Marshall Plan

We can safely assume that Bill made the acquaintance of certain U.S. cultural representatives either involved in organizing the exhibition or invited to the opening and that these contacts led to him eventually being assigned the task of traveling to cities in war-torn Germany to report on the state of the colleges in the territory then occupied by the United States. Bill traveled to Germany in July and August 1947 and again in March the next year, after which he was able to report back to the Americans, writing favorably of Ulm’s Volkshochschule or adult education college, led by Inge Scholl.20

In 1950, John McCloy,21 the U.S. High Commissioner for Germany, assigned Bill the task of setting up an international research council in Paris with funds from the European Recovery Program (ERP). Better known as the Marshall Plan, the ERP provided for the economic reconstruction of war-torn western Europe, including devastated West Germany. As far as Germany was concerned, it marked a shift away from a more punitive policy stance as represented by the blueprints of the so-called “Morgenthau Plan,” which had essentially envisaged turning the defeated country into an agricultural, non-industrial state after the war. It was against this historical backdrop of recovery and rebuilding that the Ulm School of Design was founded.