Natalie Scholz. Redeeming Objects: A West German Mythology. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2023. 324 PP. $79.95 Cloth. ISBN: 9780299344306.
The rise of the Federal Republic of Germany out of the rubble of the Nazi years and World War II was a surprising achievement, so the story goes. Under pressure from Allied occupation governments, West Germans left the fascist dictatorship behind and built a working democratic republic and a stalwart Cold War ally. By the mid-1950s, the economic miracle had taken off, leaving behind Nazi visions of economic autarky. An increasingly vibrant consumer society, which helped leaders rebuild the economy, integrated the FRG into an international “Western” world of commodity exchange. The growing availability of goods ranging from modern household furnishings to the increasingly ubiquitous Volkswagen “Beetle” offered rewards to ordinary people who bought into the new system and used consumerism to mark the distance they had traveled from the Nazi past.
Certainly, historians have poked holes in the notion of 1945 as a comprehensive “Stunde Null” or Zero Hour, when everything supposedly changed for the better. In postwar West Germany notions of race and hierarchy that grounded the Nazi “People’s Community” (Volksgemeinschaft) remained popular. Ordinary people remembered 1933 and not 1945 as the start of the “good years.” Former National Socialists retained leading positions in business and politics. The new state stubbornly supported patriarchal family structures and typical postwar gender roles. State and society alike moved slowly to recognize and atone for the Holocaust and other crimes committed by the German-Nazi regime. Continuities aside, the notion of the miraculous rebirth of West Germany, driven by a triad of modernization, liberalization, and Westernization—all embodied in the “new” consumer goods that filled stores and homes—retains a narrative force that clinches the arrival of the FRG as a success story with a happy ending. Despite some downsides, it’s an uplifting tale.
Redeeming Objects: A West German Mythology, by University of Amsterdam historian Natalie Scholz, reframes this dominant narrative. This challenging, visionary, and at times profound look at postwar ruptures and continuities places the ordinary goods that accompanied West Germans during the transition from dictatorship to democracy at the center of analysis. Scholz unpacks descriptions of material culture in expert and popular texts, cartoons, advertisements, and feature films to uncover the hidden but charged meanings of material remnants from the Nazi years, modern home design and décor, West German export goods, and the ever-present Volkswagen. On the surface, the mass consumption and global export of these “redeeming objects” distanced West Germany and West Germans from the Nazi past and exemplified the new republic’s increasingly significant place in the transnational networks of an emerging Cold War West. Yet Scholz’s painstaking genealogy of these commodities, which traces their evolution from the 1920s through the Nazi years to the early 1960s, reveals a disturbing dreamscape, what she describes as a “gray and murky realm” haunted by the ghosts of National Socialism and by the colonial fantasies of European imperialism (10).
“History itself was an absence,” writes Scholz, a vacant space filled with a mythical imaginary of the modern West founded on miraculous material objects that masked their own historical imbrication in Nazi policies and propaganda (16). The result was “a convoluted reality of moral, political, emotional, and historical contexts of belonging” that helped West Germans evade their personal and collective guilt for Nazi crimes and eased the rebirth of the FRG (10). Even the term “economic miracle” had a spectral history: as West Germans might well remember but strove to forget, Nazi propagandists repeatedly cited “the German miracle” to describe economic growth in the 1930s (104, 212).
Scholz’s major themes cut across four fields of analysis that have dominated postwar German history in the past decades: the political and economic restructuring of the FRG after the Nazi years; the meaning and various impacts of the rapid turn to a full-blown consumer society; the attempts to “master” the putatively unmasterable Nazi past; and the impact and legacy of European imperialism and postcoloniality in the metropole during the 1950s and 1960s. Linking these crucial themes through consumer objects is hardly an obvious endeavor, especially since the connections were rarely explicit. Some few commentators had criticized the links between material objects and the Nazi past. A 1947 cartoon in the humorist magazine Der Simpl titled “The Old Lady’s Secret,” for example, portrayed an elderly woman embracing a portrait of Hitler that she kept hidden in her desk (35-36). A handful of contemporary commentators called attention to the increasingly popular Volkswagen’s roots in Nazi völkisch policy and its usefulness in the war (78). The 1960 West German cinema hit The Haunted Castle included a scene where an angry judge strikes his table, revealing a swastika underneath its official decoration (223). Yet for the most part, such links were at best implicit, hidden in postwar texts that aimed to rid the world of objects with fascist connotations and instead embed them in a timeless modernity. The contemporary descriptions and apparent uses of objects were filled with “silences, omissions, and discrepancies.” Scholz takes it as her task to uncover, reveal, and explain these hidden meanings, which “exceed conscious intentions and thereby mold structures of feelings” that circulated around and through objects despite “the apparent transparency of (mainstream) discourses” (118).
