Trams or Tailfins?: Public and Private Prosperity in Postwar West Germany and the United States

By Jan L. Logemann

In the years that followed World War II, both the United States and the newly formed West German republic had an opportunity to remake their economies. Since then, much has been made of a supposed “Americanization” of European consumer societies—in Germany and elsewhere. Arguing against these foggy notions, Jan L. Logemann takes a comparative look at the development of postwar mass consumption in West Germany and the United States and the emergence of discrete consumer modernities.
 
In Trams or Tailfins?, Logemann explains how the decisions made at this crucial time helped to define both of these economic superpowers in the second half of the twentieth century. While Americans splurged on private cars and bought goods on credit in suburban shopping malls, Germans rebuilt public transit and developed pedestrian shopping streets in their city centers—choices that continue to shape the quality and character of life decades later. Outlining the abundant differences in the structures of consumer society, consumer habits, and the role of public consumption in these countries, Logemann reveals the many subtle ways that the spheres of government, society, and physical space define how we live.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Nov 28, 2012
• ISBN: 9780226491523

Book preview

Jan L. Logemann is the editor of The Development of Consumer Credit in Global Perspective. A research fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C., he is also the director of its Transatlantic Perspectives project.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2012 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2012.

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-49149-3 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-49152-3 (e-book)

ISBN-10: 0-226-49149-8 (cloth)

ISBN-10: 0-226-49152-8 (e-book)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Logemann, Jan L., author.

Trams or tailfins? : public and private prosperity in postwar West Germany and the United States / Jan L. Logemann.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-49149-3 (cloth : alkaline paper)

ISBN-10: 0-226-49149-8 (cloth : alkaline paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-49152-3 (e-book)

ISBN-10: 0-226-49152-8 (e-book) 1. Consumer behavior—United States— History—20th century. 2. Consumer behavior—Germany (West)—History. 3. United States—Economic conditions—1945– 4. Germany (West)— Economic conditions. I. Title.

HF5415.33.U6l64 2013

339.4'7094309044—dc23

2012004827

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Trams or Tailfins?

Public and Private Prosperity in Postwar West Germany and the United States

JAN L. LOGEMANN

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

Contents

List of Figures

List of Tables

Abbreviations

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION: Divergent Paths to Mass Consumer Modernity: Comparing West Germany and the United States

PART 1. State—Private Consumption and the Framework of Public Policy

Introduction to Part One

1. The Politics of Mass Consumption: Balancing Public and Private Consumption in Postwar West Germany and the United States

