction of the building does seem crucial. After
all neither Mrs. Aicher-Scholl nor I can make de-
cisions when there are practical differences of
opinion between the building department and
the department of product design: We cannot
clearly see all the connections. We simply need
a coordinating brain, something we always realize
every time you leave. […] It is of utmost impor-
tance that you should be here.” 754
One must not forget that the students who en-
rolled at the college had already completed their
professional training before they applied to study
in Ulm. For instance, the job of site supervisor
was taken on by the young architect Fred Hoch-
strasser. 755 In other words, HfG students were
 The rectorship of Bill
158 often autonomous personalities – and that had
been the expectation, of course , but at the same
time it implied that students needed to be treated
more professionally than was customary. They ex-
pected precisely the high-quality advanced train-
ing they had been promised in the gray prospec-
tus and that they had read about in newspa-per
reports. By November 1953 there were al-ready 15
students, and they elected a three-member body
from their midst, including Fred Hochstrasser, who
would represent their interests. Toward the end of
the year Inge Aicher-Scholl once more reminded
Max Bill how important it was, now more than
ever, to complete the architectural plans in order
to meet the financing deadlines for the residential
buildings: “Even if we were able to get an exten-
sion – which will be very difficult – we’ll lose our
moral credit with the government agencies, which
we need so badly right now. […] We can’t prod
that slow Pfeil into action if you don’t let us have
the plans soon. We’ve al-ready been putting off
the government agencies from month to month as
it is. Something that’s also urgent, maybe even
more important than the Building plans, is who
will be on the teaching staff.” While she was at it,
she described the unpleasant atmosphere that
prevailed in Ulm at the time: “Dear Mr. Bill, you
do know, don’t you, that even without these prob-
lems your presence in Ulm can now no longer
be limited to short visits. I hope you realize we
still don’t have a team that can do without a driv-
ing force. The staff and students are very aware
of your absence and are of- ten pretty worried.
[…] Gradually the mood here when you’re
away has been causing me a great deal of con-
cern.” 756
At the turn of the year from 1953 to ’54 the situa-
tion in Ulm with Max Bill, or rather, without Max
Bill was aggravated. Due to the rector’s continuing
absence from his college, unresolved questions
piled up into a mountain that overshadowed all
that the project had accomplished up to that point.
Otl Aicher enumerated the school’s problems on
11 January 1954: The construction office needed
Max Bill’s authority, and Fritz Pfeil’s work was not
sufficiently independent; in organizing the peda-
gogical aspects of the school and in the basic
course many flaws had to be ironed out; the stu-
dents had too little instruction; there were still no
blueprints for the residential buildings; and the
Progress: The construc-
tion site on 25 May
1954.
Photo: Hans Conrad
government agencies were criticizing the snail’s
pace at which the whole project was developing.
Otl Aicher implored Max Bill to offer a major part
of his creative energy to the HfG, not only in order
to accomplish the work, but primarily to allow the
wished-for atmosphere to unfold: “While the basic
course of Peterhans and Albers probably does
function, both believe that directing a school in
this way is impossible, and even disastrous, be-
cause they themselves and the students too have
no real contact with you and they exist without
connection in a vacuum. You are the head of the
school and represent in your person the school as
a whole, its concerns and its responsibilities. If you
are not here, this is just a lot of people, that’s all.
[…] Inge, Schlensag, and I do all we can to put a
stop to internal criticism of you, but once the wave
of criticism has flooded over these barriers, some-
thing’s bound to happen. Either the people are
going to run away or there’ll be an attempt to
expel them. […] Moreover it is certain that people
like Pfizer, Guther, Pfleiderer, even the ministries
are easy to work with. We can count on their help.
But their confidence in our cause depends on you
personally.” His proposal to Max Bill was as fol-
lows: “The extent of your presence here must not
be dictated by the fact that ‘everything’s been dis-
cussed’. You’d also have to find enough time to
maintain human contacts with staff and students
At the blackboard in an in such a way that a feeling of working for a com-
Adult Education Center mon cause can develop.” 757
classroom: Otl Aicher Max Bill shared Otl Aicher’s analysis of the situ-
(18 May 1954), Josef ation and resolved to fulfill his obligations: “He
Albers (1954), and Max said he knew that in the future he had to devote
Bense (31 March 1954). himself completely to his work as the rector of the
school. He planned to be in Ulm for at least two
Josef Albers, a student weeks out of every month until 31 March 1954;
and later teacher at the after 1 April he would remain in Ulm permanent-
Bauhaus, head of its ly – except for about one week per month.” 758
basic program.
The decision-making entity of the foundation, the
Max Bense, who, from administrative council, continued to be fairly active.
1949, held the chair for The fourth meeting had been set the preceding
philosophy of technolo- year, on 27 October 1953. In connection with the
gy, theory of science, teaching contract of Walter Zeischegg, the admin-
and mathematical logic istrative council for the first time dealt with a prob-
at the Stuttgart Techni- lem that was to continue to haunt the HfG and that
cal University. caused permanent conflict, especially in the last
years of its existence. It concerned the lecturers’
Photos: Hans Conrad share of foundation income that it received in the
form of fees and royalties for work for the private
and public sector. It is true that in the precedent of
Walter Zeischegg the members of the administra-
tive council had expressed considerable doubt
whether the proposed apportionment – 45 percent
each for the designer and the foundation, with the
remaining 10 percent going to the scholarship
fund – was not too advantageous for the design-
ers. And furthermore Günther Boulanger, the rep-
resentative of the Stuttgart ministry of finance, had
voiced his misgivings that the nonprofit character
of the foundation might be called into question
under these circumstances. Nevertheless the
administrative council had agreed to the con-
tract. 759 In subsequent contracts of employment 159
with designers this arrangement for the lecturers’
share was adopted.
However, they were not finished with the topic
yet. Günther Schlensag asked around and, a few
days later, came up with a comparable situation:
The Max Planck Institute offered its lecturers a
share of at least 33 percent of royalties. The ad-
ministrative council defended the arrangement
with the argument that the HfG needed it as an
incentive in order to be able to hire particularly
well qualified teachers, because they would not
receive attractive salaries. 760 Wolfgang Donndorf
added that teachers at a comparable level in Land
universities and colleges earned about DM 1,200
to 1,300 a month plus civil service benefits, lecture
fees, and additional family allowances. Fritz Pfeil
on the other hand received DM 850, while Walter
Zeischegg and Otl Aicher each got DM 760. That
is why it was fair if the regular salary was low but
the share each time turned out to be high: “If it
was the other way around, the teachers would no
longer have an incentive to do their own creative
work. The more such creative work they do, the
greater will be the income of the foundation.” 761
That this model might also give rise to interperson-
al problems – envy, rivalry, covetousness – which
could only poison the climate at the HfG, was
apparently something they could hardly imagine
at the time.
At its fifth meeting, on 1 February 1954, the
administrative council 762 confirmed Max Bill’s con-
tract of employment 763; on 4 February 1954 the
foundation also concluded an arbitration agree-
The former head of the
Bauhaus’ typography
workshop, Herbert
Bayer, and his wife visit
the young HfG at the
Adult Education Center
location in November
1953.
Photo: Hans Conrad
 The rectorship of Bill
160 ment with the rector. 764 One can only speculate
whether this caution in regulating relations with
Max Bill was routine or whether it had come out of
experience with his difficult personality. But in the
spring of 1956 the foundation was glad it had con-
cluded this arbitration agreement. Also the admin-
istrative council gave its approval to the contract of
employment with Otl Aicher, as a result of which
he was retroactively hired to be the head of the
department of visual design starting 1 April 1953,
and to teach the basic course starting 1 April
1954. 765 And finally the members of the council
found out to their regret that in spite of every effort
(and contrary to many reports) financing for con-
Roofing ceremony at struction was short a whole DM 60,000. A good-
end of first construction sized donation of steel, for instance, would have
phase, 5 July 1954. come in handy, but it never materialized: “Above
Left: Hans Zumsteg, all we did not succeed in gaining access to the
Inge Aicher-Scholl, and Wirtschaftsvereinigung Eisen und Stahl (Iron and
Hermann Josef Abs. Steel Trade Association) and thus to the major iron
industry, so that we had to purchase all the iron
Center: Part of the roof- we needed, while, for example, the cement indus-
ing ceremony. try worked out a very generous arrangement with
us.” 766 Added to this there was the fear that the
Right: Hermann Josef HfG’s own funding, which the Ulm group had listed
Abs, Otl Aicher, Arthur in the building financing plan as an asset of DM
Roth (director of the 50,000, had in the meantime become question-
industrial firm Klöckner- able. Designs for fixtures such as sinks and fau-
Humboldt-Deutz) and cets, which of course could not be manufactured
Inge Aicher-Scholl. in the school’s own workshops, had to be con-
tracted out, whether they liked it or not, to com-
Photos: Hans Conrad mercial firms. 767 But this situation was still not dra-
matic, and there was no reason to criticize the
financial planning of managing chairperson Inge
Aicher-Scholl in principle, which is why the admin-
istrative council approved the budget she submit-
ted for the past fiscal year, 1 April 1953 through
31 March 1954. 768 Inge Aicher-Scholl was also
able to show the council a successful balance
sheet, having raised a total of DM 377,144 in pri-
vate sector donations by 1 March 1954, of which
DM 61,200 had been given for scholarships. 769
Let’s stay with the administrative council a little
while longer, that entity of the foundation whose
members up to that point had had to deal primarily
with sober figures and sobering crisis manage-
ment. Hellmut Becker wanted to make more use
of this circle of influential representatives of trade,
industry, and government agencies. That is why he
asked that at the next meeting Max Bill give a
position paper about the college’s recruitment pol-
icy: “People keep telling me […] that the fate of a
college depends on who gets appointed to teach-
ing positions. […] It seems important to me that
the administrative council be given an overview as
to what kind of personalities are even considered
for positions here. We must use the meetings of
the administrative council to integrate the mem-
bers of the council as propagandists for the col-
lege. But you don’t just tell them about some nice
man who will be offered a position; they need to
be informed about the totality of the personalities
that make good candidates, and also about the
specific type of personality that does not.” Be-
sides, he added, it wasn’t enough to say he wanted
to appoint as many foreigners as possible, but he
must give the members of the council valid rea-
sons for such appointments, since otherwise they
would simply allow any member of parliament to
change their minds. 770
As winter drew to a close construction work
resumed on Kuhberg on 15 March 1954. 771 At the
same time Max Bill moved to Ulm – as did his sec-
retary Eugen Gomringer (coeditor of the interna-
tional art journal Spirale) – and stayed almost con-
tinuously at the scene of the action. Actually he
and his wife and son were supposed to be moving
into the planned rector’s house, but the latter –
like the other residential buildings – could not be
built as part of the publicly assisted housing. That
is why the rector’s house became another duplex
for two teachers, and Max Bill couldn’t (or didn’t
need to) move his permanent residence to Ulm
as planned. 772
On 5 July 1954 the HfG founders celebrated the
roofing ceremony of their school building. 773 Her-
mann Josef Abs and Theodor Pfizer were among
those present who were offered two different per-
spectives in the addresses of the rector and of the
foundation’s managing chairperson: Max Bill out-
Max Bill at the con-
struction site with
Brigitte Bermann-
Fischer, May 1954.
lined a vision and couched his dream in the often-
cited words, “From a coffee cup to a housing
development”, while Inge Aicher-Scholl looked
back and spoke full of pride and satisfaction of
their “victory over the resignation and weariness,
over the pessimism and skepticism of our time”,
which had largely been possible thanks to her own
efforts. Verbatim, the short speeches read as fol-
lows 774:
Max Bill: “Not every year, not every decade […],
but at even longer intervals a new college or uni-
versity is founded somewhere in the world. When-
ever something new is created, it is because this
new thing answers a need. That is true here. This
college answers a need – the need to help young
people to develop in the best way possible those
things that are used in our day-to-day lives. In
Left: with Alfred Roth,
Swiss architect and
journalist, May 1954;
right: with Hans Guge-
lot and the student
Maria Viera, June 1954.
Photos: Hans Conrad
other words, everything, from a coffee cup to a
housing development, that is there to make our
planet as livable as possible. As livable as possible
means beautiful and civilized, for we are convinced
that we need a culture again today in which every-
one can participate in order to create a counterbal-
ance for our daily work. And we want to work for
this culture; we can’t bring that culture down from
the attic, because we live in a new era, an era with
new and better possibilities. We hope our work
will succeed.’”
Inge Aicher-Scholl: “Perhaps you remember how 161
many fine plans were hatched after 1945, how
many experiments in cultural and spiritual renewal
were started – periodicals, societies with impor-
tant goals, groups whose purpose was to turn a
good cause into a reality, and so on. How many of
these fine, hopeful experiments, which had started
off with great vigor, failed or fizzled out. Why?
Because there wasn’t enough confidence in per-
sonal initiative, because individual persons capitu-
lated in the face of red tape and bureaucracies,
because they did not use their power of resistance
at the moment when their cause most needed it –
at those times when their energy was at a low
point, when they felt bitterness and resignation.
Every task brings with it those most dangerous of
moments. – And, you see, the fact that this school
and its goals brought together many very different
people and challenged their very personal initiative
is what is special about it, what distinguishes it,
makes it profoundly authentic and legitimate. This
building is something of a victory over the resigna-
tion and weariness, the pessimism and skepticism
of our time – of course, this is not the result of
mere chance, but because it has to serve a present
and future purpose.”
With the roofing ceremony on 5 July 1954, i. e.
with the completion of the school building exterior,
the first phase of construction was completed. The
second phase of construction would now be to
erect the residential buildings (three duplexes for
teachers, a five-story student residence, and a
caretaker’s house) and to start finishing the school
interior. And just as it had been part of the concept
of the HfG founders that the school’s architecture
should be programmatic and exemplary, the same
was true of the finish work of the school. Walter
Zeischegg in particular had been hired for this pur-
pose, but with him in charge work dragged at such
a slow pace that reinforcement was necessary. It
came in the person of the Dutchman Hans Guge-
lot, nicknamed “Gütsch“. He was a polyglot, an
engaging character. Born in Indonesia in 1920, he
graduated from secondary school in Davos, stud-
ied for a year at the Lausanne School of Engineer-
ing, and obtained his architect’s diploma in 1946
 The rectorship of Bill Bronze plaque on the Otl Aicher teaching:
outside wall of the HfG on 18 May 1954, in the
building, missing since basic course, still at the
1968. Adult Education Center
Photo: Rueß location with Eva-Maria
Archive: Südwestpresse Koch; on Kuhberg with
Maurice Goldring in
1955.
Photos: Hans Conrad

162 at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule
Zürich (Zurich Confederate Institute of Technolo-
gy). He was a member of the Swiss Werkbund
and had become acquainted with Max Bill when
they worked together between 1948 and 1950; it
was at that time that he began designing furniture.
These designs had been exhibited at the exhibition
The closing celebration Wohnbedarf of the 1954 Basel Trade Fair. 775 Now,
of the first basic course starting on 15 June 1954, he had been very suc-
on the construction site, cessfully running furniture building and finish work
June 1954. at the HfG: “His skill in inventing simple, clear de-
Left: standing, Fritz signs, and indeed his initiative and his personality
Querengässer, seem to have a stimulating effect on the work in
Günther Schlensag, and his department.” 776 Hans Gugelot developed into
Helene Nonné-Schmidt. one of the most important Ulm designers, becom-
Right: Max Bill. ing just as essential for the HfG’s product design
Photos: Hans Conrad as Otl Aicher was for visual design.
Another important designer joined the HfG during
those days in the summer of 1954: the painter
Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart, 55 years old,
an artist who also came to Ulm through Max Bill’s
connections and contacts and taught primarily in
the HfG’s department of visual communication.
Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart had been in-
volved in important movements of modern art dur-
ing the first half of the 20th century. In 1924 he
was the founder of Gruppe K in Hannover, a mem-
ber of De Stijl in Leyden, a founding member, in
1930, of the group Abstraction-Création in Paris,
and his work was exhibited all over the world,
including at the Berlin show Entartete Kunst
(Degenerate Art) in 1936; since 1952 he had held
a special teaching post at the Akademie Rotter-
dam, and since 1954 he had been a member of
the international writers’ association PEN Club
(PEN stands for poets, essayists, novelists). 777
In addition, the last of the HfG’s prominent lec-
turers arrived in August 1954. Tomás Maldonado,
an enigmatic personality, sophisticated and charis-
matic, who with his Latin American charm intro-
duced an exotic element that took some time for
the petty bourgeois population of Ulm to get used
to. He was 32 years old when he arrived in Ulm
from Buenos Aires accompanied by his wife. In
Argentina he had attracted Max Bill’s attention as
a painter, graphic artist, and writer who had founded
and published art journals and who in 1949 orga-
nized an exhibition about modern architecture; this
had led to his being made a member of the Con-
grès Internationaux d‘Architecture Moderne 778,
and in 1955 he published a monograph about Max
Bill in four languages. 779 Inge Aicher-Scholl de-
scribed him as follows in her quarterly report:
“Tomás Maldonado will spend the next few weeks
getting a firm grasp of the German language and
then be part of a team teaching a seminar on
design problems and designing the future basic
curriculum. In Maldonado our teaching staff has
gained not only a person with special talents but
also someone they like as a person.” 780
Glancing at the list of permanent faculty at this
time (Aicher, Bill, Gugelot, Maldonado, Vordem-
berge-Gildewart, Zeischegg), one is struck by the
fact that one by one Max Bill assembled an inter-
national teaching staff. The German teachers (Otl
Aicher and Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart)
were in the minority – surely an unprecedented
situation for an institution of higher learning in
Germany. It is not surprising therefore that Hellmut
Becker was concerned about familiarizing the
members of the administrative council with the
rationale for this hiring policy, so that they could
support it in public. Max Bill therefore gave the
required short talk at the sixth meeting of the
administrative council in the foundation’s office
at Bahnhofstraße 1 on 3 August 1954. 781
Unfortunately we do not know what he said. But
there is hardly a doubt as to how he said it if we
read the letter Hellmut Becker sent him by return
mail: “Your behavior at the last administrative
council’s meeting has left a somewhat unpleasant
taste in my mouth. […] If, after such a meeting,
one after another, three people who have truly
positive feelings toward the school and toward
you, people like Mr. Pfizer, Mr. Pfleiderer, and Mr.
Cron say that they felt your behavior was extreme-
ly hurtful and basically incomprehensible, then
surely something must be wrong. You know that I
really support the independence of intellectual and
artistic work. But you can’t open a school in Ger-
many if you don’t surround this school with a
group of people that will defend this school for
you against a conformist or bureaucratic milieu.
[…] Finally, as for your own relationship to the
administrative council, it’s simply childlike [to
assume] that the school and the foundation have
nothing to do with each other. […] The fundraising
that the foundation, or rather the administrative
council does assures the continuing existence of
the school. The administrative council is not sup-
posed to determine the intellectual or artistic
direction of the school, but should and must be
really well informed about it, and they can’t be
entertained with remarks to the effect that all that
is no business of theirs. […] The political develop-
ment in Germany is such that up till now the
school only had lethargy and mistrust to contend
with, but in the coming years it will have to con-
tend with open rejection and the attempt to de-
stroy it.” 782 This sermon by the prophet Hellmut
Becker went unheeded on Kuhberg.
Max Bill proved slow to cooperate with the ad-
ministrative council in another matter as well: As
of 1 August 1954 the Ulm municipal building sur-
veyor, Max Guther, who had been an important
supporter for Inge Aicher-Scholl and Otl Aicher in
the municipal administration and had become a
close friend of theirs, left for the Technische Hoch-
schule Darmstadt (Darmstadt Technical College),
where he accepted a professorship in urban plan-
ning. Inge Aicher-Scholl did not want to do with-
out his advice and tried to bind him to the founda-
tion. Max Bill resisted the idea that in the future
Max Guther, as an adviser to the administrative
council, might be allowed to take part in its meet-
ings, because he was afraid of being observed and
controlled by the other college. This suspicion was
totally uncalled-for in Max Guther’s case; but the
fact that Max Bill voiced it shows that he was jeal-
ously keeping watch over his autonomy from any
outside influence, especially from the administra-
tive council (which was outside for him).
It is hard to believe, but only a few months had
passed since surviving the big nail-biter before
Parliament finally agreed to subsidize the HfG. At
the same meeting Wolfgang Donndorf, the repre-
sentative on the administrative council of the min-
A meal being served in istry of education and the arts, declared that his
the HfG student dining ministry was already drawing up the budget for
hall (1955). 1955/56. For the third and last time, he said, it
Photo: Hans Conrad contained a subsidy for the foundation (DM
265,000), and then the first three years would
have elapsed and the Land’s DM 800,000 would
be exhausted and used up. New negotiations thus
loomed on the horizon, for “they mustn’t expect
that the ministry of finance and Parliament would
authorize as large a subsidy as this in the coming
years, if at all. […] The administrative council is
unanimous that it is possible that subsidy require- 163
ments will decrease as of the beginning of fiscal
year 1956/57.” However, this was a premature
judgment, and damaging because the representa-
tives of the ministries brought their superiors the
reassuring message from the administrative coun-
cil’ meeting that in the future the foundation would
ask the state for less money than in the past. It
would have been lovely, for it would have meant
that the plan of the HfG’s founders to have
increasing financial independence had been ful-
filled, but it was not true, and no doubt someone
like Hellmut Becker knew better.
Here is another bit of incidental information
about a long smoldering confrontation between
the ministry of finance and the ministry of educa-
tion and the arts: During a discussion about overall
allowances for income-related expenses of HfG
teachers an argument erupted regarding the status
of the HfG. Wolfgang Donndorf (ministry of educa-
tion and the arts) was of the opinion that the HfG
was a college for teaching and research. It was a
college because it had the following characteris-
tics:
1. four years of study offering comprehensive
training and a background in general education,
as opposed to narrow specialization in one field,
2. the goal of the studies was to train architects,
graphic artists, and designers,
3. it differed from other technology institutes in
the length, scope, and depth of training;
4. there were no regulations governing examina-
tions due to organizational problems, but this
would soon be remedied;
5. while the secondary school Abitur was not an
admission requirement, this was also true of
academies and conservatories of music.
As a result the HfG was considered primarily as a
Land college with special status, but not from a
fiscal point of view, at least not “in the narrow
sense” like the Land’s seven science-oriented
institutions of higher learning (the universities of
Freiburg, Heidelberg, and Tübingen, the technical
colleges of Karlsruhe and Stuttgart, the Agricultur-
al College of Stuttgart-Hohenheim, and the Mann-
heim College of Business and Economics).
As the ministry of finance saw it, what deter-
mined the status of an educational institution was
whether it required its students to have a secon-
dary school diploma and its lecturers to be quali-
fied to teach at a college; whether it had the right
to confer doctorates and bestow on its graduates
the qualification to be university lecturers; and
whether it governed itself through a senatorial
charter. 783 (In the sixties another criterion became
important as well for the ministries and the mem-
bers of the federal and Land Parliaments in distin-
 The rectorship of Bill
164
“The booming sound of guishing the HfG as a college from a higher tech-
running footsteps in the nical school or a school of engineering – the fact
reverberating concrete that the HfG did research and development work.)
arcade under his white The first recorded instance of a ruling by the
cell roused the reporter foundation that limited Max Bill's absolute position
from his Cartesian med- – though very minimally – is 18 September 1954.
itations. He heard shouts Up to that point the development of the HfG had
of joy, whistling, sing- always been in danger of coming to a standstill
ing. Something was up. whenever the rector was not in Ulm because Max
In the distance, there Bill reserved the right to make or at least to con-
was the muffled, regu- firm all decisions in person. Now the position of an
lar beating of a drum. acting rector was created to whom unlimited re-
Snatches of jazz were sponsibility was transferred; at any rate the short
audible. […] Later he statement contains no restriction of his authority:
realized that parties are “During the rector's absence until the beginning of
not all that infrequent October Mr. Gugelot will carry out the duties of the
on Kuhberg.” rector as his deputy.“ Signed: Inge Aicher-Scholl
and Max Bill. 784
Bernhard Rübenach,
Der rechte Winkel von By the end of November 1954 the school building
Ulm, p. 21. was finished, and the wood, metal, and plaster
workshops had been fully equipped. After the
The picture was taken beginning of December all HfG classes were
on 14 May 1955 at the taught on Kuhberg. 785
HfG spring festival in its As the move into the new building took place,
own building, and there was a first protest by an HfG student. Mau-
shows, from the left, rice Goldring, who was enrolled in the first basic
Hans Frieder Eychmül- course and was later involved in the development
ler and Hans Zumsteg. of the teachers’ houses by the department of
architecture, complained bitterly about the egoism
Photo: Hans Conrad that predominated at the HfG and poisoned the
atmosphere, instead of the expected team spirit
around a common cause: “And thus enthusiasm
has increasingly given way to a certain resignation.
The situation today is such that our work suffers
and that no problem is accorded the concentrated
attention it deserves.” 786 He refused to continue
working in the department of architecture and
demanded that a program and suggestions for
solutions should be discussed. Four features of
this first student flare-up are characteristic for the
HfG's attitude toward its members and toward the
outside world:
1. After a short time at the HfG many students
were disappointed in their expectations based
on the promises of publications about the
school; however, they did not simply accept the
situation, but tried to eliminate discrepancies
between expectation and reality;
2. in the process many students self-confidently
stood up for their often radical demands and
crossed boundaries that were often observed,
almost as a matter of course, at state colleges
and universities;
3. the formation and institutionalization of discus-
sion and work groups and committees became
a peculiar quirk of the HfG that reflected a deep-
ly rooted, liberal, and naive faith in the power of
words to convince people and to solve prob-
lems;
4. there was method in their madness. In Ulm doc-
uments were typed with multiple carbon copies:
one for the writer's own records, two or three
more for people who were to be kept informed
about what was going on. Thus on the college
campus, cramped and densely populated as it
was, nothing remained hidden, and everything
was included in one way or another in ongoing
internal debates. Historians and archivists are
Eugen Gomringer 1955.
Photo: Hans Conrad
grateful for this. – Maurice Goldring sent carbon
copies of his letter, which was addressed to
Max Bill, to Inge Aicher-Scholl and Fritz Pfeil.
Max Bill's energetic response was not long in
coming: “If the work suffers, it's the fault of the
people who should be doing it. And it's just the
way I told you a little while ago: Those who de-
mand more freedom must also take more respon-
sibility for their actions. You have not wanted to
understand what an opportunity you have in be-
Elke Koch-Weser and ing part of the team completing the teachers’
Max Graf in the wood- residences, and that’s why you’re giving up to-
working shop in the 3d day. I admit that the mess on Kuhberg is partly to
basic course, 1955/56. blame for the demoralization many are experienc-
Photo: Hans Conrad ing. But this is also a test of these people's ability
to resist.” He gave the rebellious student a choice
– either to return to his traineeship immediately or
to withdraw from the university register. 787 HfG stu-
dents had had no practice in effective protest;
Maurice Goldring meekly went back to work, and
the rector had firmly nipped the first mutiny in the
bud. 788
Maurice Goldring’s ideas may have been the
cause or just simply a trigger for the forming, at
the turn of 1954/55, of a small group that called
itself the commission for organizational ques-
tions. Included in the group were two lecturers,
one representative of the foundation (most likely
Günther Schlensag), and two student representa-
tives. Together they worked out a first, provisional
version of the Ordnung für das Studium an der
HfG (Studienordnung) (Regulations for Studies at
the HfG), which did not go into effect yet. 789
The 8 January 1955 version was signed by Max
Bill and Inge Aicher-Scholl and obviously did not
correspond in a few points to what the students
had in mind; a good week later, on 17 January
1955, they submitted their alternative draft. 790
(Student participation in organizing studies from
the beginning was not only due to the fact that
they were older than usual and had mostly already
completed some kind of vocational training; it was
also in keeping with a reformed, modern educa-
tional model where teachers and students collabo-
165
rated with each other.) On the following points the
two drafts diverged:
While in the first version the rector alone was to
determine which students should be admitted
to the HfG, the students demanded that the
decision be made by a commission that in-
cluded a student representative.
In the first version, studies at the HfG for all stu-
dents would extend over four years; in the alter-
native student version, the study period might
be shorter, depending on prior experience and
training.
Unlike the first version, the student proposal
suggested that only DM 90 per quarter in tui-
tion fees were sufficient, and not the DM 120
currently required.
The students also proposed that a four-week,
tuition-free leave of absence, which would not
count towards the total period of study, would
be possible.
There were important differences as to how
rights in the students' work while studying at
the HfG were interpreted. The rector and the
foundation intended that student work created
as part of class instruction would become the
property of the foundation. In addition the foun-
dation planned to reserve the exclusive right to
register international patents and to exploit such
patents. In contrast the student proposal was
that the students as the originators were to keep
proprietorship and all rights in their work. In
exploiting this work they wanted to concede a
maximum share of 55 percent of the proceeds
to the foundation.
 The rectorship of Bill
166 Finally the students also proposed that the
expected commissions by the private and public
sector to the HfG should be allocated by a com-
mittee that included a student representative.
With this last proposal the students aimed at the
core of the economic plan of the HfG’s founders.
The proposal shows that from the beginning (and
not only in the mid-sixties, when a number of
orders had already been completed and sizable
royalties had been channelled to Ulm) the stu-
dents recognized the most awkward point about
the HfG construct.
It is not possible to clarify whether their propos-
al meant they wished to participate in the hoped-
for royalties in order not to be exploited as cheap
labor or if it meant they wanted to defuse the
implicit explosiveness of this construct by distrib-
uting responsibility on as broad a basis as pos-
sible.
The HfG regulations went into effect on 2 February
1955. 791 In essence they corresponded to the ver-
sion that had been worked out by the committee
for organizational questions and submitted to Inge
Aicher-Scholl and Max Bill for final approval.
That means that from the students' perspective
they contained rather stringent passages. Only in
counting previous experience toward the four
years of study did the rector and foundation com-
ply with the students' wishes.
Here, in detail, are the most important points of
the regulations:
Max Bill and Charles
Eames, who together
with his wife Ray was
an American design
legend even during his
lifetime, on Kuhberg in
March of 1955.
Photo: Ernst Hahn
Archive: HfG (Depositum
90/41.3)
Admission and course of training
The studies took four years, and each year was
divided into three academic quarters and one
quarter of vacation; previous experience was taken
into account; studies began with the first year in
the basic course and then continued in the depart-
ment chosen by the student; both in the basic
course and in the department, the first three
months had to be completed on probation – only
then was it decided whether the student would be
definitively admitted; this decision was made by
Class at the HfG, 24
March 1955.
From the left: Franz
Bullrich, Rolf Mangold,
Irmgard Philippi, and
Claude Schnaidt, also
Tomás Maldonado and
Max Bill.
Photo: Immo Krumrey
Archive: HfG (Depositum 19/1)
the rector in agreement with the student's lectur-
ers; upon graduation a diploma was awarded.
Tuition fees
A one-time fee of DM 50 was charged upon
admission to the HfG; per quarter tuition fees were
DM 120; extra fees were charged for material; in
addition, students had to take out accident and
health insurance at DM 15 per quarter.
Proprietorship, exploitation, and publication of
class projects
Student work completed in class became the
property of the foundation; the foundation had the
exclusive right to apply for international patents on
this work; the foundation also reserved the right of
industrial exploitation, with students ineligible to
claim compensation; private work by students
completed while they were enrolled at the school
but not connected to their classwork could be
published and exploited only with the rector's
approval; in that case the HfG could be mentioned
by name only with the rector's permission. The
students had to observe confidentiality for all com-
missions with which they came into contact.
Student involvement
Three committees were formed with the goal of
collaborating between the college directorship,
administration, and students:
1. the committee for organizational questions,
2. the committee for personal concerns, and
3. the committee for quality questions.
Each committee included two lecturers, one repre-
sentative of the foundation, and two students, and
helped the rector and the foundation‘s executive
board prepare their decisions.
From the students' perspective one might say
that this meant they were always in the minority
and that the foundation’s technically noncompe-
tent voice tipped the scales; but this assertion
would be an anachronism, for it is based on the
idea of the so-called Drittelparität (equal say in
decision-making for students), which did not
appear on the scene at German colleges and uni-
versities until the mid-sixties and which presup-
poses the experience of confrontation between
organized students and faculty, and the fear that
they might be played off against each other – at
the moment, however, we are in Ulm in a climate
of cooperation.
By the time these issues were discussed at
institutions of higher learning, including the HfG,
the committees had long since come to an end.
On 10 January 1955 Max Bill opened the basic
course for the second group of new students. At
167
The main building on
11 Nov. 1954, 8 weeks
before the first HfG
classes were taught in
the school’s own space.
Photo: Hans Conrad
the time, about 50 students were taught by seven
lecturers and four workshop foremen as well as
guest lecturers at the HfG building on Kuhberg. 792
Starting 1 January 1955 Tomás Maldonado was
in charge of the basic course; he was also teach-
ing as an instructor in the department of visual
design. 793
Before we turn back to financial questions
again, here is a comment on the somewhat un-
pleasant relationship between Max Bill and Wal-
ter Zeischegg. This comment is appropriate
because it is a graphic example of a few typical
characteristics of the atmosphere at the HfG just
after it be- gan operating.
By the end of March 1955 Max Bill was no longer
willing to collaborate with Walter Zeischegg. Un-
der normal circumstances things could no doubt
have been arranged so that no one would have
had to lose face or be deeply hurt. When we read
the following lines we can't help wondering what
it was that Walter Zeischegg had done to his rec-
tor for the latter to write him such a letter, on 29
March 1955. Max Bill wrote to him: “I was asked
by the foundation whether I could accept the
responsibility for extending your contract beyond
the planned period. That means I would have to
assume responsibility for your continued work as
an instructor at our college. I cannot assume this
responsibility for the following reasons:
1) Your teaching has produced practically no pos-
itive results. […]
2) […] After three years of activity you have pro-
duced hardly any completed practical develop-
 The rectorship of Bill
168 ment work except for the fluorescent tube
mounting. […]
3) Several of my valuable colleagues have an-
nounced that it is impossible for them to work
with you for a protracted period of time; they
Max Bill’s class on the
first day in the HfG
building on Kuhberg,
10 January 1955.
Photo: Hans Conrad
say you create a mood that puts a strain on the
working climate and makes people lose their
enthusiasm for work.“ 794
If we bring to mind the fact that Max Bill and Wal-
ter Zeischegg were members of the foundation's
advisory board, we realize how impossible this sit-
uation was. Walter Zeischegg was never dismissed
from his position, he even continued working as an
instructor longer than most of the others. But that
is not what is interesting about this episode; rath-
er, it is the following features that in part became
characteristic for life at the HfG:
the looming interpersonal conflict is noticeable;
it arose from the fact that the people who came
together here were strong, independent charac-
ters (as the founders had wished);
this frequent conflict was intensified by the
pressure exerted on HfG members from three
sides: the HfG immediately needed to be inter-
nationally successful and to come up to its own
high standards, which it had raised itself; there
was not the time or the money to tackle things
calmly; and the crowded conditions on Kuhberg
also intensified interpersonal relationships;
another factor is style of communication that
claims to be objective because it describes
facts, but is so drastically sober that it can be
very hurtful, namely when human beings are
concealed behind the facts – and it was exactly
this dubious way of expressing things that some
HfG members had mastered to perfection.
Inge Aicher-Scholl's agenda for 1955 was deter-
mined by the next step toward her goal – getting
the Landtag, during the next negotiations, to
renew the subsidies for regular maintenance. 795
Wolfgang Donndorf had already hinted, of course,
that for the 1956/57 Land budget then being dis-
cussed government officials needed to submit
their documents as early as August 1955. The
foundation's request was to considered in the
council of ministers in October 1955, and the
adoption of the budget was planned for January
1956. These deadlines hardly offered enough lee-
way, because the Landtag elections in Baden-
Württemberg were scheduled for the first part of
March 1956.
In order to be as well prepared as possible for
the looming marathon of negotiations, Inge Aicher-
Scholl had to rely on three sources of aid: Firstly,
on the firm and matter-of-course support of the
city of Ulm, secondly, on the HfG's first successes,
which proved that it was fulfilling its promises from
past debates, and thirdly, on as broad-based pub-
lic approval as possible or at least on public inter-
est in the HfG. A large-scale dedication ceremony
of the HfG buildings in the coming year was sup-
posed to create the publicity necessary for this .
On 4 February 1955 the main division of the
Ulm municipal council authorized the municipal
administration's request (which meant that Theo-
dor Pfizer was behind it) to increase the delivery of
coke, water, gas, and electricity to the foundation
for the half-year between 1 October 1954 and 31
March 1955 to an annual sum of DM 49,000.
Originally, of course, the municipal council had
decided, on 16 January 1953, on a subsidy that
would amount to no more than DM 40,000. 796 In
other words, here was another small but neces-
sary victory by the foundation over its opponents
in town.
Up to this point it was not as obvious that the
HfG had to defend itself against strong adversaries
in its own town. While the difficulties during the
founding phase were immense, they were not
insurmountable, and the decisions of the munici-
pal council had up till then marked brilliant suc-
cesses for Inge Aicher-Scholl. Last but not least,
in Mayor Theodor Pfizer the HfG gained an indefat-
igable fighter for its cause. But the more the HfG
itself took shape, the more its opponents began to
close their ranks.
For Thursday, 21 April 1955, the municipal council
announced it would visit Kuhberg. Inge Aicher-
Scholl insistently warned that this visit should not
be taken too lightly, and that the opportunity for
an impressive self-portrayal should not be missed:
“This group is by no means as well-disposed
toward us as the specialist advisors on art or the
administrative council. As far as we’re concerned
these people's barometer points to bad weather,
or variable at best. Whatever else we do during
this visit, which will probably not be repeated in
the foreseeable future, we must try and change it
to point to good weather, because unfortunately
the municipal council is the background against
which Schlensag and I have to fight for the new
budget this fall when we go to the members of the
Landtag and to the Land government agencies.” 797
Presumably during this visit there was neither a
diplomatic catastrophe nor was the mood of the
municipal politicians transformed into enthusiastic
euphoria, for both would have been recorded in
the documents. It would probably be an exaggera-
tion to say that this was the adversaries’ first con-
tact with the enemy; however, no details or results
of this day are known.
On the day before, 20 April 1955, the foundation's
administrative council had had its seventh meet-
ing. Its members were confronted with the dilem-
Hosting the cultural ma that while construction on Kuhberg progressed
bureaucracy: ministerial sufficiently, financing was not keeping pace with it.
art and culture advisers As early as March, Inge Aicher-Scholl had blamed
of the Länder with Inge the delays on the fact that costs had risen by
Aicher-Scholl, Günther about 10 percent and a total of DM 250,000 were
Schlensag, Otl Aicher, needed for the remaining construction. Hermann
Walter Zeischegg, Hans Josef Abs was again expected to help persuade
Gugelot, and Tomás the federal ministry of economics to pay at least
Maldonado. part of these costs. 798 Inge Aicher-Scholl thought
Photo: unknown the balance should materialize following an article
Archive: Südwestpresse
by Helmut Cron in the Deutsche Zeitung und
Wirtschaftszeitung. 799 Now she presented a new
financing plan to the administrative council in
which she had again made an extremely conserva-
tive estimate, i. e., without provision for unforeseen
expenses. However experience showed that the
only thing that was foreseeable was that there
would always be unforeseen expenses. It's easy
to say this today, but Max Bill had, of course, dem-
onstrated it several times during the founding peri-
od: If your financial plan was somewhat more
large-scale, at least you didn't lose credibility
when the plans became outdated a short time
later and you had to ask for more money.
Meanwhile, on Kuhberg, by mid-February 1955
the administration had moved into the new build-
Left: Cornelius Müller
in the basic course,
5 May 1955; center:
Fritz Querengässer,
6 May 1955; right: Jo-
sef Albers on the first
day of the second basic
course, 22 May 1955.
Photos: Hans Conrad
ing, the last part of the foundation and college to 169
do so. Finish work on the new building was practi-
cally completed, and the exteriors of all residential
buildings were almost finished. 800 Now the second
stage of construction – finish work on the depart-
ment of product design, the little lecture hall, and
the outfitting of the synthetics workshop – could
begin, but as of 31 March 1953 they were still
DM 140,000 short. However, the HfG was not sup-
posed to be fully equipped until the third stage of
construction was finished (finish work of the basic
classrooms and the department of architecture,
installation of a printing shop, completion of all
remaining buildings on the college campus), for
which an additional DM 200,000 were required.
The administrative council took note of this and
hoped that a concerted fundraising campaign with
the support of the bankers Hermann-Josef Abs,
Karl Max von Hellingrath, Karl Klasen, and Otto
Pfleiderer would remedy the situation.
Finally the administrative council briefly dis-
cussed the subsidy from the Land. There was rea-
son to fear that for 1956 the cabinet would provide
only the remaining DM 65,000 that had not yet
been used out of the existing DM 800,000 subsi-
dy. It was quite clear that the foundation could not
meet its next budget with this sum. That is why
the administrative council (which of course in-
cluded Günther Boulanger as the representative
of the ministry of finance) did not want to rule out
the possibility that it might again be necessary to
be included in the draft budget of the ministry of
education and the arts with a significantly higher
amount. The representative of the federal ministry
of economics, Walther Hinsch, informed Theodor
Pfizer that same day how disillusioned he felt
about the situation: “I didn’t know that things look
as bad for the institution as the minutes show. I
can only wish that there’s a way out of this situa-
tion. Unfortunately I can’t promise that we can
help provide federal funds once again. […] In my
opinion [the HfG] should do its utmost to get the
private sector more interested in the institution
and close the existing gap with their help.” 801
In mid-May 1955, Inge Aicher-Scholl still radiated
calculated optimism regarding the expected Land
grant for the HfG's ongoing operation: “After the
conversations we've had so far with government
consultants and members of parliament, we have
the impression there won’t be any serious prob-
lems.” 802 At the eighth meeting of the administra-
tive council 803 on 4 July 1955 Günther von Alberti,
the deputy of Wolfgang Donndorf at the ministry
of education and the arts, once more pointed out
that he and his colleagues had to submit their
draft budget for 1956/57 to the ministry of finance
by the end of the month. In the foundation's draft
budget for ongoing operations in 1956/57 Günther
 The rectorship of Bill “An aerial picture. Like
standing looking at the
model of a city. In front,
against a backdrop of
black woods, white
buildings, cubes, flat.
Crystals with windows,
many windows; like
something from a con-
struction kit, a right
angle fits into the jig-
170 Schlensag reported that a subsidy of DM 325,000
was needed. The city was prepared to raise its
contribution to DM 60,000, but at the final count it
was still obvious that the Land would have to con-
tribute DM 265,000 (and not only the remaining
DM 65,000), because a normal budget was not
possible in 1956/57 either, “since maximum en-
rollment figures would again not be reached this
year”. That was certainly an inadequate reason,
which only marginally described the foundation's
financial difficulties. There was also the fact that
Left: Hans Curjel,
6 September 1955.
Right: Tomás Maldo-
nado, 16 May 1955.
Photos: Hans Conrad
Günther Schlensag had counted on an income of
DM 80,000 from commissions and patents; in the
preceding fiscal year (1954/55) the foundation had
already generated DM 19,000 of such income, and
for the current year (1955/56) DM 40,000 could
be expected. On the other hand, faculty positions
would be completely filled by the beginning of fis-
cal year 1956/57, and this meant expenses would
rise. The industry's donations were urgently needed
for continuing finish work on the buildings and for
the scholarship fund. With Günther Boulanger ab-
staining, the administrative council resolved that
the foundation would ask the ministry of education
and the arts for a Land subsidy of DM 265,000. 804
At this meeting, the idea also came up that fu-
ture financing of the foundation could be made
easier by creating a body consisting of personal-
ities from the private and public sector that would
not exert influence on the college or the founda-
tion – on the analogy of the board of trustees,
which was closer to the college in substance. For
this purpose, it was felt, the advisory board could
be changed. Günther Schlensag replied that the
advisory board had the important function of elect-
ing the foundation’s governing board, and they
could not thoughtlessly allow this to pass out of
their hands. But for Otto Pfleiderer this was, in any
case, the responsibility of the administrative coun-
cil. 805 The discussion was not brought to a conclu-
sion. But strangely enough no mention at all was
made of the Society of Friends, which had been
created precisely for the purpose of establishing
contact with the private sector and with the public.
Of course, up to this point, it had scarcely gone
into action on behalf of the HfG.
saw puzzle of a slope. ing. In the foreground,
Behind it, in the haze, white, the building
untidy, gray on gray, blocks of the future. A
the maze of the city. luminous castle of the
Above it, like a sil- future.“
houette before the glis-
tening ribbon of the Bernhard Rübenach,
Danube, the massive Der rechte Winkel von
shape of the cathedral, Ulm, p. 10.
far away, vanishing. A
past that is disappear-
In accordance with the resolution of the adminis- 171
trative council, its chairman, Theodor Pfizer, sent
the foundation’s request for a 1956/57 Land subsi-
dy of DM 265,000 to the ministry of education
and the arts on 23 July 1955 806; the ministry
granted the request and included the sum in its
draft budget for the annual appropriations. 807 Wolf-
gang Donndorf now had to be careful that the
promises of preceding parliamentary debates were
not reduced to a simple formula and used against
the foundation. On the one hand the gravity, in-
deed the urgency, of the financial situation in Ulm
must not be concealed so that the need for the
state subsidy could be justified. On the other
hand, in accordance with previous argumentation,
this situation must be characterized as an excep-
tion. Finally, there was also a need for convincing
reasons to explain that this exceptional situation
still prevailed, although the financial situation
should really already have been normalized. And in
order to establish a connection between existing
conditions and previous projections, Wolfgang
Donndorf now had to clearly show that the foun-
dation was moving in the right direction and would
reach its goal as soon as possible. Here is his
attempt to do so: “Without subsidies the Geschwis-
ter-Scholl-Stiftung cannot exist. As in the case of
every school, expenses are considerably greater
than income in spite of the most careful economiz-
ing. […]There cannot be the least doubt that the
enterprise would fail if the Land were to refuse to Photo: Otl Aicher 2 Aug. 1955 HfG will not have a normal year until fiscal year of the HfG draft budget and that they simply con-
Archive: HfG
grant a subsidy for ongoing operation. The Land (ohne Negativ-Aicher Luftbild)
1957; not until that year will enrollment have cealed this self-deception with cheery phrases.
cannot bear responsibility for its failure. At no time reached the expected figure of approximately 180 As the legislative procedure began, Inge Aicher-
during or after the founding of the college has and will income from patents and industrial com- Scholl and Günther Schlensag also needed to re-
anyone claimed that in the future the foundation missions rise. In fiscal year 1957 the government turn to the Parliament lobby to work on the mem-
subsidy can therefore be lower than DM 265,000.” bers of parliament. They were more concerned
Helga Pross, with informing members about the HfG’s program
10 August 1955. Two points catch the eye: Firstly, the wording this rather than with financial policy calculation. Theo-
Photo: Hans Conrad time turned out to be a great deal more guarded dor Pfizer helped as much as he could. One exam-
than during the last negotiations with the Landtag. ple is his letter of 2 August 1955 to the chairman
And secondly the ministry of education and the of the politico-cultural committee, Walter Erbe
arts had adopted the view of the foundation’s ad- (one of the two representatives of the FDP/DVP
ministration that the HfG would basically defray its who voted for the HfG in 1953): “Anyone who
own operating costs once it was running as close looks at the circumstances without prejudice will
as possible to capacity. We must ask ourselves no doubt subscribe to the HfG’s goals – designing
why the representatives of the ministries always a better environment and training the people
allowed themselves to be persuaded that this needed for this purpose. He would also agree that
financial construct was viable and did not recog- an institution created to do this cannot come up
can manage without subsidies.“ – This statement nize its inherent fragility. How, for example, could with huge successes from one day to the next, but
was accurate as to its wording, though not as to the money be raised to defray costs caused by would give it the opportunity to do so regardless
its meaning, for in its 1952/53 request the ministry financing gaps in the budget and in construction, of a number of initial problems. One crucial ques-
of education and the arts had said that govern- and all the consequences (such as interest on tion remains: Is the School of Design to continue
ment subsidies would continue to be minimal if loans and redemption) until that ideal state was receiving a subsidy from the Land?” He pointed
the HfG concept was successful. Wolfgang Donn- reached? Presumably they found Inge Aicher- out that the requested DM 265,000 were a mod-
dorf went on: “Today it is possible to state with Scholl’s enthusiasm infectious, and perhaps the est sum compared with [those given to] other cul-
conviction that the present state of affairs at the only possible way to get the HfG going was to tural institutions. 808
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung justifies, indeed de- have this kind of concentrated confidence. In any Incidentally, now that the question of future
mands, that we grant it a regular subsidy. […] case, one can scarcely assume that the officials subsidies by the Land had been addressed, they
Here we need to take into account the fact that the were fully aware of the inherent financial weakness were back at the old game where the other gov-
 The rectorship of Bill
172 ernment agencies did not want to discuss their
own financial support until the Land made its deci-
sion.
Walther Hinsch’s standpoint, for example, was
clear: It was not the job of the Federal Republic to
Tomás Maldonado and support the HfG. Once the HfG's financial support
the painter Georges was ensured, they could talk about selective points
Vantongerloo during the in which the Federal Republic could be of assis-
official opening of the tance. That is why it was not possible, he contin-
HfG buildings on ued, for the foundation to receive a federal guar-
2 October 1955. antee for the remaining construction costs. “As for
Right: Tomás Maldona- the rest, he says he believes we cannot expect any
do and Konrad Wachs- kind of payments until the Land has guaranteed
mann giving Friedrich ongoing financing.” 809
Vordemberge-Gilde-
wart encouragement Back to the college. There, at the end of April 1955
(26 August 1955). the student dining room started operating, and
Leaning against the four weeks later the first residential buildings (the
wall are Vordemberge- caretaker's house and the two one-story studios)
Gildewart’s paintings. were ready for occupancy; the exterior of the du-
Photos: Hans Conrad plexes for the lecturers was completed, so that
finish work on these could now begin; the student
apartments in the tower were already equipped
with wardrobes, alcoves for beds, and washstands;
development by the city was completed – the pre-
dominant part of the buildings was presentable to
the point that they could risk scheduling the offi-
cial dedication ceremony of the college campus
three months down the road, at the beginning of
October 1955. 810
In spite of all delays and cutbacks: the very fact
that the HfG building stood on Kuhberg was an
extraordinary success for the founders of the HfG,
something they could be proud of. But at the dedi-
cation ceremony they had other interesting pro-
jects to boast about, projects that hinted at the
HfG's future direction.
Thus the HfG had been commissioned by the
city to design the Ulm pavilion for the Baden-
Württemberg regional exhibition. The exhibition
was inaugurated on 1 July 1955. The HfG had
developed and built in its own workshops a bold,
simple wooden platform without frills, which al-
lowed visitors to experience the view from Ulm
Cathedral down on the city. At this, the HfG’s first
public appearance, a visitor found neither Swabian
Baroque nor the aesthetics of the so-called eco-
nomic miracle – the spare simplicity of the design
was too much for the public.
On Thursday, 14 July 1955, Norbert Wiener
spoke at the HfG, one of four guest lectures he
gave in Germany. Norbert Wiener was a professor
of mathematics and is considered to be the foun-
der of the science of information and communica-
tion he called cybernetics. Max Bill refers to this
fact in his invitation: “It is the goal of the Ulm
School of Design to integrate the field of design,
and that is why we have been following the devel-
opment of cybernetics with great interest and
teaching its fundamentals in lectures as part of
‘cultural integration’. Cybernetics, particularly as
the science of information and communication, is
also one of the foundations of the college's de-
partment of ‘information’.” 811 By the way, cybernet-
ics, communication, cultural integration (the word
referred to general education) were terms that had
little meaning for the public. Here, too, we see a
characteristic typical of the HfG – its desire for a
professional jargon that gave its work an academic
aura and made initiation into this hermetic circle
necessary in order to understand it.
A few weeks before the planned dedication of the
HfG buildings there was much tension within the
HfG. At least slightly less than half of the students
were still dissatisfied with the school leadership,
and obviously Max Bill also felt uneasy, since he
was the person who had to take care of every
detail of college life, even if this situation was
actually in keeping with his ideas of his rectorship.
The students’ dissatisfaction was expressed in a
memorandum addressed to Inge Aicher-Scholl
(with carbon copies to the rector, the head of the
committee for organizational questions and to the
head of the committee for personal matters). On
12 August 1955 the students held a general as-
sembly, with 24 of the then 43 registered students
showing up; of those present, 21 students ap-
proved the memorandum in which they declared
their distrust of the HfG’s leadership. 812 They gave
three reasons for their vote of no confidence:
1. “Events around the introduction of college regu-
lations, and the declaration that the ‘gray pros-
pectus’ because of which we came to Ulm ‘was
actually already outdated when it was sent out’
(4 April 1955)”. (Presumably the first part of the
objection refers to the fact that Max Bill and
Inge Aicher-Scholl issued the college regula-
tions without going into the essential demands
of the students.)
2. “The school administration forgets that the stu-
dents are adults who know why they are here
(11 August 1955).”
Max Bense (partially 3. The contradiction between the goals of the
shown), guest speaker HfG's founders (briefly mentioned in the gray
Norbert Wiener, and prospectus and other documents) and the high
Max Bill, 14 July 1955. expectations of the students on the one hand,
Photo: Hans Conrad and reality on Kuhberg on the other hand.
This criticism led to a clear demand which, howev-
er, was not met: “We feel that in this climate our
common goals cannot be attained. We therefore
demand democratic school bylaws (another rea-
Anthropology class on
the patio at the home
of Stuttgart professor
Erich F. Podach on 5 or
28 July 1955.
Photo: Ernst Scheidegger
Archive: HfG (56/0085)
son for that is the official opening of the school). 173
These bylaws must reflect the ideals of those after
whom the school was named, for we owe it to
them.”
In his cover letter, student representative Immo
Krumrey urged Inge Aicher-Scholl not to take this
student protest lightly: “Above all I’d like to empha-
size that we are not talking about the juvenile ob-
structionism of a few grumblers – in actual fact,
there’s no one like that among us; on the contrary,
the degree of disapproval regarding these regret-
table matters shows a genuine concern that
should be taken seriously, a concern that is (unfor-
tunately) only the negative expression of true con-
viction and enthusiasm.” 813
For Max Bill this campaign was possibly the
straw that broke the camel’s back. At any rate the
rector was just as dissatisfied with the situation
within the HfG as the students. Obviously his daily
duties were too much of a burden for him, and he
felt restricted by duties that he regarded as dis-
tracting and that reduced his creativity.
On 5 September 1955 Max Bill handed the
initiative, the daily business of the rector, to a rec-
torship steering committee, reserving only veto
power and representation of the HfG for him-
self. 141 This event actually came as a surprise –
the resource material does not document specific
motives – and it is hardly likely that the only rea-
sons for Max Bill’s retreat were the recent con-
flicts, for in dealing with them he had blithely dis-
regarded the attacks, and this student storm in a
teacup was hardly comparable with the difficulties
he, as well as Inge Aicher-Scholl and Otl Aicher,
had overcome during the founding of the HfG.
In a short text titled “Structure of the rector-
ship”, Max Bill stated:
The rector of the HfG was able to transfer his
duties and authority to a governing body to
which he himself did not belong;
this governing body was to consist of a maxi-
mum of five members;
the deputy rector, who was at the same time
the chairman of the governing body, was
appointed by the rector;
the rector could take part in the meetings of the
governing body;
the decisions of the governing body must be
approved by the majority;
the decisions of the governing body needed to
be authorized by the rector.
One can only speculate, but it seems plausible that
even in the early days Max Bill already had some
idea about what types of issues the future rector
of the HfG would have to deal with and what
direction his daily work would take. Max Bill’s prior
actions indicate that though he held democracy as
 The rectorship of Bill Official opening of the The three architects
HfG buildings, 2 Oct. Walter Gropius, Max
1955. Brigitte Bermann- Guther, and Max Bill.
Fischer next to Inge Photo: Hannes Rosenberg.
Aicher-Scholl and stu- Archive: Rosenberg (345/08)
dent Fred Hochstrasser.
Photo: Hannes Rosenberg
Archive: Rosenberg (345/05)

174
The speakers: Inge
Aicher-Scholl, Walther
Hinsch, Walter Gropius,
Dr. Christmann.
a form of government in high regard, he was not
willing to organize “his” college along completely
democratic lines. After all, for a long time he had
been asserting the primacy of artistic talent over
political mission. Also he seems to have lacked
organizing and diplomatic ability (which he pre-
sumably did not regret), something that is particu-
larly crucial for the rector of a newly formed aspir-
ing college. His decision does not suggest resig-
nation, it appears to be liberation from a heavy
burden, for at the HfG every decision still needed
his seal of approval.
The documents give hardly any information
about the members and activities of this governing
body that depended on Max Bill's favor and had
not been provided for in the college bylaws. It
consisted of four lecturers: Tomás Maldonado,
the members of the HfG, but unfortunately the
event lacked the luster that would have been pro-
vided by the names of a few prominent personal-
ities. Ellen and John McCloy were unable to
come 815, and so were Shepard Stone, Carl Zuck-
mayer, Herbert Read, and James Morgan Read,
who had assisted at the institution’s birth.
Absent, too, were a number of prominent feder-
al and Land politicians: Neither Ludwig Erhard nor
the prime minister or the minister of education and
the arts managed to get to Ulm. They were repre-
sented by their senior officials, who were familiar
with the foundation's day-to-day business in any
case, and so the atmosphere was cultured and
matter-of-fact. A few members of the federal and
Land parliaments who were interested in cultural
matters made their appearance, as did the Hessian
In the auditorium:
Left: Walter Erbe, Binia
and Max Bill.
Photo: Hans Conrad
Center: Walter Gropius
on the podium.
Photo: Hannes Rosenberg.
Archive: Rosenberg (346/09)
there was the most incredible intrigue and political
libel.” 816
After Inge Aicher-Scholl’s address and a speech
by Walter Gropius 817, Max Bill confronted his
guests with the standards he had set for work at
the HfG, which were by no means modest: “We
are clear about our goal: Everything we do at the
HfG is directed towards working together to build
a new culture, and the objective is to create a life-
style that is in keeping with our age of technology.
[…] Present-day culture is too badly shaken for us
to be able to continue building at the top of the
pyramid, as it were. We have to start at the base
and scrutinize the very foundations.” 818
The principal figures from the foundation and col-
lege were surprised at the great public response to
nunciation, and responds to the affluence of the 175
nouveaux riches with voluntary poverty. Max Bill is
Swiss – and a Calvinist to a certain degree. His
forms appear in ascetic severity. […] If this college
is marked by asceticism, if it acts in opposition to
the arts-and-crafts movement, which today once
more shows all the bad habits of whim, fad, and
kitsch in the name of the ‘new daintiness’, it is on
the defensive, as it were, against the style of an
age that has gotten rich too quickly. […] We must
take into account the fact that human beings have
not only practical reason but also have aesthetic
needs. […] What is correct is not enough to sup-
port and nourish us. That which is superfluous –
that extra ingredient of a beautiful appearance –
is an element of human nature, too. Does anyone
have the right to etch it away, overlook it, eliminate

“To experiment you

Photo: Hannes Rosenberg
Archive: Rosenberg (346/05)
who apparently was very much in favor of forming
this committee, was the deputy rector and thus
the chairman of the governing body, while Otl
Aicher, Hans Gugelot, and Friedrich Vordemberge-
Gildewart were the remaining members. (With the
same makeup, the constitutional governing body
took up its work in March 1956.)
The dedication of the HfG buildings on Saturday,
1 October 1955 and Sunday, 2 October 1955
turned out to be a successful self-promotion for
need absolute freedom
and support by farsight-
ed government agen-
cies, who look on
benevolently as some-
thing new that is often
hard to understand is
born. Give the School of
Design time to develop
quietly; it will take years.
I know how we at the
Bauhaus suffered when
every little thing we
produced was dragged
out to be inspected.
That wasn’t good!“
Walter Gropius in his
speech on 2 Oct. 1955.
minister of finance, Heinrich Troeger, who had
wanted the HfG to be built in Frankfurt am Main.
Inge Aicher-Scholl was the first to address the
audience: “I'm sure just about all the obstacles
that can be imagined were placed in our path and
nothing was handed to us on a platter. There was
the lack of understanding people show everything
that is new; and the discouraging, protracted diffi-
culties that a world of red tape and bureaucracy
offers in response to individual citizens; and finally,
Max Bense and Franz
Wiedemeier (member
of the Landtag, member
of the Ulm municipal
council, district chair
of the CDU for Ulm).
Photo: unknown
Archive: Südwestpresse
Center: The guests also
saw an exhibit of sam-
ples of work done at
the young HfG.
Right: Inge Aicher-
Scholl, Walter Gropius,
and Max Bill.
Photos: Hannes Rosenberg
Archive: Rosenberg (346/07
and 345/10)
their celebration. All over Germany there were
press, radio, and newsreel reports about the
unconventional institution on Kuhberg in Ulm. As
a rule the journalists chose architecture as the
embodiment of the college's program in order to
explain the goals and issues addressed by the HfG
to their readers. Already a year earlier the Ulm
newspaper Schwäbische Zeitung had showed it-
self to be very reserved: Under the headline Bi-
zarre new buildings overlooking the Danube Val-
ley the editor was baffled by the “strange contrast
with the undulating hills of the Danube Valley” and
resorted helplessly to vague murmurs: “The out-
side shell seems alien and bleak, and the huge,
empty window openings add to the eerie impres-
sion.“ 819 (This is just a foretaste of the quality of
local journalism with which the HfG had to come
to terms in the years that followed.)
Three examples from press reviews of the dedica-
tion show the various views of opinion makers
regarding the new college. The Stuttgarter Zeitung
in its article Under the sign of asceticism had
spoken ambivalently about the objectives of the
HfG's founders, discussing them within the frame-
work of their theoretical context: “The principles of
the school are becoming clear. Both in its mental-
ity and its education it recommends puritanism. It
elevates economizing to a style, sees gain in re-
it?“ 820 Doubts were permissible as long as they
stayed on the level of this sound article, but unfor-
tunately this was the exception. –
Regarding the effect of the horror vacui (na-
ture abhors a vacuum; transl. note) on the guests
at the dedication ceremony, the Frankfurter Allge-
meine Zeitung tartly commented: “If an English-
man spoke of the ‘new brutality’ of these cement
blocks, which are painted a light gray, he was
merely expressing the shock felt by many of the
visitors.“ 821 – And the Handelsblatt finally came up
with the label that was to be applied time and time
again to members of the HfG: “The almost over-
emphasized puritanism of this architecture seems
[…] intent on educating monks of the technologi-
cal age.” 822 –
But there were also other voices that had ac-
quired a taste for the atmosphere of the college.
For instance, there was Kurt Seeberger, who in the
Tageschronik (Daily chronicle) of the Bayerischer
Rundfunk (Bavarian Radio) described his impres-
sions as follows: “A bold conception. At first I was
taken aback: There is something severe about this
group of buildings. I kept thinking: This is the ar-
chitecture of puritans. Until, at the opening cere-
mony, I found out more about the intentions. […]
That was when I was struck by the fact that these
faces are far more world-oriented than one is used
to seeing among the venerable writers of our
 The rectorship of Bill
176
Looking up: Tomás Mal- academies.[There were] many architects, engi-
donado, the director of neers, government officials, and men from indus-
the Basel Museum of try and commerce. That is the circle that supports
Art, Georg Schmid, and the objectives of the Ulm college. […] After I had
Max Bill in November taken the tour of the grounds, I knew what this
1955. architecture, which I at first considered to be puri-
Photo: Hans Conrad tanical, is all about. It is not puritanical but severe.
It is severe because it restricts itself to essentials
and needs no embellishments. There is none of
that extravagant use of metal and precious wood
that transforms so many of our businesses and
office buildings into places of provocative luxury,
on the contrary: Here is the cell of an architecture
that will act in conscious opposition to the mega-
lomaniacal and ostentatious style of the 20th cen-
tury.” 823
The opening of the HfG buildings is a welcome
opportunity to assess in a few words what had
been achieved. The HfG campus now consisted
of the following building components 824:
the common rooms: auditorium, kitchen, utility
rooms, and the student dining hall and terrace,
the workshops (for work with plaster, wood,
metal, and synthetics), including studios, art
rooms, and a small lecture room,
the rector’s office, with the library and adminis-
tration offices,
the five-story residential high-rise for students
(35 single and double rooms; bath and shower
rooms; the rooms of the dormitory matron),
two ground-floor studio apartments (16 rooms)
for students and assistants,
three duplexes for lecturers (6 apartments), and
the caretaker’s house.
As of 24 October 1955 building costs to date were
DM 2,634,000. The foundation had raised DM
2,165,000 mark and taken out a mortgage and a
loan for a total of DM 400,000. There remained a
deficit of DM 39,000. 825
Three aspects of the construction balance sheet
are worth noting:
1. Up to this point the foundation had had to bor-
row DM 400,000. It had to pay back this money
with interest at a future date, and this sum had
to come out of the limited budgetary funds. This
pattern – borrowing and debt servicing – con-
tinued to grow and developed into an onerous
mortgage for the foundation.
2. In spite of this there was not enough money,
they were still DM 39,000 short.
3. In one part of the campus, finish work and fur-
nishing had not yet been completed, and the
foundation still needed DM 140,000 for this as
soon as possible and DM 200,000 by the end
of 1957.
In short, at the time of the dedication of the HfG
buildings the foundation would have needed ap-
proximately DM 800,000 to act freely from then
on. The HfG's financial difficulties in the years that
followed are, in part, a result of the need to plug
this hole and to keep it from expanding. In other
words, the HfG was financially a premature birth.
Inge Aicher-Scholl cold not afford to take a break.
For two reasons, they needed to cash in on the
success of the dedication ceremony immediately
and turn it into financial aid. The outstanding bills
for the construction of the college needed to be
paid quickly, and she hoped that the Landtag
would soon decide on additional subsidies to
cover operation costs. In her efforts she had to
concentrate primarily on simple members of par-
liament, for the HfG was no longer popular with
most of the members of the Land government.
That is why the cabinet had, by a large majority,
rejected the request of the minister of education
and the arts to provide not only the remaining
DM 65,000, but a total of DM 265,000 in the
1956 Land budget for the upkeep of the HfG;
that would have meant an annual subsidy of
DM 200,000. But because the government's bill
provided for only DM 65,000 for 1956, the foun-
dation had to begin the laborious and uncertain
march through official parliamentary channels: a
motion by the politico-cultural committee, its ap-
proval by the finance committee, and adoption by
Parliament in the readings of the budget.
That is why Inge Aicher-Scholl had reason to be
pleased that she soon had a new opportunity to
give the members of the politico-cultural commit-
tee a better understanding of the HfG. On 31 Octo-
from above, spring
1956.
Photo: Hans Conrad
ber 1955 two members of parliament spent two
hours at the college 826, and Inge Aicher-Scholl
made every effort to convince them of the truth of
the HfG concept. She based her arguments pri-
marily on the most recent successes: on the one
hand, the international response to the dedication
ceremony, on the other hand the first industry
commissions. For instance, at the recent Düssel-
dorf Radio Trade Fair the Frankfurt company Braun
had introduced three new radios that “caused a
sensation and represent a break with the outward-
ly ugly radios up to this point.” (One of these, the
radio-phono combination Phonosuper SK 4, dubbed
Schneewittchensarg (Snow White's coffin) be-
came the symbol of German design and an adver-
tisement for the HfG. Moreover, Inge Aicher-Scholl
pointed out that the HfG building had been de-
signed by members of the HfG, and a major part
of the school building, the residential high-rise,
and the lecturers' houses had been produced in
the school's own workshops. She concluded her
remarks emphatically: They had succeeded in
bringing the idea of the Bauhaus back to Germany
and letting it to take root there. “Here, a focus
point for an urgent cultural task of the 20th centu-
ry is being formed; it has repercussions through-
out the whole world, and in turn can gather the
ideas and influences of the world and pass them
on in concentrated form to the younger genera-
tion.”
A few days later, on 9 November 1955, several
members of the Landtag made a privileged intra-
party motion that the politico-cultural committee
should take a position regarding the foundation in
connection with deliberations on the 1956/57
budget. 827 The intention behind this was to get a
clear overall view of the HfG and of the mood
within Parliament concerning the foundation. The
last time there had been a vote in Parliament about
the HfG, on 29 April 1953, those who made the
motion had voted partly for and partly against it;
now, as a prerequisite for further Land support,
they expected that the politico-cultural committee
should by a clear majority adopt the foundation's
request to pay a total of DM 265,000 to the foun-
dation. Inge Aicher-Scholl was determined: “What
we’re trying to do now is to talk to and inform
Günther Schlensag at those members of parliament who are not yet
the hat-and-beard familiar with the work and the goals of our college,
party, end of November and win their support.” 828
1955. One of them was Paul Binder, a retired under-
Photo: Ernst Hahn secretary and a member of the finance committee,
Archive: HfG (Depositum who until then had been barely informed about the
90/11.1)
HfG. He believed in principle that it was out of the
question that an institution should be created on
private initiative and the state should then be bur-
dened with most of its regular maintenance. He
believed that the right solution would be for the
The HfG building seen
Land to give an additional DM 300,000 subsidy 177
and then contribute no more than 20 to 25 per-
cent of maintenance costs. If the foundation
could not manage on that amount, he believed
the HfG should be put under government control.
Günther Schlensag countered by saying that the
budget draft for 1956/57 already planned on hav-
ing over 50 percent of the institution's budget
covered by its own income, but that probably in
1957/58, too, a subsidy would still be required, the
same amount as the foundation had requested for
1956/57, i. e., DM 265,000. Later “there would
possibly be a decrease, provided that the econo-
my continued at its present level”. His argument
for government support was as follows: “They say
we believe the state should welcome private
initiative; it is up to the state to investigate wheth-
er an institution of this type is worth subsidizing.”
While Paul Binder showed understanding for the
fact that the foundation needed Land support for
one or two more years, he said that “later [finan-
cial aid] has to be reduced.” 829
In a detailed letter to Theodor Pfizer dated 28
November 1955 Paul Binder described the situa-
tion as he saw it. 830 This document sums up the
latest developments shortly before the meeting of
the politico-cultural committee. Also he graphi-
cal-ly showed how little the state's support of the
HfG had to do with objective arguments; rather, it
depended on party-line calculations, on an “I'll
scratch your back if you'll scratch mine” attitude
among Land politicians, with government officials
careful not to step on each other's toes. (So we
can understand why, during their visit a month
earlier, Inge Aicher-Scholl asked the members of
the politico-cultural committee for only two
things – impartiality and objectivity.) “I can tell
you in confidence that among the members of my
party there is no inclination to grant a regular
state subsidy. Mr. Wiedemeier is somewhat star-
tled by this. He personally pleaded for the pro-
posal of the minister of education and the arts
that a state subsidy roughly equaling personnel
expenditure be granted for a few years, and that
only then should it be decided whether support
for the School of Design ought to be continued.
However this proposal was badly received. […]
Rather the majority view was that at one time the
finance committee approved the DM 800,000 by
a majority of only one vote. This narrow majority
came about only because Dr. Alex Möller voted
as a favor to Mr. Wiedemeier, who at the time
backed the college out of Ulm local patriotism.
Now people rightly said that in this way the state
is being forced to pay for the keep of children it
has not begotten, and that a regular subsidy of
this nature might possibly lead other groups to
found similar institutes and then ask the state for
help when they were in financial trouble. I drew
 The rectorship of Bill Bernhard Rübenach,
Der rechte Winkel von
Ulm, p. 47.
“It’s remarkable – in the Could it be that a right Max Bill 1956.
white building on Kuh- angle is not only the Photo: Hans Conrad
berg, fear of the inex- basic architectural fig-
act, the vague, the ram- ure of the Ulm college,
bling or, geometrically but also the symbol of
speaking, of swelling their mentality?“
curves, undefinable
turns, appears to have
been replaced by wor-
ship of straight lines
and right angles. […]

178 Frau Aicher-Scholl's attention to this problem at
the time. In particular, it was explained that at the
time the DM 800,000 subsidy was requested, the
state was told the school would not need a reg-
ular government subsidy in later years. Now things
obviously seem to have changed, possibly be-
cause apparently Mr. Wiedemeier out of irritation
has negatively influenced certain industrialists
who’ve been making payments [to the foundation]
so far.” Paul Binder went on to say that he would
support the HfG only if the politico-cultural com-
mittee explicitly pronounced itself in favor of the
HfG: “I would do it with a heavy heart because, on
principle, I am opposed to institutes being founded
without prior consultation, institutes which later
Student life at the HfG, require a government subsidy. […] Mr. Wiedemei-
1956. er obviously has hopes of being able to buy the
and minister of finance Karl Frank took part in this 179
meeting. First, the result of the vote: With 10 to 7
votes (1 abstention) the committee voted for a
one-time subsidy of DM 200,000 in the 1956/57
budget – this did fulfill the foundation's wish, but
the vote was by no means decisive enough to
definitively sweep away doubts.
Up to that time the draft budget of the ministry
of finance included only the remaining DM 65,000
to which the foundation was still entitled. If a larg-
er sum was fixed upon, went the reasoning of HfG
opponents, they would never get away from the
subsidy. For the HfG would hardly be able to sup-
port itself, because it was a school and that is why
they'd always have to reckon on subsidizing it.
Doesn’t that also mean that if the HfG was no
longer to receive a subsidy, but could not exist

committee’s vote, which the latter had not fulfilled,
from turning to disillusionment to the detriment of
the HfG. The mayor did not shy away from somber
admonitions: “We must not overlook the fact that
many eyes in Germany and abroad look hopefully
toward this institution, nor forget the political as-
pect that if this institution is cut back, people
would say we are being reactionary – incidentally,
a word that is otherwise used far too carelessly –
and especially accuse us of being extremely con-
1956 metal workshop: servative”. 834
at the time, and besides the whole project was far
too ambitious. Moreover, there was no evidence of
positive achievements that might offer new ap-
proaches to home décor and to the formation of
taste – as an example they recalled the discussion
in the municipal council regarding the pavilion for
the Baden-Württemberg Trade Fair.
The FDP/DVP representative, who was commit-
ted to politico-cultural affairs, took up and pre-
sented Inge Aicher-Scholl’s argumentation that
the predictions of three years ago would not be

Left: In the 3d basic buildings cheaply one of these days to be used as
course, front left – a city of Ulm vocational school. […] I completely
Claude Schnaidt; agree with Mr. Becker that this type of school
Angela Hackelsberger needs to be set up in a somewhat freer form than
on the right. can be done at a state academy. On the other
hand I can quite imagine that the CDU [= Christian
Right: in the plaster Democratic Union] delegates are terrified of the
workshop, far right – somewhat romantic-looking artists with their cos-
Oswald Glean Chase mopolitan worldview, and that they are afraid that
from Trinidad. these efforts to create modern design may also
produce monstrosities, except that their success
Photos: Hans Conrad or lack of success cannot be judged for another
twenty years or so. On the other hand I can’t help
thinking that it would be quite foolish to drop the
experiment at this early stage of the game. For
after all we could demand that the previous gov-
ernment or the then finance committee look into
things thoroughly, so that the decision that was
made then rightly still stands today. […] By the
way, you did mention in your letter to the minister-
president that by the end of the first three years
the school would be self-supporting.”
On Friday, 29 November 1955, in response to the
9 November 1955 privileged intraparty motion, the
politico-cultural committee of the Landtag dis-
cussed the subsidizing of the foundation for
1956/57. Minister-president Gebhard Müller, min-
ister of education and the arts Gotthilf Schenkel,
without subsidies, it would be forced to close?
Thus, if the opponents of the HfG had been hon-
est, they should have stated that they wanted the
HfG to close.
The supporters refused to evaluate the HfG from
fiscal standpoints alone. They said the school was
indispensable, for the technical colleges and the
Stuttgart Trade Supervisory Office were not in a
position to create an institution that promised to
be as successful as the HfG. The HfG had a histor-
ic task – the continuation and development of the
Bauhaus. New design methods were particularly
important for industry. 831 – “At the same time new Left: workshop head Theodor Pfizer’s commitment was futile, at least true for matters that needed ten years to develop.
trends were stressed at the meeting. For example, Cornelius Uittenhout for the moment. For the finance committee of the Thus it was no wonder, he said, that these expec-
Gebhard Müller was far more lenient and ap- with students Franz Landtag, at its 9 December 1955 meeting, re- tations had not been fulfilled yet. That had been
proachable, and Frank at least no longer insisted Bullrich and Immo jected the request of the politico-cultural commit- the case with the Bauhaus, too, except that today
on his earlier reservations.“ 832 Krumrey. tee to make available to the foundation more than it was obvious how important the Bauhaus had
the remaining DM 65,000. 835 The result of the vote become for the modern world and what an impact
The HfG's controversial nature is shown by the Right: Uittenhout with (11 to 10) may be regarded as a fluke, but for the it had internationally. This tradition, which Ulm had
result of the vote. Incidentally, it is amazing that students Elke Koch- foundation this decision was the biggest political reconnected with, must not be broken off. The
Gerhard Storz (CDU), who later became the minis- Weser and Dominique defeat in its short history, even though that history construction of the HfG was finished in the rough,
ter of education and the arts, voted against the Gilliard. consisted of a whole series of ups and downs. It and this construction had demanded every ounce
HfG although only two days earlier he had per- meant that the majority of the finance committee of energy. That is why one could not expect the
sonally assured Inge Aicher-Scholl of his support – Photos: Hans Conrad endorsed the view of the cabinet and no longer same achievements in commission work.
“a change of heart I cannot understand, which can wanted to help finance the HfG. The representa- Especially interesting is his reference to criti-
presumably be put down to some unpredictable tives of the government stated in their reasoning cism which he claimed came from the “restorative”
minor detail.“ 833 that their fears in 1953 had been confirmed. The camp, to the effect that Inge Aicher-Scholl was no
Theodor Pfizer now did all he could to keep the interest of the private sector and popularity among longer in charge of the HfG and that the spirit of
high expectations placed in the politico-cultural students were not nearly as favorable as promised the school was politically suspect. People must not
 The rectorship of Bill
180
“Those, then, were the let this bother them, he said, for the motives of the
myths about Ulm: the White Rose continued to be relevant, and people
myths of purism, hostil- should not rashly cast suspicion on personalities
ity toward art, snob- who were victims of National Socialism. But that
bery, amateurishness, was exactly what was happening, and it was dis-
and the belief that the turbing. Parliament must not encourage such ten-
School of Design was dencies. – The majority of the finance committee’s
unique. Everyone knew members were unimpressed by these remarks. It
something, and no one is true that the one last chance the Ulm group still
knew anything precise.“ had was to persuade the plenary session to sup-
port their cause and to gain its support in the sec-
Bernhard Rübenach, ond reading of the Baden-Württemberg Budget
Der rechte Winkel von Law.
Ulm, p. 10. The gravity of the situation must not be under-
estimated. The documents leave no doubt that the
Photo: unknown active members of the foundation – headed by
Archive: Südwestpresse Inge Aicher-Scholl and Theodor Pfizer – realized
that once more it was a question of life and death.
Where was the foundation supposed to get the
needed DM 200,000 in budget monies if the Land
did not take responsibility for them? The federal
government still could not be considered as a
sponsor, at least for 1956 – if at all, it would be
able to make a smaller contribution distinctly less
than DM 100,000.
However, initial conversations with members
of the Federal Parliament’s budget committee
showed that it was just possible that in 1957 the
foundation might be funded with federal monies,
probably from the federal ministry of the interior. 836
Representative Georg Kahn-Ackermann (SPD) had
been active in Bonn trying to obtain another DM
100,000 for 1956 from the federal government,
but the budget had already been submitted to the
cabinet and delivered to the Bundesrat. 837
The journalist Helmut Cron, a member of the
foundation's administrative council, turned to Alex
Möller on 11 January 1956 and asked his advice:
How could the foundation's request once more be
made acceptable to the Landtag after its defeat in
the finance committee? 838 While Alex Möller was a
dyed-in-the-wool friend of the cause, he did ad-
vise the foundation to arrange for a motion by co-
alition groups. He himself also intended to support
the motion. He recommended that the foundation
use different arguments. The Landtag's consent
would probably be assured “if the arguments state
that the subsidy would be required for the begin-
ning years, but that as the years went by the sub-
sidy would decrease and finally be discontinued
altogether”. Even if the foundation knew full well
that the HfG would never be able to manage with-
out a subsidy, in the present situation he could
only advise that they “choose this form, because
otherwise the entire request will be jeopardized”.
The representatives, he said, would find the re-
quest easier to understand if it contained the
whole financing framework at the same time. He
recommended the following graduated schedule:
DM 300,000 this year, DM 200,000 next year,
only DM 100,000 in 1958, and nothing at all in
1959. At any rate he advised against requesting
money for this year only: “For in that case the op-
ponents of the project would immediately refer the
matter to the finance committee with the intention
that the issue would not be discussed during the
last few weeks of Parliament and thus disappear
from the scene.”
Inge Aicher-Scholl followed half of Alex Möller’s
advice. She refused to promise that the foundation
would soon no longer need Land funds. If in a few
years a different situation developed the founda-
tion’s credibility would be undermined, and the
HfG’s opponents could use the foundation’s own
words to discredit the whole project. No doubt
Inge Aicher-Scholl had a premonition that the HfG
founders’ original intentions would not be fulfilled
and that the HfG would be dependent on substan-
tial government subsidies for operating expenses
in the future as well. Nevertheless it would be
shabby to condemn Inge Aicher-Scholl for this.
Rather, we must recognize that she apparently dis-
covered that the politico-cultural reality in the Fed-
eral Republic of Germany put countless obstacles
in the path of the HfG that the institution could not
overcome. That was why the foundation needed to
adapt to these circumstances as well as possible
without allowing itself to be deflected, and above
all keep the HfG in operation. The mere fact that
the HfG existed was a great triumph. It would have
been a defeat if the original idealistic financing
concept had been uncompromisingly preserved
with the end result that the foundation soon failed
Visiting architects from
Japan at the home of
Tomás Maldonado,
1956.
Photo: Hans Conrad
and the HfG had to close its doors. But at the time
no one thought of this, perhaps not even the HfG’s
opponents in the government. Probably they were
speculating on adding a program and a complex
of buildings to the existing technical colleges at
a bargain price if the foundation had to close the
HfG. – The foundation did pursue the other half of
Alex Möller’s recommendation – to arrange for a
motion by coalition groups. On 31 January 1956
this motion was handed over to Parliament. 839 The
HfG promoters among the members of parliament
introduced a motion that the politico-cultural com-
mittee’s resolution should be complied with and
Above: A class with consequently the Land’s subsidy for the founda-
psychologist Hans-J. tion should not be restricted to the remaining DM
Firgau, January 1956 65,000, but rather should be raised by DM
200,000 to a total of DM 265,000 for 1956.
Below: Gustav Has- The motion by the HfG’s supporters was ac-
senpflug, director of the companied by a public appeal to the members of
Hamburg Landeskunst- parliament, signed by the most prominent friends
schule (in conversation of the cause, including Hermann Josef Abs, Otto
with Max Bill), January Bartning, Romano Guardini, Carl Friedrich von
1956. Weizsäcker, and Carl Zuckmayer. 840
However, even more important for the mood
among members of parliament was another signal
received from Bonn at this very same time: At the
end of January the cultural committee of the Bun-
destag had unanimously come out in favor of pay-
ing the foundation a one-time subsidy of DM
75,000 for 1956. 841 The head of the cultural divi-
sion in the federal ministry of the interior, Paul
Egon Hübinger, who later became a member of
the foundation’s administrative council, supported
this subsidy. (Of course the resolution still had to
be authorized by the budget committee of the
Bundestag.)
The decisive debate in the Landtag took place at
the end of the parliamentary term, on 2 February
1956. 842 The members of parliament had less than
three minutes to come to a decision about the
HfG. In this HfG debate the finance minister, Karl
Frank, was in a more pleasant situation than the
last time, 1953, when he had asked the House to
strike one item from his own budget draft. Now he
was authorized by the council of ministers “to de-
clare in the name of the government that we are in
favor of the government bill and ask that the mo-
Photos: Hans Conrad tion [he means the 31 January 1956 motion by the
parliamentary intraparty group; author's note] be
denied.” 843 The concluding remarks by Johann
Brandenburg (FDP/DVP) are typical of the attitude
of the majority of members. Only three years earli-
er the mayor of Pforzheim had voted against the
HfG because he had promoted the founding of a
school of design in his town. Now he spoke the
mind of presumably most of the undecided mem-
bers of parliament: “I shall vote for it today, becau-
se we started this thing and we have to see it
through. I do it very reluctantly.” Because he was 181
by no means convinced that the HfG was a good
idea, but did believe that it was necessary to pro-
mote design, he demanded that the minister of
education and the arts, Wilhelm Simpfendörfer
(CDU), create chairs for teaching design at techni-
cal colleges and academies: “The school must not
get a monopoly in this matter in Ulm […], for we
cannot live from a single source alone in our Land,
which relies on highly developed industrial de-
sign.” 844 – In Parliament there was a clear majority
(no roll call vote) in support of the appeals to hold
out that had been issued, i. e. in support of treating
the HfG pragmatically. Behind these was neither
conviction nor enthusiasm for the ideals of the
HfG, and therefore the foundation could not count
on a stable and solid majority (in case the latter
should continue in the next legislative period),
which would have been necessary for dependable
planning. The coalition group’s motion was ac-
cepted (and thus the government bill was re-
jected), so that after the first DM 800,000 be-
tween 1952 and 1956 the HfG now received an-
other DM 200,000 subsidy from the Land for
operating expenses.
It would be an exaggeration to describe early 1956
as welcome or successful. The foundation had
withstood the acid test, but without bravura. How-
ever, it had not succeeded in developing a realistic
financing scheme and in raising the necessary
funds, the present budget contained too large a
share of hope; as a result the foundation took the
risk of again being dependent on subsequent cor-
rections and emergency assistance, which bore
out its reputation that its financial planning could
not be relied upon. Now, as the spring of 1956
approached, there began a game of intrigue at the
college that gave the damaged reputation of the
entire project an added distinctive nuance. Even
as Inge Aicher-Scholl focused her entire energy
on getting the members of parliament to agree,
in January 1956 the atmosphere at the HfG inten-
sified. The general weather situation changed and
weighed heavily on the mood at the college for a
year until March 1957. It was not until then that
the situation exploded, and depending on the
observer's perspective this can be seen as a
storm that cleared the air or as a destructive hur-
ricane.
At the end of the preceding year, on 17 Decem-
ber 1955, student representative Immo Krumrey
went to Tomás Maldonado, the deputy rector, to
demand that work on the college bylaws be con-
tinued. Apparently the three committees of the
HfG undertook this job, but in the meantime the
initiative petered out, and a few of the seats on the
committees became vacant. Immo Krumrey there-
fore proposed that a special team be formed. 845
 The rectorship of Bill Inge Aicher-Scholl (to
her left: administrative
director Günther
Schlensag) explains to
students on 21 or
22 Feb. 1956 why the
HfG is separating from
Max Bill.
Photo: Hans Conrad

182 At this stage Inge Aicher-Scholl described the
objectives of the college bylaws from the perspec-
tive of the foundation: “These provisional bylaws
are to clarify how the college leadership will be
determined and what the areas of its authority will
be. There should be no doubt that the leadership
of the school makes completely independent deci-
sions on all educational and school-related matters
of importance. The college’s leadership shall form
a governing body that on the one hand will be
elected by the lecturers of the college, but on the
other hand must be able to function. That is why
there is to be a provision that after the initial elec-
tion of the governing body part of the RK [RK was
the abbreviation used at the HfG for the governing
board; author’s note] should be reelected every
year. Before making decisions on the most impor-
tant questions this governing board will have to lis-
ten to a group that may be called the “kleiner Kon-
“Silence. Surrounded by vent” (inner council). Besides lecturers this inner
space. Space – a stone council is also to include students and representa-
skin. It’s in the center. tives of the workshop foremen. At a general meet-
Halfway to the top. No ing, in which representatives of all personnel who
wallpaper. No picture. support the college have a seat, there is to be an
No scent. […] A cell, opportunity to express one’s opinion on all issues
architecture that makes that concern the college. My hope is that such
one focus on oneself. bylaws will prevent every kind of dictatorship and
Architecture that re- offer a basis for trusting collaboration by all.“ 846
stores order. That makes Here there was no longer any mention of a rec-
one lonely, forces one tor, especially not an authoritarian and autono-
always to start anew.” mous rector like Max Bill. His position was to be
replaced by the ideal of a collective, different vari-
Bernhard Rübenach, ants of which would be responsible for the various
Der rechte Winkel von tasks of the HfG: the smallest group (the govern-
Ulm, p. 18 f. ing board) for day-to-day business, the medium-
sized group (inner council) for more basic issues,
and the HfG at large for everything its members
wanted to work on. In the governing board there
was not supposed to be a primus inter pares, be-
cause the vote of the chairperson was not to be
decisive when there was a tie. Moreover the mem-
bers of the committee were to rotate every year.
The idea behind this was that the HfG could imple-
ment its inner freedom by practicing equality and
brotherhood – the more equal their positions and
the more brotherly their attitude, the freer the HfG
would be. It was probably Otl Aicher who brought
this radically democratic idea into the HfG. And he
was probably quite aware that these bylaws could
only be realized without Max Bill.
But how could the foundation get rid of Max Bill
again? He still had the power to dominate the day-
to-day affairs of the HfG if he was so inclined. And
the only clause in his contract providing for a dis-
solution of this relationship that was not based on
mutual understanding was the agreement to ac-
cept the verdict of an arbitration court.
But Hellmut Becker did not want to let things
get to that point. He had the following scenario in
mind: Max Bill, he thought, would write the foun-
dation a letter in which he explained that after
developing the institutions of the foundation he
now planned to devote himself to his free creative
work once more. At the present stage of the col-
lege's development it was appropriate that respon-
sibility would be shared, and therefore he wished
to be involved in directing the HfG only in the ca-
pacity of a member of the governing board. His
old contract outlining his position as the rector
and head of the department of architecture was to
be revoked. The new contract would be for one
year, i. e., through 31 March 1957, and after that
date a three-month period of notice was to be in
effect. 847
This settlement would have allowed all those
involved to save face, Max Bill to regain his per-
sonal freedom, and the HfG to have the indepen-
dence to settle its own affairs. However, Hellmut
Becker overlooked that Max Bill expected to be
remunerated for retiring after his work founding
the HfG into which he had put so much time and
Student apartments in
the high-rise from the
outside and the inside
(1956).
foto links: ernst scheidegger
foto rechts: Hans Conrad
energy, and which would not have prospered as it
did if it had not been for his personal contacts. It
went against his self-image to beat a retreat when
he had just won a victory as the glorious leader of
a small troop. All the same there was a possibility
that he might have been exploited only because of
his reputation. So that he would not be left looking
like a loser, he expected a high compensation.
Another reason for wanting to separate was that
it had become clear there was estrangement be-
tween Max Bill and the Aichers. As long as they
had had the common goal of setting up the HfG,
and as long as there had been enough obstacles
they needed to overcome together, their view of
each other’s character differences was obscured
or enhanced by the enthusiasm of working on
founding the school. Recently, however, it had
become very obvious that Max Bill's ideas on how
the HfG was to be managed were too different
from those of the Aichers.
In the events of the twelve months that followed,
which intensified into the infamous Bill Crisis in
March 1957, the protagonists appear to have com-
municated only in writing. The documents that
came from Inge Aicher-Scholl and Hellmut Becker
show disenchantment; in Max Bill’s letters there is
also disappointment, while Otl Aicher’s express a
sense that things were disintegrating. Max Bill’s
dominance, and finally his mere presence at the
HfG, was a thorn in his side. Up to that point,
though, there had been only personal discrepan-
cies and no material ones. In the course of that
year, however, it was precisely these fundamental
differences regarding design that became obvious,
Friedrich Vordemberge- raising the atmosphere to a fever heat. Whereas in
Gildewart with packag- the spring of 1956 an amicable settlement with
ing designs, February Max Bill represented the next stage on the road to
1956. final separation, a year later, in the spring of 1957,
Photo: Hans Conrad the situation escalated into a highly precarious cri-
sis.
On 5 January 1956 Inge Aicher-Scholl com-
plained that the rector had an overly intimate rela-
tionship with a woman student. She said she had
been approached regarding this matter by lectur-
ers and students and had gotten the impression
183
“that this undermines trust both within and outside
the college. I even feel that sooner or later people
outside will try to use this against us. I also don’t
think I’m exaggerating if I observe from all that I've
been told that there is definitely estrangement and
isolation between you and the lecturers, as well as
between you and the students.“ 848
If Max Bill would no longer continue in office as
the rector of the HfG because the atmosphere at
the HfG had changed, it would be possible to have
college bylaws that would really be to the taste of
a lawyer like Hellmut Becker. In mid-January 1956
Hellmut Becker set to work creating ideal bylaws
for the HfG. 849
For the leadership of the HfG he strove for a
structure that would provide more continuity than
one where the rector changed every year (the type
of bylaws common in universities), but that would
also allow more change than a structure where the
rector's position was permanent (the type of by-
laws used in technical schools). His solution was
collective leadership by the leading personnel of
the HfG. He tried to make this solution palatable to
Max Bill, for the rector would not leave office with-
out knowing exactly how the HfG was to be run
(after all, he had been one of the cofounders of
the HfG): “The whole world knows that you are the
school’s founder, but I would say that if the school
is directed by a single person, this would be in-
consistent with the whole philosophy of this novel
school. Also I keep getting the impression that you
do not enjoy representing the school in the outside
world, or conferring with committees, which I can
understand very well. I believe that at this point it
would be important if you were not regarded, as
 The rectorship of Bill
184 you have been up to this point, as being respon-
sible, for better or for worse, but rather that a col-
lective should run the school, so that you are to
some extent removed from your present routine.”
Hellmut Becker had other reasons for opposing the
existing bylaws: For instance, because of the pres-
tige involved, each lecturer would have the ambi-
tion to be elected rector at least once, and as a
result there would be wrangling that would cause
trouble. Besides, he felt, it was difficult for inde-
pendent-minded persons to subordinate them-
Walter Zeischegg,
February 1956.
Photos: Hans Conrad
selves to a rector. Also, based on his experience
during the school construction, he felt it was bet-
ter if a single person was not responsible for ev-
erything and everybody. And finally the existence
of a rector promoted the undesirable attitude that
those who were not part of the power structure did
not feel otherwise responsible for the HfG. “That
type of collective leadership would have the addi-
tional advantage that we would be perceived as
being different from the technical college with its
permanent rector and the university with its annual
change, and that it would become clear that here
something new is trying to find its own form and
internal regulations that are not based on tradition-
alism, antiquated ideas no longer appropriate for
our present-day social reality.” It is hard to believe
that Hellmut Becker was actually convinced of the
validity of all his arguments. The reality, after all,
was more complicated and human that his theo-
ries would have it.
Max Bill was not ready to listen to Hellmut
Becker’s proposals, and retorted that there was
already a governing board in place to do the HfG’s
day-to-day business: “You may be aware that last
fall, at the urging of Mr. Maldonado and in order to
be able to devote more time to the departments,
with the approval of the foundation's executive
board, I formed a governing board of which I am
not a member, but whose resolutions need to be
authorized by me.” 850
We have to imagine how impossible daily life
now became and continued to be until 1968: The
letters that circulated in the house became more
and more aggressive – and whenever people met
in the hallways, how were they to avoid each
In the 4th basic course,
1956/57.
Front row: Thomas Dawo;
back right: Bill Huff.
other? After all, the HfG’s small campus meant not
only that there was intellectual closeness but also
that people were physically cramped, and there
was no room to avoid interpersonal meetings.
Then, on 16 February 1956, Otl Aicher took the
initiative by writing to Max Bill. 851
He did not conceal his view that Max Bill’s tem-
peramental behavior – moody, unpredictable,
prone to tantrums – was as inappropriate for an
educational institution as for someone who was
the spokesman of a newly founded college in
meetings with representatives of the public, the
government, and the private sector. But he wanted
to be assured that Max Bill’s expertise and pres-
tige would continue to be associated with the HfG.
Otl Aicher argued that things had now devel-
oped to a “critical point”, and blamed the “present
structure” of the HfG for the crisis. Max Bill had
given the Aichers and Hellmut Becker a choice:
Either he would continue to exercise all power as
the rector of the HfG, or he would leave. Otl Aicher
now proposed a third alternative: “to maintain your
full practical influence, but to reduce the likelihood
of interpersonal conflicts to a minimum […]. You
say that the reason for the diminished trust in you
is that you have too little authority. I, on the other
hand, see the cause of the present crisis solely in
your ‘congenital defects’, in the way you deal with
people. This affects the attitude of the school to-
ward both the outside and the inside. I don't want
this observation to be seen as a value judgment;
all I am interested in here is that the school should
continue to function. And let’s face it, no life can
thrive in a climate of fear where people are con-
stantly wondering ‘what mood Caesar is in’. On
the other hand I do know how much the school
owes to your influence as an expert. My proposal
is that you no longer continue teaching, but stand
above it. Department heads would have to be
found for the departments of architecture and
product design, and you would have to take a
position that allowed you to work on your projects
in all departments with those students who are
interested. The unique and special nature of this
position would have to be explicitly emphasized.
The advantage of such a free arrangement would
be that you would always see what is happening
in the individual departments. At the same time
it seems to me that such a free way of working is
more in keeping with your creative work than if
you have to keep struggling with all the students
of a department, which regularly leads to conflicts
– I don't have to be a prophet to predict that. In
running the school, too, I feel it is necessary to
separate the functions into tasks that require deal-
ing with people and practical management. The
way I see it you should leave directing the educa-
tional operation and most of the work of repre-
senting the school in the outside world to other
members of the administration. The free exchange
of ideas and shared responsibility by all members
of such a committee, on the other hand, seems to
me to be a necessary requirement for the solidarity
of the faculty and for the reestablishment of mutu-
al trust.” Otl Aicher was too much of an “object-
focused thinker” (Peter Schubert), who sought
concrete specifics, not to have known that Max Bill
must lose his footing at the HfG the moment he
was no longer involved with the students in con-
crete, daily classroom teaching. When he pro-
posed that Max Bill should soar above things, that
meant Bill was to break away from the HfG. This
marked the beginning of the division of the core
founding group.
A few days later, on 20 February 1956, Max Bill
answered him in detail and frankly. His letter to a
large extent fell in with Otl Aicher’s hopes that
Max Bill would allow himself to be persuaded by
him: “There’s something tempting about your pro-
posal.” But a new leadership structure for the HfG
was only supposed to be tried out using an interim
solution before it could be included in the college
bylaws: “The governing board will be strengthened
and will practically be in charge of the school (col-
lective leadership!). It would still need to be decided
whether I will then continue to be a ‘figurehead’
rector. At any rate I would not be a member of the
governing board. […] I also believe that my effec-
tiveness would improve as a result. […] I must say
that this governing board has to a great extent
taken the load off me and that therefore the func-
tions on account of which I originally accepted the
appointment are either outdated or at least can be
Psychology lecture in
3d basic course, 1956.
Photo: Hans Conrad
carried out independently of me personally. My
prestige, which I brought to bear when I came to
Ulm and which was necessary for many things we
hoped to achieve when the work here began, is no
longer essential today. I therefore believe that I
could retire from the school today without detri-
ment. I myself have such definite opinions about
how a school I belong to should be run that I can’t
accept changes in the course I have in mind.
Under such circumstances it no longer makes
sense for me to continue to be responsible for the
Olivio Ferrari, Claude
Schnaidt, and Maurice
Goldring in a building
department class (Feb-
ruary 1956) taught by
Max Bill.
Photos: Hans Conrad
college. Unlike you I am convinced – and my 185
experience here has only confirmed my opinion –
that a school such as this, like all cultural things,
should be run only with authoritarian means. What
your proposal is really about – that is, if the exist-
ing structure of the school is to be changed – is
that my contract, too, is to be automatically can-
celed. I would appreciate if this could happen as
soon as possible, since cooperation locally is no
longer possible even today, and mutual trust is
rapidly dwindling. I think people in the foundation
should get the problems I’ve raised here clear in
their minds very soon and maybe, while they’re
about it, discuss whether in the future my work at
the school will even still be possible and welcome,
and if so, in what shape or form. […] From my
remarks you can see that I do not want to put any
obstacles in the way of a structural change that
according to you and many others who work here
is more in keeping with present-day circumstanc-
es. It’s absolutely not a matter of prestige for me.
I’d like to regain my freedom as quickly as pos-
sible, which would no doubt make Mrs. Aicher’s
work easier as well.” 852
Otl Aicher was glad that Max Bill seemed to
agree to his proposals. But in his answer to Max
Bill on 24 February 1956 he said he was not pre-
pared to have an initial preliminary trial period of
collective management. This trial stage was to
apply only to “the relationship between you and
the school, which needs to be redefined.” On the
issue of school leadership he urges Max Bill to
make “a clear decision along the lines of a man-
agement committee that guarantees shared re-
sponsibility. Here we have experience, which,
however, we lack as regards your new relationship
to the school. […] I’d like to thank you in particular
for the fact that there’s been no animosity in this
matter“ – this was precisely what he had feared,
and that clearly shows the attitude and relationship
of the college's founders toward each other.853
On 29 February 1956 Max Bill submitted to the
foundation a 22-point agreement that would de-
fine his continuing cooperation with the college
and be the precondition for annulling his contrac-
tual relationship of 4 February 1956. 854 Otl Aicher
had gotten his hopes up too soon, for in this out-
line Max Bill included quite a few demands that
were his way of expressing “animosity”. The first
four points concerned his position at the HfG, and
clearly show that he had not the least intention of
giving up his dominant position:
the HfG was to be directed by a committee that
had to report to Max Bill;
the resolutions of the committee were to be
subject to his veto;
Max Bill reserved the right to initiate proposals
in financial and appointment questions;
 The rectorship of Bill Bernhard Rübenach, “Admission to the col-
Der rechte Winkel von lege is an initiation rite.
Ulm, p. 37 f. The students give each
other haircuts. The hair-
cut is the first stage of
the initiation. A very
short haircut. […]
186 the administration would need to have financial
resolutions countersigned by Max Bill.
Thus while Max Bill would have given up his rec-
tor’s rank, he would have kept his fundamental
powers. And that wasn’t all. The foundation and
college were supposed to pay for Max Bill’s with-
drawal with some further substantial conces-
sions:
He was to be allowed to work together with stu-
dents and staff and faculty of all departments,
even with personnel from outside the HfG, in all
college facilities;
he would be entitled to three rooms that had
been provided for him as the rector, as well as a
secretary and an assistant who had to be paid
for by the foundation;
Günther Schlensag and
Max Bill, 1956.
Photo: Hans Conrad
all facilities were to be at his disposal: office
and apartment, including heat, telephone, postal
charges, plus workshop services including
material; finally the foundation was also to pay
travel expenses and cover taxes on these;
the foundation was to commission him with
architectural designs of all future foundation
buildings, while it would take care of supervis-
ing construction itself;
from all German commissions the foundation
assigned to him it would receive 30 percent,
while it would receive nothing from all foreign
commissions;
Max Bill and his staff were to be exempted from
contributions to the foundation for their work as
writers and freelance artists;
he was to receive a comprehensive right to
organize social and educational events, to criti-
cize the HfG and foundation publicly, and to visit
classes;
Max Bill wanted to reserve a right to veto the
HfG’s promotional material;
The second stage is to The last stage: to change
stop using capital let- your way of thinking. To
ters. Not for historical reassemble the way you
or linguistic reasons. It’s think and feel. Especially
more expedient. […] because there’s constant
The third stage is to pressure to give a reason
drop last names, the for everything (every-
burden of your origin. thing!). Anyone who’s
[…] been in Ulm has gone
through this initiation.
in return he would waive all reimbursement for
his teaching;
with this contract Max Bill was to be released
from his responsibility;
the contract could be terminated without notice
and only unilaterally by Max Bill.
Barely a week later, on 8 March 1956, Inge Aicher-
Scholl and Max Bill discussed the 6 March 1956
draft of the college bylaws (still called the “provi-
sional bylaws”), which Max Bill opposed. 855 This
draft provided for an organization of the HfG where
responsibility would be divided among two groups:
a governing board and a council. Overall, the radi-
cal-democratic ideas that had been talked about
as recently as the beginning of the year had again
been curtailed:
The running of the HfG was to be in the hands
of the governing board, which would comprise
a minimum of three and a maximum of nine
members. The first governing board was to be
appointed by the head of the foundation (that
is, by Inge Aicher-Scholl). Its chair was to re-
main in office for a year, head meetings, but not
be able to cast the deciding vote when there
was a tie. The members of the board would not
be able to appoint proxies. The head and the
administrative director of the foundation were
to be advisory members of the board but have
no vote.
The extended council of the HfG was to take
part in running the school in an advisory capac-
ity. It was to comprise the head and the admin-
istrative director of the foundation, all lecturers,
assistants and heads of workshops, two student
representatives, the managing chairperson, and
the administrative director, and had a right to
make proposals for all matters that concerned
the HfG. The governing board was to report to
the council. The meetings of the council were
to be convened and chaired by a representative
of the governing board.
On 14 March 1956 Max Bill and the Geschwister-
Scholl-Stiftung concluded an agreement that can-
celed Max Bill’s previous 14 March 1954 contract
as of 31 March 1956 “by mutual consent”. 856 The
two parties did not establish a new employer-
employee relationship with this contract: Max Bill
was no longer an employee of the foundation and
only on Kuhberg “as a guest”, i. e., as a “consul-
tant” of the head of the foundation and of the HfG
leadership, and as an “independent contractor” of
the Institute of Product Design.
The contract was a compromise for both sides,
for Max Bill’s maximum demands were cut back
while the foundation was forced to take a few
steps in the direction of the former rector:
Anyone who’s been
through it has received
a sort of secularized
holy spirit. […] Anyone
who’s been integrated
here will have a hard
time getting readjusted
to normal behaviors and
circumstances.”
Max Bill had the right to make proposals in all
matters that concerned the HfG;
he had the right to work with all students “with-
in the framework of the college's pedagogical
program. This work was considered to be part
of the students’ training and was to be done in
the departments of the college itself or in ven-
ues available elsewhere, within the college as
a rule”;
he was allowed to employ his own staff, but at
his own expense;
he had access to all rooms and workshops;
he was allowed to organize events as part of
the curriculum;
he received no remuneration for his activity;
only an architect’s fee would be due as soon
as he designed additional foundation build-
ings;
the foundation undertook to pay the expenses
for Max Bill’s activities on Kuhberg: It paid his
secretary and assistant; it put its administrative
services at his disposal; it paid travel expenses
and the taxes for the latter;
from all of Max Bill’s commissions that were
negotiated by the foundation, the foundation
received 30 percent;
for commissions that were not negotiated with
the help of the foundation, Max Bill kept all
rights and royalties, but he reimbursed the foun-
dation for any costs incurred;
the foundation received no royalties or rights in
the journalistic and artistic work of Max Bill, his
assistant, and his secretary.
The pictures show the
admission of the new
students in October
1956.
Photos: Hans Conrad
The contract was supplemented by three docu- 187
ments dated the same day: an arbitration agree-
ment 857 and two letters from Inge Aicher-Scholl to
Max Bill. In the first letter she confirmed that he
was to continue as the architect planning all fu-
ture foundation buildings. 858 In the second letter
she informed him that he belonged to the govern-
ing board as an associate member: “That means
you will regularly be invited with an agenda to the
meetings, and have access at all times to the
meetings of the governing board; you are to be
heard by them upon request. If a resolution is
voted on, you have the same right to vote as the
regular members. You are not obligated to partici-
pate regularly in the governing board meetings.
The same is true by analogy of participation in the
college's extended council.” 859
The entire contract still had to have the blessing
of the administrative council. 860
The end of Max Bill’s rectorship offers another
opportunity to assess this founding and develop-
ment phase from a financial point of view. Here a
“A hundred times, he’d
look up and see the
stool, that Platonic idea
of a chair: two boards
vertical and one hori-
zontal, all firmly dove-
tailed, held together
underneath by a round
wooden dowel. Stools
like the original building
blocks for this building.“
Bernhard Rübenach,
Der rechte Winkel von
Ulm, p. 26.
Photo: Ulrich Burandt
Archive: HfG (Depositum 32/1)
distinction needs to be made between two items:
The financing of the college construction on the
one hand was a priority during this time. It was
not completely successful and placed a burden
on the future, though that burden was not oppres-
sive enough to seal the foundation’s fate. The
foundation had debts of over DM 400,000, but to
offset this the value of its assets was consider-
able. Besides there was a short-term deficit of
almost DM 200,000 mark and a medium-term
deficit of an additional DM 200,000 for the com-
 The rectorship of Bill

188 pletion of the campus on the planned scale. – An assembly in 1955, 189
On the other hand there was the financing of the when Max Bill still sat at
HfG’s operating expenses. During this period, this the head of the table, in
political issue did not yet have the serious effect it the so-called bathtub:
was to have in subsequent years. – Of course both
items depended on each other, particularly in mid- Max Bill, librarian
range planning. According to the plan, income Andrea Schmitz to his
from student fees and rents in particular was to left, then lecturers
make up an important part of total income; howev- Helene Nonné-Schmidt,
er, this situation could only occur once there was Walter Zeischegg,
adequate classroom and housing space for stu- Tomás Maldonado, and
dents, and therefore the foundation had to try to Friedrich Vordemberge-
expand and supplement the buildings as soon as Gildewart, student rep-
possible. This in turn cost money that was not resentative Fred Hoch-
available at the time. But Inge Aicher-Scholl was strasser, architect W.
already counting on the planned number of stu- Florian Thienhaus, then
dents (150) being reached in the coming year: “It work-shop heads
will be necessary to finish the uncompleted parts Cornelius Uittenhout,
of buildings and to build the student dormitories Josef Schlecker, and
we had planned; if that isn’t done we can expect Paul Hildinger, con-
problems as soon as maximum enrollment is struction manager Fritz
reached in the fall of 1957 through annual new Pfeil, also Otl Aicher,
admission of students.” 861 Inge Aicher-Scholl and
administrative director
Günther Schlensag.

Photo: Hans Conrad

 1958

1 Jan. The European

Economic Community
and the European 1960
Atomic Energy Com-
munity are established. 15-18 April The first
nationwide Easter pro-
10 March Publication test marches.
of “Fight nuclear
death!”, a protest by 1959
intellectuals, politi-
cians, and labor union 2 Jan. Cuban guerille- 1961
members against the ros defeat the dictator
federal government’s Batista; Fidel Castro 20 Jan. John F. Ken-
plans to arm the Bun- assumes power. nedy becomes the U.S.
1956 deswehr with nuclear president.
weapons. 1July Heinrich Lübke
25 July The Bundes- succeeds Theodor 17 March Franz-Josef
tag adopts the intro- 17 Apr.-19 Oct. Brus- Heuss as the federal Strauß becomes the
duction of compulsory sels World Fair. president. chairman of the CSU.
military service.
13 May The coup by 13 Nov. A special SPD 11 April The trial of SS
17 Aug. The KPD is French officers in Alge- party convention head Adolf Eichmann
banned by the Federal ria causes the end of adopts the Godesberg begins in Jerusalem,
Constitutional Court. the Fourth Republic. program, thus becom- ending on 15 Decem-
ing a national party . ber with Eichmann’s
23/24 Oct. The Soviet The first riots by young death sentence.
military put down the 1957 rowdies.
popular uprising in 1June Birth control
Budapest. 1 Jan. The Saarland 1 Dec. One million TV pills are approved in
becomes the tenth sets are registered in the Federal Republic.
1 Dec. Full employ- Land of the Federal Germany.
ment in Germany. Republic of Germany. 6 June The minister-
21 Dec. Charles presidents of the Län-
25 March The Rome de Gaulle becomes der found the ZDF
Treaties confirm the president of the 5th (Zweites Deutsches 13 Aug. 1961
establishment of the French Republic. Fernsehen). Archive: dpa
European Economic
Community and the 13 Aug. Since the
Atomic Energy Com- beginning of the year, 1962
munity with France, 150,000 refugees have
Italy, and the Benelux registered at the 17 Aug. Peter Fechter
states. Marienfelde transit is shot as he tries to
camp in Berlin; in Ber- escape to the West
12 April Göttingen lin, co-lumns of Volks- over the Berlin Wall;
declaration by leading armee soldiers and left lying in no man’s
nuclear scientists People’s Police begin land, he bleeds to
against the plan to arm to build the wall by death.
the Bundeswehr with putting up barbed-wire
atomic weapons. fences and barricades. 26 Oct. The Spiegel
affair begins that night
4 Oct. The first man- In the course of the as police search the
made satellite, the year, the SPD dissoci- editorial offices of the
Soviet sputnik, circles ates itself from its stu- Hamburg news maga- 30 Oct. 1962
the Earth and causes dent organisation SDS. zine. Archive: dpa
sputnik shock.
28 Oct. End of the
Cuban crisis after
Khrushchev agrees to
4 Oct. 1957 U.S. demands not to
Archive: dpa station Soviet medium-
range rockets in Cuba.

