Like many aspects of the history of the Third Reich, discussion of issues of consumption has tended to rehearse rather well-known debates, the essential contours of which reproduce divisions of opinion that have been established for years, even if the empirical detail expands and the arguments shift slightly here and there. Thus, on the one hand, there are those who argue that the Nazi “good years” were pivotal in establishing consumer desires for a wide variety of goods, and that the satisfaction of that demand was central to what made the Nazis popular; on the other, there are those who remind that the vision of a German consumer paradise foundered on the realities of war and the inability of the economy to provide both guns and butter, as the formula goes—visions of consumption were ultimately propagandistic chimeras and no more. Yet as Jon Wiesen's thoughtful, elegant study amply demonstrates, this is a false distinction, in that the desires the Nazis fostered and tapped into were no less real for being desires, and thus no less central to the process of imagining oneself as a citizen, or racial comrade, in the era; more to the point, debates such as these miss much of what makes the problem of consumerism in the Third Reich so interesting.

Rather than treat consumer desire as something fostered by the regime itself, Wiesen emphasizes that the idea of a consumer society was being thought out by a range of actors, from advertising men to Rotary Club members to market and consumer researchers, and it was being done so in a manner that had both distinctively Nazi and generically modern, capitalist aspects. Indeed, it was precisely the compatibility of each, and the partial merging of the two, that made advertising, marketing, and selling part of the daily normality of the Third Reich. The limitations on consumption brought about by the armaments boom did not alter this—quite the opposite, for, insofar as exhortations to organize one's domestic economy efficiently were directly linked to the greater interests of national politics, notions of “correct” consumption were a key mechanism through which citizens could imbibe and act out the regime's core politics: in the Third Reich, as elsewhere, consumer (self-)regulation can thus be understood as a key form of governmentality. It is the connections Wiesen makes between what was happening in the Third Reich and what was happening elsewhere that makes this book so intriguing in other ways, too.

Much of what marketing men and consumer researchers did in the Third Reich drew upon preexisting practices, and much of it survived 1945; much of it drew inspiration from not only from the U.S.A. but also from understandings of consumer psychology derived from Freud—not that writers explicitly couched it in those terms, of course—and insofar as it was couched in nationalist language, it was that of a generic, banal nationalism rather than a strident fascist one. Similarly, the Nazi lexicon of competition and performance was one bourgeois producers could work with perfectly comfortably—so much so that organizations such as the Rotary Club had to adapt little apart, obviously, from dissociating themselves from their Jewish members. Implied in this is a sense that the Third Reich was more open, at least for a time in the 1930s, than one might think.

The book is an excellent example of how scholarly perspectives on the Third Reich have been transformed in the last twenty years. Whereas once upon a time accounts such as this would have been critiqued for supposedly downplaying the singularity of the Third Reich, they can now be embraced for what they are—contributions not to the relativization of the Nazi era but to its proper contextualization and to a more subtle critique of how power worked in that era. It shows how the issue of consumption in the Third Reich is best approached not just as a problem of the regime and its propaganda—as a uniquely duplicitous regime seeking to fool the masses with promises that masked the material realities of shortage—but as a manifestation of something inherent to the project of modernity more generally. The political success of the Nazis and the emotional purchase of the Volksgemeinschaft, according to the logic of Wiesen and others, is to be found not just in those aspects of the Third Reich that at first sight mark it out as politically different to other regimes—profound terror and overwhelmingly propaganda—but also in those aspects that made it feel rather more similar. It is no accident, indeed, that the swastika was banned from advertising and that companies drew on a much more familiar archive of images when projecting the reassuring Germanness of their products to a national audience. In this sense the visual culture of the Third Reich changed less than one might assume: advertising in the Nazi era contributed to the naturalization of the regime precisely through its repetition of the familiar. In this and many other ways, this outstanding study sits at the center of the current project to reimagine the place of the Third Reich within the wider sweep of twentieth-century history.