In a 2001 essay, the introduction to a special journal issue on consumption in twentieth-century Germany, historians Alon Confino and Rudy Koshar noted the relative lack of scholarship on consumption and consumerism in European, especially German, historiography, as compared to the explosion of interest in the topic among historians of the United States.Footnote ¹ For Confino and Koshar, this disjuncture appears all the more remarkable in view of the centrality of consumption and consumer goods to the political and ideological struggles of the German twentieth century and indeed the potential power of consumption, as a historiographic subject, for linking daily life and individual experience to the sweeping trajectories of the century's history. It turns out that Koshar and Confino did not have to wait very long for this gap to be filled; in the several years since that journal issue appeared, works on consumption in modern Germany have been coming out at a furious pace. In addition to several broad surveys of and edited collections on consumer society in the modern period,Footnote ² over the last few years there has been a wave of specialized studies of consumption and consumer goods in Nazi Germany, in the Federal Republic, and notably in the GDR. The problem of consumption has also been a key concern in recent works on Wilhelmine and Weimar cultural history, although historical studies of the period's consumer culture—or the institutions and mechanisms for its dissemination—remain fairly rare.Footnote ³

Looking back at nearly a decade of historical writing, it is now time to assess what this historiographic movement has contributed to our understanding of modern Germany. In other words, has consumption, as a historical category and an object of analysis, provoked a reconsideration of the democracies and dictatorships, of the success stories and the atrocities that have marked recent German history? Has this new work complicated accepted narratives of the German past or rather confirmed and reinforced those narratives? What avenues of further research and new methodological innovations has it opened up? What areas remain to be investigated? What are the shortcomings of this body of literature?

The eleven books I examine here represent only a selection of this rapidly growing body of scholarship.Footnote ⁴ They were chosen, in part, because of their differences, i.e., because together they illustrate the range of approaches, assumptions, and conclusions that characterize this nascent field and thus attest to the openness and flexibility of consumption and consumer culture as category and subject. Several books, for example, chiefly those that deal with the Nazi and GDR dictatorships, focus above all on state policies toward consumption. They tend to examine the state's involvement in the economic sector and its attempts to control—and respond to—popular demand. Another handful of works in this sample seizes on particular products or categories of goods and assesses changes in their use, availability, marketing, etc., as a barometer of the growth of consumer industries and levels of consumption across periods and regimes. Still others operate on the level of discourse analysis and intellectual history and treat responses to consumerism by intellectuals and theoreticians or among political actors and grass roots movements. A couple of these works address consumer habits and actual consumer experiences, although as we will see, that area remains relatively underdeveloped in German consumption studies.

Despite these differences in emphasis and approach, these studies can be clustered around several overarching questions and debates that have more or less structured this emerging field and tied it to broader trends and issues in German and European historiography. First, when and how did Germany become a consumer society, or a society of mass consumption? Given the relative lateness and the particular intensity of the German experience of mass consumerism, was there then a German Sonderweg, a special path toward consumer society? Second, how relevant are concepts such as Americanization, modernization, and Westernization to understanding Germans' relationships to consumer goods and consumer abundance in the twentieth century? Third, what kinds of continuities and ruptures characterize this century-long historical period, both in terms of discourses on consumption and in terms of material realities and experiences? Fourth, how have the various twentieth-century regimes balanced the often contradictory priorities of stimulating heavy industry and producing consumer goods? And, relatedly, how successful were Nazi and GDR attempts to create unique, ideologically inflected styles and patterns of consumption that competed with or provided alternatives to the American model? Fifth, how have conceptions of consumer culture and consumer desire been gendered? How has mass consumption affected men and women differently, and to what extent has this gender effect been consistent across the five consumer regimes of the twentieth century? Sixth, what has this body of literature contributed to old debates about consumer agency and the manipulative power of mass culture? That is, taking these works together, how do we assess the power and agency of the consumer citizens of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century? What, furthermore, do these historical works tell us about consumer desire; can it be seen as an active force and a vehicle for the expression and articulation of identities and even resistances, or rather do modern consumers come across as passive, suggestible vessels, manipulated by a pernicious culture industry? Finally, how do we square narratives of increasing prosperity and consumer abundance with the interludes of deprivation and suffering that Germans have experienced, and more importantly, with the suffering and atrocities they have perpetrated? What, if any, connections can be traced between modern forms of consumption and Nazi racial and anti-Semitic ideologies and policies? In the words of historians Konrad Jarausch and Michael Geyer, “what is the relation between a Germany created from the spirit of consumption and the other Germanys, created from the spirit of production or destruction?”Footnote ⁵

When did Germany become a consumer society? When did it become a society of mass consumption? The 1890s? The 1920s? The late 1930s? The 1950s? All are plausible answers with their share of proponents, and each of these moments marked a significant shift in the way Germans provisioned themselves—and perceived themselves and their provisions. Of course, on one level the periodization question is simply a matter of terminology and semantics. Several of these authors define a consumer society in empirical terms, as the state of being beyond subsistence, where most citizens, freed from concern about basic necessities, enjoy enough leftover income and leisure time to participate in the world of abundance around them.Footnote ⁶ What those studies often overlook, however, are the crucial gaps between appearance and reality, the historically significant moments—such as the early Nazi years or the West German 1950s—when discourses operated more powerfully than actual material conditions in shaping consumer perception.

Cultural approaches, on the other hand, are more likely to treat subsistence as a precondition, but not a definition of a consumer society. Such studies tend to emphasize the symbolic value of objects and their role in creating meaning or shaping individual and group experiences. Victoria de Grazia, one of the few historians of consumption who straddles the empirical and cultural divide, defines a consumer culture as “a society-wide structure of meaning and feeling organized primarily around acts of purchase.”Footnote ⁷ Seen in this light, instead of measuring standard of living or the availability and affordability of goods, historians should be asking about the origin of a “system of needs” in which we express our desires around objects and consumable experiences.Footnote ⁸ These abstract workings, though brilliantly suggestive, are difficult to pin down in concrete historical settings, which might explain why historians (with some notable exceptions) have been relatively slow in incorporating these kinds of insights into consumer culture studies.Footnote ⁹

Using the former, more empirical conception, most historians conclude that it was not until the 1950s—and the later 1950s at that—that (West) Germany became a full-blown consumer society and hence completed a process that had begun some sixty years earlier. The 1890s marked a beginning point for Germans' intense engagement with early forms of mass consumption. In the years preceding the turn of the century, Germans began buying goods from department stores and other large retail shops, obtaining items from mail-order catalogs, and extracting chocolates and cigarettes from vending machines; products began bearing brand-name labels; and glittery advertisements for goods and services were becoming a conspicuous part of the urban landscape in Berlin and other major cities. While World War I put Germany's fledgling consumer economy on hold, the Weimar Republic, especially during the relatively stable years of the mid 1920s, witnessed the diffusion of nascent consumerism beyond the elite classes, and notably, its extension into the realms of culture through the expansion of radio, phonograph recordings, mass-produced books, and the cinema.Footnote ¹⁰ The impact of mass culture and encroaching commodification, of course, preoccupied many of the period's leading intellectuals, such as Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, and Siegfried Kracauer, whose theorizations continue to shape our own intellectual horizons. Still, most historians agree that these new forms of consumption and new kinds of experiences remained demographically limited and had yet to extend much behind Germany's largest urban centers.

The Nazi period represents another crucial turning point in this story. Michael Geyer has written that during the Third Reich, Germany became a fully realized consumer culture, as the new technologies of the 1920s were deployed to turn (“Aryan”) society into an “audiovisual space,” a kind of mass audience for Nazi propaganda broadcasts and for Nazi fantasies of a racially homogeneous consumer paradise.Footnote ¹¹ As we will see, Götz Aly, in his provocative and controversial book on Hitler's “people's state,” also draws direct connections between Nazi racism, war, and levels of German consumption, but in a far more literal manner than Geyer. Most scholarly work on Nazi consumer culture, however, emphasizes that the regime's promises to create consumer abundance—through automobiles, fine apartments, mass tourism, new clothing styles, etc.—remained largely unfulfilled and that most Germans' standards of living scarcely increased in the 1930s, and then dropped precipitously during the war years.

The 1950s, by any standard, marked a watershed in the history of consumption, and the material abundance and relative stability of these years contrasted starkly with the impoverished and desperate state of most Germans at the war's end. Recent scholarship, however, has begun to revise and complicate our image of West Germany's allegedly miraculous postwar economic recovery. S. Jonathan Wiesen has shown, for example, that images and discourses about the economic miracle and the new profusion of goods preceded its actual occurrence by several years and represented, in some ways, a recycling of Nazi economic propaganda promising miraculous recovery in the 1930s—one of several examples we will see of discourses preceding, and shaping perceptions of, material economic changes.Footnote ¹² Nevertheless, the tremendous prosperity of the Federal Republic represented a clear break with the German past and saw also an acceptance of consumer habits and a diminution of some six decades of critical reflection on the social, economic, and cultural consequences of mass consumerism. For Erica Carter, author of a brilliant study that helped to create this whole field, consumption provided an apparently innocuous, alternative identity for West Germans, primarily West German women, who could no longer rally around nationalism or patriotism in the aftermath of war and genocide.Footnote ¹³

These years saw consumption become an intense political issue in another way, as it was turned into a barometer of the relative success of the two postwar German states and ideological systems. The four-decade history of the GDR, as illustrated by a spate of new research, can be viewed as a series of partially realized, at times dreadfully botched attempts to compete with (or even overtake) the West German consumer economy and alternately to convince its citizens to sacrifice their immediate material desires for the longer-term project of building socialism. While East Germany did end up constructing a unique consumer culture, the regime could never mount a serious run at the West German economic juggernaut. In fact, the west's automobiles, television sets, washing machines, and vacation packages, visible to a great many East Germans through western television or through family visits, certainly helped to foment discontent and longing among East German citizens.