The governing boards
March 1956 through December 1962
192 The members of the governing board did not wait
until 1 April 1956, the date when, according to the
contract, Max Bill’s term of office was to expire.
The board was constituted as early as 19 March
1956. It consisted of the same members it had
had since September 1955: Otl Aicher, Hans Gu-
gelot, Tomás Maldonado, and Friedrich Vordem-
berge-Gildewart; Max Bill was an associate mem-
ber. 862 Tomás Maldonado was elected chairman
for the period until the end of the current school
year (30 September 1956).
Friedrich Vordemberge- The board immediately (25 April 1956) passed a
Gildewart surrounded new version of college regulations, which differed
by his paintings, from the preceding version only in two points: the
14 March 1956. rector was replaced by a governing board, and the
Photo: Hans Conrad quarterly tuition fees of the students were no longer
a general DM 120, but fluctuated between DM
120 and 150. 863
Less than a month later, on 24 May 1956, the
governing board passed the provisional bylaws of
the HfG. 864
These bylaws were based on the ideas of Otl Ai-
cher, which had been given legal form by Hellmut
Becker. Because Max Bill had been a highhanded
rector, who ran the HfG as a ruler and had imposed
a hierarchy on its faculty, it seemed reasonable to
establish exactly the opposite of these conditions.
Despotism, the dependence of the HfG on the
moods of one individual, even a genius like Max
Bill, the fact that the foundation could be black-
mailed – the HfG’s bylaws were to prevent all this
in the future.
Otl Aicher’s vision of what the opposite of the pre-
vious rectorship would look like can be summed
up by the ideals freedom, equality, and brother-
hood. The HfG’s freedom from despotism and
highhandedness was to be embodied in the basic
equality of the lecturers, who were expected to act
according to the principle of brotherhood. Cooper-
ation and collegiality were to replace hierarchy and
hegemony.
Anger about one person, however, was a poor
guide in their search for new rules for running an
institution. For the powerful rector was now re-
placed by a powerless governing board. The order
of the HfG, which had only recently been seen as
confining, was now broken up in the new bylaws.
This breakup was not immediately noticeable, but
that was because of the persons who made up the
faculty in the initial period. But what if new lectur-
ers joined the faculty and fell out with the senior
lecturers, what if the faculty no longer lived up to
the principles of collegiality and cooperation?
Then the order of the HfG was at risk, and chaos
loomed.
If there is a point to the bylaws of an institution,
then no doubt that point is that they lay down the
rules for emergency situations. There is no need
for bylaws when everything is coming up roses.
But that means that bylaws cannot bring about the
conditions they take for granted when push comes
to shove, namely when there is doubt, dissent, dis-
cord. The bylaws the governing board passed on
24 May 1956 took for granted the collegiality and
cooperation of the HfG members because their
regulations were based on these behavior patterns.
That means that the bylaws were worthless as
soon as the lecturers no longer saw each other as
having the same rights and equal value, when they
no longer cooperated with each other, and when
they dragged the students into the maelstrom of
their arguments. And that means that the bylaws
were completely useless (because they were no
help when they were needed).
Max Bill realized that he had been given a pretext
when he was told that the “structures” of the HfG
had to be changed in order to do justice to a
changed situation. However, he saw that behind
this assertion were human and, increasingly, pro-
fessional differences. Otl Aicher also saw this, but
he insisted on the argument that the “structures”,
read: the inner order of the HfG, must be improved.
Probably the simple truth – “Unfortunately we
can’t get along with Max Bill” – would have met
with more understanding among the public than
was actually the case in 1957, for even though he
was held in high esteem, Max Bill was known to
be a difficult character. But Otl Aicher took the
constitutional way, the one based on principles.
He did not anticipate that this order could one day
be directed against his own person. When this sit-
uation did arise in 1962, again it was not as though
a clear separation was carried out by unpleasant
persons. Again bylaws were called upon to provide
a pretext for personal and professional differences.
Of course, in 1962 everyone was aware what was
really going on. In 1956 no one realized yet that
In class:
Tomás Maldonado
teaching his first basic
course (15 March
1956), Hans Gugelot
(30 May 1956), and
Konrad Wachsmann
(7 June 1956).
Photos: Hans Conrad
new bylaws would not alter human nature. As a
result Otl Aicher was suspected of not observing
the rules of a game he had set up himself.
The reason the HfG’s bylaws were called “provi-
sional” was that they regulated only responsibility
within the HfG for its operation as an educational
institution. Additional sections were to regulate the
HfG’s relations with the foundation and student
affairs, but within the framework of the by-laws it
never came to that.
As announced, the college’s administration was
now shared by two bodies: the governing board
and the council, which was broken down into the
inner and extended council in 1958. The governing
board constituted the school administration and
was accountable to the foundation’s managing
chairperson: an aspect that was not without signif-
icance, for here, too, one fact had been forgotten
– that Inge Aicher Scholl might leave this position
and someone else might take charge.
The governing board was to consist of three to
nine members who would be replaced from among
the regular faculty. The first four full members and
the one associate member (Max Bill) were ap-
pointed by the managing chairperson of the foun-
dation. The chair of the governing board was really
only a primus inter pares, for his was not the
deciding vote. Another thing that is interesting is
the regulation that seems to be tailor-made espe-
cially for Max Bill: “The governing board, with a
3/4 majority, may ask any member to resign from
the governing board; this request must be com-
plied with.” One wonders why this distortion of
the meaning of a “request” was found to be nec-
essary.
The council was to be the HfG’s parliament, which
would meet every month and have the right to
initiate measures “for all matters that concerned
the college”. The governing board had to report to
the council “about completing its tasks”. The
council could have had a say in faculty appoint-
ments (because there was no express regulation
regarding the question of appointments, it was
naturally one of the matters that concerned the
HfG) and could have taken the initiative itself, but
in actual fact the council met only once, on 13
June 1956. The following persons had a seat in
Detten Schleiermacher, the council:
1 June 1956.
Photo: Hans Conrad the permanent lecturers,
the assistant lecturers,
the heads of the workshops,
one representative each of the students in each
department and the basic course,
the administrative director of the foundation,
the business manager, and
the executive secretary.
This list clearly shows that the council would have 193
become a far too large and unwieldy body to be
able to develop initiative power.
By passing these bylaws on 24 May 1956, the
governing board at the same time gave itself rules
of procedure. 865
Incidentally, no one seemed to notice that these
HfG bylaws were not passed in due form. The
1953 bylaws of the foundation had expressly
determined, in section 13: “The structure and
organization of the school of the Geschwister-
Scholl-Stiftung is regulated by special school by-
laws that are worked out by the managing chair-
person and are to be authorized by the advisory
board.” However, in reality the initiative regarding
these bylaws did not come from the managing
chairperson, and they were also never authorized
by the advisory board. Quite on the contrary we
read: “Passed in the version on hand by the gov-
erning board at its 24 May 1956 meeting. Signed
Tomás Maldonado (Chairman of the governing
board)”.
Certainly it was not discovered until 1962 that
only a very small number of lecturers knew the
bylaws of the foundation. If Max Bill, a member of
the advisory board, had remembered this section,
the HfG might have found itself in hot water.
The new contract with Max Bill had financial con-
sequences for the foundation. At its ninth meeting
on 28 March 1956 the administrative council dis-
cussed these, and Max Bill put through another
small change in favor of the students – later it
became clear: in favor of his students. 866 The
share in commissions the foundation had granted
him was now 65 percent for Max Bill (previously:
70 percent), 25 percent went to the foundation
(instead of 30 percent), and the remaining 10 per-
cent flowed into the scholarship fund of the foun-
dation. The crucial clause read: “The decision as to
how the scholarship moneys are to be distributed
is yours” (i. e., Max Bill’s). 867
The representative of the federal ministry of
economics, Walther Hinsch, expressed his aston-
ishment and misgivings regarding the agreement
with Max Bill: “Whenever we discussed the found-
ing of the institution and its ongoing financing, we
always assumed that the institution would support
itself as fully as possible by means of paid com-
missions from industry. But if the person who has
been the head of the institution to date, and to
whom the institution no doubt owes many com-
missions it has received, now is given the right to
continue accepting such commissions and to
complete work on them in the institution while the
greater part of the income goes to Mr. Bill, then
this seems to me to be a fundamental change of
previous intentions regarding the financing of the
institution. Also I can’t quite see why Mr. Bill is to
 The governing boards
194 be allowed to enjoy such substantial privileges.“ 868
That was the financial price the foundation had to
pay for ridding itself of Max Bill. Obviously this had
not been made very clear to the members of the
administrative council. They swallowed the bitter
pill.
Presumably this was not too hard for them,
because at the same time a light appeared on the
traditionally dark horizon. Paul Egon Hübinger, the
head of the department of culture at the federal
ministry of the interior, had been vehemently fight-
ing to have a subsidy for the foundation included
in the federal budget. Theodor Pfizer therefore
invited him to terminate the interministerial agree-
ment and to take the seat of the federal ministry of
the interior, which had until then been occupied by
Walter Weißwange on behalf of the federal minis-
Max Bense and his try of housing construction. In this letter there is
panel “Freedom“, also an example for the official version of Max
6 June 1956. Bill’s departure: The foundation, writes Theodor
Photos: Hans Conrad Pfizer, has made an agreement with Max Bill “[…]
according to which Mr. Bill will in the future no
longer head the college as its rector, but work as
a consultant and freelance contributor. The school
is now directed by a governing board […]. This
change conforms to Mr. Bill’s wish to devote him-
self more intensively to creative tasks in the future
(which was hardly possible for him during the last
year of organizing the college), as well as to devel-
oping the college’s bylaws, a process that has
been going on for some time. I am convinced that
this new structure can do a great deal to help
increase the school’s productivity. We all realize
that by fall at the latest, new successes must be
produced if the school is to receive the necessary
subsidies from the Land and from the federal gov-
ernment.” 869
At midyear, the school’s financial situation remained
unchanged: The foundation estimated that about
DM 400,000 were necessary to complete all re-
maining construction at the HfG. 870 Of this amount,
almost DM 90,000 had to be found as soon as
possible in order to pay bills. Everywhere one
looked, things still needed to be installed and built
in: in the department of architecture, the basic
course department, the cafeteria, the plastics
workshop, the sanitary facilities, the rector’s office;
the total deficit here was DM 300,000. It is true
that the annual financial statement of 15 June
1956 included a good DM 75,000 in outstanding
receivables and promises of donations, but the
foundation tried to collect the major part of these
items for years until the accountant wrote them off
as a loss.
In this situation the foundation was forced to
economize ruthlessly. It did so, and successfully.
A year later it turned out that the 1956/57 fiscal
year had brought an increase in assets of almost
DM 100,000.All told this was the second best
result in the period from 1953 through 1968. 871
Of course that did not mean that the foundation
had liquid funds, but at least it had not created a
deficit – on the contrary, it had increased its as-
sets (an increase in investments and repayment
of debts). How can this increase in assets be ex-
plained? Unfortunately it was not produced by
additional receipts, but by the fact that the founda-
tion spent less money. Personnel expenses had
been a good DM 100,000 less than estimated, but
at the same time that meant that the personnel sit-
uation was very tight. This, too, came home to
them in March 1957, when many students started
worrying that hardly any lecturers would remain if
Max Bill and his faculty supporters left.
In the parliaments of the federal government and
the Land, the foundation now had a better status.
On 7 March 1956 the budget committee of the
Bundestag resolved to increase support for cultural
activities by DM 450,000 to a total of DM 1.3 mil-
lion. The HfG, too, profited by this, receiving a
budgetary grant of DM 75,000. 872
A day before, on 6 March 1956, the topic of
design or industrial design (referred to as Form-
gebung, since the term design had not yet been
adopted into the German vocabulary) was on the
agenda of a conference, in Darmstadt, of the
Arbeitskreis für Industrielle Formgebung im Bun-
desverband der Deutschen Industrie (Association
for Industrial Design in the Federal Association of
German Industry). It was true, they said, that there
was “a whole range of opinions about the best and
most effective education and training for design-
ers. At the Darmstadt conference the opinion was
even voiced that a real training was not possible
at all. […] In Darmstadt, arts and crafts schools in
particular were described as made for the job of
training designers“ – but this must not necessarily
be interpreted as a dig at the HfG.
For at this Darmstadt conference it was also
decided to present a fundamental petition to the
parliaments of all German Länder and to the Bun-
destag: “The good design of industrial products in
all areas – which must be achieved along with
technical perfection – is of utmost importance for
Germany’s reputation as a civilized country and for
its position in the world market.” There was not
enough young blood. That is why the members of
the association urgently requested that existing
institutes be subsidized and appropriate personal-
ities be appointed to teach at technical schools,
arts and crafts schools, or technical colleges. Only
in North Rhine-Westphalia, they continued, the
Landtag had worked on guidelines for arts and
crafts schools in February 1956 and passed them,
while there was a draft version of similar guide-
lines for Hesse. 873 Consequently the politicians in
the Baden-Württemberg Landtag also addressed
the issue of designer training, and that could only
help the cause of the HfG, for this time the impe-
tus came from a source that was completely above
suspicion – from industry itself.
The Landtag had, of course, authorized a subsidy
of DM 200,000 to the foundation for 1956. During
this debate the mayor of Pforzheim, Johann Bran-
denburg (FDP/DVP), supported the view that the
HfG should not be the only place in the Land
where design was taught. That is why he brought
forward a motion that was subsequently enacted
and decreed that the ministry of education and the
arts was to work out proposals for the 1957 bud-
get so that “personnel and the necessary material
resources would be available for teaching design
at technical colleges and/or academies of fine arts
as well”. This motion had the same intentions as
the petition of the Association for Industrial De-
sign, and that is why Johann Brandenburg was
Elisabeth Walther and
Ernst Scheidegger,
7 June 1956.
Photos: Hans Conrad
appointed as the parliamentary reporter for this 195
topic.
In mid-May 1956 Wolfgang Donndorf, the spe-
cialist adviser at the ministry of education and the
arts, brought good news to Ulm. 874 He had called a
meeting with representatives of the technical col-
leges and the academies of the Land in order to
report to the Landtag which institutions of learning
were interested in teaching design and what were
their financial needs. In the process he “discovered
that at the moment the technical colleges are not
particularly interested in setting up professorships
for design, i. e., designing machines or objects of
daily use, and likewise the Karlsruhe State Acade-
my of Fine Arts for the time being does not wish to
set up a special department or classes in industrial
design.” Only the Stuttgart Academy announced it
was interested, and was accordingly asked to sub-
mit a memorandum to the ministry of educations
and the arts. In other words, one might say that
the result of this discussion was that the HfG was
recognized by the technical colleges and the Karls-
ruhe academy as a training center for designers.
This meant competition for Land funds was no
longer as fierce, and an important argument of
those who looked at the HfG skeptically was invali-
dated, for it was generally recognized that the HfG
performed services that most traditional colleges
of the Land did not offer.
Of course, the memorandum of the Stuttgart
academy did try to justify its own need for Land
funds for design instruction by disparaging the
HfG. For one, they said, there was already a ten-
year tradition for what amounted to the teaching
of design (meaning that in Stuttgart they also had
Johann Brandenburg
(FDP/DVP) (24 March
1905–3 March 1977),
mayor of Pforzheim
(1946–66), member of
the Baden-Württem-
berg Landtag (1946–64
and 1968–76).
Photo: unknown (ca. 1955)
Archive: Landesbildstelle Würt-
temberg (LBW 73 / 41)
the necessary experience); for another, instruction
in Ulm was limited by the fact that no courses in
art were offered: “Occasionally the question has
been raised whether setting up a department for
industrial design at one of the existing colleges
has not become superfluous with the founding of
the Ulm school. The present remarks show that
this subject already has a half-century tradition at
the Stuttgart school, that industrial design has
again been taught here, even before the founding
of the Ulm school, since this school’s reestablish-
 The governing boards
196 ment in 1946, so that today all we need to do is to
develop this area of specialization correspondingly
by appointing a number of faculty and authorizing
relatively minimal funds in order to add to work-
shop facilities and to carry out experiments. […]
The type of training will be different in Stuttgart
than in Ulm, because in Stuttgart the training of
industrial designers goes hand in hand with train-
ing the students in the remaining aspects of the
arts.” 875
In order to defuse this description, Inge Aicher-
Scholl invited the special adviser of the Landtag on
design questions, Johann Brandenburg, to visit the
HfG. Up till then there had been no such reporter
for design; only Walter Erbe (FDP/DVP) had taken
on this topic because of personal interest and for
the benefit of the HfG. As part of the yearly “mobil-
ization” (Theodor Pfizer) for next year’s Land subsi-
dy Johann Brandenburg’s vote had a particularly
strong influence on the members of parliament.
Theodor Pfizer described in graphic terms how
important self-confidence and clear communica-
tion were in gaining supporters: “The deciding fac-
tor continues to be whether men like Brandenburg
get a good and especially a concrete impression.
False reticence, too much secretiveness, explana-
tions that the average person can’t understand are
out of place now. It seems the federal government
will go along with us if the Land in turn takes a
positive stance.” 876
Otl Aicher conducts the On 4 November 1956 Johann Brandenburg took
group photograph on the whole day to get to know the HfG. The visit
his wife’s birthday. was a complete success, as Inge Aicher-Scholl
Photo: Hans Conrad reported to Walter Erbe: “We were able to estab-
lish good rapport with Mr. Brandenburg, and I have
a feeling that he is quite impressed with our work.
Mr. Brandenburg said that he must now revise a
few mistaken ideas about the work of the college.
[…] We’ve already told him that it’s not exactly
beneficial for the work of our institute if year after
On Inge Aicher-Scholl’s
birthday on 11 August
1956 several well-
known pictures were
taken on the patio,
including this one
(dated by Hans
Conrad).
year the same difficulties come up when the Land
subsidy is granted, and if the ministry of finance
keeps trying to cut back. This year we requested
DM 200,000 hoping that we will get another DM
75,000 subsidy from the federal government.” 877
This hope was justified. The budget of the fed-
eral ministry of the interior for 1957 included an
item for the foundation (as it had for 1956), a sum
of DM 75,000. And the cabinet of the Land of
Baden-Württemberg did provide for a subsidy of
DM 180,000 in its 1957 draft budget at any rate.
Inge Aicher-Scholl relied on the fact that with each
authorized subsidy for the foundation, precedents
would be increasingly set for the future. As a result
the fundamental financing plan changed at the
same time. In the plans up to this time there had
been the promise that the financing shares that
came from private donors and industry could be
increased to the point where they would soon
exceed the public share.
In actual fact, however, the public monies were
already the pillar that upheld the foundation. And
in the meantime Inge Aicher-Scholl also began
naming the public funds as the school’s chief
source of income for the future. Hermann Josef
Abs, for example, who had been very important in
raising private and industrial funds up till then,
declared that he would be willing to renew his
support for the HfG at the Association for Indus-
trial Design in the Federal Association of German
Industry only if financing for the next three years
was guaranteed. This continuous financing could
be ensured only by the public sector. Inge Aicher-
Scholl therefore tried to reassure him on reliable
authority that the foundation had good chances of
getting such financing: “Now that subsidies have
been received several years in a row, we believe
we may assume that they will be granted in future
as well.” On the other hand, we must not overlook
the dilemma that federal and Land politicians
could most easily be induced to grant subsidies
The complete picture The people in the pho-
appears in: Christiane tograph are identified in
Wachsmann (ed.), the HfG-Synopse.
“Design ist gar nicht Photo: unknown
lehrbar“, p.46. The date
given there, however, is
the goodbye party for
Konrad Wachsmann in
the summer of 1954.
only if industry provided an adequate share of HfG
financing. That is why Inge Aicher-Scholl worded
her urgent request to Hermann Josef Abs as fol-
lows: “Provided that we are successful in getting
DM 250,000 from the industrial federations with
your help, I believe I can assure you with a clear
conscience that, at least for the next three years,
the college can do its work free from appreciable
financial worries.” Four-fifths of this sum, of course,
were still needed for the completion of the HfG
building. “That would mean the end of all expendi-
tures for the college building, so that only relatively
minor, ongoing additions would be necessary.” As
for the remaining DM 50,000, Inge Aicher-Scholl
wanted to use them as the cornerstone for the
construction of a second residential high-rise for
students. However, she had learned from experi-
The Landtag politico-
cultural committee
visits the HfG,
1 February 1957.
Left: minister of educa-
tion and the arts Gotthilf
Schenkel (SPD).
Right: Committee chair-
man Karl Brachat (CDU)
(24 April 1901–24 May
1971).
Photos: Hans Conrad
ence that this new building could no longer be
paid for exclusively with donations, but with a mix-
ture of the school’s own capital funds, monies
from the Bundesjugendplan (Federal Youth Plan),
American endowment funds, and a mortgage and
loan. 878
Inge Aicher-Scholl’s hope that the foundation
would be indefinitely endowed with Land subsi-
dies was confirmed by the politico-cultural com-
mittee toward the end of the year. On 7 December
1956 the committee once more discussed the fun-
damental question as to how design should be
taught and designers should be trained. The rep-
resentatives of the ministry of education and the
arts again submitted their draft, in which they
described their experience, drawing the following
conclusion as to how the Land was to promote
design: “The ministry of education and the arts
had emphasized that there were two ways design-
ers were to be trained – firstly, in a special inde-
pendent and comprehensive institute, and second-
ly in connection with an existing college of art. In
the case of the former, the ministry was thinking of
the college in Ulm, while in the case of the second 197
alternative they had in mind the Academy of Fine
Arts in Stuttgart. […] Next the minister of educa-
tion and the arts said that the question of designer
training was linked to the competitiveness of in-
dustry, including its competitiveness with other
countries. The rest of the world was far ahead of
[Germany]. The issue was urgent, and industry
had already seriously started doing something
about it.” 879
In passing, a short digression to the debate
shows the politico-cultural reservations that rep-
resentatives of all parties had toward the HfG: “A
member of parliament in the FDP/DVP thought
people in Ulm should get away from the term ‘col-
lege’ . After all, the school was an arts and crafts
school. […] A CDU member thought the name
‘school of design’ in Ulm had so far not been prac-
tically realized. The school must be given more
time to get rid of structural defects. The overem-
phasis on theory and intellectuality could be
explained by the period when the school was
founded . […] An SPD member asked whether a
designer should be trained according to Ulm no-
tions, i. e., as an architect of doorknobs and engi-
neer of chair legs; rather, wasn’t one forced to
combine design and practice? Finally it was de-
cided both to visit Ulm and to have a nonpublic
information session in Stuttgart.”
This visit by the politico-cultural committee took
place on 1 February 1957. And just as a few weeks
earlier Johann Brandenburg had been positively
surprised, so now the members of the committee
were convinced of the HfG’s promising develop-
ment. Many politicians had already visited the HfG
on 31 October 1955, of course, so that they could
now venture a comparison. An SPD member said
“his second tour [of the college] took a load off his
mind, and he asked whether they should already
begin gradually reducing the government subsidy
by 10 percent.” The committee’s information ses-
sion, which included representatives from industry
and the Stuttgart Academy, the HfG (Otl Aicher 880),
and the Pforzheim and Schwäbisch Gmünd techni-
cal institutes, was scheduled for 1 March 1957 in
Stuttgart. The politicians asked for answers to the
following questions:
How important was design in increasing pro-
ductivity and sales in Germany and abroad?
How necessary was it to design articles of daily
use?
How many designers did industry need at the
moment, how was this demand met, and how
would it develop in the future?
What recommendations did industry and trade
have for the training of designers? and
What institutions, in the opinion of industry and
trade, were appropriate for [designer] training?
 The governing boards
198 The summing up was very encouraging for the
HfG: Industry representatives felt that design of-
fered an important prospect for increasing exports,
but added that they had only a limited capability
for training the necessary new designers. That is
why specialized institutions for the training of
designers were indispensable: “Designers are pri-
marily artists, not technicians. Technical colleges
and schools of engineering are not primarily there
to train designers; that must be the task of special-
ized schools.” This is why the members of the
Carl and Alice Zuck-
mayer visit the HfG
on 14/15 Jan. 1957,
shown talking with
Inge Aicher-Scholl.
Photo: Hans Conrad
politico-cultural committee took away with them
from this meeting the realization that design should
be subsidized in Baden-Württemberg, and that
designer training at the HfG, the Stuttgart Acade-
my, and the Pforzheim and Schwäbisch Gmünd
technical schools should be supported and ex-
panded. As a result of the meeting they settled
on an appropriate sum, which they unanimously
passed in their 20th session on 8 March 1957. 881
Today we know that the HfG’s many visits to vari-
ous Land and federal politico-cultural offices and
departments were thus over, for the time being.
Inge Aicher-Scholl had reached her goal: Design
had become a relevant topic that was regarded as
an essential economic and cultural factor by all
sides. She had not reached this goal on her own –
let us remember institutions like the Association
for Industrial Design, the Werkbund, or the Design
Council, or politicians like Johann Brandenburg,
who had originally been interested only in Pforz-
heim. But the HfG was in more or less close con-
tact with all these supporters of design.
For instance, Otto Bartning, one of the founda-
tion’s trustees, was a member of the Design Coun-
cil; other regular members of the council were
members of the foundation’s administrative coun-
cil: Walther Hinsch (federal ministry of economics)
and Josef Alfons Thuma (Land Trade Supervision
Office, Stuttgart). Through Hermann Josef Abs, the
foundation had direct access to the Association
of Industrial Design, and several members of the
Werkbund were also members of the Society of
Friends of the Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung. On
20 and 21 October 1956 there had even been a
Joint meeting of the
Swiss and Baden-
Württemberg Werk-
bund, on 20 and 21
Oct. 1956. At the spea-
ker’s podium in the
auditorium: Max Bill.
joint conference of the Swiss and the Baden-Würt- 199
temberg Werkbund at the HfG at which all the
prominent people in Good Design with the excep-
tion of the chairman (Hans Schwippert) had ren-
dezvoused. Besides Max Bill and the philosopher
Max Bense (of the Technische Hochschule Stutt-
gart – Stuttgart Technical College – and guest lec-
turer at the HfG in the introductory program and
the department of information) Alfred Roth (chair-
man of the Swiss Werkbund) and Otto Haupt
(chairman of the Baden-Württemberg Werkbund)
had presented papers. 882
But the HfG had not only been instrumental in
placing design on the agenda; at the beginning of
1957 it was now one of the recognized design in-
stitutions. The subsidy itself to the foundation for
the HfG’s operating expenses was now no longer
an issue in the Landtag and the Bundestag (it did
not come up again until 1963); now the only focus
of discussion was the size of the subsidy.
After the unheard-of success represented by
the very founding and establishment of the HfG,
this parliamentary success was Inge Aicher-
Scholl’s second extraordinary achievement.
Photo: Wolfgang Siol have three reasons for describing this conflict in right “to work [with all students] within the frame-
Archive: HfG (56/0240)
From now until 1963 the political history of the detail: First of all, the Bill crisis for a long time work of the college's pedagogical program. This
HfG shifts into the HfG itself. After the battles with dominated the picture the general public had of work is considered to be part of the students’
the outside world had been won for the most part, the HfG, so that the memory of this crisis was a training and will be done in the departments of the
there followed a period on Kuhberg that may be factor that influenced the later development of the college itself or in space available elsewhere, as a
perceived, depending on one’s perspective, as one HfG. Secondly, many events were symptomatic of rule within the college.” 884
of consolidation and development or of permanent the attitude at the HfG, which is why these pat- Thereupon, on 6 April 1956, Max Bill posted on
crisis. If we look at the output of these years, these terns help to understand the school. And thirdly the bulletin board a call to all students who were
were the most productive in the HfG’s history. In there is still lack of clarity about the immediate and interested in working with him (instead of doing
every area – pedagogically, financially, and in deeper reasons that led to a separation between department work) to see his secretary Eugen
terms of personnel and structure – there was the foundation and Max Bill. To date only Eva von Gomringer. 885
expansion and intensification. Within a short time Seckendorff has given a brief summary of the Bill Three-quarters of a year later, on 31 January
the HfG and the foundation developed into institu- crisis, but in this connection her attention is fo- 1957, people noticed that on the door of the room
tions that were considerably different from those cused chiefly on differences between design the- where Max Bill worked with students of the de-
that existed in 1956. This qualitative transforma- ories. 883 partment of product design there was a sign say-
tion is also made clear by the recollections of for- The 14 March 1956 agreement between the ing, “No admittance except for members of the
mer students who, depending on when they stud- foundation and Max Bill stipulated that he had the atelier”. 886 No one knows exactly, but apparently
ied at the HfG, experienced a completely different
atmosphere. Max Bill in conversation
In the early part of 1957 one could assume that with Mia Seeger and
the HfG would develop along orderly lines. A Gregor Paulsson during
breath of normality wafted over Kuhberg: The fed- the Werkbund confer-
eral government and the Länder had agreed to ence.
provide continuous, modest subsidies; many pre- Photo: Hans Conrad
viously skeptical politicians who were interested in
cultural and educational policy had in the mean-
time become convinced of the HfG’s necessity;
almost all the traditional colleges of the Land rec-
ognized that the HfG filled a gap in the education
system of Baden-Württemberg – to say nothing of
the first internationally noted successes involving
products of the Braun company.
This was the calm before the storm that was to
erupt over Kuhberg in February 1957 with a vehe-
mence that shook the HfG’s very foundations. I
 The governing boards Braun‘s booth at the
German radio, TV, and
hi-fi trade fair in Düssel-
dorf, 26 Aug.–4 Sept.
1955, when “Snow
White’s coffin” was first
introduced to the
public.
200 “What is remarkable the sign had been put up only a short time ago.
about Ulm are its Presumably it bothered Max Bill and the students
taboos. Bill and the cri- that the other lecturers also came into these rooms
sis are taboo, as are while instruction was going on. What did people
politics and expression, find provoking? Was it the fact that they could not
style and eroticism. And enter Bill’s rooms during class, or that Max Bill and
art. He recalled that his students cut themselves off by means of the
missionary from Kuh- sign? That’s a matter of perspective. The fact that
berg, who said years either behavior could be seen as provocation im-
ago that [at the HfG] plies that neither side was willing to take things
there was still too much calmly and to compromise.
art. […] The most inter- The following week, on 6 February 1957, the
esting thinkers at the governing board (Otl Aicher, Hans Gugelot, Tomás
college are artists, or Maldonado, Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart)
former artists: Bill and had a discussion about this sign. 887 Max Bill was
Maldonado, his succes- not in Ulm. The lecturers of the governing board
sor […].“ decided on an energetic move: ”Recognizing a ‘Bill
Bernhard Rübenach, Atelier’ might mean, in practice, that we accept
Der rechte Winkel von a private institute within our institution. The exec-
Ulm, p. 50. utive board has decided to have said sign taken
down and asks Mr. Schlensag to settle the legal
side of the matter beyond all doubt with Mr. Bill.”
As I said, no one was willing to compromise any-
more. But perhaps this decision was merely in-
tended to be a test of strength to put Max Bill in
his place.
The administrative director, Günther Schlensag,
discussed the matter calmly with Max Bill on 8
and 9 February 1957. “Mr. Bill reasoned that the
term was a logical deduction from the contract
between the foundation and him. […] Mr. Bill stated
that from various indications he already had the
impression that there was the intention to get rid
of him, whereupon I replied that I could not share
The company’s booth at
the German TV trade
fair in Stuttgart,
31 Aug.–3 Sept. 1956,
with designs by Herbert
Hirche.
Photos: Hans Conrad
this view.” 888 “Mr. Bill then stated that he no longer
had personal confidence in any member of the
governing board. The only thing that still interested
him at this college were the students with whom
he was working.” 889 Günther Schlensag went on to
report that Max Bill had declared “he would leave
the college if the resolution of the governing board
was not revised”. 890 Max Bill thus took on the test
of strength, trusting that the HfG could not do
without him, the most renowned of its lecturers,
under any circumstances.
In fact the legal question of whether Max Bill
was authorized to maintain his own atelier at the
HfG was by no means the determining factor in
the attitude of the governing board, nor in that of
Max Bill. If this had been only about finding a form
and a way of describing Max Bill’s work at the HfG,
Max Bill and
Tomás Maldonado
in December 1956.
Photo: Hans Conrad
both sides would have reached an agreement. But
that had already been the subject of the 14 March
1956 agreement. The point of the latter had been,
on the one hand, to have Max Bill continue to
teach HfG students, and on the other hand to keep
him as far away from the HfG as possible. In es-
sence this arrangement was thus based on two
contradictory intentions. That was why Max Bill’s
interpretation was legitimate: “Mr. Bill’s position
was that according to the contract he had con-
cluded with the foundation he was not a faculty
member at the college when he worked with stu-
dents of the departments on practical projects.
While he was under an obligation to respect the
curriculum, teaching schedule, and general educa-
tional goals of the college, his work with the stu-
dents was not regular instruction, though the stu-
dents received class credit for this work. That was
why the term ‘Bill Atelier’ was necessary; inciden-
tally, the expression ‘atelier’ for a working team
was absolutely normal at other colleges and uni-
versities. If he was forbidden to use the term ‘Bill
Atelier’ by the governing board, he regarded this
as a decision that no longer permitted him to con-
tinue working at the college; there was only one
thing for him to do – leave.“ In contrast, the argu-
ments of administrative director Schlensag were
weaker: “I told Mr. Bill that there was no provision
for opening a ‘Bill Atelier’ in his contract with the
foundation. Also such an expression could not be
introduced by him without authorization. A specific
argument against the expression was that people
might get the impression that this was an inde-
pendent school within the college, and this should
be avoided. The training of students was part of
instruction in the departments, and in this respect
Mr. Bill was also active as a teacher, even if he was
not employed as one. The passage in the contract
stating that work with Mr. Bill ‘counted as instruc-
tion’ had been included because collaboration bet-
ween him and students in each individual case
was based on a free agreement.” 891
At its 12 February 1957 meeting the governing
board affirmed its decision: It was “unanimous in
its opinion that a ‘Bill Atelier’ must not be allowed
to exist within the college, since this compromised
educational unity”. 892 Otl Aicher informed Max Bill
of this decision, but at the same time offered him
the opportunity to give in: “The arrangements be-
tween you and the foundation laid down in the
contract shall not be infringed upon by this. How-
ever, the governing board considers it advisable to
clarify, together with you, any questions that have
been left open. I have been asked by the govern-
ing board to inform you of our decision and at the
same time to express the wish that you will con-
tinue to work at the college.” 893 It is hard to tell
Herbert Pée at the
opening of a Max Bill
exhibition in the Ulm
museum, 10 Feb. 1957.
On the left wearing a
scarf: Claude Schnaidt.
Photo: Hans Conrad
how serious this offer that they continue working
together really was. But if conflicting views on
design were indeed the real reason for the clashes,
as all those who were involved said a few weeks
later, then this offer by the governing board can
only be interpreted as a maneuver by the board to 201
keep all their options open in order to be able to
reassure the public that they had done everything
to keep Max Bill. The latter took the offensive and
on 20 February 1957 wrote a letter threatening to
resign: “I have taken a close look at your letter of
12 February 1957. I see in it the expression of such
great distrust regarding my work at the college
that I cannot help feeling that you believe it is bet-
ter if in the future you bear the responsibility for
directing the college yourself, and alone. I don’t
see any possibility of continuing to work at the
college if your decision is to be regarded as final.
I regret that you have a mistaken impression about
the meaning of ‘Max Bill Atelier’, but I am of the
opinion that other reasons appear to be even more
important to you and have induced you to use this
expression as a pretext for getting rid of my incon-
venient person.” 894
On the same day Max Bill had a conversation
with administrative director Günther Schlensag
and the foundation’s managing chairperson,
Inge Aicher-Scholl. She explained that the gov-
erning board had made its decision, and there-
fore proposed a separation by mutual agreement.
Max Bill asked for a week to think about it so that
he could discuss the matter with his wife. Until
then the two HfG founders agreed to observe the
strictest silence. 895
Indeed there was every prospect of keeping the
conflict restricted to the lecturers. But Max Bill did
not keep his promise to remain silent. He probably
felt his hopes were dashed and reckoned that his
chances would be good if he were supported by
the majority of the students and there was pres-
sure from outside. That is why he broke the agree-
ment and informed the student representative
Walter Schaer of his imminent departure from the
HfG. The latter immediately wrote a letter to the
governing board that at the same time was posted
by the student council, and asked for “a complete
explanation regarding the following question […]:
Is it true that Mr. Bill will definitively leave the
School of Design in the near future? […] We there-
fore think it is important to state that we are mere-
ly asking a question on principle, just as we would
do in any similar situation that could bring about a
substantial change in the structure of the School
of Design.” 896 The governing board still remained
silent, paralyzed by Max Bill’s beginning offensive.
The latter added fuel to the fire on 26 February
1957 with an answer that was also publicly posted:
“In response I’d like to say that since my resigna-
tion in the spring of 1956 I have been a faculty
member only in the capacity of visiting lecturer,
and that I am responsible for part of the training
only inasmuch as it takes place in the sector I
called the ‘Bill Atelier’. Recently the governing
board, during my absence, unanimously forbade
 The governing boards
202 me to use this expression. […] For me the Ulm
School of Design represents only one area within
a far more extended cultural program. Not the
school, but the personalities that come from it and
are shaped by it are the reason that since the early
part of 1950 I worked hard helping to organize this
college and trying to attract suitable faculty mem-
bers.” 897
But that was not all. Up to this point Max Bill’s
remarks could still be interpreted as parting shots
and last justifications of someone who was step-
ping down. But on 28 February 1957, in a letter to
Inge Aicher-Scholl, he reneged on the announce-
ment of his resignation. If he had spoken of separ-
ation, he wrote, this was to be understood as a
sharp separation within the HfG: “My atelier has
a connection with training at the college, and thus
with the college itself only in so far as the work
carried out by students there is recognized as
instruction, according to our agreement. […] The
‘Max Bill Atelier’ has nothing to do with the gentle-
men of the governing board; their interference is
unwarranted. My activities, referred to as the ‘Max
Bill Atelier’, have no other purpose than that laid
down in our agreement. The reason that a separa-
tion expressed by that term is necessary both for
the college and me personally is that this way nei-
ther the college has to identify with my projects,
nor I with the projects of the college. Added to this
there is the fact that I am not an employee either
of the college or of the foundation. All I want to do
at the college is to be able to work in peace, with
due regard to our agreement, without constantly
being disturbed there by a few troublemakers and
Left: Warren Robbins
during a lecture on the
history of American
jazz, 26 Jan. 1957.
Right: Sociologist Prof.
Pollock as a visiting
lecturer, 8 Jan. 1957.
Photos: Hans Conrad
envious people. […] As I already informed the stu-
dent representative, I wouldn’t dream of spending
my old age in Ulm. That means that I intend very
gradually to transfer my activities from Ulm back
to Zurich again. The basis for this is the ‘Max Bill
Atelier’, as a result of which, in the course of time,
I intend quite naturally to phase out my active
work in Ulm. I believe that such a solution is in the
interest of all those involved. I therefore request
that you take the view with the governing board
that we should fully adhere to our agreement; that
the ‘Max Bill Atelier’ should ensure and maintain
my independent work within the college at least
for the time being, so that I can continue to con-
tribute to and enrich the educational program at
the college; and that the gentlemen of the govern-
ing board should not apply different standards to
my work and their own, that is, that they should
stop regularly judging the work of students who
want to work with me negatively while they favor
their own students and their special protégés, a
phenomenon that strangely enough has become
a habit of theirs recently.” 898
On the same date, 28 February 1957, the con-
tracting parties Inge Aicher-Scholl and Günther
Schlensag on the one hand and Max Bill on the
other hand met for another conversation. But the
positions were now unalterable. Max Bill insisted
on remaining in Ulm, while Inge Aicher-Scholl
wanted to remain in control: “You introduced the
term ‘Bill Atelier’ on your own authority without
consulting the management of the foundation or
the governing board. By doing so you unquestion-
ably overstepped the rights to which you are en-
titled , since this ‘Bill Atelier’ is supposed to com-
prise your activity and your work with students of
the college within the college. […] Our agreement
with you does not stipulate that you maintain a
school of your own within the college; the students
who work with you do not, for instance, get a leave
of absence to do this work; rather, they are receiv-
ing their training within the framework of the col-
lege. […] Therefore I do not understand your re-
mark, ‘The ‘Max Bill Atelier’ has nothing to do with
the gentlemen of the governing board; their inter-
ference is unwarranted’. When you state that a
separation between you and the college that is
also expressed outwardly is necessary so that you
do not need to identify with the work of the col-
lege nor the college with yours, and when I am
forced to realize that you are making disparaging
remarks about the work of the college within the
college and outside it, I cannot see the point of
your continuing to work here. […] Under these cir-
cumstances one of the most important elements
of our 14 March 1956 agreement no longer ap-
plies. It is completely out of the question that, with
your attitude toward the college and its leadership,
you can continue to be the consultant of the col-
lege administration and of the managing chairper-
son of the foundation. […] Unfortunately I must
insist that the matter be settled at once, since as
a result of your statements the conflict has been
publicized within and outside the college, and I
wish to give an explanation of what has been hap-
pening as promptly as possible.” 899 That night of
28 February 1957, Inge Aicher-Scholl made a
statement, at first to the assembled lecturers and
the heads of the workshops, and then to the stu-
dents, giving a brief report about the situation
from the perspective of the foundation and the
governing board. Max Bill knew of this, but did
not attend. 900
The faculty and the student body of the HfG began
to drift apart into two factions. Even if the govern-
ing board was in the minority, they had a strategic
advantage because together with the managing
chairperson of the foundation they could legally
create a fait accompli. The philosopher Max Bense,
lecturer in the basic program and the department
of information, who like the photographer Ernst
Scheidegger and Elisabeth Walther (department of
information) sided with Max Bill, defended his
conduct and attacked the legal basis of the gov-
erning board: “At every academy and at every col-
lege there are such institutions [as the Max Bill
Atelier; author’s note], and that includes Stuttgart.
Over and above that, Bill is one of the school’s
leading founders, and after all he did define at
least the artistic and creative substance of the
whole school. As far as I can see there are only
two effective important contributions that were
represented and became influential in the peda-
gogical objectives of the school and that supple-
mented the former program formulated by Bill:
1) the organization of classes and the distribution
of subjects that was probably your work, Mr. Mal-
donado, and that gave and continues to give the
school a firm curriculum, and 2) my own theoriza-
tion of the established subjects and the scientific
fixation of the terminology necessary for practicing
design. My own theoretical goals, for instance,
would not have been developed at the school had
it not been for Bill’s theoretical goals and the pro-
ductions of concrete art in general (naturally I
don’t want to make an exception of your own and
those of Mr. Vordemberge-Gildewart). What I con-
clude from this is that the school cannot afford,
neither pedagogically nor ideologically, to allow
Mr. Bill to leave or even to resign. […] It is a fact
that Mr. Bill’s differences with the school, and my
own differences as well, were caused by the fail-
ure or nonfunctioning of the governing board,
whose task is to serve intellectual, not economic
or internal policy interests […]. I believe that the
continuing existence of the governing board is a
mistake, indeed, out of the question, because in
the board the administration and the foundation
presumably play a more important part than the
faculty, and unfortunately, as I was forced to
observe, internal policy and economic interests
have been better represented than intellectual
ones. […] There is no point in making a different 203
contract with Mr. Bill unless the bylaws of the pres-
ent board, which concluded the controversial con-
tract with Mr. Bill, are abolished and new rector-
ship bylaws are instituted (with a rector whose
term in office is to be one or two years). […] This
written statement is not intended to be posted on
the bulletin board.” 901
On 5 March 1957 Inge Aicher-Scholl tried to get
the situation under control by taking it out of the
HfG’s reach and placing it in the care of the ad-
ministrative council. 902 Max Bill on the other hand
made it very clear by his letter to Inge Aicher-
Scholl on the same date that he was not willing
to be forced out of the HfG: “Since I realize by
what means people who are only too interested
are planning to bring about the downfall of a cause
that is good in and of itself, I see no reason and no
possibility to resign. It would be irresponsible to-
ward all those who are still under the impression
that the college is intellectually a unified whole,
and for whom my reputation and my name guar-
antees the direction of the college. […] I repeat,
as far as I am concerned, all I want to do at the
college is to be allowed to work in peace, with
due regard for our agreement.” 903
Two days later “the students of the Bill Atelier”,
in a memorandum about “the general crisis of
confidence within the college” joined the offensive
against the governing board. 904 This crisis of confi-
dence, they claimed, had not only divided the lec-
turers among themselves, but also students on the
one hand and lecturers on the other. At that time,
it is true, a majority of students still seem to have
pronounced themselves in favor of Max Bill
Visiting lecturer Alexan-
der Mitscherlich (on the
left) next to Erich Fran-
zen, 12 Dec. 1956;
seated in front of them
is Claude Schnaidt.
Photo: Hans Conrad
remaining at the HfG, but in the final analysis very
few were willing to risk a split in the HfG. Of course,
Immo Krumrey, who had signed the letter for the
students who supported Bill, was able to win on
points: “In the written response of the governing
 The governing boards
204 board, there is a mention of Mr. Bill’s ‘school with-
in a school’. In this connection we refer you to the
wording of the school’s prospectus: ‘The structural
organization of the college is similar to a free join-
ing together of mutually complementary institutes,
studios, ateliers, and labs, as well as the work-
shops that go with them, for the purpose of work-
Konrad Lorenz during a ing together.’ The assertion that this must create
visit to the HfG in 1957, a ‘school within a school’ can therefore be applied
in conversation with to every other team of the college. […] If Mr. Bill is
Otl Aicher. forced to leave the school, we shall make the
Photo: Hans Conrad school’s administration legally responsible for the
fact that the prerequisites for studying here listed
in the school prospectus no longer exist.” Immo
Krumrey, too, used the situation as an opportunity
to demand that the HfG’s bylaws, which according
to him had caused the “crisis of confidence bet-
ween the school’s administration and the student
body”, should be revised: “One of the main rea-
sons for the never-ending crises and the unneces-
sary internal politics that interfere with studies is
without doubt the fact that the old demand of the
students that bylaws appropriate for the school be
established is constantly obstructed.”
Less than a week later the situation seemed to be
suddenly resolved. On Tuesday, 12 March 1957,
Inge Aicher-Scholl for the foundation and Max Bill
made a new agreement that would not replace
the old one of 14 March 1956, but amend it. 905
The most important stipulation was that the old
agreement was to expire “before the start of the
new school year 1957/58 at the latest”. Undoubt-
edly Inge Aicher-Scholl and the governing board
had successfully had their way. But again they
lacked the courage for a clear separation – the
final date was postponed once again. From now
on Max Bill was on the HfG faculty only as a visit-
ing lecturer. All students in his atelier would be
“The Ulm department
of product design is
probably unique in how
sharply its members
formulate [design] the-
ory. The method prac-
ticed here is truly
Cartesian: a method
that is exemplary of
procedures in this
de-partment and the
others as well. It is the
Ulm ritual.“
Bernhard Rübenach,
Der rechte Winkel von
Ulm, p. 42.
able to continue to work with him in Zurich until
they obtained their diploma; this counted as part
of the students’ coursework. And all other stu-
dents who had signed up to work with him before
the agreement was concluded could decide by 31
March 1957 whether they also wanted to com-
plete their diploma with him. Finally, Max Bill
received all rights to the work he had done for
the HfG.
In an additional agreement Inge Aicher-Scholl
and Max Bill agreed that he would step down from
his position as associate member of the governing
board, but in return was appointed to the board of
trustees of the foundation. 906
The next day, at 5:30 p.m. on 13 March 1957,
all lecturers, staff members, and students met
in lecture room no. 4 of the HfG to find out the
details of the new agreement from Inge Aicher-
Scholl, Tomás Maldonado, Max Bill, Hellmut Beck-
er, and the chairman of the administrative council,
Mayor Theodor Pfizer. 907
A rough draft of this meeting’s minutes still exists.
It records the discussion using direct quotes, and
is especially interesting because it is an unfiltered
version of the attitudes of the participants, and the
concerns and expectations of the students. 908
Theodor Pfizer opened the meeting and imme-
diately tried to pacify, to calm people down, and
to reconcile opposing sides. He did not refer to
concrete events, speaking instead of fate and inev-
itability, looking for meaning in all that had hap-
pened, but finally refusing to dwell on who was to
blame: “At this time, it is important for us – even
those of us who were not here in the initial phases
– to remember that the name of Max Bill is inti-
mately linked with the work here on Kuhberg; we
will not offend anyone if we also remember at this
moment that without his personality [this school]
in all its breadth would not have been possible at
all; that the work so clearly bore the stamp of his
genius. No one would have expected anything
else of such a personality. You all know (Bauhaus),
that it is precisely strong personalities like him
who at times inevitably leave the [work they have
begun], outgrow it – organically, I would say –, but
Students on the patio,
6 June 1956.
Photo: Hans Conrad
that this does not always happen painlessly. And
we [the members of the administrative council;
author’s note] realized that there was a meaning
in all this; and that the word blame is completely
beside the point. It would be a mistake to speak of
From the left:
Hans-Günther Sperlich,
Thomas Rago, Gerhard
Eichhorn, and Hermann
Haan in 1957.
Photos: Hans Conrad
205
blame – this is about fate, about a development
that claims its rights and confronts us with a situ-
ation we need to resolve.”
However, one of the students replied that there
was only one reason he had come to the HfG – to
work with Max Bill, and that now he was being
deprived of this opportunity: “I feel I’ve been
cheated and betrayed.” He expected a person who
was equally renowned to be appointed in lieu of
Max Bill. Theodor Pfizer had no choice but to re-
spond helplessly: “You wished to follow a person-
ality – and that is each individual’s inalienable
right. However, I believe no school will guarantee
that this person will continue to be your teacher
for the duration of your studies. So many students
lose the person they have chosen as their model
because he’s been hired by another school,
through death, illness, etc. […] And if I were you
maybe in the next few days I’d think about wheth-
er instead of saying cheated I shouldn’t say ‘bitter
fate’.”
In addition to asking about the practical conse-
quences for their studies, the students also wanted
to know the reasons for Max Bill’s separation from
the foundation: “One more thing, can you tell us
quite clearly why it is necessary for Mr. Bill to
leave? If you have a person of his stature, you
should make sure he stays.” But the mayor could
tell them nothing that made sense to them: “If
I read you an agreement signed by Mr. Bill and
the college, there seem to be reasons on both
sides that have made such a separation possible.”
A third subject was discussed – the students’
doubt whether the situation that had now been
created would be permanent. A student in the
basic program remarked: “I don’t believe that
these tensions [within the HfG during the last
months; author’s note] will decrease significantly
for the time being, because for us, the new stu-
dents in the basic program, there are simply a lot
of points that aren’t clear, and we can’t simply
ignore them.” Regardless of the causes of the cri-
sis and subsequent events, he criticized inade-
quate communication within the HfG, and was dis-
appointed that the department of architecture now
consisted only of two visiting lecturers (Konrad
Wachsmann and Herbert Ohl), in glaring contra-
 The governing boards
206 diction of the promises made in the gray prospec-
tus, which spoke of the departments of architec-
ture and urban development. So he wondered
what studies at the HfG would be worth in the
future: “Here’s the reason we’re worried: If Mr. Bill
Käthe Hamburger, 1957
Photo: Hans Conrad
leaves, there will be too few competent teachers
here, people who still give the school a good repu-
tation.” Finally he complained the governing board
did not treat students democratically: “Two meet-
ings were held, organized by the school’s adminis-
tration, and right from the outset discussion was
cut off, we had no say in it […]. Those are the
things where I seen tensions, and for the time
being I don’t think this business [the separation of
the foundation from Max Bill; author’s note] will
eliminate them.”
And so discussion had moved to a general
exchange of views about the situation at the HfG.
For student representative Immo Krumrey (the au-
thor of the bulletin board notice on 23 February
1957 and a student of Max Bill) this was an oppor-
tunity to accuse the governing board that it had
pushed through the college bylaws in the face of
student reservations and, after the bylaws went
into effect, had made no more efforts to keep the
exchange of ideas about the bylaws going. That is
why he felt the bylaws must be revised.
One might have thought that the atmosphere on
Kuhberg would have become less tense, especially
since it seemed as though everything had been
settled in writing and expressed verbally.
But Max Bill again took the initiative. He had
changed his mind once again. He had allowed
himself to be talked into signing the 12 March
1957 agreement, but how could he annul the
whole thing? He wanted to start with the next
higher level of authority, the foundation’s adminis-
trative council, to whom Inge Aicher-Scholl was
accountable as managing chairperson. Max Bill
had no objection to a signature campaign by his
students, which some described as spontaneous,
while others said it was planned. 909 The list of 52
signatures, not authorized by a student assembly,
was sent to the members of the administrative
council.
Soon thereafter, these gentlemen received a sec-
ond list with the signatures of 29 students who
were of a very different opinion: “Because of a
campaign by some of the students, who are gath-
ering signatures about the good qualities of Max
Bill and his remaining at the college, we feel com-
pelled to make a statement. We must assume that
the list of signatures is to be used somehow to
change the decision of the administrative council
regarding Max Bill’s position at the college. Since
in our opinion it is not the students’ job to interfere
in the business of the administrative council, we
would hereby like to express our confidence re-
garding the decision that has been made.” 910 The
tone had again become sharper, and the conflict
reached the outside world. The press, too, got
wind of the dispute on Kuhberg and demanded
statements.
Inge Aicher-Scholl wanted to channel the infor-
mation to the public and proposed to Max Bill that
they make a joint announcement. But Max Bill was
interested in causing as big a sensation as pos-
sible: “I am opposed to playing down this busi-
ness, because nobody believed even the announce-
ment that was made last year. At the time I felt I
should comply with your wish for the sake of the
goal we have aspired to. Today I know that this
was a mistake and that I have always been far too
tolerant of all those with whom I often did not
agree.” 911 It was important for Max Bill that the
public should learn that he had resigned “because
of irreconcilable differences of opinion” and at the
urging of the administrative council and managing
chairperson of the Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung
and of the governing board of the School of
Design”, both statements that Inge Aicher-Scholl
would have preferred to do without. 912 She did not
make comments that would have been effective
publicity in the name of the foundation, and con-
centrated on winning over the influential politi-
cians and lobbyists for her decision. Here she did
not mince her words, as the following example, a
letter dated 1 April 1957 to Günther Baron von
Pechmann, the founder of the Neue Sammlung,
member of the presiding board of the Rat für
Formgebung (Design Council), and chairman of
the Arbeitskreis für Industrielle Formgebung,
shows: “At the time I still hoped that Bill’s egocen-
trism would become more bearable and not inter-
fere with the development of the colleagues. I was
quite aware that it wasn’t easy to make up for
years of omissions, especially as regards hiring
needed faculty, within six months or a year. I had
always tried to conceal Bill’s flaws and difficulties
from the outside world, and all my colleagues at
the college had helped me do so and had for years
stepped into the breach. The fact that in the end,
over and over again, the only thanks they got were
arrogance, blows below the belt, and patronizing
condescension gradually destroyed mutual trust
to such an extent that at the end of this quarter I
could have had letters of resignation from all the
members of the governing board as well as from
the administrative director on my desk. That would
From the left: have been the absolute end of this school.[…]
Bruno Horisberger, During the five years we developed the school, my
Bruce Martin, and husband and I put up with Bill’s big personal prob-
Hellmut Becker, 1957. lems, which came up again and again, and we
Photos: Hans Conrad defended him against the world hoping that the
problems would be worked out once the team had
been formed. But to my great disappointment the
exact opposite happened. […] I realized that we
were dealing with a brilliant loner who either took
everything personally or else could not help having
a destructive effect. […] My idea of this school is
to gather a faculty of talented people and to bring
out the best in each. It was hard for Bill to tolerate
true talent next to him. Either they took him as
their leader and became part of his loyal following
– or he passed over them in silence, put them in
the shadow, and quashed them with paralyzing
criticism. […] None of us denied his skills as a
specialist and his artistic qualities, on the contrary.
I am sure we would not have kept trying for such
a long time to retain these qualities for the school.
But I have now become firmly convinced that the
college can truly develop and live up to expecta-
tions people have of it only if there is a guarantee
that those who are in charge of it can work togeth-
er as a team.” 913
Actually this could have been a beautiful and fit-
ting closing speech on this topic. But now news-
paper editors all over Germany really became
interested in what was going on at the HfG. The
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung led the fray: On
6 April 1957 Clara Menck, in an article entitled
Adventures on Q-berg, gave a long and detailed
report of her impressions and tidbits she had man-
aged to pick up during her visit in Ulm (what we
Werner Blaser and Max have here is onomatopoeia: Q-berg in German
Bill in December 1956. sounds just like Kuh-berg – the name of the hill on
Photo: Hans Conrad the outskirts of Ulm on which the HfG buildings
are located; literally: Cow Hill). This report caused
a great sensation, not only with both opposing
parties at the HfG, but also outside the school, 207
and that is at least an indication of the journalist’s
independence.
For a long time to come, this article influenced
public opinion about the HfG. In it the HfG appears
as a gathering of gifted and creative, but also
eccentric and esoteric prophets of a technologi-
cal age. Even the language used at the HfG is ques-
tioned, for Clara Menck finds terms like visual
communication and cultural integration suspect:
“To translate them as commercial art and general
education is a sacrilege on Q-hill. They tend to
use a secret language, the unavoidable teething
troubles of all young schools – especially if they’re
a twenty-minute walk from the end of the bus line
[a reference to the fact that there was no bus con-
nection to downtown Ulm; author’s note]. […]
Infected by the arts-and-crafts movement as one
is, one easily commits faux pas. The young man
over there is working on a vase? No (eyes roll re-
proachfully), it’s a study on unorientable surfaces.
(In such a case it’s best to act as if one under-
stood.)“ Following this smug introduction, Clara
Menck did offer a judicious and carefully consid-
ered description of the consequences of the Bill
crisis, and she even concluded her remarks on an
understanding note: “One may believe that Bill is
a genius and still recognize that he is not the right
person for teamwork; one can have a less high
opinion of him and one will still recognize his con-
tributions during the ‘pioneering days’ of the
school. […] This experimental character – not the
individual name – makes the school interesting to
the public, and important, maybe even indispen-
sable, for the economy. The crises and quarrels are
an inseparable part of this character.”
The local Schwäbische Donau-Zeitung printed this
article two days later and thus caused the conflict
in Ulm to escalate to a new peak. 914 Otl Aicher,
Max Bill, his friend Will Grohmann, and student
representatives Walter Schaer and Immo Krumrey
then contacted the Frankfurt and Ulm press. 915 The
time had now come for a clear-headed outsider to
point out to the squabblers that they were getting
nowhere and would sooner or later even hurt
 The governing boards
208 themselves if they washed their dirty linen in pub-
lic. Max Guther wrote to that effect on 7 April
1957 to Max Bill and the Aichers: “I therefore turn
to both you and the Aichers with the request that
you stop fighting in public. You're hurting not only
yourselves, you know, but the good cause per se,
and not just here on Kuhberg. You’re gratifying the
petit bourgeois, those stick-in-the-muds who
knew all along that this would happen, that things
would go wrong. You are serving and helping your
common enemies, the reactionaries, and you’re
hurting all those (including me) who fight against
Johanna Rösner, 1957. reaction and restoration of the old order in Germa-
Photo: Hans Conrad ny and other countries. […] And try, on both sides,
not to make the students who came to Kuhberg
full of confidence, often from far away and at great
sacrifice, suffer for the fact that your lives and
work have drifted in different directions. […] I am
shattered that the students are now beginning to
appear before the public with pro and con state-
ments to the press, I can see the exultation of my
former, your present, our constant opponents in
the city council and among the citizenry of Ulm!” 916
But since a public scandal was Max Bill’s only
hope of returning to the HfG, he would have noth-
ing to do with Max Guther’s request: “What’s hap-
pening at the college is not a family matter, but a
public concern. The article in the Frankfurter All-
gemeine Zeitung gives the point of view of a mi-
nority at the college that’s trying to keep the ma-
jority from being heard. I didn’t start this war, it
was unleashed upon me. […] Your suggestions
sound very wise when one hears them in the tur-
moil we’re in, and no doubt it would be the sim-
plest solution – for everybody including me – to
keep silent. But that’s no longer possible; anybody
who keeps silent now is a coward and a horse
trader and has shady dealings in mind.” 917
Reactions among the people who were important
for the foundation (members of the administrative
council, trustees, design specialists) were mixed.
On the one hand most of them knew from person-
al experience that it wasn’t easy to get along with
Max Bill. On the other hand they felt it was indis-
pensable that the HfG should be headed by a
famous man whose reputation would help it and
who would determine the course the HfG was to
follow. That was the reaction, for instance, of the
secretary of the Design Council, Mia Seeger 918, or
Walter Gropius. The latter wrote to Inge Aicher-
Scholl: “I am not surprised that the collaboration
with Bill has come to an end. I have seen that for
a long time because his character simply doesn’t
permit building up collaborating teams, and I think
it is right that you separate from him altogether.” 919
Roderich Count Thun, the managing chairman of
the Society of Friends, who was now also con-
cerned with limiting the damage, spoke of conver-
sations with Karl Max von Hellingrath and other
opinion makers from the Munich area: “Every-
where the next question we are asked is what
‘prominent person’ could replace Mr. Bill, and
most people express concern for the future devel-
opment of the school. […] Now that the students
have made foolish ‘statements’ in the press, we
are now paying the penalty for not having told
them clearly enough that the [school’s] new direc-
tion is definitive.” 920
Max Bill did not realize that the ranks in the
foundation’s committees were closing around Inge
Aicher-Scholl and were directed against him. Oth-
erwise he would probably not have slandered, with
a sweeping blow, the development of the HfG to
date, thus exactly confirming the accusations that
Inge Aicher-Scholl had listed as the main reasons
why a separation from Max Bill had become nec-
essary: He was unjust and he exaggerated, in-
sulted, offended, and disparaged as worthless
and harmful the work of lecturers he himself had
appointed. Thus, for instance, he tried to convince
the HfG’s mentor in America, Walter Gropius, of
the correctness of his behavior and of the corrup-
tion of the HfG, not knowing that Walter Gropius
had already pronounced his judgment. Incidental-
ly, another thing that is interesting about this let-
ter, dated 25 April 1957, is Max Bill’s statement
that the only financial future for the HfG would be
to nationalize it: “As was to be expected from the
very beginning (1950), the Aicher-Scholls began
their machinations to take over the college. They
could never get over the fact that I thwarted their
intention to found a ‘Geschwister-Scholl-Hoch-
schule’ (Hans and Sophie Scholl College), that I
declared I would have nothing to do with such an
enterprise. […] Now they’ve got an outbreak of a
pestilence that romanticizes technology, where
everything is important except proper training in
design. It is too complicated to list all the confus-
ing ways the sensible golden mean is being aban-
doned, only to veer off into arts and crafts on the
one hand, or the romanticization of technology on
the other. In Ulm they’ve got the same forces at
work that always attacked the Bauhaus as ‘out-
moded’ […]. Some time ago I realized that the Ulm
college in its present structure (especially when a
lack of funds = a lack of good faculty and staff)
must perish and that the only solution is regular
senate bylaws, so that after a transition period the
college might be affiliated with the Technical Uni-
versity as an ‘Institute of Design’. That would mean
there would be state guarantees, you could work
together with the other institutes and have more
freedom than when you have to suck up to every-
body, the way it is now. It would also mean the
Catholic family conspiracy of the Aichers would be
exorcized. […] I’d like to hope that in spite of the
conflict between the Aichers + school administra-
Tomás Maldonado,
20 April 1956.
Photo: Hans Conrad
tion and me […] Mrs. Aicher would still bring the
missing two million back from her trip to America
in order to overcome the financial crisis. Yet I fear
she will not get enough because of her sentimen-
tal twaddle, which has no practical meaning at all.
[…] Of course it is Maldonado who has the worst
influence – with his ambitions to introduce the
loftiest scientific methods he opens the floodgates
to a wretched dilettantism. […] On the other hand
the college has practically no commissions, except
for the one from Braun and others connected with
it. At the same time these Braun appliances are no
better than they would be if they’d been produced
by any old arts and crafts school.” 921
Walter Gropius would not accept these accusa-
tions and made it clear to Max Bill that he did not
approve of his behavior: “I am convinced that it is
the head of a team who is primarily responsible for
the atmosphere in the team. […] To my knowledge
you had a great deal to do with picking the faculty
as it is today. You yourself recently paid tribute to
Maldonado by having him publish a collection of
your own work, yet now you accuse him of ‘wretch-
ed dilettantism’. Also it is really not appropriate to
dismiss a personality like Inge Aicher as ‘senti-
mental’ – she supports her idealism with hard
facts, and she has raised the money for the school
and her buildings in an absolutely heroic fashion.
I wish I had had this woman by my side when I or-
ganized the Bauhaus. The thing that was appar-
ently most hurtful to your faculty – and I’ve been
told this by various people – was your interference
and your criticism of faculty members’ teaching in
front of the students. Are you sure you were not
too aggressive and sharp with your colleagues?” 922
The disputes now went on continuously within the
HfG as well. Now the occasion was the interpreta-
tion of the 1956 and 1957 contracts between the
foundation and Max Bill. The idea was to gradually
reduce Max Bill’s presence at the HfG and thus to
make possible a painless transition to his depar-
Konrad Wachsmann, ture on 30 September 1957. Max Bill, however,
October/November relied on a solid argument by means of which he
1956. wanted to make it possible for his work at the HfG
Photo: Hans Conrad to continue and expand. He had in mind the lists
of students who had declared in 1956 that they
wanted to continue their studies with Max Bill, so
that it had turned out “that of a total of 41 stu-
dents, with the exception of the graduating year
and the basic program, 28 have voluntarily signed
up for the Bill Atelier, while the remaining 13 are
distributed among all the rest of the lecturers”. 923
There were now differences of opinion as to
whether these students should be taught by Max
Bill in the facilities of the HfG or whether they
should travel to Zurich to see him. The foundation
and the governing board were of the opinion that
Max Bill, true to the sense of the contract, should
not work and teach at the HfG. If they had their 209
way, the result would be that most of the students
would probably not have Max Bill as their teacher,
for who could afford not only HfG tuition fees, but
also room and board in expensive Zurich?
In this situation, in which to all appearances the
discussion involved only minor contractual details
because the separation itself was a fait accompli,
a new campaign by Max Bill again ratcheted up
the tension. On 8 May 1957 the Deutsche Studen-
tenzeitung published a lengthy article about the
HfG with detailed background information that
could have come only from Max Bill. For of course
Max Bill had interpreted the report in the Frankfur-
ter Allgemeine Zeitung as a personal attack, al-
though the governing board had also energetically
protested against the report, and successfully
made sure that his perspective on things was now
published. The article College fires its creator was
even more momentous than Clara Menck’s report
a month earlier, because it provided the oppo-
nents of the HfG with ammunition for their future
attacks. In his rage Max Bill had not shied away
from passing on to the editor details from people’s
private lives and the history of the school’s found-
ing that appeared to have hardly any connection
with the ongoing crisis. Thus, for instance, the ar-
ticle contains the following extremely strange
remark: “Inge Scholl, who in the meantime had
married Otl Aicher, borne three children, and con-
verted to Catholicism, became the managing
chairperson of the foundation.” Regardless of the
fact that the derisive tone was totally inappropriate
and the chronological sequence was wrong: What,
one wonders, did religious faith have to do with all
this? Perhaps it was a veiled response to Clara
Menck’s report in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zei-
tung, in which she had written – though in a com-
pletely different tone: “The material Tomás Maldo-
nado drills in the ‘basic program’ (which all stu-
dents take for one year) is ‘lucidité’ that contrasts
with ‘Calvinist puritanism’ […].” The term Calvinist
could refer only to the Swiss Max Bill or the Swiss
students in the first-hour class.
Two more excerpts from this article clearly
show what kind of weapons Max Bill used when
he aimed below the belt. One segment about the
pedagogical structure says that Max Bill tried to
organize a basic program like that of the Bauhaus
and hired prominent Bauhaus people (Walter Peter-
hans, Josef Albers, Helene Nonné-Schmidt) as
guest lecturers “with whom he wanted to appren-
tice his future teachers in order to start training the
teachers for this basic course. […] The young man
who was slated to take charge of the basic pro-
gram after he had completed the lecture series of
all these guest teachers was Otl Aicher, then an
unknown young graphic artist who basically lived
on [the sale of] posters he designed for the Ulm
 The governing boards
210 Adult Education Center.” Because Otl Aicher sub-
sequently decided to enter the department of visu-
al communication, the article went on, another
faculty member had to be hired for the basic pro-
gram. On this occasion, Tomás Maldonado had
elbowed his way in. He had appeared one day in
1948 at Max Bill’s home in Zurich because he had
belonged to a group of young Argentineans “who
idolized Klee, Kandinsky, and Bill from afar by the
La Plata. Not blessed with worldly goods, he earned
his living sorting cotton.” – In another part of the
Left: Tomás Maldonado article the author speaks of the founding history of
circa 1957. the HfG and of the attitude the HfG’s founders had
Photo: Wolfgang Siol in the meanwhile come to have toward it: For years
Archive: HfG (58/0269/2) “the members of parliament had kept [clinging] to
the illusion that the school needed less money
Right: Horst Rittel, from year to year and would be able to be self-
1958. supporting – an account they had been given at
Photo: Wolfgang Siol one time in order to worm the first funds from
Archive: HfG (58/0358/2) them. […] But stranger than all this was the fact
that they were gradually beginning to distance
themselves from their own beginnings. When Bill
in a basic course gave a woman student the as-
signment to collect data on the college’s history,
the young girl’s paper did not include the very first
program that had been drawn up when the writers
Richter […] and Soehring were still on board. When
Bill made inquiries, Inge Aicher declared that such
a program had never existed. In order not to be
branded as a liar, the Swiss placed his own copy
on the table.” – The reporter’s conclusion was
obvious, and the way it was substantiated was
incontestable : “Bill alone made the ‘School of
Design’ what it is today. He condensed the un-
clear and vague, while certainly very noble but
somewhat romantic plans of the circle around Inge
Scholl into a concrete idea. The conception of this
school is his idea. […] Inge Scholl began this work
with the intention of creating a living monument
for her murdered sister and brother. Bill kept her
from doing so. […] A Geschwister-Scholl-Hoch-
schule with generally humanitarian and idealistic
goals would have succumbed to the first on-
slaught of the economic miracle. On the other
hand, an institute that could offer concrete results
for good money had every chance of succeeding.”
There is no doubt that parliamentary officials natu-
rally found this article “disagreeable”, and that was
putting it mildly. 924 Because the student represen-
tatives had sent the article with a complacent com-
mentary to everyone including the members of the
administrative council, Roderich Count Thun could
not help being surprised: “The ‘student represen-
tatives’ don’t seem to disapprove of the article in
the Studentenzeitung all that much if they are
sending it to the members of the administrative
council, as the enclosure says.“ 925
Now it was time for the foundation to rally its en-
ergies and resolve to take the appropriate meas-
ures to stand up to Max Bill’s aggressiveness. The
administrative director, Günther Schlensag, an-
nounced initial steps in his letter to Max Guther,
dated 17 May 1957: “Even Professor Bense, who
never approved of Mr. Bill’s leaving, is indignant at
the style of writing, and Professor Franzen […] has
[…] condemned the ‘fascist style’ of this piece of
writing. One wonders why Mr. Bill proposed ap-
pointing persons who are now characterized as
know-nothings, cotton pickers, and dreamers. […]
We assume that Mr. Bill will use the documenta-
tion for this article elsewhere as well. We must
therefore probably go to the trouble of summing
up in a memorandum the facts that led to Mr.
Bill’s leaving the School of Design[…].” 926
Roderich Count Thun felt this did not go far
enough. He had already been urging for some time
that somebody should put a stop to the mudsling-
ing – not only in the press – by means of a clear
and hard separation of the inside and the outside:
“But if we cannot immediately decide completely
to resolve matters internally, we will elegantly,
slowly but surely sink into the swamp of mutual
declarations of worthlessness.“ 927 Incidentally, he
wanted to withdraw from the Society of Friends
because he could find less and less time for this
commitment.
Otl Aicher and Tomás Maldonado felt time took
a wait-and-see attitude, for in less than six weeks
classes at the HfG would be over and the summer
break would begin. But Max Bill still firmly hoped
that he would soon take charge of the HfG. Per-
haps it was the calculated optimism he had spo-
ken of on 22 May 1957 to Walter Gropius, but per-
haps he quite simply underestimated the norma-
tive power of existing facts and the strength of the
connections Inge Aicher-Scholl and Hellmut Be-
cker had formed: “However, today I can tell you
that the feet on which the others are still standing
are becoming weaker and weaker. […] The col-
lege’s sole salvation is to be affiliated with the
Technical University as an independent institute
or to be financed directly by the government.That
has been my experience over the last seven years.
[…] The school in its present form blocks the way
to the school I had really planned. That is the only
reason that convinced me, along with the majority
of the lecturers and all the heads of the workshops
and 2/3 of the students, that we cannot let the
work be destroyed by a few individuals. […] Not
long ago I was ready to resign. There are so many
other things I need to do. But it would be irrespon-
sible.“ 928
Matters got even worse. In a notice he posted on
27 May 1957, student representative Walter Schaer
demanded that Tomás Maldonado immediately
publish detailed information about the continued
tenure and the composition of the faculty, since
it was customary at all colleges and universities
to publish lecture catalogues and changes in the
faculty at the end of the concluding semester,
“since individual students could not make the
decision whether they should stay on at the col-
lege or not until after the above questions were
answered […].” 929 When he received no answer
and the summer break began, he sent a memoran-
dum in the name of the student council, which he
also posted at the HfG, to the minister of educa-
tion and the arts. 930
Without even mentioning Max Bill, he adopted
the latter’s arguments and claimed that the HfG’s
bylaws were the main cause of the existing crisis,
from which he felt it had become impossible since
February 1957 for the HfG to extricate itself of its
own accord: “The crisis, for one, is expressed by
the fact that the students’ trust in the school’s ad-
ministration – the four-member governing board –
is shaken to a large extent, and also by the fact
that only a fraction of the courses scheduled in the
catalogue are actually offered and nothing is done
to remedy existing shortcomings. The primary rea-
son for this seems to be the bylaws of the school,
which have not been sufficiently thought through.
The four-member governing board decides not
only the organization of classes but also faculty
appointments or dismissals, while student repre-
sentatives and lecturers who are not members of
the governing board have no influence whatsoev-
er.” Walter Schaer suspected that the members of
the governing board were pursuing only personal
interests. As a solution for the situation he
demanded the following measures:
the resignation of the governing board;
college bylaws that would do away with the
governing board; these bylaws were to be
worked out by a five-member commission,
with the students asking to be represented
by two representatives who would have equal
rights as other members,
placing the HfG under government oversight
and transforming the foundation into a sponsor-
ing association.
Two aspects of this memo are of overriding inter- 211
est. For one, now that Max Bill had raised the
accusation of the family oligarchy, an important
polemical catchword had been uttered, one that
was used in the future by the HfG’s opponents as
well. In order to defuse this accusation (but above
all to professionalize fundraising and to improve
contacts with industry), Thorwald Risler was soon
brought into the foundation as the managing
chairman of the foundation’s executive board.
Secondly, those who found fault with conditions
Herbert Ohl, October
1957.
Photo: Hans Conrad
at the HfG always seem to have thought that (at
least partially) the foundation was to blame for the
Bill crisis, for the crises of 1962 and 1963, and for
the closing [of the college]. Isn’t it obvious to look
for the reason why the HfG was so prone to crises
in the very fact that the foundation existed at all –
i. e., the legal construction that differentiates bet-
ween the college and its sponsor? It is necessary
to go one step further and to inquire into the mo-
tives that impelled the HfG’s founders to divide
functions among two institutions. When I come to
the crisis of 1962, I will return to the subject again.
The open letter by student representative Walter
Schaer evoked the sharp reaction of the governing
board, which was long overdue because of the
board’s instinct of self-preservation. 931 With a no-
tice on 5 June 1957 Tomás Maldonado made it
clear he dissociated himself from all students who
would no longer rally unconditionally and loyally
around the HfG’s leadership: “This text attacks the
college’s governing board in an unobjective and
insulting fashion. Furthermore it demands that the
School of Design be nationalized. […] The student
representative and members of the student council
have gone far beyond the framework of student
self-government and assumed competences to
which they have no right. The administration of the
School of Design is not willing to go on tolerating
this kind of provocations. The governing board has
therefore decided no longer to recognize the in-
cumbent student representative and the present
student council, and to refuse to work with them.
Their posted notices will be taken down and will
no longer be tolerated on the college campus. The
 The governing boards
212
Tomás Maldonado, governing board reserves the right to undertake
1958. additional measures. The election of a new repre-
Photo: Christian Staub sentative and council who represent more than
Archive: HfG (58/0429/2) unilateral interests is left to the discretion of the
students of the School of Design. The governing
board will continue to cooperate, as it has done to
date, with all lecturers, staff, and students who are
willing to work together on the continuing devel-
opment of the School of Design.” One week later
the governing board handed out questionnaires in
which all students had to disclose definitively
whether they intended to study with Max Bill and
complete their diploma. 932 Only a fraction of the
students – four – now decided for Max Bill; in the
end, eight students finished their HfG studies with
him in Zurich. 933
That settled the conflict. Now the matter still
had to go through the maze of bureaucracy: On
28 June 1957 Wolfgang Donndorf and Günter von
Alberti met with the new student representative,
Bertus Mulder, the successor of Walter Schaer,
who had been removed from office, Herbert Lin-
dinger, and Immo Krumrey (the former had until
“Integration and grid
and prefabricated ele-
ment are basic ideas of
the Ulm School of
Design that appear in a
large number of varia-
tions in all departments;
these basic ideas make
it possible to go beyond
design based on “stud-
ying the essence of the
then sided with the executive board, while the
other had been on Max Bill’s side). 934 The result
was as objective as the tone of the conversation,
and that left room for future conciliation: “All three
students declared unanimously that they were no
longer interested in the ‘Bill affair’, but solely in
creating certain principles of order that had hither-
to been lacking. […] To sum up, everyone realized
that while opinions about the events of the past
are divided, there is for the most part agreement
about the direction we need to go in the future.”
The Bill affair was thus no longer under discussion,
and this could not be altered by the fact that Max
Bill sank so low as to threaten Wolfgang Donndorf
quite unnecessarily: “In cases where I’m involved
you must in the future find arguments that are less
incriminating for you than the ones you’ve used up
till now, or else I’ll be forced to put you on the list
of those with whom I’ll have to unavoidably settle
accounts one of these days.“ 935
The air had been cleared, and the new academic
year (1957/58) began on 3 October 1957. The gov-
material” as taught at the unimaginativeness Bernhard Rübenach,
the Bauhaus, and to and pseudomodernity Der rechte Winkel von
arrive at the mathemati- that divides up the Ulm, p. 49.
cal combination and façades of insurance
variation of objective and bank high-rises
dimensions. We need with a ruler into identi-
to clear up a misunder- cal little boxes.“
standing: Grid, as used
by Ulm designers, must
not be confused with
erning board, as before, consisted of Tomás Mal-
donado (chairman), Otl Aicher, Hans Gugelot, and
Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart.
The Bill crisis was thus over. It had taken up the
entire year, and the sacrifices it had cost all those
who were involved must have become obvious.
But the end of the conflict did not mean it was
finally laid to rest: It remained in the HfG’s memory
as a traumatic experience.
In contrast to Horst Rittel, who asserted in 1962
that the HfG did not have a collective memory, one
might well state that all subsequent conflicts were
compared to the Bill crisis and that this crisis was
conjured up as the most dangerous phase in the
HfG’s history.
In 1957 the course of the HfG’s further develop-
ment was set in a second, totally different area.
This involved the financing of the HfG and the
question as to how the foundation could obtain
new money from private sources. This question
had important consequences for the inner organ-
ization of the foundation and the HfG.
Shortly after the worst of the Bill crisis was over,
Inge Aicher-Scholl left on a five-week trip to the
United States that had been in the planning for
some time. Her goal was to collect money from
large and small foundations. She also planned to
make new contacts and to cultivate old acquain-
tanceships.
That was why she visited many universities and
private persons and gave lectures about the HfG.
Well-known names such as Josef Albers, Fred
Burckhardt, Walter Gropius, John McCloy, Herbert
Hans Gugelot and
Otl Aicher, 1958.
Photo: Wolfgang Siol
Archive: HfG (58/0415)
Read, James Morgan Read, Shepard Stone, or the
Zuckmayers surfaced again in this connection. If
we think of the foundation’s chronic lack of money
and expectations of a second American shower of
donations Inge Aicher-Scholl may have had when
she set out, this trip was a flop. At least, she said
nothing about direct financial contributions. 936
The American funds would have been intended
to provide fresh capital for the construction of the
remaining residential buildings. Inge Aicher-Scholl
had done the following calculations:
The second high-rise dorm for about 40 stu- 213
dents: DM 290,000 ,
the third high-rise dorm for about 50 students:
DM 350,000,
6 residential buildings for lecturers with fami-
lies: DM 200,000.
In toto, the foundation thus required DM 840,000
so that the HfG campus would be completed as
originally projected by Max Bill and presented to
all agencies. Here is how she imagined the financ-
ing of these buildings:
DM 100,000 of the foundation’s own assets
(still to be raised),
DM 150,000 American and German donations,
DM 130,000 Bundesjugendplan (Federal Youth
Plan),
DM 280,000 mortgage,
DM 280,000 loan from the Landeskreditanstalt
(Land Bank).
That was a total of DM 940,000. Thus the plan
included a DM 100,000 reserve. 937
But new construction was precisely what the
American foundations did not wish to fund. Ap-
parently the only chance of receiving a sizable sum
was to add a new institute to the HfG. During her
visit at Princeton Inge Aicher-Scholl among other
things became acquainted with the Perception
Demonstration Center.
In her report to the administrative council this
was the moment she first suggested that the HfG
was planning to set up a comprehensive institute
of communication and information: “The research
done by Centril [Professor Hadley Centril, a social
psychologist, head of the Perception Demonstra-
tion Center; author’s note] and the short contact
we were able to have with it was one of the
strongest and most interesting experiences of my
US trip this year, particularly because the results of
his research seem to be extremely important for
the work of our visual communication department,
but also for the department of product design.
There is something so revolutionary about [this
research] that a school involved in giving creative
form to our environment and in modern visual
means of communication should study it inten-
sively and have a critical look at it.” When she vis-
ited the Ford Foundation, Shepard Stone again
explained that his organization did not finance
buildings. “On the other hand he was very inter-
ested in our plan of an institute of communication
and information. We had several in-depth conver-
sations about it, and he finally declared quite un-
mistakably that it might be possible to interest the
Ford Foundation in the financing of the startup
period of this institute (we spoke of 3–5 years).
We gave him a memorandum about it, with a
 The governing boards
214 financing plan […].” At the Rockefeller Foundation,
too, Inge Aicher-Scholl’s request for financial sup-
port to build the high-rise student residence fell on
deaf ears: “It was only when we mentioned the
plan for an institute of communication and infor-
mation that he became interested.”
Inge Aicher-Scholl again faced a dilemma. Either
she went along with the interest of the American
foundations and agreed to expand the HfG by a
new institute, for which the foundations presum-
ably gave money. Or she did without this money
and concentrated on obtaining the urgently needed
funds for finish work on the existing campus build-
ings and new construction of the residential high-
rise and the lecturers’ apartments from other places.
Both held opportunities and risks.
A new institute whose financing initially cost the
foundation nothing might open up new sources of
commissions, increase the attractiveness of the
entire HfG to the economy, and add to its signifi-
cance in the view of politicians who dealt with cul-
tural policies. But it might also divert energies from
the already established departments, which of
course were still growing. On the other hand it
would have been a sign of solid financial planning
first to complete what they had started, in other
words, to take care of finish work and ongoing
construction.
Left: Dieter Östreich,
1958.
Photo: Hans Conrad
Right: Siegfried Haenle,
1958.
Photo: Wolfgang Siol
Archive: HfG (58/0312)
When the governing board met from 12 through
14 July 1957, it dealt with the following question
that concerned the basic pedagogical and organ-
izational structure of the HfG. Until that time the
way things had been done was that the foundation
passed on commissions from the private sector
directly to the HfG; there, the governing board dis-
tributed them to be worked on by the correspond-
ing departments and lecturers. That is, work on a
commission was the subject of the classes of stu-
dents who had successfully completed the basic
program and, with their second year at the college,
had entered one of the departments. Such classes
were called departmental work.
Now the governing board decided on a new
structure: “The work in the departments is being
relieved of the burden of the commission system
as it has existed to date. Instead, we are organiz-
ing the following institutes and development of-
fices, which will at the same time be in a position
to undertake larger projects (development pro-
jects, investigation and research projects):
a) Institute of Product Design: starting 1 October
1957 with the assistance of Gugelot, Leowald,
Zeischegg,
b) Institute of Communication: scheduled to begin
work later, for the time being its work is being
done by the
c) Development Office (‘Development of Visual
Communication’), which is later to continue in
existence in addition to the institute. It is in
charge of organizing the ‘Institute of Commu-
nication’,
d) Institute of Industrialized Building: here the per-
sonnel question is still open, and thus its organ-
ization is still unclear. In addition to this there is
e) the ‘Building Development’.
All commissions go to the institutes and develop-
ments [this means the development groups; au-
thor’s note], detail commissions may be passed on
from there to the departments in so far as they can
be handled in the classes. All lecturers have the
right to work in the ‘institutes’ and ‘development
groups’. Orders are routed through the senate or
possibly a special topic commission, which makes
sure that only those orders are accepted that are
of significance for the development of the college.
Only students who have degrees work in the insti-
tutes and development groups, plus freelance con-
tractors in exceptional cases.”
This new organizational plan was in accordance
with Otl Aicher’s old idea of combining theory and
practice in development work. With the new plan
the goal had now been defined: As the years went
by a separate institute would be set up for each
department and would be able to deal with com-
mercial orders. The only function of the develop-
ment offices, which were each headed by a lectur-
er and (as so-called development groups) were
numbered consecutively, was to organize the insti-
tutes with which the groups overlapped. That also
meant that several offices or groups could be com-
bined in one institute. The reason this is important
is that Inge Aicher-Scholl’s suggestion that an
institute of perception phenomena be founded at
the HfG with the help of American funds fit in per-
fectly with this overall plan.
Walter Zeischegg,
1958.
Photo: Wolfgang Siol
Archive: HfG (58/0339)
Incidentally, not all lecturers agreed to this plan.
For instance, while the governing board had hoped
Konrad Wachsmann would set up the Institute of
Industrialized Building, he was not willing to do so.
He announced that he would leave if such plans
were implemented. However, after laconically
weighing the pros and cons in the governing
board, members made the following decision:
“Arguments against the plan: The risk of commer-
cialism, teaching will suffer. For the plan: We’ve
always wanted to have institutes alongside the
school.” Subsequently, Herbert Ohl took care of
issues related to industrialized building and the
setting up of a corresponding institute.
Behind this entire topic, of course, was the tire-
some lack of money. The lecturers received from
the foundation salaries that were considerably
lower than those at state colleges and in the pri-
vate sector. But the foundation needed the earn-
ings from the commission work to finance the
educational work of the school. That means that
the aim of the foundation’s participation in the
commercial success of a few lecturers was the
concerted financing of the entire institution. Yet
a gap opened between the lecturers who taught
and were able to earn additional money with com-
missions, and those lecturers who did nothing but
teach. Georg Leowald and Hans Gugelot were not
willing to run a development group in the Institute
of Product Design when they were entitled only to 215
part of the proceeds. 938 Still, as I said: The founda-
tion was dependent on a share of the earnings of
its lecturers for the work they did at the institutes.
To keep the gap from widening, the administra-
tive council decided at its 12th meeting on 25 July
1957 that the lecturers’ salaries needed to be raised
as soon as possible. 939 But the money was simply
not there, and in this situation the administrative
council admitted it was helpless: “The administra-
tive council is satisfied that the foundation is mak-
ing every effort to increase its own income. How-
ever there are limits to what is possible.” That is
why requests were again to be made for subsidies
for the coming fiscal year of 1958/59 – DM
200,000 from the Land and DM 100,000 from the
federal government. At the same time the adminis-
trative council gave the green light to the setting
up of the Institute of Product Design: The institute
could start work as long as it made the money to
cover its own expenses, so that it would cost the
foundation nothing: “This should make it possible
to undertake research and development projects
that cannot be handled as part of college classes
and therefore make it necessary to hire additional
people.”
In his address at the start of the fourth academic
year (1957/58), the chairman of the governing
board, Tomás Maldonado, announced with a
sweeping gesture that he would not remind the
audience of the events of the past months. 940 He
expressed his hopes for the future of the HfG and
introduced an ambitious program to his colleagues
and to the students. He demanded that design and
design education must develop in the direction of
science and technology and must be stripped of
all artistic arrogance: “From time to time we come
across the view that design is a magic formula that
is supposed to help solve all the problems in the
world around us, that is, design becomes a philos-
ophy of life. However, the attempt to measure all
human experience by the yardstick of design as a
theory of existence is futile. […] Where […] design
functions as a constricting ideology, the designer
comes on the scene as a Grand Inquisitor who
metes out mercy and justice. An example of this
view is the designer’s relationship to industry. Ac-
cording to this view, the designer is supposedly
someone who dictates the form of products from
outside, the motto being, The designer commands
and the engineer obeys. This attitude is not in
keeping with the reality of our time. Rather, the
designer must work in close and unassuming con-
tact with the technician. In order for this dialogue
to be possible, one condition must be met: The
designer must know something about technology
[…]. For example, he must know what happens
during manufacturing processes and what factors
 The governing boards
216 need to be taken into account as far as production
and materials are concerned. Also he must have a
command of the laws of construction. That is why
we have included science courses in our curricu-
lum.”
Herbert Bayer during A new era now began: the use of scientific meth-
another visit, 6 February ods in design and in the teaching of design at the
1958. HfG. The signs of the new era were new subjects
that were the last thing one would have expected
Left: in conversation at a college of design. For example, starting imme-
with Friedrich Vordem- diately applied physiology, classes on manufactur-
berge-Gildewart. ing methods and materials, construction methods,
as well as general mechanics, a seminar on the
Right: Otl Aicher, Fried- history of design and one on sociology were
rich Vordemberge- taught in the department of building, which to
Gildewart, and Herbert date had still been directed by Max Bill and had
Ohl at the reception in been called department of architecture while he
the rector’s office. was the department head. The new orientation
showed that the HfG had settled accounts with
Photos: Hans Conrad Max Bill and had unequivocally dissociated itself
from all other design training centers (arts and
crafts schools, institutes of technology, academies
of art).
I have already pointed out that two decisions in
1957 set the course of the foundation and the HfG
in a new direction.
One of these decisions was that in the future
the HfG would constitute only the core of a con-
glomerate of economically interesting institutes.
This idea originated in the intention during the
founding phase that an institute of product design
would be operated parallel to the HfG; this inten-
tion had been embedded in the bylaws, one rea-
son being financial necessity. The ideas Inge Ai-
cher-Scholl had brought back from her trip to the
US now led the executive board to deal with the
institute question.
The second decision was closely connected
with this complex of problems: It had to do with
the curricular orientation of the HfG. The HfG’s
separation from Max Bill, its adoption of method,
science, and technology brought to light topics
that were reflected not only in the coursework but
particularly in new contents for new institutes. The
School of Design with its four departments was to
turn into an institution – these were initial reflec-
tions – at which the entire process of industrial
production would become the subject of research
and teaching.
The designer was to be trained to be the equal
partner of the engineer and help determine the
process of developing a new product from the
start as a peer of the technicians. The prerequisite
for this ambitious program, formulated chiefly by
Tomás Maldonado, was theoretical and technical
training, so that the designer could even begin to
be taken seriously in the development departments
of industry. At the same time the sociopolitical
component of the training fell behind, though it
was not abandoned.
A third decision, which had not yet appeared on
the horizon in 1957, linked these two elements of
HfG history. All three elements together produced
such a qualitative transformation of the foundation
and the HfG during the next five years that they
had only little in common with the 1957 institu-
tions.
The third decision was Inge Aicher-Scholl’s
resignation from her position as an executive of
the foundation (its sole managing chairperson);
the reasons will be mentioned below. She was
replaced by Thorwald Risler. In my opinion, his
participation in the HfG’s history is as important
as that of Otl Aicher, Inge Aicher-Scholl, and Max
Bill, because by his work as the managing chair-
man of the foundation’s executive board he made
it possible for the HfG to be raised to a qualitative-
ly higher level. This quality was characterized by
the medium-term safeguarding of the foundation’s
budget, but at the same time by the expansion of
the budget to a level that was realistic and offered
the HfG prospects for the future. It is because of
his work that the Land and federal subsidies to the
foundation became a permanent component of
the annual budget whose continuing existence no
longer had to be debated. Of course Inge Aicher-
Scholl had prepared the ground for this, but it was
not as if Thorwald Risler merely harvested what
Inge Aicher-Scholl had sowed. Another character-
istic of his achievement is the institutional expan-
sion of the foundation: By the time he left the
foundation in 1964, the HfG was at the center of
a network of institutes and development groups.
Thorwald Risler was an industrialist, but his
heart was set on cultural and educational con-
cerns. He had wanted to be an archaeologist, but
the National Socialists had forced him to leave the
German Historical Institute in Rome. After World
War II he had put his parents’ factory, the Süd-
deutsche Isolatorenwerke in Freiburg, back on its
feet. He had met Hellmut Becker at the gathering
of a group of intellectuals at Schloß Salem in the
fall of 1945. Subsequently he had worked on
behalf of the Schulen Salem and Birklehof, and
had thus remained in contact with Hellmut Becker.
Inge Aicher-Scholl, as a follow-up to Hellmut
Becker’s recommendation, invited Thorwald Risler
to visit the HfG on 15 January 1958. 941
October/ November Inge Aicher-Scholl wanted Thorwald Risler to start
1956. working for the HfG as early as the beginning of
1958, so that he could directly take over the most
The lecturers important annual job: to guarantee public sector
Erich Franzen and subsidies for the coming year.
Herbert Ohl,
guest lecturer Hermann On19 February 1958 the plenary session of the
von Baravalle. Baden-Württemberg Landtag discussed the results
of the politico-cultural and finance committees’
Photos: Hans Conrad lengthy preoccupation with ways and means of
organizing and financing design and design edu-
cation in Baden-Württemberg. In the course of
dealing with the topic, the previously reserved
members of parliament had spoken positively
about the HfG and had reached the conclusion
that the HfG was to be one of the pillars of design
in the Land. That means that in 1958 there were
basically no more reservations in the Landtag
about subsidizing the foundation. But every year
the respective amount did turn out to be an ex-
tremely contentious issue. For instance, a repre-
sentative of the GB/BHE 942 stated that he had
been very positively surprised by the fine equip-
ment and facilities of the HfG compared to the
Stuttgart Academy. But then he added that the
subsidy should not be increased: “For one, it
would give our trade and industry, who are of
course the main reason the school is there, the
opportunity and also the incentive to do their share
for this School of Design”. 943 Though it isn’t clear
whether this dubious reason had also been the
decisive factor in the finance committee, its mem-
bers refused to raise the subsidy for the founda-
tion from DM 180,000 to DM 220,000. Therefore
the same sum was approved in 1958 as the year
before. In view of such twisted argumentation
there was good reason to despair, for was it really
an incentive that a college was constantly laboring
at subsistence level? Besides it had become clear
in the discussions of the politico-cultural commit-
tee that the HfG was not only an economic con-
cern, but particularly one of importance to a civil- 217
ized country. The only chance that the HfG might
still get something would be through the supple-
mentary budget, and this is what Inge Aicher-
Scholl was hoping would happen: “We are now
determined to take up the struggle again by way
of the supplementary budget, as intensively as
possible; in the long run we can’t base a large part
of the regular subsidy on chance donations from
the private sector.“ 944
Inge Aicher-Scholl had no choice – the income
must finally rise. It had been discovered in the pre-
vious year that the foundation’s scope of action
would have proved to be considerably greater and
the Bill crisis would have had a far less serious
effect if the HfG’s faculty had been more fully
developed. This personnel development must now
no longer be put off. In order to find someone to
do Max Bill’s work and implement the expansion
of the program, the foundation was now negotiat-
ing with new lecturers: with the architect and de-
signer Georg Leowald, for instance (for the depart-
ment of product design), with Anthony Froshaug
(typography in the department of visual communi-
cation) and Christian Staub (photography in the
same department), with Hanno Kesting (sociology
for all departments), or with Bruce Martin, who
was to teach in the departments of product design
and building and set up the Institute of Industrial-
ized Building, now that Konrad Wachsmann was
no longer available for the job. If the foundation
wanted to appoint all these lecturers, it was DM
90,000 short for this item alone in 1958, even with
salaries a third lower than lecturers’ salaries at
technical colleges and universities. Moreover,
state institutions offered an old-age pension plan.
The foundation could not even promise new lec-
turers the apartments on Kuhberg as advised. 945
Theodor Pfizer, the chairman of the administra-
tive council, now recommended, quite contrary to
his usual diplomatic reticence and indecision, that
the Gordian knot should be cut by force: The foun-
dation should conclude contracts with the lectur-
ers even if there was no money, because he be-
lieved “that in spite of the financial situation, which
was so unresolved at present, they must get the
necessary and now available vital teachers in order
to strengthen the college in this consolidation
phase at least as far as faculty was concerned.
[…] Even though if truth be told I still don’t know
how this faculty is to be financed, I do think this
task is so important that somehow the ways and
means must be found to do the job.” 946 Roderich
Count Thun, the managing chairman of the Society
of Friends, completely agreed with this view, but
he expressed it more clearly: “[…] We must now
get clear in our minds what level the school is to
attain in comparison with other countries, meas-
ured by the lecturers who teach there. In view of
 The governing boards
218 Georg Leowald, the fact that a year ago we decided we will not let
Hans Gugelot, and the character of the school be determined by the
Nick Roericht on dictatorial figure of one single ‘important name’,
13 March 1958. we must now see to it that the team from which
Photo: Hans Conrad the school is to derive its reputation is selected
accordingly. But in this day and age we’ll never be
able to provide or maintain a viable leadership for
the school if we keep lecturers’ salaries at the pre-
sent level. […] But I believe we cannot put off the
decision regarding lecturers’ salaries without risk-
ing a loss for the college that we will no longer be
able to make good later. We all know the pleasing
results of combining lecturers, students, and com-
missions from industry. If it is necessary, we will
simply have to implement some of our plans in the
certain expectation of those results, even if there
are no funds to cover such expenditures for the
time being. ” 947
Wolfgang Donndorf, the representative of the
ministry of education and the arts in the founda-
tion’s administrative council, believed the time had
come for the foundation to ask the Land the sixty-
four-thousand-dollar question: “I feel it is crucial
for the college to get something straight: whether
it wants to decide the question of its existence
once and for all by the end of this year, or whether
– if the situation cannot be changed – the school
and foundation are prepared to keep ‘muddling
along’ somehow.” 948
And Thorwald Risler was the person Inge Ai-
cher-Scholl expected to carry out this task – to
work with political groups and raise the subsidy
for the foundation to a level that would assure the
school’s existence.
Thorwald Risler sat in on the 13th meeting of the
administrative council on 21 April 1958. What situ-
ation was he in when he came to the HfG, what
did people expect of him? On the financial side
Inge Aicher-Scholl expected, as described above,
that he would get the annual federal and Land
subsidy raised to a level where the small college
could operate as befitted an institution of higher
learning. She also believed that through his indus-
try contacts the school might obtain new commis-
sions. From Tomás Maldonado, the chair of the
incumbent governing board, he heard at this meet-
ing in what direction the HfG administration visual-
ized the school developing and the scope of this
development. He also heard the objectives for
which Inge Aicher-Scholl’s successor was sup-
posed to create the financial and organizational
conditions. The chair of the governing board made
a policy statement about the HfG’s situation and
prospects.
Tomás Maldonado began by announcing that,
for the first time, he would tell the members of the
administrative council the real reasons why Max
Bill had had to leave: “The conflict was deeper
than we ourselves thought at the outset. Basically
the conflict involved the conception of the college.
Before the crisis people believed that the ques-
tions addressed by the Bauhaus and its principles
had remained unchanged over thirty years to the
present day and were therefore binding and au-
thoritative for us. People did not want to see that in
reality the situation had changed completely […].
We cannot close our minds to the fact that scien-
tific knowledge needs to be taught in a disciplined
Richard Buckminster
Fuller explains the
world, 23 June 1958.
Photo: Hans Conrad
way. In the next few years, industrial designers
will definitely not be inspired ‘stylists’, a sort of
‘enfants terribles’ of industry, that is, people who
are regarded with distrust in all engineering offices.
On the contrary: A new type of industrial designer
will emerge – industrial designers who are able to
work as part of a team, whose function does not
end with “giving products a form”, but who are
capable of designing products using their basic
knowledge of technology and in collaboration with
specialists and engineers. As a result methodolog-
Horst Rittel in the ical questions acquire a central meaning for the
rector’s office, 1958. education of industrial designers. […] The meth-
Photo: Hans Conrad odological aspect I am speaking of here and that
in our view is of special significance was not only
neglected in the past but even discredited. […]
Because of these facts we are convinced we need
to build a new dimension into our curriculum – we
might call it the methodological dimension.” 949 –
It would be worth researching whether Tomás
Maldonado’s prognosis about what a designer’s
work would entail developed in the direction he
predicted.
Tomás Maldonado emphasized how much the
HfG had changed during the past year since Max
Bill had to leave Kuhberg: 90 percent of the sub-
jects that were now being taught were not yet part
of the curriculum the year before. For example,
methodology was taught in two disciplines – in
mathematical operation analysis (such subjects
as group theory, set theory, theory of probabilities,
statistics, theory of games, linear programming,
theory of evaluative series, standardization, infor-
mation theory) and in theory of science. They sup-
plemented the technological subjects (production
study, materials technology, general mechanics,
technical design). Tomás Maldonado summarized
this spectrum of sciences as follows: “You see that
we’ve made every effort to place the college’s
work on an exact foundation.”
The next step for him was to found research
institutes at the HfG. In doing so he would pursue
two goals: One, he wanted to solidify the connec-
tion between the sciences and create links, and
two, he wanted to review the canon of subjects as
it related to practice and continue to develop it.
219
However, the institutes were not to be located
within the HfG: “It is true that in terms of organiza-
tion these research institutes would not be part of
teaching, but would of their own accord come to
be meeting places, especially for the faculty in dif-
ferent disciplines. […] After all, it is important to
give lecturers the opportunity to work outside
teaching, to experiment, and to exchange ideas.
[…] And lastly, an additional argument speaks for
setting up such institutes: the difficulty in recruit-
ing qualified lecturers who devote themselves
exclusively to teaching without having the oppor-
tunity to continue working on their own and spe-
cific research projects.” Incidentally, Tomás Mal-
donado did not say a word about the fact that the
lecturers and the foundation would be able to
make money on commissions received by these
institutes.
Tomás Maldonado did mention two concrete
examples to the administrative council: one, the
Institute of Product Design which had always been
planned, and which for a year now was being put
into effect; however, in the meantime people had
realized that, two, it was necessary to set up an
Institute of Communication. On the one hand set-
ting it up would extend department work to include
mass media, while on the other hand the depart-
ments of information and visual communication
would be extended by a research institute that
addressed communication problems theoretically
and empirically. He felt it made sense to divide this
Institute of Communication into two laboratories,
“one for optical, the other for acoustical percep-
tion”. And lo and behold, the HfG was now in a
 The governing boards
220 good position to set up precisely that one part –
the Research Institute of Optical Perception – be-
cause the Ford Foundation was prepared to pay an
colleague of social psychologist Hadley Centril for
two years and make available 27 sets of equip-
ment “with the help of which the most important
perceptual phenomena could be demonstrated,
but above all further studies and research could
be carried out. I don’t have to say any more to
emphasize the significance that this laboratory of
optical perception can have for our work, let alone
An in-house exhibition in the prestige that the School of Design would gain
the students’ dining hall through its collaboration with the Ford Foundation
to document methods and especially with Princeton University.” For it
and results of work, had become apparent that Princeton University –
6 June 1958. the leading institute of perception research in the
Photo: Wolfgang Siol U.S. – was planning to set up a research center for
Archive: HfG (58/0186) optical perception in Europe and that there was an
excellent chance that the HfG could work in coop-
eration with the renowned American university.
Tomás Maldonado closed his programmatic re-
marks as he said, simply, that the foundation had
to make this course possible for the HfG, cost
what it may: “Perhaps you might have some con-
cerns after hearing me describe the process of
expanding and enlarging our college. However, I
see no possibility of consolidating the school other
than to expand it and enlarge it as proposed.”
“The Ulm college is not
only spatially remote
from the town, isolated
from the usual social
ties. Its stigma is exclu-
siveness. A self-chosen
stigma, and a stigma
imposed from outside,
self-exclusion and
being excluded. […]
This 13th session of the administrative council on
21 April 1958 is informative with regard to the
political history of the HfG for one reason; I would
otherwise not have given it as much space. Thor-
wald Risler, the up-and-coming man of the years
until the end of 1964, figuratively speaking here
received his assignment book. That is, he was
informed within the formal framework of the coun-
cil meeting not only of the financial troubles but
also the organizational and curriculum plans and
goals of the HfG. These were the conditions under
which he agreed to take on the position of manag-
ing chairman of the foundation‘s executive board.
Half a year later, in a circular letter, Theodor Pfizer
officially introduced Thorwald Risler to the mem-
bers of the administrative council in this connec-
tion as well. He mentioned the following:
the push to foster relations with trade and
industry,
“the transfer of long-term and extensive devel-
opment projects”,
the HfG’s interest in issues related to “industrial
production, including in particular the perspec-
tive of productivity and efficiency”. 950
It is worthwhile to recall these circumstances
because Thorwald Risler subsequently went to
Thus, on Kuhberg peo- They live and work Bernhard Rübenach,
ple are always by them- apparently without his- Der rechte Winkel von
selves, in a ghetto, iso- torical and social con- Ulm, p. 33.
lated from a day-to-day sciousness, as though
environment. […] in a vacuum, in an
atmosphere of puristic
lucidité and dangerous
rationalistic hubris.“
work to accomplish the tasks that were connect-
ed with these expectations. And when he had par-
tially accomplished them, and was well on the way
there, he was, after 1962, criticized for it, then
attacked, and finally discredited and repudiated.
Another reason Tomás Maldonado presented
his conception of the HfG to the administrative
council was that in the meantime the governing
board was on its way to creating a number of faits
accomplis. Inge Aicher-Scholl explained her posi-
tion to the HfG’s administration: Although she
would have been happy to accept the Ford Foun-
dation’s tempting offer of funds and expertise, she
was reluctant because, contrary to all promises,
there might be new financial holes and because
she felt the HfG’s previous pedagogical unity was
at risk: “In principle I am of the opinion that one
shouldn't do things by halves, but that one should
keep the institute in mind and not think of carrying
out that project until we have reached our next
stage in stabilizing the college’s personnel situa-
tion and finances. I hope that we will have man-
aged this for the most part by spring 1959. Prior
to that it will hardly be possible for us to bring the
space for a perception institute up to code. (We’ll
need an estimated DM 25–30,000 for the project,
and those funds will not be available before the
spring of 1959 under any circumstances.) My per-
sonal opinion is that it would be a big plus for the
college and a very exciting part of the Institute of
Communication to have such a perception insti-
tute. Only I’m opposed to our taking step 5 before
step 1.” 951
On 8 and 9 March 1958, Warren Robbins, then still
the cultural attaché of the U.S. consulate in Stutt-
gart, and Mr. Slater of the Ford Foundation visited
the HfG. Mr. Slater made it quite clear that he was
interested only in the small and limited institute
that was to work on perceptual issues and be
within the tradition of Princeton University. The
comprehensive institute of verbal and nonverbal
communication that the HfG had in mind hardly
concerned him. In this situation the cultural
attaché, Warren Robbins, urged Inge Aicher-Scholl
and Tomás Maldonado to accept the Ford Founda-
tion’s offer and to appoint Princeton University
instructor Mervyn Perrine as a lecturer at the HfG
to set up the institute of perceptual issues: “After
both Mr. Maldonado and Mrs. Aicher-Scholl em-
phasized that we want the perception institute
only in connection with an institute of communi-
cation and that we have no funds for that right
now, Mr. Slater declared that the Ford Foundation
was not interested in supporting things that the
Germans want, only those they wanted them-
selves, and that they were not interested in an in-
stitute of communication.” 952 “Then Robbins said
that he was surprised and disappointed that nei-
ther Mr. Maldonado nor I would immediately grab 221
at the offer. Now, with DM 80,000 we could finance
both Mr. Perrine for 2 years and possibly even use
the rest of the money to pay to equip the facility
and manufacture the test objects. […] I described
our present worries to Mr. Slater and told him that
this year, come what may, we must get to a point
where the current budget is stabilized.“ 953
Thereupon, at its 11 March 1958 meeting, the
governing board dealt with this matter. Only Otl
Aicher sided with his wife in her cautious assess-
ment. “Contrary to the view of the governing board
that financial support for such an institute from the
U.S. would serve as positive propaganda to influ-
ence German agencies and especially the Landtag,
Mrs. Aicher-Scholl is skeptical based on her expe-
riences and does not expect great fund-raising
success when it comes to setting up an institute
of communication. […] Mr. Aicher still believes
that it is more appropriate not to set up the per-
ception institute in a vacuum, but in connection
with the institute of communication.” 954 But in the
coming months Tomás Maldonado had his way:
On 15 July 1958 the governing board decided that
Mervyn Perrine would be appointed as a lecturer
beginning with the coming academic year (i. e., as
of 1 October 1958), and that his contract would
run through 31 March 1960. 955 For this period, the
Ford Foundation would pay his salary. The govern-
ing board did not want to risk that this position
would be continued at the expense of the other
lecturers’ positions if in the meantime no other
financing opportunity had presented itself. Thus
the stipulation that the lecturer's position carried a
time limit was established right from the start, and
Giulio Pizzetti, 1958.
Photo: Hans Conrad
the only reason this is noteworthy is that Mervyn
Perrine later ignored this fact and created a scan-
dal at the end of his employment at the HfG. It was
regarded as a scandal that the newsmagazine Der
Spiegel took up the topic – and this Spiegel article
in turn did tremendous damage to the HfG.
These first steps toward translating into reality
what would later be the Forschungsstelle für
Optische Wahrnehmung (Research Center for
Optical Perception), as well as the Institut für Pro-
 The governing boards
222 duktgestaltung (Institute of Product Design) came
about, as I said above, in connection with Tomás
Maldonado’s plan to enlarge the HfG’s infrastruc-
ture institutionally and technically. That is why, in
1958, the HfG also began to get interested in radio
and film. Bernhard Rübenach of the Südwestfunk
Baden-Baden (a state radio station) visited the HfG
and was so enthusiastic that, in January 1958, he
offered his assistance because he saw a great
opportunity for the HfG in doing research work for
radio. 956 It is true that this only directed attention
to the topic, and that it took a while for the infor-
mation department to get to the point where they
could work with their own equipment. But with
this background Thorwald Risler in 1963 managed
to persuade the company Siemens & Halske to
give the HfG a large in-kind donation (the studio of
electronic music) that caused considerable agita-
tion at the HfG.
In June 1958 the Munich film director Herbert
Vesely had proposed that a film studio be set up
in the department of visual communication whose
expenses might be covered by commissioned
work (documentary films): “Mr. Aicher and Mr.
Schlensag like the idea of incorporating a film stu-
dio in the department of visual communication.
[…] Possibly the subject ‘film’ might be considered
as a fifth year of study for students of visual com-
munication, just as ‘urban construction’ is a fifth
year of study for students in the department of
building.” 957 It was from these plans that the Insti-
tut für Filmgestaltung (Institute of Film Design)
later emerged; as of 1967, this was an indepen-
dent organization, and it might also have been
described as a school within the school.
Now for the last part of the story of how the HfG
came to terms with its own past after the Bill cri-
sis: the HfG’s new bylaws.
Charles Eames pre-
sents, on 24 April 1958,
three experimental films
he produced in collabo-
ration with his wife Ray.
Photo: Hans Conrad
Wolfgang Donndorf and Günter von Alberti, the
responsible officials at the Baden-Württemberg
ministry of education and the arts, had, as we
know, pacified the troubled students in 1957 by
directing their attention and rebellious energy to
working out new college bylaws.
The 1956 bylaws of the HfG, which up to this point
had been only “provisional”, were to be given a
final form in order to regulate the inner organiza-
tion of the HfG: the mission and goal of the HfG,
faculty appointments, the HfG’s administration, the
inner and extended council, the student body, ad-
ministration, and rules and regulations regarding
diplomas. For this purpose, a bylaws commission
had been formed that worked without any to-do
and supplied the governing board with at least
eight versions in the period between 28 Septem-
ber 1957 and 7 March 1958. 958 In these individual
steps the version that was finally decided on hard-
ly diverged from the first one. The most serious
change consisted in reducing the number of gov-
erning board members from four to three – and
that was a proposal presented by a member of the
administrative council (Otto Pfleiderer). 959
An additional correction by Otto Pfleiderer was
included in the text of the bylaws: The governing
board was now no longer responsible for fulfilling
the mission of the foundation, but for making sure
studies proceeded in accordance with the founda-
tion’s mission. Of course the governing board did
reject a third proposal at its 24 February 1958
meeting: The student body did not have to decide,
as Otto Pfleiderer suggested, which of the two stu-
dents present in the inner council would be enti-
tled to vote. The governing board was of the opin-
ion that this was a matter the students were sup-
posed to settle among themselves. During the
1962 crisis this decision was interpreted to mean
that the students were to be divided – an interpre-
tation that permits us to draw more conclusions
about the situation in 1962 than the intentions of
the writers of the 1958 bylaws.
I have already pointed out that the 1958 HfG by-
laws (like those of 1956) were not drawn up and
passed according to the bylaws of the foundation.
Under the title “school administration” section 13
clearly lays down: “The structuring and organiza-
tion of the school of the Geschwister-Scholl-Stif-
tung is regulated by special school bylaws that are
worked out by the executive board and must be
Hans Gugelot and
Charles Eames.
Photo: Hans Conrad
authorized by the advisory board. 960 But the initia-
tive was up to the governing board, which together
with student representatives and the executive
board had worked out the bylaws. The fact that, in
a highhanded gesture, the bylaws were given the
blessing of the inner council of the HfG puts the
crown on this situation. The impossibility of this
procedure is in no way changed by the fact that
Inge Aicher-Scholl as the foundation’s managing
chairperson gave the bylaws the go-ahead. The
most ingenious legal construction is worthless if it
is not put into practice – a realization that Hellmut 223
Becker had to reckon with in 1963.
The again “provisional” bylaws of the HfG of
7 March 1958 essentially contained the following
regulations 961:
Ray Eames.
Photo: Hans Conrad
The HfG’s administration was still in the hands
of the governing board. The governing board
was independently in charge of the pedagogi-
cal work of the HfG and was responsible to the
administrative council only to the extent “that
the operation of the college and the institutes
affiliated with it is conducted in accordance
with the mission of the foundation and that
these provisional bylaws are observed”.
In lieu of the previous four the governing board
now consisted of only three lecturers with per-
manent contracts.
The governing board was now elected by the
inner council and by the executive board of the
foundation; the administrative director of the
foundation was the election officer; one of the
members of the previous governing board
would also belong to the next board for one
more year and must be elected in the first bal-
lot; it was possible for members to be reelected
repeatedly.
The term of office for the governing board was
one academic year (1 October through 30 Sep-
tember).
The governing board elected a permanent chair-
person.
The members of the governing board could not
appoint a proxy.
The essential difference between the old and new
bylaws of the HfG was that the governing board
was now elected by the inner council. According
to the earlier bylaws the governing board could
complement its own number. Now that they were
elected the lecturers would be more deeply involved
in the school administration. After all, the fact that
most lecturers had no opportunity to participate,
and the students’ dissatisfaction with the previous
arrangement had been the reasons the bylaws
were revised. It is true that because the governing
board had to be elected, this institution was weak-
 The governing boards Friedrich Vordemberge-
Gildewart and Hans
Gugelot at the opening
of the Vordemberge
exhibition at the
Staatliche Kunsthalle
Baden-Baden on
17 May 1958.
Photo: Hans Conrad

224 ened, because now it would only remain strong as
long as the electing body was in agreement. More-
over now that the board was subject to election
there was also the risk that election campaigns
could erupt at the HfG.
The composition of the inner council was as
follows:
all lecturers with permanent contracts;
all visiting lecturers who taught an average of
five or more hours per week and had already
been part of the faculty for one quarter;
one elected head of a workshop, except in
questions concerning faculty appointments;
two elected students, except in questions con-
cerning faculty appointments; only one student
took part in the election of the governing board;
Hermann von Baravalle the administrative director of the foundation
in October 1956 or (without a vote).
1957.
Photo: Hans Conrad The inner council’s most important powers were:
the election of the governing board;
a say in the HfG’s general organization, teaching
schedule, college regulations, and rules relating
to examinations, as well as in faculty appoint-
ments.
Compared to the governing board and the inner
council, the extended council was referred to as
the HfG’s “parliament”. It consisted of the entire
faculty (lecturers with permanent contracts, per-
manent visiting lecturers, assistant lecturers), the
heads of workshops, the student representative,
and one representative each of the students in
each department and the basic program, the ad-
ministrative director, the business manager, the
executive secretary, and the librarian. In its com-
position and powers (but also in its importance) it
essentially corresponded to the preceding council
of the HfG.
The inner council of the HfG met on 7 March
1958 and in accordance with the new bylaws
elected the members of the governing board for
the current academic year, 1957/58. In the first
ballot they elected the member who was to be
taken over from the present governing board. This
board included Otl Aicher, Hans Gugelot, Tomás
Maldonado, and Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart.
It was Tomás Maldonado who was elected. In the
second ballot the two other members of the gov-
erning board had to be elected. Only the lecturers
with permanent contracts, but not the visiting lec-
turers, were eligible. Thus the following were up
for election: Otl Aicher, Anthony Froshaug, Hans
Gugelot, Hanno Kesting, Herbert Ohl, Friedrich
Vordemberge-Gildewart, and Walter Zeischegg.
Otl Aicher and Hans Gugelot were elected in this
ballot; but because Otl Aicher was going to give
lectures in the U.S. from 15 March through 25 May
1958, the inner council decided at the same time
that the sociologist Hanno Kesting was to be des-
ignated as his deputy for this period. N. B.: Hanno
Kesting had only been in Ulm for a week. 962
At the meeting that followed, the governing
board again elected Tomás Maldonado as its
chair. 963
Back to the foundation: On Saturday, 10 May
1958, Thorwald Risler, Hellmut Becker, and Inge
Aicher-Scholl met at the Restaurant Pelikan in
Beuron at 10:30 a.m. in order to vote on the de-
tails of their future cooperation. 964 The result of
this discussion was that Thorwald Risler would
begin his work for the foundation as early as 1
July 1958, “his particular objective being to push
through the new budget”.965 Of course, this needed
to be done gradually, that is, starting with one day
a week. As of 1959 he would be fully at the dis-
posal of the foundation. Notice that Thorwald Ris-
ler, as mentioned previously, was an industrialist
whose living standard could not be reduced to the
level of the salaries of Ulm lecturers. It was neces-
sary to find a way of making it possible to pay him
an appropriate salary, and a way was indeed found;
but when the HfG ended this circumstance was
used against the foundation in a particularly pain-
ful manner (the HfG was reprimanded by the Land
audit division, which led to very unpleasant politi-
cal consequences), and only because the con-
struction put on the salary thus became politically
relevant, I shall explain it briefly:
While Thorwald Risler appeared everywhere as
the managing chairman of the foundation’s execu-
tive board, he received only a meager remunera-
tion for expenses incurred, in all a quarter of his
fixed income. The foundation needed an industrial-
ist who was used to a salary that was normal in in-
dustry, and therefore Thorwald Risler, too, needed
to receive a considerably larger income. Thus he
was at the same time hired as the business man-
ager of the Society of Friends, which was, of course,
a legally independent association. It was in his
capacity as business manager that he received
three-fourths of his total fixed income. Also he
received a percent share of the foundation’s earn-
ings that were to come from commissions by the
private sector. These earnings were supposed to
keep alive his motivation for steering industrial
commissions towards Ulm, but at the same time
they would make up for the fact that the founda-
tion could not take on the expense of the company
pension plan he had had until then. On the whole
the arrangement may appear to be incomprehen-
sible at first glance because it is so complicated,
and that is why it might have aroused the suspi-
cion that the foundation supposedly had some-
thing to hide. But this suspicion was unfounded.
The only reason for this complicated arrangement
is that for tax reasons the foundation could not pay
anyone of Thorwald Risler’s caliber. Besides, a
donation by the Braun company earmarked for
specific purposes guaranteed the share of Thor-
wald Risler’s salary that the Society of Friends
undertook to pay for the first three years (1 July
1958 through 30 June 1961). 966
On 23 July 1958 Inge Aicher-Scholl gave the man-
aging chairman of the Society of Friends, Roderich
Count Thun, a report of the successfully concluded
agreements. After all it was Count Thun who was
now supposed to hire Thorwald Risler, whom he
had not met at the time, as a business manager:
“You know, dear Roderich, that the idea of a full-
time managing chairman for the foundation‘s ex-
ecutive board, who could slowly replace me here
and who will above all fully take over the increas-
ing responsibilities of the foundation, has taken
root in me more and more strongly, and that I feel
more and more that we need such a man, for vari-
ous reasons. From the perspective of the school
and also because of my situation here. […] He
has good contacts in industry, especially to people
in plastics, and he also knows a lot of politicians.
I have the impression that he is a very outgoing
person and that he will activate a most essential
side in the foundation that has lain dormant up till
Georg Leowald, now: a connection with industry that will produce
22 March or 28 April orders. […] These latter steps had to be taken very
1958. quickly so that we could persuade the man to
Photo: Hans Conrad make a commitment, or else I’d have informed you
earlier, of course. But I felt I could assume that it is
225
something you’d approve of, for we have been in
agreement about the need for such a person for a
long time, haven’t we? We couldn’t pass up such
an opportunity. Gradually, I’m beginning to feel the
impact of an enormous, nonstop responsibility.
There’s another thing, too – the business with Bill
affected me so much that deep inside me I have
not even begun to get over it. That is, outwardly
I feel no reactions, but inwardly in my self-confi-
dence and in my spirit of enterprise I’m pretty
shattered and inhibited. It would do me good to
step back, and it would have quite a positive ef-
fect on my continuing work for the college. I am
infinitely glad and relieved about the new situa-
tion.” 967
However, Inge Aicher-Scholl rejoiced too soon,
because the administrative council of the founda-
tion was convened by the advisory board – and
Max Bill as a member of the advisory board was
not willing to give her proposals his blessing with-
out having a hand in them. That is why the formal
appointment of Thorwald Risler, in the course of
the reorganization of the executive board, dragged
on into the next year.
One of Thorwald Risler’s first proposals was that
he suggested applying for Land and federal subsi-
dies not only for the HfG, but for the Institute of
Product Design as well. This proposal was irresis-
tibly simple and solved several urgent problems
all at once.
The foundation might receive more money, for
in the meantime hardly anyone could bear to listen
to the foundation’s complaints that the subsidies
were too little to live on and too much to die. The
 The governing boards
226 institute would become a reality and could devote
itself exclusively to work on orders and develop-
ment. The virulent problems with outstanding pay-
ments for orders and reimbursement of students
and independent contractors would be cleared up,
because the institute was supposed to be run like
a business. Work on orders for industry would be
separate from the more restless business of teach-
ing. It is true that nobody saw the danger inherent
in what amounted to separating the pedagogical
part of the HfG plan from the practical part, when
the regular cycle of theory, development, and
practice might collapse.
One question had still not been settled: The
share of the foundation and lecturers in the profits
of commissioned work. If the institute was now to
concentrate on industry commissions and new
lecturers were to be hired, a solution had to be
found as quickly as possible. At the 13th meeting
of the administrative council on 21 April 1958,
Hellmut Becker admitted that the current arrange-
ment could not be continued much longer: “Dur-
ing the stage of the school’s development that had
now come to a close, he said, the idealism of the
lecturers and staff had sustained the college, fi-
nancially as well as in other ways. In the long run
they could not be expected to go on in this fash-
ion, however; also, new lecturers could hardly be
attracted on this basis.” Georg Leowald, for in-
stance, refused to accept the current involvement
of the foundation because this was not customary
at state colleges and universities either. Tomás
Maldonado and Günther Schlensag agreed with
him, emphasizing that the institute could not be
developed if the foundation did not first work out
a new standard contract. But that meant the foun-
dation had to find a way to cover the institute’s
expenses (up to that point, there had been none,
because the institute was only a plan). As an inter-
Theodor Heuss visits
the HfG on 28 July
1958.
From the left: Theodor
Pfizer, Georg Leowald,
Theodor Heuss, Otto
Pfleiderer, Horst Rittel.
Photo: Hans Conrad
im solution for a year, the administrative council
accepted the compromise proposal that the foun-
dation and lecturers would share the proceeds
from orders at a ratio of 50:50. 968
At the following, 14th, meeting of the administra-
tive council on 14 July 1958 Otto Pfleiderer, the
president of the Landeszentralbank Baden-Würt-
temberg, proposed that because of the dual char-
acter of the HfG (development and teaching) they
should apply for part of the required subsidy with
the ministry of education and the arts and the
other part should be requested from Land and fed-
eral research funds. “In response Mr. Thuma [the
president of the Trade Supervision Department;
author’s note] said that after debates at this and
the last meeting and after a thorough investigation
he saw only the choice between giving up the col-
lege or financing it in a way that did justice to the
circumstances. […] He said he could imagine that
the Land ministry of economics would decide to
provide a subsidy, since it was in the Institute of
Product Design that promising research projects
to promote Land economy were being carried out.
What they needed to do first was to ascertain the
financial requirements for this institute for approxi-
mately three to four years, and obtain statements
from the Land’s trade and industry regarding the
need for this kind of projects. In this connection it
was important to find out if the federal govern-
ment would subsidize the projects.” 969
Because the representatives of the ministry of
education and the arts and of the federal ministry
of the interior agreed to this proposal, the adminis-
trative council decided that the foundation should
apply for dual subsidies from the federal and Land
governments, i. e., for both teaching and develop-
ment carried out at the HfG and in the institute.
The total they requested was DM 620,000. But,
as always, the representatives of the Land minis-
tries involved (finance and economics) dampened
the expectations: “Both gentlemen [Josef Alfons
Thuma and Günther Boulanger; author's note]
stressed that it was of primary importance that
efforts to grant subsidies should be supported
by industry.”
How could one justify the financing of an institute
with public funds if it was engaged in work com-
missioned by industry with the intention of making
a profit? The only imaginable legitimation was to
argue that the institute was on the road to produc-
Otl Aicher, Theodor
Pfizer, and Theodor
Heuss in the rector’s
office,
Photo: Hans Conrad
ing developments and discoveries that would ben- 227
efit the entire economy of the Land. That meant
that gradually the institute would no longer devel-
op individual products but comprehensive sys-
tems. This was the argument underlying the foun-
dation’s 11 October 1958 application to the Trade
Supervision Department: “Up till now the founda-
tion has not received subsidies for research and
development in the area of product design. There-
fore it has also not been possible to create person-
nel-related and material conditions for the effec-
tive functioning of the Institute of Product Design.
The institute began its work in the beginning of
1958 in response to industry needs when compre-
hensive long-term development projects had to be
done that could not be incorporated in the instruc-
tion program of the College of Design. However, in
order to be able to afford successful research and
development work whose goal is not exclusively
to create production-ready models for individual
industrial firms, but that also passes on general
discoveries to the industry at large, it is necessary
to have financing that is not dependent on the
companies that commission the orders.” 970
After the years of expansion (the currency reform
had taken place ten years ago), producers now
moved in saturated markets where growth could
no longer be taken for granted. That is why, the
application stated, increases in productivity, effi-
ciency and automation of production, and im-
provement in quality were necessary if German
industry was to hold its own on the markets – and
with this in mind the foundation, together with the
HfG and the institute, wanted to bring to light and
teach new knowledge.
These were indeed very different objectives than
merely the functional and aesthetic design of an
object. Also from now on the German term Gestal-
tung was consistently replaced by the term design.
And starting with this proposal, the foundation no
On the terrace:
Friedrich Vordemberge-
Gildewart, Inge Aicher-
Scholl, Theodor Heuss,
Theodor Pfizer, Georg
Leowald, Hans Gugelot.
Photos: Hans Conrad
longer spoke of the Institut für Produktform (Insti-
tute of Product Form): The subject of this applica-
tion was the Institut für Produktgestaltung (Insti-
tute of Product Design). This was the name it used
from then on.
 The governing boards
228 The first Großer Kon-
vent, extended council,
of the HfG took place
on 9 June 1958 in the
rector’s office (prior to
this only one such meet-
ing of the Konvent,
council, had been held).
Photo: Wolfgang Siol
Archives: HfG (58/0390/3)
Of course this did not mean that such cosmetic
changes were enough to distract the officials from
the substance. The Trade Supervision Department
carefully studied the application although its presi-
dent was a member of the administrative council,
and arrived at a critical result: On closer examina-
tion the so-called first current research projects
appeared pretty grandiose.
Walter Zeischegg claimed he was working on
ceramic magnets that were treated as top secret
in the huge labs of Siemens, Bosch, and AEG; and
even a lay person does a double take today on
reading the assertion that the Institute of Product
Design is at present “working with radioactive sub-
stances”, an area in which, in 1958, even the ex-
perts were beginners. Here is what the Trade Su-
pervision Department said in its critique: “The pro-
jects and goals listed in the outline describe a pro-
gram for the next 50 years. For a proposal cover-
ing the first year, more modest projects should be
tackled where working teams can form first with a
sufficiently strong background in physics, technol-
ogy, and economics to create design that points
the way.” 971
Therefore the foundation was not doing itself
a favor with this sort of application; rather, along
with the HfG and the Institute of Product Design,
it was suspected of running an expensive play-
ground for braggarts and dreamers.
Federal officials, on 10 December 1958, rated the
foundation’s request for a DM 70,000 subsidy to
the Institute of Product Design positively after four
experts had given their opinions. Interestingly
enough, however – in contrast with the reaction
of the Land Trade Supervision Department in Stutt-
gart – these opinions evaluated only the HfG, not
the actual plan for the Institute of Product Design.
In brief, all the experts felt the application should
be approved, because the HfG “was doing work
that was worthy of support and was considered to
be one of the few important institutions of this
kind.” 972 The differing focal points of individual
opinions are worth noting for two reasons: first,
because they took stock of the first five years of
work at the HfG from the perspective of experts
in the field at large and secondly, because the
opinions represented the basis for regular future
subsidies to the Institute of Product Design.
The first expert obviously sympathized with the
Werkbund and the arts and crafts schools, both
institutions that eyed the HfG from a safe distance.
He still recalled the Bill crisis: “Training in the basic
course led to conflicts among the faculty and the
departure of former rector Max Bill, who had strived
to develop the creative abilities of the students in a
non-goal-oriented way. Now Maldonado had or-
ganized the basic course purely as preliminary
studies leading toward professional training. His
views are thus in contradiction to those of most
arts educators, and doubts about the goal-oriented
nature of this type of basic education should prob-
ably not be omitted in an opinion concerning the
present application.” In keeping with the scheme
of this evaluation, the designer Georg Leowald is
characterized as “the strongest, most distinctive
personality of the Ulm faculty”. At any rate this first
expert measured everything that was done, or not
done, in Ulm by the standards of Max Bill: “Opin-
ions may vary about the advisability of the depart-
ments of “visual communication and information’.
The subjects taught here […] are the same as at
other arts and technical schools. What is new in
Ulm, however, is the way they are combined and
specifically oriented toward the goals of industrial
design, and toward educating the public about
design. When Max Bill left, the college received
new bylaws, and the school is now administered
by a governing board. This does not seem to be
practical, for the college absolutely needs to be
administered by an energetic individual who car-
ries out the necessary changes resolutely and pur-
posefully. It would also be such a person’s job to
shed some ballast – an overemphasis on theory.
The lack of direction that is noticeable at present
is a sore point that needs to be healed soon if the
college is to survive.”
The second expert saw an even sharper con-
trast between the college’s beginnings under Max
Bill and its present orientation, and therefore wrote
that “[…] in comparison with the Bauhaus, on
whose tradition the school is based, it lacks the
influence and the weight of freelance artists, and
Right: The extended
council‘s chairman,
Tomás Maldonado.
Photo: Wolfgang Siol
Archive: HfG (58/0389)
hence the great stimulation, excitement, and cha-
risma communicated by the teaching [of such art-
ists]. One has the impression that Ulm is about
abjuring anything that has to do with art, in favor
of a curriculum in which science and research
make up a considerable part of what is taught, for
they get to the bottom of all things, measure, com-
pare, and go in for statistics and market research.”
Unlike his two colleagues, the third expert
chose not the HfG’s origins but its plans as his
starting point. He reported that “in connection with
its special teaching program the School of Design 229
has developed methods in research and develop-
ment that are extraordinarily important for the pres-
ent and future because of their special objectives
and their character. […] This is a very important
and promising research institution that does excel-
lent work […].”
Like the third expert, the fourth was far more
sympathetic toward the HfG than the first two.
This fourth person sang what amounted to a hymn
of praise to the HfG and represented the view “that
Bernhard Rübenach,
22 March 1958.
Photo: Hans Conrad
Ulm was the only place where people do practical
work in the field [of design; author’s note] with
obvious success. This was the only place, he
wrote, where it made sense to invest funds in sup-
port of research on product design. One cause of
critical remarks about the college was the person-
nel crisis, which seemed to have been overcome in
the meantime, and another was the vocabulary of
the technical designers that so disconcerted sci-
entists and engineers and that people at the HfG
also loved to use in the school’s catalogues. All the
more impressive and truly persuasive, however,
were the practical results and achievements the
school had to show for itself […]. It was necessary
to complement and to secure the practical work of
the designers through a systematic grasp and
evaluation of the technical and physiological
premises. This seemed to be a true research
opportunity. […] The expert ends by remarking
that he was forced to realize that product design
could not be incorporated in the giant machinery
of a technical college or university. One needed
smaller, more flexible institutions that were espe-
cially organized for this purpose, as independent
as possible of government influences and as free
from bureaucratic inhibitions as possible. Ulm had
all the prerequisites for turning these wishes into
a reality.”
The fruit of the efforts to apply for Land and feder-
al subsidies both for the HfG and for the Institute
of Product Design could soon be harvested. At the
end of 1958 Thorwald Risler got a notice that the
application to the Land Trade Supervision Depart-
ment had been successful, though with reserva-
 The governing boards
230 tions: “Subject to approval by the minister, the
ministry of economics would be willing to grant a
subsidy for the following research projects: ‘office
furnishings’, ‘scales’, ‘light fixtures’, and ‘kitchen
equipment’, i. e., not a basic subsidy for the insti-
tute.” 973
There are still three details from the internal life of
the HfG in 1958 left to report.
First, the inner council had assembled once
more on 16 June 1958 in order to elect the gov-
erning board for the following academic year. The
bylaws of the HfG stipulated that the governing
board for the next academic year had to be elected
by the end of June. For the 1958/59 academic
year it consisted of Tomás Maldonado (reelected
in the first ballot) as well as Otl Aicher and Hanno
Kesting (elected in the second ballot). 974 Then, on
30 September 1958, the new governing board
again chose Tomás Maldonado as its chair. 975
Secondly, on 30 May 1958, the inner council
introduced the new positions of department rep-
resentatives as connecting links between the
departments and the governing board: “Mr. Mal-
donado listed the chief functions of the ‘DRs’:
1. To free the governing board of organizational
problems.
2. To establish better contacts between the
departments and the school administration.”
And thirdly, on the morning of 28 July 1958, Presi-
dent Theodor Heuss, on a tour of the departments,
workshops, and the in-house exhibit of the HfG,
received an impression of the school’s achieve-
ments. 976 Perhaps the tour changed the previously
distant attitude of the federal president, but the
HfG and the foundation profited by this visit only
inasmuch as there were positive headlines in the
daily press.
1959 was a year of consolidation, a peaceful year
during which the HfG and the foundation expanded
in the dimensions laid down in 1957 and 1958.
The folowing two focal points are of note:
the definitive appointment of Thorwald Risler as
managing chairman of the foundation‘s execu-
tive board and secretary of the Society of
Friends;
increased Land and federal subsidies to the
foundation for the HfG and for the Institute of
Product Design, and – connected to the forego-
ing – plans to enlarge the HfG (Institute of Prod-
uct Design, Institute of Communication).
A few remarks in reference to point one, Thorwald
Risler: The managing chairman of the foundation‘s
executive board, as previously stated, had to be
discharged by the advisory board and reelected.
Again, based on the sources, I am forced to con-
clude that the makeup of the advisory board had
changed by tacit agreement, and that no resolu-
tion on the matter is known to exist. At any rate
Hellmut Becker and Roderich Count Thun, who
had been present at the last advisory board meet-
ing on 24 April 1953, were no longer invited to
the meeting that was to take place on 30 January
1959 with the purpose of electing the new execu-
tive board of the foundation. Since both were
members of the administrative council, it is pos-
sible that their membership in the advisory board
tacitly came to an end; in any case, no formal res-
olution exists.
The new executive board of the foundation was
originally supposed to consist of Thorwald Risler,
The exhibition pavilion
for the Braun company,
part of the radio exhibi-
tion at the exhibition
center of the 1959
Frankfurt Trade Fair.
Photos: Hans Conrad
Inge Aicher-Scholl, and the Mannheim economist
Johann Dietrich Auffermann. (The latter had ap-
parently been brought on board by Karl Schmöl-
der, the new member of the foundation’s adminis-
trative council who had joined it on 9 December
1958 to replace Karl Klasen and had been pro-
posed for membership by Otto Pfleiderer; though
Karl Schmölder kept in the background just as
much as Karl Klasen. 977) Johann Dietrich Auffer-
mann, however, withdrew his candidacy for mem-
ber of the foundation‘s executive board before the
advisory board meeting. 978
Inge Aicher-Scholl had decided to eat humble
pie and, on 19 December 1958, informed Max Bill
of the planned restructuring, because, after all, he
was a member of the advisory board. 979 It is true
Herbert Schober, 1959.
Photo: unknown
Archive: HfG (59/0065/4)
that he was of the opinion that only advisory board
members could be elected as members of the
foundation‘s executive board, because they be-
longed to the advisory board, but later he no longer
insisted on this view. He proposed that Thorwald
Risler should be elected to be sole member of the
foundation‘s executive board, since he wished
thus to document the fact that Inge Aicher-Scholl
had failed as managing chairperson: “People
should stop obfuscating the facts with flowery
words.” 980 Moreover he demanded that for the
coming advisory board meeting a new item must
be added to the agenda: “Discussion about the
current direction and the so-called educational
philosophy of the School of Design; decisions
regarding appropriate measures to lead the col-
lege back to the original founding idea”. 981 Quite
obviously the separation from the HfG was not
over for Max Bill, just as Inge Aicher-Scholl had
written that she had not completely overcome this
crisis yet. But unfortunately Max Bill’s reaction,
every time he was involved in foundation business
for procedural reasons, was to opt for resistance
and obstruction with every ounce of energy. Thus,
on 6 February 1959, he wrote to Hellmut Becker:
“I have now left the Ulm school alone for a while,
something Mr. Maldonado wished for so much,
and the reason why he made the students so
many promises, which he said would be redeemed
once I was ‘no longer there’. The result is more
than pitiful; Mr. Maldonado has been practically
running the school for 3 1/2 years, that is, this is
his fourth academic year now. I myself only had
the opportunity to direct the school a little longer
than two school years, and under particularly diffi-
cult conditions, starting from scratch. Judging by 231
everything I see and hear today, the school has
not only developed very little, but above all in the
wrong direction as far as principles are concerned.
[…] I can’t watch in silence what is going on there
now; I cannot help protesting against what Mr.
Maldonado writes. Today, there are only two alter-
natives left! Either Mr. Maldonado withdraws and
I resume the position I held before the 12 March
1957 agreement was concluded, or I’ll be forced
to attack Mr. Maldonado’s nonsense ruthlessly
and unmask his machinations publicly, in the inter-
est of the school and with a sense of responsibility
toward the idea that underlies the school and to-
ward its students. […] I regret having to write you
such a long letter. But you are one of the people
who are responsible for my no longer being in Ulm
and who preferred to hand over to Mr. and Mrs.
Aicher together with Mr. Maldonado a good cause
that could have worldwide importance today and
that might still regain it. Because of sentimental
notions, the school is now on the brink of dissolu-
tion, because they have given their support to
these incapable people.” 983
In the same tone, Max Bill also addressed Walter
Gropius: “[…] Primarily Maldonado is the one who
wants to gear the whole pedagogy to accumulat-
ing knowledge and who tries to discredit ‘learning
by doing’ in his speeches and writings. What is
more, he’s infected by a mysticized awe of tech-
nology (I guess people always feel the most re-
spect for things they understand the least!). Well,
I’m just in the process of doing a thorough job of
exposing the Ulm machinations in the press. For
as I write, the oldest prop of the present system,
Mrs. Aicher, is being forced to resign by the exec-
utive board (officially they use a different word,
which doesn’t change the reality, though). […]
Even the oh-so-loyal administrative council, which
sacrificed me on Mrs. Aicher’s account, has now
had enough and has realized that she is incompe-
tent, since they haven’t been able to make pro-
gress in spite of the fact that I left. The school’s
future is still completely dark, and the stuff you
read about it in circulars is – if you know how to
read it after long experience – the old method of
throwing dust in everybody’s eyes. I’m just telling
you this in passing; you’ll see soon enough how
badly things will turn out even without Mrs. Aicher,
for she is being replaced by an industry man who
has no idea what he’s doing.” 984 Max Bill did not
realize that he was discrediting himself by the way
he spoke and by his wrong-headed interpretation
of things, while to a large extent he and Walter
Gropius were in agreement on design-related mat-
ters. Walter Gropius did report to Inge Aicher-
Scholl “[…] the irresponsible rumors Bill was writ-
ing” 985, but then cautioned her not to neglect the
 Administrative council
of the Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung
1953 –1963 982

Meeting 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22
Date 24.IV. 8.VI. 7. IX. 19.X. 1.II. 3.VIII. 20.IV. 4.VII. 28.III. 20.VII. 11.III. 25.VII. 21.IV. 14.VII. 9.XII. 12.XI. 5.XII. 12.IV. 30.X. 14.VII. 26.IV. 11.XI.
1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961 1962 1963 233

Federal ministry Walther Hinsch

of economics

Federal ministry Mr. Rothe Paul Egon Hübinger Karl Gussone

of the interior

Federal ministry Helmut Döscher Walter Weißwange

of housing construction

Gerd H. Müller

Baden-Württemberg ministry Wolfgang Donndorf

of education and the arts

Baden-Württemberg ministry Edgar Hotz Adalbert Seifriz Josef Alfons Thuma

of economics

Baden-Württemberg ministry Günther Boulanger

of finance

City of Ulm Theodor Pfizer (chairman)

Baden-Württemberg Otto Pfleiderer (deputy chairman)

Land Central Bank

Society of Friends

1 Hellmut Becker

2 Brigitte Bermann-Fischer Klaus Dohrn

3 (DGB) Otto Burrmeister Heinz Küppers Wilhelm Kleinknecht Richard Knobel

4 Helmut Cron

5 Karl Max von Hellingrath

6 Karl Klasen Karl Schmölder

7 Roderich Count Thun

 The governing boards
234 artistic part of the HfG as against the theoretical
part; also he pleaded – just as Max Bill had done,
but surely without having him in mind – for a rec-
tor in lieu of a governing board: “What seems to
be of greatest importance to me for the school is
that the artistic element should remain predomi-
nant, that problems of sociology, methodology and
mathematics should remain at the margin and not
become preponderant. Out of the chaotic intuition
of the artistic element, all parts of the school must
be fed. The other branches are instruments of
Reyner Banham and order for the inner substance. […] You know my
Tomás Maldonado at doubts whether it will be possible to run the school
the discussion after permanently under a group leadership. […] I be-
Banham’s lecture on lieve that an institute like yours in Ulm needs artis-
Consumption and tic leadership which ends in one decision-making
product design, personality.“
13 March 1959. Though Max Bill had intentionally disseminated
Photo: Wolfgang Siol his intention “to fight the nonsense spread by Mr.
Archive: HfG (59/0211)
Maldonado and his followers with all means at his
command” 986, when there might have been an
opportunity to do so he gave in: For the advisory
board meeting on 6 March 1959, Max Bill sent his
regrets. Another member who was missing was
Fritz Pfeil, who had had nothing more to do with
the HfG since 1956 and had been busy on an ur-
ban development project in Iran since the spring of
1958. 987 Thus the Ulm circle, except for Thorwald
Risler, now consisted of the old familiar group:
Inge Aicher-Scholl and Otl Aicher, Günther Grzi-
mek, Max Guther, Hans Frieder Eychmüller, and
Walter Zeischegg were present at this meeting. It
was in keeping with the makeup of this group that
the old managing chairperson of the foundation
Visit by the German
Design Council, 18 and
19 Feb. 1959.
Left: Mia Seeger and
Stephan Hirzel;
Right: Mia Seeger and
Inge Aicher-Scholl.
(Inge Aicher-Scholl) was relieved of her position
and the new three-member executive board (Thor-
wald Risler, Inge Aicher-Scholl, and Max Guther)
was elected without incidents.
In a ceremony on 7 April 1959, the new executive
board introduced itself to the extended council of
the HfG and then to the public. The direction and
goal for which Thorwald Risler had been brought
on board were announced quite clearly: “He will
help us develop a more intensive relationship to
industry and thus also help promote the develop-
ment of the institutes.” 988 Thorwald Risler returned
to these key concepts in his address: “The new
phase in the development of the School of Design
– the emphatic turn toward industrial practice and
thus toward an accelerated development of the
institutes for research and development – first
caused me to consider joining your circle. […] If
in the near future we succeed in showing that we
have new designs in current production that are
the result of the teamwork of designers and engi-
neers we strive for here and that owe their specific
production engineering and their marketing advan-
tages to this ‘teamwork from the ground up’, then
it will also be possible – and this is a very essential
point of view that aims at the sphere of pedagogy
– to convince those technical designers and lead-
ing engineers that it is useful to have a designer
work as part of the team from the very beginning
of a project. So far engineers have thought they
can manage to do the whole thing – correct con-
struction plus the resulting correct design – much
better if they work on their own; understandably,
Photos: Wolfgang Siol
Archive: HfG (59/0174 and
59/0179)
they obey only very reluctantly when the business
manager, for marketing reasons, insists that the
product be subsequently cosmeticized. However,
we’d like to convince them of the usefulness of
the kind of designer who, in this college, has
learned to think and speak the language of the
engineer.” 989 Now, no one could still claim not to
know in what direction the foundation intended
to steer the HfG.
One more factor made complete the new cir-
cumstances within the foundation: On 31 March
1959 the previous administrative director, Günther
Schlensag, had exchanged his position for one in
the Scientific Council. 990 His reserve, which might
have appeared to be colorless and weak, had
always surrounded him with the aura of a timid
bureaucrat who was lacking in independence.
Now he was replaced by Günther Schweigkofler,
a self-confident and consistent, sometimes ener-
getic colleague of Thorwald Risler's. 991 – Finally,
as of 1 April 1959, the foundation set up a budget
of its own that was not part of the HfG’s budget. 992
The contractual agreement between Thorwald
Risler and the Society of Friends was delayed to
the very end of the year. Roderich Count Thun, the
managing chairman of the Society of Friends, felt
extremely uncomfortable about the financial scale
on which the foundation now wanted to run
things, with money that would be handled as do-
nations by the Society of Friends. He no longer
wanted to assume the sole responsibility for this,
apart from the fact that at the beginning of 1958
he had begun spending about half of the year in
Costa Rica, his wife’s country of origin. That is why
he felt it was important that Theodor Pfizer assume
Reyner Banham and
Martin Heidegger at the
traditional Ulm ceremo-
ny in honor of Albert
Einstein, 14 March
1959.
Photo: Christian Staub
Archive: HfG
(ohne Negativ. Heidegger)
responsibility for the contracts with Thorwald Ris-
ler, but also for future development: “I had ex-
plained that I am willing to sign this contract as
the chairman of the Society of Friends only if Mr.
Becker […] has approved the text: first, because
the contract completely explodes the very narrow
scale of our arrangements to date and second,
because the fiscal policy of the ‘Geschwister-
Scholl-Stiftung’ and the ‘Society of Friends’ cannot
in practice be completely separated, though legal-
ly they are separate. I still consider the fact that we
have succeeded in winning Mr. Risler’s support 235
for these tasks to be a great advantage for the
college. That is why I am very grateful to you for
assuming personal responsibility for the text of
this contract as the chairman dealing with the
administrative council.” 993
Apropos: The Society of Friends had become quite
inactive during the past years, only making a brief
appearance three times. On 10 December 1956
the first members’ meeting had taken place in
order to retroactively confirm the appointment of
the members of the administrative council (at the
time these still included Hellmut Becker, Brigitte
Bermann-Fischer, Helmut Cron, Karl Max von Hel-
lingrath, Karl Klasen, Wilhelm Kleinknecht, and
Roderich Count Thun) and to correct the statutes
of the Society of Friends to read that not six but
rather seven persons had been appointed to serve
on the foundation’s administrative council. 994 On 6
June 1958 the first and only annual meeting of the
Society of Friends took place. It included a detailed
account of the HfG’s development. 995 And on 20
September 1958 Inge Aicher-Scholl, through a let-
ter to members of the society, obtained their con-
sent to having Karl Schmölder succeed Karl Klasen
as a member of the administrative council. 996 Ob-
viously the Society of Friends had so far not even
begun to fulfill the great expectations placed in it
as an organization that would raise funds and ar-
range contacts with industry. Roderich Count
Thun, in his 27 October 1959 circular letter, as-
cribed this partly to the fact that the Society of
Friends had not yet begun to enjoy tax-exempt
status. That meant that donations to the Society
of Friends were not completely tax-deductible up
to that point – a truly careless omission for a fund-
raising organization. This shortcoming was now to
be remedied: “The Stuttgart internal revenue office
has, by a letter dated 31 July 1959, recognized the
Society of Friends of the Geschwister-Scholl-Stif-
tung, a nonprofit organization, to be a scientific
institution for tax purposes. Thus it is accorded
tax-exempt status for donations and other contri-
butions.” 997 As a prerequisite for this status, how-
ever, the statutes of the Society of Friends first had
to be changed. To be precise, the purpose of the
society in section 2 had to expressed more pre-
cisely. At the same time, without any fuss, you
could almost say surreptitiously, a sentence was
added to the statutes that made it possible for the
Society of Friends to hire a full-time employee –
meaning Thorwald Risler. It is very possible that
this represented the legal reaction of Roderich
Count Thun to his discomfort with the new organ-
ization. He was now definitely covered as far as
the consequences of future development were
concerned. – The new statutes were approved by
the members and went into effect on 5 December
 The governing boards
236 1959. 998 This brought to a close the restructuring
that had been set in motion by the hiring of Thor-
wald Risler. December 31, 1959 also marked the
end of his transition period, and as of 1 January
1960 he worked only for the foundation.
Now to the second focus point of 1959: the ex-
pansion of the HfG with new institutes, and the
foundation’s attempt to obtain subsidies for oper-
ating expenses from the Land and the federal gov-
ernment both for the HfG and the Institute of Prod-
uct Design.
Herbert Hirche, 1959. The fact is that in October 1958 the foundation
Photo: unknown had addressed the first such request to the Land
Archive: HfG (59/0498) Trade Supervision Department, but the application
had been widely criticized. Thorwald Risler had
revised these documents and again submitted
them on 5 March 1959. This time he stressed that
the Institute of Product Design must be expanded,
because industry requirements had changed: The
future did not lie in the designing of individual
objects, but in projects with long-term develop-
ment. This work could no longer be dealt with dur-
ing class time, which is why it was necessary to
have a separate institute for this purpose. At the
same time technical emphasis had shifted: “The
Institute of Product Design at the School of De-
sign makes the complex problems of production
and design into a unified subject for research. To
solve the tasks resulting from this fact, which are
listed below, the Institute coordinates the work of
School of Design faculty and – if need be – out-
side specialists and research institutes. […] The
tasks of the Institute of Product Design are as fol-
lows:
Lucius Burckhardt, 1. research and development of methods and pro-
Frei Otto, and Joachim cedures for designing industrially manufactured
Kaiser, 1959. products;
Photos: Wolfgang Siol 2. exemplary application of these methods
Archive: HfG (59/0017, a) to the design or redesign of individual objects,
59/0069/4, 59/0144)
b) to the design or redesign of series of related
products;
3. developing areas for the application of new
technical data for product design;
4. research on the connections between design
and use;
5. research on the connections between design
and demand.
In order to carry out these tasks there needs to be
an organizational separation of the Institute of
Product Design from the School of Design. The
teams scheduled to do institute work have to be
augmented by full-time specialists who, up till
now, have been availably only for hours at a time,
from case to case.”999 It is true that the Land Trade
Supervision Department was reluctant to partici-
pate in financing the operating expenses of the
Institute of Product Design. But it had no objection
to doing so if the request contained added state-
ments to indicate it referred only to the financing
of four specific research projects that would con-
tinue for one and a half to two years. This subsidy
was again intended only as start-up assistance:
“By granting one-time financial assistance, we
want to make it possible for the Institute of Prod-
uct Design to initiate large-scale research pro-
jects.” 1000 With this in mind, on 3 December 1959,
the foundation asked the Land ministry of eco-
nomics (the sponsor of the Land Trade Supervision
Department) for a DM 100,000 subsidy to the
institute for fiscal year 1959/60. 1001
On the federal level the expert opinions of the
previous year and the arguments presented this
year had borne fruit: The federal ministry of the
interior granted the foundation the requested
DM 100,000 for the HfG and DM 70,000 for the
Institute of Product Design in the current fiscal
year. 1002 At the 16th meeting of the administrative
council on 12 November 1959, the representative
of this ministry, Karl Gussone, spoke of his suc-
cessful work in support of the foundation in Bonn
and promised that this subsidy might be continued
in the future. 1003 That meant that Thorwald Risler
had proved to be right: The federal government
and the Land seemed to find the new plan by the
HfG and foundation acceptable.
In the same breath, Thorwald Risler tried to
build up the capacity of the HfG. Now that there
was industry interest and applications were com-
ing in, it was possible to teach 150 students, but
what stood in the way was a shortage of class-
rooms. That is why additional capital expenditures
were necessary in order to enlarge the residential
buildings. Thorwald Risler expected DM 300,000
to be made available from funds of the Federal and
Land Youth Plan in order to build a second resi-
dential high-rise and new teachers’ houses. The
foundation’s capital resources for this purpose
consisted of a donation from the Braun company
totaling DM 100,000.
Finally Thorwald Risler told the members of the
administrative council of an ambitious financial
perspective that was finally supposed to prepare
a solid basis for the HfG: “In conclusion Mr. Risler
finds that in the opinion of the foundation’s execu-
tive board an annual budget volume of approxi-
mately DM 1.5 million should be attained for oper-
ating the college and the institute. […] According
to Mr. Risler it ought to be possible to raise the
budget to DM 1.5 million within about three
years.”
This budget was to make it possible for the
foundation on the one hand to hire a sufficient
number of lecturers and assistants and on the
other hand enable it to pay them salaries compar-
able to those at state colleges and universities.
That is why at this meeting the administrative
council adopted salary regulations retroactive to
1 April 1959. According to these regulations the
basic salaries ranged from DM 900 and DM 1,800, 237
and the foundation also paid extra depending on
age, years of seniority, marital status, and for
cases where lecturers had no opportunity or hardly
any opportunities to take on commission work. 1004
Compared with the earnings that teachers at state
art colleges of Baden-Württemberg received ac-
cording to their salary regulations of 9 April 1959,
the incomes of HfG lecturers were definitely al-
most always lower. 1005 Only in the department of
information were the lecturers adequately paid;
Max Guther, Inge
Aicher-Scholl, and
Thorwald Risler being
introduced as the foun-
dation’s new, three-
member executive
board, 7 April 1959.
Photo: unknown
Archive: HfG (59/0309)
the biggest differences existed in the departments
of product design and visual communication,
where HfG lecturers earned around DM 600, or
about 50 percent less than their colleagues in the
academies!
As the HfG’s organizational structure changed,
a pedagogical transformation also continued in
1959. 1006
The new students who registered at the HfG in
the 1959/60 academic year no longer exclusively
participated in the basic course as a set of classes
all students alike had to take together during their
first year at the school. After the first quarter par-
tial separation began into the specialized fields of
product design (for the departments of product
design and industrialized building) and communi-
 The governing boards
238 cation (for the departments of visual communica-
tion and information). The HfG also received a new
workshop for processing plastics. And within the
Institute of Product Design the individual lecturers
began to form the so-called development groups,
in which they completed their commission work.
Up to that point there had been five groups, four of
which were numbered; the group around Herbert
Ohl was apparently not supposed to be perma-
nently housed within the Institute of Product
Design, but to form a separate institute; in fact,
however, it worked within the Institute of Product
Design:
e2: Hans Gugelot (product design),
e3: Walter Zeischegg (product design),
e5: Otl Aicher (visual communication),
e6: Tomás Maldonado (visual communication),
Institute of Industrialized Building: Herbert Ohl. 1007
Restructuring within the HfG and the foundation
also preoccupied the faculty. Not all lecturers were
in agreement with the new curricular direction of
the HfG, and the internal organization of the HfG
and its relationship to the foundation were criti-
cized.
The two lecturers Walter Zeischegg and Hans
Gugelot, both designers who had already been
The exhibition pavilion
for the Braun company,
part of the radio exhibi-
tion at the 1959 Frank-
furt Trade Fair.
Photos: Hans Conrad
working at the HfG for a long time, summed up
this criticism in a proposal to the inner council that
the HfG’s bylaws should finally be given a “defini-
tive” form. 1008 They began this initiative at the very
moment when the new direction of the HfG was
obviously being affirmed : At the meeting of the
inner council on 6 June 1959 the governing board
for the coming academic year (1959/60) was
elected by rotation, and for the first time no prod-
uct designer was represented in the school admin-
istration. Tomás Maldonado was reelected, and in
Architects and product
designers of the Italian
association ADI (Asso-
ziazione per il Disegno
Industriale) in the plas-
ter workshop, 15 June
1959.
From left: Herbert Lin-
dinger, Tomás Maldo-
nado, Gianfranco Frat-
tini, Raffaele Crespi,
Enzo Frateili, Pier Giaco-
mo Castiglioni, F. Helg,
Giancarlo Pozzo, Giulio
Castelli, Joe de Pas,
and Marco Zanuso.
Photo: Wolfgang Siol
Archive: HfG (59/0564)
the second ballot Herbert Ohl and Horst Rittel
were chosen. – Horst Rittel was a mathematician,
taught in the basic program, and soon emerged as
Otl Aicher’s fiercest opponent; embodied in these
two persons were the extremes that polarized the
HfG in 1962: the new lecturer, a theoretician on
the one hand, and the HfG founder, a designer, on
the other. – Walter Zeischegg gave the following
reasons for his proposal: “In the interest of teach-
ing and of work at the institute, the current provi-
sional school bylaws must now be given a defini-
tive form. The present form of school administra-
tion – the governing board – must be replaced by
a rector who represents the school internally and
externally, and the senate, which must be made
up of representatives of all departments and assist
the rector. Important decisions are only possible if
the school’s present four departments have a right
to make decisions, act in an advisory capacity, and
have a say in school affairs. Furthermore, in the
definitive bylaws the relationship between founda-
tion and HfG administration as regards responsibil-
ities must be demarcated more clearly than here-
tofore. According to the foundation’s bylaws, the
administration of the HfG is responsible to the
administration of the foundation for fulfilling the
founding mission. Something that needed to be
fundamentally clarified was the question: Whom
do the institutes report to? These fundamental
problems must be settled by the beginning of the
next academic year.” In the course of the discus-
sion that followed Walter Zeischegg indicated
what it was he disliked about the present situation:
On the one hand the departments of the HfG did
not feel sufficiently represented in the HfG’s ad-
ministration, and felt ignored on many issues. On
the other hand he saw that the current bylaws of
the foundation only insufficiently regulated the
new structure of the institute. Tomás Maldonado
suggested that the bylaws of the foundation need-
ed to be changed first so that definitive HfG by-
laws could also be passed. Thorwald Risler, how-
ever, said that the group should consider that the
bylaws of the foundation could not be changed all
that quickly, even if their flaws were obvious. But
in any case one goal was certain: “The HfG is to
have as much freedom as possible, and I shall not
intervene either. But I am responsible for seeing
that what is in the bylaws is carried out. I am mak-
ing every effort to get a full budget – we’re in the
middle of negotiations with the ministry of eco-
nomics right now –, but again that would mean
stricter government supervision. We must try to
get funded – without government supervision.”
To sum up this council meeting, they agreed that
first the governing board must expand its rules of
procedure: All departments that were not repre-
sented in the governing board were to be invited
through their elected department representatives
to extended meetings of the governing board and
be heard. Secondly a draft for a new provisional
version of the bylaws was to be submitted by
Christmas, though it had not been determined
who had the authority to do this. – Both proposals,
however, were translated into action only half-
heartedly or not at all. And even if this had hap-
pened, it would have made no difference to the
uneasy design lecturers, because both proposals
touched only the surface. But the situation had not
yet reached the point where the underlying rea-
sons could come to light.
Günther Schweigkofler, The next day the inner council continued its
circa 1959. debate. 1009 There was an initial confrontation bet-
Photo: unknown ween the lecturers of the theoretical and the de-
Archive: Schweigkofler sign-related subjects. The mathematician Horst
Rittel and the sociologist Hanno Kesting proposed
that a new department for planning and develop- 239
ment should be organized in which the profession-
al profile of the planner should be developed. They
were concerned with comprehensive learning that
would go beyond individual specialties, so that
decisions could be made on a rational basis. The
designers Hans Gugelot and Walter Zeischegg
voted against it, while the architect Herbert Ohl
supported the plan: It is true that in 1957 after the
Bill crisis the lecturers had been in agreement that
methodology should be taught in each department
and also be studied in courses that transcended
individual departments: “We wanted to get away
from a Bauhaus ideology and work more toward a
technological level”, to quote Tomás Maldonado.
But in the meantime they no longer felt comfort-
able about what was going on, because the new
disciplines were getting out of control: “Today, for
instance, the lecturers who have been recently
hired come up with the project of founding a new
department. If we ever hire a mechanical engineer,
he, too, will want to set up a department of me-
chanical engineering.” The discussion was de-
fused by the fact that Hanno Kesting and Horst
Rittel were asked to describe their plan in more
concrete terms. However, it never came to that in
the next few months, and the entire plan was not
pursued further.
The Institute of Communication, too, was dis-
cussed by the inner council. Tomás Maldonado
reminded members of the resolution during a 4
July 1957 pedagogical meeting at the HfG that this
institute was to be developed slowly. Since then,
however, hardly anything had been done, and for
material reasons this institute was still needed:
“Experience has shown that the fact there is no
such institute is quite detrimental to visual com-
munication, and that therefore the position of the
vc department [= visual communication; author’s
note] also looks pretty critical. In that department
there is apparently a tendency to think in stereo-
types and to choose schematic solutions, and
apparently they still haven’t gotten over seeing
their program in terms of commercial art here. And
it is not enough to teach only certain fundamental
ideas about typography, poster design, typeset-
ting, etc. There is no other dimension there that
takes into consideration other aspects of visual
communication, not only in the area of film and
television, but in a number of other areas that will
significantly gain in importance in the coming ten
years: the problem of the man-machine system.”
(The latter aspect in fact conceals something that
is today considered to be one of the most impor-
tant tasks of design: creating so-called user inter-
faces.) Walter Zeischegg and Otl Aicher agreed
with this analysis, which represented an implicit
attack on the work of Friedrich Vordemberge-
 The governing boards
240 Gildewart: “If we go on like this, it won’t be long
before we’ll come down to the level of traditional
schools. And only the energy with which we go on
to new problems will show us the right way. An-
other problem seems much more crucial: that it is
only through the Institute of Communication that
the Research Center for Optical Perception will find
its true place within the school.” Tomás Maldona-
do envisioned that with concrete commissions the
institute would now begin to grow. But the Insti-
tute of Communication was to be open to all lec-
turers. He himself had prospects of a project for
the Italian company Olivetti that would involve dis-
play units (lettering, legibility, visibility, ease of
Opening of the identification): “The Ford Foundation gave the
Re-search Center for money to establish an institute of communication
Optical Perception, that is to consist of 2 laboratories, 1 sound studio,
16 Jan. 1960. and 1 research center for optical perception. A
start has already been made on the RCOP [ Re-
In the foreground, search Center for Optical Perception; author’s
Tomás Maldonado, note], and now we must start to develop the insti-
Warren A. Robbins, and tute itself. For this purpose M. [Tomás Maldonado;
Mervyn W. Perrine; author’s note] went in search of a very concrete
behind them, Herbert project.” At the same time Tomás Maldonado real-
Ohl and Thorwald ized that while institute work and teaching had
Risler. certain commonalities, they were basically cast in
a different mold: “In 1957 it was decided to separ-
Photo: Sander ate the institute from the school for the most part;
Archive: Südwestpresse it could be included in the school as a whole only
Center: Mervyn Perrine. for partial problems, since the research work is
supposed to have a certain degree of indepen-
Right: Warren Robbins, dence from teaching. The institute is supposed to
Theodor Pfizer, and be an organism for continuing education, i. e.,
Thorwald Risler. good students of the school may go on working in
the institutes after completing their studies, so that
Photos: Wolfgang Siol potentially they could gradually be trained to be
Archive: HfG (60/0011, future lecturers. Thus the institute pursues two
60/0052)
goals: one, to make it possible for lecturers to do
research, and two, to provide continuing training
for the students.”
The HfG’s Research Center for Optical Perception,
which was intended to be the first step toward the
implementation of the Institute of Communication,
had developed more slowly during the past year
than had been hoped. Mervyn Perrine worked as a
guest lecturer, paid by the Ford Foundation, but
this grant ran out on 31 March 1960. That is why
at the end of 1959 Mervyn Perrine wanted to know
whether the foundation was willing to pay his sala-
ry until the end of the 1959/60 academic year and
whether the HfG was interested in having him
work there after that time as well. 1010 The governing
board (Tomás Maldonado as chairman, Herbert
Ohl, and Horst Rittel) supported Mervyn Perrine’s
intention to continue working at the HfG, but only
as long as the budget allotted to permanent lectur-
ers was not used.
The Research Center for Optical Perception at
the School of Design – part of the Institute of
Communication that was being developed – offi-
cially opened on 16 January 1960, i. e., six weeks
before the Ford Foundation’s grant ran out. 1011 Sub-
sequently Mervyn Perrine continued working as a
guest lecturer, and on 20 June 1960 the (new)
governing board, which consisted of Gert Kalow
(chair), Herbert Ohl, and Horst Rittel, resolved that
Mervyn Perrine was to teach as a guest lecturer at
the HfG in the coming academic year (1960/61) as
well. 1012 On the other hand, the finance and em-
ployment contract committee of the foundation’s
administrative council decided on 5 December
1960 that no money was available for this position,
and resolved that Mervyn Perrine’s employment as
a guest lecturer would be terminated on 30 June
1961 1013 – all this is not sensational news, and is
recorded here only to complete the picture, be-
cause the Research Center was used as ammuni-
tion as trench warfare began and Mervyn Perrine
distinguished himself as an unlucky second-rank
fighter.
In 1960, tensions appeared at the HfG, and only
gradually those who were involved began to speak
about the reasons for them.
It all began with the so-called Hanno Kesting
affair when the latter had words with Tomás Mal-
donado. Tomás Maldonado accused the sociolo-
gist of slandering him – Maldonado – in public. On
2 March 1960, Hanno Kesting tried to defend him-
self by averting attention from the truth of the ac-
cusation to the question of Tomás Maldonado’s
World design confer-
ence in Tokyo, May
1960.
Left: Christian Staub
and Otl Aicher. Right:
Tomás Maldonado.
Photos: unknown
Archive: HfG (60/0354/2 and
60/0353/3)
Haya Kawa gives a
guest lecture, 28 April
1960.
Photo: Wolfgang Siol
Archive: HfG (60/0214/2)
qualifications: “I've been accused of making dis-
paraging, even – the word has been used here –
‘slanderous’ remarks about my colleagues. Well,
here in the isolation of Kuhberg people talk a lot,
gossip even more, and peddle rumors even more,
if such a thing is possible. […] So if I say that the
so-called Kesting case is in reality the Maldonado
case, I know what I’m saying and I can prove it if
need be. Gentlemen! The connection between the
accusations made against me and my argumenta-
tion lies in the person of the accuser. What hap-
pened in fact was that I challenged his authority –
and I still challenge it today; I’m prepared to ex-
plain the reasons, carefully thought out reasons, at
any time; I’ve already announced that if need be I
will take a closer look at the scientific and peda-
gogical abilities of Tomás Maldonado.” Thorwald
Risler, who was just dealing with the question of
how the budget of the foundation could be raised
to a practicable level, could not condone trouble at
the HfG that compromised his efforts. That is why
he tried to nip things in the bud and decided to
give a clear signal appealing to all lecturers not to
take their disputes into the public sphere: “Having
studied and assessed the situation carefully, the
executive board has become convinced that cer-
tain statements by Dr. Kesting have indeed not
shown the necessary degree of loyalty toward the
institution as a whole. […] The executive board
most strongly disapproves of all such incidents
and, aware of his responsibility for the institution
as a whole, will not tolerate, now or in the future,
violations against community life and work at the
school, in relationships between lecturers among
themselves, and between lecturers and students.
Community life and work, to his way of thinking,
need to be absolutely irreproachable.
The foundation dismissed Hanno Kesting effec-
tive 30 May 1960. 1014
Wheels had thus been set in motion. Horst Rittel,
a member of the governing board, disregarded this
warning and announced that as far as he was con-
cerned the matter was not closed yet, he would
“come back to it yet – in complete candor – in the
inner council or in the pedagogical discussions”. 1015
Horst Rittel accused Tomás Maldonado, the chair-
man of the governing board, that he had “said of
himself: ‘I am the director of the school – and have
been for 5 years.’ Mr. Rittel felt this was a dis-
avowal of all the members of the governing board;
that type of slanderous statements were inappro-
priate and reprehensible. According to the bylaws
Maldonado was the chairman of the governing
board, but not the actual director of the school.”
These pinprick tactics did not miss their target: On
31 May 1960 Tomás Maldonado informed the gov-
erning board and the foundation that he was re-
signing from office: “After thorough deliberation I
have decided to tender you my immediate, irrevo- 241
cable resignation as chairman and member of the
governing board of the HfG. For more than five
years, during the often difficult and stressful phase
of the pedagogical and organizational develop-
ment of our school, I worked without interruption
in the administration of the HfG – initially as vice
president, later as chair and member of the gov-
erning board. […] I am convinced that at present
I can be of more use to the students in teaching,
research, and development than by participating
in the administration of the school.” 1016 This began
the temporary withdrawal of the “old” design lec-
turers from the governing board, who now left the
direction of the HfG to the “new” lecturers on
theoretical subjects for the two years that fol-
lowed.
The inner council was thereupon convened for
7 June 1960 in order to complete the present gov-
erning board. At the meeting Thorwald Risler again
repeated his admonition to the lecturers: “Mr. Ris-
ler recommended that in principle all problems
should be thoroughly discussed openly and fairly,
which would mean that unnecessary tensions and
unpleasant situations like the one that had led to
Mr. Kesting’s leaving would be avoided.” 1017 Otl
Aicher did not wish to be considered as a candi-
date – as I said previously, the design lecturers
withdrew – and the writer Gert Kalow, who had
distinguished himself as an independent lecturer
and tried hard to bring about conciliation, was
elected to succeed Tomás Maldonado. The gov-
erning board appointed him the chairman. 1018
Three days later, on 10 July 1960, the inner
council met again in order to appoint the HfG
administration for the coming academic year
(1960/61) in accordance with the bylaws. 1019
Because the design lecturers did not want to be
run for office, this meant that Otl Aicher, Hans
Gugelot, Herbert Ohl, and Walter Zeischegg were
not available as candidates, and when the vote
was taken, six empty ballot papers were handed
in.
The people who were elected were Gert Kalow,
Horst Rittel, and Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart.
Herbert Ohl gave his reason for not running for
reelection: “The HfG’s present bylaws, its resulting
organization and the flow of its educational work
has turned out to be unsuitable, as I have discov-
ered in the course of my work during the last four
years. […] I am not willing to offer my services to
do administrative work at the School of Design
until new bylaws of the school go into effect, and
the various disciplines are fully represented.” Now,
we must not forget that the HfG bylaws had been
worked out in 1956 and 1958 by the same lectur-
ers who now used its inadequacy as a pretext for
refusing to work in the HfG administration. Pos-
sibly it was a shortcoming that not every depart-
 The governing boards “In the monastery of The isolated location, the rigorous training, side Ulm could be The spirit of the age has What will things be like Bernhard Rübenach,
rationalism. At the the unconventional the sense of mission – called a monastery. A chosen Kuhberg to be when this college has Der rechte Winkel von
home of the disciples of communal life, the initi- really, the School of monastery for people the outpost of this become part of history? Ulm, p. 57 f.
Descartes. In the Abbey ation into this commu- Design on Kuhberg out- who want to construct world. But what will it Will people be more
of the Right Angle. nity, its deliberate a world from its purest look like? human, will they have
exclusive-ness, the her- elements: from num- the capacity to be more
metic language, isola- bers and symbols. human?“
tion by society at large,

242 who now worked in the institutes turned to Thor- 243

West view, 1960. ment was represented in the governing board; but
Photo: unknown if such an arrangement had been arrived at, it
Archive: HfG (60/0167) would have meant that the design lecturers (prod-
uct design, visual communication, industrialized
building) would always have dominated the rest
of the lecturers (information, basic program). And
that was what the designers’ uneasiness amounted
to. However, this goal was not yet openly ex-
pressed, but concealed behind a formula that ap-
peared to be democratic, of how all departments
should participate in the HfG’s administration.
This guise of democracy was, however, belied by
the lecturers’ attitude: They were not exactly in-
clined to work constructively on changing the sit-
uation.
After the new governing board was elected, Thor-
wald Risler asked the design lecturers to give up
their include-me-out policy and to agree to coop-
erate with the new HfG administration. “It was
imperative, he said, that the many tensions be
eliminated, and that could only be done by making
a joint effort, regardless of what the makeup of the
administration was. Mr. Risler urgently appealed to
all those present that they should remember more
often than hitherto that they were working on some-
thing together here at the school. They were all
entitled to their own opinions, but this must not
lead to tensions that put the school’s development
seriously at risk.”
The silent protest of the old guard was followed
by the public protest of the representatives. In an
open letter on 21 June 1960, six former students
wald Risler and to the governing board. 1020 Gui
Bonsiepe, Klaus Franck, Herbert Lindinger, Helmut
Müller-Kühn, Hans Roericht, and Claude Schnaidt
represented the position of the design lecturers
and argued in a spirit of objectivity that most
members of the HfG could later no longer muster.
Here are the reasons for the increasing tensions at
the HfG from their perspective: It was a power
struggle for leadership of the HfG between design-
ers and non-designers, they said. And behind it,
they felt, was the question whether theoretical
subjects had the same rights as design subjects
at the HfG, or whether design subjects should be
given priority treatment, while science and tech-
nology were only supposed to be a designer’s
tools. This conflict split the HfG into groups and
was associated with personal animosities, and in
the meantime a dangerous mixture was created
that was every bit as explosive as the Bill crisis.
“We are of the opinion that the internal crisis of the
HfG is obvious and that there’s no point in cover-
ing up this crisis. We believe that the tense situa-
tion at the HfG can be described in one sentence:
At present there are no longer any material prob-
lems at the HfG, only factional ones. The politiciza-
tion of thought and action is on the increase. Ped-
agogical discussion turns into political discussion;
design problems are transformed into battle-
grounds of political single combat; and a party
turns into a potential conspiracy. An atmosphere
of mutual distrust pervades the school. The gener-
al feeling of insecurity has infected the students.
[…] One symptom of the present crisis is the
latent, if not openly demonstrated, split in the
faculty. We are experiencing a crisis that is as seri-
ous as the one that occurred a few years ago. The
reaction to the former lack of scientific methodolo-
gy has produced a one-sided emphasis on science
courses, whose integration into the overall curricu-
lum of the HfG has been only partially successful.
The inadequate coordination of the theoretical
subjects and the objective facts of design, and the
lack of understanding and distrust some lecturers
feel toward these subjects cause the divergent
tendencies within the pedagogical structure of the
HfG. No one can deny that courses in science are
essential for the comprehensive training of a de-
signer. The introduction of this discipline was pre-
cisely what was supposed to raise the education
of a designer to a level that meets the demands
made on such a profession in today’s society. […]
We believe that the inconsistencies between the
demands of design pedagogy can be offset by
striving for scientific rigor, but not by an authorita-
tive claim to power that glosses over the problems
with a false semblance of scientific rigor. […]
Increasingly, people seem to forget that techno-
logical and scientific courses are a tool. […] For
 The governing boards Meetings of the inner and of the
extended council of the HfG
1956 –1962 1021

