31 October > 7 February 2010 Disappeared from the GDR
Design from 50 years ago
In 1959 Christa Petroff-Bohne (�1934) was commissioned by the Ministry of the Interior of the GDR to design a series of crockery for the GDR gastronomy. At the time Christa Petroff-Bohne was working at the East Berlin Academy of Arts. This academy had been set up at the beginning of the 1950s under the direction of the Dutch architect/designer Mart Stam.
This commission, which was actually a pioneering work, was a challenge for Christa Petroff-Bohne. She did not know any foreign designs and she was rather unfamiliar with the term 'Bauhaus'. Walter Ulbricht, the leader of the GDR, who had been trained as a traditional furniture maker, hated the Bauhaus designs. Bauhaus was taboo to him.
For many weeks Christa Petroff-Bohne studied the daily routine in the various forms of gastronomy in 1959. She wanted to learn more, for instance, about the requirements to be met by the new, stainless steel crockery.
That very same year the first designs were taken into production in the Auer Besteck- und Silberwarenwerke (ABS) in the town of Aue within the Erzgebirge district. The Wellner plant, a 19th-century producer of silver cutlery and crockery, had been converted into a 'Volkseigener Betrieb' (VEB). These designs, in a slightly modified version or not, were produced until the beginning of the 1990s.
A couple of new designs were added to the series in the 1960s. Designers such as Brigitte Mahn-Diedering and Dietmar Scheibe were involved.
ABS did not produce the series of stainless steel crockery for the average East German families but for gastronomy and export purposes. The wholesale business 'SUCCES' from Lanaken (B) imported the crockery to sell it in Belgium.
In practice, the crockery was highly satisfactory and there was no need to change it. Christa Petroff-Bohne, who had in the meantime been appointed professor at the Weissensee Akademie, stopped designing metal crockery after 1959. She still made drawings of porcelain crockery and she also drew the shape of the electric hand mixer KOMET RG 5.
All gastronomy companies in the GDR (the well-known Inter Hotels, restaurants, ice-cream parlours, etc.) used this crockery for thirty years. After the 'Wende' (reunification of East and West Germany) these companies were privatized at the beginning of the 1990s, which implied that the old crockery was taken to the scrap dealer almost everywhere. Only the Schwarzer B�r Hotel in Jena held on to the collection and its guests still make use of it today, in 2009.
