Pamela E. Swett is Associate Professor of History at McMaster University. She is the author of Neighbors and Enemies: The Culture of Radicalism in Berlin, 1929–1933.

S. Jonathan Wiesen is Associate Professor of History at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He is the author of West German Industry and the Challenge of the Nazi Past, 1945–1955.

Jonathan R. Zatlin is Assistant Professor of History at Boston University. He is the author of The Currency of Socialism: Money and Political Culture in East Germany.

SELLING MODERNITY

Advertising in twentieth-Century Germany

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2007 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4047-8

Contents

List of Illustrations……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..ixForeword Victoria de Grazia……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….xiiiAcknowledgments…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..xixIntroduction Pamela E. Swett, S. Jonathan Wiesen, and Jonathan R. Zatlin……………………………………………………………………………………………………….11. Marketing, Modernity, and “the German People’s Soul”: Advertising and Its Enemies in Late Imperial Germany, 1896-1914 Kevin Repp…………………………………………………..272. Visions of Prosperity: The Americanization of Advertising in Interwar Germany Corey Ross………………………………………………………………………………………523. Branding Germany: Hans Domizlaff’s Markentechnik and Its Ideological Impact Holm Friebe……………………………………………………………………………………….784. “Planting a Forest Tall and Straight Like the German Volk”: Visualizing the Volksgemeinschaft through Advertising in German Forestry Journals, 1933-1945 Michael Imort…………………1025. Selling the “Racial Community”: Kraft durch Freude and Consumption in the Third Reich Shelley Baranowski………………………………………………………………………..1276. “Die erfrischende Pause”: Marketing Coca-Cola in Hitler’s Germany Jeff Schutts……………………………………………………………………………………………….1517. Lufthansa Welcomes You: Air Transport and Tourism in the Adenauer Era Guillaume de Syon……………………………………………………………………………………….1828. “The History of Morals in the Federal Republic”: Advertising, PR, and the Beate Uhse Myth Elizabeth Heineman…………………………………………………………………….2029. “Wowman! The World’s Most Famous Drug-Dog”: Advertising, the State, and the Paradox of Consumerism in the Federal Republic Robert P. Stephens……………………………………….23010. “True Advertising Means Promoting a Good Thing through a Good Form”: Advertising in the German Democratic Republic Anne Kaminsky………………………………………………….26211. Promoting Socialist Cities and Citizens: East Germany’s National Building Program Greg Castillo……………………………………………………………………………….28712. “Serve Yourself!” The History and Theory of Self-Service in West and East Germany Rainer Gries………………………………………………………………………………..307Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..329Contributors……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..347Index……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………351

Chapter One

KEVIN REPP

MARKETING, MODERNITY, AND “THE GERMAN PEOPLE’S SOUL”

Advertising and Its Enemies in Late Imperial

Germany, 1896-1914

The German advertising specialist has to know the German people’s soul better-than the advertisements in American humor magazines. -Ernst Growald, “Auguren-Sprche”

Advertising had come a long way, proclaimed the director of Hollerbaum und Schmidt, Berlin’s premiere publisher of poster art, as he opened the latest show of retail displays and modern graphic design at the Zoological Garden Exhibition Halls in February 1908. Once shunned due to a “reputation for unsoundness,” the industry had worked hard in the past two decades to overcome German cultural prejudices that had only been sharpened by an uncritical adoption of garish foreign models in the early days. “Unrelentingly one sought at that time for new means of propaganda, and with just as much dexterity as energy the German business world has understood how to make art and technical skill, science and literature, subservient to its purposes,” Growald proudly declared-and without undermining German Kultur in the least. On the contrary: “With a firm gaze the applied arts have seized hold of the advantages that the tasteful outfitting of shops offered them, and the painter and the sculptor know just the same that they can go hand in hand with commerce and find material advantages in this way, without needing to become untrue to their artistic ideals.” As a result, modern advertising had won acceptance as a legitimate practice not only among members of the respected business community, but also from guardians of the nation’s cultural heritage as well. Supervised by Professor Bruno Paul, students from the Royal School of Applied Arts had thus decorated the booths for the Exhibition, which brought together the work of more than 120 poster artists-“among them names like Dpler t[he] Y[ounger], Ernst Neumann, Julius Klinger, Lucian Bernhard”-much of it on loan from public museums or private connoisseurs such as the art critic Paul Westheim (whose collection resides at the core of the Berlin Art Library’s holding of historical posters today). Mainstays of the local and national economy, AEG and Siemens, demonstrated their support with a joint exhibit on advances in the subtle and effective illumination of shop windows, while the Alliance of Berlin Specialty Stores underscored the constructive nature of this relationship on the evening after the opening with lectures on “Physics in the Service of Advertising” and “Technology in the Service of Businesses.” The keynote address, however, highlighted the distance modern advertising professionals still felt the need to place between themselves and the crass hucksterism of P. T. Barnum, which many Germans continued to associate with the industry: “Science in the Fight against Crime.”