244 the most part the institutes have deepened the cleared up as soon as the bylaws of the founda- Inner council Extended council tute of Product Design: “But something that must 245
gap between theoretical courses and practical tion and the HfG were revised. This conclusion 1955 / 56 1 13. VI.1956 * be seen as completely separate is commissioned
activity, since their personnel was to some extent was tempting, but once that happened the conflict research, i. e., ongoing development work for cer-
inadequately prepared to translate the newly intro- shifted to a different scene. The constitutional reg- tain companies within the framework of the insti-
1957 / 58 2 7. III.1958 2 9. VI.1958
duced disciplines into practice. […] Thus, at the ularization of the HfG could be fought over as a 3 16. VI.1958 tute. The expenses resulting from this work could
periphery of the school, almost without exception, bone of contention by the opponents without 4 30. IX.1958 on no account be covered by public subsidies.”
a certain degree of commercialization has increased their having to settle their differences of opinion That meant the old model of always sharing the
1958 / 59 5 3. X.1958 3 3. X.1958
the distance between theory and practice, while directly. 6 14. X.1958 4 7. XI.1958 surplus did not work under these circumstances,
the program of the school aims at decreasing this The governing board (Gert Kalow, Horst Rittel, 7 19. III.1959 5 8. XII.1958 for otherwise the foundation had to carry the bur-
distance. […] In our opinion, things were politi- and Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart, who had 8 6. VI. + 6 16. I.1959 den of the entrepreneurial risk of design lecturers.
7. VI.1959 7 7. IV.1959
cized because as time went on one group of peo- been caught in the crossfire) picked up the con- 9 20. VI.1959 8 15. V. + From now on lecturers who wanted to maintain
ple working at the HfG – whether rightly or wrong- stitutional ball and, on 23 September 1960, de- 19. V.1959 development teams had to think and act like en-
ly is an open question – increasingly felt excluded manded that the work in the institutes should also trepreneurs. Thorwald Risler worked out that the
1959 / 60 10 12. I.1960 9 11. XI.1959
from the life of the institution at large. The cause be regulated, or better still, that bylaws be drawn 11 7. VI. 1960 10 14. XII.1959 foundation had to collect a contribution toward
of mutual animosity, we believe, is of a social na- up for the institutes. 1022 — 8. VI.1960 expenses for proportional expenses that resulted
ture; i. e., there is a lack of rational participation by 12 10. VI.1960 from the work of development teams at the Insti-
13 22. VI.1960
individual members of the HfG in leadership and If the institutes now increasingly worked on com- tute of Product Design. This fixed rate was to be
control, in the cultural and material profit of the missions, the cash flow really did have to be chan- 1960 / 61 14 25. X.1960 11 17. XI.1960 100 percent of personnel costs. Consequently a
HfG. Those employees of the HfG who did not neled according to regulations. On 28 October 15 17. XI.1960 12 29. VI.1961 development team had to take into account three
16 15. XII.1960
have the opportunity to found an institute at the 1960 Thorwald Risler explained to the governing 17 30. I.1961 factors when working on an order: personnel
HfG run along the lines set out in the foundation’s board the accounting system the foundation strived 18 27. II.1961 costs, the contribution toward the foundation’s
bylaws turned to the pedagogical sector, so that to use with the development teams of the Institute 19 23. III.1961 expenses, which equaled personnel costs, and the
20 18. IV.1961
one might have had the impression that they alone of Product Design. 1023 21 27. IV.1961 designer’s salary. “If there is a surplus after settling
were the champions of a financially uncorrupted Thorwald Risler aspired to finance teaching (i. e., 22 19. V.1961 accounts, it is to be shared between the designer
truth, and that all the heads of the institutes were the HfG) largely from two sources: one, from sub- 23 26. V. 1961 and the foundation, taking into consideration all
24 9. VI.1961
nothing but profiteers who were not interested in sidies by the Baden-Württemberg ministry of edu- 25 29. VI.1961 relevant perspectives.”
the students.” cation and the arts and by the federal ministry of However, the work on this regulation had not
In 1960 the HfG was This lengthy quotation shows not only how the interior, and two, from the HfG’s own income 1961/ 62 26 24. X.1961 progressed to the point of producing the standard
27 10. XI.1961
invited to take part in closely entangled the most dissimilar strands of (rents and student fees). Then there were sup- 28 26. I.1962 contract of employment that was expected by all
the Milan Triennale. Its conflict were, but also that at this point people posed to be pure research projects that would not 29 17. V.1962 and sundry. For the time being this plan was still
introduction to the were still able to give an objective analysis and be tied to commercial orders. In the case of the 30 30. V.1962 shelved, not to be picked up again until the follow-
31 8. VI.1962
show was a photo account of their own attitude. Of course the au- latter he was counting on subsidies by the Baden- ing year by Mervyn Perrine when he tried to obtain
panorama. thors were laboring under the misapprehension Württemberg ministry of finance (Land Trade Su- orders for the Research Center for Optical Percep-
Photos: Claus Wille that this objectivity was possible for all those con- pervision Department). A third part, which was tion.
Archive: Südwestpresse cerned. They expected that the situation would be independent of the other two, concerned the Insti-
The five development teams that were working
* At that time the meeting within the Institute of Product Design during the
was called Konvent (Council).
1960/61 academic year, as they had the year
before (Otl Aicher, Hans Gugelot, Tomás Maldo-
nado, Walter Zeischegg, and Herbert Ohl), had,
in the last year and a half that had passed since
the foundation’s 5 March 1959 application to the
Land Trade Supervision Department, blossomed
into functioning units. 1024
They even had to refuse some orders: “We did
not have enough personnel to deal with the jobs
that were placed in our way. […] Technical design
– that is, design that largely takes into account
technical structural factors – is increasingly gain-
ing in importance. At this time the Institute of
Product Design is the only institution in Germany
that focuses exclusively on this problem on a
broad basis.” Thorwald Risler, in that year’s appli-
cation to the Land Trade Supervision Department,
told of training centers in Italy and Canada whose
educational program had been developed in coop-
eration with the HfG; in the GDR a school of de-
sign and a development institute were to be set up
modeled on the HfG and the Institute of Product
 The governing boards
246 Design; at this point there were only four institu-
tions worldwide comparable to the HfG:
the Pratt Institute (USA),
the Institute of Technology, Chicago (USA),
the Georgia Institute of Technology (USA) and
the Royal College of Art, London (England).
“We believe these facts underline how necessary
it is to continue making every effort to promote the
independence of the Institute of Product Design
from projects that are too closely linked to a spe-
cific purpose, so that it can fulfill its central task of
developing exemplary, technically designed prod-
ucts that benefit the general public.” For that rea-
son the Institute of Product Design was justified in
asking the Baden-Württemberg ministry of eco-
nomics for a subsidy for the current academic year
(1960/61) which was now to total DM 150,000 (in
1959/60 it was still DM 100,000); at the same
time the foundation had requested DM 120,000
from the federal ministry of the interior (instead of
DM 50,000, as in the previous year). The founda-
tion expected that the institute would now have an
income of its own of DM 145,000 (as opposed to
Hans Gugelot designed a previous income of DM 100,000). Thus, for
the new lecturers’ resi- 1960/61, the foundation projected a total budget
dences that were built of DM 415,000 for the Institute of Product Design.
in 1960. In the previous year it had been only DM 250,000.
Photo: Wolfgang Siol With this grand-scale financial planning, Thorwald
Archive: HfG (61/0397)
Risler opened a completely new perspective for
the foundation. This planning was different from
that practiced by Inge Aicher-Scholl in that Thor-
wald Risler no longer looked at the budget year by
year, but had set his sights on a mid-range goal.
This goal was referred to as budget consolidation.
Inge Aicher-Scholl’s experiences had taught him
that modest requests had produced only modest
contributions. But the financial situation, which
had previously always been precarious, had taken
a lot out of the people involved and had damaged
the credibility of the foundation. In his financing
plan Thorwald Risler had gone back to Tomás Mal-
donado’s factual and organizational concept and
had implemented it on the part of the foundation
or rather had made implementation possible. The
keystone of his financial structure was the fact that
for 1962 (the first year in which the foundation’s
fiscal year corresponded to the calendar year) he
aimed at drawing up a total budget of roughly
DM 1.8 million.
That was an ambitious goal. On 5 December
1960 he consulted with the members of the ad-
ministrative council at the council’s 17th meet-
ing. 1025 At the moment certain questions still
needed to be answered: How were they to make
up for the presumable shortfall of DM 200,000 for
the 1961 abbreviated fiscal year (1 April through
31 December) and how was the new construction
of lecturers’ and students’ apartments to be man-
aged? 1026 But above and beyond this daily busi-
ness Thorwald Risler had every reason to assume
he could reach his ambitious goal. For there was,
on the one hand, the welcome news of the repre-
sentative of the Land ministry of finance, Günther
Boulanger, that the subsidy from the ministry of
education and the arts for 1961 had finally been
transferred from one-time to continuing expendi-
tures. And there was the result of a conversation
between Thorwald Risler, Wolfgang Donndorf, the
representative of the ministry of education and the
arts, and minister of education and the arts Ger-
hard Storz (CDU). Gerhard Storz visited the HfG
twice, first on 5 July 1959 – the minister on that
day appeared to be skeptical and distant – and
just recently, on 28 October 1960, when it was
possible to transform his reserve into the convic-
tion that the HfG was essential. 1027 Subsequently
Gerhard Storz declared he was willing to support
Thorwald Risler’s financial plan. The total of DM
1.9 million in income was to have the following
components:
1. for the HfG:
DM 600,000 from the Baden-Württemberg min-
istry of education and the arts
DM 200,000 from the federal ministry of the
interior
DM 200,000 of the HfG’s own income (rents,
student fees)
DM 100,000 from the city of Ulm
2. for the Institute of Product Design:
DM 400,000 of the foundation’s own income
(commissions)
DM 200,000 from the Baden-Württemberg min-
istry of economics
DM 200,000 from the federal ministry
of the interior.
Thus the financing of the foundation was to rest on
four pillars:
the contribution of the Land of Baden-Württem-
berg (DM 800,000 = 42 percent),
its own income (DM 600,000 = 32 percent),
the contribution of the federal government
(DM 400,000 = 21 percent), and
the contribution of the city of Ulm (DM 100,000
= 5 percent).
That seemed to be a realistic middle course be-
tween the pure doctrine of the foundation’s com-
plete financial independence and the nationaliza-
tion of the HfG.
In order to understand this new financial dimen-
sion of the foundation, one must not forget that
two political parameters had radically changed in
the past five years since the official opening of the
HfG buildings. On the one hand the state had more
money available, and on the other hand education
policy was well on the way to developing into a
hot political topic. To give only two examples from
the immediate vicinity of the HfG that found their
way into the documents in the following three
weeks: On 16 August 1960 the newly founded
Arbeitskreis Universität Ulm (association Ulm Uni-
versity) tried to get support for its campaign to
make the city into the seat of a Land university.
The association’s efforts began with the attempt
to put together a board of trustees, and among
others they hoped to win over Thorwald Risler. 1028
And on 3 September 1960 it was certain that the
HfG together with other established non-govern-
mental colleges and universities (the Musikhoch-
schule Mannheim (Mannheim College of Music),
Musikhochschule Karlsruhe (Karlsruhe College of
Music), Hochschule für Musik und Theater Heidel-
berg (Heidelberg College for Music and Theater), 247
Hohner-Stiftung Trossingen (Trossingen Hohner
Foundation)) had been included in the group of
colleges and universities to whom the Land of
Baden-Württemberg made available as part of the
state budget plan student stipends similar to stu-
dent scholarships at regular universities, following
the so-called Honnefer Modell (Bad Honnef mod-
el). This support was retroactive to 1 April 1960. In
the two years up to 31 March 1962, at least 42
HfG students received such scholarships.
Assembling the resi-
dences from prefabri-
cated panels.
Photo: Tomás Gonda
Archive: HfG (Depositum 129 /2)
The policy speech of the chair of the governing
board, Gert Kalow, to the administrative council at
its year-end meeting also forges a link to this gen-
eral politico-educational background. The term
university reform, for example, which had fallen
into oblivion for a decade, obviously again became
a concept with current relevance: “Every-one
knows how you train an architect or an electrical
engineer, and there are whole libraries of special-
ized literature documenting this. But there is noth-
ing written about how to train a designer in the
most efficient way possible, i. e., with a focus on
practical needs. We, as the first college of its kind
in Europe, had to start from scratch, had to invent,
design, and experimentally test this branch of edu-
cation. […] Possibly in decades to come people
will see the simple fact that we explored the best
possible way to train designers as the most impor-
tant achievement of the School of Design. That is
our practical contribution to uni-versity reform.
There are indications that the Ulm model, both
from a pedagogical and a technical perspective,
will one day be copied all over the world.” 1030
Thorwald Risler had based his financial plan on
the premise that the HfG’s budget could not be
consolidated – meaning, raised to a realistic level
– step by step. As long as the foundation did not
take a big chance, it was always in danger of get-
ting caught up in petty struggles and lagging be-
hind constantly rising prices. The new level could
not be reached from one day to the next. But the
coming fiscal year, which consisted of nine
months, needed to be a big step in the right di-
direction.
 Meetings of the HfG
governing board
1955 –1962 1029

248 Academic year First governing board Academic year Sixth governing board spec. Special meeting The ministry of education and the arts had origi- the HfG’s position and significance, its curriculum, 249
1955 /1956 1959 /1960
September: 30. ext. Extended group nally planned to raise the subsidy for 1961 by a and its difference from other institutions; the mem-
1955 No informations October: 8. 15. 27. 29.( spec .) of participants modest DM 20,000 to DM 200,000. Prorated over orandum should also furnish proof that the Land
November: 3.(ext.) 5.( spec .) 9.( spec .) nine months that would have meant DM 150,000. would not be giving the HfG preferential treatment
1956 January: 24. 26. 10. 11. 19. 24. 26.
December: 8. 15. 23. On 19 January 1961 the Ulm member of the Land- over government institutions if it were to subsidize
tag, Hugo Roller (SPD), introduced a motion that it from the education and arts budget to the tune
1960 January: 5. 12. 19. 21. 27. the contribution of the ministry of education and of DM 600,000 per year.
Second governing board February: 2. 9. 18. 19. 23. 25. 26.
March: 8. 15. 22. 29. the arts should actually be DM 300,000. 1031 The When Thorwald Risler spoke of rising public
March: 19. 21. 22. 23. April: 8. 26. finance committee discussed this and then fol- interest in the HfG, this was an allusion to reports
April: 6. 7.(spec.) 11. 18. 25. May: 5. 12. 13. + ( ext .) 16.(ext.) 31. lowed Walter Erbe’s (FDP/DVP) proposal that the in the daily press about the completion of the first
May: 2. 9. 24.
June: 6. 13. 14.(spec.)+(ext.) 20. foundation should receive DM 250,000 from the big project of the Institute of Product Design. The
July: 11. budget of the ministry of education and the arts.1032 project involved passenger cars for the Hamburg
August: ( date unknown) Seventh governing board Minister of education The ministry for economics had projected DM elevated railroad, which were discussed, mainly
September: 4.
June: 7. 9. 10. 14. 28. and the arts Gerhard 150,000 for the nine months (corresponding to positively, by journalists all over West Germany.
Academic year October: 3. 9. 23. July: 12. 14. 27. Storz during his visit the sum of DM 200,000 for twelve months). There For instance, the 20 January 1961 issue of the
1956 / 1957 November: 2. 6. 13. 22. 27.( ext .) August: 10. at the HfG on 28 Oct. were welcome news from the federal government Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung had devoted a
December:4. 11. September: 21. 23. 28.
1960, pictured with as well. The budgetary committee of the Bundes- long article to this design project, and the article
1957 January: 8. 15. 22. 29. Gert Kalow. tag had reversed the decision made the previous came just at the right time because Thorwald Ris-
February: 6. 12. 20. Photo: unknown year to limit the subsidy to DM 150,000, and had ler could offer it as evidence of the HfG’s impor-
March: 1. Academic year Eighth governing board Archive: Südwestpresse
1960 /1961 already authorized DM 170,000 for the 1961 fiscal tance. It also made it clear in what way the HfG
October: 2. 4. 11. 18. 25. 28. year, and also authorized the federal ministry of was different from other institutions of learning
November: 3. 8. 15. 23. 29. the interior to make additional funds available. subsidized by the public sector: “Thus, for in-
Third governing board December: 6. 8. 13. 20. 22.
Thorwald Risler counted on DM 190,000 for twelve stance, it is the job of schools of engineering to
March: 15. 19. 22. 25. 28. 29.( ext .) 1961 January:12. 20. 27. months, corresponding to an actual sum of DM train as large a number of engineers as possible,
April: 3. 12. 25. February: 3. 10. 17. 24. 152,000 for the fiscal year. that is, to emphasize quantity. The goal of the
May: 7. 10.( spec .) 14. 16.( spec .) 21. 28. March: 3. 10. 17. 24.
June: 4. 5. 13. 19. 25. April: 11. 18. 19. 25. 26. 27. All in all these were signs that indicated that the School of Design, on the other hand, is to train
July: 4.( spec .) 12. 13. 14. 15. May: 2. 9. 16. 18. 23. 30. federal and Land members of parliament and gov- highly qualified specialists. Here it is not so much
August: 17. June: 6. 13.( ext .) 20.( ext .) 27. ernment officials were listening to Thorwald Ris- the number that matters but the quality.“ 1034
July: 7. 13. 27.
Academic year October: 9. 31. August: 2. 19.( spec .) 25. ler’s arguments and that his plan had realistic What might be a reasonable price for this qual-
1957 / 1958 November: 5. 12. 19. + 22. 26 September: 13. 28. chances of being implemented in 1962. At the ity? Professor Rembeck of the Stuttgart Trade
December: 3. 10. 12. 14. 18. meeting of the finance and employment contract Supervision Department had, of course, already
Academic year Ninth governing board
1958 January: 8. 14. 28. 29. 1961/ 1962 committee of the foundation’s administrative suggested that the HfG had the reputation of
February: 4. 11. 18. 24. 28.( spec .) October: 4. 13. 16.( ext .) 19. council on 15 February 1961 the representative of being an expensive institution and was treated
March: 5. 6. November: 2. the federal ministry of the interior, Karl Gussone, better by the ministry of education and the arts
stated something along the same lines: In the fed- than government institutions. Thereupon Günter
eral government, people were willing to increase von Alberti had gone to the trouble to determine
Fourth governing board Tenth governing board their financial assistance. But this was on condi- the “correct” subsidy amount for the HfG by
March: 7. 11. 17 November: 21. 28. tion that the Land of Baden-Württemberg led the means of a comparison. 1035
April: 15. 29.( spec .) December: 5. 7.( ext .) 12. 19. way. When the representative of the Stuttgart min-
May: 6. 20. istry of finance, Günther Boulanger, raised objec- Günter von Alberti’s premises were as follows:
June: 4. 10. 18. 24. 1962 January: 10. 16. 23. 30.
July: 1. 10. 11. 15. 25. February: 7. 27. tions that the concept might be too risky, Thorwald
March: 15. 20. 27. Risler replied “that in his opinion they should not The state must not treat the private HfG better
April: 5. continue to approach the issue of consolidation in than it does public colleges and universities.
Academic year Fifth governing board a step-by-step fashion. He again emphasized that The HfG was “a college of a special and unique
1958 / 1959 minister of education and the arts Gerhard Storz type”, and because it was special it deserved
September: 30. Eleventh governing board had declared he was willing to put his whole support.
October: 7. 14.
November: 4. 11. 18. 25. May: 30. weight behind a request of that nature, and that Because the city of Ulm would not be a college
28.( spec ., ext.) + ( spec .) June: 1. 4. 12. 22. 26. the response among the parliamentary parties in town were it not for the HfG, the HfG deserved
December: 2. July: 4. 18. 24. 26. the Landtag was positive. The obstacles that had to be subsidized for that reason as well.
September: 20. 25. 27. 29.
1959 January: 9. 13. 14. 21 27. 28. + 29 existed up to this point had been removed by The criterion of comparison was to be the
February: 3. 9.( spec ., ext.) 24. increased subsidies for 1961. Now it was neces- numerical ratio of lecturers to students. At the
March: 10. 11. 17. sary to take advantage of the interest that had HfG this ratio was about 1:10, and the public
April: 9. 24. Academic year Twelfth governing board
May: 14. 1962 /1963 been aroused everywhere in the continuing devel- college of the Land that came closest to this
June: (7. : first session of the October: 4. 11. 25. opment of the School of Design in order to push ratio was the Staatliche Akademie der Bilden-
sixth governing board) November: 8. 20. through a solution that would be as definitive as den Künste (State Academy of Fine Arts) in
9. 10.( ext .) 12. 23. December: 4. 12.
July: 16.( ext .)
possible.” The representative of the Stuttgart min- Karlsruhe (1:7).
istry of economics, Professor Rembeck 1033, sup-
ported Thorwald Risler and recommended that a The result of his comparison was astounding. In
memorandum be worked out giving an account of 1961 the academy received a subsidy of DM 3,187
 The governing boards
250
One of the best known per student. At the same rate, the HfG ought to
design projects to be receive approximately DM 480,000 for 150 stu-
developed at the HfG: dents. But there was more: The foundation’s bud-
the cars of the Ham- get contained many items that were not included
burg elevated railway in the normal budget of the academy, for pension
(January 1961). payments for the permanently employed lectur-
Photo: unknown ers, building maintenance, and new construction
Archive: Südwestpresse were paid separately by the state. If one visualizes
just the difficulties involved in setting up the
school, and the mortgages that had weighed on
the HfG ever since, the significance of this factor
becomes clear. Günter von Alberti estimated it at
DM 308,000. Also he calculated that the founda-
tion had had to spend about DM 100,000 for its
workshops, while the academy had no such work-
shops. At the final count Günter von Alberti came
to the conclusion that if the HfG were to be treated
exactly like the academy, “the resulting subsidy
would total DM 888,000”. As I said, this sum, just
under DM 900,000, merely the amount the Stutt-
gart ministry of education and the arts would
need to award to the foundation for the HfG, that
is, for the teaching program, if it wanted to treat
the HfG and state institutions identically. At this
point there was as yet no mention of contribu-
tions by the Land Trade Supervision Department
and the federal government to the HfG and to the
Institute of Product Design.
Whether equal treatment was something the foun-
dation wanted was a political decision, as was the
question whether the federal government wanted
to take on its share of the financial plan. The re-
marks of the representative of the federal ministry
of the interior at a meeting of the finance and em-
ployment contract committee on 12 April 1961
sounded encouraging: “Mr. Ludwig [the deputy for
Karl Gussone; author’s note] declared that it was
not unrealistic to expect to receive a subsidy total-
ing DM 400,000 from the federal ministry of the
interior. The question was more on the political
side. However, the mood in the budget committee
of the Bundestag was good. But in any case the
condition for success was still authorization by the
Land of subsidies totaling roughly DM 800,000.”1036
Again, all eyes turned to the ministry of finance,
because the ministries of education and the arts
and of economics had already signaled their ap-
proval. Although the representative of the Stuttgart
ministry of finance in the administrative council,
Günther Boulanger, respected Günter von Alber-
ti’s calculation, he made the proviso that he would
abstain from voting if the administrative council
decided to request DM 600,000 for 1962 from the
budget of the ministry of education and the arts
for the HfG.
With these financial dimensions Thorwald Risler
was miles away from the idealistic concepts that
people had had in mind when the foundation and
the HfG were first planned. He had consistently
and without deviating followed the road Inge Ai-
cher-Scholl, Otl Aicher, and Max Bill had taken and
Tomás Maldonado had changed. As some of those
involved saw it, this was a mistake. Even if Thor-
wald Risler tailored the original goal – to run a pri-
vate college as independently as possible – to the
necessities of day-to-day business, he never called
into question the organizational independence, the
pedagogical freedom, the self-determination of
the personnel. But with every day and every step
on this road of making the school a reality, trans-
lating plans into action and making them possible,
the HfG and the foundation moved further away
from the initial dream of the HfG founders: from
the wonderful dream of humanism practiced in
seclusion, the dream of quiet selflessness, the
dream of a focused core group of a few like-minded
people, a modern interpretation of the motto ora
et labora (lead a life of prayer and work; transl.
note). The HfG and the foundation never suc-
ceeded in achieving enough power over circum-
stances for them to be able to devote themselves
to this ideal completely independently of material
constraints (apart from the fact that HfG members
were only human, and only very rarely saints).
Roderich Count Thun felt he had been passed
over in this process. Perhaps there was even a
touch of bitterness there, but I believe that his pre-
dominant feeling was one of serenity – a feeling
that one must not delay travelers – when he wrote
Inge Aicher-Scholl a lengthy letter in January 1961
about his “very personal attitude toward the goals
of the ‘Geschwister Scholl Stiftung’”. 1037 Though he
did not say it in so many words, there was a clear
sense that for him the direction they were going
no longer felt right, and that was also the reason
he became distant toward Thorwald Risler, who
held the course: “Of the goals and the programs
of the ‘Geschwister Scholl Stiftung’ that were pub-
lished when it was founded, what personally inter-
ested me from the beginning was the human as-
pect of the work. I was thrilled that in this ‘college’,
in close human contact between teachers and stu-
dents, new upholders of the ‘technological age’
were to be trained at least in one area. As long as
I lived in Jettingen, I also tried to participate ac-
tively to some extent in this human coming to-
gether. Unfortunately the so-called Bill crisis, of all
things, showed that the sense of connection be-
tween the administrators, teachers, students, and
the old circle of Ulm friends had dropped below an
acceptable level. Many people believed that only
Mr. Bill’s subversive influence was to blame. Even
at that time I repeatedly pointed out that it was a
fundamentally wrong orientation that was even
more to blame. At the time people kept promising
me that after Mr. Bill’s departure, in which I was
very actively involved, people would devote them-
selves with renewed zeal to reestablishing this hu-
man connection inside and outside the school. The
opposite is true. It is my impression that nothing
at all has improved in that regard, indeed that this
‘orientation’ is now seen as the only right course
to take. That means that for me personally the
most important goal of this school has been lost.”
As early as 1958, when Inge Aicher-Scholl first
contacted Thorwald Risler, Roderich Count Thun
had been trying to relinquish responsibility for the
Society of Friends. 1038 His long absences in Costa
Rica were only a pretext for this. On 10 April 1961
he addressed all the members of the Society of
Friends in a circular letter. He asked them to agree
to yet another change in the society’s statutes that
would make it possible to expand the executive
board of the Society of Friends from one member,
as had been the case so far, to five. He wanted to
be involved only as a member of the new board:
“Recently the ‘Society of Friends’ has rapidly be-
come more and more important for the further
expansion of the institutions of the Geschwister-
Scholl-Stiftung. To the same extent that the Ge-
schwister-Scholl-Stiftung was able to increase its
budget and thus broaden its basis, the potential of
the ‘Society of Friends’ had to be utilized to the full
for buildings, equipment, and other expenditures.
The result was a considerable flow of funds. More-
over, step by step, the need becomes clearer to
help maintain the private character of the Ge-
schwister-Scholl-Stiftung through becoming more
active as its circle of friends.” This last appeal
shows once more that he did not want to give up
the old ideals. And yet it was an illusion that the
Society of Friends, the foundation, and the HfG
were to become one big Ulm family. That it was an 251
illusion becomes clear, if only because three of the
four candidates he proposed for the new executive
board were precisely not from the Ulm circle, but
men of business. They were:
Johann Dietrich Auffermann (the Mannheim
economist whose interest in the HfG had been
awakened by board member Karl Schmölder,
and who had also already been considered
for the post of the foundation’s executive
board),
Klaus Dohrn (owner of the Berliner Handels-
Gesellschaft (Berlin Commercial Company),
who had been brought on board by board mem-
ber Karl Max von Hellingrath), and
Erhard Löwe (the then executive manager of
Telefunken AG). 1039
The fifth board member, the only one other than
Roderich Count Thun to come from the Ulm circle,
was to be Hellmut Becker. The members of the
Society of Friends approved the required change in
Gert Kalow gives a
commemorative speech
in honor of Hans and
Sophie Scholl at the
concentration camp
memorial on upper
Kuhberg on 22 Feb.
1961.
Photo: Rueß
Archive: Südwestpresse
the statutes in writing and accepted the personnel
proposals. As of 31 May 1961 the new statutes
went into effect 1040, while as early as 20 April 1961
the new board was constituted. Klaus Dohrn was
elected to be its chair, with Roderich Count Thun
and Erhard Löwe as his deputies, and Johann Diet-
rich Auffermann and Hellmut Becker as simple
members of the board. 1041
The gentlemen immediately had to deal with a
difficult question that had basically already come
up some time ago, but now needed to be solved
at short notice: “The development teams at the
Institute of Product Design, whose success had
been the chief argument in the efforts to increase
public subsidies and obtain industry support, went
beyond the foundation’s spatial, organizational,
and economic scope as it had existed to that
point. On the other hand, current regulations for
particularly successful lecturers such as Mr. Guge-
lot, were unsatisfactory. In order to reach a solu-
tion that would on one hand keep Mr. Gugelot in
Ulm, and on the other avoid problems within the
foundation budget that were increasingly being
 The governing boards
252
Gruppe 47 radio play
meeting at the HfG,
27 March 1960. The
group includes Hans
Werner Richter.
Photo: Alfred Jungraithmayr
Archive: Südwestpresse
judged by government standards, a plan was de-
veloped with the help of the public accountant,
Dr. Max Horn in Ulm. The essential points met with
the provisional approval of attorney Becker. The
plan provided for the Society of Friends to found
a special registered, nonprofit association that
would sponsor the institute that would be set up
and hire Mr. Gugelot as the institute’s director.” To
put it in plain language: Hans Gugelot, next to Otl
Aicher the one designer who gave the HfG a dis-
tinctive image, was tired of the turmoil on Kuhberg
and wanted to leave, and the foundation now had
to try to keep him at the HfG or at least the foun-
dation in spite of his reluctance. Hans Gugelot was
almost irreplaceable as a designer, and if he were
to leave, he would have left a huge gap financially
as well.
On 19 September 1961 it was certain that Thor-
wald Risler’s reaching for the stars had been large-
ly successful. Wolfgang Donndorf, the representa-
tive of the ministry of education and the arts on
the administrative council, informed the founda-
tion that the council of ministers had passed the
draft of the 1962 national budget, in which the
ministry of education and the arts had earmarked
DM 500,000 for the HfG. “With this subsidy the
financial basis of the School of Design would al-
ready be consolidated in the coming fiscal year,
which is why on 1 January 1962 the Geschwister-
Scholl-Stiftung will ask the ministry of economics
only for funds for individual research projects of
the Institute of Product Design.” 1042
While these DM 500,000 were DM 100,000
less than requested, they’d managed to have a
decisive breakthrough on two fronts: On one hand
it was “tremendously important […] that the col-
lege be included in the regular government bud-
get from now on”. 1043 And on the other hand the
Baden-Württemberg minister of finance gave in for
the first time in the fifteen-year history of the foun-
dation: At the cabinet meeting he “basically recog-
nized that a subsidy totaling DM 600,000 was jus-
tified, and promised that the remaining raise would
be implemented in 1963”. Now the foundation
could definitively count on receiving DM 600,000
as of 1963 for the HfG from the ministry of educa-
“Hans Gugelot is origi-
nally Dutch. You can
tell. Because the Dutch
have had the pressure
of struggling with the
sea, they have devel-
oped a pragmatic
approach and an inge-
nious attitude toward
their environment. […]
tion and the arts, and this did indeed happen.
On 18 October Thorwald Risler gave a report on
the latest developments to the members of the
finance and employment contract committee of
the administrative council: It was true that the fed-
eral ministry of the interior budget for 1962 also
included DM 100,000 less, but it was possible to
make up for this gap. In addition, the city of Ulm
wanted to raise its contribution to DM 100,000.
Thorwald Risler fought to keep his plan of consoli-
dating the budget at one stroke from being under-
mined, and to prevent the missing DM 100,000 of
the ministry of education and the arts for 1962
from having a domino effect. He wanted success
for 1962 by hook or by crook. That is why he pro-
posed that for the time being five lecturer posi-
tions should be left vacant and not be filled until
1962 when it was certain that the DM 75,000 that
were still missing in his finance plan would come
in after all. But he insisted on sticking to his plan:
“Mr. Risler wants administrative council members
to keep in mind that giving up the idea of consis-
tent consolidation as early as 1962 will naturally
have unfavorable internal and external conse-
quences. Moreover, right now the overall situation
is favorable for pushing through subsidy increases,
while no one knows what political and economic
conditions might turn out to be like a year from
now.“ But the committee members did not go
along with this: “When Mr. Risler suggests the
finance committee should try to push through the
definitive increase against all odds as part of the
budget negotiations now beginning in the Land-
tag, the committee responds in the negative. On
the other hand, in dealing with the federal govern-
ment, they intend to refer to the Land’s pledge to
give the full subsidy of DM 600,000 in 1963, and
to point out that in former years the federal gov-
ernment lagged behind the Land subsidies.”
So they left it at that: Consolidation had not
been achieved at a single stroke, but they ex-
pected a deficit of only DM 75,000 for that pur-
pose, with a budget of DM 1.9 million, and the
members of the committee did not want to forfeit
their chances with the government officials and
members of the Bundestag on account of this
minimal difference. 1044 Thorwald Risler would have
preferred to have done with the whole thing once
and for all.
At this moment Thorwald Risler’s power base col-
lapsed. The goal of permanently consolidating the
foundation’s budget had almost been reached. But
now events at the HfG escalated. In the process
centrifugal forces were set free between the most
important people involved, severely damaging the
foundation at its core (namely the HfG). Thorwald
Risler did not succeed in gaining control of the
internal unrest from his outsider position. He also
Photo: unknown (1959) did not succeed in maintaining his power over cir-
Archive: HfG (59/0056/2)
cumstances, because he himself became embro-
iled in the conflict. When, after two years of strug-
gle, he was forced to realize that because of
events at the HfG not only his efforts during pre-
ceding years were at risk, but also his personal
credibility with the ministries and industry was at
stake, he did not hesitate and left the foundation
and the HfG to those who in their dispute paid no
heed to losses.
Events at the HfG up to that point – we are at a
point between the end of October and the middle
of November 1961 – can be summed up quickly.
The Research Center for Optical Perception,
FOW for short, represented a bone of contention.
It could be used as a pretext for arguing about all
unresolved problems – problems that were inter-
twined because they could be traced back to a
crucial HfG issue: What should be the relationship
between the new theoretical, scientific subjects
and the old, practical design subjects? An answer
to this question needed to be found (even if it had
to be done by force), because many issues relat-
ing to daily work at the HfG depended on it:
Pedagogically: Were the new subjects only aux-
iliary disciplines for design, or were both groups
of subjects equally legitimate? How could the
integration of scientific subjects in the work of
In Hans Gugelot’s work
there’s a lot of technical
curiosity, but never
pathos.” 1045
Otl Aicher on Hans
Gugelot.
the departments best be implemented? 253
Ideologically: Could only the designers develop
design, or could the scientists do so as well?
Did design at the HfG consist only of science
and method now, or did design at the HfG con-
sist primarily of a blueprint based on scientific
and methodological knowledge? Otl Aicher
asked: Should design be value-free?
Institutionally: What position should design lec-
turers occupy in the HfG, and what position
should non-designers have?
Constitutionally: How should the answers to
these questions be reflected in the “definitive”
bylaws of the HfG? Must the foundation also
change its bylaws?
Economically: What relationship should an insti-
tute (institutes) or development teams have to
the HfG? What did this imply for those lecturers
who could earn money with commissions, and
for those who couldn’t?
Historically: To what extent should the HfG and
foundation be expanded in accordance with
1957 projections (institutes, development
teams, radio, film)? What were the consequen-
ces of the collision with the interest rooted in
humanistic goals (exponent: Roderich Count
Thun)?
Mervyn Perrine, the head of the Research Center
for Optical Perception and guest lecturer at the
HfG, refused at the beginning of 1962 to accept
the skeleton contract of the foundation that Thor-
wald Risler had drafted. 1046 The contract was to
“establish the status of the RCOP [Research Center
for Optical Perception] within the HfG, its relation-
ship to the GSS [Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung], and
methods of settling accounts for commissioned
research”. 1047 Essentially Mervyn Perrine did not
wish to pay 100 percent of the personnel costs of
the research center to the foundation as a lump
sum contribution towards expenses. He argued
that this factor made it impossible for the research
center to obtain orders from industry or the public
sector – the work would simply become prohibi-
tively expensive. His annoyance was all the greater
because he suspected that Otl Aicher and Hans
Gugelot had already concluded these contracts
with the foundation. In a roundabout way people
tried to explain to him that demand was dictated
not only by the price but also by the quality of the
offer. In his search for allies he tried to make his
case into a precedent: He warned that all other
institutes or development teams who wanted to
do commissioned work would then have to accept
the skeleton contract, and it would no longer be
possible to discuss it.
During the meeting of the inner council on
22 June 1960, Mervyn Perrine had been forced to
realize that in his search for like-minded lecturers
 The governing boards
254 he had become embroiled in trench warfare. 1048
Partly he was drawn into it, partly he joined through
sheer inertia, and his poor knowledge of German
did the rest. He found himself at the front of the
scientists and theoreticians, and here he was in
the first row because the Research Center for Opti-
cal Perception had up to that time offered the only
opportunity for non-designers to work on industri-
al orders and thus earn money.
At this meeting Tomás Maldonado had reminded
those present that in 1957 the intention had been
to create an institute of communication, but that
because of lack of funds they had allowed them-
selves to be talked into setting up the research
center and into specifying the details of the insti-
tute as a whole as it grew. It had not grown, and
the inference had been obvious, though unspoken.
The research center had become superfluous: “I‘ve
never made a secret of the fact that while the Re-
search Center for Optical Perception is valuable
because it demonstrates scientific facts (and I
have expressed my appreciation for Dr. Perrine’s
important contributions), it is also useless in its
relationship to our school’s main goal, which is
design.” Tomás Maldonado could imagine that
they might have to get in touch with scientific
institutions of experimental psychology in order to
“turn the valuable series of experiments and data
Perrine has assembled into the kind of research
center we need here. […] What we need to do is
to establish the connection between this institute
and work in the departments.”
Others besides Tomás Maldonado also sharply
criticized this inability to integrate the research
center in the pedagogy of the HfG: Otl Aicher,
Hans Gugelot, Claude Schnaidt, Christian Staub,
and Walter Zeischegg. Mervyn Perrine, they felt,
had come to the HfG solely with an interest in sci-
entific work, but with hardly any interest in design.
Theodor Pfizer wel-
comes participants of
a conference of the
Industrial Design Team
of the National Associa-
tion of German Industry,
on 30 November 1960.
foto; unknown
Archive: südwestpresse
Walter Zeischegg expressed his uneasiness as
follows: “If we want to do scientific work in every
specialty that extends into our field of design or is
tangential to it as a peripheral field or temporary
area of specialization in terms of themes and the
type of problem addressed, we'd have to have an
institute as big as the Batelle Institute, with 500 to
600 staff members and the necessary equipment
– which is a complete illusion. The fact is that you,
Dr. Perrine, have worked here as a visiting lecturer
for almost two years, and there’s been hardly any
professional contact with you.” Gert Kalow, Horst
Rittel, Georg Leowald, and Anthony Froshaug had
not wanted to draw this conclusion at all. Further
discussion about the continued existence of the
research center was then supposed to be adjourned,
but Mervyn Perrine protested. He was successful,
for his appointment as guest lecturer for the
1960/61 academic year, which the governing
board granted on 14 June 1960, was confirmed
by the inner council after all.
Originally, on 8 December 1959, the governing
board decided to keep Mervyn Perrine as a guest
lecturer at the HfG only as long as the foundation
did not have to spend any of the funds designated
for permanent lecturers. 1049 His appointment for
the 1960/61 academic year meant that his con-
tract was extended up to 30 June 1961. Because
the financial situation of the foundation had not yet
Inge Aicher-Scholl, improved to the point that money would be avail-
1958. able to expand the faculty over and above the
Photo: Hans Conrad budget, and because Mervyn Perrine could not
establish proof of commercial orders that would
have financed his presence at the HfG, it was clear
in February 1961 that it would not be possible to
extend his contract. 1050
This in turn appeared to all HfG lecturers to be
tantamount to a decision in which the managing
chairman of the foundation‘s executive board had
exceeded his powers. For this reason, the inner
council on 18 April 1961 decided that the Re-
search Center for Optical Perception was neces-
sary for the HfG after all, and that its continued
existence should be safeguarded. 1051 The student
body protested on 20 April 1961 with a resolution
against the fact that Thorwald Risler had repeated-
The governing board
for the academic year
1960/61: Horst Rittel,
Gert Kalow, and Fried-
rich Vordemberge-
Gildewart.
Photo: unknown
Archive: Südwestpresse
ly intervened in their education. They announced a
token strike for 21 April 1961 and threatened that
they might have to call an unlimited strike and
inform the general public if the foundation were
not willing to safeguard the future of the research
center. 1052 Thorwald Risler refused to let this
“provocation” and “rash action” (Inge Aicher-
Scholl 1053) upset him and tried to remind everyone
that Mervyn Perrine’s contract as guest lecturer
had a time limit. Mervyn Perrine in turn com-
plained to Inge Aicher-Scholl that he had not been
given six months’ notice. “The fact that such state-
ments are even possible gives us a significant in-
sight into Dr. Perrine’s overall behavior[…], and on
the other hand shows that the governing board,
against its better judgment, was not in a position
to make clear to Mr. Perrine in its endless discus-
sions with him even the most rudimentary precon- 255
ditions of our present situation.“ 1054
Four days later, on 25 April 1961, Mervyn Per-
rine had the chutzpah to give the governing board
the ultimatum that he be appointed to a position
on the regular faculty. If this was not done he
would leave. The governing board agreed to do so.
Naturally the gentlemen were aware that the bud-
get provided no funds for this purpose, i. e., that
the new permanent position had to be financed at
the expense of the guest lecturer positions: The
result would be not enough guest lecturers to
teach the courses. 1055 On 27 April 1961 the inner
council confirmed this decision after a controver-
sial debate, by a vote of seven to six. In the pro-
cess it became obvious that the tug of war around
the research center was merely a surrogate strug-
gle: “Mr. Aicher warned against the reasons the
governing board had given for appointing Mr. Per-
rine as a regular faculty member, which were basi-
cally that the school needed the Research Center
for Optical Perception, and that Perrine had already
been at the HfG for three years. He said that we
must not play appointment politics, but that it was
qualifications that were the deciding factor. This
sort of appointment would put the school’s repu-
tation at risk, and the students would be inclined
more and more to feel that our school provided a
second-rate education. […] Mr. Rittel believes that
it is too late now to enquire about qualifica-
tions.“ 1056 Subsequently the governing board rati-
fied Perrine’s appointment as a regular lecturer
effective 1 July 1961. 1057
This decision was made during Thorwald Ris-
ler’s absence. Günther Schweigkofler, the adminis-
trative director of the foundation, informed him
that Otl Aicher, Hans Gugelot, Gert Kalow, Tomás
Maldonado, and Walter Zeischegg had spoken
against the permanent appointment, presumably
Herbert Ohl as well, but they had been outvoted
by Bruce Archer, Harald Berns, Rudolf Doernach,
Anthony Froshaug, Horst Rittel, Christian Staub,
and Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart. The admin-
istrative director stated laconically: “The founda-
tion is now stuck with the Old Maid. […] All in all,
people are agreed on doing everything they can to
work against the foundation. […] In the near future
I am certain there’s a whole series of things head-
ing our way that amounts to a power struggle. If
there’s going to be a showdown anyway, I’d be
inclined to take a chance in this case and not
agree to Perrine’s appointment.”
That means that circumstances slowly became
more complicated. It was no longer just a matter
of deciding whether the research center should be
retained. Even the person of Mervyn Perrine was
no longer the only focus. Sympathies and antipa-
thies that went beyond these issues led to chang-
 The governing boards
256 ing alliances, groups formed around Otl Aicher on
the one hand and Horst Rittel on the other. There
was also the oversensitivity of the lecturers to
actions by the foundation, and their lack of sensi-
tivity to the foundation’s financial problems: this
lent each confrontation a tone that seemed to
change at random from day to day. The lecturers
had gradually become indifferent to financial is-
sues. That was irresponsible, for the foundation’s
budget was not supposed to be used as a tool for
personnel policy. And finally, part of the student
body now knew with certainty that the reality of
studying at the HfG did not come up to the self-
description of the school (as expressed in the
questionnaires sent to applying students, for in-
stance). Their discontent was reflected in a stu-
dent paper they founded, Output, whose first is-
sue appeared in March 1961. It addressed the real-
ity and goals of the HfG, quoting documents since
1953, and also did a student survey.
Gert Kalow, the head of the governing board,
always levelheaded and conciliatory, became en-
tangled during his many peacemaking efforts in
the many traps set by the opposing parties. His
personal call for help to Thorwald Risler after the
appointment of Mervyn Perrine makes one aware
of the tense atmosphere at the end of April 1961,
as well as the fact that an objectively correct deci-
sion could be wrong in the wrong situation, and
could cause damage: “The decision to appoint Dr.
Perrine as a regular lecturer is not meant to be an
attack against the foundation, as I would like to
emphasize. […] Mrs. and Mr. Aicher and I spent
two evenings in discussion, weighing the pros and
cons. The debate ended with the realization that
the decision is up to the governing board. […] The
following alternative emerged: Either the wish for
personnel change or for continuity of work at the
Research Center for Optical Perception should be
given priority. We chose the latter, and rightly so,
I believe. […] In my opinion there is no ‘Old Maid
card’ in this business that could be passed back
and forth. The governing board bears full respon-
sibility, as the bylaws prescribe for pedagogical
matters. However, it would be a misfortune for the
whole school, the most terrible of all misfortunes,
if the foundation and governing board did not act
unanimously. Particularly since there are spirits
here in the house, just waiting for a conflict be-
tween the Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung and the
governing board, only to rise on the waves of a
rapidly stirred up ‘popular movement’. I entreat
you, dear Mr. Risler, I beg you sincerely and in the
strongest terms, to side with us in this case – even
if you still consider Perrine’s appointment to be a
mistake. (Whether Perrine’s salary is paid from the
guest lecturers’ or some other fund should make
no difference.) If the foundation and governing
board remain united, for which I beseech the help
of all the gods, then there is also every chance of 257
long-term planning together, as regards both the
HfG in general and filling future personnel posi-
tions; while an openly visible breach between the
foundation and the governing board would benefit
neither you nor us, only the obscurantists who
would like to tear down everything we've built up
in the way of supporting structures.” – There it
was again: the belief in structures, in constitutional
regulation that might be able to determine human
behavior even if it was against the will of the per-
sons involved. However, the history of the HfG can
be read as one continuous example proving that
everything depends on the will of those involved:
whether they wanted to adapt to the structures or
to disregard them and create new ones.
On 3 May 1961 the students again threatened to
strike if the foundation did not immediately con-
clude a contract with Mervyn Perrine and put an
end to the uncertainty of the research center’s
future. One shouldn’t have to wait, they said, for
Thorwald Risler to return from his vacation, be-
cause he was not the only one in the foundation
who was authorized to sign. 1058 However, Thor-
wald Risler’s colleagues on the foundation‘s exec-
utive board, Inge Aicher-Scholl and Max Guther,
no longer had an opportunity to react: On 7 May
1961 Mervyn Perrine took the martyr’s cross upon
his shoulders and announced his resignation. He
claimed that in the meantime he had had another
job offer: “The recent more favorable development
comes too late.” 1059
The research center ceased to exist de facto as
of 1 October 1961. Mervyn Perrine remained angry
for some time because of the way events had turned
out. One of the letters he later sent to various Exhibition of Hans the honorable names of Hans and Sophie Scholl, seven of the eleven eligible members of the inner
recipients explains his bitterness – a feeling he Gugelot’s designs, who were killed in their struggle against dictator- council refused to run for office in the next govern-
shared with several former HfG lecturers: “Now, 4 November through ship and abuse of power. But this will soon no ing board. Of the remaining members, Gert Kalow,
however, I realize that the research center fell vic- 4 December 1960 at longer be possible, once the public realizes the Horst Rittel, Christian Staub, and Friedrich Vordem-
tim to the ideological and power-politics interests the Ulm Museum. ill-use to which these names have been put.” berge-Gildewart, only Christian Staub was not
of a family oligarchy. It must be emphasized that Photo: Sander On 9 June 1961 the inner council met to elect, elected. In order to induce the objectors to cooper-
it is by no means an exception: A large number of Archive: Südwestpresse by rotation, the governing board for the coming ate after all, a bylaws committee was to be formed
lecturers and many promising beginnings were its academic year (1961/62). First, council members which was actually to consist of four members.
victims in recent years. Every attempt to limit the had to decide on a privileged motion that was to But when the election of these four members (Otl
negative influence of the Geschwister-Scholl-Stif- annul the existing bylaws of the HfG: The present Aicher as the chairman, Horst Rittel, the student
tung on the pedagogical work at the HfG, the governing board, to quote the motion, was to representative Klaus Pfromm, and the representa-
nearsighted dominance of the family and the remain in office until 31 December 1961 in order to tive of the heads of the workshops, Otto Schild)
‘wheeling and dealing’ (exclusively commercial make up for its omissions as regards the agreed- failed to produce a clear majority for the represen-
interests), and to focus on the training of students upon change in the bylaws; until that date, in a tatives of the design lecturers, the latter rebelled
and on scientific work was systematically fought. joint commission with all department representa- against the result, and succeeded in expanding
[…] Now that the only institution that did scientif- tives, it was to work out a proposal, submit it to the commission by one more member (Walter
ic work has been eliminated, the Ulm School can the council for approval, and have it confirmed by Zeischegg) – so much for the importance of will
hardly claim to be a college anymore, and even the foundation so that it would go into effect by as opposed to structures. 1060
less a full-scale academic institution. The good 1 January 1962. (A reminder: According to the
name Ulm surely once had is now only a thin fa- foundation’s bylaws a change in the bylaws was Thorwald Risler also made one attempt to decrease
çade consisting of a few Braun appliances, furni- to be initiated by the executive board of the foun- the potential for discontent by clear structuring of
ture, and cups. […] Up to this point, critics have dation, and there was no mention of the HfG being the HfG. As I have mentioned, of course, the foun-
again and again held back out of consideration for involved.) This motion was rejected. Thereupon dation fell about DM 75,000 short of the 1962
 The governing boards
258 budget. It is true that this deficit was not dramatic,
in view of a total budget of DM 1.9 million. But
Thorwald Risler wanted to use the question as to
where the governing board was supposed to econ-
omize until this money was raised in the course of
fiscal 1962 as an opportunity to ask how the facul-
ty was to be structured in principle. His 16 October
1961 proposal read as follows:
a total of 12 tenured lecturers (“chairs”), i. e., 3
tenured lecturers in each of the 4 departments
(industrialized building, information, product
design, visual communication);
3 tenured lecturers for theoretical subjects, e. g.,
sociology, psychology, and natural sciences;
it was around these tenured lecturers that the
guest lecturers were to be grouped.
To keep a hopelessly muddled debate around per-
sonnel issues from breaking out, he called upon
the governing board to determine professional
appointment criteria and qualifications as a basis
for negotiations between the foundation, govern-
ing board, and department representatives. 1061
They never got around to discussing this propo-
sal.
Gert Kalow resigned from his positions as a mem-
ber of the governing board and as its chair on
Students’ dining hall,
1959.
Photo: Wolfgang Siol
Archive: HfG (59/0038)
3 November 1961 – for a welcome reason. The
Rockefeller Foundation gave him a grant with the
proviso that he concentrate only on his research
about The historical preconditions and present
possibilities of a democratic form of government
in Germany for one year. He continued as a ten-
ured lecturer in the department of information, but
did not teach during that academic year or partici-
pate in school administration in hopes of helping
to pacify the belligerent parties: “The great Ulm
experiment, which is important for our whole pres-
ent-day cultural situation, the start of a completely
new college – which intends to be, and must be,
not just a technical school but a college – can only
succeed if all those involved renounce extreme
measures and make sacrifices on the altar of com-
mon sense and willingness to compromise.” 1062
Bernhard Rübenach,
Der rechte Winkel von
Ulm, p. 51 f.
Three candidates ran for the by-election on 10
November 1961, at any rate – Hans Gugelot, Chris-
tian Staub, and Walter Zeischegg – but as always
the flaws of the bylaws were put forward as a pre-
text, and the true causes of trouble at the HfG
were not discussed. Hans Gugelot was elected,
but he gave the HfG a deadline. “Mr. Gugelot de-
clares that he is willing to serve as a member of
the governing body until 31 January 1962 at the
latest. He says he assumes the new bylaws will
have gone into effect by then.” 1063 The new gov-
erning board consisted of Hans Gugelot (chair),
Horst Rittel, and Friedrich Vordemberge-Gilde-
wart. 1064
I have reported that Thorwald Risler’s finance plan
for the foundation for the year 1962 had almost
succeeded, and that in mid-November 1961 there
was every indication that consolidation would be
completed in 1963. And I mentioned that at the
moment when this was certain, his support base
collapsed because the HfG entered a serious cri-
sis.
Otl Aicher had returned to the stage of action
during the past months, having stayed away for
about two years to do research. (Inge Aicher-
Scholl had for the most part also been able to
withdraw as she had wished when the executive
board was expanded two years earlier.) On 9 June
1961 Otl Aicher became the chair of the bylaws
commission. This commission made no progress.
Then, on 13 November 1961, he ended his restraint
with a letter to Gert Kalow.
This letter may be seen as a signal for the be-
ginning of open confrontation. It came about for
what was actually a trivial reason, but on the other
hand the reason for Otl Aicher’s request was at the
same time fundamental. One may also criticize
that Otl Aicher made a human mistake when he
turned full force against Gert Kalow at the very
moment when the latter had just honorably left the
ring, for he virtually stabbed him in the back. But
I do not believe that Otl Aicher meant it personally.
At any rate, Otl Aicher here for the first time called
a spade a spade and named the reasons that had
provoked the skirmishes of the past months. – On
the occasion of an oral examination whose result
he had considered to be pathetic, he formulated a
fundamental position: “The positive evaluation sur-
prised me for another reason as well: The triviality
of the statement was embedded in neobaroque
vocabulary, a pile-up of terms from cybernetics,
games theory, information theory. However, I ad-
mit that the style of the delivery appeared very
self-assured. Now, it’s not that I’m interested in
dwelling on this case. I suspect that what we’ve
got here is a general problem with education at
our school. In contrast with colleges of science,
training at the School of Design addresses skills
“One important reason Ever since the school People make impres-
for the exclusiveness opened, it has been sionistic judgments
and isolation of the pointed out how aloof because they are una-
School of Design is a its language is […]. ware that the terminolo-
terminology that gy used in Ulm is not
sounds hermetic. private at all, but in-
volves the use of tech-
nical terms […].
and, coming out of that, intentional action and
behavior. In lieu of knowledge that can be general-
ly applied, training at the HfG is directed at con-
crete change. Acquirable knowledge is only a
means to this goal. If you like, designers represent
a political and a moral stance. They take up a posi-
tion. They not only adopt an attitude, they act.
Their position is not simply a resultant in an inter-
play of forces. They do not have compromise in
mind, even when they have to make compromises.
I assume that students in the department of infor-
mation are not sent out into the world to seek their
place within a social and economic system, but to
push through principles. I know that little has yet
been done at our school to guarantee education in
this direction. Design policy happens only coinci-
dentally. It is anchored only in persons, not in the
curriculum. That wouldn’t really be such a tragedy
if it weren’t for the fact that the view is obviously
being spread that there is no such thing as design
policy, and if people didn’t make the mistake of
confusing design and science.” 1065
Now the eye of the cyclone had been given a
In the auditorium at the name: Design was not a science – to quote Otl
opening of the new Aicher – and the School of Design was not a col-
academic year, 3 Octo- lege of science. Those who did not like to accept
ber 1960; in front, Hans the truth of this statement moved beyond the cen-
Gugelot and Tomás ter and risked being seized by centrifugal forces
Maldonado. and hurled outside.
Photo: Sander The crisis of 1962 was a power struggle between
Archive: Südwestpresse
the two factions into which the HfG had been split.
It revolved around the question whether design at
the HfG was to be pursued as an unbiased science
or not. Depending on which view people held,
they rallied around Horst Rittel or Otl Aicher. But if
there had only been this one clear question with
both fronts plainly aligned, the dispute could have
been settled quickly. That was not so, however.
The dispute dragged on torturously over all of
1962 because many additional parameters influ-
enced the decision if and when a person leaned
toward either faction or again turned away from it:
personal sympathy and antipathy, envy and re-
sentment, ignorance and uncertainty, loyalty and
acting in the interest of the foundation, many small
professional and pedagogical differences. A few
It is not just Ulm termi-
nology that seems to be
hermetic. The theories
behind it are hermetic –
because they are unfa-
miliar.“
students proved to be very active seconds, while 259
many students apparently concentrated on their
studies and were barely touched by the unrest.
Horst Rittel was a member of the governing
board – a good starting position within the HfG.
Otl Aicher, who lay claim to moral responsibility for
the HfG as its co-founder, was a member of the
advisory board – the better position, as it turned
out. For the foundation’s bylaws decreed that the
advisory board should pass the HfG bylaws after
the foundation’s executive board had drafted
them. There was no mention in the bylaws that the
HfG would be part of this process, and if circum-
stances had been the other way around when the
two previous bylaws were passed, that was be-
cause of the presumptuous behavior of the gov-
erning board, which the executive board and advi-
sory board had tolerated.
These two starting positions corresponded to
the venues where the struggle took place: on one
hand the HfG, on the other the advisory board of
the foundation. At the end of the year Otl Aicher
was clearly the winner. It was a Pyrrhic victory, and
the price of the victory was that the foundations of
the HfG were permanently damaged.
On 3 February 1962, 25 of 46 students in their
first year of studies – formerly the basic program,
but as early as the 1959/60 academic year this
initial year of studies had been partly changed;
on 30 January 1961 the inner council had official-
ly done away with the name Grundlehre (basic
program) in favor of Erstes Studienjahr (first year
of studies), and as of 1 October 1961 students
directly entered the departments 1066 – wrote a spe-
cific memorandum as well as a comprehensive
one for each department in which they seriously
criticized conditions at the HfG 1067: “After four
months of study we are deeply disappointed, for
daily we see and experience anew that this school
is not what it should and could be and does not
keep its promises. […] Teaching and research are
simply not connected, for the institutes, of course,
are taboo for the students. Rather, we have the
impression that the entire student and college
setup is only a clever façade for the institutes. […]
Also we are no longer willing to allow ourselves be
stuffed full of book learning and to keep trotting
like dumb school children from lecture to lecture,
to cram the material into our brains only to regur-
gitate it during exams, like kids in grade school.
We do not want to become sociologists, or phys-
iologists, and certainly not structural theoreticians,
statisticians, analytical thinkers, or mathemati-
cians, but designers! The lectures only have value
for us if the material refers to problems of design
or at least is presented in such a way that we our-
selves are capable of seeing the connections.”
Otl Aicher took up the students’ request as evi-
dence for his assertion that the HfG could not con-
 The governing boards
260 tinue as it had so far, and that the cause of this
trouble was the mistaken belief that design was
a science. In his general attack he named names:
“Until now I have avoided discussing this topic
with any of the students. But after this massive
protest, which brings the bankruptcy of the pres-
ent administration’s pedagogical intentions to
general awareness, I am no longer willing to exer-
cise any sort of collegial restraint toward the facul-
ty and administration of the school. In the last two
years the HfG has been going downhill step by
step. We who founded and developed this school
had to stand here and watch, for reasons of soli-
darity, how through lack of ability and vanity, bit by
bit, our work fell apart. After the present step by
students in the first year of studies the time has
come when continued passivity would be irre-
sponsible. The students’ statement makes it clear
to all that the HfG faces pedagogical ruin. The
cause of this development is in the declared inten-
tion of Mr. Rittel and Mr. Kesting to replace design
by science and, as they thought, thus to found a
proper college at long last. I know that Mr. Rittel
now denies that he took this view in conversation
with me. I’ll be happy to take it upon myself that
this means one of us has to appear as a liar. In ac-
cordance with this policy Mr. Rittel has gathered
all the lecturers who are unimportant for design,
and finally with the help of the election mecha-
nism in the council he managed to bring about a
situation where the designers had to pursue their
activity almost illegally. There was no longer a
legitimate place for design in the HfG. People were
trained in abstract methods and, for the most part,
taught irrelevant knowledge. […]The only obvious
conclusion to be drawn from this wretched state
of things is the resignation of those persons who
are responsible for such a fiasco. If people are
unable to see this, I think it would be best if the
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung takes the appropriate
steps that will allow the reputation of the HfG to be
restored. The process will be laborious and lengt-
hy. In my responsibility as co-founder of the HfG,
I intend to do everything I consider appropriate to
clarify the situation . The time for standing by and
watching is past.” 1068
With the support of Tomás Maldonado, Herbert
Ohl, and Walter Zeischegg, Otl Aicher demanded
the resignation of the governing board – an affront
to Hans Gugelot, the board’s chairman, who as the
representative of the designers, that is, those very
Paul Hildinger,
Cornelius Uittenhout,
and Otto Schild,
1958.
Photos: Wolfgang Siol
Archive: HfG (58/0276/1,
58/0331 and 58/0348)
lecturers, had allowed himself to be pressed into
taking part in the administration of the HfG becau-
se he hoped thus to make possible the necessary
change in the bylaws. But Otl Aicher accepted the
fact that as he struggled with Horst Rittel, Hans
Gugelot was also compromised.
Horst Rittel and Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart
passed on the memoranda of the first-year stu-
dents, which were addressed solely to the execu-
tive board of the foundation, the governing board,
and the tenured lecturers, to the student represen-
tatives. The reaction: The very next day five ad-
vanced students condescended to write a scornful
response. Why, every entering group of students
had had the same experience at the HfG – within
the first weeks they’d been shocked out of their
reverie and hope. Moreover the advanced students
defended the teaching of theoretical subjects:
“Whatever theory and science is taught here serves
solely as a tool, as a method for working on and
grounding design problems. Knowledge from a
vast range of specialties is part of a designer’s
general education. It’s the only way a designer
attains understanding and supreme ease. In the
view of the 30 protesting voices we see an idea
borrowed from traditional art institutes that may be
appropriate at such institutes. The fact that they
insist on such ideas has an embarrassingly pro-
gressive character and represents a step backward
with regard to the design concept that has already
been elaborated at the HfG. We understand design
as a creative ability that must be preceded by a
methodical process – taking down the facts, tak-
ing into account and thinking through many differ-
ent standpoints, and formulating logical inferences.
We believe that because of this the HfG became
a trendsetter even for institutions that have a rich
tradition, and provided a model for the founding of
new schools of design.” 1069
Thorwald Risler immediately tried to ensure that
this matter remained the difference of opinion bet-
ween two lecturers within the faculty and that it
was kept from the students. 1070 At the same time,
he said, he supported Otl Aicher’s position. At this
point he was still in agreement with Otl Aicher and
Walter Zeischegg (also a member of the advisory
board) that the foundation must now intervene and
the advisory board must pass new HfG bylaws. He
supported Otl Aicher’s request that “the HfG must
be led back and reorganized in accordance with its
original goals”, or to put it differently: that the con-
centration of the HfG on design must be reestab-
lished. 1071
At the 15 December 1962 meeting of the gov-
erning board Horst Rittel took up Otl Aicher’s
gauntlet. 1072 He had the support of Friedrich Vor-
demberge-Gildewart (probably only because he
had for some time been in a personal confronta-
tion with Tomás Maldonado, and Tomás Maldona-
do in turn was a bitter opponent of Horst Rittel).
Thorwald Risler, who had spoken to the first-year
students just the day before, insisted that all the
items mentioned in the memorandum were mat-
ters that concerned only the faculty. It was not up
to the students to make any decisions about it. He
reminded Horst Rittel that he should not misuse
the students as foot soldiers to reinforce his power
base now, as he had done in the Mervyn Perrine
affair. He was afraid, though, that it had in the
meantime become impossible to clarify objectively
all the issues and differences of opinion, because
those who were involved no longer acted as
though they were capable of negotiating: “They all
say they have made an effort to dialogue with the
others. But an objective discussion is no longer
possible here. It is not the students’ letter that is
critical, but the attitude of the colleagues on the
faculty. I see no way out and no possibility of get-
ting everybody around a conference table again.”
Horst Rittel knew his own Achilles’ heel: There
was only one possibility that he would no longer
be able to maintain his position, and that was if
the current bylaws were changed. The foundation
could not suddenly dismiss all the lecturers who
had elected him in the inner council without risk-
ing the collapse of teaching activity. And he knew
that Otl Aicher aimed precisely at this weak spot:
He made every effort to change the bylaws in such 261
a way that precisely this type of election would no
longer be possible. Both Horst Rittel and Otl Aicher
had of course been put under an obligation to co-
operate when on 9 June 1961 they were elected
to the committee of the inner council that was
supposed to revise the bylaws by the end of 1961.
Nothing came of that – the committee, in Otl
Aicher’s opinion, had been disbanded because
except for him no one had drawn up any propo-
sals. 1073 Besides Otl Aicher did not want students
to be part of this commission, or part of revising
the bylaws in general, because he was convinced
that the only students who participated in this
work were those who were on Horst Rittel’s side.
Now, Horst Rittel did not agree with Thorwald Ris-
ler that the situation could be resolved by giving
the HfG new bylaws, because he believed “that
the present situation was less about the bylaws
than about the configuration of the personnel”.
The HfG, he said, had “no memory, was not ca-
pable of learning”.
Even as Thorwald Risler was conferring with the
governing board, student representatives Karlheinz
Allgayer and Klaus Pfromm entered the room and
handed the gentlemen the latest issue of the stu-
dent newspaper Output, which was devoted
exclusively to the change in the bylaws and in
which the bylaws of the HfG and the foundation,
as well as changes proposed by the students,
were printed in full. The students again wanted to
use this opportunity to express their displeasure at
the fact that the reality of their studies, because of
personnel and curriculum shortcomings, did not
live up to the claims made in the school’s publicity
material. 1074 Nevertheless Thorwald Risler was out-
raged at the student representatives’ behavior and
at once sharply rebuked them for it as a flagrant
breach of confidence, because he had expressly
asked that the students’ proposal be given directly
to the foundation and not be publicly discussed.
“Mr. Pfromm says the reason the student govern-
ment took this step is that it believes a change in
the bylaws cannot take place behind closed doors,
but must be made in full view of the public.” Hans
Gugelot replied that the foundation as the sponsor
of the HfG would approve the bylaws, and that it
was a great show of trust if it asked the student
body for a recommendation; the students’ attitude
was all the more questionable if they published
their recommendation in print beforehand. Thor-
wald Risler refused to consider using an issue of
the Output as a working basis for changing the
bylaws. But that was not all: “If it is true that any
of the lecturers knew of this publication, then this
only adds to a very disrupted situation.” For Hans
Gugelot this incident was the straw that broke the
camel’s back. He announced his resignation: “Mr.
Gugelot also emphasized that he considers the
 The governing boards
262 current situation to be far more critical than the
onetime Bill crisis, since the school administration
is now no longer respected at all, and that there
was no opposing group whose members agreed
with each other. He said Mr. Aicher in particular
was very upset and disillusioned, and as one of the
founders was seriously worried about the school’s
future.” He stressed that “when he had run for of-
fice, he had only done so to allow the situation to
simmer down to some extent. The present lack of
consideration among colleagues, however, was a
great breach of trust. […] Mr. Risler, shaken, also
states that there is no more trust in the school,
neither among the lecturers nor among lecturers
and students. In conclusion Mr. Rittel admits that
for two days he has known about the Output is-
sue, but simply forgot to tell anybody. He says he
only told Mr. Vordemberge-Gildewart.” Honi soit
qui mal y pense! [Shamed be he who thinks evil of
it!]
On 19 February 1962 there was a meeting of
those members of the advisory board who lived in
Ulm: the Aichers, Hans Frieder Eychmüller, Thor-
wald Risler, Walter Zeischegg. 1075 It was not an
ordinary advisory board meeting because there
would not have been enough time to call a meet-
ing. Not until that point did people realize that the
existing bylaws had not been formally correctly
passed, but of course this was not about formal-
ities but about the substance of the bylaws: “The
very democratic trend of the bylaws, i. e., the fact
that student representatives, heads of workshops,
and guest lecturers, who actually sustain the
school, are able to join in all decisions has meant
that sometimes majority decisions have been
made whose consequences for the college were
extremely unfavorable. Another result has been
that in the last two years governing boards have
been elected that cannot represent the college in
their current makeup. […] Since this is a college of
design, it is primarily the design lecturers who
ought to have the opportunity to run the school.
The ancillary lecturers who are naturally necessary
for the theoretical subjects ought not to be given
too much influence over the course of the col-
lege.”
Now, the crux of the current situation was that
Hans Gugelot had resigned from his position as
the chair of the governing board, partly out of res-
ignation in view of the hopelessness of the situa-
tion, partly because he had been hurt by the gen-
eral attack of Otl Aicher, partly to go back to his
work as a lecturer and at the institute. Actually it
would have been advisable to have an immediate
by-election in the inner council. But Thorwald Ris-
ler disregarded this, and “Mrs. Aicher agreed with
Exhibition booth of the
BASF at the Hannover
Industrial Fair, May
1962.
Photo: unknown
Archive: Südwestpresse
him that [it would be a mistake] to set in motion
the electoral mechanism prescribed by the provi-
sional bylaws of the college in order to complete
the governing board. This would lead nowhere.”
That is why Hans Gugelot’s resignation was to be
rejected out of hand.
Otl Aicher together with Herbert Ohl and Walter
Zeischegg had worked out a proposal for changing
the HfG bylaws. Thorwald Risler basically wanted
to have this text approved by the advisory board as
soon as possible so that the HfG would get some
peace once more. It is true that Hans Frieder
Eychmüller doubted “whether any constitutional
change was a possibility or guarantee that these
types of conflicts that concerned matters of sub-
stance would be avoided in the future. In his opin-
ion, theoretical subjects would be needed in the
future as well. Mr. Risler responded that in the new
plan, too, in addition to practical training in design,
scientific minor subjects would be taught. But
these minor subjects would need to be evaluated
and things must never again get to the point
where the gradual differences between design
courses and ancillary courses would become too
blurred. In the present situation, however, he felt
a discussion of this topic among the lecturers was
unproductive.” Otl Aicher’s draft was aimed at set-
ting up a “representative democracy” with a strong
rector elected for a set term at its head. All those
who were present understood that this meant the
rights of individuals or groups would be diminished,
and that the plan could therefore be expected to
meet with resistance. To put it in different terms:
If the foundation did not dismiss all the lecturers
who did not accept Otl Aicher’s views on design, it
had to demote them to mere yes men who auto-
matically supported Otl Aicher. In conclusion, Thor-
wald Risler admonished those present “that the
adoption of new bylaws and the mobilizing of the
old lecturers, who would now have to try to do
more for the school, represented a last attempt to
renew the college from within.” If this attempt
were to fail, of course, he saw only one other alter-
native – that the school be managed by someone
else, that is, to put it plainly, that it be nationalized.
At the moment, he felt it was the duty of the advi-
sory board and of the executive board to support
the ideas of the old lecturers which had after all
sprung from the attempt at renewal.
A look at the results of the constitutional com-
mission shows two drafts: one is that mentioned
above, by Otl Aicher, Herbert Ohl, and Walter Zei-
schegg, the other is by the student body and was
published in Output.
Two years previously, in May 1960, when tensions
first appeared between the designers and the the-
oreticians, Herbert Ohl had drawn up a draft ver-
sion for the bylaws of the HfG. It already contains
the essential concerns that the designers, headed
by Otl Aicher, associated with new HfG bylaws: a
strong rector and the limitation of eligibility for this
office to a “competent”, qualitatively limited select
group. From the start, the criterion of this quality
was whether one belonged to the design or non-
design departments. Interestingly enough, Herbert
Ohl had at the time proposed an especially small
electoral body (senate: the four department heads
and the head of the basic course). 1076 Otl Aicher
(who was attending a design conference in Tokyo)
had criticized the plan at that time: “I consider 263
your proposal to be technically impracticable.
Elections are based on statistical premises. You
need larger numbers to have one. An election
with two, three, four voters is an absurdity.” (On
20 December 1962, Otl Aicher himself would be
elected rector by five colleagues.) Beyond this Otl
Aicher’s letter explains the objectives he had pur-
sued since by demanding a constitutional change:
“The change in the bylaws ought to effect the fol-
lowing:
1. that competent persons are considered for lead-
ership positions,
2. that the leadership becomes more viable,
3. that we do not have to live through another Bill
case. Power makes people vain. […]
Only, I tend to judge bylaws by potential conflict
situations. If all goes well, the bylaws will become
almost redundant.” 1077
The previous November, Otl Aicher, Herbert
Ohl, and Walter Zeischegg worked out several
drafts of the new HfG bylaws for the commission
of the inner council. 1078 The first version, dated 6
November 1961, shows the unvarnished intention
of the designers to introduce a faculty hierarchy:
“The faculty consists of the immediate faculty, the
design lecturers, technical lecturers, guest lectur-
ers, and the extended faculty, the lecturers, assist-
ant lecturers, [and] teachers of specialized sub-
jects.” 1079
The rector was to be elected by the senate,
which – as already outlined in Herbert Ohl’s pro-
posal of 29 April 1960 – was to consist only of the
rector, the department heads, and one representa-
tive of the “technical lecturers”. The classification
of the faculty changed in name but not in sub-
stance in the drafts that followed.
The 22 December 1961 recommendation of the
student body (the member of the commission rep-
resenting the students was Klaus Pfromm) also
provided for the faculty to be divided into design
and technical lecturers as well as a rector, but the
latter was to be far weaker than in Otl Aicher’s pro-
posal. The primary reason for this was that the rec-
tor was to be elected by a council that was basi-
cally made up of the same members as previous-
ly. 1080 The recommendation for change printed in
Output sounded quite different: It essentially
amounted to a continuation of the existing situa-
tion with a three-member governing board.
On 27 and 28 February 1962 the advisory
board discussed a revised version of the draft pro-
posed by Otl Aicher, Herbert Ohl, and Walter Zei-
schegg. 1081 With the introductory definition of their
educational goal they wanted to commit the HfG
to a focus on design: “The task of the School of
Design is training designers in the fields of indus-
 The governing boards
264 trial production and communication. In order to
support this pedagogical goal, related subjects are
taught. The promotion of applied research and de-
velopment in design-related areas is in the interest
of the college.” Eligibility for the governing board
was to be reserved for “tenured” lecturers. The
rector was to be elected for a two-year term, be
the pedagogical head of the HfG, and have the
right to nominate faculty appointments; appoint-
ments were to be approved by the executive board
of the foundation. The inner senate (rector, depart-
ment heads, and a representative of the special-
ized lecturers) was to decide on the appointment
of lecturers to tenured positions. The extended
senate (tenured and non-tenured lecturers, one
representative each of the assistant lecturers and
technical teachers, two student representatives)
was to elect the rector. The departments were to
be constituted as a new body of the HfG (corre-
sponding to the departments of traditional col-
leges and universities) with one department head
each (a position attainable only by a tenured lec-
turer) and regular department meetings. In this
draft, the crucial point of the bylaws, namely, who
could become a tenured lecturer, was not explicit-
ly limited to designers. Rather, there was an ex-
tremely vague circumlocution: “An appointment to
a tenured lectureship is only permitted on the
basis of special qualification and a lengthy teach-
ing period at the college. Exceptions from these
requirements are possible only in particularly justi-
fied cases and need the approval of two-thirds of
the votes of the inner senate.”
The crisis could have been over with this meeting
of the advisory board on 27 and 28 February 1962.
Wolfgang Siol, 1958. Max Bill sent his regrets, and the foundation re-
Photo: Christian Staub ceived no response from Fritz Pfeil to the invitation,
Archive: HfG (58/0370/1) so that except for these two all members of the
advisory board were present: the Aichers, Hans
Frieder Eychmüller, Max Guther, Günther Grzimek,
Thorwald Risler, and Walter Zeischegg. They made
it possible for the foundation’s executive board
(Thorwald Risler, Inge Aicher-Scholl, and Max
Guther) to present the HfG with a fait accompli:
The proposal of Otl Aicher, Herbert Ohl, and
Walter Zeischegg was adopted as the bylaws
of the HfG;
the executive board of the foundation was
authorized to give this proposal to Hellmut
Becker for review, and later to make editorial
changes;
in addition the executive board was authorized
to pass the bylaws at a time it deemed appro-
priate;
half a year after the bylaws went into effect a
new meeting of the advisory board was to be
called to discuss how well the bylaws were
working and to have a chance to react to
them. 1082
The situation was not immediately cleared up, but
not because of the authority the foundation’s ex-
ecutive board had received through these powers.
What was called for now was resolute action, but
the alliance between Thorwald Risler and Otl Ai-
cher broke down.
Thorwald Risler had supported Otl Aicher’s initia-
tive in the interest of the foundation: The founda-
tion needed a peaceful HfG behind it that made
concentrated work possible and radiated profes-
sionalism so that the confidence of industry and
of the ministries would not be lost. In addition he
respected the HfG founders’ goal of limiting the
HfG to its original intentions. At the same time he
demanded that these questions should be resolved
in all openness and objectivity. He could not toler-
ate intrigues and tactical maneuvers. And he
doubted that a constitutional change could do the
job when actually a change in interpersonal rela-
tionships was required.
Suddenly this difference of opinion between
Thorwald Risler and Otl Aicher turned into an open
quarrel – for a trivial reason. Thorwald Risler had
referred the Badische Anilin-& Soda-Fabrik AG
(Baden Aniline & Soda Factory) (BASF) as a client
to Otl Aicher’s development team, and the team
had developed an exhibition stand for the industri-
al fair in Hannover. On the opening day Thorwald
Risler, in the presence of Otl Aicher and the chair-
man of the BASF executive board, Carl Wurster
(who was at the same time the vice president of
the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft), expressed the criti-
cism that this work, in his opinion, had not been
done professionally enough. 1083 Thorwald Risler
felt obliged to voice this criticism to this influential
captain of industry because he bore the respon-
sibility for the entire foundation and in any case
wanted to avoid the impression that the HfG did
unprofessional work. Otl Aicher, however, inter-
preted this criticism as interference in the work
of the designers and felt that it was substantially
unjustified, expressed at the inappropriate time,
and a personal affront. He declared that his co-
operation with Thorwald Risler was over and used
the incident as an opportunity to grumble about
the basic relationship between the foundation and
the HfG. What was disastrous was that he refused
to solve one question after the other; instead he
combined the two and thus slowed down the pro-
cess of clearing up the entire situation.
Thorwald Risler’s colleagues on the executive
board, Inge Aicher-Scholl and Max Guther, be-
lieved out of deep conviction in the goals Otl Ai-
cher associated with the reform of the bylaws.
Guther expressed them clearly on 16 April 1962:
“The makeup of the governing board in recent
years gave rise to fears that the school would
develop contrary to the intentions of the actual
founders, who had intentionally wanted a school
of design. […] I, too, believe that new bylaws can
fulfill their purpose if there is a trusting interplay
of forces. On the other hand we must realize that
the School of Design is not ‘supported’ equally by
all the lecturers. And also we must not overlook
the fact that such great differences have arisen
within the faculty that it is no longer possible to
achieve trusting cooperation through mediation
alone. Thus we will have to decide who matters
most. […] If we do not succeed in giving the
school a new basis for work and development
by means of new bylaws and through mediation
among the teachers who truly support the school
Christian Staub and and therefore are indispensable, then the School
Anthony Froshaug, of Design has forfeited its right to exist. In that
1958. case it is better to put an end to the school once
Photos: Wolfgang Siol and for all rather than keep it alive artificially. […]
Archive: HfG As for who ought to be the rector, I think that only
(58/0315 and 58/0294)
a tenured lecturer for design may become a rector.
[…] You can see that I intentionally wish to deny
the technical lecturers any decisive involvement as
a rector or member of the inner senate. I want to
be quite frank about it and honestly admit that it
was the behavior of Mr. Rittel in particular that
made me choose this strict position. ” 1084 Reading
between the lines, we can see the hand of Otl Ai-
cher, who tried to use Max Guther to push through
his maximum demands against Thorwald Risler in
the foundation’s executive board.
On 25 April 1962 the governing board was no
longer able to withstand the pressure of its oppo-
nents at the HfG and resigned as a body. 1085 The
HfG lapsed into a sort of paralysis because now,
except for Christian Staub, no one was willing to
run for a position on the governing board anymore.
This is why the inner council was not even con- 265
vened in order to elect a new governing board in
accordance with the bylaws. The alternative, for
the foundation, would have been to take advan-
tage of the moment and put the new bylaws into
effect. But the dispute between Otl Aicher and
Thorwald Risler blocked this option.
Otl Aicher and Thorwald Risler could not agree
on the position Horst Rittel (pars pro toto) was to
be given according to the next bylaws. Risler’s
concern was to go beyond the momentary agony
and think of instruction at the school in the future.
What good was all this if only half the faculty stayed
on at the HfG? That is why he tried to “win over
Mr. Gugelot and the lecturers who did not belong
to the old group to work with him and implement
the compromise proposal.” 1086 And that is why he
clung to his demand that the provisions to regulate
the transition from the old to the new bylaws
would be formulated in such a way that “there is
protection for everyone from Mr. Aicher’s and Mr.
Maldonado’s doctrinaire endeavors.” These provi-
sions for a transition were meant to establish, as
agreed, the new positions of the lecturers that
would be their starting line under the new HfG
bylaws. Otl Aicher, Tomás Maldonado, Herbert
Ohl, and Walter Zeischegg demanded that Horst
Rittel, Gert Kalow, Christian Staub, and Friedrich
Vordemberge-Gildewart occupy positions from
which they could not get into the school adminis-
tration. Besides they demanded that Otl Aicher, by
an act of sovereignty of the foundation, be ap-
pointed as the rector for a two-year term. Otl Ai-
cher concentrated on making any continuing work
in the school administration impossible, particular-
ly for Horst Rittel, because he believed this would
jeopardize the attempt to renew the HfG. 1087 Thor-
wald Risler on the other hand insisted “that it was
impossible to reduce Mr. Rittel in rank”. In the
meantime three months had gone by since the
advisory board agreed to approve the new bylaws.
The advantage that a surprise coup would have
brought about had dwindled with each day of hes-
itation. Now the members of the administrative
council also realized what was happening. In a
memorandum, student representative Gudrun Otto
furiously complained that the students had not
been informed of the resignation of the HfG ad-
ministration, and that their arguments from issue
no. 9 of Output had not been taken into consider-
ation during the conference about the bylaws. 1088
Besides, Mervyn Perrine with the above-mentioned
letter had returned to the stage of action for a
short guest engagement, now that the tumult of
battle was at its thickest. As the members of the
administrative council saw it, if the HfG bylaws
were to be changed, a legitimate sequence of
steps must now be observed. If Otl Aicher had
been “enthroned” by the foundation’s executive
 The governing boards
266 board, exactly the opposite would have happened.
And this situation did not exactly become clearer
when Otl Aicher adamantly refused to be account-
able to the foundation’s executive board “in any
way whatsoever” once he would appointed rector
by the foundation. 1089
This went on for a whole month until the entire
executive board of the foundation decided to call
another meeting of the inner council as the gov-
erning board’s electoral body, for Wednesday 30
May 1962. This election was actually an anachro-
nism, because the new HfG bylaws could have
been put into effect long before if Thorwald Risler
and Otl Aicher had reached an agreement. But the
HfG’s business, after all, had to be continued leg-
itimately. Thorwald Risler’s hopes for the election
were that at least circumstances within the HfG
would be put in order if the new bylaws were
passed: “The executive board expects the elector-
al body and of the eligible lecturers to cooperate
loyally in order to elect a viable, competent, and
representative governing board.” 1090 And lo and
behold, the inner council elected a governing
board of designers: Otl Aicher (visual communi-
cation), Tomás Maldonado (product design), and
Herbert Ohl (industrialized building). 1091 Thus the
administration positions of the HfG were filled
exclusively by representatives of the three design
departments. They held all the trumps, and it was
up to them to win the constitutional poker game
against department representatives Christian
Staub (visual communication), Horst Rittel (infor-
mation and representative for the theoretical sub-
jects), and Paul Hildinger (representative for the
workshops) . 1092 Now the foundation was also no
longer under pressure to pass the new bylaws as
soon as possible, for the situation that existed now
was the very one that the new bylaws were to
have brought about.
Herbert Ohl, who was elected to be chair by his
two colleagues, made a confident programmatic
statement to the assembled lecturers and students
two days later: “In spite of apparent breaches,
change, and nothing but demonstrations, the growth
of this college is characterized by a consistent
sequence – foundation, development, and experi-
ence. […] The contributions of all members of the
college are necessary and will be organized and
used in accordance with the central task of this
school of design. One of the special contributions
of this school of design is the realization that only
with all the creative forces of our industrial society
– with science and technology playing a leading
role – can we truly learn to grasp and solve our
design problems and come up with design pro-
cesses. […] Nevertheless, at this college, this very
relationship of science and design has created dif-
ferences of opinion whose cause can be found in
the different ways the basic purpose of this col-
lege is evaluated. To solve our design tasks we 267
need science and technology as applied sciences.
[…] The experiences relating to these problems
that we have gained from the college’s develop-
ment to date will help us to restore the proper
order to the composite of teachers, learners, and
problems that has lost its equilibrium and its abil-
ity to work as a unit.“ Herbert Ohl then presented
a series of concrete suggestions to illustrate his
remarks:
The social and economic background of design
should be represented by a tenured lecturer for
economics.
Film should be developed “as an essential com-
municative medium” and developed with money
and lecturers “into an effective part of our
teaching and research”.
The interrupted experiment of the Research
Center for Optical Perception ought to be con-
tinued; however, it should not only carry out
demonstrations as heretofore, but rather de-
sign-related experiments. In addition the re-
search center should also “extend its percep-
tion projects into the related branches of the
other faculties of perception and thus attain an
integral view of perception, contributing to
opening up ‘human engineering’ for our objec-
tives”.
The institutes should continue to be an “indis-
pensable precondition for lively and progressive
teaching and thus be of functional importance
for our school”.
Finally, a warning in the direction of the student
representatives: “The natural situation when the
student government was founded was that in
spite of many diverse views there was a com- Visit by 32 British once more explained that a long, hot autumn directions” was impossible for a school as small as
mon interest shared with all members of the industrialists and repre- could be expected from some of the students if the Ulm college. Aicher’s direction was not easy to
college, and not the kind of unnatural, conflict- sentatives of the British the HfG were to be restructured according to the put into words, she said, and those who followed
ing interest and polarity found in a labor Council of Industrial will of the designers. Interestingly enough, as the that direction simply knew it. That is why Otl Ai-
union”. 1093 Design, 31 Aug. 1962. student representative, she also mentioned nation- cher’s position must be carried through: The HfG
Photo: Wolfgang Siol alization as a last resort – an idea that Max Bill had was neither an academic college where design
Far less confident was Thorwald Risler’s memo of Archive: HfG (62/0346) of course held and that had been considered, or was pursued as a science nor a school of arts and
5 June 1962 to the administrative council about rather conjured up, by members of the administra- crafts at which design was seen as something that
constituting the new governing board: “Even if the tive council, by Max Guther, and also by Thorwald was value-free.
basic problems and difficulties within the faculty Risler. “All factual debates are dragged down to As a reaction to past events, Otl Aicher an-
and with the student government have by no the level of personal confrontations. […] We need nounced that he wished to remove his develop-
means all been rectified, there has been a notice- to find out whether this school can still administer ment team from the Institute of Product Design
able easing of tension.” 1094 itself.[…] There should be a guarantee that per- and transfer it to an institute that would be separ-
sonnel questions will no longer be misused to ate from the HfG and the foundation. His reason
Three days later, on 8 June 1962, the inner coun- pursue ‘power politics’ and alter electoral rela- was as follows: Hans Gugelot had already indicat-
cil, as was customary, elected the governing board tions.” 1096 ed in the preceding year that he was no longer
for the coming academic year (1962/63). It con- In the evening Thorwald Risler, Max Guther, and willing to let himself be worn down between two
sisted of Otl Aicher, Rudolf Doernach, and Chris- Inge Aicher-Scholl met with Otl Aicher, Hellmut fronts. He had seriously considered turning his
tian Staub and became the last governing board of Becker, Roderich Count Thun, and a colleague of back on the HfG. There were attractive offers.
the HfG. 1095 Hellmut Becker, the attorney Johann Peter Vogel, Thorwald Risler did not want to lose Hans Gugelot,
A week before the beginning of the summer who was editing the draft of the bylaws. Inge a mainstay of teaching, the international reputation
break, on 24 June 1962, student representative Aicher-Scholl put her finger on her husband’s con- of the HfG, and the economic success of the Insti-
Gudrun Otto, in a letter to Roderich Count Thun, viction that “the coexistence of various different tute of Product Design. Together with the founda-
 The governing boards
268 tion’s accountant, Max Horn, he drafted an organ-
izational structure that on the one hand gave Hans
Gugelot the desired independence from the HfG
but at the same time tied him to the foundation.
Outwardly the change was hardly noticeable –
somehow Hans Gugelot still belonged to the HfG
(as of 1 June 1962 only as a guest lecturer). This
was the structure: On 31 January 1962 a new as-
sociation was founded, called Institut für Produkt-
entwicklung und Design e.V. (Institute of Product
Development and Design, Inc.). The association
consisted of the legally prescribed minimum of
seven members, i. e., the five members of the ex-
ecutive board of the Society of Friends (Johann
Dietrich Auffermann, Hellmut Becker, Klaus Dohrn,
Erhard Löwe, and Roderich Count Thun) plus Thor-
wald Risler (chair) and Günther Schweigkofler, the
administrative director of the foundation (deputy
chair and general manager of the association). 1097
If Otl Aicher and his development team now
wanted to break away from the HfG and the foun-
dation completely, this meant that like Hans Guge-
lot he wanted to establish an institution of his own
for his work, even at the risk that the second pillar
that supported design at the HfG might collapse.
For Otl Aicher, however, it was more important that
– unlike Hans Gugelot – he wanted to act inde-
pendently of the foundation, for this foundation
had, of course, long been embodied by Thorwald
Risler and not by his own wife. Otl Aicher saw the
situation in terms of personnel, not of the institu-
tion, and Thorwald Risler, Hellmut Becker, and
Max Guther had been warning people of this very
thing: “Messrs. Risler, Becker, and Guther point
out the risk inherent in a situation where all the
faculty and staff that set the tone of the college
gradually break away into separate institutes.
Above all only institutes that are under the direct
control of the foundation should be formed. In
these institutes students must take part in re-
search and development. At all events the execu-
tive board of the foundation should continue to be
the highest authority for the college and the insti-
tutes, since it also bears the highest responsibil-
ity.” Otl Aicher’s counterargument was that he
wanted to be “independent of the foundation’s
executive board and especially of Mr. Risler,”
whom he no longer trusted. In view of this situa-
tion Hellmut Becker appealed to Otl Aicher’s sense
of responsibility: “The financial situation of the
school will become very precarious if the most
important institutes leave the school, because then
orders would no longer be met by the school, but
by the institutes. Mr. Guther also remarked that
the quality of the school would be diminished if it
could no longer identify with the achievements of
its best faculty and staff.” 1098 Otl Aicher did not let
this argument affect him and continued planning
the separation of his development team from the
HfG. 1099 On 12 July 1962 Thorwald Risler reminded
him that the foundation was the contractual part-
ner of all companies and that a solution could not
be effected from one day to the next: “Develop-
ment team no. 5 has now been working under
your direction since 1958/59 in an extended
sense. Contracts for the orders were concluded
between the customer and the GSS [Geschwister-
Scholl-Stiftung] as a legal entity.” 1100 He proposed
a separation by common agreement as of 30 June
1963. In the same breath he defended his criticism
Gert Kalow, 1958.
Photo: Hans Conrad
at the Hannover industrial fair, which had triggered
the discord between him and Otl Aicher: “For all
the bigger customers, possibly with the sole ex-
ception of the Braun Company, it was definitely
reassuring, and partly a prerequisite for working
with us, that I made a commitment to those re-
sponsible to supervise the work and to act as a
mediator during its completion.” At the same time,
he said, until spring 1962 he had always placed
himself protectively in front of the work of all the
development teams, “since I was convinced that in
time sensible and frictionless cooperation between
the customer and development team could be
reached. I didn’t express criticism until the crisis-
wracked completion of the BASF exhibit stand,
since here more than with all the other previous
orders the actual reputation of the institution as a
whole was also at stake.” The BASF, he said, had
very sharply criticized not only the collaborative
work of Otl Aicher and its staff members, but also
his own staff.
On the same date, 12 July 1962, Thorwald Risler
informed Max Guther about the dilemma he was
in: On the one hand, interests of the foundation
forced him finally to clear the air. On the other
hand, he was not prepared to use every available
means to do so. Otl Aicher insisted uncompromis-
ingly that there was no third way. In the process he
also ignored rules of interpersonal conduct. Thor-
wald Risler claimed that once Otl Aicher was a
member of the governing board, he wanted “to
prevent precisely that which in years gone by had
guaranteed him complete freedom to do his
work – i. e., limiting the governing board to teach-
ing only and giving the foundation’s executive
board freedom in structuring relations with the
individual lecturers and their areas of work. In the
same breath with which he demands powers […],
he is energetically pursuing the separation of his
development team from the context of the foun-
dation.” The irony of the story was that Otl Aicher
now demanded that he be given authority just as
Max Bill had done formerly. And just as Max Bill’s
professional qualities had been emphasized by
everyone, Otl Aicher’s outstanding abilities were
now praised. And yet it was supposedly a fact
“that all the members of the Landtag and Bundes-
tag with whom I spoke about budget raises stressed
unanimously […] that the funds were given in
spite of the Aichers.” Thorwald Risler began to
worry whether it made sense to go on working
in Ulm: “I invested the only capital I actually had –
my contacts in industry, and the name I had made
for myself in this sector, as well as my political
connections – fully in my work here without keep-
ing anything back. Since it is clear that I will not be
in Ulm forever, I cannot possibly risk the capital
I invested here without reservation by losing both
internal and external credibility.” 1101
At the same time Gert Kalow made one last 269
effort to try and get Otl Aicher to understand,
through an insistent letter, that the end does not
justify the means: “You have made many mistakes
in your dealings with people. You did not consider
that one must not offend the innermost, personal
dignity of one’s colleagues. […] Rittel is a tenured
lecturer, brought to Ulm at least with your approval
(if not actually at your wish); one can send him
away again, as long as one has a nice and tidy rea-
son for it […]. There must be no privileges among
the tenured lecturers of the HfG.” Events during
the year that had passed since Gert Kalow had
accepted the grant of the Rockefeller Foundation
and Otl Aicher had written him a harsh letter
would have confirmed his statement “that all the
fighting of the last years is basically simply about
a war between the old lecturers about privileges.
You, dear Aicher, are the main culprit; and the
continuing existence of the school depends on
you, you alone. You must make more spiritual sac-
rifices than ever before in order to make the HfG
even viable as an institution. You must (without
any diminishment of your ideas) pay greater trib-
ute to the social value of manners. […] Otherwise
you will (not only in the eyes of your evil contem-
poraries, but in actual fact) turn into a dictator.
Otherwise you will soon be surrounded by only
two types of people: bootlickers and (open or
secret) haters. […] If we in Ulm go on collecting
electoral majorities instead of working on trans-
forming enemies into partners, we’re going to de-
stroy the school. If you, dear Mr. Aicher, cling to
the vision of an ‘integral’ HfG in which every little
detail is strictly interrelated, you will destroy your
own work. You will never get over the internal cri-
ses – not because you are a bad person (you’re
not), but because your vision contains a fallacy.
[…] A school is […] not viable without an objec-
tive, concretized structure of regulations and ritu-
als, without some sacrifice of subjectivity on the
part of all those involved. There’s no help for it.
We must learn to make a sharp distinction be-
tween the mission and the institution of the HfG.”
Part of this sanctioned behavior, he added, was
respect for giving students the right to make deci-
sions, or the absence of privileges: “We’ve never
succeeded in establishing the most fundamental
rituals here in Ulm, not least because of your re-
sistance.” 1102
Gert Kalow went on with this argumentation in a
report on my experiences dated June 1962. 1103
One reason for the continuing internal crisis of
the HfG, he said, was the absence of a generally
accepted “canon of rules of the game”. While the
bylaws were good, they were impaired by the fact
that they were provisional: “Whenever anything is
done according to the rules of the game of these
 The governing boards
270 bylaws that is contrary to the ideas of one or more
lecturers, this ‘provisionality’ is brought up as an
argument in order to protest that the result (for
example, the election of a governing board) is
‘intolerable’ or ‘actually illegal’. It’s happened not
once, but several times, after the election of a new
governing board, that one or several lecturers de-
clared that it was impossible to work with this gov-
erning board. The inevitable consequence: a latent
civil war. […] The HfG has still not been objectified
as an institution: It is still predominantly a mere
idea or ‘a genial improvisation’ , and only very min-
imally a concrete material form. […] We ought to
think again about the HfG’s connection with the
spiritual heritage of Hans and Sophie Scholl. In
actual fact it is difficult to reconcile much that has
happened at the HfG in recent years with the spirit
of democratic freedom for which the two students
sacrificed their lives.” Since a governing board had
been elected in 1960 which for the first time in-
cluded neither Otl Aicher, nor Tomás Maldonado,
nor Walter Zeischegg, this “group of old lecturers
more and more vociferously declared the bylaws
(which they themselves had drawn up) to be ‘use-
less’ and demanded new ones. […] Only the old
lecturers feel they are the patriarchs, only they
may determine the general policy of the HfG, and
to hell with the bylaws. […] In a certain sense the
HfG suffers from the fact that it makes excessive
idealistic demands on itself. If you put a friendly
interpretation on the policy of the directorate [i. e.,
the above-mentioned “old” lecturers; author’s
note], it was (and still is) based on the idea that
the Ulm school, without the constraint of any kind
of rules, ought to actually function as a close
friendly alliance. (I consider such an idea to be
criminal.) And then there is an even more criminal
idea, so idealistic that it is truly a terrorist concept,
that everything and anything that lecturers teach
in Ulm must be ‘design-related’.”
Presumably this statement by Gert Kalow was
intended for a administrative council discussion.
For Herbert Lindinger, Horst Rittel, and Otl Aicher
summarized their view of things in voluminous
papers during the same period. Herbert Lindinger
addressed Hellmut Becker on 25 June 1962. 1104
He sent him a highly sophisticated exploration of
the Ulm tangle of crises, a clear analysis from the
perspective of the designers versus the scientists.
Herbert Lindinger saw the causes of the crisis in
the clashes over four topics (design theory, design
as something value-free, the development teams
or institutes, and the bylaws). He also dissected
the different roles of the lecturers, students, and
the administrative director of the foundation: “The
foundation’s new administrative director was defi-
nitely a great gain for the entire institution. The
fact that HfG financing today is secured at a very
high level is due not only to the efforts of the
administrative council but also largely to the untir-
ing energy and negotiating skills of our administra-
tive director.” At the same time he criticized the
fact that Thorwald Risler interfered in the self-gov-
ernment of the HfG – in the old days, when the
governing board was not capable of making deci-
sions, this had, in his opinion, been necessary, but
not anymore. The role of the students, i. e., of the
student representatives, was something Herbert
Lindinger judged very critically: “In recent years,
however, student participation has become a
questionable institution. Increasingly college poli-
tics fell prey to demagoguery. All institutional or
pedagogical intentions that were not acceptable to
students were constantly under pressure that the
press would be informed. […] More and more stu-
dents […] come to the HfG only because the news
has spread that design is a fine and lucrative pro-
fession. These students are committed neither to
the cause nor to individual persons. […] The
standstill and delay of the new bylaws seems to
be largely due to the recent influence of these stu-
dent representatives. Claiming to represent the
student body as a whole (a plebiscite would em-
barrass this group terribly), the group uses a mas-
sive strategy of threats reminiscent of that used by
labor unions, which has had quite an impact on
the foundation. […] It is sad that things came to
the point that this institution, which took so much
energy to create, has today become a plaything for
a few students who try to compensate for their
lack of talent by labor union carryings-on or try to
change the school into something that would cor-
respond to their talents or their short-term prefer-
ences.” In conclusion he expressed his support
for the designers’ demand for a new HfG bylaws:
“While I don’t believe that good bylaws neces-
sarily result in a well functioning community, on
the other hand I don’t believe that a well function-
ing community could thrive if it is based on bad
by-laws.” The biggest trouble with the bylaws
was an overemphasis on the equality of persons
and courses, a counteraction to Max Bill. “The
new bylaws are certainly no panacea for Ulm,
but they will again put the emphasis where our
mission is.”
Horst Rittel, in his report to Roderich Count
Thun, disputed the logic of these arguments. 1105
Though the bylaws left room for improvement,
they were not the cause of the crisis: “Any order is
paralyzed if it contains members who, citing privi-
leges, are able not only to elude the order if neces-
sary, but also disturb and attack this order without
having to accept responsibility for this within the
order. […] At the HfG these kinds of privileges are
based on two types of claims: Some claim they
have made contributions as founders and refer to
their seniority, while others claim without justifying
this claim that they are visionaries and apostles of
Seated: Konrad Wachs- the ‘correct’ view of a ‘world of tomorrow’ by
mann, standing: Mau- whose standards every quality must be measured,
rice Goldring, Claude insisting on radically and simplistically categoriz-
Schnaidt, and Hermann ing all other viewpoints as positive or negative.”
Delugan, October/ Horst Rittel therefore demanded that the school
November 1956. continue to assign equal status to designers and
Photo: Hans Conrad non-designers: “There must be no orthodox, offi-
cial doctrine as it were if we don’t want to have a
sterile sect instead of a college.”
On 14 July 1962, during its 20th meeting, the
administrative council devoted itself to the dis-
putes at the HfG. 1106 Helmut Cron and Otto Pflei-
derer regretted “that the intellectual consolidation
of the college had not kept pace with financial
consolidation.” Helmut Cron said there was still a
critical undertone that there must be something
wrong with the whole structure of the HfG:
“Charges of oligarchic privileges were made too
often to be able to simply ignore them. […] More-
over he [Helmut Cron; author’s note] believed that
if there was the right kind of organization it ought
to have been possible to create peace, order, and
discipline within a period of ten years without pro- 271
ducing intellectual sterility.” After the debate, dur-
ing which Hellmut Becker, Max Guther, Thorwald
Risler, and Roderich Count Thun informed the rest
of the administrative council about the individual
facets of the entire process, Otl Aicher was given
the floor to present his policy statement. The idea
for this presentation seems to have originated with
Hellmut Becker, who was all for limiting the duties
of the administrative council solely to a superviso-
ry function: “However, it seemed wrong to him
[Hellmut Becker; author’s note] to start out from
new bylaws. He felt that they must first of all start
out from the way things were. Therefore he felt it
was necessary to inform the administrative council
about the concept.” In principle he was supported
by Max Guther: “At the moment all we’re con-
cerned about is that people at the college again
remember the school’s central purpose, namely
training in design. The prevailing crisis was no
doubt partly determined by the fact that the col-
lege’s bylaws were too democratic. He, too, be-
lieved that a change in the bylaws did not alter
everything, which was why people ought not to
focus exclusively on this issue, while on the other
hand they should also not push it aside.”
Otl Aicher’s lengthy talk about The future of the
School of Design, remarks on the 1962 crisis con-
tained his design theory credo. His analysis was
limited to the consequences of the dispute be-
tween the designers and the theoreticians. 1107
At Hellmut Becker’s suggestion he reworked it by
September 1962 into a more detailed account Zur
Situation der Hochschule für Gestaltung 1962. 1108
Otl Aicher saw the causes of the Bill crisis and the
present crisis in objectively based differences of
opinion that according to him were not dealt with
objectively: “We should make efforts to bring the
intellectual disputes to a level that would keep
them from being seen as scandals. Incidentally,
they can be understood as signs of intellectual
vitality.” – “The cause of today’s crisis is a classic
argument about methods.” However, the gain in
knowledge that resulted from this dispute was
considerable. Even the result of the Bill crisis had
shown that “only rational methods make intuition
legitimate. The consequence was that a series of
scientists were appointed. […] Overnight, the
school was given a new ‘scientific’ program,
markedly polemical in character. […] The goal was
to found a ‘real’, i. e., a scientific college.” Howev-
er, Otl Aicher distinguished between science and
design: “Design reveals itself in the individual de-
cision, in the individual object, not in finding truth.
[…] It has moral dimensions. Science, on the other
hand, must strive to be value-free. […] How can
you void methodical terror, a pedagogical mis-
understanding, and a falsification of goals? […]
 The governing boards
272 The existing bylaws promoted the tendency to
deal with questions of quality by means of quanti-
tative mechanisms. […] New bylaws must reflect
the fact that the school is there to train students in
design. […] The old bylaws must no longer be in
effect in the new school year.”
Eight weeks later, on 12 September 1962, a few
days before the beginning of the new academic
year (1962/63) Inge Aicher-Scholl turned shaken
to her longtime friend and fellow fighter Hellmut
Joseph Rykwert,
February 1958.
Photo: Hans Conrad
Archive: HfG (59/0107/3)
Becker. She was paralyzed and realized with be-
wilderment that chaos had developed around her:
“I am not the kind of person who can fight and
speak up for her ‘cause’. I have antennae, not
horns.” (But when the HfG was founded she had
demonstrated what strength could radiate from
her gentle power.)
She had nothing but bitter sarcasm for the
meeting of the administrative council, until she
disclosed her husband’s and her own ultimate,
unquestionable conviction: “The fact that at cer-
tain moments a student committee in such a small
school simply holds in check the personnel who
are actually in charge, such as the administration
of the school and the foundation, by means of the
local press, memoranda to the members of the
administrative council etc., was, I am glad to say,
not taken seriously. […] You can forget such
things, especially since they sprang from a social-
ly neurotic situation. The point where this gets
dangerous, I think, is when there’s a tendency to
believe in it and to build a future on it. And here
I come to a point that most disturbed me: the
clearly expressed wish, which various administra-
tive council members support, that in this college
a number of different opinions on teaching and
views on the object of teaching supposedly have
to exist side by side. Nothing poses such danger
for the college as such an attitude. It would take
from the school the intensity and the power to
influence style that it has retained until now. […]
I have observed that what I am accustomed to call
the ‘millimeters’, the painstaking attention to detail
the college considers important and for which we
are both hated and admired, is watched extremely
sharply from a great distance and by trained eyes.
We can’t get to the root of this with the concept
of tolerance.” 1109 Implicitly this meant that she ac-
cused Thorwald Risler of precisely this sort of tol-
erance out of incompetence. In other words, she
believed he was destroying her work.
Hellmut Becker had moved away from Otl Ai-
cher’s position in some of his views, as became
apparent in the course of a discussion about de-
tails of the future HfG bylaws. On 9 August 1962
Hans Rettich (the representative of the Baden-
Württemberg ministry of education and the arts),
Günther Schweigkofler (the administrative director
of the foundation), and Johann Peter Vogel (Hell-
mut Becker’s colleague) gathered to edit the text
of the bylaws that had already been approved by
the advisory board on 28 February 1962. As he
compared the development of Otl Aicher’s propo-
sals for changes with those suggested by others,
Hellmut Becker noted in summary: “Aicher’s chan-
ge of the bylaws, compared with the Rettich/
Schweigkofler/Vogel draft obscures the powers of
the executive board and of the college. Moreover,
the rights of the executive board are curtailed.
Finally the sole control of the design lecturers is
made into a norm to the disadvantage of the lec-
turers on technical subjects. At any rate clarifica-
tions that would have avoided conflict have been
eliminated, and what is more new contentious
issues have been created by one-sidedly favoring
the design lecturers. We might as well have kept
the old bylaws.“ 1110
Although Hellmut Becker so clearly criticized
Otl Aicher’s and Walter Zeischegg’s previously ap-
proved bylaws text, Hans Rettich, Günther Schweig-
kofler, and Johann Peter Vogel proposed only mi-
nor changes. 1111 In all important aspects the origi-
nal sense or wording was retained:
in the way the mission of the HfG was defined;
in the predominance of the design lecturers
(tenured and non-tenured lecturers in one of the
three departments of building, product design,
and communication) as opposed to the techni-
cal lecturers (tenured and non-tenured lecturers
of complementary subjects);
in the fact that only tenured design lecturers
were eligible to run for rector.
Thorwald Risler explained to the chair of the ad-
ministrative council, Theodor Pfizer, why Otl
Aicher’s and Walter Zeischegg’s draft of the by-
laws was barely reworked 1112: As you know, Mr.
Guther and I, like the members of the administra-
tive council, felt that changing the bylaws would
not solve the internal problems of the college. But
since obviously salvation is expected from a new
structure, the paths in that direction needed to be
made smooth, the objective being to give Mr. Ai-
cher a chance to implement his ideas. The foun-
dation‘s executive board and Messrs. Becker and
Donndorf therefore felt all they had to do was to
make sure the new bylaws contained clear legal
definitions, that instances of injustice were avoided,
and incidentally that formulations could be found
to define as clearly as possible the relationship
between the executive board and the administra-
tion of the HfG, of which there is hardly any men-
tion in the statutes of the Geschwister-Scholl-Stif-
tung and in the present college bylaws.”
Otl Aicher made minor revisions in his draft and
sent it to the advisory board on 5 November
1962 1113 – as opposed to the 28 February/9 Au-
gust 1962 version that had originally been passed.
The representatives of the foundation Hans Ret-
tich, Günther Schweigkofler, and Johann Peter
Vogel gave in on a crucial item, the dominance of
the designers, because they hoped that this would
actually help reestablish calm.
Before the beginning of the new academic year
(1962/63), on 26 September 1962, Otl Aicher re-
signed from his position as member of the govern-
ing board. Thorwald Risler did not accept this res-
ignation. 1114 Otl Aicher’s reason for resigning was
that he was negotiating with Thorwald Risler and
Max Guther about arrangements for his takeover at
the HfG. On 2 October 1962 he delivered his de-
mands in the form of an ultimatum to Max Guther;
he would become rector under the new bylaws
only if these were met 1115:
“I would join the school administration not only
as the rector, but as the person who first had
the idea for this school, who drew up its first
program, who over the years put his personal
professional work last in order to help turn it
into reality.”
Before he made his decision, he first wanted to
know who would fill the tenured positions, i. e.,
tenured lectureships in accordance with transi-
tion regulations.
“The relationship between the school and the
foundation had so far been the subject of con-
stant internal disputes. To this very day it is not
clear how the weight is distributed or should be
distributed. For my term as rector I require close
cooperation between the foundation and the
school administration in equal partnership.”
The third item sounded as if the foundation had
kept the HfG on a tight rein – which is debatable.
Otl Aicher knew very well why the bylaws of the 273
HfG and the foundation were set up in such a way
that the managing chairman of the foundation‘s
executive board had combined responsibility for
day-to-day business, why the managing chairman
had unrestricted responsibility for the entire insti-
tution, and why the managing chairman had also
been given top authority, including last authority
over the financial repercussions of the appoint-
ment policy of the HfG administration: because
Inge Aicher-Scholl was initially the sole managing
chairperson and then a member of the executive
board. This fact was intended to be a guarantee
that there would never be a development that was
not in accordance with Otl Aicher’s views. And
besides they had intended to prevent the possibil-
ity of a second Max Bill by weakening the HfG
administration through collective leadership and
eligibility rules.
Otl Aicher neglected to say that he was now in
the same position he had fought against during
the Bill crisis. This object-focused thinker, who had
such an outstanding ability to infer graphic and
philosophical abstractions from concrete circum-
stances, repeatedly confused concrete and ab-
stract levels during his time at the HfG. If he did
not like the situation at the HfG, he did not clear up
the situation by an open separation from the spe-
cific person he disapproved of, but the constitu-
tional framework, the abstraction within which all
this was taking place had to be shifted, reduced in
size, restructured. This was the case with Max Bill
and Horst Rittel, and now there were signs it was
going to happen with Thorwald Risler also. Here
was the reason for the accusation of a “family oli-
garchy”, for the foundation was identified with
Inge Aicher-Scholl, and the foundation made pos-
sible Otl Aicher’s maneuver.
He now again returned to the 1950 programs
and made the following demands: “The school and
the foundation are two sides of the same institu-
tion. The principle of their work is cooperation. It is
difficult to delimit responsibility.” In a letter to Max
Guther he stated more precisely that the founda-
tion in his opinion was necessary purely as a su-
pervisory body vis-à-vis the HfG administration,
“but it would be wrong to see this superordination
as indicating a higher authority. […] There is no
reason to deduce that there is a direct hierarchy.
[…] The concept of hierarchy in my opinion is
unsuitable in reference to the relationship between
the foundation and the school administration.” 1116
In 1956 and 1957 Otl Aicher would have rejected
this thesis because it would not have unequivocal-
ly curtailed Max Bill’s powers. Now, at the horizon
of his demands, there were indications that areas
of competency would merge: “Even if one con-
cedes that the school governing board is respon-
sible for the curricular side, for pedagogy and
 The governing boards
274 direction of the enterprise, while the foundation is
responsible for administration, finances, and su-
pervision, this means little in terms of practice.”
Thorwald Risler asked the group to consider that
Otl Aicher had had considerable input in all the
essential regulations: “He became part of the
minority vis-à-vis the lecturers he had appointed
himself.” 1117 As a matter of fact Max Guther would
not agree to Otl Aicher’s ultimatum, but responded
on 14 November 1962 with the arguments that
Thorwald Risler had presented, for the new bylaws
could not be tailored to Otl Aicher’s specifications:
“But since you had a strong involvement in draw-
ing up both the statutes of the foundation and the
draft for the provisional bylaws of the School of
Design, you are not entirely uninvolved in a devel-
opment that I, like you, deplore, and in which you
have become part of a minority vis-à-vis the lec-
turers you yourself appointed. […] I must also
draw your attention to the fact that we should not
grant you a different right as a rector and a differ-
ent position with regard to the executive board
than those that will (may) later be granted to your
successor if the latter does not bring the same
human, professional and performance-related
qualifications to the job as you. This can by no
means be overlooked today. […] I am convinced
that it will be easy for the managing chairman of
Matthew Wallis,
May 1958.
Photo: Hans Conrad
the foundation‘s executive board and you as the
rector to come to an exclusively personal and
probably temporary agreement regarding the co-
operation you describe and wish for. This agree-
ment ought on no account to have ‘institutional’
significance. Otherwise you might again accuse us
in a few years that we institutionally deprived you
of influence!” Max Guther concluded his letter with
an appeal for cooperation between Otl Aicher and
Thorwald Risler: “I hope you will both come to an
understanding without needing me.” 1118
On 14 November 1962 Otl Aicher discussed his
ideas about the HfG bylaws with Wolfgang Donn-
dorf at the ministry of education and the arts and
submitted a new draft with two substantial changes
to the members of the advisory board on 16 No-
vember 1962.1119 Firstly, spheres of responsibility of
the foundation and the HfG management were to
be left vague: “The spheres of competence of the
college and the foundation could not be delimited
exactly . […] On the one hand, Mr. Aicher accepts
that the executive board of the foundation should
be at the head of the institution, but at the same
time he demands that in a whole series of issues
the foundation is not to have a priority position,
but only equal status with the rector.” Secondly
he wanted to restrict he course content of the
HfG: “[He said] the academic freedom guaran-
teed in the scientific colleges and universities
could not readily be transferred to the School
of Design.”
On the next day there was a meeting of the
foundation’s advisory board. 1120 When they voted,
Otl Aicher’s last draft won through against the text
of Hans Rettich, Günther Schweigkofler, and Jo-
hann Vogel. In addition, the advisory board passed
the regulations governing the transition from the
old to the new HfG bylaws. 1121
The mission of the HfG was now defined as
“the training of designers in the areas of indus-
trial production and communication.” The HfG
concentrated on training designers. “Adjacent
scientific areas” were taught at the HfG only to
back up this pedagogical goal.
A very basic question, which was controversial
to the last, was left open: Which departments
were to make up the HfG? For the more depart-
ments there were (except for those for design),
the more qualified lecturers there had to be.
The bylaws only laid down that the executive
board decided whether to establish and dis-
solve departments.
The entities at the HfG were now the rector,
the inner and the extended senate, the depart-
ments, and (this was new) the student body.
The rector headed and represented the HfG,
conducted day-to-day business, and reported
on this only to the foundation. Cooperation with
the executive board of the foundation was regu-
lated by separate rules of procedure. The rector
was elected by secret ballot for a two-year term
by the extended senate by an absolute majority
and confirmed (or rejected) by the executive
board of the foundation. The election took place
a year before the beginning of his term in Octo-
ber; until he assumed office he functioned as
vice rector.
The inner senate consisted of the rector, the
vice rector, the department heads, and a repre-
sentative of the technical lecturers. It met once
a month, decided on appointments (which had
to be confirmed by the executive board) and the
curriculum; its chairman was the rector, who
had the tie-breaking vote.
The extended senate consisted of tenured and
non-tenured lecturers, one representative each
of the regular teaching assistants and the tech-
nical lecturers and a total of two student repre-
sentatives. It offered advisory opinion in all ped-
agogical and organizational matters and elected
the rector (from among the tenured lecturers).
The departments held department meetings for
their tenured and non-tenured lecturers, techni-
cal lecturers, and regular teaching assistants
who had teaching certificates. The meetings
were directed by department heads; this office
rotated among the tenured lecturers; in case of
doubt, the rector decided.
As for the hierarchy of the HfG lecturers: When
appointed to teach at the HfG, appointees “as a
rule” became non-tenured instructors. “It is the
executive board of the foundation which grants
a lecturer tenure, proposed by the rector. Propo-
sals for appointments are decided by the inner
senate by simple majority. Only those designers
may be granted tenure who have, by their spe-
cial qualifications and teaching performance,
demonstrated that they can set design tasks in
the respective departments and can implement
them pedagogically.” According to the bylaws,
technical lecturers were those who taught “the-
oretical or practical complementary subjects as
non-tenured lecturers”.
Only “designers” could now be elected to the po-
sitions of department head and rector, because
only they could become tenured lecturers as in-
tended by these bylaws. The concept of the de- -
signer was central for the entire bylaws, but was
not defined. Thus the foundation was again dealt
the losing card, because in the transition regula-
tions, it had to determine by name who was being
promoted to tenure. To put it more precisely, the
advisory board passed these bylaws and the tran-
sition regulations, and it took critics a long time to
forget that Otl Aicher and Walter Zeischegg, as fel-
low originators of the bylaws, immediately inter-
preted them in their favor and thus determined
their own status. The critical passage of the transi-
tion regulations read as follows: “When the new
bylaws are passed, those permanent lecturers who
were already teaching at the School of Design on
2 October 1955 will be granted tenure, namely
Messrs. Aicher, Maldonado, Vordemberge-Gilde-
wart, and Zeischegg.“ 1122
The classification of the lecturers in the new HfG
bylaws made the atmosphere on Kuhberg oppres-
sive. Thorwald Risler explained to Theodor Pfizer 275
why he felt the advisory board decision was a
heavy burden 1123: “According to the provisional
bylaws that were in effect up till now, all lectur-
ers with permanent contracts had equal rights.
Regardless of what subject they represented and
what educational background they had, they could
be elected to the governing board after one year
at the school. According to the new bylaws that
have now been approved, only ‘designers’ may be
granted tenure, only they can become rector and
department head. The technical lecturers, i. e., the
lecturers heretofore referred to as ‘theoreticians’,
can only be non-tenured lecturers. […] Because
of the decisions of the advisory board, from which
I expressly dissociated myself by abstention, the
executive board is now in the very unpleasant situ-
ation where the assurances made to the ‘opposi-
tional’ lecturers and students after the July admin-
istrative council‘s meeting by Count Thun for the
administrative council and by Prof. Guther and me
lose credibility. At that time there was a declara-
tion that the executive board was independent of
group interests, that based on his employer status
he felt equally committed to every lecturer regard-
less of area of specialization and subject, and that
the students were guaranteed continuity in terms
of curriculum planning, independent of factional
disputes or personal conflicts within the faculty,
and were assured of academic freedom. Even at
the time, doubts were clearly voiced whether the
lack of separation of powers and the way execu-
tive positions were filled in the Geschwister-
Scholl-Stiftung would even make it possible for
the executive board to take an independent posi-
tion.”
After the bylaws were passed, the advisory
board began a general debate around the question
of how the future relationship of the foundation
and college management might be structured.
Thorwald Risler had no illusions that the crises
would automatically disappear now that there
were new bylaws. He demanded plain language in
the future, for he was not prepared to run the risk
of another crisis: “Mr. Risler then reminded us that
at one time he had been appointed to the execu-
tive board in order to secure the financial basis for
the work of the School of Design and to achieve
not only external but also internal continuity of
development. The efforts of the executive board to
reform financial conditions had been successful.
Considerable funds were given because the col-
lege and those working there could demonstrate
a number of successes. But equally important had
been the fact that he had assured the responsible
persons in the ministries and parliaments, and
friends from the private sector, that there had been
a consolidation internally as well, and that the
stage of crises was over. […] However, the fact
 The governing boards
276 that the executive board was exclusively account-
able to the administrative council, financial donors,
and the public did not allow a division of authority.
It might therefore also be possible that in excep-
tional cases the executive board had to attend to
pedagogical questions, since decisions in the ped-
agogical area also had financial consequences, of
course. […] He was firmly convinced that only a
strong position on the part of the executive board
could prevent conflicts and crises. […] If it turned
out that it was impossible to reach an agreement
on the basic questions he had addressed here,
then he might need to draw personal conclusions
from that fact.” In his report to Theodor Pfizer,
Thorwald Risler clearly voiced his fear that the
powers of the foundation’s executive board were
in jeopardy. He wanted to resist this tendency and
planned to formulate the responsibility of the ex-
ecutive board unequivocally to include supervision
of the rector. To do this he needed the support of
the administrative council 1124: “My success with old
and new financial backers in industry and among
members of parliament is due […] primarily to the
fact that I assured them, referring to successful
industrial orders, that after the ‘Bill case’ there had
been a gradual consolidation, and that now that
the executive board had been strengthened it
would be possible to make sure there would be
the necessary minimum of peace and order for
some time to come. I don't need to go into detail
when I say how much distrust there has been and
still is for many reasons, including political ones.
[…] Just to clarify things let me repeat that the
lecturers who are at the same time members of
the advisory board feel that an independent exec-
utive board is contrary to the spirit of the charter of
the Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung […]. As far as I’m
concerned, being able to control internal crises
within the college is a precondition for being able
to continue to bear total responsibility externally.
[…] In my opinion the administrative council will
soon have to thoroughly address the question
whether it is able to share my basic views and
whether it is prepared to help establish the neces-
sary independence of the executive board both
internally and externally.” 1125
Now that the advisory board had passed the new
bylaws of the HfG, Thorwald Risler had to get it
accepted in the interest of the foundation, although
he himself rejected it. This meant that in the eyes
of the lecturers and students, who felt they had
been deprived of their rights, he became Otl Ai-
cher’s accomplice. Therefore people did not con-
fide in him, and he could no longer intervene in
events as a mediator from outside.
He had become a partisan himself. Where were
students and lecturers who rebelled to turn when
they were angry, to whom did they look for help?
They turned to the general public. I can only inter-
pret it as a sign of uneasiness and a guilty con-
science that the bylaws and the transition regula-
tions did not go into effect immediately, but only
four weeks later – on Saturday, 15 December 1962
– and that the extended senate of the HfG was
convened for 20 December 1962, directly before
the Christmas break. 1126 This tactical decision made
the entire procedure look like a surprise coup. It
was a sign of weakness that this seemed neces-
sary to the members of the advisory board in order
to push through the by-laws.
Also on 15 December 1962 all future members
of the extended senate of the HfG received the
new bylaws, transition regulations, and a letter by
Thorwald Risler in which he informed various lec-
turers of their new status. 1127 Now the faculty of
the HfG consisted of the following categories:
1. lecturers with permanent contracts
1.1. tenured lecturers (the right to vote and be
elected in the election of the rector): Otl
Aicher, Tomás Maldonado, (the critically ill)
Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart, and Wal-
ter Zeischegg;
1.2. non-tenured lecturers (only the right to vote
in the election of the rector): Rudolf Doer-
nach, Gert Kalow, Herbert Ohl (the fall guy),
Horst Rittel, and Christian Staub;
2. regular teaching assistants with teaching
licenses: Gui Bonsiepe, Herbert Lindinger,
and Claude Schnaidt (this group appointed
Gui Bonsiepe to be their representative with
the right to vote in electing the rector);
3. technical teachers: Paul Hildinger, Herbert
Maeser, Peter Muthes, Wolfgang Siol, and
Josef Schlecker (formerly head of a work-
shop; this group appointed Wolfgang Siol to
be their representative with the right to vote
in electing the rector).
The student representatives also appointed one
representative into the extended senate with the
right to vote in electing the rector (Gudrun Otto).
Two examples show the resistance of the de-
moted lecturers and of the students against the
new HfG bylaws and the transition regulations.
Gert Kalow, for one, addressed a letter full of
indignation and disappointment to Thorwald Risler
on 16 December 1962. 1128 His accusations culmi-
nated in the statement that this was a seizure of
power by a dictatorial rector in the name of Hans
and Sophie Scholl. In particular he complained
that “this new bylaws has not turned out to be the
result of a sensible debate by all those who are
intimately concerned, but is the legally formulated
manifesto of the will of a group of lecturers whose
declared objective was and is to keep another
group away from the management of the school.”
Hanno Kesting in May Gert Kalow, who had been an HfG faculty member
1958 with students of since 1 October 1957 and had been the chair of
the information depart- the governing board for almost one and a half
ment. years, now could not even become a department
Photo: Hans Conrad representative anymore: “Except for my imprison-
ment during the Nazi period, nothing more mon-
strous has ever happened to me in my entire life.
[…] I shall enlist all legal remedies that our demo-
cratic state makes available to us in order to cor-
rect such a manifest injustice. All the more so
since I am convinced that by clearing up this situa-
tion in the public eye I also serve that governmen-
tal and social public sector that made millions of
marks available to the HfG and definitely has a
right to know what is being done with these taxes.
[…] The ‘report of my experiences’ […] culminated
in the thesis that underlying the permanent crises
of the HfG was a battle for privileges in which the 277
‘old’ lecturers, who believe they are the only ones
to be full lecturers, fight against all new colleagues.
In the meantime my thesis has been confirmed by
a number of occurrences.” Gert Kalow understood
the new bylaws of the HfG to be a breach of the
foundation’s statutes: The “modern and universal
education” that combines “technical skills, creat-
ing culture, and political responsibility into a uni-
fied whole” was not possible without an informa-
tion department on a par with other departments,
and in a school where the theoreticians had been
demoted. The “lecturer who teaches political sci-
ence at the HfG [is] the upholder of one of the
foundation’s main intentions. However, the new
bylaws of the HfG on principle categorize him as a
lecturer with lesser rights.” Similarly, the technical
lecturers were “upholders of one of the main peda-
gogical intentions of the GSS [Geschwis-ter-Scholl-
Stiftung].” The design lecturers’ accumulation of
power was an anachronism: “While all those who
support higher education reform in the Federal
Republic are in agreement that the almost monar-
chic power position of tenured faculty is the great-
est obstacle to change at the universities, the very
opposite tendency is being practiced in Ulm, in the
name of Hans and Sophie Scholl!” Because there
was no clear regulation that would allow the foun-
dation to influence the appointment and dismissal
of faculty, he opined: “With these rules and regu-
lations a rector doesn’t have to, but can certainly
develop into a dictator without coming into con-
flict with the bylaws. Or is it a coup d’état? In all
seriousness, are such bylaws democratic? […]
This isn’t a seizure of power, or is it?” In contrast
with the Bauhaus, he felt, the HfG lacked an inte-
grating force like Walter Gropius; as a result there
was, in the meantime, a long list of first-rate lec-
turers “who had been in Ulm and left Ulm again
full of bitterness because the ‘old’ lecturers, who
had installed themselves after Bill’s overthrow as
a kind of directorate, were either unwilling or inca-
pable of integrating the talents of these col-
leagues in their program. […] The ‘Ulm style’
which has be- come famous by now, and which
characterizes the climate within the HfG, the ex-
act opposite of Gropius’s style, consists of un-
friendliness, jealousy, coldness, mutual hatred,
inability to talk to each other – a long-time scan-
dal, only barely concealed (but not much longer)
by the names of Hans and Sophie Scholl. […] It
certainly doesn’t take much to predict that the
new bylaws will bring not peace (unless it is the
peace of the graveyard) but an increase of the
internal squabbles.”
Now for the second example: On Sunday,
17 December 1962 there was a student gathering
with Harry Pross, Horst Rittel, and Christian Staub
as guest speakers. Harry Pross, a guest lecturer in
 The governing boards
278
Friedrich Vordemberge- the department of information, picked to pieces
Gildewart in February the bylaws: “In general there are two kinds of by-
1956. laws: 1. the representative type and 2. the authori-
Photo: Hans Conrad tarian type. Representative bylaws are those in
which powers are delegated to certain groups.
This delegation is based on the conviction that no
single person knows what is the right thing to do.
Supporters of the representative bylaws start from
the premise that one cannot absolutely and once
and for all determine what is wrong and what is
right.” And that, he said, was precisely not the
case here, for Otl Aicher claimed to have exclusive
knowledge of what was correct and incorrect
design. Apart from individual criticisms that had
already been discussed (dominance of the design-
ers; definition of designers; absolute power of the
rector) Harry Pross also drew the students’ atten-
tion to a practical angle: In view of the rector’s
term in office and the combination with the deputy
vice rectorship he could only “advise [the students]
to be on good terms with the man. For, you see,
the man will be in office for four years, and be-
sides he can be reelected. I would recommend
that you refrain from ever criticizing this man so
that you get through your studies here success-
fully. […] The point about the dismissal of the rec-
tor by the foundation is a farce. If he violates gen-
eral laws, he has to leave anyway, but even the
most stupid rector will never manage to violate
these particular school bylaws. […] All in all these
bylaws are the caricature of a medieval rectorship
bylaws transplanted into the 20th century. Since
the number of students and lecturers is small,
there’s something ridiculous about it, oligarchy
and all.”
A legal action by the lecturers who were de-
moted to non-tenured faculty status led to a settle-
ment the following year at the labor court, which
found that while this particular passage was not
legally tenable, it would be judged as a notice of
termination pending a change of contract effective
1 July 1963. As of that date the regulations of the
HfG bylaws would be valid without restriction, and
by then precedents had long since been created
because the lecturers had chosen not to contest
Otl Aicher’s election as rector. 1129
On 19 December 1962 Friedrich Vordemberge- decisions to be made. […] Each of you present 279
Gildewart died after a long illness. here will possibly feel that some of the decisions
are harsh. Nevertheless I shall take them upon
Only six of the eleven members took part in the myself. To get out of a crisis implies, right from
first meeting of the extended senate, although the start, that you can’t please everybody.”
attendance was obligatory. Rudolf Doernach and
Gert Kalow had written to say they would not at-
tend in order to document their rejection of the
bylaws, and Horst Rittel and Christian Staub left
the rectorate in protest before the meeting was
called to order. The student representative, Gudrun
Otto, handed the group a resolution by the stu-
dents and also left the room before the election.
Of the six people present, three were eligible for
office as rector: Otl Aicher, Tomás Maldonado,
and Walter Zeischegg. Otl Aicher was unanimous-
ly elected rector, and Tomás Maldonado was
unanimously elected vice rector. 1130
After he was elected rector, Otl Aicher made a
statement. 1131 He expressed his thanks “for the
confidence that has been expressed through this
election.” The main flaw of the old bylaws, he con-
tinued, “was that they had certain idealistic traits.
They would only have functioned if the basic as-
sumption had remained intact that solidarity
among the faculty is an essential prerequisite for
work at the HfG.” (The concept of solidarity was
given a completely new dimension in this use of
the term.) Otl Aicher argued that “nobody at the
time when the school’s first bylaws were drafted
would have thought that the school would be
inwardly torn and paralyzed by opposing groups.”
The opposite is true: The old bylaws were passed
for the sole reason that the school was split into
groups for and against Max Bill, and Otl Aicher
together with his wife, Hans Gugelot, and Tomás
Maldonado no longer wanted to work with Max
Bill. Then he formulated his program of design
theory for the HfG: “The School of Design must
become a true school of design again. The doc-
trine and pedagogy of design is concerned first
and foremost with the process of design and with
the resulting design. That sounds like a truism, but
I believe we’ve lost sight of this fact. […] What I
mean is, design and design theory can be devel-
oped and justified only by the outcome. […] To
mistake design for a science was a huge miscon-
ception. Science looks for knowledge that can be
generalized, while design looks for concrete, indi-
vidual results. And that’s a fundamental difference.
Design and science differ in the same way as an
epistemological process differs from the process
of planning.” The HfG “should also shift the almost
forgotten items on its program back to the fore, so
that design at the HfG is regarded as a social and
cultural commitment”. At the end he indicated that
in the future he would engage in every open de-
bate: “I am a person whose inclination to discus-
sion and talk has its limits. I think we need certain
 Excursus Education policies in the Federal Republic
during the 1960s
280
“The American kitchen In the late fifties and early sixties an
on which European upturn of the education system be-
ones are modeled. gan in the Federal Republic. Asso-
Nothing is missing in ciated with this upturn was a new
this workshop: freezer language. Starting with professional
and refrigerator, dish- educators and eventually adopted by
washer, built-in oven, society at large, this language fo-
grill, and cooking plates cused awareness on individual fac-
set into the work sur- tors that finally became catchwords:
face, electromechanical from Bildungsnotstand (the shortage
aids of every kind.The of educational facilities), Bildungska-
design itself of this tastrophe (the catastrophe of educa-
work space is not tion), Bildungsmisere (the desperate
exemplary.“ situation of education), Bildungsge-
(form 17/1962, 27) fälle (the gap in educational levels),
and Begabten- or Bildungsreserve
(the reserve of the gifted or of the
educated), to Bildungsexpansion
(education expansion) and Bildungs-
chancen (educational opportunities),
Bildungsreform (educational reform),
Bildungspolitik (education policies),
Bildungseuphorie (educational eu-
281
phoria), and finally Bildungsmelan-
cholie (educational melancholy). 1132
New professions and occupations
such as Bildungsforschung (edu-
cational research) and Bildungs-
planung (educational planning)
emerged.
The economic success of the Federal
Republic made it possible in the late
fifties for people to start thinking
about how the future could take
shape beyond the immediate satis-
faction of basic and material needs.
They began again to look at the old
conviction of politicians concerned
with culture and politics that the edu-
 Excursus Tables and chairs lined
up to form a furniture
system, linked by a knot
that connects them. An
idea and a design typi-
cal of their time. The
design is by HfG gradu-
ate Ernst Moeckl, who
also worked on Max
Bill’s door handle for
the HfG buildings.
(form 22/1963, 63)
282
The electrification of life
and work included writ-
ing. In the first half of
the ’60s, businesses
buy their secretaries
preferably electric type-
writers, whose forms
are now distinctly cubi-
cal as opposed to the
round shapes of their
mechanical precursors.
(Olivetti Praxis 48, advertise-
ment in form 32/1965, 77)
The radio-phono com-
bination SK 4 of Braun,
Inc., nicknamed “Snow
White’s coffin”, design:
Hans Gugelot and Die-
ter Rams. Since their
first introduction in
1956 (cost: DM 295.-)
they have been the
archetype of every hi-fi
system.
(form 23/1963, 8 ff.)
283
cation system ought to occupy “a key
position in the distribution of life
opportunities“ and that education
defines an individual’s position and
chances in later life. 1133
The legal basis for this – more
strongly at the time than today – was
that the German Constitution had
given the Länder substantial freedom
in dealing with cultural questions,
and particularly with educational
issues. There is a large political area
in which the Länder are able to man-
age things autonomously as they see
fit. According to the Constitution the
only limitations of their autonomy are
contained in article 5, in which free-
dom of science is expressly extended
to institutions, including scientific
institutions, having its roots in article
7 (religious instruction). The federal
government had no (today: little
more) jurisdiction, the competent
legislatures being the Landtage. That
means that according to the Consti-
tution the education system could be
centralized only within the Länder.
However, in practice the education
system was standardized, and this
result is surprising in view of the
legal premises. 1134 There are two rea-
sons for this: Firstly, the educational
bureaucracy assumed great impor-
tance in everyday life. 1135 Secondly, in
the Federal Republic an unusual fea-
ture developed as a result of the con-
junction of a centralist political cul-
ture on the one hand and the federal
government’s lack of jurisdiction on
the other hand. It was referred to as
 Excursus

284 “institutionalized cooperation among 285

the Länder and between the federal
goverment and the Länder“. This
cooperation took the form of over 20
central organizations that were, and
partly still are, financed by the federal
government and the Länder. 1136
That the education system be-
came the concern of the Länder is
an expression of the intention not
to repeat the kind of centralization
in this sphere that had been imple-
mented by the National Socialists in
1934 when they established the
Reich Ministry of Science, Education,
and Adult Education.
Directly after the war the Western
occupying powers (with different
weighting) tried to organize the Ger-
man education system in such a way
as to make its elements more inter-
changeable, giving equal access to
all social strata and rendering the
system more democratic. Yet the
years between 1945 and 1960 are The miracle kitchen of
seen as the period when reforms 1962 was only a model.
were obstructed, although a few All the same, in addition
reform plans and beginnings were to the household appli-
produced. 1137 In these early years, the ances customary today,
most important points of institution- it offered a cleaning
alized cooperation that led to the robot (below right in the
standardization of the Federal Ger- form of a bathroom
man education system were: scale), a serving robot,
and an automatic food
the first conference of all West preparer. Also, there
German ministers of education was the planning cen-
and the arts in Stuttgart-Hohen- Radio-phonograph When the word com- ter housewife’s help,
heim on 19/20 Feb. 1948, which HM4 of Braun, Inc., munication was still where we do not know
was later to turn into the Standing 1956, the year when associated with com- whether it was named
Conference of Länder Ministers of “Snow White’s coffin” munism, the German after a deep sigh or a
Education and the Arts; was introduced. An Federal Post Office was housewife’s scream for
early stage of develop- in charge of hooking up help.
ment on the way from phones. The new type (Traum oder Alptraum der
compact radio furniture 611/612 telephones Zukunft: Die Whirlpool-Küche,
in: form 17/1962, 32 f.)
to the flexible hi-fi set. offered improvements:
Design: Herbert Hirche, “A very light, yet sturdy,
cost: DM 1430. practically mainte-
(form 23/1963, 8 ff.) nance-free telephone.
The handset and phone
base are light gray, the
receiver, speaker and
number plate are ivory,
while the dial plate is
Plexiglas. […] Cost: not
for sale, one-time addi-
tional rental fee
DM 20.“
(form 21/1963, 51)
 Excursus
286 the adoption of the Königstein
Agreement on 31 March 1949,
whereby it was decided to jointly
finance research institutions
(above all, the Max-Planck-
Gesellschaft (Max Planck Society)
and the Deutsche Forschungs-
gemeinschaft (German Research
Council)) 1138;
the founding of the Deutscher
Ausschuss für das Erziehungs-
und Bildungswesen (German
Commission on the Education
System) (constituted 22 Sept.
1953), which worked until 1965
as an advisory committee and
submitted its Rahmenplan zur
Vereinheitlichung des Schulwe-
sens (Outline plan on the stan-
dardization of the school system)
in 1959 1139;
the adoption of the Düsseldorfer
Abkommen (Düsseldorf Agree-
ment) on 17 Feb. 1955, which
established the tripartite school
system (Hauptschule, Realschule,
Gymnasium). 1140
However, the fifties also saw devel-
opments that, though initially weak,
grew into strong political factors by
the sixties. For example, the Bundes-
ministerium für Atomfragen (federal
ministry for nuclear issues) was
founded on 20 Oct. 1955 (first minis-
ter: Franz Josef Strauß, CSU), work-
ing as the Bundesministerium für
Wissenschaftliche Forschung (feder-
al ministry for scientific research)
after 14 Dec. 1962 (first under Hans
Lenz, FDP, then, after 26 Oct. 1965,
under Gerhard Stoltenberg, CDU),
and renamed the Bundesministerium
für Bildung (federal ministry of edu-
cation) after 22 Oct. 1969. It is clear
that there had been a shift of empha-
sis in education policy.
287
Ernst Moeckl designed
this small alarm clock
after his time working
with Max Bill at the HfG.
“For easy readability of
the clock face one
needs to clearly recog- Max Bill’s kitchen clock
nize which way is up (in collaboration with
and down, right and Ernst Moeckl), 1956/57,
left. The circular motion the first of many mod-
of the clock hand re- els for the manufacturer
sults in a circular dial if Junghans.
the design is to be logi- (Margit Staber, Zu neuen
cal. […] All in all: a Gestaltungen von Max Bill, in:
form 4/1958, 21 ff.)
clock designed with
mass production in
mind, whose form is
simple and convincing.“
(Immo Krumrey, Der Produkt-
gestalter Ernst Moeckl, in: form
20/1962, 26 ff.)
“Design from the GDR:
This floor vacuum clea-
ner is one of many ex-
emplary designs that
were recently devel-
oped by the Zentralin-
stitut für Formgestal-
tung (Central Institute
of Design) in East Berlin
for mass production.“
Design: Erich John for
VEB Elektrowärme,
Altenburg.
(form 32/1965, 44)
 Excursus An interagency agreement between
the federal government and the Land
governments led to the founding, on
5 Sept. 1957, of the Wissenschaftsrat
(Scientific Council), a body that hel-
ped shape education policy in the
sixties through its varied expert advi-
sory services. 1141 Thus politicians with
a special interest in education refer-
red to the recommendations of the
Scientific Council when they made
their first plans to expand scientific
288 colleges. 289

The date 4 October 1957 is consid-

ered as a factor in boosting the ex-
pansion of education in the Federal
Republic: the day on which the Sovi-
et Union sent the first satellite (sput-
nik) into space. The sputnik shock
triggered by this event in the late fif-
ties arose from doubts in the West
whether its own education system
was inferior to that of the Eastern
Bloc and therefore in need of reform.
Hellmut Becker, who became
increasingly critical of educational
research and planning and was
appointed the founding director of
the Max-Planck-Institut für Bildungs-
forschung (Max Planck Institute for Compared to dishes for
Educational Research) in Berlin in private use, hotel table-
1963, gives two reasons for the end- ware needs to be espe-
ing of this phase of creeping non- cially durable. The func-
reform 15 years after the end of the tional aspect predomi-
war, when a new era of education nates over the image.
policy began: economic pressure and This was in keeping
pressure produced by the findings of with the view of design
social scientists. held at the HfG. But it
The economic pressure, according was not only at the HfG
to Hellmut Becker, came from the one met with this chal-
fact that in the early sixties middle lenge. Heinrich Löffel-
Design from the GDR, class Germans enjoyed higher in- hardt, too, had de-
presented at an exhibi- comes; they therefore pressed for signed exemplary hotel
tion in Warsaw from more education, starting a chain tableware. Here is pro-
11 December 1967 reaction: People who would once duction series 598,
through 14 January have had a Hauptschule (elementary 1967, designed for the
1968 “that would be school) education now graduated manufacturer Schön-
worth showing over Once the chair had mu- from Realschule (junior high), former wald.
here as well”, because tated into a seating Realschule students thronged to a (form 37/1967, 64)
it “is aware of social, accommodation and Gymnasium (high school), and those
cultural, and economic from there into a pneu- who once had only a few years of
significance and makes matic function, tradit-
the principles visible, ional forms were dis-
supporting (them) with solved in total transpa-
arguments.“ Its title rency. Modern design
Function – form – qual- had now attained one
ity would have at least of its basic ideals –
evoked associations lightness –, and found
among people in the itself again on Blow, to
Federal Republic as pick one example: “A
well. big doll that hugs you
(Design der DDR, and holds you in its
in: form 41/1968, 30 ff.) lap.“
Design: Carla Scolari for
Zanotta Poltrone.
(Blow-up im Wohnzimmer,
in: form 42/1968, 16 ff.)
 Excursus Olivetti is one of the
European pioneers for
data processing equip-
ment. Two HfG gradu-
ates, Hans von Klier and
Andries van Onck, were
among the staff of Etto-
re Sottsass, whose
company had been
commissioned to work
on the Olivetti project.
A critic commented as
290 follows on systems 291
such as the pictured
Recensor 20,000:
“Thus a feeling of the
miraculous is created,
making these electronic
computer automats
seem like mysterious
metal furniture. They
are machines whose
cube-shaped bodies
may posthumously
recall certain cubist and
expressionist character-
istics of the Italian ‘Nov-
ecento‘ – thoughts of a
style from the time of
that radical neoplastic
change in the distribu-
tion of fields of color,
the organization of the
quadrants, the handles,
and the details.“
Enzo Frateili, Zwei Briefe aus
Mailand, in: form 20 /1962, 2 ff.