That’s a challenge. How can a historian excavate such forgotten pasts? What tools can the determined scholar-as-exorcist use to confront such uncomfortable, dubious ghosts and their impact on today’s society and culture? Scholz’s answer lies in an ambitious and creative use of critical social theory. Marx’s notion of the commodity fetish plays a part, since it underscores the way the relations of production “magically disappear” from popular consciousness (7). Postcolonial theories make an appearance, especially in the last chapter. More central to her argument, as the book’s title suggests, is Roland Barthes’s concept of myth, which “transforms history into nature” and depoliticizes ideas and objects by making them seem natural, timeless, and transparent (11). Scholz also returns repeatedly to Raymond Williams’s notion of “structures of feeling,” because it suggests that aspects of shared culture may be unconscious but are nonetheless central to shaping broadly constituted communities. In this sense, for Scholz, “culture (is) something that can never be fully grasped, something that encompasses the full richness and complexity of social life, including gestures, styles and ideas, and assumptions or intuitions that cannot or need not be spoken.” The power of such assumptions may seem “strange” to later generations and must be unpacked with an eye to change, contradiction, and incompatibility (8). Indeed, in each chapter, Scholz puts herself in the role of the cultural-historical stranger, whose discovery of some inexplicable oddity or object from the past inspires her to probe beneath the surface to find its unspoken implications.
Tying this all together is a subtle yet compelling use of psychoanalytic terms and techniques. Germans “repressed” guilt about crimes committed during the war, for example, which shaped “an atmosphere of latency ripe with public secrets” in the 1950s (10, 16). Scholz argues that the material remnants of National Socialism were “transitional objects” that became “uncanny material relic(s),” carrying troubling, guilty meanings (25-6). An inconsistency in a 1947 feature film revealed “a narrative slip with a Freudian load” (65), while an ugly and all-too-familiar joke about a Volkswagen and the Holocaust exposed content usually repressed because of “social taboos” (72). Such examples could be multiplied, but I wouldn’t label Redeeming Objects “psychohistory.” It is Scholz’s confident use of psychoanalytic techniques that helps her diagnose the hidden qualities embedded in the objects she explores and suggests that judicious use of Freudian categories related to memory, guilt, and object relations remain illuminating when carefully used.
Chapter One, “Stranded Objects: The Political Beneath the Rubble,” examines images, architecture, and objects that survived the Nazi years. Scholz uses these items to excavate the ways in which West Germans dealt with their moral burden, drawing on the chapter title and conceptual apparatus in part from Eric Santor’s eponymous book on postwar West German film. Scholz expresses surprise at finding a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf on a family bookshelf, and wonders at the portrait of “Der Führer” underneath a Christmas tree in a private photo album she found in an archive. Everyday remnants from the Third Reich, Scholz suggests, inevitably evoked the “poisoned cultural repertoire” of Nazi ideologies and legacies, even though these objects and the ideologies were supposed to be gone and forgotten. Instead, such things were all too present, both “nowhere and everywhere” (25).
In city spaces—neighborhoods, buildings, former synagogues—the traces of German history, racial oppression, Nazi projects, and wartime destruction “stuck to the materiality of the urban landscape” (45). Intellectuals and critics turned to verbal acrobatics as they tried to grapple with the violence and persecution of the Nazi years while also salvaging remnants of destruction that might be useful for shaping a West German new beginning. Nazi objects, as shown by Santor, were also stranded in feature films. Plots turned on a Jewish woman’s necklace (Yesterday and Tomorrow, 1947), a black-market camera and a Christmas tree (The Murderers Are Among Us, 1946), and the unavoidable Volkswagen (In Those Days, 1946-47), ambiguous objects that recalled the Nazi past. The cognitive dissonance surrounding these and other cultural remnants was never fully resolved in the immediate postwar years. Instead, uncomfortable feelings would be buried under the success of the 1950s economic miracle, where they would continue to haunt its many glittering objects and images.