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Few single-authored studies place German consumer culture in long-term perspective, and of the books under review here, only Detlef Briesen's Warenhaus, Massenkonsum und Sozialmoral (Department Store, Mass Consumption, and Social Morality) spans several regimes and periods. It extends from the late Kaiserreich through the early Bundesrepublik and surveys some six decades of critical responses to mass consumerism, or Konsumkritik, a term that cannot be easily or elegantly rendered into English.

Briesen's book turns on one central question, namely what changed between the 1880s and the 1950s to strip mass consumerism, once the subject of heated controversy, of its provocative power and negative connotations. What happened to the once vigorous opposition of coalitions of smaller shopkeepers, actual and would-be representatives of the Mittelstand, and anti-Semites who decried department stores and new forms of advertising as corrupting (Jewish) influences? Was there a gradual “social learning process” or period of adjustment that made the department store no longer threatening to West German citizens? To address this problematic, Briesen traces evolving—economic and moral—discourses around department stores and other forms of mass consumerism over this long span.

This optic accounts for both the book's major strengths and its major weaknesses. On the positive side, Briesen offers an extremely tight, clear, thorough, and well-documented account of several debates as they evolved through the century, and he helpfully puts West German economic culture in long-term historical context. The cost of this sharp focus, however, is that his perspective is rather limited, and thus the book is unlikely to have great appeal for social and cultural historians. Briesen, as he freely admits, has essentially nothing to say about popular responses to, or experiences of, these new retail possibilities or of the broader social and cultural changes surrounding them. He does mention works of fiction and journalistic accounts but almost completely restricts his analysis to the writings of professionals, politicians, and intellectuals. Moreover, he focuses so closely on retail shops and consumption in a material sense that he ignores the consumption or “massification” of culture, the subject of vigorous debate in the Weimar period and beyond.

Department stores stand in the foreground of Briesen's analysis, and he provides a useful overview of their history in Germany and elsewhere. Much of this material will be familiar to specialists from earlier accounts by such scholars as Siegfried Gerlach, Simone Ladwig-Winters, and Uwe Spiekermann, but given the importance of the department store to the history of consumer culture and the relative shortage of scholarship on the German stores, as compared to the French, British, and American cases, the story bears repetition.Footnote ¹⁴ Briesen notes that critical perspectives on department stores actually appeared in Germany before the stores themselves—another case of discourse preceding and helping to shape economic and commercial changes. These discourses, like the stores, originated in France, and Briesen uses Émile Zola's Au Bonheur des Dames, a novel based in a thinly fictionalized Bon Marché and an enormously rich primary source for the early history of the department store, as an entry point into this terrain. Indeed, the Zola novel colorfully dramatizes the excitement generated by new department stores and the pull they exercised on their female customers, but it also shows the dark side of these hulking new commercial establishments: a feared erosion of moral standards within their walls; cases of shoplifting, even kleptomania, among respectable ladies; and the merciless transformation of the city's topography and economy, meaning that long-standing, family-owned businesses could no longer hold their ground against the ever expanding behemoth.

Department stores arrived in Germany some thirty years later than they appeared in France, and about twenty years after their arrival in British and American cities. Unlike their counterparts abroad, German department stores sprang up in small and medium-size towns first and entered the major cities later, arriving in Berlin only in the 1890s. Although different stores catered to different demographics, German department stores were more likely to serve the working class and petty bourgeoisie than the more luxurious French stores, at least in their early years. Furthermore, the conspicuous presence of Jewish businessmen as department store owners—in significantly higher proportion than in any other national context—heavily influenced their reception in Germany and helped to turn department stores into a salient political issue. Due to a combination of all of these factors, the German reception of department stores was particularly intense and conflicted. These stores, as Briesen suggests, functioned as a kind of screen for projections of the hopes and the fears of a polarized society undergoing a dizzying transformation. Thus, early responses to department stores came down to the conflict between those who embraced modernity's promises and so-called cultural pessimists, who feared the decline of (imagined) German traditions. In a corrective to this oversimplified dichotomy, historian Uwe Spiekermann argues that smaller specialty shops also embraced modernity in this period and should not be portrayed as clinging to outmoded retail traditions.Footnote ¹⁵ Department store debates were simultaneously disputes over gender roles, over how to regulate the marketplace, and over a whole bundle of social and cultural problems that Germany faced amid the rapid industrialization and modernization that hit stride in the later nineteenth century.

Briesen boils these debates down to their essence. He maintains that they represented German society's working out of two broad problematics: how consuming or living in a society of mass consumption affected the individual's moral integrity and what place consumption should have in society as a whole. He breaks both questions down further into various technical-professional debates, dissecting, for example, medical and legal responses to kleptomania, a problem believed to have reached epidemic proportions in the early days of the department store. This debate revolved around whether the seductive power of the stores or women's deficient constitution deserved the blame for the high incidence of pathological shoplifting.Footnote ¹⁶ The point of his analysis is to show the widespread belief in the deleterious moral effects of modern mass consumption and then to trace its ebb in the Federal Republic when department stores were no longer new, innovative, or morally threatening.

Briesen also follows political-economic disputes over taxation, retail restrictions, and other efforts to halt department stores' spread. Since the passage of these kinds of measures—special department store taxes were levied in Prussia, Saxony, and Bavaria around the turn of the century—scarcely dented profits or prevented expansion, he concludes that they were always more political than economic, and that they represented opportunistic attempts by the various political parties to win over Mittelstand support rather than genuine economic agendas. Indeed, department stores actually accounted for a tiny share of all of German retail sales through the 1920s and there was no evidence to suggest that their presence harmed neighboring businesses; on the contrary, a department store often brought new customers to an area and buoyed surrounding stores as well.Footnote ¹⁷

The interventions of the Nazis, according to Briesen, for all of their anti-department store rhetoric—going back to point sixteen of their 1920 founding party platform, which called for the stores to be communalized—were motivated more by political expediency and anti-Semitism than economic concerns, and this dictated their relatively non-interventionist policy toward department stores after the seizure of power. The department store debates flared up again in the postwar period, and the stores reached a high water mark in 1957, when they accounted for more than twelve percent of German retail sales, but these later debates lacked the urgency of their earlier manifestations, and by this time the issue had lost its political traction.

In his thought-provoking conclusion, Briesen broadens his analysis and weighs in on several larger historiographic issues. Other historians have asked what role the Nazi regime played in creating postwar German mass consumption and abundance and by implication therefore, to what extent the wealth of postwar West Germany was tainted by the Third Reich and its unspeakable crimes. The ‘68ers certainly made this connection and claimed to reveal alarming continuities between the Nazi and West German states, associating postwar prosperity with both the legacies of Fascism and the lingering threat of American-style capitalism. Geyer, as we have seen, provocatively puts the Nazi years at the center of the story of the unfolding of German consumer culture. Briesen takes issue with these associations. Nazi rhetoric was so heterogeneous, he notes, that drumming up apparent continuities between Nazi and West German political voices tells us nothing. More important, for Briesen, are the real discontinuities in economic policy and discourse between the two regimes and the ways in which the Federal Republic's social market economy overturned the legacies of Nazi anti-modernism. The late 1950s, then, represent a kind of “Stunde Null” in the history of German consumption. Finally, Briesen dismisses the idea that West German society underwent a process of Americanization or westernization in the 1950s, preferring a model that accounts for both the international flow of technologies and business methods and the determinative influence of internal, uniquely German forces.

One wonders why Briesen makes no mention of left-wing consumer protest and anti-department store agitation in the postwar period.Footnote ¹⁸ Kommune 1 propaganda around a 1967 department store fire and the 1968 firebombing of two Frankfurt stores by Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and others would suggest that, contrary to Briesen's conclusions, department stores did remain sources of controversy in the Federal Republic and continued to serve as powerful symbols of capitalism and corruption. This observation does not undermine Briesen's thesis or diminish the many merits of his valuable book, but it does suggest that the narrowness of his scope often prevents him from seeing the larger context and that his discourse history, with its exclusive focus on intellectuals and professionals, obscures other, often contradictory and always murky currents that run through the history of German consumer culture.

