Latest / The History of Germany: Kingdoms, War, and Rebuilding Europe — Fexingo History / The Frankfurt Kitchen's Hidden Rival: Grete Lihotzky's Radical Home
Transcript
- Lucas: So we've talked about the Bauhaus a lot in recent episodes, and the Frankfurt Kitchen came up when we did that piece on Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky. But I think we barely scratched the surface. Because her story really is one of those wild arcs — from designing the most famous kitchen in the world to being locked up by the Gestapo for smuggling secrets to the Soviet Union. Luna: Wait, the same woman who designed the kitchen? That's quite a jump. Lucas: Exactly. And that's what makes her so fascinating. She's often reduced to just the kitchen, but she lived this incredible life that spans the whole catastrophe of the twentieth century. Born in Vienna in 1897, she became one of the first female architects in Austria — and right from the start she was convinced that good design could change society. She studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Vienna, which was this progressive school that was way ahead of its time. Lucas: And before we get into the kitchen itself, I want to say something — and this is the kind of thing we only get to do because listeners support the show. Between research, recording, and editing, each episode takes us a good chunk of time, and we love doing it. But it only keeps going because of people like you chipping in a couple of dollars a month over at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. It genuinely makes the difference between us being able to keep going and not. Luna: Yeah, it really does. Every little bit helps us keep the lights on, as they say. Lucas: So now, the kitchen. The Frankfurt Kitchen was designed between 1926 and 1930, as part of a massive public housing program in Frankfurt, directed by the architect Ernst May. May had this vision of a modern, rational city, and he brought together a team of designers — including Margarete — to create efficient, affordable apartments for working-class families. And she approached the kitchen not just as a room, but as a workspace. She studied how women actually moved while cooking, how long their steps were, what was where — she applied something called scientific management, or Taylorism, to the home. Which sounds cold, but the result was a kitchen that was actually a joy to work in. Luna: So she was basically the Marie Kondo of the 1920s? Lucas: Hah, in a way. But Marie Kondo is about tidying, Margarete was about total efficiency. The kitchen was only about 1.9 meters wide — tiny — but she packed it with everything a cook would need: a fold-out ironing board, a rotating spice rack, a built-in flour container with a chute, a pull-out cutting board, a garbage drawer with a zinc liner. And the colors weren't just aesthetic — the cabinets were a dark blue-green because she'd read that it repelled flies, and the work surface was beechwood because it was soft on glassware. Every detail was tested and thought through. Luna: That's incredible. But wasn't there some controversy about it? Like some women hated it? Lucas: There was a lot of debate, actually. Some women found it too small, too cramped. They missed their old kitchens where kids could play and the family could gather. But the Frankfurt Kitchen was designed for a specific kind of apartment — a very small, modern flat that was meant to be used differently. And you have to remember that before this, many working-class families had no running water or electricity in their kitchens. So for a lot of people, it was a huge upgrade. And it was also part of a larger movement called Neues Frankfurt, which was about designing the whole city: housing, schools, parks, even the streetlights. Margarete was a key figure in that, designing not just kitchens but also kindergartens and other public buildings. Luna: It's amazing that a woman was at the center of that. In the 1920s, architecture was really dominated by men. Lucas: Absolutely. And she faced a lot of discrimination. But she was also part of a circle of progressive architects who believed that design could be a tool for social change. That idea was very much in the air in Weimar Germany. But then, of course, everything fell apart. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, the modern movement — and anyone associated with it — was attacked as degenerate. Margarete, who was a committed communist, went into exile. First to the Soviet Union, then later she lived in Turkey, which was a haven for many German émigrés at the time. Lucas: And that's where her story takes a really unexpected turn. In exile, she didn't just keep designing. She became involved in the resistance, specifically with a group that the Gestapo would later call the Rote Kapelle, the Red Orchestra. This was a network of anti-fascist groups that were connected to Soviet intelligence. Margarete used her position as an architect to travel and to pass information. She even went to Vienna in 1940, posing as a tourist, to meet with a resistance cell. But the Gestapo was already onto her, and she was arrested and imprisoned. She spent the rest of the war in a Nazi prison. Luna: That's terrifying. How did she survive? Lucas: She survived partly because she was a woman — they didn't execute her right away, like they did with many male resistance fighters. And also she was incredibly tough. She was interrogated, but she never gave up any of her comrades. After the war, she was freed by the Allies, and she went back to Vienna. But here's the thing — she was never really celebrated for her resistance work. In Austria, after the war, there was this dominant narrative of Austria as the first victim of Hitler. People who had actually fought back were often sidelined or even shamed. She had to fight to get her pension, and for a long time, her contribution to architecture was overshadowed by the fact that she'd been a communist and a spy. Luna: Wow. So she was punished twice — once by the Nazis, and then again by her own country. Lucas: Exactly. And it wasn't until the feminist movement of the 1970s that her work started to get real recognition. Scholars began to study the Frankfurt Kitchen not just as a design object, but as a cultural artifact that revealed a lot about gender roles and modernity. Margarete herself lived to be 103, and in her later years she became something of a celebrity again. She was interviewed, she gave lectures, and she saw the kitchen she designed become an icon. There's a famous photo of her standing in a reconstructed version of it, at the age of 100, and she looks totally at home — even though the kitchen was so small. Luna: That's a great image. It's like she finally got her due. Lucas: And that's the thing — the Frankfurt Kitchen is often seen as a precursor to the modern fitted kitchen, which we all take for granted now. But it's also a reminder that design isn't neutral. It's shaped by politics, by economics, by ideas about who does the cooking and cleaning. Margarete's kitchen was revolutionary because it tried to make housework easier, but it also reinforced the idea that women were primarily responsible for that work. She grappled with that tension her whole life. She always said she wasn't a feminist in the traditional sense, but her career and her choices — becoming an architect in a male-dominated field, joining an armed resistance, surviving everything — those were deeply feminist acts. Luna: I never would have thought a kitchen could have so much political baggage. Lucas: That's the thing about history — sometimes the most familiar objects hide the most surprising stories. And that's why we keep digging into these corners. Just a quick note — if you're enjoying these deep dives, and you want us to keep making them, supporting us at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo really does help. It's how we fund the research time and the audio editing, and it keeps the show free for everyone. Luna: And it's an easy way to say thanks for all the hours we put in. Lucas: So next time you're standing in your own kitchen, maybe think about Margarete and her tiny, efficient revolution. Because she didn't just design a room — she designed a way of thinking about the domestic world, one that we're still living with today.