Far from signaling the happy acceptance of advertising as part and parcel of the “German people’s soul,” Growald’s optimistic pronouncements in fact sought to deflect gathering resistance to what the public widely perceived to be an unhealthy, alien-and primarily American-intrusion. Like the pretentious art-show atmosphere, with critics, catalogues, and juried competition, the buoyant mantra of symbiosis between the worlds of commerce and Kultur, endlessly repeated by Growald, Westheim, Klinger, and others at the 1908 Exhibition, had emerged from years of confrontation as a defensive strategy consciously designed to “tame” the brazen Otherness of commercial modernity by rendering it in idioms suited to the particular social, cultural, and aesthetic sensibilities of a German audience. “American advertising is good for America, but not for Germany,” Growald warned potential clients at the show. Or, as he put it rather more vividly a few years later, in America the advertisement could “run around all naughty and naked; in Germany she has to be decently draped in a nice little cloak.” At times bitter, at times playful, the engagement between advertising and its enemies in late Imperial Germany had certainly been productive. Indeed, the efforts of Wilhelmine advertisers to soothe fears of rampant “Americanization” evoked powerful visions of a Symbolist-inspired aesthetic and the “Gothic” modern that represented significant breakthroughs in the history of graphic design and commercial architecture at the beginning of the twentieth century. But by 1908 these strategies of appeasement were beginning to wear thin. Emboldened by success, and stung by campaigns that resulted in punitive taxes, police harassment, and ordinances against the “disfigurement” of urban and rural landscapes by advertising, spokesmen for the industry became increasingly resentful of the scorn with which even supposed friends and allies continued to treat the profession. Already discernible beneath the harmonious rhetoric in Growald’s catalogue, this defiance burst into angry debates over the respective value of art and advertising that made headlines within weeks after the exhibition closed. As the conflict escalated, some in the business soon declared it was time to throw off the “mask of culture” once and for all.

The clashes over advertising and art spilled out into many different arenas at the beginning of the twentieth century-economic and political, aesthetic and cultural-as the advent of commercial modernity directly touched on the material interests of many competing groups in Wilhelmine society at the same time that it visibly transformed the landscapes of German towns and cities. In order to explore these complex ramifications, I focus on two manifestations of fin de sicle commercial culture that seemed to gather the various elements of contention involved in these debates around particular sites laden with special significance in the eyes of contemporaries: the department store and the advertising poster. Among the most powerful motors behind the rapid expansion of the German advertising industry, department stores quickly became a concrete symbol of the new commercial order on many levels, evoking opposition from conservatives and the small shopkeepers and artisans of the Mittelstand as well as the cultural opponents of Americanization. At the same time, however, these conflicts produced one of the first and most successful attempts to “tame” commercial modernity for German consumption: the modern Gothic architecture of the Wertheim Department Store designed by Alfred Messel in Berlin. The successful melding of traditional cultural sensibilities and modern commercial prowess in Messel’s Wertheim served as a model for the spiritualized Sachlichkeit advertising professionals like Growald promoted as a way to assuage the qualms of the German soul in 1908. Focusing on the so-called Sachplakat, or “object poster,” the second part of the essay examines conflicts between advocates of the fine and applied arts that emerged from this solution, generating an increasingly visceral contempt for aestheticism on the part of advertisers and graphic artists, which in many ways anticipated the avant-garde’s revolt against l’art pour l’art and the cult of creative genius in the epoch of high modernism that followed the First World War.

Wertheim, Tietz, and the “Idea of the Department Store”

The predicament advertisers faced could easily be seen at the grand opening of Tietz’s Department Store on Leipziger Strae in Berlin, which took place the same year the Greatest Show on Earth came to town, in September 1900. After pouring 3.5 million marks into the construction of the enormous, “hypermodern,” glass-and-steel emporium-instantly nicknamed “The Aquarium” by smirking locals-the ill-advised owner, Oskar Tietz, compounded his error by bringing in an entire team of American advertising consultants to prepare the city for what he hoped would be an outstanding entrepreneurial debut in the imperial capital. A barrage of press releases, posters, and publicity stunts finally culminated with a pompous opening-day address, followed by a “lighting rehearsal” intended to astonish the assembled crowds with the spectacle of the magnificent glass mansion illuminated from within by night. The result was a stream of public ridicule and denunciations so intense that Tietz’s family worried for months that the venture was bound to end in bankruptcy. “It’s not that the Berliner is too conservative for it. On the contrary. He gladly takes to the foreign when it appeals to him. But things like American advertising are distasteful to him from the start,” one critic sourly observed in Maximilian Harden’s Future magazine, a review of culture and politics that was widely read by both established elites and young and struggling avant-garde artists at the fin de sicle. “Tietz’s advertising was completely lacking in that discreet finesse that precisely knows the limits within which it is effective without giving offense. The public was fed up with reading the name Tietz in every tram coup and running across Tietz automobile-wagons that had been sent out on advertising rides in every part of the city.” While the fate of the enterprise hung in the balance, Tietz’s major competitor, Wertheim, only benefited from the public relations disaster, as its advertising was soon held up as a model of tact and restraint, favorably contrasted with the tawdry “American” rival just down the street.