In 1965, the internation-

al designers’ associa-
tion ICSID organized a
conference on Design
and the general public
in Vienna. In the vener-
The 1968 Hannover able Palais Liechten- Gymnasium now tried to get their
Trade Fair, the world’s stein, a design exhibi- Abitur. Economic development, too,
largest “supermarket of tion was shown parallel it was felt, created an increasing de-
industry“, drew to the conference. mand for a qualified, trained work
500,000 visitors to the form 32/1965, 15 force. 1142
fair’s pavilions. They Social scientists, headed by Ralf
were brought to the fair Dahrendorf, presented new studies
by 330,000 cars. Minis- showing that the Federal German
ter of finance Karl education system did not allow equal
Schiller opened the fair opportunities for all: “Essentially the
and, at the special groups that could be shown to be
exhibit Gute Industrie- significantly underprivileged were
form (Good industrial women, children from a working-
design), sat in a chair class background, the rural popula-
designed by Georg tion, and Roman Catholics.“ Ralf
Leowald for Wilkhahn. Dahrendorf‘s focus was the Moder-
Hannover-Reflexe, nitätsrückstand of German society,
in: form 42/1968, 44 ff. the fact that it was not in step with
the modern world. 1143
This second phase of Federal Ger-
man education policy, which also
lasted about 15 years (i. e., roughly
from 1960 to 1975) and was charac-
 Excursus
292 Expo 1967 in Montreal
on the topic Man and
his world. At the largest
world exhibition ever
seen in the world, the
Federal Republic pre-
sents itself in a pavilion
as a tent landscape
designed by architects
Rolf Gutbrod and Frei
Otto. (As a key image of
this expo, however,
what comes to mind is
the U.S. pavilion devel-
oped by Richard Buck-
minster Fuller in the
form of a three-quarter
geodesic sphere 76
meters in diameter and
61 meters high.) The
HfG introduced itself
as one of 17 design
schools with work on
the topic transport facil-
ities; in the German
pavilion an exhibit
system by Herbert Ohl
and Herbert W. Kapitzki
was used.
(Margit Staber, Expo-Steno-
gramm, in: form 38/1967, 40 ff.)
terized by a lively commitment to
reform, began as professionals
accepted the ideas of economists
and scientists. The following factors
were typical of this phase:
In 1962 the conference of minis-
ters of education and the arts
resolved to draw up an assess-
ment of needs, published 14
March 1963: It was the first offi-
cial plan involving the education
system and, among other things, 293
advised that scientific colleges be
expanded as the Scientific Council
had recommended 1144;
on 14 and 15 Feb. 1963 the con-
ference of ministers of education
and the arts resolved to found the
Max-Planck-Institut für Bildungs-
forschung (Max Planck Institute
for Educational Research);
Federal Chancellor Ludwig Erhard
(CDU), in his 18 Oct. 1963 govern-
ment policy statement, declared
that education, science, and pro-
fessional training had the same
existential significance for the
20th century as the social ques-
tion had for the 19th century 1145;
This electric razor of
Braun, Inc. canonized
the color combination
black and silver for
products that are tech-
nical in character and
are intended to be seen
as especially high-
grade. Their effect has
been heightened to
assume representative
value, so that they have
become part of the cor-
porate identity of Braun,
Inc. Sixtant appeared
on the market in Sep-
tember 1962 priced at
about DM 80.–, and
became an extraordi-
nary success for the
manufacturer.
Design: Hans Gugelot
and Gerd A. Müller.
(Advertisement in
form 36/1966, 49)
 Excursus

294 Who’d have thought “In the beginning there 295

that this chair could be is a fact that is as sur-
described as the coun- prising as it is sobering:
terpart of the famous Our light bulb trans-
coffeehouse chair no. forms only 4.7 percent
19? “It is based on the of the current it receives
same criteria – trans- into light. In other
lated into the language words, 95.3 percent
of modern forms and are emitted as a waste
technology: a chair that product, as annoying
consists of three pre- heat in the air.“ At this
formed parts of lami- main hall of the Com-
nated wood that can be merzbank Düsseldorf
produced economically the designer tried “to
and that, with slight transform the waste
variations – can also be product heat into a
combined into stools or commodity and to
low armchairs.“ Design: regard the light merely
Verner Panton for Gebr. In 1968, a good two as a byproduct: The
Thonet AG. years after Hans Guge- roughly 800 square
(form 36/1966, 31) lot’s death, Gugelot De- meter room is heated
sign GmbH presented solely with the energy
itself as one of the larg- produced by the light-
est private design busi- bulbs.“
nesses in Europe; with (Johannes Dinnebier,
business manager Licht als Wärme?, in: form
40/1967, 30–31.)
Malke Gugelot and
technical manager Ernst
Reichl, it had a staff of
32.
(Ein Design-Büro mit 32 Köpfen,
in: form 42/1968, 21 ff.)

at its 100th plenary session on 5

and 6 March 1964 the conference
of ministers of education and the
arts made the Berlin Declaration,
which demanded a general rise in
the educational level. 1146

In 1964, with a series of articles by

Georg Picht in the conservative
weekly Christ und Welt on “the
catastrophe of German education“,
the interest of the general public was
drawn to the concerns of politicians
who were involved in educational
matters. 1147 Georg Picht argues in his
analysis that in the future German
society would be backward, because
Germany spent too little money on
its educational system compared to
other countries. Based on an OECD
study, Germany was ranked last
when it came to spending on edu-
cation. 1148
 Excursus
296
1958 Brussels World
Fair. The German pa-
vilion by Sep Ruf and
Egon Eiermann pre-
sents to the world Ger-
man respectability, with
walls made of glass and
supporting girders
“delicate as bamboo“.
(Curt Schweicher: Flaneur durch
die Belle Époque ‘58,
in: form 3/1958, 2 ff.)
The conclusions drawn from the
statistics now presented, which had
quite a few repercussions in the mid-
sixties, are in part considerably criti-
cized today: “Spending on education
in the FRG, as international compari-
sons showed, was quite modest, and
the conclusions drawn from this fact
were as far-reaching as they were
unsubstantiated. Theories on con-
nections between economic growth
and educational expansion gained in
popularity; admittedly, they did not 297
stand up to an empirical test.“ 1149
A second series of articles, pub-
lished in 1965 in the weekly Die Zeit,
this time by Ralf Dahrendorf, placed
educational reform issues squarely
on the political agenda. The hopes
of the politicians, who felt supported
by general euphoria, extended far
beyond the factual questions: “An
idea that had a large number of sup-
porters in the early sixties was that it
was possible to determine the edu- Alternative program:
cation of individuals and simultane- In 1965, stereo furniture
ously affect the development of soci- and radio-phonographs
ety.“ 1150 After Ludwig Erhard stepped were still being de-
down in 1966 and the Grand Coali- signed, manufactured,
tion was formed, reform politicians promoted. E. g., this
felt their opportunity had arrived: stereo concert cabinet
They now tackled a comprehensive KS 680 manufactured
reform of the structure and curricu- by Grundig.
lum of the educational system. The (In: form 32/1965, 65)
most important goals they had in
Introduced at the 1967
Hannover Trade Fair: a
hi-fi system by Verner
Panton for WEGA. “On a
pillar stand he installed
a box with a studio
record player, and a
second swiveling one
above it, containing a
high-quality radio con-
trol unit. Together with
the speaker boxes that
formally go with these,
the result is a novel,
practical music system
that takes up relatively
little space.“
(form 38/1967, 52)
 Excursus

298 299

Design from the GDR:

hi-fi-modules by Cl.
Dietel and L. Rudolph
for the manufacturer
Hempel, 1963/64. “Per-
haps it can be regarded
as a modified Braun In the fall of 1965, at
production series, but the Stuttgart radio exhi-
even then it is at least bition, WEGA gave visi-
on a par with compet- tors a look at stereo
ing West German prod- systems of the future,
ucts by Braun.“ designed by the Dane
(Design der DDR, Verner Panton and Gerd
in: form 41/1968, 30 ff.) A. Müller, whose de-
signs for Braun, Inc.
have become classics.
A critic wrote the fol-
lowing about Panton,
now celebrated as a
visionary: “Unlike (the
work) found at similar
trade fairs, he keeps
surprising us by novel,
creative solutions that
mind in order to create equal educa- at first seem absurd but
tional opportunities were to expand soon strike us as realis-
preschools and kindergartens, to tic and relevant.“
replace the Gymnasium entrance (form 32/1965, 54)
examination by a trial orientation
period, and the three-part school
Cornelius Uittenhout system by the Gesamtschule (com-
designed this stainless prehensive school). In 1966 every
steel men‘s wristwatch Land parliament discussed its own
after he left his job as university and college act.
head of an HfG work- The peak of this phase of expand-
shop and was appointed ing reform activities, however, is out-
the technical director side the time frame of this study. In
of the teaching depart- 1969 the federal government took
ment of industrial de- over responsibility for educational
sign in Kassel policies. The social liberal coalition
(form 19/1962, 18 ff.) adopted a skeleton higher-education
law, became involved in building
institutions of higher learning on a
large scale, and established a federal
ministry of education and science.
In 1970 the federal government pub-
lished its first report on education
and created a joint federal and Län-
der commission that submitted the
Bildungsgesamtplan (Overall Educa-
tion Plan) in 1973. Science, which
had helped to start the ball rolling,
was closely linked with politics and
 Excursus

300 the bureaucracy by way of the vari- 301

ous organizations of federal and Län-
der cooperation. Scientists formulat-
ed the political parties’ education
policy-related programs and profited
from increased interest in questions
of educational research and planning.
For instance, between 1967 and 1974
expenditure for institutions for edu-
cational research increased from DM
22 million to DM 126 million.

When we look at predictions made in

analyses during those years, it is dif-
ficult not to laugh, even if ridicule in
retrospect is cheap. Economic opti-
mism, which was projected on the
education system as a whole, also
sustained the belief that the findings
of educational researchers and plan-
ners were reliable. In spite of the
countless multitude of pages that
made up studies published at that
time, the abundance of material, and
the completeness and many-sided-
ness of the questions studied, it was
not possible to grasp all the com-
plexity of reality and to predict fu-
ture developments. For example, the
expansion of education also led to
crowded institutions of higher learn-
ing, and an attempt by ministers of
education and the arts to prevent
crowding by introducing a numerus
clausus policy (to limit university and
college admissions) fell flat. Hellmut
Becker, one of the most important
protagonists of German educational
research, felt he and his colleagues
were not at fault, and blamed bu-
reaucracy, for the goals of reform
had fizzled out in the process of
being implemented by the bureau- The vision of office fur-
crats: “A decisive point for this niture manufacturing
whole period of reform and anti- company Planmöbel for
reform is the fact that we were un- work in the year 1990,
able to extend the educational re- adapted for sale in
form to include those who adminis- 1968.
tered the education system, although Design: Arno Votteler.
here, too, there were enormous ad- (Allseits abgerundet:
vances.“ 1151 The present assessment Programm Design ‘90,
in: form 42/1968, 10–11)
of the period of educational euphoria
and the upswing of education be-
tween 1960 and 1975 can also turn
out to be more withering. For in-
stance, “ [e]ducational planning
failed, and so did the academics
who tried so hard to do something
about it.“ 1152
 1968

4 April Martin Luther

King, 1964 Nobel
4 June 1967 Peace Prize winner,
Photo: unknown is assassinated.
Source: HfG-Synopse 1967
13 May Student
1 Dec. 1966 21 March The first unrests peak in France.
Archive: dpa imported Japanese car
is introduced to the 21 Aug. Soviet tanks
German market. roll into Czechoslovakia
and put an end to
2 June The student reformer Alexander
Benno Ohnesorg is Dubçek’s Prague
shot to death at a dem- Spring.
onstration against the
shah of Iran in West 11 Nov. Stanley
Berlin; student revolt Kubrick’s film “2001:
escalates in Germany. A Space Odyssey“ is
shown in German
5 June Israel wages movie theaters.
the Six-Day War
against its Arab adver- 7 Nov. Beate Klarsfeld
1964 saries Egypt, Jordan, slaps Federal Chancel-
and Syria. lor Kurt Georg Kiesin-
2 July The most ger at the federal party
important civil rights 9 Oct. Che Guevara is convention of the CDU
law since the abolition killed in Bolivia. in order to draw atten-
of slavery is passed in tion to his Nazi past. 4 April 1968
1963 Washington; discrimi- 1966 1 Oct. This year the Archive: AKG
nation against people NPD gains seats in the
22 Jan. In Paris, Presi- of color in the U.S. is The Vietnam War esca- parliaments of Rhine-
dent Charles de Gaulle prohibited. lates. The picture of land-Palatinate,
and Federal Chancellor the naked, fleeing Viet- Schleswig-Holstein,
Konrad Adenauer sign 3 Oct. Through a 140- namese girl is seen all Lower Saxony, and
the Cooperation Treaty meter tunnel, 57 East over the world. Bremen.
for Franco-German Berliners escape to the
Friendship. West. 30 Oct. Protests in 21 Oct. Student pro-
Frankfurt am Main tests in Berlin.
16 Oct. Ludwig Erhard 14 Oct. In the USSR, against the Notstands-
takes over the office of head of state and party gesetze (emergency
federal chancellor from leader Nikita Khrush- 1965 laws) planned by the
87-year-old Konrad chev is succeeded by federal government.
Adenauer. 57-year-old Leonid 24 Jan. Winston 13 May 1968
Brezhnev. Churchill dies at 90. 6 Nov. The NPD Archive: AKG
28 Aug. With a march obtains seats in the
on Washington, 18 March The Russian parliaments of Hesse
200,000 people dem- Alexey Leonov is the and Bavaria.
onstrate against racial first human being to
discrimination in the float freely in space. 1 Dec. Ludwig Erhard
U.S. steps down as federal
chancellor; the CDU-
22 Nov. John F. Ken- FDP coalition ends. He
nedy is killed in Dallas. is succeeded by Kurt
Georg Kiesinger, previ-
ously ministerpresident
of Baden-Württemberg;
his term is marked by
the Grand Coalition
with the SPD under
Willy Brandt.

21 Aug. 1968
Archive: dpa
 The rectorships of Aicher, Maldonado and Ohl
December 1962 through December 1968
304 The last chapter in the history of the HfG starts on
20 December 1962, when the HfG was again
headed by a rector.
Today we know that the HfG closed at the end
of this chapter. But it would be a mistake to look
at these last years only from the perspective of the
closure. For this was by no means an inevitable
development – one that started at this point and
that would have necessarily, as it were, led to the
closure of the HfG. The school’s history could also
have developed differently, and if we put forth the-
ses about this it does not mean that we are trying
to assign blame, or that we reproach the protago-
nists for not choosing such alternatives.
However we cannot overlook the fact that the
end of this chapter concludes with the end of the
HfG. That is why we need to inquire into the caus-
es that led to this development. Again, I would like
my answers to this question to be understood only
as theses and not as accusations.
The conditions that caused the foundation to
shut down the HfG at the end of 1968 essentially
grew out of what happened in 1963. That year,
the course was set in a direction that in retrospect
turned out to be wrong. In 1968 those who were
in executive positions at the foundation and the
HfG were no longer capable of correcting this
course. On the contrary, their behavior led from
the serious crisis to actual collapse. Yet we must
In class: Dieter Reich,
Walter Zeischegg, Peter
Emmer, Peter Beck, and
Reinhold Beckelmann,
1962.
Photo: unknown
Archive: HfG (62/0479)
differentiate between this inappropriate behavior
and the more remote events that led to the closure
of the HfG. This is especially true of the financing
of the foundation.
Here is an example: The events of 1963 laid the
foundation for the withdrawal of the federal gov-
ernment from subsidizing the HfG in the years that
followed. The reason the government withdrew its
funding was that the HfG (because of the events
of 1963) was no longer regarded as a college, i. e.,
an institution that carried out research and devel-
opment. Point-blank, the rule was: No research –
no subsidy. The so-called Troeger expert opinion
for the finance reform was merely a welcome pre-
text at the time for the federal government to stop
its financing of the HfG. The federal government
announced early enough that it would end subsi-
dizing the school. Thereupon, after Thorwald Ris-
ler’s departure in 1964, three mistakes were made
at the foundation and the HfG that were the most
important causes of the financial crisis of 1967/68.
Firstly, they did not take the federal government’s
announcement seriously. Secondly, they did not
change course, that is, the HfG did not (as it had
done before 1963) devote itself to research and
development in such a way as to appear worthy of
subsidizing to the federal government. And thirdly,
they also neglected to look in a timely manner for
a subsidy that would replace that of the federal
government. Those are three alternatives that
would have been possible for the protagonists in
the foundation and the HfG. We need to examine
each one to see how realistic these alternatives
were at the time. The reason the federal govern-
ment’s announcement was not taken seriously
enough was that Friedrich Rau achieved the amaz-
ing political success, by division in the Bundestag,
of setting the subsidy for 1966 at DM 200,000 –
actually the subsidy should have been only DM
100,000. That is why no one wanted to believe
that this victory could not be repeated once more
in 1967. All the more painful was the realization in
1967 that the federal government actually com-
pletely discontinued its subsidy as announced. –
Also, with the prevailing personnel and institution-
al situation at the HfG beginning in 1965 it was
not possible to take advantage of the sweeping
and successful circumstances before 1963: Hans
Gugelot had died, Otl Aicher concentrated on the
visual image of the Olympic Games in Munich, and
there were no congenial successors. – It was also
not easy to renew contacts with the private sector
after pretty much all the damage that could be
done in Ulm and Stuttgart had been done in 1963.
When Thorwald Risler left, the connection be-
tween the foundation and the Society of Friends
eroded – neither side derived any pleasure from
the other anymore. And yet this would have been
the right place for an energetic and imaginative
new beginning. But no one in the foundation was
able or willing to track down contacts to industry
or to new financiers – especially no one at the
HfG, where the industrialist and CDU member
Thorwald Risler had been made the scapegoat in
absentia (and out of ignorance), and the private
sector was regarded with increasing distrust. The
fact that after 1964 the foundation in particular no
longer performed this, its original function, but
simply administered the assets, must indeed be
named as an important reason for the end of the
HfG. Added to this is the fact that at the same
time, the administration went downhill.
Here is a second example, which was of course
connected with the HfG’s change of course: After
1964 the foundation and the HfG concentrated
almost exclusively on financing their budget from
public funds. This meant that they became depen-
dent on politicians, primarily Land politicians. But
as early as 1966 the latter quite unequivocally
stated that the HfG would not be nationalized, and
neither would the subsidy be raised. At this unmis-
takable signal from the Landtag there could again
– from today’s perspective – have been a right or
a wrong reaction: successful or unsuccessful. The
foundation and the HfG, however, paid no atten-
tion to this signal, they ignored it and failed to act
accordingly. One reaction that needs to be evalu-
ated as a promising alternative today might have
been the attempt to develop new sources of fund-
ing. This attempt was made, only very halfhearted-
ly, and brought no income to Ulm. An additional
reaction might have been to move the HfG else-
where in order to tie it to a different public sponsor
who would have been willing to spend more
money for the HfG that the Landtag in Stuttgart.
This reaction took place in the spring of 1968,
again too late and without success. The action the
foundation and the HfG decided on was precisely
to try to get the foundation nationalized and the
subsidy raised, although both had been rejected
in anticipation by the Landtag in 1966 when the
topic was not even being debated, and when there
would still have been enough time to go in alterna-
tive directions. However, the foundation and the
HfG decided on a road that was not exactly a blind
alley, but that significantly contributed to their
share of responsibility for closing the HfG.
A third example: the decline of the administra-
tion starting in 1965. A large number of details
that will be mentioned below show up enormous
deficiencies in the way the foundation was admin-
istered. The HfG was left to itself, and self-respon-
sibility did not agree with it. By their irresponsible
behavior its members destroyed part of the re-
sources the HfG lived on. The various successors
of Günther Schweigkofler as administrative direc-
tor failed when faced with this Augean organiza-
tional task. In the end the supervisory body of the
foundation – the foundation‘s council – was re-
sponsible, for it should have exerted control over
the administration; at least it would have been the
council’s duty to appoint a competent administra-
tive director and an energetic executive body, the
executive board. In both instances the organization
moved in the wrong direction. At the same time
the influence on the HfG of the foundation‘s coun-
cil, whose function was to formulate objectives,
dwindled to such an extent that the HfG could
openly oppose the council’s decisions without fear
of sanctions. The members of the foundation‘s
council hoped that they would succeed if they
submitted to the will of the HfG. Today we know
this was a mistake.
Because 1963 was the decisive year for the
development that led to the HfG’s closing, I shall
address the events of that year in somewhat more 305
detail.
For the years that followed from 1963 through
1968, an enormous number of documentation is
available. The reason for that is not just the grow-
ing number of duplicating opportunities thanks to
the new, modern technological achievements of
the sixties. It is also characteristic of the behavior
of HfG members that (out of distrust, from the
need to talk to other people, because they wanted
to be published, because they enjoyed document-
ing events and discussing them) they put down
a lot of thoughts on paper and also sent out a lot
of copies. I am sure this pattern of behavior has
become obvious by now, and it even intensified in
the course of the coming years. The large amount
of paper is also a result of a preference typical of
the HfG to create special commissions, commit-
tees, or teams to deal with every imaginable mat-
ter; these would then produce minutes, working
papers, and outlines en masse – a symptom typi-
cal of the time, incidentally, culminating in the
familiar idea of the movement of ’68 that resolu-
tions and statements to the press were their
strongest weapons in the class struggle.
The rectorship of Otl Aicher
December 1962 through September 1964
At the beginning of 1963 the situation could have
been a positive one for making a fresh start . The
financial consolidation of the foundation was pro-
ceeding according to plan, the budget was close
to DM 2 million, constitutional details at the HfG
had been regulated as Otl Aicher wished, to the
point that many of those involved had hopes that
the situation would calm down over the Christmas
break. 1153 If things had calmed down, the personal
relationship between Otl Aicher and Thorwald Ris-
ler could have been cleared up again. However,
the fundamental dispute about how authority was
to be shared between the foundation and the HfG
concealed the fact that cooperation between the
two protagonists had changed to mutual distrust.
The more intense the disputes on Kuhberg be-
came, the more their antipathies grew. To put it
another way: Otl Aicher and Thorwald Risler were
not the type of people who disregard circum-
stances in order to create a new order; no, they
remained stuck in the existing circumstances.
Directly after the election of the rector, on 20
December 1962, a public debate began about the
HfG. It was triggered by those students and lectur-
ers who were not in agreement with the new HfG
bylaws. The student representative, Gudrun Otto,
sent a protest telegram to minister of education
and the arts Gerhard Storz (CDU) and to the chair-
man of the politico-cultural committee of the
Landtag of Baden-Württemberg, Karl Brachat
 The rectorships of
Aicher, Maldonado
and Ohl
306 (CDU). 1154 On the following day the Stuttgarter Zei-
tung published a report with the headline Riot and
protests. New rector at the Ulm School of Design
about the actions of those who felt they had been
tricked: “Before and during the election there were
student riots and protest rallies at the college. A
banner displayed outside in front of the building,
‘Less cold war, more education’, was later remo-
ved by the caretaker. On Thursday, the students’
official representatives addressed a resolution to
the politico-cultural committee of the Parliament
of Baden-Württemberg, to the executive board and
the advisory board of the Geschwister-Scholl-Stif-
tung, and to the chief election official for the elec-
tion of the rector.” The Ulm paper Schwäbische
Donau-Zeitung, which was always well-disposed
towards the HfG, pointed out on 22 December
1962 that there had been a second banner: “Not
without democratic bylaws”. Also: “Only a group
of about ten students clapped when the voting
was over and the members of the extended senate
left the room.” A student declaration on the bulle-
tin board must also not be overlooked, the article
went on: “We wish to point out that not all stu-
dents identify with the views and the protest ac-
tion of the student representatives (‘in the name
of the students’).” In the weeks that followed there
were repeated newspaper articles with critical
statements. 1155
The radio joined the press announcements: The
“The HfG’s reputation, Süddeutscher Rundfunk (South German Radio)
especially in interna- announced a late-night show for 7 February 1963
tional circles, is largely with a report on college life at the HfG, entitled
based on a rigorous The permanent crisis situation at the Ulm School
conception of design of Design. Prior to the broadcast the rector, Otl
and the pedagogical Aicher, turned to the members of the HfG, asking
concept resulting from them to listen to the program in order to judge for
it.“ themselves whether this style of confrontation
should be pursued in the future as well. 1156 As a
Otl Aicher in his memo matter of fact, the program was not a journalistic
“On the situation of the showpiece, and it spread further unrest in the city
School of Design in of Ulm. 1157
1962“, dated
September 1962. The Federal Republic had just lived through events
around the so-called Spiegel affair: the search of
The photo shows him in the Hamburg Press Building on 26 October 1962,
1963. the arrest of Rudolf Augstein, a debate in the Bun-
Photo: Wolfgang Siol destag from 7 to 9 November 1962, public protest,
Archive: HfG (63/0291/3) and demonstrations against censorship of the
press. Together with his wife, Otl Aicher had signed
a resolution by Gruppe 47 in defense of the Spie-
gel, but a few days later they dissociated them-
selves from their signatures, because they had not
learned the exact wording of the resolution until
they read the publication. The administrative com-
mittee of the Ulm municipal council, which was
informed by Theodor Pfizer on 8 March 1963
about the situation at the HfG, took exception to
this resolution. A local politician declared that “he
could not understand how the federal government,
the Land, and the city could subsidize an institu-
tion whose leading personalities […] participated
in such attacks. Treason was treason, and was dis-
gusting no matter how you looked at it. The effect
Rector Aicher’s attitude had on the HfG students
could be gauged by the fact that the students also
published a resolution in connection with the Spie-
gel affair.” – Subsequently the city councilors sev-
eral times expressed the wish that the HfG should
be more open to the city: “The HfG was far more
firmly anchored in international consciousness
than in the consciousness of the citizens of Ulm,
and it was to be hoped that all those involved
would see to it that Ulm became more deeply
aware of the college. However, if the city of Ulm
could no longer cope with such an institution intel-
lectually, there was no point in the city’s troubling
itself over the college anymore. […] They’d be on
the wrong track if they were to regard an institu-
tion critically only because there were things hap-
pening there that certain people weren’t very
happy about. […] There was only one way for the
wish that the HfG should be more firmly anchored
in the consciousness of the citizens of Ulm to be
fulfilled – the city would need to practice toler-
ance.”
Public attention reached its pinnacle in an article
published – where else? – in the Spiegel. On 18
Inge Aicher-Scholl,
1963.
Photo: Wolfgang Siol
Archive: HfG (63/0354/1)
In class.
Photo: Wolfgang Siol
Archive: HfG (63/0361/1)
March 1963 the magazine devoted an article to
the HfG that was not a credit to this journalistic
authority. Otl Aicher now spoke of a press cam-
paign kicked off by HfG members against their
own institution. The result was the dissemination
all over West Germany of biting criticism of the
HfG whose tenor was etched in the consciousness
of many politicians. The Spiegel editor summed up
his verdict in one sentence: “However, no newly
founded institution has made so many more prom-
ises than it has kept; to this day no other academic
arts institution devoted to teaching and research
has been plagued by so many crises and disputes,
or been so sharply criticized by co-founders and
staff and faculty members as the enterprise on
Kuhberg sponsored by the ‘Geschwister-Scholl-
Stiftung’.” 1158 Otl Aicher urged the students and
lecturers who had informed the journalists of the
Bill crisis, the Perrine problem, and the new HfG
bylaws to leave the HfG, since they felt that the
HfG no longer deserved to be supported by the
public sector. Vae victis (Woe to the vanquished),
the journalists now exclaimed. 1159
The words that would strike at the very roots of
the HfG had now been spoken: Was the HfG wor-
thy of being subsidized?
Since the big debate at the constituent assembly
of Baden-Württemberg on 29 April 1953, when a
roll-call vote was taken regarding subsidizing the
foundation for the operating costs during the first
three years, there had been no more arguments
worth mentioning with the plenum of the Landtag.
The cabinet, which had wanted to let the initial
subsidy run out, was outvoted on 2 February 1956.
Since then, the HfG had been carried along by the
general upswing of all that was associated with
design. Probably another reason for the calm on
the floor in Bonn and Stuttgart was that since
1959 many members of parliament had been rely-
ing on the presence of Thorwald Risler in Ulm and
had put aside their misgivings about subsidizing
the HfG.
Kurt Angstmann (SPD), who had succeeded
Alex Möller in October as the chairman of the
Landtag finance committee, used the Spiegel arti- 307
cle as an opportunity to call into question the HfG.
In 1953 he had voted against continuing the subsi-
dy to the foundation, and now, on 22 March 1963,
together with eight colleagues of his parliamentary
faction, he introduced a petition for review in the
Landtag to study whether the HfG was worthy of
being subsidized. 1160 The mere fact that this peti-
tion was filed made everyone who was involved in
the HfG and the foundation extremely nervous. Otl
Aicher countered by publishing the address he
had given at the end of the HfG academic quarter:
The petition of the parliamentary faction of the
SPD, he said, was “the result of a press campaign
whose point of departure was in our own ranks.
The existence of our school is being jeopardized.
[…] The important fact is that via the Spiegel a
distorted image was presented to the public – an
image that originated in our own circles. […] I’m
counting on the integrity of those who are respon-
sible, and will advise them to leave the school.
Without them we shall be able to put an end to
the process of self-dissolution and self-undermin-
ing, if not of self-defamation.” 1161
Wolfgang Donndorf, the representative of the min-
istry of education and the arts on the foundation’s
administrative council, at once turned to Mayor
Theodor Pfizer, the chair of the administrative
council, and formally asked him to have the chair
of the foundation put together as soon as possible
exact data about the curriculum, enrollment fig-
ures, income and subsidies, as well as internation-
al successes of the HfG. 1162 He had always strongly
 The rectorships of “From the very begin- continuous improve- Otl Aicher in his
Aicher, Maldonado ning the School of ment of the pedagogi- address upon the open-
and Ohl Design was subject cal concept. Without ing of the HfG exhibi-
to pronounced internal this process of constant tion at the Stuttgart
changes that give an reorientation it is Trade Supervision
impressive picture of impossible to under- Department, 24 April
dynamic change and stand the School of 1963.
Design […].“

308
At the opening of the
exhibition. Pictured
among others are Frank
Hess on the left and
next to him (wearing
sunglasses) Claude
Schnaidt.
Photo: Bernd-Gunter Franck
Archive: HfG (Depositum 84/1)
supported the HfG at his ministry and was now
afraid of a parliamentarian conflict. But also quite
simply figures were needed, a few statistics to
substantiate the HfG’s claims of success.
The HfG and the foundation needed to realize
that the petition by the SPD faction in the Landtag
was an opportunity to demonstrate credibly and
convincingly in public that they were worthy of
financial support. On 18 April 1963, in answer to
Wolfgang Donndorf’s questions, Thorwald Risler
produced substantial documentation (Dokumenta-
tion 1), representing an initial basis for evaluating
the HfG’s achievements in recent years. It included
the present curriculum, statistics on students, dis-
sertations, graduates up to 1963 and faculty, data
on research and development projects, awards,
publications, and budget development. 1163 The
most important data for argumentation in the polit-
ical groups were at the end of the report: In the
last five years the foundation’s budget had more
than doubled, and yet the ratio of its own income
to public subsidies had remained almost unchan-
ged. In 1957/58, 48 percent of the budget had
consisted of foundation income, while in 1962 it
was 40 percent. In other words, industry had in-
creased orders for the foundation to the same
degree as the public sector increased its subsi-
dies. 1164
In effect the HfG had up to this time been far
too restrained in its self-promotion – a shortcom-
ing that many friends of the HfG could not under-
stand. At the same time the Bill crisis showed that
a handful of easily understandable facts and fig-
ures could have refuted many defamations. The
local politicians in the municipal council, for exam-
ple, welcomed the SPD’s Landtag petition, not
because they actually questioned the HfG’s exis-
tence, but because they thought it would force
the HfG to provide the public with fundamental
information, including an account of the events of
the past months. 1165 In the press the view gained
ac- ceptance that it was a political necessity to
straighten out circumstances on Kuhberg, because
the HfG was receiving considerable moneys from
public funds. 1166 The journalists and politicians
found the lack of publicity on the part of the HfG
all the more incomprehensible because the HfG
departments of information and visual communi-
cation were made for the job, but also because
the HfG could indeed be proud of the successes
of its members. It is true that since the end of
1958 the HfG had been publishing ulm, promo-
tional material that appeared sporadically with a
circulation of 3,000 copies, which caused a sensa-
tion and aroused admiration everywhere, including
professional circles – but it didn’t mean a thing to
a Land politician. That is why the HfG now worked
hard on putting together a traveling exhibition with
examples of HfG work from the first ten years. Part
of the annual budget had to be used for this un-
foreseen expense. On 26 April 1963 the exhibition
opened at the Land Trade Supervision Department
in Stuttgart, and its next stops were Ulm (Korn-
haus, 2 October 1963), Munich (Die Neue Samm-
lung, 11 May 1964), and Amsterdam (Stedelijk
Museum, 7 May 1965).
On the occasion of the exhibition the newspa-
pers again turned their attention to the HfG with
articles whose quality and message varied, and
that did not help decrease tensions on Kuhberg. 1167
One paper printed a tendentious article entitled
Not a college – a junior high, which reported that
the argument around Max Bill’s “position in the
school, and finally his departure and the fact that
his friends also left preoccupied the general public
for a long time. Since then, again and again, there’s
been talk of the problems the lecturers have to
deal with, of craving for power and the increasing
predominance of the Aicher-Scholl family in the
school, of trips to America, and of amateurism
[…]. It’s obvious that in addition to purely personal
power struggles among the lecturers a factional
dispute has also developed.” A student was quoted
as saying: “In my graduating class, and I think in
other years as well, there are a number of students
drifting around who simply don’t meet matricula-
tion requirements on account of their educational
background, and who join the Aicher clique be-
cause they just can’t understand a man like Horst
Rittel, who is trying to proceed on the basis of
theoretical considerations.” 1168 The Stuttgarter
Nachrichten adopted the same tone, but even
louder: “The husband of Inge Scholl, graphic
designer Otl Aicher, who has been doggedly work-
ing his way to the top, announced, against the will
of the majority of the faculty, new bylaws that
assured he would have power.” Regarding the
exhibits at the Stuttgart show the author noted:
“But this sort of ‘industrial design’ is pursued at
other institutes as well. It has become an occupa-
tion for people of good taste. Does one need a
college to do that? […] In other words, it would be
important to have a scientific superstructure, even
more than the infrastructure. Then one could right-
ly speak of a college. Then Ulm would deserve the
Thorwald Risler, international reputation it has acquired thanks to
Otl Aicher, and Paul certain individual great minds who have in the
Hildinger, 1963. meantime been gotten rid of again or who have
Photo: Wolfgang Siol left for some reason.” 1169
Archive: HfG (63/0358/4)
At the HfG, Herbert Lindinger and Claude Schnaidt
responded to this report with an open letter, al-
though Theodor Pfizer, on 16 May 1963, had re-
quested in the extended senate of the college that
no further steps be taken that might exacerbate
the situation: “There are attempts to suggest to the
public that the HfG is a corrupt bunch of amateurs,
wheeler-dealers, and dishonorable characters, that
the HfG is a place plagued only by intrigue and
power struggles, that the HfG is a school where
classes are now taught only sporadically, where
every day there is reason to fear that whole de-
partments might disappear, where undemocratic,
power-obsessed minds constantly drive out peo-
ple of great genius, and finally that the HfG ac-
quired its international renown in some other way
than by its achievements. […] This well-aimed
campaign is not, as some members of the HfG
think, a drama one can watch with interest but
without involvement. […] We believe that one can-
not allow these defamations to be out there in
public without denying them. The silence that
Mayor Pfizer recommends would in the long run
be interpreted by the general public as acquies-
cence in these assertions that damage the school’s
reputation.” 1170 A week later the majority of HfG
members (17 lecturers, 77 students, 9 institute
staffers) expressed their disapproval of those col-
leagues and classmates who were supposed to
have fueled the press campaign. 1171
309
At the same time as Otl Aicher opened the HfG
exhibition at the Stuttgart Trade Supervision De-
partment on 26 April 1963, the administrative
council of the foundation arrived at the ministry of
education and the arts, a few meters away, for its
21st meeting. At the meeting Thorwald Risler once
more presented his view that the administrative
council as the supervisory body of the foundation
ought to agree on how to reestablish the inner
order of the HfG, for “developments in recent
months have shown that the college is not capable
of resolving the internal tensions of its own ac-
cord”. Otl Aicher, he said, simply always blamed
the crisis on the factional dispute between design-
ers and theoretician. “There was a great deal of
truth in that, but on the other hand he, Mr. Risler,
believed the crux of the difficulties was primarily
personal inadequacies and unwillingness to permit
a certain open-mindedness.” He urged the admin-
istrative council to find a regulation that prevented
a dispute about approaches to teaching from im-
mediately spreading to the foundation and jeop-
ardizing the existence of the institution at large. At
the same time he demanded that as the managing
chairman of the foundation‘s executive board he
should be put in a position to “work with all mem-
bers of the college regardless of the interests of
individual members, as a neutral authority so to
speak”. This made it clear that Thorwald Risler had
once and for all taken a stand against Otl Aicher:
firstly because as the managing chairman of the
foundation‘s executive board he demanded the
same powers as those Inge Aicher-Scholl had dur-
ing the Bill crisis when she intervened in the HfG’s
affairs, and secondly because he represented an
 The rectorships of
Aicher, Maldonado
and Ohl
310 institutional pattern of behavior, while Otl Aicher
never saw the institutions, but only those persons
who stood behind them. – The representatives of
the ministries expressed their horror at the amount
of public scandal during recent months, and at the
events themselves that had given rise to this un-
rest: “Mr. Boulanger strongly believes that the
administrative council must make it clear to Mr.
Aicher what is meant by ‘creative unrest’. Even
with the best of intentions, recent events at the
college could not be described in those terms,
and they must on no account be condoned. Now
the very existence of the college is at stake. […]
Summarizing, Mr. Pfizer says that by and large the
administrative council is in agreement in its as-
sessment of the situation.”
When Otl Aicher hurried from the opening of the
exhibition to the meeting in order to take part in it
as a guest, the administrative council was just in
the middle of the discussion. The representative of
the federal ministry of the interior, Karl Gussone,
had just informed the meeting that “in the relevant
committees of the federal government the ques-
tion had been raised whether continuing financial
support, but particularly an increase of such sup-
port, made sense in view of the latent crisis that
had prevailed for quite some time.” Wolfgang
Donndorf, the representative of the ministry of
education and the arts, then told Otl Aicher that
“considering the many tensions within the college
and especially among the faculty, and all the inci-
dents that had become public knowledge, he [felt
compelled to express] doubt whether from the
pedagogical viewpoint the institution was still en-
titled to financial aid.” Otl Aicher defended his
view that only a designer could be the rector of the
HfG. Several members of the administrative coun-
cil disagreed with him: “Mr. Donndorf declares that
the question whether designers and scientists are
equal in rank is crucial in deciding whether the
Ulm School of Design can even claim to be a col-
lege. In his opinion the present crisis was caused
primarily if not solely by the downgrading of the
scientists.”
After the discussion, the administrative council
decided that the bylaws of the foundation had to
be changed in two stages: In one initial, quick step
the advisory council would be eliminated to refute
accusations of self-promotion and of family oligar-
chy; in a second step the entire bylaws would be
reviewed. Also, an independent commission would
study circumstances at the HfG.
On 30 May 1963 the petition of Kurt Angstmann
(SPD) that the HfG ’s entitlement to aid be re-
viewed was on the agenda of the plenary session
of the Landtag of Baden-Württemberg. 1172 At least
equally interesting for the whole politico-cultural
situation was the fourth item on the agenda: the
memo of the Land government on establishing
new colleges of science in Baden-Württemberg
by 1978. A few figures will illustrate the dimen-
sions of these plans:
The Land government reckoned on construction
costs for three new colleges of science totaling
DM 1,160.5 million, and annual maintenance
costs of DM 85.5 million. The breakdown of the
expenditure is as follows:
Detten Schleiermacher,
Herbert Maeser, and
Herbert Ohl, 1963.
Photos: Wolfgang Siol
Archive: HfG (63/0299/4,
63/0311/4, and 63/0321/3)
The planned new University of Constance was
to receive DM 26.1 million a year for about
3,000 students, which would come to DM
8,700 per student per year, not counting con-
struction costs (an estimated DM 524.7 mil-
lion).
The planned Ulm Medical College was to recei-
ve DM 50.7 million a year for operating ex-
penses with 1,000 students (construction costs:
DM 605 million), i. e., DM 50,700 per student
(not counting construction costs).
Construction costs for the planned second
medical school of the university of Heidelberg,
which was to be affiliated with the Mannheim
School of Economics, was estimated at DM
30.8 million, with annual operating costs of
DM 8.7 million.
Furthermore the cabinet planned to expand the
existing seven colleges of science for an addi-
tional DM 1,900 million.
The Land subsidy to the HfG at this time totaled
DM 600,000; in 1963 the foundation received
DM 4,650 per student, including all construction
and construction-related costs. These figures were
often distorted in the political debate of the years
that followed, and the actual per-head subsidy
was wrongly quoted by the HfG’s opponents.
Now we come to the petition by Kurt Angst-
mann and his colleagues of the SPD Landtag fac-
tion: Once more Hellmut Becker’s and Otl Aicher’s
suspicions from the time of the HfG’s founding
that the state would want to exert influence on the
HfG as soon as it gave the school money proved
to be correct. Kurt Angstmann expressed it openly:
“We have chosen this form of petition because we
want to make it perfectly clear that this is not a
state institution, because actually we can only try
to bring an influence to bear by authorizing the
subsidy. […] Secondly, the good intentions that no
doubt underlie the plans and their support should
be brought before the public once more, because
that too is necessary in order to judge things cor-
rectly.”
This was surely a dubious argument for a peti-
tion that could cause considerable damage politi-
cally as well as financially. Thereupon Kurt Angst-
mann referred to the wealth of newspaper articles,
starting with the ones about the Bill crisis in 1957
and going on to reports about the resignation of
the governing board in 1962, the biased broadcast
by the Süddeutscher Rundfunk (South German
Radio), the Spiegel article, and finally the com-
mentary on the “purging” of the HfG of undesir-
able lecturers and students. He quoted extensively
from these accounts, and so the members of the
HfG were now made to pay for the fact that over
ten years they still hadn’t learned not to give their
opponents weapons that could be used against
them. Kurt Angstmann was able to list every one
of a number of cheap accusations: never-ending
scandals, incidents, and crises, an impenetrable
entanglement of authorities, settling accounts with
inflexible members of the college; he claimed that
even the existence of a department was supposed
to be a figment of the imagination (actually the
department of information had been in a bad way
ever since Gert Kalow accepted a study grant in
the fall of 1968). He therefore demanded conse-
quences – massive interventions in the pedagogi-
cal and organizational structure: “It seems to me 311
that the safest thing would be if it was possible to
have a close organizational connection with exist-
ing government institutions.” He felt the school’s
right to exist was not the issue for him, while its
right to an autonomous existence was: He sug-
gested that after there was a review of the HfG’s
entitlement to financial aid it might be advisable
to think about affiliating the school with the Ulm
Medical College then being planned. – Naturally
there was another reminder of the old promise
from the period of the HfG’s founding that the col-
lege would be completely self-supporting in a few
years.
Former minister of finance Karl Frank (FDP/DVP)
insisted on pointing out with obvious enjoyment
that not only his own misgivings, but those of
much more “progressive” members of parliament
as well had meanwhile been confirmed by what
had happened: “But the friends of the college said
at the time, Well yes, those are teething troubles,
we’ve got to have time to get started. A few more
years, and things will get better. And so we come
to the third stage: Things haven’t gotten better.
[…] But, ladies and gentlemen, the fact that the
feud among the lecturers and the feud between
a segment of the lecturers and a segment of the
students, and another segment of the lecturers
and students was carried on like this, out in the
Peter Cornelius, 1963.
Photo: Roland Fürst
Archive: HfG (63/0579/1)
open, so that it almost took the adversaries before
a court of law – why, that shows that all those
years they really never got around to building a
community within this School of Design. […] Com-
pared with the great plans to found a new univer-
sity and a medical school in Ulm, and to create a
second medical school in Mannheim, of course,
the downfall of the Ulm School of Design is a mi-
nor matter, small potatoes, as they say.” Neverthe-
less and precisely because of the comparatively
minor contributions involved [in this case], it was
 The rectorships of
Aicher, Maldonado
and Ohl
312 the Landtag’s duty to handle even small subsidies
from taxes responsibly, and the money for the HfG
had been “needlessly squandered”.
That was certainly a bit thick, and one might
have had the impression that this obfuscation was
meant to conceal the fact that considerable sums
were being slated to support state colleges of sci-
ence. During the meeting the representatives of
the Land ministries who were on the administrative
council were sharply attacked because they had
backed the HfG in the press. Although Walter Erbe
(FDP/DVP) spoke on behalf of the HfG, he was not
very convincing. Quite different on the other hand
were the remarks of Erich Ganzenmüller (CDU),
who picked up on the detail that currently the HfG
needed an administrative staff of 29 to run a
school with an alleged enrollment of 95 students.
If the HfG was to continue to grow, steps must be
Bill Huff, 1963. taken “so we can find that this college is really
Photo: Roland Fürst entitled to receive the subsidy”. Finally there was
Archive: HfG (63/0457/1) a mood swing of 180 degrees as minister of edu-
cation and the arts Gerhard Storz (CDU) threw his
weight behind the HfG, and behind his department
head Wolfgang Donndorf. And he showed ways in
which the Landtag could intervene: “The Land can
give its subsidy or cancel it, there’s not much it
can do in between. […] But we are not in a posi-
tion to give the college any kind of orders or to
make any arrangements regarding the use of funds,
curricula, or personnel schedules. The way things
are structured now, we don’t have the authority to
do that. […] There is a good reason for reviewing
entitlement to aid as accurately as possible, partic-
ularly for the college’s own sake. However, I do
hope that the result will be that Parliament, too,
will confirm that the school is entitled to financial
aid, at least in principle.” – The request was re-
ferred to the politico-cultural committee for dis-
cussion. It was to this committee that the ministry
of education and the arts had to submit a report
about the HfG.
Parallel to the review of the HfG’s entitlement to
aid, which the ministry of education and the arts
began as early as April 1963, a committee of the
so-called “Three Wise Men” (Hellmut Becker, Theo-
dor Eschenburg, and Alexander Mitscherlich) was
appointed to analyze the situation on Kuhberg and
to provide suggestions on improving it.
In addition, Hellmut Becker introduced the first
steps in changing the bylaws. In an April 1963 dis-
cussion with Inge Aicher-Scholl, Max Guther, and
Thorwald Risler (the foundation’s entire executive
board) and Otl Aicher in Wasserburg, the group
came to an agreement that the foundation’s advi-
sory board would be eliminated and its powers
would be transferred to a body that would replace
the administrative council. Hellmut Becker gave
the following two reasons for eliminating the advi-
sory board: Firstly, there was no clear delimitation
of powers between the advisory board and the
administrative council; secondly, the makeup of
the advisory board was unsatisfactory. In part its
members were simultaneously members of the
HfG (Otl Aicher, Walter Zeischegg), in part they
were former members of the HfG (Max Bill, Fritz
Pfeil), in part they were members of committees
of the foundation (Inge Aicher-Scholl, Max Guther,
Thorwald Risler), and the rest were completely
independent (Hans Frieder Eychmüller, Günther
Grzimek). As a result two intolerable situations had
developed:
Instructors monitored the administration to
which they were subject at the same time;
the executive board was an executive of the
foundation and was at the same time expect-
ed to monitor the executive.
Hellmut Becker reached a definite conclusion: “an
unbiased resolution of disputes within the college
by the executive board, or of disputes between the
executive board and the college by the advisory
board is pretty much out of the question because
of the way roles overlap. […] The advisory board
was intentionally given this makeup in order to
preserve the tradition of the foundation. Once the
above-named group of persons was removed,
there would be no point to the advisory board, and
it would be just one more superfluous committee.
The present confusion of roles can therefore be
remedied only by eliminating the advisory board.”
Max Guther also endorsed this assessment:
“I agree to the change in the charter of the foun-
dation whereby the advisory board would be
eliminated and its powers would be transferred
to the administrative council. I also feel that the
restructuring of the executive board that would be
necessary if Mrs. Aicher-Scholl resigns is a good
idea.” 1173 The administrative council concurred on
26 April 1963. Hellmut Becker, Günther Schweig-
kofler (the foundation’s administrative director),
and Hans Rettich (Baden-Württemberg ministry
of education and the arts) then worked out a draft
of the foundation’s charter on 13 May 1963. The
general meeting had long been scheduled for 12
June 1963; it was to vote on replacing the founda-
tion’s by-laws with a new charter. 1174
There seemed to be one opportunity left for the
disputes to be settled and for the former coopera-
tion to have a chance of being reestablished. Inge
Aicher-Scholl wrote about Thorwald Risler to Wal-
ter Gropius on 29 May 1963: “It is his special con-
tribution that during the past years he succeeded
in placing the college’s budget on a broad and
secure foundation, so that the worst material wor-
ries have been overcome. However, he was less
skillful at dealing with internal school problems,
perhaps because he saw them too much from the
perspective of business and administration.” 1175
And at the same time Thorwald Risler saw the situ-
ation as difficult, but not past all hope: “Neverthe-
less I haven’t lost heart yet that it might be pos-
sible to make something out of the opportunities
that exist on Kuhberg. What is clear to me, however,
is that the difficulties lie for the most part in purely
personal failings that are not present to this extent in
every comparable institution. In other words, suc-
cess is only possible here if the personal failings
can be localized by the necessary pressure from
outside and thus do not affect the institution as a
whole. I must say I haven’t found the philosophers’
stone here yet. 1176
But by the end of May Otl Aicher changed his
mind about dissolving the advisory board. On 29
May 1963 he told Hellmut Becker: “Suddenly ev-
eryone’s asking me about the dissolution of the
advisory board. There’s a moral conflict for me
here. In this matter I share the arguments of those
who are against strengthening the position of the
foundation, but feel obliged to keep quiet because
of the discussion with Risler at your house. At the
present stage, though, I’d like to remain free in my
decisions and not commit myself, as I did all too
spontaneously in our phone conversation yester-
day. I might even have to vote against dissolving
the advisory board. Let’s leave that open. […] Af-
ter all, I did not come out in favor of eliminating
the advisory board, did I? The version that’s mak-
ing the rounds in Ulm: that I said yes to the deal;
[but] that night the first thing I said was that I had
to think it over […].“ 1177
For Hellmut Becker, this letter from Otl Aicher
was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Ener-
vated, he answered, on 1 June 1963: “I’m sure
you must know yourself what it is you really want,
but if Inge and you think it makes tactical sense
always to leave every avenue open, the Ulm
School will be destroyed very soon. The idea of
eliminating the advisory board originally had noth-
ing to do with the school-foundation relationship,
but rather with the confusing structure, which
must be clarified as a result of the crisis, or rather
the constant crises. The change in the charter that
is being planned is part of a multifaceted program
– our attempt to help you straighten out your mess
at least in part. Since I heard no objections at my
house in Kreßbronn and at the Stuttgart meeting
[of the administrative council on 26 April 1963;
author’s note], I did assume that Inge and you
would do anything to help move this thing for-
ward. I can’t stand this constant back and forth
anymore. And then when I hear you say you
wouldn’t mind the institution being nationalized,
I really ask myself just why we’ve been devoting
our time and energy to this business.” Hellmut
Becker reminded Otl Aicher of the 13th meeting of 313
the administrative council on 21 April 1958, when
Tomás Maldonado presented the program of phil-
osophical and pedagogical reorientation: “When
the imagination and our own view of the college’s
mission change so rapidly, so radically, there
needs to be a clear separation of powers. I feel
really funny to be writing this again, because
we’ve discussed this so often. The change in the
charter was the first start of an order about which
we seemed to be in agreement. […] I can’t claim
that your letter makes me feel eager to take part in
the work of the Three Wise Men. […] Now it’s
really up to you, nobody’s going to prevent you or
your friends from doing the work. […] I don’t be-
lieve that focusing anger on Mr. Risler is a way out
of the crisis, but I do feel that the misunderstand-
ings have reached a level where it will be crucial to
bring things out into the open soon. […] Please do
not unnecessarily destroy whatever reserves of
confidence the foundation still has.” 1178
At the same time Otl Aicher turned his irritation
at giving up the advisory board into a personal
attack against Thorwald Risler. This was not at all
surprising, because the managing chairman of the
executive board had made the dissolution of the
advisory board his business. If Thorwald Risler had
become impossible, the threat to the advisory
board would have been eliminated along with his
person. Otl Aicher believed that Thorwald Risler
was acting and agitating against him. “It is clear
what I think of the man and how I need to behave
toward him when just recently he threw me the
bait that I was the only person who could run the
school, everybody else was incapable, he said
(and that’s why he claimed we needed to change
to bylaws that called for a rector). What kind of an
idiot do people think I am? The way things are now
I think it is truly lucky that we have the advisory
board to act as a brake. I’ll do everything I can to
preserve it. There can be no more question of
restraint.” 1179
No wonder the majority of the advisory board
supported Otl Aicher’s view that the advisory
board should be preserved (The exceptions were
Max Guther, Hans Frieder Eychmüller, and Thor-
wald Risler). Even Max Bill, contacted by Walter
Zeischegg, had visited Otl Aicher, who was sick,
in the sanatorium. In actual fact an open exchange
of ideas developed between Otl Aicher and Max
Bill in the coming months (regarding the opening,
on 2 October 1963, of the traveling exhibit of the
HfG in Ulm). In the course of this exchange Max
Bill reproached Otl Aicher that the information he
gave in a brochure about his development team
e5, and in another one about the HfG (Information
63) falsified history, because the dates and facts
relating to the history of the school’s founding and
 The rectorships of
Aicher, Maldonado
and Ohl
314 evolution were not correct. Moreover he found
fault with the fact “that what you now call the new
direction of the HfG is something I’ve believed in
for years; It’s something I formulated most clearly
in the paper I gave at the HfG during the Werk-
bund conference in fall 1955 [the correct date is
1956; author’s note], ‘Umweltgestaltung nach
morphologischen Methoden’ (‘Designing the en-
vironment according to morphological methods’),
but nobody speaks about that. For at the time peo-
ple felt it was necessary to shoot me down with all
sorts of hyper-pseudoscientific hocus-pocus and
to keep reminding everybody that I was an artist
with my head in the clouds. But maybe you can
see for yourself where your and Maldonado’s poli-
cy of misrepresenting history and persons has led
to, now that I have had no influence on the devel-
opment of the college for almost 8 years and have
been gone from Ulm for over 6 years. Even the
accomplishments shown at the Ulm exhibition,
some of which are respectable, can’t hide that
fact. I sometimes wonder what devil possesses
you both; even today, when the school has a lot
of positive stuff to show for itself, you feel you
have to operate and let others operate with rhet-
oric and vague concepts.“ 1180 In the months that
followed Max Bill even had hopes of returning to
the HfG again with the same rights as he had had
before his departure in 1957, but that didn’t suit
Edgar Reitz,
Alexander Kluge,
1963.
Photos: Wolfgang Siol
Archive: HfG (63/0300/1 and
63/0337/3)
Otl Aicher. 1181 Still, Max Bill kept in touch until, in
February 1964, he was quite unexpectedly ap-
pointed to the foundation‘s council.
For the general meeting slated to meet on 12 June
1963, the old members of the advisory board,
headed by Otl Aicher, Max Bill, and Walter Zei-
schegg, threatened to abort the vote on the new
charter of the foundation with their blocking mi-
nority (6 votes), for a change in the bylaws re-
quired three-fourths of a total of 22 votes. 1182 They
argued that an embarrassing situation could result
for the representatives of the government agen-
cies. In order to spare them this humiliation it
would be better not to convene the general meet-
ing at all. 1183 Otl Aicher implored Hellmut Becker
along these lines: “Dear Hellmut, can’t you bring
your influence to bear so that the advisory board
business is put to rest once more? Besides, I don’t
think it would be a good idea if the members of
the administrative council were to be defeated in
a vote (which I assume is certain).” 1184
But Hellmut Becker was outraged at the latest
turn of events and the developing “grotesque cam-
paign” against Thorwald Risler. 1185 He felt this was
a red herring, because now “the whole internal
dispute is suddenly being turned against Risler
and the continued existence of the advisory board
is being made into the question on which the free-
dom of the school hinges. In the process a few
psychological blunders by Mr. Risler were grossly
exaggerated. On Whit Monday Otl told me on the
phone that Risler is the first person in his life he
truly hates.” 1186 Max Guther was just as indignant:
“Prof. Guther is horrified at the Aichers’ zigzag
maneuvers, and in view of the circumstances he is
on the point of resigning from his position, even at
the risk that this will jeopardize his friendship with
the Aichers. […] He even refused to speak with
the Aichers on the telephone, since the conversa-
tions would only lead to self-pitying reminiscences
of their old friendship. He is transferring his vote to
Risler: strict elimination of the advisory board.“ 1187
The general meeting of the foundation took place
on 12 June 1963. The assembly was divided into
two camps: One consisted of the members of the
advisory board, almost all of whom were deter-
mined to defend their status; in the other camp
were the members of the administrative council,
who were equally determined to defend their con-
viction. They emphasized that they wanted to pre-
serve the HfG whatever happened. In the face of
the HfG’s crisis of confidence in the press and the
Landtag, a sign of good will was called for now,
however. Because the advisory board bore the
brunt of the criticism, and because public sector
subsidies depended on a clear foundation struc-
ture, the advisory board was now to be dissolved
and the foundation would give itself a new charter
as Hellmut Becker had proposed. The representa-
tives of the ministries pointed out “unanimously
that the situation was serious, and in this connec-
tion, criticized the lack of restraint of statements
coming from the HfG, which are not fitting for a
college”. The members of the advisory board, on
the other hand, argued that “clarification and reso-
lution cannot simply be achieved by eliminating a
committee – namely, the advisory board. The HfG,
they said, needed a committee that would monitor
curriculum development and advise the school in
this.” 1188
The general meeting ended with a compromise.
It is true that the representatives of the ministries
pushed through the decision on general principles
that the advisory board should be dissolved. But
the details were still to be negotiated. There was
a unanimous resolution to revise the bylaws of the
foundation in such a way that the foundation and
the college would be clearly separated both or-
ganizationally and in terms of personnel. The du-
ties of the advisory board were to be transferred
to a newly constituted administrative council (the
later foundation‘s council). A commission led by
Hellmut Becker with representatives of the ad-
visory board, the administrative council, and the
executive board received the mandate to work
out the new bylaws (the later charter) of the foun-
dation. 1189
Let us now follow the debate about the new char-
ter of the foundation – one of the two decisive
topics that year – to the end of August 1963.
The advisory board was thus to be eliminated,
but the majority of its members had to help sup-
port this resolution in the general meeting. In the
face of this majority the foundation could not be
restructured, and here was the means of exerting
pressure the founding members of the advisory
board used in dealing with Thorwald Risler, Max
Guther, and the administrative council. They them-
selves formed their own constitutional forum in
order to represent their interests as effectively as
possible. The advisory board now met more fre-
quently. At these meetings there was a widening
of the rift between Thorwald Risler (supported
without reservation by Max Guther, and with reser-
vations by Hans Frieder Eychmüller) and Otl Aich-
er, the spokesman of the remaining members of
the advisory board.
On 29 June 1963 the first open argument took
place: “In answer to a direct question by Mr. Ai-
cher, Mr. Risler again states what concerns him
most: Clear roles must be created so that internal
conflicts do not affect the sponsor, thus leading
to existential crises for the institution at large. The
college, he says, must be autonomous and have
its own means of regulation.“ 1190 That is why the
entire advisory board could not come to an agree-
ment either at this or at the following meetings on
19 July and 5 October 1963. 1191
Four days later Otl Aicher summed up recent
events in a letter to Thorwald Risler: “Two years
ago we began developing ideas for a new school
bylaws. That is when the first conflicts between
us began. I felt the fundamental principle of new
school bylaws was a partner-type relationship be-
tween the foundation and the school. You on the
other hand emphasized the foundation functioning
as an employer. […] I had never questioned cer- 315
tain sovereign functions of the foundation, but
assumed that the precondition for a reasonable
development might be daily cooperation between
the school and the foundation on an equal level.
Today the advisory board is to be dissolved. What
is more, you are developing new ideas about the
role of the foundation. The foundation is to be
placed in a position where it is able to create new
institutions apart from the school. Development
and school are to be taken out of the school and
placed under your control. […] In this connection
I would again like to emphasize that the Geschwis-
ter-Scholl-Stiftung was never regarded by us who
founded the school as anything but the legal and
economic sponsor of the School of Design, and
only the School of Design. It cannot become a
separate enterprise without distorting the intention
of its founders. […] You see the crisis in human
inadequacies that can be remedied once order is
established. I see it primarily in the fact that an
attempt was made by means of a coup d’état to
alter the original concept of the school. […] In the
present situation I believe it is unfortunate, to say
the least, that differences of opinion within the col-
lege are described not as a consequence of a ped-
agogical concept but as human incompetence.
This form of argumentation, which you support,
misses the point completely and leads us into a
morass whose consequence can only be a call
for a new power structure.” 1192
In a letter to Otto Pfleiderer, Inge Aicher-Scholl
used as an argument the same intention not to
expand the purpose of the foundation in the new
charter: “It is well known that at the time we had to
choose wording that would guarantee us nonprofit
tax status. In this respect I agree with you: we
shouldn’t perpetuate a onetime tactical necessity.
Still, I don’t think it is a good idea to plan for the
possibility within the foundation of establishing
other institutions in addition to the college. I would
see this as a risk and a source of new crises. […]
The Ulm School of Design was primarily founded
for the sake of a particular idea. We did not have
the intention of adding one more to the existing
number of schools of product design, architecture,
or graphic art. Rather, we were interested in devel-
oping a certain progressive cultural idea that we
had hardly ever seen implemented. […] I would
definitely not like to exclude the possibility that
additional institutions will be founded with this
cultural goal; on the contrary, I think it’s desirable.
However, I feel the effect of such institutions
would be to damage the original intention if they
were set up independently of the college or even
in opposition to it.” 1193
Here it becomes clear how closely the individual
strands of actions and goals were interwoven.
 The rectorships of
Aicher, Maldonado
and Ohl
316 On the one hand Thorwald Risler (and with him
the administrative council) wanted to dissolve the
advisory board, give the college administrative
autonomy, and reformulate the mission of the
foundation in such a way that the HfG would not
be designated as the sole purpose of the founda-
tion.
Hans Gugelot’s institute with its outstanding
reputation, and prestigious and lucrative orders,
which had already pulled out of the HfG, should at
least remain with the foundation and thus indirect-
ly with the HfG – though only indirectly, of course.
Every institute that was founded in accordance
with the foundation’s expanded mission was to be
just as independent of the HfG, so that trouble that
broke out at the college would not be able to af-
fect these institutions to their detriment. For ex-
ample, should the HfG be able to exert influence
on Hans Gugelot’s institute, he intended to leave
Ulm for good, and it would be impossible to get
equally qualified designers to come and work in
Ulm. 1194 Besides such a concept would have made
it possible to set up an institute devoted primarily
to scientific research and development, so that
money would continue to come in (in increasing
amounts) from the federal government, because
the federal government had always made its sub-
sidies strictly contingent on the academic work
and research activities of the foundation’s institu-
tion(s).
On the other hand Otl Aicher (and with him the
majority of the advisory board and the HfG lectur-
ers) regarded the college and the foundation as
two sides of a coin that were there for the same
purpose. The advisory board was to make it pos-
sible for the HfG to influence the foundation, the
HfG was to be the sole purpose of the foundation,
the purpose of the HfG consisted in concentrating
on design and not in scientific work (this, at least,
was the motto at this moment), and if new institu-
tions were created, then only at the initiative of the
HfG and with its express authorization.
No connecting bridge could be built to link these
two standpoints: One side had to give in. Klaus
Dohrn, the chairman of the executive board of the
Society of Friends, tried nevertheless, in a letter to
Otl Aicher dated 9 August 1963, to soften the har-
dened positions: “I don’t believe that anybody in-
tends to undermine the idea on which the founda-
tion is based. The purpose of the foundation – at
least in my opinion – should remain basically un-
touched.” And he went on to formulate from the
perspective of the financial backers what Thorwald
Risler’s plan to expand the activities of the founda-
tion was all about. According to Risler, the purpose
of the foundation was “the legal basis for the
granting of subsidies, voluntary donations, and
other material contributions without which the life
of the college would not be conceivable. No doubt
the ideas of the foundation as well as the artistic
and intellectual achievements of the college lec-
turers motivate the granting of subsidies. However,
the originators of the ideas would overrate them-
selves if they were to believe that the administra-
tors of other people’s money – and that today in-
cludes not only all ministers of finance, but almost
always the heads of large business enterprises as
well – are willing to entrust them on a continuous
basis with sizable subsidies unless certain material
requirements have been met. Among those re-
quirements are a clear organizational structure,
clear-cut regulations regarding responsibility and
competence, and an expert administration. Ac-
cording to my observations and based on the
opinions of third parties I have heard, I believe
that Mr. Risler dealt with the worldly side of your
Kuhberg enterprise, if I may say so, in an exem-
plary fashion. It is only since he first appeared on
the scene that in the areas administered by him
there’s been the kind of order that is indispensable
with the present financial scale your institution has
reached in the meantime. Particularly if you try, by
bringing in more design commissions from private
enterprise, to create a more balanced relationship
between public subsidies and fees for work per-
formed, you realize you cannot exist without a reli-
ably run and functioning administrative system,
and a partner of industry who understands the lan-
guage of private enterprise and speaks it him-
self.” 1195
Klaus Dohrn did not convince Otl Aicher. For
both factions envisioned two radically different
concepts when they spoke of the “underlying”
purpose of the foundation. Otl Aicher, Inge Aicher-
Scholl, and Max Bill claimed that as the founders
of the HfG they were able, and had the right, to
give the only definition of what they had “actually”
had in mind when they established the HfG.
The Three Wise Men (Hellmut Becker, Theodor
Eschenburg, and Alexander Mitscherlich), who had
been appointed as early as April 1963 to study the
situation of the HfG from an independent perspec-
tive, conducted interviews with a few representa-
tives of the college and foundation in Ulm on 3
July 1963. 1196 On 27 August 1963 they gave their
report to the chairman of the administrative coun-
cil, Mayor Theodor Pfizer. Their statement also
included concrete proposals as to how the HfG
and the foundation could be reorganized and how
their bylaws should be changed. 1197 The Three
Wise Men basically supported the goals and the
work of the HfG: “The college definitely appears to
be worth preserving. On the contrary, they warn
against letting the college fold or limiting financial
support of the college. Certain difficulties the col-
lege has had seem to us to result precisely from
the fact that it hasn’t been sufficiently consoli-
dated. In order to preserve the experimental char-
acter of the college with its special values and ad-
vantages, they warn against nationalizing it. It
seems to make sense to continue running the col-
lege as a free, nonprofit institution in whose fi-
nancing public and private funds work together.
[…] Because of the special character of the col-
lege, whose work is in the area of design, there
will be crises in the future as well. The only thing
that matters is to mitigate these manifestations of
crises and their effects by means of an appropriate
administrative structure.” Essentially they recom-
mended two improvements:
1. The bylaws of the foundation were to be changed
with the intention of implementing the principle
of incompatibility of offices in both institutions.
This proposal meant the elimination of the advi-
sory board (which was not surprising coming
from Hellmut Becker), and this was put into
effect.
2. The HfG was to receive a large degree of admin-
istrative autonomy: It was to draw up its own
budget, which the foundation had to authorize.
An administrator of the HfG was to work side by
side with the rector: “The duties of the adminis-
trator are to process all personnel matters, to
draw up the budget, to administer the budget,
to assign apartments and rooms, to perform all
organizational duties, to see to it that legal regu-
lations are observed”. – This proposal was not
implemented because the members of the
administrative council felt this was a potential
source of future conflict.
Professor Kono giving a
guest lecture on Design
in the modern life of
Japan in October 1963.
Photo: Roland Fürst
Archive: HfG (63/0456/2)
Now to the second dominant topic of 1963 – the
Landtag’s request that the ministry of education
and the arts review the eligibility of the HfG for
financial aid.
The ministry of education and the arts gave the
politico-cultural committee of the Landtag an in-
terim report on the status of its investigation at
the Landtag’s 80th session on 18 July 1963. After
a critical discussion the committee concluded that
the documentation submitted up to that time (doc-
umentation of the foundation’s executive board
and a report of the Three Wise Men) were not 317
quite sufficient to do justice to the uniqueness of
the HfG.
The HfG itself had not yet had a chance to
speak. That is why the ministry of education and
the arts sent Hans Rettich, Wolfgang Donndorf’s
colleague, to Kuhberg with a long list of questions
to all lecturers, to the representative of the regular
assistant lecturers (Gui Bonsiepe), to the represen-
tative of the technical teachers (Wolfgang Siol), to
the student representative (Gudrun Otto), and to
the foundation (Thorwald Risler and Günther
Schweigkofler). 1198 From 25 to 30 July 1963 Hans
Rettich gave them 25 questions by the politico-
cultural committee on pedagogical and organiza-
tional details, with HfG members mostly concen-
trating on the pedagogical, and representatives of
the foundation concentrating on the organizational
answers. Among other things the members of par-
liament wanted to know the following:
“2) Is it true that faculty members often teach sub-
jects they were not appointed to teach and for
which they therefore lack the professional
qualifications?
3) Is it true that the lecturers announced in the
publicity material frequently do not come? […]
4) Is it a fact that the school’s diploma only has
significance within the school and does not
entitle the graduate to be entered in the list
of architects? […]
10) What is the relationship between permanent
lecturers and guest lecturers like? […]
12) What about the scientific work of the HfG? […]
15) Is it possible or even advisable
a) to incorporate the building department at a
technical college or a school of engineering?
b) to affiliate the department of product design
with other technical colleges (e. g., the Verei-
nigte Goldschmiede-, Kunst- und Werkschule
Pforzheim (the Pforzheim Comprehensive
School of Gold Work, Art, and Arts and Crafts)
or the Höhere Fachschule für das Edelmetall-
gewerbe Schwäbisch Gmünd (the Schwäbisch
Gmünd Technical College of Precious Metal
Work))? […]
17) As a result of the separation of the Gugelot
Institute from the foundation does the money
earned there by development work not benefit
the foundation? Have there been plans to de-
tach other development teams from the foun-
dation in a similar manner and to run them on
a private basis? […]
19) What is the nature of the factional dispute
among the lecturers, and what are its effects?
[…]
24) Is the term college justified?
25) Are the lecturers qualified to teach at college
level?” 1199
 The rectorships of To celebrate its 10-year
Aicher, Maldonado anniversary, the HfG
and Ohl organized a traveling
exhibition that made
guest appearances in
Ulm, Munich, and
Amsterdam.
Photo: Roland Fürst
Archive: HfG (63/0461)

318 The very fact that the politico-cultural committee
even asked such questions, some of them sugges-
tively, can already be judged as strong criticism.
The answers were given to the members of parlia-
ment on 13 September as Dokumentation 2. 1200
This lengthy volume of reports, not surprisingly,
was a faithful mirror image of the spectrum of
beliefs that were behind events at the HfG.
That same day the Landtag faction of Free Demo-
crats met at the Ulm city hall. The city had invited
today have to be familiar with problems of con- 319
struction, production, choice of material, and eco-
nomics even if they cannot be creative in those
areas. This was the reason we included a series
of technological and scientific disciplines in the
curriculum of the Ulm School of Design. This so-
called ‘Ulm concept’ was much debated, but in
the long run brought us international recognition
that is also expressed in the international makeup
of the student body. […] The development of such
a curriculum can naturally not be concluded within
a span of four to five years if one considers that
industrial design is a relatively new area for which
the pedagogical groundwork still needs to be
gradually laid. The causes of the internal crisis of
the School of Design can be traced to this fact.
I am convinced there would be no crises, and the
press would not deal with the school in such de-
tail, if we had not gone beyond the pedagogy of
the Bauhaus, which, as you know, did not deal
with the problems of industrial production to the
same extent and was far more closely related to
the arts.” 1202

The two photographs all the Landtag factions to visit the city and to dis-
date back to the open- cuss tasks facing local politicians; the politico-cul-
ing in the Kornhaus of tural caucus of the CDU faction had met earlier, on
Ulm, where the exhibi- 24 July 1963, and Otl Aicher had responded to a
tion was shown from barrage of questions from the politicians. 1201 Now
1 through 27 Oct. 1963. at least the three Land ministers of justice (Wolf-
Photo: Roland Fürst gang Haußmann), economics (Eduard Leuze), and
Archive: HfG (63/0461) finance (Hermann Müller) were present, as well as
former minister of finance Karl Frank.
Otl Aicher was glad to take advantage of the op-
portunity and give a talk to the faction, who, partly
out of sympathy, partly out of antipathy, were very
interested in the HfG’s current situation: “We
could, of course, also have developed into a classi-
cally peaceful and well-tempered arts and crafts
school, one that restricts itself to creating beauti-
ful, modern objects for the home. But we felt our
mission was to update the education level and to
train students who would be capable of designing
more complex technical objects on a par with en-
gineers. For that we needed a new teaching con-
cept. […] The type of designers that are called for
The responses of the Land politicians to Otl Aicher
each focused on different points.
On the one hand incumbent minister of finance
Hermann Müller spoke in support of the HfG: “It
had been subsidized by the Land up to this point
and would continue to receive this subsidy in the
future as well. The fact that some people did not
approve of it and found things to criticize about it
– a good sign of democracy – could not change
that. The FDP, through its members of parliament,
had expressed the view that it definitely saw the
value of this college and would certainly not stand
its way in the future either.”
On the other hand former minister of finance
Karl Frank, who had been one of the opponents of
the HfG even when it was founded and was still of
the same opinion, persevered in his criticism of the
HfG: “During the recent Landtag debate about the
Ulm School of Design his language was quite blunt
and harsh. […] Certainly there had been disputes
at the universities as well, he said, and he knew
important scholars who had been extraordinarily
pugnacious. But his critical position was that dis-
putes at the School of Design had assumed forms
that went beyond tolerable levels. […] His second
criticism was that the program of the college, its
curriculum, the topics taught, and so forth, had
not been adequately clarified. The third was that
there had been an enormous turnover among
faculty […]. During previous debates in the Land-
tag, when he had still been minister of finance,
friends of the college had said that the way things
were going, the school’s own income would basi-
cally cover expenses and that consequently subsi-
dies from public budgets could be reduced.”
The ministry of education and the arts submitted
the result of its study to the Land government on
11 October 1963. 1203 This report had grown to 39
pages; documentations and the expert opinions
of the Three Wise Men totaled another 200 odd
pages. In essence the HfG was found to be elig-
ible for continuing government subsidies. For 1964
the plan was a subsidy of DM 600,000. At the
same time, however, the ministry of education and
the arts proposed ten recommendations:
1. a binding curriculum outline was to be set up.
2. All permanent full-time lecturer positions were
to be filled.
3. An admissions test for applicants who had not
graduated from a secondary school was to be
introduced.
4. The publicity material and catalogue of the HfG
were to state clearly that studies in the depart-
ment of building represented only supplemen-
tary training.
5. Student representatives were to be excluded
from electing the rector.
6. Pedagogical conferences should again be held
with all lecturers, and the basic course should
be reintroduced.
7. No more new lecturers’ housing should be
built.
8. “By changing Section 14 of the college by-
laws, all regular lecturers working at the School
of Design must be given the same legal status.
9. By changing the foundation’s charter a clear
separation of the foundation and the college in
terms of organization and personnel must be
implemented.“
10. Graduates and assistant lecturers should have
prior teaching experience at other institutions
before they could become lecturers at the HfG.
It is striking that items 8 and 9 contained the word
“must”. The ministry of education and the arts was
of the opinion that the DM 600,000 authorized for
1964 should be disbursed only if these two stipu-
lations were met.
The Land government supported both the state-
ment that the school was eligible for aid and the
wording of the recommendations. It passed on the
results of the study to the politico-cultural commit-
tee. The latter, at its 85th session on 25 October
1963 and its 87th session on 4 November 1963,
discussed the government bill that included an
information packet for the politico-cultural com-
mittee consisting of the documents from the foun-
dation (Dokumentation 1), the list of questions
and answers (Dokumentation 2), and the expert
opinion of the Three Wise Men. 1204
At both these sessions the Land government
represented the view that it was appropriate to
force the HfG to conform to the ideas of the minis-
try of education and the arts. In order to maintain
this pressure, it did not even shy away from cut-
ting off Land funding. By threatening to block
funds, the government wanted to make sure the
recommendations were followed. If the shortcom-
ings they had complained about were corrected,
the government would consider the HfG eligible
for aid. All that was new and unique about the HfG
was explicitly acknowledged: Teamwork by engi-
neers (traditionally trained at technical colleges)
and designers (designers for industrial production
 The rectorships of
Aicher, Maldonado
and Ohl
320
“If you want to know
what kind of people live
on Kuhberg, then go
and sit as long as you
can stand it on one of
the stools with pipe
legs at the coffee bar.
The coffee bar’s coun-
ter is not the only wavy
line in the building. The
coffee bar is the human
center, the agora of the
college. […] And you
will realize: Intelligence
flows without interrup-
tion at the coffee bar.“
Bernhard Rübenach,
Der rechte Winkel von
Ulm, p. 30.
Photo: Michael Penck
(25 Oct. 1963)
Archive: HfG (Depositum 69/2)
who did not aspire to be artists [like those] edu-
cated at a college of art, but rather concentrated
on series production). This, it was felt, was the
basis of the HfG’s success, particularly outside
Germany. Incidentally, the government felt that
the ministry of education and the arts could not
be responsible for everything at the HfG. People
were tired of constantly being asked about an
institution for which they were only partially re-
sponsible, but for which other ministries were al-
so partially responsible. The government represen-
tative demanded that at the HfG and the founda-
tion, the “ballast” of unnecessary staff and faculty
should be jettisoned, even if the ministry did not
have immediate jurisdiction. In agreement with the
administrative council such people should gradu-
ally be dismissed. A representative of the SPD
even felt that the funds should not be released
until the necessary personnel changes had been
made. Probably the politicians had Tomás Maldo-
nado particularly in mind. The government repre-
sentative did warn those present that the HfG and
its entities should not be treated as though they
were incapable of managing their own affairs.
The representatives of the ministry of education
and the arts protested against the personnel-re-
lated demands, pointing out that the moment the
advisory board was dissolved and its functions
transferred to the foundation’s new foundation‘s
council, the ministries would gain influence over
the curriculum, hiring and firing practices, and the
HfG’s bylaws. Thereupon an SPD representative
responded that in that case the majority of the
seats on the foundation‘s council should be filled
by officials of the ministries. The HfG only had it-
self to blame for its present situation; he did not
want a situation where the ministries could be out-
voted, and when everything was consolidated, it
would probably be possible to talk about a new
board with fewer Land representatives. This strange
college had stirred up more trouble in the press in
the past two years than any other normally func-
tioning college of science had in a decade. As long
as the school demanded state funding, the Land-
tag had to deal with it. The SPD representative
lacked confidence in the HfG’s senate, and as long
as everything in this respect had not been set
right, he considered this college to be an ailing
enterprise. It was these people’s own fault for
constantly giving the press more scandals to write
about. The tax moneys that were given to them,
after all, were not chicken feed. He described the
fact that former students had been appointed to
teaching jobs as inbreeding.
After this the discussion became heated at the
questions whether the HfG should be called a col-
lege and whether the departments of building and
information made sense. Without discussion, the
group unanimously decided that students should
not participate in the election of the rector.
The committee agreed to petition the ministry of
education and the arts to make sure that the foun-
dation implemented the recommendations. And
the Landtag was to include a notice in the budget
for 1964 to the effect that the funds could be re-
leased to the HfG only through a resolution of the
politico-cultural committee. This blocking notice
transformed the government’s recommendations
into the Landtag’s conditions (provided the Land-
tag agreed with the petition of the politico-cultural
committee, but there was hardly any doubt about
that).
On balance the result of these two discussions
of the politico-cultural committee was as follows:
The uncompromising opponents of the HfG, of
whom there were some in all the parties, had
sharpened the tone of the conditions laid down
by the ministry of education and the arts and the
Land government somewhat and had added an
eleventh item (the department of information was
to be incorporated in another department). The
gist of this was unmistakable: If the foundation
wanted to receive money for the HfG from the
Land, it had to acquiesce in the ideas of Land pol-
iticians. Though the HfG’s development to date
demonstrated its objective right to exist, organi-
zational circumstances had arisen that the politi-
cians did not want to accept. True, this was not
the end of cultural freedom in Baden-Württem-
berg, but existing conditions at the school must
have felt to the politicians as license to do any-
thing it pleased. The only member of the politico-
cultural committee who stood up for the HfG un-
reservedly was Walter Erbe (FDP/DVP).
Thus a new situation had developed on Kuhberg.
Actually the foundation and college were satisfied
with the basic result of the investigation: “The
Land government has recognized that the School
of Design is eligible for aid and has described it as
a world-class institute. In the recommendations
the Land government maintains that the so-called
crises at the School of Design must not be over-
rated. In this whole business not much is left of
the original charges against the School of Design.
The recommendations of the Land government
seem to be acceptable; in part they have already
been implemented.”
But on 5 November Otl Aicher vehemently pro-
tested against the fact that the Landtag tied the
continuation of subsidies to conditions (in doing
so he made the false assumption that originally all
ten points had been only recommendations, and
that the blocking notice had not been added until
later. Of course this blocking notice had been pres-
ent in the documents submitted by the ministry of
education and the arts from the very beginning):
“The politico-cultural committee has in the mean-
time made these recommendations into conditions
– the agreed-upon subsidy to the School of De-
sign will not be released until these conditions are
met. Since the Land government explicitly con-
firmed that the School of Design is trustworthy,
it is extraordinarily hard to understand why recom-
mendations are transformed into governmental
conditions. The state thus exposes itself to the
suspicion that it is trying to exert direct influence
on the school, a behavior that must appear unusu-
al even in the case of state colleges, and all the
more astonishing in our case, since we are a pri-
vate college.” He felt he was arguing in accor-
dance with Section 5 of Basic German Constitu-
tional Law, which guarantees academic freedom.
That is why he felt it was his right to move from
the objective level to the level of polemic: “This is
the first time in the history of the School of Design
that conditions are tied to the availability of funds,
partially putting pressure on constitutional sover-
eignty within the school and the Geschwister-
Scholl-Stiftung. […] But as soon as recommen-
dations are changed to conditions, it is no longer
possible to argue freely and to act of one’s own
free will in the spirit of the recommendations. The
School of Design is placed under a pressure that
is below the dignity of an educational institution.
It is being placed in a dilemma where it has to bow
to outside pressure.” 1205 Yet even at the time the
HfG was founded, both the Landtag and the Land
government made their subsidy contingent on the
administrative committee’s being transformed into
the administrative council (with seats and votes for
representatives of government agencies). The new 321
conditions of the Landtag were not the precedent
Otl Aicher made it out to be.
The extended senate of the HfG discussed the
conditions of the politico-cultural committee on
7 November 1963. 1206 Otl Aicher reformulated his
view: He was concerned “not so much about the
substance of the conditions than about the fact
that ‘conditions’ have been made. In the case of a
college they represent interference with academic
autonomy. A few points directly refer to teaching
and jeopardize the sovereignty of committees.
We’re faced with the alternative of accepting or
rejecting these ‘conditions’.” The extended senate
agreed that the HfG must take a firm stand and be
prepared for a worst-case scenario. Firstly, the HfG
was to try and have the conditions changed to rec-
ommendations. Secondly, “if the Landtag, plenum,
and government did not dispense with the block-
ing notice and if public subsidies were not avail-
able after January 1964, they must now consider
whether and how the school (possibly on a reduced
basis) could continue operating. This situation,
which promised to be difficult, must be examined
without delay and in particular it is necessary to
examine how much money would be absolutely
required and could possibly be raised in other
ways. Mr. Maldonado reported that regular lectur-
Baptizing the new
academic year, 25 Oct.
1963.
Photos: Michael Penck
Archive: HfG (Depositum 69/5
and 69/6)
ers and technical teachers currently working at the
HfG had met and unanimously declared that in the
event that public funds were cut they were willing
to take all consequences that affected them per-
sonally upon themselves.”
Günther Schweigkofler did draw attention to the
fact that the conditions were only known to them
from the press and that before the college advisory
bodies took a stand they should wait for the offi-
cial documents first; moreover the Land’s contri-
bution was a voluntary payment that could very
well be tied to conditions. 1207 However, the mem-
bers of the extended senate believed quite the
reverse: that the situation could be saved only by
taking the bull by the horns – a press statement to
the public at large in which the entire faculty strict-
ly rejected the imposition of conditions. 1208 On
 The rectorships of
Aicher, Maldonado
and Ohl
322
13 November 1963 the Schwäbische Donau-Zei-
tung printed this Position statement by the HfG on
the conditions of the politico-cultural committee.
As a result the energies that had until then been
engaged in intra-college disputes were now di-
rected at common targets: the politico-cultural
committee, the Landtag, the Land government.
This public declaration regarding the Landtag’s
conditions contained several punch lines. For one,
it was extremely awkward to refuse, in uncompro-
mising terms, the demands of the Land politicians
of which the HfG had only hearsay knowledge. Not
even the foundation had so far been officially been
informed by the ministry of education and the arts.
Secondly, it was also premature to take the floor
without being asked, because as agreed it was the
foundation that was responsible for issues that
concerned relations to the outside world. The sen-
ate and Otl Aicher should have waited until they
were asked to make a statement. They had not
even informed the foundation that they had ap-
proached the press. Because the administrative
council had been passed over, government repre-
sentatives on the council felt attacked by the HfG,
while at the same time they had to defend them-
selves in their ministries because of the attack.
What carried the most weight was that they had
the impression that they had been intentionally
deceived. For the administrative council had met
as recently as 11 November 1963 and invited Otl
Aicher as a guest. Theodor Pfizer had clearly pointed
out to him “that he should prevent protest rallies
on the part of the college in order not to aggravate
the tense situation in the Landtag even more. […]
Mr. Aicher responds that things are not entirely in
his power – it is not he, but the senate that deter-
mines what goes on at the school. But he says he
will make an effort to stabilize the situation at the
college.“ 1209 This response by Otl Aicher was a
game of hide-and-seek, however, for in actual fact,
in the sessions of the inner and the extended sen-
Otl Aicher, 1965.
Photo: unknown
Archive: HfG (65/0143/4)
ate, he had been the driving force for an immedi-
ate public reaction. And his efforts by no means
helped to stabilize the situation.
Thorwald Risler, whose responsibilities were
internal (as an employer) and external (in dealing
with clients and officialdom), was outraged by Otl
Aicher’s behavior. He now wanted to take discipli-
nary measures. “In the past, when the interest sit-
uation was the other way around, if there had been
similar violations of loyalty toward the foundation,
a summary dismissal for good reason would have
been demanded.” (Here Thorwald Risler’s stand
again becomes evident. For Otl Aicher it was total-
ly unthinkable that he could act against the com-
mon cause, because he identified himself with the
cause – L‘état, c‘est moi). “The completely arbi-
trary actions of the rector, which moreover went
against the repeatedly and clearly expressed opin-
ion of two members of the executive board and
the administrative council, have created a situation
I myself as managing chairman of the executive
board am no longer able to control.” 1210
On the same day that the declaration appeared
in the paper, the internal council of the HfG (Otl
Aicher, Gert Kalow, Tomás Maldonado, Herbert
Ohl, and Günther Schweigkofler) had a meeting.
The administrative director summed up the result:
“As the discussion continued, Messrs. Aicher, Mal-
donado, and Ohl unanimously and firmly agreed
that the college could not put up with having pres-
sure exerted on it. The college was not willing to
give in to this pressure, they said, it was deter-
mined to do without public funds if need be.” 1211
They realized that the moment the Land blocked
its subsidy as of 1 January 1964, the federal gov-
ernment and the city would also not pay any sub-
sidies. Otl Aicher suspected that the HfG would
have to struggle for one to two years to get over
such a situation without any public money. People
were willing, he said, to cut back the HfG program
for that. A commission was to look into what steps
would be necessary. 1212
If we look at the events of the years that fol-
lowed, this determination to get along without
public subsidies if necessary, appears to be lip
service that sprang from the euphoria of a shared
defiance. It is scarcely conceivable that the three
leading HfG lecturers were completely aware of
the consequences that would inevitably set in if
the Land’s subsidy and, a few weeks later, the fed-
eral and city subsidy as well did in fact fail to ma-
terialize. It was something like a poker game, and
they were just practicing how to play a bad hand
well. – Otl Aicher also turned to the members of
the advisory board with the HfG’s statement in
order to mobilize them for the imminent adoption
of the new foundation charter, and announced that
the HfG would defend itself against this interfer-
ence with its autonomy. 1213
The price the HfG had to pay for the touchy
public declaration was promptly announced on
15 November 1963 in the Schwäbische Donau-
Zeitung: “With an extremely biting statement,
the chairman of the Landtag’s finance committee,
member of parliament Kurt Angstmann yesterday
reacted, in an interview with our Stuttgart repre-
sentative, to the HfG’s declaration regarding the
resolution of the politico-cultural and finance com-
mittees […]. Angstmann commented that if this
Claude Schnaidt, 1963.
Photo: Wolfgang Siol
Archive: HfG (63/0335/2)
condition was rejected, he would fight to have the 323
subsidy cut. […] He and many other members of
parliament felt the HfG was not exactly behaving
like a college when it allowed the disputes to go
on and on instead of now working in peace and
getting the best out of the Landtag’s resolutions.
[…] The seven higher institutions of the Land, he
said, […] had not stirred up nearly as much dust
in the years between 1946 and 1963 as the HfG
in Ulm had managed to do within a very short pe-
riod. […] The HfG had done the most foolish thing
it could possibly have done”, because it had im-
mediately brought its protest before the public
instead of first airing the arguments in private.
Every one of those involved at the college and
foundation now realized that Kurt Angstmann
(SPD) was the spokesman of the HfG’s opponents,
Harry Pross, 1963.
Photo: Wolfgang Siol
Archive: HfG (63/0333/4)
besides Erich Ganzenmüller, the deputy chairman
of the politico-cultural committee (CDU), and Karl
Frank (FDP/DVP).
Theodor Pfizer pointed out to Otl Aicher what a
disservice he had done the HfG. He was afraid the
damage could hardly be made good, because the
chances of getting the subsidy released by 1 Jan-
uary 1964 were very poor. “I must tell you cate-
gorically that in the opinion of the administrative
council you exceeded your competence as rector
of the college by making this public statement.
When the Landtag’s recommendations have been
adopted by the plenum they will be directed to the
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung as the legal sponsor
of the college. […] You can see that the adminis-
trative council considers close and good coopera-
tion with the college to be important, because the
council invited you as the rector to take part in its
11 November meeting. Because of your unauthor-
ized behavior there is again great danger that after
1 January 1964 no more funds will be available for
the college. This forces the administrative council
to examine the consequences of your actions.
The administrative council feels that what you did
was an affront to its unanimous opinion and in-
tention. […] I don’t want to conceal from you that
the executive manager, Mr. Thorwald Risler, en-
joys the full confidence of the administrative
council.” 1214
 The rectorships of
Aicher, Maldonado
and Ohl
324 One really wonders what the responsible people
at the HfG hoped to achieve by bringing their dis-
pute before the public. The reason seems to have
been that they were incapable of settling their dif-
ferences internally. The person who was temporar-
ily the weaker one felt the urge to go public with
his perspective – but one gets the impression that
this was not done in order to gain allies, but in
order to hurt the institution as a whole so as to
unsettle what existed at the time, and because the
weaker person hoped to gain by unsettling things;
he expected, if not to become stronger, then at
least to weaken his stronger opponent, so that
both parties would become equally weak again.
The result was a constant weakening of the ins-
titution as a whole.
At the same session of the inner senate on 13 No-
vember 1963, when the public statement of the
HfG regarding the Landtag conditions had been
decided upon, the majority of its members also
passed a vote of no confidence in Thorwald Risler
because of the so-called Siemens Studio of Elec-
tronic Music:
For some time Ulm had been receiving sugges-
tions that a department of film education should
be established at the HfG. The tasks, organization,
and goals of this department had for a long time
been the focus of pedagogical discussions. On 6
March 1963 the inner senate finally authorized the
inclusion of film education in the HfG’s program. 1215
Five lecturers were to begin the work; for the time
being, film education would be taught as part of
the department of visual communication.
One of the film lecturers, Edgar Reitz, had turned
to Thorwald Risler during the 1963 summer break
because he had heard that the Munich company
Siemens & Halske wanted to give away its studio
of electronic music at short notice. 1216 The studio,
which had become known through the sound
tracks of avant-garde films and through new com-
positions, was considered technologically unique
in Europe, and was to be given away for economic
reasons. “It’s obvious that this equipment would
be extraordinarily valuable for our film and televi-
sion plans, to say nothing of the gain in prestige
this expansion might bring with it.”
Thorwald Risler pointed out to Edgar Reitz that
this question must first be discussed with the vice
rector, because Otl Aicher was on vacation. Recip-
rocal visits by the Siemens staff at the HfG and by
Tomás Maldonado and Otl Aicher in Munich fol-
lowed. “The film department and the school ad-
ministration unanimously showed strong interest
in taking over the studio […]. Because of the posi-
tive attitudes of the college and of the film depart-
ment, which was primarily interested, I now began
direct negotiations with Siemens.”
Members / sessions of the
general meetings of the
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung
1953 –1968 1220
For fiscal reasons the company wanted to sign General meeting 1 2 3 Risler did not appear, but he took up the topic 325
over the studio quickly. “Siemens feels it is impor- again during the meeting. Günther Schweigkofler,
tant that the HfG continue developing the equip- a non-voting member of the inner senate, pro-
ment technically in close cooperation with Sie- tested against this action, but without success. 1222
Date 24. IV.1953 12. VI.1963 28. XI.1963
mens itself, that there be the possibility of re- While Otl Aicher and Tomás Maldonado were
search in related fields (psychology, physics, etc.), interested in the idea of a studio, they felt that it
and that opportunities for sound recording in the was first necessary to work out (preferably in a
areas of film, radio, and television continue to be commission) how it could be integrated in the HfG
fully explored.” Expenditure for the technicians Executive board Aicher-Scholl Aicher-Scholl Aicher-Scholl – possibly in a comprehensive institute of commu-
who would have to be taken on was DM 87,500 Guther Guther nication (encompassing film, information, and
Risler Risler
per year, and to date, at 50 percent capacity, the sound). Thorwald Risler, they believed, had arbi-
studio had received orders earning roughly DM trarily created a fait accompli. In Otl Aicher’s opin-
96,000 per year. ion Thorwald Risler was trying to sever teaching
At the beginning of October 1963 Thorwald Ris- from development, create separate institutes
ler informed Otl Aicher about the latest develop- Advisory board Aicher Aicher Aicher through the foundation, and replace the old lectur-
ments of the negotiations; the contract of donation Becker ers. But, they maintained, the cultural functions
Bill Bill Bill
was planned for 18 October 1963, and in the inner Eychmüller Eychmüller Eychmüller were anchored in the HfG, while the foundation
senate Gert Kalow appeared to be satisfied becau- Grzimek Grzimek Grzimek had been created only in order to support the HfG
se he had been working for a year towards having Pfeil Pfeil Pfeil and its institutions, but not to establish institutes
Thun
a recording studio come to the HfG for the training Zeischegg Zeischegg Zeischegg of its own. The Siemens studio was the first at-
of the information students. 1217 tempt to implement this new concept of a foun-
Subsequently, on 8 October 1963, Otl Aicher dation. “He believed that it was up to the adminis-
wrote to Thorwald Risler: “I happened to hear that tration of the school to decide which institute it
you are negotiating with Siemens about the re- wanted to have here and which one it did not
cording lab. May I ask that you conduct negotia- Administrative committee Becker Becker Becker want, but its job was not to determine what to do
(1953) Boulanger Boulanger
tions in such a way that no substantive decision resp. administrative council Burrmeister or not to do with an institute that was introduced
that needs to be made by the school is anticipated (1963) Cron Cron (by the foundation). We are not a junk room, he
in any form.” 1218 Again there was a talk between Dohrn Dohrn said, for stuff that other people give away and that
Donndorf Donndorf
the two protagonists. “Mr. Aicher raised no objec- Gussone Gussone is just dropped off here and represent a burden.”
tions in this talk either [against Thorwald Risler’s Guther Tomás Maldonado, referring to gifts accepted by
preceding negotiations with Siemens; author’s v. Hellingrath v. Hellingrath v. Hellingrath the HfG, reminded the inner senate of the fiasco
Hinsch Hinsch
note].” The contract of donation between the foun- Klasen involving the Research Center for Optical Percep-
dation and Siemens about the studio of electronic Knobel Knobel tion. The debate ended as the meeting disap-
music, valued at DM 500,000, was concluded on Pfizer Pfizer Pfizer proved of Thorwald Risler’s action: “The rector
Pfleiderer Pfleiderer Pfleiderer
18 October 1963. 1219 Schmölder Schmölder and senate thus feel there is no longer a basis for
It is difficult to understand Otl Aicher’s real Thuma Thuma cooperation with the managing chairman of the
motivation for the escalation that now followed. Thun Thun Thun foundation‘s executive board.“ Gert Kalow voted
Did he actually feel steamrollered by the fact that against this, while the remaining three members of
Thorwald Risler had accepted the gift in the name the inner senate who were entitled to vote accept-
of the foundation? Was he really convinced that ed the resolution. 1223 In terms of labor law this vote
only a formal resolution by the HfG authorized the was litigable, but the foundation never got to the
foundation to do so? Did he consider the Siemens point of instituting legal proceedings before a
studio to be the acid test that would show who labor court.
determined the purpose of the foundation? Or did
he want to use these events to demolish Thorwald Without delay and in the tone of voice of someone
Risler at the HfG and to compromise him in the who had won an important preliminary round, Otl
eyes of industry? No definite answer can be found Aicher informed Thorwald Risler of the inner sen-
in the research material. – At the meeting of the ate’s vote of no confidence. “May I also mention
administrative council on 11 November 1963 he that I told the senate that I do not feel your unau-
openly protested against the donation of the Sie- thorized action is an isolated case, but see it as a
mens studio: “In Mr. Aicher’s opinion, the initiative symptom of your efforts, which have been made
for incorporating this type of facilities had to come clear to me, to found institutes independent of the
from the college.” 1221 Then, on 12 November 1963, school, to separate teaching and development in
a letter to the members of the advisory board fol- such a way that the rector is only supposed to be
lowed. And, at Otl Aicher’s suggestion, Thorwald in charge of the teaching part, and to gradually
Risler had been scheduled for a week to report on replace the old lecturers. As you know I am a firm
the studio to the inner senate on 13 November opponent of a new concept that would give the
1963. However, on 12 November 1963, Otl Aicher foundation a higher expert competence it has not
took this item off the agenda, so that Thorwald had until now – the sort of competence you have
 The rectorships of
Aicher, Maldonado
and Ohl
326 exercised in this case. I shall resolutely defend the
founding intention.“ 1224
Thus, in mid-November 1963, the two main plot
lines of the year converged: first, the conflict with
the Landtag regarding the review of the HfG’s eli-
gibility for aid and secondly, the struggle around
eliminating the advisory board and reformulating
the purpose of the foundation as the bylaws of
the foundation was revised. The two strands con-
verged at the general meeting of the foundation
on 28 November 1963.
All members of the administrative council had
previously supported the view that the purpose of
the foundation should be formulated in such a way
that the foundation would also be able to found
institutions that worked on design-related research
and development. “This was meant to create a
basis to allow new institutions (e. g., the electronic
studio made available by the Siemens company
and the Ulm film department of the planned film
and television academy) to remain autonomous
and organizationally independent of the HfG. In
this way it would be possible to keep the planned
new institutes and their faculty from being drawn
into the internal disputes of the HfG. Besides, with
the projected guarantee of autonomy, presumably
Mr. Gugelot would have been willing to make a
closer commitment to the GSS than is the case
now.” 1225
Otl Aicher refused to expand the purpose of the
foundation to design-related projects that could
be handled independently of the HfG. If the foun-
dation, as Thorwald Risler imagined, also founded
institutes that would exist apart from and not with-
in the HfG, “the executive board would gain an
authority that would be superior to that of the col-
lege.” 1226 As for the second important item, Otl
Aicher also rejected the draft version that was to
be passed as the foundation’s charter at the gen-
eral meeting: The new controlling body (the for-
mer administrative council – the future founda-
tion‘s council), was to be made up as heretofore
of seven representatives of government agencies
and seven persons who would be appointed by
the Society of Friends. Otl Aicher believed that
there would then no longer be a connection be-
tween the HfG and the foundation: “It must be
possible for the school to bring an influence to
bear on the appointment of the executive board
of the Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung, on changes in
the charter and objectives, as well as on decisions
about the by-laws of the school.” But it was pre-
cisely this incompatibility of college and founda-
tion levels and functions that was the main reason
for reworking the foundation’s bylaws. One of the
demands of the Landtag had been a revision of the
bylaws. Otl Aicher wanted to circumvent this in-
compatibility by having the HfG directly appoint
the seven “free” representatives of the founda-
tion‘s council.
At the 22nd and last meeting of the adminis-
trative council on 11 November 1963 he clearly
expressed his views: The HfG, he said, was the
sole purpose of the foundation; additional institu-
tions such as a film academy, the Gugelot Insti-
tute, or a Siemens studio were, for him, imagin-
able only as part of the HfG, and if so, the HfG’s
initiative was always a precondition. 1227 In a matter
like this, he did not agree to a compromise. Be-
sides, the HfG must be represented in the future
foundation‘s council, “for the school was the sole
purpose of the foundation.” Otto Pfleiderer, the
president of the Landeszentralbank (State Central
Bank) in Baden-Württemberg, answered that this
was unacceptable because it implied a crossover
of functions, the very thing that was supposed to
be eliminated.
Thus the general meeting of the foundation on
28 November 1963 truly did not appear to be
promising. 1228 Its purpose was to pass the future
charter of the foundation. In order to do so it was
given a draft by the bylaws commission of the
administrative council. 1229
After Otl Aicher’s 8 November 1963 letter to the
members of the advisory board, the latter passed
a resolution backing the rector: The purpose of the
foundation, they stated, must not be expanded, an
administrator of the HfG was to be appointed, and
half of the foundation‘s council was to be elected
by the extended senate. 1230 The representative of
the advisory board (Günther Grzimek) stood alone
in the bylaws commission while the majority pushed
through its opposing views on these points. That
was why the draft before the general meeting for
a change in the charter was not acceptable: “The
advisory board rejects this proposal by a majority.”
The administrative council would in reality contin-
ue in existence, the advisory board would simply
be dropped while its functions would not be trans-
ferred as appropriate, the foundation would be
allowed to found independent institutes, and
would thus in effect be in a position of superior
authority to the HfG, which it must not be allowed
to have “without entering into competition with
the school”. 1231 The advisory board therefore de-
manded that a new commission be formed and
the general meeting not be convened – playing
for time.
The majority of the advisory board was morally
supported by both sides. On the one hand Walter
Gropius had vehemently urged Inge Aicher-Scholl
on 22 November 1963 on no account to give in to
the plans of the advisory board and of Thorwald
Risler: “You invited me to be on the foundation‘s
council of a foundation whose sole purpose was
to run the School of Design and its institutions.
One of the important things I have learned as a
teacher is that in an institute that advocates a
programmatic idea the administration must never
be given a superior position. The influence of the
Ulm college here and abroad depends solely on its
creative development, its unhindered growth. Res-
ponsibility for defining goals, regulations govern-
ing instruction, and their observation must be un-
equivocally in the hands of the teachers, while the
administration should remain merely an aid to
maintain order. An administration that is a higher
authority becomes the straitjacket of the idea. 1232
Secondly, three of the five regular lecturers
turned directly to the general meeting: “The school
was founded, like the Bauhaus, on the basis of a
specific cultural idea. It is a programmatic school.
All its institutions, the school as well as the insti-
tutes of development and research, must serve
this goal. With this type of concept a unified au-
thority is logical. […] This position, which concen-
trates on a clear-cut goal, is behind the school’s
international reputation – the ‘Ulm concept’. In our
opinion it is therefore absolutely necessary that
potential new institutions of the foundation be
created only within the framework of the school,
and that the purpose of the foundation be clearly
formulated with this in mind.” An administrator
such as the one proposed by the Three Wise Men
was just as essential as a lawyer in the executive
board of the foundation – the bylaws commission
Martin Krampen, 1963.
Photo: Wolfgang Siol
Archive: HfG (63/0356/3)
had rejected both. In a second letter to the gen-
eral meeting signed by most of the permanently
employed employees of the HfG (except for Horst
Rittel and Gert Kalow, both on leave, and Otl Ai-
cher), the latter emphasized that Otl Aicher’s views
in the Schwäbische Donau-Zeitung had not been
a personal statement, but the unanimous opinion
of the “regular faculty” of the HfG. “There is no
longer a crisis today within the faculty; rather, a
latent crisis of confidence has developed between
the regular faculty and the managing chairman of
the foundation‘s executive board.” 1233 This referred 327
to the inner senate’s vote of no confidence in
Thorwald Risler on 13 November 1963 and the
announcement that it would no longer cooperate
with him.
The internal opposition at the HfG was also heard
from. The student representative Gudrun Otto held
the view that the resolution of the current crisis
must not break down because of the issue wheth-
er students should take part in electing the rector:
“The actual value of student participation in elect-
ing the rector is, according to the bylaws now in
effect, nothing but a democratic gesture in the
bylaws against which we protest. The student rep-
resentative would like to urge the managing chair-
man of the executive board and the chairman of
the administrative council to distinguish between
the opinions of the present fragmentary faculty
and of the students in all the decisions you are
about to make.” 1234
Gert Kalow, in a letter to Thorwald Risler, sharp-
ly objected to the inner senate’s vote of no con-
fidence and the letter from the permanently em-
ployed lecturers to the general meeting: “The inner
senate of the HfG consists of five members [and
the administrative director; author’s note]; two of
the five are Rittel and I. How is it possible that ‘the
entire regular faculty’ comes out with statements
if neither Rittel nor Kalow know anything about it?
[…] Of the twelve, or rather thirteen gentlemen
[Otl Aicher, who did not sign, is meant to be the
thirteenth; author’s note], only four are actually
long-standing lecturers, who can refer to them-
selves as regular faculty: Aicher, Maldonado, Ohl,
Zeischegg […]. A document in which the names
of Bill, Wachsmann, Bense, Leowald, Franzen, Po-
dach, Lucius Burckhardt, Rübenach, Harry Pross,
Vordemberge-Gildewart, Gugelot, and so many
others are not mentioned at all? […] Mr. Aicher
accuses you of having accepted a gift valued at
one-half million DM from the Siemens company as
the managing chairman of the foundation‘s execu-
tive board (which financially sponsors the HfG).
This accusation is beyond the limits of my compre-
hension. Aicher’s cause of action is beyond what
I consider to be rationally understandable. In so far
as relations between the GSS and the HfG are con-
cerned, I can say the following: 1.) In the ‘Ulm
bylaws’, which may have been written by Aicher
himself, in the official charter of the GSS, there is
nothing at all to indicate that the college is the
sole purpose of the foundation, but at the same
time, and on a par with the college, an institute is
mentioned; 2.) during my time as a rector, in the
face of my resistance and Rittel’s, Aicher main-
tained that within the framework of the GSS there
should be design institutes that would be indepen-
dent of the HfG. If I have to sum up my position in
 The rectorships of
Aicher, Maldonado
and Ohl
328 one sentence, I must say there is grave danger
that Mr. Aicher is going to destroy his own school.
In the long run no public corporation can with-
stand the type of frequent and abrupt changes of
course the HfG’s founders have expected of it and
continue to expect of it.” 1235
So shortly before the general meeting, Thorwald
Risler and Günther Schweigkofler too joined the
general mobilization of typewriters and duplicating
machines and worked out two statements from
the perspective of the foundation’s executive and
administration. As he took stock, Günther Schweig-
kofler, the administrative director, was full of bit-
terness. For the first time in its history, he wrote,
there was no internal HfG crisis but rather a dis-
pute between the foundation and the HfG. He felt
the college was represented by Otl Aicher, Tomás
Maldonado, Herbert Ohl, and Walter Zeischegg,
who claimed they had a right to interpret the
founding idea and therefore believed they were
legitimately entitled to make decisions in the foun-
dation and college. In their opinion it was the HfG
that took precedence: “In the eyes of the group of
founders, the Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung was
founded merely to be a corporate shell for the col-
lege. The foundation acts for the college, though
only according to the wishes of the college […].
The managing chairman of the foundation‘s exec-
utive board thus becomes the director of the col-
lege.” Otl Aicher’s conduct, to quote Günther
Schweigkofler, made it imperative to dismiss him,
but that was unthinkable, for it would set off a
smear campaign. Instead, Inge Aicher-Scholl
should again take over Thorwald Risler’s post be-
side Rector Otl Aicher, so that the founders would
have to bear full responsibility. 1236
In his statement, Thorwald Risler again recalled the
spring of 1963 when he was supposed to have a
reconciliation with Otl Aicher mediated by Hellmut
Becker. At the time, he wrote, he had proposed
that Otl Aicher should be installed as rector, for he
felt it was a flaw of the new HfG bylaws that the
rector had to be elected. “As for the question of
research and development, I referred to my experi-
ences during financing negotiations with industry
and government representatives. Both the impor-
tant new clients and the members of the Landtag
Peter Matthes, 1963. and the Bundestag said they were going along
Photo: Wolfgang Siol with doing things on a new basis [he means Thor-
Archive: HfG (63/0306/4) wald Risler’s financing plan; author’s note] only
because I believed I could promise, in contrast
with the past, that there would be a guarantee of
continuity in terms of who filled the positions of
administrative director, members of the adminis-
trative council, and the executive board of the
Society of Friends. All negotiations, wrote Thor-
wald Risler, began with a question about the Bill
crisis, and it was possible to conclude them posi-
tively only by substantiating the institution’s re-
newed creditworthiness. The experiences of re-
cent years have been bitter. I would be willing to
put aside my reservations about the overly biased
rule of a single group if it remained limited to the
sphere of teaching at the college. As far as that
goes, it is also possible for the college to focus
intellectually on a single predominant concept [of
design] as long as in turn academic freedom is
allowed in the realm of research and develop-
ment.” Lecturers who might come into conflict
with the school’s administration would have to be
able to change over peacefully into research and
development; new lecturers could first be given a
probation period there before they were appointed
to a position at the HfG. The former was a refer-
ence to Hans Gugelot, while the latter referred to
complications involving Mervyn Perrine and Horst
Rittel. Then, there were the heads of teams (for
instance, Hans Gugelot, Otl Aicher) who were au-
tomatically part of the HfG leadership independent
of change. “If the college must be granted a cer-
tain amount of lack of continuity, that was all the
more reason to guarantee continuity for research
and development.” And it was precisely because
of its research and development that the HfG was
recognized as a unique college in West Germany
and in Baden-Württemberg – not because of the
training it provided. The foundation as an indepen-
dent, higher corporate body was the condition for
receiving funds to do research and work on pro-
jects. “Besides, the possibility of receiving avail-
able state funds independent of the college bud-
get was, for reasons related to budgetary law, tied
to the existence of separate institutions.” The thing
was that as long as the foundation received money
from the college budget, it was in competition with
the colleges and universities. Ever since Thorwald
Risler tapped the other budgets, the HfG had been
funded. However, these other budgets were tied to
research and development, which needed to be
independent of the college’s crises. “Mr. Aicher
raised no objections, so that I left, convinced that
we had largely been in agreement. A few days
later, to my complete amazement, Mr. Aicher told
me that the conversation in Wasserburg had been
one of the most depressing experiences he had
ever had. Since then, he has been agitating
against these ideas, which we should be discuss-
ing. He keeps referring to ‘machinations to under-
mine the founding idea’. This interpretation of my
ideas is all the more outrageous since the idea of
setting up separate research and development
teams originated with Mr. Aicher himself. […]
When I came to Ulm, development projects were
already being handled on a basis that was com-
pletely detached from the school administration.”
The development teams, he went on, had increas-
ingly isolated themselves the more the governing
Josef Schlecker,
Peter Raacke, 1963.
Photos: Wolfgang Siol
Archive: HfG (63/0309/1 and
63/0357/2)
boards were dominated by the scientists. “Since
the school administration is largely identical with
the heads of the development teams, the develop-
ment teams must be incorporated in the school.
If, as a result of new appointments, there is ever
a school administration that is outside this direct
influence, then no doubt an isolating protection
will be required again.” Otl Aicher, he wrote, had
always taken the liberty of disregarding the liberty
of others. –
At the beginning of the general meeting, Thorwald
Risler announced that he would step down at the
end of the year if the HfG lecturers who were pres-
ent (Otl Aicher and Walter Zeischegg) did not dis-
sociate themselves from the inner senate vote of
no confidence in him, and if “by that time a con-
cept that was acceptable in content and form was
not found for continuing work”: Responsibilities
must be clearly distributed among the executive
board of the foundation and the HfG leadership,
and the purpose of the foundation must be ex-
panded to include design-related projects. 1237
The members of the administrative council then
expressed their confidence in Thorwald Risler and
their disapproval of the inner senate’s conduct. In
addition Otl Aicher gave a satisfactory explanation.
The actual discussion of the charter of the founda-
tion could begin.
Now a heated debate about the purpose of the
foundation erupted (Section 3). The members of
the advisory board, Otl Aicher, Inge Aicher-Scholl,
Max Bill (with power of attorney for Fritz Pfeil),
Günther Grzimek, and Walter Zeischegg, with their
blocking minority, prevented acceptance of the
proposed text that expanded the purpose of the
foundation (three-fourths of the 22 members of
the general meeting would have had to vote for it).
The draft included a provision that the foundation
was to have the power to “‘create additional insti-
tutions apart from the HfG, or to participate in 329
institutions that were appropriate for serving re-
search and development in the field of design, in
the spirit of the founding purpose’”. 1238 Instead,
the meeting accepted Otl Aicher’s proposal ruling
out the founding of new institutes by the founda-
tion. “The government representatives therefore
abstained from voting on the planned charter. For
the same reasons, the managing chairman of the
foundation‘s executive board, Mr. Thorwald Risler,
also refused to approve the new charter and an-
nounced that possibly under these circumstances
he would hand in his resignation in due course.
A member of the advisory board, the architect
Eychmüller, also declared he was resigning from
the advisory board in view of the rigid stance of
some of the board members.” 1239 The elimination
of the advisory board it-self was no longer a con-
tentious issue at all. But when the meeting voted
on the second controversial section, which regu-
lated the membership of the foundation‘s council
(Section 7), the proposed version was put through.
Instead of the former 14 members, the founda-
tion‘s council now had 12 members, half of whom
basically would be government agency represen-
tatives, while the other half would come from the
Society of Friends “in agreement with the HfG”:
one representative each of the city of Ulm, the fed-
eral ministries of the interior and of economics, the
ministries of finance, education and the arts, and
economics of the Land of Baden-Württemberg,
and 6 representatives of the Society of Friends.
The representative of the German Federation of
Trade Unions and the president ex officio of the
Stuttgart State Central Bank were no longer repre-
sented on the foundation‘s council.
In a letter to the general meeting, Hans Frieder
Eychmüller later gave his reasons for resigning
from office during the meeting: “Contrary to our
hopes, the new charter was not a promising new
beginning. In spite of serious compromises we
included in the charter related to what is presently
a troubled relationship between the school leader-
ship and the foundation, the deep distrust of the
school leadership toward the managing chairman
of the foundation‘s executive board was not been
resolved. […] And so there is reason to fear that
the struggle of the school leadership against the
foundation’s alleged greed for power will continue.
[…] Since in past advisory board meetings I have
repeatedly and completely unsuccessfully tried to
convince the members of the advisory board who
are opposed to the foundation that it is necessary
to have a sensible conciliation, I have no hopes at
all that any further meetings would make a differ-
ence. That’s why I resigned.” 1241
The elimination of the advisory board fulfilled one
of the two essential Landtag conditions (item 9).
 The network of Ulm institutions
1953 –1968 1240

1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961 1962 1963 331

Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung
GSS
(Hans and Sophie Scholl
Foundation)
bylaws statutes
24 April 1953 6 March 1959 28 November 1963
1 managing chairperson 3 executive board members (1 managing chairman) 3 executive board
9 advisory board members 9 advisory board members members
14 administrative council members 14 administrative council members (1 managing chairman)
general meeting general meeting 12 foundation‘s council
board of trustees board of trustees members
board of trustees

statutes statutes statutes statutes

17 December 1952 10 December 1956 5 December 1959 31 May 1961
Gesellschaft der Freunde der 1 managing chairman 1 managing chairman 1 managing chairman 5 executive board members
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung e. V.
GdF 1 secretary 1 secretary
(Society of Friends of the
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung, members of the society members of the society members of the society members of the society
reg.)

Structure of
classes begin Posted notice rectorate bylaws bylaws bylaws
3 August 1953 18 September 1954 5 September 1955 24 May 1956 7 March 1958 15 December 1962
Hochschule für Gestaltung rector rector rector rector
HfG
(Ulm School of Design) vice rector vice rector vice rector

governing board (5 members) governing board (3 members) inner senate

lecturers lecturers lecturers assembly inner council extended senate

guest lecturers extended council departments

students students students students students students

1 October 1957
..............................................................................................................................................................................
Institut für Produktform Hans Gugelot E2 Hans Gugelot
resp. Institut für Produktge-
staltung der HfG Georg Leowald
IfP
(Institute of Product Design) Walter Zeischegg E3 Walter Zeischegg

E5 Otl Aicher until 30 September 1964

E6 Tomás Maldonado until 30 September 1964

............................................................................
Institute of Industrialized Building Herbert Ohl

..............................................................................................................................................................................
Institut für Kommunikation Development team Otl Aicher
der HfG
(Institute of Communication) Research center for Optical Perception Mervyn Perrine
(planned) ..................................................................................................................................................................................................
film film ( in process)
....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Institute of sound studio sound studio ( in process) Institut of Acoustic Research
Acoustic Perception ( planned to begin October)

statues
31 January 1962
Institut für Produktentwicklung 2 executive board members
und Design e. v. 7 members of the society
IPD 1 institute director
(Institute of Product Development staff
and Design, reg.)
 The rectorships of
Aicher, Maldonado
and Ohl
332 In order to meet the second important demand
(that the lecturers be given equal status), section
14 of the HfG bylaws needed to be changed. That
is why, a week later, on 5 December 1963, at the
second reading of the state budget for 1964, the
plenum of the Landtag of Baden-Württemberg re-
solved that the blocking notice for the Land sub-
sidy totaling DM 600,000 should remain in effect
and the politico-cultural committee should decide
if and when this blocking notice should be re-
moved. 1242 So that teaching would not come to a
standstill on 1 January 1964, the politico-cultural
committee released part of the subsidy, a sum of
DM 150,000, at its 92nd session on 16 December
1963. 1243 Otherwise the foundation would have
had to give notice to the lecturers and staff on
31 December 1963 effective 30 September 1964.
Otl Aicher was confident that because of this first
release of funds, the Land and federal subsidies
would in the future also be regularly included in
the budget: “I no longer have any worries on
account of the Land subsidies to the HfG. They’re
as good as guaranteed.” 1244 This view, however,
quickly proved to be mistaken. The Land and fed-
eral politicians very soon called into question the
subsidies by the public sector. Thus, only a few
weeks later, a second application for the federal
contribution for 1964 had to be submitted for the
first time in years, because the budget committee
of the Bundestag had struck this item from the
budget draft.
Otl Aicher had once more gained the upper hand
in a tenacious dispute. In 1957 and 1962 the crisis
had been based in the HfG itself. Now he had
managed to get the majority of HfG members
Gui Bonsiepe, 1963. behind him and asserted himself single-mindedly
Photo: Wolfgang Siol against the majority in the foundation. In spite of
Archive: HfG (63/0328/2) all professions of support on the part of members
of the administrative council, Thorwald Risler felt
abandoned, for when it had been important for the
ministry officials to stand up steadfastly for their
own views, they had shied away from openly set-
tling differences. The situation had become impos-
sible for him, and that was why even at the general
meeting he suggested he would be leaving Kuh-
berg – not only because he saw no chance of sub-
stantial improvement for the foundation as long as
it was tied to the HfG’s apron strings, but also
because most HfG lecturers were openly opposed
to him, and a new type of conflict was developing,
as evinced by the inner senate’s vote of no confi-
dence. On the other hand, Otl Aicher had proved
to be the one protagonist who, with all his might
and determination, with tactical cunning and reso-
lution, sometimes even ruthlessness, had remai-
ned successful. He had made peace with Max Bill,
allowing him to go on hoping that he could again
work at the HfG in a leadership role – Max Bill was
worth 2 deciding votes in the advisory board, his
own and that of Fritz Pfeil, whose deputy he was in
the latter’s absence. He had accepted the fact that
old friendships, for example, his friendship with
Hellmut Becker, Max Guther, and Hans Frieder
Eychmüller, were badly impaired.
What was the price Otl Aicher had to pay for
this work? If we don't count personal problems
(Otl Aicher fell ill the following year; old friends
kept their distance), there is the heavy burden that
from now on made relations with ministry officials
in Stuttgart and Bonn very difficult. The officials
were convinced that the changes Otl Aicher had
prevented were necessary. They found the person
of Thorwald Risler, whom Otl Aicher continued to
disparage, convincing. And they increasingly re-
garded Otl Aicher’s conduct since 1962 as inap-
propriate. Like Max Guther, they believed that
since that time Otl Aicher had equivocated a great
deal in order to push through his ideas at the HfG:
“Prof. Guther is horrified at the Aichers’ zigzag
maneuvers, and in view of the circumstances he is
on the point of resigning his office, even at the risk
of jeopardizing his friendship with the Aichers.” 1245
At the same time it was they who daily had to de-
fend the subsidies of their ministries as correct.
Their conviction and their enthusiasm about the
HfG had now given way to disenchantment, resig-
nation, and even disapproval. Perhaps as time
went on Otl Aicher could have again won over
the important officials – Karl Gussone, Wolfgang
Donndorf, and Günther Boulanger – and persuaded
them once more to support the cause of the HfG
with all their energy. But up to 1965 he did not
devote himself to this task, and when he subse-
Walter Jens, 1963.
Photo: Wolfgang Siol
Archive: HfG (63/0340/2)
quently pulled out of the HfG, there was a gaping
hole into which the school then plunged. The net-
work of helping hands created by Inge Aicher-
Scholl, Hellmut Becker, and Thorwald Risler began
to tear, and the damage was so serious no inte-
grating power could repair it.
Exactly four years later, on 5 December 1967, the
HfG was in a situation best described by Wolfgang
Donndorf in the following two sentences: “The
council of ministers of the Land of Baden-Würt-
The Institute of temberg, which wishes to preserve the School of
Electronic Music. Design because of its unique character and its sig-
Photo: Ernst Stritzinger nificance, at its session of 5 December 1967 came
Archive: HfG (67/0420) out strongly in favor of the Ulm School of Design
being affiliated or incorporated in the state School
of Engineering in Ulm, and has petitioned the min-
istry of education and the arts to study at its earli-
est convenience in what form this can be imple-
mented and what expenses it would involve for
the Land. […] The Landtag of Baden-Württem-
berg, in the 2nd reading of the state budget for
1968 on 7 December 1967 adopted this resolu-
tion of the council of ministers and has requested
that the ministry of education and the arts give its
report by 1 March 1968 at the latest.” 1246
What brought about this sellout? It would be
dishonest to offer a single handy answer. We will
find a reasonable explanation when we understand
the following main points of developments
through December 1967:
The dispute between Otl Aicher and Thorwald
Risler continued;
the most important protagonists of the past 333
years distanced themselves;
the foundation‘s council took over the work of
the administrative council;
the foundation became increasingly embroiled
in financial and organizational difficulties.
Re item 1: The continuing debate between Otl
Aicher and Thorwald Risler.
With its vote of no confidence, the inner senate
had erected a blockade between the leadership of
the HfG and the foundation‘s executive board that
was not cleared away in spite of all appeals and
threats of sanctions. For reasons pertaining to
labor law, Thorwald Risler felt the HfG lecturers
were out of line, because as employees of the
foundation they were under an obligation to be
loyal to and cooperate with the foundation’s stat-
utory bodies. Otl Aicher and the inner senate,
however, delayed retracting their censure with
endless discussions about the interpretation of
shades of meaning, while Thorwald Risler finally
broke with the foundation and turned toward a
new career. This plot began to develop on 19
December 1963, when Otl Aicher demanded of
Theodor Pfizer that a commission should first in-
quire into Thorwald Risler's conduct in connec-
tion with the Siemens studio before anyone
thought of revising the senate resolution. 1247 For
actually, said Otl Aicher, it had been Thorwald Ris-
ler who by his high-handed actions put an end to
cooperation with the HfG. Theodor Pfizer responded
that first the resolution had to be retracted and
cooperation resumed before they could think of
an inquiry. 1248
The bone of contention – the question whether
the foundation’s executive board had had the au-
thority to accept the Siemens gift without being
formally sanctioned by the HfG – could easily have
been cleared away. But this was not simply about
a question of procedure. It concealed more far-
reaching consequences. By preventing the inte-
gration of the Siemens studio (also referred to as
the Studio für Elektronische Ton- und Bildgestal-
tung (studio for electronic sound and image pro-
duction), or Studio für Klangforschung (studio for
acoustic research)), Otl Aicher achieved three
objectives:
1. He succeeded in preventing the foundation from
expanding by forming institutions. Moreover,
the efforts of the film lecturers, whom this tech-
nical equipment could have helped considerably
and who had tried for some time to organize an
autonomous department (which would be
financed independently of the HfG, because
they did not want to become dependent on it),
were aborted. 1249
2. He prevailed over the foundation‘s council, the
 The rectorships of
Aicher, Maldonado
and Ohl
334
Left: Abraham Moles at
a Wednesday seminar
on the topic Is there an
information theory of
objects? on 10 June
1964.
Right: Kohei Sugiura
1964.
Photos: Roland Fürst
Archive: HfG (64/0479/4 and
64/0676/4)
Meetings of the HfG’s
inner senate and extended senate
1962 –1968 1253
statutory body whose actual function it was to Theodor Pfizer, the chair of the foundation‘s coun- inner senate extended senate putes continued and by the loss of good will. As 335
develop objectives, and over the foundation’s cil, no doubt had this kind of independence above 1962 /63 1 31. I.1963 — 20. XII.1962 ( reg.) far as the income of the Society of Friends is con-
executive board. At the same time he proved the tangle of circumstances, but lacked the cour- 2 16. II.1963 cerned, the effects are so devastating that, for in-
that his claim that the HfG should take prece- age and determination to bring about a powerful 3 6. III.1963 16. V.1963 ( spec.) stance, expenses incurred by the society in em-
4 19. VII. 1963
dence over the foundation was valid. decision. He continued a policy of wrongly inter- ploying me and activities related to that are no
3. Thorwald Risler, who was under a moral obliga- preted diplomacy and let things take their course. 1963 /64 5 2. X.1963 2 23. X.1963 ( reg.) longer covered.”
tion to Siemens, sustained damage to his per- Hellmut Becker tried on 28 March 1964 to urge 6 13. XI.1963 7. XI.1963 ( spec.) Because of this the foundation was not able to
7 11. XII.1963
sonal reputation in the eyes of industry – to say Theodor Pfizer to act: “If something about the be- 8 15. I.1964 expand as planned in 1963, he said; the result was
nothing of future cooperation with the HfG. havior of the foundation doesn’t suit the rector or 9 4. III.1964 that there was a shortage of about DM 80,000 for
the inner senate, they can appeal to the founda- 10 6. V., 12. V., 21. V. the rest of the lecturers’ houses, money they had
+ 1. VI.1964
On 15 January 1968 the HfG’s inner senate re- tion‘s council at any time, but it is legally indefen- 11 3. VI.1964 3 11. VI.1964 ( reg.) counted on. In 1963 the foundation had had a loss
solved to retract the vote of no confidence as sible that the necessary contact is blocked by self- 12 9. IX.1964 4 25. IX.1964 ( reg.) of about DM 160,000, because considerable ex-
soon as two conditions were met: Thorwald Risler help measures. […] If Mr. Aicher demands declar- penditures that had not been provided for in the
1964 /65 13 19. X.1964 5 15. X.1964 ( reg.)
would have to declare a) that the inner senate ations from Mr. Risler for relations to be resumed 14 3. XI.1964 budget became necessary for HfG publicity (par-
should have a say about the affiliation of the Sie- once more, the answer must be no.” Only after 15 27. I.1965 ticularly relating to the traveling exhibition); but the
mens studio, and b) that the sole purpose of the the senate had retracted its resolution and rela- 16 10. II.1965 foundation was able to offset this result against a
17 17. III.1965
foundation was the HfG and the institutions affili- tions were back to normal should the foundation‘s 18 28. IV.1965 profit of ca.DM 80,000, so that the books showed
ated with it. 1250 Thorwald Risler, on the other hand, council deal with the HfG’s logistical reservations 19 11. I.1965 a debit of about DM 80,000. The current status of
like Theodor Pfizer before him, demanded that regarding the Siemens studio. 1252 But de facto the 20 9. VI.1965 negotiations, he said, was that thanks to the “joint
21 21. VII. 1965
they do the opposite: “The 15 January senate foundation had become superfluous for the HfG 22 27. VII. 1965 efforts of members of the foundation‘s council and
decision does not permit a direct and fair settle- as of 13 November 1963 because after that date 23 9. IX.1965 the administrative director it was possible to save
ment. One cannot link the retraction of a formally its hardest-working functionary, Thorwald Risler, the state subsidies at least in principle”.
1965 /66 24 6. X.1965
illegal measure with a demand for a declaration now carried on those of his activities that were 25 3. XI.1965 6 5. XI.1965 ( reg.) When, in 1959, Thorwald Risler had been re-
that contravenes the spirit and text of the bylaws. related to industry, Land politics, and federal poli- 26 10. XI.1965 cruited for the post of managing chairman of the
The material problems, I am sure, can be easily tics only at a low level. For he in turn felt that any 27 25. XI.1965 foundation‘s executive board, “the small circle of
28 13. XII.1965 7 13. XII.1965 ( reg.)
resolved if the formal violation represented by the effort under these circumstances was a waste of 29 2. II.1966 contributors in trade and industry consisted, ex-
13 November 1963 senate resolution is recognized his energy. Back at the general meeting on 28 30 25. II.1966 cept for the Braun company, of enterprises that
as such and is eliminated.” 1251 These pros and cons November 1963 he had come to the obvious con- 31 27. IV.1966 8 29. IV.1966 ( reg.) had primarily responded to Mrs. Inge Aicher-
32 17. V.1966
demonstrate the extent to which the two protag- clusion and, on 12 December 1963, in a letter to 33 8. VI.1966 Scholl’s publicity for political and humanitarian,
onists were trapped by circumstances. Thorwald Klaus Dohrn, he repeated his intention to wind up 34 6. VII. 1966 not for professional reasons. At that time one of
Risler argued that the senate resolution was his work on Kuhberg sooner or later. 1254 35 8. VII. 1966 the most important objections when the founda-
36 9. IX.1966 9 28. IX.1966 ( spec.)
wrong. He demanded that the senate resolution tion attempted to secure state subsidies or in-
should first be revoked so as to reestablish a com- Thorwald Risler brought about the final decision in 1966 /67 37 7. X.1966 crease them was that industry had a wait-and-see
mon basis and make it possible to discuss the April 1964. A meeting of the executive board of 38 4. XI.1966 attitude or even a negative one.” That is why, said
39 2. XII.1966
matter. Otl Aicher argued that it was Thorwald Ris- the Society of Friends was scheduled for 27 April 40 12. I.1967 10 23. I.1967 ( reg.) Thorwald Risler, he had pushed the soliciting of
— 7. II.1967 — 7. II.1967 ( spec.) development projects instead of continuing to col-
41 10. II.1967 lect donations. “We did manage not only to suc-
42 20. II.1967 11 23. II.1967 ( reg.)
43 17. III.1967 cessfully work on development projects but also to
44 5. V.1967 bring in donations, though with the express mutual
45 12. /13. VI.1967 proviso that the pedagogical sphere had to be fi-
46 14. VII.1967
47 22. IX.1967
nanced by the ministry of education and the arts.
[…] The fact that we could prove that industry was
1967/ 68 — 6. X.1967 12 17. X.1967 ( reg.) involved on a practical level was, as you all know,
48 18. X.1967
49 15. XI.1967
the most important argument in winning parlia-
50 13. XII.1967 13 13. XII.1967 ( spec.) mentary majorities for increasing subsidies by the
51 25. I.1968 14 12. I.1968 ( spec.) ministry of education and the arts and the federal
52 19. VI.1968 15 19. II.1968 ( spec.)
53 11. XI.1968 16 20. III.1968 ( spec.)
ministry of the interior.” His successes, he said,
17 25. IV.1968 ( spec.) were not reflected in increased donations raised
ler’s conduct that was wrong. He demanded that 1964. This group represented Thorwald Risler’s 18 27. V.1968 ( spec.) by the Society of Friends, but in commissions and
19 12. VII. 1968 ( reg.)
the matter should first be decided so that there power base, since the foundation‘s council had not 20 23. VII. 1968 ( spec.)
subsidies that went straight into the foundation’s
could again be a basis for cooperation and the res- taken the clear stance he would have wished.1255 budget, or in gifts in kind (Siemens) that increased
olution could then be retracted. In other words, In the paper he prepared for this meeting he ob- the foundation’s assets. Only Otl Aicher and Hans
Thorwald Risler emphasized the basic procedure, served that the Society of Friends “had been badly Gugelot had managed, because of their personal
independent of the specific occasion, while Otl affected for the last year and a half by the crisis achievements, to keep development teams suc-
Aicher focused precisely on the specific occasion, caused by internal disputes of the School of De- reg. regular meeting cessfully occupied. “In connection with commis-
spec. special meeting
which exemplified the basic procedure. In other sign. Every activity of the Society of Friends in sion work, deep ‘social’ differences have devel-
words, the head of the foundation thought deduc- initiating or continuing financing negotiations with oped, and the claim made by the so-called ‘old’
tively, while the rector thought inductively. Only an industry has since then been made more difficult faculty members that they had exclusive rights to
outside force could have untied this Gordian knot. or completely stopped by inner insecurity as dis- work on commercial orders was an even stronger
 The rectorships of
Aicher, Maldonado
and Ohl
336 factor in the formation of castes.” The only one to
be spared the crisis of 1962/63 had been Hans
Gugelot, whose development team was separate
from the HfG. “Thus the practical course of events
has borne out the thesis once also held by Mr.
Aicher that one of the most important conditions
for successful development work is to be as far
away as possible from events in the college.”
The only “chances for external and internal
development” he saw for the future were “in reso-
lutely building up research and development. I feel
such chances are realizable only if a structure is
found that is protected from manifestations of cri-
sis at the HfG – and those will keep recurring reg-
ularly as long as the existing core personnel struc-
ture remains unchanged.” He emphasized more
strongly than half a year earlier that the HfG must
stimulate the progress of research and develop-
ment, because colleges of art and Werkschulen
(arts and crafts schools) had developed their own
design classes. If the HfG focused on advanced
and postgraduate studies, it could provide new
justification for its special position, which was now
seriously at risk. “For this task a prerequisite would
be a well developed, stable institute that would
offer credible protection against new witch-hunts
and full academic freedom. […] In order to get
industry to make a complete commitment, howev-
er, a very attractive program with expanded course
offerings would have to be developed over and
above the safeguarding of the institute.” He pro-
posed that this institute should begin with the
tasks of the department of film design and of the
Siemens studio, and that the facilities of the Re-
search Center for Optical Perception should be in-
tegrated. The institute would have to be indepen-
dent of the HfG, because the rector of the HfG
(necessarily a designer) could have no right to give
instructions to the scientists because he lacked
the expert knowledge. According to Thorwald Ris-
ler, the Volkswagen Foundation and the Fritz
Thyssen Foundation were interested in this far-
reaching concept. “But no doubt it is probably to
be expected that the implementation of such a
vast new plan would meet with the bitter resis-
tance of the ‘founders’. There is the question as
to what extent, from a purely legal standpoint,
such a resistance would be relevant; but apart
from that it will be difficult to persuade the foun-
dation‘s council to support such a plan, since un-
derstandably there is fear of new complications.
[…] On the other hand, I believe new sources of
financing cannot possibly be found without a new
plant. If a new plan is not evolved, the activity of
the Society of Friends and by analogy the work of
the executive board of the foundation would logi-
cally have to be limited to preserving the existing
state of affairs, which would be in keeping with
the present ideas of the ‘founders’.” Thorwald Ris-
ler sent the same comments to the foundation‘s
council for its 15 June 1964 meeting. 1256
The chairmen of the Society of Friends decided
not to take on the HfG. Hellmut Becker had spoken
with Otl Aicher the night before and advised
against such a step: “The quintessence of Mr.
Aicher’s remarks allegedly was that the only solu-
tion he could see was Mr. Risler’s resignation. In
view of the totally muddled situation he, Mr. Be-
cker, said he felt it was hardly possible to convince
the foundation‘s council to make resolutions or
engage in actions that would go against the de-
clared intention of the Aichers. Since no one wanted
to risk a new public scandal, he could only plead
that they should jointly look for suitable work and
a position for Mr. Risler and then as soon as pos-
sible, but by 31 December 1965 at the latest, to
retire him from his position as the foundation’s
executive board‘s managing chairman. Dr. Dohrn
emphasized that considering the current attitude
of the people who, in the final analysis, were “sub-
sidized”, it was logical to discontinue additional
help from the private sector.” Thorwald Risler, he
added, should for the time being attend to obliga-
tions that had developed in connection with the
institute of Hans Gugelot (an independent incor-
porated association, which soon had to be trans-
formed into a corporation because of its profits),
the Siemens studio, and the film department, until
they were all able to stand on their own feet. 1257
The foundation‘s council was thus spared the un-
pleasant situation of having to decide on one of
the directions in which the two adversaries wanted
them to go. Full of resignation, Hellmut Becker,
who pulled all the strings, had given Thorwald Ris-
ler the signal for retreat. Now the leading lecturers
(Otl Aicher, Tomás Maldonado, Herbert Ohl, and
Walter Zeischegg) took the offensive again. In a
memorandum to the foundation‘s council they
demanded that the Institute of Product Design
should be completely integrated into the HfG:
“A separation of the HfG and the Institute of Prod-
uct Design would cause irreparable damage. The
design concept of the HfG becomes effective pre-
cisely within the framework of the Institute of
Product Design in that the lecturers of the HfG
carry out research and development work in this
institute. […] According to the HfG’s founders,
teaching and research should form an integrated
whole that should be implemented in practice by
having the same personnel employed in both insti-
tutions. If the Institute of Product Design were to
be operated separately from the HfG and with dif-
ferent personnel than that of the HfG, this would
be inconsistent with the original idea and the legal
de facto situation.” In addition they defended their
views on the Siemens studio and the inner sen-
ate’s vote of no confidence: “The decision of the
Ernst Bloch, 1964.
Photo: Roland Fürst
Archive: HfG (ohne Negativ.
Bloch)
managing chairman of the foundation‘s executive
board to take over this lab was done on his own
initiative and is thus contrary to practices available
to the managing chairman and the school direction
for resolving this type of problem. The decision is
also a violation of the foundation’s old and new
bylaws and flouts the rules and regulations that
govern relations between the managing chairman
and the direction of the school. […] We believe
that this detailed account was necessary in order
to explain the reason for the vote of no confidence
against Mr. Risler.” 1258
While the foundation‘s council, at its second
meeting on 15 June 1964, objected to this behav-
ior on the part of the HfG lecturers, it did not mus-
ter the energy to express its disapproval and take
the appropriate steps. Theodor Pfizer and Hans
Zumsteg, the new member of the foundation‘s 337
council, wanted to soothe Otl Aicher and Thorwald
Risler and gain time. However, they misjudged the
seriousness of the situation, because time was
running out for the foundation. The longer the
foundation, or rather the group that developed the
foundation’s objectives – its foundation‘s council –
was concerned solely with internal business and
became embroiled in disputes with the HfG in the
process, the less time remained to think about a
promising financing plan, which really needed to
be addressed. One could hardly expect this of
Hans Zumsteg because he had just come on
board, but Theodor Pfizer must surely have known
what a huge share (from a psychological and argu-
mentative as well as from a financial perspective)
was constituted by the contributions of industry –
donations and commissions – to the foundation’s
budget. How was this money to be brought in
after Thorwald Risler’s departure? Although the
foundation‘s council had unanimously approved
Thorwald Risler’s plan to expand the purpose of
the foundation, its members were incapable of
transforming their insights into action. With a tol-
erance worthy of a Solomon they noted that by
exonerating the executive board for 1963, the gift
of the Siemens studio had been approved. Also it
was resolved that the inner senate had no author-
ity to express a vote of no confidence. And since
things that are not supposed to happen are impos-
sible, the inner senate’s vote, they said, was also
nonexistent. There was no longer any need to re-
tract it. Both sides were admonished to resume
cooperation at once. Also the foundation‘s council
noted that “the statutes of the Geschwister-Scholl-
Stiftung leave every opportunity open in the ques-
tion whether independent institutes should be
created. The foundation‘s council reserves the
right to make a decision of principle on how a pos-
sible dovetailing of independent institutes and the
college might be implemented.” Otl Aicher, who
sat in on the meeting as a guest, did not comment
on these resolutions and took it upon himself to
inform the inner senate so that they could give
their position. 1259
The reaction of the inner senate came two
weeks later: a complaint addressed to Theodor
Pfizer as the chairman of the foundation‘s council
demanding that a fact-finding commission be ap-
pointed. First of all, the inner senate stated, con-
trary to the foundation’s statutes, according to
which no new institute could be founded, there
was already a new institute of that type, namely,
the Siemens Studio of Electronic Music. “The sole
purpose of the foundation is the HfG and the Insti-
tute of Product Design, which on the other hand is
linked in substance with the HfG and consists of
its development teams and the Institute of Indus-
trialized Building. An institute that stands outside
 The rectorships of
Aicher, Maldonado
and Ohl
338 these institutions jeopardizes the pedagogical and
cultural conception for the sake of which the foun-
dation was created; it could, if appropriate, work
only within the framework of the HfG or the Insti-
tute of Product Design. Its present status is incon-
sistent with the bylaws.” Secondly, they stated
that in this connection Thorwald Risler had vio-
lated the HfG bylaws: “The lab for electronic music
was attached to the foundation without consult-
ing the inner senate.” And thirdly he was “planning
to detach the Institute of Product Design from its
close substantial ties with the HfG. This, too, is in-
consistent with the cultural and pedagogical con-
ception that led to the founding of the Geschwis-
ter-Scholl-Stiftung, and would be a violation of a
right established by years of tradition and deci-
sions by the school’s direction, against which the
foundation has never protested before.” 1260
Was the HfG really still the foremost concern of
its members’ thought and action? One can’t help
thinking that the development had been detached
from the thing itself and had assumed a dynamic
of its own, which should be described as demoral-
ization, dogmatism, and stubbornness. Thorwald
Risler at any rate no longer saw any sense in what
he was doing for the HfG, and, at the end of July
1964, agreed to terms of employment with the
“A School of Design That was quite clear
whose mission is to judging by the reaction
develop better products of one segment of the
and better information press, though not so
[…] is still in an isolated much of this city, to
position today. fairly normal disputes
within our school. We
find that people don’t
understand us, mis-
understand us.“
Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft in
Essen. On 13 August 1964 he asked Theodor Pfiz-
er to accept his resignation at year’s end. 1261
Thorwald Risler was not the only person who felt
there was nothing holding him on Kuhberg any-
more. One by one most of the leading figures of
the past years gave up their commitment to the
HfG, while the foundation did not find similarly
committed and successful people to replace them.
The long list of those who turned their back on
The second stop of the
traveling exhibit of the
HfG: The Neue Samm-
lung in Munich,
11 May–17 June 1964.
Photo: Roland Fürst
Archive: HfG (64/0393/4)
Ulm had begun with Hans Frieder Eychmüller, one
of the Ulm friends who had been there from the
very beginning. He resigned from the advisory
board as far back as 28 November 1963.
At the third meeting of the foundation‘s council
on 13 July 1964, Thorwald Risler announced that
he hoped to get a new job. He made one more
recommendation, which was implemented, though
unintentionally: “It seemed quite possible, he said,
that the foundation could get along without a
managing chairman of the foundation‘s executive
board if its activity was geared to consolidating
what had been achieved and not on further expan-
sion.” 1262 On 1 January 1965 he began working
for the Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissen-
schaft as the association’s director and head of
their central administration. Hellmut Becker, who
Otl Aicher in his
address at the official
opening, 11 May 1964.
had brought him to Ulm, was involved in this ap-
pointment as well. 1263
Along with Thorwald Risler, his closest col-
league, administrative director Günther Schweig-
kofler, also left Kuhberg as of 15 January 1965
after an April 1964 announcement; one of the
positions he held subsequently was at the Oden-
waldschule. 1264
On 23 October 1963, in the middle of the con-
flict with the rest of the world, Otl Aicher was
elected rector for a second term (1 October 1964
Otl Aicher, 1965.
Photo: unknown
Archive: HfG (65/0135/3)
through 30 September 1966) by the HfG’s extended
senate. (The election of the rector, according to
the new bylaws, had to be carried out one year in
advance, and the term was two years.) He did not
decide to run until the morning of the election day,
and received eight out of twelve votes. 1265 Tomás
Maldonado received only three votes (1 absten-
tion), and was extremely indignant about this re-
sult. After hoping earlier that he would become
rector, he now had to get used to the idea of being
vice rector for two more years. 1266 But then, unex-
pectedly and as if in answer to his prayer, it did
happen, because Otl Aicher announced on 18
June 1964 that he could not serve his second term
in office due to poor health. 1267– One is struck by
the fact that Otl Aicher announced he was resign-
ing from office (18 June 1964) directly after it was
definite that Thorwald Risler was resigning (15
June 1964). No doubt the health reasons were
weighty. And yet, when Otl Aicher resigned, his
struggle for all his ideas, to implement which he
had even been willing to accept that the entire in-
stitution would be in jeopardy, became question-
able. In the end it looked as though, in the lengthy
dispute with Thorwald Risler, his only concern had
been to prevail. Starting 30 September 1964, Otl
Aicher also gave up his development team, the
famous e5, and from then on only worked in his
private office. 1268 He did continue working as a lec-
turer at the HfG until the end. In October 1966, he
was chosen to be project designer for the 1972
Munich Olympic games. This new job was a novel,
extremely satisfying sphere of activity for him, ab-
sorbing most of his energy (and the result of his
work catapulted him to the international summit
Visitors in Munich.
Photos: Roland Fürst
Archive: HfG (64/0403/1 and
64/0397/2)
of graphic designers). Though he still belonged 339
to the HfG, he was apparently done with it after
1965. When he left, the HfG lost its most impor-
tant driving force, stimulus, and motivator. 1269
The rectorship of Tomás Maldonado
October 1964 through September 1966
After Otl Aicher’s resignation Tomás Maldonado
was elected rector by the extended senate on 25
September 1964 for a term running from 30 Sep-
tember 1964 to 1 October 1966 (six votes for him,
one invalid, three abstentions). 1270 In this election
there was practically only the possibility of decid-
ing in favor of Tomás Maldonado or Herbert Ohl,
for Gerd Kalow and Horst Rittel left the HfG at the
beginning of the new academic year, Otl Aicher
automatically became vice rector for a year in ac-
cordance with HfG bylaws, and Walter Zeischegg
had declared that he would not run for office –
and those were all the design lecturers eligible for
rectorship. “Mr. Kalow asked to make the following
observation regarding the last time he had attended
a meeting: He said he regretted that the HfG’s pol-
icy was now such that no larger electoral panel
was available, that a number of lecturers had
fewer rights, and there were no laws that stood
above persons. […] He could not help remarking
that he thought this election was almost a farce.”
Thorwald Risler, who was still managing chairman
of the foundation’s executive board until the end
of the year, doubted whether the board would be
able to confirm this election: “In the current situa-
tion the board’s approval of the election, which is
necessary according to the bylaws, is especially
important. In the intra-faculty disputes during the
past years, in the attacks of lecturers who have left
in the meantime and of some of the students, and
in subsequent discussions in the press and in the
Landtag the person of Maldonado played a special
role. This role was also examined in statements
made at confidential sessions of the administrative
council […]. As one of the few personnel-related
conclusions of their deliberations, the Three Wise
Men recommended that Mr. Maldonado be dis-
missed. Both the new structure of a faculty hired
because they met higher standards and the future
human climate in the college will be greatly bur-
dened in the near future by a Maldonado rector-
ship.” 1271 Thorwald Risler’s new colleagues on the
executive board, Walter Erbe, the Land politician,
and Hans Zumsteg, an Ulm businessman, shared
his misgivings, for this and another reason: “The
extended senate as the electoral body of the HfG,
they said, had a total of 18 votes if all 15 planned-
for lecturer positions were filled. Because the po-
sitions had not been filled, only ten persons who
were entitled to vote participated in the 25 Sep-
tember election. Therefore in the view of Messrs.
 The rectorships of
Aicher, Maldonado
and Ohl
340 Erbe and Zumsteg, it did not make much sense to
confirm Mr. Maldonado as a normally elected rec-
tor. They said they accepted the fact that Mr. Mal-
donado had been elected, but only in the sense
that he carries on the business of the rector until
a regular election can take place after all planned
positions are filled. Along these lines, they said,
they pleaded that no confirmation in the normal
sense be expressed, but that Mr. Maldonado
merely be confirmed as a managing rector on the
basis of the election results.” 1272 But the executive
Left: Werner Wirsing, board had to put aside its misgivings. The confir-
Tomás Maldonado, mation of the rector by the executive board pro-
Rodolfo Bonetto at the vided for in the HfG bylaws was intended to be
board meeting of the merely legal supervision; the orderly carrying out
Baden- Württemberg of the electoral procedure could not be ques-
Werkbund at the HfG, tioned. 1273 Tomás Maldonado was confirmed as
18 Jan. 1965. rector by the foundation’s executive board on
Photo: Klaus Werner 8 December 1964. 1274
Archive: HfG It was only with great difficulty that Otto Pflei-
(ohne Negativ. Wirsing)
derer, the president of the Baden-Württemberg
State Central Bank, had been persuaded by Theo-
dor Pfizer to agree – but just for a year – to be a
Right: The second member of the foundation’s council in spite of his
Baden-Württemberg reluctance. Now that the year was over, he was on
Werkbund meeting at the verge of resigning from office although in the
the HfG. About 150 course of the year the foundation‘s council had not
members attended managed to come up with a successor. Theodor
events on 2 and 3 July Pfizer begged him to wait: “Of course you agreed
1965. to accept the appointment to the foundation‘s
Photo: Herbert Pée council of the School of Design for this year only.
Archive: Südwestpresse But for me it is not a very pleasant situation if Mr.
Risler and Mr. Schweigkofler, both representing
the administration, leave, Mr. Aicher resigns from
his rector’s position – something he’s already
done – and you, Mr. Becker, and maybe other
people leave the foundation‘s council.” 1275
For Hellmut Becker, too, had definitively resigned
all his foundation-related offices, effective 31
December 1964, on 3 September 1964 when he
moved from Kreßbronn on Lake Constance to Ber-
lin, where he had been appointed as the first di-
rector of the Max-Planck-Institut für Bildungsfor-
schung (Max Planck Institute of Educational re-
search). 1276 He resigned from the foundation‘s
council, the executive board of the Society of
Friends, the Society of Friends itself, and from the
Institute of Product Development and Design.
“I don’t want to conceal from you personally that
one contributing factor in this decision is the fact
that cooperation between the administrative staff
I introduced and the designers has proved to be
impossible. […] My personal friendship with Otl
Aicher and Inge Aicher-Scholl, too, remains unaf-
fected by this step, although – as you were aware
– I was very often not in agreement with Mr. Ai-
cher’s behavior in recent years.”
Hans Gugelot, who together with Otl Aicher
(and initially, it goes without saying, with Max Bill)
formed the first rank of the HfG designers, had of
course already withdrawn into his institute, sick-
ened by the turmoil of 1962, and had been con-
centrating on client orders. Effective 31 August
1965 he transformed this institute from a nonprofit
association into a commercial company, because
the nonprofit character of the association no longer
applied. His business had already been officially
accredited but had not yet been entered in the
Neu-Ulm commercial register when Hans Gugelot
had a heart attack and died on 10 September 1965
at the age of 45. 1277 The association (the Institute
of Product Development and Design) was dis-
banded by members of the association on 18 Jan-
uary 1966. 1278
Tomás Maldonado, the first in the second rank
of the HfG, terminated his institute activity, the e6,
which had been in existence since 1958, effective
30 September 1966. 1279 Nine months later, on 30
June 1967, he also ended his teaching activities as
a lecturer and left the HfG. 1280
Eberhard Schnelle at a
Wednesday seminar on
Information and organ-
ization, 1964.
Photo: Roland Fürst
Archive: HfG (64/0591/1)
Now, going back to December 1963, let us look
at the foundation‘s council, the new supervisory
body of the foundation.
The foundation’s new statutes were authorized
by the regulatory authority, the ministry of educa-
tion and the arts, on 4 January 1964, effective on
that date. 1281 In filling the six member positions
of the foundation‘s council, which were to be ap-
pointed by the Society of Friends “in consultation
with”, not in agreement with the HfG, Otl Aicher
tried to circumvent this regulation of the statutes.
It had, of course, been passed by the general
meeting on 28 November 1963 against his will.
The new foundation‘s council, however, had to be
constituted quickly so that the foundation would
again become capable of acting vis-à-vis the Land
and the federal government – after all, they needed
to get the Land to release the funds for 1964 as
soon as possible. On 10 December 1963, speaking
to Klaus Dohrn, Otl Aicher insisted that the inde-
pendent members of the foundation‘s council
could be appointed by the executive board of the
Society of Friends only “in agreement” with the
HfG’s direction: “The term used in the statutes,
‘consultation’, was chosen for the optical effect.”
In addition he demanded that the previous old
members of the administrative council should not
be appointed to the foundation‘s council. This
meant there was once more the risk of a blockade,
this time against the constituting of the founda-
tion‘s council. Presumably Otl Aicher hoped that
he would be able to interpret the crucial sections
as he wished after all, because the advisory board
and the administrative council would continue in
a managing position until the foundation‘s council
was constituted. But Thorwald Risler, who was
able to watch the argument as an outside observ-
er, prophesied that Klaus Dohrn would prevail for
a simple reason: “In the dispute about the six seats
of the Society of Friends, the executive board of 341
the Society of Friends and Mr. Aicher or the inner
senate this time confront each other without the
buffering layer of municipal and ministry represen-
tatives, who usually soften in the long run.” 1282 And
that is exactly what happened: Klaus Dohrn did not
deviate from the wording of the foundation’s stat-
utes and the minutes of the general meeting by
one iota. Both documents clearly stated that the
decision was up to the Society of Friends: “A right
of the college to take upon itself the appointment
Mia Seeger and Tomás
Maldonado during a
visit by the German
Design Council in
December 1964.
Photo: Roland Fürst
Archive: HfG (64/0672/2)
of members of the foundation‘s council, i. e., of an
authority above the college, cannot be seriously
discussed .“ 1283 It was, of course, precisely the
higher authority of the foundation that Otl Aicher
had always rejected, and yet he had not managed
to prevent the hierarchy in this aspect. It was not
until things had reached a point where the founda-
tion‘s council lost all significance that the whole
structure on Kuhberg collapsed so pitifully that
none of those involved deserved what happened.
Without further ado, Klaus Dohrn countered Otl
Aicher’s delaying tactics with an ultimatum: If the
latter had not named any names by 6 January
1964, he would not hesitate to appoint the six
independent members of the foundation‘s coun-
cil. 1284 And so, on 24 January 1964, he appointed
the following:
 The rectorships of
Aicher, Maldonado
and Ohl
342 Hellmut Becker, Walther Hinsch for the federal ministry of eco-
Max Bill, nomics,
Klaus Dohrn, Theodor Pfizer for the city of Ulm, and
Günther Grzimek, Josef Alfons Thuma as the president of the Land
Otto Pfleiderer, and Trade Supervision Department for the Baden-
Hans Zumsteg, an Ulm businessman whom Otl Württemberg ministry of economics. 1286
Aicher had brought into the dialogue. 1285
The foundation‘s council was constituted on
In the course of the years up to 31 December 6 February 1964 and elected Theodor Pfizer as
1968, this front line of independent members of its chairman, and Klaus Dohrn as his deputy. 1287
the foundation‘s council eroded considerably, for All three members of the foundation’s executive
gradually members would resign, while no one board, Inge Aicher-Scholl, Max Guther, and Thor-
Tomás Maldonado saw to it that successors were found. In the end wald Risler, announced their resignation. It had
and Theodor Pfizer only Max Bill and Günther Grzimek were left. Inci- been common knowledge for a long time, actually
during a visit of the Ulm dentally, the statutes of the foundation stated that since the spring of 1959, that Inge Aicher-Scholl
municipal council, the six independent members of the foundation‘s wanted to leave the foundation completely for per-
23 Feb. 1965. council had a two-year term only, but later no one sonal reasons, but the members of the administra-
tive council had been reluctant to let her go, and
had been able to convince her to stay time after
time. For the past two years Max Guther had also
become tired of Kuhberg. Two weeks later, on 24
February 1964, the new executive board was final-
ly complete:
Max Guther (incumbent member of the execu-
tive board) and Hans Zumsteg (incumbent
member of the foundation‘s council) switched
their positions,
Inge Aicher-Scholl was replaced by Walter Erbe,
the politico-cultural representative of the
FDP/DVP who had done his utmost to support
the HfG in the Landtag ever since its founding,
and Thorwald Risler remained in office until the
end of the year as the managing chairman of
the executive board. 1288
The most serious aspect of the situation up to
December 1967 was the organizational and finan-
cial plight of the foundation.
The decline of the foundation’s administration
was also due to the loss of personnel. The founda-
tion was supposed to fulfill two important func-
tions for the HfG: It was supposed to administer it
and to take care of financing. These functions had
been shared from the very beginning by the exec-
utive board‘s managing chairman and the adminis-
trative director. When Thorwald Risler and Günther
Schweigkofler left the foundation, a successor had
Photo: unknown remembered that. – The representation of the gov- been found only for the managing chairman, while
Archive: HfG (65/0066/1)
ernment agencies was taken on by the same offi- the position of administrative director remained
cials who had already been on the administrative unfilled for the time being. Subsequently there
council: was a succession of administrative directors, and
this lack of stability impaired the reliability of the
Günther Boulanger for the Baden-Württemberg foundation’s administration.
ministry of finance, It was Hellmut Becker who again made the
Wolfgang Donndorf for the Baden-Württemberg deciding suggestion as to who should succeed
ministry of education and the arts, Thorwald Risler: On 21 September 1964 he told
Karl Gussone for the federal ministry of the Theodor Pfizer, the chairman of the foundation‘s
interior, council, about the lawyer Friedrich Rau. 1289 Fried-
Martin Walser and Inge
Aicher-Scholl at a cultu-
ral event in the Ulm
Schuhhaus in 1965 or
1966.
Photo: Florian Fischer
Archive: HfG (Depositum 98/6)
Visit of the Ulm munici-
pal council, 23 Feb.
1965.
Photos: Roland Fürst
Archive: HfG (65/0169/1 and
65/0175/1) and Südwestpresse
rich Rau was 48 years old at this point and had
gathered considerable experience in college
administration and university legislation working
in the administration of the University of Tübingen
and as a curator of the University of Frankfurt/Main,
his final position had been as the permanent sec-
retary of the municipal government of Berlin. The
Social Democrats had nominated the university
expert as a candidate for the 1965 Bundestag
election. Theodor Pfizer asked him on 19 October
1964 whether he would be willing to assume the
position of administrative director of the Geschwis-
ter-Scholl-Stiftung effective 1 January 1965. 1290
To be sure, conditions were different than they
had been during Thorwald Risler’s term: Friedrich
Rau was to spend only one week a month in Ulm
and receive a fixed remuneration directly from the
foundation. (Thorwald Risler had received his va-
riable salary from the Society of Friends as its
secretary.) Friedrich Rau agreed, and the founda-
tion‘s council appointed him at its fourth meeting
on 5 November 1964, with a term that was to run
from 1 January 1965 until 1 January 1970, but
that was longer than Friedrich Rau could stand
it in Ulm. 1291 He wanted to throw in the towel be-
fore the first year was out, but was gradually tal-
ked into going on with the job until 30 September
1967.
Friedrich Rau’s experience in college adminis-
tration and university legislation was based on his
work at state institutions. As the curator of the
University of Frankfurt he was the state adminis-
trator who worked closely with the university
administrator. He was used to the university indi-
cating its teaching-related needs to him. He would
then calculate what the university’s financial needs
were and set up its budget. But other rules were
in effect for the HfG: rules relating to private enter-
prise as compared to those relating to a planned
economy. For the private foundation it had been
a question of survival to use available funds eco-
nomically. Friedrich Rau started with the premise
that professionally essential requirements had to
be financed (by the state) at all events, but the his-
tory of the HfG from start to finish is a history of
working on the edge of what was professionally
essential. For the HfG his method was not appro- 343
priate because it had no government safety net –
the HfG could not draw up a supplementary bud-
get. For everything that could not be paid out of
the operating budget, the foundation had to get
loans. Up to 1964 this had been necessary only
for the construction of the HfG (i. e., there was col-
lateral pledged as a security against these out-
standing liabilities), but never for items relating to
teaching (without a corresponding value secured
by property).
In view of his history and his interests, we can
also understand that Friedrich Rau limited himself
in his perspective from the start to financing the
foundation exclusively with public funds – as
though he were completely unfamiliar with the
history of the foundation. (Limiting his work to one
week per month would, however, not have allowed
him to canvas private industry to any extent.) After
the first three months of working for the founda-
tion he set up a financing plan in which three
items are noteworthy:
Firstly, the nationalization of the HfG was a
completely self-evident solution for Friedrich
Rau in order to secure permanent financing
of the foundation – as though the private, non-
governmental factor had never been in the
foreground of the HfG’s history;
secondly, nationalization for him was not just
one direction among many that could be pur-
sued as naturally as any other; rather he felt
nationalization was the only way out; Friedrich
Rau never considered another alternative;
thirdly, from the beginning he saw that the fed-
eral government and the Land rejected these
nationalization plans. Nonetheless he clung to
his concept.
He also repeatedly emphasized that he only want-
ed to work for the foundation and the HfG under
the condition that his concept would be imple-
mented. Consequently he packed his bags when
it was clear that he had failed.
It seems as though Friedrich Rau’s presence
hardly did the HfG any good. He was not a stabiliz-
 The rectorships of
Aicher, Maldonado
and Ohl
344
Tomás Maldonado at
the opening of the
HfG’s traveling exhibi-
tion at the Stedelijk
Museum in Amsterdam,
7 May 1965.
Photos: unknown
Archive: HfG (65/0333/2) and
Südwestpresse
ing factor, since his sporadic presence in Ulm was
much too short for that. In reality the HfG was
largely left to itself. Neither the foundation‘s coun-
cil nor the executive board seriously interfered in
matters that concerned the school.
Breaking down the functions of the managing
chairman of the executive board of the Geschwis-
ter-Scholl-Stiftung in the way Thorwald Risler had
taken them over from Inge Aicher-Scholl and
developed them turned out to be an illusion. This
caused the entire structure of how responsibilities
were divided between the foundation and the HfG
to fall apart. Otl Aicher, in his conflict with Thor-
wald Risler, had successfully undermined the con-
stitutional significance of the executive board – to
be a strong executive of the foundation‘s council
(which developed objectives and acted in a super-
visory capacity). The idea that the foundation
should supervise and control the HfG seemed pre-
posterous to Otl Aicher. Both institutions, he be-
lieved, should work together, and that is why both
were on the same level. Thus, writing to Thorwald
Risler, he said: “Two years ago we began to devel-
op ideas for new school bylaws. That’s when the
first disputes between us began. I felt the funda-
mental principle of new school bylaws was a part-
ner relationship between the foundation and the
school. You, on the other hand, emphasized the
employer-employee function. […] I had never
questioned certain sovereign functions of the
foundation, but assumed that the prerequisite for
reasonable development could be daily coopera-
tion between the school and the foundation with
both having equal status.“ 1292 Shortly thereafter,
with satisfaction, Otl Aicher quoted a conversation
he had had with Walter Gropius in a letter to Hell-
mut Becker: “His experiences at the Bauhaus and
at Harvard had been that the administration must
definitely be below the school. I had trouble ex-
plaining to him that the foundation here in Ulm
was intended to be management on an equal foot-
ing.“ 1293 Somewhat later he explained his view in
more detail: “The school and the foundation must
be regarded as two sides of the same enterprise.
Every attempt to raise the foundation to a status of
higher authority falsifies, out of a single subjective
interest, the intentions that led us in founding the
Ulm School of Design, and also in appointing Mr.
Risler.“ 1294 As far as the substance of the work was
concerned, Otl Aicher was certain that cultural
responsibilities should be taken over exclusively
by the HfG and the foundation should assume an
ancillary function: “The school bylaws state that
the foundation puts its services at the disposal of
the HfG.” 1295 To be sure, Friedrich Rau was not a
fighter who ran the organization on his own terms,
but a mediator. He did not assert the will of the
foundation‘s council against the resistance of the
HfG, and as a result the foundation lost its execu-
tive power. Friedrich Rau practiced precisely the
type of cooperation that Otl Aicher would have
wished from Thorwald Risler and that implied that
the HfG had to share the decisions of the founda-
tion‘s council or could also block them. Now the
foundation‘s council had lost its significance as a
group meant to formulate objectives. This was
shown by the example of the HfG bylaws.
The period from 1965 on is thus characterized
by a rapid decline of administrative achievements
by the foundation. At the same time the control of
the foundation’s supervisory branch – the founda-
tion‘s council – over the administration waned.
And furthermore the influence on the HfG by the
foundation‘s council as a formulator of objectives
was reduced to the point where the HfG was able
to openly oppose the council’s decisions without
having to fear sanctions. In what follows, I shall
mention three examples of this development.
Firstly, there was the unending story of changes
in the HfG bylaws. There was not a trace left in the
years after 1964 of the conditions laid down by
the Landtag at the end of 1963, upon whose fulfill-
ment further subsidies to the foundation were con-
tingent. On the one hand the Landtag no longer
cared whether the conditions it had imposed were
actually observed, while on the other hand the
foundation‘s council did not manage to ensure
that all the conditions were fulfilled at the HfG.
While the first condition – the elimination of the
advisory board – had long since been fulfilled, the
HfG, in changing its bylaws, successfully opposed
every intervention until the end. The two Landtag
demands in this connection were as follows:
parity of the lecturers (section 14 of the HfG
bylaws), so that non-designers could also be
elected rector and
termination of student participation in the elec-
tion of the rector (section 6).
From the start, even before the foundation was
officially informed of these Landtag conditions, the
HfG refused to give in on the last two points. 1296
The Landtag plenum put the decision whether
the blocking of the authorized Land subsidy total-
Theodor Pfizer, Kultus-
minister Wilhelm Hahn,
Franz Wiedemeier,
and Hans Lorenser,
30.11.1965.
Photo: unknown
Archive: Südwestpresse
ing DM 600,000 could be revoked in the hands of
the politico-cultural committee, and there people
were agreeable. As early as 16 December 1963
the request of the ministry of education and the
arts to release a first installment totaling DM
150,000 was authorized. The HfG accepted the
reason (foreseeably negotiations with the HfG
would drag on, which is why they needed time),
but how would the Landtag succeed in defending
its interests without exerting pressure? 1297
The foundation was officially informed of the
Landtag conditions on 17 December 1963. 1298 The
ministry of education and the arts announced at
the same time that it had been charged to work
toward implementing the measures resulting from
the conditions. On 15 January 1964 the inner sen-
ate was asked by the foundation to decide what
would be the HfG’s position. 1299 It noted that the
HfG agreed with the Landtag conditions on the
first five points, and that two points still needed to
be discussed (reintroduction of the basic course,
former HfG students as lecturers). On the remain-
ing four points the inner senate was fundamentally
of a different opinion; among these were the two
main demands that students no longer be allowed
to participate in electing the rector and that all lec-
turers be eligible to run for rector: “The participa-
tion of a student representative in electing the rec-
tor is an old right at the Ulm School of Design that
has parallels at other schools as well. A right, once
given, should not be revoked. […] There is actually
no reason why lecturers who teach supplementary
subjects should not be able to become full lectur-
ers. The school bylaws should be amended on this
point. On the other hand it makes sense to elect
the rector at a school of design only from among
the designers. A school that represents a certain
orientation must entrust its direction to the group
of lecturers who are responsible for that orienta-
tion.”
The executive board and the foundation‘s council
used this as the basis for the foundation’s position
statement addressed to the ministry of education
and the arts on 6 February 1964. 1300 The members
of parliament could now expect that the founda-
tion would work toward having the HfG change its
bylaws on these last two points. And this weak
Photo: unknown declaration of intention was sufficient for the pol-
Archive: HfG (65/0183/4)
itico-cultural committee to release the remaining
DM 450,000 in Land subsidies, at its 105th ses-
sion on 13 March 1964. 1301 Also during this ses-
sion, the issue surfaced whether reports from the
Bonn ministries that the federal subsidy was to be
blocked or cut were true. While the representative
of the ministry of education and the arts claimed
he did not know, obviously these first warning sig-
nals had already reached Stuttgart. – In fact, the
HfG passed a version of its bylaws on 30 Septem-
ber 1964 that corresponded to the Landtag’s de- 345
mands in both crucial points. The students were
not to be involved in electing the rector, and all
lecturers were to be equally eligible to run for rec-
tor. 1302 But at its fourth session on 5 November
1964 (against Wolfgang Donndorf’s objection), the
foundation‘s council decided not to approve these
bylaws because certain details still needed to be
revised: “The School of Design has amended its
bylaws in accordance with the recommendations
of the Baden-Württemberg Landtag and submitted
them to the foundation‘s council for authorization.
The foundation‘s council, however, considers addi-
tional changes to be necessary and therefore in-
tends to delay authorization until a fundamentally
revised version is submitted to the council.” 1303
Despite this the member of the politico-cultural
committee who submitted the year-end report
stated that the Landtag recommendations had
been “fully taken into consideration”. 1304 Now the
Landtag conditions were finally cleared out of the
way, but the foundation and the HfG were still pre-
occupied with the HfG bylaws.
One year later things on Kuhberg were going
wrong. The foundation‘s council, at its fifth meet-
ing, was of the opinion that the HfG bylaws, long
since approved, should finally go into effect,
though “with the reservation that there had yet
been no resolution by the extended senate of the
HfG”. Moreover, a more far-reaching amendment
of the bylaws was to be worked out in agreement
with the college. 1305 Friedrich Rau, Thorwald Ris-
ler’s successor as the managing chairman of the
foundation‘s executive board, had transferred his
experience at state universities to the HfG and pre-
sented the argument that the agreement of the
extended senate to an amendment of the bylaws
“was necessary in accordance with general law
governing higher education”. 1306 Under such cir-
cumstances they could not even think about the
special conditions at the HfG. Now he asked To-
más Maldonado, on 18 October 1965, to get the
extended senate to agree to the amendment of the
bylaws decided on by the foundation‘s council on
5 November 1964. In practice, cooperation bet-
ween the HfG and the foundation was now on a
friendly, inconsequential level where no decisions
were made, or implemented once they had been
made. The extended senate made a few more edi-
torial changes in the text of the bylaws on 5 and 6
November 1965, and the foundation‘s council now
intended to put into effect this version at its sixth
session on 16 November 1965. 1307 However, Fried-
rich Rau did not want to act so precipitously and
once more asked the extended senate for its ap-
proval of this version. 1308
Naturally, the student body was now made up
of different students than two years earlier, when
there had still been indications that they were in
 The rectorships of Participants at the Manuel Villazon Vas- Zvonimir Radic (Jugo- International designers pictured, Zvonimir
Aicher, Maldonado ICSID conference: quez (Mexico), Alexan- slavia), Tomás Maldo- and design teachers Radic, Tomás Maldona-
and Ohl Josine de Cressonniere dre Wollner (HfG), nado (HfG), Misha met at the HfG to dis- do, and Misha Black.
(Belgium), André de Arthur Pulos (USA), Black (Great Britain), cuss the teaching of Photo: unknown
Poerck (Belgium), Roger Gino Valle (Italy), Michi- Nathan Shapira (USA). industrial design at a Archive: HfG (65/0645/1)
Tallon (France), Basilio taka Yoshioka (Japan), conference of the inter-
Uribe (Argentina), Shinji Koike (Japan), national design associa-
Gui Bonsiepe (HfG), tion ICSID, 17 through
19 Sept. 1965;

