How German Is She? Postwar West German Reconstruction and the Consuming Woman.

By Erica Carter (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. xiv plus 272pp.).

In the English-speaking world, "cultural studies" has become a major academic industry. Publishers' catalogs bulge with lists of books on film, television and the other media. University departments offer courses on the history of rock 'n roll. Until quite recently, all of this would have seemed very much out of place in Germany. Despite the fact that Anglo-American "cultural studies" originally drew an important element of its inspiration from the theoretical work of the Frankfurt School in the 1920s and 30s, post 1945 German scholarship, particularly historical research, was quite content to ignore this type of cultural analysis. Now, however, there are signs of change. At the end of June, 1997, for example, "a challenge to the writing of history" was issued by a conference in Bad Homburg which was devoted to "mass media in the context of domination, society and everyday life." The three books under review here likewise signal a new openness to "cultural studies."

Kate Lacey has set out in her book to construct a "gendered history of radio" that not only makes "women visible as audiences and program makers" (p. 221) but also shows why gender must be a central category of analysis in media history. The history of radio in Weimar and Nazi Germany is a particularly interesting choice; first, because the growth of radio as a new form of mass media coincided with the extension of formal political rights to women after the German Revolution; second, because radio transgressed the boundaries delineating the public from the private spheres, a division which had traditionally played a major role in defining "proper" roles for women; and, finally, because German radio broadcasting was subject to state control and state censorship, hence product and reflection of dominant political ideas about the role of the new media in society and the role of women in the new media. Lacey argues that the first two of these factors might have promoted the emancipation of women, the more general democratization of Weimar society and the "extension and reinvigoration" of the public sphere (p. 235) had it not been for the overriding influence of the third factor, state control, which promoted a policy of non-political radio (seen as the only way for radio not to become embroiled in the highly contentious and fragmented politics of the Republic) which "represented a denial of the democratic potential of a new public sphere and the redefinition of the private sphere that radio promised."(p. 242) Driven by their fears about the "crisis of the family" in a Germany devastated by a lost war, revolution and inflation, conservatives and cultural critics argued that radio must serve to make the home more attractive to women. Feminists saw greater potential for emancipation in the new mass medium; radio could "inform women of their sisters' achievements ... inspire them to new experiences ... mobilize them in the direction of equality with men."(p. 44) But even feminists concentrated more on saving the institution of marriage and ensuring the stability of the state than on "liberating" women from the private sphere. What this meant in concrete terms was that although Weimar radio developed programming specifically aimed at women (the so-called Frauenfunk) and created some new careers for women as writers and even announcers, radio addressed its female audience in predictably traditional terms; "women's radio very quickly became predominantly a space for women as housewives, consumers, and mothers." (p. 242)

Lacey supports these arguments with detailed analyses of womens' programming and scheduling in the Weimar Republic. She shows that it was "the imagined daily routine of a household with the woman at the center that provided the blueprint" for women's radio programming (p. 57 ) and that "decisions about women's programs... were shaped by the uncritical assumption of gender as a category which transcended all other social divisions."(p. 61) Programs for women concentrated mainly on what were assumed to be women's issues; expert advice on "rational" housework, pregnancy and child-rearing (to the complete exclusion, however, of any mention of issues, such as abortion, which were hotly contested in the public political debates of the time, p. 67). There were also features on fashion and discussions of legal matters such as the rules governing the employment of domestic servants. Although Weimar radio was state-controlled, commercial advertising was permitted until 1936; commercials aimed at women listeners attempted to promote the sale of household products and at the same time "to integrate the housewife into her function and task by offering romantic gratification." (p. 62) Only the Berlin regional station and the Hamburg-based Norag seriously tried to explore the possibilities of speaking to women not just as housewives and mothers but "as citizens, voters, and even as intellects." (p. 85) In 1924, Norag began to broadcast a series of talks on politics and current affairs.(p. 74) The success of this series led to the establishment in 1925 of the world's first "woman's college of the airwaves" which targeted working women as well as housewives. When they came to power, the Nazis immediately terminated these progressive experiments. Lacey concludes that Weimar radio did not respond in very innovative or progressive ways to "the central dilemma that was apparent from the start of public broadcasting, the negotiation of the challenge to the public-private divide." (p. 85)