2. Public and Private Consumption in Affluent Societies: Divergent Approaches to Consumer Policy during the 1960s

PART 2. Society—The Social Significance of Consumption

Introduction to Part Two

3. What the People Want: Consumer Aspirations and the Social Meaning of Consumption

4. Menace or Promise? Credit Financing in Two Postwar Consumer Societies

PART 3. Space—Urban and Suburban Spaces of Consumption

Introduction to Part Three

5. Urban and Suburban Living: Public Development and Private Consumption

6. Shaping the Postwar Consumer City: Urban and Suburban Patterns of Postwar Retailing

CONCLUSION

Notes

Index

Figures

1 Publicly planned West German consumption spaces

2 American automobilized shopping

3 Saturday Evening Post, August 15, 1959

4 Phelps, Using Instalment Credit

5 Cheyney, Using Our Credit Intelligently

6 Der Spiegel, February 11, 1953

7 Owner-occupied housing (graph)

8 Levittown, Pennsylvania, 1950

9 Bremen, Neue Vahr, 1960

10 Streetcar in downtown Karlsruhe, 1961

11 Southdale Center, Minneapolis, 1957

12 Self-service store, Bremen, 1957

13 Hohe Strasse, Cologne, 1968

Tables

1 Private consumption as a percentage of GNP

2 Public spending as a percentage of GDP

3 Personal consumption expenditures, United States

4 Personal consumption expenditures, West Germany

5 Durable goods in percentages of West German and US households

6 New private housing units started, United States

7 Passengers using public transportation, United States

Abbreviations

AFL—American Federation of Labor

AGV—Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Verbraucherverbände

BLS—Bureau of Labor Statistics

BUARCH—Bundesarchiv Koblenz

CDU—Christliche Demokratische Union

CEA—Council of Economic Advisers

CIO—Congress of Industrial Organizations

CIS—Congressional Information Service

ECA—Economic Cooperation Administration

FDA—Food and Drug Administration

FHA—Federal Housing Administration

FNMA—Federal National Mortgage Association

FTC—Federal Trade Commission

GDP—Gross Domestic Product

GNP—Gross National Product

HstA Köln—Historisches Archiv Stadt Köln

ICC—Interstate Commerce Commission

IMA—Interministerieller Ausschuss

MCUSPD—Monthly Catalog of United States Public Documents

NAM—National Association of Manufacturers

NRA—National Recovery Administration

NRPB—National Resources Planning Board

NYT—New York Times

OECD—Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development

OPA—Office of Price Administration

RKW—Rationalisierungs-Kuratorium der Deutschen Wirtschaft

SMSA—Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area

SPD—Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands

VA—Veterans Administration

VAT—Value Added Tax

Acknowledgments

This book was a long time in the making and has benefited in the process from the guidance, help, and advice of many colleagues, friends, and teachers. The book has grown out of research begun at the Pennsylvania State University. I owe much to Greg Eghigian, Adam Rome, and John Christman for their insightful comments and encouraging support. Gary Cross, in particular, has helped me shape my thoughts and questions and has been a wonderful mentor, guiding me into the world of academia, a Doktorvater in the truest sense of the word.

The Penn State academic community proved to be a tremendously nurturing environment for this project. In numerous courses and workshops, I have received valuable input and feedback from Greg Roeber, Robert Proctor, Philip Jenkins, Donna Bahry, Sophie De Schaepdrijver, Deryk Holdsworth, and many others. I am grateful to the Department of History for several research and travel grants that have allowed me to conduct and present my work. The Institute for Arts and Humanities’ generous support allowed me to begin the writing process in the reflective atmosphere of the cottage. Pattee Library and its helpful Interlibrary Loan Service allowed me convenient access to a vast array of sources and materials. A great community of peers in the Penn State graduate program not only made my experience there a very enjoyable one but also helped tremendously in the development of my research. Jana Byars, Robert Faber, Mary Faulkner, David Hensley, Padraigh Higgins, Matt Isham, Alexander Krivonosov, Mary Miles, Russell Spinney, and Jason Strandquist have read chapter drafts or helped me think through the project.

Many others outside of Penn State had their share in the conception and development of this project. A number of interests and ideas that inform the book first took shape during my master’s studies at Humboldt University of Berlin and the Free University–John F. Kennedy Institute. I am grateful to Hartmut Kaelble and Constantin Goschler for guiding me early in my studies toward questions of consumption. Many of my peers from Humboldt have remained good friends and much-appreciated sounding boards for my work, including Tillmann Lohse, Sebastian Ullrich, Gordon Lemm, Stefan Uhlmann, and Gregor Rinn. During conferences, workshops, and the like, I have greatly benefited from conversations and exchanges with Marten Barfuss, Arndt Bauernkämper, Andrew Bergerson, Lizabeth Cohen, Matthew Hilton, Kathy Pence, and Adelheid von Saldern.

Since I left Penn State, the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC, has provided me with an ideal intellectual environment and set of resources for anyone completing a manuscript dealing with the history of mass consumption from a comparative transatlantic perspective. I am especially grateful to Hartmut Berghoff and Uwe Spiekermann for their interest in my project and to the many colleagues and friends who have commented on my work in the context of the institute’s research seminar. My time at the GHI began in November 2008, when I was able to present, at the Decoding Consumption workshop, portions of my work to an audience of specialized consumer historians for the first time. This book has also benefited from the questions, suggestions, and interest of many current and former fellows and coworkers, including Uta Balbier, Carola Dietze, Philipp Gassert, Heather Hester, David Kuchenbuch, Christina Lubinski, Ines Prodoehl, Jonas Scherner, Mark Stoneman, Sebastian Teupe, Corinna Unger, and others. David Lazar has been of particular help as I began to navigate my way through the world of American academic publishing. Of course, my editorial team at the University of Chicago Press—Douglas Mitchell, Margaret Mahan, and Tim McGovern—as well as two anonymous reviewers contributed tremendously to the successful transformation of my manuscript into a more readable and polished book.