346
Photo: Nick Roericht sympathy with the amendment of the bylaws.
Archive: Südwestpresse
Now, on 1 December 1965, the students held a
one-day strike to protest the fact that their right
to participate in electing the rector was to be re-
voked. 1309
The argument of the politico-cultural committee,
they said, had been that the students had abused
their right and had thus contributed to the politici-
zation of the HfG. This was not true, however. “The
student body of the Ulm HfG has drawn the con-
sequences from the behavior of the HfG’s extend-
ed senate and the foundation‘s council of the GSS,
and has resolved, after its previous arguments
were cited without success, to have a one-day
warning protest strike on 1 December 1965 and
to issue a communiqué. […] The student body did
not abuse its constitutional rights. […] In the opin-
ion of the student body the resolution of the ex-
tended senate has been based on the assumption
that if the recommendations of the politico-cultu-
ral committee on point 5 are not complied with,
the HfG’s Land subsidy is in jeopardy. The student
body feels that this argument is irresponsibly
speculative, in view of the fact that a guaranteed
right is being taken away. […] In part, the founda-
tion‘s council has used the arguments of the politi-
co-cultural committee. […] Also their arguments
are based on the belief that the students of the
HfG have no right to something – the right to elect
the rector – that other universities and colleges,
and newly founded institutions in Germany also
do not possess. This argument, the students be-
lieve, is uncalled-for in this context. It is a con-
cealed argument for taking away a right that was
deliberately and intentionally given in an emphati-
cally anti-fascist and democratic institution. […]
However, the students of the Ulm HfG are not will-
ing to be systematically deprived of their guaran-
teed rights. They protest against being deprived of
their rights in this way, because they believe these
rights are an essential part of what the school is
about.”
In addition, the students delivered an ultimatum:
If by 8 December 1965 “no agreement has been
reached with the school administration regarding
the demands of the HfG’s students, the students
have decided to begin a strike for an unlimited
period. In the event that disciplinary measures by
individual lecturers or by the school’s direction
result from this concerted action for individual stu-
dents or student groups, the students of the Ulm
HfG declare that they will oppose such measures.
The student council and student representatives of
the Ulm HfG reserve the right to publish this com-
muniqué in the press.” Tomás Maldonado, how-
ever, was able to pacify the students by assuring
them that he would support their concerns before
the foundation‘s council. 1310
By this point, of course, the Landtag assumed that
the HfG had long since fulfilled all the conditions
that had been stipulated exactly two years earli-
er. 1311 But a few months later, on 29 April 1966,
the extended senate again passed a new version
of the text of the bylaws that rescinded all previ-
ous changes. 1312 What is more, Friedrich Rau also
suggested that the students should take part not
only in the election of the rector, but also in the
sessions of the inner senate. 1313 This did go too far
for the members of the foundation‘s council; they
rejected the HfG’s new statements: “The students
are not partners of the college […], but part of the
college. The students belong to the college. Stu-
dent participation in academic self-government
must be limited to consulting on factual questions.
It is inappropriate to let students take part in per-
sonnel decisions. That includes electing the rector.
Participation in factual decisions might, on the
other hand, be more explicitly grounded in the
bylaws.” 1314 The request by the foundation‘s coun-
cil that approval of the new bylaws be considered
once again resulted in a Sibylline response by
Tomás Maldonado, on 29 October 1966, that the
rector and senate were “of the opinion that the
vote [of the students in the election of the rector;
author’s note] does not have political significance,
but only symbolic value. Moreover it also appears
[…] to be difficult to take away from the students
a right they have held for many years.” 1315 The un-
ending squabbling between the foundation’s ex-
ecutive board, the foundation‘s council, the stand-
ing committee of the foundation‘s council, the
inner senate, the extended senate, and the rector
fizzled out because starting in 1967 changes in the
HfG bylaws were linked with the revision of the
foundation’s statutes, but both came to an end in
the confusion of the year 1968. 1316
A second example of the organizational and finan-
cial decline of the foundation is the chaos into
which the bookkeeping of the foundation was
plunged. Thus, for example, as of 1 January 1965,
there was no administrative director continuously
at work there anymore. A random illustration of
how this affected the school is the fact that the
heating system of the HfG building was going to
be replaced – but this conversion was based on
Inge Aicher-Scholl, an abstruse report with an incorrect calculation
17 Sept. 1965. that it would save money. And the fact that this
Photo: unknown calculation was wishful thinking should have been
Archive: HfG (65/0671/2) no secret to the foundation’s administration, be-
cause the foundation’s auditor had also recog-
nized the error. At any rate, the expert had to be
paid, for one; secondly, there was the replacement
of the heating system, and thirdly the foundation
now saved no money on heating costs, but had to
spend even more. Finally, the total cost to the
foundation totaled DM 260,000, although the esti-
mate had been for DM 200,000. This became one 347
of the nails in the HfG’s financial coffin: For these
DM 200,000 the foundation had already obtained
an expensive, short-term loan, but because the
costs had been exceeded, it needed an additional
DM 60,000 in 1967 alone, and this in turn exacer-
bated the liquidity crisis of the foundation in 1967.
The Land General Accounting Office brought to
light what had been happening, so that an account
of these events also reached the Landtag’s finance
committee and created political havoc. 1317 – Again,
when it was important, in a financially tense situa-
tion, to obtain DM 54,000 in Land subsidies, the
foundation’s administration failed. The Land gov-
ernment had decided on a general 6 percent cut-
back of all budget items. An exception could be
made only for those items where there was proof
that this cutback would be an absolute hardship.
Although the foundation needed this money ur-
gently, the administration failed to observe the
deadline by which it had to file its objection. A few
lines would have been sufficient, for the adminis-
tration could indeed substantiate the fact that the
foundation needed every penny. Thus the Land
subsidy for 1966 was needlessly cut by DM
54,000. 1318
Finally, here is a third example that illustrates
the mismanagement of the years beginning with
1965. In 1965 Friedrich Rau introduced a new
method of setting up the foundation budget; the
method can be explained by his history: Because
the HfG was the only endowed institution and was
supposed to be largely self-governing, he asked
Rector Tomás Maldonado to draw up the desired
budget of the HfG himself. The foundation would
then make every effort to raise the necessary
money. The procedure practiced up to that point,
where the budget would not be drawn up until it
was certain how much money the foundation was
supposed to receive had the disadvantage that
the HfG was always forced to make compromises
when it came to teaching materials and facilities.
But at the same time the procedure also had the
undisputable advantage that basically only money
that was really available was spent. To date there
had also not been any deficits worth mentioning.
However, in 1965, DM 420,000 were spent out-
side the budget plan, i. e.: without the authoriza-
tion of the foundation‘s council. This sum corre-
sponded to the subsidies of the federal govern-
ment and the city of Ulm. In the same year the
foundation’s books showed a deficit of DM
250,000. In order to close this gap, the foundation
had to get a second expensive short-term loan.
The joke was that it was not until the end of 1967
that the foundation‘s council could be informed by
the rudimentary administration of the foundation
of the full extent of these nonbudgetary expenses
and of the deficit of 1965.
 The rectorships of
Aicher, Maldonado
and Ohl
348 And so we come to the most unpleasant aspect of
the HfG’s history after 1964: its finances.
In the past, the budget for the HfG had been sup-
ported by four pillars: subsidies from the city, the
Land, and the federal government, and the HfG’s
own income (primarily research and development
commissions). During the founding period these
four supports had not been erected one after the
other, but had all had to stand at the same time.
That means they were closely connected. If one
Memorial ceremony for column began to sway, it threatened to pull down
Hans Gugelot, 23 Nov. the whole structure.
1965: The first of these pillars consisted of the foun-
dation’s own income, which it obtained for com-
Address by Hans Eck- missioned work by the development teams. For-
stein, head of the Neue merly the foundation’s contact to industry had
Sammlung, Munich; he come about almost exclusively through the Society
was preceded by Tomás of Friends or had been arranged by it. The Society
Maldonado. of Friends had been created for the simple pur-
Photo: Simon Resch pose of having a pool of like-minded people who
Archive: Südwestpresse were willing to support the HfG. When Thorwald
Risler came to Ulm, he activated the then somno-
lent Society of Friends and became its general
manager; its executive board was expanded to
five members. When it became certain in 1964
that Thorwald Risler would leave Ulm, the execu-
tive board of the Society of Friends openly stated
on 27 April 1964 that in the future the foundation
could expect no additional funds from the society.
The unanimous resolution read as follows: “Since
under the given circumstances it seems impos-
sible to implement the plan, which the executive
board approves in principle, for a reorganization of
the Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung and an expansion
of its functions, the board has decided not to be-
come active along these lines. That means it will
no longer be possible to encourage supporters in
the private sector to remain committed or to be-
come recommitted.” 1319 When Thorwald Risler left
the foundation’s executive board, the connection
between the Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung and the
Society of Friends broke off. Friedrich Rau as a
politician with a special focus on education was
neither interested nor qualified to maintain contact
with industry. While the Society of Friends was not
liquidated until the end of the HfG, i. e., December
1968, it was no longer active on behalf of the
HfG. 1320 Furthermore, the income of the foundation
from industry orders had been an important factor
in the financing plan since the HfG was founded.
Certainly HfG lecturers worked on industry-com-
missioned projects after 1965 as well, but increas-
ingly without the foundation’s help.
The second pillar of support that began to teeter
as a result of the 1962 crisis was the federal subsi-
dy. Unrest at the HfG and in the press was reflect-
ed in the budget as early as 1963 in a cutback of
the federal subsidy. This cutback was minimal:
instead of DM 300,000 (1962), the federal minis-
try of the interior paid only DM 270,000 in 1963.
But the Bonn ministry reacted to the tremors in
Ulm like a seismograph: The creeping decline of
the foundation was accompanied by the with-
drawal of this federal subsidy. On 26 April 1963,
at the first meeting of the foundation‘s council
after the HfG bylaws were revised, the representa-
tive of the ministry on the council, Karl Gussone,
had already openly expressed his doubts whether
financial support of the HfG was defensible in the
future. But there was profound lack of concern on
the part of the HfG; there was a belief that both
the Landtag and the Bundestag would subsidize
the foundation forever, and that it was just a ques-
tion of how high the subsidies would be. However,
a few weeks later, the finance committee of the
Bundestag sent a clear signal to Ulm that pointed
in a very different direction: It cut the subsidy from
the 1964 budget estimate. Thus in spring of 1964
a new application for the federal subsidy had to be
submitted, and that essentially depended on the
situation in the Landtag or, in other words, on
whether the contributions to the foundation were
still blocked. The federal subsidy had always been
contingent on whether the HfG was an institution
of higher learning. It was precisely this status of
the HfG that had been seriously questioned be-
cause of the crises of 1962 and 1963, the retrac-
tion of the concept of scientific research by the
institutes, and by the fact that the theoreticians at
the HfG had been discredited. 1321 The foundation
did receive a federal subsidy for 1964 as well, but
it had been cut back once more, to a mere DM
250,000. The trend that had begun a year earlier
had not been arrested.
On the contrary: During his negotiations with
the federal ministry of the interior, Thorwald Risler
learned that the ministry’s subsidy for 1965 and
beyond was in serious jeopardy. “At least it can be
expected that the subsidy will be steadily reduced
in the years to come.” 1322 At the second meeting
of the foundation‘s council on 15 June 1964 Karl
Gussone reported again “on the very critical atti-
tude of the federal government, which is seriously
considering cutting or completely eliminating its
subsidy to the HfG”. He energetically pointed to
the reason why federal interest had waned: The
HfG’s claim that it was a college required the inner
senate to give up its rigid attitude and strengthen
research work at the HfG, something that Tomás
Maldonado had planned in 1965 and Thorwald
Risler had publicized since then. “In the end the
inner senate was responsible for the fate of the
federal subsidy; if the inner senate decided to
move forward, i. e., in particular to strengthen re-
search, and to create a partnership between the
film department and the Tonstudio München
(Munich Sound Studio), there might be a certain
hope that the federal government would also not
refuse to provide continued assistance. But if the
college persisted in its present attitude, further
assistance by the federal government could hardly
be expected for practical reasons alone.” 1323 Thus
the condition for federal support in the past – the
development of the HfG into a center of far-reach-
ing research interests, with institutes that corre-
sponded to these – was no longer being met be-
cause the HfG no longer wanted to follow that
road. The warnings that Karl Gussone expressed in
1963 and 1964 were unmistakable, but were not
taken seriously. Yet as early as 21 December 1964
he informed the standing committee of the foun-
dation‘s council that the federal government would
give the foundation only DM 200,000 for 1965. 1324
Because, at the same time, the foundation had to
take into account rising expenditures for additional
permanent appointments in 1965, it was already
clear by the end of December 1964 that there was
the likelihood of a substantial deficit in 1965. The
city could raise its subsidy by a maximum of DM
50,000, and even that was debatable and would
by no means have made up for the decrease in
income.
The fact that the funds the foundation received
from the government and from industry were
quickly drying up is only one side of the financial
crisis after 1965, however. The other side is that
the foundation and the HfG responded to this situ-
ation in an irresponsible manner. When the first
cutbacks appeared in the spring of 1964, Theodor
Pfizer, the chairman of the foundation‘s council,
informed Rector Otl Aicher that the council had
decided to cut the budget for the current year, 349
1964, by 15 percent. 1325 The HfG, he said, was to
implement this cut on its own authority. The HfG’s
reaction was characteristic: “The inner senate has
decided to set up a commission, consisting of
Messrs. Aicher, Kluge, Maldonado, and Ohl, as
well as the head secretary, Mrs. Rösner, to work
out economy proposals.” On 23 September 1964,
a few days before the end of his term, Otl Aicher
informed the foundation‘s council that unfortu-
nately the HfG was able to cut down expenditure
by only 8 percent this year. 1326 The foundation‘s
council could not bring itself, either this year or in
following years, to impose sanctions.
After three months, on 13 April 1965, Friedrich
Rau took stock for the first time of what he had
done and presented his plan for the future financ-
ing of the foundation. 1327 He felt the financial base
of the HfG “is not sufficiently large, and too vague
in terms of legal commitment […]. The college
budget to date is not nearly sufficient to deal
appropriately with the tasks that confront the col-
lege.” The lecturers’ salaries, he said, were so low
that first-rate faculty could not be hired. In order
to safeguard the HfG’s financial base, he proposed
the following measures: “Up to this point the col-
lege was able to set up its budget only when it
knew what subsidies the foundation can expect
from the federal government, the Land of Baden-
Württemberg, and from the city of Ulm [N.B.:
Friedrich Rau does not mention the foundation’s
own income; author’s note]. These subsidies were
not calculated on the basis of need, but were a
lump sum estimate. That is a method that doesn’t
do justice to our cause. I think the federal govern-
ment, Land, and city should agree that they will
jointly cover the subsidy needs of the college ac-
cording to a distribution code negotiated by them;
subsidies will be provided based on a discussion
of the budget by the foundation‘s council in which
the three regional corporate bodies are represent-
ed. The way things have gone so far, it is to be
expected that even if the teaching is kept to a min-
imum, and with severe economizing in every res-
pect, the foundation’s deficit will grow from year
to year. That’s a development I cannot be respon-
sible for. That’s why I think that representatives of
the three corporate entities that sponsor the school
should conclude an interagency agreement on the
joint financing of the college. The hardest part will
be to convince the federal government to do
things this way, because rumor has it that the so-
called “Troeger Commission” will question federal
participation in the Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung
and/or the Ulm School of Design.”
The so-called Troeger Commission was a commis-
sion that had been instructed by the federal gov-
ernment to work out a financial reform. 1328 The
 The rectorships of
Aicher, Maldonado
and Ohl
350
Hermann Veit (SPD)
(13 April 1897–
15 March 1973), both
Nordwürttemberg-
Baden and Baden-
Württemberg minister
of economics and vice
minister-president,
1948–60, chairman of
the parliamentary group
of the SPD in the
Baden-Württemberg
Landtag, 1961–73, and
first vice-president of
the Baden-Württem-
berg Landtag, 1962–73
Photo: unknown (ca. 1966)
Archive: Landesbildstelle Würt-
temberg (54149)
experts were to examine, among other things, all
cultural institutions that were jointly financed by
the federal government and one or more Länder.
According to a conversation between Friedrich Rau
and the commission’s chairman, Heinrich Troeger,
however, the commission was not supposed to
declare its position regarding individual institu-
tions, but simply to develop guidelines for financ-
ing cultural institutions. “It is to be expected that
if we apply the principles that are to be worked out
by the Troeger Commission, the federal share of
the college’s financing would probably be elimi-
nated.” And in anticipation of this, the federal sub-
sidy for 1965 was already cut by DM 50,000 as
announced, so that the subsidy now totaled only
DM 200,000.
That means that from the start Friedrich Rau
saw the difficulty of convincing the federal govern-
ment to help support the nationalization of the HfG
he strived for. Both the work of the Troeger Com-
mission and the fact that the government had
already begun gradually to phase out its financing
of the foundation clearly showed upcoming ob-
stacles that the federal government would put in
the path of the implementation of his plan. This
should really have caused Friedrich Rau some con-
cern. But he did not look for alternatives. Quite the
reverse, he came to a conclusion that was unre-
alistic in view of the HfG’s history: “During the
more than ten years the Ulm School of Design has
been in existence, the appropriate authorities in
the city, Land, and federal government must surely
have realized that the privately run School of
Design fills an important gap in the German edu-
cation system and thus fulfills a public function,
and that because the training program of the col-
lege is unique it is crucial to have the highest-
quality equipment and faculty. […] The subsidy
requirements could be shared at a rate of, say,
1:2:1 by the city, Land, and federal government.”
The man who is speaking here is a politician con-
cerned with cultural and educational matters, a
higher-education reformer who had unfortunately
not listened attentively in recent years to his col-
leagues in the Landtag and Bundestag. In Bonn
and Stuttgart there was quite obviously consider-
able resentment against the HfG, as anyone in the
Landtag could hear when the inquiry was launched
into whether the foundation was eligible for finan-
cial aid. He made no mention at all of the private
sources of income. Friedrich Rau felt that the pub-
lic sector was the only sponsor of the HfG. Also
the fact that up to that point the HfG had been
successfully sponsored by a private foundation
must have struck him as a curious and out-dated
phenomenon. He pleaded that the federal govern-
ment, the Land, and the city should conclude an
interagency agreement that would once and for
all establish public sponsorship of the HfG. Finally,
on the question of research and development,
Friedrich Rau was of the same opinion as Otl Ai-
cher: Such work, he felt, should be completely
integrated in the HfG. He considered the division
between the HfG and the institute to be a mistake.
It would be better, he thought, if the big develop-
ment projects that were beyond the scope of the
HfG were done by the lecturers in their private
offices. In line with these ideas, he wanted to
change the foundation’s statutes to reflect the
idea that the HfG was the sole purpose of the
foundation.
On 14 May 1965 Karl Gussone reported to the
ministry of education and the arts what arguments
the Federal Audit Office had produced against
continued federal subsidies to the foundation:
“‘Incidentally we […] doubt whether federal inter-
est in the continuing existence of the Ulm School
of Design is still so considerable as to justify giving
the school federal subsidies.’” The reason given for
these misgivings was the college’s dubious aca-
demic status. It is true that the Federal Audit Office
used as its supporting arguments the polemical
statements made in the Landtag on 30 May 1963
that had slandered the HfG and had for the most
part been disproved long since. But from this per-
spective the HfG was considered as a more or less
ordinary technical college on a par with an arts
and crafts school or a school of engineering: “‘
However, the federal government is not compe-
tent to sponsor such schools. […] Incidentally,
another circumstance should cause restraint […]:
the original intention was only to subsidize the
school temporarily during its startup phase, be-
cause the school was supposed to gradually sup-
port itself with the income expected to be generat-
ed by orders from industry and commerce. […]
After all this we have considerable misgivings for
both legal and economic reasons whether granting
additional federal funds […] to the Geschwister-
Scholl-Stiftung, whose name ought to be its spe-
cial commitment, is justifiable.’” 1329
If the Federal Audit Office dealt such sweeping
blows, with no effective counterarguments of-
fered, it is not surprising that the federal govern-
ment took back its subsidy piece by piece and that
Gerhard Storz (CDU)
(19 Aug. 1898 – 30 Aug.
1983), literary scholar,
educationalist, and poli-
tician. Baden-Württem-
berg minister of educa-
tion and the arts, 1959–
64, president of the
German Academy of
Language and Litera-
ture since 1966.
Photo: unknown (ca. 1966)
Archive: Landesbildstelle Würt-
temberg (LBW 77/12)
Karl Gussone held back his support in the federal
ministry of the interior. The time when Inge Aicher-
Scholl and Hellmut Becker organized public ap-
peals by prominent intellectuals and industrialists
was long past. All that Wolfgang Donndorf was
able to tell the Federal Audit Office in response
was that a college did not have to be a scientific
college to be an institution of higher learning. In
the eyes of the ministry of education and the arts
the HfG was on a par with public and private col-
leges of art and music. An unrelated question was
whether both types of college should have the
same status. 1330 Friedrich Rau never tired of re-
peating that the HfG closed a gap in the education
system. He believed it was a fitting argument that
if the school did not exist similar institutions of
learning would need to be created by the federal
government and the Länder. Also, because of its
international reputation and faculty, it had a repre-
sentative character for Germany. Finally, “the foun-
dation […] was dependent on federal funds. Friends
of Germany abroad would also react very negative-
ly if the School of Design had to close.” 1331 Fried-
rich Rau overlooked the fact that the teaching of
design in German arts and crafts schools and
academies had meanwhile profited from the pace-
setters in Ulm. That is why it was hardly possible
to explain in a plausible manner to the politicians
and officials that the HfG must be respected and
supported as a unique institution, period. For lay
people the differences had become smaller; the
arguments would have had to be more sharply dif-
ferentiated (or take place on a different basis).
Friedrich Rau sent the budget for the current
year (the first that had been drawn up according to
his new method) to Theodor Pfizer, the chair of the
foundation‘s council, on 2 July 1965. In spite of
falling revenues and bleak prospects, this budget
called for considerable increases in expenditure,
because there were major shortcomings compared
with the ideal condition of the HfG. The conse-
quences of the increases in expenditure were
additional demands for money. Sixteen full-time
lecturers were now planned for, 12 assistant lec-
turers, and 6 technical teachers; the machine
equipment of the workshops, which dated back for
the most part to the period when the HfG was 351
founded, was in urgent need of updating; the
costs of material for the students, who numbered
150 for the first time, had also increased; the li-
brary had announced it needed to buy additional
books; student field trips and conferences at-
tended by the lecturers needed to be taken into
account; the house publication ulm was to be
continued, in order to inform a worldwide public
about the HfG; and the general inflation also left
its traces on the budget. The budget contained a
deficit of DM 100,000. However, this gap would
not be filled immediately, but continue to exist “un-
til it is possible to cover the amount with increased
income” – a graphic example of the patterns of
thought and behavior that reveal the difference
between dealing with public and private funds.
Up to that point it went without saying in the foun-
dation that a budget must show no deficit, since
that meant that more money was slated to be
spent than was available. And it would have been
completely unthinkable that not only was there no
effort to make good the deficit at once, but that
the deficit was allowed to remain in existence, a
burden for the years to come. 1333 While the foun-
dation‘s council recognized the blind alley into
which this budget led the institution, it chose not to
look for a solution “because of lack of time”.1334
Prospects for 1966 were not any better, quite
the reverse. In his draft budget for 1966 Friedrich
Rau tried “to estimate only what is necessary so
that it will be possible to avoid closing the School
of Design”. He feared that the development teams
were causing considerable losses. But his conclu-
sion unfortunately did not follow business man-
agement practices, for he demanded not econo-
mizing but growth: “In my opinion that would nec-
essarily have the result that along with adding per-
sonnel in the college, enough auxiliary staff needs
to be included in the budget so that development
projects can be carried out independently of
industry-commissioned orders.” He added that
because nothing could be saved anyway, and they
were already operating at close to subsistence
level, the idea of economizing made no sense. The
foundation needed about DM 460,000 extra for
the HfG in 1966 if the expenses planned in the
budget were to be incurred and public funds
remained stagnant at the same time.
The gravity of the situation was unmistakable, and
it was feared that a department would have to be
closed. This had to be avoided under all circum-
stances. Today it is hardly possible to judge whether
the public and the politicians would have seen the
closing of an HfG department as the beginning of
the end or as streamlining (if the HfG had agreed):
“All thoughts of completely closing a department –
even temporarily – are problematic, since this
 Foundation’s council
of the Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung
1964 –1968 1332

Meeting 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22
Date 6.II. 15. VI. 13. VII. 5. XI. 26.VII. 16.XI. 4.VII. 14.XI. 19.XII. 15.II. 17.IV. 3.VII. 30.X. 18.XII. 12.II. 1.IV. 8.V. 4.VI. 9.VII. 12.IX. 14.X. 18.XII.
1965 1966 1967 1968 353

Federal ministry Walther Hinsch Franz frank

of economics

Federal ministry Karl Gussone

of the interior

Baden-Württemberg ministry Josef Alfons Thuma Karl Hipp

of economics

Baden-Württemberg ministry Günther Boulanger

of finance

Baden-Württemberg ministry Wolfgang Donndorf

of education and the arts

City of Ulm Theodor Pfizer (chairman)

Society of Friends

1 Hellmut Becker

2 Max Bill

3 Klaus Dohrn

4 Günther Grzimek

5 Otto Pfleiderer (deputy chairman)

6 Hans Zumsteg Max Guther

understaffed -1 -1 -1 -1 -1 -1 -2 -2 -2 -3 -3 -3 -4 -4 -4 -4 -4 -4
 The rectorships of
Aicher, Maldonado
and Ohl
354
At a meeting held in the looks like downsizing and may shake the confi-
building department dence of the college. Despite this we have seri-
from 12 through 21 ously deliberated doing so. […] The only depart-
April 1966, 42 British ment that could be closed temporarily is the de-
architects and teachers partment of information. Its phasing out has al-
of architecture dis- ready been prepared for. […] For the college, this
cussed Teaching de- budget means […] there will be no development,
sign. Design methods but standstill, particularly because of the auxiliary
in architecture. staff, which has so far been paid out of income
Photo: Schlitz from industry commissions; I would have to insist
Archive: Südwestpresse that they be terminated if the positions are neither
included in the budget nor covered by securely
guaranteed industry commissions […]. The subsi-
dy required from the public sector totals DM
1,475,000.” 1335
If we ask today whether there were alternatives
to the public subsidies, we are inevitably referred
to the commissions and donations of the private
sector that helped finance the foundation for ten
years. We must not forget that the commissioned
work was an important proof of the HfG’s impor-
tance. But Friedrich Rau’s perspective did not in-
clude the private sector, and the members of the
foundation‘s council took no initiative along these
lines.
At the sixth meeting of the foundation‘s council
on 16 November 1965, Friedrich Rau presented
the figures on which he had based his financing
plan that would maintain the HfG in such a way
that there would be no need to close a depart-
ment. 1336 According to the plan he aimed at the
following subsidies for 1966:
DM 825,650 from the Land
(last subsidy DM 600,000),
DM 412,825 from the federal government
(last subsidy DM 200,000),
DM 412,825 from Ulm
(last subsidy DM 200,000).
Even at first glance one can see that this was
wishful thinking. The federal government, for
example, as Friedrich Rau had explained himself,
was about to phase out its subsidies to the foun-
dation completely. Only DM 100,000 were plan-
ned for 1966, and actually Friedrich Rau’s greatest
success, after the Bundestag agreed to his re-
quest, was getting parliament not to decrease the
subsidy but to leave it at DM 200,000. In view of
these facts it was irresponsible to draw up a bud-
get that counted on over DM 400,000 from the
federal government, and also expected the city
of Ulm to double its subsidy. With such a frivolous
budget the foundation risked losing credibility in
Bonn and Stuttgart.
After all, experience and the statements from
the ministries spoke against every hope that the
state would help out at the last minute; on the
contrary, in these moments of weakness the HfG’s
adversaries had been able to gain in stature. That
is why the representative of the Land ministry of
finance, Günther Boulanger, observed “that the
draft budget drawn up by the foundation‘s execu-
tive board is based on hopes for whose fulfillment
there are presently no grounds. […] Dr. Pfizer re-
ports on the difficulties he had obtaining the DM
200,000 from the city of Ulm for this year and
does not believe that it will be possible to get an
increase for 1966 from Ulm. […] The federal min-
istry of the interior declares that it is not compe-
tent and refers the applicant to the Land of Baden-
Württemberg. Dr. Gussone declares that an in-
crease in the subsidy cannot be expected under
any circumstances.” Theodor Pfizer now helpless-
ly conjured up “the example of America […],
where patrons can always be found in industry
and business in such a case. If the HfG closes
today because of losing the federal subsidy, this
is a great loss not only for Ulm, but all Germany
is set back one more step in the field of design.”
Walter Erbe proposed that they should blackmail
the public donors: If it was made clear to them
what the situation in Ulm was like, it would de-
pend directly on them whether the HfG had to
close or not. This is also how he felt they should
proceed in the finance committee when request-
ing the desired DM 825,000 (as provided for in
the draft budget). This was certainly not respon-
sible behavior. Everyone was aware that blackmail
is a sign of weakness and that pressure is followed
by counterpressure. Matter-of-fact conviction,
constructive search for alternatives, and the de-
termination to get things done would have been
called for at this time.
Karl Gussone, the representative of the federal
ministry of the interior, took a first look at how
things were being handled at the HfG and asked
for information: What would happen to the stu-
dents if the HfG had to close a department, the
department of building, for example? Friedrich
Reyner Banham during Rau refused to consider this perspective: “If the
a lecture on The resi- subsidy by the public sector is not substantially
dential machine: myth increased, radical measures are the only way out.
or fraud? on 25 March But from the point of view of educational and cul-
1965. ture policy it is a mistake and it means the begin-
Photo: Roland Fürst ning of the end for the HfG.” The foundation‘s
Archive: HfG (65/0264/3) council then decided that the departments of
building and information would be phased out if
there was no other financing possibility for 1966.
Friedrich Rau wanted to resign his position after
just a year, effective 31 December 1965, because
the situation appeared to be hopeless, but finally
allowed himself to be talked into temporarily ex-
tending his commitment. “I will consider staying
on longer only if the financial basis of the founda-
tion is guaranteed through subsidies from the pub-
lic sector.”
One of the factors that aggravated the financial 355
crisis was that HfG members did not know what
to do when faced with an empty till. It was disas-
trous for the operation of the entire institution that
the foundation was given the ungrateful task of
obtaining money and at the same time every ef-
fective economy measure was sabotaged. At the
end of 1963, when the Landtag conditions had just
been made public, there had still been heroic vows
that the institution would get along without any
public funding in order to assert its own autonomy.
Kohei Sugiura and
Otl Aicher, December
1965.
Photo: Roland Fürst
Archive: HfG (65/0142/3)
Now Rector Tomás Maldonado wrote to Theodor
Pfizer, on 14 January 1966: “The inner senate has
decided to inform the foundation‘s council that the
school direction and the inner senate can under no
circumstances agree to any sort of amputation or
restriction of the original idea and mission of the
school. Such a measure would be so fundamental
an intervention in the substance of the HfG that it
would be tantamount to the liquidation of the enti-
re school. […] Such fundamental problems, in
their opinion, can be solved only by the joint ef-
forts of the foundation‘s council and the school’s
direction.” 1337 No doubt about it: There would have
been a deep, painful cut in the HfG’s teaching pro-
gram if it had closed a department. On the other
hand we may get the impression that HfG mem-
bers were not aware how serious the situation
actually was. Today the answer to the question
whether it would have been right or wrong to cut
back the teaching program in 1966 due to lack of
money is a matter of personal opinion. However,
there are the facts: The HfG refused to show un-
derstanding for the recommendations of the foun-
dation‘s council; the foundation‘s council was
incapable of translating its decisions into actions;
and the foundation‘s council and executive board
did not look for alternatives to public funding.
The foundation had to fill an impending financial
gap totaling DM 460,000 for 1966 in order to be
able to authorize the scheduled expenditure of the
HfG’s teaching program. 1338 It was impossible to
impose economy measures at the HfG. The school
asked the ministry of education and the arts to
double the Land subsidy for 1966 to DM 1.2 mil-
lion. The Land was supposed to cover the entire
 The rectorships of
Aicher, Maldonado
and Ohl
356
Erich Ganzenmüller (CDU)
(5 Jan. 1914–24 Aug.
1983), member of
Baden-Württemberg
Landtag, 1960–80, and
chairman of the parlia-
mentary group of the
CDU in the Landtag,
1968–72.
Photo: unknown (ca. 1966)
Archive: Landesbildstelle Würt-
temberg (k537/22)
requested amount, for the city was not in a posi-
tion to do so, the federal government was not will-
ing, and other sources had dried up. But the Land
government had considered an increase of only
ten percent (from DM 600,000 to DM 660,000)
and refused to double the subsidy. The minister
of education and the arts defended the request in
view of the financial emergency at the HfG, but the
majority of the ministers was willing to accept the
fact that the HfG might be closed.
In the Landtag’s finance committee the mood
was no friendlier. The members of parliament dis-
cussed the foundation’s request at their 54th ses-
sion, on 9 February 1966. 1339 From their guests
Friedrich Rau and Theodor Pfizer they got to hear
a great deal that, while realistic, was hardly pleas-
ant. It was imperative that lecturers’ salaries be
raised and permanent positions filled; the build-
ings urgently needed to be renovated, and the li-
brary was greatly in need of updating its holdings.
Though property- and personnel-related expendi-
ture had been frozen since 1963, at the same time
income had decreased – Otl Aicher’s and Hans
Gugelot’s lucrative institutes had been separated
from the HfG. Members of parliament perked up
their ears when they heard that deficits had devel-
oped. One piece of the mosaic after another fell
into place in a dubious overall portrait of the HfG
and a foundation dangerously close to organiza-
tional and financial disorder, confusion, almost
slovenliness. This impression was reinforced by
the fact that there was a request to double the
Land subsidy from one day to the next. The mem-
bers of parliament felt that the deficit must surely
have been foreseeable earlier. The draft of the
Land government still stated DM 660,000, and
now, suddenly, the foundation demanded so much
more! Therefore the delegates asked that the gov-
ernment take a position on whether it considered
the HfG to be eligible for further funding. It was
absolutely clear to them: If they now released only
DM 660,000, this meant that the HfG would close.
And that is why the question needed to be asked
whether the Landtag and the Land government
really wanted the school to close. There were more
important things in the Land, they said. No matter
how essential the work of the HfG was, it would be
easy to integrate it in the other colleges of the
Land or to have other institutions fulfill its func-
tions. The HfG must die, demanded a representa-
tive of the CDU. The Land government also be-
lieved that the financing of the higher education
program as a whole must be a priority. And be-
sides, no one could be sure whether the HfG could
manage to get by with its new subsidy, because
there were many elements of uncertainty. What if
demands rose to DM 1.5 million next year? Maybe
the Land would sooner or later have to come up
with the entire budget of the foundation? In spite
of such sharp attacks from all the parliamentary
groups, the committee decided, by an extremely
narrow majority, in favor of the Social Democrats’
compromise proposal: The HfG was to receive
DM 900,000 instead of DM 660,000 for 1966 (12
votes in favor, 11 against , 2 abstentions). The ple-
num of the Landtag needed to rule on this result.
This happened in two stages. At first, on 15
February 1966, there was a lively debate about the
far-reaching politico-education plans of the gov-
ernment. 1340 Walter Krause recapitulated the dis-
cussion in the finance committee for the Social
Democrat opposition: “At any rate that gave us an
insight into what’s been developing – things are
extremely serious not because of what this means
financially, but because of the political implica-
tions. […] Mayor Pfizer and Dr. Rau declared be-
fore the finance committee that the purport of the
government bill is that the college must be closed.
[…] It was very disturbing, you know, to hear the
minister-president declare in the finance commit-
tee that members should draw the logical conclu-
sion. […] Ladies and gentlemen, it is an extraordi-
narily alarming policy that new higher education
projects are started while Ulm and Constance are
sacrificed. […] I am sure you are aware that the
public would feel that the beginning of a new pro-
ject was seriously handicapped if this meant hav-
ing to close another college first. (Indignant pro-
tests from the CDU. – Minister-president Dr. Kie-
singer: ‘That’s not a college of science!’. – Mem-
ber of parliament Dr. Erbe: ‘But it is an essential
institution of our Land!’).“
Four weeks later, on 15 March 1966, there was
a sharp controversy in the Stuttgart Landtag during
the second reading of the government budget, the
like of which had not happened for ten years. 1341
The draft budget included the DM 900,000 that
had been accepted as a compromise in the fi-
nance committee by a majority of only one vote.
The Christian Democrats then made two motions.
Firstly, the HfG subsidy by the Land was to be only
DM 660,000 (as planned by the Land govern-
ment). 1342 The government, headed by minister-
president Kurt Georg Kiesinger, and the represen-
tatives of the CDU knew quite well that the foun-
dation would have to close the HfG if their motion
was passed. 1343 Secondly, the HfG was to be told,
“1. that it cannot expect to get higher subsidies
from the Land in the future and must therefore
Karl Frank (FDP/DVP)
(9 Aug. 1900–3 May
1974), Württemberg-
Baden and Baden-
Württemberg minister
of finance, 1951–60.
Photo: unknown (ca. 1966)
Archive: Landesbildstelle Würt-
temberg (LBW 65/4)
make every effort to find additional funding just
to be on the safe side, [and] 2. that the Land of
Baden-Württemberg has no intention of taking
over the sponsorship of the foundation.“ 1344
Walter Erbe (FDP/DVP), a member of the foun-
dation’s executive board, gave a long speech
against the four CDU motions, which, however,
was too academic to be truly convincing. He ac-
cused the HfG’s opponents that if their motion
was accepted they would destroy all the efforts
undertaken since the founding of the HfG: “Why
did we go to all this trouble in the past? Was it
perhaps with the mental reservation that the first
chance we got we’d ruin the institute? […] As for
me, I believe […] that there have always been
members of parliament who’ve had a lot of resent-
ment toward the Ulm college. […] This resentment
has hurt the college in the circles on whose finan-
cial support it depends. Who wants to invest mon-
ey in an institution if he doesn’t know whether it
will have gone bankrupt, so to speak, by the time
an order he placed with it is supposed to be com-
pleted. […] At any rate, it is a utopian idea that you
can get the private sector to help finance the col-
lege if the minimum it needs to survive has not
even been safeguarded. […] The uncertain situa-
tion in recent years has brought the School of De-
sign and therefore us members of parliament to
the point where all we can do is play ‘double or
nothing’, meaning that we either give up the whole
business or increase the funding. I am convinced
that the first alternative would be so stupid it
would go down in the annals of history; you see,
we would interrupt an act we would soon have to
resume in order to maintain our connection with
current international developments in the field [of
design].” Raising the Land subsidy for the HfG, he
said, was simply a necessity. A study by the minis-
try of education and the arts to find out if the func-
tions of the HfG could be carried out by another
institution had clearly shown, he went on, that the
HfG was irreplaceable. There was no evidence 357
for the opposite assertion – that the HfG could be
replaced. To believe that was to act according to
the principle “It’s true because I want it to be true.”
The Freiburg teacher Karl Person (CDU) tried to
get support for his party’s motion because he
believed that it was now necessary to “state how
urgent it was to solve the situation by integration
in another sponsoring organization […].” The
opponents of the HfG said it openly: The HfG
should not continue working as an independent
institution if it demanded these subsidies from the
Land. Hans-Otto Schwarz (SPD), who became the
minister of economics at the end of the year,
demanded that the CDU not put forward a fig-leaf
motion but admit its intention: “It has become
quite clear in our discussion with the gentlemen
from Ulm that DM 660,000 mean the death of the
college. And those who want that should immedi-
ately ask that the funds be cut. That’s something
we’re not prepared to do.”
Erich Ganzenmüller (CDU, the chairman of the
Landtag faction of the party starting in 1968) had
paid a one-day visit to the HfG as recently as 29
January 1966 and gathered detailed informa-
tion. 1345 He was the referee of the finance commit-
tee and had for a long time considered the HfG to
be superfluous. The HfG had blithely stated that
“Mr. Ganzenmüller, whose previous opposition to
Hans Filbinger (CDU)
(*15 Sept. 1913),
Baden-Württemberg
minister of the interior
and vice minister-presi-
dent, 1960–66, minis-
ter-president 1966–78.
Photo: unknown (ca. 1966)
Archive: Landesbildstelle Würt-
temberg (k535/12)
the HfG is well known, [showed] no animosity, but
[was] very receptive and positive in all teaching-
related questions. […] Mr. Maldonado emphasized
that a clear decision had to be made whether the
Landtag was prepared to generously support the
HfG or to close the school once and for all. There
was no middle way, he said.” And now Erich
Ganzenmüller read aloud in the Landtag a seem-
ingly endless list of criticisms regarding the situa-
tion of the HfG (library, construction, salaries,
workshops, student dormitory, the lecturers’ pen-
sion entitlements, the foundation’s mortgages and
loans). This list unfortunately largely corresponded
with the facts, because it included all the wishes
and defects the HfG lecturers had shared with him
in the belief that he wanted to speak in support of
the HfG. But all he had wanted to do was to get a
 The rectorships of
Aicher, Maldonado
and Ohl
358
Herbert Ohl gives a
group of German
Design Council visitors
a tour of the HfG (1967).
Photos: unknown
Archive: HfG (67/0460/2 and
67/0465/2)
realistic picture of the situation on Kuhberg, and it
was indisputable, after all, that buildings were in
urgent need of renovation and classrooms had to
be expanded if good basic conditions were to be
created at the HfG. But the foundation lacked the
funds, and Erich Ganzenmüller was now able to
demonstrate how much the Land would have to
spend on improvements if it intended to take
charge of the HfG – and the politician had not
invented these cravings for nationalization on his
own; on the contrary, they were proposed to him
on Kuhberg. The HfG had today “truly become a
financial policy problem; and then there is another
question: Must the Land of Baden-Württemberg
really take on everything that needs to be done, at
its expense? For that quite definitely means – and
this is what they have in mind by submitting this
budget – the complete takeover of the School of
Design. […] If you bear all this in mind, I ask you
whether you’ve given enough thought to how large
the budget volume will have to be some day so we
can support this School of Design for the dura-
tion.” As he presented these arguments, it was not
hard for him to give due credit to the achievements
of the HfG, but “we’re talking about our concern:
What long-term burdens are we agreeing to shoul-
der for the future? That’s why, to be on the safe
side, we have also put forward a motion that there
should be a clear understanding that we won’t
have to expect higher subsidies at a future date.
[…] We don’t want to be faced with the same sit-
uation next year if the budget draft suddenly says
DM 2.2 million, where we again give an extra DM
300,000 as we did this year, and thus find our-
selves spending more and more money year by
year.” Finally, it was easy to substantiate the mo-
tion that the foundation should not be sponsored
by the Land: “Just now I heard that nobody was
thinking of that. Ladies and gentlemen! If nobody
is thinking of that, then please second this motion,
and, at least for today, our minds will be set at
rest!”
The Landtag did decide by a majority against the
original subsidy, which meant the closing of the
HfG, and yet the result of the vote was depressing.
At any rate the foundation did receive DM 900,000
for 1966, but in other respects the CDU managed
to get its motions adopted. 1346 This increase in
subsidy needed to be seen as an opportunity
granted to the foundation for only a short trial pe-
riod so that the situation on Kuhberg could be put
back on an even keel as quickly as possible. That
was precisely Walter Erbe’s argument. As a politi-
cian concerned with educational and cultural poli-
cies, he felt that anyone who wanted to promote
design in Baden-Württemberg must promote the
HfG. This argument, however, was always bur-
dened by the pressure that design could not sur-
vive if it did not have the added utilitarian function
of being a component of the promotion of trade
and industry. Erich Ganzenmüller argued as a fis-
cal politician, warning that the HfG would yet prove
to be very expensive for the Land. Both spoke of
the Land’s future, but they were talking at cross-
purposes. There was the same cast of characters
as there had been back in 1953, which only goes
to show that the foundation and the HfG had since
that time not managed to persuade the fiscal poli-
ticians, among others, of its cultural mission. It
was the cultural mission and the promotion of
trade and industry that together were the primary
reasons why it was necessary to subsidize the
HfG, and if the first argument was denied (with
such assertions as that there were academies,
technical colleges, arts and crafts schools for
the same purpose) and the second had become
redundant (because contacts to industry had
broken off), then there was also no need to sup-
port the HfG.
Thus, by March 1966, it was settled that the
HfG could count neither on nationalization nor on
increasing subsidies. Nevertheless the founda-
tion’s executive board, the foundation‘s council,
and the HfG direction persisted in their wishful
thinking that the HfG needed higher subsidies
from the Land, and should be nationalized as of
1967. The Landtag resolution was obviously not
taken seriously. And in the same way the deter-
mination of the HfG’s opponents in the Landtag,
who did not shy away even from the closing of the
HfG, was underestimated. It would probably have
been an exaggeration to say that they not only did
not shy away from closing the HfG, but caused it.
After all, the causes of the financial crisis could not
be attributed to the HfG’s opponents. But now that
the foundation had gotten into this difficult situation,
they were prepared to make the HfG eat humble pie.
Erich Ganzenmüller made no secret of this
intention. The film department, which was legally
independent of the HfG (a fact most members of
parliament had not known), received a rebuff from
the Landtag at the same time. Two weeks later,
during the third reading of the government budget,
the plenum once more discussed subsidizing it,
and in the process the subject of the HfG again
came up. 1347 The CDU representative regretted the
Landtag’s decision regarding the foundation and
indicated what it was about the HfG that actually
disturbed him: “Why, it’s no surprise that [on 15
March 1966; author’s note] we supported the
closing of the Ulm School of Design, because we
have a very different idea of an operation that is
truly essential. You see, if these people really pur-
sue the ideals they’ve been talking about, they
ought to set up a real college and do real work, by
and large. […] All in all, we should have sorted
things out here, especially in the interest of the
people who are part of the institution and whose
work we definitely do appreciate. That’s something
we don’t even need to discuss. But that type of
work needs a different facility and completely dif-
ferent technical equipment; it also needs a com-
pletely different study and teaching program than
is possible in Ulm. […] I repeat: It would be in the
interest of their cause – and I want to give credit
to these people who are now affected by this situ-
ation, I want to emphasize that specifically. […]
I feel we need to resolve these questions […] on
a completely different level at some point […].”
This “solution on a completely different level” did
finally materialize at the end of 1968. But it doesn’t
mean that Erich Ganzenmüller was the chief per-
son who pulled the strings in the background. That
would be to overestimate his role and the signifi-
cance of his words at this point. Nevertheless his
statement in the Landtag does reflect a mood of
impatience, irritation, and intolerance of the HfG
that in the meantime prevailed among many Land-
tag and federal government members and that did
not change back to positive by the end of 1968.
From now on (if not before) the majority in the
Landtag and Land government took a negative
attitude toward the HfG; the persuasive power of
Inge Aicher-Scholl or Thorwald Risler was gone
with nothing to take its place, and appearances by
HfG representatives during 1968 on the floor of
the Stuttgart Landtag hurt the HfG more than they
prolonged its existence.
Just a reference to some unfair arguments that
were presented in these Landtag debates and that
were probably an important reason why many
Land politicians took a negative stance. Erich Gan-
Hans Zumsteg, zenmüller asserted that a German HfG student
ca. 1967. cost the land DM 27,000, and if you counted the
Photo: unknown total number of students, including those who
Archive: Südwestpresse were not German, the cost per student was still
DM 14,000. He meant that German taxpayers paid
a high price for foreign students registered at the
HfG. These figures were wrong: In 1966 the Land
provided DM 900,000 for 143 students of whom
50 were foreign. That is a total of DM 6,300 if one
counts all the students, or DM 9,700 counting only
the German students. Interestingly enough Erich
Ganzenmüller mentioned no comparative figures 359
from the public education system. If we look at the
Land’s seven universities and colleges of science,
for instance, we see that during the preceding year
(1965) the Land paid DM 305 million in regular
operating costs. 1348 With over 47,000 students
this corresponded to a little more than DM 6,400
per student. In the current year (1966) this sum
increased to over DM 6,700 per student. If we add
Land expenditure for construction at the colleg-
es/universities of science – which were included
in the budget of the HfG – then the Land had
spent around DM 10,300 per student in 1965,
and in 1966 the total was DM 10,200. The implied
reproach that the HfG was a particularly expensive
educational institution for the Land (and moreover
one that was not even under government control)
is not only refuted by these comparative figures
but also backfires against those politicians who
used it in their arguments. 1349
In other words, dark clouds gathered over Kuhberg
in the late spring of 1966, and the foundation was
left out in the cold. The standing committee of the
foundation‘s council discussed the situation on 9
May 1966. 1350 They had to address three devastat-
ing pieces of news:
The federal government had definitively decided
no longer to subsidize the HfG in 1967; 1351
the Land had imposed a general cutback of all
budget items for the current year (1966); for the
foundation this meant a shortfall of DM 54,000;
moreover, according to the 15 March 1966
Landtag resolution, it was definite that no more
than DM 900,000 could be expected from the
Land in 1967.
Friedrich Rau commented with resignation “that
the DM 54,000 cutback, the refusal to grant a
1967 increase, and the fact that the federal gov-
ernment intended to eliminate the entire federal
subsidy for 1967 in combination make it impos-
sible to keep the college operating. If things are
the way they are described here, the subsidies
authorized now can only be regarded as a liquida-
tion sum. He himself, however, asks that under
these circumstances the foundation accept his
resignation effective 1 July 1966.” 1352 (Friedrich
Rau stayed on as the foundation’s executive man-
ager until 31 December 1966. 1353) Theodor Pfizer
knew of no alternative solution: “We should also
definitely approach people in industry now, even
though that can avowedly not be Dr. Rau’s job.”
Since income had shrunk this year, since DM
200,000 had to be raised due to mismanagement
alone in order to service debts (this was not capi-
tal expenditure, but debts for current expenses,
i. e. to cover gaps in the budget), and since pros-
 The rectorships of
Aicher, Maldonado
and Ohl
360
Tomás Maldonado, pects were as poor as never before, the committee
1966. recommended to the foundation‘s council that the
Photo: Roland Fürst building department be eliminated in order keep
Archive: HfG (66/0024/1) the rest of the HfG operating.
However, the foundation‘s council and the HfG’s
inner senate found it impossible to face reality. On
17 May 1966, the inner senate denied that the HfG
shared the responsibility for the financial situation:
“The important thing is that debts have to be paid
off that the HfG has no part in, as they are chiefly
attributable to the film [department], and that there
must be an attempt […] to get at least part of
these funds released for the school. Mr. Ohl is of
the opinion that it should then be possible to con-
tinue running the school with its present struc-
ture.” 1354 The accusation leveled at the film depart-
ment was a pure fabrication; being autonomous, it
had nothing to do with the HfG budget. The inner
senate then conjectured that one commission was
no longer sufficient to deal with the situation, and
decided to form two commissions: One for liaison
with the foundation‘s council, the other to study
budget-related problems.
“And when the reporter
sat in his studio this
morning and happened
to glance out the win-
dow, he discovered:
trees, grass, meadows,
clouds, air, mountains,
river. […]
The head-in-the-sand policy of the foundation‘s
council was hardly more appropriate for resolving
financial problems. True, Friedrich Rau had been
able to achieve unexpected success for the foun-
dation in the Bundestag when, due to a vote by
division on 26 May 1966, a subsidy totaling DM
200,000 was decided on for the current year (the
federal government had originally planned on only
DM 100,000). 1355 Probably the trustees allowed
themselves to be lulled by the hope that all future
decisions in the political bodies would in the end
let the foundation off just as lightly. But disillusion-
ment followed at once.
Herbert Ohl‘s rectorship
October 1966 through December 1968
At its eighth session on 14 November 1966 the
foundation‘s council discussed a budget for 1967
that projected DM 1.1 million in federal and/or
Land funds, i. e., either the federal government
paid a DM 200,000 subsidy after all (and the Land
kept to DM 900,000) or the federal government
How suspect it all is. Bernhard Rübenach,
How untidy. How inex- Der rechte Winkel von
act. How crude. […] Ulm, p. 44 f.
Decorative chaos. Fos-
sils that stimulate the
senses. And now he
could not see nature
except with mistrust
and impatience.“
paid nothing (and the Land had to raise its contri-
bution). 1356 Friedrich Rau thus again disregarded
the unmistakable statements of the Landtag on
15 March 1966 (no increase of the Land subsidy)
and of the federal minister of the interior, who had
announced on 3 June 1966 that the foundation
could expect no money from the federal govern-
ment for 1967, using the findings of the Troeger
Commission as an excuse. 1357 Friedrich Rau was
still confident that he could convince the Bundes-
tag that the subsidy was essential. He explained
his planning as follows: The foundation had a right
to public subsidies as it were, because of the HfG’s
educational mission. Moreover the subsidies
needed to be high enough to enable the HfG to
work productively. If one of the sources of public
funds dried up, another source had the moral obli-
gation to take over that burden: “Until the Federal
Republic makes a decision to the opposite ef-
fect 1358, it is not possible, for political reasons, to
drop this demand toward the federal government.
The federal subsidy is essential for the institution’s
survival, and it is therefore not possible to cut it
[…]. Dr. Boulanger asks members to note that it is
not possible for him as a representative of the min-
istry of finance to continue to share responsibility
if a completely dubious budget like the present
one is drawn up. Dr. Boulanger asks the council to
consider that the actual need is not the determin-
ing factor in authorizing a subsidy, so that in the
case of the HfG the foundation should not count
on the DM 200,000. […] Dr. Rau’s response to Dr.
Boulanger’s remarks is that in his opinion subsi-
dies should be contingent on the needs of a school’s
program and not vice versa.” 1359 Wolfgang Donn-
dorf, the representative of the ministry of educa-
tion and the arts, shared the grave misgivings of
his colleague Günther Boulanger and added that
he feared that even the DM 900,000 Land subsidy
might be cut. Even Theodor Pfizer expected that
he could get the Ulm municipal council to agree
to only DM 200,000, and not the DM 250,000
planned for in the budget. – At this session the
members of the foundation‘s council were con-
fronted with the full extent of confusion in the
foundation’s administration. In previous years the
capable team of Thorwald Risler and Günther
Schweigkofler had saved them the trouble of mak-
ing sure that indisputable order prevailed on Kuh-
berg. Now, for the first time, they learned about
the nonbudgetary expenditure (DM 420,000) and
the deficit (DM 250,000) for the past year alone.
At the same time it was not possible to get infor-
mation about the current financial status, and they
were also unable to get a clear overview of the li-
abilities. How, then, were they to adopt a serious
budget for 1967? Quite obviously they had badly
neglected their supervisory responsibilities over
the past two years: “Before resorting to a non-
scheduled and nonbudgetary expenditure totaling 361
DM 419,804.56, in the opinion of the ministry of
education and the arts […], the consent of the
foundation‘s council should have been required,
though obviously such consent was not obtained.
At the 14 November 1966 foundation‘s council
meeting it was not possible to ascertain complete-
ly whether and how the handling of the budget of
the Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung is being effective-
ly supervised.” 1360 To cover the deficit from the
year 1965, a loan totaling DM 260,000 had to be
taken out. 1361
Four weeks later, on 19 December 1966, the
foundation‘s council again tried to convince the
HfG to close a department effective 1 October
1968. 1362 But the inner senate entrenched itself
behind its hubris: “The inner senate categorically
states that the issue of the HfG’s organization, in-
cluding the adding or closing of a department, is
exclusively the responsibility of the HfG and the
extended senate. It has already been repeatedly
explained and is sufficiently well-known that the
HfG with its departments represents an indivisible
whole, no part of which can be amputated with-
out destroying the school as a whole.” 1363 The
HfG’s extended senate showed itself to be equally
un- compromising and unanimously decided, on
23 November 1967: “The members of the extended
senate are dismayed by this proposal. They are
forced to point out that their sole sphere of re-
sponsibility is to decide on substantial and struc-
tural issues of the School of Design. […] The ex-
tended senate thus feels it is unable to follow the
suggestion of the foundation‘s council to con-
sider the possible closing of a department of the
HfG.” 1364
We must respect the HfG’s decision, its refusal to
continue operating on a limited basis. If it was
necessary for members of the HfG for pedagogical
reasons to preserve all departments of the HfG,
then this decision was legitimate. But it was dis-
honest to refuse to deal with the consequences.
The last resort would have been to close the HfG
at once. The HfG repeatedly emphasized that the
closing of one department would be tantamount
to closing the entire institution.
However, if both were out of the question, the
HfG should have seriously considered a third al-
ternative. The Landtag had already burst the
dreams of nationalization like soap bubbles. What
possibilities were left if to economize meant clos-
ing a department, if that meant closing the HfG,
if nationalization was impossible, if contacts with
industry had been broken off, if no generous con-
tributor appeared, a deus ex machina, as John
McCloy had done once? Even today I see no alter-
natives, and it seems as if the HfG was able to
exist only if the filigree structure Inge Aicher-
 The rectorships of
Aicher, Maldonado
and Ohl
362
Kurt Georg Kiesinger
(CDU) (6 April 1904–
9 March 1988), Baden-
Württemberg minister-
president, 1958–66,
and federal chancellor,
1966–69.
Photo: unknown (1967)
Archive: Archive für kultur und
geschichte
Scholl had built when the school was founded
held together. Still, the foundation‘s council and
the HfG – especially the inner and the extended
senate – should have started working together in
a timely manner.
Perhaps even at this point, in January 1967, a
way out could have been found – that’s specula-
tion –, but also things couldn’t have gone worse
than they actually did. Yet they did not work to-
gether, and the HfG barricaded itself behind a wall
of denial, bureaucracy, and obstinacy. For a start,
the inner senate decided to form a “commission
for possible structural changes in the HfG”. 1365
And on 14 April 1967 the inner senate protested
against the intention of the foundation‘s council
simply to sell the right of first refusal for a plot of
land adjacent to the HfG in order to get access to
some badly needed money. The HfG believed that
“this plot of land represents the only chance for
the HfG to expand” – the HfG’s flight from reality
had in the meantime assumed pathological pro-
portions when, faced with sheer struggle for exis-
tence, utopian dreams of expanding the HfG cam-
pus made the crisis even more severe. 1366
In July 1967 the foundation was practically in-
solvent. At its 12th meeting on 3 July 1967 the
foundation‘s council discussed the foundation’s
illiquidity: It had overdrawn its advances on current
accounts and had not observed repayment agree-
ments for the short-term loans; the bank demanded
securities for the necessary extension of the credit
limit. The short-term outstanding liabilities were
estimated by the administrative director to total
around DM 640,000. 1367
The budget for 1967 still projected a Land sub-
sidy of DM 1.1 million and increasing subsidies
from the city. Both were illusions. Friedrich Rau
persisted in claiming that the foundation had the
right to demand subsidies large enough to cover
HfG operating expenses. The representatives of
the ministries could only shake their heads at this
lack of judgment and turn away from the HfG.
On 15 September 1967 Friedrich Rau definitively
resigned effective 30 September 1967; an author-
ized representative of the executive board (Werner
Ruch) was to continue to act for him temporari-
ly. 1368 At the next, 13th, meeting of the founda-
tion‘s council on 30 October 1967, Theodor Pfizer
also announced his intention to resign at the end
of the year (but he held out to the end); Max Gu-
ther left the council, Klaus Dohrn had stopped
being a member of the foundation‘s council as of
17 April 1967, and member of the foundation‘s
executive board Walter Erbe, who had energetical-
ly supported the HfG from the beginning in the
Landtag, died on 3 October 1967. 1369 Not only was
the personnel situation at the end of 1967 alarm-
ing, but so were the foundation’s finances:
Address by Herbert Ohl
in the auditorium at the
start of the 1967/68
academic year, 1 Oct.
1967.
For the current year the foundation‘s council
again expected a budget deficit totaling
DM 130,000 (the actual deficit was
DM 110,000 ), and this gap could be closed
only with new loans;
at the time the foundation had debts totaling
almost DM 1.9 million;
debt repayment service totaled DM 155,000,
of which DM 80,000 were slated for the two
short-term loans (DM 520,000 in toto) that had
been taken out since 1965 due to mismanage-
ment on the part of the foundation’s administra-
tion;
every month the HfG had a deficit of about DM
17,000, although a balanced budget had been
adopted, which the HfG had helped to draw up.
In other words, the HfG was spending more
money than agreed, and the foundation failed
to control the finances. 1370
Herbert Ohl had been the rector of the HfG since
1 October 1966. The HfG’s extended senate had
elected him on 13 December 1965. 1371 On 2 Octo-
ber 1967 he gave the opening address of the new
academic year (1967/68) to the lecturers, students,
and staff.
Most members of the HfG were unaware of the
ominous proportions reached by the financial defi-
cit. We may assume that only a few members of
the inner senate had even an inkling how serious
the situation was. But the direct connection that
had once existed between the foundation and the
HfG was no longer there. That explains why HfG
members increasingly thought of the foundation
as something extraneous.
When Herbert Ohl came to speak of the HfG’s
future, he explained his vision as to how the HfG
might be transferred to the care of the state. For
since the imagination of all those involved, in the
foundation and the HfG, had been restricted for
years to stubbornly trying to obtain subsidies from
the public sector, the imaginary step to national-
ization was only a question of how the HfG could
keep its autonomy: “The incorporation of the HfG’s
structure in the encompassing structure of the
overall higher education program of the Land of
Baden-Württemberg […] is something the college
itself and the Baden-Württemberg coordinated
higher education plan have been considering. At
present the HfG is a private institution, though it
is predominantly financed with public funds. It
seems to be practical and necessary to nationalize
the institution in the future as part of a stabilizing
move, thus turning a de facto situation into a de
jure one. The comprehensive higher education
plan sees the differentiated coordinated university
as a system of colleges that are interrelated and
complementary. To quote from the plan: In the
case of the Ulm School of Design, ‘becoming part
First row: unidentified,
Otl Aicher, Herbert W.
Kapitzki.
of larger academic units can substantially assist
the development of the college.’ The HfG performs
a vital task in Baden-Württemberg, in the other
federal Länder, and in the rest of Europe that is
not provided in this form by any other institution.
Since its work is carried out in concerted action
with other colleges anyway, it makes sense to
consider whether the college could perhaps be
integrated into the higher education system of
Baden-Württemberg.” 1372
In fact this integration had until then existed
only on paper. And Herbert Ohl knew this, for
Günther Boulanger had repeated it often enough
in the foundation‘s council. For 1967 and the years
thereafter it didn’t do much good for the founda-
tion to concentrate on this HfG wish; what mat-
tered now was to save the HfG itself. Also one
must not forget that in 1966 the Landtag had un-
mistakably stated that it did not wish to nationalize
the HfG. Herbert Ohl was thus grasping at an es-
pecially fragile straw.
A few days after the beginning of the new aca-
demic year the foundation‘s council had a meet-
ing. To prepare for it the new administrative direc-
tor, Klaus Fischer 1373, had prepared a report in
which he succinctly stated: “The GSS has no liquid
assets of its own. Rather, all its financial obliga-
tions are made possible only through overdrafts on
Discharge of Tomás
Maldonado in the
rector’s office, 30 June
1967:
With Herbert Ohl
and with Otl Aicher.
Photos: Gui Bonsiepe
Archive: HfG (ohne Negativ
Maldonado/Aicher and
Ohl/Maldonado)
the Ulm Volksbank [industrial credit cooperative].
[…] The GSS and the School of Design feel that to
close a department – something that has been
considered several times – is out of the question,
since this would change the character of the col-
lege to such an extent that one could no longer
call it a college organization.” 1374 The deficit created
month by month would mount up, if nothing was
done, to a total of DM 200,000 – an amount
equaling the last federal subsidy. The HfG did not
seem to want to admit this loss; it wanted to bring
about a subsidy increase by force, by the norma-
tive power of existing facts.
The members of the foundation‘s council saw
only one way out – to put themselves at the Land-
tag’s mercy for better or for worse: The Land was
supposed to authorize DM 1.2 million for 1968 –
Photos: Hartwig Koppermann
Archive: HfG
(67/0562 and 67/0567)
and the coming years (DM 900,000 as before, 363
the DM 200,000 loss of the federal subsidy, and
DM 100,000 to wipe out the short-term debts).
All members of the foundation‘s council knew that
this plan had hardly any prospects of succeeding.
Yet Günther Boulanger, the representative of the
ministry of finance, expressed the hope of the
despairing: “I told my minister that we have to
close the school if we do not get the 300,000.
It is clear to me that in that case we have to carry
out what we said we would do. Then we have to
start firing people etc. We have to state quite clearly:
Either we get adequate subsidies or we close the
school. At the moment the situation is incredibly
favorable. The elections are coming up. There’ll
be a public scandal. The press will back the
school. That will have quite an effect. […] If the
finance committee doesn’t authorize the 300,000,
then we must start handing out notices.” 1375
Günther Boulanger would not be satisfied with
a more modest increase of the Land subsidy: “We
need the DM 300,000 – at least in order to sur-
vive. Partial successes would mean running into
more debt. We government people can’t go along
with this anymore.” A compromise was out of the
question – that was the unanimous opinion of the
foundation‘s council. Its members tried to make
their resolution as determined and credible as pos-
sible: “If the Landtag is unable to comply with this
request, then the foundation‘s council will order
that the school be closed at the end of the 1967/68
academic year. This is the foundation‘s council’
unanimous decision. The council has no other
choice, since it can no longer assume responsibil-
ity for additional annual deficits.” 1376
Hans Lorenser (CDU), who had become Theo-
dor Pfizer’s successor as the mayor of Ulm in 1972,
asked the Landtag for DM 1.2 million in subsidy
funds for 1968. 1377 But the finance committee, on
8 November 1967, refused to include this sum in
the draft budget: “The discussion in the finance
committee was to the effect that things must fi-
nally be settled once and for all.” And the only
thing a final settlement could mean was that com-
mittee members were not willing to for the state
to assume charge of the HfG – if the HfG could
 The rectorships of
Aicher, Maldonado
and Ohl
364
Wilhelm Hahn (CDU)
(14 May 1909–9 Dec.
1996), Baden-Württem-
berg minister of educa-
tion and the arts, 1964
to 1978, and vice minis-
ter-president, 1972–78.
Photo: unknown (ca. 1967)
Archive: Landesbildstelle Würt-
temberg (k539/33)
manage on the Land’s DM 900,000 and raise the
other funds it needed on its own, nothing would
have changed. 1378
Now it was the turn of Wolfgang Donndorf, the
representative of the ministry of education and the
arts on the foundation‘s council, to draw up a gov-
ernment bill so that the Land government would
include the requested DM 1.2 million in the draft
budget for 1968. In his 23 November 1967 bill he
gave an exact, unvarnished view of the situation
and of the consequences of possible decisions,
and came to the conclusion that the Land should
raise the subsidy to the foundation to the requested
total of DM 1.2 million: “Because of its mission the
School of Design has a unique position among
German institutions of higher learning. At this time
no other educational institution in the Federal
Republic of Germany is capable of taking on this
mission. The proof of its influence and its quality
are its national and international successes and its
international reputation. Closing a center that has
such significance for the German economy would
not only be misunderstood in Germany and abroad,
but possibly misinterpreted politically as well. The
ministry of education and the arts feels that be-
cause of the significance of the Ulm School of
Design, it is imperative that the school be pre-
served.” 1379
The cabinet discussed this item on the agenda
on 5 December 1967. 1380 Of course, the founda-
tion‘s council had announced that if its request
for a subsidy increase were to be denied, the HfG
would be closed at the end of the 1967/68 aca-
demic year. The members of the foundation‘s
council hoped that the Land government would
be deterred by a possible public outcry – after all,
a new parliament was to be elected on 28 April
1968. But the minister-president, Hans Filbinger
(CDU), gave no credence to this threat. He doubted
that the foundation would actually have to close
the HfG if it continued to receive a Land subsidy
of DM 900,000 (plus DM 200,000 from the city).
The minister of economics, Hans-Otto Schwarz
(SPD), proposed an investigation to see whether
the HfG could not become affiliated with the Staat-
liche Ingenieurschule Ulm (Ulm State College of
Engineering). In response to the minister-presi-
dent’s question how the Landtag would respond
to this proposal, the ministers said that parliament
would no doubt accept a motion to that effect.
Thereupon the council of ministers declared itself
in favor of the HfG becoming affiliated with or
incorporated in the Ulm College of Engineering.
The ministry of education and the arts was to
study in what form this integration or affiliation
could be carried out and how much this would
cost. Therefore no proposal was made to the
Landtag that the subsidy be raised as asked; the
draft of the Land government for the state budget
contained DM 900,000 for the foundation as be-
fore and not the requested DM 1.2 million. And the
cabinet, with its initiative to affiliate the HfG with
or incorporate it in the Ulm College of Engineering
assumed part of the responsibility that the foun-
dation‘s council was so eager to hand over. The
development that had begun four years previous-
ly when the Land blocked its subsidy had now
reached a temporary low.
Günther Boulanger, the representative of the
ministry of finance on the foundation‘s council,
who had not been part of this cabinet meeting,
surmised the reason for the government’s nega-
tive attitude was old resentment against the HfG:
“I’ve been wondering what could have caused the
ministers not to follow the ministry of education
and the arts a hundred percent. […] The council
of ministers did not go along with the Ministry, but
instead made counterproposals that the School of
Design should become affiliated with or integrated
in [another institution]. Personally I am of the opin-
ion that if the council of ministers had made a
show of strength, the Landtag would have ac-
cepted. The pre-election mood would have helped.
You don’t really want to close a school just before
an election. […] This is not just about the money.
Some ministers would like to strengthen govern-
ment influence on the school. All decisions that
do not achieve that will not go through if the inten-
tion is to get stronger control of the school. Certain
influences are to be strengthened. If this institution
is incorporated in the College of Engineering, they
hope to reach that goal. This is not about money,
there’s a lot more involved. It’s simply a question
of influences. The eternal old struggles. Those are
arguments that don’t have so much to do with this
business. People don’t like the whole orientation
of the school.”
By this “orientation” of the school that the min-
isters did not like, Günther Boulanger did not really
mean the cultural mission the HfG had set as its
goal. He meant, for instance, the autonomy the
HfG had enjoyed since its founding and that could
now, in the inflamed general discussion around
higher education reform, be transmuted into a
shining example of the autonomy of institutions of
higher learning. After all, HfG students had been
participating in rectoral elections since 1958 and
had successfully resisted the revocation of this
right since 1964 in every way they could: strikes,
resolutions, protests, disobedience. But he also
meant the sum total of details that had since 1965
increasingly linked the HfG with political agitation.
For instance, in July 1965 there had been a pri-
vate collection for the victims of the Vietnam War
that had caused quite a stir in the local press.
There had been loud accusations that people at
the HfG engaged in communist activities. Theodor
Pfizer had been sharply attacked in the municipal
council for a while. He had to make a position
statement in the municipal council, start an inves-
tigation of the incident, and defend himself against
Landtag speaker Franz Gurk (CDU), who believed
that the HfG represented the radical left. 1381 When
the German studies student Benno Ohnesorg was
shot on 2 June 1967 at a demonstration against
the visit of the Persian shah in West Berlin, HfG
students published a protest resolution in the
press on 7 June 1967 and called for a demonstra-
tion in the center of town – but petit-bourgeois
Ulm refused to support this show of solidarity. 1382
Another fact that did not go unnoticed was that
the HfG student council gave the Sozialistischer
Deutscher Studentenbund (Socialist Association
of German Students) (SDS) 1383 space on its own
allotted share of the bulletin board, and that the
(local) group of the SDS was permitted at the
HfG. 1384
What is more, internally and externally the HfG
continued to present a picture of disharmony
amidst the poisoned atmosphere where personal
character assassination was par for the course as
long as it helped one reach one’s own goals. The
graphic designer Herbert W. Kapitzki, brought to
the HfG in 1965 by Otl Aicher for the department
of visual communication, described his impres-
sions a few months after his arrival in Ulm as fol-
lows: “In the meantime events have occurred that
lead one to conclude that the whole faculty is
made up of various interest groups that are pre-
sumably in competition with each other. The stu-
dents, too, are affected by this putative situation.
If you ask those who are involved, however, they
claim they know nothing about it. Looking at the
causal connections analytically, I believe that this
situation has been becoming more embittered for
years. […] But I’d like to criticize the way these
events are handled here in the school; to my way
of thinking, that is no basis for constructive and
honest teamwork. […] It also seems to me that it
is not proper for resolutions made in the senate
that ought to be treated as confidential to be made
public by those involved because matters are in-
appropriately handled. In this regard there are con-
stant breaches of confidence. […] My idea of
‘good faith’ in such a community is different from
Herbert W. Kapitzki what’s going on here. […] I wouldn’t want to have
1967 to make a choice to join a group that is disap-
Photo: Eckhard Jung proved of by another group or described as reac-
Archive: HfG (67/0610/3) tionary, conservative, even radical right-wing. The
above terms have been repeatedly used by stu-
dents and lecturers.“ 1385
Two days after the meeting of the council of minis-
ters, on 7 December 1967, the finance committee
and the plenum of the Baden-Württemberg Land-
tag accepted the proposal that in 1968 the foun-
dation should not receive a higher subsidy and 365
that affiliation with or integration into the Ulm Col-
lege of Engineering should be studied. 1386 The
ministry of education and the arts had to do this
study and submit its report by 1 March 1968. 1387
Thus, on 7 December 1967, a turning point in
the history of the HfG had been reached – the
moment when its development hung in the bal-
ance, when it was by no means certain what direc-
tion it would finally take. Six factors had brought
the HfG to this point:
the resignation of qualified faculty and staff
from the HfG and foundation;
the simultaneous prevention of new opportu-
nities for research and development;
the end of federal interest in the HfG;
the breaking off of relations between the foun-
dation and trade and industry;
the failure of the foundation’s supervisory and
executive branches;
and, finally, the break in ideology and action
between the HfG and the foundation.
The situation worsened in 1967 when the founda-
tion was acutely insolvent. From then on the 1968
struggle for existence, in the eyes of most histo-
rians, is reduced to a financial crisis. But that
would be confusing cause and effect. The oppres-
sive financial difficulties were only the trigger, al-
though they had reached a dimension hitherto
unknown in HfG history. The foundation had al-
ways been plagued by financial worries, but now
they had taken on a different character: From
being unable to pay its bills, the foundation now
became unable to act. The response to this paral-
ysis was that the council of ministers assumed
responsibility for what would happen subsequent-
ly, since the foundation‘s council forced it upon
them.
At the 14th meeting of the foundation‘s coun-
cil on 18 December 1967, the views of the five
groups who were involved were expressed. These
were the Land cabinet, the Landtag, the Ulm
municipal council, the foundation‘s council, and
the HfG, represented by its rector Herbert Ohl,
who was present at the meeting as an observer. 1388
By the end of the meeting it was agreed that the
foundation would close the HfG effective 30 Sep-
tember 1968.
First, Günther Boulanger reported on discus-
sions in the council of ministers and the finance
committee of the Landtag. In his report he came
to the sobering realization that the HfG’s long-term
adversaries had now gained the upper hand. Old
allies had abandoned their own side, no new allies
had been recruited, and now old resentments re-
surfaced: “I've been wondering what could have
caused the ministers not to follow the ministry of
 The rectorships of
Aicher, Maldonado
and Ohl
366
Robert Gleichauf (CDU)
(4 April 1914–25 Oct.
1992), secretary of the
parliamentary group of
the CDU in the Baden-
Württemberg Landtag,
1956–68, and Baden-
Württemberg finance
minister, 1968–80.
Photo: unknown (1968)
Archive: Landesbildstelle Würt-
temberg (k527/5)
education and the arts a hundred percent. The
school would have been able to manage on that
[the requested DM 1.2 million; author’s note]. […]
My personal opinion is that if the council of minis-
ters had stood up for [the increase], it would have
been accepted in the Landtag. The pre-election
mood would have been favorable. People don’t
like to close a school right before an election. But
they [the members of parliament; author’s note]
were not prepared to vote against the council of
ministers. This is not about money. Some ministers
are interested in strengthening a state influence on
the school. All decisions that do not achieve that
will not go through if the intention is to get greater
control of the school. Certain influences are to be
strengthened. If this institution is incorporated in
the College of Engineering, they hope to reach that
goal. This is not about money, there’s a lot more
involved. It’s simply a question of influences. The
eternal old struggles. Those are arguments that
don’t have so much to do with this business. Peo-
ple don’t like the whole orientation of the school.”
In this context, “orientation” can only mean the
school’s current openness to the ideas of the stu-
dent revolt: The participation of its students in self-
government, in setting up the curriculum, even in
electing the rector were, of course, traditional char-
acteristics of the private School of Design that
went considerably beyond student rights at public
colleges and universities. This why the HfG could
be used as a prime example for more far-reaching
student demands. At the same time it could now
also be misinterpreted by leading Land politicians
as a dangerous vanguard of rebelliousness close
to the Land’s capital. Here was an opportunity to
make this avant-garde a part of the government’s
own ranks, the price being the loss of the school’s
special constitutional character, paid only by HfG
members, however. – We must not forget, how-
ever, that this interpretation by Günther Boulanger
makes it easier to understand only the question
why at the beginning of December 1967 the Land
failed to noticeably increase its subsidy. It is by no
means an adequate explanation of why the HfG
no longer exists.
Secondly, the mood in the Landtag’s finance
committee seemed to be even chillier. The founda-
tion‘s request of DM 1.2 million had been rejected
by a vote of 9 to 16. Here, at first, it was felt that
only a (subsidiary) affiliation with the College of
Engineering could be considered if the HfG wanted
to be nationalized. Günther Boulanger observed,
“There are simply certain gentlemen who are ab-
solutely against it [the HfG; author’s note].” His
colleague from the ministry of education and the
arts, Wolfgang Donndorf, added: “Discussion in
the finance committee showed that people actual-
ly thought things ought to be finally settled once
and for all.”
Thirdly, Theodor Pfizer had to acknowledge that
the HfG’s opponents in the Ulm municipal council
had also taken the initiative. In the finance com-
mittee of the municipal council a note was added
for the city’s DM 200,000 to say that the funds
should be blocked, so that the subsidy could be
disbursed only once the situation was settled. The
mayor of Ulm explained: “Well, there are serious
opponents in the municipal council. […] Naturally
that’s also an issue for Ulm. No doubt the majority
would say: Finally we’re rid of this financial ballast.
But still, every once in a while you’ve got to do
something against the majority of the citizens for
the citizens.” – Three days later, on 21 December
1967, the entire municipal council, at the request
of the CDU faction, followed the recommendation
of its finance committee and blocked the city’s
subsidy. On 6 February 1968 Theodor Pfizer man-
aged to unblock the funds again. 1389
Fourthly, Herbert Ohl, the rector, indicated that
he was steadfastly pursuing his goal of national-
izing the HfG as an autonomous institution. That
is why he also understood the resolution of the
council of ministers to mean just that, although
that was clearly not the intention of the ministers.
The HfG, he said, must be preserved. And it must
be preserved as a college. In the reference to the
“subordination” of the HfG, he added the schools
of his choice. He claimed that the term “affiliation
with or integration in” did not go far enough: “The
only way for it to be understood is that we should
be able to use the Hochschulgesamtplan [Higher
Education Coordination Plan, a plan by the ministry
of education and the arts to structure higher edu-
cation policy in Baden-Württemberg; translator’s
note] . Only in that context can we see (possible)
steps. […] Nationalization should be studied. A
step toward this subordination can be visualized
only within the framework of such an integrated
university system. […] If all that is meant by affil-
iation is affiliation with a school of engineering,
then that is not possible. […] Subordination goes
without saying, but it should be primarily subordi-
nation to the state. […] It can’t be done at all with
an engineering school. […] I only wish that the
studies should be conducted with the Higher Edu-
cation Coordination Plan in mind. If there’s to be
nationalization, it should be from this perspective.
Staying independent or nationalization – those are
the only alternatives.” Herbert Ohl was aware that
Ralf Dahrendorf’s plan of a coordinated university
system would not be implemented for a few years.
No doubt he even regarded this period of time as
the greatest opportunity to preserve the autonomy
and independence of the HfG. For as soon at is
was certain that the HfG was part of the coordi-
nated university system, there would be enough
time and opportunities to assert the HfG’s inter-
ests. That is why Herbert Ohl did not miss a single
Theodor Pfizer at the
HfG, 1968.
Photo: unknown
Archive: city archive Ulm (11–5–
97)
opportunity to argue that his objective was not out
of touch with reality. Only four days earlier, with
this end in view, he had published a position pa-
per: “The Ulm School of Design is determined to
go on working fully and in its capacity as a college,
and welcomes the decision of the council of min-
isters and the Baden-Württemberg Landtag to pre-
serve it ‘because of its uniqueness and significan-
ce’. The School of Design awaits studies on the
possibility of nationalization […]. The School of
Design hopes the studies will produce a result that
on the one hand will ensure the college continues
to develop dynamically and on the other hand rep-
resents a starting point toward building a new, all-
encompassing system of higher education.” 1390
And fifthly, most of the members of the founda-
tion’s council proved to be perplexed and helpless.
The road they had taken at their previous meeting
turned out not to be the clear way out they had
been looking for. Again they saw themselves in a
blind alley; their disappointment and resignation
were unmistakable. Otto Pfleiderer, the president
of the Landeszentralbank, who had supported the
HfG ever since the first administrative council meet-
ing, took the initiative and demanded that the
council draw conclusions from his insights, from
the situation, and from the last decisions: “Do we
stick to the 30 October 1967 decision or not? On
that day we presented our conclusions to the
Landtag, clearly formulated. The conditions in fact 367
occurred. The first question for us: Do we want to
stick to this decision? From a purely legal stand-
point we can, but I see no possibility of going on.
I see that we will continue to function as sponsors
until the end of the 67/68 academic year at the lat-
est. […] Then the next question is whether the
GSS is still entitled to exist or not. I want to say,
unless people here tell me differently, that the GSS
would then have to be dissolved.” Günther Grzi-
mek objected that first they must wait for the re-
sults from the ministry of education and the arts to
see in what way the HfG could be affiliated with or
integrated in the State College of Engineering. But
his point did not persuade his listeners. At least
there was agreement that the current academic
year 1967/68 would be brought to a conclusion.
And contrary to the misgivings of Günther Bou-
langer, the representative of the ministry of finan-
ce, the foundation‘s council did not give notice
to all the faculty members and staff of the foun-
dation. From a financial point of view, this would
have been the correct and safest behavior, be-
cause it would have kept 1968 from ending with
yet another fiasco. 1391 At the same time, however,
and this was most important, it would have meant
that negotiations about the future of the HfG
would have to be conducted from an even weaker
position. And no doubt teaching would have in-
stantly collapsed. Finally Otto Pfleiderer energeti-
cally got the group to accept his view, and so the
foundation‘s council decided the end of a privately
sponsored HfG – in the hope that a public spon-
sorship would seamlessly follow:
„1. The 1967/68 academic year will be brought to
a conclusion […] as planned.
2. As a result of the DM 300,000 cut in the re-
quested subsidy the Geschwister-Scholl-Stif-
tung is no longer in a position to function as
the sponsor of the School of Design beyond
30 September 1968.
3. The foundation‘s council in principle welcomes
the intention of the Land government to keep
the School of Design going and to have the
Land take charge of it.
4. In this context the foundation‘s council em-
phatically requests that the Land government
bear in mind the unique character of the School
of Design and if at all possible maintain the col-
lege as a self-contained unit.”
The king is dead, long live the king.
Thus by the turn of 1967/68 it had been settled
that the HfG was no longer going to be privately
sponsored starting 1 October 1968. The dominant
question emerged from that fact: What would a
publicly sponsored HfG be like? All thoughts and
 The rectorships of
Aicher, Maldonado
and Ohl
368
23 February 1968.
Smoking a cigarette:
Walter Zeischegg.
Herbert Ohl.
Photos: Gloria Nauber-Gassmann
Archive: HfG (Depositum 96/9
and 96/1)
events circled around this center in 1968. In the
course of that year one characteristic feature of
development emerged; it can most strikingly be
described as the clarifying of positions and varia-
tions thereof.
At first, and almost like an eruption, confronta-
tion between the HfG and all faculty and staff who
supported the school’s affiliation with or integra-
tion in the Ulm State College of Engineering or
even merely considered the idea (up to the middle
of March 1968) grew in intensity. In this first phase
the HfG, with its stance of rejection, completely
asserted itself against the passive foundation‘s
council and the active Stuttgart protagonists in the
ministries. In the course of the dispute there was
also a process of mutual repulsion between the
HfG and the foundation. On the one hand lecturers
like Herbert Ohl and the students increasingly re-
jected the foundation’s claim that it was their sole
external representative, because the foundation
had forfeited its right to represent the HfG’s inter-
ests by a decision of its foundation‘s council, and
because as time went on the students opposed
any higher institution that arrogated authority to
itself. On the other hand events were coming to
light at the HfG that, to the members of the foun-
dation‘s council, seemed to be evidence of irre-
sponsible, short-sighted, and foolish behavior and
stripped them of any vestige of patience, under-
standing, and interest in the college.
As of the middle of March 1968, the members
of the HfG had to change their behavior; they had
to do more than simply reject proposals that came
from outside. Now they themselves needed to for-
mulate their own ideas as to what the future of the
HfG would look like. In this second phase they no
longer had an easily identifiable adversary, while
up to that time all internal forces of the HfG had
concentrated on warding off that adversary’s in-
tentions. Now, within the HfG, opposing factions
that had hitherto existed only in an embryonic
stage became more pronounced. The HfG devel-
oped hardening of the arteries; it gradually be-
came impossible for the school to respond flexibly
to current demands. Very valuable time was lost
in exhausting factional struggles. The factions,
though, did not develop merely because of the
school’s own difficulties. Rather, they were to
some extent fed by the latest issues raised by stu-
dent unrest. As a result, students, assistant lec-
turers, and lecturers were divided into separate
groups, so that by the end of the academic year
(30 June 1968) the HfG was no longer recogniz-
able as a unified whole, as a voluntary gathering
of teachers and learners with the common interest
of self-preservation. It was scattered in many di-
rections. And only a very minimal number of its
members returned to the college on 1 October
1968 at the end of the summer holidays. Kuhberg
had lost its attractiveness, literally: its power to
attract, as an international magnet of design edu-
cation and personality training.
Yet this was not enough to seal the fate of the
HfG. The HfG did not dissolve itself, neither in an
active sense (as resolved on 19–23 February 1968)
nor in a passive sense (when students failed to
re-register on 1 October 1968). Classes started
for the new 1968/69 academic year, though on
an irregular basis. Until November 1968 there was
a real possibility that the HfG might remain in exis-
tence in the future. Not until November 1968 was
its existence finally cut short when a degrading
cannibalism set in among its remaining members.
The starting position as of 1 January 1968 may be
characterized as follows:
1. The value of the foundation’s real estate was
approximately DM 4.3 million. 1392 The debit side,
on the other hand, totaled almost DM 1.5 mil-
lion, divided over nine loans with different
Hans Lorenser (CDU)
(6 Feb. 1916–19 July
1989), member of
Baden-Württemberg
Landtag, 1964–72,
and mayor of Ulm,
1972–84.
Photo: unknown (1 May 1968)
Archive: Südwestpresse
maturity dates – and correspondingly different
scales of rates and charges. In part these were
long-term mortgages secured by property, in
part , however, they were short-term obligations
that had been entered into in order to cover
gaps in the budget to avoid imminent insolven-
cy. Annual payments on these totaled about DM
150,000. 1393
2. The foundation’s personnel had been decimated.
This exsanguination reflects the fact that those
groups who could traditionally be counted on to
HfG meeting, support the foundation disapproved of the
23 February 1968. events of the past years. There was now only
a truncated foundation‘s council (three vacant
Seated at the table positions, and four starting May 1968), and
(from the left): Johanna what is more there was only a truncated execu-
Rösner, Herbert Ohl, tive board (one member instead of three). The
Claude Schnaidt, and administrative director was pale and weak. Per-
Herbert Lindinger. sonnel and financial shortages meant that the
Photo: unknown foundation was incapable of acting – not inevi-
Archive: Südwestpresse tably, but de facto; it admitted this, and strove
to shift the responsibility for the HfG to the Land
of Baden-Württemberg, wherever anyone was
willing to take charge of it: in the Landtag or in
the Land government or in the ministry of edu-
cation and the arts. Of the foundation’s previous
financial sponsors, only the Land was left; only
here could there be a faint hope, contrary to all
statements up to this point, that it would make
a stronger commitment after all. The federal
government and the private sector were now
definitely not willing to support the HfG, the city
of Ulm would have been overtaxed, and there
were no wealthy patrons in sight.
3. At the beginning of the 1967/68 academic year
the HfG was active and lively as always, unlike
the foundation’s more passive foundation‘s
council. For instance, it was the HfG that was
responsible for the main German contribution to
the 1968 Milan Triennale. The HfG’s design was
the winner of a competition by the Rat für Form-
gebung (Design Council) on the theme “Design
in public life”. It is true that recently the socio-
political interests of HfG members appeared to
supersede their interest in design-related prob-
lems. The slogans of the student unrests found
a receptive soil at the HfG.
In the sixties there had been a sudden burst of
reforms in Baden-Württemberg educational policy,
and specifically in higher education. In the ministry
of education and the arts the HfG had always been
recognized as a college with a unique character.
However, it was not classed as a scientific univer-
sity or technical college, just as it was not consid-
ered to be a technical school.
For the sake of simplicity it could possibly be
compared with one of the nine colleges of music
369
and art, but its technological orientation and equip-
ment also suggested a comparison with the
schools of engineering. There were also feeble
comparisons with the Land’s two arts and crafts
schools (Pforzheim and Schwäbisch Gmünd),
which were ranked as state professional colleges.
Today the HfG could be interpreted as being, for
a few years, the realization of the old dream of a
techno-humanistic college and from the point of
view of objectives represented an alternative to
technical colleges.
The general goals of the Land government, as
recapitulated by minister of education and the arts
Wilhelm Hahn (CDU) in 1965 for the biennial re-
port of the Länder at the conference of ministers
of education and the arts, were to decrease the
“education gap” between urban and rural areas
and develop “educational reserves” in the country
(a kind of intellectual fallow land).
The minister placed himself on the side of polit-
ico-cultural reformers: The educational policy of
the Land government of Kurt Georg Kiesinger (who
had emphasized its importance in his government
policy statement on 25 June 1964 1394) „stressed
that educational policy today is the same as overall
policy: The fate of a democracy largely depends
on its education system. For democracy presup-
poses that citizens are politically mature and re-
sponsible. (...) The education system, which is
indissolubly linked with social, economic, and fi-
nancial policy, is therefore rightly considered to be
part of a country’s infrastructure. (...) In the triad of
educational research, educational planning, and
educational policy each individual’s and the entire
society’s claim to freedom must be safeguarded.
(...) To prevent rising numbers of applicants to col-
leges and universities from being penalized by the
restriction of admissions (numerus clausus), an
overall higher education plan is worked out as part
of educational planning that deals with higher
educational programs and tries to coordinate indi-
vidual educational institutions – scientific colleges
and universities, teachers’ colleges, schools for
vocational educators, teacher training courses, art
and music colleges, schools of engineering and
institutes of technology – in such a way as to have
greater flexibility.“
 The rectorships of
Aicher, Maldonado
and Ohl
370
Voting on 23 Feb. 1968
on the resolution to dis-
band. Wearing a scarf,
partially concealed,
Inge Aicher-Scholl is
seated next to her hus-
band.
Photo: Gloria Nauber-Gassmann
Archive: HfG (Depositum 96/6)
This reform activity had begun, to choose an
example, with the opening of eight teacher train-
ing colleges in the summer semester of 1962
(Esslingen, Freiburg, Heidelberg, Karlsruhe, Lud-
wigsburg, Reutlingen, Schwäbisch Gmünd, and
Weingarten). The Land government also took
under advisement the Recommendations of the
Scientific Council on expanding scientific col-
leges and universities:
Of the 204 additional professorships at the
seven scientific colleges and universities of
Baden-Württemberg recommended by the
Scientific Council, a total of 99 were estab-
lished in 1961 and 1962;
the Scientific Council diagnosed a particular
need for more teachers in the non-professorial
teaching staff of higher institutions of learning
(such as lecturers, assistant professors, teach-
ing assistants); it advised that about 900 addi-
tional positions be established; the Land gov-
ernment included a total of 441 positions in the
budget in 1961 and 1962;
in 1961 the Land spent DM 44.4 million for the
construction of colleges and universities; this
represented 42 percent of expenditure for all
building construction in the state; in 1962, as
the budget increased generally, this grew to as
much as DM 83.37 million (43 percent).
“Again and again a
reporter may hear
someone say with
proud resignation:
Two developments influenced the higher educa-
tion policy of the Land of Baden-Württemberg
beginning in the mid-sixties: The decision to add
new colleges and universities, and the adoption of
the University and College Act on 7 March 1968
by the Landtag.
Minister-president Kurt Georg Kiesinger (CDU)
intended Baden-Württemberg to have an eighth
scientific college: “In September 1959 Minister-
president Kiesinger, to the surprise of the general
public, recommended the city of Constance as the
location of a new, fourth Land university in Baden-
Württemberg, and repeatedly confirmed this line
of thinking.“ 1396 The city of Ulm also vied for the
university – Ulm Mayor Theodor Pfizer supported
the idea –, and later so did the city of Mannheim.
But Kurt Georg Kiesinger prevailed: On 27 Feb.
1964 the Landtag decided to establish the Uni-
versity of Constance and thus put into effect a
model of academic reform. So that the two other
competitors would not come away empty-handed,
it was decided on the same day to found a medi-
cal school in Ulm and to expand the Mannheim
School of Business by adding a clinical complex
that would become the second medical school of
Heidelberg University. In August 1964 the ministry
of education and the arts added an educational
planning department that subsequently designed
a comprehensive higher education plan for the
What’s to become of Maybe it wouldn’t be so Hasn’t it done enough
this school? Which way bad if the school were just by being there?
are we heading? Aren’t to fold in a year or two. Doesn’t it already seem
we a luxury? What will It’s achieved enough regulative, normative? It
become of us once we already: It was there. wouldn’t be a tragedy.
graduate? Where will The longer it exists, the This is the voice of an
the next generation of greater the risk that it elite that feels mis-
students come from? will become petrified or understood.“
peter out.
Land to encompass all institutions of higher learn-
ing for purposes of reform. On 21 June 1966 Con-
stance laid the foundation stone for the university.
On 25 Feb. 1967 the Ulm medical school was of-
ficially opened; as of July 1967, it has had the right
to call itself the Universität Ulm, Medizinisch-
Naturwissenschaftliche Hochschule (University of
Ulm, a School of Medicine and Natural Science).
The disputes regarding whether and how the
HfG was to be nationalized occurred in the middle
of a period when the College and University Act
was on the agenda. The reason for them was not
only growing unrest among students during 1967
and 1968, when student protests increasingly
moved out into the streets and no longer shied
away from violence. 1397 One reason was also that
the first College and University Act of the Land
was discussed among much controversy right in
the Landtag of Baden-Württemberg in the spring
of 1968. On 7 March 1968 the Landtag passed a
resolution: The self-government of the universities
was to be strengthened and the dualism of state
and academic administration to be eliminated; the
so-called “power structures“ that were felt to exist
in colleges and universities, (at the HfG, too, dur-
ing that time, students examined the power struc-
tures in their college) were to be dismantled. 1398
They were to be replaced by a structure where
members of the institution worked together as
partners. The students’ criticism aimed at imple-
menting equal say in decision-making for students
in all university committees (at the HfG this policy
became a reality in the committees to save the
HfG).
This picture was
probably taken at the
HfG’s 19 Feb. 1968
meeting, when the
resolution to disband
was discussed.
Photo: unknown
Archive: HfG (0380/2)
A few figures illustrate the promotion of the HfG
by the Land and the federal government as com-
pared to another budget item of educational and
cultural policy.
For if we compare the sums provided by the
Land for the operation of its seven scientific insti-
tutions of higher learning with contributions to the
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung for the HfG, it is strik-
ing that assertions by the HfG’s opponents, who
claimed that the HfG was an expensive college for
the Land, turn out to be groundless. They are es-
Bernhard Rübenach,
Der rechte Winkel von
Ulm, p. 57.
pecially unfounded if we remember that the HfG 371
raised its own construction costs and that the lat-
ter were a substantial part of its budget, while
state colleges and universities could fall back on
the Land’s building construction budget. In 1965
the Land spent DM 185 million for construction at
the existing seven colleges and universities; in
1966 it was still DM 165.5 million, not counting
the cost of new construction at the three addition-
al academic institutions. If these sums are brought
into relation with numbers of students and the
Gui Bonsiepe,
23 Feb. 1968.
Photo: Gloria Nauber-Gassmann
Archive: HfG (Depositum 96/2)
result applied to the HfG, then the HfG should have
been able to receive an additional DM 575,000 in
1965 and an additional DM 500,000 in 1966 with-
out receiving preferential treatment as compared
to state academic institutions. This result is all the
more bitter in that it illustrates actual proportions
at the very point when the federal subsidy to the
HfG failed to materialize and the foundation stag-
gered into the fatal financial crisis.
Of course this comparison is not meant to imply
that the foundation had a right to receive such
sums from the Land. The comparison merely indi-
cates the regard in which the HfG was held by
Land politicians as expressed in financial terms,
and it shows the groundlessness of the assertion
that the HfG was the most expensive school in the
Land.
The ministry of education and the arts had been
asked to respond to the Landtag’s request and to
study under what circumstances the HfG could be
nationalized, with the reservation that only affilia-
tion with or integration in the Ulm School of Engi-
neering could be taken into consideration. The in-
tention of the majority of the council of ministers,
in which they followed Minister-president Hans Fil-
binger, was to achieve state supervision of the
restless and unfathomable, and presumably messy
HfG. The present director of the School of Engi-
neering, Josef Hengartner, was considered to be
an assertive, authoritarian, and straightforward
personality. He was preceded by the reputation
that he was capable of mucking out the proverbial
stables of Augias – which is how people probably
thought of the HfG. Also he was said to have the
 The rectorships of Expenditure
Aicher, Maldonado of the Land of Baden-Württemberg
and Ohl for the ongoing operation
1960 –1966 1395

372 the 7 colleges HfG HfG ambition of wanting to upgrade the School of En- to ensure that the citizens, who after all give mon- acter and significance of the HfG could not be pre- 373
of science subsidy subsidy
gineering to an Institute of Technology. The enrich- ey to such an institution through their taxes, should served through affiliation with or integration into
actual (DM) “debit“ (DM)* actual (DM) ment of the programs that were currently offered get a different, positive view of the college than the State School of Engineering. The inclusion of
entsprechend by the broad canon of the HfG would presumably has been the case so far. The citizens, he claimed, both institutions under an umbrella organization
have been a welcome partial victory in reaching still thought that the HfG had a negative opinion of made sense only as part of an association of insti-
1960 per student 000.006,647.03 006,647.03 001,764.71 this goal. them and the state. […] Because of Dutschke the tutions of higher learning that would include the
total amount 262,597,500.00 677,996.06 180,000.00 Three characteristics are typical of the activity of political situation has changed; there is now a neg- university. “Such a fundamentally new solution
the ministry of education and the arts that began ative attitude among taxpayers because they don’t should be implemented by changing the private
1964 per student 000.005,091.13 005,091.13 004,651.16 without delay: The HfG immediately refused even see why they should make funds available for in- foundation status of the HfG to state sponsorship,
total amount 236,243,800.00 656,755.77 600,000.00 to consider being affiliated with the School of En- stitutions where revolutionary ideas are promoted, with the proviso that after carefully and thoroughly
gineering, to say nothing of being integrated in it; especially today, when everyone is economiz- planning the organizational structure of the associ-
1965 per student 000.006,411.61 006,411.61 004,054.05 from the start, negotiations seem to have taken ing.“ 1400 One result that was noted was that the ation of institutions of higher learning, the HfG
total amount 305,250,800.00 948,918.28 600,000.00 place in an atmosphere of aggressiveness and School of Engineering and the HfG were to hand would be incorporated in this association.” 1403
+ construction per student 000.003,885.82 003,885.82 000.000,0– arrogance, and the representatives of the HfG and in their position statements on two possible solu- There were no further negotiations between
costs total amount 185,000,000.00 575,101.36 000.000,0– the School of Engineering probably pulled no tions by 16 January 1968: integration of the HfG both Ulm parties until the end of the study by the
punches, for just as Josef Hengartner no doubt as postgraduate studies at the School of Engi- ministry of education and the arts. Not till after its
1966 per student 000.006,714.57 006,714.57 006,293.71 looked down on the creative anarchists – as he neering, or a merger of both institutions without conclusion, on 15 February 1968, was there one
total amount 316,142,200.00 960,183.51 900,000.00 saw them – who had apparently been ruined by
mismanagement, the designers doubtlessly wrin-
+ construction per student 000.003,515.07 003,515.07 000.000,0–
costs total amount 165,500,000.00 502,655.01 000.000,0– kled their noses at the supposedly provincially lim-
ited horizon of the engineering school’s curricu-
lum; and finally, it is possible to recognize the pos-
itive and supportive attitude of the representatives
of the ministry, striving for a constructive solution.
In the first discussion at the Stuttgart ministry of
education and the arts on 5 January 1968, Herbert
Kapitzki presented the officials with three propos-
als, which, however, all differed from the instruc-
tions of the council of ministers:

1. the autonomous nationalization of the HfG with-

out a change in its status resulting from the
breaking up of the foundation;
2. the founding of an association consisting of the
HfG, the School of Engineering, and the medical
school, while preserving the autonomy of each
institution;
3. the transformation of the private foundation into
one governed by public law.

Josef Hengartner, on the other hand, intended the

* This column shows the amounts
of subsidies the Land of Baden-
Württemberg would have paid to
the HfG if it had supported them
financially exactly like the Land's
seven scientific colleges and uni-
versities.
HfG to be integrated in the School of Engineering
in the form of a four-semester series of postgradu-
ate courses. Another possibility he considered was
a merger as part of an association of Ulm institu-
tions of higher learning, but he knew quite well
that this solution, which would have been the most
agreeable and elegant for all the institutions con-
cerned, had the least prospects of success. 1399
Three days later Herbert Kapitzki and Claude
Schnaidt met at the ministry of state with minister
of state Adalbert Seifriz, who was well acquainted
with the HfG from having been a member of the
administrative council from 1955 through 1958.
Herbert Kapitzki's minutes show the predominant
political problems faced by Land politicians at the
time, which overshadowed the objective treatment
of HfG issues: Adalbert Seifriz “had only one wish:
that the HfG should help him and other politicians
Plenary assembly after changing their curricula with a new, joint umbrella
voting, 23 Feb. 1968. organization headed by the current director of the
Photo: unknown School of Engineering.
Source: L‘école d‘ulm This second variant, at least, was unanimously
approved by the council of lecturers of the School
of Engineering. As early as 11 January 1968 the
council informed the ministry of education and the
arts of its proposal that a future Ulm Institute of
Technology with five departments, one being the
present HfG, would be the best solution. They did
not exclude the possibility that the HfG would be
farther absorbed into the departments of the
School of Engineering – for financial reasons. 1401
The extended senate met on 12 January 1968 and
adopted the position statement of the HfG. 1402
Both proposals were rejected, for the unique char-
more discussion, arranged by the Stuttgart offi-
cials. Josef Hengartner here pushed his attempt
to preserve the unique character of the HfG to a
large extent, as the council of ministers wished,
expressing his intention to found an institute of
technology that would comprise both the School
of Engineering and the HfG. The rectorate bylaws
would then have to be dropped because the smaller
HfG had to adapt itself to the larger School of En-
gineering, and directorial bylaws were more effi-
cient. The institute of technology, he added, meant
not only a common umbrella for two different or-
ganizations, but shared regulations with the same
rights and duties. Along these lines the HfG would
become an added department of design in the
present School of Engineering, and thus his propo-
sal was in keeping with the instructions of the
 The rectorships of
Aicher, Maldonado
and Ohl
374 council of ministers. From the perspective of HfG
representatives what this plan was saying was that
“for the future of the HfG the motto will be, ‘If you
don’t like it, you can lump it’.” 1404 Josef Hengart-
ner’s remarks must have sounded completely alien
to their ears, for hierarchic subordination and im-
balanced adaptation were, for them, concepts
from another world that needed to be overcome,
a world whose sociopolitical ideas struck them as
anachronisms.
The HfG members rejected any constructive
cooperation around the question whether the HfG
and the School of Engineering could be merged in
any way, shape, or form as long as the goal of
such a merger did not involve an association of
Ulm institutions of higher learning. The students in
particular focused their energy on topics vital to
the student movement and – applying these con-
sistently – on the separation of the HfG from the
foundation. On the weekend of 3/4 February 1968
they held a public seminar at the HfG on Higher
education in the process of democratization.
Michael Klar gave the introductory talk on The
political and pedagogical situation of the HfG,
with plenty of criticism of the current HfG, which
he felt was far from coming up to the ideals of a
nonauthoritarian college. 1405 The Stuttgarter Nach-
richten published a report about the seminar on 5
February 1968. – A few days later the HfG set up
a committee committed to basic principles, with
ideal, equal representation (three lecturers, three
assistant lecturers, and three students, one from
each department); the group would “study the
Württemberg-Baden University and College Act
as a basis for the nationalization of the HfG, and
Signing the resolution,
23 Feb. 1968.
Photo: Gloria Nauber-Gassmann
Archive: HfG (Depositum 96/3)
resulting effects on the bylaws, rules of procedure,
and other regulations of the HfG”. 1406 At the same
time the students demanded, first, that a commit-
tee be formed to work out new HfG by-laws, “in
which for the time being only the right of partici-
pation by students, assistant lecturers, technical
teachers, and lecturers in the crucial committees
of the HfG (extended senate, inner senate, depart-
ment conference, pedagogical conference) would
be newly regulated and laid down”. Secondly, to
prevent the imminent affiliation of the HfG with the
School of Engineering, other alternatives for na-
tionalizing the HfG as an autonomous institution
were to be studied, “as long as nationalization is
out of the question and cannot be implemented
as part of a coordinated university system because
the prerequisites are lacking (no interest on the
part of the University of Ulm etc.)”. The commis-
sion was also to look into ways of continuing to
operate the college privately. Thirdly, all negotia-
tions regarding nationalization were to be conducted
in such a way “that the HfG’s bylaws – which it
has yet to develop – must be taken over and guar-
anteed by the new sponsoring organization so as
to ensure the independence and progressive natu-
re, and thus also the special teaching mission, of
the HfG”. Obviously from the students’ perspective
the uniqueness of the HfG, which the council of
ministers was also striving to preserve, was ex-
pressed primarily in its bylaws. And the existing
bylaws of the HfG seemed so questionable to
them that they preferred that the HfG should be
dissolved to its being nationalized with the exist-
ing bylaws. They summed up their demands as
follows: “The students ask that the college admin-
istration examine whether the present bylaws of
the HfG can guarantee that the institution will be
truly progressive after being transferred into state
hands, when it has become apparent even now
that the HfG as an organism uses up more energy
to save itself from destruction than in attaining
regeneration, something that has become abso-
lutely necessary. It is precisely the existing bylaws
that encourage such a diversion of energy.”
By mid-February 1968 the determining factions
had polarized. Affiliation with or integration in an-
other school were out of the question. At the HfG,
since the end of December 1967, people had been
wondering out loud whether the foundation as the
sponsor of the HfG could still justify its existence,
since by its 18 December 1967 resolution it had
already separated itself from the HfG. 1407 Moreover,
the members of the HfG believed that what mat-
tered most was not to preserve the HfG at all costs
but to respect its unique founding idea. As early as
12 January 1968, the students demanded, at the
meeting of the extended senate, that this be taken
into account during the negotiations. 1408 But Her-
bert Ohl also emphasized in an open letter to the
Ulm Südwestpresse that he was not prepared to
make any concessions that would give up those
hitherto undefined characteristics which together
made up the famous unique character of the HfG:
“The future of the HfG cannot be bought at the
price of sacrifices by others or by ourselves that,
while partially preserving our educational institu-
tion, deform, alienate, and undervalue the educa-
tional mission of the HfG. That is why the HfG is
forced to point this out and propose that it can
only be preserved as an autonomous school of
design, the only form appropriate, even if it be-
comes part of an association of institutions of
higher learning.“ 1409 And finally, at the 15th meet-
ing of the foundation‘s council on 12 February
1968, the distance between its members and the
HfG increased.
At this meeting Wolfgang Donndorf and Gün-
ther Boulanger, the representatives of the leading
ministries in Stuttgart, discussed the result of the
study by the ministry of education and the arts. 1410
The next day they planned to pass it on to the min-
istry of state to be submitted to the council of min-
isters. Wolfgang Donndorf's report recommended
that the HfG and the School of Engineering be
combined under a new joint umbrella into a new
entity that would be open to a possible future de-
velopment into a coordinated university system
headed by the director of the School of Engineer-
ing, who was to take the place of the foundation:
“Somehow – and that is intentional – Hengartner
will be in a superior position. And that’s what the
college is afraid of. There is Hengartner’s good
will, but he is also saying quite clearly, and rightly
so: Not next to me, but quite definitely under me.”
There were no instructions for a study to see
whether the HfG might be able to continue in ex-
istence in a (so-called autonomous) nationalized
form. And Wolfgang Donndorf was pessimistic
about any other continuing private future: “I’m
afraid there’s a great risk that the DM 900,000
will also stop coming if the HfG continues to lead
its independent existence as it has done so far.
There’s no point in talking about it.” Theodor Pfizer
agreed with him: “The mood among Land officials
is no different than the mood in the city govern-
ment. The only way it was possible to save the
DM 200,000 was by pointing out that the institu-
tion would be nationalized. […] But I also had the
impression that they [the members of the munici-
pal council; author’s note] want nationalization.
Just three or five years ago there was no such
wish. After all the experience, a certain disillusion-
ment has set in.“ That is why the foundation‘s
council agreed with Wolfgang Donndorf’s conclu-
sion and adopted his proposal. Herbert Ohl rejected
this recommendation because it was not in keep-
ing with the ideas of the HfG: “Our proposal was
not acknowledged here at all. […] You say that the
college should be kept going at all costs. I’m not
so sure about that. It must be able to continue to
determine its own curriculum in an appropriate
form.” The two opposing views collided on this
very issue. Theodor Pfizer contradicted the HfG
rector: “You say you’re against preservation at all
costs. You’d rather let the HfG break apart if the
curriculum does not continue exactly as it is now.
My opinion is that I’d rather change the curriculum
a bit and save the college. Where there’s a will
there’s a way.” The foundation‘s council as the 375
official negotiating partner of the ministry of edu-
cation and the arts would really have liked to hear
the position of the HfG’s extended senate first, but
because the parliamentary term was ending in a
few weeks and the Landtag would stop its discus-
sions on 28 March 1968, there was no time. Also,
based on experience, Wolfgang Donndorf feared
the indiscretion of HfG members. At all costs, he
wanted to prevent a situation where the govern-
ment would learn about the bill it would be nego-
tiating from the press. That is why the extended
senate could not express its views on the official
proposal of the foundation about the continued
existence of the HfG – and in the HfG’s opinion
the foundation thus committed a violation of the
bylaws. From its perspective the foundation was
once more acting against the actual interests of
the HfG, as it had before on 18 December 1967,
and what is more acting from a position of arro-
gated authority when parity-based cooperation
would have been called for. This widened the rift
between the two involved parties on Kuhberg.
It is true that the HfG members were largely to
blame for the widening of that rift. The college
persisted in undermining attempts by the founda-
tion to stick to the nonbinding budget. The only
remaining member of the foundation’s executive
board, the Ulm businessman Hans Zumsteg,
spoke of the efforts of the administrative director:
“Fischer wanted to clear up a lot of things; the rea-
son he’s failed is that the college is being difficult
– things that are unforgivable. […] That’s all be-
cause they’re so terribly overbearing. […] As far
as conditions at the HfG are concerned, please for-
give me for not telling you before today. […] A lot
of things are still at sixes and sevens. It simply
defies all description.”
Hans Zumsteg gave several examples of the
daily behavior of HfG members that proved they
lacked a sense of responsibility in their own cause,
the discipline necessary for a community, and, in
view of the situation, good sense and the will to
economize that was needed in order to overcome
the financial crisis. Theodor Pfizer was stunned:
“I didn't know just how glaring these cases [of
inappropriate behavior at the HfG; author’s note]
were, but I did suspect something. My many years
of experience led me to predict something of the
kind. Had I known, I don’t think I could have repre-
sented the cause [of the HfG] in the municipal
council. […] It is humanly incomprehensible to me,
now that the college is hanging by a thread, that
people can be like this. […] To me that feels like
ingratitude and horrible shortsightedness.” It was
no wonder that the foundation found itself aban-
doned in its efforts by a college that had not only
publicly cut itself loose from the foundation, but
 The rectorships of
Aicher, Maldonado
and Ohl

376 also stabbed it in the back through its fiscally irre- On 4 May 1968, Walter 377
sponsible behavior. Gropius had actually
only planned to open
On 16 February 1968 the ministry of education and the Bauhaus retrospec-
the arts delivered its report to the ministry of state tive in Stuttgart. – The
on the form and costs of the HfG’s affiliation with demonstrators’ posters
or integration in the School of Engineering. Its rec- say: “Weep over the
ommendation, in agreement with the foundation’s Bauhaus and protect
council, was to go with the so-called “cooperation the HfG“; “Words for
model” (merging into a new organizational unit), to the Bauhaus are good,
be implemented by 1 October 1968. The HfG it- deeds for the HfG are
self, of course, aimed at being incorporated in a better“; “In 1968 buried
future Ulm coordinated university system (Gesamt- during the excavation of
hochschule). “[The HfG] thus anticipates a pos- the Bauhaus: the HfG“.
sible later solution. On the other hand a possible Photo: unknown
solution at present is at first to combine the Ulm Archive: Südwestpresse
State School of Engineering and the Ulm School
of Design into an organizational unit […] in which
the School of Design would constitute the ‘School
of Design’ department with subdivisions for prod-
uct design, building, and visual communication.
This organizational unit would remain open for
potential development into an Ulm coordinated
university.” 1411
Immediately, the HfG organized a large-scale
public campaign against this model. Posters, pro-
tests, resolutions, and public letters by HfG mem-
bers produced an international wave of hundreds
of expressions of solidarity, letters of indignation,
and appeals by famous as well as unknown friends
of the HfG that were for the most part sent directly
to the Stuttgart ministry of education and the arts,
and partly reached Stuttgart only by way of Ger-
man embassies all over the world, the Foreign
Ministry, and the office of the federal chancellor.
The press took up the topic and often supported
the perspective represented by the HfG that the
existence of the HfG should be brought to an end.
The result was a clear victory for the HfG: The min-
istry of education and the arts was impressed by
the concerted campaigns and the HfG’s resistance
and, in the middle of March, stopped working on
implementing the cooperation plan.

