Speech OB 30/09/2007

The spoken word counts!

Honourable Members of the German Bundestag,
Honourable members of the Saxon State Parliament,
Honourable Minister Dr Stange,
Dear City Councillors of the City of Chemnitz,
Honourable members of the jury and participants in the Marianne Brandt Competition,
dear guests,

Considering her rather self-effacing personality, Marianne Brandt would certainly not have dared to hope that on the eve of her birthday in 2007, which would have been her 114th, hundreds of guests would gather at the Chemnitz Opera House for the Marianne Brandt Competition.

This is already the third competition and I am delighted to welcome you here, dear guests, jurors, competition participants and, of course, above all you - the prizewinners.

The first Marianne Brandt competition in 2001 took place at a time when Chemnitz was actively building a new city centre. It was to be a modern, architecturally inspiring and distinctive city centre. And it was!

With the new Chemnitz city centre, something has been achieved that many did not think possible.

Whatever may have inspired the architects Jahn, Kollhoff or Ingenhofen to create their buildings:
Today, in the heart of our city centre, we also find essential features of Marianne Brandt's design approach: "The poetry of the functional".

Ladies and gentlemen,
Chemnitz could not be more aptly interpreted as a city of modernity. Because Chemnitz is modern, functional, honest and straightforward.

The Marianne Brandt Competition in Chemnitz thus simultaneously honours the work of a great designer and focuses on Chemnitz as the perfect place to do so.

The city comes alive from these impulses. And it is clear that the city is gradually realising that something special is taking place in Chemnitz, something unique that gives this city a new identity and becomes part of its unique selling point as a city of modernity.

The designer competition reminds us of a part of our history, which includes the work of Marianne Brandt.
In Chemnitz, the Saxon industrial metropolis, she received the kind of lasting input for her creativity that could only come from a flourishing industrial city, at least at the time.

Marianne Liebe was born in Chemnitz on 1 October 1893. She grew up well protected in a time of great economic growth.

The city was full of movement and the population was rising rapidly. As a result, areas of tension developed within and between the social milieus.
A new space for artistic freedom opened up and this was utilised in Chemnitz with creative inventiveness and in a variety of ways.
The arts and cultural life as a whole flourished. Chemnitz proved to be a fertile breeding ground.

The Kunsthütte and the theatre association, to which Marianne Liebe's father belonged, formed the intellectual centres of the Chemnitz bourgeoisie and its pronounced patronage.

This creative intellectual environment shaped Marianne Brandt throughout her life.

Ladies and gentlemen, dear guests,
Her love of art and design never left her. There was hardly a genre of the fine arts that remained foreign to her.

Her educational and life path testifies to her need and desire to learn art and to live in art. This also included music and literature in her childhood and youth.

Her first step into the world was to study painting in Weimar at Prof Flitzer's school and then to join the drawing class at the Academy of Fine Arts.
She also deepened her studies in other disciplines such as painting and sculpture. The Norwegian painter Erik Brandt was a companion in her artistic development. However, her marriage to him only lasted a few years.

Marianne Brandt had her first exhibition at the renowned Gerstenberger Gallery in Chemnitz, where she showed her figurative works, which were inspired by Expressionism. Marianne Brandt had been noticed!

This was followed by several stays abroad in Europe, which not only opened up other countries to her, but also new worlds of art.

She studied at the Bauhaus in Weimar and later in Dessau.
The most creative phase of her life began here. She had recognised her talent for designing everyday objects and now devoted all her creative energy to this.

She was completely absorbed in her artistic work.
She owed this above all to Walter Gropius, whose views she not only adopted, but for which she was passionate.

The integration of craftsmanship, art and technology had become the guiding principle of her work. Gropius found Marianne Brandt to be a good student.

She learnt the tools for her work in formal design from Josef Albers, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, for example.

In her letter to the younger generation, she attached great importance to her move to the metal workshop.
In it, her great respect for craftsmanship and the resulting marvellous design possibilities can be felt.

At the same time, however, she expressed very clearly and firmly that she herself saw her task as a designer as "...to design these things in such a way that they could meet all practical and aesthetic requirements in a labour-saving manner, even in series production, and yet be far cheaper than any individual production."

With her Bauhaus-orientated thinking, she succeeded in setting European standards even as a young woman.

She moved onto an artistic level that also became a working platform for other European designers.

One outstanding example is the Finnish designer and architect Alvar Aalto. His work can be found throughout Europe and, of course, particularly in Scandinavia.

Even after many decades, everyday objects such as the swinging armchair with armrests, developed by Aalto in 1930/31, have become an integral part of our everyday lives.

Brandt and Aalto were almost contemporaries of the same age. They worked in different places, but in similar ways. They were both associated with the Bauhaus.

