The German company Braun was founded in 1921 and 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 household appliances epitomized West Germany’s embrace of functionalism and quickly entered museum collections in Europe and the United States. This talk will examine the origins of Braun’s 1950s product designs in the National Socialist era and consider in particular the company’s indebtedness to forced labor.
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 (2014) and Untimely Beggar: Poverty and Power from Baudelaire to Benjamin (2008). He has edited or co-edited six books, including An Austrian Avant-Garde (2020)and Conceptualism and Other Fictions: The Collected Writings of Eduardo Costa, 1965-2015 (2016), and his most recent literary translations and co-translations are Heimrad Bäcker’s Documentary Poetry (2024) and Carlos Soto Román’s 11 (2023)
