Bernd Polster in 2008

Bernd Polster (born 22 June 1952) is an author.^[1] He spent the first eleven years of his life in the village Winsen an der Aller in Northern Germany. As he was visiting secondary school in Celle he cofounded and designed the prize winning school magazine bi; 1970 its second issue was illegelized because of an educational "sex supplement". He studied in Bochum, where he listened to the lectures of the marxist philosopher Leo Kofler, and in Bonn. His main field of interest was „Kritik der bürgerlichen Wissenschaft“ (Critique of bourgeois science). He was awarded his diploma in psychology - instead of the required experiment - for a philosophical thesis on the topic „Wissen als Vorraussetzung wissenschaftlichen Lernens" (Knowledge as a requirement for scientific learning), an examination of the incompetences of academical psychology.

After some years as school psychologist in Ahrweiler and Cologne he picked up an interest for photography and art. Exhibitions with collages, drawings, and photographs of punk musicians and shut down filling stations followed. In 1980 he began working as freelance author.

Since the late Nineties Bernd Polster has been running normalbuch as chief editor and art director, an office for the conceptual design and production of illustrated books (book packaging), with Eduard Rühmann (founder of normal records, one of the early German independent labels), as well as formguide.de, an internet platform for German furniture and home accessory design. Followed by formweh.de, a design blog. As an author and editor of many design books he is seen as a renowned expert on international design history.

He lives in Bonn with his wife and two children.

Publications

In 1982 Bernd Polster's first book Tankstellen. Die Benzingeschichte (Filling stations. The History of Petrol) was published, in which he – as in all of his later publications – was also responsible for image research. In the 1980s and 1990s he traveled through Europe in order to write articles for high quality magazines such as GEO, for which he wrote portraits of universities.

He is author of television, and radio documentaries and has led hundreds of interviews. In 1995 he initiated Westwind, a theme week of the TV and radio station WDR about the Americanization of the Western lifestyle. He was awarded with the RIAS prize for the opening feature Alltag Made in USA

In his radio documentaries Bernd Polster took on topics related to a multicultural society, subcultural movements and biographies of artists, dancers and musicians. Examples are "Swing Heil" (on the Swing youth movement under the Nazis) his London portraits Nottinghill Carnival in the late eighties (the first outside of Britain), "Kanakenkartel" on German-Turkish rap musicians, "Generation Ghetto" on the riots of the East Asian youths in the city of Bradford. In Requiem für Theresienstadt – Der böhmische Künstler Peter Kien (on an artist and writer killed in Auschwitz), again the two topics came together in one documentary.

Bernd Polster published guidebooks for Great Britain, South of England and the Caribbean, as well as city guides for London, Prague and Vienna. For these books he also acted as photographer.

From 2001 on he was responsible for the Designseite (designpage) of the Financial Times Deutschland, for which he developed several rubrics. He was responsible for the Kulturkalender of GEO-Saison for six years, starting 1990. Here he presented European cultural events in short essays, a text form which he later often used. This project, along with most of the books and travel guides were carried out as a cooperation with Mandy Howard, whom he married.

The series Design Directories, consisting of 5 volumes, which he developed, was an attempt to introduce the design culture of important countries (Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Scandinavia and the USA) and was translated into four languages. In 2009 the Chinese edition was released. In the recent years he wrote more than ten books on design and design history many of which were translated into English. His latest book is "bauhaus design", the first comprehensive overview on this topic, and a biography on Peter Ghyczy, an architect, inventor and entrepreneur.

References