The career of Carola Hersel, a pioneer in the field of young women's radio, hints at some of the missed possibilities. In terms of their content, the broadcasts aimed at young women were not at all unorthodox. But Hersel did introduce some innovations with regard to form by encouraging her young listeners to write in to the station and by putting correspondents with similar interests or problems in touch with one another. During the Depression, Hersel used her radio program as a clearing house where young women could offer one another practical help in dealing with unemployment, hunger and emotional strain. This was too much for her superiors who saw what she was doing as an unwelcome intrusion of "politics" into radio. Yet, Hersel was no radical and "certainly did not have any qualms about" working for the Nazis. (p. 93) Hersel stayed on in radio until 1938 when she left to become a woman's magazine editor. The types of broadcasts in which she had been involved before 1933, like most of Weimar women's programming "were accommodated relatively easily into the new schedules."(p. 95)

Most of Weimar women's radio was, then, de-politicized and intent upon reproducing conservative representations of women as wives and mothers. These characteristics allowed the Weimar legacy of broadcasting for women to be appropriated without much friction by the new Nazi rulers after 1933. But the Nazis did make changes. Apart from the exclusion of all material and personnel that the Nazis considered ideologically and racially unacceptable, there was also what Lacey terms a "racism of absences." The women addressed in friendly, conversational tones by the radio announcers of the Third Reich were quite clearly Aryan. Jews were no longer permitted even to own radios after 1939.

Lacey ends her book with a fascinating discussion of"the Evolution of Broadcast Talk" which shows that in writing the history of the media it may be as important to focus upon form as upon content. The realization that "while radio is public discourse, the circumstances of reception are defined in the private sphere" (p. 194) encouraged women presenters to experiment with intimate, informal and familiar modes of address which created the illusion that the radio personality was speaking directly to (if not with) each individual listener. The aim, as one male commentator saw it in 1934, was to concentrate "on speaking to a single listener, thereby winning over millions" (p. 203). At the same time, it was important to give women the impression that they were part of a larger "imagined" community of listeners. Both of these "presentational strategies," pioneered in women's radio during the Weimar Republic, and subsequently adopted by male announcers as well, could be pressed into the service of the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft after 1933.

Were these lines of cultural continuity that connected Weimar and the early years of the Third Reich simply severed by the war and the allied occupation? The popular image of "a zero hour" in 1945 served to promote the belief that after defeat and collapse, Germany steered a completely new course. This now largely discredited myth has in recent years been replaced by another, at least in popular memory - the myth of "the golden 50s." This is the decade, so numerous TV shows, magazine articles and coffee table books would have us believe, when Germany put the devastation and deprivation of World War Two firmly behind it and became the prosperous, consumer society which has been the permanent foundation of West German national identity ever since. West Germans could now enjoy the benefits of leisure time and holidays in the sunny south. And they began to acquire all the accoutrements - from TVs to automobiles - without which no modem consumer society would be complete. The 1950s was, in brief, the decisive breakthrough to modem consumerism. Not so, according to Axel Schildt, whose impressively exhaustive study of social trends and cultural developments presents a far more sobre assessment. Schildt constructs a detailed analysis of demographic, social and economic developments in the 1950s which challenges many of the stereotypes used to characterize this crucial decade. Making use of all the relevant survey materials he constructs a fascinating historical sociology of leisure and mass media use and combines this with an extended discussion of the reactions of intellectuals, moral authorities and other opinion makers to the introduction and spread of the new mass media, such as TV. Many of the cliches used to characterize the 1950s - the "leisure society," the "consumer society" - clearly had their origins in some of the more exaggerated images offered by the "culture critics" who worried in print about the dangerous effects on post-war West German society of "technology," the rise of the "mass," "teenagers" and "youth culture" and, of course, the ever-popular shibboleth, "Americanization." But Schildt's careful discussion makes clear that these were often false alarms.