The foundation‘s council had decided on 15 Febru-

ary 1968 for reasons of financial urgency to give
notice to the foundation’s staff. In part a year’s
notice was given, while there would probably be
enough money – if the HfG stuck to the budget –
only until 30 September 1968. If there were no
funds for the authorized salaries after 30 Septem-
ber 1968, the foundation‘s council would have
been responsible for them. That is why these staff
members had to be given notice, but in the eyes of
many HfG members the foundation took the last
step toward a final separation by doing so. This is
expressed in the pamphlet Observations regard-
ing the HfG, dated 16 February 1968, which states
that it is the foundation that is in debt, not the HfG:
 The rectorships of
Aicher, Maldonado
and Ohl
378 “Those are two different things.” While the reasons
for the notices are financial in nature, the pamphlet
goes on, political motives are involved as well. Pol-
iticians are said to dislike the whole orientation of
the HfG and feel it is necessary to get control of
the HfG (a quote from the 18 December 1968
foundation‘s council meeting, when Günther Bou-
HfG protests during the langer reported conversations in the finance com-
opening of the Stuttgart mittee and the council of ministers, asking HfG
exhibition on the Bau- representatives to observe absolute secrecy):
haus, 4 May 1968. “Truly clear opinions and wishes that give us rea-
What’s the difference son to regard all rehabilitation, rescue, and consol-
between 1943 and idation plans, in so far as they come from outside,
1968, asked these pos- with serious reservations”.
ters, immediately pro- At any rate, the text continued, the decisions
viding an answer: There had already been made, and besides nowadays
is none. There was no it was to a school’s disadvantage that “it was
need to mention specif- founded in memory of the revolutionary action
ically that Hans and of two students who were murdered because of
Sophie Scholl were exe- this action by the fascist regime”.
cuted in 1943. – The That is why the HfG would resist all outside
posters say: “1943 / pressure: “Well-meaning offers to ‘save’ the HfG,
1968 execution HfG“. and kindly advice that the HfG should just get
Photos: unknown down off its high horse contradict each other, for
Archive: Südwestpresse looming in the background is the menacing alter-
native, ‘Do or die!’ Not all the people at the HfG
will ‘do’. At that point free decision becomes a
farce where financial backers and pressure groups
have the upper hand. Members of the HfG here
unmistakably show that they are under no circum-
stances prepared to accept the proposals that
have in part already been discussed in public –
attempts to undermine the free democratic bylaws
of this institution.” 1412
In the same tone of voice, in letters to the Land
ministers, Herbert Ohl explained why HfG mem-
bers were definitely not willing to accept the coop-
eration plan: The results of the study by the minis-
try of education and the arts, he said, had not
taken into consideration the proposals of the HfG,
and the proposed solution by the ministry of edu-
cation and the arts was contrary to the educational
mission of the HfG. “If those who did the study for
the government continue in the direction that has
been evident so far, the educational mission of the
HfG will be destroyed. The faculty, assistant lectur-
ers, and students of the School of Design will then
no longer be willing to continue the task of the col-
lege. That would mean the existence of the col-
lege is over.” 1413 Rumors began to circulate that the
end of the HfG was being brought about by out-
side forces or was being deliberately provoked.
And for the first time Herbert Ohl openly said that
the foundation‘s council was no longer felt to rep-
resent the “educational mission” of the HfG – a
smoke screen that suggested that the mission
could be defined only by HfG members; however,
the content of this mission had not been deter-
mined, and moreover the word evoked a genuine
social task that could supposedly be fulfilled only
by the HfG. That is why society’s postulated but
vague mission for the HfG to train its members
could be produced every time there was an unwel-
come comment, a suggestion, an objective argu-
ment, with the implicit message that contradiction
might lead to the destruction of the very basis of
the HfG. From this perspective, the HfG was identi-
fied exclusively with (all?) its members. Ultimately
this meant that any action against the intentions
of HfG representatives was directed against the
HfG itself. And if the HfG ceased to exist, it would
mean not only that an institution had been de-
stroyed, but that society itself, which had suppos-
edly given the HfG that mission had been irrepara-
bly damaged. At any rate what was at stake was
more than just the HfG, this was about warding off
an insidious attack against democracy in Germany,
period. It sounded as though people within the
HfG were deployed primarily to ward off attacks
on society at large, so that the concrete institu-
tion HfG could be sacrificed on the altar of its
principles.
At the same time the Neu-Ulmer Zeitung pub-
lished an open letter by HfG members. 1414 In the
letter all lecturers, students, and staff of the HfG
supported the views expressed in the Observa-
tions regarding of the HfG, the Report of a murder,
and the manifesto Exodus 1 – Exodus 2: “Now-
adays there is only one unanimous view at the
HfG: The HfG must carry on while retaining com-
plete autonomy; if need be it should be national-
ized in association with the University of Stuttgart.
We strictly reject any connection – regardless of
its form – with the Ulm School of Engineering,
since no provisions exist for incorporation into a
cooperative university plan for Ulm, and none are
planned for the near future. […] The financial crisis
of the HfG is a crisis of the Geschwister-Scholl-
Stiftung, and the teaching sector of the HfG should
not be blamed for it. […] This financial crisis re-
flects more on the majority of the present and for-
mer members of the foundation‘s council than on
members of the highest administrative level of the 379
GSS. […] Debts were incurred by the GSS, and in
the process the HfG was either ignored or the
foundation even acted against its express protest.
Thus a clear separation must be made between
the GSS and the HfG. These are the reasons that
we can no longer regard the majority of those who
presently make up the GSS as being representa-
tive of the interests of the HfG.”
A file on The case of the Ulm School of Design
– a classic example of political development in
the Federal Republic of Germany, which was pre-
sumably written by students, illustrates the extent
to which the new patterns of thought and language
borrowed from the student movement had taken
hold of the heads of HfG members. 1415 A lecture by
the students in memory of the 25th anniversary of
the execution of Hans and Sophie Scholl on 20
February 1968 corresponds with it almost verba-
tim. 1416 In the text, criticism of contemporary soci-
ety and modern sociological jargon have been
compressed to a miniature of the 1968 universe.
The file and the lecture are important for three fur-
ther reasons. For one, they show how the students
distanced themselves from the existing HfG, but
also from a possibly nationalized (“technocratic”)
HfG. Instead they place their hopes in a third, de-
mocratic HfG, although they are already aware that
it will continue to be a Utopia because society
stands in its way. Secondly they clearly reveal the
divergence and disintegration of forces within the
HfG. And thirdly the texts suggest an infamous
parallel: Just as Hans and Sophie Scholl were ex-
ecuted in 1943, the HfG is being executed now,
25 years later. Published opinion about the HfG
never recovered from this obscene provocation.
During the Ulm commemoration ceremony, the
students protested with placards that repeated this
suggestion: “1943–1968 execution of the HfG”.
At the opening of the Bauhaus retrospective on
4 May 1968 in Stuttgart, Walter Gropius was re-
ceived with the same placards. Here is an excerpt
from the texts: “‘Nothing is more unworthy of a
civilized nation than allowing itself to be governed
without resistance by an irresponsible ruling clique
given to base instincts.’ That is the beginning of
one of the fliers of the White Rose, which was
written by Hans Scholl in 1942. Twenty-five years
ago, Hans and Sophie Scholl were executed. Sev-
ven years later a foundation bearing the name of
the brother and sister was founded. […] The
School of Design, originally the political expression
of this foundation, is now being unconditionally
handed over to the state by the foundation’s rep-
resentatives. Its independence, the lifeblood of a
progressively democratic educational institution, is
being cut off so that without resistance it will obey
the private sector’s calls for uncritical, specialized
professionals. What was formerly concealed as a
 The rectorships of
Aicher, Maldonado
and Ohl
380 financial crisis now turns out to be a critical ele-
ment that is increasing by leaps and bounds. The
attack on the autonomy of the School of Design
goes hand in hand with other efforts by the same
groups to replace fundamental civic rights with
structures involving nothing but command and
obedience. […] The case of the HfG is not an iso-
lated phenomenon. It exemplifies the transition
from a liberal, pluralistic society to a regimented
one. […] The technical colleges and the univer-
sities are turning into branches of industry. The
demand for highly specialized technicians and sci-
entists definitely dominates attempts at reform at
all educational centers. […] The fact that we reject
a future technocratic School of Design does not
mean we approve of or even defend the present
HfG, since for the students the only difference be-
tween it and the technocratic school is that it is
more chaotic and leaves a larger number of stu-
dents in the dark. Our criticism of the technocratic
HfG, a school that has not yet been implemented,
must be implied in the criticism of the existing HfG
and its present structure. As things stand at pres-
ent, the students are studying at a college which is
already stagnating; neither can they expect a bet-
ter school from the state. In other words, they have
nothing to lose. […] At the same time this criticism
inevitably becomes a criticism of society, which pre-
vents a democratic HfG from becoming a reality.”
The commemoration speech concludes as fol-
lows: “In this process enforced by the regimented
society [concentration on economic expansion;
author’s note] lie the actual root causes of student
protests and criticism in general. In Berkeley and
in Berlin, in Tokyo and in Brussels, wherever the
late capitalist economic system has to maintain its
hold by means of authoritarian measures, the very
groups that are not yet integrated in the produc-
tion process of society are resisting. The interna-
tional student movements fight against a system
of rule that tries to push through its interests by
ever more sophisticated – i. e., more brutal – means.
To resist these interests and methods is in keeping
with the founding idea of the Geschwister-Scholl-
Stiftung and the School of Design. The meaning
of this memorial ceremony should be to point that
out. Hans and Sophie Scholl in their time fought
against the fascism of the Third Reich. The stu-
dents of the School of Design are presently fight-
ing against authoritarian measures that threaten
to destroy the liberal and democratic structure of
their institution and, over and above that, of their
society.”
For the moment the politicians seemed unim-
pressed by this agitation. On the same day, 20
February 1968, the council of ministers was look-
ing into the documents submitted by the ministry
of education and the arts. 1417 The unanimous opin-
ion of the members of the government was that
the HfG was in need of a strict, capable adminis-
tration that would eliminate the many things that
were wrong and could be assumed to be intoler-
ant of the kind of rebellion against the higher insti-
tution – at this point, the foundation – that was
being experienced just then and that everyone had
been aware of for years. They recommended that
the HfG’s resistance should be disregarded in or-
der to save the HfG. There was no interest in giv-
ing up an institution that had a fine international
reputation and had cost the Land a great deal of
money. In view of the school’s freedoms up to this
point members of the cabinet even expressed
understanding for the fact that HfG members had
rejected a stricter administration. The council’s
Another vote: On
18 July 1968 the Stutt-
gart Landtag decided to
continue subsidies to
the foundation, contin-
gent on conditions
accepted by the HfG.
Photo: Simon Resch
Archive: Südwestpresse
decision was that the proposal of the ministry of
education and the arts be accepted and instruc-
tions be given to work out a cooperation plan for
the HfG and the School of Engineering. The two
institutions were to be merged “into a new organ-
izational unit, to be called ‘Ulm State School of
Engineering and College of Design’”, “in which
both the Ulm State School of Engineering and the
Ulm School of Design represent separate centers
of education, each preserving its own unique char-
acter. This organizational unit is to be transformed
into a Comprehensive University of Ulm [Gesamt-
hochschule Ulm] in due course. […] However, the
new organizational unit would have a joint direc-
tion and administration. After appropriate adjust-
ment to the new organizational unit the School of
Design will also retain its academic self-govern-
ment. […] The details of cooperation […] on the
basis of equal rights will be regulated by a cooper-
ation plan. The council of ministers has instructed
the ministry of education and the arts to work out
this cooperation plan together with the two educa-
tional institutions.” If there was still time in the
expiring parliamentary term, the Landtag was to
instruct the ministry of education and the arts
accordingly.
The following day, at the Land press confer-
ence, minister of education and the arts Wilhelm
Hahn explained that it was not a question of a
merger or incorporation, but merely of a joint ad-
ministration. The HfG was to keep its educational
objectives, curriculum, and academic self-govern-
ment. Incidentally, he added, the HfG was mistak-
en when it asserted that an “autonomous national-
ization” was cheaper. The HfG had been in a per-
manent state of crisis that threatened to have a
fatal ending. “The government’s offer was ‘gen-
erous’. One couldn’t demand, as the college had
done, ‘Pay for everything, but don’t interfere!’ If
someone had used the word ‘murder’, they must
really mean suicide.” 1418
“Suicide” was the cue the members of the HfG
picked up on. On 23 February 1968 they unani-
mously decided, with four abstentions, on a reso-
lution stating that the HfG would cease to exist on
30 September 1968 if the Landtag did not agree
to nationalize the HfG “autonomously”. 1419 – Their
very choice of words indicated the utopian nature
of their ideas, since the whole history of the HfG
had shown that an autonomous existence – that
is, one where the rules of living together were set
by the school itself – was only possible if undesir-
able outside influence could be warded off. The
influence of the state was always undesirable in
this context. An “autonomous nationalization” can
only be understood as a self-contradiction. Hell-
mut Becker in his long years of commitment had
always worked for the preservation of as much
freedom as possible for cultural organizations, and
when, in 1963, he heard suggestions from Otl
Aicher that it might be better after all if the HfG
were to be nationalized, he had firmly rejected this
notion with complete lack of understanding, be-
cause it shook the deepest foundation of the Ulm 381
project.
In case the Landtag did not comply with the
demand for “autonomous nationalization”, contin-
ued the HfG resolution, there would be the follow-
ing consequences: “The undersigned members of
the HfG are […] not willing to obey the govern-
ment’s dictate. The members of the HfG have re-
solved that the HfG as an international center for
teaching, development, and research in the field of
environmental design, with all the institutional divi-
sions of an autonomous college, will cease to exist
in Ulm as of 30 September 1968.” The true rea-
sons for the end of the HfG were political, not fi-
nancial. It was the foundation, the government, the
Landtag, and the federal government that were to
blame. The press statement by the HfG on the
same date ends with the following summary: “The
founding idea today is given a cynical ambiguity.
The foundation that bears the names of Hans and
Sophie Scholl is selling out the political and peda-
gogical independence of the School of Design.” 1420
The ultimatum had been delivered, the separation
from the foundation had been voiced, the guilty
had been named, and first steps had been taken
toward creating a myth: in actual fact, of course,
the foundation had decreed the end of the present
HfG as far back as 18 December 1967. But because
HfG members identified the HfG only with their
voluntary assemblage of the community of teach-
ers and students, they could also assert that it was
they alone who decided when the HfG existed and
when it ceased to do so. The foundation‘s council
was unable to stop this movement of secession.
Further documents to cement their own position
followed. Even the title of a File on the preparation
of the end of the HfG, dated 4 March 1968, sug-
gests who is the innocent party. The file begins
with 1967, when – so it claims – the federal sub-
sidy was suddenly cut. Supposedly the result of
the expert opinion by the Troeger Commission was
the reason for this discontinuation of the subsidy,
which allegedly came from one day to the next.
There is also not a single mention of the fact that
the Landtag had decided as far back as 1966 not
to give a higher subsidy to the HfG and not to
nationalize it.
The report of the ministry of state to the Landtag,
which had been passed by the cabinet on 20 Feb-
ruary 1968, was no longer considered by the mem-
bers of parliament. On 7 March 1968 it was pub-
lished as a Landtag document. 1421 The day before,
the HfG had asked the Landtag’s council of elders
to get at least the standing committee to work on
it 1422, but the council of elders rejected the request,
“because in this parliamentary term there would
no longer have been enough time for a consulta-
 The rectorships of
Aicher, Maldonado
and Ohl
382 tion in committee and the Landtag was not asked
for a resolution. The council of elders feels it is
important to note that the Landtag’s silent ac-
knowledgement of the government report in ap-
pendix 5858 is not taken to mean agreement.”
In other words, the decision had to be made by
the new Landtag.
This meant that the HfG did not have its parlia-
mentary supporting structure to help it use the
whole force of its ultimatum in order to thwart the
cooperation plan. There was no longer anyone in
parliament who was responsible for matters relat-
ing to the HfG, no one who could be pressured;
they grasped at thin air. The next Landtag would
not be elected until 28 April 1968. It was easy to
see that the new members of parliament would
not be able to deal with the HfG’s future until the
summer break had already started at the HfG. The
HfG no longer had time on its side.
But within the HfG the faculty no longer con-
centrated on working out concrete plans. Instead
they first spent time on fundamental politico-edu-
cational and societal issues that they felt urgently
needed to be solved before it would make sense
to talk in detail about the HfG’s future. Thus a team
for autonomous nationalization now devoted itself
to the general political parameters that in their
opinion determined the situation of the HfG. A res-
olution by the team dated 8 March 1968 illustrates
the extent to which its members had moved away
from pressing day-to-day business and how trap-
ped they were by patterns of thought and empty
phrases of the contemporary student movement.
They interpreted the existential crisis of the HfG in
terms of the movement’s clichés, which of course
could not possibly fit the actual situation. The cli-
chés, though convincingly formulated, could never
bring about the kind of behavior that would help
prevent the imminent end of the school. Here is a
lengthy excerpt: “The crisis of the HfG is not a cri-
sis of this institution, let alone a financial crisis.
Rather, it is a symptom of the crisis of the educa-
tion system as a whole in the schools, professions,
colleges, and universities of the Federal Republic
of Germany and over and above that in all indus-
trial nations of the earth. […] However, as long as
education, in the hierarchy of priorities, is ranked
under ‘also-rans’ and even funds can be cut as
soon as there‘s a financial shortage, while at the
same time expenditures for the military stay con-
stant or even go up, there can be no comprehen-
sive reforms. Nonetheless these reforms are cru-
cial for the continued existence and development
of a humane, future-oriented society. […] The goal
of training is to enable the designer to distinguish
between socially irrelevant and relevant problems.
[…] Social conditions and the ruling powers, with
goals they have defined, influence even the sci-
ence that is called in to solve problems. It is ex-
tremely important to recognize these connections
between social structure and the work of scientists
and to take this fact into account in the work de-
signers do. […] The only acceptable solution for
the HfG would be autonomous nationalization. […]
Only as a democratic, autonomous institution does
the HfG have the opportunity to develop an aware-
ness of socially relevant problems. Social con-
sciousness, or rather social responsibility, a hu-
manistic impulse can materialize only when an
institution is independent of economic and politi-
cal manipulations. Only as an autonomous entity
can the HfG function as a compensatory organiza-
tion between the interests of society and of indus-
try.” 1423 The quotation clearly shows how painful
the collision between the reality of circumstances
at the HfG and the unreality of the needs of its stu-
dents must have been.
In mid-March the ministry of education and
the arts for the last time tried to fulfill its function,
calling for cooperating dialogues between the HfG
and the School of Engineering. Herbert Ohl re-
fused to take part. 1424 At the same time he stated
that he did not intend to implement the economy
measures the foundation‘s council had decided,
on 12 February 1968, were necessary. 1425 The
foundation, in his opinion, had simply ”reached
rock bottom”, and therefore it was no longer nec-
essary to consult with managing chairman of the
foundation‘s executive board Hans Zumsteg about
a way out of the crisis. 1426 The latter had outlined
an unconventional and creative proposal. Accord-
ing to his calculations the foundation’s assets,
conservatively estimated, totaled DM 4.5 million.
Its long-term liabilities were DM 900,000 for con-
struction, with annual payments (interest and
amortization) of close to DM 75,000. Its short-
term loans added up to another DM 500,000,
which would eat up about DM 41,000 in interest
in 1968 alone. The foundation, he suggested,
should first sell a piece of land valued at those
DM 500,000. Secondly, in order to save adminis-
trative costs, the foundation and college were to
be combined. And thirdly, he wanted to revive not
only the Society of Friends but also connections
with trade and industry, in order to generate in-
come once more. Fourthly, the only subsidy in-
creases needed would be an extra DM 50,000
from the city and DM 100,000 from the Land.
Hans Zumsteg reached the following conclusion:
“Based on these considerations, the independence
of the HfG would continue to be ensured. This way
the problem of affiliating with the School of Engi-
neering is no longer applicable. All avenues would
also remain open to the future plan of one day
incorporating the HfG in a comprehensive univer-
sity plan.” 1427 This paper is the only example after
1964 of an initiative by the weary foundation that
did not focus on increasing government subsidies.
Unfortunately Hans Zumsteg did not pursue his
idea. Perhaps he felt it was already too late, since
no further opportunity for an HfG that would con-
tinue to be independent and privately sponsored
offered itself in Ulm and in the Land.
As announced, Herbert Ohl did not respond to the
invitation by the ministry of education and the arts
to come to the first cooperation dialogue on 14
March 1968. That meant these plans were defi-
nitely no longer on the agenda. The ministry of
education and the arts stopped its efforts and
announced at the press conference that it was
now the HfG’s turn. Up to that point, claimed the
ministry, the HfG had refused to take part in work-
ing on resolving the situation. Now it must come
up with concrete proposals for its future organiza-
tion, structure, administration, and concomitant
costs. 1428 It had barely three months to do this:
On 18 July 1968 the summer break of the newly
elected Landtag would begin, and the HfG’s sum-
mer interim began as early as 1 July 1968. Con-
crete arrangements for the future of the HfG defi-
nitely needed to be made by then, for a large part
of the notices of dismissal went into effect on
1 October 1968, and it was hardly conceivable
that the faculty and staff involved would return
voluntarily for the new academic year full of good
hope that a happy solution would be found. No
doubt the students felt much the same. It all boiled
down to one thing: If the future of the HfG remai-
ned uncertain until July 1968, a regular new aca-
demic year was unimaginable. Any meaningful
effort to keep the HfG going had to take into
account this timeframe.
At the Stuttgart Land-
tag on 18 July 1968;
center: student repre-
sentative Rolf Lohbeck.
Photo: Simon Resch
Archive: Südwestpresse
When the ministry of education and the arts handed
over to the HfG the responsibility for drawing up
its own clear and detailed proposals for the future
of the college, the second phase in 1968 develop-
ment began. The members of the HfG, however,
did not diverge from the path they had taken up
to that time; they still had no concrete plans as to
how to solve the current crisis, and continued to
indulge in discussions of fundamental socio-politi-
cal issues; as their radicalism grew, so did their
scorn for compromise. They lost sight of what
was most important, because their focus was on 383
peripheral matters.
During the following months, from mid-March
through mid-July 1968, the decline of Kuhberg
community continued. There was no sign of con-
certed action, no integrating force or idea; the
motley mix of explosives had gone off. The mem-
bers of the HfG were split into lecturers, assistant
lecturers, and students, and these groups in turn
were not unified. The revolt against the foundation
as a legal statutory corporation was about to reach
its peak. At the same time this phase ended with
the students refusing to recognize the currently
existing executive organs of the HfG, because they
felt these were one-sidedly dominated by the lec-
turers. Up to 18 July 1968, when the newly elect-
ed Landtag plenum met for deliberation, the stu-
dents and the lecturers worked on future plans
that competed with each other.
On 19 March 1968 the students in their plenary
assembly unanimously voted to petition the
extended senate that a new college entity (“col-
lege council”) be created, whose members would
have equal representation and which would repla-
ce the senates, stand above the rector, and work
out new HfG bylaws by 15 June 1968. Not until
then, they claimed, was it possible to think of
drawing up plans for the future of the HfG. Also,
separation from the foundation was to be complet-
ed: “The prerequisite for constituting the college
council: The GSS as a constituent power is to be
abolished effective immediately and is no longer to
be recognized. […] The GSS has shown itself to be
incapable of making useful, constructive proposals
for the continuation of the HfG. It demonstrated its
incompetence and ignorance when it proposed
that the HfG be merged with the Ulm State School
of Engineering without hearing the HfG’s views on
the proposal. […] The many erroneous decisions
and almost criminal actions of the GSS are not list-
ed here, but may be verified in the team’s report
‘Description of a black book’. […] The goal of the
college council is to form a new, progressive,
effective structure that will be based on new byla-
ws. The existing, defective structure of the HfG
with its rigid teaching system does not fulfill the
demands the students make on this system. […]
As soon as the college council has completed the
task assigned to it, its work will be finished. It will
then disband and hand over its task to the com-
mittees of the newly formed system. […] The
makeup of the college council will be fundamen-
tally different from the traditional decision-making
bodies of the college, i. e., it will be based on the
principle of equality. […] The kind of structural
planning that takes into account the interests of
all members of the HfG can be developed only in
nonauthoritarian discussion. Only in an organ
 The rectorships of
Aicher, Maldonado
and Ohl
384 whose members have equal rights, i. e., parity, can
nonauthoritarian discussion become possible.” 1429
When the extended senate met on 25 April 1968,
tensions between lecturers and students grew. The
students had intended to turn the organization of
the HfG topsy-turvy, the goal being “minimaliza-
tion of the authority of individual persons or groups
over others. At present group conflicts within the
college increasingly prevent the tasks and goals
of the college from being formulated and imple-
mented.” Because Herbert Ohl had dismissed the
students’ attempt at a constitutional revolt by re-
ferring to existing regulations regarding coopera-
tion at the HfG, they asked the rest of the lecturers
and assistant lecturers to show their solidarity:
“Therefore we choose this way to criticize the con-
duct of the rector and at the same time appeal to
all members of the extended senate to dissociate
themselves from the biased and authoritarian be-
havior of the rector toward student representatives
at the 25 April meeting – regardless of whether his
decisions were legal.” 1430
Subsequently they stepped up their pace in
order to overcome constitutional barriers encoun-
tered up to this point in a second round, and to
push through their interests. On 2 May 1968 the
students passed a protest resolution against the
lecturers and their current position within the HfG
bylaws: “The students do not accept the extended
senate’s 25 April 1968 decision regarding changes
in the HfG bylaws. […] If the students’ demand for
a resolution and renegotiation is not met, the stu-
dent body will in the future act as an independent
body of the HfG and reserve the right to take the
following steps: 1. Representation of student inter-
ests outside the extended senate and in opposition
to the newly appointed bodies of the extended and
inner senate. 2. Information of the interested pub-
lic regarding student objectives and the way stu-
dents are treated by the college’s administra-
tion.“ 1431
On 9 February 1968, of course, a commission had
been formed at the HfG that consisted of a rotat-
ing group of three members each from among the
lecturers, assistant lecturers, and students of each
of the three departments (“the commission of
nine” or “group of nine”); moreover, the heads of
the workshops were represented in it. From initial-
ly general topics the commission finally turned to
working out concrete proposals regarding the con-
tinued operation of the HfG. In mid-May 1968, dis-
cussions intensified. One suggestion went as fol-
lows: The present structure of the HfG with four
(actually only three at this point) departments of
specialization and the four-year program of studies
of the Ulm model should be replaced by one that
addresses the tasks of “environmental design”.
The kind of exemplary specialized training the HfG
had provided since 1953, it was claimed, was no
longer necessary: “In the Federal Republic of Ger-
many alone, designers are now being trained at 10
institutions, so that demand for these specialists in
industry and commerce should have been more
than met” (an argument that the HfG’s opponents
would subsequently enjoy quoting). In the future,
in a two-year program of postgraduate studies,
the college was to concentrate on research and
development, or, in other words, on grounding
“environmental design” both theoretically and in
practice. 1432 In the future, work was to be “prob-
lem-oriented”, i. e., address projects that would
involve research and development. “Research”
meant the following: “The general gaining of
knowledge in the field of environmental design,
where empirical and theoretical research are pos-
sible at the same time. ‘Development’ means the
production of practical results.” 1433
On 15 May 1968, representatives of the HfG and
the foundation met with Egbert-Hans Müller, one
of Wolfgang Donndorf’s colleagues from the Stutt-
gart ministry of education and the arts, who had
also recently begun devoting himself to the HfG.
Herbert Ohl believed that from the HfG’s perspec-
tive there was one preferable solution: “a federa-
tive association with the University of Stuttgart
and a concentrated teaching and research pro-
gram as advanced postgraduate training with
increased attention to applied research”. 1434
Egbert-Hans Müller was not unaware of the
signs of disintegration in the HfG community:
“During this conversation I had the impression
that people at the School of Design are still not
quite clear as to how they see the HfG’s future.” 1435
The shift of perspective to the University of Stutt-
gart, of which the HfG now wished to be a part,
required that the university must also be involved
in the negotiations. Thus one more organization
joined the dialogue, and the HfG was running out
of time, because all employees of the foundation
had been given notice effective 17 May 1968. 1436
On 26 May 1968 the results reached by the
group of nine were summarized so that the ex-
tended senate could pass the binding HfG propo-
sal at its 27 May 1968 meeting. 1437 Then a further
split became evident: Norbert Kurtz, the represen-
tative of the assistant lecturers, told Rector Herbert
Ohl before the meeting that the assistant lecturers
could no longer accept the “domination” of the
lecturers over all other members of the HfG, which
went back a long way: “At present positions on the
extended senate are filled in a very one-sided way
by one group [he means the lecturers; author’s
note]; this does not allow a development of objec-
tives that does justice to all groups at the HfG. The
assistant lecturers of the HfG therefore feel there is
no justification for the extended senate deciding
on the results of the work of the commission of
nine. The representatives of the assistant lecturers
therefore refuse to take part in today’s meeting of
the extended senate.” 1438
Nevertheless the members of the extended sen-
ate stuck to their claim that they could decide the
fate of the HfG. They agreed on the “preferable
solution for the HfG”: It should be nationalized as
a college for postgraduate studies, teaching, and
research, and be associated with the University of
Stuttgart. Its interdisciplinary task was in the area
of environmental design focusing on building, prod-
uct design, and visual communication. The struc-
ture of the college was to be in accordance with
the categories of design, planning, and research.1439
On the following day Herbert Ohl sent this result
to the ministry of education and the arts. 1440
The students and the assistant lecturers felt they
had been passed over by the entire last develop-
ment. They claimed the lecturers had not taken in-
to account their interests to the extent they wished.
Admittedly this would have meant the lecturers
would largely have to give up their power and
hand over authority they had held until that time
to college committees that had yet to be formed.
The lecturers were not willing to do so. Further-
more the factual ideas of lecturers on the one
hand and students and assistant lecturers on the
other differed substantially on important points.
In the center was the question of the money that
would be generated by industrial commissions:
However, HfG members were unable to reach
agreement as to the organization of these com-
missions and on how fees would be shared.
Out of protest the students and the assistant
lecturers resigned from the commission of nine
and announced that they were working out a
counterproposal: “The assistant lecturers are not
willing to take part in working on a document in
which the different views as to the continued exis-
tence of the HfG are to be submitted to the foun-
dation‘s council. Instead they themselves together
with the students, whose views they share, will
present their ideas to the foundation‘s council.“ 1441
The proposal of the students and assistant lec-
turers was also based on the intention that the HfG
should be nationalized in association with the Uni-
versity of Stuttgart, where it would remain as inde-
pendent as possible. Both plans fundamentally dif-
fered regarding the regulation of the institutes (for
work on industrial commissions), participation in
decision-making, and hiring policies for the plan-
ned interdisciplinary work. 1442 It is surprising, how-
ever, that the foundation‘s council, contrary to
what everyone had stated, was accepted as the
authority in charge with whom the oppositional
plan was to be discussed.
Since then the foundation‘s council had met twice. 385
At its 16th meeting on 1 April 1968, members still
reeled from the sharp confrontation between the
college and the foundation. 1443 In response to ac-
cusations regarding financing expressed in the
HfG resolution, the president of the Landeszentral-
bank (Land Central Bank) told the HfG representa-
tives who were present that he would resign if the
HfG did not publicly disassociate itself from its
accusations: “Since the GSS has been the school’s
sponsoring organization from the start, it is quite
clear that no other organization is responsible for
the assets and thus the debts as well. No one else
would have given the college a loan. And thus it is
also quite clear that there is no other possible
debtor. And why did it contract debts? Solely for
the HfG. Simply to prevent the operation of the
college from having to be restricted much earlier.
I think it’s pretty irresponsible to reproach the GSS
for this, because we did nothing but try and save
the college. I’m sure it’s too much to expect to be
thanked for work one has done for years on a vol-
untary basis. The least one can expect is for the
facts to be described accurately. They tell us we’ve
contracted debts. Our fiscal policy has always
been to make available to the HfG as large a sum
as possible, one way or another. We have seen to
it, in constant agreement with the executive board
and also with the representatives of the college,
that the funds were found. I cannot – if only be-
cause of my profession – take these accusations
lying down, accusations that for 15 years I’ve re-
sponsibly belonged to a committee that pursues
an irresponsible fiscal policy. And in an honorary
capacity, too. I don’t see why they have to make
us into their enemies.” Actually, one must not for-
get that a foundation that included less influential
representatives of industry and trade and of public
subsidy providers would certainly have had to get
along on less money. And the college itself was
not legally responsible, of course. – When Otto
Pfleiderer asked what would have been the right
thing for the foundation to do, Herbert Ohl an-
swered: It should have discussed the planning of
the budget with the school. That had only been
introduced by Friedrich Rau, he added. Herbert
Ohl’s answer showed that he was not aware of the
real connections or wanted to divert attention from
them. For after all it was precisely as a result of
this financial planning that control over college
spending rapidly decreased, that the HfG no long-
er lived up to its responsibility and disregarded the
financial limits it had agreed to observe, and that
the foundation had to contract debts to make up
the resulting deficits. – A second attempt began
to find someone to blame, and this time Thorwald
Risler was supposedly the scapegoat. Günther
Boulanger refuted this by pointing out that in 1959
the Land’s subsidy had totaled DM 180,000, while
 The rectorships of
Aicher, Maldonado
and Ohl
386 in 1966 it was DM 900,000, not to mention the
funds from the city, the federal government, and
industry and trade. Was this the result of a disas-
trous fiscal policy, as the HfG members stated in
their resolution? Hans Zumsteg added that the
debts were balanced by assets, and that the first
debts for construction had already been almost
paid off. Later in the discussion the members of
the foundation‘s council clarified the complicated
background of HfG financing, primarily for the
benefit of the student representative.
The foundation‘s council sent away the HfG
representatives, asking them to work out propos-
als for the continued operation of the college,
which the foundation planned to submit to the
ministry. For DM 900,000 to be reinstated in the
next Land budget, these plans had to be discussed
by the foundation‘s council in May.
The minutes of student representative Alfred Gra-
zioli show that the students no longer regarded the
HfG as an entity, but distinguished between the
student body and the lecturers: “Proposals for the
continuing development of the HfG were to be
submitted by 8 May. The students must do this
work and after the senate meeting [in which a de-
cision is to be made whether the resolution will be
retracted; author’s note] they must decide whether
this will be discussed with the lecturers or whether
the students should go directly to the GSS meet-
ing.” 1444 On the other hand, this process of disinte-
gration, which also led to a split of the faculty into
lecturers and assistants, did strengthen the foun-
dation. As we have seen, the foundation‘s council
was soon accepted once more as the body re-
sponsible for negotiations with the ministry of
education and the arts.
At the subsequent meeting of the foundation‘s
council on 8 May 1968, the division in the HfG had
become obvious. 1445 Herbert Ohl presented five
possible models of the HfG’s future:
1. affiliation with the School of Engineering (cate-
gorically rejected by the HfG);
2. autonomous nationalization of the HfG, its stat-
us being that of an academy;
3. nationalization and association with the Univer-
sity of Stuttgart;
4. nationalization and association with the Univer-
sity of Stuttgart as a postgraduate program
(favored by Herbert Ohl and the lecturers);
5. continuation as the Max Planck Institute, i. e.,
without a teaching program, for research and
development only.
Rolf Lobeck, on the other hand, demanded in the
name of the students that the HfG and foundation
ought not to address the preparation of a proposal
for the continuation of the college yet. First, the
students wanted an analysis of the actual situation
of the HfG to be done in order to note potential
undesirable trends and unfulfilled expectations.
Then goals were to be formulated. And only after
that were the structure of the organization and
a possible merger with the University of Stuttgart
to be studied. “For working out these basic stages
the students would like a commission to be formed
consisting of representatives of the lecturers, as-
sistant lecturers, and students.”
Rolf Lobeck’s initiative convinced the founda-
tion‘s council. A commission of four was formed.
It included Günther Grzimek (foundation), Herbert
Ohl (lecturers), Norbert Kurtz (assistant lecturers),
and Rolf Lobeck (students), and met with the min-
istry of education and the arts on 15 May 1968.
The basis for its discussion were pedagogical and
organizational models that the three HfG groups
had promised to prepare beforehand. As a result
of this discussion, Egbert-Hans Müller proposed
to Wilhelm Hahn, the minister of education and
the arts, that the plan for fusion with the School
of Engineering be officially given up and that asso-
ciation with the University of Stuttgart now be pur-
sued. The ministry was to request that the univer-
sity study the HfG’s affiliation plans. 1446
On 29 May 1968 Otto Pfleiderer, who had already
stayed away from the last foundation‘s council
meeting, informed Mayor Theodor Pfizer that he
was resigning from the council because there had
been no reaction to his demand that the HfG reso-
lution be retracted.
On 4 June 1968, separated into students, as-
sistant lecturers, and lecturers, the representatives
of the HfG each presented their respective pre-
ferred solutions to the foundation‘s council; all
proposals were based on the same premise: that
association with the University of Stuttgart be pur-
sued and that training at the HfG be organized as
a postgraduate program. The foundation‘s council
welcomed this fundamental agreement – in spite
of all differences in individual details – as a favored
proposal, and authorized the HfG to form a com-
mission that would negotiate details with the uni-
versity.
The summer break of the Stuttgart Parliament
began on 18 July 1968. By then the college and
foundation needed to know whether, for 1969,
they could again count on the DM 900,000 Land
subsidy they had been receiving to date. The min-
istry of education and the arts was therefore sup-
posed to ask the council of ministers to make a
motion to the finance committee to that effect.
The result of the finance committee deliberations
was then to be discussed by the plenum.
The cabinet submission gave the reasons for the
HfG’s persistence in opposing the government’s
affiliation plans. The question whether the founda-
tion could expect continued Land subsidies for
1969 led the cabinet to make a preliminary deci-
sion regarding the continuing existence of the
HfG, for: “The existence of the HfG is assured […]
through 31 December 1968. But the HfG will have
to stop its work as of the end of the current aca-
demic year (30 September 1968) if the GSS can-
not expect a Land subsidy for 1969 that is at least
as large as previous ones. Whether it can expect
that is still open. As a precautionary measure the
GSS has therefore given notice to its entire per-
sonnel effective on that date. The efforts of the
Landtag and Land government become illusory if
the GSS is not in a position to retract the notices
before the summer break and to promise students
that they can continue their studies at least one
more academic year. […] The ministry of educa-
tion and the arts asks that the Land government
make a binding promise before the summer inter-
im that in 1969 the GSS will again receive a Land
subsidy of DM 900,000, as in previous years; if
need be, it asks that the Land government ap-
proach the Landtag and request that the Landtag
agree to such a promise.” 1447
The Stuttgart cabinet under Hans Filbinger dis-
cussed the request on 11 June 1968. It is true that
Land politicians had not failed to notice signs of
disintegration on Kuhberg in Ulm. They suspected
that the HfG was simply trying to play for time to
wind up operations by requesting a subsidy for
1969, because it had the impression that influen-
tial lecturers were engaged in the self-destruction
of the HfG, a process that had only been slowed
down due to student pressure. That was why the
ministers agreed on a resolution that for 1969 the
foundation would receive a subsidy only if by 31
December 1968 the definitive organizational struc-
ture of the HfG and its financing had been settled.
The Landtag was to give its consent to this resolu-
tion. 1448
The message the council of ministers was thus
sending to the members of the foundation and
college was unmistakable: If by the end of the year
they agreed on a clearly defined model, if the HfG
was again recognizable as a structured entity, they
could count on continued support from the Land.
At any rate, this decision did not stand in the way
of a subsequent nationalization of the HfG; on the
contrary, it opened up a realistic possibility for its
continued operation. At least money and thus time
would still be available in 1969, and details could
be discussed at leisure – if the HfG and the foun-
dation would both agree on a plan.
And it was precisely this agreement that seemed
more remote than ever. Within the HfG there was
now pressure, a mixture of nerve-wracking uncer-
tainty, lack of time, growing impatience, and the
need to arrive at an agreement. The HfG could not
withstand this pressure. The members of the HfG 387
had become antagonists who defined themselves
by their status as students, assistant lecturers, and
lecturers. They continued to spend their time pri-
marily obsessing about the opposite side instead
of searching for a common way out.
On 12 June 1968, the day after the meeting of the
council of ministers, a number of HfG members
took an initiative whose objective was the split of
the HfG and its partial transfer to Paris: “During the
last month, representatives of the lecturers, assist-
ant lecturers, and students have been working very
intensively on a new plan for the HfG. It became
apparent that the views of lecturers on the one
hand and assistant lecturers and students on the
other remained irreconcilable on basic issues. […]
Since the academic year ends on 28 June, and in
view of the uncertain situation in Baden-Württem-
berg, a group of members of the HfG considers
the school administration’s policy of waiting for
Land decisions to be a mistake, and has taken its
own initiative. An initiative committee (which does
not recognize the school administration) has been
formed; it is dealing intensively with issues relating
to Paris. Because it is dissatisfied with the situation
of the HfG, the group that is interested in Paris is
determined to avail itself of the Paris offer, regard-
less of the decision of the Baden-Württemberg
Landtag. […] We therefore ask you to let us know
whether you are interested in carrying out this pro-
ject as a lecturer or guest lecturer (or assistant lec-
turer), and whether you know of other persons
who should be considered for this project.” 1449 At
the next meeting of the inner senate on 19 June
1968, the lecturers discussed opportunities to fol-
low the call of a number of cities in Germany and
abroad. There were offers from Ingolstadt and
Frankfurt am Main, as well as from Olten in Swit-
zerland and from Paris.
Also, the current, and last, issue of the HfG pub-
lication ulm, no. 21, had just appeared. This too,
gave rise to a dispute at the HfG: “Mr. Kapitzki asks
that deliveries of the issue be stopped, and feels it
is very damaging to publish it in the present situa-
tion. His reasons for this request are that the intro-
ductory statement does not fit the facts and that
descriptions are partly garbled. The editor [Gui
Bonsiepe; author’s note] took it upon himself to
interpret according to his opinion that Ulm was
closing and that the intellectual existence of the
HfG was thus blotted out. […] The rest of the sen-
ate members believe, among other things, that
the tenor of the ‘end of the HfG’ is not justified and
that the editor did not stick to democratic rules, or
rather tried to bid a journalistic goodbye to the
HfG.” 1450
On 20 June 1968, i. e., a good week before the
beginning of the summer break, there were still no
 The rectorships of
Aicher, Maldonado
and Ohl
388 Using lowercase for concrete proposals for the Landtag to negotiate.
initial letters was no A survey of HfG members was even done to find
longer explicit enough out which of them intended to continue their stud-
in 1968. When the HfG ies at the HfG. 1451 However, the large majority of
was renamed in Octo- the students who held their plenary meeting on 25
ber 1968, Ulm was in June 1968 demanded that the survey be stopped.
the best of company: “In view of the months of ineffective negotiations
Johann Wolfgang about the restructuring of the HfG, the students
Goethe University in consider your letter of 20 June unacceptable. The
Frankfurt had been interests of the students are totally disregarded
given the honorary title by this action.” They expected the promise that
Karl Marx University they would be able to continue their studies as of
(during demonstrations 1 October 1968 on condition that there would be
against the adoption of an extensive reorganization of the HfG (in terms of
the emergency laws at structure, pedagogy, and course of studies). 1452
the end of May 1968). But the inner senate had a very different idea of
how the acute crisis could be temporarily defused.
In the coming academic year of 1968/69 the lec-
In 1968 souvenir hunt- turers planned to work with two groups of stu-
ers managed to get dents only: those who were just then in their sec-
hold of the metal letters ond year of studies were supposed to take a year’s
spelling out the HfG break beginning 1 October 1968; in other words,
name. the regular third year of studies would have no
Photo: Simon Resch students. Students who were still in their first or
Archive: Südwestpresse
third year of studies were to go on taking their sec-
ond and fourth year of studies as usual. And for
one year no new students were to be admitted.
The students, however, did not want to accept this
inner senate decision under any circumstances.
In their plenary meeting on 27 June 1968, on the
academic year’s last day of classes, they once
more took the initiative against the lecturers and
dealt the entire present concept of the HfG an en-
ergetic blow: “The students consider the HfG’s
administration incapable of directing an institution
like the HfG, and therefore make a motion of no
confidence toward the rector and the inner senate.
[…] Starting immediately the students of the HfG
will strike until the school administration gives in
to their demands. In addition, they will turn to the
interested public to discuss the problems of the
HfG and its future. […] The naive idealism of the
HfG’s founding phase, namely the intention to
change society by changing objects in the human
environment was immediately co-opted by indus-
try and exploited economically to serve its inter-
ests. Braun appliances, once the most exclusive
evidence of how progressive the HfG was, are
today featured in the catalogues of Neckermann
and Quelle, and are used as demonstration ob-
jects in teaching basic courses at arts and crafts
schools. Making cosmetic changes in mass-pro-
duced goods, as was practiced at the HfG at this
time and is being practiced more and more, leaves
out of consideration the entire complex of produc-
tion, consumption, and demand. […] The arbitrary
and unimaginative way an individual product is
developed and designed here becomes evident in
the overemphasis on formal aspects, used as iso-
lated criteria to judge a design. […] The number
one function of the institutes was to make money
on commissions for the lecturers, whose letter-
heads bore the name of the school. The need for a
lecturer to complete orders must necessarily lead
to his neglecting his teaching. […] The fact that a
student who has to prove his worth is willing to
work is exploited as a means of oppression . […]
Recently these tendencies have increased by leaps
and bounds, leading to intense criticism among
the student body. This criticism and the students’
willingness to bring about progressive change in
the HfG was systematically boycotted in recent
years by the lecturers. The lecturers used the ex-
ternal crisis situation as a means of suppressing
internal conflicts and changes. Repression of stu-
dent activity by lecturers was constantly linked
with the argument that if the internal crisis became
known, the school’s existence would be jeopard-
ized. […] The students make a motion of no confi-
dence toward the rector and the lecturers, and are
no longer prepared to cooperate with them. They
demand
that all students registered since October 1967
be allowed to continue their studies;
that rooms be made available to operate an HfG
engaged in critical analysis;
that new lecturers proposed by the student
body be appointed. The students turn to the
public because they feel it is irresponsible that
this deplorable state of affairs and these manip-
ulations within the HfG be kept from the public
any longer.” 1453
On the following day, 28 June 1968, the 1967/68
academic year at the School of Design ended with
its members unable to come to an agreement on a
joint proposal for the future of the HfG. The Land-
tag had already carried the cabinet’s motion and
sent it on to the finance committee for delibera-
tion. 1454 That is why Herbert Ohl sent the lecturers’
proposal to the ministry of education and the arts,
knowing that the students had definitively rejected
it in essential points – except for the fundamen-
tal idea that an attempt should be made to bring
about an association with the University of Stutt-
gart. 1455 And from their conduct up to this time it
was unmistakably evident that they made no se-
cret of their rejection. They wrote a position state-
ment and sent it off to all and sundry: “The views
quoted in the lecturers’ proposal prove that their
endeavors are not aimed at a progressive trans-
formation of the HfG, but rather at protecting their
own existence by unrestricted powers and in-
creasing and enhancing their personal prestige
and their economic circumstances. Students and
assistant lecturers most sharply protest against
this interest-driven policy and reject the lecturers’
proposal as a subject for discussion regarding the
continuing development and future of the HfG.” 1456
In the meantime, the thinking of the two opposing
poles had crystallized. First, the students accused
the lecturers of virtually wanting to divide the HfG
into two colleges: one to train students and one as
an autonomous design institute in which research
and development projects would be carried out. 1457
Secondly – a sign of the times – they were against
retaining the present HfG structure, for in the inner 389
and extended senate, lecturers, assistant lecturers,
and students did not have equal representation,
and they believed the sciences were underrepre-
sented (one of four planned departments). One
lecturer (at least) agreed with this student view. 1458
The result of the students’ resistance was that
the inner senate’s plan to have only two classes
of students in the coming academic year was not
pursued further. 1459 But Herbert Ohl was not willing
to bow to student wishes without resistance. He
The empty lecture
room, November 1968.
Photo: unknown
Archive: Südwestpresse
noted: “During the past months student leaders
have proved that they by no means represent a
separate, independent, progressive group, i. e., one
that acts realistically and objectively; looking out
of the corner of their eye at the demands and
problems of other colleges and universities, which
are partly necessary and perhaps justified, they
would like to transfer them sight unseen to the
HfG. […] These students, and sometimes non-stu-
dent functionaries of political groups used by this
student leadership, thoughtlessly see the work of
the HfG, the work and achievement of trade and
industry and of society as meaningless; they look
at it in a politically sectarian, undemocratical,
propagandistical manner camouflaged as elitism.
[…] [These are the] anarchistic traits of ideolo-
gized groups.“ 1460 In the same tone he informed
student representative Rolf Lobeck in the form of
an ultimatum on 11 July 1968: “I ask the student
body and each individual student to retract imme-
diately their slanderous and defamatory insinua-
tions regarding the lecturers […], among other
things particularly the unqualified and personal
accusations that refer to the lecturers’ research-
and development-related work. […] If these insin-
uations are not immediately retracted or these
assertions are not factually proven, I shall draw
the appropriate conclusions for those members
of the student body who continue to stand behind
these assertions and thus dissociate themselves
from the academic community.“ 1461
On Kuhberg the summer interim term had begun
two weeks earlier, and this meant that the consti-
tutional groups at the college did not have a quo-
 The rectorships of
Aicher, Maldonado
and Ohl
390 rum. Weariness set in. The extended senate had to
change a meeting they had called into an informal
gathering because six members were absent, and
realized with resignation: “However, the student
body is divided, for some students want to work in
the workshops, others are interested in working
with the lecturers on their diploma projects, and
yet another group has declared in writing that they
wish to continue studying here in the next aca-
demic year under the entrance conditions as long
as the financial basis of the HfG is secure. But over
and above that the HfG is split into two camps:
into lecturers and students. While the assistant
lecturers would like to act as mediators, they are
on the side of the students. On the one hand every
effort is made to save the HfG, but on the other
everything is being ruined. Accordingly Mr. Ohl
has little hope that the institution can continue in
operation.” 1462
It is quite true that at this time there were scant
prospects that HfG members would soon settle
their differences of opinion and might again be
able to join forces to pursue a common goal – and
this was the sine qua non for the continued exis-
tence of the HfG. But at this moment the vagaries
of Land politics offered the HfG an unexpected
opportunity.
The Landtag elected in Baden-Württemberg on
28 April 1968 now included the right-wing Nation-
al Democratic Party, which had received 12 seats.
Its electoral successes between 1966 and 1969 in
seven Länder were a reaction by ordinary citizens
to the economic recession and rising unemploy-
ment figures in 1966/67, to the big coalition in the
federal government (CDU/CSU, SPD) in 1966–69,
and finally also a response to the student revolts
of 1967/68. Conversely it seemed that the appear-
ance of right-wing representatives in the parlia-
ments proved the almost hysterical suspicion of
students and intellectuals that the democracy of
the Federal German Republic was in danger of an
insidious takeover by rightist authoritarian forces,
to repel which it was permissible to disregard even
the bounds of law. 1463
At its third meeting on 16 July 1968 the Land-
tag’s finance committee considered the Land
government’s motion: The foundation was to re-
ceive a subsidy in 1969 as well if the future of the
HfG was settled by the end of the year. 1464 The
member who submitted the committee’s report to
the Landtag plenum was newly elected member
Lothar Späth (CDU). The achievements of the HfG
in the area of design and design training were
unreservedly appreciated by the parliamentarians.
And the representative of the government shrewd-
ly argued that the need for subsidies had risen in
recent years only because personnel costs had
been unavoidably brought into line with increases
in the civil service. However, in the government
budget no other educational institution was penal-
ized for this unavoidable rise in personnel costs .
The representatives of the Social Democrats felt
that if the government motion, which only referred
to a transition period, was not supported, this
would mean the instant end of the HfG. Those who
wanted this, they challenged, should say so direct-
ly. Characteristically, there was something uncom-
fortable about the HfG; that was part of it, as it
was part of the liberal constitutional system of the
state. The closing of the Bauhaus, an alleged par-
allel to the closing of the HfG, was also mentioned.
But the representatives of the Christian Democrats
were not convinced by such arguments, they in-
sisted that the HfG should not receive a Land sub-
sidy: Its training program could be incorporated in
the schools of arts and crafts; the HfG’s claim that
it was the only institution doing this kind of work
must be regarded as self-glorification (an argu-
ment provided by the students’ pamphlets). Now,
this cannot have been the only reason for rejecting
an institution whose work and achievements were
expressly acknowledged in the same breath. On
the other hand one thought was foremost in peo-
ple’s minds – it was irresponsible to spend gov-
ernment funds on an institution that lacked all
semblance of order. On this point the CDU and
the NPD were in agreement, and together they
outvoted HfG supporters by 14 to 10. 1465
This first exchange of blows between the support-
ers and opponents of the HfG was followed two
days later by the debate in the plenum. But in the
meantime the press had unleashed a storm of
indignation about the finance committee’s nega-
tive decision. The HfG was only considered to be
the occasion, or rather, the first occasion when the
collaboration people had feared between the CDU
and NPD proved to be a fact. The HfG suddenly
turned out to be a victim in danger of being elimi-
nated by reactionary forces. After all, all collabora-
tion of the political parties with the right wing
should have been out of the question. The govern-
ment party could not leave headlines like CDU and
NPD stop government or CDU and NPD use iden-
tical arguments hanging, for they made it seem
highly likely that this was merely the prelude to a
creeping coalition between the CDU and the NPD
in the new parliamentary term. 1466
Preconditions for the 18 July 1968 HfG debate
in the Landtag, the last day of sessions before the
Parliament’s summer break, were thus a great deal
better than anyone could have foretold only two
days earlier. The Christian Democrats now tabled
a new motion – gnashing their teeth, one may
suspect; in this motion they no longer demanded
the end of the DM 900,000 subsidy, but rather
asked that it be continued. True, this was to be
tied to certain conditions: The organization and
financing of the HfG – in particular regulations re-
garding sideline activities by the lecturers, academic
regulations and examination regulations, regulations
concerning the appointment of faculty, entrance
requirements – would all have to be in place by
1 December 1968, the city of Ulm would need to
continue its participation, the Land subsidy must
not increase, and no additional debts should be
contracted. 1467 These conditions were acceptable
because they meant time had been gained for
negotiations regarding the nationalization of the
HfG. They also did not go beyond what the Land-
tag had decided back in 1966; quite the reverse –
now the way was even open to nationalization.
The Social Democrats, the Free Democrats, and
Ulm Mayor Hans Lorenser (CDU) moved that Par-
liament approve the government bill, in which con-
ditions for the HfG subsidy were not defined as
exactly. 1468 But even these members of parliament
wanted the organization of the HfG to be newly
regulated and to have the Landtag’s blessing be-
fore the foundation would receive DM 900,000 for
1969. 1469 Heinrich von Hacht (SPD) commented on
the voting behavior of the political opponents in
the finance committee: “If a very negative attitude
toward this School of Design is adopted, particu-
larly by the right wing of the Landtag, […] we are
not surprised, for the background and mentality of
NPD representatives make it inevitable that they
should have a negative attitude toward this school.
[…] Debates about a similar institution in the Wei-
mar period and the fate of the Bauhaus in Dessau
show quite clearly that this matter involves impor-
tant political issues, but also questions that have
to do with culture, education, and the arts.”
The Christian Democrats firmly rejected the
dangerous accusation that they had formed a
coalition with ideologically like-minded cohorts.
They said they had felt impelled to vote the same
way as the NPD in the finance committee for com-
pletely different reasons: “The unanimous stance
of the members of the CDU faction in the finance
committee was in no way directed against the
School of Design per se, but rather against the
conditions, against the circumstances, and above
all against the way the wishes of the Landtag in
past years have been ignored, and against the fact
that no changes have been made in the organiza-
tion and the whole internal structure of the col-
lege. […] Since then we have accepted in silence
the fact that the school has been taking money
from the Land but has negated our wishes in every
way.“ That is why the CDU motion contained these
explicit conditions; they were actually already in-
cluded in the government bill itself, but CDU mem-
bers wanted to list them expressly one more time.
Even previously strict opponents of the HfG in the
CDU, who only a short time ago had wanted to
close the HfG, now felt the petition was worth sup-
porting. In this respect public attention because of 391
the CDU’s “like-minded coalition” with the right
wing in the finance committee had led to a com-
plete CDU turnabout. In fact even the minister of
finance praised the HfG’s achievements and its
international significance. And still the CDU and
NPD agreed, for they approved of design but at
the same time rejected the organization, adminis-
tration, and fiscal conduct. Therefore there needed
to be objective reasons why the Christian Demo-
crats now steered a far friendlier course vis-à-vis
the HfG: “The Ulm HfG and its sponsoring founda-
tion have been aware of their financial situation for
a long time, and after the federal subsidy was dis-
continued, the new income situation was well
known. Therefore it is not proper to reproach the
Landtag of Baden-Württemberg at this point for
wanting to deal the HfG the deathblow. We’re
looking at a development that has taken many
years. […] We also tolerate – and we even wel-
come – the nonconformism and also the adversar-
ial position of the Ulm students or lecturers, for
instance. […] Don’t you see, the point is whether
the college itself is capable of finally ending its
everlasting internal quarrels, its disagreements,
so that orderly work as well as orderly creation
becomes possible. The point is to end these con-
stant disagreements and the struggle of every-
body against everybody else, which we read about
all the time in those leaflets that land on our desks
almost every day. And now added to this of course
there’s also the order of the finances and of the
organization. […] Let us remind you that the stu-
dents themselves have touched on a sore point
that is also the subject of the motion. The students
themselves write that the lecturers are too involved
in making money on the side, that they are betray-
ing their educational mission, and there is even a
printed report, which Mr. Peter von Kornatzki has
circulated, that funds were misappropriated by the
foundation.”
All parties agreed that there must be an end to
the HfG crisis and that the situation must be set-
tled to the satisfaction of all those involved. They
all felt the Landtag’s deadline and pressure were
absolutely necessary so that something would
change on Kuhberg. Thus this second phase of
the year 1968 ended with a last chance. That was
exactly the understanding of the extended senate
of the HfG as well. On 23 July 1968 they adopted
their position statement regarding the Landtag’s
resolution: “The extended senate of the School of
Design welcomes the Landtag’s resolution to grant
another DM 900,000 subsidy in 1969 and recog-
nizes this decision as a first contribution to the
continuing operation of the School of Design. […]
The extended senate considers the conditions
named by the Landtag to be fundamentally ac-
ceptable, since they are in the college’s own inter-
 The rectorships of
Aicher, Maldonado
and Ohl
392 est and have in part been practiced at the HfG for
years.” 1470
Here it must be said in no uncertain terms that the
Baden-Württemberg Landtag no longer dealt with
the HfG after this meeting. It is therefore not a fact
that in November 1968 the Landtag passed a reso-
lution to close the HfG. 1471 Apart from the fact that
this abridges the legal continuity – only the foun-
dation was capable of closing the HfG. This is one
of two of the most widespread myths about the
history of the HfG. (The other is that the HfG sud-
denly got into financial difficulties because no fed-
eral subsidy was received in 1967.) The Stuttgart
Landtag did not close the HfG; quite the reverse,
it approved its full subsidization for 1969 as well.
The HfG did not reject the conditions on which
the subsidy was contingent because, as quoted
above, they were “in the interest of the college”.
The third phase of 1968 began with the above
Landtag resolution. Now the fate of the college
was in the hands of the HfG’s members alone. The
foundation‘s council had given them far-reaching
negotiating powers and was content with remain-
ing passive. The Parliament’s conditions simply
boiled down to a speedy agreement between HfG
members and the University of Stuttgart, and
among themselves. Both in Stuttgart and at the
HfG, obstacles needed to be cleared out of the
way.
It was hardly conceivable that the internal frag-
mentation could be healed. A few days after the
Landtag debate, the extended senate observed:
“The students said that they no longer wanted to
cooperate with the lecturers and no longer recog-
nized the competent bodies of the institution.” 1472
In the middle of the summer holidays, they said,
the members of the HfG had to gather again and
find their common goal. Not only had the Landtag
set a deadline (1 December 1968), but among stu-
dents and lecturers there was also a great deal
of uncertainty whether classes would resume on
1 October 1968. In any case, the HfG was sup-
posed to come to an internal agreement by 15
September 1968 and present a joint plan to the
foundation‘s council – such was the valiant wish
of the foundation‘s council. There would then still
be chances that the government might be able to
pass on this proposal to the Landtag in a timely
manner. 1473 Of course, at the same time the HfG’s
ideas needed to be discussed with the University
of Stuttgart. But the university’s decision-making
branch, the extended senate, could not discuss
the matter until mid-November. That was actually
too late, because the Stuttgart officials already
needed the documentation two weeks earlier. 1474
Otl Aicher had largely retired from the HfG some
time ago, but was still a lecturer there. Probably
this circumstance – the fact that he had left the
HfG and no longer intervened in what was hap-
pening – was the reason that a basis for negotia-
tions again developed within the HfG. At the end
of July 1968 he managed to get the students to
begin negotiations with the lecturers and assistant
lecturers again. 1475 At his suggestion a new six-
member commission was formed (two students,
assistant lecturers, and lecturers each), who would
work out a proposal in good time – by 9 Septem-
ber 1968. The work involved details only, for all
those involved had been certain of the general
direction months ago: The School of Design was
to be associated with the University of Stuttgart,
be nationalized, and offer a postgraduate pro-
gram. 1476 The foundation‘s council again approved
this plan. 1477 But this did not completely meet re-
quirements for the continued existence of the HfG.
For firstly: “Essential differences in the new plan
still exist only as regards the handling of private
commissions.” This so-called “institute issue” still
split the HfG into lecturers and students; the as-
sistant lecturers sided with the students. HfG
members still needed to agree on this point. And
secondly, the University of Stuttgart still had not
agreed to the Ulm plan.
On 25 September 1968 there was an initial discus-
sion between representatives of the university, the
HfG, the foundation‘s council, and the ministries
about the modalities of affiliation. The result gave
cause for optimism, even though time was very
pressing: “Subject to consent by the extended
senate, the department representatives who are
present and the student representative of the uni-
versity in principle approve the affiliation of the
Ulm School of Design with the University of Stutt-
gart, with the proviso that the university will have
the same right to a say in the appointment of lec-
turers at the School of Design as in the appoint-
ment of professors to individual departments (of
the university). In the opinion of all those present,
incorporation of the School of Design into the
University of Stuttgart is not possible at present
for various reasons. The definitive opinion of the
university will be given by the extended senate,
[…] whose next meeting is on 13 November
1968.“ 1478
Herbert Ohl officially opened the 1968/69 aca-
demic year in the presence of a small circle of HfG
members who had made their way to Ulm on 2
October 1968. The foundation had not retracted its
termination notices because up to that point no
one could assume responsibility that sufficiently
large subsidies would be approved for 1969. Thus
the HfG’s administration was decimated; there
were only seven lecturers still present (with 12 full-
time positions) and two assistant lecturers (with 9
full-time positions), and of the approximately 110
students who were still supposed to be registered,
about half had taken a leave of absence. 1479
In the name of the lecturers and students, Her-
bert Ohl declared: “The lecturers of the HfG, after
careful consideration, feel that at present they are
unable to take upon themselves the responsibility
of offering quality teaching at the HfG at the start
of the 1968/69 academic year. Developments dur-
ing recent weeks have led to an ongoing disinte-
gration of the structure of the teaching personnel,
so that it is not possible to pursue a course of
studies that will qualify graduates professional-
ly.” 1480 With a resolution on the following day, the
vestigial HfG tried at the same time to keep the
school going and to continue the Ulm experiment:
“In the first quarter of the 1968/69 academic year,
the members of the HfG will attempt to develop
new, collective forms of studies or to try them out.
With this aim in view, all members of the HfG (lec-
turers, assistant lecturers, technical teachers, and
students) will join together in a plenum. The pur-
pose of the plenum is to organize studies at the
HfG during the above-named period.” 1481
Naturally, the fact that the HfG was reduced to
organizing work did not mean that existing differ-
ences of opinion had been settled. Quite the re-
verse – the students and lecturers, in spite of time
pressures, were hardly willing to compromise as
far as the institutes were concerned. 1482 During
deliberations by the foundation‘s council on 15
October 1968, they had no choice but to state that
“the opinions of the students and lecturers diverge
substantially on the issue of separation between
pure development and fundamental research on
the one hand and studies and work on real re-
search projects on the other hand. As far as the
work of the institutes is concerned, it would be
necessary to work out a version that both lectur-
ers and students can agree on.”
The work of the lecturers, which, as “develop-
ment”, had up to this time had the same status as
research and teaching, was now forced out of the
context of the traditional HfG program, being refer-
red to as a “sideline”. This term was borrowed
from the civil service. The choice of words shows
what was actually meant by the seemingly objec-
tive designation. For if there was supposed to be
a sideline, there must also be a main occupation:
research and teaching. Of course the mentality
that produced this separation had no connection
with the motives of the founders, in which it was
precisely practical activity, work on projects, that
had played a central part. Now the HfG mentally
retreated to an ivory tower that was removed from
practical experience, when it had so far given a
wide berth to this way of thinking. Those lecturers
who wanted to continue to test the quality of their
achievements on industrial projects were appar-
ently supposed to feel conscience-stricken for not
spending more time on their main occupation. – 393
This institute work was supposed to be possible
according to the same regulations as those in
effect for the civil service. One could hardly ex-
pect anything else from a nationalized HfG.
Yet there was one remaining contentious issue:
the question whether the institutes should be lo-
cated on campus (as the lecturers believed) or off
(as the students thought). In this last question the
threads by which the HfG’s fate was hanging con-
verged. From the lecturers’ perspective the insti-
tutes should belong directly to the college. They
resisted the idea that their practical work, which
had already been devalued by being called a side-
line, would be forced off the HfG’s campus spatial-
ly as well. Then it would no longer take much to
come to the obvious conclusion and banish the
institutes from Kuhberg conceptionally as well.
The students, on the other hand, feared “the dan-
ger of a split between an institution of institutes
and an educational one. […] One should eliminate
the risk of having an institute turn into a business
enterprise.” 1483
Because of this ongoing dispute it was highly
probable that the disease which had plagued Ulm
so long – “no concessions” –, which had so often
heightened tensions and given the HfG a bad
name among politicians, had not been cured by
the HfG’s own efforts now that the very existence
of the school was threatened, and could not be
cured in the future if there was no fundamental
change. At the meeting of the council of ministers
on the following day, minister of education and the
arts Wilhelm Hahn therefore announced that there
were reservations against the HfG’s affiliation with
the University of Stuttgart. Subsequently, in the
cabinet, regrets were expressed that the merger
with the School of Engineering had not happened
as the cabinet had planned a year earlier. In no
case should the government be blamed, they said,
if coordinating talks between the HfG and the uni-
versity should fail. The government had given the
HfG a helping hand, and if the affiliation should
fail, those responsible should be found at the
HfG. 1484 But for the moment the ministers were
waiting to see the foundation’s documentation.
The foundation’s proposal was two weeks late in
arriving. Identical with the HfG’s plan, it reached
the ministry of education and the arts at the end
of October 1968.
The dispute regarding the institutes had not been
settled in the documents either. It was conceiv-
able, of course, for the foundation‘s council to
decide on one of the two perspectives. But the
members of the foundation‘s council were no
longer willing to be so actively involved on behalf
of the HfG, which had so often snubbed them. 1485
That is why the plan for the HfG’s future the minis-
 The rectorships of Ludwig Erhard and
Aicher, Maldonado Franz Wiedemeier at a
and Ohl CDU event during the
Landtag election cam-
paign, 8 March 1968.
Photo: unknown
Archive: Südwestpresse
394 try of education and the arts received documented
the discord of its members. An energetic position
statement by the foundation‘s council at this point
would undoubtedly have steered events in a differ-
ent direction.
Instead, in November 1968, the remaining lec-
turers and students tore each other to pieces
shortly before the University of Stuttgart was to
discuss affiliating with the HfG. Even those who
had up to that point been conspicuous by their
reasonable behavior and unbiased argumentation
fell prey to cannibalism. By the end of the four
weeks that followed, no part of the HfG remained
alive.
On 5 November 1968 the lecturers sent supple-
mentary material to the ministry of education and
the arts. In it they explained their position on re-
search and development work: “The lecturers of
the HfG regard it as a constitutional right that, as
is the practice at other institutions of higher learn-
ing, they be able do independent research and
development work in addition to teaching. This
right to personal free professional work is a pre-
requisite for doing the kind of teaching that is con-
stantly renewed. Above and beyond that, this right
to professional growth is an important requirement
if highly qualified people are to be recruited and re-
tained as teachers at the HfG. Until now this work
has been possible at the HfG within the framework
of the institutes and development teams, and has
accounted for the international reputation of the
HfG and made important contributions to the Ger-
man economy. […] The research groups, which
are at present still decentralized and are recog-
nized by the public and by trade and industry, are
being joined together into an independent interdis-
ciplinary, federative organization, an association of
institutes. […] The Institute of Design, located on
campus and in the college complex of the HfG, is
self-supporting, requires no personnel, and gives
itself its own bylaws.” 1486 In addition to this posi-
tion statement, the ministry of education and the
arts also received a draft budget that diverged
from the foundation’s – an impressive substantia-
tion, particularly in this situation, of the suspicion
that the HfG was financially disorganized and
unpredictable.
The students responded two days later, on 7 No-
vember 1968. They also sent their remarks on the
regulation of the HfG lecturers’ additional work to
the ministry of education and the arts. 1487 They
gave reasons for their opposition to institutes on
the HfG campus: The institutes exploited students
financially and creatively, the foundation was be-
ing financially exploited, and because it was nec-
essary to keep projects confidential, nothing flowed
back into the HfG from a pedagogical perspective:
“The long-term controversy regarding this issue
between the lecturers and the students makes this
question incalculably important for the HfG. It is a
central problem that determines the success or
failure of a future HfG. […] The lecturers intend to
combine the separate institutes and development
teams that presently exist at the HfG into a federa-
tive association of institutes with bylaws of their
own. This institute is to be autonomous, indepen-
dent of the HfG, and not controllable by it, but lo-
cated in the immediate area of the HfG campus.
Here, the lecturers are deliberately covering up
the actual facts, i. e., the regulation of their side-
line work, and speak of the work of the institutes.
Those are two entirely different sets of circum-
stances. As far as the lecturers’ sideline work is
concerned, it is acceptable on condition that it is
regulated according to civil service regulations.
[…] The ‘institute work’ of the lecturers that has
been practiced so far and is planned for the future,
in other words, means nothing other than the side-
line work they perform while using the facilities
and nominal advantages offered by the HfG: a
privilege enjoyed at no other educational institu-
tion. […] While at one time the lecturers’ title of
ownership and their claim to power still referred in
part to a realm of ideas, that is, to their sole deter-
mination of the HfG’s curricular development, the
lecturers are now at the point where they put the
safeguarding of their material interests above col-
lective educational interest and above the actual
survival of the HfG. Thus the Institute of Design
planned by the lecturers must be understood as a
commercial enterprise which, although dependent
on the HfG, will act as a foreign body within it and
against it. […] In spite of this, the students regard
the overall plan of postgraduate studies at the HfG
in association with the University of Stuttgart as a
desirable solution, provided that a different type of
faculty is created for it.” In their position state-
ment, the students repeated their bitter accusa-
tions against the lecturers, especially against Her-
bert Ohl, and emphasized that they would abide
by their vote of no confidence.
The escalation of the pamphlets culminated in
a telegram by Herbert Ohl to the extended senate
of the University of Stuttgart. The senate was
meeting on 13 November 1968 to consider affilia-
tion with the HfG. Into the middle of the delibera-
tions burst the HfG rector’s announcement that
this hearing was no longer necessary: “The stu-
dents declare that in the future they are no longer
willing to cooperate with lecturers, and demand a
different faculty if there is to be affiliation with the
University of Stuttgart […]. These foreground
actions conceal a diversionary tactic from various
sides:
1. Since for the students in their efforts at reform
the actual adversaries in cultural and education-
al politics are inaccessible, they use the lectur-
ers as surrogates for their aggression.
2. In the foundation‘s council, which is responsible
for the financial disaster of the HfG and there-
fore for the crisis that threatens its existence,
people see this as a welcome opportunity to
distract the public from the council’s own fail-
ure. […]
3. The ministry of education and the arts averts
attention from its responsibility by making the
public believe that the crisis (for which it shares
the blame) has been caused by the disagree-
ment between the students and the lecturers.
[…]
4. The Landtag will scapegoat the lecturers now
that it has resolved, by a very narrow margin
and primarily for political and tactical reasons,
to grant the HfG a demonstrably inadequate
subsidy.
Owing to this development the HfG has been
plunged into anarchy and vandalism. […] The
HfG’s objectives and outcomes were largely deter-
mined by the lecturers. A purported rehabilitation
of the HfG by eliminating inconvenient lecturers is
therefore tantamount to the dissolution of the HfG.
The anarchy and lack of direction, which was con-
trolled and promoted from the outside, make the
continued operation of the HfG pointless and im-
possible.” 1488 – Hardly had Herbert Ohl thrown in
the towel than the first accusations began. It was
the undignified end of a surreal year.
It is true that the rector of the University of
Stuttgart described this telegram as a “rash ac-
tion”, and the extended senate continued its de-
liberations: “The present, critically ailing condition
of the HfG must not affect our deliberations. […]
The extended senate’s resolution approves a fu-
ture involvement by the University of Stuttgart.” 1489
Yet the image of an ailing HfG that must urgently
be cured already described the perspective from
which people at the University of Stuttgart would 395
henceforth regard the HfG: The HfG would not
manage to regain its health by itself. And the diag-
nosis identifying what exactly ailed the HfG had
been generally accepted for some time at the min-
istry of education and the arts, the Land govern-
ment, and at the university. Herbert Ohl and Her-
bert Kapitzki reaffirmed that impression with their
last remarks, addressed to the valiant Theodor
Pfizer. Herbert Ohl wrote, his tone matter-of-fact,
the content anything but: “Because all members of
the School of Design have now been given notice
by the Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung effective 31
December 1968, I’d like to say that as of 1 January
1969 the HfG will conclude its work and its exis-
tence as a teaching institution.” 1490 And Herbert
Kapitzki made absurd accusations, which, because
they were untenable, only reflected badly upon
himself: “In conclusion I’d like to add that your
conduct – that of the various members of the GSS
and of the administrative director – has not helped
to remedy the existential and politico-educational
problems that have shaken the HfG recently. On
the contrary, it has fueled the students’ incompe-
tent accusations. These facts might lead one to
conclude that the GSS deliberately drew public
attention to these events in order to divert it from
the foundation’s own problems, which brought on
the HfG’s crisis in the first place.” 1491
The officials of the ministry of education and the
arts were faced with a mess they did not want to
clean up. For the 27 November 1968 government
meeting they had prepared a presentation that in-
cluded not only the foundation’s proposal but also
the two pamphlets by the lecturers and the stu-
dents. 1492 The contentious issue of the institutes
was clearly demonstrated. There was also the fact
that the foundation and the lecturers had submit-
ted competing budgets, which did not help increase
trust in the HfG. For interestingly the foundation
had worked out that the needed Land subsidy
totaled DM 1,053,300, while the HfG lecturers
asked for almost DM 100,000 more. There was a
simple reason for this: “The higher estimate in the
HfG’s budget plan is based essentially on higher
salaries for the lecturers and more personnel posi-
tions.” Since the students had insinuated that the
lecturers were interested in personal gain, and the
financial organization of the HfG had shown itself
to be incompetent, it also looked as though the
lecturers wanted to be put in a higher income
bracket and hire more auxiliary staff – which the
ministers and officials considered to be outra-
geous. At least it was not diplomatic, since the
touchy situation would have demanded that every
word and every mark be carefully weighed. Ac-
cordingly, in their response, the officials of the
ministry of education and the arts came to the
 The rectorships of
Aicher, Maldonado
and Ohl
396 conclusion that the HfG had not completely met
the Landtag’s conditions. The question of organ-
izational structure had not been completely re-
solved, since the lecturers and students disagreed
on the question of the institutes. And above all:
“With the importance given to this question by
both lecturers and students, it cannot simply be
taken care of with a decision coming from the
ministry of education and the arts.” Also, the min-
istry stated, the kind of administration the HfG
would have had been left open.
Another factor that prepared the session of the
council of ministers was a statement to the press
by the ministry of education and the arts: It de-
scribed Ohl’s repeated statements in the press
that the HfG was defunct as incomprehensible.
The ministry, to quote the statement, welcomed
the proposal that in the future the HfG would offer
a postgraduate program and wanted to be affili-
ated with the university of Stuttgart. “The reason
Rector Ohl’s statements are inexplicable is that
they quite unnecessarily aggravate the atmos-
phere in the public and in parliament.” 1493
Indeed the atmosphere was now so poisoned
that the council of ministers lost its patience with
the HfG. It is true that a last-minute telegram ar-
rived announcing that the students and lecturers
had agreed on the institute question. 1494 And min-
ister of education and the arts Wilhelm Hahn also
tried to convince his government colleagues that
this announcement completely fulfilled the Land-
tag conditions. However, he said the lecturers had
resisted until the end against control of their side-
line activities and had not agreed to their being
regulated until the last minute. He thought the
government should probably accept this result,
even if he had come to believe that the Land gov-
ernment would have saved itself a great deal of
trouble if the HfG had disbanded by itself. A refu-
sal by the Land government would have dire politi-
cal consequences. But minister of finance Robert
Gleichauf had different views. He questioned the
value of the telegram announcing internal agree-
ment at the HfG because there was also a tele-
gram from Ohl in which the latter announced that
the HfG had disbanded. The Landtag’s conditions
had not been fulfilled, including the unresolved
question as to the HfG’s administration. He won-
dered whether the subsidy should be cut, even at
the risk of being blamed for the end of the HfG.
That was why he pleaded that the Land govern-
ment should propose to the Landtag that the sub-
sidy for the HfG include a note that it was blocked.
This meant that after 31 December 1968 the foun-
dation could not continue running the HfG. In-
stead, a new institution should be founded to doc-
ument the interest of the land in the HfG; it could
begin its work in the 1969/70 winter semester.
The Land government felt this plan had two advan- subsidy would be blocked for 1969 with the con- 397
tages: A reliable and workable organization might dition that a committee of experts should work on
be created – even if this new organization would reorganizing the institution. In line with the foun-
cost more than the HfG, but if its structure was dation’s proposal the HfG’s successor institution
solid, this could be justified – and the personnel would offer a postgraduate program. There needed
situation could be sorted out. The officials of the to be a study whether it would be most practical
ministries in charge of this matter also no longer for such a program to be offered by a separate
had any hopes that the present HfG could suc- institution or in affiliation with an existing institu-
cessfully continue its work. For one, there had tion of higher learning. Classes were expected to
been practically no more classes since 1 October resume in winter semester 1969/70. The cabinet
1968, and there were a mere 35 students now. approved this proposal with 18 votes in favor, two
Thus they were faced with the question whether against, and two abstentions. 1497 On 11 December
under the circumstances one could even say that 1968 the ministry of state informed the Landtag of
the HfG still existed. Secondly, almost all the lec- this resolution. 1498
turers were concentrating their energy on fighting Because all employees of the foundation had
against the foundation. No plan could be made been given notice effective 31 December 1968,
with these lecturers; the old controversies would the foundation‘s council no longer needed to re-
surface again, and that was why old accusations act. Exhausted and weary, Theodor Pfizer summed
should be laid aside so that a successful new be- up: “Our task is to maintain things, but to close the
ginning could be made. Thirdly, the most recent present school.” The foundation thus stated that
telegram had been signed by only four lecturers; the School of Design was officially suspending its
one was against it, and the remaining three had operation on 31 December 1968. 1499
not yet voiced their opinions because they had not
been present. – Although all participants at this At the ministry of education and the arts, the HfG
discussion were aware that the Land government had been the responsibility of the department of
was being blamed for the end of the HfG, the cabi- fine arts, since a concrete program had been in-
net passed the resolution that the HfG had not ful- volved. Now this responsibility reverted to the de-
filled the conditions of the Landtag and that the partment of higher education, as had been the
planned Land subsidy was to carry a note that it case in the very beginning, when the HfG existed
was blocked. 1495 – This meant that the politicians only as a vague, distant idea. 1500
took upon themselves the charge – to use the
handy formula – that they were to blame for clos- The absurdity of all the developments in this final
ing the HfG. Their counterargument that the HfG phase is graphically illustrated by the fact that the
had not fulfilled the conditions imposed upon it no Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung ended the 1968 fiscal
longer got a hearing. And of course, as we have year with the biggest surplus since 1954.
seen, it only served as a pretext.
Herbert Ohl commented on this resolution,
again demonstrating how out of touch with reality
he was. He declared, “in reference to the liquida-
tion of the college by the Land of Baden-Würt-
temberg”: “The intention that has often been ex-
pressed over the years to gradually liquidate the
HfG by division – individual departments, individu-
al faculty members, or the cooperation of the aca-
demic community itself – is now complete, al-
though in spite of all these attempts the HfG was
in the end able to keep alive a joint and unani-
mous will for its preservation and renewal. After
a year during which the government, parliament,
and sponsors treated the institution as an outlaw,
the HfG and its members could not hold back
these destructive outside forces.” 1496
The HfG as a balanced ideal entity had no longer
been in existence since spring. Now the end of the
HfG as a functioning unit had also been sealed. All
that was left were the buildings and grounds. On
3 December 1968 the council of ministers put its
ideas in concrete form: The DM 900,000 Land
 Profit and loss statement of the
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung
1950 –1968

Surplus Total
Personnel Personnel Materials Materials Total Total Total or deficit Increase surplus
expenditure expenditure expenditure expenditure expenditure expenditure income income/ or decrease or deficit
as per budget actual as per budget actual as per budget actual actual expenditure in assets in figures

398 up to 31 March 1953 — 68,140.20 — 57,714.04 — 125,854.24 1,909,929.67 1,784,075.43 — 1,784,075.43 399
1953 / 54 — 127,044.61 — 59,608.47 — 186,653.08 183,803.19 -2,849.89 — -2,849.89
1954 / 55 — 172,781.26 — 210,948.28 — 383,729.54 369,786.42 -13,943.12 — -13,943.12
1955 / 56 — 247,937.26 — 292,816.97 — 540,754.23 583,821.41 — 43,067.18 43,067.18
1956 / 57 — 243,237.00 — 274,739.73 — 517,976.73 612,253.36 — 94,276.63 94,276.63
1957 / 58 355,700.00 358,690.18 322,800.00 280,528.26 678,500.00 639,218.44 641,878.00 -9,808.50 -90,816.98 -100,625.48
1958 / 59 410,700.00 422,827.46 281,800.00 328,306.20 698,500.00 751,133.66 739,178.14 -21,764.02 -23,872.36 -45,636.38
1959 / 60 543,900.00 528,266.27 331,700.00 499,256.13 875,600.00 1,027,522.40 1,027,522.40 — 21,066.61 21,066.61
1960 / 61 658,700.00 690,815.64 372,600.00 524,023.15 1,031,300.00 1,214,838.79 1,200,215.88 -14,622.91 62,985.21 48,362.30

1961 815,644.10 482,289.12 1,110,000.00 1,369,849.57 1,356,180.00 -13,669.80

(611,733.01) (361,716.83) (842,000.00) (1,027,387.20) (1,017,134.85) ( -10,252.35)

1962 972,800.00 825,693.79 537,300.00 962,448.60 1,510,100.00 1,788,142.39 1,879,229.96 80,835.22 — 80,835.22
1963 944,000.00 925,383.89 541,000.00 1,269,133.28 1,485,000.00 2,194,517.17 2,027,951.76 -85,730.19 415,390.14 329,659.95
1964 777,600.00 950,058.40 677,400.00 742,944.68 1,455,000.00 1,693,003.08 1,679,240.50 -13,762.58 -81,065.53 -94,828.11
1965 832,000.00 971,250.37 652,000.00 790,799.27 1,484,000.00 1,762,049.64 1,514,003.51 -248,046.13 -155,683.03 -403,729.16
1966 956,650.00 1,036,405.23 1,323,700.00 1,445,145.00 2,280,350.00 2,481,550.23 2,397,878.91 -83,671.32 60,252.48 -23,418.84
1967 845,730.00 866,860.10 572,770.00 656,597.85 1,418,500.00 1,523,457.95 1,411,857.21 -111,600.74 -255,670.57 -367,271.31
1968 905,100.00 847,476.14 539,900.00 446,608.21 1,445,000.00 1,294,084.35 1,397,585.88 103,501.53 -98,222.82 5,278.71

Alle data in deutsche mark. They Decrease in assets: 1958/59: 1965:

are based on the auditing re-
ports of Max Horn, except for
the last column, which is a sim-
ple addition of the two preced-
ing columns. The following ref-
erences elucidate points that
are not clear:
Under this heading the auditor
included the deficit created
when more money was spent
for nonbudgetary items than
was earned for nonbudgetary
items.
Up to 31 March 1953:
Income, including the McCloy
funds, is reported as totaling
DM 1,037,685.88; the surplus
quoted also refers to this total.
However, in calculating earnings
and losses, a higher amount has
been entered, because as a
result of part of the donations
being deposited in bank ac-
counts for many years there
was interest.
Up to 1956/57:
Up to 31 March 1957 there was
no budget examination using
actual figures.
1957/58:
In that year the auditor added
two items totaling
DM 12,468.06, which represent
a carry-forward of the losses, to
total expenditure. This results in
the shortfall, where normally, on
the basis of the bill of receipts
and expenditures, a small suplus
would have been calculated.
In that year the budget con- In the year that followed, total
tained a DM 6,000.00 deficit; income was later decreased by
this meant that there was a dif- DM 39,130.20 by the auditor,
ference between the sum of and thus the deficit was raised
budgetary personnel expendi- by the same amount. This ex-
ture and expenditure in kind, plains the difference from the
and total budgetary expendi- audit report figures for 1965.
ture. Also, the auditor counted
the preceding year’s deficit 1967 and 1968:
against the current deficit. The These data no longer include
result is a deficit that is higher the film department.
than the difference between
income and expenses.
1961:
This fiscal year was only
9 months long. The correspond-
ing audit report is not available,
but it was definitely drawn up,
for in 1962 the auditor offset a
DM 10,252.35 deficit he had
identified for the rest of 1961
with the calculated surplus for
1962, a total of DM 91,087.57,
the difference between income
and expenditure.* In order to
compare data for 1961 with
those for the other years, I gave
the projections for 12 months
and put the actual figures for 9
months in parentheses, if avail-
able.
1963:
The actual deficit
(DM 166,565.41) was set off
against the preceding year’s
surplus.
 Selected financial data from the
profit and loss statement of the
Geschwister- Scholl-Stiftung
1950 – 1968

Income Commissions/ Income Subsidies Subsidies

Student payments Rents Royalties Donations Other total Land City Federal total

400 up to 31 March 1953 — — 14,053,40 195,919,84 1,111,118,34 1,321,091.58 60,000.00 — — 60,000.00 401
1953 / 54 5,129,25 — 21,168,46 48,696,24 3,530,87 78,524.82 250,000.00 245,000.00 250,000.00 745,000.00
1954 / 55 11,023,00 — 10,639,96 79,847,05 6,671,14 108,181.15 225,000.00 22,362.16 50,000.00 297,362.16
1955 / 56 28,270,50 11,597,00 36,511,99 178,697,41 10,486,12 265,563.02 265,000.00 53,257.69 — 318,257.69
1956 / 57 50,173,75 16,375,13 32,422,57 150,487,81 32,065,82 281,525.08 200,000.00 63,228.28 67,500,00 330,728.28
1957/ 58 54,270,99 17,912,75 55,880,58 60,883,82 725,47 189,673.61 180,000.00 74,575.17 75,000.00 329,575.17
1958 / 59 49,485,90 19,512,00 59,439,56 85,631,15 5,197,77 219,266.38 180,000.00 63,753.07 90,000.00 333,753.07
1959 / 60 53,623,90 19,036,50 46,168,38 9,163,02 144,596,13 272,587.93 180,000.00 61,037.10 170,000.00 411,037.10
1960 / 61 54,743,50 19,495,50 287,000,16 14,265,03 269,236,24 644,740.43 180,000.00 61,860.32 162,500,00 404,360.32

1961: 12 months 200,000.00 740,178.67 330,000.00 80,000.00 190,000.00 600,000.00

(9 months) (150,000.00) (555,134.85) (250,000.00) (60,000.00) (152,000.00) (462,000.00)

1962 81,118,00 40,640,50 351,462,75 15,047,17 75,430,44 563,698.86 500,000.00 100,000.00 295,000.00 895,000.00
1963 85,577,13 41,750,25 189,432,98 503,984,60 38,427,66 859,172.62 600,000.00 150,000.00 269,550,00 1,019,550,00
1964 89,229,86 42,616,43 297,339,09 27,666,32 87,500,07 544,351.77 600,000.00 200,000.00 246,000.00 1,046,000.00
1965 96,367,41 45,805,25 55,719,30 12,995,52 94,352,07 305,239.55 600,000.00 200,000.00 200,000.00 1,000.000,00
1966 90,854,00 46,331,25 264,361,03 37,239,15 83,186,28 521,971.71 900,000.00 200,000.00 200,000.00 1,300,000.00
1967 153,401,58 46,007,45 26,623,35 26,413,55 75,666,01 328,111.94 900,000.00 200,000.00 — 1,100,000.00
1968 122,191,45 67,209,95 29,335,73 1,380,00 3,566,16 223,683.29 900,000.00 200,000.00 — 1,100,000.00

Alle data in deutsche mark. Re the first reporting period: Re 1961:

They are based on the auditing
reports of Max Horn.
The totals of earnings for the
first three audit periods (through
31 March 1955) do not agree
with the total earnings listed in
the profit and loss statement
because the auditor identified all
public sector subsidies (HICOG,
city, Land, federal) in the first
audit (through 31 March 1953)
as income, even if they had not
actually been paid out. This
chart, however, gives the actual
income per year. Because of
interest that could not be calcu-
lated at the outset, there are fur-
ther differences. In 1955/56 the
totals of own resources and
subsidies (here) agree with total
identified earnings (GV) (NB:
deficits and decreases in assets
must if applicable be added on).
Under other income, only the
McCloy donation is listed includ-
ing interest identified in the
1955/56 audit.
Re 1954/55:
In effect only DM 20,000 were
paid out by the federal ministry
of the interior that year, while
the remaining DM 30,000 plus
DM 5,000 were paid out in fiscal
year 1956/57 (i. e., the founda-
tion received a total of
DM 55,000 — and not just
DM 50,000 as promised — from
the federal ministry of the interi-
or out of funds provided by the
third Bundesjugendplan, the
Federal Youth Plan).
This fiscal year was only nine
months long. The corresponding
audit report is no longer avail-
able. In order to compare these
data with those from the other
years, I gave the projections for
12 months, and put the actual
figures for nine months in
parentheses. The item “other”
refers to the subsidy of the
Stuttgart Land Trade Supervisory
Department (i. e., the Baden–
Württemberg ministry of eco-
nomics) to the Institute of Prod-
uct Design. In the two preceding
years a large part of that item
consisted of the respective sub-
sidy by the Land Trade Supervi-
sory Department to the institute.
 Selected items from the
financial statement of the
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung
1950 – 1968

Assets Liabilities

Fixed Current Own

assets assets resources Liabilities

402 up to 31 March 1953 114,395.58 1,688,592.02 1,784,075.43 7,482.79 Alle data in deutsche mark. They 403
1953/54 628,079.73 1,339,882.83 1,807,161.95 191,154.91 are based on the auditing
1954/55 1,909,023.57 267,263.56 1,957,013.68 163,307.28 reports of Max Horn.
1955/56 2,550,471.65 111,612.92 1,993,401.72 438,502.50
1956/57 2,489,057.90 112,226.62 2,094,724.16 461,957.81 Fixed assets
1957/58 2,454,018.40 57,743.58 2,004,147.04 509,749.64 These include the value of such
1958/59 2,404,044.40 82,386.03 1,970,556.18 490,513.28 property as the site, the college
1959/60 2,394,441.40 147,105.28 1,969,858.77 550,220.61 building, student residences,
1960/61 2,509,318.85 166,279.82 2,032,843.98 622,465.57 other residential buildings, fur-
nishings and equipment of
1961 buildings, land improvements.

1962 3,051,563.15 287,518.24 2,053,067.75 1,160,026.02 Current assets

1963 3,496,910.38 213,505.55 2,549,293.11 1,302,453.36 These include the value of such
1964 3,416,459.89 142,608.54 2,468,227.58 1,271,531.96 items as stock-in-trade,
1965 3,225,120.44 92,256.33 2,312,544.55 1,389,594.70 accounts receivable, bank
1966 3,565,300.74 131,392.15 2,113,197.03 1,523,918.22 deposits, cash in hand.
1967 3,317,006.25 263,788.32 1,943,733.78 1,870,384.75
1968 2,958,643.25 157,312.09 1,493,185.70 1,575,765.88 Real property
• not reported through 31 March
1956
• 1957/ 58 through 1958 / 59
value: 267,583.40
• 31 March 1960 value:
266,383.40
• 31 March 1961 value:
266,858.75
• after 1 April 1961 constant
value: 265,146.25
 HfG publications

Contemporary note paper, advertis- 405

ing and informational material
shows a cross section of the design
of publications between 1948 and
1968. The main focus of this hap-
hazard, by no means representative
selection is on designs from the
HfG and those directly associated
with it. In other words, this is work
in which the HfG’s position regard-
ing design had to be demonstrated
in practice. We notice that over
many years HfG letterheads that
were consistently lowercased were
used in parallel with others that
used standard spelling. – This
spectrum is only meant to give an
impression and does not claim to
be a scholarly appraisal. There may
be minor deviations from the origi-
nals, since to a large extent repro-
ductions of copies were used.

Der Graue Prospekt

black-white
4 pages 210 x 210 mm
1952

Information
black-white
2 pages 210 x 297 mm
1951

Reprint from idea 55

black-white
4 pages 210 x 297 mm
1955
HfG publications Cover
information 63
Cover colour orange
pages black-white
21 pages 210 x 297 mm
1963

407

Information
cover and double page
black-white
28 pages 210 x 210 mm
1960

Information
black-white
16 pages 148 x 210 mm
1956
HfG publications

409

Cover
HfG curriculum
black-white
16 pages 148 x 210 mm
1964/65

output no. 16
cover and double page
black-white
60 pages 210 x 210 mm
1963
HfG publications

Fragebogen
black-white
2 pages 148 x 210 mm
circa 1966

411

Erläuterungen zur Studienordnung

geforderten Vorbildung black-white
black-white 4 pages 148 x 210 mm
2 pages 148 x 210 mm 1964
1964

Fragebogen
cover and double pages
black-white
4 pages 148 x 210 mm
1964
HfG publications

413

Extracts from the

information map of the
development team 5 (E5)
color
each 4 pages 297 x 210 mm
1964
HfG publications

415

Extracts from the

information map of the
development team 5
(E5)
color
each 4 pages 297 x 210 mm
1964

Cover
ulm no. 12/13
black-white
80 pages 210 x 297 mm
March 1965
HfG publications

417

Information of the department Cover and double page

of visual communication ulm no. 21
black-white black-white
16 pages 210 x 297 mm 60 pages 210 x 297 mm
1967/68 April 1968
HfG publications

Erklärung
of members of the
Bauhaus
black-white
2 pages 210 x 297 mm
4 May 1968

419

Mordanzeige
black on red paper
2 pages 210 x 297 mm
February 1968

Aufruf
black on red paper
2 pages 210 x 297 mm
April 1968
In this study I looked at the HfG from a perspec- social ideals on which his attitude toward design 421
tive that addressed the basic conditions that made was based to the self-government of the HfG as
its work possible. I tuned out the actual work of well – but that was precisely what did not work
the HfG almost completely, which is why the pic- at the HfG. He initially did this against the back-
ture I have painted should be assumed to be ground of Hans and Sophie Scholl’s resistance,
only one aspect of the HfG’s history. then as a countermove in opposition to the per-
For the HfG to be appreciated in its entirety, sonality of Max Bill, and at the same time as a re-
it must be examined first and foremost as a de- turn to the idealistic aims of the founding phase.
sign institution — but that is not the subject of my
study. Also, an analysis from a sociological stand- Thus this study may also be read as a long an-
point and from the point of view of the history of swer to the question why the HfG no longer exists
mentality would be very instructive. My study is today. However, the question Hellmut Becker
meant to serve as background information for posed back in 1953 remains unanswered: Who
such inquiries. will finance this cultural freedom?
I reached the conclusion that in the final analy-
sis the HfG failed because of false reasoning. As
the attempt was made to translate this false rea-
soning into real terms and as on the other hand
attempts were made to prevent its implementa-
tion, there were errors in behavior. They were the
factors in the historical process that together con-
stituted the development of the HfG. These factors
on the one hand led to the intended effects, but
also produced unintended side effects. Human
factors were also involved, and these could not
be predicted in advance: character developments
of individual people, and the development of the
independent existence of institutions that in turn
were run by human individuals. On the one hand
the web of relation-ships between those involved
became tighter, while on the other hand their cir-
cle expanded. This meant that many more, and
more varied, cycles of actions and reactions were
set in mo-tion; there were arguments and counter-
arguments, expectations and expectations based
on expectations that were hard to assess or to
control in detail, and whose overall effect could
not be foreseen. Thus the process as a whole de-
veloped laws of its own, an energy of its own, and
took a direction that ended in an outcome very few
of those involved had wanted. What is more, this
outcome was not in keeping with the power of
those who wanted it, and contradicted the goals
of those who did not have the energy to reach it.
The false reasoning on which the HfG was
based was a utopia, and it does credit to its origi-
nators that they took it upon themselves to turn
this utopia into a reality: This was what the HfG
experiment was all about. What I, from analyzing
the HfG's history, describe as false reasoning, as
the cause of the HfG’s failure, is the fact that its
founders improperly combined ideas and stan-
dards from the realms of design and of social pol-
itics. For when it comes to the quality of design
work, participatory peer-based decisionmaking
and tolerance are not appropriate; Otl Aicher’s
demand that the HfG be limited to a dogmatic
design program was legitimate. It was equally
legitimate that Otl Aicher wanted to apply the
 Index of names
422 This index does not give the
names of those persons who
appear only in the list of referen-
ces or the bibliography.
Alvar Aalto 88
Hermann Josef Abs 88, 100,
107–108, 112, 114, 122, 160, 169,
181, 196–198, 427, 442, 449,
451–452
Konrad Adenauer 34, 39, 60,
123, 132, 302
Otl Aicher (i.e. Otto) 5–6, 10–
12, 16, 20–24, 26, 29–31, 33,
36–37, 40–43, 48–51, 54–55,
57–59, 64–65, 68–85, 87–96,
100, 102, 106–108, 110–114, 118,
121–122, 126–127, 130–131, 134,
141, 155–160, 162–163, 169, 171,
173–174, 182–185, 189, 192–
193, 196, 200–201, 204, 207,
209–210, 213–214, 216, 221, 224,
227, 230, 234, 238–239, 241,
245, 250, 252–276, 278–279,
304–316, 318, 321–337, 339–
342, 344, 349–350, 355–356,
363, 365, 381, 392, 421, 426,
430–431, 433–435, 439–453,
455–462
Inge Aicher-Scholl (see also s.v.
Inge Scholl) 7, 29, 31, 50, 70, 95,
100–101, 122–124, 126–128,
130–135, 145, 154–156, 158,
160–166, 168–169, 171, 173–183,
186–189, 196–198, 201–206,
208, 210, 213–214, 216–218, 221,
223–225, 227, 230–231, 234–
235, 237, 246, 250–251, 255–
256, 258, 264, 267, 272–273,
306, 309, 312, 315–316, 326,
328–329, 332, 335, 340, 342–
344, 347, 351, 359, 370, 427–
428, 432–433, 441, 443–459
Ingela Albers 130
Josef Albers 154–156, 159,
169, 209, 213
Günter von Alberti 212, 222,
249–250, 427, 451
Karlheinz Allgayer 261
Elke Amberg 7, 427, 434, 441
Alfred Andersch 56, 58, 429,
444
Josef Andre 34
Kurt Angstmann 35, 113, 115,
154, 307, 310–311, 323, 460
Bruce Archer 255
Johann Dietrich Auffermann
32, 101, 230–231, 251, 268
Rudolf Augstein 306
Michael P. Balla 78, 119, 449
Reyner Banham 234–235,
355, 429, 431, 434, 438, 441
Hermann von Baravalle 217,
224
Klaus Barbie 107
Otto Bartning 100, 105–106,
112, 122, 181, 198, 429–430
Theodor Bäuerle 34, 90, 97,
446–447
Herbert Bayer 159, 216
Hanns Becher 88
Werner Becher 48
Peter Beck 304
Reinhold Beckelmann 304
Carl Heinrich Becker 91, 443,
447
Hellmut Becker 31–33, 44, 73,
85, 88, 91–92, 96, 99–102, 105–
108, 110, 112–114, 118, 122, 130,
133–134, 155, 160, 162–163,
182–184, 192, 205, 207, 210,
216–217, 223–224, 226, 230–
232, 235, 251, 264, 267–268,
270–272, 289, 300, 311–317,
328, 332, 334, 336, 338, 340,
342, 344, 351–352, 381, 421,
426–427, 429, 434, 441–443,
445–454, 456–459
Ludwig van Beethoven 55
Felix Beheim 142
Peter Behrens 13
Berthold Beitz 7
Ernst Benda 35, 431
Max Bense 156, 159, 173, 175,
194, 198, 203, 453
Wolfgang Benz 52, 434–435,
443–444
Brigitte Bermann-Fischer 32,
70, 90, 95, 112, 134, 174, 232,
235, 446, 455
Gottfried Bermann-Fischer
70, 427
Prinz Lennart Bernadotte 86
Prinz Sigvard Bernadotte 136
Josef Bernhart 48
Harald Berns 255
Binia Bill 175
Jakob Bill 7, 427
Max Bill 5, 7, 11–12, 14–15, 21,
23–24, 27, 29–31, 33, 36–37, 43,
59, 63–65, 72, 75–96, 100, 102–
103, 106–107, 110–114, 117–128,
133–135, 140, 146, 154–170,
172–176, 178–189, 192–194,
198–213, 216–219, 225, 228–
229, 231, 234, 250, 264, 267,
269–270, 273, 279, 282, 286–
287, 308, 312–314, 316, 329,
332, 340, 342, 352, 421, 427,
429–441, 444–454, 457–459
Paul Binder 177–178, 452
Acton Bjørn 139
Misha Black 346–347
Werner Blaser 207
Ernst Bloch 337
Franz Blücher 113
Fred Boerner 72, 75
Rodolfo Bonetto 340
Gui Bonsiepe 18, 243, 276,
317, 332, 346, 363, 371, 387,
426, 431, 440–441, 454, 458–
462
Christian Borngräber 28, 434,
440–441, 451
Hans Bott 30, 75, 126, 445–
446, 450
Günther Boulanger 32, 159,
169–170, 227, 232, 246, 249–
250, 332, 342, 352, 355, 361,
363–367, 375, 378, 385, 457
Margret Bovari 44, 429, 447
John Boxer 7, 78, 427, 446
Karl Brachat 34–35, 197, 305,
448, 452, 457, 459
Dr. Bradler 7
Margrit Brandel 7, 31
Johann Brandenburg 181,
195–198
Willy Brandt 302
Erwin Braun 27, 434, 441
Leonid Brezhnev 302
Franz Bullrich 166, 179
Ulrich Burandt 187
Beth Burchard 50, 431
Fred Burckhardt 213
Lucius Burckhardt 236, 327,
433–434
Bernhard Bürdek 23, 431, 434,
440–441
Ralph A. Burns 132
Otto Burrmeister 32, 133–134,
232, 451, 453
Benjamin J. Buttenwieser 78,
447–448
James F. Byrnes 47
John F. Capell 93–94, 443
Giulio Castelli 238
Pier Giacomo Castiglioni 238
Fidel Castro 190
Hadley Centril 213, 220
Oswald Glean Chase 178
Dr. Christmann 174, 452
Nikita Khrushchev 66, 302
Winston Churchill 302
Lucius D. Clay 45, 52
Sabine Cofalla 7, 33, 427, 435
Hans Conrad 7, 9, 29, 33, 128,
154–165, 167–170, 172–173,
175–179, 181–187, 189, 192–
209, 211, 214, 216–219, 221–227,
229–230, 238, 255, 268, 271–
272, 274, 277–278
Peter Cornelius 311
Raffaele Crespi 238
Josine de Cressonniere 346
Helmut Cron 32, 88, 133–134,
169, 180, 232, 235, 271, 430,
452, 457
Jörg Crone 7, 441
Gerhard Curdes 7, 13, 29, 427,
435, 441, 455
Susanne Curdes 7, 29
Hans Curjel 92, 170
Rolf Dahlgrün 35
Ralf Dahrendorf 291, 296, 366,
429, 434, 457, 461
Thomas Dawo 184
Hermann Delugan 271
Kurt Deschler 88, 130
Cl. Dietel 298
Johannes Dinnebier 295
Walter Dirks 58, 95–96, 113,
428, 431, 447
Richard Döcker 110, 116, 129,
445, 448–449
Rudolf Doernach 25, 255, 266,
276, 279
Katja Dohrn 7, 427, 441
Klaus Dohrn 30, 32–33, 101,
233, 251, 268, 316, 334, 341–
342, 352, 362, 426, 447, 455,
457–459
Wolfgang Donndorf 32, 155,
159, 163, 168–170, 195, 212, 218,
222, 232, 246, 252, 274, 307–
308, 310, 312, 317, 332, 342,
345, 351–352, 361, 364, 366,
375, 384, 451–453, 455, 457–
462
Helmut Döscher 32, 232, 451
Alexander Dubçek 303
Jost Dülffer 7
Rudi Dutschke 373
Charles Eames 151, 166, 222–
223
Ray Eames 223
Elke Eckert 30, 441
Hans Eckstein 148, 348, 430–
431, 435, 440, 451, 453
Gerhard Eichhorn 205
Adolf Eichmann 190
Egon Eiermann 148, 296
Albert Einstein 88, 235
Dwight D. Eisenhower 122
Elizabeth II. 153
Ralph Waldo Emerson 119
Peter Emmer 304
Hans Magnus Enzensberger
20
Charlotte Erbe 7, 427
Walter Erbe 31, 101, 154, 171,
175, 196, 249, 312, 320, 339,
342, 355, 357–358, 362, 435,
451–452, 458
Ludwig Erhard 34–35, 103,
105, 174, 293, 296, 302, 394,
448, 450, 457
Michael Erlhoff 7, 29, 427,
435, 440–441, 451
Peter Erni 14, 435, 440
Jupp Ernst 116, 430–431, 436
Hans Frieder Eychmüller 7,
32, 100, 130, 134, 164, 234,
262–264, 312–313, 315, 329,
332, 338, 427, 457–458
Karl Eychmüller 48
Peter Fechter 191
Olivio Ferrari 185, 453
Eduard Fiedler 34
Hans Filbinger 35, 154, 357,
364, 371, 387, 461
Hans-J. Firgau 181
Florian Fischer 343
Hans Jörg Fischer 101
Klaus Fischer 101, 460–462
Kenneth Frampton 36, 441
Bernd-Gunter Franck 308
Klaus Franck 243
André François-Poncet 60
Franz Frank 32, 352, 459
Hans Frank 35
Hermann Frank 48
Karl Frank 34, 105, 113, 116–
117, 128–129, 178, 181, 311, 318,
323, 357, 449–450
Erich Franzen 203, 217
Enzo Frateili 238, 290
Gianfranco Frattini 238
Hans Frei 7, 33, 87, 426–427,
435, 441, 443, 445–446
Roland Freisler 42
Kurt Fried 49–50, 94
Elmar Frings 7
Anthony Froshaug 217, 224,
254–255, 265, 434
Günther Fuchs 147
Richard Buckminster Fuller
20, 218, 293
Roland Fürst 311–312, 317–
318, 334, 337–341, 343, 355,
360
Wilhelm Furtwängler 70–71
Erich Ganzenmüller 312, 323,
356–359, 460
Charles de Gaulle 190, 302
Gerhard Gehle 157
Hugo Geisert 35
Sigfried Giedion 63, 433, 445
Dominique Gilliard 179, 427
John Gimbel 53, 435, 443,
445
Alexander Girard 151
Robert Gleichauf 35, 366, 396
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
55, 388
Maurice Goldring 163–165,
185, 271, 451
Eugen Gomringer 29, 160,
164, 199, 433
Tomás Gonda 247, 434, 437
Alonzo Grace 62
Max Graf 7, 18, 156, 165, 427,
453
Alfred Grazioli 386, 462
HAP Grieshaber 68–69, 445
Will Grohmann 207, 431–433,
453
Walter Gropius 14, 30, 82, 84,
88, 93, 100, 112–114, 116, 121,
174–175, 208–210, 213, 231, 277,
312, 326, 344, 377, 379, 428–
429, 435, 437–438, 445–449,
452–454, 457–458
Günther Grzimek 7, 31, 33,
100, 112, 134, 234, 264, 312,
326, 329, 342, 352, 367, 386,
427, 437, 441, 457, 459, 461
Romano Guardini 48, 50, 70,
72–73, 88, 100, 112, 181, 429,
438, 443
Guido Guendisch 94
Che Guevara 303
Hans Gugelot 22, 24, 142, 156,
161–162, 169, 174, 192–193,
200, 213, 215, 218, 223–224,
227, 238–239, 241, 245–246,
252–255, 257–262, 267–268,
279, 283, 293–294, 304, 316,
328, 330–331, 335–336, 340,
348, 356, 426, 431, 439, 441,
451, 455, 459–460
Malke Gugelot 294
Franz Gurk 365
Karl Gussone 32, 233, 236,
249–250, 310, 332, 342, 348–
350, 352, 355, 454, 457, 459
Gustav VI. 139
Rolf Gutbrod 293
Max Guther 31, 33, 69, 72, 85,
101, 134, 163, 175, 208, 210, 234,
237, 256, 264–265, 267–269,
271, 273–274, 312–315, 332, 342,
352, 362, 452–457
Hermann Haan 205
Gottfried Haase 35
Heinrich von Hacht 391
Angela Hackelsberger 178
Theodor Haecker 40, 442
Siegfried Haenle 214
Ernst Hahn 7, 93, 166, 177, 427
Kurt Hahn 91
Wilhelm Hahn 35, 345, 364,
369, 381, 386, 393, 396, 434–
435, 460–462
Käthe Hamburger 20, 206
Hugo Häring 156, 451
Josef Harter 34
Fritz Hartnagel 58, 88, 130
Gustav Hassenpflug 88, 181,
429
Hilary Hatch-Conrad 7
Otto Haupt 198
Wolfgang Haußmann 318
George P. Hays 106, 448
Martin Heidegger 235
Joachim Heimbucher 7, 33,
36, 426, 428, 431, 441, 461–462
Gustav Heinemann 34, 66
Werner Heisenberg 85, 88
Willi von Helden 35
F. Helg 238
F. P. Hellin 88
Karl Max von Hellingrath 32,
88, 112, 134, 169, 208, 232, 235,
251
Fritz Helmstädter 35
Josef Hengartner 371–374,
461
Arno Hennig 122, 449
Jost Hermand 136, 436, 450
Eva Herrmann 7
Frank Hess 308
Theodor Heuss 30, 34, 39, 62,
73, 75, 77, 80, 117, 153, 155, 190,
226–227, 230, 429, 436, 445–
446, 449
Paul Hildinger 12, 20, 156, 189,
260, 266, 276, 309
Walther Hinsch 32, 105, 129,
169, 172, 174, 193, 198, 232, 342,
352, 448–452, 459
Karl Hipp 32, 353, 454, 459
Herbert Hirche 201, 236, 284
Stephan Hirzel 234
Hermann Höcherl 35
Mr. Hochstetter 446
Fred Hochstrasser 29, 157–
158, 174, 189, 427, 441
Kurt Hochstuhl 7
Herbert Hohenemser 58–59,
443–444
James E. Hoofnagle 157, 451
Bruno Horisberger 207
Max Horn 252, 268, 399, 401,
403, 459
Albrecht Hotz 4, 7
Edgar Hotz 32, 103, 112, 115,
232, 447–451, 454
Paul Egon Hübinger 181, 194,
232, 453–454
Bill Huff (i.e. William) 184, 312
Johannes Itten 20, 92, 156
Heiner Jacob 36, 436, 440–
441
Arne Jacobsen 143, 147
Fred Jaeger 7
Beryl Natalie Janssen 7, 427,
436
Karl Jaspers 57, 88
Walter Jens 332
Eugen Jochum 70–71, 88
Eckhard Jung 365
Ernst Jünger 90
Georg Friedrich Jünger 91
Alfred Jungraithmayr 252
Marcia Kahn 32, 100, 112, 134
Georg Kahn-Ackermann 180,
452
Joachim Kaiser 236
Gert Kalow 25, 240–241, 244,
247, 249, 251, 254–258, 265,
268–270, 276–277, 279, 311,
322, 324–325, 327, 431, 454–
456, 458
Wassily Kandinsky 433, 445
Herbert W. Kapitzki 293, 363,
365, 426, 431, 436, 461, 463
Marie Luise Kaschnitz 50
Erich Kästner 88
Edmund Kaufmann 34
Haya Kawa 241
Dieter Keller 85, 88
Petra Kellner 33, 436, 441
Thomas Kempf 7
John F. Kennedy 190, 302
Rudolf Kerscher 7, 427
Hanno Kesting 24, 217, 224,
230, 239–241, 277
Olaf Kiel 7
Kurt Georg Kiesinger 35, 302–
303, 356, 362, 369–370, 432,
460–461
Moselle Kimbler 109, 427
Max M. Kimental 122
Martin Luther King 303
Michael Klar 374
Beate Klarsfeld 303
Karl Klasen 32, 112, 134, 169,
231–232, 235
Paul Klee 145, 210
Wilhelm Kleinknecht 32, 232,
235, 451, 453, 455
Hans von Klier 290
Harm Klueting 6
Alexander Kluge 18, 314, 434–
435, 458–459
Richard Knobel 32, 233, 451,
455
Eva-Maria Koch 157, 163
Elke Koch-Weser 165, 179
Heinrich Köhler 34
Shinji Koike 346
Andreas König 7, 437, 441
Heinrich König 105, 430–431
Professor Kono 317
Hartwig Koppermann 363
Peter von Kornatzki 36, 391,
437, 441, 459
Norbert Korrek 36, 437, 440–
441, 443
Gisela Krammer 20
Martin Krampen 36, 327, 431,
437, 440–441, 446
Gert Krappe 101, 460
Walter Krause 34, 356
Karl-Heinz Krug 29, 450
Immo Krumrey 166, 173, 179,
181, 203–204, 206–207, 212,
286, 431–432, 452–453
Stanley Kubrick 303
Erich Kuby 114, 433, 449
Heinz Küppers 122, 232
Norbert Kurtz 384, 386, 462
Gregor Lang 48
Robert Lehr 34
Robert Leibrand 34
Hans Lenz 286
Georg Leowald 215, 217–218,
225–227, 229, 254, 290, 330,
430, 454
Eduard Leuze 35, 318
Herbert Lindinger 7, 23, 28–
29, 36, 212, 238, 243, 270, 276,
309, 369, 426, 431, 437, 440–
441, 443, 456–457, 459, 462
Irm Lindström 72, 74, 130, 446
Sven Anker Lindström 74, 88
Rolf Lobeck 386, 389, 461–
462
Raymond Loewy 27, 429
Heinrich Löffelhardt 289
Hans Lorenser 345, 363, 368,
391
Konrad Lorenz 204
Erhard M. Löwe 7, 32, 427,
441
Heinrich Lübke 190
Paul Lücke 35, 460
Herbert Maeser 276, 310
Reinhold Maier 34, 98, 104–
105, 124, 443
Tomás Maldonado 5, 11–12,
20, 22, 24, 36, 155, 162, 166–
167, 169–170, 172, 174, 176, 181,
189, 192–193, 200, 205, 209–
213, 215–216, 218–222, 224,
226, 229–230, 234, 238–241,
245–246, 250, 254–255, 259–
261, 265–266, 270, 276, 279,
313, 320, 322, 324–325, 328,
331, 336, 339–342, 344–349,
355, 360, 363, 426, 429, 431–
432, 437, 440–441, 451–456,
458–461
Rolf Mangold 166
Horst Dieter Marheineke 7
George Marshall 58
Bruce Martin 207, 217
Bruno Mathsson 138
Peter Matthes 328
Almir Mavignier 157
Joe McCarthy 108
Ellen McCloy 72, 121–122
John McCloy 42, 60, 62–63,
72–73, 75–76, 78, 82, 93, 97–98,
102, 104, 106, 108, 110–111, 116,
118–123, 132, 174, 213, 361, 438,
444, 452
Clara Menck 28, 207, 209, 431
Axel Menges 7
Felix Messerschmid 48
Bernd Meurer 15, 429, 437,
440–441
Vera Meyer-Waldeck 88
Peter Michels 33, 36, 428, 441
Alexander Mitscherlich 91,
203, 312, 316, 428, 438, 447
Ernst Moeckl 282, 286–287
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy 114
Abraham Moles 15, 36, 334,
431, 440–441
Alex Möller 34–35, 107, 109,
111, 131, 177, 180–181, 307, 450,
452
Piet Mondrian 145
Henry Moore 146
Henry Morgenthau Jr. 44
William Morris 13
Bertus Mulder 212
Cornelius Müller 169
Egbert-Hans Müller 384, 386,
458–459, 461–463
Gebhard Müller 34, 115, 155,
178
Gerd A. Müller 293, 299
Gerd H. Müller 117, 124, 126,
131, 133, 232, 449–451
Hermann Müller 35, 318
Rolf Müller 7, 29, 36, 427, 437,
441
Helmut Müller-Kühn 243
Clemens Münster 72
Carl Muth 40
J. Fr. Muth 88
Odd Nansen 70, 77, 83, 85, 88,
100, 112, 429, 445–446
Gloria Nauber-Gassmann
368, 370–371, 374
F. Neidenberger 88
Ralph Nicholson 62
Lutz Niethammer 46, 437, 442
Marcello Nizzoli 139, 145
Helene Nonné-Schmidt 20,
154–157, 162, 189, 209
Herbert Ohl 5, 7, 11, 20–21, 25, 423
29, 36, 205, 211, 215–217, 224,
238–241, 245, 255, 260, 262–
266, 276, 293, 310, 322, 328,
330, 336, 339, 358, 360, 362–
363, 365–366, 368–369, 374–
375, 378, 382–386, 389, 392–
393, 395–396, 426–427, 440–
441, 455–463
Benno Ohnesorg 303, 365
Andries van Onck 290
Hermann Oncken 62
Carl Orff 50
Mr. Oschatz 83
Dieter Östreich 214
Frei Otto 236, 293
Gudrun Otto 265–266, 276,
279, 305, 317, 327, 456–458
Verner Panton 294, 297, 299
Joe de Pas 238
Gregor Paulsson 65, 116, 199,
433, 445
Günther Baron von Pechmann
115–116, 206, 449
Herbert Pee 201, 340
Michael Penck 320–321
Mervyn Perrine 221, 240, 245,
253–256, 261, 265, 328, 331
Hermann Person 35
Karl Person 357
Walter Peterhans 154–156,
209, 451
Christian Petry 40, 148, 437,
441–442
Nikolaus Pevsner 65
Erich Pfeiffer-Belli 148, 431,
433
Eva Pfeil 140, 146, 453
Fritz Pfeil 32, 100, 133–134,
155–156, 158–159, 164, 189,
234, 264, 312, 329, 332
Theodor Pfizer 30–32, 72,
103–104, 107, 113, 121–122, 130,
134–135, 160, 168–171, 177–180,
194, 196, 205, 217, 220, 226–
227, 232, 235, 240, 254, 272,
275–276, 306–307, 309, 316,
322–323, 333–334, 337–338,
340, 342–343, 345, 349, 351–
352, 355–356, 359, 361–363,
366–367, 370, 375, 386, 395,
397, 432, 441, 443, 445, 448–
454, 456–463
Otto Pfleiderer 31–33, 112,
122, 134–135, 169–170, 223,
226, 231–232, 271, 315, 326,
340, 342, 352, 367, 385–386,
450, 454, 457–459
Albert Pflüger 154
Klaus Pfromm 257, 261, 263
Irmgard Philippi 166
Georg Picht 295, 429, 457
Giulio Pizzetti 221
Erich F. Podach 173
André de Poerck 346
Holger Poessnecker 33, 436,
441
Wolfgang Pohl 33, 437, 441
Professor Pollock 202
Ferdinand Alexander Porsche
20
Giancarlo Pozzo 238
Christoph Probst 42, 447
Harry Pross 7, 29, 36, 156,
277–278, 325, 327, 427, 438,
441, 451
Helga Pross 20, 170
 Index of names
424 Arthur Pulos 346
Fritz Querengässer 155, 162,
169
Marcela Quijano 7, 30, 37, 441
Peter Raacke 329
Zvonimir Radic 346–347
Thomas Rago 205
Dieter Rams 7, 29, 137, 283,
427
Friedrich Rau 31, 101, 117, 304,
342–345, 347–351, 354–356,
359–362, 385, 432, 457–462
Herbert Read 88, 100, 112, 174,
213, 436, 445
James Morgan Read 75, 78,
85, 94, 102, 174, 213, 445, 448
Ms. Rebel 7
Dieter Reich 304
Ernst Reichl 294
Edgar Reitz 18, 314, 324, 459
Professor Rembeck 249, 455
Simon Resch 348, 380, 383,
388
Hans Rettich 272–274, 312,
317, 456–459
Ernst Reuter 110
Hans Werner Richter 5, 33,
56–59, 68–69, 71–75, 77–82,
84–88, 93, 95–96, 113, 252,
426, 428, 435, 437–438, 444–
448, 451
Toni Richter 7, 29, 33, 427,
438, 441, 446
Richard Riemerschmid 14
Albert Riester 42, 76, 106–107,
433, 447–448
Thorwald Risler 7, 29, 31, 91,
101, 211, 216–218, 220, 222,
224–225, 229–231, 234–237,
239–247, 249–253, 255–258,
261–276, 304–305, 307–309,
312–317, 322–329, 332–339,
341–345, 348–349, 359, 361,
385, 426–427, 453–459, 462
Horst Rittel 25, 210, 213, 219,
226, 238–241, 244, 254–261,
265–266, 270–271, 273, 276–
277, 279, 308, 327–328, 339,
433, 441, 454, 456
Gerhard Ritter 50, 438
Warren Robbins 202, 221, 240
Brian Robertson 60
Nick Roericht (i.e. Hans) 18,
33, 36, 218, 346, 438, 440–441
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
156–157
Hugo Roller 249
Jules Romain 88
Eleonor Roosevelt 88
Franklin D. Roosevelt 44
Anneliese Rosenberg 7
Hannes Rosenberg 7, 51, 68,
70–71, 74–76, 79, 81, 84, 87–88,
90, 95, 103, 118, 174–175, 427
Johanna Rösner 112, 208, 369,
454–455, 457–462
Alfred Roth 161, 198, 433
Arthur Roth 160
Mr. Rothe 32, 232
Johannes Rother 7, 426
Ulrich Rothfuss 9
Bernhard Rübenach 130, 164,
170, 178, 180, 182, 186–187, 200,
204, 213, 221–222, 229, 243,
258, 320, 361, 371, 429
Werner Ruch 101, 362, 459–
460, 462
L. Rudolph 298
Mr. Rueß 162, 251
Sep Ruf 296
Hans Rupp 74
Wolfgang Ruppert 15, 28, 438,
440–441
John Ruskin 13
Joseph Rykwert 272
Eero Saarinen 65, 151
Mr. Sander 240, 256, 258
Pier Carlo Santini 430
Dieter Sattler 85
Walter Schaer 201, 207, 211–
212, 431–432, 438, 441, 453
Fritz Schäffer 34, 447
Ernst Scheidegger 88, 112,
173, 182, 195, 203, 450
Gotthilf Schenkel 34, 97, 99,
103, 105, 112–113, 115, 119, 124,
127, 130, 154, 178, 197, 447–450
Otto Schild 156, 257, 260
Friedrich von Schiller 14
Karl Schiller 35, 290
Josef Schlecker 12, 20, 155–
156, 189, 276, 329
Detten Schleiermacher 193,
310
Günther Schlensag 100, 108,
157, 159, 162, 165, 169–171, 177,
182, 186, 189, 200–202, 210,
226, 235, 448, 451–454
Carl Schmid 50
Georg Schmid 176
Hannes Schmidt 151
Jakob Schmied 42
Andrea Schmitz 189
G. Schmitz 88
Karl Schmölder 32, 230–231,
233, 235, 251, 454
Kurt Schmücker 35
Franz Schnabel 50
Claude Schnaidt 7, 21, 23, 25,
29, 33, 36, 166, 178, 185, 201,
203, 243, 254, 271, 276, 308–
309, 323, 369, 372, 427, 438,
440–441, 457, 459–461
Franz Josef Schneider 95
Eberhard Schnelle 340
Herbert Schober 231
Elisabeth Scholl 58, 441
Geschwister Scholl (see also
s.v. Hans resp. Sophie Scholl) 15,
61, 97, 250–251, 431–432, 436,
444–448, 455, 461
Hans Scholl 10, 12, 40–43, 58–
59, 61, 69, 71–72, 78, 86, 108,
114, 119, 122–123, 128, 133, 154,
208, 251, 257, 270, 276–277,
330, 378–381, 421, 428, 436,
439, 441, 443, 447
Inge Scholl (see also s.v. Inge
Aicher-Scholl) 10, 12, 27, 30–31,
33, 37, 40, 42–43, 48–51, 57–59,
62–65, 68–99, 102–104, 106–
114, 116–123, 126, 209–210,
308, 428, 431–432, 441–449,
451, 453
Magdalene Scholl 441
Robert Scholl 40, 48, 428,
441–443
Sophie Scholl 10, 12, 40–43,
58–59, 61, 69, 71–72, 78, 86,
108, 114, 119, 122–123, 128, 133,
154, 208, 251, 257, 270,
276–277, 330, 378–381, 421,
428, 436, 439, 441, 443, 447
Werner Scholl 42, 441
Rolf Schörken 13, 438, 440,
442
Mathias Schreiber 28
Gerhard Schröder 34
Peter Schubert 185, 446
Barbara Schüler 7, 73, 427,
438, 441–447
Hans-Otto Schwarz 35, 357,
364
Curt Schweicher 143, 296
Günther Schweigkofler 7, 29,
101, 235, 239, 255, 268, 272–
274, 305, 312, 317, 321–322,
324, 328, 339, 342, 361, 427,
455–459
Hans Schwippert 198
Carla Scolari 289
Eva von Seckendorff 52, 87,
199, 438, 440–443, 445–447,
449, 452
Kurt Seeberger 175, 452
Mia Seeger 199, 234, 341
Hartmut Seeling 29, 36, 438,
441, 443, 445–446
Adalbert Seifriz 32, 232, 372,
451, 454
George A. Selke 119, 122–123,
131, 133, 445, 450
Gert Selle 28, 438, 440–441
Nathan Shapira 346
Ferdinand Sieger 90–91, 446
Ignazio Silone 100, 112
Wilhelm Simpfendörfer 34,
110, 181
Wolfgang Siol 199, 210, 213–
215, 220, 228–229, 234–236,
238, 240–241, 246, 258, 260,
264–265, 267, 276, 306–307,
309–310, 314, 317, 323, 325,
327–329, 332
Mr. Slater 221
Hans Jürgen Söhring 88, 95
Nikolaus Sombart 20, 57
Ettore Sottsass 149, 290
Lothar Späth 7, 29, 390, 427
Hans Eugen Specker 29, 439,
441–443
Hans-Günther Sperlich 205
Johannes Spörl 50
Margit Staber 15, 140, 143,
145–146, 151, 287, 293, 431–
433, 453
Joseph Stalin 38, 66, 123
Anton Stankowski 20
Christian Staub 25, 212, 217,
235, 241, 254–255, 257–258,
264–266, 276–277, 279
Eberhard Stauß 7, 427
Theodor Steinbüchel 48, 50
John P. Steiner 52, 61, 81, 85,
443, 445–446
Fedor Stepun 48
Gerhard Stoltenberg 286
Dominic R. Stone 439, 441
Shepard Stone 42, 62–63, 68–
70, 72, 74–75, 93, 95–96, 98,
108–109, 111–112, 118, 122–124,
127, 132, 157, 174, 213, 430, 434,
442, 445–447, 449
Margret Stone-Macdonald 7
Gerhard Storz 35, 178, 246,
249, 305, 312, 351, 457, 459
Franz-Josef Strauß 35, 190
Egidius Streiff 63, 433, 445
Ernst Stritzinger 333
Fritz Stuber 7, 427 Thornton Wilder 88 425
Kohei Sugiura 334, 355 Claus Wille 244
Christine Sztankovitz 157 Werner Wirsing 340
Alexandre Wollner 346
Roger Tallon 346 Carl Wurster 264
Florian W. Thienhaus 189 Toni Wyss-Verdier 95
Josef Alfons Thuma 32, 198,
227, 233, 342, 352, 454–455, Michitaka Yoshioka 346
459
Roderich Count Thun 32, 88, Marco Zanuso 238
100–101, 112, 130, 134, 208, 210, Walter Zeischegg 12, 32, 88,
217, 225, 230, 232, 235, 250– 100, 112, 133–134, 155–156,
251, 253, 266–268, 270–271, 159, 161, 167–169, 184, 189, 215,
453–456 224, 228, 234, 238–239, 241,
Manuela Tattenbach Thun 7, 245, 254–255, 257–258, 260–
427, 441 265, 270, 272, 275–276, 279,
Arne Torgersen 47, 69–70, 72, 304, 312–314, 328–331, 336,
74, 88, 430, 445 339, 368, 426, 438–439, 441,
Heinrich Troeger 174, 350 450–451, 455–456, 458–460
Harry S. Truman 44, 58, 60 Werner Zinkand 7, 33, 36,
426–427, 439, 441, 446
Cornelius Uittenhout 179, 189, Ellen Zinsser 60
260, 298, 431 George F. Zook 52
Fritz Ulrich 128 Alice Zuckmayer 69, 198
Basilio Uribe 346 Carl Zuckmayer 70–71, 77, 85,
88, 95, 100, 112, 174, 181, 430,
Gino Valle 346 445–446
Georges Vantongerloo 65, 172 Hans Zumsteg 31, 33, 101, 160,
Manuel Villazon Vasquez 346 164, 337, 339, 342, 352, 359,
Hermann Veit 34, 128–129, 375, 382–383, 386, 458–459,
350, 448–450 461–462
Henry van de Velde 14, 65, 88,
92, 100, 112, 116, 433, 445
Herbert Vesely 222
Maria Viera 161
Johann Peter Vogel 267, 272–
273, 456–457
Clemens Vollnhals 46, 429,
439, 442
C. W. Voltz (i.e. Carl Wilhelm)
133
Friedrich Vordemberge-
Gildewart 24, 65, 162, 172,
174, 183, 189, 192, 200, 213, 216,
224, 227, 241, 244, 255, 257–
258, 260–261, 265, 276, 278–
279, 438, 451, 454–455
Wilhelm Vossenkuhl 29, 427
Karl Vossler 50
Arno Votteler 301
Christiane Wachsmann 7, 30,
37, 197, 427, 439–441, 443–445
Konrad Wachsmann 172, 193,
197, 205, 209, 215, 217, 271
Peter Wackernagel 32, 74, 76,
100, 112, 134
Wilhelm Wagenfeld 116, 155
Matthew Wallis 274
Elisabeth Walser 49
Martin Walser 343
Elisabeth Walther 20, 195,
203
Walter Weißwange 32, 194,
232, 451, 453
Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker
100, 112, 181
Ernst Baron von Weizsäcker
44, 91
Klaus Werner 340
Rainer Wick 7, 29, 439
Franz Wiedemeier 34, 94, 111,
131, 175, 345, 394
Herbert Wiegandt 49, 58, 74,
130, 428, 433, 443, 447
Norbert Wiener 172–173
Hermann Wild 34, 49, 104,
106, 115
 Abbreviations List of references

