Abstract
How did people enjoy themselves during the Third Reich? In light of the Nazis’ barbarism, the question seems potentially crass. Yet, recent scholarship has revealed multiple forms of entertainment under a dictatorship and the ability of popular amusement to bolster a brutal regime. Whether on cruise ship tours sponsored by the Nazis’ Strength through Joy organization or in drinking Coca-Cola at the 1936 Olympics, Germans who were deemed racially acceptable found multiple opportunities for pleasure, which in turn helped Hitler promote his vision of a völkisch economic and spiritual recovery.1 The year 1933 did not represent a break of such proportions that modern forms of enjoyment — film, music, radio — were altered beyond recognition. The Nazis employed these media both to propagate their ideological vision and to give the public familiar forms of visual and aural satisfaction.2
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Notes
See S. Baranowski, Strength through Joy: Consumerism and Mass Tourism in the Third Reich (Cambridge, 2004); K. Semmens, Seeing Hitler’s Germany: Tourism in the Third Reich (Houndmills, 2005); and J. Schutts, ‘Die erfrischende Pause: Marketing Coca-Cola in Hitler’s Germany’, in P. E. Swett, S. J. Wiesen and J. R. Zatlin (eds) Selling Modernity: Advertising in Twentieth-Century Germany (Durham, 2007), 151–181.
W. König, Volkswagen, Volksempfänger, Volksgemeinschaft: ‘Volksprodukte’ im Dritten Reich: Vom Scheitern einer nationalsozialistischen Konsumgesellschaft (Paderborn, 2004); I. Guenther, Nazi Chic? Fashioning Women in the Third Reich (Oxford, 2004); R. Bavaj, Die Ambivalenz der Moderne im Nationalsozialismus. Eine Bilanz der Forschung (Munich, 2003), 69–71; H. Berghoff, ‘Enticement and Deprivation: The Regulation of Consumption in Pre-War Nazi Germany’, in M. Daunton and M. Hilton (eds) The Politics of Consumption: Material Culture and Citizenship in Europe and America (Oxford, 2001), 165–184.
V. de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth Century Europe (Cambridge, 2005), 75–129.
On German advertising before 1945, see D. Reinhardt, Von der Reklame zum Marketing: Geschichte der Wirtschaftswerbung in Deutschland (Berlin, 1993). On the Nazi years specifically, see U. Westphal, Werbung im Dritten Reich (Berlin, 1989) and Swett in this volume.
W. Vershofen, Handbuch der Verbrauchsforschung, vol. 1 (Berlin, 1940), 16. On Smith and consumption see also J. Z. Muller, The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought (New York, 2002), 53–60.
C. Ross, ‘Mass Politics and the Techniques of Leadership: The Promise and Perils of Propaganda in Weimar Germany’, German History 24,2 (2006), 184–211. See also F. Schönemann, Die Kunst der Massenbeeinflussung in den Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika (Stuttgart, 1924).
D. E. Lindenfeld, ‘The Professionalization of Applied Economics: German Counterparts to Business Administration,’ in G. Cocks and K. H. Jarausch (eds), German Professionals, 1800–1950 (Oxford, 1990), 213–231.
On market research in the Nazi period, see G. Bergler, Die Entwicklung der Verbrauchsforschung in Deutschland und die Gesellschaft für Konsumforschung bis zum Jahre 1945 (Kallmünz/Oberpfalz, M., 1959, Laßleben, translator); C. Conrad, ‘Observer les consommateurs. Études de marché et histoire de la consommation en Allemagne, des années 1930 aux années 1960’ in Le Mouvement Social, no. 206 (2004), 17–39; S. Schwarzkopf, ‘Kontrolle statt Rausch? Marktforschung, Produktwerbung und Verbraucherlenkung im Nationalsozialismus zwischen Phantasien von Masse, Angst und Macht’, in Á. von Klimó and M. Rolf (eds), Rausch und Diktatur: Inszenierung, Mobilisierung und Kontrolle in totalitären Systemen (Frankfurt, 2007), 193–209; and P. Heinelt, PR Päpste: Die kontinuierlichen Karrieren von Carl Hundhausen, Albert Oeckl und Franz Ronnenberger (Berlin, 2003), 49–54.
H. W. Brose, Götterdämmerung des Markenartikels? Neue Wege zu neuen Käufern (Gärtner, 1934), 7–8. See also V. de Grazia, Irresistible Empire, 220–221.
B. S. Ivens, Wilhelm Vershofen: Professor der Absatzwirtschaft? Ein Rückblick zu seinem 125. Geburtstag, Arbeitspapier Nr. 109 (Lehrstuhl für Marketing, Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, 2003).
