Selling Under the Swastika: Advertising and Commercial Culture in Nazi Germany by Pamela E. Swett (review)

Nazi Propaganda reiterated and disseminated grandiose political visions but was hardly able to insinuate such visions into the many mindless chores and simple pleasures that characterized everyday life in the Third Reich. Advertisements for the laundry detergent Persil, Nivea skin cream, Osram light bulbs, and many other brand products, however, accomplished just that. In this important book, Pamela Swett examines the “bounded relative autonomy” of corporations and the complex relationships between the commercial sector, consumers, and the regime (2). Rather than focusing on the negotiations between bureaucrats and commercial agents alone, she demonstrates that consumers were fully engaged in the market—all in preparation for the “new order” that the National Socialist regime promised and actively began to forge (2).

Spanning the period from the late 1920s to the early 1950s, the book makes visible important continuities between the commercial culture of the 1930s and the economic miracle of the 1950s. When it comes to advertising, the real break, Swett suggests, occurred in 1943 as the regime put a moratorium on new advertisements. The subsequent dearth of both ads and goods enabled memories that decoupled consumer products from the politics of Nazism and extended the ubiquitous Persilschein (denazification certificate) to even the most popular laundry detergent manufacturer Persil as a surrogate for the commercial sector more generally.

After a brief overview of the advertisement industry during the late Weimar years that highlights the industry’s tenuous reputation and excessive self-doubt of its staff, Swett demonstrates that National Socialism facilitated the advertisement industry’s ability to cast itself in a more positive light in part because propaganda, with which advertisements had often been conflated, attained a more positive connotation, at least officially. Although the Ad Council (Werberat) “relied on Goebbels patronage, it was a nongovernmental body that existed outside of the Reich’s Chamber of Culture” and therefore its members, both business leaders and party officials, enjoyed a modicum of independence (56–57). Swett scrutinizes commercial culture as it took shape in the 1930s, assessing the industry’s ability to tap into pervading consumer trends while articulating National Socialist priorities at the same time. The staffs responsible for advertising and sales were crucial here, particularly because their “self-professed aims,” as Swett convincingly argues, evidenced striking, and perhaps surprising, continuities between the Weimar and Nazi periods (91). In fact it seems as though the Nazi regime unfettered German advertisement from its previous strictures and facilitated a more “scientific” approach to advertisement, pushing German advertising into the realm of market research in 1935.

Ad men and sales staff nonetheless remained outsiders in Nazi Germany, sub-professionals who were seen as “dishonest in commercial dealings” and always in danger of resembling “Jewish peddlers from an earlier era who were considered racial pariahs” (161). Trying to represent their company and its racial credentials, traveling sales staff, Swett argues, played a crucial role in commercial life; and their purportedly apolitical dealings helped cement the Volksgemeinschaft through routine interactions between sales staff, retailers, and consumers (161). Swett is thus able to demonstrate that German firms—who generally designed advertisements for their products in house—took great care to listen to, learn about, and directly address their customers (139). Following Peter Fritzsche’s Life and Death in the Third Reich (2008), Michael Wildt’s Volksgemeinschaft als Selbstermächtigung (2007), Andrew Bergerson’s Ordinary Germans in Extraordinary Times (2004) and others, Swett brings into view a society in which individual consumers, companies, and their staff as well as local collectives not only wrested liminal agency from the regime but actively articulated visions for their communities and the nation—in other words, a society where people not only made do with Nazism but keenly shaped it. Instead of merely being enthralled by fascist spectacle, seduced by power, or bought with trifles stolen from the East, Swett demonstrates that Germans developed their loyalty to the regime through...