The story of iF Design
The first Mercedes E-Class is launched, equality between men and women before the law is written into the German constitution, and on June 16 and 17, a gigantic popular uprising takes place east of the border in Berlin, which spreads to most of the GDR and becomes a national holiday until 1990 in West Germany.
It's 1953 in the Federal Republic of Germany, and the effects of the war are still being felt - especially in the GDR, but also west of the Iron Curtain. German industry, at best stagnant and at worst bombed to pieces, was struggling to find a foothold both in Germany and abroad.
Six years earlier, the British military government had founded the Hannover Messe in an undamaged factory building in the Hannover suburb of Laatzen. The idea was that the fair would help the economy and industry recover after the war - and to make Hannover the new fair city, as the old fair city, Leipzig, was now in the Soviet part of Germany.
The Hannover Messe was a resounding success, with people from all over Germany visiting the fair to showcase new means of production, methods and inventions - and, extraordinarily, to create an institution to support, refine and celebrate the design of industrial products themselves: thus iF e.V. was founded - a symbol of high-quality design ever since.
It is estimated that over 700,000 people visited the fair from all over the world.
Image: Märklin's stand at the first Hannover Messe, 1947. Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-2005-0808-508 / CC-BY-SA 3.0