Some portions of the research and ideas contained in this book have already been published elsewhere. Aspects of chapter 2 are—in a revised form—contained in Is It in the Interest of the Consumer to Pay Taxes? Transatlantic Differences in Postwar Approaches to Public Consumption, Journal of Consumer Culture 11 (2011): 339–65. Chapter 4 appeared in revised form in Different Paths to Mass Consumption: Consumer Credit in the United States and West Germany during the 1950s and ’60s, Journal of Social History 41 (2008): 525–59. The section on pedestrian malls in Chapter 6 was published in German in a different form as Einkaufsparadies und ‘Gute Stube’: Fußgängerzonen in Westdeutschen Innenstädten der 1950er bis 1970er Jahre, in Stadt und Kommunikation in bundesrepublikanischen Umbruchszeiten, edited by Adelheid v. Saldern (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner 2006), 103–22. Some parts of chapter 6, finally, have also appeared in Where to Shop? The Geography of Consumption in the Twentieth Century Atlantic World, GHI Bulletin 45 (Fall 2009): 55–68, and in Consumption and Space: Inner-City Pedestrian Malls and the Consequences of Changing Consumer Geographies, in Decoding Modern Consumer Societies, edited by Hartmut Berghoff and Uwe Spiekermann (New York: Palgrave, 2012).

There are many institutions to which I would like to express my gratitude because they have enabled me to conduct or present my research. The Bundesarchiv in Koblenz (especially Barbara Limberg), the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin, the Stadtarchiv Kassel, the Stadtarchiv Köln (which unfortunately no longer exists), the Bremer Zentrum für Baukultur (especially Eberhard Syring), the Otto-Suhr-Institute’s Pressearchiv, the Historische Komission Bremen Niedersachsen, and the Library of Congress need to be mentioned in particular.

While I benefited greatly from the help of colleagues, friends, and teachers, my family has been the most reliable source of support in this long process. I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to my parents Fritz and Gisela, my brother Hans, and my wife Beth. I dedicate this book to my children Sebastian Louis and Eva Marie, who have grown up so unbelievably much while this book was being conceived and written.

INTRODUCTION

Divergent Paths to Mass Consumer Modernity: Comparing West Germany and the United States

Over the course of the postwar boom era, mass consumer affluence transformed Western societies in Europe and North America alike. By the mid-1970s, after nearly thirty years of sustained growth, West Germany had become an affluent consumer society. The deprivation of the war and postwar years was an increasingly distant memory among German consumers, as was the nationalist drive for autarchy of the National Socialist era. West Germans, much like their contemporaries elsewhere in Western Europe and North America, were increasingly enmeshed in a transnational consumer marketplace with globally advertised brands, multinational corporations, and seemingly ubiquitous mass-market retailers such as supermarkets and shopping centers. By some accounts West Germans had become part of America’s irresistible empire of consumer goods, whose twentieth-century success story had been aided by its cold war influence on Western Europe during the 1950s and ’60s.¹ Following an American model, the consumerist wave of the future would entail a global convergence of lifestyles centered on the suburban home, automobiles, durable goods, and shopping on credit.

This midcentury globalization or Americanization of consumption had clear limits, however. The newly affluent West Germans of the 1970s hardly conformed to any globalized consumer standard.² For all the talk about single-family homes, many of them lived in apartments and seemed to enjoy it. While stories about suburbs filled the pages of news magazines across the Atlantic world, a substantial portion of West German consumers expressed a preference for urban living. If household appliances and the latest consumer electronics occupied the minds of postwar shoppers, Germans refused to go to great lengths—let alone into debt—to obtain them. Whereas supermarkets and shopping centers were hailed as the latest innovation in retailing, the corner grocery and the downtown specialty store remained central to German neighborhoods and towns. More important than what one possessed, consumer surveys suggested, was the quality of one’s living environment: shops within walking distance, public and cultural facilities nearby, and—of central importance—proximity to public transportation.³ Despite West Germans’ clear fascination with cars, their postwar standard of living had more to do with trams and trolleys than with chrome and tailfins.

