Fassbinder, Functionalism, and the Beauty of Braun Design

The company Braun is postwar Germany’s most prominent design-oriented manufacturer, and its 1950s collaborations with designers from the Bauhaus and the Ulm School of Design are part of the design history canon. Until now, its functionalist style has been celebrated as an expression of West Germany’s turn away from Nazism. I argue in this article that, on the contrary, Braun’s 1950s designs recalled the products that the company made for the Wehrmacht and the SS, and I show how the company built its brand identity during the Nazi era and used nationalism and antisemitism to sell its products in the 1950s. I embed my analysis in readings of two films in which Rainer Werner Fassbinder uses Braun devices as key elements in his mise-en-scène, and I show how looking at Braun through Fassbinder’s lens restores lost historical and political content to his films and to West Germany’s exemplary industrial design style.