Marcel Bois is a historian at the Research Centre for Contemporary History in Hamburg (FZH).
Viennese architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky is best known as the designer of the Frankfurt Kitchen, forerunner of modern fitted kitchens. Her work was informed by her communist politics — a cause in whose name she joined the resistance against Nazism.
Throughout history, it’s been hard for agitators and troublemakers to hold down a good job. In the interwar decades, tens of thousands of them were hired by the Communist International — an employer with long hours, difficult bosses, and a lot of opportunities for travel.
Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky is renowned as creator of the first fitted kitchen, designed to cut the time devoted to household chores. But her “social architecture” was just part of her deep political convictions — a journey that led her to the Communist resistance against Nazism.
In the years before the Nazi takeover, Berlin was a pulsing metropolis. Hit series Babylon Berlin immerses us in a recognizable era of transformation — and despair.
Executed by the Nazis on this day in 1944, the life of German Communist Ernst Thälmann was as contradictory and tragic as the movement he led.
The anniversary of the Nuremberg Trials is cause to reflect on the forces that failed to halt Nazism’s rise.