In this respect, their contrast to American consumers was glaring. In postwar America, the pursuit of the suburban American dream and a standard package of consumer goods had become widely accepted as a marker of middle-class respectability and a good life.⁴ During the 1950s and ’60s, the United States appeared to embody modern consumerism, producing a plethora of affordable goods offered conveniently at new mass retailing outlets. West German consumers, retailers, and policy makers followed American developments closely and with fascination. Yet they did not import or copy the American model of mass consumption wholesale. In tackling the question of why these two countries pursued different paths to consumerist modernity, I trace the influence of three factors—the state, society, and space—on twentieth-century mass consumption in West Germany and the United States.⁵ How did public policy frame consumption patterns? In what ways did social and cultural norms shape consumer behavior and expectations? How were consumption and shopping geographically embedded within the metropolitan landscape?

By emphasizing differences, a structural comparison of two Western mass consumer societies serves to question popular narratives about a global homogenization of consumption. Mass consumption certainly has become a global phenomenon today that transcends national boundaries. Multinational corporations such as Daimler produce their goods for international markets. A German advertising agency developed the latest global marketing campaign for American fast-food giant McDonald’s. Teenage consumers across the continents aspire to the same brands and shop at the same—or at least very similar—retail outlets.⁶ Recently, historians have rightfully emphasized the transnational nature of consumer markets, product communication, and even consumer organizations.⁷ Mass consumption has become a phenomenon that defies national borders and often the regulatory power of the state as well. And this is by no means a recent phenomenon; marketing and advertising as well as new consumer trends have criss-crossed the Atlantic world since the late nineteenth century or even earlier.⁸ Such transnational connections are an important part of the story in this book: both Germans and Americans have crossed the Atlantic on study trips and trade missions, as consumers, retailing experts, and public planners.

Still, consumer cultures have largely developed within national contexts, and only a close comparative reading can unearth the significant differences that continue to underlie these advanced consumer societies. What makes the comparison so meaningful in the case of West Germany and the United States is the mix of commonalities and differences between the two largest industrial economies of the post–World War II decades. The comparative approach highlights the social choices taken by actors in each society and elucidates the respective forms that modern consumption took in each country. For example, whereas American retailers, consumers, and policy makers collaborated in the creation of suburban shopping centers across the United States, Germans retained retailing within traditional urban centers by constructing and frequenting inner-city pedestrian shopping streets. More than a superficial difference in the geography of shopping, I argue, pedestrian malls and numerous other examples from neighborhood shopping to the use of savings loans and public transportation added up to a substantially different societal engagement with modern consumer goods. When it comes to consumption, Germans (and other Europeans) are to this day—in the words of American historian Richad Pells—not like us.⁹

The options available to business leaders, policy makers, planners, and consumers in both countries were certainly shaped by larger economic structures.¹⁰ After World War II, the United States found itself in a period of unparalleled affluence, fueled by American economic prowess worldwide and a set of economic growth policies that rested on domestic mass-market consumption. West Germany, by contrast, initially had to concentrate on reconstruction rather than consumption. Income levels did not compare to those of the United States, and recovery frequently followed existing paths of German economic development that favored exports over the mass production of consumer goods for the domestic market. Despite such constraints, however, the sustained growth of the economic miracle during the broader Western boom era (roughly from the late 1940s to the crisis of the early 1970s), which frames this study, soon did afford Germans with choices.¹¹

Nonetheless, American and German consumer societies did not converge. German consumers shopped differently, frequently desired different goods, and financed their consumption in ways different from those of their American counterparts. Much has been written about the supposed Americanization of West German society, especially in the wake of World War II and the Marshall Plan recovery efforts.¹² Today we find a substantial literature about the Americanization of German business and retailing through the adoption of modern (i.e. American) management, production, and distribution methods. Similarly scholars have discussed the Americanization of German popular and youth culture as well as everyday consumption habits.¹³ To many contemporaries, all this suggested rationalization and increased efficiency in German business as well as the adoption of more democratic attitudes in everyday German life. Especially to bourgeois elites, by contrast, Americanized consumption also signified, in a more negative way, a debased and materialistic mass culture.