Letters to the author Interviews

426 The essential parts of this manuscript AB Abteilungsbeauftragter AfS Archiv für Sozialgeschichte Unpublished sources Hermann Josef Abs 29 Jan. 1993, 21 April 1993 Inge Aicher-Scholl 7 April 1992 + 12 Aug. 1993 427
were completed in July 1996, and AL Abteilungsleiter APZ Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte AEG company’s archive 10 May 1996 Max Bill 16 Aug. 1993
individual passages were revised up E2 Entwicklungsgruppe 2 des Instituts für Produkt- BE Bildung und Erziehung Inge Aicher-Scholl 27 Feb. 1992, 20 July 1993, 16 Aug. 1993 John Boxer 21 Jan. 1997
to July 2001. While recent publica- gestaltung (Produkt Design; head: Hans Gugelot) DA Deutschland-Archiv Günter von Alberti 3 June 1996 Susanne and Gerhard Curdes 9 Jan. 1993
tions were added to the bibliography E3 Entwicklungsgruppe 5 des Instituts für Produkt- DR Design Report Elke Amberg 30 July 1996 Michael Erlhoff 20 April 1996
up to 1 September 2000, it was not gestaltung (Produkt Design; head: Walter Zeischegg) FZ Form + Zweck Hellmut Becker 8 Dec. 1993 Ernst Hahn 25 Nov. 1996
possible to use these, except in indi- E5 Entwicklungsgruppe 5 des Instituts für Produkt- HQ High Quality Volker Berghahn 6 April 1997 Rolf Müller 22 May 1996
vidual cases, to update the text. gestaltung (Visual Communication; head: Otl Aicher) ICHS International Congress of the History of Sciences Gottfried Bermann-Fischer 5 Feb. 1993 Herbert Ohl 30 Oct. 1996
Where several essays from a E5–A Entwicklungsgruppe 5 des Instituts für Produkt- JDH Journal of Design history Max Bill 14 June 1993 Harry Pross 23 Nov. 1995
collection were used, these are not gestaltung (Visual Communication; head: Otl Aicher) KZSS Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie Jakob Bill 8 May 1995 Dieter Rams 15 Aug. 1995
listed individually here, but only the E6 Entwicklungsgruppe 6 des Instituts für Produkt- LAA L‘architecture d‘aujourd‘ hui Angela Thomas Bill 30 Nov. 1994 Toni Richter 31 July 1996
title of the collection. Whenever quo- gestaltung (Visual Communication; PM Die Politische Meinung Volker Brown 6 April 1997 Thorwald Risler 10 Jan. 1995 + 1 June 1996
tations from these essays were used, heads: Tomás Maldonado; Gui Bonsiepe) TAJB Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte Sabine Cofalla 20 Aug. 1996, 5 Sept. 1996 Anneliese and Hannes Rosenberg 1 Aug. 1996
the exact reference follows in the E6–B Entwicklungsgruppe 6 des Instituts für Produkt- WZ Werk und Zeit Gerhard Curdes 19 Jan. 1994, 9 Jan. 2000 Claude Schnaidt 17 April 1993
respective footnotes. gestaltung (Visual Communication; head: Gui Bonsiepe) Dartmouth College Library 6 July 1998 Günther Schweigkofler 24 April 1993 + 1 June 1996
E7–K Entwicklungsgruppe 7 (Visual Communication; FS Festschrift Deutsche Bundesbank 6 Dec. 1994 Lothar Späth 23 Jan. 1996
head: Herbert W. Kapitzki) n. a. no author DGB-Archiv im Archiv der sozialen Demokratie Eberhard Stauß 9 May 1997
E-L Entwicklungsgruppe Lindinger n. d. no date der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung 18 July 1996 Wilhelm Vossenkuhl 28 Sept. 1995
(Produkt Design; head: Herbert Lindinger) n. p. no place DGB, Landesverband Baden-Württemberg 25 July 1996 Werner Zinkand 1 Aug. 1996
E-Z Entwicklungsgrppe Zeischegg Hartmut Dieterich 13 Feb. 1996
(Produkt Design; head: Walter Zeischegg) BA Bundesarchiv, Koblenz Katja Dohrn 3 May 1996
FoW Forschungsstelle für optische Wahrnehmung resp. BAZ Bundesarchiv Berlin, branch Zehlendorf Ursula Dreher 1 March 1996, 7 March 1996
Forschungsstelle für Wahrnehmung und Design BHA Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin Charlotte Erbe 22 July 1996
an der Hochschule für Gestaltung FTS Fritz-Thyssen-Stiftung Michael Erlhoff 10 April 1996, 7 June 1996
(head: Mervyn William Perrine) HfG HfG-Archiv, Ulm Hans Frieder Eychmüller 12 July 1996 Works of the HfG Archive
GdF Gesellschaft der Freunde der Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung e. V. HStA Hauptstaatsarchiv, Stuttgart Hans Frei 4 April 1993, 16 Nov. 1993
GSS Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung HWR Stiftung Hans Werner Richter Dominique Gilliard 16 April 1999
GzF Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Hochschule für Gestaltung e. V. im Archiv der Akademie der Künste, Berlin Max Graf 17 April 1999 Diplomarbeiten Hochschule für Gestaltung
HfG Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm PAB Privatarchiv Hellmut Becker Günther Grzimek 3 April 1996 Ulm 1953 –1968, Ulm 1992.
IfP Institut für Produktgestaltung der Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung PABW Parlamentsarchiv Christian Guther 27 March 1996, 17 July 1996
IIB–O Institut für industrialisiertes Bauen des Landtags von Baden-Württemberg, Stuttgart Achim Heimbucher 21 Jan. 1993 Christiane Wachsmann:
(Industrialized Building; head: Herbert Ohl) PAD Privatarchiv Klaus Dohrn Fred Hochstrasser 16 July 1996 Auswertung der Personalakten des HfG-Archivs.
IPD Institut für Produktentwicklung und Design e. V. PAF Privatarchiv Hans Frei Beryl Natalie Janssen 1 July 1996 Dozenten und Studenten, Ulm 1993.
RK Rektoratskollegium PAH Privatarchiv Joachim Heimbucher Rudolf Kerscher 7 Aug. 1996
PAR Privatarchiv Thorwald Risler Landesgewerbeamt Baden-Württemberg, 9 July 1996, 10 July 1996
BHE Bund der Heimatvertriebenen und Entrechteten PARi Privatarchiv Hans Werner Richter Haus der Wirtschaft
CDU Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands PARo Privatarchiv Johannes Rother Landeszentralbank Baden-Württemberg 30 Nov. 1994, 19 Jan. 1996
CSU Christlich Soziale Union Deutschlands PASF Pressearchiv des Südwestrundfunks, Baden-Baden Landeszentralbank Hamburg 1 July 1996
DGB Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund PASW Pressearchiv der Südwest-Presse, Ulm Moselle Kimbler 19 June 1998
DM Deutsche Mark PAZ Privatarchiv Werner Zinkand Erhard M. Löwe 5 June 1996. 13 June 1996
DP Deutsche Partei StU Stadtarchiv, Ulm Christopher Oestereich 2 July 1997, 11 Sept. 1997
DVP Demokratische Volkspartei THD Archiv der Technischen Hochschule, Darmstadt Herbert Ohl 30 Oct. 1996
FDP Freie Demokratische Partei THM Archiv der Technischen Hochschule München, Annemarie Pfeiffer 26 March 1996
FWU Freie Wählergemeinschaft Ulm Weihenstephan Harry Pross 31 Jan. 1995, 27 Oct. 1995
GB Gesamtdeutscher Block City of Recklinghausen, archive 23 July 1996
Gestapo Geheime Staats-Polizei Rheinische Hypothekenbank 29 May 1996
HICOG High Commission of Germany Thorwald Risler 30 Jan. 1996
KPD Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands Dirk Scheper 22 Feb. 1995
NPD Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands Hilde Schmitt-Schlaaff 18 Jan. 1995, 27 Jan. 1996, 26 March 1996
NSDAP Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter-Partei Claude Schnaidt 29 Dec. 1992, 9 Dec. 1993, 5 Jan. 1994 ,
OMGUS Office of Military Government, United States 24 May 1995, 19 Jan. 1996, 1 Feb. 1996
SPD Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands Barbara Schüler 16 Feb. 1996
Günther Schweigkofler 1 June 1996
Lothar Späth 3 Jan. 1995
Margaret Stone Macdonald 22 June 1998, 23 June 1998, 2 July 1998 ,
30 Nov. 1998
Fritz Stuber 12 April 1999, 24 April 1999, 16 May 1999 ,
2 June 1999 ,
Manuela Tattenbach Thun 8 March 1996
Lene Thun 18 Feb. 1996
Georg Thun-Hohenstein 27 March 1996, 16 April 1996
City of Überlingen am Bodensee, 8 Aug. 1996
City of Ulm, archive 4 Nov. 1994, 23 Jan. 1995, 27 April 1995
24 July 1995, 21 Nov. 1995 ,
Ulmer Volkshochschule 5 July 1993
Beate Voltz 2 Feb. 2001
Christiane Wachsmann 5 Oct. 1993
Wirtschaftsvereinigung Stahl 10 Dec. 1992
Herbert Wolf 5 June 1996
Carlos Zumsteg 11 June 1996
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 References
440 1 A basic orientation about work and
life at the HfG is provided by Herbert
Lindinger (ed.), Hochschule für Ge-
staltung Ulm. Die Moral der Gegen-
stände, Berlin 1987, 21991, and Nick
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synchronoptische Darstellung der
Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm, Ulm
1982. It is from these publications
that most works about the HfG draw
their figures and data. – On the
sources of the illustrations in this
book: All photos printed here come
from my archive, except for those
where the archive is indicated in the
list of illustrations. This list also in-
cludes, whenever possible, the cata-
log number of the respective archive.
– Every attempt was made to locate
all those holding rights to the photos
printed here. I should like to ask any-
one who was nevertheless not ac-
knowledged to contact me at the fol-
lowing e-mail address: info@wort-
bild.de. – A note regarding these
annotations: At the end of each refer-
ence I have listed the abbreviation of
the archive in which the document is
kept. Cf. the list of abbreviations.
2 HfG insider jargon referred to
women and men registered at the
school as “Studierende“. I did not
use this awkward term, preferring the
word “student“, whose grammatical
gender automatically includes both
women and men.
3 Wolfgang Ruppert: “Ulm ist tot. Es
lebe Ulm! Rückblick auf die Hoch-
schule für Gestaltung“, in: Kursbuch
106, December 1991, 119–138, here:
120.
4 Rolf Schörken, Jugend 1945.
Politisches Denken und Lebens-
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5 Cf. Gert Selle, Design-Geschichte
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Entwurf und Erfahrung, Cologne
1987, 21990.
6 Walter Grasskamp: “Das geschei-
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78.
7 On the Werkbund: John Campbell,
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Princeton 1978, Munich 1989.
8 Peter Erni: Die gute Form. Eine
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9 Of the extensive literature on the
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Weimar, Dessau, Berlin und die
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10 Cf. Peter Erni (see note 8), and
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Ort ihres Entstehens“, in: ibid. (ed.),
„Fangen wir an, hier in Ulm“. Hoch-
schule für Gestaltung Ulm – die
frühen Jahre (= HfG-Archiv Ulm
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28–45.
11 Peter Erni (see note 8) 11.
12 Peter Erni (see note 8) 5f.
13 On “Gelsenkirchen baroque“ cf.
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14 Peter Erni (see note 8) 109.
15 Max Bill’s remarks in: Internatio-
nales Design Zentrum Berlin (IDZ)
(ed.), “… daß diese ganze Geschich-
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16 In: Schweizerischer Werkbund
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zeichnung „Die gute Form“ an der
Mustermesse Basel, Winterthur
1957.
17 Cf. Wolfgang Ruppert (see note 3)
120.
18 Kathryn Hiesinger, George H.
Marcus (eds.), Design since 1945,
New York 1983, xvi.
19 For instance, Gert Selle (see note
5) 266; ibid.: „Das Produktdesign der
50er Jahre: Rückgriff in die Entwurfs-
geschichte, vollendete Modernisie-
rung des Alltagsinventars oder Vor-
bote der Postmoderne?“, in: Axel
Schildt, Arnold Sywottek (eds.), Mo-
dernisierung im Wiederaufbau. Die
westdeutsche Gesellschaft der 50er
Jahre, Bonn 1993, 612–624, here:
618.
20 Bernd Meurer: “Modernity and
the Ulm School“, in: Jocelyn de Nob-
let (ed.), Industrial Design. Reflec-
tion of a Century, Paris 1993, 226–
235, here: 229.
21 Margit Weinberg-Staber (ed.),
Design – Formgebung für Jeder-
mann. Typen und Prototypen, Zürich
1983, 155.
22 Wolfgang Ruppert (see note 3)
122.
23 Abraham Moles: „Was für Verbin-
dungen hatten die Mitglieder der
Hochschule für Gestaltung mit ihrer
Institution? Welche Rolle hat sie in
ihrem Leben gespielt?“, in: Martin
Krampen, Horst Kächele (eds.), Um-
welt, Gestaltung und Persönlichkeit.
Reflexionen 30 Jahre nach Grün-
dung der Ulmer Hochschule für Ge-
staltung, Hildesheim 1986, 34–41,
here: 40 f.
24 Wolfgang Ruppert (see note 3)
122.
25 Christiane Wachsmann: Letter to
the author. 5 Oct. 1993.
26 Cf. René Spitz, Die politische Ge-
schichte der Hochschule für Gestal-
tung Ulm (1953–1968). Ein Beispiel
für Bildungs- und Kulturpolitik in der
Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Diss.
Phil. Köln 1997, 10–15 f. – Source of
the statistics: Christiane Wachsmann,
Auswertung der Personalakten des
HfG-Archivs, unpublished typescripts
1993.
27 Herbert Ohl: “Das Bewusstsein,
das Ulm geschaffen hat“, in: Archi-
these 15/1975, 19–25, here: 20.
28 Wolfgang Ruppert (see note 3)
120.
29 The term “Ulm model“ as used by
Otl Aicher: “Die Hochschule für Ge-
staltung. Neun Stufen ihrer Entwick-
lung“, in: Archithese 15/ 1975, 12–
18, here: 14; Herbert Lindinger in:
ibid. (ed.) (see note 1) 11; Gui Bon-
siepe ibid. 266–268; Wolfgang Rup-
pert (see note 3) 127; Norbert Kor-
rek, Die Hochschule für Gestaltung
Ulm: Dokumentation und Wertung
der institutionellen und päda-
gogischen Entwicklung der Hoch-
schule für Gestaltung Ulm unter be-
sonderer Betrachtung der zeitbezo-
genen politischen und wirtschaftli-
chen Rahmenbedingungen in der
Bundesrepublik Deutschland.
(= Diss. Ing. 1986) Weimar 1987, 11.
– The term “Ulmer concept“ as used
by Otl Aicher: “Das Ulmer Konzept“,
in: Bauen und Wohnen 12/1964, xii
4; Tomás Maldonado in his remarks
in IDZ-Protokolle (see note 15) 34 f.
30 Wolfgang Ruppert (see note 3)
127.
31 Otl Aicher in Archithese (see note
30) 14.
32 Christiane Wachsmann: Letter to
the author. 5 Oct. 1993.
33 Tomás Maldonado in his remarks
in IDZ-Protokolle (see note 15) 34.
34 Tomás Maldonado: “Ulm revisit-
ed“, in: Rassegna 19/1984, trans-
lated from the Italian by Frank Spada-
ro, no page references at end of jour-
nal.
35 Wolfgang Ruppert (see note 3)
128.
36 Wolfgang Ruppert (see note 3)
131.
37 Wolfgang Ruppert (see note 3)
128.
38 Herbert Ohl (see note 27) 22.
39 Claude Schnaidt: “Ulm 1955–
1975“, in: Archithese 15/ 1975, 5–11,
here: 8.
40 Otl Aicher: in Archithese (see
note 30) 12–18.
41 Norbert Korrek (see note 30) 28
is based on this, but he only counts
7 stages; Herbert Lindinger: “Her-
ausgebergespräch: Konflikte und
Widersprüche“, in: ibid. (ed.) (see
note 1) 48–60, reduces the phases
to 6 instead of 8, but feels the curric-
ular development had a comparable
structure; Michael Erlhoff: “Das Bun-
des-Bauhaus“, in: Westermanns Mo-
natshefte 7/ 1985, 22–30, counts
5 phases; reduced even more to
3 stages, while Martin Krampen
offers a similar interpretation: “Der
Anteil des wissenschaftlichen Unter-
richts an der Schulwerdung der
Hochschule für Gestaltung“, in: ibid.,
Horst Kächele (ed.) (see note 23) 7–
31, here: 25 (revised version of his
article in Rassegna 19/1984).
42 Martin Krampen (see note 23) 8.
43 Kathryn B. Hiesinger (see note
18) XI. – On the significance of the
HfG within the international evolu-
tion of design: Wolfgang Ruppert
(see note 3); Gert Selle (see note 5);
Hans Eckstein, Formgebung des
Nützlichen. Marginalien zur Ge-
schichte und Theorie des Design,
Düsseldorf 1985;. Heinz Fuchs,
François Burckhardt (eds.), Produkt
Form Geschichte, Stuttgart 1985;
unconventional: Christian Borngrä-
ber: “Nierentisch und Schrippendale.
Hinweise auf Architektur und
Design“, in: Dieter Bänsch (ed.), Die
fünfziger Jahre. Beiträge zu Politik
und Kultur, Tübingen 1985, 223–
258; ibid.: Stil novo. Design in den
50er Jahren. Phantasie und Phan-
tastik, Frankfurt 1979.
44 Bernhard E. Bürdek, Design: Ge-
schichte, Theorie und Praxis der Pro-
duktgestaltung. Cologne 1991, 39.
45 Cf. Wolfgang Ruppert (see note
3) 121, François Burkhardt (see note
43) 86.
46 Bernhard Bürdek (see note 44) 46.
47 Cf. René Spitz (see note 26)
408 f.
48 Hans Eckstein (see note 43) 165.
49 Wolfgang Ruppert (see note 3)
121.
50 Herbert Lindinger: “Herausgeber-
gespräch: Die Suche nach den Grün-
den und Systemen“, in: ibid. (ed.)
(see note 1) 82–86, here: 83 ff.
51 Bernhard Bürdek (see note 44)46.
52 Wolfgang Ruppert (see note 3)
120.
53 Gert Selle (see note 5) 271.
54 Heiner Jacob: “HfG Ulm: A per-
sonal view of an experiment in
democracy and design education“,
in: JDH 1/ 1988, 221–248, here: 227.
55 Peter Hahn, Lloyd C. Engelbrecht
(eds.), 50 Jahre New Bauhaus. Bau-
haus-Nachfolge in Chicago, Berlin
1987. On the influence of the New
Bauhaus on pedagogy at the HfG cf.
Eva von Seckendorff: “HfG: Außer
Bauhaus nichts gewesen? Das New
Bauhaus, Chicago, und die Hoch-
schule für Gestaltung, Ulm“, 87–91.
56 See also Christopher Frayling,
Claire Catterall (eds.), Design of the
Times: One Hundred Years of the
Royal College of Art, London 1996.
57 See also Otto Sudrow: “Skizzen
zur Geschichte der Designausbil-
dung. Außer Bauhaus und HfG nichts
gewesen?“, in: Werk und Zeit 3+4/
1984,
58 These data are based on a projec-
tion: In 1987 the Club Off Ulm, which
keeps a database of the addresses of
former HfG members, published
questionnaires received from all 240
persons who responded to the club’s
questions as to their address and
profession. Of these, 84 stated they
were teachers by profession (mostly
in higher education). Cf. the private
reprint available in the HfG Archive:
Club Off Ulm, Ulm 21987.
59 Bernhard Bürdek (see note 44)
47. Cf. also Michael Erlhoff (see note
41) 24.
60 François Burkhardt (see note 43)
78.
61 Bernhard E. Bürdek (see note 44),
Gui Bonsiepe in Herbert Lindinger
(see note 1).
62 Guido Lambeck has been the only
person so far to attempt to sketch
the influence of the HfG on a school
of design: “Kunsthandwerk und
‚Design‘. Anmerkungen zum Einfluß
der HfG Ulm auf die Entwicklung des
Fachbereichs industrial Design“, in:
Hartmut Frank (ed.), Nordlicht. 222
Jahre. Die Hamburger Hochschule
für bildende Künste am Lerchenfeld
und ihre Vorgeschichte, Hamburg
1989, 269–282.
63 Herbert Lindinger’s remarks in
IDZ-Protokolle (see note 15) 33.
64 Inge Aicher-Scholl: “Letter to
Erwin Braun“, in: Für Erwin Braun
zum 29. August 1981. n.p, n. d., 7–9,
here: 8.
65 François Burkhardt (see note 43)
84.
66 Christian Borngräber in Dieter
Bänsch (ed.) (see note 43) 252.
67 Michael Andritzky’s remarks in
IDZ-Protokolle (see note 15) 15.
68 Herbert Lindinger’s remarks in
IDZ-Protokolle (see note 15) 41.
69 Michael Schreiber’s remarks in
IDZ-Protokolle (see note 15) 38 ff.
70 Kathryn B. Hiesinger (see note 18)
x.
71 Wolfgang Ruppert (see note 3)
120.
72 Gert Selle in Axel Schildt, Arnold
Sywottek (eds.) (see note 19) 612 ff.
73 Elisabeth Noelle, Erich Peter Neu-
mann (eds.), Jahrbuch der öffentli-
chen Meinung 1947–1955, Allens-
bach 1956, 108–112; ibid. (eds.),
Jahrbuch der öffentlichen Meinung
1957, Allensbach 1957, 107–115;
ibid. (eds.), Jahrbuch der öffentli-
chen Meinung 1958–1964, Allens-
bach, Bonn 1965, 168–181; ibid.
(eds.), Jahrbuch der öffentlichen
Meinung 1965–1967, Allensbach,
Bonn 1967, 101–104.
74 Max Bill, Zum „Vermerk über mit
Herrn Bill zu klärende Fragen“,
10 Sept. 1957, BHA, HfG records,
folder 122; Inge Aicher-Scholl, Ver-
merk über mit Herrn Bill zu klärende
Fragen, 25 July 1957, BHA, HfG
records, folder 122. – Toni Richter in
her conversation with me specifically
referred to the memo regarding the
Stuttgart discussion of 12 July 1950.
Cf. also the article in the Deutsche
Studenten-Zeitung of 8 May 1957,
Hochschule entläßt ihren Gründer;
the value of this document is, how-
ever, dubious because its author was
obviously trying to create an apologia
for Max Bill and attacked the Aichers;
on the other hand, it also contains
much background information that is
correct and is mentioned nowhere
else.
75 Max Bill in conversation with the
author, 16 Aug. 1993. It is question-
able, however, where Max Bill obtai-
ned this information, for at the time
he himself no longer had direct
access to the administration of the
HfG and to that of the foundation
then in office. Only from these two
positions was it possible to judge
whether the files were complete.
76 Fred Hochstrasser in conversa-
tion with the author, 9 May 1997.
77 Hans Eugen Specker in conversa-
tion with the author, 20 May 1996.
78 Cf. City of Ulm, HfG Archive (ed.),
Jahresbericht 1989/90, Ulm 1990;
Jahresbericht 1991/92, Ulm 1993.
79 Cf. Elke Eckert, Bestandsverzeich-
nis Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm
im Bauhaus-Archiv Museum für
Gestaltung, typescript Berlin 1991.
80 Mr. Vollmer, Landeszentralbank
Baden-Württemberg: Letter to the
author. 30 Nov. 1994. Dr. Pohl,
Deutsche Bundesbank: Letter to the
au-thor. 6 Dec. 1994. Hilde Schmitt-
Schlaaff: Letter to the author. 18 Jan.
1995.
81 Dr. Wischnath, Eberhard-Karls-
Universität Tübingen: Letter to the
author. 16 July 1996.
82 Carlos H. Zumsteg: Letter to the
author. 11 June 1996.
83 Hellmut Becker: Letter to Theodor
Pfizer. 28 Dec. 1964. PAB
84 Lene Thun: Letter to the author.
18 Feb. 1996. Manuela Tattenbach
Thun: Letter to the author. 8 Mar.
1996. Georg Thun-Hohenstein: Let-
ters to the author. 27 Mar. 1996,
16 April 1996.
85 Katja Dohrn: Letter to the author.
3 May 1996.
86 Erhard M. Löwe: Letters to the
author. 5 June 1996. 13 June 1996.
87 DGB Archive in the Archiv der
sozialen Demokratie of the Friedrich-
Ebert-Stiftung: Letter to the author.
18 July 1996. DGB, Landesverband
Baden-Württemberg: Letter to the
author. 25 July 1996. City of Reck-
linghausen, city Archive: Letter to the
author. 23 July 1996.
88 Landesgewerbeamt Baden-
Württemberg, Haus der Wirtschaft:
Letters to the author. 9 July 1996, 10
July 1996.
89 Claude Schnaidt: “Ulm. (Dernier
épisode d‘une affaire de récidives.)“,
in: l‘architecture d‘aujourd‘hui 143/
1969, 61–66.
90 Claude Schnaidt: “Den Schreibern
unserer Geschichte gewidmet“, in:
Form + Zweck 5/1983, 24–29.
91 Joachim Heimbucher, Peter Mi-
chels, Bauhaus HfG IUP. Dokumen-
tation und Analyse von drei Bildung-
sinstitutionen im Bereich der Um-
weltgestaltung, unpublished thesis
Ulm 1971.
92 Wolfgang Pohl (ed.), Industrial
Design – ein neues Studienmodell
an der Hochschule für Bildende
Künste Hamburg, (= Hochschuldi-
daktische Materialien, vol. 29) Ham-
burg 1971.
93 Petra Kellner, Holger Poessnecker,
Produktgestaltung an der HfG Ulm.
Versuch einer Dokumentation und
Einschätzung, (= Designtheorie,
vol. 3) Hanau 1978.
94 Nick Roericht (ed.) (see note 1).
95 Hans Frei, Konkrete Architektur?
Über Max Bill als Architekt, (= Diss.
Phil. Zürich 1990) Baden, Geneva
1991; Norbert Korrek (see note 29);
Eva von Seckendorff, Die Hoch-
schule für Gestaltung in Ulm. Grün-
dung (1949–1953) und Ära Max Bill
(1953–1957), (= Diss. Phil. Hamburg
1986) Marburg 1989; Hartmut See-
ling, Geschichte der Hochschule für
Gestaltung Ulm 1953–1968. Ein Bei-
trag zur Entwicklung ihres Program-
mes und der Arbeiten im Bereich
der visuellen Kommunikation, Diss.
Phil. Cologne 1985.
96 Additional works by Norbert Kor-
rek on the HfG: “Versuch einer Bio-
graphie. Die Hochschule für Gestal-
tung in Ulm“, in: Form + Zweck 6/
1984, 39–45; reprinted in: Dagmar
Lüder (ed.), Das Schicksal der Dinge.
Beiträge zur Designgeschichte,
Dresden 1989, 295–308; Kontinuität
und Wandel. Zur Rezeption der
Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm. Lec-
ture to the Club Off Ulm, Ulm 1989.
97 Werner Zinkand, Max Bill und die
Ulmer Schule, (unpublished master’s
thesis) Munich 1985.
98 Herbert Lindinger (see note 1).
Besides the articles of Michael Erl-
hoff, his interview with Max Bill (65–
68), and the “Herausgeberge-
spräche“, this work also contains
articles by Reyner Banham: “Retro-
spektive“ (26 f.); Horst Rittel: “Das
Erbe der HfG?“ (118 f.); Otl Aicher:
“Bauhaus und Ulm“ (124–129); Her-
bert Ohl: “Industrielles Bauen in Ulm“
(197–199); Claude Schnaidt: “Archi-
tektur und wissenschaftlich-technis-
che Revolution“ (214–217); Tomás
Maldonado: “Ulm im Rückblick“
(222–224) and Gui Bonsiepe: “Das
Ulmer Modell in der Peripherie“
(266–268).
99 Max Bill: “Vom Bauhaus bis Ulm“,
in: DU 6/1976, 12–21; Walter Schaer:
“Die Ulmer Schule im Grenzgebiet
des Zeitgeistes“, in: Hellmuth Gsöll-
pointner, Angela Hareiter, Laurids
Ortner (eds.), Design ist unsichtbar,
Vienna 1981, 209–216; Margit Wein-
berg-Staber (see note 21); Bernd
Meurer (see note 20); Bernhard E.
Bürdek (see note 44); Otl Aicher:
“Krise der Moderne“, in: ibid., Die
Welt als Entwurf, Berlin 1991, 15–26;
Bernd Meurer, Hartmut Vinçon, Indu-
strielle Ästhetik. Zur Geschichte und
Theorie der Gestaltung, (= Werk-
bund-Archiv, vol. 9) Gießen 1993.
100 Stanislaus von Moos: “À propos
Ulm“ (2–4); Claude Schnaidt: (see
note 40); Otl Aicher (see note 30);
Herbert Ohl (see note 28); Kenneth
Frampton: “Ulm: Ideologie eines
Lehrplanes“ (26–42).
101 Tomás Maldonado: “Ulm rivisita-
to“ (5); Marina Bistolfi: “La HfG di
Ulm: Speranze, sviluppo e crisi“ (6–
19); Martin Krampen: “Il contributo
dell‘insegnamento scientifico alla
HfG“ (20–24); Giovanni Anceschi,
Piero G. Tanca: “Ulm e l‘Italia“ (25–
34).
102 The essays of Martin Krampen
and Abraham Moles in: Martin
Krampen, Horst Kächele (eds.) (see
note 23); also: Abraham Moles: “Der
Funktionalismus des Bauhauses in
der Gesellschaft des Wirtschafts-
wunders. Die Ulmer Hochschule für
Gestaltung“ (85–89); Harry Pross:
“Umwelt, Gestaltung und Persönlich-
keit auf einen Begriff von Kommuni-
kation gebracht“ (46–52).
103 Heiner Jacob (see note 53);
Dominic R. Stone, The Ulmer Hoch-
schule für Gestaltung: Ideology and
Methodology, (unpublished master’s
thesis) London 1989.
104 IDZ-Protokolle (see note 15).
105 Peter von Kornatzki, Rolf Müller:
“Die Abteilung visuelle Kommunika-
tion der Hochschule für Gestaltung
Ulm. 1951 bis 1968“, in: High Quality
29/1994, 58–77.
106 Elke Amberg, Der eigene Weg
der Abteilung für Filmgestaltung an
der Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm,
(unpublished master’s thesis),
Munich 1989; sketchy and not very
careful: Daniela Sannwald, Labor der
Nachkriegsmoderne. Zur Theorie
und Praxis der Filmausbildung an
der Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm
1958–1968, Diss. Phil. Berlin 1995;
Beryll Natalie Janssen, Die Abteilung
visuelle Gestaltung/Kommunikation
an der Hochschule für Gestaltung in
Ulm, (unpublished master’s thesis),
Bochum 1996; Andreas König,
Günther Grzimek. Ein Landschaftsar-
chitekt der Nachkriegszeit. Berufliche
Entwicklung, Konzepte und Arbeiten,
(unpublished thesis), Munich/Wei-
henstephan 1996; Jörg Crone, Die
visuelle Kommunikation der Gesin-
nung: Zu den grafischen Arbeiten
von Otl Aicher und der Entwick-
lungsgruppe 5 für die Deutsche Luf-
thansa 1962, Diss. Phil. Freiburg im
Breisgau 1998: unfortunately the
selection of sources and bibliography 441
is extremely limited, as is the way the
author views Otl Aicher’s perspec-
tive; very helpful: Christopher Oeste-
reich, „Gute Form“ im Wiederaufbau.
Zur Geschichte der Produktgestal-
tung in Westdeutschland nach 1945,
(= Diss. Phil. Cologne 1999) Berlin
2000; exemplary: Barbara Schüler,
„Im Geiste der Gemordeten …“: Die
„Weiße Rose“ und ihre Wirkung in
der Nachkriegszeit, (= Politik- und
kommunikationswissenschaftliche
Veröffentlichungen der Görres-Ge-
sellschaft, vol. 19) Paderborn 2000;
Gerhard Curdes, Die Abteilung
Bauen an der HfG Ulm. Eine Refle-
xion zur Entwicklung, Lehre und Pro-
grammatik, Ulm 2001.
107 Christiane Wachsmann (ed.),
“Design ist gar nicht lehrbar …“
Hans Gugelot und seine Schüler.
Entwicklungen und Studienarbeiten
1954–1955, (= HfG-Archiv Ulm Do-
kumentation, vol. 1) Ulm 1990; Chri-
stiane Wachsmann (ed.), Objekt +
Objektiv = Objektivität? Fotografie an
der HfG Ulm 1953–1968, (= HfG-
Archiv Ulm Dokumentation, vol. 2)
Ulm 1991; Christiane Wachsmann
(ed.), Kartoffelchips im Wellflächen-
quadrat. Walter Zeischegg, Plastiker,
Designer, Lehrer an der HfG Ulm
1951–1968, (= HfG-Archiv Ulm Do-
kumentation, vol. 3) Ulm 1992. –
See also Andrea Scholtz, Hand und
Griff. Ausstellung Wien 1951, Walter
Zeischegg, Carl Auböck, Cologne
1995. – Christiane Wachsmann (ed.),
Bauhäusler in Ulm. Grundlehre an
der HfG 1953–1955, (= HfG-Archiv
Ulm Dokumentation, vol. 4) Ulm
1993; ibid., Brigitte Reinhardt (ed.)
(see note 10); „Die Augen sind hung
rig, aber oft schon vor dem Sehen
satt“. Otl Aicher zum 75. Geburtstag
(= HfG-Archiv Ulm Dokumentation,
vol. 6), Ulm 1997; Marcela Quijano
(ed.), HfG Ulm: Programm wird Bau.
Die Gebäude der Hochschule für
Gestaltung Ulm, Stuttgart 1998.
108 Robert Scholl: 13 April 1891–
25 Oct. 1973; Magdalene Scholl:
5 May 1881–31 Mar. 1958; Inge
Scholl: b. 11 Aug. 1917; Hans Scholl:
22 Sept. 1918–22 Feb. 1943; Elisa-
beth Scholl: b. 27 Feb. 1920; Sophie
Scholl: 9 May 1921–22 Feb. 1943;
Werner Scholl: b. 13 Nov. 1922,
missing since June 1944. For what
follows cf. also Inge Aicher-Scholl
(ed.), Sippenhaft. Nachrichten und
Botschaften der Familie in der Ge-
stapo-Haft nach der Hinrichtung von
Hans und Sophie Scholl, Frankfurt
am Main 1993.
109 Basic: Christian Petry, Studenten
aufs Schafott. Die Weiße Rose und
ihr Scheitern, Munich 1968. Incl.
final references to older literature:
Heinrich Siefken (ed.), Die Weiße
Rose. Student resistance to National
Socialism 1942/1943. Forschungs-
ergebnisse und Erfahrungsberichte,
Nottingham 1991; Christiane Moll:
“Die Weiße Rose“, in: Peter Stein-
bach, Johannes Tuchel (eds.), Wider-
stand gegen den Nationalsozialis-
mus, (= Schriftenreihe der Bundes-
zentrale für politische Bildung, vol.
323) Bonn 1994, 443–467.
110 Cf. the exemplary discussion of
this topic now: Barbara Schüler (see
note 106).
 References
442 111 Kurt Sontheimer: “Der studenti-
sche Widerstand gegen den Natio-
nalsozialismus“, in: Heinrich Siefken
(see note 109) 183–194, here: 183.
112 Cf. Arno Klönne: “Bündische
Jugend, Nationalsozialismus und
NS-Staat“, in: Jürgen Schmädecke,
Peter Steinbach (eds.), Der Wider-
stand gegen den Nationalsozialis-
mus. Die deutsche Gesellschaft und
der Widerstand gegen Hitler, Munich
1985, 182–189; Hildegard Vieregg:
“Die Weiße Rose und die Rebellion
der Jugend gegen das NS-Regime –
der studentische Widerstand als
Fanal“, in: Heinrich Siefken (see note
109) 77–115, especially 93–96;
Rudolf Lill (ed.), Hochverrat? Die
“Weiße Rose“ und ihr Umfeld, Con-
stance 1993, 182.
113 Hans Mommsen: “Der deutsche
Widerstand gegen Hitler und die
Wiederherstellung der Grundlagen
der Politik“, in: Jürgen Schmädecke,
Peter Steinbach (eds.) (see note
112), here: 212.
114 Christiane Moll (see note 110) 460.
115 Clemens Vollnhals (ed.), Entna-
zifizierung. Politische Säuberung
und Rehabilitierung in den vier Be-
satzungszonen, Munich 1991, 58.
116 Cf. Heinrich Siefken: “Die Weiße
Rose und Theodor Haecker. Wider-
stand im Glauben“, in: ibid. (see note
109) 117–146; Hans Maier: “Christ-
licher Widerstand im Dritten Reich“,
in: Die “Weiße Rose““ und das Erbe
des deutschen Widerstandes. Mün-
chener Gedächtnisvorlesungen,
Munich 1993, 116–131; Barbara
Schüler: (see note 106) 10–12.
117 Christiane Moll (see note 110)
464.
118 Christian Petry disagrees (see
note 109) 147 ff., but see Kurt Sont-
heimer, Die Adenauer-Ära. Grund-
legung der Bundesrepublik, Munich
1991, 192.
119 Hans Mommsen (see note 113)
213.
120 Inge Scholl, Die Weiße Rose,
Frankfurt am Main 1955, 21993, 99–
102.
121 Otl Aicher: 13 May 1922–
1 Sept. 1991.
122 Christian Petry (see note 109)
117 f.
123 Otl Aicher, Innenseiten des
Kriegs, Frankfurt am Main 1985, 153
ff. Cf. Hellmut Becker: Letter to Her-
mann Josef Abs. 23 Apr. 1952. BHA,
HfG records, folder 20.
124 Cf. Wolfgang Frühwald: “Anti-
gones Tat. Die ‚Weiße Rose‘ und der
Traum vom anderen Deutschland“,
in: Die „Weiße Rose“ und das Erbe
des deutschen Widerstandes, (see
note 116) 61–80; Christiane Toyka-
Seid: “Der Widerstand gegen Hitler
und die westdeutsche Gesellschaft:
Anmerkungen zur Rezeptionsges-
chichte des ‚anderen Deutschland‘ in
den frühen Nachkriegsjahren“, in:
Peter Steinbach, Johannes Tuchel
(eds.) (see note 109) 572–581.
125 Gotthard Jasper: “Schwierig-
keiten und Zumutungen des Wider-
standes in Deutschland“, in: Die
„Weiße Rose“ und das Erbe des
deutschen Widerstandes, (see note
116) 177–197, here: 195 f.
126 On the military connection, see
the detailed account by Klaus-Diet-
mar Henke, Die amerikanische Be-
setzung Deutschlands, (= Quellen
und Darstellungen zur Zeitgeschich-
te, vol. 27) Munich 1995, 789 ff.
127 Eva von Seckendorff (see note
96) 17.
128 Hubert Fink: “Der Ulmer Ge-
meinderat im Spannungsfeld zwi-
schen Repräsentation und Verwal-
tung“, in: Hans Eugen Specker (ed.),
Tradition und Wagnis. Ulm 1945–
1972, (= Forschungen zur Geschich-
te der Stadt Ulm, vol. 12) Ulm 1974,
137–163.
129 Klaus-Jörg Ruhl, Die Besatzer
und die Deutschen. Amerikanische
Zone 1945–1948, Düsseldorf 1980,
40.
130 Cf. the essays of Hans Eugen
Specker: “Grundlagen der wirtschaft-
lichen Entwicklung“, Gerd Albers‘:
“Planung und Aufbau“, and Walter
Buzengeiger’s: “Not überwinden,
nicht verwalten!“, in the collection
Tradition und Wagnis (see note 128)
edited by Hans Eugen Specker; also
Robert Scholl: “Bericht über den
Wiederaufbau in Ulm“, in: Ernst Joa-
chim Bauer (ed.), Zusammenbruch
und Wiedergeburt. Ulm and Neu-
Ulm 1945–1950. Eine Dokumenta-
tion in Wort und Bild, Ulm 1996, 3–
22.
131 Rolf Schörken (see note 4) 51.
132 See, for instance, David Schoen-
baum: “Deutschland als Gegenstand
der amerikanischen Nachkriegspla-
nung“, in: Ludolf Herbst (ed.), West-
deutschland 1945–1955. Unterwer-
fung, Kontrolle, Integration, (= spe-
cial issue of Schriftenreihe der Vier-
teljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte)
Munich 1986, 27–36; Hans-Werner
Fuchs, Klaus-Peter Pöschl: Reform
oder Restauration? Eine verglei-
chende Analyse der schulpolitischen
Konzepte und Maßnahmen der Be-
satzungsmächte 1945–1949,
Munich 1986, 22–39; Lutz Nietham-
mer, Die Mitläuferfabrik. Die Entna-
zifizierung am Beispiel Bayerns, Ber-
lin, Bonn 1968, 21982, 32–68; Petra
Bigman-Marquardt: “Amerikanische
Geheimdienstanalysen des National-
sozialistischen Deutschlands“, in:
TAJB 23/1994, 325–344.
133 Printed in: Beate Ruhm von
Oppen (ed.), Documents on Germa-
ny under occupation 1945–1954,
London, New York, Toronto 1955,
40–50.
134 Direktive des Generalstabs der
Streitkräfte der Vereinigten Staaten
an den Oberbefehlshaber der Besat-
zungstruppen der Vereinigten Staa-
ten hinsichtlich der Militärregierung
für Deutschland (Direktive JCS
1067), 26 April 1945. Reprinted in:
Beate Ruhm von Oppen (see note
133) 13–27. Directive JCS 1067 was
replaced by Directive JCS 1779,
which went into effect on 11 July
1947.
135 Maßnahmen zur Verhinderung
eines Dritten Weltkrieges durch
Deutschland, 4 Sept. 1944. Re-
printed in: Klaus-Jörg Ruhl (ed.),
Neubeginn und Restauration. Doku-
mente zur Vorgeschichte der Bun-
desrepublik Deutschland 1945–
1949, Munich 1982, 24–27.
136 Elmer Plischke: “Denazification
in Germany. A Policy Analysis“, in:
Robert Wolfe (ed.), Americans as
Proconsuls. United States Military
Government in Germany and Japan,
1944–1952, Carbondale, Edwards-
ville 1984, 198–225, here: 207.
137 Hans-Werner Fuchs, Klaus-Peter
Pöschl (see note 132) 38.
138 Official announcement about
the Potsdam Conference, 2 Aug.
1945. Excerpted in: Klaus-Jörg Ruhl
(see note 135) 112–123.
139 On denazification: Clemens
Vollnhals (ed.) (see note 115); Lutz
Niethammer (see note 132); Conrad
F. Latour, Thilo Vogelsang, Okkupa-
tion und Wiederaufbau. Die Tätigkeit
der Militärregierung in der amerika-
nischen Besatzungszone Deutsch-
lands 1945–1947, Stuttgart 1973;
Justus Fürstenau, Entnazifizierung.
Ein Kapitel deutscher Nachkriegs-
politik, Diss. Phil. Frankfurt am Main
1955. (= Politica, vol. 40) Neuwied
1969. – A critique of Lutz Nietham-
mer in: Klaus Dietmar Henke: “Die
Grenzen der politischen Säuberung
in Deutschland nach 1945“, in:
Ludolf Herbst (ed.) (see note 132),
127–133. – The communiqué of the
Yalta Conference (11 Feb. 1945) is
excerpted in Klaus-Jörg Ruhl (see
note 135) 49–51.
140 On the additional measures cf.
Elmer Plischke (see note 136) 211 ff.
141 Cf. Beate Ruhm von Oppen (see
note 133) 50–58 and 97–102.
142 Clemens Vollnhals (see note
115) 8.
143 Clemens Vollnhals (see note
115) 12. Cf. Elmar F. Ziemke: “Impro-
vising Stability and Change in Post-
war Germany“, in: Robert Wolfe (ed.)
(see note 136), 52–66, here: 62 f.
144 Gesetz Nr. 8 der Militärregie-
rung der amerikanischen Zone, 26
Sept. 1945“, in: Klaus-Jörg Ruhl (see
note 135) 275 f.
145 Elmar Ziemke (see note 143)63.
146 Clemens Vollnhals (see note
115) 12 f.
147 As quoted in Elmar Ziemke (see
note 143) 63.
148 Elmar Ziemke (see note 143) 63.
149 Gesetz zur Befreiung von Natio-
nalsozialismus und Militarismus,
5 Mar. 1946. Excerpts appear in:
Klaus-Jörg Ruhl (see note 135) 279–
284.
150 Clemens Vollnhals (see note
115) 17.
151 Clemens Vollnhals (see note 115)
20–22.
152 Clemens Vollnhals (see note
115) 23.
153 Clemens Vollnhals (see note
115) 23.
154 Clemens Vollnhals (see note
115) 55–64.
155 Karl-Ernst Bungenstab, Re-edu-
cation nach 1945. Die amerikani-
sche Besatzungspolitik in Deutsch-
land nach 1945, dargestellt an Bei-
spielen aus dem Bildungswesen in
der amerikanischen Zone. (= Diss.
Phil. Berlin) Düsseldorf 1970, 18.
156 The thesis that the democratiza-
tion policy produced restorative
effects as well, in: Diethelm Prowe:
“German democratization as conser-
vative restabilization: The impact of
American policy“, in: Jeffry M. Die-
fendorf, Axel Frohn, Hermann Josef
Rupieper: American Policy and the
Reconstruction of Western Germany
1945–1955, Washington, D.C., Cam-
bridge/ Mass. 1993, 307–329.
157 Hermann Josef Rupieper, Die
Wurzeln der westdeutschen Nach-
kriegsgesellschaft. Der amerikani-
sche Beitrag, Opladen 1993, 8.
158 Hermann Josef Rupieper (see
note 157) 8.
159 Cf. Henry J. Kellermann: “Reflec-
tions on German reorientation“, in:
Michael Ermarth (ed.), America and
the Shaping of German Society
1945–1955, Oxford 1993, 190–194,
here: 191–193. – Henry J. Keller-
mann was the alter ego of Shepard
Stone and his colleague at the State
Department in Washington: When
Shepard Stone was the director of
the HICOG public affairs department
in Germany, Henry J. Kellermann
headed the department by the same
name at the Bureau of German
Affairs. He summed up experiences
regarding his main concern, the
HICOG exchange program, in: Cultu-
ral relations as an instrument of for-
eign policy. The educational exchan-
ge program between the United
States and Germany, 1945–1954.
(= Department of State Publications,
vol. 8931) Washington, D.C. 1978.
160 Hermann Josef Rupieper (see
note 157) 10.
161 SWNCC 269/5, adopted on
16 May 1946. – Cf. Jutta-B. Lange-
Quassowski: “Amerikanische Westin-
tegrationspolitik, Re-education und
deutsche Schulpolitik“, in: Manfred
Heinemann (ed.), Umerziehung und
Wiederaufbau. Die Bildungspolitik
der Besatzungsmächte in Deutsch-
land und Österreich, (= Veröffentli-
chungen der historischen Kommis-
sion der deutschen Gesellschaft für
Erziehungswissenschaft, vol. 5)
Stuttgart 1981, 53–67, here: 56.
162 Hermann Josef Rupieper (see
note 157) 31 f.
163 Excerpts reprinted in Klaus-Jörg
Ruhl (see note 135) 448–453 and
Beate Ruhm von Oppen (see note
133) 152–160.
164 Henry P. Pilgert, The West Ger-
man Educational System, n. p. 1953,
9 f.
165 James F. Tent: “Education and
Religious Affairs Branch, OMGUS
und die Entwicklung amerikanischer
Bildungspolitik 1944 bis 1949“, in:
Manfred Heinemann (see note 161)
68–85, here: 74 ff.
166 Karl-Ernst Bungenstab (see note
155), 117–131.
167 Cf. James F. Tent, Mission on the
Rhine. Reeducation and Denazifica-
tion in American-Occupied Germa-
ny, Chicago, London 1982, 316.
168 James F. Tent (see note 167) 73.
169 Karl-Ernst Bungenstab (see note
155) 112.
170 On 11 Apr. 1948 Robert Scholl
lost in the final ballot of the first free
mayoral election since 1929 to Theo-
dor Pfizer, who then remained mayor
until 1972, i.e., the entire period the
HfG was in existence. This continuity
was very beneficial for the HfG, for it
meant constant support due to the
far-reaching politico-cultural com-
mitment of Theodor Pfizer.
171 Hans Frei (see note 96) 17.
172 Information Bulletin, April 1950.
173 For details regarding the follow-
ing see Barbara Schüler (see note
106) 17–25. – Romano Guardini (17
Feb. 1885–1 Oct. 1968), Catholic
theologian, spiritual leader of the
Catholic youth movement in the Wei-
mar Republic, head of the then most
important Catholic seat of learning in
Germany, Burg Rothenfels, spon-
sored by the Quickborner Bund;
Prussian minister of education and
the arts Carl Heinrich Becker ap-
pointed him professor of Catholic
philosophy of religion and world view
at the University of Berlin, the then
stronghold of Protestant scholarship;
after 1939, exiled in Allgäu; in 1945,
professor in Munich, where he was
well-known for his Sunday sermons
at the Universitätskirche St. Ludwig;
he was awarded many prizes includ-
ing the Peace Prize of the German
Book Trade, the Order Pour le Mérite
for Arts and Sciences, and the Prae-
mium Erasmianum. Cf. Burg Rothen-
fels 1955. Romano Guardini zum 70.
Geburtstag. n. p., n. d. (Rothenfels
1955).
174 .Sabine Hanslovsky: “‚Fangen wir
an, hier in Ulm‘. Die Ulmer Volk-
shochschule und die Entstehung der
Hochschule für Gestaltung“, in:
Christiane Wachsmann (ed.) (see
note 10), 12–27, here: 26 fn. 2.
175 Karl-Ernst Bungenstab (see note
155) 131.
176 Cf., for instance, the 1946 cata-
log of the Ulm Adult Education Cen-
ter.
177 Hermann Glaser, Die Kulturge-
schichte der Bundesrepublik
Deutschland: Vol. 1: Zwischen Kapi-
tulation und Währungsreform 1945–
1948, Munich 1985; Vol. 2: Zwi-
schen Grundgesetz und Großer Koa-
lition 1949–1967, Munich 1986; Vol.
3: Zwischen Protest und Anpassung
1968–1989, Munich 1989, Frankfurt
am Main 21990. Here vol. 1, 164 f.
178 Alfred Knierim, Johannes Schnei-
der, Anfänge und Entwicklungsten-
denzen des Volkshochschulwesens
nach dem 2. Weltkrieg (1945–1952),
Stuttgart 1978, 41.
179 Alfred Knierim, Johannes Schnei-
der (see note 178) 37.
180 Alfred Knierim, Johannes
Schneider (see note 178) 46.
181 Inge Aicher-Scholl shared this
information about the “first“ Ulm
adult education center with me in a
conversation on 12 Aug. 1993.
182 Inge Scholl: Letter to Hellmut
Becker. 20.5.1951. BHA, HfG records,
folder 19.
183 Otl Aicher: “Bauhaus und Ulm“,
in: Herbert Lindinger (ed.) (see note
1) 124.
184 Eva von Seckendorff (see note
95), 17, and in agreement with her
Norbert Korrek (see note 29), 69,
mistakenly mention 27 April 1946,
a Saturday, as the beginning of the
opening week, while Herbert Wie-
gandt: “Das kulturelle Geschehen“,
in: Hans Eugen Specker (ed.) (see
note 128) refers to 24 April 1946,
a Wednesday. According to the Ulm
Adult Education Center, the latter
date is correct (5 July 1993 letter
from the Ulm Adult Education Center
to the author).
185 Ulm Adult Education Center. Cat-
alog. Ulm 1946, 22.
186 Barbara Schüler, „Im Geiste der
Gemordeten …“: Die „Weiße Rose“
und ihre Wirkung in der Nachkriegs-
zeit, Diss. Phil. Stuttgart 1998, 12. A
detailed discussion of this topic: ibid.
12–17.
187 Ulm Adult Education Center. Cat-
alog. Ulm 1946.
188 Der Städtetag 9/1953.
189 Information Bulletin, April 1950.
190 Barbara Schüler (see note 186)
20.
191 When I spoke with Inge Aicher-
Scholl on 12 Aug. 1993, she referred,
for instance, to the then editor of the
feature page of the Münchner Mer-
kur, Herbert Hohenemser, and to
Pamela Wedekind, who brought the
cultural VIPs of Germany to Ulm,
arguing that it was a moral duty to
support the adult education center
that was directed by the sister of
Hans and Sophie Scholl.
192 Hartmut Seeling (see note 96)
16
193 Otl Aicher in: Blätter der Ulmer
Volkshochschule 1. Ulm 1946.
194 Barbara Schüler also mentioned,
and rightly so, the characteristic and
clear structure of the curriculum as a
reason for the school’s success: Bar-
bara Schüler (see note 186) 22.
195 In 1949 a number of Ulm digni-
taries denied that Otl Aicher specifi-
cally was qualified for this position
when John F. Campell asked them
about it. It is doubtful whether those
who had such a low opinion of Otl
Aicher’s abilities had ever actually
visited the Adult Education Center.
196 Eva von Seckendorff (see note
95) 18.
197 “Education was a notoriously
neglected step-child of United States
military government.“ Harold Hur-
witz: “Comparing American reform
efforts in Germany. Mass media and
the school system“, in: Robert Wolfe
(see note 136) 321–341, here: 329.
198 Cf. Harold Hurwitz (see note
197) 329 f.
199 Harold Hurwitz (see note 197)
323 f.
200 Wolfgang Benz: “Postwar soci-
ety and National Socialism: Remem-
brance, amnesia and rejection“, in:
TAJB 19/1990, 1–33, here: 1.
201 Harold Hurwitz (see note 197)
330. Cf. James Tent (see note 167)
316 f.
202 Josef Henke, Klaus Oldenhage:
“Office of Military Government for
Germany (US)“, in: Christoph Weisz
(ed.), OMGUS-Handbuch, (= Quel-
len und Darstellungen zur Zeitge-
schichte, vol. 35) Munich 1994, 1–
142, here: 112.
203 Regarding the following cf. Wil-
fried Schöntag: “Office of Military
Government for Württemberg-
Baden“, in: Christoph Weisz (see
note 202) 455–595, here: 464–503.
204 On 24 Sept. 1945 the military
governor appointed Reinhold Maier
minister-president of Württemberg-
Baden and also appointed a Land
government.
205 Beginning Mar. 1946 John P.
Steiner worked for the military gov-
ernment as a civilian. After 1949 he
was taken over by HICOG. – The
Education and Religion Division was
renamed Education and Cultural
Affairs Division in April 1947; in May
1948 it became the Education and
Cultural Relations Division.
206 Erziehung in Deutschland.
Bericht und Vorschläge der amerika-
nischen Erziehungskommission,
Munich 1946. Partially reprinted in:
Heinrich Kanz (ed.), Deutsche päda-
gogische Zeitgeschichte 1945–
1959. Von der Bildungspolitik der
Alliierten bis zum Rahmenplan des
Deutschen Ausschusses, (= Pädago-
gische Zeitgeschichte, vol. 1) Rating-
en, Kastellaun 1975, 37 ff.
207 Alfred Knierim, Johannes
Schneider (see note 178) 27.
208 Cf. Hermann Josef Rupieper
(see note 157) 115–117. Also inclu-
des references to the pedagogical
origins of these American reformers:
The concept of educational philoso-
pher John Dewey that democracy is
not a form of government but rather
a way of life.
209 Alfred Knierim, Johannes
Schneider (see note 178) 29.
210 Karl-Ernst Bungenstab (see note
155) 134.
211 John Gimbel, Amerikanische
Besatzungspolitik in Deutschland
1945–1949, Stanford 1968, Frankfurt
am Main 1971, 311.
212 In Elmer Plischke (see note 136)
208: 11.7.1947 Veröffentlichung von
JCS 1779. – Richtlinien der amerika-
nischen Regierung an General Clay
(JCS 1779), excerpted in: Klaus-Jörg
Ruhl (see note 135) 375–382, where
the deadline is given as 17 July 1947.
213 Jutta-B. Lange-Quassowski (see
note 161) 59 f.
214 Cf. Hansjörg Gehring, Amerika-
nische Literaturpolitik in Deutsch-
land 1945–1953. Ein Aspekt des Re-
educationprogramms, (= Schriften-
reihe der Vierteljahreshefte für Zeit-
geschichte, vol. 32) Stuttgart 1976.
22.
215 Hermann Josef Rupieper (see
note 157) 118.
216 Karl-Ernst Bungenstab (see note
155) 18 f. – On British and French
reorientation and education policy cf.
Maria Halbritter, Schulreformpolitik
in der britischen Zone von 1945 bis
1949, (= Diss. Phil. Karlsruhe 1977;
Studien und Dokumentationen zur
deutschen Bildungsgeschichte, vol.
13) Frankfurt am Main 1979; Falk Pin-
gel: “Wissenschaft, Bildung und
Demokratie – der gescheiterte Ver-
such einer Universitätsreform“, in:
Josef Foschepoth, Rolf Steininger
(ed.), Die britische Deutschland- und
Besatzungspolitik 1945–1949,
Paderborn 1985, 183–209; Kurt Jür-
gensen: “Zum Problem der ‚political
re-education‘“, in: Manfred Heine-
mann (ed.), Umerziehung und Wie-
deraufbau (see note 161) 114–139. –
In the same volume are the essays of
René Cheval: “Die Bildungspolitik in
der französischen Besatzungszone“,
pp. 190–200, and of Jérôme Vaillant:
“Was tun mit Deutschland? Die fran-
zösische Kulturpolitik im besetzten
Deutschland von 1945 bis 1949“, pp.
201–210; Angelika Ruge-Schatz,
Umerziehung und Schulpolitik in der
französischen Besatzungszone
1945–1949, (= Sozialwissenschaft-
liche Studien, vol. 1) Frankfurt am
Main, Bern, Las Vegas 1977; Jérôme
Vaillant, Französische Kulturpolitik in
Deutschland 1945–1949. Berichte
und Dokumente, Lille 1981, Con-
stance 1984; Franz Knipping, Jac-
ques Le Rider (eds.), Frankreichs Kul-
turpolitik in Deutschland, 1945–
1950. Ein Tübinger Symposium,
19. und 20. September 1985. Tübin-
gen 1987.
217 Cf. Karl-Ernst Bungenstab (see
note 155) 18 f., whose study pro-
vides a detailed definition and delim-
itation of the terms “reeducation“,
“reorientation“, “democratization“,
and “Umerziehung“. I shall not dis-
cuss this topic because it takes me
too far away from the subject of this
study.
218 Jutta-B. Lange-Quassowski:
“Amerikanische Westintegrationspoli-
tik, Re-education und deutsche 443
Schulpolitik“, in: Manfred Heinemann
(ed.) (see note 161), 53–67, here: 55.
219 Karl-Ernst Bungenstab (see note
155) 163.
220 Hansjörg Gehring (see note
214).
221 John Gimbel (see note 211) 321.
222 John Gimbel (see note 211) 314
f. He disagrees with an interpretation
of American reeducation policy that
regards “the realization of this goal,
the introduction of ‘real democracy’
on an institutional and intellectual-
moral level,“ as the “core of Ameri-
can occupation policy in Germany“,
to quote Hansjörg Gehring (see note
214) 17 f.
223 Older literature on this topic in
Karl Heinz Füssl, Die Umerziehung
der Deutschen. Jugend und Schule
unter den Siegermächten des Zwei-
ten Weltkriegs 1945–1955, Pader-
born 1994.
224 Christoph Kleßmann, Die dop-
pelte Staatsgründung. Deutsche
Geschichte 1945–1955, Bonn 41986,
92.
225 Karl-Ernst Bungenstab (see note
155) 30.
226 John Gimbel (see note 211)
322 f.
227 Cf. Jutta-B. Lange-Quassowski
(see note 161) 60 ff.
228 John Gimbel (see note 211) 317.
229 Karl-Ernst Bungenstab (see note
155) 164.
230 Christoph Kleßmann (see note
224) 98.
231 U.S. Information and Exchanges
Survey Mission, quoted from Henry
P. Pilgert (see note 164) 18.
232 Josef Foschepoth: “Zur deuts-
chen Reaktion auf Niederlage und
Besatzung“, in: Ludolf Herbst (see
note 132) 151–165.
233 Hansjörg Gehring (see note 214)
31.
234 Hansjörg Gehring (see note 214)
31.
235 Christoph Weisz (ed.) (see note
202) 496; after May 1948 John F.
Capell was liaison officer in Ulm
(ibid. 503).
236 Ulrich M. Bausch, Die Kultur-
politik der US-amerikanischen Infor-
mation Control Division in Württem-
berg-Baden von 1945–1949. Zwi-
schen militärischem Funktionalis-
mus und schwäbischem Obrigkeits-
denken, (= Veröffentlichungen des
Archivs der Stadt Stuttgart, vol. 55;
Diss. Phil. Tübingen 1991) Stuttgart
1992, 21.
237 The American military initially
felt suspicious even of Inge Scholl:
Inge Aicher-Scholl reports that her
name had to be removed from one of
the first catalogs of the Ulm Adult
 References
444 Education Center after it had already
been printed, because she – like her
brothers and sister – had once been
a member of the Hitler Youth. Her
application for membership in the
NS-Frauenschaft (National Socialist
women’s organization) : NS-
Frauenschaft, Gau Württemberg-
Hohenzollern, Ortsgruppe Ulm-
Schwörhaus: Aufnahme-Erklärung
Nr. 1661657. n. d. 1938. BAZ.
238 Jutta-B. Lange-Quassowski (see
note 161) 55 f.
239 Hansjörg Gehring (see note 214)
80.
240 Cf. Karl-Ernst Bungenstab (see
note 155) 116.
241 Hermann Josef Rupieper (see
note 157)113.
242 Control Council Directive no.
54, 25 June 1947, reprinted in: Beate
Ruhm von Oppen (see note 133)
233–234.
243 Wolfgang Benz, Zwischen Hitler
und Adenauer. Studien zur deut-
schen Nachkriegsgesellschaft,
Frankfurt am Main 1991, 189.
244 Karl-Ernst Bungenstab (see note
155) 150.
245 Quoted from Hansjörg Gehring
(see note 214) 86.
246 Hansjörg Gehring (see note 214)
20.
247 Christoph Kleßmann (see note
224) 99.
248 The first event took place in
October 1949; cf. Sabine Hanslovsky
(see note 174) 20.
249 Cf. Jérôme Vaillant, Der Ruf.
Unabhängige Blätter der jungen
Generation (1945–1949). Eine Zeit-
schrift zwischen Illusion und Anpas-
sung, (= Kommunikation und Politik,
vol. 11) Munich 1978. – For the larger
context cf. Bernhard Zeller (ed.), „Als
der Krieg zu Ende war“. Literarisch-
politische Publizistik 1945– 1950.
(= Sonderausstellungen des Schill-
er-Nationalmuseums, Catalog
No. 23) Stuttgart, Munich 1973;
Hans Borchers, Klaus W. Vowe, Die
zarte Pflanze Demokratie. Amerika-
nische Re-education in Deutschland
im Spiegel ausgewählter politischer
und literarischer Zeitschriften (1945–
1949), Tübingen 1979; Jürgen Schrö-
der, Brigitte Bonath, Bertram Salz-
mann, Claudia Wischinski, Angela
Wittman (eds.), Die Stunde Null in
der deutschen Literatur. Ausgewähl-
te Texte, Stuttgart 1995. – Bernhard
Adam, Dieter Müller: “Amerikanische
Literaturpolitik und Literatur“, in:
Dieter Bänsch (ed.) (see note 44),
147–168.
250 Christoph Kleßmann (see note
224) 157.
251 Hans Werner Richter: “Wie ent-
stand und was war die Gruppe 47?“,
in: Reinhard Lettau (ed.), Die Gruppe
47. Bericht, Kritik, Polemik, Neuwied
1967, 41–176, here: 47. On the pro-
gram of the editors of Der Ruf cf.
Jérôme Vaillant (see note 249) 82–
105; Bernhard Zeller (see note 249)
100–108.
252 Hans Werner Richter: “Fünfzehn
Jahre“, in: ibid. (ed.), Almanach der
Gruppe 47. 1947–1962. Reinbek
1962, 8–14, here: 14.
253 Hans Werner Richter (see note
252) 10.
254 Kurt Sontheimer (see note 118)
135. – In contrast to this interpreta-
tion of the current situation there
were others, who, under the effect of
the catastrophe the country had just
survived, looked backward, finding
their bearings with the help of the
culture of German classicism. Fried-
rich Meinecke, Die deutsche Kata-
strophe. Betrachtungen und Erinne-
rungen, Wiesbaden 1946. Cf. also
Bernd Hüppauf: „Die Mühen der
Ebenen“. Kontinuität und Wandel in
der deutschen Literatur und Gesell-
schaft 1945–1949, (= Reihe Siegen,
Beiträge zur Literatur- und Sprach-
wissenschaft, vol. 17) Heidelberg
1981, 104–109.
255 Anselm Doering-Manteuffel, Die
Bundesrepublik Deutschland in der
Ära Adenauer. Außenpolitik und
innere Entwicklung 1949– 1963,
Darmstadt 1983, 21988, 206.
256 Bernd Hüppauf (see note 254)
96 f. – The first programs for a
Geschwister Scholl College also have
this nebulous quality; perhaps they
would have vanished into thin air, as
happened with Studio Null, if Max
Bill had not given them solidity.
257 Rüdiger Bolz: “Ansätze einer
Universitätsreform im Spiegel deut-
scher Nachkriegszeitschriften“, in:
Gerhard Hay (ed.), Zur literarischen
Situation 1945–1949, Kronberg
1977, 63–83, here: 63.
258 Rüdiger Bolz (see note 257) 65.
259 Rüdiger Bolz (see note 257) 67.
260 Karl-Ernst Bungenstab (see note
155) 116.
261 Rüdiger Bolz (see note 257) 76.
262 Rüdiger Bolz (see note 257) 77.
263 Bernd Hüppauf: “Krise ohne
Wandel. Die kulturelle Situation
1945–1949“, in: ibid. (see note 254)
47–112, here: 90.
264 Michael Streich: “Politisch-litera-
rische Publizistik“, in: Christoph Kleß-
mann (see note 224) 161–171, here:
168.
265 Hans Werner Richter: “Fünfzehn
Jahre“, in: ibid. (ed.) (see note 252),
here: 11.
266 Michael Streich (see note 264)
168.
267 On the licensing of postwar peri-
odicals see Hans Borchers, Klaus W.
Vrowe (see note 249); on Der Ruf
note especially 50–54.
268 Bernhard Adam, Dieter Müller:
Amerikanische Literaturpolitik und
Literatur“, in: Dieter Bänsch (see note
44) 147–168, here: 152.
269 Marcel Reich-Ranicki: Eine klei-
ne Unsterblichkeit“, in: Hans A.
Neunzig, Hans Werner Richter und
die Gruppe 47, Munich 1979. 33–39,
here: 37.
270 Anselm Doering-Manteuffel (see
note 255) 219. – On Gruppe 47 cf.
Hans Werner Richter (ed.) (see note
252), particularly 8–21; Hans A.
Neunzig (ed.) (see note 269); Hel-
mut Heißenbüttel: “Literarische
Archäologie der fünfziger Jahre“, in:
Dieter Bänsch (see note 44) 306–
325, especially 310–315.
271 Hans Werner Richter (see note
252) 8.
272 Bernd Hüppauf: “Schwierigkei-
ten mit der Nachkriegszeit“, in: ibid.
(ed.) (see note 254), 7–20, Here: 12.
273 Cf. Helmut Müller: “Der ‚dritte
Weg‘ als deutsche Gesellschafts-
idee“, in: Aus Politik und Zeitge-
schichte 27/1984, 27–38.
274 Hans Werner Richter (see note
252) 10.
275 John McCloy held the opposing
pedagogical view that the HfG ought
to teach a large number of students,
but he did not insist on this.
276 Cf. Hans Werner Richter (see
note 252) 88.
277 Friedrich Minssen in the Febru-
ary 1948 issue of Frankfurter Hefte,
quoted from Reinhard Lettau (see
note 250) 30.
278 Alfred Andersch, Deutsche Lite-
ratur in der Entscheidung. Ein Bei-
trag zur Analyse der literarischen Sit-
uation, Karlsruhe 1948.
279 Heinz Ludwig Arnold (ed.), Der
Skorpion. Herausgegeben von Hans
Werner Richter. Jahrgang 1, Heft 1,
München, Januar 1948. Reprint Göt-
tingen 1991.
280 Reprinted in: Beate Ruhm von
Oppen (see note 133) 195–199.
281 Vorschläge des amerikanischen
Außenministers Marshall zur ame-
rikanischen Hilfeleistung für die
europäischen Länder (Rede in Har-
vard), 5.6.1947, in: Klaus-Jörg Ruhl
(see note 135) 368–371.
282 Hermann-Josef Rupieper (see
note 157) 22.
283 Sabine Hanslovsky (see note
174) 19.
284 This and the two following quo-
tations: Otl Aicher, Herbert Hohe-
nemser, Inge Scholl, Studio Null,
n. d., 1947/48, in: Barbara Schüler
(see note 186) 67.
285 Bernd Hüppauf (see note 254)
90.
286 This and the following quota-
tions: Studio Null, Fangen wir an,
16.8.1948“, in: Christiane Wachs-
mann (see note 10) 82 f. The consis-
tent use of lowercase initial letters
indicates that Otl Aicher was the au-
thor.
287 Inge Scholl: Brief an die Freunde
der Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung, n.
d., Jan. 1952. HfG, unlisted file; on
the currency reform cf. Beate Ruhm
von Oppen (see note 133) 292–294.
288 Barbara Schüler (see note 186)
24.
289 Cf. Henry P. Pilgert (see note
164) 79; Hermann Josef Rupieper
(see note 157) 137.
290 Cf. Rüdiger Bolz (see note 257)
81; Rudolf Walther Leonhardt: “Die
deutschen Universitäten 1945–
1962“, in: Hans Werner Richter (ed.),
Bestandsaufnahme. Eine deutsche
Bilanz 1962, Munich, Vienna, Basel
1962.
291 Hermann Josef Rupieper (see
note 157) 139.
292 About John J. McCloy (31 Mar.
1895–11 Mar. 1989): Kai Bird, The
chairman. John J. McCloy: the mak-
ing of the American establishment,
New York 1992; Thomas Alan
Schwartz, Die Atlantik-Brücke. John
McCloy und das Nachkriegsdeutsch-
land, (= Diss. Phil. Harvard 1985)
Cambridge/Mass., London 1991,
Frankfurt am Main, Berlin 1992;
Klaus Schwabe: “Fürsprecher Frank-
reich? John McCloy und die Integra-
tion der Bundesrepublik“, in: Ludolf
Herbst, Hanno Sowade (eds.), Vom
Marshallplan zur EWG. Die Einglie-
derung der Bundesrepublik in die
westliche Welt. (= Quellen und Dar-
stellungen zur Zeitgeschichte, vol.
30) Munich 1990, 517–533; Erika J.
and Heinz-Dietrich Fischer: “Initiati-
ven und Begegnungen des Hoch-
kommissars McCloy im zeitgenössi-
schen Presseecho“, in: ibid. (eds.),
John J. McCloy und die Frühge-
schichte der Bundesrepublik
Deutschland. Presseberichte und
Dokumente über den amerikani-
schen Hochkommissar für Deutsch-
land 1949–1952. Cologne 1985, 13–
49.
293 Cf. John J. McCloy: “From mili-
tary government to self-government“,
in: Robert Wolfe (see note 136) 114–
123.
294 Das Besatzungsstatut für die
Bundesrepublik Deutschland,
10.4.1949, in: Klaus-Jörg Ruhl (see
note 135) 479–481.
295 Hermann Josef Rupieper (see
note 157) 123.
296 Henry J. Kellermann, Cultural
relations as an instrument of foreign
policy. The educational exchange
program between the United States
and Germany, 1945–1954.
(= Department of State Publications,
vol. 8931) Washington, D.C. 1978,
191.
297 Cf. also Thomas Alan Schwartz:
“Reeducation and democracy: The
policies of the United States High
Commission in Germany“, in: Michael
Ermarth (see note 159) 35–46.
298 Hermann Josef Rupieper (see
note 157) 20.
299 Henry Pilgert (see note 164) 11.
300 Re this and the following cf.:
Harold Zink, The United States in
Germany 1944–1955, Princeton,
Toronto, London, New York 1957,
49–52.
301 When the responsibilities of
OMGUS were taken over by HICOG,
the Education and Cultural Relations
Division (ECR) was merged with the
Office of Public Affairs, HICOG in
accordance with General Order no.
44, OMGUS, dated 3 Sept. 1949.
Josef Henke, Klaus Oldenhage (see
note 202) 114.
302 It was headed by: Dr. Alonzo G.
Grace; after January 1950 Dr. James
Morgan Read; then George A. Selke.
303 Henry Pilgert (see note 164) 25.
Re what follows cf. 80–105.
304 Henry Pilgert (see note 164) 93.
305 On Shepard Stone: Ein Buch der
Freunde. Shepard Stone zum Acht-
zigsten. Berlin 1988.
306 Erika J. und Heinz-Dietrich Fi-
scher (see note 292) 25–28.
307 J. F. Gillen, The Special Projects
Program of the Office of the U.S.
High Commissioner for Germany,
Bad Godesberg-Mehlem 1952, 2 f.
308 J. F. Gillen (see note 307), 4.
309 Cf. Hermann Josef Rupieper
(see note 157) 110.
310 Henry Pilgert (see note 164) 13.
311 Hermann Josef Rupieper (see
note 157) 126 f.
312 John Gimbel (see note 211) 318.
313 Werk, Vol. 33, 5/1946. Articles
by: Egidius Streiff: “Formgebung in
der schweizerischen Industrie“ (138–
154); Sigfried Giedion: “Stromlinien-
stil und industrielles Entwerfen in
USA“ (155–162); Max Ernst Haefeli:
“Die neue Spitaltoilette. Beispiel
einer Modellentwicklung“ (163–167);
Max Bill: “Erfahrungen bei der Form-
gestaltung von Industrieprodukten“
(168–170).
314 Barbara Schüler (see note 106)
33; cf. Hans Frei (see note 95) 34.
315 Hans Frei (see note 95) 34.
316 Max Bill: “Ausstellungen. Ein Bei-
trag zur Abklärung von Fragen der
Ausstellungs-Gestaltung“, in: Werk,
vol. 35, 3/1948, 65–71.
317 Max Bill: “Schönheit aus Funk-
tion und als Funktion. Vortrag bei der
Tagung des schweizerischen Werk-
bundes in Basel am 23./24.10.
1948“, in: Werk, vol. 36, 8/1949,
272–274. Reprinted in: Gerd Hatje
(ed.), Idea 53. Internationales Jahr-
buch für Formgebung, Stuttgart
1953, XVI–XVIII.
318 Max Bill: “Die mathematische
Denkweise in der Kunst unserer Zeit.
Zu der Ausstellung Pevsner-Vanton-
gerloo-Bill im April/ Mai 1949 im
Kunsthaus Zürich“, in: Werk, vol. 36,
3/1949, 86–91. – Additional docu-
mentation of his many-sided activ-
ities: Max Bill, Wiederaufbau. Doku-
mente über Zerstörungen, Planun-
gen, Konstruktionen, Zürich 1945;
ibid.: “Wassily Kandinsky“, in: Werk,
vol. 33, 4/1946, 128–132.
319 Max Bill: Letter to Otl Aicher.
10 Aug. 1949. PAF; Otl Aicher: Letter
to Max Bill. 5 Oct. 1948. PAF; Max
Bill: Letter to Otl Aicher. 10. Oct.
1948. PAF; Otl Aicher: Letter to Max
Bill. 9 Feb. 1949. PAF; Max Bill: Let-
ter to Otl Aicher. 12 Mar. 1948. PAF;
Otl Aicher: Letter to Max Bill. 17 Mar.
1949. PAF; Max Bill: Letter to Otl
Aicher. 17 Mar. 1948. PAF; Otl Ai-
cher: Letter to Max Bill. 18 Mar.
1949. PAF; Otl Aicher: Letter to Max
Bill. 21 Apr. 1949. PAF; Max Bill: Let-
ter to Otl Aicher. 10 May 1948. PAF;
Otl Aicher: Letter to Max Bill. 12 May
1949. PAF; Otl Aicher: Letter to Max
Bill. 12 Aug. 1949. PAF.
320 Otl Aicher: Letter to Max Bill.
5 Oct. 1948. PAF
321 Ulmer Volkshochschule (ed.),
Der Geist weht, wo er will. Kalender
für das Jahr 1949, Ulm 1948. Re
Max Bill, see: Week 25, 12–18 June
1949.
322 Otl Aicher: Letter to Max Bill.
9 Feb. 1949. PAF
323 Max Bill: Letter to Otl Aicher.
10 Aug. 1949. PAF; Otl Aicher: Letter
to Max Bill. 17 Mar. 1949. PAF; Max
Bill: Letter to Otl Aicher. 17 Mar.
1948. PAF; Otl Aicher: Letter to Max
Bill. 21 Apr. 1949. PAF; Max Bill: Let-
ter to Otl Aicher. 10 May 1948. PAF;
Otl Aicher: Letter to Max Bill. 12 May
1949. PAF; Otl Aicher: Letter to Max
Bill. 12 Aug. 1949. PAF
324 Max Bill: Letter to Otl Aicher.
10 May 1948. PAF
325 Cf. Max Bill’s book, which in-
cludes some of the illustrations:
Form. Eine Bilanz über die Forment-
wicklung um die Mitte des XX. Jahr-
hunderts, Basel 1952.
326 Max Bill: Letter to Otl Aicher.
10 Aug. 1949. PAF
327 Henry van de Velde: “Die reine
zweckmässige Form“ (247–250);
Theodor Brogle: “Der Qualitäts- und
Formgedanke in der schweizerischen
Industrie“ (259–260); Gregor Pauls-
son: “Die soziale Aufgabe im kunstin-
dustriellen Unterricht“ (260– 271).
328 Inge Scholl: Letter to Shepard
Stone. 8 Dec. 1949. HfG, file 433.
329 Cf. Inge Scholl: Ausgangspunkt.
N. d. May 1950. HfG, unlisted file;
Exposé zur Gründung einer Ge-
schwister-Scholl-Hochschule
(Arbeitstitel). n. d. December 1949.
PAH, DOK 2; Inge Scholl: Kurze Zu-
sammenfassung über die Vorarbei-
ten zur Gründung der Geschwister-
Scholl-Hochschule. n. d. December
1949. PAH, DOK 1; Inge Scholl: Die
Ulmer Volkshochschule gilt als eine
der besten Volkshochschulen in
Deutschland. n. d. December 1949.
HfG, unlisted file; Inge Scholl:
Gespräch mit Carl Zuckmayer, Mün-
chen 11.12.1949. 11 Dec. 1949. HfG,
unlisted file; Inge Scholl: Norwegi-
sche Europahilfe. 18 Dec. 1949. HfG,
unlisted file; Inge Scholl: Gespräch
mit Wolfgang und Marianne v.
Eckardt. n. d. December 1949. HfG,
unlisted file; Inge Scholl: Gespräch
mit Boerner. n. d. December 1949.
HfG, unlisted file; Inge Scholl: Undat.
summary. December 1949. HfG,
unlisted file; Inge Scholl: Undated
summary. December 1949. HfG,
unlisted file; Inge Scholl: Gespräch
mit Professor Guardini. 28 Nov.
1949. HfG, unlisted file; Inge Scholl:
Gespräch mit Herrn. Torkersen am
18.11. 18 Nov. 1949. HfG, unlisted
file; Inge Scholl: Gespräch mit Herrn
Torkersen und Frau Zuckmayer am
20.11.49. 20 Nov. 1949. HfG, unlist.
file; Inge Scholl: Besprechung mit
Oberbürgermeister Pfizer und Stadt-
baurat Guther. 24 Nov. 1949. HfG,
unlisted file; Inge Scholl: Norwegi-
sche Europahilfe. n. d. November–
December 1949. HfG, unlisted file.
330 This and the two following quo-
tations are from: Inge Aicher-Scholl:
Bericht über die Vorarbeiten von
1949 bis 1953. 27 Jan. 1954. HfG,
unlisted file.
331 Hans Werner Richter: Anfänge
der „Geschwister Scholl“ Hoch-
schule. n. d. PARI.
332 Inge Scholl: Letter to Hans Wer-
ner Richter. 5 Oct. 1949. HWR.
333 The Norwegian Aid for Europe
was founded by Odd Nansen (6 Dec.
1901–27 June 1973), the son of
Fridtjof Nansen, the Norwegian polar
explorer, diplomat, and 1922 Nobel
Peace Prize recipient. Odd Nansen
was an architect. In 1936 he founded
the Nansen Aid for Refugees and
Stateless Persons; from 1941 to 1945
he was interned in Germany and in
1946 founded this aid organization. –
On Arne Torgersen’s experiences cf.
his memoirs: „Nach Ihnen, Herr Ge-
neral!“ Humanitäre Abenteuer eines
Norwegers im Nachkriegseuropa,
Stuttgart 1971, especially 75–131.
334 On Otl Aicher’s contacts with
HAP Grieshaber starting in 1948, cf.
Margot Fuerst, Grieshaber. Der
Drucker und Holzschneider. Plakate,
Flugblätter, Editionen und Akziden-
tia, Stuttgart 1965, n. p.
335 Inge Scholl: Die Ulmer Volks-
hochschule. n. d., 1949, reprinted in:
Christiane Wachsmann (see note 10)
54–66, here: 66.
336 It is amazing that here it is al-
ready possible to recognize the
board of trustees and the advisory
board of the later foundation, whose
third body, the administrative coun-
cil, was only included in the statutes
at the urging of the ministries.
337 The fact that the plans dis-
cussed here include printing work-
shops for refugees is not solely due
to the foundation’s sense of mission
and their need for a way of carrying
their conviction into the world or
their need to fulfil the ideal that theo-
ry and practice should complement
each other: The Norwegian Aid for
Europe supported only institutions
that cared for refugees; cf. Hellmut
Becker: Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung.
11 Sept. 1951. BHA, HfG records,
folder 19.
338 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Bericht über
die Vorarbeiten von 1949 bis 1953.
27 Jan. 1954. HfG, unlisted file.
339 Inge Aicher-Scholl: “Offen für
neues Denken – offen für Exper-
imente“, in: Ein Buch der Freunde
(see note 305), 13–16, here: 13.
340 Cf. Hermann Josef Rupieper
(see note 157) 49.
341 Max Bill: Letter to Richard
Döcker. 19 Nov. 1951. HfG, file 556.
342 Exposé zur Gründung einer
GeschwisterScholl-Hochschule
(Arbeitstitel). n. d. December 1949.
PAH, DOK 2; Exposé zur Gründung
einer GeschwisterScholl-Hochschule
(Arbeitstitel). n. d. December 1949.
HfG, unlisted file; Geschwister-Scholl
Stiftung zur Errichtung einer Ge-
schwister-Scholl-Schule. n. d.
December 1949. HfG, unlisted file.
343 Geschwister-Scholl Stiftung zur
Errichtung einer Geschwister-Scholl-
Schule. n. d. December 1949. HfG,
unlisted file.
344 Exposé zur Gründung einer
GeschwisterScholl-Hochschule
(Arbeitstitel). n. d. December 1949.
HfG, unlisted file.
345 Hans Bott: Letter to Inge Scholl.
4 Apr. 1950. BA; Ministerial Council-
lor Dr. Rupp: Aktenvermerk H 1091.
11 May 1950. HStA, EA 3/203, bun-
dle 73, document 5.
346 Cf. Inge Scholl: Kurze Zusam-
menfassung über die Vorarbeiten
zur Gründung der Geschwister-
Scholl-Hochschule. n. d. December
1949. PAH, DOK 1.
347 Inge Scholl: Kurze Zusammen-
fassung über die Vorarbeiten zur
Gründung der Geschwister-Scholl-
Hochschule. n. d. December 1949.
PAFH doc 1.
348 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Bericht über
die Vorarbeiten von 1949 bis 1953.
27 Jan. 1954. HfG, unlisted file.
349 Inge Scholl: Gespräch mit Boer-
ner. n. d. December 1949. HfG,
unlisted file; Inge Scholl: Undated
summary. December 1949. HfG,
unlisted file.
350 The person referred to is the
American HICOG staffer James Mor-
gan Read, not the British art historian
Sir Herbert Read.
351 Inge Scholl: Letter to Hans Wer-
ner Richter. 23 Dec. 1949. HWR
352 Dating as in Hans Frei (see note
95) 24, as opposed to Eva von Se-
ckendorff (see note 95) 35 ff., who
assigns the date April 1950 to this
outline. – The term “yellow program“
(= Geschwister-Scholl-Hochschule.
undated. January 1950. BA) was also
used by recipients at the time: Cf.
Theodor Pfizer: Letter to Hans Bott.
25 May 1950. BA.
353 Inge Scholl: Letter to Hans Wer-
ner Richter. 29 Dec. 1949. HWR.
354 Inge Scholl: Letter to Theodor
Heuss. 27 Jan. 1950. BA.
355 Inge Scholl: Letter to Hellmut 445
Becker. 22 May 1950. BHA, HfG
records, folder 19.
356 Inge Scholl: Letter to Theodor
Heuss. 27 Jan. 1950. BA.
357 Inge Scholl: Letter to Hans Wer-
ner Richter. 10 Jan. 1950. HWR.
358 Regarding this and the following
cf: J. F. Gillen (see note 307) 4 f.
359 The J.F. Gillen book states that
at the time he interviewed John H.
Boxer on 1 July 1951, the latter was
with the Office of the Land Commis-
sioner for Bavaria, Public Affairs Divi-
sion, Education and Cultural Rela-
tions Branch, Information Centers
Section.
360 Cf. Erika and Heinz-Dietrich
Fischer (eds.), John J. McCloy. An
American architect of postwar Ger-
many. Profiles of a trans-Atlantic
leader and communicator, Frankfurt
am Main 1994, 157. See also Inge
Scholl: Letter to Mr. Boxer. 2 Feb.
1950. HfG, file 433. Wrong: 18 Jan.
1950 in Inge Scholl: Letter to Hans
Werner Richter. 10 Jan. 1950. HWR;
also mistaken is Hans Frei (see note
95) 24, who dates this meeting as
22 Dec. 1949, agreeing with Hartmut
Seeling (see note 95) 32. – Cf. Eva
von Seckendorff (see note 95) 30,
and Max Bill: Letter to Walter Gropi-
us. 12 June 1950. BHA, Gropius
Estate, correspondence Bill-Gropius:
Shepard Stone, Max Boerner, and
John H. Boxer (secretary of the Spe-
cial Projects fund), James Morgan
Read (head of the Education Branch),
John P. Steiner (head of the Educa-
tion and Cultural Affairs Branch,
Württemberg-Baden, Stuttgart). See
also Ulrich M. Bausch (see note
236).
361 Inge Scholl: Letter to Max Bill.
26 Jan. 1950. HfG, unlisted file.
362 HICOG: Press Release No. 183.
27 Jan. 1950. HfG, file 433.
363 It is worth noting that the high
commissioner spoke of a “day insti-
tution“, i. e., something along the
lines of a day adult education center.
364 Cf. Inge Scholl: Gespräch mit
Herrn Torkersen am 18.11. 18 Nov.
1949. HfG, unlisted file. Cf. also
Anette Dumbach, Jud Newborn,
Die Geschichte der Weißen Rose,
Freiburg, Basel, Vienna 1986, 21994,
203.
365 Inge Scholl: Letter to Max Bill.
26 Jan. 1950. HfG, unlisted file.
366 Cf. Inge Scholl: Letter to John
Boxer. 31 Jan. 1950. HfG, file 433.
367 Inge Scholl: Letter to John
Boxer. 31 Jan. 1950. HfG, file 433.
368 Cf. Inge Scholl: Gespräch mit
Herrn Torkersen am 18.11. 18 Nov.
1949. HfG, unlisted file and Inge
Scholl: Norwegische Europahilfe.
n. d. November–December 1949.
HfG, unlisted file.
369 Cf. Inge Scholl: Gespräch mit
Carl Zuckmayer, München 11.12.
1949. 11 Dec. 1949. HfG, unlisted
 References
446 file, Inge Scholl: Undated summary.
December 1949. HfG, unlisted file;
and Inge Scholl: Undated summary.
December 1949. HfG, unlisted file.
370 Cf. Inge Scholl: Letter to Mr.
Boxer. 28 Feb. 1950. HfG, file 433.
371 Inge Scholl: Letter to Theodor
Heuss. 27 Jan. 1950. BA.
372 Inge Scholl: Letter to Mr. Boxer.
28 Feb. 1950. HfG, file 433. In this
letter there is a difference of
DM 100,000 between the sum total
of listed items and the final total
given. Either the Ulm group made a
mistake, which cannot be ruled out
but is unlikely, or expected donations
in kind that made up the sum total
were included, without being listed a
second time.
373 Cf. Barbara Schüler (see note
186s) 33.
374 Cf. the Adult Education Center
calendar 1949.
375 Inge Scholl: Letter to Max Bill.
21 Feb. 1950. HfG, unlisted file.
376 Max Bill: Letter to Inge Scholl.
6 Mar. 1950. HfG, unlisted file.
377 Inge Scholl: Letter to Max Bill.
13 Mar. 1950. HfG, file 556.
378 Re this and the following cf. J.F.
Gillen (see note 307) 5–7.
379 Along with other GARIOA
matching funds, German newspapers
were granted start-up credits totaling
DM 15 million. Cf. Erika J. and Heinz-
Dietrich Fischer (see note 360) 35.
380 Shepard Stone “… called me
back to the I. G. Farben building in
Frankfurt, to manage the Special Pro-
jects fund, designed to finance joint
American-German cultural projects.
The first was Inge Scholl‘s for indus-
trial design in Ulm, hundreds fol-
lowed.“ John H. Boxer: “Dear Shep
…“, in: Ein Buch der Freunde (see
note 305), 48 f.
381 Contradictory: J.F. Gillen (see
note 307), 6, lists these eleven mem-
bers, but: “Each of the six voting
members had an equal voice in
determining awards.“
382 Inge Scholl: Letter to Max Bill.
20 Mar. 1950. HfG, file 556, Ge-
schwister Scholl Hochschule. n. d.
Mar. 1950. HfG, unlisted file and Inge
Scholl: Kuratorium. 20 Mar. 1950.
PAF.
383 Irm Lindström: Letter to Hans
Werner Richter. 13 Mar. 1950. HWR
and Inge Scholl: Letter to Hans Wer-
ner Richter. 14 Mar. 1950. HWR.
384 Otl Aicher: Letter to Max Bill.
25 Mar. 1950. HfG, unlisted file.
385 Otl Aicher: Letter to Hans Wer-
ner Richter. 23 Mar. 1950. HWR.
386 Max Bill: Letter to Walter Gro-
pius. 2 May 1950. BHA, Gropius
estate, correspondence Bill-Gropius.
387 Cf. Martin Krampen, Horst
Kächele (see note 23).
388 Inge Scholl: Letter to Theodor
Heuss. 27 Mar. 1950. BA; cf. Inge
Scholl: Letter to Hans Bott. 13 Apr.
1950. BA and Ferdinand Sieger: Let-
ter to Inge Scholl. 19 Apr. 1950.
BHA, HfG records, folder 18.
389 Inge Scholl: Letter to State
Councillor Wittwer. 31 Mar. 1950.
HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 73, docu-
ment 1 and Inge Scholl: Letter to
minister of education and the arts
Theodor Bäuerle. 31 Mar. 1950.
HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 73, docu-
ment 3.
390 See above for remarks on his
lecture to the Swiss Werkbund.
391 Otl Aicher: Letter to Hans Wer-
ner Richter. 27 Mar. 1950. HWR.
392 Otl Aicher: Letter to Hans Wer-
ner Richter. 30 Mar. 1950. HWR.
393 Inge Scholl: Letter to Hans Wer-
ner Richter. 24 June 1950. HWR.
394 This worsening of the situation
and decision between Max Bill and
Hans Werner Richter exists in two
versions by Hans Werner Richter: In
the first, told to Hartmut Seeling, the
scene was a lobby or anteroom in
John J. McCloy’s villa, where the Ulm
group along with a few helpers (Max
Bill, Hans Werner Richter, plus Bri-
gitte Bermann-Fischer) and Ameri-
can HICOG staffers waited chatting
until all except for Hans Werner Rich-
ter were asked to come into the con-
ference room. Cf. Hartmut Seeling
(see note 95) Fn. 65. – The second
version is the one Richter reported to
Werner Zinkand (as told by Werner
Zinkand on 1 Aug. 1996 in conversa-
tion with the author): Inge Scholl, Otl
Aicher, Max Bill, Hans Werner Rich-
ter, and Jürgen Söhring were waiting
in a Frankfurt hotel; first, Inge Scholl
and Otl Aicher were invited by phone
to come to Bad Homburg, then so
was Max Bill. Hans Werner Richter
was not asked to join them. Cf. Hans
Frei (see note 95) 39.
395 An additional reference to the
fact that the date for the decision is
wrong: The telegram by Walter Gro-
pius to Shepard Stone to which Max
Bill was referring cannot have been
available on 25 April 1950, as Hans
Frei (see note 95) 39 writes, because
Max Bill first turned to Gropius as
regards the college project on 2 May
1950: Max Bill: Letter to Walter Gro-
pius. 2 May 1950. BHA, Gropius
estate, correspondence Bill-Gropius.
396 See below; cf. also Toni Rich-
ter’s oral report and Hans Werner
Richter: Anfänge der „Geschwister
Scholl“ Hochschule. n. d. PARI and
Inge Aicher-Scholl: Aktennotiz zum
2.7.1988. 2 July 1988. PARI.
. Hermann-Josef Rupieper (see note
397 Entwurf der Werbeschrift „Ge-
schwister-scholl-stiftung“. 9 Nov.
1950. HfG, unlisted file; Inge Scholl:
Letter to Oberregierungsrat Hoch-
stetter. 9 Nov. 1950. HStA, EA
3/203, bundle 73, document 13.
398 John P. Steiner: Letter to Inge
Scholl. 27 Apr. 1950. HfG, file 433.
399 On the influence of HICOG on
iestablishing political and social sci-
ences at Federal German universities
cf. Arno Mohr, Politikwissenschaft
als Alternative. Stationen einer wis-
senschaftlichen Disziplin auf dem
Wege zu ihrer Selbständigkeit in der
Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1945–
1960, (= Diss. Phil. Heidelberg 1985;
Politikwissenschaftliche Paperbacks,
vol. 13) Bochum 1988.
400 Hermann-Josef Rupieper (see
note 157) 78 f.
401 Thomas Alan Schwartz (see note
292) 127.
402 Thomas Alan Schwartz (see note
292) 130 f. – Cf. Norbert Frei: “‚Ver-
gangenheitsbewältigung‘ or ‚renazifi-
cation‘? The American perspective
on Germany‘s confrontation with the
Nazi past in the early years of the
Adenauer era“, in: Michael Ermarth
(see note 159) 47–59.
403 Cf. Hermann-Josef Rupieper
(see note 157) 66–70.
404 John J. McCloy: cover letter to
Secretary of State Dean Acheson
regarding the quarterly report 1 Apr.–
30 June 1950, in: Erika J. and
Heinz-Dietrich Fischer (see note
292) 98–102, here; 100.
405 J.F. Gillen (see note 307) 7f. –
On 11 Feb. 1951 the administrative
council raised the sum total to DM
54 million.
406 Inge Scholl: Letter to Max Bill.
15 May 1950. HfG, file 556.
407 The architect, designer, and
Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius is
an outstanding example of modern-
ism, which emigrated from Germany
to America in the 1930ies and ex-
erted its influence back on Germany
in the 1950s. In August 1947 Walter
Gropius was the first of a series of
“visiting consultants“ whom OMGUS
invited to come to Germany to hear
their views on matters relating to
(architectural and urban-planning-
related) reconstruction. He saw Ber-
lin, Hannover, Frankfurt am Main,
Stuttgart, and Munich. See: Fried-
helm Fischer: “German reconstruc-
tion as an international activity“, in:
Jeffry M. Diefendorf (ed.), Rebuild-
ing Europe‘s bombed cities, New
York 1990, 131–144; Jeffry M. Die-
fendorf: “Berlin on the Charles, Cam-
bridge on the Spree: Walter Gropius,
Martin Wagner and the rebuilding of
Germany“, in: Helmut F. Pfanner
(ed.), Kulturelle Wechselbeziehun-
gen im Exil – Exile across Cultures.
(= Studien zur Literatur der Mod-
erne, vol. 14) Bonn 1986, 343–357;
ibid.: “America and the rebuilding of
urban Germany“, in: ibid., Axel Frohn,
156) 331–351.
408 Geschwister-Scholl-Hochschule
Ulm Graduate School of Design. n. d.
May 1950. BHA, Gropius estate, cor-
respondence Bill-Gropius.
409 Inge Scholl: Ausgangspunkt.
n. d. May 1950. HfG, unlisted file ,
Geschwister Scholl Hochschule. n. d.
March–May 1950. HfG, unlisted file
and Inge Scholl: Letter to Odd Nan-
sen. 8 May 1950. HfG, unlisted file.
410 Inge Scholl: Letter to Hellmut
Becker. 22 May 1950. BHA, HfG
records, folder 19.
411 See Peter Schubert in the film
documentation Edition Disegno, Otl
Aicher – der Denker am Objekt,
VHS-Video, Munich.
412 Max Bill: Letter to Inge Scholl.
16 May 1950. HfG, unlisted file.
413 Both were translated into Max
Bill’s terms: Politics was kept on as
part of general education at the HfG,
while the department of information
eked out its existence.
414 Otl Aicher: Letter to Max Bill.
23 May 1950. HfG, file 556. This let-
ter also contains a remark about a
term that is in vogue today: “It seems
to me that your concept of informa-
tion to a large extent corresponds to
that of communication, which you
used once. Communication seems to
be more correct. Information is
essentially a mediation where one
does not join in oneself. Communica-
tion includes the sharing of personal
things as well. Communication is the
personal relationship to the totality in
the interest of the group as a whole.“
415 Walter Gropius: Letter to Max
Bill. 28 May 1950. BHA, Gropius
estate, Bill-Gropius correspondence.
416 Cf. Eva von Seckendorff: “HfG:
Außer Bauhaus nichts gewesen? Das
New Bauhaus, Chicago, und die
Hochschule für Gestaltung, Ulm“, in:
Peter Hahn, Lloyd C. Engelbrecht
(see note 54), 87–91.
417 Max Bill: Letter to Walter Gro-
pius. 1 June 1950. BHA, Gropius
estate, Bill-Gropius correspondence.
418 Inge Scholl: Letter to Max Bill.
5 July 1950. HfG, unlisted file.
419 Fragebogen. n. d. July 1950.
HfG, unlisted file.
420 Inge Scholl: Letter to Hans Wer-
ner Richter. 24 June 1950. HWR.
421 Hermann-Josef Rupieper (see
note 157) 47 f.
422 Ergebnis der Stuttgarter
Besprechung am 12.7.1950. 12 July
1950. PARI.
423 Geschwister Scholl Hochschule.
n. d. July 1950. PAZ and Geschwister
Scholl Hochschule. n. d. July 1950.
PARI
424 Cf. Shepard Stone: “The found-
ing of the Federal Republic of Ger-
many – an assessment of the role of
the U.S.A., 1945–1949 and beyond“,
in: Michael Ermarth (see note 159)
203–210.
425 Hermann-Josef Rupieper (see
note 157) 71.
426 Ergebnis der Stuttgarter Be-
sprechung am 12.7.1950. 12 July
1950. PARI.
427 Walter Gropius: Programm des
staatlichen Bauhauses in Weimar.
April 1919. PAH, DOK A.
428 Inge Scholl: Letter to Max Bill.
25 July 1950. HfG, file 556.
429 Inge Scholl: Offizieller Antrag an
das HICOG. 7 Aug. 1950. HfG, file
433 and Inge Scholl: Vorentwurf des
Antrags an HICOM [!]. 1 Aug. 1950.
HfG, unlisted file.
430 Eva von Seckendorff (see note
95) 39.
431 Inge Scholl: Letter to Max Bill.
21 Feb. 1950. HfG, unlisted file.
432 Inge Scholl: Letter to Hellmut
Becker. 22 May 1950. BHA, HfG
records, folder 19.
433 Inge Scholl: Letter to Max Bill.
21 Feb. 1950. HfG, unlisted file.
434 Max Bill: Letter to Inge Scholl.
6 Mar. 1950. HfG, unlisted file.
435 Max Bill: Letter to Inge Scholl.
22 Mar. 1950. HfG, unlisted file.
436 Otl Aicher: Letter to Max Bill.
25 Mar. 1950. HfG, unlisted file.
437 Otl Aicher: Letter to Max Bill.
30 Mar. 1950. HfG, file 556.
438 Up to August 1954 the ministry
was called the Kultministerium. Only
after that date was it referred to as
the Kultusministerium. Vgl. Leonhard
Müller: „Das Schulwesen“, in: Mein-
rad Schraab (ed.), 40 Jahre Baden-
Württemberg. Aufbau und Gestal-
tung 1952–1992, 497–528.
439 About Carl Heinrich Becker
(12 Apr. 1876–10 Feb. 1933) cf. Hell-
mut Becker: “C.H. Becker – Portrait
eines Kultusministers“, in: ibid., Auf
dem Weg zur lernenden Gesell-
schaft. Personen, Analysen, Vor-
schläge für die Zukunft, Stuttgart
1980, 31–45.
440 Literature on this topic has been
compiled in: Karl Schwarz (rev.), Bib-
liographie der deutschen Landerzie-
hungsheime, (= Aus den deutschen
Landerziehungsheimen, vol. 8)
Stuttgart 1970.
441 Hellmut Becker: “Alexander
Mitscherlich – ein Kampf für Freiheit-
Sozialismus-Psychoanalyse“, in: ibid.
(see note 438) 61–79, here: 61.
442 Alexander Mitscherlich, Gesam-
melte Schriften VI-VII. Politisch-pub-
lizistische Aufsätze. Ed. Herbert Wie-
gandt. Frankfurt am Main 1983;
Provokation und Toleranz. Festschrift
für Alexander Mitscherlich zum sieb-
zigsten Geburtstag. Ed. Sibylle
Drews et al. Frankfurt am Main 1978.
443 Cf. Leonidas E. Hill (ed.), Die
Weizsäcker Papiere 1933–1950.
Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Vienna
1974; Margret Bovari, Der Diplomat
vor Gericht, Berlin, Hamburg 1948.
444 Cf. Inge Aicher-Scholl: Letter to
Hellmut Becker. 26 Feb. 1955. BHA,
HfG records, folder 22.
445 The zoological station was
founded in 1870 by Anton Dohrn and
then run by the Dohrn family; Anton
Dohrn’s son Harald was in contact
with the White Rose and on 13 July
1943 was acquitted because of lack
of evidence by the special court of
Munich District Court 1, but contin-
ued to speak out against National
Socialism, was denounced in 1945,
arrested and shot in Perlach Forest
together with other political prisoners
on 29 April 1949; his stepson Klaus
Dohrn, an Austrian Catholic journal-
ist, published writings against
National Socialism, but must not be
confused with the banker of the
same name from the same family,
who was the chair of the Society of
Friends after 1961; Harald Dohrn’s
daughter Herta was married to Chris-
toph Probst, who was executed
together with Hans and Sophie
Scholl on 22 Feb. 1943. – Karl Josef
Partsch, Die zoologische Station in
Neapel. Modell internationaler Wis-
senschaftszusammenarbeit,
(= Studien zu Naturwissenschaft,
Technik und Wirtschaft im neun-
zehnten Jahrhundert, vol. 11) Göttin-
gen 1980.
446 Ministerial Councillor Hassinger:
Aktenvermerk. 14 Apr. 1950. HStA,
EA 3/203, bundle 73, document 4.
447 Ministerial Councillor Dr. Rupp:
Aktenvermerk H 1091. 11 May 1950.
HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 73, docu-
ment 5.
448 Max Bill: Letter to Inge Scholl.
6 July 1950. HfG, unlisted file.
449 Inge Scholl: Letter to the Würt-
temberg-Baden ministry of education
and the arts. 8 July 1950. HStA, EA
3/203, bundle 73, document 4 and
Inge Scholl: Verfassung der Stiftung
„Geschwister-Scholl-Hochschule“.
8 July 1950. HStA, EA 3/203, bundle
73, appendix to document 4.
450 Inge Scholl: Letter to Max Bill.
5 July 1950. HfG, unlisted file.
451 Inge Scholl: Errichtung der ge-
meinnützigen Stiftung „Geschwister-
Scholl-Hochschule“. 14 Sept. 1950.
HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 73, docu-
ment 7; Inge Scholl: Verfassung der
Stiftung „Geschwister-Scholl-Hoch-
schule“. 8 July 1950. HStA, EA
3/203, bundle 73, appendix to docu-
ment 4; Inge Scholl: Errichtung der
Stiftung „Geschwister-Scholl-Hoch-
schule“. 11 Sept. 1950. HStA, EA
3/203, bundle 73, document 8a;
Inge Scholl: Errichtung der gemein-
nützigen Stiftung „Geschwister-
Scholl-Hochschule“. 9 Oct. 1950.
HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 73, docu-
ment 9a and Inge Scholl: Errichtung
der gemeinnützigen Stiftung „Ge-
schwister-Scholl-Hochschule“. 25
Oct. 1950. HStA, EA 3/203, bundle
73, document 12.
452 Inge Scholl: Errichtung der ge-
meinnützigen Stiftung „Geschwister-
Scholl-Hochschule“. 9 Nov. 1950.
HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 73, appen-
dix to document 13 and Inge Scholl:
Errichtung der gemeinnützigen „Ge-
schwister-Scholl-Stiftung“. 5 Dec.
1950. BHA, HfG records, folder 29.
453 Inge Scholl: Letter to the Würt-
temberg-Baden ministry of education
and the arts. 11 Sept. 1950. HStA,
EA 3/203, bundle 73, document 8.
454 The sections refer to the author-
ized version of 5 Dec. 1950.
455 Inge Scholl: Letter to the Würt-
temberg-Baden ministry of education
and the arts. 11 Sept. 1950. HStA,
EA 3/203, bundle 73, document 8.
456 Inge Scholl: Verfassung der Stif-
tung „Geschwister-Scholl-Hoch-
schule“. 8 July 1950. HStA, EA
3/203, bundle 73, appendix to docu-
ment 4.
457 Inge Scholl: Letter to the Würt-
temberg-Baden ministry of education
and the arts. 11 Sept. 1950. HStA,
EA 3/203, bundle 73, document 8.
458 Inge Scholl: Letter to Shepard
Stone. 7 Aug. 1950. HfG, file 433.
459 Max Bill: Letter to Walter Gropi-
us. 17 Aug. 1950. BHA, Gropius es-
tate, Bill-Gropius correspondence.
460 Inge Scholl: Letter to Max Bill.
5 Oct. 1950. HfG, file 556. – On the
kreis liaison officers cf. Hermann-
Josef Rupieper (see note 157) 83–
109.
461 Re this and what follows cf.: J.F.
Gillen (see note 307) 10 f.
462 Cf. Ulrich M. Bausch (see note
236) 149–152.
463 Presumably the Dr. Albert Rester
quoted in the expert opinion and
wrongly described as “editor of
Ulmer Nachrichten“ is identical with
the subeditor of this paper, named
Dr. Albert Riester, whose smear cam-
paign damaged the college project
considerably in the summer of 1951.
464 Inge Scholl: Letter to Shepard
Stone. 5 Oct. 1950. HfG, file 433 and
Inge Scholl: Letter to Max Bill. 5 Oct.
1950. HfG, file 556.
465 Max Bill: Letter to Inge Scholl.
7 Sept. 1950. HfG, file 556.
466 Max Bill: Letter to Inge Scholl,
Otl Aicher. 7 Sept. 1950. HfG, file
556.
467 Otl Aicher: “Bildung hat ihre
Nachteile“, in: Ulmer Monatsspiegel
9/1950, 3 f.
468 Inge Scholl: Letter to Shepard
Stone. 5 Oct. 1950. HfG, file 433.
469 Kongreß für studentische
Gemeinschaftserziehung und Studi-
um generale: Denkschrift über die
Arbeiten und Ziele des Kongresses
für studentische Gemeinschaftserzie-
hung und Studium generale. n. d.
October 1950. HfG, unlisted file.
470 Hans Werner Richter: Anfänge
der „Geschwister Scholl“ Hoch-
schule. n. d. PARI.
471 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Aktennotiz
zum 2.7.1988. 2 July 1988. PARI.
472 Inge Scholl: Letter to Hans Wer-
ner Richter. 26 Sept. 1950. HWR. –
Inge Scholl’s remark on 13 Dec. 1950
also shows how uninvolved Hans
Werner Richter was in the planning
sessions after that date: “The foun-
dation has been authorized by the
ministry of education and the arts,
you’ve no idea what that involves.“
Inge Scholl: Letter to Hans Werner
Richter. 13 Dec. 1950. HWR.
473 Otl Aicher: Letter to Max Bill.
5 Oct. 1950. HfG, file 556.
474 Walter Dirks: “Der restaurative
Charakter der Epoche“, in: Frankfur-
ter Hefte 9/1950, 942–954.
475 Inge Scholl: Letter to Shepard
Stone. 5 Oct. 1950. HfG, file 433.
476 Hans-Peter Schwarz, Die Ära
Adenauer 1949–1957: Gründerjahre
der Republik, (= Geschichte der
Bundesrepublik Deutschland, vol. 2)
Stuttgart, Wiesbaden 1981, 211.
477 Kurt Sontheimer (see note 118)
136.
478 Anselm Doering-Manteuffel (see
note 255) 210.
479 Hellmut Becker: Letter to Inge
Scholl. 17 Oct. 1950. BHA, HfG
records, folder 19.
480 Wissenschaftliche Arbeit an der
„Geschwister-Scholl-Hochschule“. n.
d. 1950. BHA, HfG records, folder 19.
481 Cf. Max Bill: Letter to Otl Aicher.
27 Nov. 1950. HfG, file 556 and Otl
Aicher: Letter to Max Bill. 23 Nov.
1950. HfG, file 556.
482 Otl Aicher: Letter to Max Bill.
17 Oct. 1950. HfG, file 556.
483 Ministerial Councillor Dr. Rupp:
Betr.: Geschw. Scholl-Hochschule.
19 Oct. 1950. HStA, EA 3/203, bun-
dle 73, document 11; Württemberg-
Baden ministry of education and the
arts: Aktenvermerk U I 2799. 27 Oct.
1950. HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 73,
document 12a and Württemberg-
Baden ministry of education and the
arts: Zu U I 2799. 11 Nov. 1950.
HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 73, docu-
ment 12b.
484 Inge Scholl: Letter to Hellmut
Becker. 29 Dec. 1950. BHA, HfG
records, folder 19.
485 Theodor Bäuerle: Verfügung.
13 Dec. 1950. HStA, EA 3/203, bun-
dle 73, document 16. – Theodor Bäu-
erle as the assistant department
director at the ministry of education
and the arts had given the opening
address at the Ulm Adult Education
Center on 24 Apr. 1946. My thanks
for this information to Barbara
Schüler.
486 Benjamin J. Buttenwieser: Letter
to Inge Scholl .29 Dec. 1950. HfG,
file 433.
487 J.F. Gillen (see note 307) 8; for
what follows, see 16.
488 J.F. Gillen (see note 307) 20.
489 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Letter to 447
the Friends of the Geschwister-
Scholl-Stiftung. 30 June 1952. BA.
490 Cf. René Spitz (see note 26),
446–451.
491 Inge Scholl: Letter to Hellmut
Becker. 9 Jan. 1951. BHA, HfG
records, folder 19.– On the cultural
involvement of the National Associa-
tion of German Industry BDI cf. Wer-
ner Bührer: “Der Kulturkreis im Bun-
desverband der Deutschen Industrie
und die ‚kulturelle Modernisierung‘
der Bundesrepublik in den 50er Jah-
ren“, in: Axel Schildt, Arnold Sywot-
tek (eds.) (see note 19) 583–595.
492 Edgar Hotz: “Erste Ausstellung
neuzeitlicher Gebrauchsgeräte aus
USA“, in: Industrie und Handwerk
schaffen neues Hausgerät in USA.
Catalog of the exhibition in the Lan-
desgewerbeamt Stuttgart 20 Mar.–
25 Apr. 1951. Stuttgart 1951, n. p.
493 The application itself has not
been preserved. As to its date, cf.
Fritz Schäffer: Letter to the Ge-
schwister-Scholl-Stiftung. 30 May
1951. HfG, unlisted file.
494 H. Heinrich: Letter to Hellmut
Becker. 11 Jan. 1951. BHA, HfG
records, folder 19.
495 Inge Scholl: Letter to Ministerial
Councillor Dr. Rupp. 12 Jan. 1951.
HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 73, docu-
ment 17a.
496 Dr. Rupp: Letter to Inge Scholl.
24 Jan. 1951. HStA, EA 3/203, bun-
dle 73, document 20
497 Bundesanzeiger 106/6 June
1951, 2f.
498 Fritz Schäffer: Letter to the
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung. 30
May 1951. HfG, unlisted file
and Fritz Schäffer: Letter to the
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung. 30
June 1951. HfG, unlisted file .
499 Permanent conference of the
Federal German Länder ministers of
education and the arts: Letter to the
Württemberg-Baden ministry of edu-
cation and the arts. 7 Feb. 1951.
HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 73, docu-
ment 24; Dr. Wende: Letter to Mini-
sterial Councillor Dr. Kaufmann. 21
Feb. 1951. HStA, EA 3/203, bundle
73, document 26 and Dr. Löffler: Let-
ter to Dr. Wende. 1 Mar. 1951. HStA,
EA 3/203, bundle 73, document 27.
500 Gotthilf Schenkel: Letter to the
federal ministry of the interior. 21
Feb. 1951. HStA, EA 3/203, bundle
73, document 25.
501 Hellmut Becker: Letter to Erich
Wende. 13 Feb. 1951. BHA, HfG
records, folder 19 and Dr. Wende:
Letter to Hellmut Becker. 8 Feb. 1951.
BHA, HfG records, folder 19.
502 Inge Scholl: Letter to Gotthilf
Schenkel. 5 Mar. 1951. HStA, EA
3/203, bundle 73, document 28.
503 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Total cost estimate. 15 Feb. 1951.
HfG, file 433.
 References
448 504 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Gesamtkostenplan. 15 Feb. 1951.
HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 73, appen-
dix to document 28 and Inge Scholl:
Letter to Gotthilf Schenkel. 5 Mar.
1951. HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 73,
document 28.
505 Inge Scholl: Letter to Gotthilf
Schenkel. 5 Mar. 1951. HStA, EA
3/203, bundle 73, document 28.
506 Max Bill: Letter to Walter Gro-
pius. 16 Mar. 1951. BHA, Gropius
estate, Bill-Gropius correspondence;
and Otl Aicher: Letter to Max Bill.
13 Apr. 1951. HfG, file 556.
507 Inge Scholl: Letter to Hellmut
Becker. 20.5.1951. BHA, HfG records,
folder 19.
508 Inge Scholl: Letter to Max Bill.
23 May 1951. HfG, file 556.
509 Cf. Walther Hinsch: Letter to
Hermann Veit. 21 June 1951. HStA,
EA 3/203, bundle 73, document 37,
enclosure 2.
510 John J. McCloy: Cover letter to
Secretary of State Dean Acheson
with 1 Jan.–31 Mar. 1951 report, in:
Erika J. and Heinz-Dietrich Fischer
(see note 292) 113–120, here: 118.
511 James Morgan Read: Former
commissioner for education in Con-
necticut, graduate (Ph. D.) of the Phi-
lipps-Universität Marburg, professor
of education and, beginning in Jan.
1950, head of HICOG’s dept. of edu-
cation and culture. Cf. Hermann-
Josef Rupieper (see note 157) 141.
512 Hermann-Josef Rupieper (see
note 157) 141 f.
513 Inge Scholl: Letter to Hellmut
Becker. 20 May 1951. BHA, HfG
records, folder 19.
514 Benjamin J. Buttenwieser: Letter
to Inge Scholl. 23 May 1951. HfG, file
94.
515 Inge Scholl: Letter to Gotthilf
Schenkel. 12 June 1951. HStA, EA
3/203, bundle 73, document 30.
516 DVP: renamed DVP/FDP as of
Mar. 1952, and FDP/DVP as of 20
Nov. 1952.
517 Max Bill: Letter to Inge Scholl. 4
June 1951. HfG, unlisted file.
518 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung: Der
finanzielle Aufbau der Geschwister-
Scholl-Stiftung. n. d. 18 June 1951.
HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 73, docu-
ment 34, enclosure 1.
519 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung: Der
finanzielle Aufbau der Geschwister-
Scholl Stiftung. n. d. 18 June 1951.
HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 73, docu-
ment 34, enclosure 1.
520 Edgar Hotz: Letter to Gotthilf
Schenkel. 15 June 1951. HStA, EA
3/203, bundle 73, document 31.
521 Gotthilf Schenkel: Letter to Lud-
wig Erhard. 25 June 1951. STU, H
Pfizer, HfG.
522 Cf. City of Ulm: § 800 Geschwis-
ter-Scholl-Stiftung, Unterstützung
ihrer Pläne zur Errichtung eines For-
schungsinstituts für Produktform und
einer Hochschule für Gestaltung. 24
July 1951. STU, B 005/5, vol. 369,
fiche 10, pp. 68–80.
523 Theodor Pfizer: Letter to the
Württemberg-Baden council of min-
isters. 27 June 1951. HStA, EA
3/203, bundle 73, attached to docu-
ment 39.
524 Gotthilf Schenkel: Letter to the
ministries of Württemberg-Baden. 26
June 1951. HStA, EA 3/203, bundle
73, document 37.
525 Württemberg-Baden State
Chancellery: Twenty-fourth session
of the council of ministers. 29 June
1951. HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 73,
appendix to document 37; and Theo-
dor Pfizer: Anruf von Herrn Rupp. 30
June 1951. STU, H Pfizer, HfG.
526 Undated memo. July 1951. HfG,
unlisted file.
527 Inge Scholl: Letter to Theodor
Pfizer. 10 July 1951. STU, H Pfizer,
HfG.
528 Cf. Inge Scholl: Letter to Theo-
dor Pfizer. 10 July 1951. STU, H Pfiz-
er, HfG.
529 City of Ulm: § 800 Geschwister-
Scholl-Stiftung, Unterstützung ihrer
Pläne zur Errichtung eines For-
schungsinstituts für Produktform und
einer Hochschule für Gestaltung. 24
July 1951. STU, B 005/5, vol. 369,
fiche 10, pp. 68–80.
530 Ludwig Erhard: Letter to Theo-
dor Pfizer. 22 June 1951. STU, H Pfiz-
er, HfG.
531 Dr. Kitz: Letter to the Geschwis-
ter-Scholl-Stiftung. 17 Aug. 1951.
STU, H Pfizer, HfG.
532 Hellmut Becker: Letter to Hein-
rich Röhreke. 11 Aug. 1951. BHA,
HfG records, folder 19.
533 Walther Hinsch: Letter to Her-
mann Veit. 21 June 1951. HStA, EA
3/203, bundle 73, document 37,
appendix 2.
534 Mr. Burkart: Letter to Gotthilf
Schenkel. 13 July 1951. HStA, EA
3/203, bundle 73, document 45.
535 Hellmut Becker: Telefonge-
spräch mit Ministerialrat Hinsch,
Bonn. 14 July 1951. BHA, HfG
records, folder 19.
536 Cf. Hans Werner Richter: Anfän-
ge der „Geschwister Scholl“ Hoch-
schule. n. d. PARI.
537 Dr. Linder: Letter to the Würt-
temberg-Baden ministry of state.
1 Sept. 1951. HStA, EA 3/203, bun-
dle 73, document 51.
538 Württemberg-Baden ministry of
state: Thirty-second session of the
council of ministers. 3 Sept. 1951.
HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 73, appen-
dix to document 52; Dr. Franz: Letter
to the Württemberg-Baden represen-
tative agency in Bonn. 3 Sept. 1951.
HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 73, docu-
ment 53 and Dr. Linder: Letter to Dr.
Burkhard. 3 Sept. 1951. HfG, file 433.
539 George P. Hays: Grant-in-aid
award. 28 June 1951. HfG, file 433.
540 Cf. Hellmut Becker: Anmerkun-
gen für Unterredung Inge Scholl und
Herr Bill in Stuttgart am Freitag den
19. Okt. 51. n. d. October 1951. HfG,
file 556; Geschwister-Scholl-Stif-
tung: Haushaltsplan. 20 Nov. 1951.
HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 73, appen-
dix 3 to document 88 and 3438.
541 Inge Scholl: Letter to Max Bill.
30 Sept. 1951. HfG, file 556.
542 Inge Scholl: Letter to Hellmut
Becker. 30 Sept. 1951. BHA, HfG
records, folder 19.
543 Inge Scholl: Letter to Max Bill.
30 Sept. 1951. HfG, file 556.
544 Dr. Frank: Letter to the Württem-
berg-Baden Ministries of State and
of Education and the Arts. 4 Sept.
1951. HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 73,
document 54.
545 Inge Scholl: Letter to Hellmut
Becker. 30 Sept. 1951. BHA, HfG
records, folder 19.
546 Foundation‘s council of the
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung: Proto-
koll. 26 Sept. 1951. HfG, file 524.
547 Personal data on the informer cf.
Inge Scholl: Wer ist Dr. Albert Ries-
ter? n. d. Sept. 1951. HfG, file 524;
Inge Scholl: Erklärung zu einer ano-
nymen Denunziation gegen die
Familie Scholl. 25 Sept. 1951. HfG,
file 524 and Theodor Pfizer: Letter to
Otto Lenz. 20 Oct. 1951. HfG, file
524.
548 Albert Riester: “Kann in Ulm eine
Hochschule errichtet werden? In:
Ulmer Nachrichten, 14 Dec. 1950.
549 Inge Scholl: Letter to Hellmut
Becker. 9 Jan. 1951. BHA, HfG
records, folder 19.
550 (Riester, Albert): Zusammenfas-
sung über Oberbürgermeister a.D.
Scholl und Tochter Inge Scholl.
19 Sept. 1951. HfG, file 524; (Albert
Riester): Bericht. Geheim! 27 Sept.
1951. HfG, file 524.
551 (Albert Riester): Abschrift! n. d.
September 1951. HfG, file 524.
552 Inge Scholl: Letter to Max Bill.
24 Nov. 1951. HfG, file 556; Theodor
Pfizer: Letter to Otto Lenz. 20 Oct.
1951. HfG, file 524; Theodor Pfizer:
Letter to Dr. Kitz. 7 Dec. 1951. STU, H
Pfizer, HfG.
553 Theodor Pfizer: Letter to Inge
Scholl. 12 Dec. 1951. STU, H Pfizer,
HfG.
554 Inge Scholl: Letter to Hellmut
Becker. 8 Dec. 1951. BHA, HfG
records, folder 19.
555 Cf. Inge Aicher-Scholl: Draft. 1
Sept. 1952. BHA, HfG records, folder
20.
556 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Betr.: Ent-
wicklung der Beziehungen der Ge-
schwister-Scholl-Stiftung zur Wirt-
schaftsvereinigung Eisen- und Stahl-
industrie in Düsseldorf. 29 Nov.
1952. BHA, HfG records, folder 20.
557 Hellmut Becker: “Begegnungen“,
in: Ein Buch der Freunde (see note
305) 22–26, here: 23f.
558 Axel von den Bussche: Letter to
Hellmut Becker. 3 June 1953. BHA.
HfG records, folder 21.
559 Cf. the memo about a conversa-
tion on 27 Nov. 1953 (= Inge Aicher-
Scholl: Aktennotiz. 27 Nov. 1953.
HfG, file 524).
560 Günther Schlensag: Letter to
Hellmut Becker. 22 Feb. 1954. BHA,
HfG records, folder 22.
561 Hellmut Becker: Letter to Sigis-
mund Baron von Braun. 29 Mar.
1952. BHA, HfG records, folder 20.
562 City of Ulm auditing office: Let-
ter to Theodor Pfizer. 23 Nov. 1951.
STU, B 310/21/1.
563 Dr. Rupp: Letter to Inge Scholl.
16 Oct. 1951. PAF.
564 Karl Brachat: Letter to Gotthilf
Schenkel. 30 Oct. 1951. HStA, EA
3/203, bundle 73, document 62. Cf.
Max Bill: “Bei uns kann man kein
Maler werden“, in: Die Neue Zeitung,
1 Sept. 1951. Response to the article:
Hermann Brachert: Letter to Max Bill.
25 Sept. 1951. HfG, file 556.
565 Richard Döcker: Letter to Inge
Scholl. 5 Nov. 1951. HfG, file 556.
566 Württemberg-Baden ministry of
education and the arts: Betr.: Ge-
schw. Scholl-Stiftung. 20 Oct. 1951.
HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 73, docu-
ment 59.
567 Max Bill: Letter to Inge Scholl. 9
Nov. 1951. HfG, file 556.
568 Reprinted in Erika J. and Heinz-
Dietrich Fischer (see note 292) ca.
155 ff.
569 John J. McCloy: Cover letter to
Secretary of State Dean Acheson
with the 1 July–30 Sept. 1951 report,
in: Erika J. and Heinz-Dietrich Fischer
(see note 292) 113–120, here: 118.
570 Hans-Peter Schwartz (see note
475) 350.
571 Hermann-Josef Rupieper (see
note 157) 170 f.
572 Cf. Inge Aicher-Scholl: Bespre-
chung im Bundesbahnhotel Ulm am
8.10.1951. n. d. October 1951. HfG,
file 433.
573 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Haushaltsplan. 20 Nov. 1951. HStA,
EA 3/203, bundle 73, appended to
document 67; Geschwister-Scholl-
Stiftung: Erläuterungen zu Ziff. II a
des Etats 11. April 1952–31. März
1953. 20 Nov. 1951. HStA, EA 3/203,
bundle 73, appended to document
67; Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Gesamtkostenplan. 15 Nov. 1951.
HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 73, ap-
pended to document 67; Hellmut
Becker: Anmerkungen für Unterre-
dung Inge Scholl und Herr Bill in
Stuttgart an Freitag den 19. Okt. 51.
n. d. October 1951. HfG, file 556;
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung: Auf-
bauetat. 20 Nov. 1951. HStA, EA
3/203, bundle 73, appended to doc-
ument 67; Inge Scholl: Letter to the
Württemberg-Baden ministry of edu-
cation and the arts. 22 Nov. 1951.
HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 73, docu-
ment 67; Geschwister-Scholl-Stif-
tung: Haushaltsplan. 20 Nov. 1951.
HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 73, appen-
dix 3 to document 88; Inge Scholl:
Letter to minister Hermann Veit. 20
Nov. 1951. STU, H Pfizer, HfG
574 Inge Scholl: Letter to Hellmut
Becker. 24 Nov. 1951. BHA, HfG
records, folder 19.
575 Inge Scholl: Letter to Hellmut
Becker. 24 Nov. 1951. BHA, HfG
records, folder 19.
576 Max Bill: Letter to Edgar Hotz.
30 Nov. 1951. HfG, file 556.
577 Inge Scholl: Letter to Max Bill.
24 Nov. 1951. HfG, file 556.
578 Württemberg-Baden Landtag,
1st electoral period: Landtagsdruck-
sache Beilage 900. 5.12.1951. PABW;
finance committee of the Württem-
berg-Baden Landtag: Auszug. 8 Jan.
1952. HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 73,
document 82.
579 Inge Scholl: Letter to Gotthilf
Schenkel. 1 Feb. 1951. HStA, EA
3/203, bundle 73, document 21.
580 Inge Scholl: Berufung des Bei-
rats der Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung.
22 June 1951. HfG, file 564.
581 Advisory board of the Geschwis-
ter-Scholl-Stiftung; Beschluß des
Beirats der Geschwister-Scholl-Stif-
tung. 24 June 1951. HStA, EA 3/203,
bundle 75. In the foundation and the
HfG there seems to have been uncer-
tainty later as to who was part of the
complete board of trustees, because
in its publications a vague “et al.“ was
usually placed at the head of the list.
582 Inge Scholl: Letter to Shepard
Stone. 31 Dec. 1951. HfG, file 433.
583 Dr. Kitz: Undated memo. Octo-
ber 1951. STU, H Pfizer, HfG.
584 Gotthilf Schenkel: Letter to the
Württemberg-Baden ministry of
finance. 3 Dec. 1951. HStA, EA
3/203, bundle 73, document 69.
585 Dr. Albrecht: Letter to J.C. Cun-
ningham. 28 Dec. 1951. HStA, EA
3/203, bundle 73, appended to doc-
ument 89.
586 Minutes of the Baden-Württem-
berg Landtag, 1st electoral period,
43rd plenary session, 5 Dec. 1951,
page 1696. PABW.
587 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Hochschule für Gestaltung. For-
schungsinstitut für Produktform. n. d.
June -August 1951. HfG, unlisted file;
as regards dating cf. Erich Kuby: Let-
ter to Hellmut Becker. 24 June 1951.
BHA, HfG records, folder 19.
588 Geschwister- Scholl- Stiftung:
Hochschule für Gestaltung / For-
schungsinstitut für Produktform /
Auszüge aus Gutachten und Briefen.
n. d. August 1951. HfG, unlisted file.
589 Otl Aicher: Letter to Theodor
Pfizer. 29 Jan. 1951. STU, H Pfizer,
HfG.
590 Max Bill: Letter to Walter Gropi-
us. 9 Mar. 1951. BHA, Gropius estate,
Bill-Gropius correspondence.
591 Eva von Seckendorff (see note
95) 42.
592 Otl Aicher: Letter to Max Bill.
13 Apr. 1951. HfG, file 556.
593 Max Bill: Letter to Otl Aicher.
17 Apr. 1951. HfG, file 556.
594 Inge Scholl emphasized Her-
mann Josef Abs‘ support of her pro-
ject because “he had the courage to
trust us even in the early beginnings,
in 1950; and it is to him (handwrit-
ten: mostly; author’s note) that we
owe the great success of the fund-
raising campaign among the private
sector“; Inge Scholl: Letter to the
Friends of the Geschwister-Scholl-
Stiftung. n. d. January 1952. HfG,
unlisted file.
595 Hellmut Becker: Letter to Direc-
tor Pirker. 15 May 1951. BHA, HfG
records, folder 19.
596 Erich Kuby: Letter to Hellmut
Becker. 24 June 1951. BHA, HfG
records, folder 19.
597 Walter Gropius: Letter to Max
Bill. 13 Mar. 1951. BHA, Gropius es-
tate, Bill-Gropius correspondence.
598 Max Bill: Letter to Walter Gropi-
us. 16 Mar. 1951. BHA, Gropius es-
tate, Bill-Gropius correspondence.
599 Walter Gropius: Letter to Max
Bill. 28 Nov. 1951. BHA, Gropius
estate, correspondence Bill-Gropius.
600 Max Bill: Letter to Inge Scholl.
23 Apr. 1952. HfG, file 556.
601 Inge Scholl: Letter to Max Bill.
24 Apr. 1952. HfG, file 556.
602 Otl Aicher: “Bauhaus und Ulm“,
in: ibid., Die Welt als Entwurf (see
note 99), 87–115, here: 87.
603 Württemberg-Baden Landtag,
2nd electoral period: Landtagsdruck-
sache Beilage II 956. 11 Jan. 1952.
PABW.
604 Minutes of the Baden-Württem-
berg Landtag, 2nd electoral period,
47th plenary session, 16 Jan. 1952,
page 1832. PABW.
605 Gotthilf Schenkel: Letter to John
J. McCloy. 21 Jan. 1952. HStA, EA
3/203, bundle 73, document 77.
606 Günther Baron von Pechmann:
Betr.: Geschwister Scholl-Stiftung,
Ulm a/D – Kultministerium Württem-
berg-Baden. 23 Jan. 1952. HStA, EA
3/203, bundle 73, document 87.
607 Günther Baron von Pechmann:
Stellungnahme. 16 Feb. 1952. HStA,
EA 3/203, bundle 73, appendix 2 to
document 88.
608 Richard Döcker: Letter to the
rector of the Technische Hochschule
Stuttgart. 4 Feb. 1952. HStA, EA
3/203, bundle 73, appendix to docu-
ment 84.
609 Re what follows cf. Inge Aicher-
Scholl: Letter to Gerd H. Müller. 12
Oct. 1952. HStA, EA 3/203, bundle
74, document 110.
610 Until March 1952 the party was
called DVP; through 20 Nov. 1952 it
was called DVP/FDP, and finally
FDP/DVP.
611 Cf. Theodor Pfizer: Letter to Gerd
H. Müller. 3 Nov. 1952. HStA, EA
3/203, bundle 74, document 115.
612 Württemberg-Baden ministry
of education and the arts: Betr.: Ge-
schwister Scholl-Stiftung. 16 Jan.
1952. HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 73,
document 76.
613 Carl Schaefer: Letter to the Würt-
temberg-Baden ministry of education
and the arts. 18 Feb. 1952. HStA, EA
3/203, bundle 73, appendix 1 to
document 88.
614 Gerd H. Müller: Letter. 12 Jan.
1952. HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 73,
document 75.
615 Walter Bauer: Letter to Theodor
Heuss. 20 Feb. 1952. BA.
616 Theodor Heuss: Letter to Walter
Bauer. 22 Feb.1952. BA.
617 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Daten zur Besprechung mit Finanz-
minister Dr. Frank. 26 Feb. 1952.
STU, H Pfizer, HfG.
618 The federal minister for the Mar-
shall Plan informed the ECA special
mission for Germany on 28 Dec.
1951 that a total of DM 300,000
would be made available to the foun-
dation from federal budgetary ap-
propriations and ERP funds of the
third section; cf. document 2055.
Subsequently the Mutual Security
Agency MSA authorized that the fed-
eral ministry receive the requested
DM 200,000 for the Marshall Plan
from the ECA investment program,
research division, 3d section. The
foundation was given the ECA num-
ber 377; cf. F.L. Mayer: Letter to Dr.
Albrecht. 27 Mar. 1952. HStA, EA
3/203, bundle 73, appendix to docu-
ment 95.
619 Walther Hinsch: Letter to the
Württemberg-Baden minister of
finance. 25 Jan. 1952. HStA, EA
3/203, bundle 73, appendix to docu-
ment 89 and Gerd H. Müller: Letter
to Inge Scholl. 12 Mar. 1952. HStA,
EA 3/203, bundle 73, document 90.
620 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Erklärung.
3 June 1953. HfG, file 433 and Inge
Scholl: Letter to Theodor Pfizer. 26
Feb. 1952. STU, H Pfizer, HfG.
621 Max Bill: Letter to Inge Scholl.
11 Jan. 1952. HfG, file 556.
622 Max Bill: Letter to Inge Scholl.
22 Jan. 1952. HfG, file 556.
623 Inge Scholl: Letter to Inge
Scholl. 21 Mar. 1952. HStA, EA
3/203, bundle 73, document 91.
624 Hellmut Becker: Letter to Max
Bill. 22 Mar. 1952. BHA, HfG records,
folder 20.
625 Theodor Pfizer: Letter to Hellmut
Becker. 16 Apr. 1952. STU, H Pfizer,
HfG.
626 Inge Scholl: Letter to Max Bill.
27 Mar. 1952. HfG, file 556.
627 Hermann-Josef Rupieper (see
note 157) 110.
628 Regarding what follows cf. Erika
J. and Heinz-Dietrich Fischer, Reden
(see note 292) 205–211.
629 Inge Scholl: Letter to Michael P.
Balla. 15 Jan. 1952. HfG, file 433.
630 Gotthilf Schenkel: Letter to John
J. McCloy. 21 Jan. 1952. HStA, EA
3/203, bundle 73, document 77.
631 Inge Scholl: Letter to Max Bill.
25 Feb. 1952. HfG, file 556.
632 John J. McCloy: Letter to the
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung. 9 Apr.
1952. HfG, file 433 and Inge Scholl:
Letter to Max Bill. 17 Apr. 1952. HfG,
file 556.
633 Cf. Erika J. and Heinz-Dietrich
Fischer (see note 360) 293.
634 Max Bill: Letter to Walter Gro-
pius. 15 Apr. 1952. BHA, Gropius
estate, Bill-Gropius correspondence.
635 Cf. Erika J. und Heinz-Dietrich
Fischer (see note 360), 297.
636 Max Bill: Fragen von Mr.
McCloy. 15 Apr. 1952. BHA, Gropius
estate, Bill-Gropius correspondence.
637 Max Bill: Letter to Inge Scholl.
18 Apr. 1952. HfG, file 556.
638 Max Bill: Letter to Walter Gro-
pius. 18 Apr. 1952. BHA, Gropius
estate, Bill-Gropius correspondence.
639 Max Bill: Antworten auf 5 Fra-
gen von Mr. McCloy und 4 ergän-
zende Punkte. 18 Apr. 1952. BHA,
Gropius estate, Bill-Gropius corre-
spondence and Max Bill: Fragen von
Mr. McCloy. 15 Apr. 1952. BHA, Gro-
pius estate, Bill-Gropius correspon-
dence.
640 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Unterlagen
für die Besprechung mit Mr. McCloy.
n. d. April 1952. HfG, unlisted file.
641 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Erfahrungen.
n. d. March-April 1952. HfG, unlisted
file.
642 Inge Scholl: Letter to Max Bill.
24 Apr. 1952. HfG, file 556.
643 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Letter to
the friends of the Geschwister-Scholl-
Stiftung. 30 June 1952. BA and Inge
Aicher-Scholl: Letter to the foreign
friends of the Geschwister-Scholl-Stif-
tung. 15 Sept. 1952. HfG, unlisted file.
644 Hellmut Becker: Letter to Ar-
no Hennig. 4 May 1952. BHA, HfG
records, folder 20 and Max Bill: Let- 449
ter to Walter Gropius. 2 May 1952.
BHA, Gropius estate, Bill-Gropius
correspondence.
645 Cf. Inge Aicher-Scholl: Akten-
bericht zum Besuch Mr. Selke‘s am
8. Dezember 1952 in Ulm. 8 Dec.
1952. HfG, file 433; John J. McCloy:
Stiftungsurkunde. 23 June 1952.
HfG, file 433; John J. McCloy: Stif-
tungsurkunde. n. d. 1952. HfG, file
433; and Geschwister-Scholl-Stif-
tung: Kostenvoranschlag. 10 May
1952. HfG, file 433.
646 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Letter to
Hellmut Becker. 7 June 1952. BHA,
HfG records, folder 20.
647 Otl Aicher, Inge Aicher-Scholl:
Letter to friends and acquaintances.
June 1952. BA.
648 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Angaben für
die Presse durchgegeben an Mr.
Kimentahl, HICOG, mehlem. 20 June
1952. HfG, unlisted file.
649 Ansprache des amerikanischen
Hochkommissars, Mr. John J.
McCloy, anläßlich der Überreichung
einer Geldspende zur Unterstützung
der Hochschule für Gestaltung in
Ulm. 23 June 1952. PABW.
650 Phone conversation with the
author, 21 Jan. 1997.
651 31 July 1952, in Erika J. and
Heinz-Dietrich Fischer (see note
292) 147–157.
652 Hans-Peter Schwarz: Die Ära
Adenauer (see note 475) 164.
653 John J. McCloy: Stiftungsur-
kunde. 23 June 1952. HfG, file 433
and John J. McCloy: Grant-in-aid
award. 23 June 1952. PAH, DOK 8.
654 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Letter to
the Friends of the Geschwister-
Scholl-Stiftung. 30 June 1952.
BA.
655 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Letter to the
foreign friends of the Geschwister-
Scholl-Stiftung. 15 Sept. 1952. HfG,
unlisted file.
656 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Letter to
Max Bill. 13 June 1952. HfG, file 556.
657 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Letter to
Gotthilf Schenkel. 1 July 1952. HStA,
EA 3/203, bundle 73; Inge Aicher-
Scholl: Letter to Gerd H. Müller. 2
July 1952. HStA, EA 3/203, bundle
73, document 100.
658 Gotthilf Schenkel: Letter to the
Württemberg-Baden ministry of
state. 9 Apr. 1952. HStA, EA 3/203,
bundle 73, document 88a.
659 Karl Frank: Letter to the Würt-
temberg-Baden ministry of state.
5 May 1952. HStA, EA 3/203, bundle
73, document 94.
660 Dr. Schlösser: Letter to Würt-
temberg-Baden ministry of education
and the arts. 24 Apr. 1952. HStA, EA
3/203, bundle 73, document 93.
661 Cf. Eberhard Konstanzer, Die
Entstehung des Landes Baden-Würt-
 References
450 temberg 1945–1952. Unter beson-
derer Berücksichtigung des Landes
Württemberg-Hohenzollern, (= Diss.
Phil. Tübingen) Karlsruhe 1969;
Theodor Eschenburg: “Die Entste-
hung Baden-Württembergs“, in:
Hans-Georg Wehling (ed.), Baden-
Württemberg. Eine politische Land-
eskunde, Stuttgart 1975, 41–63.
662 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm
(Donau). n. d. July 1952. HfG, un-
listed file.
663 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Hochschule für Gestaltung / For-
schungsinstitut für Produktform /
Auszüge aus Gutachten und Briefen.
n. d. August 1952. HfG, unlisted file.
664 Max Bill: Outline. 12 Apr. 1952.
HfG, unlisted file.
665 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Letter to
Hans Bott. 10 July 1952. BA.
666 Max Bill: Undated position
paper. August–December 1952. HfG,
file 556, incidentally the only docu-
ment written by Max Bill I know that
is not entirely in lowercase. Because
of the content and his signature,
there is no doubt that Max Bill is the
author.
667 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Letter to
Gerd H. Müller. 4 Oct. 1952. HStA,
EA 3/203, bundle 74, document 107.
668 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Letter to
Max Bill. 8 Sept. 1952. HfG, unlisted
file.
669 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Letter to
Max Bill. 11 Sept. 1952. HfG, unlisted
file.
670 Max Bill: Letter to Inge Aicher-
Scholl. 19 Dec. 1952. HfG, unlisted
file.
671 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Letter to Max
Bill. 24 Dec. 1952. HfG, unlisted file.
672 Gotthilf Schenkel: Letter to the
Baden-Württemberg ministry of
state. 20 Oct. 1952. HStA, EA 3/203,
bundle 74, document 111.
673 Karl Frank: Letter to the Baden-
Württemberg ministry of state. 31
Oct. 1952. HStA, EA 3/203, bundle
74, document 114.
674 Gerd H. Müller: Notiz für Gotthilf
Schenkel. 15 Nov. 1952. HStA, EA
3/203, bundle 74, document 121.
675 Karl Frank: Letter to the Baden-
Württemberg ministry of state.
7 Nov. 1952. HStA, EA 3/203, bun-
dle 74, document 116.
676 Hermann Veit: Letter to the
Baden-Württemberg ministry of
state. 10 Nov. 1952. HStA, EA 3/203,
bundle 74, document 117.
677 Karl Frank: Letter to the Baden-
Württemberg ministry of state. 17
Nov. 1952. HStA, EA 3/203, bundle
74, document 122.
678 Walther Hinsch: Letter to Edgar
Hotz. 11 Nov. 1952. HStA, EA 3/203,
bundle 74, appendix to document
118. The next example is George A.
Selke’s deadline for the release of
the DM 925,000 (20 Jan. 1953). For
this, he also asked for documents
about German matching funds
(DM 700,000) and the Land subsidy;
Inge Aicher-Scholl: Aktenbericht
zum Besuch Mr. Selke‘s am 8. De-
zember 1952 in Ulm. 8 Dec. 1952.
hfg, akte 433.
679 Ludwig Erhard: Letter to the
Baden-Württemberg ministry of edu-
cation and the arts. 24 Sept. 1952.
HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 74, docu-
ment 105.
680 Dr. Schlösser: Letter to the
Baden-Württemberg ministry of edu-
cation and the arts. 18 Nov. 1952.
HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 74, docu-
ment 127 and the Baden-Württem-
berg ministry of state: Auszug aus
dem Protokoll der Ministerratssit-
zung vom 17./18.11.1952. 18 Nov.
1952. HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 74,
document 128.
681 Baden-Württemberg ministry of
education and the arts: Für den
Haushaltsplan. n. d. 18 Nov. 1952.
HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 74, appen-
dix to document 130.
682 Cf. Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Tätigkeitsbericht für das Quartal
Oktober–Dezember 1952. n. d. Janu-
ary 1953. HfG, unlisted file.
683 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Letter to
Gotthilf Schenkel. 26 Nov. 1952.
HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 74, docu-
ment 130.
684 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Bespre-
chung über Terminplanung zwi-
schen Hellmut Becker, Inge Aicher-
Scholl und Otl Aicher in Anwesen-
heit von Walter Zeischegg und Ernst
Scheidegger in Stuttgart am 11.12.
1952. 11 Dec. 1952. BHA, HfG
records, folder 20.
685 The association was registered
in the register of associations of the
Ulm district court, vol. 6, page 175,
no. 287, published in the Staatsan-
zeiger für Baden-Württemberg no. 6
dated 24 Jan. 1953, p. 1 and in the
Amtsblatt für den Stadt- und Land-
kreis Ulm no. 412 dated 22 Jan.
1953. Cf. Gesellschaft der Freunde
der Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Satzung. Niederschrift über die
Gründungs-Versammlung. 17 Dec.
1952. HfG, file 504.
686 Hellmut Becker: Notiz über die
Zeitplanung. 13 Nov. 1952. BHA, HfG
records, folder 20.
687 Cf. Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Daten zur Besprechung mit Finanz-
minister Dr. Frank. 26 Feb. 1952.
STU, H Pfizer, HfG and Finance com-
mittee of the Württemberg-Baden
Landtag, 2nd electoral period: Aus-
zug. 8 Jan. 1952. HStA, EA 3/203,
bundle 73, document 82.
688 City of Ulm: § 2 Beitrag an die
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung. 16 Jan.
1953. STU, B 005/5, vol. 373, fiche 1,
pp. 8–14.
689 Cf. City of Ulm: § 2 Beitrag an
die Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung.
16 Jan. 1953. STU, B 005/5, vol.
373, fiche 1, pp. 8–14 and Hellmut
Becker: Letter to Theodor Pfizer.
14 Jan. 1953. STU, H Pfizer, HfG.
690 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Vortrag vor
dem Gemeinderat am 16.1.1953.
16 Jan. 1953. HfG, unlisted file.
691 Cf. City of Ulm: § 2 Beitrag an
die Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung.
16 Jan. 1953. STU, B 005/5, vol.
373, fiche 1, pp. 8–14.
692 Cf. Inge Aicher-Scholl: Letter to
Max Bill. 21 Jan. 1953. HfG, file 556.
693 Cf. Otto Pfleiderer: Letter to
Theodor Pfizer. 1 Dec. 1952. STU, H
Pfizer, HfG.
694 Cf. Gerd H. Müller: Letter to the
Baden Württemberg ministry of
finance. 24 Dec. 1952. HStA, EA
3/203, bundle 74, document 135. –
When the new state of Baden-Würt-
temberg was formed, it had no
adopted budget for fiscal year
1952/53, which ended on 31 Mar.
1953. Cf. Gerd H. Müller: Letter to
George A. Selke. 15 Jan. 1953. HStA,
EA 3/203, bundle 74, document 142.
695 Cf. Otto Pfleiderer: Aktenver-
merk. 10 Jan. 1953. HStA, EA 3/203,
bundle 74, document 141.
696 George A. Selke: Letter to Gerd
H. Müller. 21 Jan. 1953. HStA, EA
3/203, bundle 74, document 143.
697 Otto Pfleiderer: Letter to Paul
Vowinkel. 12 Jan. 1953. HStA, EA
3/203, bundle 74, appendix to docu-
ment 141.
698 Karl Frank: Letter to Alex Möller.
9 Mar. 1953. HStA, EA 3/203, bun-
dle 74, appendix to document 153.
699 Hearings of the legislative
assembly of the Land of Baden-
Württemberg, 29 Apr. 1953. PABW.
700 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Letter to
Hellmut Becker. 16 March 1953.
BHA, HfG records, folder 21; cf. Gerd
H. Müller: Letter to Inge Aicher-
Scholl. 13 Mar. 1953. HStA, EA
3/203, bundle 74, document 151.
701 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Letter to
Hellmut Becker. 9 Feb. 1953. BHA,
HfG records, folder 21 and Walther
Hinsch: Letter to the Geschwister-
Scholl-Stiftung. 26 Jan. 1953. HStA,
EA 3/203, bundle 74, appendix to
document 149.
702 Dr. Zinkahn: Letter to the
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung. 14 Mar.
1953. BHA, HfG records, folder 21.
703 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Letter to
George A. Selke. 17 Feb. 1953. HfG,
file 433.
704 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Letter to
George A. Selke. 10 Apr. 1953. HfG,
file 433.
705 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Überschlägige Finanzaufstellung zur
Errichtung der Bauten. 4 Mar. 1953.
HfG, file 556 and Geschwister-
Scholl-Stiftung: Aufstellung über die
deutsche Gegensumme. 4 Mar.
1953. HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 74,
appendix to document 148.
706 Cf. Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Kostenvoranschlag nach cbm um-
bautem Raum. 9 Apr. 1953. HStA,
EA 3/203, bundle 74, appendix to
document 155.
707 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Aktenbericht über die Besprechun-
gen mit Herrn Bill v. 27.2.–6.3.53. 13
Mar. 1953. HfG, file 556.
708 Max Bill: Letter to Inge Aicher-
Scholl. 16 Mar. 1953. HfG, unlisted
file.
709 Gerd H. Müller: Letter to Edgar
Hotz. 5 Jan. 1953. BHA, HfG records,
folder 21.
710 Society of Friends of the Ge-
schwister-Scholl-Stiftung: Protokoll.
20 Apr. 1953. HfG, file 504.
711 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Letter to Otl
Aicher. 20 Apr. 1953. HfG, unlisted
file.
712 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Protokoll. 25 Apr. 1953. HStA, EA
3/203, bundle 74, appendix to docu-
ment 157.
713 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Protokoll. 25 Apr. 1953. HStA, EA
3/203, bundle 74, appendix to docu-
ment 157.
714 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Finanzierungsplan. 1 Apr. 1953.
HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 74, appen-
dix to document 157.
715 Gerd H. Müller: Betr.: Sitzung
des Verwaltungsrates der Geschwis-
ter-Scholl-Stiftung am 24.4.1953 in
Ulm. 30 Apr. 1953. HStA, EA 3/203,
bundle 74, document 158.
716 Hermann Glaser (see note 177)
vol. 2, p. 127. – All the illustrations in
this and the following appendix are
from the periodical form, which has
been commenting on developments
in design since 1957, and has in the
process itself come to play a major
role in design history. For his extraor-
dinary support, I should like to
express my special thanks to Karl-
Heinz Krug, himself an HfG graduate
and longtime co-editor of form.
717 Jost Hermand, Kultur im Wie-
deraufbau. Die Bundesrepublik
Deutschland 1945–1965, Munich
1986, 299.
718 ibid. 300 f.
719 ibid. 301.
720 Hermann Glaser (see note 177)
vol. 2, p. 121.
721 Jost Hermand (see note 717)
300.
722 Hermann Glaser (see note 177)
vol. 2, p. 120 f.
723 Spring 1949: the Home Decora-
tion Export exhibition in New York;
the 1951 Milan Triennale: the first
foreign exhibition officially sponsored
by the Federal Republic of Germany;
cf. Karlgeorg Tiemann, Die Werk-
kunstschule in Westdeutschland,
(= Berufserziehung im Handwerk,
vol. 2) Cologne 1953, 19.
724 Hans Eckstein (see note 43) 161.
725 Michael Erlhoff (see note 41) 25.
726 Hans Gugelot: Referat Tokio. n.
d. May 1960. HfG, unlisted file.
727 Inge Scholl: „Eine neue Gründer-
zeit und ihre Gebrauchskunst“, in:
Hans Werner Richter (ed.) (see note
290) 421–427, here 427.
728 Christian Borngräber (see note
43) 228.
729 Karlgeorg Tiemann (see note
723) 24.
730 Hearings of the Land legislative
assembly of Baden-Württemberg,
29 Apr. 1953. PABW; Gerd H. Müller:
Betr.: Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung.
30 Apr. 1953. HStA, EA 3/203, bun-
dle 74, document 159.
731 Gerd H. Müller: Betr.: Geschwis-
ter-Scholl-Stiftung. 30 Apr. 1953.
HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 74, docu-
ment 159.
732 Max Bill: Letter to Hellmut
Becker. 25 Mar. 1952. HfG, file 556.
733 Max Bill: Letter to Hellmut
Becker. 25 Mar. 1952. HfG, file 556.
734 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Letter to
Max Bill. 30 Aug. 1952. HfG, file 556.
735 Max Bill: Letter to Inge Aicher-
Scholl. 2 Sept. 1952. HfG, unlisted
file.
736 Max Bill: Letter to Walter Peter-
hans. 8 Jan. 1953. BHA, HfG records,
folder 120.
737 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Aktenbericht über die Besprechun-
gen mit Herrn Bill v. 27.2.–6.3.53. 13
Mar. 1953. HfG, file 556.
738 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Tätigkeitsbericht für das Quartal
Januar–März 1953. 30 Apr. 1953.
HfG, unlisted file.
739 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
„Hochschule für Gestaltung“. 14 May
1953. HfG, file 444.
740 Max Bill: Letter to Otl Aicher and
Inge Aicher-Scholl. 3 July 1953. HfG,
unlisted file.
741 Harry Pross: Letter to Max Bill.
7 July 1953. HfG, file 556.
742 Hochschule für Gestaltung:
Übergangslehrplan für das Studien-
jahr 1953/54. n. d. June-August
1953. HfG, unlisted file.
743 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Letter to the
members of the Society of Friends of
the Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung.
1 Sept. 1954. BA.
744 Max Bill: Aushang. 11 Aug.
1953. HfG, file 556 and Max Bill,
Mies van der Rohe, Hugo Häring:
Auszüge aus den Ansprachen zur
Eröffnung des Unterrichts der Hoch-
schule für Gestaltung. 3 Aug. 1953.
HfG, file 556.
745 Cf. Administrative council of the
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung: Proto-
koll. 7 Sept. 1953. HStA, EA 3/203,
bundle 75.
746 James E. Hoofnagle: Letter to
Inge Aicher-Scholl. 13 Aug. 1953.
HfG, file 433.
747 Günther Schlensag: Letter to
Max Bill. 18 Aug. 1953. HfG, file 556.
748 Günther Schlensag: Lebenslauf.
14 May 1953. HStA, EA 3/203, bun-
dle 75.
749 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Letter to
Theodor Pfizer. 19 May 1953. STU, H
Pfizer, HfG.
750 Administrative council of the
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung: Proto-
koll. 8 June 1953. HStA, EA 3/203,
bundle 75. – Wolfgang Donndorf
replaced Gerd H. Müller on the
administrative council as the repre-
sentative of the ministry of education
and the arts. He and Günter von
Alberti often exercised their man-
date.
751 The federal ministry of the interi-
or had transferred its seat on the
administrative council to the federal
ministry of housing construction,
town and regional planning, which
was represented by Helmut Döscher.
752 Administrative council of the
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung: Proto-
koll. 7 Sept. 1953. HStA, EA 3/203,
bundle 75.
753 Construction continued until 15
Dec. 1953, when there was a winter
break because of frost; Theodor Pfi-
zer: Ansprache zur Einweihung der
HfG-Gebäude. 2 Oct. 1955. HfG,
unlisted file and Geschwister-Scholl-
Stiftung: Tätigkeitsbericht für das
Quartal Oktober–Dezember 1953.
25 Jan. 1954. HfG, unlisted file.
754 Günther Schlensag: Letter to
Max Bill. 15 Sept. 1953. HfG, unlisted
file.
755 Max Bill: Richtlinien. 3 Oct.
1953. HfG, file 556.
756 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Letter to
Max Bill. 30 Nov. 1953. HfG, unlisted
file; cf. also Theodor Pfizer: Letter to
Max Bill. 21 Dec. 1953. HfG, file 556.
757 Otl Aicher: Letter to Max Bill.
11 Jan. 1954. HfG, unlisted file.
758 Günther Schlensag: Bespre-
chung zwischen Herrn und Frau
Aicher und mir mit Herrn Bill am
19.1.1954. 19 Jan. 1954. BHA, HfG
records, folder 117.
759 Administrative council of the Ge-
schwister-Scholl-Stiftung: Protokoll.
27 Oct. 1953. HStA, EA 3/203, bun-
dle 75.
760 Günther Schlensag: Letter to the
Baden-Württemberg ministry of
finance. 16 Nov. 1953. HStA, EA
3/203, bundle 75.
761 Wolfgang Donndorf: Letter to
the Baden-Württemberg ministry of
finance. 2 Dec. 1953. HStA, EA
3/203, bundle 75.
762 For the Society of Friends Dr.
Küppers replaced Otto Burrmeister
as the representative of the German
Trade Union Federation (DGB); Burr-
meister had not taken part in any of
the meetings of the administrative
council. Dr. Küppers was a member
of the federal executive board of the
DGB and headed the education
department. He appeared at the HfG
as rarely as Otto Burrmeister and as
his own two successors, Wilhelm
Kleinknecht and Richard Knobel.
763 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung,
Max Bill: Dienstvertrag. 4 Feb. 1954.
BHA, HfG records, folder 117; cf. Max
Bill: Vereinbarung über meine wei-
tere Zusammenarbeit mit der Hoch-
schule für Gestaltung. 29 Feb. 1956.
BHA, HfG records, folder 117.
764 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung,
Max Bill: Schiedsvertrag. 4 Feb.
1954. BHA, HfG records, folder 117.
765 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung, Otl
Aicher: Schiedsvertrag. 2 Feb. 1954.
HfG, file 426.
766 Günther Schlensag: Letter to
Helmut Döscher. 11 May 1954. HfG,
unlisted file.
767 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Aktennotiz
über eine Besprechung mit Herrn Bill
und Herrn Schlensag. 27 Apr. 1954.
HfG, file 556.
768 Administrative council of the
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung: Proto-
koll. 8 Feb. 1954. HStA, EA 3/203,
