The Cutlery That Arrived Fourteen Years Early
Every generation has its idea of what a proper table looks like, and in West Germany at the end of the 1950s that idea was elaborate. Millions of families had lost their household goods in the war and were buying again, and the taste of the moment ran to ornament, curling handles and engraved borders included, in a style known as Gelsenkirchen Baroque. Around two hundred German cutlery makers shared a booming market. Restaurants and canteens ordered in bulk. Nobody was asking for a fork that looked like a strip of steel.
That is, more or less, what Herbert Seibel commissioned. His family had been making metalware since 1895, when Wilhelm Seibel founded a Britannia ware factory in Mettmann, near Düsseldorf. A branch opened in Ziegenhain, in northern Hesse, in 1911, and it was there, at the Hessische Metallwerke Gebr. Seibel, that Herbert, the third generation, watched sales fall as cheaper competition arrived from abroad. The firm produced solid, conventional cutlery for department stores, and his father intended to keep it that way. According to the family's own account, Herbert drove to Kassel without telling him and met a young lecturer in industrial design named Peter Raacke.
Raacke, born in Hanau in 1928, had trained as a silversmith and goldsmith before turning to industrial design, so he came to the task from the workbench rather than the drawing board. The brief from Seibel was practical: a modern cutlery that could be made simply and with little waste. Raacke worked on it with his students at the Staatliche Werkkunstschule in Kassel, and the result was four pieces with flat, straight handles of even width, the bowl of the spoon and the tines of the fork growing directly out of the same band of steel. There was no ornament and no attempt to imitate silver. The knife had a short blade.
The cutlery came to market in 1959 under the name Mono A, and with it a new brand. Karl Oskar Blase, a graphic designer who also taught in Kassel, drew the logo, the packaging and the printed matter. An early red poster shows a place setting reduced to a few circles and lines, and its text describes the cutlery as the result of many investigations into everyday use. Mono still counts Blase, alongside Raacke and Seibel, as one of its founders.
The trade was not convinced. Retailers who had bought from the Seibels for years found the design too severe, and customers agreed. In a portrait of the company published by brand eins in 2004, the journalist Thomas Ramge recalled how competitors dismissed it.
A piece of sheet metal that wants to be cutlery.
It took fourteen years for that judgement to turn. In 1973 Mono A received the Bundespreis Gute Form, the German federal prize for good design, its first major award. The cutlery has since entered museum collections, among them the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and in 1999 it appeared in a German stamp series on design history. By then Raacke had added a second idea to the range. Mono Ring, from 1962, was meant to hang from a stand on the table rather than disappear into a drawer, and in 1967 it entered the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Mono has produced it again since 2018, and the coloured sets still hang from their stand in the original way.
The plainness of Mono A is deceptive, because a flat handle hides nothing. Every piece starts as a sheet of stainless steel, one by two metres, from which roughly four hundred forks or eight hundred coffee spoons can be cut. Apart from the knife blades, which are made from a harder steel that holds an edge, everything is 18/10 chromium nickel steel. An eccentric press punches flat blanks from strips of the sheet. The working end is then rolled thinner in sixteen to thirty passes, down to around two millimetres for a fork and between 1.2 and 1.5 millimetres for a spoon, so that the piece balances in the hand and sits lightly in the mouth. The tines are cut in two stages, because punching them all at once would twist the metal. A final press gives the piece its three dimensional shape, and before that step each blank is cleaned by hand: a single grain of dust under that pressure would leave a mark that could not be polished out.
What follows is mostly grinding. Edges are ground first with a coarse grit and then a fine one, the surfaces are worked on sisal wheels with a white paste, and the brushed matt finish gives Mono A its soft grey sheen. A spoon or a fork goes through more than thirty steps. A knife needs over ninety. In a design that relies on straight lines and clean edges, any inaccuracy would be visible at once, which is why the company describes the grinding shop as the heart of the manufactory.
That manufactory is back where the family started. In the late 1980s Wilhelm Seibel, a great grandson of the founder, moved cutlery production from Ziegenhain to Mettmann, where around thirty people now work on roughly two thousand square metres, with the fifth and sixth generations of the family running the company. The presses and grinding machines are not new, and the company makes a point of keeping them that way, maintaining older equipment rather than replacing it. A typical batch is fifty pieces.
Mono A belongs to a particular moment in postwar German design, when designers and manufacturers began to favour use over representation. The same years produced furniture such as the Eiermann table, another object that started as a modest answer to a practical question and outlasted almost everything that was fashionable around it. Raacke himself went on to design cardboard furniture, cooking pots and office furniture, taught in Kassel, Ulm and Hamburg, and died in March 2022 at the age of ninety three.
The cutlery has changed very little. A version with a longer knife blade was added for those who prefer it, and the four piece set is now offered with either. The family has grown to include serving pieces, salad servers and the slender cheese fondue forks, which follow the same plain idiom and appear on the table mostly in the colder months.
Seen today, beside the many tables laid with it over more than six decades, Mono A no longer looks radical. That may be the clearest measure of what Mono and Raacke achieved. A design dismissed as a piece of sheet metal has become, for many people, simply what cutlery looks like.
Photography: Haw-lin Services (cover), Fabian Frinzel (manufactory and table). Archive images: Courtesy of Mono.