But—whichever way it may have been perceived—Americanization had its limits. The term implies a unidirectional and wholesale adoption of cultural practices, which were in reality subject to much more complex processes of adaptation and appropriation. The United States was hardly the only source of influence. There was a broader Western European social convergence at the time, and some German scholars have suggested that the term Westernization more accurately explains German transformation.¹⁴ The comparative perspective also provides a clear understanding of the very deep-reaching transformation of American consumer society during the postwar decades. If West German consumption became Americanized during the 1950s and ’60s, the same could be said for consumption patterns across the United States itself. Even more important than transfers and convergence, finally, were the often vastly contrasting choices made by consumers, businesses, and policy makers on both sides of the Atlantic.

Rather than transnational adaptation, the social choices made by Americans and West Germans suggest alternative and competing consumer modernities.¹⁵ The term modern was certainly all-pervasive in discourses surrounding consumption at the middle of the twentieth century. Its meaning remained somewhat opaque, oscillating between the simply new or technologically innovative and broader notions of social rationalization and efficient organization. Many commentators in the 1950s and ’60s shared in a popular view that modernization was a linear process of social, economic, and political improvement, culminating in a convergence with American conditions.¹⁶ But the historical record shows that we need a more complex understanding of social development, allowing for multiple modernities and therefore multiple manifestations of modern mass consumption.

The emphasis on public consumption provides one of the most specific examples of West Germany’s contrast to the United States, especially in the 1970s.¹⁷ Deputy minister of economics Philip Rosenthal explained the vision of consumer policy of the then governing Social Democrats: Consumption is not just material consumption, and consumption is not just private consumption: consumption [spans from] the car to education, from caviar to the hospital bed [ . . . ], and from stereo systems to the urban landscape.¹⁸ Public consumption, the provision of publicly funded alternatives to private consumer goods and services in areas ranging from housing to transportation or entertainment, has received too little attention from historians of consumption. In part, this is due to a common perception that the American model of modern mass consumption, based on advertising, technological innovation, and private domestic goods in a free market economy is the norm. But we need to broaden our understanding of consumption, particularly for the postwar decades.¹⁹ The cold war was in large measure fought over consumption, with two political systems competing over standards of living and what constitutes the good life trying to win the hearts and minds of consumers. Especially at the European frontlines of the cold war, this fight concerned not just which system produced the most cars, kitchen appliances, or consumer gadgetry, but also which provided adequate housing and transportation, and a more broadly conceived standard of living.²⁰

FIGURE 1. Publicly planned West German consumption spaces, Bremen-Vahr, 1960. Small but modern shops within walking distance of publicly supported housing complexes were a typical feature of Germany’s postwar affluent society. Photo by Simon Müller. Bundesarchiv.

Historians of consumption during the cold war era need to correct the bias toward private consumption and recognize the role of the public sector. A recent and growing literature on consumption in socialist Eastern Europe has emphasized the close interrelation between state policies and personal spending in those societies.²¹ West Germany’s social market economy, to be sure, was no planned economy, and policy makers here paid more than lip service to market-liberal ideas of consumer sovereignty. Still, even under the leadership of the conservative Christian Democrats (CDU), who governed for much of the 1950s and ’60s, consumer markets were much more tightly regulated than in the United States, and public funding and services became available for a growing array of consumer needs. While the American consumers’ republic was no mere market creature either, since government intervention greatly aided the middle-class consumer’s suburban dream,²² the contrast in political engagement was remarkable.

FIGURE 2. American automobilized shopping at suburban shopping center, Smithtown, NY, 1954. The car and spacious shopping malls became hallmarks of postwar American consumption and its sprawling suburban developments. Photo by Gottscho-Schleisner, Inc. . Library of Congress.

Such alternative conceptions and models of mass consumption had broader implications. Public planning and differences in spatial layout, for example, led to vastly different metropolitan landscapes, with significant consequences for the social composition of cities and the relative environmental footprint of individual consumers.²³ Above all, however, West Germans and Americans saw the relationship between individuals as consumers and that between individuals as citizens very differently. Much attention has recently been paid to the impact of the consumer mind-set on American politics and to the consumer as citizen. The disposable income of consumers had come to play an ever more important role in American politics over the course of the twentieth century. As Americans came to identify themselves increasingly as consumers, any tax infringement on the pay envelope seemed a threat to newly gained social status. The rise of postwar conservatism in the United States was aided by the tendency of American middle-class consumers to look to everyday low prices for consumer goods rather than to public services as a means to better their lives.²⁴ This circumscribed notion of the consumer citizen came not only from national but also from local politics and from policies that limited government at the suburban and municipal levels.