The books by Christiane Lamberty and Gideon Reuveni cover the years surrounding the onset of mass consumption in Germany. Lamberty's Reklame in Deutschland (Advertising in Germany) is an exhaustive account of the early history of advertising, an exceedingly rich and persuasive book that treats the establishment and development of advertising as a profession and investigates a whole range of contemporary responses to advertisements. She sets these developments in economic, social, and cultural historical context and navigates back and forth between professional discourses and changes that affected people's daily lives and experiences.

Lamberty's and Briesen's books overlap substantially, and Lamberty also foregrounds the department store in her narrative. Like Briesen, she conceives of the department store as a symbol of modernity, and she, too, treats it as a screen onto which Germans of various persuasions projected their anxieties and concerns about (and at times euphoria over) the rapid changes that were afoot. The same applied to advertising which, she shows, was the subject of endless debate among businessmen, artists, psychologists, and consumers in Imperial Germany. Both the profession of advertising and the department store were decried by their opponents as “non-productive” economic sectors, both vilified at times as “Jewish” innovations and stigmatized at other times as American imports. What makes Lamberty's book more satisfying than Briesen's is that she draws on a wider array of sources, including memoirs, trade journals, and contemporary fiction and drama and provides more of a glimpse into both representations and actual conditions. She writes about not only discourses, but also material changes, such as the introduction of new technologies in the graphic arts, electric lighting, and glass production, and the arrival of film, all of which dramatically transformed advertisements and product displays. She sketches the emergence of new professional niches and identities, such as shop-window decorators, advertising psychologists, and designers teetering on the fine line between art and commerce. Incorporating a tremendous amount of material, she paints a multilayered and highly differentiated picture, certainly including professional perspectives, but encompassing broader mentalities as well. Indeed, the reader is led to understand why department store visits aroused so much excitement among middle-class women and is given tantalizing descriptions and images of shop windows, kiosks, newspaper ads, bustling street scenes, and teaming crowds.

These images help to explain why new forms of mass consumption altered lives so dramatically and generated so much controversy. Industrialization meant that goods were being produced far from where they were consumed, and the process of production became mysterious and unknowable. Buying started to become more of an abstract, anonymous process, and the relationship between people and products was less frequently mediated by a familiar storekeeper or craftsman. (As Werner Sombart pointed out at the time, advertising stepped into and began to occupy this new space between goods and consumers.) Furthermore, enormous structures rose up and were followed by new commercial districts that changed the urban topography in Germany's major cities. And women were increasingly visible, out and about in public spaces, now the greater part of the throngs that crowded around new shop-window displays or pushed their way through the portals to see the latest store exhibition or new product line.

What were these new crowds? Some observers, devotees of Le Bon's mass psychology, decried them as a mass, a suggestible mob of debased sensibility, able to be herded around by nefarious department store owners and unable to resist the siren call of advertisements. Others conceived of them as a discriminating consuming public chiefly composed of rational housewives, those educated, savvy shoppers who knew where to find a bargain and how to run the household economy efficiently. The former characterization gave fuel to the fire of anti-department store activists who tried to shock their readers with depictions of department store depravity. They denounced store owners for manipulating and exploiting female customers and taking advantage of shoppers and employees financially and even sexually. Images of the consuming masses also played into anxieties about social leveling, about the untoward mixing of social classes in the stores and the consequences of placing luxury goods within the reach of middle- and working-class consumers.Footnote ¹⁹ Department store backers, on the other hand, emphasized the countervailing image of judicious housewives making sensible choices. But the rational citizen-consumer was too far ahead of her time, and the democratization of consumption, to the limited extent that it did occur in Imperial Germany, continued to incite controversy and conflict.Footnote ²⁰

Lamberty concludes her book with an extended treatment of three critiques of advertising: that it was “Jewish,” that it was “American,” and that it destroyed Germany's precious natural beauty. The first played itself out in a series of debates surrounding the publications of economist Werner Sombart and articles published by the viciously anti-Semitic Hammer-Schriften, both of which drew on misleading stereotypes of Jews as usurers, middlemen, and ruthless profit seekers. Lamberty claims that these debates had petered out by the early twentieth century, but of course they returned in even sharper form in the 1920s, a period that lies outside the scope of her analysis. It would have been interesting if she had discussed actual Jewish ownership of department stores and participation in the advertising industry from economic- and Jewish-historical perspectives, but her work goes in a different direction.

Fear of America and its economic might was stoked by the widely held notion that the United States lacked culture (Kultur). Even as German industrial leaders looked to the U.S. for technical guidance, Germans feared being swallowed up by American-style mass culture which was habitually condemned as amoral and uncivilized. Finally, Lamberty treats the nascent environmental movement's successful agitation for limits to advertisements that blighted natural settings. Landscape preservation, she maintains, was another kind of anti-modernist discourse that sought to stymie the advertising and consumer culture juggernaut.

Reklame in Deutschland is a tour de force. Only its enormity, its mountains of material and prodigious footnotes, betray the book's origins as a doctoral dissertation. At times, though, Lamberty's voice gets lost amid her sources, which she quotes a bit too liberally, and the book's countless chapters, parts, subsections, etc., can detract from the main analytical thread. Nevertheless, this is an indispensable book for anyone interested in the history of advertising and Germans’ early encounters with mass culture and mass consumption. Far more than a history of the advertising industry, it offers a panoramic perspective on Germans' confrontation with the powers and forces of modernity as they reshaped their relationships to the goods and services around them.

Gideon Reuveni's Reading Germany is a more specialized study that focuses on reading as a constituent part of early German consumer culture. Covering the period from the late nineteenth century through the Nazi assumption of power, Reuveni is more theoretically oriented than most of these authors and is more engaged with the broader historiography of consumption. Reading, as a topic in consumer culture, is at once slippery and highly suggestive. As Reuveni notes, reading itself, through the vehicles of newspapers, catalogs, and mass-produced books, was bound up with early consumer culture, and simultaneously, as a medium, it helped to create new needs and desires and thus drove the consumer market engine further. This observation, the Möbius strip of consumer desire and market supply, plunges the author into debates from the historiography of the eighteenth-century Atlantic World and the so-called consumer revolution, a period that saw a profusion of consumer goods and the trickling down of certain kinds of consumption from the elites down to the emerging middle classes.Footnote ²¹ Siding with some of the newer studies, Reuveni avers that consumption and consumer desire can help to drive production, and hence consumers are not simply passive recipients, held in thrall by market forces, but are rather active shapers of their own cultural horizons. He draws on anthropological insights into our relationship with things and takes the position that consuming and interacting with the objects around us can be a creative act that helps to define and express identities and cultures.

Reading, then, can be seen as a way of making sense of the world through words and as a way of establishing an identity through preferences and choices.Footnote ²² But reading was also a politically and culturally loaded act in early twentieth-century Germany (and beyond), as alarmists feared the proliferation of low-brow literature and the cheapening of Germany's literary-cultural inheritance through commodification. Ironically, the Bildungsbürger who condemned mass consumerism as a threat to German high culture failed to grasp that reading was actually on the rise in Weimar Germany, and that the very system they deplored was aiding the broader dissemination of the works they valued. For Reuveni these attacks helped the bourgeoisie establish itself in this period by enabling the reification of the class into a set of values and ideals.

Significantly, Reuveni shows that advertising culture and book culture grew and prospered side by side; some of the earliest advertisements served the publishing industry, and newspapers provided the major vehicle for early ads. (Unlike advertising and department stores, however, the publishing industry, another sector with a high concentration of Jews, was not condemned as a “Jewish” phenomenon, which Reuveni reflects on in his conclusion.) Even new media such as radio and film, considered grave threats to German reading culture, actually stimulated more reading, as eager audiences sought out and subscribed to fan magazines and collected scripts and other related materials for their reading pleasure. Having seen a good movie, Germans wanted to read the book.

World War I was a watershed in the history of reading. The war increased Germans' reliance on the written word, in cities, towns, and especially in rural areas, where newspapers often provided the only link to vital information. Postwar political upheavals certainly intensified this dependence, and Reuveni's evidence shows convincingly that Germans consumed increasing amounts of reading material in the 1920s. This change accompanied a broader shift in how Germans spent their money and time. Citing American historian Gary Cross, Reuveni points to the onset of a “work and spend” approach among Germans in the Weimar period. Shorter working hours (and indeed high unemployment) and economic and political fluctuations led more and more people to spend their leftover income on leisure activities, including reading, rather than save it for an uncertain future. During these years social observers launched a series of studies on what Germans were reading and on what percentage of their household income different social groups were spending on reading material.

Yet Reuveni is careful to stress that the Weimar Republic did not see the full realization of a consumer culture in Germany. Traditional institutions such as church and family still largely dictated people's actions (and how they spent their money) and thus provided alternative systems of identity and meaning that curbed the power and appeal of the consumer market. One could add to Reuveni's assertion the empirical reality that huge numbers of Germans were struggling to meet daily needs during most of these tumultuous years, so the necessary economic preconditions for a consumer society had, at best, a fleeting existence between currency stabilization and economic collapse. Notably, Reuveni writes that the period's powerful new vehicles of consumer culture widened the “gap between daily existence after the war and the paradise of consumer culture as expressed in the world of print… . This process increased feelings of frustration and discrimination among broad swaths of the populace, and intensified fears of the potential results.”Footnote ²³ Far from being an apolitical sphere, consumer culture emerges as an area where powerful longings were aroused and where the painful disjuncture between consumer fantasies and material realities helped to prepare the ground for radical solutions.

