Creating the Nazi Marketplace: Commerce and Consumption in the Third Reich

Creating the Nazi Marketplace: Commerce and Consumption in the Third Reich. By S. Jonathan Wiesen. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Pp. xi + 277. Paper $26.99. ISBN 978-0521746366.

Which fresh insights about Nazism can be gleaned by casting a critical eye on seemingly humdrum topics such as Schaufenster, Rotary clubs, or market researchers? S. Jonathan Wiesen's persuasive new book shows there is much to learn, especially about the confluences of ideology and everyday life in the Third Reich. Creating the Nazi Marketplace is clearly an intellectual outgrowth of the author's award-winning West German Industry and the Challenge of the Nazi Past, 1945-1955 (Chapel Hill, 2003). Whereas that work focused on corporate complicity in Nazi crimes and attempts by businesses to rehabilitate their image after the war, this book sets its sights on the consumer economy and investigates the role of "getting and spending" in the German dictatorship. For at least three decades, scholars have demonstrated the significance of the consumer in the National Socialist attempt to realign the market economy with its political and racial goals. But Wiesen blazes new ground by focusing not so much on consumers as on elite perceptions of consumer society. The result is a sociocultural history of business that explores how companies went about marketing and selling products to consumers in an economy that was both undergirded by Nazi ideology and heavily regulated by the state.

Wiesen argues that attempts to "imbue a violent economy with...