Modernism is the rejection of ornament and decoration of all forms. Form follows function is a modernist idea of Louis Sullivan in 1896, stating that purpose comes before aesthetics. For example, when designing a poster, you must first ensure the poster communicates the desired message competently, before making it 'pretty'.
Post World War II Swiss typographical design is very modernist. It uses grids, primarily Helvetica or similar sans-serif typefaces, and flush left, ragged right text. Photographs, if they were present, replaced illustrations, creating everything clean and precise. Modernist design aims to make sense/order the crazy, confusing world we live in, via the use of the grid as an organisation device.
Anti-ornamentalist modernists primarily also used sans-serif fonts, as they though serif's didn't form a function. They are just there to look decorative, but don't actually form any purpose at all.
Modernism is all about making design depersonalised, but also universal, functional and objective. Neue Grafik is a great example of true Swiss modernism at it's best. Muller Brochmann was also a defining modernist graphic designer.
The whole point of the stripped back, grid like design of modernist graphic design is so that it doesn't age, and won't look out of date within a year or two. The Universal typeface was designed for this purpose, to be used with modernist graphic design. Herbert Bayer designed Universal as a sans serif typeface, with only lowercase letters. Bayer thought that Uppercase letters were unnecessary as they didn't improve the legibility of type, and were basically an added extra that wasn't needed, so as a modernist Bayer chose not to have any. Bayer designed Universal as a universal typeface, hence the name. He intended for it to speak to anybody regardless of race, status, or gender.
Of course, whilst all of this modernism was going on, there is always an opposing force that tries to over rule it. In this occasion it was Hitler, as he opposed modernism saying "works of art which cannot be understood in themselves but need some pretentious instruction book to justify their existence will never again find their way to the German people". Instead he favoured art that realistically portrayed landscapes and buildings. This resulted in Hitler banning all modernist or "offensive" artwork, in some cases hiding it in flats, as one stash of modernist art was discovered in a flat in Munich just last year.
Information in the last paragraph courtesy of http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24819441
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