Am Beginn der Konsumgesellschaft: Mangelerfahrung, Lebenshaltung, Wohlstandshoffnung in Westdeutschland in den funfziger Jahren

Journal of Social History, Fall, 1995 by Warren Breckman

By Michael Wildt (Hamburg: Ergebnisse Verlag, 1994. 396pp.).

While the literature on the development of consumer culture in America is voluminous, parallel studies in Germany are scarce indeed. Michael Wildt's study of food consumption in West Germany during the 1950s takes a major step toward correcting that deficit. Wildt's greatest strength is his complex approach to the history of consumption, which successfully integrates statistical analyses of household expenditures and living standards into a web of transformations in cultural, discursive, and individual practices. From this sophisticated vantage point, Wildt challenges the main account of economic growth in the first decades of the Federal Republic. Observers have frequently spoken of successive waves of consumption carrying West Germans ever higher onto the shores of affluence, beginning with a surge in food consumption in the late 1940s, then a "clothing wave," "housing wave," "household appliance wave," and so on. Wildt rejects the image of steady progress that has accompanied accounts of the "Economic Miracle," insisting instead on discontinuities and interruptions in patterns of consumption in the late forties and fifties, punctuated by an abrupt change in consumer behavior at the end of the 1950s.

Wildt's detailed analysis of working-class household budgets shows that until the mid fifties, most West German families remained in modest, even straitened circumstances. The later 1950s witnessed a series of dramatic changes which taken together inaugurated West German consumer society. Wages rose rapidly, as did the expectations of consumers. The purchase of consumer durables such as refrigerators and electric stoves increased dramatically after 1955. The variety of available foods expanded and quality improved. The number of industrially produced foods rose sharply, and brand names gained heightened dominance in the marketplace. The demand for efficient distribution of mass-produced goods spurred an increase in the number of self-service grocery stores from 203 in 1955 to 53,000 in 1965. Wildt argues that these changes deeply altered the behavior of consumers themselves as they reoriented themselves in the new world of proliferating goods and expanding choices. Eager to guide consumers was a troop of marketing strategists, dieticians, and lifestyle commentators. The book concludes with a semiotic analysis of shifts in the discourses of eating that by the early 1960s had transformed food into an object of health concerns or an expression of lifestyle, fantasy, and individual self-expression.

This foray into semiotics is generally illuminating, but Wildt might have supplemented it with a closer examination of the actual purveyors of this new fetishistic culture of food. Wildt tells the reader little about the development of marketing in Germany; and he virtually ignores the role of the state in regulating foodstuffs, establishing nutritional norms, and promoting consumption. State agencies had already assumed this role in the Wilhelmine period, and it probably expanded along with other activities of the welfare state in the postwar years. Wildt's semiotic analysis also stands in some tension with his account of consumer practice. He stresses the plurality of consumer practices, as well as consumers' creative ability to appropriate products in ways contrary to the intentions of designers and marketers. His discursive analysis, however, isolates the language of consumption from its reception by consumers, and it falls below the complexity of his study of consumer practice.

Analysis of the development of consumerist modernity in Germany is complicated by the disruptions of World War II, yet Wildt's insistence on an abrupt change in the late 1950s becomes less persuasive when one considers the trends of earlier decades. Quantity, quality, and diversity of foods were all on the rise before 1914. Advertising of "luxury" foods began after 1850 and soon expanded to new industrially processed foodstuffs. Great market halls anticipated the post-1950 supermarket, department stores pioneered self-service, and when it came to meeting their daily needs, the majority of Germans already depended on the market. Without question, Germany had become a culture of "mass consumption" by 1914.(1) The thorny issue is how to distinguish between mass consumption and consumer culture. Wildt is undoubtedly correct to emphasize the conjunction and convergence of numerous economic and socio-cultural phenomena in the 1950s and sixties, but the accumulation of technical, economic and behavioral changes in preceding decades suggests the need for longer perspectives on the history of West German consumer culture.

In West Germany's first years, growing prosperity was constantly measured against the deprivations of wartime. As Wildt suggests, the fifties were a time when ordinary Germans turned from the shame of their recent past and focused on family and personal advancement. More needs to be done on the relationship between consumption and the acts of evasion by which West German society was reconstructed. Furthermore, if it is true that West German democracy won acceptance primarily because of its delivery of economic prosperity, then the mechanisms by which the Federal Republic's legitimacy became equated with the state's capacity to ensure the conditions of individual consumer satisfaction should become objects of greater concern. Such an inquiry would move politics from the peripheral position it holds in Wildt's study to a central place in the study of West German consumer society. It might also suggest that far from being unique, West Germans' identification of democratic legitimacy with consumer satisfaction presents an extreme, yet,paradigmatic, example of the relationship between societies and states in the post-war West.