With its extensive assemblage of everyday items, this museum ostensibly traces German design history from the early 20th century to today but actually feels more like a cross between a cabinet of curiosities and a flea market. Alongside detergent boxes and cigarette cases are plenty of bizarre items, like a spherical washing machine, inflation money from 1923 and a swastika-adorned mug.
The collection is based on the archive of the Deutscher Werkbund (German Work Federation), an association of artists, architects, designers and industrialists formed in 1907 to integrate traditional crafts and industrial mass-production techniques. It was an important precursor of the 1920s Bauhaus movement.