A better translation (from the Hebrew) and perhaps a clearer, more chronologically bound organization would have benefited this book, since it often requires multiple readings to grasp Reuveni's dense argumentation and nuanced distinctions. Nevertheless, this is an extremely valuable book. Reading Germany fills several gaping holes in the historiography, and it remains one of the few historical studies of consumption—both cultural and material—in the Weimar period. The field will be well served if other historians follow in his path and isolate and study other consumer mechanisms and products. Reuveni's methodological choices and historiographic framework are exemplary, as is the book's combination of theoretical insight with empirical investigation. Of all the authors under discussion here, Reuveni is among the most conscientious about contextualizing his work in terms of the broader development of consumer society and consumer culture in Germany, but also in modern European and American history and in staking out a position in the debates and methodological issues that run through the entire field.

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The study of consumption under the Nazis is by now a richly developed and rapidly growing subfield that provokes reconsideration of numerous crucial issues, including daily life and experience in the Third Reich, popular support for the regime, the success and strengths of the German economy, the modernity of the “Nazi Revolution” and the Nazi management of occupied lands. Conventional images of Nazi consumer culture—such as it existed—are rife with contradiction. The Volkswagen and the Autobahn are among the most familiar icons of National Socialism, and Hitler's investment in both projects is well known. Yet, it is also well established that the regime prioritized rearmament and heavy industrial production at the expense of consumer goods, and that these priorities helped to jump-start the moribund German economy. On another level, images of wartime scarcity, especially of women sifting through heaps of rummage in bombed out cities, are seared into postwar Germans' collective memory, lending affective force to notions of German victimhood. Closer scrutiny, enabled by this new body of scholarship, reveals Nazi Germany's consumer culture to have been an inconsistent patchwork, a series of semi-realized measures that got caught up in intra-ministerial rivalries, was strained by autarchic policies, and lagged ever further behind the regime's fantastical propaganda.

Nazi consumption policy faced daunting practical and ideological obstacles. In practical terms, the regime, always desperately concerned with public opinion, felt the need to keep its citizens happy and thus dangled promises of material abundance, in part, to show that the economic crises of the Weimar era had been overcome. But real material abundance and the Aryan consumerist fantasyland that Nazi planners promised were only part of the long-term vision, to be made possible and sustained through military conquest and the economic exploitation of vanquished lands. In the meantime, before these long-term visions could be realized, the regime felt pressure to placate the population's desire for a better life.

Ideologically, the Nazis aspired to create a new kind of consumer culture in explicit opposition to existing models: on one side, the specter of American-style consumer capitalism, with its unabashed materialism and valorization of greed, and on the other, the threat of socialist redistribution, with its embrace of class conflict and its disregard for hierarchy and merit.Footnote ²⁴ The result, according to Shelley Baranowski, author of a recent book on the Nazis' Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy), or KdF, leisure and tourism programs, could be characterized as a “paradoxical blend of belt tightening measures and foretastes of the good life for the ‘master race.’”Footnote ²⁵ The paradox is well captured in the words of historian Hartmut Berghoff, who described Nazi consumption policy as a combination of “Enticement and Deprivation.”Footnote ²⁶

Tourism turned out to be a consumer activity that fit perfectly into the space between Fordist and socialist visions of consumption. Tourism is the subject of some of the most suggestive recent research on the history of consumer culture in general and in Nazi Germany specifically. An extraordinarily fruitful analytical category, tourism encompasses a whole range of consumer practices, including the material consumption of guide books, foods, accommodations, travel services, and organized tours, and also the cultural consumption of experience, as for example, in collecting souvenirs, visiting landmarks, taking in historical sites, and viewing natural landscapes.Footnote ²⁷ Historians have abundantly shown how this pursuit, which was previously restricted to elites, was transformed in the nineteenth century into a middle-class phenomenon, and by the mid twentieth century was increasingly made available to the working classes as well. Historical study of tourism has also provoked debate about agency, as nearly every branch of consumer culture studies has. That is, while some historians characterize tourism as a kind of passive imbibing of prescribed ways of seeing, others treat it as a set of creative opportunities that enabled individuals to escape socially determined roles and identities. Thus, some accounts stress the function of tourism in helping nineteenth- and early twentieth-century states spread national feelings and solidify loyalties among disunited and diverse populations, while others have focused on the activities and accounts of tourists themselves independent of larger social and political structures.

In the case of Nazi Germany, the active role of the state in shaping tourism cannot be overlooked, although the effectiveness of its schemes can certainly be questioned. The regime saw in tourism a way of winning and retaining popular support without succumbing to the allegedly coarsening effects of American materialism, which Nazi ideologues had been condemning for years. The Strength through Joy program gave working-class Germans the hope—of course, a false hope in the great majority of cases—that they could participate in leisure activities that previously had been far beyond their means. Perhaps most importantly, KdF tourism provided a kind of non-commercial consumption that did not require a diversion of resources away from rearmament and hence did not interfere with the regime's economic priorities. At the same time, state-sponsored tourism lent itself to the spreading of racial and nationalistic propaganda, through, for example, visits to sacred Nazi sites or Mediterranean cruises, where Germans could bask in feelings of superiority by measuring their standard of living against that of the local populations.

Tourism under the Nazis, as a field of study, benefits from an unusually well-developed historical literature.Footnote ²⁸ Most notably, the last several years have seen the publication of Baranowski's Strength through Joy and Kristin Semmens's Seeing Hitler's Germany, two intersecting and complementary books. Wolfgang König also provides a detailed treatment of the topic in a section of his major book on Nazi consumer goods. Baranowski takes as her subject the entire KdF program, a series of organized attempts to win the loyalty of German workers away from trade unions and social democracy, which included beautifying the workplace, and fitness, hygiene, and cultural events aimed at the industrial workforce, but she devotes most of her attention to KdF's mass tourism initiatives. Semmens, on the other hand, focuses chiefly on the preexisting tourist industry, which continued to account for the great majority of German tourism through the years of the Third Reich. König's primary concern is the extent to which members of the working class actually benefited from KdF tourism, a question he asks throughout his treatise on “people's products” (Volksprodukte) in the Nazi period.

In a sense, Semmens and Baranowksi tell opposite stories. Semmens emphasizes continuities with pre-Nazi tourism and the regime's attempts to convey a sense of normality amid the enormous changes of the 1930s and 1940s. Much of her book is devoted to those tourist sites that the Nazis did not change, or modified only slightly, and to the adaptation of the existing tourist industry to its new working conditions. Still, Semmens is careful not to imply that Nazi-era tourism was somehow apolitical or not implicated in the regime's atrocities. Rather, she emphasizes Goebbels's principle of preserving seemingly apolitical spaces in people's lives as a way of smoothing citizens' adaptation to National Socialism—a kind of “managed normality” that was balanced with heavy-handed Nazi spectacles and the regime's more ideologically explicit programs. As was the case with radio programming and cinema, where light diversions always overshadowed overt political propaganda, even when tourism appeared neutral and apolitical, it served the needs of the regime by trying to win the hearts, minds, and stomachs of its subjects.

KdF-sponsored tourism, on the other hand, was saturated with Nazi ideology. As Baranowski argues, Nazi mass tourism represented the attempt to bring workers firmly into the National Socialist fold, to goad them into renouncing class conflict in favor of racial solidarity within the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft, in short, to bribe them into becoming good Nazi subjects. These observations imply that, as we have already seen, the Nazi regime could not, or chose not to, rely solely on terror and intimidation to keep the population in line. All too aware of the effects of deprivation on civilian morale during World War I, and truly convinced that the master race deserved its share of material enjoyment, the Nazi leadership plotted ways to keep its citizens well provisioned and happy, often through smoke and mirrors, even as it geared up for war.

Baranowski's sources enable her to draw conclusions about popular responses to KdF tours, and this distinguishes her work from the majority of consumer culture studies that continue to operate almost exclusively at the level of state policy and discourse. Even if KdF ultimately served more of a middle-class constituency and failed to raise working-class standards of living significantly, and although it constantly struggled for resources within the Ministry of Labor bureaucracy, Baranowski argues that its cruises and resorts did help to solidify support for the regime. This it accomplished chiefly by helping to spread the regime's propaganda about racial difference, and German unity and superiority, which justified the Nazis' imperial designs and their murderous persecution of Jews and other racial others. To be sure, not every cruise passenger or resort vacationer came away satisfied, complaints and nonconformity persisted, and more broadly, the goal of creating a specific Nazi consumer culture was certainly never realized. Baranowski shows, however, that the regime did succeed in giving citizens memorable experiences and in instrumentalizing the apparatus of modern tourist culture, creating, in a sense, its own sort of Nazi dream factory. KdF also offered tangible proof that the Nazis had improved life and overcome economic crisis and furthered visions of a strong, wealthy, and united national community.