Was this the beginning of a self-indulgent "leisure society," as some contemporary commentators claimed? Hardly. Work continued to occupy a central place in most Germans' everyday lives. The impressive annual industrial growth rates in the 1950s - 10 percent in most years - which gave the "economic miracle" its name required long hours of hard work. In the mid 1950s, the daily industrial work week averaged 50 hours. Only in the second half of the 1950s did the five day week began to make inroads, but the working day itself was now extended by one hour, on average. The important change, which did create new opportunities for more leisure activities, was not the reduction in overall working time but the spread of the two day weekend. Most of the 1950s were thrifty years. Families saved for the consumer durables lost in the war, perhaps also for their own home. Commentators lamented about a "retreat into the private sphere;" but it was to be expected that when families did get their own place to live, after long-years of overcrowded, substandard housing, they would make the private space within their "own four walls" as comfortable as possible. Until the late 1950s most Germans enjoyed their leisure at home in the same ways as they had in the 1920s. Changes in the use of leisure time could be detected among young people; but the spectacular youth cultures of these years - the "Halbstarken" and rock 'n roll riots - were the exception. Most young people worked as many hours as their elders, tended to spend their leisure at home and did the same things as their parents. Reading was popular, although most Germans did not read "good books," but illustrated magazines, radio magazines (such as the extremely successful "Hor Zu"), local newspapers and the new tabloids such as "Bild-Zeitung." Radio remained the media focal point of the household, even determining the schedule of meals. Taste preferences (entertainment and light music rather than "information") exhibited strong continuities with the 1920s. The expansion of radio ownership which began under the Nazis with the introduction of an affordable "People's Receiver" continued into the 1950s; it was now simply assumed that everyone should have at least one radio. Going to the movies was still one of the most popular leisure pursuits outside the home. In 1956, Germans paid some 817 million visits to local movie houses. By 1962, however, German cinemas recorded only 442 million visits. The cause of this nose-dive was the "slipper cinema," television, which also marked the end of radio's heyday. In increasing numbers of families, the radio was displaced by the TV, although at the end of the 1950s still only one quarter of West German households owned a television. Nonetheless, TV cemented the already clear trend towards the domestication of leisure.

An important conclusion emerges from this part of Schildt's study; most of the 1950s had more in common with the years before the war than with the period after 1960. Indeed, Schildt argues quite convincingly that the 1950s combined the final phase of a longer cultural history stretching back into the 1920s with a new stage of social modernization which became fully visible only after 1960. If this is true, a meaningful discussion of post-war cultural patterns would have to extend into at least the early 1960s which, however, as Schildt points out, have so far barely been touched by researchers.

In the final section of his book, Schildt investigates what he calls the "Zeitgeist" of the 1950s. Trolling the public opinion polls of the early 1950s he finds that long shadows from the German past continued to haunt the popular imagination; reactions to "modernity" were colored by the kind of cultural pessimism common in the 1920s. As a central trope in the analysis of contemporary cultural developments, "Americanization" provided a convenient synonym for everything that Germans feared about "modernity," or at least about the next stage of modernity upon which the FRG seemed to be entering in the 1950s. While admitting that the USA was technically advanced, most Germans still clung to the idea that Germany was culturally superior to the "backward," even "barbarous" United States (which seems more than slightly absurd considering the still-recent world-historical barbarity of Nazi Germany). In contrast to the 1920s, however, more positive voices could be heard by the end of the 1950s, even amongst the intellectuals and moral authorities who made cultural pessimism their speciality. Whether this shift in public opinion represented a genuine change of attitude or a new generation of those who "made" public opinion is unclear.

In her imaginative, innovative and provocative book, Erica Carter offers a different perspective on the 1950s in the form of "a gendered history of postwar reconstruction."(p. 16) Her basic argument is that, irretrievably tainted by Nazism and World War II, traditional forms of patriotism and national identification were no longer available to aid in the process of physically and morally reconstructing Germany after 1945. In their place, however, the Federal Republic was able to substitute "consumerism as the source of core values for the nation." (p. 5) In the early years of the Federal Republic "the national economy [became] a fantasy object for collective identification,"(p. 21) the "characteristic qualities of nationhood" were transposed onto the "social market economy as discursive formation," (p. 23) and the social market economy became a "displaced space of the nation." (p. 43) Commitment to market capitalism anchored West Germany firmly in the "Christian West," but it did not result in a slavish imitation of American-style free-market capitalism. The "imagined community" of the social market economy was a compromise between "the liberal vision of Germany as a political community of free citizens and the conservative view of the German Kultumation as third space between East and West, as cultural bastion against the barbaric East." (p. 30) The democratic aspirations of post-war West Germany were focused upon the market rather than the state. The consumer "exercising free choice in a free market context came to figure as the very embodiment of the democratic free citizen." (p. 25) By the 1990s, the "specifically West German national identity" created in the 1950s had become so firmly rooted in the contemporary "common sense" about "German-ness" that it was shared by East Germans as well.

