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Strength through Joy: Consumerism and Mass Tourism in the Third Reich. By Shelley Baranowski. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. xvii + 254 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. Cloth, $65.00. ISBN: 0-521-833-523.
Shelley Baranowki's Strength through Joy (Kraft durch Freude, or KdF) is an impressive and convincing interpretation of a suborganization of the German Labor Front (Deutsche Arbeitsfront), successor to the dissolved unions in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. Baranowski acknowledges that in collective remembrance, KdF remains one of the assets of the Nazi period. At the time, it was the largest leisure and travel agency in the world and is credited with building up tourism in Germany on a mass scale. Shelley Baranowski has written the first English-language general history of "Strength through Joy," which claimed to have established a seamless bond between work and leisure, constructing a "third way" that departed from (Soviet, French, and Weimar) "socialistic collectivism" and (American) market-based consumption. KdF tried to integrate work and leisure, to improve working conditions, and to overcome conflicts between labor and management, thus reinforcing the "beauty of work" (Schonheit der Arbeit, SdA). At the same time, KdF helped to strengthen economic growth and to bolster rearmament efforts (p. 39). It was also a racist organization that excluded Jewish and other "non-Aryan" citizens.
KdF claimed to have fundamentally changed the cultures of work and leisure. That was...