An institution-builder
Inge Aicher-Scholl was a German writer and educator. She founded and directed the Ulm Adult Education Center and co-founded the Ulm School of Design with Otl Aicher and Max Bill in 1953. Her place in design history is closely connected with creating institutions for education.
She lived from 1917 to 1998, and she directed the Ulm Adult Education Center from 1946 to 1978. Otl Aicher, who co-founded the design school with her, was her husband, and Max Bill, the third founder, was a former Bauhaus student.
Education after the war
She was the elder sister of Hans and Sophie Scholl, members of the White Rose resistance movement who were executed by the Nazi regime. After the war she wrote about the movement, publishing Die Weiße Rose in 1952. She also participated in the peace movement.
Her father, Robert Scholl, was mayor of Forchtenberg. Hans and Sophie studied at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München in 1942 and were core members of the White Rose student resistance group, which printed and distributed leaflets highly critical of Nazi war crimes, particularly those against the Jews on the eastern front. Hans and Sophie were caught distributing the leaflets, tried for treason and executed by guillotine, together with another member, Christoph Probst. Inge and other members of the family were arrested and interrogated, but later released.
Die Weiße Rose, her first book on the subject, was the first book ever written about the White Rose, and it has since been translated into multiple languages. She went on to write several more books about the group. In the later half of the twentieth century she was heavily involved in the peace movement. She died of cancer in Leutkirch im Allgäu on 4 September 1998.
Why her role matters
Study her role alongside the school’s teaching and design output. That wider view makes the work of establishing and sustaining an institution visible beside the objects associated with it. It also offers a concrete reason to include a writer and educator in a design history: the conditions for learning and collaboration are part of that history.