The product solutions of Aalto's tea trolley and Brandt's tea service, for example, are interesting. This shows how much Europe was imbued with the idea of modernity and the poetry of functionality at the time.

Ladies and gentlemen, dear guests,
Marianne Brandt always sought challenge and success. With the practical experience she acquired as an employee of Walter Gropius in a Berlin design office, she took over the management of the design department for arts and crafts at the Ruppelwerke metal goods factory in Gotha.

She was finally able to realise her artistic design vision in practice and in series production. She revised the entire product range with great success.

Wardrobe holders, candlesticks, napkin and letter stands, candlesticks, watering cans and other everyday objects testify to Marianne Brandt's energy and inventiveness.

The Gotha period was also to be the creative high point of her work.

Her success was short-lived. The global economic crisis plunged millions of people into misery. Marianne Brandt also lost her job.

The economic crisis was followed by the artistic night of fascism. The so-called "Gleichschaltung", to which art and culture in Nazi Germany were also subjected, left no room for the ideas of the Bauhaus and modernism.

Marianne Brandt showed civil courage.

She refused to be co-opted and refused to become a member of the Reichskunstkammer. This meant isolation and no longer being recognised by the public.
It was a difficult time for Marianne Brandt, both artistically and privately.

She lived in seclusion again in Chemnitz and, after the death of her father in 1936, devoted herself to painting and photography.
She took part in a modest number of exhibitions at the Chemnitz Municipal Art Collections and designed tapestries, wallpaper and jewellery.

She survived the destruction of her parents' home on Kaßberg in March 1945, despite all the difficulties: The end of the war gave Marianne Brandt new courage.

As early as November 1945, an exhibition of Chemnitz artists was shown in which she took part.

With the active involvement of Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, further exhibitions followed, which helped Marianne Brandt to regain public visibility and, at this time, recognition.

The idea of Bauhaus was revived in the newly founded GDR. For Marianne Brandt, there were initially many opportunities to develop her ideas, knowledge and skills once again.

From 1949 to 1951, she taught as a lecturer at the Hochschule für Werkkunst, which later became the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden. She then worked successfully at the Institute for Industrial Design in Berlin until 1954.

With her designs for various everyday objects, she also recommended herself for international presentations. She was commissioned with the artistic supervision of the exhibition "German Applied Art in the GDR", which was shown in Beijing and Shanghai from October 1953 to March 1954.

The encounter with a different culture, combined with many experiences and inspirations, left a lasting impression on the artist. These Chinese impressions were also reflected in her later works.

Marianne Brandt left Chemnitz in 1949 and returned to Karl-Marx-Stadt in 1954. The prescribed change of name for her hometown was also an indication of where developments in the GDR were heading.

In the mid-1950s, the formalism that emerged from the Stalin era replaced the Bauhaus concept.

She was no longer in demand as a designer of form. The boundaries of what was artistically desirable and economically possible in the GDR were obviously too narrow.

Marianne Brandt once again lived in seclusion in her parents' house. Painting, graphics and small sculptures determined the content of her early life.
In Karl-Marx-Stadt, the artist and designer of European stature did not receive the public recognition she deserved.

She was very quiet. She died on 18 June 1983 in Kirchberg near Zwickau. Marianne Brandt was laid to rest in the Nikolai cemetery in the town where she was born.

18 years passed between Marianne Brandt's death and the selection of the winners of the first competition of the same name.

In order to bring Marianne Brandt back into the public eye, it took a fundamental upheaval in the history of the state and the city.

Germany is reunited. Karl-Marx-Stadt became Chemnitz again according to the will of the citizens.

Today, Chemnitz is proud of Marianne Brandt. A street on Kaßberg bears her name. This honour is in keeping with the spirit of the design competition, which is sponsored by the Villa Arte e.V. art association and the Saxon Industrial Museum.

The theme "The Poetry of the Functional" beautifully describes the life's work, the combination of aesthetics and functionality, of the great Bauhaus artist.
The call for entries for the 3rd Marianne Brandt Competition in October 2006 met with an impressive response.
The jurors from three countries, chaired by Mrs Wiebke Loeper from Berlin, selected the winners in the categories of product design, photography and control room design.

It was a difficult choice. 273 entries, including 63 applications from abroad, illustrate the attractiveness and high status of the competition among young European artists.

Ladies and gentlemen,
Dear participants in the Marianne Brandt Competition, today's award ceremony is a great day in memory of Marianne Brandt and thus also for the city of Chemnitz. My heartfelt thanks go to all the personalities, institutions and sponsors who made the 3rd Marianne Brandt Competition possible.

I would like to thank all applicants for bringing the competition to life in the spirit of this great daughter of our city. They have made life and art in Chemnitz richer.