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Technical Glamour: Functionalism, Forced Labor, and the History of German Design

A lecture by PATRICK GREANEY, University of Colorado, Boulder

The German company Braun became internationally prominent in the 1950s for its products designed in collaboration with Bauhaus alumni and the Ulm School of Design. Its radios, record players, and other household appliances epitomized a new era of functionalist design and quickly entered the design history canon. This talk presents the conflicted origins of Braun’s product designs. On the one hand, they had their roots in the utopian ideas of the Ulm School’s European and Latin American teachers, many of whom were key members of the artistic avant-garde. And on the other hand, the products were indebted to Braun’s National Socialist past. The talk situates Braun design in contemporaneous aesthetic theory and shows how the history of design illuminates the tensions that shaped West German society. 

Patrick Greaney is Professor of German and Humanities at University of Colorado Boulder. He is the author of Quotational Practices: Repeating the Future in Contemporary Art and Untimely Beggar: Poverty and Power from Baudelaire to Benjamin. His edited and co-edited books include An Austrian Avant-Garde and Conceptualism and Other Fictions: The Collected Writings of Eduardo Costa, 1965-2015, and his most recent literary translations and co-translations are Heimrad Bäcker’s Documentary Poetry and Carlos Soto Román’s 11. 

Monday, November 3, 2025  |  5:00pm  |  Kresge 5-546

All are welcome! Brought to you by the Global Avant-Garde and Modernist Studies Cluster and the Program in Comparative Literary Studies