Today, questioning the Americanization paradigm entails little risk. A once lively debate about the thoroughness of U.S. cultural hegemony in Europe has dissipated, and historians have come to agree that Germans, French, and others drew only selectively from American models of producing and consuming. Despite the introduction of mass marketing, the old world ethos of quality goods and neighborly retailing has persisted across the Atlantic. From 1945 until today western Europeans have experienced not an “Americanized” but a “creolized” consumer society.

It is one thing to insist on cultural and ideological divergences between the U.S. and Europe, but it is another to provide evidence of them. Here is where Jan Logemann's book is valuable. With its focus on arguably the two most affluent postwar democracies, Trams or Tailfins asks us not to reassess the limits of American cultural penetration but to identify and account for them more precisely. If West Germans and Americans approached spending, homeownership, and the use of public space differently, why was this the case? How did politicians, economists, urban planners, and housewives navigate the consumer marketplace differently in these two countries?

The author answers these questions by scouring popular and trade publications, economic data, and opinion polling from the late 1940s through the early 1970s. He provides a wealth of material demonstrating how different ideas about the state, the individual, and public well-being permeated the United States and West Germany. In the Federal Republic (FRG), policy makers and shoppers harbored a suspicion of credit buying, personal debt, and conspicuous consumption, while their American counterparts strove for ever higher standards of living through installment buying, trading up, and relocation to the suburbs. It is not that some of the hallmarks of American consumer society—advertisements, credit cards, and cars—were absent in the FRG. It's that they were not nearly as prevalent or as economically decisive as once assumed. Simply put, Germans felt uneasy about exchanging the long-term comforts associated with personal savings for immediate gratification. Logemann's study hinges on a dichotomy between a West German model and an American one, captured effectively by his book's suggestive title. While municipal authorities in the FRG put money into “public goods” such as buses, trains, and trams, Americans valued the outward signs of individuality and hyper-consumption, embodied in the increasingly exaggerated tailfins on the cars of the late 1950s.

Behind this reductive contrast of a showy Americanism and a sensible Germanness lies an essential point about the two regimes of consumption under examination. Whereas the United States cast prosperity as very much a private phenomenon (centered on increasing standards of personal comfort), Germans made considerably more room for what Logemann and others have referred to as “public consumption”—goods and services supported by taxpayer money and benefiting communities widely. Again and again, the book documents Germans' tendency to reject the American “purchasing power” paradigm of lower consumer prices in favor of higher wages and savings. During the first three postwar decades, the United States saw a greater democratization of consumption but also an accompanying dissolution of the inner city and an atomization of the consumer.

Logemann has provided a great service with this book. By casting his net widely to include culture, class, demography, and fiscal policy, he allows us to peer behind the glitzy facades of the German “economic miracle” and the American postwar boom to understand how two consumer societies functioned on the ground level. His approach is not problem-free, however. Because Logemann succeeds in tracing the tenacity of cultural attitudes and practices, he offers the reader a static, occasionally redundant picture. It is perhaps unavoidable that “change over time” is largely absent, but so are some of the attending anecdotes, controversies, and surprises that would have livened up the book. This is not to gainsay Logemann's findings so much as to wonder, in the case of the FRG, whether the author has unfairly deprived the reader of the Wirtschaftswunder's color and energy. Do images of overflowing shops, vibrant ads, and flourishing youth culture in the FRG have no place in this sober study? More importantly, did the relative abstemiousness that supposedly marked the German model sustain itself as fully as Logemann suggests?

The desire for a more dynamic rendering of consumption might merely be nostalgia for a mythologized view of West Germany's recovery; but it also might point to the risks of drawing too stark a contrast between Europe and America. Logemann is too careful a historian to traffic in clichés about American superficiality and German levelheadedness. And yet, we can't help but stand in awe of the German model and shake our heads at the U.S. one. As Americans survey some of the wreckage wrought by our system—abandoned downtowns, stagnant wages, shrinking public services—we may wonder whether some of the perils of advanced capitalism are bound to assault non-American consumer societies as well (where they haven't done so already). For anyone who has enjoyed the pedestrian zones, state-funded orchestras, and mom and pop bakeries of Germany, one can only hope that the answer is no. And yet with austerity and neoliberalism sweeping Europe, it is perhaps time to look again not only at the differences between models but also the convergences, as well as the multidirectional flows of market ideals. Elsewhere Logemann has indicated how the teachings and personnel associated with German urban planning moved, if haltingly, west across the Atlantic, and there are probably other examples of bilateral cultural exchange worth noting. And someday we might discover that the “German” model was more than just a case of counter-hegemony; perhaps it might even conquer America.