Sibylle Brändli. Der Supermarkt im Kopf: Konsumkultur und Wohlstand in der Schweiz nach 1945. Wien: Böhlau Verlag/Wien, 2000. 271 S. $122.33 (paper), ISBN 978-3-205-99264-6.
Reviewed by Henry Wend (History Department, University School of Milwaukee)
Published on H-German (August, 2005)
Paper or Plastic?
That Western Europe became more prosperous after 1945 than it had been before the Second World War is indisputable. A material quality of life that previously had been solely the province of the middle and upper classes percolated down to the working classes. This development of Europe's consumer market after 1945 has been the subject of a rising tide of scholarship. Most of these works revolve around the theme of an "Americanization" of European production and consumption habits. These studies have tended to focus, on the one hand, on consumer behavior, as mirrored in macro-level economic data, which suggests that Europeans consumed more and on a broader basis after 1945 than they had before 1939, although the emergence of a consumer mindset was restrained by a mindset molded by scarcity.[1] Alternately, recent studies focus on such artifacts as blue jeans, Elvis, American movies, and Coca Cola to prove European inculcation of American consumer values.[2] Some scholars also have noted that Europeans did resist the American model, or that they modified the American message and adapted it to the European context.[3] Sibylle Brändli's work looks at the inception of a consumer society in Switzerland after 1945. In this book, she unlocks visions of consumption, consumerism, and abundance from the viewpoints of the producer, the retailer and the consumer. In so doing, she covers familiar ground from a fresh perspective that reveals the meaning of prosperity and abundance to the consumers themselves.
Throughout this study, Brändli uses three questions to assess four interrelated interpretative "bundles" concerning the emerging Swiss consumer mindset (pp. 13-15). The questions are: how were the sale and demand of goods newly rearranged as a "practice"? Second, what were the contours and subject position of the consumer? Third, how was the concept of abundance reworked and understood in political and economic discourses after 1945? To accomplish her goal, she uses four conceptual "bundles" of questions to investigate her sources. First, what did the new consumption promise to consumers? Second, how was the concept of "abundance" gendered? Third, how did the discourse over consumption promote the processes of nationalism and internationalism, which simultaneously helped to promote homogeneity in the concept of social mobility and heterogeneity in the form of individualism? Fourth, how were ethical norms used to determine the legitimacy of the cultural practice of consumerism? Brändli employs these questions and bundles in tandem with a panoply of literary theory to investigate the cultural expression of commercialization and mass consumerism in Switzerland after World War II.
Brändli uses the advent of the self-service grocery store as an instrument to examine the shift in the European consumer mindset before, during and after the Second World War. Brändli divides her work into three parts--exploring the decision by the Migros retailing firm to introduce self-service in order to examine the physical dimensions of the new consumerism, looking at the role played by the Gesellschaft für Marktforschung (GfM) in shaping the social discourse about the meanings of consumerism, and interpreting four different texts to highlight the consensual and conflicting dimensions of the new consumerism.
After an introduction of moderate length in which she situates her work in the literature on cultural studies, Brändli explores the introduction of self-service to the Migros chain of retail stores. The transition from a mindset of scarcity to one dominated by dreams of abundance occurred in the 1940s in Switzerland. In this first section of the book, Brändli adroitly traces the antecedents to the shift to self-service to pre-war and wartime planning by the Migros management, which sought to provide its new self-service stores with store loyalty and the "Migros ideal" (p. 59). This played into the competition between the Migros chain and Switzerland's consumer cooperatives, which used "Americanization" as a pejorative to attack Migros's shift to self-service (pp. 66-67). However, by the 1950s, the cooperatives had to renovate their stores to the self-service model to compete with Migros.
She then examines how the spatial dimensions of shopping brought together the "partners of rationalization and abundance" (p. 78). In this section, she notes the emergence of what previously had been missing in the European consumer mindset before 1945: namely, the disjunction between the producer, the retailer, and the consumer. As Mary Nolan and others have pointed out, the major inhibition to the emergence of a consumer mindset in Europe after the First World War was the assumption, on the part of European business and technical elites, that raising productivity alone would spur consumption. This proved not to be the case, and the "bourgeois" dimensions of consumerism persisted, with mass consumption held at bay by class inhibitions, low wages, and an underdeveloped consumer mentality.[4] With the introduction of self service at Migros, however, Brändli demonstrates that the store management consciously worked with producers, advertisers, and architects to lay out the stores and to package the goods with the consumer in mind. For instance, Migros management employed consumer surveys to better place goods to interest consumers with the idea that "all of the goods [should] work as an ensemble" and to give the idea of never ending abundance (p. 89). Packaging was encouraged to inform and entice the consumer. Shop windows fulfilled much the same purpose. I found Brändli's use of illustrations and drawings of stores particularly useful. These drawings demonstrate the Foucauldian ritualization of patterns of consumption, with the layout of these stores serving to "discipline" consumer desires and actions (pp. 90-96).
