The Deutscher Werkbund was founded on 5–6 October 1907 in Munich, at a meeting of approximately one hundred artists, craftsmen, industrialists, and officials convened following two precursor events: the 1906 Dresden Arts and Crafts exhibition, where Fritz Schumacher had organised a display of serial furniture by Richard Riemerschmid, and a June 1907 split within the Düsseldorf professional association for applied arts. The founding appeal was signed by twelve artists and twelve manufacturers, among them Peter Behrens, Riemerschmid, Schumacher, and Theodor Fischer on the artists’ side, and Peter Bruckmann and the Dresdner Werkstätten on the manufacturers’. Fischer became the organisation’s first president. Schumacher delivered the keynote, arguing for a working alliance between artists and producers.
The primary ideologue was Hermann Muthesius, an official in the Prussian Ministry of Trade who had spent 1896 to 1903 in London on a diplomatic posting studying English domestic architecture and design reform. His three-volume Das Englische Haus appeared in 1904–05; his spring 1907 speech advocating systematic design reform in the applied arts helped precipitate the organisational moment. The 1908 statutes defined the Werkbund’s purpose as Veredelung der gewerblichen Arbeit — the refinement of commercial work — with Qualitätsarbeit as the operative standard. The underlying argument was economic as well as cultural: better-designed German exports could overcome the stigma that had attached to the “Made in Germany” label in foreign markets.
The organisation’s internal debates proved more consequential for what came after than its administrative achievements. Supporters of individual craftsmanship clashed with proponents of industrial typization and Sachlichkeit — functional sobriety over ornament. These tensions reached their sharpest articulation at the 1914 Cologne exhibition, where Muthesius issued ten theses in favour of standardisation and Henry van de Velde responded with ten counter-theses defending the individual artist’s right to formal invention. The Typenstreit was not resolved; the war ended the debate by dissolving the context that had produced it. Walter Gropius, who joined the Werkbund around 1913 and contributed an essay to its 1913 yearbook, carried both sides of this argument into the Bauhaus he founded six years later — the school’s initial guild structure echoing van de Velde’s counter-position while its later industrial turn followed Muthesius’s logic.