Selling Modernity

by Swett, Pamela E.; Wiesen, S. Jonathan; Zatlin, Jonathan R.

• ISBN13: 9780822340478
• ISBN10: 082234047X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-10-30
• Publisher: Duke Univ Pr

Summary

The sheer intensity and violence of Germany's twentieth-century transformations-through the end of an empire, two world wars, two democracies, and two dictatorships-provides a unique opportunity to assess the power and endurance of commercial imagery in the most extreme circumstances.Selling Modernityplaces advertising and advertisements in this tumultuous historical setting, exploring such themes as the relationship between advertising and propaganda in Nazi Germany, the influence of the United States on German advertising, the use of advertising to promote mass consumption in West Germany, and the ideological uses and eventual prohibition of advertising in East Germany.While the essays are informed by the burgeoning literature on consumer society,Selling Modernityfocuses on the actors who had the greatest stake in successful merchandising: company managers, advertising executives, copywriters, graphic artists, market researchers, and salespeople, all of whom helped shaped the depiction of a company's products, reputation, and visions of modern life. The contributors consider topics ranging from critiques of capitalism triggered by the growth of advertising in the 1890s to the racial politics of Coca-Cola's marketing strategies during the Nazi era, and from the post-1945 career of an erotica entrepreneur to a federal anti-drug campaign in West Germany. Whether examining the growing fascination with racialized discourse reflected in early-twentieth-century professional advertising journals or the post-war efforts of Lufthansa to lure holiday and business travellers back to the country, the contributors reveal advertising's central role in debates about culture, business, politics, and society in twentieth-century Germany.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Marketing, Modernity, and "the German People's Soul": Advertising and Its Enemies in Late Imperial Germany, 1896-1914

Visions of Prosperity: The Americanization of Advertising in Interwar Germany

Branding Germany: Hans Domizlaff's Markentechnik and Its Ideological Impact

"Planting a Forest Tall and Straight like the German Volk": Visualizing the Volksgemeinschaft through Advertising in German Forestry Journals, 1933-1945

Selling the "Racial Community": Kraft durch Freude and Consumption in the Third Reich

"Die erfrischende Pause": Marketing Coca-Cola in Hitler's Germany

Lufthansa Welcomes You: Air Transport and Tourism in the Adenauer Era

"The History of Morals in the Federal Republic": Advertising, PR, and the Beate Ushe Myth

"Wowman! The World's Most Famous Drug-Dog": Advertising, the State, and the Paradox of Consumerism in the Federal Republic

"True Advertising Means Promoting a Good Thing through a Good Form": Advertising in the German Democratic Republic

Promoting Socialist Cities and Citizens: East Germany's National Building Program

"Serve Yourself!" The History and Theory of Self-Service in West and East Germany

Bibliography

Contributors

Index

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