Brändli's second section investigates the introduction of market research as a force that shaped Swiss concepts of consumerism. Here, she gets into the central dilemma of all advertisers: what makes the customer tick? Brändli looks into this as a means to discover the emergence of an ideal type of consumer, which marketers and manufacturers could use to tailor goods to fit consumer tastes. In this manner, Brändli links past mentalities of scarcity with the future mentality of abundance as it converged in the emergence of the academic field of marketing under the auspices of the GfM. Brändli uncovers a mentality on the part of GfM president Peter Kaufman that antedated the war and had sought a transformative moment to move Switzerland to a free-market society of unbridled consumerism. Brändli chronicles the GfM's postwar activities, especially its use of surveys, exchanges, and conferences, all of which sought to link producers with consumers through market research and advertising. The GfM used experience with rationing to develop a vision of abundance and consumption much closer to American advertising during the Second World War. In this respect, the war awoke the vision of the democratization of consumption (pp. 128-129).
Brändli then turns to gender and consumption. She argues that the discourse of consumption, as presented by the GfM, generated discursive gender boundaries that dominated postwar Switzerland. Advertising and marketing research concentrated on the "facts" that rational impulses guided male consumption choices, while women were portrayed as irrational consumers. Brändli examines the work of Arthur Lisowsky, the original occupant of the chair for the seminar on trade and advertising at St. Gallen (pp. 134 ff), a transitional figure who linked traditional European studies with American sources to shape Europe's postwar field of market research. Lisowsky and his students carried out a number of surveys that typified consumers by age, gender and social class and connected this to advertising (p. 141). Swiss researchers then examined Lisowsky's work through the lens of Freudian analysis to create a hierarchy of needs divided between passions and obsessions (pp. 150-156). Brändli concludes this section with an analysis of the emergence of consumer protection, and the image of the need for an advocate for consumers versus unscrupulous advertisers. This movement, beginning in the 1960s, coincided with the emerging image of women as "rational" housewives and consumers. Brändli links this development with the women's rights movement in Switzerland in the 1960s and 1970s (pp. 175-178). Ultimately, Brändli finds that maternalistic and paternalistic relationships developed between consumers and stores like Migros, as advertisers were successful in melding consumption patterns and the post war image of the consumer, into brand and corporate loyalty (pp. 199-201).
Brändli's third section investigates the figure of the consumer as a part of the nation-building process and the emergence of national identity. To do this, Brändli examines essays from the 1950s and early 1960s that reveal how the concept of affluence became imbedded in the national and individual consciousness of the Swiss. Again, Brändli returns to the market as a gendered construct, especially in the idea of the "sex appeal" of material goods. This section also looks at the legitimation of consumer society as a function of the Cold War and a perception of the "developed" versus the "under-developed" (pp. 210-211). The tension in this section is between national identity and consumerism as a tool in international affairs and as a comparative device when comparing national development with the United States, on the one hand, and the Third World, on the other. She uses travel reports to discuss reactions of the Swiss to the United States, and how such reactions shaped Swiss self-identification as a developed nation (pp. 211-221). Brändli then examines the gendered limits of consumerism, by examining how Swiss women viewed consumerism as infantilizing versus liberating. Lastly, she explores the extent of "Americanization" and the democratization of consumerism.
Brändli has supplemented her research in archival material with a thorough examination of periodicals and secondary literature. However, readers seeking a chronological examination of the emergence of consumerism in Switzerland and its interplay with politics and society will be disappointed. Brändli has topically selected historical artifacts and then analyzed these with the help of literary theory to make certain points about the emergence of a consumer mentality in Switzerland. The most satisfying section dealt with the spatial dimensions of consumption and the introduction of self-service during the 1950s. This section made clear the connections between producer, retailer, and consumer. The other sections used documents not to tell a coherent story, but as distinct episodes, that, under interrogation from the good and bad cops of literary theory, ultimately confessed their relevance to the formation of the Swiss consumer mindset after 1945. Even if translated (which is desirable), this book may be too dense for most undergraduates. However, it would be a welcome addition in graduate seminars, especially because of Brändli's use of a broad range of literary theory. This book should be read by any scholar of history and cultural studies interested in the emergence of a consumer society in Europe after the Second World War.
Notes
[1]. For instance, see Michael Wildt, Am Beginn der "Konsumgesellschaft". Mangelerfahrung, Lebenshaltung, Wohlstandshoffnung in Westdeutschland in den fünfziger Jahren (Hamburg: Ergebnisse-Verlag, 1994); Arnold Sywottek, "Zwei Wege in die 'Konsumgesellschaft'," in Modernisierung im Wiederaufbau. Die westdeutsche Gesellschaft der 50er Jahre_, Axel Schildt and Arnold Sywottek, eds. (Bonn: Dietz, 1993), pp. 269-274.
[2]. See for instance, Reinhold Wagnleitner, Coca-Colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria after the Second World War, trans. Diana M. Wolf (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).
[3]. One of the best examples of this viewpoint is Richard Pells, Not Like Us. How Europeans have Loved, Hated, and Transformed American Culture since World War II (New York: Basic Books, 1997).
[4]. Mary Nolan, Visions of Modernity: American Business and the Modernization of Germany (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p.153; and Victoria de Grazia, "Changing Consumption Regimes in Europe, 1930-1970: Comparative Perspectives on the Distribution Problem," in Getting and Spending: European and American Consumer Societies in the Twentieth Century, ed. Susan Strasser, Charles McGovern and Matthias Judt (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 59-84.
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Citation:
Henry Wend. Review of Brändli, Sibylle, Der Supermarkt im Kopf: Konsumkultur und Wohlstand in der Schweiz nach 1945.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
August, 2005.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=11115
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