The Nuremberg School rejected Gallup-style polls in the United States, which were often satisfied with yes or no answers. On Gallup and market research in the United States, see S. E. Igo, The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public (Cambridge, 2007).
‘Das Warenzeichen: Eine Untersuchung über den Bekanntheitsgrad des Warenzeichen ‘Das Bayerkreuz’, S 1900 001, GfK Archive, Nuremberg (hereafter GfKA). For Mann’s reflections on this report, see W. R. Mann, ‘Das Bayer-Kreuz,’ 1.13.1, (1976), 17–22, Bayer Archiv, Leverkusen.
See A. Tooze, Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (New York, 2006), 138–147.
See H. Proesler, ‘Problematik des Verstehens’, Markt und Verbrauch, 11 (1939), 157–166, and idem, ‘Über das Verstehen in der Verbrauchsforschung’, 13 (1941), 279–284.
H. Berghoff, Zwischen Kleinstadt und Weltmarkt: Hohner und die Harmonika 1857–1961: Unternehmensgeschichte als Gesellschaftsgeschichte (Paderborn, 1997).
G. D. Smith, S. A Strobele and M. Egger, ‘Smoking and Health Promotion in Nazi Germany’, Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, 48 (1994), 220–223.
R. N. Proctor, The Nazi War on Cancer (Princeton, 1999), 173.
Ibid., 174–175, 189.
J. Lewy, ‘A Sober Reich? Alcohol and Tobacco Use in Nazi Germany’ in Substance Use & Misuse, 41,8 (2006), 1179–1195.
On smoking in the 1930s, see L. Garfinkel, ‘Trends in Cigarette Smoking in the United States,’ Preventive Medicine 26, no. 4, (1997), 447–450; and e.g. S. Lock, L. A. Reynolds and E. M. Tansey (eds), Ashes to Ashes: The History of Smoking and Health (Amsterdam/Atlanta, 1998), 199–200.
On gender and market research, see also H. Proesler, Handbuch der Vebrauchsforschung (Volume Two as companion to Vershofen’s first volume) (Berlin, 1940), 29–45, and Conrad, ‘Observer les consommateurs’.
D. Herzog, Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton, 2005), 10–63; J. Stephenson, Women in Nazi Germany (Harlow, 2001); E. D. Heineman, What Difference Does a Husband Make? Women and Marital Status in Nazi and Postwar Germany (Berkeley, 1999).
See H. Berghoff, ‘“Times Change and We Change with Them”: The German Advertising Industry in the Third Reich — Between Professional Self-Interest and Political Repression’, Business History, 45,1 (2003), 128–47.
On women’s reactions to the Four-Year Plan austerity measures, see N. R. Reagin, Sweeping the German Nation: Domesticity and National Identity in Germany, 1870–1945 (New York, 2007), 110–180.
On Germans’ interest in the United States during the Third Reich, see P. Gassert, Amerika im Dritten Reich: Ideologie, Propaganda und Volksmeinung, 1933–1945 (Stuttgart, 1997), 104–116; and H. D. Schäfer, ‘Amerikanismus im Dritten Reich’, in M. Prinz and R. Zitelmann, (eds), Nationalsozialismus und Modernisierung (Darmstadt, 1991), 199–215.
On this organization, see D. Orlow, The Nazis in the Balkans: A Case Study in Totalitarian Politics (Pittsburgh, 1968), 16–66. On advertising in Nazi dominated Europe, see P. E. Swett ‘Preparing for Victory: Heinrich Hunke, the Nazi Werberat, and West German Prosperity’, Central European History, 42, no. 4 (2009), 675–707.
See Nazi-era photographs of Berlin housed in the Landesarchiv Berlin (filed by street name). On Christmas in the Third Reich, see J. Perry, ‘Nazifying Christmas: Political and Popular Celebration in the Third Reich’, Central European History, 38, no. 4 (2005), 572–605.
U. Herbert, ‘Good Times, Bad Times: Memories of the Third Reich’, in R. Bessel (ed.), Life in the Third Reich, 2nd revised edition (Oxford, 2001), 97–111.
See the introduction to this volume and G. Aly, Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State (New York, 2007).
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© 2011 S. Jonathan Wiesen
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Wiesen, S.J. (2011). Driving, Shopping and Smoking: The Society for Consumer Research and the Politics of Pleasure in Nazi Germany. In: Swett, P.E., Ross, C., d’Almeida, F. (eds) Pleasure and Power in Nazi Germany. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230306905_2
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