The amnesia of the Wirtschaftswunder: Essen’s ‘House of Industrial Design’

Abstract

This article has two parts. The first part returns to Theodor Adorno’s seminal essay that seeks to understand the impulse to forget the past in terms of reification. Adorno characterizes late modern capitalist society as governed by the ‘law of exchange’ that reduces all things in the world to a commonality. This reductionist propensity in bourgeois society leads to forgetting insofar as any and all forms of particularity are effaced: any aspect that may make a thing distinct, such as its history, becomes forgotten by reification in the post-industrial consumerist society. The second part of the essay explores Adorno’s argument through the example of the transformation of Essen’s synagogue into an industrial exhibition of consumer goods. During the height of West Germany’s ‘economic miracle,’ city officials viewed the synagogue instrumentally as nothing other than a thing that could be repurposed to celebrate West Germany’s post-Nazi transformation into a society of consumerist wonder.