West Germany provides a telling contrast to this culture. On the one hand, middle-class German consumers were traditionally much less inclined to equate material consumption with social improvement. On the other hand, they remained much more open to the notion of supporting public consumption as they themselves were often beneficiaries of such goods and services. Middle-class consumers, not just the poor, used public transportation, moved into apartments developed with public funding, and enjoyed shopping in the downtown pedestrian zones urban planners had devised. While American subsidies for private consumption often remained hidden from public view, German consumers exerted equally high demands both on their commercially produced cars and on their public train service.

Many of the features of West Germany’s model of mass consumer modernity—the emphasis on state regulation and public consumption, more socially segmented consumption patterns, and the urban setting of shopping and spending—were shared, with variations, across Western Europe. Given the growing European integration over the second half of the twentieth century, I hope to contribute to recent discussion about a European way and broader transatlantic differences in social models.²⁵ Even beyond Europe, similarities between West German and Japanese consumers—when it came, for example, to financing consumption and the reluctant embrace of consumer credit—suggest that American consumer modernity was hardly irresistible worldwide. Instead of being a global model for twentieth-century consumption, the United States remained in many ways a peculiar case.²⁶

My study shows how these differences were revealed during the boom era of 1945 to 1973. I explore them by focusing in turn on the development of consumer policy (chapters 1–2), the social meaning of consumption (chapters 3–4), and the geographic configuration of postwar mass consumer societies (chapters 5–6).

Part I discusses the political framework of consumption in broad terms. This means more than market regulation and consumer rights and protection. It also concerns economic and social policies that shaped different patterns of production and distribution. While the consumer citizen’s private spending became central to postwar American conceptions of economic and social progress, an alternative conception of social citizenship gained more traction on the other side of the Atlantic. It posited the satisfaction of at least basic consumption needs as a social right for every citizen.²⁷ The tension between private consumer affluence and its counterpart in public goods and social spending ran through the boom era and informed the politics of mass consumption in important ways.

Chapter 1 sets out to contrast consumer politics in both countries from this perspective. In the United States, a broad political consensus—involving the state as well as unions and industry—emerged around the expansion of purchasing power during the 1940s.²⁸ Mass consumption became an instrument of economic growth in the emerging cold war economy. This Keynesian emphasis on expanded mass consumption went hand in hand with a deregulation of the consumer marketplace in the 1950s and ’60s as shopping hours expanded and restrictions on retail pricing disappeared or were poorly enforced. A mass distribution economy emerged in postwar America, which promised abundance for most citizens at an affordable price.

The contrast with the West German case reveals how central mass consumption really was to postwar American politics. While the social market economy set up by the West German economics minister Ludwig Erhard and other liberal modernizers after 1948 revolved around the right to free consumer choices, the politics of mass consumption took a different shape in West Germany.²⁹ To be sure, reconstruction required government-sanctioned saving, capital buildup, and exports rather than domestic consumer spending. The social market economy too continued to remain more committed to public spending and social security than its American counterpart. The postwar expansion of the West German social-security state was owed in part to the direct competition with East Germany’s socialist economy, and public spending was an important component of the 1950’s economic miracle. Even under the conservative CDU government, prosperity for all included the notion that at least some access to newfound abundance would be provided by the state.

Chapter 2 looks at policy responses to the debate on private affluence and public poverty. In the 1960s, American critiques of private affluence had little political impact. Instead, US consumer policy during that decade remained largely limited to product safety and other consumer protection legislation. In West Germany, spending on public goods from publicly subsidized housing to public transportation and urban development remained high. This culminated in the explicit recognition of both private and public forms of consumption by the governing Social Democrats by the late 1960s and into the ’70s. As a result, each country developed a very different balance between private and public goods as well as a different means of access to the growing affluence of the boom era.