What makes Carter's book so original is her attempt to understand "economic transformation as cultural process." (p. 15) By offering "a reading of the national economy as a textualized and gendered cultural space" (p. 10) she allows us to see the relationship "between processes of economic production and the production ... of hierarchies of cultural difference - most specifically, hierarchies of gender." (p. 15) Women were expected to play an important role in the construction of consumer prosperity and in the "restitution to cultural order of the postwar nation, through their work as cultural producers of consumer lifestyles in the family home." (p. 7) Carter detects three major stages of post-war economic recovery between 1945-60 each of which required different forms of female labor in the household: (1) subsistence economy, 1945-49 (2) market stabilization, 1949-1957 (3) accelerating market expansion, 1957-1960. In the first phase, housework was quite simply strenuous physical labor in the bombed-out ruins of Germany's cities (hauling water, gathering or stealing wood and coal, "hamstering" for food in the countryside), tasks for which women had been well trained in the last disastrous years of the Third Reich when bombs and battles destroyed the material infrastructure of urban life. Housework continued to be physically demanding for at least a decade after the war but in the early 1950s women's domestic labor began to assume a second function, what Carter calls the "primitive accumulation" of family savings for the vacuum cleaners, washing machines, refrigerators, radios and automobiles that West German industry was now starting to manufacture. In the late 1950s, with the transition to consumerism (the third stage of postwar recovery) "the emphasis of housewifery shifted again from rational management of scarce resources to the creative production" of a modem consumer lifestyle (pp. 62-65). Housework had now become a form of cultural production requiring "(modernist) aesthetic creativity" and generating "aesthetic value and social meaning." (p. 71) Carter acknowledges that each of these successive constructions of German women's roles could be regarded as oppressive; but she refuses to see this generation of postwar German women simply as victims. Arguing that it "was as consumers ... that West Germans in the postwar period gained one form of access to citizenship," Carter insists that "the postwar generation of housewife-consumers must be viewed as the bearers of a specifically feminine form of historical agency: as active participants in ... the reconstruction of the Federal Republic as social market economy." (p. 7) Although postwar representations of women's roles as housewives "cemented a hierarchical gender division of labor," (p. 71) Carter thinks that women's desires and energies were managed, channeled and regulated, rather than simply suppressed.

The discourses that attempted to convey to women the acceptable parameters of their post-war roles and identities circulated in a "feminized consumer Offentlichkeit (public sphere of representation)" (p. 78) which included women's magazines, market surveys and commercial advertisements. At each of these discursive sites, women were tutored in the practices of "rational consumption" that were to be a specifically female "contribution to national recovery." (p. 102) Carter argues, for example, that post-war forms of market research, such as demoscopy, were regimes of knowledge-power which manufacturers hoped to use (in the same way that politicians came to rely upon political polling) to better understand, anticipate, even regulate consumer demand. Yet, these attempts at control were "not just repressive but productive; productive in particular of new social identities" as consumers (p. 82) which in turn helped women to actively form themselves "as the objects and the agents of postwar national reconstruction." (p. 104)

