In the last decade we have witnessed some significant changes in German historiography, both in terms of method and research interests. Social and political history finally gave way to more culturist approaches while research into the post-war period gained dominance over all other areas of research on German history. These developments were not always perceived positively. While most scholars seem to appreciate the contribution of the new field of cultural history, some regard it as fragmented and unfocused, arguing that the turn to culture distracts historians from the “big questions” of modern German history. Selling Modernity is an illuminating rejoinder to this skepticism, not in the sense that it provides answers to questions such as how Germany got into the Great War in 1914 or landed itself in the Third Reich in 1933, but rather because it diverges from the approach that sees “German history” merely as a mystery that historians struggle to solve like detectives faced with a difficult murder case.

Instead of trying to explain political upheavals, the underlying premise of this collection, as Victoria De Grazia notes in her foreword, is that the visibility and power of the contemporary consumer economy requires a detailed and wide-ranging history of its origins. By examining the multifaceted practices of advertising in the different political and social settings of Germany during the “long twentieth century,” Selling Modernity seeks not only to reconstruct the history of German advertising, but also to place this history within a broader framework of the emergence of new cultures of consumption. This endeavor is based on the notion that the significance of commercial advertisements as a historical source goes beyond their ability to provide information on business practices and consumer habits. The editors argue that the image of a company and its products reflect the formation of individual and national identity, as well as inform discourses on politics and morality. Advertising, then, is conceived as a complex social activity embodying a range of social, economic, political, and cultural interests as well as being an area where an unremitting struggle is waged between various bodies and individuals determining its use and meaning. Interestingly, although the volume seeks to elevate the interconnections between culture, business, and politics, it assumes a periodization based solely on political events. This, of course, gives the book a sense of coherence as the reader moves from one chapter of the German “story” to another. Given this structure, it is not clear why the book omits the two World Wars, presenting them as black holes in the history of German advertising. More surprising, however, is the scarce use of sources beyond written ones. The book contains numerous suggestive images, yet these are used predominantly as illustrations and are not analyzed as part of the text. That said, this is still an important volume, which presents twelve excellent essays.

Kevin Repp and Correy Ross's essays set the framework for the volume, locating the origins of Germany's advertising practices in the Imperial period. By examining discussions on commercial design Repp neatly illustrates its ambivalent relationship with advertising that seems to reflect a broader discussion on the relationship between culture and the economy in Germany prior to World War I. Ross provides a stimulating account of another leitmotiv of this collection—the process of Americanization. He examines the appropriation and adoption of American advertising practices in interwar Germany, demonstrating that “Americanization” made its greatest advance in the 1930s amid the “Germanization” rhetoric of the Nazis. This conclusion is confirmed by Jeff Schutts who explores the marketing strategies of Coca-Cola in Hitler's Germany. Schutts shows that the “Germanization,” or in his terms, the “Cola-Colanization” in Germany was so successful that after the War many Germans were surprised to discover that the soft drink originated from America. In the essay on Hans Domizlaff, the doyen of German branding marketing, Holm Frieber depicts Domizlaff as an agent of the “conservative revolution” seeking to develop marketing techniques to protect “German values” from the discontentment of modernity. Michael Imort offers an in-depth analysis of advertisements in forestry journals during the Nazi period as a reference point for the blurring lines between political propaganda and commercial advertisements in that era. While Imort argues for the primacy of political ideology over commercial interests, Shelley Baranowski provides a much more nuanced examination of the relationship between ideology and commerce in the context of the “Strength Through Joy” (Kraft durch Freude, KdF) program. She calls attention to the contention between the official National Socialist ideology of privileging the collective interest over the individual need, and the regime's commitment to meeting the desires of its population. According to Baranowski this tension explains the mixed messages of KdF advertisements which, as she observes, significantly aided the regime's quest for popular legitimacy by successfully reconciling Spartanism and luxury. Moving to the post-war era, Guillaume De Syon explores the Lufthansa marketing strategies in the Adenauer period. In this context the question of recovery and reconstruction comes to the fore. De Soyn depicts Lufthansa as the purveyor of a new [West] German identity based on being modern and on a positive image of soft and friendly Germans. Elisabeth Heineman deals in her essay with another fascinating aspect of the transition from Nazism through hardship to a world of pleasure and plenty. She provides an illuminating account of the story of the Beate Uhse erotica firm as it pertains to the success story of West Germany after the war. Robert P. Stephens reminds us that advertising is not only designed to promote consumption, but can also be used to discourage it. Dealing with the anti-drug campaign in the 1970s—that is, with its failure—Stephens demonstrates the limits of economic rationality and the tension between public health and consumer desires. With Anne Kaminsky and Greg Castillo's essays we move from the recovery story of West Germany to the discrepancies between socialist ideology and the consumer economy in East Germany. Both contributions discuss the gap between the dream worlds of advertisements and the daily reality of the people, suggesting that it was the socialist state that cultivated the production of images of plenty to cover for its failure to create an alternative socialist version of the affluent society of the west. In the last contribution Rainer Gries examines the meanings and function of self-service stores in the three post-war Germanies. He claims that the removal of the space between shoppers and products marked a dramatic new stage in the development of consumption in both East and West Germany. Products now had to sell themselves, making consumer goods into communicative objects.

Without a doubt, this excellent collection adds a new level to our understanding of German history. I hope it will encourage historians to follow and to explore further the multifaceted interrelations between culture, the economy, and politics in the German century.