Part two turns to consumers and their engagement with growing postwar affluence. In chapter 3, I take a look at the development of household spending patterns and consumer aspirations and attitudes, drawing conclusions about the contrasting social meaning of consumption, especially for middle-class Americans and West Germans.³⁰ This analysis brings out the importance of class and status differences in the shaping of those consumer societies.³¹ Postwar America was marked by the widening adoption of a middle-class consumption pattern centered on the home, the durables that fill it, and the car. While the consumer market was segmented and products were offered in a growing number of variations and price gradations, postwar America was truly a mass market in that it advertised the same basic set of goods, the same American standard of abundance, to the vast majority of the population. The postwar economic miracle introduced consumer affluence to West Germany as well, but West Germans continued to spend comparatively more on food and Genussmittel (semiluxury foods), while expenses for housing, transportation, or household durable equipment never caught up to American levels. Equally important, household spending patterns continued to be more stratified by class differences.

Middle-class attitudes toward consumption played a vital role in explaining these differences. Increasingly since 1900, middle-class Americans sought social distinction through the purchase of the newest and most improved goods. They also had acquired the attitude of bargain hunters, rationally searching for bargains to maximize their attainment of consumer goods. Other groups in American society followed their lead on a sliding scale of quality gradations. By contrast, middle-class West Germans remained somewhat skeptical of American styles of shopping and what they perceived as an overt American materialism. While historians have emphasized the degree to which postwar consumption challenged older cultural hierarchies, the comparative perspective underscores the continuity of what I call a bürgerlich ethos of consumption, which emphasized restraint, saving, and buying only few and high-priced but quality goods. Mass consumption in postwar America met the promise of a more egalitarian society based on an expanding basket of durable goods (including homes). In Germany, by contrast, material consumption was a much less accepted means of climbing into the middle class, and a culture of Bürgerlichkeit perpetuated differences between the middle and the working classes into the 1960s.³²

This difference in social meaning becomes especially clear when the financing of consumer goods is discussed in Chapter 4. The dramatic expansion of consumer credit in the United States after the war is a distinctive feature of the expansion of consumer culture across American society.³³ In West Germany, consumer goods were more likely financed through household savings. Saving rather than spending defined Bürgerlichkeit or middle-class status in the eyes of many West Germans, separating them from the working class.

The differences between the two consumer societies are to this day most palpable in their metropolitan geography. Part three explores the spatial transformation of metropolitan space through mass consumption. Chapter 5 traces the development of housing and transportation and their impact on the metropolitan landscape. As is well known, suburban home ownership became the norm in the United States, while renting and apartment housing were increasingly the exception for middle-class consumers.³⁴ Less acknowledged is the accompanying decline in public housing and public transportation. Middle-class and increasingly working-class Americans left the cities for the suburbs in droves during the 1950s and 60s with dramatic consequences for the metropolitan balance of private and public consumption. While West Germany also saw a trend toward the detached, single-family home (Eigenheim) and the private automobile, West Germans rebuilt their cities and urban life rather than fleeing to the suburbs after World War II.³⁵ Urban living entailed a greater acceptance of public transportation and other public goods, which faced dramatic decline in the car-dependent and socially segregated suburbs of America.

The geographic development of retailing discussed in Chapter 6 mirrors the broader urban / suburban differences observed in housing and transportation. Postwar retail stores were subject to local and national embedding.³⁶ American retailing shifted increasingly to the suburbs with the spread of shopping centers and large discounters.³⁷ More urban forms of retailing prevailed in West Germany, with distinct forms of neighborhood and downtown shopping. State regulation protected smaller neighborhood retailers, and middle-class culture perpetuated a preference for quality goods at downtown specialty retailers. In the United States, municipal zoning regulations and private developers kept new suburban subdivisions almost devoid of neighborhood retailers. Urban planners in West Germany, by contrast, often constructed new housing and apartment developments around neighborhood shopping centers and supplied public transportation connections to inner-city retailers.

Alarmed by the decline of traditional downtowns and main streets in America, West Germans consciously tried to keep consumers within their cities. The most important example of this is the construction of Fußgängerzonen (pedestrian malls) since the 1950s. While the malls of postwar America have privatized shopping space, pedestrian malls in German inner cities have helped to conserve public space and more traditional forms of retailing. My comparative perspective shows that mass consumption was not necessarily the end of a culture of urbanity; nor did it bring about a globally uniform postmodern metropolitan space. From the West German—and, more broadly, European—perspective, the suburban pattern of living and shopping (as well as the energy-intensive and automobile-centered pattern of consumption that came with it) remained largely characteristic of the United States.