bundle 75.
769 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Zusammenstellung. 1 March 1954.
HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 75.
770 Hellmut Becker: Letter to Max
Bill. 4 May 1954. BHA, HfG records,
folder 22.
771 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Tätigkeitsbericht für die Zeit vom
15. März–30. Juni 1954. 20 July
1954. HfG, unlisted file.
772 Günther Schlensag: Vermerk.
23 June 1954. BHA, HfG records,
folder 117.
773 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Tätigkeitsbericht für die Zeit vom
15. März–30. Juni 1954. 20 July
1954. HfG, unlisted file.
774 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Letter to the
members of the Society of Friends of
the Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung.
1 Sept. 1954. BA.
775 Hans Gugelot: Lebenslauf.
4 March 1954. HStA, EA 3/203, bun-
dle 75.
776 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Letter to the
members of the Society of Friends of
the Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung.
1 Sept. 1954. BA.
777 Friedrich Vordemberge-Gilde-
wart: Undated curriculum vitae.
1954. HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 75.
778 The CIAM was an international
association of architects between
1928 and 1959, and organized 10
conferences on modern architecture
and modern urban development; one
example of its work is the so-called
Charter of Athens, 1933.
779 Tomás Maldonado: Lebenslauf.
n. d. 1954. THD, 71/5, file 14; Tomás
Maldonado, Max Bill, Buenos Aires
1955.
780 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Letter to the
members of the Society of Friends of
the Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung.
1 Sept. 1954. BA.
781 Administrative council of the
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung: Proto-
koll. 9 Aug. 1954. HStA, EA 3/203,
bundle 75.
782 Hellmut Becker: Letter to Max
Bill. 7 Sept. 1954. HfG, unlisted file.
783 Cf. letter to the Baden-Württem-
berg ministry of employment. 14 Apr.
1955. HfG, unlisted file; Baden-Würt-
temberg ministry of education and
the arts: Undated letter to the Ge-
schwister-Scholl-Stiftung. June
1955. HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 75;
Wolfgang Donndorf: Letter to the
Baden-Württemberg ministry of
employment. 19 Apr. 1955. HStA, EA
3/203, bundle 75 and Wolfgang
Donndorf: Letter to the Baden-Würt-
temberg ministry of finance. 11 Aug.
1954. HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 75.
784 Inge Aicher-Scholl, Max Bill:
Announcement. 18 Sept. 1954. HfG,
unlisted file.
785 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Tätigkeitsbericht für die Zeit vom
1.10. bis 31.12.1954. 25 Jan. 1955.
HfG, unlisted file.
786 Maurice Goldring: Letter to Max
Bill. 12 Dec. 1954. BHA, HfG records,
folder 121.
787 Max Bill: Letter to Max Bill.
8 Dec. 1954. BHA, HfG records, fold-
er 121.
788 Maurice Goldring: Letter to Max
Bill. 12 Dec. 1954. BHA, HfG records,
folder 121.
789 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Ordnung für das Studium an der
Hochschule für Gestaltung (Studien-
ordnung). 8 Jan. 1955. HfG, file 444.
790 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Ordnung für das Studium an der
Hochschule für Gestaltung (vorläufi-
ge Studienordnung). 17 Jan. 1955.
HfG, file 444.
791 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Ordnung für das Studium an der
Hochschule für Gestaltung (Studien-
ordnung). 2 Feb. 1955. HfG, unlisted
file.
792 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Tätigkeitsbericht für die Zeit vom
1.1.– 31.3.1955. 25 Apr. 1955. HfG,
unlisted file.
793 Inge Aicher-Scholl,Tomás Mal-
donado: Dienstvertrag. 4 Feb. 1955.
THD, 71/5, file 14.
794 Max Bill: Letter to Walter Zeis-
chegg. 29 Mar. 1955. HfG, unlisted
file.
795 Cf. Günther Schlensag: Ver- 451
merk. 14 Apr. 1955. HfG, unlisted file.
796 Main department of the Ulm
municipal council: Auszug aus der
Niederschrift über die Verhandlun-
gen der Hauptabteilung des Ge-
meinderats: § 114 Beiträge an die
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung für die
Hochschule für Gestaltung und das
Forschungsinstitut für Produktform.
4 Feb. 1955. STU, B 310/21/1.
797 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Letter to Max
Bill. 9 Apr. 1955. HfG, file 556.
798 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Undated let-
ter to Hermann Josef Abs. March
1955. HfG, unlisted file.
799 Günther Schlensag: Aktenver-
merk über eine Besprechung bei
Herrn R. A. Becker. 7 Mar. 1955. HfG,
unlisted file.
800 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Letter to
Hellmut Becker. 26 Feb. 1955. BHA,
HfG records, folder 22 and Ge-
schwister-Scholl-Stiftung: Tätigkeits-
bericht für die Zeit vom 1.10. bis
31.12. 1954. 25 Jan. 1955. HfG,
unlisted file.
801 Walther Hinsch: Letter to Theo-
dor Pfizer. 20 Apr. 1955. HfG, file
456.
802 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Letter to
Hermann Josef Abs. 18 May 1955.
HfG, file 532.
803 As the representative of the
Land ministry for economics, Adal-
bert Seifriz was the successor of
Edgar Hotz; Walter Weißwange of
the federal ministry of housing, town
and regional planning took the place
of Helmut Döscher.
804 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Auszug aus dem Protokoll der Sit-
zung des Verwaltungsrates der
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung Ulm am
4. Juli 1955 in der Hochschule für
Gestaltung, Ulm. n. d. July 1955.
HfG, file 486.
805 Günther Schlensag: Vermerk.
5 July 1955. HfG, file 564.
806 Theodor Pfizer: Letter to the
Baden-Württemberg ministry of edu-
cation and the arts. 26 July 1955.
HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 75.
807 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Letter to
Hermann Josef Abs. 8 July 1955.
HfG, file 532.
808 Theodor Pfizer: Letter to Walter
Erbe. 2 Aug. 1955. STU, H Pfizer,
HfG.
809 Günther Schlensag: Note.
3 Aug. 1955. HfG, unlisted file.
810 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Tätigkeitsbericht für die Zeit vom
1.4.–30.6.1955. 20 July 1955. HfG,
unlisted file.
811 Max Bill: Letter to the members
of the Society of Friends of the
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung. 11 Jul.
1955. THD, 71/5, file 14.
812 Students of the School of
Design: Internes Memorandum der
 References
452 Studierenden an die Schulleitung
der Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm /
Donau. 12 Aug. 1955. BHA, HfG
records, folder 195.
813 Immo Krumrey: Letter to Inge
Aicher-Scholl. 13 Aug. 1955. HfG,
unlisted file.
814 Max Bill: Aufbau des Rektorates.
5 Sept. 1955. HfG, unlisted file.
815 That is why John McCloy could
not take part in his own admission to
the board of trustees of the founda-
tion as its eleventh member; Cf. Ge-
schwister-Scholl-Stiftung: Geschäfts-
bericht für das Rechnungsjahr
1955/56. 1 June 1956. HfG, file 559.
816 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Ansprache
zur Einweihung der HfG-Gebäude.
2 Oct. 1955. HfG, unlisted file.
817 Walter Gropius: Die Notwendig-
keit des Künstlers in der demokrati-
schen Gesellschaft. Ansprache zur
Einweihung der HfG-Gebäude.
2 Oct. 1955. HfG, unlisted file.
818 Max Bill: Ansprache zur Einwei-
hung der HfG-Gebäude. 2 Oct. 1955.
HfG, unlisted file. – The rest of the
speakers were Mayor Theodor Pfizer,
Walter Erbe (chair of the Landtag’s
politico-cultural committee), Assist-
ant Director Walther Hinsch (federal
ministry of economics) and Director
Christmann (ministry of education
and the arts); cf. Dr. Christmann:
Ansprache zur Einweihung der HfG-
Gebäude. 2.10.1955. HStA, EA
3/203, bundle 75; and the adresses
of Walther Hinsch, Walter Erbe, and
Theodor Pfizer. HfG, unlisted file.
819 Schwäbische Zeitung, 23 Sept.
1954.
820 Stuttgarter Zeitung, 1 Oct. 1955.
821 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,
4 Oct. 1955.
822 Handelsblatt, 7 Oct. 1955.
823 Kurt Seeberger: Tageschronik.
3 Oct. 1955. HfG, file 442.
824 Günther Schlensag: Memoran-
dum. 28 Nov. 1955. HfG, unlisted
file.
825 Baden-Württemberg ministry of
education and the arts: Aktennotiz
des Kultusministeriums Baden-Würt-
temberg betr. Geschwister-Scholl-
Stiftung (Hochschule für Gestaltung)
ulm. 24 Oct. 1955. HStA, EA 3/203,
bundle 75.
826 Cf. Walter Erbe: Letter to Inge
Aicher-Scholl. 12.10.1955. HfG,
unlisted file and Geschwister-Scholl-
Stiftung: Besuch und Sitzung des
kulturpolitischen Ausschusses des
Landtages in Ulm am Montag den
31.10.1955. n. d. October 1955. HfG,
unlisted file.
827 Minutes of the Baden-Württem-
berg Landtag, 1st electoral period,
81st plenary session, 9 Nov 1955,
page 3934. PABW.
828 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Letter to
Walter Erbe. 17 Nov. 1955. HfG,
unlisted file.
829 Günther Schlensag: Note.
17 Nov. 1955. HfG, unlisted file.
830 Paul Binder: Letter to Theodor
Pfizer. 28 Nov. 1955. HfG, file 554.
831 Finance committee of the
Baden-Württemberg Landtag, 1st
electoral period: Auszug aus der
Niederschrift über die Sitzung des
Finanzausschusses des Landtags
am 9. Dezember 1955. 9 Dec. 1955.
HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 75.
832 Theodor Pfizer: Letter to Paul
Binder. 6 Dec. 1955. STU, H Pfizer,
HfG.
833 Theodor Pfizer: Letter to Paul
Binder. 6 Dec. 1955. STU, H Pfizer,
HfG.
834 Theodor Pfizer: Letter to Paul
Binder. 6 Dec. 1955. STU, H Pfizer,
HfG.
835 Finance committee of the
Baden-Württemberg Landtag, 1st
electoral period: Auszug aus der
Niederschrift über die Sitzung des
Finanzausschusses des Landtags
am 9. Dezember 1955. 9 Dec. 1955.
HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 75.
836 Cf. Mr. Schröder: Letter to Georg
Kahn-Ackermann. 22 Nov. 1955.
HfG, unlisted file.
837 Georg Kahn-Ackermann: Letter
to Inge Aicher-Scholl. 25 Nov. 1955.
HfG, unlisted file.
838 Re the following: Helmut Cron:
Besprechung mit Herrn Dr. Alex
Möller am 11.Januar 1956 in Stutt-
gart. 11 Jan. 1956. HfG, unlisted file.
839 Landtag of Baden-Württemberg,
1st electoral period: Landtagsdruck-
sache Beilage 2210. 31.1.1956.
PABW.
840 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung: An
die Abgeordneten des Landtags von
Baden-Württemberg. n. d. January
1956. HfG, file 450.
841 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Letter to
Walter Erbe. 30 Jan. 1956. HfG,
unlisted file.
842 Cf. Minutes of the Baden-Würt-
temberg Landtag, 1st electoral peri-
od, 2 Feb. 1956, pp. 4482/83.
PABW.
843 ibid.
844 Cf. Baden-Württemberg Land-
tag, 1st electoral period: Landtags-
drucksache Beilage 2276. 2.2.1956
PABW.
845 Immo Krumrey: Letter toTomás
Maldonado. 17 Dec. 1955. BHA, HfG
records, folder 121.
846 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Undated
position statement on the college
bylaws. 1956. HfG, file 444.
847 Hellmut Becker: Undated draft
of the contract between the Ge-
schwister-Scholl-Stiftung and Max
Bill. 1956. BHA, HfG records, folder
121.
848 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Letter to
Max Bill. 5 Jan. 1956. BHA, HfG
records, folder 121.
849 Re what follows cf.Tomás Mal-
donado: Besprechung Bill-Maldo-
nado über Verfassung. 13 Jan. 1956.
BHA, HfG records, folder 121.
850 Max Bill: Letter to Hellmut
Becker. 28 Jan.1956. BHA, HfG
records, folder 121.
851 Otl Aicher: Letter to Max Bill.
16 Feb. 1956. BHA, HfG records,
folder 121.
852 Max Bill: Letter to Otl Aicher.
20 Feb. 1956. BHA, HfG records,
folder 121.
853 Otl Aicher: Letter to Max Bill.
24 Feb. 1956. BHA, HfG records,
folder 121.
854 Max Bill: Vereinbarung über
meine weitere Zusammenarbeit mit
der Hochschule für Gestaltung.
29 Feb. 1956. BHA, HfG records,
folder 117.
855 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Entwurf. 6 Mar. 1956. BHA, HfG
records, folder 117 and Hellmut
Becker: Entwurf. n. d. March 1956.
BHA, HfG records, folder 117.
856 Inge Aicher-Scholl, Max Bill:
Vereinbarung. 14 Mar. 1956. BHA,
HfG records, folder 117.
857 Inge Aicher-Scholl, Max Bill:
Schiedsvertrag. 14 Mar. 1956. BHA,
HfG records, folder 118.
858 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Gesamtkostenplan. 15 Nov. 1951.
HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 73, appen-
dix to document 67.
859 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Letter to
Max Bill. 14 Mar. 1956. BHA, HfG
records, folder 121.
860 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Letter to
Max Bill. 14 Mar. 1956. BHA, HfG
records, folder 121.
861 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Geschäftsbericht für das Rechnungs-
jahr 1955/56. 17 June 1956. HfG, file
559.
862 Cf. Max Bill in his letter to the
editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung (FAZ), 17 Apr. 1957.
863 School of Design: Ordnung für
das Studium an der Hochschule für
Gestaltung in Ulm. 25 April 1956.
HfG, unlisted file.
864 Tomás Maldonado: Protokoll zur
Sitzung des Rektoratskollegiums
Donnerstag, 24, Mai 56/15 Uhr.
11 June 1956. BHA, HfG records,
folder 133. HfG bylaws: School of
Design: Vorläufige Verfassung der
Hochschule. 24 May 1956. BHA, HfG
records, folder 112.
865 Tomás Maldonado: Geschäfts-
ordnung des Rektoratskollegiums.
24 May 1956. BHA, HfG records,
folder 133.
866 Günther Schlensag: Letter to
Max Guther. 20 Mar. 1956. THD,
71/5, file 14.
867 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Letter to
Max Bill. 20 April 1956. BHA, HfG
records, folder 121.
868 Walther Hinsch: Letter to Theo-
dor Pfizer. 24 Mar. 1956. HfG, file
496.
869 Theodor Pfizer: Letter to Paul
Hübinger. 11 Apr. 1956. HfG, file
554.
870 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Finanzierungsplan. 15 June 1956.
HfG, unlisted file.
871 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Haushaltsplan für das Rechnungs-
jahr 1956/57. 26 Mar. 1956. HfG,
unlisted file.
872 Stuttgarter Zeitung, 8 Mar. 1956.
873 Minutes of the Baden-Württem-
berg Landtag, 2nd electoral period,
40th plenary session, 11 Dec. 1957,
appendix 4: Schriftlicher Bericht des
Berichterstatters Brandenburg über
die Beratungen des kulturpolitischen
und des Finanzausschusses. PABW.
874 Wolfgang Donndorf: Letter to
the School of Design. 23 May 1956.
HfG, file 486.
875 Rectorate of the State Academy
of Fine Arts, Stuttgart: Letter to the
Baden-Württemberg ministry of edu-
cation and the arts. 30 June 1956.
HfG, file 486.
876 Theodor Pfizer: Letter to Inge
Aicher-Scholl. 20 Sept. 1956. Stu H
Pfizer, HfG.
877 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Letter to
Walter Erbe. 6 Nov. 1956. HfG,
unlisted file.
878 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Letter to
Hermann Josef Abs. 14 Dec. 1956.
HfG, file 532.
879 Re this and what follows cf.:
Minutes of the Baden-Württemberg
Landtag, 2nd electoral period, 40th
plenary session, 11 Dec. 1957,
appendix 4: Schriftlicher Bericht des
Berichterstatters Brandenburg über
die Beratungen des kulturpolitischen
und des Finanzausschusses. PABW.
880 Karl Brachat: Letter to Otl Aicher.
7 Feb. 1957. HfG, unlisted file.
881 Landtag of Baden-Württemberg,
2nd electoral period, Beilage II 863.
20.3.1957. PABW.
882 Cf. the detailed documentation
in the Monatsschrift des Deutschen
Werkbundes: Werk und Zeit 11/
November 1956.
883 Eva von Seckendorff (see note
95) 162–171.
884 Inge Aicher-Scholl, Max Bill:
Vereinbarung. 14 Mar. 1956. BHA,
HfG records, folder 117.
885 Max Bill: Aushang. 6 Apr. 1956.
BHA, HfG records, folder 121.
886 Günther Schlensag: Zum Fall
Bill. 7 Mar. 1957. HfG, file 526.
887 Tomás Maldonado: Protokoll zur
Sitzung des Rektoratskollegiums
Dienstag, 6-2-57 um 10 Uhr. 6 Feb.
1957. BHA, HfG records, folder 133.
888 Günther Schlensag: Vermerk.
8.2.1957. BHA, HfG records, folder
119.
889 Günther Schlensag: Vermerk.
9 Feb. 1957. BHA, HfG records, folder
119.
890 Günther Schlensag: Zum Fall
Bill. 7 Mar. 1957. HfG, file 526.
891 Günther Schlensag: Rektorats-
kollegium. 11 Feb. 1957. BHA, HfG
records, folder 119.
892 Tomás Maldonado: Protokoll zur
Sitzung des Rektoratskollegiums
Dienstag 12-2-57 um 14,30 Uhr.
12 Feb. 1957. BHA, HfG records, fold-
er 133.
893 Otl Aicher: Letter to Max Bill.
12 Feb. 1957. BHA, HfG records, fold-
er 119.
894 Max Bill: Letter to the governing
board of the School of Design.
20 Feb. 1957. BHA, HfG records,
folder 119.
895 Günther Schlensag: Zum Fall
Bill. 7 Mar. 1957. HfG, file 526; cf.
also Günther Schlensag: Letter to
Hellmut Becker. 22 Feb. 1957. BHA,
HfG records, folder 22 and Tomás
Maldonado: Protokoll zur Sitzung
des Rektoratskollegiums, Mittwoch
20-2-57 um 10 Uhr. 22 Feb. 1957.
BHA, HfG records, folder 133.
896 Walter Schaer: Letter to the gov-
erning board of the School of Design.
23 Feb. 1957. BHA, HfG records,
folder 195.
897 Max Bill: Letter to Walter Schaer.
26 Feb. 1957. BHA, HfG records,
folder 195.
898 Günther Schlensag: Zum Fall
Bill. 7 Mar. 1957. HfG, file 526.
899 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Letter to
Max Bill. 1 Mar. 1957. BHA, HfG
records, folder 119.
900 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Ansprache
vor den Studierenden der Hoch-
schule für Gestaltung. 1 Mar. 1957.
BHA, HfG records, folder 195; Walter
Schaer: Letter to Inge Aicher-Scholl.
8 Mar. 1957. BHA, HfG records, fold-
er 195 and Otl Aicher: Letter to Max
Bill. 24 Feb. 1956. BHA, HfG records,
folder 121; cf. also Otl Aicher’s hand-
written draft for a declaration by Mal-
donado to the students that Maldo-
nado did not make: Otl Aicher: Ent-
wurf Erklärung Maldonado an die
Studierenden. n. d. March 1957. HfG,
unlisted file.
901 Max Bense: Letter toTomás Mal-
donado. 3 Mar. 1957. HfG, file 526.
902 Günther Schlensag: Zum Fall
Bill. 7 Mar. 1957. HfG, file 526.
903 Max Bill: Letter to Inge Aicher-
Scholl. 5 Mar. 1957. BHA, HfG
records, folder 119.
904 Students of the Bill Atelier of the
School of Design: Betrifft: Die allge-
meine Vertrauenskrise innerhalb der
Hochschule. 7 Mar. 1957. BHA, HfG
records, folder 119.
905 Inge Aicher-Scholl, Max Bill:
Vereinbarung. 12 Mar. 1957. BHA,
HfG records, folder 118.
906 Max Bill: Letter to Inge Aicher-
Scholl. 13 Mar. 1957. BHA, HfG
records, folder 118; Inge Aicher-
Scholl, Max Bill: Vereinbarung.
12 Mar. 1957. BHA, HfG records,
folder 118 and Inge Aicher-Scholl:
Letter to Max Bill, 13 Mar. 1956.
BHA, HfG records, folder 195.
907 Inge Aicher-Scholl,Tomás Mal-
donado: Einladung. Mittwoch, 13.
März 1957, 17,30 uhr (Seminarraum
4). 13 Mar. 1957. BHA, HfG records,
folder 117.
908 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Pfizer. n. d. March 1957. BHA, HfG
records, folder 117.
909 Cf. Inge Aicher-Scholl: Akten-
notiz. 6 Apr. 1957. BHA, HfG records,
folder 121.
910 29 students of the School of
Design: Letter to the administrative
council, the executive board, the
administrative director of the Ge-
schwister-Scholl-Stiftung, and the
governing board of the School of
Design. 14 Mar. 1957. BHA, HfG
records, folder 195.
911 Max Bill: Letter to Inge Aicher-
Scholl. 22 Mar. 1957. BHA, HfG
records, folder 121.
912 Günther Schlensag: Betr.: Pres-
semeldungen über das Ausscheiden
von Herrn Bill. 26 Mar. 1957. BHA,
HfG records, folder 121 and Inge
Aicher-Scholl: Presse. 22 Mar. 1957.
BHA, HfG records, folder 121.
913 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Letter to G.B.
von Hartmann. 1 Apr. 1957. BHA,
HfG records, folder 23.
914 Schwäbische Donau-Zeitung,
8 April 1957.
915 Otl Aicher and the members of
the Governing board, Max Bill and
Will Grohmann in the Frankfurter All-
gemeine Zeitung 17 Apr. 1957;
Immo Krumrey in the Schwäbische
Donau-Zeitung 9 Apr.1957; Otl Ai-
cher and the members of the Gov-
erning board and Will Grohman
printed in the Schwäbische Donau-
Zeitung 18 Apr. 1957.
916 Max Guther: Letter to Max Bill.
7 Apr. 1957. THD, 71/5, file 14.
917 Max Bill: Letter to Max Guther.
9 Apr. 1957. THD, 71/5, file 14.
918 Max Guther: Letter to Inge Ai-
cher-Scholl and Otl Aicher. 8 Apr.
1957. THD, 71/5, file 14.
919 Students of the Technische Uni-
versität Berlin: Anrisse. 6 Dec. 1967.
BHA, HfG records, folder 88.
920 Roderich Count Thun: Letter to
Hellmut Becker. 11 Apr. 1957. BHA,
HfG records, folder 121.
921 Max Bill: Letter to Walter Gro-
pius. 25 Apr. 1957. BHA, Gropius
estate, Bill- Gropius correspondence.
922 Walter Gropius: Letter to Max
Bill. 5 May 1957. BHA, Gropius es-
tate, Bill- Gropius correspondence.
923 Max Bill: Letter to Inge Aicher-
Scholl. 7 Apr. 1957. BHA, HfG
records, folder 121.
924 Hellmut Becker: Letter to
Günther Schlensag. 18 May 1957.
BHA, HfG records, folder 122.
925 Roderich Count Thun: Letter to
Günther Schlensag. 18 May 1957.
BHA, HfG records, folder 122.
926 Günther Schlensag: Letter to
Max Guther. 17 May 1957. THD, 71/5,
file 14.
927 Roderich Count Thun: Letter to
Günther Schlensag. 21 May 1957.
BHA, HfG records, folder 122.
928 Max Bill: Letter to Walter Gro-
pius. 22 May 1957. BHA, Gropius
estate, Bill- Gropius correspondence.
929 Walter Schaer: Letter toTomás
Maldonado. 27 May 1957. BHA, HfG
records, folder 195.
930 Walter Schaer: Memorandum
die Situation der Hochschule für Ge-
staltung betreffend. 2 June 1957.
BHA, HfG records, folder 195.
931 Tomás Maldonado: An alle Stu-
dierenden der Hochschule für Ge-
staltung. 5 June 1957. BHA, HfG
records, folder 195.
932 Tomás Maldonado: Letter to the
students of the School of Design.
12 June 1957. BHA, HfG records,
folder 119.
933 Otl Aicher: Letter to Hans Eck-
stein.16 July 1957. BHA, HfG records,
folder 23. – The eight students were
Peter Disch, Olivio Ferrari, Max Graf,
Peter Hofmann, Eva Pfeil, Walter
Schaer, Rolf Schröter und Margit Sta-
ber. Thanks to Max Graf for this hint
(Letter to the author, 17 Apr. 1999).
934 Wolfgang Donndorf: Letter to
the student representatives of the
School of Design. 24 June 1957. HfG,
unlisted file and Baden-Württemberg
ministry of education and the arts:
Aktenvermerk. 5 July 1957. BHA, HfG
records, folder 195.
935 Max Bill: Letter to Wolfgang
Donndorf. 18 July 1957. BHA, HfG
records, folder 122.
936 Cf. Inge Aicher-Scholl: Bericht
über die USA- Reise von Frau Inge
Aicher-Scholl vom 23.4.–29.5.1957.
n. d. 1957. HStA, EA 3/203, bundle
76.
937 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Finanzbedarf für den Bau von weite-
ren Studentenwohnheimen und Do-
zentenwohnungen (einschl. Einrich-
tung der Heime). 22 Jan. 1957. HfG,
file 532.
938 Tomás Maldonado: Protokoll
zur außerordentlichen Sitzung des
Rektoratskollegiums am Samstag,
den 14. Dezember 1957 um 10,00
uhr. 16 Dec. 1957. BHA, HfG records,
folder 134.
939 Administrative council: Proto-
koll. 1 Aug. 1957. HStA, EA 3/203,
bundle 76. With this meeting Paul
Egon Hübinger (federal ministry of
the interior) replacing Walter Weiß-
wange (federal ministry of housing
construction, town and regional plan-
ning) and Wilhelm Kleinknecht
replacing Otto Burrmeister (both Ger-
man Trade Union Federation; as rep-
resentatives of the Society of Fri-
ends) became members of the
administrative council. Cf. Geschwis-
ter- Scholl-Stiftung: Entwurf. n. d.
April 1957. HStA, EA 3/203, bundle
76.
940 Tomás Maldonado: Ansprache
zur Eröffnung des Studienjahres
1957/58. 3 Oct 1957. PAH, DOK 53.
941 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Letter to
Thorwald Risler. 15 Jan. 1958. PAR.
942 Gesamtdeutscher Block/Block
der Heimatvertriebenen und Entrech-
teten.
943 Minutes of the Baden-Württem-
berg Landtag, 2nd electoral period,
47th plenary session, 19 Feb. 1958,
page 2313. PABW.
944 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Letter to
Roderich Count Thun. 26 Feb. 1958.
HfG, file 514.
945 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Letter to
Theodor Pfizer. 24 Feb. 1958. STU,
H Pfizer, HfG.
946 Theodor Pfizer: Letter to Inge
Aicher-Scholl. 3 Mar. 1958. STU,
H Pfizer, HfG.
947 Roderich Count Thun: Letter to
Inge Aicher-Scholl. 1 Apr. 1958. HfG,
file 514.
948 Wolfgang Donndorf: Letter to
Inge Aicher-Scholl. 5 Mar. 1958.
HfG, file 486.
949 Tomás Maldonado: Bericht von
Herr Tomás Maldonado in der Ver-
waltungsratssitzung am 21. April
1958. PAB.
950 Theodor Pfizer: Undated letter to
administrative council of the Ge-
schwister-Scholl-Stiftung. December
1958. HfG, file 554.
951 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Aktennotiz.
4 Mar. 1958. HfG, unlisted file.
952 Tomás Maldonado: Protokoll zur
Sitzung des Rektoratskollegiums am
Dienstag, 11-3-58 um 11 Uhr.
11 Mar. 1958. BHA, HfG records,
folder 134.
953 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Aktennotiz.
10 Mar. 1958. BHA, HfG records,
folder 134.
954 Tomás Maldonado: Protokoll zur
Sitzung des Rektoratskollegiums am
Dienstag, 11-3-58 um 11 Uhr.
11 Mar. 1958. BHA, HfG records,
folder 134.
955 Otl Aicher: Protokoll zur Sitzung 453
des Rektoratskollegiums am Diens-
tag, den 15. Juli 1958 um 9,00 Uhr
(3. Feriensitzung). 15 July 1958.
BHA, HfG records, folder 134.
956 Tomás Maldonado: Protokoll zur
Sitzung des Rektoratskollegiums am
Mittwoch, 8-1-58 um 16 Uhr.
10 Jan. 1958. BHA, HfG records,
folder 134.
957 Tomás Maldonado: Protokoll zur
Sitzung des Rektoratskollegiums am
Dienstag, 10-6-58 um 10 Uhr.
11 June 1958. BHA, HfG records,
folder 134
958 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Entwurf einer vorläufigen Verfas-
sung. 28 Sept. 1957. HfG, file 444;
Geschwister- Scholl-Stiftung: Vor-
schläge zum Entwurf einer vorläufi-
gen Verfassung der Hochschule für
Gestaltung vom 30.10.1957. n. d.
November 1957. BHA, HfG records,
folder 29; Geschwister- Scholl-Stif-
tung: Entwurf einer vorläufigen Ver-
fassung der Hochschule für Gestal-
tung. 14 Dec. 1957. HfG, file 444;
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung: Entwurf
einer vorläufigen Teilverfassung der
Hochschule für Gestaltung. 20 Dec.
1957. HfG, file 444; Geschwister-
Scholl- Stiftung: Entwurf einer vor-
läufigen Teilverfassung der Hoch-
schule für Gestaltung. 9 Jan. 1958.
BHA, HfG records, folder 29; Ge-
schwister-Scholl-Stiftung: Vorläufige
Verfassung der Hochschule für Ge-
staltung. 25 Feb. 1958. HfG, file 444;
Inge Aicher- Scholl: Vorläufige Ver-
fassung der Hochschule für Gestal-
tung. 7 Mar. 1958. HfG, file 444 and
Geschwister-Scholl- Stiftung: Vorläu-
fige Verfassung der Hochschule für
Gestaltung. 28 Feb. 1958. BHA, HfG
records, folder 29.
959 Tomás Maldonado: Protokoll zur
Sitzung des Rektoratskollegiums
Montag, 24-2-58 um 11 Uhr.
24 Feb. 1958. BHA, HfG records,
folder 134.
960 Inge Scholl: Errichtung der ge-
meinnützigen „Geschwister-Scholl-
Stiftung“. 24 Apr. 1953. HfG, unlisted
file.
961 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Vorläufige
Verfassung der Hochschule für Ge-
staltung. 7 Mar. 1958. HfG, file 444.
962 Tomás Maldonado: An die Mit-
glieder des Kleinen Konvents.
28 Feb. 1958. BHA, HfG records,
folder 29; Tomás Maldonado: Proto-
koll zur Sitzung des Kleinen Konvent
am Freitag, den 7. März 1958 um
11,00 Uhr. 7 Mar. 1958. BHA, HfG
records, folder 113. Günther Schlen-
sag: Bekanntmachung. 7 Mar. 1958.
BHA, HfG records, folder 113.
963 Tomás Maldonado: Protokoll zur
Sitzung des Rektoratskollegiums am
Dienstag, 11-3-58 um 11 Uhr.
11 Mar. 1958. BHA, HfG records,
folder 134.
964 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Letter to
Thorwald Risler. 7 May 1958. PAR.
965 Thorwald Risler: Letter to Inge
Aicher-Scholl. 28 May 1958. PAR.
 References
454 966 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Aktennotiz.
24 June 1958. HfG, file 549; Erwin
and Max Braun: Letter to the Ge-
schwister-Scholl-Stiftung. 24 June
1958. PAR; Inge Aicher-Scholl: Letter
to Thorwald Risler. 21 May 1958.
PAR and Tomás Maldonado: Proto-
koll zur Sitzung des Rektoratskolle-
giums am Dienstag, 17. März 1959.
17 Mar. 1959. BHA, HfG records,
folder 135.
967 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Letter to
Roderich Count Thun. 23 July 1958.
HfG, file 514.
968 Administrative council of the
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung: Proto-
koll. 14 May 1958. HStA, EA 3/203,
bundle 76.
969 Administrative council of the
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung: Proto-
koll. 7 Aug. 1958. HStA, EA 3/203,
bundle 76. – This was the first time
Josef Alfons Thuma participated in a
council meeting (as president of the
Land Trade Supervision Dept.) qua
the successor of Adalbert Seifriz. He
had previously already represented
his predecessor Adalbert Seifriz and
the latter’s predecessor Edgar Hotz
on the administrative council. Cf.
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung: Ge-
schäftsbericht für das Rechnungsjahr
1957/58. 3 July 1958. HfG, file 559.
970 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Entwurf eines Antrags an das Wirt-
schaftsministerium Baden-Württem-
berg. 11 Oct. 1958. BHA, HfG
records, folder 2.
971 Dr. Würth, Baden-Württemberg
Trade Supervision Dept.: Betreff An-
trag der Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung
vom 14. Oktober 1958 „Institut für
Produktgestaltung (IfP)“. 16 Oct.
1958. BHA, HfG records, folder 2.
972 Federal ministry of the interior:
Stellungnahme zu dem Antrag der
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung an das
Bundesministerium des Innern vom
10. Dezember 1958. 10 Dec. 1958.
HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 80.
973 Günther Schlensag: Vermerk.
30 Dec. 1958. HfG, unlisted file.
974 Tomás Maldonado: Protokoll zur
Sitzung des Kleinen Konvent am
16. Juni 1958 um 10,00 Uhr.
16 June 1958. BHA, HfG records,
folder 113.
975 Tomás Maldonado: Auszug aus
dem Protokoll zur Sitzung des Rekto-
ratskollegiums am Dienstag, 30.
Sept. 1958. 30 Sept. 1958. BHA, HfG
records, folder 135.
976 School of Design: Geändertes
Programm. 28 July 1958. HfG,
unlisted file.
977 Professor Karl Schmölder was
a member of the executive board of
the Rheinische Hypothekenbank
Mannheim (which had given the
foundation a mortgage on the resi-
dential buildings) and member of the
executive board of the Bundesver-
band des Privaten Bankgewerbes
(National Association of Private
Banks). Cf. Otto Pfleiderer: Letter to
Inge Aicher-Scholl. 14 Aug. 1958.
STU, H Pfizer, HfG. He first partici-
pated in the deliberations of the
administrative council at its 15th
meeting. Cf. administrative council
of the Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Protokoll. 12 Dec. 1958. HStA, EA
3/203, bundle 76.
978 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Letter to the
advisory board of the Geschwister-
Scholl-Stiftung. 15 Jan. 1959. HfG,
file 564.
979 Max Bill: Letter to Inge Aicher-
Scholl. 19 Dec. 1958. HfG, file 564.
980 Max Bill: Letter to Hellmut
Becker. 6 Feb. 1959. HfG, file 527.
981 Max Bill: Letter to Inge Aicher-
Scholl. 6 Feb. 1959. HfG, file 564.
982 Cf. René Spitz (see note 26)
422–426.
983 Max Bill: Letter to Hellmut
Becker. 6 Feb. 1959. HfG, file 527.
984 Max Bill: Letter to Walter Gro-
pius. 10 Feb. 1959. BHA, Gropius
estate, Bill- Gropius correspondence.
985 Walter Gropius: Letter to Inge
Aicher-Scholl. 31 Mar. 1959. HfG, file
525.
986 Max Bill: Letter to Roderich
Count Thun. 17 Feb. 1959. HfG, file
527.
987 On this and the following cf.
Advisory board of the Geschwister-
Scholl-Stiftung: Protokoll über die
Sitzung des Beirats der Geschwister-
Scholl-Stiftung, Ulm, am Freitag,
den 6. März 1959. 7 Mar. 1959. HfG,
file 564 and Advisory board of the
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung: Proto-
koll über die Sitzung des Beirats der
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung, Ulm,
am Freitag, den 6. März 1959.
7 March 1959. HfG, file 564.
988 Tomás Maldonado: Protokoll zur
Sitzung des Großen Konvents am
Dienstag, den 7.4.1959 um 11 Uhr
im Rektorat. 7 Apr. 1959. BHA, HfG
records, folder 112.
989 Thorwald Risler: Letter to the
executive board of the Geschwister-
Scholl-Stiftung. 7 Apr. 1959. PAR.
990 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Geschäftsbericht für das Rechnungs-
jahr 1958/59. 25 Aug. 1959. HfG, file
559.
991 Tomás Maldonado: Protokoll zur
Sitzung des Großen Konvents am
Dienstag, den 7.4.1959 um 11 Uhr
im Rektorat. 7 Apr. 1959. BHA, HfG
records, folder 112.
992 Inge Aicher-Scholl, Theodor
Pfizer: Letter to Baden-Württemberg
ministry of economics. 5 Mar. 1959.
HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 77, docu-
ment 22.
993 Roderich Count Thun: Letter to
Theodor Pfizer. 20 May 1959. STU, H
Pfizer, HfG.
994 Roderich Count Thun: Auszug
aus dem Protokoll der Mitgliederver-
sammlung vom 10.12.1956. 10 Dec.
1956. HfG, file 504; Roderich Count
Thun: Letter to the members of the
Society of Friends of the Geschwis-
ter-Scholl-Stiftung. 15 Dec. 1956.
THD, 71/5, file 14; Roderich Count
Thun: Protokoll. 10 Dec. 1956. THD,
71/5, file 14; Roderich Count Thun:
Letter to the members of the Society
of Friends of the Geschwister-Scholl-
Stiftung. 24 Nov. 1956. THD, 71/5,
file 14; Society of Friends of the
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung: Sat-
zung. 10 Dec. 1956. HfG, file 490.
The statute change of 10 Dec. 1956
was entered in the Ulm register of
associations, vol. vi, no. 387 on 16
Jan. 1957. Cf. Ulm District Court: To
the association. Letter to the Society
of Friends of the Geschwister-Scholl-
Stiftung. 16 Jan. 1957. HfG, file 504.
995 Society of Friends of the Ge-
schwister-Scholl-Stiftung: Mitglie-
der. 16 May 1958. PAR.
996 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Letter to
members of the Society of Friends of
the Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung. 20
Sept. 1958. THD, 71/5, file 14.
997 Roderich Count Thun: Letter to
members of the Society of Friends of
the Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung. 27
Oct. 1959. THD, 71/5, file 17.
998 Society of Friends of the
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung: Sat-
zung. 10 Dec. 1956. HfG, file 490.
999 Inge Aicher-Scholl, Theodor
Pfizer: Letter to the Baden-Württem-
berg ministry of economics. 5 Mar.
1959. HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 77,
document 22.
1000 Karl Hipp: Betreff: Antrag der
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung. 23 Apr.
1959. HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 77,
document 24.
1001 Thorwald Risler: Letter to the
Baden-Württemberg ministry of eco-
nomics. 3 Dec. 1959. HStA, EA
3/203, bundle 77, document 46.
1002 Karl Gussone: Letter to the
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung. 18 May
1959. HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 77,
document 37.
1004 Re this and what follows cf.
administrative council of the Ge-
schwister-Scholl-Stiftung: Protokoll.
15 Jan. 1960. HStA, EA 3/203, bun-
dle 78, document 57. – This is the
first meeting in which Karl Gussone
participated instead of Paul Egon
Hübinger as the representative of the
federal ministry of the interior.
1005 Theodor Pfizer: Gehaltsord-
nung für Dozenten (gültig ab 1.4.
1959). 12 Nov. 1959. HfG, unlisted
file.
1005 More detailed in: René Spitz
(see note 26), table on page 175;
Sources: Theodor Pfizer: Gehaltsord-
nung für Dozenten (gültig ab 1.4.
1959). 12 Nov. 1959. HfG, unlisted
file and Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Dozenten-Gehälter der Hochschule
für Gestaltung, Ulm. n. d. September
1959. HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 74,
appendix 2 to document 43.
1006 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Business report of the Geschwister-
Scholl-Stiftung for fiscal year
1959/60. 25 Oct.1960. HfG, file 559.
1007 On the cause for gaps in the
numbering one may speculate that
E1 was probably reserved for Georg
Leowald (product design) and E4 for
Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart
(visual communication).
1008 Re this and what follows see
Johanna Rösner: Protokoll zur Sit-
zung des Kleinen Konvents am
Samstag, den 6. Juni 1959, von
10,00– 12,00 und 15,00–18,00.
BHA, HfG records, folder 113.
1009 Re this and what follows cf. Mr.
Pickert: Protokoll zur Sitzung des
Kleinen Konvent am Sonntag, den
7.6.1959 um 10 Uhr und um 15 Uhr
im Rektorat. 7 June 1959. BHA, HfG
records, folder 113.
1010 Tomás Maldonado: Protokoll
zur Sitzung des Rektoratskollegiums
am Dienstag, 8. dez. 1959, 16 Uhr.
10 Dec. 1959. BHA, HfG records,
folder 136.
1011 Thorwald Risler: Letter to Max
Guther. 14 Dec. 1959. THD, 71/5, file
17.
1012 Gert Kalow: Protokoll zu den
Sitzungen des Rektoratskollegiums
am Dienstag, 14.6.60, um 11,00 Uhr
und 14.45 Uhr. 20 June 1960. BHA,
HfG records, folder 136.
1013 Finance and employment con-
tract committee of the administrative
council: Protokoll über die Sitzung
des Finanz- und Dienstvertrags-
Ausschusses des Verwaltungsrates
der Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung am
5. Dezember in der Hochschule für
Gestaltung in Ulm. 24 Dec. 1960.
HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 79.
1014 Thorwald Risler: Aktennotiz.
3 May 1960. BHA, HfG records, fold-
er 136.
1015 Horst Rittel: Protokoll zur Sit-
zung des Rektoratskollegiums Don-
nerstag, 12.5.60, um 9 Uhr. 12 May
1960. BHA, HfG records, folder 136.
1016 Tomás Maldonado: Letter to the
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung and to
the governing board of the School of
Design. 31 May 1960. BHA, HfG
records, folder 136.
1017 Thorwald Risler: Protokoll zur
Sitzung des Kleinen Konvents am
7. Juni 1960 um 13,00 Uhr. 7 June
1960. BHA, HfG records, folder 113.
1018 Thorwald Risler: Protokoll.
7 June 1960. BHA, HfG records, fold-
er 136.
1019 Cf. Inge Aicher-Scholl: Letter to
Max Guther. 13 June 1960. THD,
71/5, file 17.
1020 Gui Bonsiepe et al.: Offener
Brief. 21 June 1960. BHA, HfG
records, folder 9.
1021 Cf. René Spitz (see note 26)
416.
1022 Gert Kalow: Protokoll zur Sit-
zung des Rektoratskollegiums Frei-
tag, 23.9.60 um 9,00 Uhr. 27 Sept.
1960. BHA, HfG records, folder 136.
1023 Cf. Gert Kalow: Protokoll zur
Sitzung des Rektoratskollegiums am
Freitag, 28-10-60, 9.00 Uhr. 3 Nov.
1960. BHA, HfG records, folder 137.
1024 Cf. Günther Schweigkofler: Let-
ter to the Baden-Württemberg minis-
try of economics. 25 Aug. 1960.
HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 78, docu-
ment 105.
1025 Cf. Finance and employment
contract committee of the adminis-
trative council: Protokoll über die Sit-
zung des Finanz- und Dienstvertrag-
sausschusses am 15.12.1961 in der
Hochschule für Gestaltung, Ulm.
7 Apr. 1961. HStA, EA 3/203, bundle
79, appendix 4 to document 153;
administrative council of the Ge-
schwister-Scholl-Stiftung: Protokoll.
28 Dec. 1960. HStA, EA 3/203, bun-
dle 79, document 132; and finance
and employment contract committee
of the administrative council: Proto-
koll über die Sitzung des Finanz-
und Dienstvertrags-Ausschusses
des Verwaltungsrates der Geschwis-
ter-Scholl-Stiftung am 5. Dezember
in der Hochschule für Gestaltung in
Ulm. 24 Dec. 1960. HStA, EA 3/203,
bundle 79.
1026 From Land and federal funds,
as part of the 2nd Federal Youth Plan,
the foundation could count on
DM 250,000 in 1961 for the second
student residence, but it had applied
for DM 300,000; however, it was still
possible to get a loan for this from
special Land funds. Cf. Dr. Rooschüz:
Letter to the North Württemberg
regional council. 1 July 1960. HStA,
EA 3/203, bundle 78, document 94.
1027 Wolfgang Donndorf: Letter to
Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart.
2 Nov. 1960. HStA, EA 3/203, bun-
dle 78 and Tomás Maldonado: Proto-
koll zur Sitzung des Rektoratskolle-
giums am Dienstag, 23. Juni 1959,
13,30. 24 June 1959. BHA, HfG
records, folder 135.
1028 Alfred Rietzsch: Letter to Thor-
wald Risler. 16 Aug. 1960. HfG,
unlisted file.
1029 Cf. René Spitz (see note 26)
410–412.
1030 Gert Kalow: Referat des Rekto-
ratsvorsitzenden der Hochschule für
Gestaltung, Gert Kalow, anläßlich
der Sitzung des Verwaltungsrates
der Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung,
Ulm, 5. Dezember 1960. 5 Dec.
1960. HfG, unlisted file.
1031 Baden-Württemberg Landtag,
3rd electoral period: Landtagsdruck-
sache Beilage III 614. 19 Jan. 1961,
issued 24 Jan. 1961.
1032 Baden-Württemberg Landtag,
3rd electoral period: Landtagsdruck-
sache Beilage III 886, issued 21 Mar.
1961. Cf. Finance and employment
contract committee of the adminis-
trative council: Protokoll über die Sit-
zung des Finanz- und Dienstver-
tragsausschusses am 15.12.1961 in
der Hochschule für Gestaltung, Ulm.
7 Apr. 1961. HStA, EA 3/203, bundle
79, appendix 4 to document 153.
1033 Professor Rembeck took part in
this meeting as a deputy of adminis-
trative council member Josef Alfons
Thuma, the president of the Stuttgart
Land Trade Supervision Depart-
ment.
1034 Finance and employment con-
tract committee of the administrative
council: Protokoll über die Sitzung
des Finanz- und Dienstvertragsaus-
schusses des Verwaltungsrats der
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung am
12.4.1961 in der Hochschule für Ge-
staltung, Ulm. 25 Apr. 1961. HStA,
EA 3/203, bundle 79, appendix 1 to
document 152.
1035 Cf. Günther von Alberti: Erwä-
gungen zur Feststellung des „richti-
gen“ Zuschußbedarfs für die Hoch-
schule für Gestaltung. n. d. April
1961. HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 79,
appendix 2 to document 153.
1036 Cf. Finance and employment
contract committee of the adminis-
trative council: Protokoll über die Sit-
zung des Finanz- und Dienstvertrag-
sausschusses des Verwaltungsrats
der Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung am
12.4.1961 in der Hochschule für
Gestaltung, Ulm. 25 Apr. 1961. HStA,
EA 3/203, bundle 79, appendix 1 to
document 152. – In the subsequent
18th meeting of the administrative
council Richard Knobel as the chair
of the Baden-Württemberg Land
association for the first time repre-
sented the German Trade Union Fed-
eration on the administrative council;
he was the successor of Wilhelm
Kleinknecht. Cf. administrative coun-
cil of the Geschwister-Scholl-Stif-
tung: Protokoll. 3 May 1961. HStA,
EA 3/203, bundle 79, appendix 1 to
document 157.
1037 Roderich Count Thun: Meine
sehr persönliche Einstellung zu den
Zielen der „Geschwister Scholl Stif-
tung“. Undated letter to Inge Aicher-
Scholl and Otl Aicher, January 1961.
HfG, file 514.
1038 Roderich Count Thun: Letter to
Thorwald Risler. 13 Mar. 1961. HfG,
file 514.
1039 Roderich Count Thun: Letter to
members of the Geschwister-Scholl-
Stiftung. 10 Apr. 1961. HfG, unlisted
file.
1040 Society of Friends of the
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung: Sat-
zung. 31 May 1961. HfG, file 490.
1041 Klaus Dohrn: Über die konsti-
tuierende Sitzung des Vorstandes
der Gesellschaft der Freunde der Ge-
schwister-Scholl-Stiftung e. v. am
20.7.1961 in Heidelberg-Hand-
schuhsheim. 20 July 1961. HfG, file
496.
1042 Baden-Württemberg ministry
of education and the arts: Letter to
Baden-Württemberg ministry of eco-
nomics. 19 Sept. 1961. HStA, EA
3/203, bundle 80, document 184.
1043 Cf. Finance and employment
contract committee of the adminis-
trative council: Protokoll über die Sit-
zung des Finanz- und Dienstver-
trags-Ausschusses des Verwaltungs-
rates der Geschwister-Scholl-Stif-
tung am Mittwoch, den 18.10. 1961
in Stuttgart. 27 Oct. 1961. HStA, EA
3/203, bundle 80, appendix 2 to
document 198.
1044 Cf. Geschwister-Scholl-Stif-
tung: Protokoll über die 19. Sitzung
des Verwaltungsrats der Geschwi-
ster-Scholl-Stiftung am Montag, den
30.10.1961, in der Hochschule für
Gestaltung, Ulm. 2.11.1961. HfG, file
463. – The 19th administrative coun-
cil meeting on 30 Oct. 1961 was the
first time Klaus Dohrn as the succes-
sor of Brigitte Bermann-Fischer rep-
resented the Society of Friends.
1045 Otl Aicher: „Hans Gugelot“, in:
Systemdesign, Bahnbrecher. Hans
Gugelot 1920–1965. Basel, Boston
2
1987, 19–25, hier 20.
1046 But this contract had not been
adopted yet: At its meeting on
15 Feb. 1961 the finance and
employment contract committee of
the administrative council had dis-
cussed it; the acounts code structure
the contract was based on was al-
ready being used, but the final word-
ing had not been settled yet. Cf.
Finance and employment contract
committee of the administrative
council: Protokoll über die Sitzung
des Finanz- und Dienstvertragsaus-
schusses am 15.12.1961 in der
Hochschule für Gestaltung, Ulm. 7
Apr. 1961. HStA, EA 3/203, bundle
79, appendix 4 to document 153.
1047 Mervyn William Perrine: Letter
to Otl Aicher. 20 Feb. 1961. HfG, file
391.
1048 Mervyn William Perrine: Letter
to Klaus Drewes. 24 Feb. 1961. HfG,
file 393; Mervyn William Perrine: Kri-
tische Stellungnahme zu den wich-
tigsten Abschnitten der „Richtlinien
über die Abwicklung von Entwick-
lungsaufträgen“. 23 Feb. 1961. HfG,
file 393; Mervyn William Perrine: Be-
merkungen zu den „Richtlinien über
die Abwicklung von Entwicklungs-
aufträgen“. 23 Feb. 1961. HfG, file
393; and Johanna Rösner: Protokoll
zur Sitzung des Kleinen Konvents am
Mittwoch, 22. Juni 1960. 22 Feb.
1961. BHA, HfG records, folder 113.
1049 Tomás Maldonado: Protokoll
zur Sitzung des Rektoratskollegiums
am Dienstag, 8. dez. 1959, 16 Uhr.
10 Dec. 1959. BHA, HfG records,
folder 136.
1050 Gert Kalow: Protokoll zur Sit-
zung des Rektoratskollegiums am
Dienstag, 11.4.1961. 17 Apr. 1961.
BHA, HfG records, folder 137 and
Thorwald Risler: Letter to the govern-
ing board of the School of Design.
20 Apr. 1961. BHA, HfG records, fold-
er 141.
1051 Inner council of the Ulm School
of Design: Empfehlungen an das
Rektoratskollegium der HfG gemäß
Sitzung des Kleinen Konvents am
Dienstag, 18. April 1961. 18 Apr.
1961. BHA, HfG records, folder 146.
1052 Karl-Heinz Allgayer: Resolution
der Studentenschaft der HfG, be-
schlossen auf einer außerordentli-
chen Versammlung der Studentens-
chaft am 20. April 1961 13 Uhr.
20 Apr. 1961. HfG, file 391.
1053 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Letter to
Gert Kalow. 24 Apr. 1961. HfG, un-
listed file.
1054 Thorwald Risler: Letter to the
governing board of the School of
Design. 20 Apr. 1961. BHA, HfG
records, folder 141.
1055 Gert Kalow: Protokoll zur Sit-
zung des Rektoratskollegiums
Dienstag, 25. April 1961. 28 Apr.
1961. BHA, HfG records, folder 137.
1056 Herbert Ohl, Johanna Rösner:
Protokoll zur 52. (ausserordentli-
chen) Sitzung des Kleinen Senats
am 19.6.1968. 24 June 1968. BHA,
HfG records, folder 103.
1057 Gert Kalow: Protokoll zur Sit-
zung des Rektoratskollegiums
Dienstag am 27. April 1961 um
16,55. 27 Apr. 1961. BHA, HfG
records, folder 137.
1058 Strike meeting of the School of
Design: Streik-Erklärung. 3 May
1961. PAH, DOK 15.
1059 Mervyn William Perrine: Letter
to governing board, foundation exec-
utive board, and inner council of the
School of Design. 7 May 1961. HfG,
unlisted file.
1060 Otl Aicher: Verfassungskom-
mission. 9 June 1961. BHA, HfG
records, folder 30, and Inner council
of the School of Design: An das Rek-
toratskollegium zur Behandlung im
Kleinen Konvent am 9. Juni 1961.
n. d. June 1961. BHA, HfG records,
folder 30.
1061 Gert Kalow: Protokoll zur Sit-
zung des erweiterten Rektoratskolle-
giums am 16-10-1961. 2 Nov. 1961.
BHA, HfG records, folder 139.
1062 Gert Kalow: Letter to the inner
council of the School of Design. 15
Oct. 1961. BHA, HfG records, folder
107. – Gert Kalow had already re-
signed from his position as chairman
of the governing board on 15 Oct.
1961, but did not step down as its
member until 3 Nov. 1961. Cf. Gert
Kalow: Letter to the inner council of
the School of Design. 3 Nov. 1961.
HfG, unlisted file.
1063 Günther Schweigkofler: Proto-
koll über die Sitzung des Kleinen
Konvents am 10.11.1961. 10 Nov.
1961. BHA, HfG records, folder 115.
1064 Thorwald Risler: Vorstand.
20 Nov. 1961. HfG, unlisted file.
1065 Otl Aicher: Letter to Gert Kalow.
13 Nov. 1961. HfG, unlisted file.
1066 Cf. Gert Kalow: Letter to the
Baden-Württemberg minister of edu-
cation and the arts. 12 Feb. 1961.
HfG, file 446 and Geschwister-
Scholl-Stiftung: Geschäftsbericht der
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung für das
Rechnungsjahr 1959/60. 25 Oct.
1960. HfG, file 559.
1067 First-year students of the
1961/62 academic year: Denkschrift.
3 Feb. 1962. PAH, DOK 20.1; First-
year students of the academic year
1961/62, department of visual com-
munication: Denkschrift für den Vor-
stand der Geschwister-Scholl-Stif- 455
tung und das Rektoratskollegium
und Festdozent der Hochschule für
Gestaltung. PAH, DOK 20.2; first-
year students of the academic year
1961/62, dept. of product design:
Denkschrift für den Vorstand der
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung und das
Rektoratskollegium und die Festdo-
zenten der Hochschule für Gestal-
tung. 3 Feb. 1962. PAH, DOK 20.3;
first-year students of the academic
year 1961/62, dept. of building:
Denkschrift für den Vorstand der
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung und das
Rektoratskollegium und die Festdo-
zenten der Hochschule für Gestal-
tung. 3 Feb. 1962. PAH, DOK 20.4.
1068 Otl Aicher: Letter to the board
of the Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung
and the governing board and full-
time lecturers of the School of
Design. 12 Feb. 1962. PAH, DOK
21 a.
1069 Gerda Krauspe, Reinhard But-
ter, Jan Schleifer: Betr.: Protest-
schreiben des ersten Studienjahres.
14 Feb. 1962. PAH, DOK 21.1.
1070 Thorwald Risler: Aktenvermerk
über Besprechung mit dem Rumpf-
Rektoratskollegium Vordemberge-
Rittel am 13. Februar 1962, 17 Uhr.
13 Feb. 1962. HfG, unlisted file.
1071 Otl Aicher, Walter Zeischegg:
Letter to Inge Aicher-Scholl, Thor-
wald Risler, Max Guther. 13 Feb.
1962. HfG, file 564.
1072 Cf. B. Schweigkofler: Protokoll
(Gedächtnisprotokoll) zur Sitzung
des Rektoratskollegiums am 15.2.
1962 um 9.30 im rk. 15 Feb. 1962.
BHA, HfG records, folder 194.
1073 Cf. Otl Aicher: Letter to Herbert
Ohl. 19 Dec. 1961. BHA, HfG records,
folder 30 and Gert Kalow: Protokoll
zur Sitzung des Kleinen Konvents am
Freitag, den 26.1.1962 um 10.00 im
Rektorat. 31 Jan. 1962. BHA, HfG
records, folder 115.
1074 Output no. 9. The first issue of
the student newspaper appeared on
27 Feb. 1961; cf. Klaus Krippendorff:
Letter to the Output editor. 27 Feb.
1961. THD, 71/5, file 17. – Gerhard
Curdes in retrospect: “The compre-
hensive claim made in the founding
prospectus (politics, urban planning
…) was narrowed down by cutbacks
in several departments (industrialized
construction in lieu of urban plan-
ning) and further restricted even
within this field. Such a small faculty
could not meet these demands. And
thus, as I see it, one reason the HfG
failed was precisely because of the
huge discrepancy between its initial
claims and the reality of teaching.
The students’ dissatisfaction regard-
ing this discrepancy has probably
hardly been documented. Still, it was
one of the causes of inner conflicts
after 1961.” Letter to the author,
9 January 2000.
1075 Cf. Günther Schweigkofler: Pro-
tokoll über eine Zusammenkunft der
in Ulm wohnhaften Mitglieder des
Beirates der Geschwister-Scholl-Stif-
tung am Montag, den 19.2.1962,
18 Uhr. 19 Feb. 1962. HfG, file 564.
 References
456 1076 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Verfassung der Hochschule für
Gestaltung Ulm. 29 Apr. 1960. BHA,
HfG records, folder 29.
1077 Otl Aicher: Letter to Herbert
Ohl. 12 May 1960. BHA, HfG records,
folder 29.
1078 Otl Aicher, Herbert Ohl, Walter
Zeischegg: Entwurf für die Änderung
der vorläufigen Verfassung der
Hochschule für Gestaltung. 8 Nov.
1962. BHA, HfG records, folder 30;
Otl Aicher, Herbert Ohl, Walter Zei-
schegg: Entwurf für die Änderung
der vorläufigen Verfassung der
Hochschule für Gestaltung. 6 Nov.
1961. BHA, HfG records, folder 30;
Otl Aicher, Herbert Ohl, Walter Zei-
schegg: Entwurf für die Änderung
der vorläufigen Verfassung der
Hochschule für Gestaltung. 13 Dec.
1961. BHA, HfG records, folder 30.
1079 Otl Aicher, Herbert Ohl, Walter
Zeischegg: Entwurf für die Änderung
der vorläufigen Verfassung der
Hochschule für Gestaltung. 6 Nov.
1961. BHA, HfG records, folder 30.
1080 Students of the School of
Design: Entwurf für die Änderung
der vorläufigen Verfassung der
Hochschule für Gestaltung. 22 Dec.
1961. PAB.
1081 Advisory board of the Ge-
schwister-Scholl-Stiftung: Verfas-
sung der Hochschule für Gestaltung.
28 Feb. 1962. HfG, file 564.
1082 Thorwald Risler: Protokoll über
die Sitzung des Beirates der Ge-
schwister-Scholl-Stiftung am 27.2.
und 28.2.1962. 14 Mar. 1962. THM,
folder 9.
1083 Cf. Thorwald Risler: Letter to
Otl Aicher. 12 July 1962. THD, 71/5,
file 17. – The trade fair booth is pic-
tured in Herbert Lindinger (see
note 1) 144 f.
1084 Max Guther: Letter to Thorwald
Risler. 16 Apr. 1962. THD, 71/5,
file 17.
1085 Thorwald Risler: Vorstand.
23 May 1962. HfG, file 562.
1086 Cf. Thorwald Risler: Aktennotiz.
16 May 1962. HfG, file 564.
1087 Cf. his lengthy tirade against
Horst Rittel of 11 May 1962: Otl
Aicher: Letter to administrative coun-
cil of the Geschwister-Scholl-Stif-
tung. 11 May 1962. THD, 71/5,
file 17.
1088 Gudrun Otto: Letter to the
administrative council of the Ge-
schwister-Scholl-Stiftung. 8 May
1962. HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 80,
document 220.
1089 Thorwald Risler: Aktennotiz.
16 May 1962. HfG, file 564.
1090 Thorwald Risler: Beschluß des
Kleinen Konvents der Hochschule für
Gestaltung. 23 May 1962. HfG,
unlisted file.
1091 Herbert Ohl: Protokoll zur Sit-
zung des Rektoratskollegiums am
Mittwoch, den 30. Mai 1962.
30 May 1962. BHA, HfG records,
folder 139.
1092 The representatives of the
departments of industrialized build-
ing and of product design were Her-
bert Ohl and Tomás Maldonado.
1093 Herbert Ohl: Erklärung zur
Amtsübernahme des Rektoratskolle-
giums. 1 June 1962. BHA, HfG
records, folder 149.
1094 Thorwald Risler: Letter to the
administrative council of the Ge-
schwister-Scholl-Stiftung. 5 June
1962. HfG, unlisted file.
1095 Herbert Ohl, Günther Schweig-
kofler: Protokoll zur Sitzung des Klei-
nen Konvents am Freitag, den
8. Juni 1962, um 10,30 Uhr im Rek-
torat. 15 June 1962. BHA, HfG
records, folder 115.
1096 Gudrun Otto: Letter to the
administrative council of the Ge-
schwister-Scholl-Stiftung. 24 June
1962. PAB.
1097 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Zusammengefaßter Geschäftsbericht
des Vorstands der Geschwister-
Scholl-Stiftung für die Rechnungs-
jahre 1961, 1962 und 1963. n. d.
May 1964. HfG, file 559; Institute of
Product Development and Design:
Protokoll über die Gründung des
Vereins: Institut für Produktentwick-
lung und Design. 31 Jan. 1962. PAB.
1098 Johann Peter Vogel: Besprech-
ung des Vorstandes der Geschwis-
ter-Scholl-Stiftung in Darmstadt am
29. Juni 1962. 10 July 1962. PAB.
1099 Otl Aicher: Letter to Thorwald
Risler. 11 July 1962. THD, 71/5, file
17.
1100 Thorwald Risler: Letter to Otl
Aicher. 12 July 1962. THD, 71/5,
file 17.
1101 Thorwald Risler: Letter to Max
Guther. 12 July 1962. THD, 71/5,
file 17.
1102 Gert Kalow: Letter to Otl Aicher.
6 July 1962. HfG, unlisted file.
1103 Gert Kalow: Erfahrungsbericht.
n. d. June 1962. PAB.
1104 Herbert Lindinger: Zur Situation
in Ulm. 25.6.1962. PAB.
1105 Horst Rittel: Letter to Roderich
Count Thun. 28.6.1962. PAB.
1106 Cf. Geschwister-Scholl-Stif-
tung: Protokoll über die 20. Sitzung
des Verwaltungsrates der Geschwis-
ter-Scholl-Stiftung am Samstag, den
14.7.1962 in der Hochschule für
Gestaltung in Ulm. 27 July 1962
PAB.
1107 Otl Aicher: Zukunft der Hoch-
schule für Gestaltung / Bemerkun-
gen zur Krise 1962. 29 June 1961.
PAB.
1108 Otl Aicher: Zur Situation der
Hochschule für Gestaltung 1962.
n. d. September 1962. HfG, unlisted
file.
1109 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Letter to
Hellmut Becker. 12 Sept. 1962. PAB.
1110 Johann Peter Vogel: Die Verfas-
sungsänderung Aicher. n. d. 1963.
PAB.
1111 Hans Rettich, Günther Schweig-
kofler, Johann Peter Vogel: Verfas-
sung der Hochschule für Gestaltung.
9 Aug. 1962. PAB.
1112 Thorwald Risler: Letter to Theo-
dor Pfizer. 10 Dec. 1962. PAB.
1113 Thorwald Risler: Letter to the
advisory board of the Geschwister-
Scholl-Stiftung. 5 Nov. 1962. HfG,
file 564.
1114 Otl Aicher: Letter to the execu-
tive board of the Geschwister-Scholl-
Stiftung. 26 Sept. 1962. HfG, un-
listed file; Thorwald Risler: Protokoll
zur Besprechung des Rektoratskolle-
giums mit der Stiftung am Dienstag,
20. November 1962, um 8.45 Uhr.
22 Nov. 1962. BHA, HfG records,
folder 140.
1115 Cf. Otl Aicher: Letter to Max
Guther. 2 Nov. 1962. THD, 71/5,
file 19.
1116 Otl Aicher: Letter to Max
Guther. 16 Nov. 1962. THD, 71/5,
file 19.
1117 Thorwald Risler: Gedanken zum
Brief Otl Aichers an Prof. Max Guther
vom 2.11.1962. 4 Nov. 1962. THD,
71/5, file 19.
1118 Max Guther: Letter to Otl Ai-
cher. 14 Nov. 1962. THD, 71/5, file19.
1119 Otl Aicher: Entwurf vom 16.11.
1962. 16 Nov. 1962. HfG, file 564.
1120 Günther Schweigkofler: Proto-
koll über die Sitzung des Beirats der
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung am
17. November 1962. 7 Jan. 1963.
HfG, unlisted file.
1121 Advisory board of the Ge-
schwister-Scholl-Stiftung: Verfas-
sung der Hochschule für Gestaltung.
17 Nov. 1962. PAR.
1122 Advisory board of the Ge-
schwister-Scholl-Stiftung: Über-
gangsbestimmungen zur Verfassung
der Hochschule für Gestaltung. 11
Dec. 1962. HfG, unlisted file.
1123 Thorwald Risler: Letter to Theo-
dor Pfizer. 10 Dec. 1962. PAB.
1124 ibid.
1125 ibid.
1126 Thorwald Risler: An die Stu-
dentenschaft. 15 Dec. 1962. BHA,
HfG records, folder 98. – The rector’s
term in office was supposed to con-
tinue until 30 Sept. 1964, but already
a year earlier, in September 1963,
the rector was supposed to be elec-
ted for the period from 1 Oct. 1964
through 30 Sept. 1966. The term of
office of the first vice rector was sup-
posed to run through 30 Sept. 1963
and his successor was also sup-
posed to be elected for two years.
1127 Thorwald Risler: Letter to the
full-time lecturers, regular assistant
lecturers, technical teachers, and the
student representatives of the School
of Design. 15 Dec. 1963. HfG, un-
listed file.
1128 Gert Kalow: Letter to Thorwald
Risler. 16 Dec. 1962. PAR.
1129 Cf. Geschwister-Scholl-Stif-
tung: Protokoll über die 21. Sitzung
des Verwaltungsrates der Geschwis-
ter-Scholl-Stiftung am 26. April
1963 im kleinen Sitzungssaal des
Kultusministeriums in Stuttgart.
26 Apr. 1963. PAB.
1130 Thorwald Risler: Hochschule für
Gestaltung. 20 Dec. 1962. BHA, HfG
records, folder 98.
1131 Otl Aicher: Ansprache vor dem
Kleinen Senat der Hochschule für
Gestaltung. 20 Dec. 1962. HfG,
unlisted file.
1132 To mention only a few introduc-
tory texts on the subject out of a glut
of literature: Leonhard Froese: „Ein-
führung. Motivation und Genese der
Bildungsreformpolitik in Deutschland
seit 1945“, in: ibid. (ed.), Bildung-
spolitik und Bildungsreform. Amt-
liche Texte und Dokumente zur Bil-
dungspolitik im Deutschland der Be-
satzungszonen, der Bundesrepublik
Deutschland und der Deutschen De-
mokratischen Republik, München
1969, 13–74; Christoph Führ, Das
Bildungswesen in der Bundesrepu-
blik Deutschland. Ein Überblick,
(= Studien und Dokumentationen
zur vergleichenden Bildungsfor-
schung, vol. 12) Weinheim, Basel
1979; Ulrich Teichler: „Das Hoch-
schulwesen in der Bundesrepublik
Deutschland – ein Überblick“, in:
ibid. (ed.), Das Hochschulwesen in
der Bundesrepublik Deutschland,
Weinheim 1990, 11–42. – This
appendix is based on an analysis of
the following documents and sour-
ces, which are not individually refer-
enced: Ständige Konferenz der Kul-
tusminister der Länder der Bundes-
republik Deutschland (ed.), Kultur-
politik der Länder 1960, n. p.
(Munich) n. d. (1961); ibid. (ed.), Kul-
turpolitik der länder 1961 und 1962,
Cologne, Opladen 1963; ibid. (ed.),
Kulturpolitik der Länder 1963 und
1964, Bonn 1965; ibid. (ed.), Kultur-
politik der Länder 1965 und 1966,
Bonn 1967; Sekretariat der Ständigen
Konferenz der Kultusminister der
Länder in der Bundesrepublik
Deutschland (ed.), Kulturpolitik der
Länder 1967 und 1968, Bonn 1969;
ibid. (hg.), Kulturpolitik der Länder
1969 und 1970, Bonn 1971.
1133 Dietrich Thränhardt: „Bildung-
spolitik“, in: Klaus von Beyme, Man-
fred G. Schmidt (ed.), Politik in der
Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Opla-
den 1990, 177–202, hier 178.
1134 ibid. 182.
1135 ibid. 180.
1136 ibid. 183.
1137 Hellmut Becker: „Bildung und
Bildungspolitik. Über den Sickeref-
fekt von Reformen“, in: Martin Bros-
zat (ed.), Zäsuren nach 1945. Essays
zur Periodisierung der deutschen
Nachkriegsgeschichte. (= Schriften-
reihe der Vierteljahreshefte für Zeit-
geschichte, vol. 61) Munich 1990,
63–68, here 63 f.
1138 Königsteiner Staatsabkommen
der Länder der Bundesrepublik
Deutschland über die Finanzierung
wissenschaftlicher Forschungsein-
richtungen, 31.3.1949, in: Ständige
Konferenz der Kultusminister der
Länder der Bundesrepublik Deutsch-
land (ed.), Kulturpolitik der Länder
1960, o. o. (Munich) o. j. (1961), no
page ref.
1139 Satzung des deutschen Aus-
schusses für das Erziehungs- und
Bildungswesen, 5.2.1954, in: Ständi-
ge Konferenz der Kultusminister der
Länder der Bundesrepublik Deutsch-
land (ed.), Kulturpolitik der Länder
1961 und 1962, Cologne, Opladen
1963, 230 f.
1140 Abkommen zwischen den Län-
dern der Bundesrepublik zur Verein-
heitlichung auf dem Gebiete des
Schulwesens, 17.2.1955, in: ibid.
227 f.
1141 Verwaltungsabkommen zwi-
schen Bund und Ländern über die
Errichtung eines Wissenschaftsrates,
5.9.1957, in: ibid. 231 ff.
1142 Hellmut Becker (see note 1225)
64.
1143 Ralf Dahrendorf, Arbeiterkinder
an deutschen Universitäten,
(= Recht und Staat in Geschichte
und Gegenwart, vol. 302/303)
Tübingen 1965, 75.
1144 Ständige Konferenz der Kultus-
minister der Länder der Bundesrepu-
blik Deutschland (ed.), Bedarfsfest-
stellung 1961–1970. Bedarfsfeststel-
lung 1961 bis 1970 für Schulwesen,
Lehrerbildung, Wissenschaft und
Forschung, Kunst und Kulturpflege,
Stuttgart 1963.
1145 Ludwig Erhard, „Aufgaben der
Bildung und Forschung. Auszug aus
der Regierungserklärung vor dem
Deutschen Bundestag am 18. Okto-
ber 1963“, in: Zur Kulturpolitik der
CDU/CSU, ed. Bundesgeschäftsstelle
CDU, Bonn 1964, 9.
1146 In: Ständige Konferenz der Kul-
tusminister der Länder der Bundes-
republik Deutschland (ed.), Kultur-
politik der Länder 1961 und 1962,
Cologne, Opladen 1963, 34 f.
1147 Georg Picht, Die deutsche Bil-
dungskatastrophe. Analyse und Do-
kumentation, Freiburg im Breisgau,
Olten 1964.
1148 Dietrich Thränhardt (see note
1221) 192.
1149 Gero Leonhardt: „Bildungspoli-
tik und Schulentwicklung in der
BRD“, in: Bernhard Blanke, Hellmut
Wollmann (ed.), Die alte Bundesre-
publik. Kontinuität und Wandel,
(= Leviathan Sonderhefte, vol. 12)
Cologne 1991, 389– 408, here 396.
1150 ibid. 391.
1151 Hellmut Becker (see note 1325)
66.
1152 Gero Leonhardt (see note 1237)
399.
1153 Thorwald Risler: Letter to
Theodor Pfizer. 26 Jan. 1963. STU,
B 310/21/1.
1154 Gudrun Otto: Telegram to Karl
Brachat. 20 Dec. 1962. HStA, EA
3/203, bundle 82, appendix to docu-
ment 3; Gudrun Otto: Telegram to
Gerhard Storz. 20 Dec. 1962. HStA,
EA 3/203, bundle 82, document 4.
1155 Neu-Ulmer Zeitung, 21 Dec.
1962: Krach auf dem oberen Kuh-
berg. Neuer Rektor gewählt – Stu-
denten protestieren; Stuttgarter
Nachrichten, 3 Jan. 1963: Ulmer
Studenten protestieren gegen die
Wahl des neuen Rektors; Neu-Ulmer
Zeitung, 8.1.1963: „Neue Phase der
Stabilität…“ sagt die HfG.
1156 Otl Aicher: Address, 7 Feb.
1963.
1157 Main Department of the Ulm
municipal council: Auszug aus der
Niederschrift über die Verhandlun-
gen der Hauptabteilung des Ge-
meinderats: § 353 beiträge an die
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung. 20 Mar.
1956. STU, B 310/21/1; Schwäbische
Donau-Zeitung, 9 Feb.1963: Hoch-
schule für Gestaltung als Rundfunk-
thema; Stuttgarter Nachrichten,
9 Feb. 1963: Hochschule für Gestal-
tung protestiert; Schwäbische Do-
nau-Zeitung, 16 Feb. 1963: „Die per-
manente Krisensituation der Hoch-
schule für Gestaltung in Ulm“. Com-
plete reprint of the manuscript and
Otl Aicher’s reply.
1158 Der Spiegel 12/1963, 18 Mar.
1963, 71 ff.: Auf dem Kuhberg.
1159 Otl Aicher: Rede an die Dozen-
ten, Studenten und Mitarbeiter.
22 Mar.1963. HfG, unlisted file; Her-
bert Ohl: Letter to Friedrich Rau.
20 Oct. 1966. HfG, unlisted file; Otl
Aicher: Letter to Gabor Gyimothy.
22 Mar. 1963. HfG, unlisted file; Otl
Aicher: Letter to Gudrun Otto.
22 Mar. 1963. HfG, unlisted file;
members of the School of Design:
Erklärung. 27 May 1963. HfG, un-
listed file; Schwäbische Donau-Zei-
tung, 23 Mar. 1963: „Aus dem Feld
der Polemik heraustreten“; Stuttgar-
ter Nachrichten, 23.3.1963: Span-
nungen an der Ulmer Hochschule;
Stuttgarter Zeitung, 26 Mar. 1963:
Ulmer Hochschule für Gestaltung
und die Pressestimmen.
1160 Baden-Württemberg Landtag,
3d electoral period: Beilage III 2909.
21 Mar. 1963. PABW.
1161 Schwäbische Donau-Zeitung,
23 Mar. 1963: „Aus dem Feld der
Polemik heraustreten“.
1162 Wolfgang Donndorf: Letter to
Theodor Pfizer. 29 Mar. 1963. HfG,
unlisted file.
1163 Thorwald Risler: Zur Beantwor-
tung der Fragen des Verwaltungsrats
an den Stiftungsvorstand. 18 Apr.
1963. HfG, unlisted file.
1164 Hochschule für Gestaltung:
Etatentwicklung. 26 Mar. 1963. HfG,
unlisted file.
1165 Ulm municipal council: Nieder-
schrift über die Verhandlung des Ge-
meinderats: § 32 Hochschule für
Gestaltung. 22 Mar. 1963. STU, B
310/21/4.
1166 Schwäbische Donau-Zeitung,
6 Apr. 1963: „Die Aufgabe: Heranbil-
dung von Produktgestaltern“.
1167 Stuttgarter Zeitung, 22 May
1963: Flurbereinigung auf dem Kuh-
berg; Schwäbische Donau-Zeitung,
24 May 1963: Vor einer Flurbereini-
gung auf dem Kuhberg.
1168 Peter Friederich: Nicht Hoch-
schule – Mittelschule, in: Abschnitte
5/May 1963, no page ref.
1169 Stuttgarter Nachrichten,
11 May 1963: Die ungestalte Hoch-
schule für Gestaltung.
1170 Herbert Lindinger, Claude
Schnaidt: Erklärung zu dem offenen
Brief. 22 May 1963. HStA, EA 3/203,
bundle 80, appendix 2 to document
280; Herbert Lindinger, Claude
Schnaidt: Offener Brief an die soge-
nannten „opponierenden Dozenten
und Studenten“. 20 May 1963.
HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 80, appen-
dix 1 to document 280.
1171 Members of the School of
Design: Erklärung. 27 May 1963.
HfG, unlisted file.
1172 Minutes of the Baden-Württem-
berg Landtag, 3rd electoral period,
30 May 1963, pp. 5860–70. PABW.
1173 Max Guther: Letter to Thorwald
Risler. 24 Apr. 1963. PAB.
1174 Hans Rettich, Günther Schweig-
kofler, Johann Peter Vogel: Errich-
tung der gemeinnützigen „Ge-
schwister-Scholl-Stiftung“. 13 May
1963. PAB.
1175 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Letter to
Walter Gropius. 29 May 1963. PAF.
1176 Thorwald Risler: Letter to Otto
Pfleiderer. 30 May 1963. PAR.
1177 Otl Aicher: Letter to Hellmut
Becker. 29 May 1963. HfG, unlisted
file.
1178 Hellmut Becker: Letter to Otl
Aicher. 1 June 1963. PAB.
1179 Otl Aicher: Letter to Hellmut
Becker. 1 June 1963. HfG, unlisted
file.
1180 Max Bill: Letter to Otl Aicher.
3 Oct. 1963. BHA, HfG records, fold-
er 125.
1181 Max Bill: Letter to Otl Aicher.
29 Oct. 1963. THM; Otl Aicher: Let-
ter to Max Bill. 19 Dec. 1963. THM.
1182 The general meeting of the
foundation consisted of the advisory
board (9 members, 3 of them from
the foundation’s executive board)
and the administrative council (14
members), i.e., a total of 23 persons.
However, Helmut Cron was no longer
on the administrative council after
26 Apr. 1963, and no successor was
appointed. Therefore the two general
meetings on 12 June and 28 Nov.
1963 consisted of 22 persons.
1183 Otl Aicher: Letter to Hellmut
Becker. 1 June 1963. HfG, unlisted
file.
1184 Otl Aicher: Letter to Hellmut
Becker. 1 June 1963. HfG, unlisted
file.
1185 Hellmut Becker: Letter to Thor-
wald Risler. 4 June 1963. PAB.
1186 Hellmut Becker: Letter to Max
Guther. 4 June 1963. PAB.
1187 Hellmut Becker: Telefonge-
spräch mit Professor Guther. 7 June
1963. PAB.
1188 General meeting of the Ge-
schwister-Scholl-Stiftung: Presse-
mitteilung. 13 June 1963. HfG,
unlisted file; Theodor Pfizer: Protokoll
über die Sitzung der Hauptversamm-
lung der Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung
am 12.6.1963 im Kultusministerium
Baden-Württemberg in Stuttgart.
28 Oct. 1963. HfG, unlisted file.
1189 The members were Hellmut
Becker, Günther Boulanger, Klaus
Dohrn, Wolfgang Donndorf, Hans
Frieder Eychmüller, Günther Grzimek,
Karl Gussone, Theodor Pfizer, and
Thorwald Risler.
1190 Thorwald Risler: Protokoll über
die Sitzung des Beirates der Ge-
schwister-Scholl-Stiftung am
29. Juni 1963 im Bundesbahnhotel
Ulm. 29 June 1963. HfG, file 564.
1191 Thorwald Risler: Protokoll über
die Sitzung des Beirates der Ge-
schwister-Scholl-Stiftung am 19.7.
1963. 25 July 1963. HfG, unlisted
file; advisory board of the Geschwis-
ter-Scholl-Stiftung: Protokoll der Sit-
zung des Beirates der Geschwister-
Scholl-Stiftung vom 5.10.1963. 5.
Oct. 1963. HfG, file 564.
1192 Otl Aicher: Letter to Thorwald
Risler. 23 July 1963. HfG, unlisted
file.
1193 Inge Aicher-Scholl: Letter to
Otto Pfleiderer. 28 July 1963. THM,
folder 9.
1194 Johann Peter Vogel: Letter to
Theodor Pfizer. 12 Oct. 1963. PAB.
1195 Klaus Dohrn: Letter to Otl Ai-
cher. 9 Aug. 1963. PAB.
1196 Johann Peter Vogel: Letter to
Hans Rettich. 4 July 1963. PAB.
1197 On this and what follows cf.
Hellmut Becker: Letter to Theodor
Pfizer. 27 Aug. 1963. PAB.
1198 Otl Aicher: Brief an die Dozen-
ten, die Vertreter der planmäßigen
Assistenten und die der technischen
Lehrer der Hochschule für Gestal-
tung. 24 July 1963. BHA, HfG
records, folder 125; Baden-Württem-
berg Landtag, 3rd electoral period:
1199 Baden-Württemberg ministry 457
of education and the arts: Dokumen-
tation 2. n. d. July 1963. PABW.
1200 Baden-Württemberg ministry of
education and the arts: Dokumenta-
tion 2. n. d. July 1963. PABW.
1201 Manfred Wörner: Letter to Otl
Aicher. 15 July 1963. BHA, HfG
records, folder 125; on 19 Nov. 1963
there was a meeting of the politico-
cultural group of the Landtag SPD
faction: Schwäbische Donau-Zei-
tung, 21 Nov. 1963: Ein Weg aus
der Krise aufgezeigt.
1202 Otl Aicher: Rede Otl Aichers
beim Empfang für FDP Landtagsfrak-
tion im Ulmer Rathaus am 13.9.63.
13 Sept. 1963. BHA, HfG records,
folder 124; Ulm city council: Bericht
über das Gespräch zwischen FDP/
DVP-Landtagsfraktion und Ulmer
Vertretern des öffentlichen Lebens
am 13. September 1963 im Ulmer
Rathaus. 13 Sept. 1963. BHA, HfG
records, folder 124.
1203 Baden-Württemberg ministry of
education and the arts: Letter to the
Baden-Württemberg ministry of
state. 11 Oct. 1963. PABW.
1204 Baden-Württemberg Landtag,
3rd electoral period: Auszug aus der
85. Sitzung des kulturpolitischen
Ausschusses vom 25. Oktober 1963.
11 Nov. 1963. HStA, EA 3/203, bun-
dle 87, document 50a; politico-cultu-
ral committee of the 3d Landtag of
Baden-Württemberg: Empfehlungen
des kulturpolitischen Ausschusses
an den Finanz-Ausschuß. 5 Nov.
1963. PABW; Theodor Pfizer: Proto-
koll über die 22. Sitzung des Verwal-
tungsrates der Geschwister-Scholl-
Stiftung am 11.11. 1963 im Kultus-
ministerium Stuttgart. 21 Feb. 1964.
PAB; Landtag of Baden-Württem-
berg, 3rd electoral period: Auszug
aus der 87. Sitzung des kulturpoliti-
schen Ausschusses am 4.11.1963.
11 Nov. 1963. HStA, EA 3/203, bun-
dle 87, document 51a.
1205 Otl Aicher: Memo. 5 Nov. 1963.
BHA, HfG records, folder 15.
1206 Otl Aicher, Johanna Rösner:
Protokoll zur außerordentlichen Sit-
zung des Großen Senats am
7. November 1963. 12 Nov. 1963.
HfG, unlisted file.
1207 Schwäbische Donau-Zeitung,
30 Oct. 1963: Landesregierung: HfG
ist förderungswürdig; Stuttgarter
Nachrichten, 30 Oct. 1963: Hoch-
schule für Gestaltung weiterhin för-
derungswürdig; Schwäbische Do-
nau-Zeitung, 5 Nov. 1963: Bedin-
gungen für den Staatszuschuß;
Stuttgarter Nachrichten, 5 Nov.
1963: Mittel für Ulmer Hochschule
sollen gesperrt werden.
1208 Hochschule für Gestaltung:
Stellungnahme. 12 Nov. 1963. HfG,
unlisted file.
1209 Theodor Pfizer: Protokoll über
die 22. Sitzung des Verwaltungs-
rates der Geschwister-Scholl-Stif-
tung am 11.11.1963 im Kultusminis-
terium Stuttgart. 21 Feb. 1964. PAB.
 References
458 1210 Thorwald Risler: Letter to Theo-
dor Pfizer. 13 Nov. 1963. PAB.
1211 Günther Schweigkofler: Akten-
vermerk. 13 Nov. 1963. PAB.
1212 Otl Aicher, Johanna Rösner:
Protokoll zur 6. Sitzung des Kleinen
Senats am 13. November 1963.
BHA, HfG records, folder 103.
1213 Otl Aicher: Letter to the mem-
bers of the advisory board of the
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung. 8 Nov.
1963. HfG, unlisted file; Advisory
board of the Geschwister-Scholl-Stif-
tung: Resolution des Beirats zum
Verfassungsentwurf der Verfas-
sungskommission der Hauptver-
sammlung vom 11.11.63. n. d.
November 1963. THM, folder 9.
1214 Theodor Pfizer: Letter to Otl
Aicher. 18 Nov. 1963. PAR.
1215 Otl Aicher, Johanna Rösner:
Protokoll zur 3. Sitzung des Kleinen
Senats am 6. März 1963. 8 Mar.
1963. BHA, HfG records, folder 103.
1216 Cf. Thorwald Risler: Letter to
Wolfgang Donndorf. 22 Aug. 1963.
HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 69, docu-
ment 1; Thorwald Risler: Letter to
Theodor Pfizer. 13 Nov. 1963. PAB.
1217 Otl Aicher, Johanna Rösner:
Protokoll zur 5. Sitzung des Kleinen
Senats am 2. Oktober 1963. 10 Oct.
1963. BHA, HfG records, folder 103.
1218 Otl Aicher: Letter to Thorwald
Risler. 8 Oct. 1963. BHA, HfG
records, folder 15.
1219 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung,
Siemens & Halske Inc.: Schenkungs-
vertrag. 18 Jan. 1963. PAB.
1220 Cf. René Spitz (see note 26)
427.
1221 Theodor Pfizer: Protokoll über
die 22. Sitzung des Verwaltungs-
rates der Geschwister-Scholl-Stif-
tung am 11.11.1963 im Kultusminis-
terium Stuttgart. 21 Feb. 1964. PAB.
1222 Günther Schweigkofler: Akten-
vermerk. 13 Nov. 1963. PAB.
1223 Otl Aicher, Johanna Rösner:
Protokoll zur 6. Sitzung des Kleinen
Senats am 13. November 1963.
18 Nov. 1963. BHA, HfG records,
folder 103.
1224 Otl Aicher: Letter to Thorwald
Risler. 14 Nov. 1963. PAR.
1225 Wolfgang Donndorf: Betr.:
Hochschule für Gestaltung hier: Än-
derung der Stiftungssatzung. 4.12.
1963. 4 Dec. 1963. HStA, EA 3/203,
bundle 82, document 25.
1226 Cf. Otl Aicher: Bericht zu den
Bemühungen um eine Änderung der
Satzung der Geschwister-Scholl-Stif-
tung. 5 Nov. 1963. BHA, HfG
records, folder 15.
1227 Cf. Theodor Pfizer: Protokoll
über die 22. Sitzung des Verwal-
tungsrates der Geschwister-Scholl-
Stiftung am 11.11 .1963 im Kultusmi-
nisterium Stuttgart. 21 Feb. 1964.
PAB.
1228 Cf. Theodor Pfizer: Protokoll
über die Hauptversammlung am
28.11.1963 im Kultusministerium
Stuttgart. 26 Feb. 1964. HfG, unlisted
file.
1229 Hans Rettich: Protokoll über
die Sitzung der Verfassungskommis-
sion der Hauptversammlung der Ge-
schwister-Scholl-Stiftung am 11.11.
1963 im Sitzungssaal des Kultusmi-
nisteriums in Stuttgart. 16 Nov. 1963.
PAR.
1230 Advisory board of the Ge-
schwister-Scholl-Stiftung: Resolution
des Beirats zum Verfassungsentwurf
der Verfassungskommission der
Hauptversammlung vom 11.11.63.
n. d. November 1963. THM, folder 9;
cf. Otl Aicher: Bericht zu den
Bemühungen um eine Änderung der
Satzung der Geschwister-Scholl-Stif-
tung. 5 Nov. 1963. BHA, HfG
records, folder 15.
1231 Advisory board of the Ge-
schwister-Scholl-Stiftung: Resolution
des Beirats zum Verfassungsentwurf
der Verfassungskommission der
Hauptversammlung vom 11.11.63.
n. d. November 1963. THM, folder 9.
1232 Walter Gropius: Letter to Inge
Aicher-Scholl. 22 Nov. 1963. PAR.
1233 Gui Bonsiepe et al., An die Mit-
glieder der Hauptversammlung der
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung. 25 Nov.
1963. PAR.
1234 Gudrun Otto: Letter to Thor-
wald Risler. 26 Nov. 1963. PAR.
1235 Gert Kalow: Letter to Thorwald
Risler. 27 Nov. 1963. PAR.
1236 Günther Schweigkofler: Überle-
gungen zu der gegenwärtigen Krise
auf dem Kuhberg. 25 Nov. 1963.
PAR.
1237 Theodor Pfizer: Protokoll über
die Hauptversammlung am 28.11.
1963 im Kultusministerium Stuttgart.
26 Feb. 1964. HfG, unlisted file.
1238 Wolfgang Donndorf: Betr.:
Hochschule für Gestaltung hier: Än-
derung der Stiftungssatzung. 4 Dec.
1963. HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 82,
document 25.
1239 Wolfgang Donndorf: Betr.:
Hochschule für Gestaltung hier: Än-
derung der Stiftungssatzung. 4 Dec.
1963. HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 82,
document 25.
1240 Cf. René Spitz (see note 26)
446–451.
1241 Hans Frieder Eychmüller: Letter
to the general meeting of the Ge-
schwister-Scholl-Stiftung. 30 Nov.
1963. PAR.
1242 Minutes of the Baden-Würt-
temberg Landtag, 3rd electoral peri-
od, 103rd plenary session, 30 Nov
1963, pp. 7056, 7080. PABW.
1243 Baden-Württemberg Landtag,
3rd electoral period: Auszug aus der
92. Sitzung des kulturpolitischen
Ausschusses am 16. Dezember
1963. 16 Dec. 1963. HStA, EA
3/203, bundle 65, document 7a.
1244 Otl Aicher: Letter to Max Bill.
19 Dec. 1963. THM.
1245 Hellmut Becker: Telefonge-
spräch mit Professor Guther. 7 Jun.
1963. PAB.
1246 Egbert-Hans Müller: Letter to
Theodor Pfizer. 11 Dec. 1967. HStA,
EA 3/203, bundle 64, document 144.
1248 Otl Aicher: Letter to Theodor
Pfizer. 19 Dec. 1963. PAR.
1249 Theodor Pfizer: Letter to Otl
Aicher. 30 Dec. 1963. HfG, file 554.
1250 The plan of the ministry of edu-
cation and the arts, the German Film
and TV Academy of Berlin, and the
film instructors was that there would
be film training on Kuhberg, but not
in the form of an institute dependent
on the foundation budget. For film
training they wanted a separate insti-
tute independent of the HfG dis-
putes, located near the foundation,
but with its own budget, as a mem-
ber of the German Film and TV Acad-
emy; under these circumstances the
HfG refused to maintain film training
as part of its program.
1251 Otl Aicher: Letter to Thorwald
Risler. 13 Feb. 1964. PAR.
1252 Thorwald Risler: Letter to Otl
Aicher. 28 Feb. 1964. PAR.
1253 Hellmut Becker: Letter to Theo-
dor Pfizer. 28 Mar. 1964. PAR.
1253 Cf. René Spitz (see note 26)
417 f.
1254 Thorwald Risler: Letter to Klaus
Dohrn. 12 Dec. 1963. PAB.
1255 Cf. Thorwald Risler: Vorüberle-
gungen zu notwendigen Entschei-
dungen des Vorstandes der Gesell-
schaft der Freunde der Geschwister-
Scholl-Stiftung. n. d. April 1964. PAB.
1256 Thorwald Risler: Vorüberlegun-
gen über den eventuellen Aufbau
eines Instituts im Rahmen der Ge-
schwister-Scholl-Stiftung (Sitzung
des Stiftungsrates vom 15.6. 1964).
n. d. May 1964. PAR.
1257 Klaus Dohrn: Entwurf / 26.5.
1964. 26 May1964. PAR.
1258 Otl Aicher,Tomás Maldonado,
Herbert Ohl, Walter Zeischegg: Me-
morandum zur Vorlage an den Stif-
tungsrat. 15 June 1964. THM, fold-
er 9.
1259 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Protokoll über die 2. Sitzung des
Stiftungsrates der Geschwister-
Scholl-Stiftung am 15.6.1964 in
Stuttgart.. 13 July 1964. HfG, file
469.
1260 Otl Aicher: Letter to Theodor
Pfizer. 3 Jul. 1964. PAR.
1261 Thorwald Risler: Letter to Theo-
dor Pfizer. 13 Aug. 1964. HfG, file
549. After Thorwald Risler’s resigna-
tion the foundation had a great deal
of trouble fulfilling its obligations
regarding the Siemens gift. The rea-
son was a mixture of denial and
delay policies on the part of HfG
committees, and the fact that the
foundation‘s council was not asser-
tive enough. This resulted in financial
losses, though these went largely
unnoticed in the general frenzy of
1967 and 1968. Cf., for example, the
Baden-Württemberg ministry of edu-
cation and the arts: Niederschrift.
9 July 1965. HStA, EA 3/203, bundle
69; Thorwald Risler: Letter to Theo-
dor Pfizer. 16 Jan. 1967. HStA, EA
3/203, bundle 69, appendix 1 to
document 34.
1262 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Protokoll über die 3. Sitzung des
Stiftungsrates der Geschwister-
Scholl-Stiftung am 13.7.1964 in
Stuttgart. 13 July 1964. HfG, file 473.
1263 Thorwald Risler: Letter to Theo-
dor Pfizer. 13 Aug. 1964. HfG, file
549; Hellmut Becker: Letter to Theo-
dor Pfizer. 9 Aug. 1964. PAR; Chair-
man of the board of the Founders’
Association for German Science: Let-
ter to Hellmut Becker. 30 July 1964.
PAB.
1264 Cf. Otl Aicher: Letter to Theo-
dor Pfizer. 17 Apr. 1964. PAB.
1265 Günther Schweigkofler: Letter
to Hellmut Becker. 24 Oct. 1963.
PAB. The following were qualified for
election: the 5 full-time lecturers Otl
Aicher, Gert Kalow, Tomás Maldona-
do, Herbert Ohl, and Walter Zei-
schegg. Gerd Kalow had previously
announced that he wanted to take a
job as a visiting professor in Japan
that year.
1266 Thorwald Risler: Bekanntma-
chung. 24 Oct. 1963. BHA, HfG
records, folders 98 and 125.
1267 Otl Aicher: Letter to Thorwald
Risler, 18 June 1964. PAR; Theodor
Pfizer: Letter to Friedrich Rau. 27
Nov. 1964. PAR.
1268 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Protokoll über die 3. Sitzung des
Stiftungsrates der Geschwister-
Scholl-Stiftung am 13.7.1964 in
Stuttgart. 13 July 1964. HfG, file 473.
1269 Otl Aicher: Letter to Friedrich
Rau. 17 Oct. 1966. HfG, unlisted file.
1270 Otl Aicher, Günther Schweig-
kofler, Johanna Rösner: Protokoll zur
(4.) ordentlichen Sitzung des
Großen Senats am 25. Sept. 1964.
30 Sept. 1964. BHA, HfG records,
folder 99.
1271 Thorwald Risler: Letter to Walter
Erbe. 30 Sept. 1964. HfG, file 562.
1272 Günther Schweigkofler: Akten-
vermerk zu den Vorstandsakten.
5 Oct. 1964. HfG, file 562.
1273 Alexander Kluge: Letter to Hell-
mut Becker. 27 Oct. 1964. PAB.
1274 Walter Erbe, Friedrich Rau,
Hans Zumsteg: Letter to Tomás Mal-
donado. 8 Dec. 1964. HfG, file 562.
1275 Theodor Pfizer: Letter to Otto
Pfleiderer. 28 Aug. 1964. STU, H Pfiz-
er, HfG.
1276 Hellmut Becker: Letter to Theo-
dor Pfizer. 9 Aug. 1964. PAR.
1277 Max Horn: Aktennotiz. 15 Mar.
1965. PAR; Max Horn: Letter to Hans
Gugelot. 23 Mar. 1965. PAR; Hans
Gugelot: Letter to Thorwald Risler.
25 June 1965. PAR; Max Horn: Letter
to Hans Gugelot. 30 July 1965. PAR;
Thorwald Risler: Letter to the mem-
bers of the Institute of Product Devel-
opment. 15 Sept. 1965. PAR; Max
Horn: Letter to Thorwald Risler.
3 Sept. 1965. PAR.
1278 Institute of Product Develop-
ment and Design: Letter to Ulm Dis-
trict Court. 18 Jan. 1966. PAR; Insti-
tute of Product Development and
Design: Protokoll der ausserordentli-
chen Mitgliederversammlung am
18.1.1966 des Instituts für Produkt-
entwicklung und Design e. v., Ulm.
18 Jan. 1966. PAR.
1279 Tomás Maldonado: Letter to
Herbert Ohl. 7 Sept. 1966. HfG,
unlisted file.
1280 Tomás Maldonado: Letter to
Herbert Ohl. 7 Sept. 1966. HfG,
unlisted file.
1281 Theodor Pfizer: Aktennotiz.
14 Jan. 1964. HfG, file 554.
1282 Thorwald Risler: Letter to Klaus
Dohrn. 12 Dec.1963. PAB.
1283 Klaus Dohrn: Letter to Otl
Aicher. 27 Dec. 1963. PAR.
1284 Klaus Dohrn: Letter to Otl
Aicher. 27 Dec. 1963. PAR.
1285 Klaus Dohrn: Letter to Otl
Aicher. 24 Jan. 1964. BHA, HfG
records, folder 15.
1286 Klaus Dohrn: Letter to Hellmut
Becker, Max Bill, Günther Grzimek,
Otto Pfleiderer, Hans Zumsteg.
24 Jan. 1964. PAB. – Of these 6 gov-
ernment representatives, 2 were
replaced by successors in 1968:
Walther Hinsch remained until the
5th session (successor: Franz Frank)
and Josef Alfons Thuma until the 8th
session (successor: Karl Hipp).
1287 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Protokoll über die erste (konstituie-
rende) Sitzung des Stiftungsrates
der Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung am
6.2.1964 in Stuttgart. 20 Feb. 1964.
HfG, file 469.
1288 Theodor Pfizer: Letter to the
foundation‘s council of the Ge-
schwister-Scholl-Stiftung. 17 Feb.
1964. PAR.
1289 Hellmut Becker: Letter to Theo-
dor Pfizer. 21 Sept. 1964. PAR.
1290 Theodor Pfizer: Letter to Fried-
rich Rau. 19 Oct. 1964. STU, H Pfizer,
HfG.
1291 Theodor Pfizer: Letter to Fried-
rich Rau. 27 Nov. 1964. PAR.
1292 Günther Schweigkofler: Letter
to Hans Rettich. 10 Dec. 1963. HStA,
EA 3/203, bundle 82, document 33.
1293 Otl Aicher: Letter to Hellmut
Becker. 7 Nov. 1963. PAB. Because
Otl Aicher felt that the foundation
and the HfG were of equal impor-
tance, there was an argument with
Klaus Dohrn in the latter part of 1963
concerning the question whether the
independent members of the foun-
dation‘s council should be nominated
by the Society of Friends “in consul-
tation with” or “in agreement with”
the HfG. Cf. Otl Aicher: Letter to
Theodor Pfizer. 1 Jan. 1964. PAB.
This is why Otl Aicher demanded that
the rector should be given the same
salary as the chair of the foundation's
executive board.
1294 Otl Aicher: Letter to Theodor
Pfizer. 13 Mar. 1964. BHA, HfG
records, folder 15.
1295 Hochschule für Gestaltung:
Protokoll der 6 Sitzung des Kleinen
Senats am 13.11.1963. 18 Nov. 1963.
HfG, unlisted file.
1296 Günther Schweigkofler: Letter
to Hans Rettich. 10 Dec. 1963. HStA,
EA 3/302, bundle 82, document 33.
1297 Baden-Württemberg Landtag,
3rd electoral period: Auszug aus der
92. Sitzung des kulturpolitischen
Ausschusses am 16. Dezember
1963. 16 Dec. 1963. HStA, EA
3/203, bundle 65, document 7a;
Gerhard Storz: Letter to Karl Brachat.
16 Dec. 1963. HStA, EA 3/203, bun-
dle 87.
1298 Wolfgang Donndorf: Letter to
the Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung.
17 Dec. 1963. PAB.
1299 Otl Aicher, Johanna Rösner:
Protokoll zur 8. Sitzung des Kleinen
Senats am Mittwoch, 15. Januar
1964. 17 Jan. 1964. HfG, unlisted
file; Otl Aicher: Entwurf einer Stel-
lungnahme gegenüber der Geschwi-
ster-Scholl-Stiftung. 20 Jan. 1964.
HfG, unlisted file; Otl Aicher: Un-
dated draft of a position statement
on the Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung.
January 1964. HfG, unlisted file.
1300 Foundation‘s council of the
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung: Stel-
lungnahme zu den Empfehlungen
des Landtages. 12 Feb. 1964. PAH,
DOK 34; Geschwister-Scholl-Stif-
tung: Protokoll über die erste (kon-
stituierende) Sitzung des Stiftungs-
rates der Geschwister-Scholl-Stif-
tung am 6.2.1964 in Stuttgart. 20
Feb. 1964. HfG, file 469.
1301 Baden-Württemberg Landtag,
3rd electoral period: Auszug a. d. 5.
Sitzung d. KPA a. 13.3.1964. 13 Mar.
1964. HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 65,
document 11b.
1302 Günther Schweigkofler: Letter
to the Baden-Württemberg ministry
of education and the arts. 30 Sept.
1964. HfG, unlisted file; foundation‘s
council of the Geschwister-Scholl-
Stiftung: Verfassung der Hochschule
für Gestaltung. 5 Nov. 1964. HfG,
unlisted file.
1303 Foundation‘s council of the
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung: Proto-
koll über die vierte Sitzung des Stif-
tungsrates der Geschwister-Scholl-
Stiftung am 5.11.1964 in Stuttgart.
20 Jan. 1965. PAB; Wolfgang Donn-
dorf: Letter to Theodor Pfizer. 12 Nov.
1964. PAB.
1304 Minutes of the Baden-Würt-
temberg Landtag, 4th electoral peri-
od, 20th plenary session, 9 Dec.
1964, page 845. PABW.
1305 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Protokoll über die Sitzung des Stif-
tungsrates der Geschwister-Scholl-
Stiftung am 26.7.1965 in Stuttgart.
13 Sept. 1965. HfG, file 427; also, at
this meeting Inge Aicher-Scholl and
Hellmut Becker were appointed as
members of the foundation’s board
of trustees.
1306 Friedrich Rau: Letter to Tomás
Maldonado. 18 Oct. 1965. HfG,
unlisted file.
1307 Johanna Rösner: Protokoll zur
6. ordentlichen Sitzung des Großen
Senats am 5. November 1965. 12.
Nov. 1965. HfG, unlisted file; Fried-
rich Rau: Letter to Tomás Maldonado.
18 Oct. 1965. HfG, unlisted file;
Tomás Maldonado: Beschlüsse des
Großen Senats in seiner Sitzung am
5./6. November 1965. 6 Nov. 1965.
BHA, HfG records, folder 126; Foun-
dation‘s council of the Geschwister-
Scholl-Stiftung: Aufgrund eines
Beschlusses des Stiftungsrates der
GSS vom 16.11.1965 erhält die Ver-
fassung der HfG folgenden Wortlaut.
16 Nov. 1965. HfG, unlisted file;
Friedrich Rau: Letter to Tomás Mal-
donado. 28 Nov. 1965. HfG, unlisted
file; Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Protokoll der 6. Sitzung des Stif-
tungsrates der Geschwister-Scholl-
Stiftung am 16.11.1965 in Stuttgart,
Kultusministerium. 7 Dec. 1965. HfG,
file 427. When this resolution was
adopted by the inner senate, it be-
came possible to finally appoint new
full-time lecturers: Gui Bonsiepe,
Herbert Lindinger, and Claude
Schnaidt (all three former HfG stu-
dents) as well as Alexander Kluge
and Edgar Reitz (both film instruc-
tors): Minutes of inner senate, 10
Nov. 1965 –594:Tomás Maldonado:
Letter to Friedrich Rau. 12 Nov. 1965.
HfG, unlisted file.
1308 Foundation‘s council of the
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung: Auf-
grund eines Beschlusses des Stif-
tungsrates der GSS vom 16.11.1965
erhält die Verfassung der HfG folgen-
den Wortlaut. 16 Nov. 1965. HfG,
unlisted file.
1309 Peter von Kornatzki: Kommuni-
qué. 1 Dec. 1965. HStA, EA 3/203,
bundle 82, appended to document
51.
1310 Peter von Kornatzki: Letter to
Tomás Maldonado. 8 Dec. 1965.
HfG, unlisted file.
1311 Baden-Württemberg Landtag,
4th electoral period: Landtagsdruck-
sache Beilage IV 2246, issued on 21
Dec. 1965. The ministry of education
and the arts also wrongly noted that
the Landtag’s conditions had been
met: Baden-Württemberg ministry of
education and the arts: Betr.: Staats-
zuschuß an die Geschwister-Scholl-
Stiftung für die Hochschule für Ge-
staltung Ulm. 7 Dec. 1965. HStA, EA
3/203, bundle 87, document 82.
1312 Tomás Maldonado, Johanna
Rösner: Protokoll zur 8. ordentlichen
Sitzung des Großen Senats am 29.4.
1966. 2 May 1966. BHA, HfG records,
folder 31;Tomás Maldonado: Letter
to Theodor Pfizer. 4 May 1966. BHA,
HfG records, folder 31.
1313 Tomás Maldonado, Johanna
Rösner: Protokoll zur 29. Sitzung des
Kleinen Senats am 2. Februar 1966.
7 Feb.1966. BHA, HfG records, folder
105.
1314 Friedrich Rau: Letter to Tomás
Maldonado. 13 May 1966. HfG,
unlisted file.
1315 Johanna Rösner: Letter to Fried-
rich Rau. 28 Oct. 1966. BHA, HfG
records, folder 128.
1316 Cf. for instance:Tomás Maldo-
nado, Johanna Rösner: Protokoll zur
32. (außerordentlichen) Sitzung des
Kleinen Senats am 17.5.1966. 3 June
1966. BHA, HfG records, folder 105;
Friedrich Rau: Bericht des Vorstan-
des der Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung
an den Stiftungsrat über eine Neu-
fassung der Satzung der GSS. 27
Jan. 1967. HfG, file 479; Herbert Ohl,
Johanna Rösner: Protokoll zur 11.
außerordentlichen Sitzung des
Großen Senats am 23.2. 1967.
27 Feb.1967. HfG, unlisted file; Tomás
Maldonado, Johanna Rösner: Proto-
koll zur 8. ordentlichen Sitzung des
Großen Senats am 29.4. 1966.
2 May 1966. BHA, HfG records, fold-
er 31; Friedrich Rau: Letter to Werner
Ruch. 24 July 1967. HfG, unlisted
file.
1317 Baden-Württemberg Audit Of-
fice: Letter to the Baden-Württem-
berg ministry of education and the
arts. 11 Aug. 1967. HStA, EA 3/203,
bundle 66, document 122.
1318 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Niederschrift über die 9. Sitzung des
Stiftungsrates der Geschwister-
Scholl-Stiftung vom 19.12.1966 in
Stuttgart im Haus des Kultusministe-
riums, Neues Schloss, 10.00 Uhr.
18 Jan. 1967. HfG, file 427; Ge-
schwister-Scholl-Stiftung: Nieder-
schrift über die 10. Sitzung des Stif-
tungsrates der Geschwister-Scholl-
Stiftung vom 8.2. 1967 in Stuttgart,
Kultusministerium Baden-Württem-
berg, Neues Schloss, 14.00 Uhr. 15
Feb. 1967. HfG, file 427; Foundation‘s
council of the Geschwister-Scholl-
Stiftung: Stellungnahme. 8 Feb.1967.
HfG, file 427.
1319 Klaus Dohrn: Entwurf / 26.5.
1964. 26 May 1964. PAR.
1320 Klaus Dohrn: Letter to Thorwald
Risler. 18 Nov. 1968. PAR.
1321 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Protokoll über die erste (konstituie-
rende) Sitzung des Stiftungsrates
der Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung am
6.2.1964 in Stuttgart. 20 Feb. 1964.
HfG, file 469.
1322 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Ergebnisprotokoll der Sitzung des
ständigen Ausschusses des Stif-
tungsrates der Geschwister-Scholl-
Stiftung am 2.6.1964 in Stuttgart.
6 June 1964. HfG, file 470.
1323 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Protokoll über die 2. Sitzung des
Stiftungsrates der Geschwister-
Scholl-Stiftung am 15.6.1964 in 459
Stuttgart. 13 July 1964. HfG, file 469.
1324 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Protokoll über die Sitzung des stän-
digen Ausschusses des Stiftungs-
rates der Geschwister-Scholl-Stif-
tung am 21.12.1964 im Haus der
Landeszentralbank von Baden-Würt-
temberg, Stuttgart. 9 Feb. 1964. HfG,
file 470.
1325 Otl Aicher: Bericht an den Vor-
stand der Geschwister-Scholl-Stif-
tung über das Ergebnis der vom
Kleinen Senat eingesetzten Spar-
kommission für das 1. Studienquar-
tal 1964/65 (okt.–dez. 64). 23 Sept.
1964. BHA, HfG records, folder 103.
1326 Otl Aicher: Bericht an den Vor-
stand der Geschwister-Scholl-Stif-
tung über das Ergebnis der vom
Kleinen Senat eingesetzten Spar-
kommission für das 1. Studienquar-
tal 1964/65 (okt.–dez. 64). 23 Sept.
1964. BHA, HfG records, folder 103.
1327 Re what follows cf. Friedrich
Rau: Letter to Theodor Pfizer. 13 Apr.
1965. HfG, unlisted file.
1328 Cf. Kommission für die Finanz-
reform: Gutachten über die Finanzre-
form in der Bundesrepublik Deutsch-
land, Stuttgart, Cologne 1966.
1329 Karl Gussone: Letter to Fried-
rich Rau. 14 May 1965. HStA, EA
3/203, bundle 65, document 39.
1330 Egbert-Hans Müller: Letter to
the federal ministry of the interior.
20 Aug. 1965. HStA, EA 3/203, bun-
dle 65, document 43.
1331 Friedrich Rau: Letter to Karl
Gussone. 24 May 1965. HStA, EA
3/203, bundle 65, document 40.
1332 Cf. René Spitz (see note 26)
430 f.
1333 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Anlage zum vorläufigen Entwurf
eines Haushaltsplanes des GSS
(Hochschule für Gestaltung) für das
Rechnungsjahr 1966, i. d. f. vom Mai
1965. n. d. May 1965. HStA, EA
3/203, bundle 62a, document 43;
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung: 1965
Haushaltsplan. n. d. July 1965. HStA,
EA 3/203, bundle 62a, document 48.
1334 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Protokoll über die Sitzung des Stif-
tungsrates der Geschwister-Scholl-
Stiftung am 26.7.1965 in Stuttgart.
13 Sept. 1965. HfG, file 427.
1335 Friedrich Rau: Letter to the
Baden-Württemberg ministry of edu-
cation and the arts. 2 July 1965. HfG,
unlisted file; only the development
teams of Maldonado and Ohl still
exist; Zeischegg terminated his in
Dec. 1960, Aicher and Gugelot priva-
tized theirs. On 30 Oct. 1960 there
was a meeting at Dr. Horn’s with Otl
Aicher, Hans Gugelot, Tomás Maldo-
nado, Herbert Ohl, and Walter Zei-
schegg because of the general
agreement –100 percent overhead
costs to the foundation –, which was
accepted only by Otl Aicher and
Hans Gugelot; since then, there has
been been no contractual regulation
with Tomás Maldonado regarding
 References
460 invoicing the development team;
there is a separate one with Herbert
Ohl; Walter Zeischegg has dissolved
his. Cf. Tomás Maldonado: Letter to
Friedrich Rau. 26 Nov. 1965. HfG,
unlisted file.
1336 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Protokoll der 6. Sitzung des Stif-
tungsrates der Geschwister-Scholl-
Stiftung am 16.11.1965 in Stuttgart,
Kultusministerium. 7 Dec. 1965. HfG,
file 427.
1337 Tomás Maldonado: Letter to
Theodor Pfizer. 14 Jan. 1966. BHA,
HfG records, folder 128.
1338 Baden-Württemberg ministry of
education and the arts: Letter to Kurt
Angstmann. 4 Feb. 1966. HStA, EA
3/203, bundle 65, document 58.
1339 Baden-Württemberg Landtag,
4th electoral period: Protokoll der
Sitzung des Finanzausschusses.
9 Feb. 1966. HfG, unlisted file.
1340 Minutes of the Baden-Würt-
temberg Landtag, 4th electoral peri-
od, 50th plenary session, 15 Feb.
1966, pp. 2589, 2619/20. PABW.
1341 Minutes of the Baden-Würt-
temberg Landtag, 4th electoral peri-
od, 58th plenary session, 15 Mar.
1966, pp. 3184–3186, 3188–3191.
PABW.
1342 Baden-Württemberg Landtag,
4th electoral period: Landtagsdruck-
sache Beilage IV 2557. 9 Mar. 1966.
PABW.
1343 A month earlier Kurt Georg Kie-
singer still denied that he had spoken
out vehemently against the HfG in
the finance committee. Minutes of
the Baden-Württemberg Landtag,
4th electoral period, 50th plenary
session, 15 Feb. 1966, pp. 2589,
2619/20. PABW.
1344 Baden-Württemberg Landtag,
4th electoral period: Landtagsdruck-
sache Beilage IV 2558. 9 Mar. 1966.
PABW.
1345 Tomás Maldonado, Johanna
Rösner: Protokoll zur 29. Sitzung des
Kleinen Senats am 2. Februar 1966.
7 Feb. 1966. BHA, HfG records, fold-
er 105.
1346 The passing of the CDU moti-
ons meant that the HfG film depart-
ment's application for DM 165,000
in subsidies was denied; also, the
Landtag made it clear that neither
the HfG nor its film department
were to be nationalized in the future.
1347 Minutes of the Baden-Würt-
temberg Landtag, 4th electoral peri-
od, 61st plenary session, 30 Mar.
1966, pp. 3415–22. PABW
1348 Sources for this calculation:
Ständige Konferenz der Kultusminis-
ter der Länder der Bundesrepublik
Deutschland (ed.), Kulturpolitik der
Länder 1960, n. p. (Munich) n. d.
(1961);. ibid. (ed.), Kulturpolitik der
Länder 1961 und 1962, Cologne,
Opladen 1963; ibid. (ed.), Kulturpoli-
tik der Länder 1963 und 1964, Bonn
1965; ibid. (ed.), Kulturpolitik der
Länder 1965 und 1966, Bonn 1967;
Sekretariat der ständigen Konferenz
der Kulturpolitik der Länder in der
Bundesrepublik Deutschland (ed.),
Kulturpolitik der Länder 1967 und
1968, Bonn 1969; ibid. (ed.), Kultur-
politik der Länder 1969 und 1970.
Bonn 1971.
1349 Erich Ganzenmüller, at the 21st
session of the 3d Landtag on 10 Dec.
1964, claimed that one student at
the HfG cost the Land DM 8,000,
while at a university the cost was
only DM 4,000 and at a school of
engineering it was DM 3,000. His
calculation did not include, firstly, the
hidden cost to the Land budget of
state educational institutions (e.g.,
civil servants’ salaries and pensions;
and the cost of construction and of
building maintenance), and he con-
fused the Land subsidy with the
foundation’s total budget (which
contained such hidden costs). The
same accusation, once it had been
stated and left unchallenged, was
repeated in the Ulm municipal coun-
cil on 21 Nov. 1964; cf. Stuttgarter
Zeitung, 23 Nov. 1964: Die äußere
Ordnung konsolidieren.
1350 Foundation‘s council of the
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung: Proto-
koll über die Sitzung des ständigen
Ausschusses des Stiftungsrats der
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung am
9. Mai 1966, 15.00 im Hause des
Kultusministeriums Baden-Württem-
berg in Stuttgart. 14 Jun. 1966. HfG,
file 470.
1351 The official confirmation by the
federal minister of the interior fol-
lowed on 3 June 1966: Paul Lücke:
Letter to Wilhelm Hahn. 3 June 1966.
HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 65, docu-
ment 81.
1352 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Protokoll der 7. Sitzung des Stif-
tungsrats der Geschwister-Scholl-
Stiftung am 4. Juli 1966 in Stuttgart,
Kultusministerium Baden-Württem-
berg. 14 Sept. 1966. HfG, file 427.
1353 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Niederschrift über die 10. Sitzung
des Stiftungsrates der Geschwister-
Scholl-Stiftung vom 8.2.1967 in
Stuttgart, Kultusministerium Baden-
Württemberg, Neues Schloss, 14.00
Uhr. 15.2.1967. HfG, file 427.
1354 Tomás Maldonado, Johanna
Rösner: Protokoll zur 32. (außeror-
dentlichen) Sitzung des Kleinen Se-
nats am 17.5.1966. 3 June 1966.
BHA, HfG records, folder 105.
1355 Minutes of the Deutscher Bun-
destag, 5th electoral period, 44th
plenary session, 26 May 1966, pp.
2096–98. – The term Hammel-
sprung (wether‘s jump; vote by divi-
sion) refers to the costly procedure,
used only rarely and in situations in
which there is no clear majority,
where members of parliament vote
by entering the floor of the House
through one of three doors, signaling
consent, rejection, or abstention. –
The SPD motion was accepted by a
vote of 190 to 148.
1356 Wolfgang Donndorf: Letter to
the Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung. 10
Nov. 1966. HStA, EA 3/203, bundle
63, document 86.
1357 Paul Lücke: Letter to Wilhelm
Hahn. 3 June 1966. HStA, EA 3/203,
bundle 65, document 81.
1358 An unclear use of the term
Bundesrepublik, suggesting national
interest in the HfG. Presumably what
is meant is Bundestag.
1359 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Protokoll der 8. Sitzung des Stif-
tungsrates der Geschwister-Scholl-
Stiftung am 14. November 1966,
14.30 Uhr, in Ulm, Rathaus, kleiner
Sitzungssaal. 5 Dec. 1966. HfG, file
427; Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Stenographisches Protokoll der
8. Sitzung des Stiftungsrats der Ge-
schwister-Scholl-Stiftung. 14 Nov.
1966. HfG, file 427.
1360 Wolfgang Donndorf: Letter to
Theodor Pfizer. 7 Dec. 1966. HStA,
EA 3/203, bundle 63, document 93.
1361 Theodor Pfizer, Klaus Fischer:
Protokoll der 2. Sitzung des Stif-
tungsrats der Geschwister-Scholl-
Stiftung vom 3.7.1967, Stuttgart, Kul-
tusministerium Baden-Württemberg,
Neues Schloss, 14.00 Uhr. 3 July
1967. THM, folder 10.
1362 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Niederschrift über die 9. Sitzung des
Stiftungsrates der Geschwister-
Scholl-Stiftung vom 19.12.1966 in
Stuttgart im Haus des Kultusministe-
riums, Neues Schloss, 10.00 Uhr.
18 Jan.1967. HfG, file 427; Geschwis-
ter-Scholl-Stiftung: Stenographi-
sches Protokoll der 9. Sitzung des
Stiftungsrates der Geschwister-
Scholl-Stiftung. 19 Dec. 1966. HfG,
file 427.
1363 Herbert Ohl, Johanna Rösner:
Protokoll zur 40. Sitzung des Kleinen
Senats am 12. Januar 1967. 16 Jan.
1967. BHA, HfG records, folder 106.
1364 Extended senate of the School
of Design: Einstimmiger Beschluß
des Großen Senats der HfG zur An-
frage des Stiftungsrates der GSS
vom 16. Januar 1967. 25 Jan. 1967.
HfG, unlisted file.
1365 Herbert Ohl, Johanna Rösner:
Protokoll zur 43. Sitzung des Kleinen
Senats am 17. März 1967. 29 Mar.
1967. BHA, HfG records, folder 106;
Herbert Ohl: Betr.: Kommission für
evtl. strukturelle Veränderungen der
HfG, Abteilungsleiter der Hoch-
schule für Gestaltung. 31 Mar. 1967.
BHA, HfG records, folder 109.
1366 Otl Aicher, Gui Bonsiepe, Her-
bert Ohl, Claude Schnaidt: Stellung-
nahme der Mitglieder des Kleinen
Senats zur Grundstücksangelegen-
heit Parz. 1940. 14 Apr. 1967. HfG,
unlisted file.
1367 Theodor Pfizer, Klaus Fischer:
Protokoll der 2. Sitzung des Stif-
tungsrats der Geschwister-Scholl-
Stiftung vom 3.7.1967, Stuttgart, Kul-
tusministerium Baden-Württemberg,
Neues Schloss, 14.00 Uhr. 3 July
1967. THM, folder 10.
1368 Friedrich Rau: Letter to Wilhelm
Hahn. 15 Sept. 1967. HfG, file 479;
Werner Ruch: Memo. 1 Oct. 1967.
HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 64, docu-
ment 130.
1369 Cf. Theodor Pfizer, Heidi Wer-
ner: Protokoll der 13. Sitzung des
Stiftungsrates der Geschwister-
Scholl-Stiftung vom 20. Oktober
1967, Stuttgart, Kultusministerium
Baden-Württemberg, Neues Schloss,
grosser Sitzungssaal, 9.00 Uhr.
15 Dec. 1967. BHA, HfG records,
folder 85.
1370 Klaus Fischer: Letter to Wolf-
gang Donndorf. 9 Oct. 1967. HStA,
EA 3/203, bundle 66, document 129.
1371 Tomás Maldonado, Gert Krappe,
Johanna Rösner: Protokoll zur
7. ordentlichen Sitzung des Großen
Senats am 13. Dezember 1965.
14 Dec. 1965. BHA, HfG records,
folder 99. Of 14 possible votes Her-
bert Ohl received 9; in accordance
with the bylaws he immediately
became vice rector through 30 Sept.
1966; from 1 Oct. 1966 through 30
Sept.1967, in accordance with the
bylaws, Tomás Maldonado was vice
rector. -On 17 Oct. 1967, by rotation,
the rector was elected for the term
from 1 Oct. 1968 through 30 Sept.
1970. Because Tomás Maldonado
had resigned on 1 June 1967 effec-
tive 30 June 1967, it became neces-
sary simultaneously to elect Tomás
Maldonado’s successor as vice rec-
tor. The result was that Herbert Ohl
was reelected, while Claude Schnaidt
became vice rector. Cf. Herbert Ohl,
Klaus Fischer, Johanna Rösner: Pro-
tokoll zur 12. ordentlichen Sitzung
des Grossen Senats am 17. Oktober
1967. 18 Oct. 1967. BHA, HfG
records, folder 100.
1372 Herbert Ohl: Eröffnungsrede
des Rektors der HfG (Herbert Ohl)
am 2.10. 1967, Studienjahr 1967/ 68.
2 Oct. 1967. BHA, HfG records, folder
123.
1373 His predecessor was Gert Krap-
pe, who had been in office as a luck-
less administrative director from 16
Aug. 1965 through 31 Mar. 1967.
Klaus Fischer held the same position
beginning 1 June 1967. I did not
manage to discover details of the
biographies of the two administrative
directors.
1374 Klaus Fischer: Stellungnahme
zum Prüfungsbericht des Rech-
nungshofes durch den Verwaltungs-
direktor der Geschwister-Scholl-Stif-
tung. 10 Oct. 1967. THM, folder 10.
1375 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Protokoll der 13. Sitzung des Stif-
tungsrates der Geschwister-Scholl-
Stiftung vom 30.10.1967, Stuttgart,
Kultusministerium Baden-Württem-
berg, Neues Schloss, grosser Sit-
zungssaal, 9.00 Uhr. 30 Oct. 1967.
HfG, file 427; Geschwister-Scholl-
Stiftung: Stenographisches Protokoll
der 13. Sitzung des Stiftungsrats der
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung. 30 Oct.
1967. HfG, file 427; Theodor Pfizer,
Heidi Werner: Protokoll der 13. Sit-
zung des Stiftungsrates der Ge-
schwister-Scholl-Stiftung vom 20.
Oktober 1967, Stuttgart, Kultusminis-
terium Baden-Württemberg, Neues
Schloss, grosser Sitzungssaal, 9.00
Uhr. 15 Dec. 1967. BHA, HfG records,
folder 85.
1376 Theodor Pfizer: Letter to the
finance committee of the Baden-
Württemberg Landtag. 31 Oct.1967.
STU, H Pfizer, HfG; cf. Schwäbische
Donau-Zeitung, 31 Oct. 1967: Be-
stand der HfG gefährdet; Schwäbi-
sche Donau-Zeitung, 9 Nov. 1967:
HfG-Studenten sind dem Stiftungsrat
gram.
1377 Baden-Württemberg Landtag,
4th electoral period: Landtagsdruck-
sache Beilage IV 5363. 29 Nov.
1967. PABW.
1378 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
stenographisches Protokoll der
14. Sitzung des Stiftungsrats der Ge-
schwister-Scholl-Stiftung. 18 Dec.
1967. HfG, file 427.
1379 Baden-Württemberg ministry of
education and the arts: Letter to the
Baden-Württemberg ministry of
state. 23 Nov. 1967. HStA, EA 3/203,
bundle 66, document 142; -Cf.
Baden-Württemberg Landtag, 4th
electoral period: Landtagsdruck-
sache Beilage IV 5363. 29 Nov.
1967. PABW.
1380 Re this and what follows cf.
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung: steno-
graphisches Protokoll der 14. Sit-
zung des Stiftungsrats der Geschwi-
ster-Scholl-Stiftung. 18 Dec. 1967.
HfG, file 427; Baden-Württemberg
ministry of state: Auszug aus der
Niederschrift über die Sitzung des
Ministerrats am 5. Dezember 1967.
5 Dec. 1967. HStA, EA 3/203, bundle
66, document 11.
1381 Otl Aicher: Letter to Tomás Mal-
donado. 28 June 1965. PAH, DOK
45; Otl Aicher: Auseinandersetzung
um eine Sammlung für Vietnam in
der HfG. n. d. July 1965. HfG, unlis-
ted file; Friedrich Rau: Bericht über
das Ergebnis von Nachforschungen
über die Vietnam-Spendenaktion an
der HfG. 21 July 1965. BHA, HfG
records, folder 126; Theodor Pfizer:
Letter to Friedrich Rau. 7 July 1965.
HfG, unlisted file; Tomás Maldonado:
Ansprache zur Eröffnung des Stu-
dienjahrs 1965/ 66. 4 Oct. 1965.
PAH, DOK 44; Tomás Maldonado:
Letter to Friedrich Rau. 1 Sept. 1965.
HfG, unlisted file; CDU district asso-
ciation of Ulm: Letter to Friedrich
Rau. 14 July 1965. HfG, unlisted file;
Friedrich Rau: Letter to the CDU dis-
trict association of Ulm. 18 July
1965. HfG, unlisted file; Max Blum:
Letter to Claude Schnaidt. 7 July
1965. HfG, unlisted file; Schwäbi-
sche Donau-Zeitung, 3 July 1965:
Vietnam-Wirbel in der Hochschule;
Schwäbische Donau-Zeitung, 3 July
1965: Fehlgriff; Schwäbische Donau-
Zeitung, 14 July 1965: Stiftungsrat
wünscht genaue Untersuchung;
Schwäbische Donau-Zeitung,
15 July 1965: CDU zur Vietnam-
Sammlung an der HfG; Schwäbische
Donau-Zeitung, 19 July 1965: Rektor
Maldonado und Dr. Rau distanzieren
sich; Schwäbische Donau-Zeitung,
28 July 1965: „Scharfe Rüge“ für
Urheber der Vietnam-Sammlung.
1382 Schwäbische Donau-Zeitung,
7 June 1967: Verantwortliche in Ber-
lin abberufen; Schwäbische Donau-
Zeitung, 8 June 1967: Kein Echo in
der Bevölkerung.
1383 Cf. Klaus Mehnert, Jugend im
Umbruch. Geschichte des sozialisti-
schen deutschen Studentenbundes
SDS, Berlin 1976.
1384 Johanna Rösner: 45. Sitzung
des Kleinen Senats am 12. Juni
1967. 12 June 1967. BHA, HfG
records, folder 109; Herbert Ohl,
Johanna Rösner: Protokoll zu 45. Sit-
zung des Kleinen Senats am 12. /13.
Juni 1967. 13 June 1967. BHA, HfG
records, folder 109.
1385 Herbert W. Kapitzki: Letter to
the inner senate of the School of
Design. 6 Dec. 1964. BHA, HfG
records, folder 111.
1386 Baden-Württemberg Landtag,
4th electoral period: Landtagsdruck-
sache Beilage IV 5425. 29 Nov.
1967. PABW; Minutes of the Baden-
Württemberg Landtag, 4th electoral
period, 112nd plenary session,
7 Dec. 1967, page 6291. PABW; offi-
cial notification of the minister-presi-
dent on the results of the cabinet
meeting: Hans Filbinger: Letter to
Theodor Pfizer. 22 Dec. 1967. HStA,
EA 3/203, bundle 66, document 157.
1387 Baden-Württemberg Landtag,
4th electoral period: Landtagsdruck-
sache Beilage IV 5425. 29 Nov.
1967. PABW; Theodor Pfizer, Heidi
Werner: Protokoll der 14. Sitzung
des Stiftungsrates der Geschwister-
Scholl-Stiftung am 18. Dezember
1967. 12 Jan. 1968. HfG, unlisted
file; Schwäbische Donau-Zeitung, 8
Dec. 1967: Fusion die einzige Hoff-
nung der HfG? Rheinische Post, 9
Dec. 1967: Erste GesamtHochschule
in Ulm?
1388 Cf. Geschwister-Scholl-Stif-
tung: Stenographisches Protokoll
der 14. Sitzung des Stiftungsrats der
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung. HfG, file
427; Foundation‘s council of the
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung: State-
ment. 19 Dec. 1967. HfG, file 427.
1389 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Stenographisches Protokoll der 15.
Sitzung des Stiftungsrats der Ge-
schwister-Scholl-Stiftung. 12 Feb.
1968. HfG, file 427.
1390 Herbert Ohl: Stellungnahme.
14 Dec. 1967. BHA, HfG records,
folder 127.
1391 Many periods of notice were for
one calendar year.
1392 Baden-Württemberg ministry of
state: Haushaltsplan 1968. n. d. Jan-
uary-February 1968. PABW.
1393 School of Design: Undated
budget draft. March 1968. BHA, HfG
records, folder 83.
1394 Kurt Georg Kiesinger: “Lebens-
hilfe als Ziel der Bildungsbemühun-
gen. Auszug aus der Regierungser-
klärung von Ministerpräsident Kurt
Georg Kiesinger“, in: Christlich De-
mokratische Union Deutschlands
(ed.), Zwischen Freiheit und Ord-
nung. Zur Kulturpolitik der CDU/
CSU, Bonn 1964, 67 ff.
1395 Sources: Kulturpolitik der Län-
der 1960 ff. (see note 1348) and,
based on this, my own calculations.
I established the relation between
the sums expended by the Land of
Baden-Württemberg for its seven sci-
entific institutions of higher learning
during the above-named fiscal years
and the number of HfG students for
the academic years of 1959/60
(= 102), 1960/61 (= 129), 1964/65
(= 148) und 1965/66 (= 143). If, in
each case, one takes the following
academic year as the standard for
comparison, the “debit” for the HfG
becomes even larger.
1396 Arbeitskreis Universität Ulm
(ed.), Universitätsplan Ulm, Ulm
1961, 7.; cf. „Die Universität Kon-
stanz. Bericht des Gründungsaus-
schusses (1965)“, in: Rolf Neuhaus
(ed.), Dokumente zur Gründung
neuer Hochschulen. Anregungen
des Wissenschaftsrates, Empfehlun-
gen und Denkschriften auf Veranlas-
sung von Ländern in der Bundesre-
publik Deutschland in den Jahren
1960 bis 1966, Wiesbaden 1968,
570–626; cf. Ralf Dahrendorf: „Zur
Entstehungsgeschichte des Hoch-
schulgesamtplans für Baden-Würt-
temberg 1966/67. Auch ein Beitrag
zum Thema des Verhältnisses von
Wissenschaft und Politik in Deutsch-
land“, in: Bildungspolitik mit Ziel und
Maß. FS Wilhelm Hahn, Stuttgart
1974, 138–163; Hochschulgesamt-
plan Baden-Württemberg. Empfeh-
lungen zur Reform von Struktur und
Organisation der wissenschaftlichen
Hochschulen, Studienseminare,
Kunsthochschulen, Ingenieurschulen
und höheren Fachschulen. Bericht
des Arbeitskreises Hochschulge-
samtplan beim Kultusministerium
Baden-Württemberg, (= Schriften-
reihe zur Bildungsforschung, Bil-
dungsplanung, Bildungspolitik,
series A, vol. 5) Villingen-Schwen-
ningen 1967.
1397 Cf. Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, Hans
Dollinger (ed.), Die deutschen Stu-
denten. Der Kampf um die Hoch-
schulreform. Eine Bestandsaufnah-
me, München 1968, 21969; Gerhard
Bauß, Die Studentenbewegung der
Bundesrepublik Deutschland und
Westberlins 1966–1968, Diss. Phil.
Marburg an der Lahn 1977.
1398 In: Das Hochschulgesetz –
eine Chance für die Hochschulre-
form, ed. Kultusministerium Baden-
Württemberg (= Informationen über
das Bildungswesen, series B, vol. 6)
Stuttgart 1968.
1399 Herbert W. Kapitzki: Erklärung
der Besprechung am 5.1.68 durch
Herrn Kapitzki. 5 Jan. 1968. BHA,
HfG records, folder 86.
1400 Herbert W. Kapitzki: Bespre-
chung am 8.1.68 mit Herrn Staatsmi-
nister Dr. Seifriz im Staatsministeri-
um Stuttgart. 22 Jan. 1968. BHA,
HfG records, folder 130; Baden-
Württemberg ministry of education
and the arts: Betr.: Hochschule für
Gestaltung Ulm. 8 Jan. 1968. BHA,
HfG records, folder 83.
1401 Josef Hengartner: Letter to
Egbert-Hans Müller. 11 Jan. 1968.
HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 64, docu-
ment 161.
1402 Claude Schnaidt, Renate Kietz-
mann: Protokoll zur 14. außerordent-
lichen Sitzung des Großen Senats
am 12. jan. 1968. 18 Jan. 1968. HfG,
unlisted file.
1403 Herbert Ohl: Letter to Egbert-
Hans Müller. 15 Jan. 1968. HStA, EA
3/203, bundle 64, document 162.
1404 Jens Feddersen: Notiz für Rolf
Lobeck. 16 Feb. 1968. BHA, HfG
records, folder 196.
1405 Students of the School of
Design: Hochschule im Prozess der
Demokratisierung. n. d. 3/4 Feb.
1968. BHA, HfG records, folder 94.
1406 Herbert Ohl: Letter to Rolf
Lobeck. 12 Feb. 1968. BHA, HfG
records, folder 92.
1407 Roland Zaugg: Letter to Herbert
Ohl. 27 Dec. 1967. BHA, HfG records,
folder 92.
1408 Claude Schnaidt, Renate Kietz-
mann: Protokoll zur 14. außerordent-
lichen Sitzung des Großen Senats
am 12. jan. 1968. 18 Jan. 1968. HfG,
unlisted file.
1409 Herbert Ohl: Letter to Mr. Moré.
12 Feb. 1968. BHA, HfG records,
folder 96.
1410 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Stenographisches Protokoll der 15.
Sitzung des Stiftungsrats der Ge-
schwister-Scholl-Stiftung. 12 Feb.
1968. HfG, file 427; point of order:
Grzimek claims he was not invited to
this meeting. He objects (Günther
Grzimek: Letter to Theodor Pfizer.
25 Feb. 1968. THM, folder 10).
1411 Baden-Württemberg ministry of
education and the arts: Letter to the
Baden-Württemberg ministry of edu-
cation and the arts. 16 Feb. 1968.
HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 67, docu-
ment 169.
1412 Students and lecturers of the
School of Design: Feststellungen in
Sachen HfG. 16 Feb. 1968. PASW.
1413 Herbert Ohl, Claude Schnaidt:
Letter to the Baden-Württemberg
Ministries of Education and the Arts,
Trade and Commerce, and Finance.
19 Feb. 1968. BHA, HfG records,
folder 83.
1414 Rector, lecturers, assistant lec-
turers, staff, and students of the
School of Design: Letter to the editor
of the Neu-Ulmer Zeitung.19 Feb.
1968. PASW.
1415 Hochschule für Gestaltung: Der
Fall Hochschule für Gestaltung. Ein
Schulbeispiel für die politische Ent-
wicklung in der BRD. n. d. February
1968. HfG, unlisted file.
1416 Students of the School of
Design: Referat der Studentenschaft
der HfG Ulm anläßlich der Gedenk-
feier zum 25. Jahrestag der Hinrich-
tung der Geschwister Scholl. 20 Feb.
1968. HfG, unlisted file.
1417 Wolfgang Donndorf: Betr.:
Hochschule für Gestaltung. 21 Feb.
1968. HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 67,
document 185; Baden-Württemberg
ministry of state: Auszug aus der 461
Niederschrift über die Sitzung des
Ministerrats am 20. Februar 1968.
20 Feb. 1968. HStA, EA 3/203, bun-
dle 67, appendix to document 194;
Wolfgang Donndorf: Betr.: Hoch-
schule für Gestaltung. 20 Feb. 1968.
HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 67, docu-
ment 183.
1418 Undated press release. July
1968. BHA, HfG records, folder 131.
1419 Hochschule für Gestaltung:
Dossier zur Vorbereitung des Endes
der HfG. n. d. February 1968. PABW.
1420 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Press release. n. d. February 1968.
PABW.
1421 Baden-Württemberg Landtag,
4th electoral period: Landtagsdruck-
sache Beilage IV 5858. 7 Mar. 1968.
PABW.
1422 Prof. Schoch: Letter to Speak-
er’s advisory committee of the
Baden-Württemberg Landtag. 6 Mar.
1968. HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 67,
document 196.
1423 Arbeitsgruppe autonome Ver-
staatlichung der HfG: HfG Ulm.
8 Mar. 1968. HfG, unlisted file.
1424 Herbert Ohl: Letter to Egbert-
Hans Müller. 8 Mar. 1968. BHA, HfG
records, folder 103.
1425 Herbert Ohl: Letter to Klaus
Fischer. 8 Mar. 1968. HfG, file 562.
1426 Herbert Ohl: Letter to Hans
Zumsteg. 8 Mar. 1968. BHA, HfG
records, folder 129.
1427 Hans Zumsteg: Notiz. 29 Feb.
1968. THM, folder 11.
1428 Baden-Württemberg ministry of
education and the arts: Pressever-
lautbarung. 14 Mar. 1968. HStA, EA
3/203, bundle 67, document 198.
1429 Plenary meeting of the stu-
dents of the School of Design: An-
trag zur Vorlage bei der Sitzung des
Großen Senats vom 20.3.68. 19 Mar.
1968. HfG, unlisted file 1482. 25 Apr.
1968 – 422, 416
1430 Rolf Lobeck: Anträge zur Vor-
lage bei der Sitzung des Großen
Senats vom 25.4.68 betreffs Ände-
rung der Verfassung der HfG. n. d.
Apr. 1968. HfG, unlisted file; Jochen
Clausen-Finks et al.: Offener Brief an
den Großen Senat der Hochschule
für Gestaltung. 26 Apr. 1968. HfG,
unlisted file.
1431 Students of the School of
Design: Resolution der Studenten-
schaft vom 2. Mai 1968. 2 May
1968. BHA, HfG records, folder 130
and 101.
1432 Gui Bonsiepe: Vorschläge für
die Weiterführung der HfG nach dem
30.9.68 (Zusammenfassung der Er-
gebnisse der Neuner-Gruppe vom
13.5.68). 13 May 1968. BHA, HfG
records, folder 130.
 References
462 1433 Joachim Heimbucher: Neuner-
gruppe / 3. Sitzung, 15.5.68 17–
18.15 h. 15 May 1968. BHA, HfG
records, folder 81.
1434 Herbert Ohl: Letter to Egbert-
Hans Müller. 21 May 1968. BHA, HfG
records, folder 83.
1435 Egbert-Hans Müller: Letter to
Theodor Pfizer. 21 May 1968. HStA,
EA 3/203, bundle 84, document 5.
1436 Klaus Fischer: Letter to the staff
committee of the Geschwister-
Scholl-Stiftung. 17 May 1968. HfG,
file 550.
1437 Joachim Heimbucher: Résumé
der Arbeitsergebnisse der 9er Grup-
pe (Dozenten, Assistenten, Studen-
ten). 26 May 1968. BHA, HfG
records, folder 131.
1438 Norbert Kurtz: Letter to Herbert
Ohl. 27 May 1968. BHA, HfG
records, folder 130.
1439 Herbert Ohl: Vorzugslösung
der Hochschule für Gestaltung für
ihre Weiterführung. 28 May 1968.
BHA, HfG records, folder 101.
1440 Herbert Ohl: Letter to the foun-
dation‘s council of the Geschwister-
Scholl-Stiftung. 28 May 1968. BHA,
HfG records, folder 130.
1441 Norbert Kurtz: Letter to Herbert
Ohl. 28 May 1968. BHA, HfG
records, folder 92.
1442 Students and assistant lectur-
ers of the School of Design: Vor-
schlag zur Weiterführung der Hoch-
schule für Gestaltung mit einem
neuen Modell eines weiterführenden
Studiums. n. d. May 1968. HfG,
unlisted files.
1443 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Protokoll der 16. Sitzung des Stif-
tungsrates der Geschwister-Scholl-
Stiftung am 1. April 1968 in Ulm,
kleiner Sitzungssaal des Rathauses,
14.00 Uhr. 1 April 1968. HfG, file
427; Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Shorthand minutes of the 16th meet-
ing of the foundation‘s council of the
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung. 1 Apr.
1968. HfG, file 427.
1444 Alfred Grazioli: Protokoll zur
Stiftungsrats-Sitzung vom 1.4.68.
1 Apr. 1968. HfG, file 466.
1445 Cf. Geschwister-Scholl-Stif-
tung: Protokoll der 17. Sitzung des
Stiftungsrates der Geschwister-
Scholl-Stiftung am 8. Mai 1968 in
Ulm, Rathaus, kleiner Sitzungssaal,
14.00 Uhr. 8 May 1968. HfG, file
427; Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Entwurf. 8 May 1968. HfG, file 427;
Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung: Proto-
koll Stiftungsratssitzung 8.5.1968,
Ulm, Rathaus, kleiner Sitzungssaal.
8 May 1968. HfG, file 427; Founda-
tion‘s council of the Geschwister-
Scholl-Stiftung: Beschluss der Stif-
tungsratssitzung vom 8.5.68. 8 May
1968. HfG, file 466.
1446 Wolfgang Donndorf: Betr.:
Hochschule für Gestaltung. 24 May
1968. HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 84,
document 5a.
1447 Baden-Württemberg ministry of
education and the arts: Letter to the
Baden-Württemberg ministry of
state. 10 July 1968. HStA, EA 3/203,
bundle 67, document 231.
1448 Baden-Württemberg ministry of
state: Auszug aus der Niederschrift
über die Sitzung des Ministerrats am
11. Juni 1968. 11 June 1968. HStA,
EA 3/203, bundle 67, document
232.
1449 Letter to all members of the
HfG. 12 June 1968. HfG, unlisted file.
1450 Herbert Ohl, Johanna Rösner:
Protokoll zur 52. (ausserordentli-
chen) Sitzung des Kleinen Senats
am 19.6.1968. 24 June 1968. BHA,
HfG records, folder 103.
1451 Herbert Ohl: Letter to the stu-
dents of the HfG. 20 Jan. 1968. BHA,
HfG records, folder 131.
1452 Students of the School of
Design: Letter to Herbert Ohl.
25 June 1968. BHA, HfG records,
folder 92; students of the School of
Design: Ergebnis der namentlichen
Abstimmung über die Erklärung der
Stud.schaft vom 25.6.68. 27 June
1968. BHA, HfG records, folder 92;
adopted with 55 yes votes, 10 no
votes, 3 abstentions.
1453 Students of the School of
Design: Erklärung der Studenten-
schaft der Hochschule für Gestaltung
vom 27.06.1968. 27 June 1968.
BHA, HfG records, folder 131; Stu-
dents of the School of Design: Reso-
lution der Studenten vom 27.6.68.
27 June 1968. BHA, HfG records,
folder 131.
1454 Baden-Württemberg Landtag,
5th electoral period: Landtagsdruck-
sache V 16. 27 June 1968. PABW,
sent on to the finance committee in
the plenary session without discus-
sion that same day.
1455 Lecturers of the School of
Design: Vorschlag der Dozentens-
chaft der Hochschule für Gestaltung
zur zukünftigen Weiterführung der
Hochschule für Gestaltung nach
dem neuen Modell „Weiterführendes
Postgraduate-Studium in Zuordnung
zur Universtität Stuttgart“. 28 June
1968. HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 84,
appendix to document 12.
1456 Students and assistant lectur-
ers of the School of Design: Letter to
Herbert Ohl. 3 July 1968. BHA, HfG
records, folder 131.
1457 Once again, this plan by the
lecturers shows something very iron-
ic about the HfG’s history, for it boils
down to a scheme that was very sim-
ilar to Thorwald Risler’s plan in
1962/63 and that had led to a funda-
mental disagreement with Otl Aicher.
1458 Gui Bonsiepe: Letter to Herbert
Ohl. 3 July 1968. BHA, HfG records,
folder 131.
1459 Herbert Ohl: Letter to Werner
Ruch, Theodor Pfizer, Friedrich Rau,
Hans Zumsteg, Klaus Fischer, Rolf
Lobeck. 8 July 1968. BHA, HfG
records, folder 129.
1460 Herbert Ohl: Meine Einstellung
zu den Vorgängen in der Studen-
tenschaft und der Berichterstattung
der Studentenschaft wie sie im
Eigenbericht der Welt wiedergege-
ben wurde, ist folgende. 9 July
1968. BHA, HfG records, folder 95.
1461 Herbert Ohl: Letter to Rolf
Lobeck. 11 July 1968. BHA, HfG
records, folder 131.
1462 Herbert Ohl, Johanna Rösner:
Protokoll zur 19. Sitzung des Gros-
sen Senats am 12. Juli 1968. 15 July
1968. BHA, HfG records, folder 101.
1463 Cf. Gerhard A. Ritter, Merith
Niehuss, Wahlen in Deutschland
1946–1991. Ein Handbuch, Munich
1991, 86 ff.
1464 Finance committee of Landtag
of Baden-Württemberg, 5th electoral
period: Auszug aus dem Protokoll
Nr. 3 vom 16.7.1968. 16 July 1968.
HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 67.
1465 This becomes Landtagsdruck-
sache V 98 of 16 Jun. 1968: Propo-
sal of the finance committee, which
the Landtag takes note of only from
the government’s letter.
1466 Südwest-Presse, 17.7.1968:
Anti-Koalition; Schwäbische Donau-
Zeitung, 17 July 1968: Kann das
denn wirklich das letzte Wort sein?
Stuttgarter Nachrichten, 17 July
1968: Ulm vor neuen Schwierigkei-
ten; Stuttgarter Zeitung, 17 July
1968: Todesstoß für die Ulmer HfG?
Schwäbische Donau-Zeitung,
18 July 1968: CDU-Abgeordneter
stellt sich gegen Fraktion; Schwäbi-
sche Donau-Zeitung, 18 July 1968:
Ulms CDZ sagt ja zur HfG.
1467 CDU motion: Baden-Württem-
berg Landtag, 5th electoral period:
Landtagsdrucksache V105. 18 July
1968. PABW.
1468 Motion by SPD, FDP/DVP and
Dr. Lorenser CDU: Baden-Württem-
berg Landtag, 5th electoral period:
Landtagsdrucksache V104. 17 July
1968. PABW.
1469 Minutes of the Baden-Würt-
temberg Landtag, 5th electoral peri-
od, 8th plenary session, 18 Jul. 1968,
pp. 189–201. PABW.
1470 Extended senate of the School
of Design: Stellungnahme des Gros-
sen Senats der Hochschule für Ge-
staltung zu dem Beschluß des Land-
tages vom 18. Juli 1968. 23 July
1968. HfG, unlisted file.
1471 Herbert Lindinger (ed.) (see
note 1) 25.
1472 Herbert Ohl, Renate Kietzmann:
Protokoll zur 20. Sitzung des Gros-
sen Senats am 23. Juli 1968. 23
July 1968. BHA, HfG records, folder
101.
1473 Wolfgang Donndorf: Letter to
Theodor Pfizer. 23 July 1968. HStA,
EA 3/203, bundle 67, document
243.
1474 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Protokoll der 19. Sitzung des Stif-
tungsrates der Geschwister-Scholl-
Stiftung am 29. Juli 1968 in Stutt-
gart, Kultusministerium 14.30 Uhr.
29 July 1968. HfG, file 427; Ge-
schwister-Scholl-Stiftung: Sitzung
am 29.7.68 – 14.30 h – Kultusmini-
sterium Stuttgart. 29 July 1968. HfG,
file 427; Geschwister-Scholl-Stif-
tung: Protokoll der 18. Sitzung des
Stiftungsrates der Geschwister-
Scholl-Stiftung am 4. Juni 1968 in
Ulm, Rathaus, kleiner Sitzungssaal,
14.00 Uhr. 4 June 1968. HfG, file
427.
1475 Otl Aicher: Letter to Herbert
Ohl. 31 July 1968. BHA, HfG records,
folder 131.
1476 Hochschule für Gestaltung:
Vorschlag der Hochschule für Ge-
staltung „Aufbaustudium der Hoch-
schule für Gestaltung in Zuordnung
zur Universität Stuttgart“. 9 Sept.
1968. HfG, unlisted file.
1477 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Protokoll der 20. Sitzung des Stif-
tungsrates der Geschwister-Scholl-
Stiftung am 12. September 1968 in
Ulm, Rathaus, 10.00 Uhr. 12 Sept.
1968. HfG, file 473.
1478 Technical University of Stutt-
gart: Ergebnisprotokoll. 25 Sept.
1968. HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 84,
document 22.
1479 In the preceding academic year
there were 140 registered students;
30 of these graduated from the HfG
with a diploma at the end of the aca-
demic year. Of the remaining 110
students, between 50 and 60 re-
turned. Cf. Stuttgarter Nachrichten,
3 Oct. 1968: HfG vor dem Ende? Die
Welt, 7 Oct. 1968: Hochschule für
Gestaltung entwickelt neuen Stu-
dienplan.
1480 Herbert Ohl: Erklärung. 2 Oct.
1968. BHA, HfG records, folder 95.
1481 Lecturers and students of the
Ulm School of Design: Hochschulin-
terne gemeinsame Erklärung der
Dozenten und Studenten der HfG
über die Durchführung der Arbeit im
1. Quartal des Studienjahres 1968/
69. 3 Oct. 1968. BHA, HfG records,
folder 91.
1482 Cf. Theodor Pfizer: Letter to
Joachim Heimbucher und Herbert
Ohl. 16 Oct. 1968. STU, H Pfizer, HfG.
1483 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Sitzung am 14.10.68 – 9.30 Uhr im
grossen Sitzungssaal des KM, Stutt-
gart. 14 Oct. 1968. HfG, file 473.
1484 Baden-Württemberg ministry of
state: Auszug aus der Niederschrift
über die Sitzung des Ministerrats am
16. Oktober 1968. 16 Oct. 1968.
HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 67, appen-
dix to document 265.
1485 Theodor Pfizer: Letter to Wil-
helm Hahn. 29 Oct. 1968. HStA, EA
3/203, bundle 85, document 26.
1486 Lecturers of the School of
Design: Forschungs- und Entwick-
lungstätigkeit der Dozenten (Insti-
tutstätigkeit) (Auffassung der Do-
zenten). 5 Nov. 1968. BHA, HfG
records, folder 80; Herbert Ohl: Let-
ter to Egbert-Hans Müller. 11 Nov.
1968. HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 84, 465
document 24.
1487 Students of the School of
Design: Anmerkungen zum Vor-
schlag der Studenten über die
Regelung der Nebentätigkeit der
Dozenten der HfG. 7 Nov. 1968.
HfG, unlisted file.
1488 Herbert Ohl: Telefonische
Durchsage des Textes eines Tele-
gramms von Rektor Ohl, Hochschule
für Gestaltung Ulm, am 17.11. 1968,
16‘00 Uhr. 17 Nov. 1968. HStA, EA
3/203, bundle 84, document 22d.
1489 F. Leonhardt: Letter to Herbert
Ohl. 14 Nov. 1968 . BHA, HfG
records, folder 132.
1490 Herbert Ohl: Letter to Theodor
Pfizer. 21 Nov. 1968. BHA, HfG
records, folder 132.
1491 Herbert W. Kapitzki to Theodor
Pfizer. 25 Nov. 1968. BHA, HfG
records, folder 132.
1492 Egbert-Hans Müller: Betr.: Fort-
bestand der Hochschule für Gestal-
tung Ulm. 26 Nov. 1968. HStA, EA
3/203, bundle 84, document 25.
1493 Baden-Württemberg ministry of
education and the arts: Der Rektor
an der Ulmer Hochschule für Gestal-
tung – ratlos? 26 Nov. 1968. HStA,
EA 3/203, bundle 85, document
28a.
1494 Egbert-Hans Müller: Betr.: Fort-
bestand der Hochschule für Gestal-
tung Ulm; hier: Nachtrag zur Kabi-
nettsvorlage vom 26. November
1968. 26 Nov. 1968. HStA, EA
3/203, bundle 85, document 30.
1495 Baden-Württemberg ministry of
state: Auszug aus der Niederschrift
über die Sitzung des Ministerrats am
27. November 1968 – ausführliches
Protokoll –. 27 Nov. 1968. HStA, EA
3/203, bundle 85, document 33.
1496 Herbert Ohl: Erklärung des
Rektors der Hochschule für Gestal-
tung Ulm, Herbert Ohl, zur Liquida-
tion der Hochschule durch das Land
Baden-Württemberg. 1 Dec. 1968.
BHA, HfG records, folder 95.
1497 Baden-Württemberg ministry of
state: Auszug aus der Niederschrift
über die Sitzung des Ministerrats am
3. Dezember 1968. 3 Dec. 1968.
HStA, EA 3/203, bundle 85, docu-
ment 65.
1498 Baden-Württemberg Landtag,
5th electoral period: Landtagsdruck-
sache V 465. 11 Dec. 1968. PABW.
1499 Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung:
Protokoll zur Stiftungsratssitzung am
18. Dezember 1968, 10.00 h, im
kleinen Sitzungssaal Rathaus Ulm.
24 Dec. 1968. HfG, file 473.
1500 Egbert-Hans Müller: Betr.:
Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm; hier:
Zuständigkeit innerhalb des Kultus-
ministeriums. 19 Dec. 1968. HStA,
EA 3/203, bundle 85, document 44.
 The Ulm School of Design (HfG) has a world-
wide reputation as the place which, after the
Bauhaus, has had the most lasting influence
not only on the design of industrially manufac-
tured goods and of services but also on de-
signer training. As a unique private institution
the HfG was different from all other contempo-
rary design-focused training centers because its
goal was design based on the humanities and
natural sciences, rather than traditional design,
whose approach is one that relies on artistic
intuition.
At the Ulm School of Design, designers were
trained, design took shape, theories of design
were elaborated, and methods of design devel-
oped. In speaking of the instruction method
used at the HfG and the way designers teamed
up with technicians and business people, the
terms “Ulm model” or “Ulm concept” are used.
But the tangible results of work at the HfG –
product and information design – have also set
a trend: They are said to have a special “Ulm
style”.

In studying the history of the HfG, one soon

gets an unpleasant impression: Facts are treated
as if they were mere opinions, and vice versa:
instead of an analysis of reality as an aggregate
of unassailable, inescapable data, there is flight
from reality. Up till now, in discussing the HfG,
there has been a dearth of publications that aim
at representing the hard facts of its history.
One of the simplest notions taught at the HfG
is the idea that the result of a project depends
on the circumstances under which it was carried
out. If external conditions are altered, the output
obtained is different. If we want to have a grasp
of the HfG’s uniqueness, we need information
about its external conditions. That is why the pre-
sent publication focuses on the framework within
which the HfG operated. The facts gathered here
are not meant to replace opinions but to make it
possible to form opinions.

ISBN 3-932565-17-7

9 783932 565175