Baranowski's book, admirable for its thorough yet concise account of KdF tourism, is a most welcome contribution to German historiography and the field of consumption history. Her multilayered account covers the ministerial politics surrounding KdF's existence, popular responses to KdF programs and, of course, the ideological framework for the elaboration of a Nazi approach to tourism. Above all, Baranowski powerfully demonstrates that a seemingly innocuous activity such as leisure tourism was deeply implicated in Nazism's ideological work, and ultimately that the regime's apparently beneficent treatment of its valued constituencies has to be seen in connection with its commission of wholesale slaughter and genocide.

While Semmens occasionally gestures in the same direction, her book is less concerned with finding tourism's connections to mass murder and more focused on the fate of the tourism industry under the Nazis. Although not as compelling or persuasive a work as Baranowski's—her concept of normality is not completely convincing—Semmens's account does put the latter's conclusions into perspective, by showing that KdF represented only some ten percent of Nazi-era tourism and that it created tense turf battles with existing tourist offices struggling to stay afloat. Significantly, long-standing and unchanged tourist sites generated far more interest than the explicitly Nazi tourist culture, whether sponsored by KdF, local Nazi organizations, or the commercial tourist industry. Most Germans, it seems, preferred paying homage to Goethe's home or admiring the beauty of the Black Forrest over visiting shrines to Nazi leaders or making pilgrimages to “Nazified” historical sites.

Semmens presents a great deal of intriguing material, and her findings are often startling. She shows, for example, that Nazi-sanctioned tourism continued after the outbreak of war when, with the economy fully in the service of the military, cultural consumption was all the regime had to offer. In some cases, state-approved tourism even continued after the invasion of the Soviet Union and the beginning of total war in 1942. Semmens also reveals the extent of the tourism industry's collaboration with the regime and its war machine, from its eager cooperation in its own Gleichschaltung at the beginning of the Nazi period, through its assisting of soldiers and later German evacuees in finding accommodations and orienting themselves to their new surroundings. She shows how quickly newly conquered regions were colonized by the tourist industry and configured as vacation destinations. Like Baranowski, she casts a suggestive glance forward to the reemergence of tourism after the war in the two German states and the creation of new tourist cultures under new ideological and economic conditions. She even brushes up against a fascinating, larger point about the connection between today's touristic consumption of Nazi-era sites of atrocity, collective memory, and the process of working through the past, but she backs away before drawing any conclusions.

Wolfgang König's treatment of mass tourism covers some of the same material that appears in the works of Baranowski and Semmens with, as we have seen, greater emphasis on evaluating the Nazis' appeals to the working class and with further research into the social composition of the programs' beneficiaries. As with many of the other consumer goods he analyzes, König shows that claims about uplifting the working class were largely unfulfilled; rather the group that benefited most from KdF tours, as well as other consumer programs, was the Mittelstand, white collar employees, civil servants, and small businesspeople.

Much of this book is devoted to disproving Nazi propaganda and establishing the failure of Nazi programs to live up to their promises, an admirable, if not always bracing endeavor. For example, König points to a contradiction between KdF's stated goals and the plans that ultimately came to fruition in the case of the gigantic seaside resort Prora on the Baltic Sea island of Rügen, whose construction was completed in autumn 1939. Nazi panegyrics to nature, to the beauty of the German Heimat, were belied by the imposing new towers that obstructed the Baltic coastline, which critics at the time derided as sterile, hyper-modern, and industrial. So much for Blood and Soil and the Nazi tourist gaze. Ultimately, while KdF did succeed in reaching great numbers of Germans—between 1934 and 1938 its vacations served an average of one million people per year and some 100,000 sailed on its cruises in each of those years—König concludes that the program was a failure for not including significant working-class or lower-income participation and thus for not achieving its goal of binding these groups more closely to the regime.

Tourism, of course, was only one solution to the Nazi regime's dilemma of trying to satisfy its citizens and keep their morale high, even as its economic priorities swung decisively away from the production of consumer goods. König's work, as well as the books by Götz Aly and Irene Guenther, provide other perspectives on particular products and solutions. König sets out to understand Nazi visions of consumer culture, and the elaboration and ultimate failure of these visions, through detailed investigation of several consumer items and “people's products”: radios, televisions, refrigerators, apartments, automobiles, and vacations; radio, as perhaps the single most important consumer good on this list, receives the most attention.

Volksprodukt or People's Product had a very specific meaning under the Nazis. Although the term had been used before the Nazi period as an advertising tag line and while, to some extent, it continued to be used this way after 1933, Nazi authorities clamped down on the unauthorized usage of the term. A Volksprodukt, in the official sense, was the kind of good that had previously been unavailable to all but the wealthy. It had to be a useful thing and couldn't simply be a piece of mass-produced kitsch or junk, but rather needed to further Nazi goals in some way. Perhaps the paradigmatic people's product was the Volkswagen, or people's car, which was intended to promote family visits to the countryside and domestic tourism. Radios (Volksempfänger, or people's receivers) represented another example for their ability to keep people informed, or rather, within reach of the propaganda machine. Frivolous or non-essential items such as motorcycles were disqualified from the Volksprodukt designation. Nor were the barrack-like apartments that the regime constructed to meet the acute housing crisis granted the label “Volkswohnung”; that term was held in reserve for the bucolic garden suites whose construction was continually being postponed. People's products, then, bespoke the high quality of life that Nazi officials believed the German people deserved by virtue of their racial supremacy. They were intended to symbolize the regime's advanced state and its modernity, and as a secondary gain, their production was intended to create jobs.

The story of the people's radio and the people's automobile runs parallel in many ways to the case of KdF tourism. Radios, for example, remained rare among the working classes, and workers, as König documents, represented only a minority of radio owners. The Nazi goal of putting a radio in every house fell short, and even cheap radios, made available for purchase on the installment plan, were scarcely affordable to anyone below the middle class. Ferdinand Porsche's Volkswagen represented an even greater failure and an even more jarring discordance between propaganda and reality. More vexing still was the fact that Germany lagged behind other industrialized nations in per capita automobile ownership. Visions of national mobility, buffeted by myths about Hitler's direct involvement in the car's design and nurtured by a steady stream of advertisements and propaganda, might have caught the popular imagination, but the regime's promises far outpaced realistic production goals. Automobile companies balked at plans for Volkswagen construction, since Hitler's stated price of one thousand Marks would not even cover production costs. Hence, the program was turned over to the KdF administration. The giant KdF Volkswagen works, built in 1938 in the town known today as Wolfsburg, barely managed to produce any cars for civilian use during the Nazi years.Footnote ²⁹ Notably, the Volkswagen savings scheme, by which would-be consumers were allowed to contribute five Marks per week (without receiving interest) with the promise of receiving a car in four years, a program that attracted tens of thousands of customers, did not lead to a single purchase.

On the whole, the Nazi economy resembled a free market, but the state intervened at times to set prices and to assign the production of certain goods to particular enterprises. (Jews, of course, were gradually pushed out of the German economy, and they were not permitted to purchase People's Products.) So how could the regime have hoped to fulfill its promises of affordable consumer goods? In the long term, everything depended on the war and on the vigorous economic exploitation of Germany's new eastern imperium. But for the short term, while the regime made vague promises about a utopian future, it targeted specific, highly symbolic consumer goods such as automobiles and radios. Yet as we have seen, producing even those items in sufficient numbers and at affordable prices eluded the economy, strained as it was by its emphasis on war production and deprived of resources by Hitler's policy of autarky. The solution was sought in rationalization, in achieving ever greater productive efficiency, and in recasting product lines into a limited number of basic model types that could be cheaply and easily modified to satisfy consumers. Rationalization, König argues, functioned as a kind of magic bullet, a panacea upon which economic planners pinned utopian hopes, but which brought about little actual improvement.

König has compiled an extraordinary amount of material, and his book is a cornerstone of the field, an indispensable account of Nazi consumer culture focused on several key products and services. Casual readers will perhaps be overwhelmed by the book's enormous detail, and better editing might have reduced some of the book's repetition. A more significant problem is the relative absence of Jews and anti-Semitism from this work, concerns that are not necessarily central to this topic, but are certainly relevant to any social, political, and cultural history of the Nazi regime. Nevertheless, this extremely valuable book has a great deal to offer. Ultimately, König situates the shattered project of Nazi consumer culture in its broader contexts. He rejects—although perhaps oversimplifies—Frankfurt School-inspired connections between instrumental rationality, modernity, and the Holocaust, arguing that the Nazi economy was hardly rational and only partially modern. And finally, he weighs in on old debates about the nature of Nazi rule, and between intentionalism and functionalism, by revealing the haphazard fits and starts that marked Nazi economic policy and by drawing the conclusion that popular opinion mattered in Nazi Germany. While the regime tried to control and shape consumer desire, it could not afford to ignore it.