All of these patterns, the political, the social, and the spatial, reveal subtle but important differences. Despite the importance of global economic trends, increased affluence does not necessarily lead to the same social or cultural model, nor to an Americanized consumer world. It may well be that the American model is the exception rather than the leading edge. We have to recognize the importance and persistence of national differences in the second half of the twentieth century.

PART ONE

State—Private Consumption and the Framework of Public Policy

The state has been a central force in shaping modern consumer societies: private consumption has always been framed by public policy. Since the late nineteenth century in particular, the regulation of retail and consumer goods gained in importance as consumers organized politically and the standard of living became a focus of wage and price policies.¹ While the political debates on both sides on the Atlantic frequently dealt with similar problems, the emerging consumer societies in Germany and the United States were embedded in profoundly different political economies—revealed clearly in the years after World War I—which produced distinct patterns of consumer economic regulation and balances between private and public consumption.

While the United States was increasingly geared toward competitive large-scale mass production and distribution of private consumer goods, with very limited state intervention, Germany produced a more organized capitalism that saw a great deal of both state and corporate regulation.² As American industry and consumers rallied around the promise of material abundance through Fordist mass production at ever lower prices, Europeans by and large held on to a consumer society that was shaped by the tastes of the bourgeois elite and centered on small shops and craft production.³

German consumers, far more than Americans, looked to the state to regulate central aspects of everyday consumption and to ensure a basic standard of living.⁴ During the Weimar years, the German political economy saw an expansion of public consumption in the form of increased welfare as well as expanded social security that grounded citizenship more strongly in social rights than in the United States. While its policies were neither comprehensive nor uncontroversial, the German state was more willing to address standard-of-living questions by means of public redistribution and public consumption.⁵ On the local level, municipal socialism did much to broaden the array of public goods available to consumers, from energy and transportation to housing and cultural entertainment.⁶

In 1920s America, by contrast, improving the standard of living was primarily left to market forces, while the more regulatory and interventionist state of the Progressive era gave way to welfare capitalist schemes. The private-public welfare state of employer-based health insurance and pension systems that would come to full fruition during the 1950s and ’60s had its roots in the rise of group insurance models during the post–World War I period.⁷ The American path to raising the consumer’s standard of living was centered on private disposable income. The pocketbook politics that emerged in the first decades of the twentieth century focused on the increasing availability of consumer goods at affordable prices.⁸ A plethora of brand-name goods became nationally available, and advertising copy sought to create a national consumer culture and consumer identities that revolved around the use of consumer products.⁹

Consumer products became not only more available but also more affordable to Americans by the 1920s. An expansion in the use consumer credit, for one, played a central role in the creation of a broad middle market, which neutralized some existing class-based differences in consumption patterns.¹⁰ More fundamentally, however, the American mass production regime, which was in many ways symbolized by Henry Ford’s assembly-line production of the low-price Model T automobile, rested on the promise of higher wages as in Ford’s introduction of the five-dollar workday in 1914. Consumer products thus grew—if unevenly—more affordable to the workers that produced them in the 1920s. While still limited, widely contested, and introduced somewhat haphazardly during the 1920s and ’30s, the postwar compromise around market-organized mass production and mass consumption was prefigured in important ways during the interwar period.¹¹

The American economic model certainly appealed to many Europeans as a vision of cultural democratization and material improvement. Talk of Americanisms—the interwar equivalent of Americanization—was part and parcel of Weimar public discourse. Numerous aspects of an emerging consumer society could be found in 1920s Germany as well; modern retail structures such as the department store had found their way into the major urban centers of Germany as early as the end of the nineteenth century.¹² To many Germans, however, from intellectuals and social elites to industrialists and the vast number of small shopkeepers, the American model also presented a severe challenge. Department stores were at the center of heated public debates—frequently infused with anti-Semitic undertones—about changes in retail structure and the potential consequences to traditional small shopkeepers.¹³ While small retailers were perhaps no match for chain stores and other American mass distribution retailers of the time, they still wielded enough political clout to challenge American-style mass distribution systems. Producers similarly were often resistant to new forms of marketing-driven strategies and price-driven competition and instead emphasized a traditional focus on quality