Abstract
‘Wartime consumption’ is typically portrayed as a contradiction in terms, with consumption, insofar as it existed, revolving around shortages, substitutes, and survival. The Consumer on the Home Front: Second World War Civilian Consumption in Comparative Perspective, by contrast, suggests that, by moving beyond stereotypes about wartime consumption, we can see the ways in which ‘the Second World War was not a break in the development of the modern consumer society but an integral part of its rise’ (p. 24). The history of modern consumer society, Hartmut Berghoff goes on to propose in his framing essay, has been ‘a transnational experience from the beginning’, and this was no less true in the lead-up to and during the war (pp. 24–25). Impressive in its geographic scope, this collection draws together 15 essays covering Germany, Japan, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and Canada – countries that were chosen as they ‘did not experience extended periods of complete occupation and retained the capability of managing their own home fronts’ (p. 17).
The first section looks at how combatants managed their food supplies amid shortages and constraints, and, often, the threat of starvation. Sheldon Garon’s essay is perhaps the most explicitly ‘transnational’ in the entire collection: he argues that, not only in Japan, ‘home fronts were consciously constructed as part of transnational flows of ideas and institutions… one could have journeyed from nation to nation and recognized many familiar features of wartime civilian life’, such as savings drives, bond campaigns, and rationing, among other features. Japan, Garon suggests, began planning for total war in the wake of the First World War, hoping to avoid the mass hunger that had affected Germany in particular (p. 38, 41). Japan ultimately proved adept at studying the home front tactics of others but ‘transnational learning has its limits [and] no people can wage war on empty stomachs’ (p. 53). Wendy Goldman’s contribution, focusing on rationing in Soviet workplaces, shows how dire the situation workers faced was: workplace canteens became the only steady supply of food, as retail stores’ supplies were diverted to the front and as central stocks were lost to occupation. Workers chafed at inequalities in distribution and authorities’ efforts to manipulate the ration system, but putting an end to its abuses simply ‘shifted hunger from one needy group to another’ (p. 67). Ina-Zweiniger-Bargielowska demonstrates that, although rationing improved some lower-class citizens’ diets, Britain’s ‘flat-rate’ rationing system took insufficient account of diverse needs, unequal distribution within households (especially the common phenomenon of women going without to feed children or working male relatives), and differential access to unrationed food (p. 80). Food policy in wartime Britain was more successful than elsewhere but ultimately ‘fell short of the idea of equality of sacrifice, and at times social solidarity was severely strained’ (p. 91). Nicole Petrick-Felber’s contribution, although not focused on food or a basic necessity, looks at the shifting logic that resulted in rationing tobacco in Germany in the last stages of the war. This was increasingly seen as essential to maintaining troops’ morale, despite the Nazis’ well-known anti-tobacco health campaigns and quest for bodily purity.
The second section shifts to advertising and the media and the ways in which it steered consumer expectations during and the war. David Clampin argues that advertising messages in Britain promised that ‘normality’ after the war would involve ‘free and unfettered consumption’ (p. 120). In doing so, advertisers latched on to the popular zeitgeist and the promises of the Labour Party, which would win the July 1945 General Election on the strength of its guarantees of a better, more egalitarian future oriented around mass consumption (pp. 138–40). Anika A. Culver shows how Japanese businesses initially supported the war with advertising featuring jingoistic messages, especially encouragements to buy ‘care packages’ for soldiers, but their tone, size, and frequency changed for the worse as the war intensified (p. 163). Despite the common perception that Nazi Germany tried to win the population over through material benefits, Pamela E. Swett suggests that the regime did not, in fact, want to sully National Socialism with ‘crass commercialism’; as a result, commercial businesses found creative ways to associate themselves with the Nazi ‘brand’ but this directive did not come from the government (p. 177).
In the third section, fashion takes centre stage. Both contributions, from Mila Ganeva on Germany and Sergey Zhuravlev on the Soviet Union, emphasize the ways in which wartime fashion imagery and ‘vicarious consumption’ of items that were otherwise unavailable to the ordinary consumer were used to boost morale. At the same time, as Ganeva argues, fashion magazines and scenes in popular films ‘maintained a precarious balance act between not drawing the public’s attention too closely to the unavailability of fashion and being an outlet for escapist visual consumption’ (p. 221). Zhuravlev suggests that, despite severe shortages of food and survival outweighing style considerations, ‘fashion came to be a “remedy of sorts”, a means of healing the wounds inflicted by the war’ (p. 235). This helps to explain the founding of the Moscow House of Fashion Design in 1944, well before the war’s end.
In the final section, the authors reflect on the war’s lessons for postwar consumption. Bettina Liverant suggests that, after expanding state planning but also remaining committed to free-market mechanisms during the war, Canada’s Keynesian-inspired approach offered an important model of a ‘middle way’ in the years that followed (p. 276–7). Jan Logemann highlights the contributions of Central European market research experts who emigrated to the USA and conducted experiments there during the war, who helped to engineer a broader shift from behaviorist models to a more complex understanding of consumer motivations and behaviors drawing on Gestalt theory imported from Europe. Uwe Spieckermann shows how the science behind processed foods like dehydrated potatoes, Scho-ka-kola and Dextro-energen and other items that were developed for the Wehrmacht, in particular, was used to create successful brands after the war. Oleg V. Khlevniuk’s essay provides an overview of wartime and postwar consumption; however, as he argues, in stark contrast to the rest of the book, ‘the most influential factor in the evolution of Soviet mass consumption was not war or peace but the transformation of the dictatorship into a relatively ‘“softer” authoritarian regime’ (p. 327). The book ends with an essay by Frank Trentmann suggesting new directions that studies of consumption might take, for example, studies of energy use, habits, and housing. He reminds us that the war had an important role in diminishing social inequality but did not eliminate it altogether; after the war, states subsidized people’s consumption to a greater degree, but, in his opinion, we need not romanticize their ‘welfarism.’
This collection succeeds more in highlighting the comparative than transnational dimensions of wartime and postwar consumption. The transnational implications trumpeted in the introductory chapter are difficult to discern in several of its chapters, especially in the Soviet contributions. In part, this has to do with the specificities of the Soviet Union, whose food supply was more affected than the other countries discussed in the book, and who had already moved to a centralized distribution system well before the war but for different reasons. As Khlevniuk acknowledges, the Stalinist government simply re-imposed the rationing system that had functioned before 1935. It was the model of rationing necessitated by rapid industrialization and the fallout from collectivization that informed the Soviet approach, not the lessons of the First World War that countries like Japan took, and certainly not the lessons of capitalist market economies. Nevertheless, the book succeeds in showing how countries on either side of what would become the Iron Curtain deployed similar consumption-oriented strategies for maintaining home front morale, portraying the war as a temporary blip or as a decisive turning point, after which ‘normal’ life – whatever that meant specifically to them – would necessarily resume.