Irene Guenther's Nazi Chic?, a history of women's fashion in National Socialist Germany, opens up other perspectives on Nazi-era consumer culture and consumer desire. It is also a story of failure—the failure of the Nazi regime to develop a consistent notion of female style and to construct a particular kind of (female) consumer. That story is, in a sense, only one chapter in a much longer German narrative that stretches back to the nineteenth century and flared up during World War I: namely, the search for a German style in contradistinction to the French influence over art, design, and high fashion. Part of this story, and a part to which Guenther justifiably devotes significant attention, was the conspicuousness and pronounced importance of Jews in the German clothing and fashion industries.

Much of Guenther's study revolves around the tension between two images of womanhood that competed for favor in Nazi life—and whose opposition reflected broader fissures within Nazism, concerning its relationship to the modern and its visions of women's roles. One valorized regional peasant customs and the blood and soil component of Nazi ideology and evoked images of sturdy farmers' wives dressed in Tracht (traditional peasant garb), while the other celebrated the young, fit, uniformed women who filled the ranks of Nazi women's organizations. What united these diverse images was their emphatic rejection of Jewish designers, French styles, and the “degenerate” urban culture of Weimar, with its androgynous new woman. (Of course, that rejection only went so far, and no one prohibited glamorous Emmy Göring from patronizing her favorite Jewish clothiers.) The marketing of updated versions of the Dirndl did make some headway among German women, but these puffy and cumbersome costumes had little in common with actual peasant outfits, and calls for rural women to sew their own outfits and even to grow their own materials were unrealistic and went largely unheeded. And sophisticated urban women, as Guenther shows, may have donned Dirndls to play dress up, but they seldom included them in their regular fashion repertoire.

Female party uniforms were serious business in Nazi Germany, so serious that Hitler himself intervened in their design. Uniforms appealed to women who wanted to show their membership in a party organization and bask in their inclusion in the Volksgemeinschaft. Yet, as the war dragged on, and as more and more women had to be recruited into logistical and support staff positions, civilian uniforms became an unwelcome reminder of the tolls of war and indeed of the contradictions in Nazi policy toward women's work.

Even the Reich's German Fashion Institute (Deutsches Modeamt, later Deutsches Mode-Institut) never succeeded in defining or promoting a consistent notion of German style. Hitler's indecipherable pronouncements about fashion and femininity hardly provided any serious guideposts, and honorary president Magda Goebbels represented a dubious role model, given her well-known fondness for particular Jews (notably a stepfather and an ex-lover) and her husband's equally well-known promiscuity. Even more detrimentally, materials such as silk and leather became increasingly scarce, which forced designers to await technical innovations in synthetic fabrics and make do with such ersatz materials as fish skins and threads made from soybeans or potato peels. Shoes with straw uppers may have seemed downright chic during the summer, but autumn rains rendered them useless. Condemnations of Parisian fashion continued, even as German designers tried to copy French designs on the cheap. The (relatively late) exclusion of Jews from the German textile industry presented an additional setback as the German fashion world was left with insufficient numbers of qualified and skilled personnel.

Guenther frames her treatment of fashion in terms of art, architecture, and film, other cultural areas that were central to the Nazis' project for transforming life. Like these other spheres, the realm of fashion, she argues, provides people with the materials and spaces for their fantasies, and, one might add, gives them possibilities for imagining and expressing alternative selves and identities. The Nazi regime sought to control these kinds of spaces, and it seems, it had a great deal of success in film and architecture, where it developed a coherent style, and as we have seen, its efforts had mixed results in the realm of tourism. Nazi fashion, in short, belongs on the scrap heap with the Volkswagen and the People's Radio, as enterprises that never lived up to their promises. Indeed, Guenther concludes that the state never succeeded in fully controlling German fashion or channeling and shaping women's desires. Ultimately, what was more powerful than any state measures was the war, which turned the Dirndl wearers and the uniformed girls alike into “rubble women.” The war also put Jews back into clothing manufacture, albeit as concentration camp laborers.

The title, Nazi Chic?, betrays a certain glibness that detracts from the seriousness of Guenther's subject. Also, toward the end of the book she starts to exhibit a kind of essentialism, implying the existence of a female desire to look pretty that transcends time and place and that the Nazi regime struggled to satisfy. Here she misses an opportunity to historicize these impulses and assess the role of the advertising and retail industries in constructing female consumer desire. Finally, as with so much of this literature, the reader learns much less about actual female consumers and their behavior than about state and professional policies and discourses. Still, on the whole, this is an extremely engaging book, written in a lively style, full of fascinating insights, extraordinarily well documented, and richly contextualized, and it's about a lot more than just women's fashion in the Third Reich.

Hitler's Volksstaat by Götz Aly, the prolific and provocative German historian and public intellectual, might appear to be a bit of an outlier among these books on German consumption and consumer culture. Strictly speaking, it's not a history of consumerism at all, rather an account of Nazi racial war and plundering; however, Aly does contribute a great deal to the debates that run through this body of literature, and the book does make a significant argument about consumption and its connections to Nazism, war, and genocide.

Aly portrays the Nazi regime as a fairly weak dictatorship, a Gefälligkeitsdiktator (a dictatorship of accommodation), that constantly sought and won the support of its citizens by doling out material rewards. Like several of the other authors reviewed here, he stresses the memory of World War I and the wartime decline of civilian morale amid scarcity and rationing, and he maintains that the Nazis were determined to keep their citizens well provisioned during the coming war and to avoid repeating the costly mistakes that helped to bring down the Kaiserreich. Asking people to sacrifice for the greater good, as Churchill had in Britain, was out of the question. Significantly, Aly emphasizes the socialism in National Socialism. Nazism, he writes, aimed its appeals to a great extent at the lower classes, whom the regime bribed with its offers of material rewards and promises to redistribute wealth. He claims that the regime's early popularity stemmed in part from its social leveling, from its promise of greater social equality within Germany, even as it claimed to elevate Germans' standard of living beyond that of non-Aryans. But how could the state actually accomplish this, given the limitations placed on the economy by autarky and the prioritization of war production? We have seen how KdF tourism fit into the space between Nazi propaganda and economic realities, and how other People's Products were similarly devised, but ultimately, thanks to the works of Baranowski and especially König, it is clear that these measures failed to redress social inequality or make new consumer goods available in any meaningful way. For Aly, the missing piece is plunder. His answer is: they took it from the Jews.

While Semmens draws intriguing parallels between Wehrmacht soldiers and tourists, Aly unearths stunning material that shows German soldiers to have been avid shoppers. At a time when Germans had excess cash, yet lacked consumer goods to spend it on, their soldiers went shopping through vanquished lands. These soldier shoppers were given carte blanche, first to buy, and later to loot and plunder their way through Europe. Aly writes of their “uninhibited buying frenzies” (Kaufwut), of the returning trains filled with such items as furs, clocks, shoes, etc., and of the urge to “storm the department stores” and “empty the shelves of Europe” for one's loved ones at home.Footnote ³⁰ German soldiers, or as Aly calls them “Hitler's Willing Raiders,” an unsubtle allusion to Daniel Goldhagen, treated the Ukraine as a giant rummage sale, where they exchanged their worn-out things—still superior to what the Ukranians had—for precious resources and agricultural products.

Aly argues, further, that the unfolding of the Final Solution was hastened by the regime's economic and social agendas, that, for example, the deportation of German Jews was accelerated by the need to expropriate their possessions and pass them on to Aryans. After auctions of Jewish property, according to his sources, simple housewives could be seen wearing fur coats and fancy jewels. Victims of aerial bombardment, he continues, donned the clothes and squatted in the domiciles of deported Jews. Policy toward occupied lands in the east, of course, shifted from shopping to outright theft and plunder, as the Nazi state transformed itself into a “giant robbing machine” (Raubmaschinerie). Hence, Aly paints a portrait of well-fed, well-supplied German civilians all the way through the war, an image strikingly at odds not only with German memory but with general historiographic consensus.

Aly's analysis casts the Nazi regime in a new light, but it has troubling implications and is based on questionable evidence. Above all, he pushes his interpretation too far when he characterizes Nazi racial ideology as essentially a stepchild of the regime's economic imperatives. Seen in such a way, the party's only raison d'etre appears to have been preserving its (tenuous) grip on power, and the German people come across as indifferent to ideology, as simply having been won over by the regime's material promises and bought off by its rewards. His characterization of the regime as weak and pandering strains credulity, and his emphasis on the Nazis' alleged push for social equality contradicts more amply documented and persuasive studies, such as those conducted by König and Berghoff. Especially troublesome is what this book implies about German guilt. Treating Wehrmacht soldiers as eager shoppers trivializes their destruction of eastern European landscapes, their massacring of enemy combatants, and their participation in the Final Solution. Civilians are also exonerated. In the end, war and genocide emerge as distasteful but necessary by-products of the German path to social equality, material abundance, and modernity.