The intense hostility of this response bespoke more than injured taste on the part of Berlin’s overly refined critics. Five years earlier, angry mobs had resorted to violence, hurling stones, smashing display windows, and assaulting female clerks at Tietz’s store in Munich, until the military was called in to suppress the outbreak, which undoubtedly owed much to the anti-Semitic slogans used to rile up shopkeepers and artisans against unwelcome competition from “outsiders.” Nor was Wertheim immune from this kind of agitation. Like Tietz, the Wertheim family had risen rapidly from humble beginnings as Jewish shopkeepers in the province (both started out in the small port city of Stralsund), borrowing models of large-scale commercial retail imported from abroad to become the owners of a nationwide chain of department stores by the turn of the century. Still new to German shoppers at the time, the department store was an unfamiliar sight, even in big cities, and at first the Wertheims had to fight hard to dissociate themselves from the image of the “junk bazaars,” sprawling outgrowths of uncontrolled traffic in wholesale goods, often of ill repute, which, alongside consumer cooperatives, represented the only alternative to small shops for most customers. Soon, however, it became apparent that the advantages of scale combined with organizational efficiency and convenience made for something qualitatively different, a juggernaut of modern consumer capitalism that threatened traditional retail with significant-many believed “unfair”-competition. If Wertheim had a reputation for tact and restraint, it was because the firm had learned to keep a low profile in order to avoid attacks from the ever-vigilant champions of small business. When the department store began advertising its status as official supplier to the Court of Wilhelm II, for instance, newspapers like The State Citizen and Truth burst out with polemics so vile that Georg Wertheim privately let it be known that he would forgo the honor of being named commercial councilor in order to avoid further attacks in the anti-Semitic press. “The Royal State Government, which would nominate Mr. Wertheim for a distinction because, say, he sacrificed 50,000 marks [in charitable donations], which with his gigantic income is a bagatelle, would flat out mock the industrious Mittelstand and slap itself in the face.”

Claiming to represent the true strength and heritage of the national economy, the small shopkeepers and artisans of “the industrious Mittelstand” appealed to the state for help on many occasions in what to them seemed to be a life-and-death struggle with the large-scale structures of commercial modernity. After a legislative campaign culminated in new regulations against “unfair competition” and a nationwide tax on advertising in the mid-1890s, the movement had next trained its sights on the department store, which it branded a mortal threat to “the general welfare.” At its eighth annual congress, held in October 1898, the Alliance of German Craft Associations warned “that the spread of department bazaars has made further advances, that the peril of great numbers of entirely justified livelihoods in the industrious and commercial Mittelstand being sucked dry has thereby lurched into precarious proximity.” It was “urgently necessary to move against this peril as quickly as possible,” the resolution advised: “The assembly, for reasons of the general welfare, especially for the preservation of a vigorous class of middling and smaller artisanry, commerce, and industry, considers an effective taxation of the large department stores to be an urgent demand.” The notion that a traditional way of life, indeed, the future of the entire social order was at stake only gained ground in intense public debates over the next few years, particularly after the younger generation of national economists hailed department stores and advertising as steps toward an increasingly rationalized and efficient system for the distribution of mass-produced consumer goods, which would ultimately lead Germany out of the age of late capitalism and into a socialist economy in the coming century. “Very small, ugly, wretched, crummy little retailers are seen in ever smaller numbers, and we don’t want to see them any more,” a young Werner Sombart defiantly announced at the 1899 congress of the Association for Social Policy, brashly assailing the older generation for its support of protective legislation for the Mittelstand. “From the consumer standpoint we are striving for a new configuration of the street’s image. We want to have magnificent stores in our cities.” On the opposite side, a local shopkeeper from Breslau, where the conference was held, bitterly complained that he was being ruined by mass retail and defended the traditional German way of doing business. “I can’t accept the principles that the large department stores apply,” he cried. “You won’t hold it against a trusty businessman from the good old days, either, if he doesn’t do such repulsive advertising as the department stores do, and no one else will claim that that kind of advertising is a good quality for an honest businessman.”

(Continues…)

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