Creating the Nazi Marketplace: Commerce and Consumption in the Third Reich by S. Jonathan Wiesen (review)

Which fresh insights about Nazism can be gleaned by casting a critical eye on seemingly humdrum topics such as Schaufenster, Rotary clubs, or market researchers? S. Jonathan Wiesen’s persuasive new book shows there is much to learn, especially about the confluences of ideology and everyday life in the Third Reich. Creating the Nazi Marketplace is clearly an intellectual outgrowth of the author’s award-winning West German Industry and the Challenge of the Nazi Past, 1945–1955 (Chapel Hill, 2003). Whereas that work focused on corporate complicity in Nazi crimes and attempts by businesses to rehabilitate their image after the war, this book sets its sights on the consumer economy and investigates the role of “getting and spending” in the German dictatorship. For at least three decades, scholars have demonstrated the significance of the consumer in the National Socialist attempt to realign the market economy with its political and racial goals. But Wiesen blazes new ground by focusing not so much on consumers as on elite perceptions of consumer society. The result is a sociocultural history of business that explores how companies went about marketing and selling products to consumers in an economy that was both undergirded by Nazi ideology and heavily regulated by the state.

Wiesen argues that attempts to “imbue a violent economy with cultural meaning” (5) led to the creation of a distinct Nazi consumer marketplace that was both a “site of autonomy and coercion” (231). The deprivations and political instability caused by World War I and the Great Depression served as painful reminders for the Nazi regime of the need to provide an adequate standard of living. While many Germans increasingly looked to the burgeoning mass consumer society of the United States as a model, party ideologues found such unbridled consumer capitalism as overly individualistic, materialistic, speculative, and “Jewish.” On the one hand, the Nazi regime generally maintained the basic tenets of capitalism—in particular private property, healthy competition, entrepreneurship—and used stock commercial phraseology and conventional business practices. On the other hand, the Nazis envisioned a marketplace tempered by a mélange of nationalist, racial, and völkisch ideals. Indeed, Wiesen holds that it was only the primacy of racial doctrine in the National Socialist conception of the market that made its vision significantly different from that of other western nations. Germany’s economic recovery in general, and increased consumption levels in particular, were thus meant to enrich the Volksgemeinschaft during the pursuit of the regime’s expansionist and racial agenda.

The book is comprised of five chapters as well as an introduction and conclusion. Chapter one details the “Nazification” of commercial thought and practice, in particular the excising of Jewish influence and attempts to steer the consumption patterns of “racially desirable” Germans. Wiesen shows just how contradictory, and ultimately incompatible, the Nazi market ethos was in an age of global capitalism, and how economic realities complicated ideological orthodoxy. The second chapter turns its attention to marketing and examines the reactions of business owners and market professionals to the often muddled dictates of the Nazi marketplace. Even though Goebbels’s newly created Advertising Council sought to legislate Nazism’s peculiar commercial morality by regulating private and public advertising, firms such as Bayer, Henkel, and Kaffee HAG were able to utilize effectively both time-honored and newfangled marketing strategies to promote their goods and brands—while at the same time selectively mirroring Nazi values. Taking his cue from Victoria de Grazia’s Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA, 2006), Wiesen uses Rotary Germany in chapter three to get a glimpse of how the minds of the Bürgertum grappled with practical and theoretical aspects of consumerism in the Third Reich. Although Nazi ideals such as sacrifice and service, combined with the creation of a German Leistungsgemeinschaft, resonated with Rotarians, the organization’s internationalist orientation proved incompatible with...