(Alternative link.)

The Society for Consumer Research emerged from these economic and cultural discourses. It was the brainchild of two economic leaders. The first was Wilhelm Mann, a director of IG Farben, inventor of the famous Bayer Cross logo, and future president of the GfK. The second was economist Wilhelm Vershofen, a keen America‐watcher, market researcher and novelist who taught at the Nuremberg Business School and who spent his career thinking about the relationship between human beings and the goods they bought.¹²

Together with future GfK colleague (and future West German chancellor) Ludwig Erhard, the two men studied marketing and consumer research practices in the United States, where individual companies sent correspondents across the country to determine which products sold and why.¹³ Mann proposed the idea of a German consumer research organization that would improve upon American conventions by making its work more in‐depth and socially relevant.¹⁴

Mann and the people who surrounded Vershofen — the so‐called Nuremberg School — hoped to centralize German consumer research in one organization by building up a network of paid employees and well‐trained correspondents who would conduct in‐depth interviews with consumers in diverse regional settings. It was not enough to look at buying habits through statistics. They would have to hear ‘the voice of the consumer’ through a network of correspondents wielding elaborate questionnaires.¹⁵

The Society for Consumer Research began its work at an inauspicious moment. [Fascism] was reshaping the economy along militaristic lines, and with the Four‐Year Plan for war readiness proclaimed in 1936, the [Fascist] economy was marked by the regulation of consumer goods and the enactment of price controls. In these circumstances, any attempt to observe consumer behaviour within a free market economy could not be realized.

Nonetheless, the profit motive remained very much alive in the Third Reich, and the GfK and its business affiliates understood the power of the consumer to choose between different brands.

(Another reason not to take free market purists seriously: their willingness to overlook important phenomena that their hypothetical economy would share with fascist economies.)

In January 1936, the GfK issued its first report, commissioned by Bayer’s president Wilhelm Mann. It was titled ‘The Trademarked Image: An Investigation into the Degree of Recognition of the Bayer Cross Logo (with a simultaneous consideration of the advertising effectiveness of the trademarked image more generally)’.¹⁶

Some 2,668 opinions were gathered in select areas of Southern and Southwest Germany, Hamburg, Berlin and East Prussia. Consumers expressed their positive opinions about Bayer products like Aspirin and Pyramidon painkiller tablets and also offered their perceptions of a number of companies with recognizable branded goods: Kupferberg sparkling wine, Zeiss–Ikon cameras, Kaiser’s coffee, Reemstma cigarettes and J. A. Henckels Zwillingswerke knives.

This first report by the GfK satisfied many of the initial goals of the organization. It combined quantitative and qualitative data, and it served the needs of the sponsoring company. It also spoke to larger economic and cultural themes — such as the Depression‐era shifts in consumption trends. Finally, it brought to light the consumer’s voice, albeit in short snippets, as students, homemakers and tradespeople revealed which products brought them pleasure.

[…]

Finally, the GfK was fascinated by the car culture that [Berlin] was promoting. A 1939 study of automobiles found that the majority of Germans interviewed made plans to purchase an Opel. The popularity of the car eclipsed that of the not‐yet‐manufactured Volkswagen, which came in second place (presumably not in first place because of the long wait for it), as well as Mercedes, Ford and Chrysler. Consumers praised Opel’s durability, performance and modest use of oil and gasoline.

Through these reports the GfK brought to the fore the contradictions that marked consumption under [Fascism]. On the one hand, the régime was gearing resources toward the military sector in the run‐up to war. Consumers thus felt the increasing absence of favourite products and the constant appeals to thriftiness and self‐sacrifice.

On the other hand, the consumer research reports of the 1930s reveal a population very much enjoying the products of an unfolding consumer society. The GfK publications are filled with discussions of goods as diverse as wristwatches, vacuum cleaners and flower vases, which indicates how much Germans by the mid‐1930s had moved beyond the scrimping of the early Depression years.²⁰

When the GfK drew attention to trends in the purchase of porcelain, it revealed the possibilities for luxury in the Third Reich.²¹ When it wrote about the sale of cameras and camping stoves, it exposed a population that made time for leisure and hiking.²²

In short, in the pre‐war Third Reich, the population did not enjoy the standard of living of the United States, a point of which [Berlin] was keenly aware.²³ But the régime made every effort to promote high levels of consumption as the birthright of racially pure Germans, and the GfK reports indicate the extent to which the population partook of the pleasures offered by mass consumption.

Had they simply offered a glimpse into consumption habits, the Nuremberg economists might be dismissed as propagandists who were feeding images of a happy populace to companies and the régime. But in their newsletters and books, scholars affiliated with the GfK also addressed the broader significance of consumption. Discussions about individual desire, the origins of consumer motivations, and the rôle of the unconscious filled the pages of the GfK newsletters and journals and gave a scholarly depth to the potentially mundane theme of shopping.

[…]

Given the GfK’s dialogue with international trends in psychology and marketing, one might expect the [Fascist] leadership to have looked askance at the work of the Nuremberg School. In fact, the GfK generally found support within the [Fascist] leadership; indeed the organization received annual contributions from the German Labor Front.²⁷ To be sure, the Gestapo became suspicious of correspondents wandering around asking people questions.

(Heh.)

Occasionally GfK correspondents would even be arrested.²⁸ Likewise the government expressed concern that the Nuremberg School economists were unqualified to be ‘leaders’ according to [Fascist] principles.²⁹ However, within the context of the [Third Reich], the Nuremberg School’s desire to situate individuals in a larger community resonated with organic ideals promoted by [Fascist] authorities.

‘Private economic interests’, wrote Vershofen, ‘must be placed second to communal economic interests’.³⁰ It was one thing to say this, but when the GfK directed its focus at diverse forms of consumer pleasure, it sometimes found this advice difficult to follow.

[…]

The fact that people could complain quite forthrightly about products and propaganda has a direct bearing on our understanding of consumption in the Third Reich. Far from being intimidated into quiet conformity, German consumers asserted themselves not only in the company of family and friends, but also in front of strangers holding questionnaires. In sending messages to the GfK (and by extension to companies and the government), individual Germans were, of course, not exercising the kind of organized political force available in democratic settings.

But they were making it clear that the lifestyles and simple everyday pleasures they had come to expect from the state were not being sustained, and that they disliked appeals to make do with less. Grumbling was a function of entitlement, and the fact that Germans complained does not mean that they were turning against their leaders. Rather, it means that they grew accustomed to a comfortable standard of living by 1939, and they feared the loss of the pleasures that had come to define the pre‐war Third Reich.

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

I would like to clarify that I have little interest in condemning consumerism. I’m generally neutral towards consumerism myself. The significance that this has for me is that it is further evidence that the Fascist economies had more in common with contemporary capitalist economies than either neoliberals or neofascists would like to admit.