Natalie Scholz's volume, Redeeming Objects: A West German Mythology, is a bold, meticulous, and unflinching examination of West Germany's efforts through the production and sale of consumer goods to shed its fascist image and reenter Western civilization in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Although the occupying forces scoured public spaces of Nazi symbolism, she argues that much of fascist Germany's ethos actually continued unabated in the private sphere, aided by the creation of a redemptive narrative—or “myth”—that West Germany's postwar manufacturing of items was totally independent of the country's Nazi past and thus marked a new beginning. Through the examination of the country's consumer material culture, however, Scholz shows how the “suspension of historical consciousness” (157) and myth-making could not fully expunge the taint of twelve years of fascist ideology and symbolism.

The volume is divided into an introduction, four lengthy chapters, and an epilogue and cites an incredible breadth of sources, including commercial, propaganda, and marketing films; intellectual, trade, and pulp newspapers and magazines; humor; political cartoons; and international expos. In the first chapter, “Stranded Objects: The Make-Believe Space,” Scholz reviews the concept of object agency and “the relationship between people, things, and the political” (23), which are the salient material cultural foundations for the volume. As she correctly notes, objects hold and transmit affective meanings that are difficult to eradicate, which is why the occupying forces prioritized the removal of Nazi symbols and structures from the public sphere. Societies can rarely change worldviews rapidly, however. It is thus not surprising that the population was unable to accept the loss of the concept of a transcendent Germany after the war. Scholz postulated that a make-believe space, therefore, had to be created in societal consciousness in which the physical reality of the postwar clearing of the rubble and the building of a new infrastructure became a metaphor for the cleansing of West Germany's history and the transition to a new, international society. As Scholz states, “If we put material objects at the center of attention, the pervasive entanglements between the outspoken and the latent come into full view. In many texts material objects radiate a troubling indeterminacy between the intimate and the political, guilt and innocence, past and present around which language encountered its own limits” (26).

Scholz's second chapter, “Miraculous Objects: The Volkswagen as Imperial Debris,” examines how West Germany's creation and promotion of a cultural “myth” surrounding Volkswagen (VW) after World War II attempted to redeem itself by eliding its actual history. The company's origins were saturated with Nazi ideology. Founded in 1937 by the National Socialist program “Strength through Joy” (Kraft durch Freude, KdF), VW was tasked with producing an affordable car for a unified German Aryan people. VW's postwar marketing campaign ironically used similar rhetoric to create a new narrative that portrayed the company as an economic miracle symbolizing West Germany's reincarnation as a unified, consumer-dedicated Western democracy. As Scholz states, this tale of self-creation from nothing “[e]vokes a nebulously abstract present that creates a mythical Volkswagen story that is dissociated both from its Nazi past and from its own concrete post-war genesis” (92).

In chapter 3, “Timeless Objects: Good Modernity and Its Other,” Scholz examines how myth creation was similarly employed to sanitize West Germany's home-furnishings industry. By tying postwar designs to the Weimar Bauhaus and Deutscher Werkbund schools of architectural and industrial design (116), which were officially dissolved in 1933 and 1934 respectively, the industry rebranded itself as another international, economic miracle free of Nazi influences and thus a symbol of a new, unified, and morally cleansed West Germany. These promotions were actually laden with Nazi rhetoric, however. The new industry used language comparable to previous Nazi marketing campaigns that promoted similar furnishing styles as indicators of Aryan national and racial superiority versus the dated, regressive designs preferred by inferior “others” (116–118). As Scholz states, “a powerful myth established itself of a modern aesthetic order that represented a harmonious German world outside of history” (159).

Scholz extends her study of the material culture of the home in the fourth chapter, “Expanding Objects: At Home in Globalizing Germany,” to include how the “imaginary world of consumer objects helped create a collective vision of the West German ‘home’ in its domestic, national, and ethnocultural sense, in relation to larger world outside the national border” (163). A particularly salient discussion focused on the contrast between the superior modern German home and the inferior foreign world within the context of two films, the Nazi-era Goodbye Franziska! (1941) and its postwar remake, Franziska (1957). Both films portray the concept of home life within a colonial narrative, with the lead male characters traveling to exotic places—for war in the 1941 version and work in the 1957 remake—but eventually realizing the importance of the clean, modern German home. As she states (176), “In the postwar discourse on the modern home, the explicit evocation of race disappeared, but the dichotomy between the moralized good form and dubious deviations from it remained paramount.”

Scholz concludes the volume with an epilogue: “Postwar Mythologies and Their Ghosts” (223) in which she reflects on the results of her study: “Even today, its anarchic staging can make me laugh about the uncomfortable observation that the cultural effects of twelve years of Nazi rule, its unprecedented level of mass propaganda, and its subsequent downfall have been so pervasive, so layered and twisted by taboos, that we can only grasp it in the notion of ‘ghosts’ …” (223–224).

The volume is a thoroughly researched, thought-provoking study of postwar West Germany, based on the examination of the continuities in a society's material culture. Although the volume occasionally gets bogged down in an overabundance of sources and types—there is enough for four books—Scholz's innovative study of West Germany's material culture reveals the unbroken continuity of entrenched postwar Nazi beliefs and worldviews in a visceral manner not possible by other means. I would be hesitant to assign the volume for an undergraduate course, but it definitely has the potential to fuel many scholarly seminars and new, cutting-edge research.