Photos by Timm Rautert and text contributions by
Otl Aicher, Jürgen Becker, Wolfgang Pehnt
Published in 1990 by: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne
On his travels and walking tours, the photographer Timm Rautert took photographs of entrance and exit doors for FSB for three years. His task, according to Otl Aicher, was to create a book of photographs “consisting of images and dry texts”.
On January 24, 1989, he wrote to us on the subject: "Such a book should have a definite character, without becoming an album. It could become a distinct personality within this series of books. It describes the environment of handles in the down-to-earth language of photography." The desired "dry texts" were provided by the architectural critic Wolfgang Pehnt and the poet Jürgen Becker. It was not hard to win Pehnt for this project. His profession makes him part of the building industry. But how can a manufacturer of door handles get in touch with a poet? Here, Hans Magnus Enzensberger took a hand. Otl Aicher had recommended him to us.
At the beginning of August 1989 Enzensberger wrote to us: "Dear Mr. Braun, this is my candidate: Jürgen Becker. You may contact him via Deutschlandfunk (German radio station). His books are published by Suhrkamp. Highly recommendable. Best regards, Hans Magnus Enzensberger." Later on we found out something that had been unknown both to Hans Magnus Enzensberger and to us at the time: Jürgen Becker and Wolfgang Pehnt had had offices next door to each other on the same floor at the Deutschlandfunk headquarters in Cologne for many years.
Response:
The Hessian television station’s cultural magazine “aspekte“ dedicated a twelve-minute television broadcast to this book and the enterprise behind it in 1991, in which also the two text authors Wolfgang Pehnt and Jürgen Becker were interviewed, in search of a common denominator for intellectual and technical culture. FSB was praised as an example of a successful synthesis between both aspects.