Gui Bonsiepe
         An open letter to an historian


The following letter was written by Gui Bonsiepe following a forum that was held last year in Offenbach on "The Ulm School of Design – a model for design curriculum". Sitting on the discussion panel with Gui Bonsiepe was René Spitz who has written his PhD dissertation on the history of the school\'s administration and has just published a book aimed at finally providing a solid foundation for debate on the Ulm School of Design. Gui Bonsiepe was a student at the school, then a member of the teaching staff. In his letter he comments on the efforts of Spitz and others to rewrite the history of the Ulm School of Design.


Good morning Dr. Spitz,

We were only able to briefly touch upon a number of issues during last night\'s debate. Thus, many questions were not answered in a manner that was satisfactory to the audience and the participants. I am writing you this letter in an effort to fill in at least some of the gaps.

The Ulm School of Design – everyone seems to agree – polarised public opinion from the day it was founded. This continues to be the case. The topic is as controversial as ever. The reasons for this are diverse, as are the various institutional and financial aspects of the Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung and the Ulm School of Design.

My comments were directed toward the substance and the objectives of your work. Given the absence or the limited availability or the lack of evaluated or easily accessible information on the school, it remains unclear to what extent readers of your book, who know nothing about the school or whose knowledge is only based on hearsay, can find an answer to the question of how it came to be that this institution gained the importance that it did.

You wanted to find out what happened behind the scenes, to see how things "really" functioned at the school. You hunted for clues like a detective. That certainly piques the reader\'s curiosity – my interest was also stimulated when I saw the cover of your book. Your investigations, however, produced little more than a long list of petty and paltry matters – results that may have annoyed you, or even fascinated you, but did little to shed light on the "functioning" of the school. Who in the world would still be interested in such petty squabbles? Could they ever be of interest to anyone? Is this nothing but a meticulous study of trivialities? Max Bill of course had an authoritarian disposition that proved to be more than his team could take. The formal scientific wing, headed by Dr. Kesting and Dr. Rittel, was by no means as innocent and docile as you seem to believe, and it had no compunctions about spreading personal slanders of a most heinous nature concerning members of the teaching staff who were powerless to defend themselves. That was really no civilised way to behave or to conduct oneself.

Why the school no longer exists, why it failed (although one has to wonder if this term is appropriate here) remains unclear, or at the very least, the explanations that you put forward fail to do justice to the complicated nature of the issue. It appears that you have concocted a story with two main protagonists: Mr. Thorwald Risler and Otl Aicher. No - one questions Mr. Risler\'s achievements when it came to restructuring the budget of the Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung and the school. However, it cannot be denied that by taking certain decisions (for example, accepting the sound studio donated by Siemens), Mr. Risler was meddling or attempting to meddle with the pedagogical structure and the programme of the school, although he was not professionally qualified for such measures and his actions could only be interpreted as arrogant posturing. I won\'t say if the bylaws of the school formally gave him the right to take such measures, however, you will hopefully understand that the teachers saw this as a reduction in their areas of competency and responsibility. One has the impression that you treat Mr. Risler with great indulgence, whereas you are disproportionately harsh in your criticism of Otl Aicher – and all the while you let the documents speak for themselves, as if they could speak for themselves. That is mock objectivity. The documents do not speak for themselves – it is YOU who speaks by selecting certain documents. I assume that you are only too familiar with such methodological issues. Do you have a personal grudge against Otl Aicher? Or against designers who ascribe to the Ulm tradition in general? Or do you begrudge everything that has to do with the Ulm School of Design, as many politicians did at the time? You surely remember the election slogan that marked an entire era: "no experiments", which also sheds light on the political context of the school. Do you feel subliminally bitter or even resentful? Historians also have their personal agendas, which they are not always aware of. This agenda becomes apparent in your – unavoidable – assessments of persons and events (no-one believes in "objective" historical accounts anymore – they have long since been recognised as fairytales), i.e., when you draw your conclusions. When researchers have to cope with huge quantities of documentation, their work can apparently develop a life of its own and defeat their original intent, i.e., to map out new territory. It is understandable that the meticulous Sisyphean task of organising and making sense of a virtual mountain of heterogeneous data – i.e., writing a coherent story – often aggravates an academic to the point that he lets his frustrations out on the very object of his inquiry. It becomes increasingly difficult to separate what is relevant from what is irrelevant. One has to pore over dry material and figures and notes from meetings that fail to answer paramount questions, including how the school, with all its contradictions, "really functioned." I can imagine that the frustration associated with this could quickly grow to the point where an academic realises that his approach falls short of the mark, and that the territory that he has mapped out is nothing but a featureless landscape.

… continue in form+zweck 20: hfg ulm …