* * *

It is fitting that the greater part of the new wave of consumer culture studies concerns postwar Germany, since it was during the postwar period, particularly the later 1950s and 1960s, that German consumer society took off. Historian Michael Wildt and cultural studies scholar Erica Carter, among others, helped to create West German consumption studies in the early 1990s. Wildt contributed path-breaking research into the economic and social dimensions of West German life and unpacked the meaning of material abundance in postwar culture and memory.Footnote ³¹ Carter, as we have seen, focused on West German housewives and their experience of and participation in the sea change from a subsistence economy to a world of affluence where “lifestyles” were marketed and consumed.Footnote ³² Other scholars, such as S. Jonathan Wiesen, have investigated the cultural side of West Germany's economic miracle, and have charted the emergence of a new kind of nationalism, or economic patriotism, that was anticipated by advertising and product display in the 1950s and helped to turn the page on the Nazi period.Footnote ³³ Ina Merkel deserves much of the credit for pioneering consumption studies in East German history and for recognizing that the GDR did develop a form of consumer culture.Footnote ³⁴ Since the publication of her book a decade ago, the field has exploded, and consumption in the GDR has been the subject of dozens of books, articles, and conference panels. Consumer culture studies of the two Germanies have naturally developed in different directions, as the two states, economies, and cultures presented rather different configurations.

How fortunate we are, then, to have David Crew's 2003 volume on consumption during the Cold War, an anthology that uniquely brings together samples of new work concerning both sides of the German divide by the generation of scholars who are rapidly defining the two fields.Footnote ³⁵ In his incisive introduction, Crew shows the enormous political stakes attached to consumption in the postwar period. He notes how West German success enabled the Federal Republic to recreate itself and emerge from the shadows of war and Nazism and how, conversely, East Germany's ultimate failure to satisfy its citizens' consumer demands led to its downfall. (Several of the volume's essays point to Kruschev's role in turning the GDR into a showcase of Communist bloc prosperity and turning household consumption into a sphere of Cold War competition.) While the two states measured their progress against each other in the early years of their sovereignty, as West Germany pulled further and further ahead economically, it grew increasingly close to its western European neighbors and began to look not across the border to the east, but across the ocean to the U.S. Prosperity and consumer abundance, and the emergence of the West German consumer citizen, however, brought new problems and tensions, and these are addressed in the chapters by Robert Stephens and Jeff Schutts.

Schutts' chapter on Coca-Cola shows how a commodity can become a vessel for meanings and identifications, independent of the conditions of its production or origin.Footnote ³⁶ He builds on Carter's work to describe West Germans' commodity fetishization—in the place of embracing problematic ideologies—and illustrates the peculiar process by which Germans turned Coke, the ultimate symbol of American consumerism, capitalism, and market imperialism, into a pillar of particularly German postwar identities. Significantly, West German consumers imbibed American sodas, but did not drink the American Kool-Aid, as it were, meaning that even as Coke consumption rose, attitudes about America and the American way of life remained, on the whole, negative. Schutts's chapter nicely balances attention to the material circumstances surrounding production and consumption with emphasis on a commodity's symbolic meanings. Notably, he helps to sketch the emergence of the modern citizen consumer for whom consumer choice became an expression of fundamental rights. The citizen consumers of the 1960s and beyond did not have to worry about the scarcities that plagued their parents and grandparents during the wars and economic crises of the century's first half. They had other kinds of problems, namely, how to differentiate oneself from the consuming crowd. Citing Wildt, who in turn betrays the influence of Georg Simmel, Schutts attends to the predicament of the modern consumer who seeks to forge a unique identity, or affiliate with a subculture, by manipulating the range of available commodity choices.

One subculture with an intriguing relationship to consumption is the youth drug scene, the subject of Robert Stephens' fascinating chapter.Footnote ³⁷ Drug use, as Stephens contends, was a kind of rejection of consumerism through consumption in a period of consumer abundance and indeed consumer conformity.Footnote ³⁸ Young people emerged in the postwar period as a new group of consumers with unprecedented spending power and mobility, a group that channeled the era's pro-consumption ethos in ways that challenged mainstream values.

Significantly, Stephens, like Schutts, has a story to tell that transcends the borders of Germany and narrow German history. He shows the workings of international networks of drug supply and distribution—from Central Asia, the Middle East, and north Africa—and also the formation of a transnational youth counterculture. There has, of course, always been a transnational element to consumer culture, but it was far more limited in earlier periods. What's new in the postwar period, it seems, is the appearance of self-consciously international styles of consumption and the formation of transnational solidarities through consumer choice. While fears of Americanization or globalization may still be operative on the national political level in western Europe, they scarcely affect actual consumer choice.

East Germany, as Crew notes, was far more successful than the west at containing the perceived threat of Americanization, i.e., the specter of uncontainable, soulless, and selfish market capitalism. The East German state had a much stronger hand and did not hesitate to prohibit problematic cultural imports. But what was proper consumption in the GDR? Was the East German regime successful at defining particular styles and modes of consumption that fit with and furthered its broader social and political agendas? Could it accomplish these projects and simultaneously keep its citizens satisfied? How did East German approaches and outcomes compare to West German and Nazi policies? The essays by Katherine Pence and Eli Rubin, and Judd Stitziel's and Mark Landsman's books, provide answers to these questions and open up different perspectives on East Germany's consumer culture.

The Sozialistische Einheitspartei (Socialist Unity Party, or SED) dictatorship, not unlike the Nazis, faced enormous ideological and economic obstacles that hindered their promotion of consumer goods. But the similarities do not go much beyond that. East Germany found itself in a thoroughly unique situation created by wartime devastation, systematic Soviet plunder of the remaining industrial infrastructure, bureaucratic infighting between officials in trade and manufacture, and ever-shifting economic priorities. The Soviets also pressured the regime to conform to Eastern Bloc consumption policy, but seldom supplied the financial support to make it possible. This staunchly ideological and doctrinaire regime was at sea when it came to ideological guideposts for the issue of consumption. As Stitziel points out in his excellent study of clothing and East German fashion, Marx wrote relatively little about consumption beyond his famous description of the commodity fetish in volume one of Capital, and subsequent Marxist thought largely ignored the problem, focused, as it was, on the sphere of production. GDR leaders associated consumer desire with women, whose wishes the regime hoped to contain and channel into an appropriate form of socialist consumption.

The GDR's centrally planned economy, as Stitziel demonstrates, worked against creating a consumer society because modern consumption depends on variation and differentiation, while socialism stresses above all equality and the leveling of material difference. Furthermore, the regime felt tremendous pressure to keep its citizens happy, as increasing numbers took flight to the west. Ultimately, the regime was trapped, boxed in by its own contradictory needs, impulses, and restrictions, and the forty years of GDR consumer policy can be understood as a series of quick-fix compromises and trade-offs between irreconcilable forces. In the terms of Mark Landsman, author of Dictatorship and Demand, the regime faced an ongoing tension between two opposing strategies: on one side, an emphasis on heavy industrial growth—considered essential for the construction of socialism—accompanied by calls for consumer patience and austerity, and on the other, an attempt to develop consumer industries that could compete with the west.

Landsman's book, a political history grounded in extensive archival research, provides a useful framework and chronology for conceiving of these fits and starts in the sphere of consumption. The June 1953 uprising led some party members to acknowledge citizen discontent and resulted in the New Course, a series of concessions to East German consumers supported by the Soviet Union and partially realized by the introduction of such practices as ordering through catalogs and installment plan purchases. But even these limited concessions were politically controversial and were never fully implemented. Soon the regime's emphasis shifted back to the heavy industrial sector, and consumption slipped to the back burner again for the next few years.

The late 1950s brought another dramatic shift, however. Walter Ulbricht famously boasted in summer 1958 that East Germany would catch up to and overtake the West German consumer economy in a matter of years. The so-called Main Economic Task was, of course, a wild pipe dream, particularly in light of the fact that East German food rationing had only ended that spring, while West German economic recovery was already in full swing. Landsman justifiably wonders whether anyone in the regime actually believed in this fantasy and notes that the new rhetoric around consumption had little actual impact on the state's economic priorities. He concludes that Ulbricht was using promises of consumer abundance as a delaying tactic, a propaganda tool to stop the massive exodus to the west until a more permanent solution could be found. That solution, the Berlin Wall, was constructed in August 1961. Indeed, the Wall removed the pressing need to heed the demands and meet the desires of East German consumers and ushered in a new period of consumer austerity.

The early 1970s, Landsman notes in his epilogue, marked the next turning point as Erich Honecker put more emphasis on consumer goods, a concession to his weary and increasingly claustrophobic citizens, but still would not divert resources from heavy industrial production. Instead he financed the new consumer programs by borrowing, and this created an even greater financial mess. Moreover, the new emphasis on consumer goods contradicted major socialist tenets by creating hierarchies, conspicuous disparities in wealth and possessions, and caving in to materialism and western styles of consumption.

Landsman's well-crafted and persuasive book does a tremendous service by filling in the political and economic side of East German consumption history. His analyses and judgments of the GDR are sober and balanced, and he historicizes SED leadership in such a way as to make its priorities (and limitations) understandable and at times even sympathetic. He begins the book with an elegant and sophisticated overview of GDR historiography, and he strikes a difficult but admirable position in his judgments of East German history and western consumer culture, refusing to see the fall of the former and the persistence of the latter as inevitable. Landsman is far more concerned with state policies, including the state's responses to consumer opinion, than individual experience, daily life, or gender. This does not mean that he assumes individual agency was not important or imagines that the state was all-powerful, rather that he focuses on fissures between different political-economic sectors (trade vs. production) and not the fault line between state and society. Unfortunately, Landsman treats consumption in a fairly narrow sense and seldom takes the discussion beyond basic foodstuffs and clothes to ask about the meaning of particular commodities. And his work contributes little to cultural-historical questions or the problem of consuming art, music, or tourist sites.