Discourses on consumer femininities were also be found in what might seem to have been the most unlikely places. Carter shows, for example, that the urban reconstruction of West Berlin was guided by a use of public space "designed precisely to stimulate the material appetites of passing shoppers" (p. 155) in dispersed suburban shopping zones. This contrasted dramatically with the reconstruction of East Berlin which created large and imposing central public spaces for the exhibition and glorification of state power. Especially in Berlin, the glittering outpost of consumer capitalism surrounded on all sides by the dreary, yet pompous "real existing socialism" of the DDR, the East-West border became "the most crucial fault line for the establishment of West German cultural difference." (p. 113) West Germany claimed its own distinctive "national" cultural space by constructing a series of images of the dangerous Eastern "other", and the consuming woman frequently functioned as a metaphorical boundary of the West German nation. Refugee women from the East were, for example, depicted in the print media as potential spies, or shoplifters who should be arrested or at least taught how to become rationally consuming West German women. Advertising experts tried to convince West German women that the "discerning" consumer should refuse to buy the allegedly inferior East German Perlon stockings that flooded western markets and undercut demand for the superior West German product.

Within West Germany itself, lines were clearly drawn between desirable and dangerous consumer femininities. In popular cultural representations of the 1950s, such as film melodrama, "women flaunting their enjoyment of extrafamilial leisure consumption were positioned not only as threats to domestic order but also as outsiders to the nation-threats to a very German project of rationally managed growth and mounting personal prosperity." (p. 193) Carter shows that the glossy photographs of high fashion models that graced the pages of women's magazines such as Constanze also reproduced this split. (p. 203) The postwar models of the couture avant garde featured in the fashion spreads of the early 1950s were rarely if ever pictured in domestic space. The women modeling high fashion radiated an aura of distinction and distance from the "normal" consumer. High fashion "persistently eluded the regulatory gaze of the demoscopers." (p. 219) Yet, these high-fashion images were not meant to condemn. Carter suggests that high-fashion photography served the voyeuristic pleasure of men (by 1957 almost half of Constanze's readers were men, p. 220) while at the same time offering suburban housewives "the fantasy of an escape from patriarchal strictures." (p. 224) In high-fashion photography, there was already a hint of the more hedonist consumer identities that after 1960 began to displace "the values of parsimony and deferred pleasure" so central to the first generation of post-war consuming housewives.

Carter offers us a very subtle and sophisticated understanding of the discourses that concerned themselves with the rationally consuming German housewife's role in the developing social market economy. She demonstrates the "intertextuality" of these "discursive formations" whose imprint can be found in a wide range of extremely diverse contemporary texts - from political speeches, economic manifestos and urban redevelopment schemes to women's magazines, advertising, film and fashion photography. And, finally, Carter shows that these "discourses" were more than merely words - they exerted important and quite concrete material effects on the everyday lives of the women who were their targets. Yet, as Carter herself freely acknowledges, this kind of analysis of discourses can only go so far; her study of "the social market economy as a discursive formation," (p. 203) however original it may be, cannot tell us whether "'really existing' feminine identities corresponded to these normative categories in discourse." (p. 239)

This is a problem which Lacey's book shares. Lacey appears to grant female radio listeners little room to exercise their own agency (apart from simply turning offending broadcasts off). Yet it is difficult to assess this judgment when, as Lacey admits, her "emphasis lies on the audience as it figures in contemporary discourses rather than as a sociological phenomenon." (p. 108) The problem of getting at the popular reception and appropriation of, or resistance to the discourses which are the primary subject of Lacey's book is compounded by the difficulties of the sources. Because of both wartime losses and the relatively low prestige attached to women's radio, few scripts and even fewer recordings from the Weimar or Nazi-era Frauenfunk have survived. Without access to the spoken word it is difficult even to begin to think about how it might be possible to "recreate the probable reactions of a group of listeners to a particular program almost fifty years ago" (p. 219) or to reconstruct the possible meanings that these broadcasts may have had at the time.

Nevertheless, these three books show that there is much to be learned from (and about) "cultural studies." Neither an attempt simply to "catch up" with Anglo-American "cultural studies," nor to show how Germany succumbed to the "Americanization" or "Coca-Colonization" of its culture, each of the books under review here helps us to understand, as Erica Carter puts it, "how ... Germany managed its encounter with ... consumerism." (p. 193) In other words, this is the beginning of a new narrative which can tell us a lot that we do not already know about specifically German forms of twentieth century "modernity" and about changing and competing definitions of German-ness since the 1920s.

Department of History Austin, TX 78712