Stitziel's and Landsman's books fit together nicely, since Stitziel emphasizes many of the areas, including consumer experience, gender, and culture that fall beyond Landsman's scope. Clothing lends itself well to this kind of analysis because, as Stitziel notes, it is both a material necessity and a source of social distinction. Clothing, furthermore, can be studied in a material sense, i.e., in terms of its production and distribution, and as we saw in Guenther's treatment of fashion during the Nazi period, it raises crucial artistic and stylistic issues. Furthermore, Stitziel stresses that the study of clothing necessarily raises gender historical questions, given that women did most of the shopping in this period, that women's fashion far overshadowed the attention given to men's fashions, and that fashion is often represented as “feminine,” fickle, or irrational.

Fashioning Socialism treats many of the same tensions that Landsman describes, but gives a clearer sense of how GDR citizens experienced the regime's shifting approaches. Stitziel shows how women adapted to scarcity, how they restitched and resewed to personalize available styles or rehabilitate worn-out dresses. We see them writing letters of complaint to regime officials and exercising consumer choice through boycotts, or in the earlier period, crossing the border and doing their shopping in the west.Footnote ³⁹

The GDR had no more success articulating and promoting proper socialist fashion than the Nazis had in defining appropriate German or Nazi styles. Official policies alternated between condemnations of western-style fashions as decadent or degenerate and clumsy attempts to emulate them. The seemingly irrepressible Dirndl appeared yet again, this time as part of the broader East German celebration of worker and peasant culture, but it quickly faded from the pages of the fashion magazines and gave way to more self-consciously modern styles and attires. In keeping with its emphasis on culture and its self-understanding as a cultured society, the GDR founded an Institute for Clothing Culture (Institut für Bekleidungskultur) in 1952, but unsurprisingly it struggled against the same obstacles, namely the continued desirability of Paris Mode and the economic realities of state socialism. Even when fashion designers succeeded at creating reasonable socialist alternatives—Stitziel shows, for example, that the state promoted a line of high fashions for larger (stärker) women to counter capitalism's fetishization of the thin female figure—the unwieldy economy was unable to deliver. That is, the regime's emphasis on centralized production and rationalization in the 1950s made it impossible to adjust to market fluctuations or changes in demand. Stitziel also demonstrates that the 1953 uprising made the regime wary of putting too much pressure on its workers to produce and shows the extraordinary inefficiency of the centrally planned economy. One of its disastrous consequences was the problem of surpluses, galling evidence of failed socialist planning, according to which demand and supply were supposed to dovetail perfectly. Another was the lack of coordination between advertisers and producers, with the result that items that were being promoted were often unavailable in the stores.Footnote ⁴⁰

By the early 1970s, as we have seen, the regime essentially conceded the point and abandoned its project of defining a distinct mode of socialist fashion or even socialist consumer culture. Yet even this concession had disastrous consequences. It meant that some GDR consumers could buy western-style products at special stores for hard currency. At their best the Exquisit and Delikat shops could only offer a pale substitute for the goods and experiences on offer in the west. But by accepting the validity of individualistic consumer desire and the discourse of western consumer culture, the East German regime opened up another playing field on which it was bound to fail. As Stitziel writes, “The crass contrast between these promises and propagated images on the one hand and the bleak reality of East German consumers' everyday experiences on the other both contributed to disillusionment with the entire system of state socialism and encouraged enchantment with the West.”Footnote ⁴¹

Katherine Pence's article in Consuming Germany, a treatment of Leipzig trade fairs in the 1950s, reinforces Stitziel's point for an earlier period. Fair displays, Pence notes, were intended to quell domestic dissatisfaction over frustrating shortages and the continued poor quality of consumer goods, and simultaneously to show off to and compete with the west. Because what was displayed seldom corresponded to what was actually available, however, these displays often fanned the flames of consumer discontent which was articulated with surprising frankness. She also finds a great deal of evidence that acts of disobedience, even deviant kinds of consumption such as prostitution, took place behind the scenes at the fairs.

Eli Rubin, finally, emphasizes another crucial dimension of East German culture, namely its embracing of modernity and science, its future orientation, which coexisted with its attempts to position itself as the heir to longer German traditions of humanism and high culture.Footnote ⁴² He focuses on an intriguing commodity, namely plastic, that played an enormous role in this resource-starved, economically limited land, and this focus allows his study to encompass both production and consumption, and both official planning discourses and citizen reception. Rubin's discussion of plastics attests to the eventual realization of a distinct consumer culture in the GDR, but not, of course, the kind of socialist-style consumption that party leaders may have dreamt of. Plastic household products seem to have been well received by East German consumers, but ironically, they were all the more highly valued because of the regime's failure to produce them in sufficient quantities. Perhaps the ultimate irony of GDR consumer culture is that, as several of these authors establish, its success came only after the fact, in the form of nostalgia for the society and culture that arose amid these adverse conditions. East German consumer culture finally took shape and emerged as a desirable alternative to western norms through nostalgia, only after the Berlin Wall, and the state that built it, had been torn to the ground.

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Taken together, the new consumption studies certainly succeed in linking individual experience to the broader developments of twentieth-century German history, as Koshar and Confino suggested, and they flesh out key historical moments with a great deal of richness and texture. Yet, rather than challenging accepted narratives, many of these works rewrite what we already knew from new perspectives and with new material, and several, unfortunately, rely too heavily on unreconstructed notions of modernity to reassert old historiographic saws. This is less true of works on the postwar period, where consumption studies are helping to shape historical fields that are still relatively new, providing, for example, new insights into the nature of state power and the space for individual agency in the GDR and new perspectives on West German economic recovery and its cultural consequences. At their best, these new investigations illustrate the mutually constitutive interplay of imagination and economic reality. Combining empirical research with the tools of cultural history, they shed light on the experiences, fantasies, and fears of individual consumers, social actors, and state agencies across five regimes of German history.

What, if anything, is left for the would-be historian of German consumer culture, given the field's extraordinary growth over the last several years? First, I would suggest that the emphasis on women as consumers could be balanced by studies of male consumption. To be sure, consumer desire has been coded as feminine in the modern period, and women have been the most active and conspicuous consumers at least since the later nineteenth century; however, men have engaged with consumer goods in a variety of significant ways. Both empirical investigations of male consumer spending and ethnographic studies of the meaning of men's goods and products would fill in what continues to be an almost entirely empty space. Second, while we now have a great deal of knowledge about Jews in consumer-oriented businesses such as fashion, advertising, and publishing, we still know very little about Jews as consumers in pre-Nazi Germany. It seems worth asking if German Jews exhibited patterns of consumption or tastes that distinguished them from non-Jewish Germans of the same social classes.Footnote ⁴³ Similar questions could be posed for the minority populations in the Federal Republic, especially immigrants and laborers from Italy, the Balkans, Turkey, and the Middle East. Furthermore, comparative studies remain rare, and more comparison could shed light on the question of German uniqueness and how Germans experienced their collective path from the keenly contested beginnings of its consumer society through the “miraculous” flourishing of consumer abundance. Finally, other spheres of German life, including the intimate realms of sexuality and religious worship, and as Götz Aly implies, the nightmare world of total war, are rich and largely untapped areas for analysis through the lens of consumption.Footnote ⁴⁴ These represent merely a handful of the many potential topics that await further investigation.

Yet, independent of the possibilities suggested by such investigations and other works in progress, this growing field would certainly benefit from new attempts to define its terms and sharpen its conceptual tools, and significant methodological hurdles persist. It remains challenging to write about the failed attempts to create alternative modes of consumption without seeing the triumph of American-style market capitalism as inevitable. We still lack an adequate language for distinguishing between the consumption of material things and culture, between stuff and experiences, and between goods and services. We still have difficulty apprehending the meaning of consumed objects, the experience of consumption, and the function of consumer choice for individuals and groups in discrete historical settings. Globalization and transnational history have yet to make their mark on this field, and it may well turn out that the nation-state is not the most useful organizing principle for histories of consumption and consumer culture. Psychology, beyond broad Freudian studies of the commodity fetish, has a lot to contribute to consumer culture history, and we are still waiting for it to be adequately integrated into the historical terrain of German consumer culture. Ultimately, the most significant studies are those that investigate particular products, practices, or policies while they simultaneously interrogate the meaning of consumption and historicize the figure of the consumer.Footnote ⁴⁵ With this kind of methodological self-consciousness, consumer culture histories can continue to provoke and challenge, to open up new perspectives on subjective experience and the nature of modern state power, and to bring us closer to our twentieth-century subjects, their inner lives, and the baggage they carried around with them.