The Volkswagen takes center stage in Chapter Two, “Miraculous Objects: The Volkswagen as Imperial Debris.” The basic outlines of the automobile’s checkered history will probably be familiar to many readers of this book. Promoted as the “people’s car” and sold to individuals by subscription, it was never actually delivered in the Nazi years; instead, it was turned into the “Kübelwagen” (a military vehicle) during the Second World War and later became the premier symbol of West Germany’s economic miracle. By zooming in on the meanings that accompanied the VW along this road, Scholz adds a forgotten and excluded layer to the story. She explores the “genealogy” of a Volkswagen print advertisement from 1960, for example, to show that the ad’s dominant motifs—depicting a group of people admiring the car—were familiar tropes from the Nazi years, now recast as a symbol of the FRG’s youthfulness, economic recovery, and consumer democracy (74-5).
An in-depth account of the VW’s image and meaning in the Nazi years follows, setting up Scholz’s investigation of the “genesis of a miracle” after 1945. While a few postwar commentators criticized the vehicle’s role in Nazi ideology and society, by the mid-1950s the success of “the Volkswagen imaginary” was firmly in place. The postwar VW represented West German recovery from the miseries of the war and “the promise of a better life.” This narrative cast the new nation as “a radiant modern society for which the past of the lost war became almost as elusive as a bad dream or as unoffending as a challenge that was successfully overcome” (73). Scholz plots this latent theme through a creative reading of advertisements, popular film, novels, magazine articles, and promotional films—several of which are available on YouTube and well worth a view. (See e.g. “Aus Eigener Kraft – Volkswagen Film 1954 / 1955 – VW Full Movie,” YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QP6-kav8zNk.)
Chapter Three, “Timeless Objects: Good Modernity and its Other,” follows a similar theoretical and historical trajectory. In this case the focus is on modern design, and especially on the home furnishings associated with the Bauhaus and the German Werkbund, an organization dedicated to the promotion of modern design founded in 1907. Postwar commentators often asserted that National Socialists disdained the Bauhaus and the Werkbund, and that their postwar re-adoption represented a break with the Nazi past. But by moving back and forth across 1945, Scholz shows that modern design played a key role in German culture before, during, and after the Third Reich. For the Nazi intelligentsia, the “good form” of modern home design was consciously pitched (as in a 1939 magazine article) against “dishonest representation” and “the racially foreign addiction to sensation” (127). The postwar recasting of “good form” as a break with the Nazi past denied historical reality. It also placed National Socialism as “the new Other of modern design,” a move that ironically reproduced the binaries at the core of Nazi racism (131).
The fourth chapter—“Expanding Objects: At Home in Globalizing Germany”—probes the imaginary world of West German export goods in the 1950s. At that time, the FRG found itself in a unique position. The new nation was technically a postcolonial state, since Germany had lost its traditional colonies after World War I. Yet the Nazi state had only recently pursued a vicious war of imperial expansion. At the same time, broad processes of decolonization were shaking the hold of Europe’s other imperial powers. The geopolitical ramifications of these broad historical trends made their way into feature films and advertisements; despite the familiarity of goods and their images, racial and gendered tropes from the colonial and Nazi years persisted. Jokes about non-Europeans pictured in print ads, such as a veiled Arab woman trying to vacuum up the desert with an AEG vacuum cleaner (190), or a picture of “primitive” Africans forced to exist without the benefits of a SABA radio (199), reinforced identities and sexualities, such as whiteness and Western superiority. Recast colonial figures helped uphold the idea that West Germany was an economic success and a global power in the postwar world.
Advertisements for fountain pens, cars, cigarette lighters, razor blades, laundry soap, refrigerators, cologne, and many other products depicted West Germany at the center of the globe. West German advertising pitched such products as “known in the whole world,” repeatedly using phrases such as “world brand,” “world-famous,” “world–proven” and “world success” to testify to the successful recovery of the state and economy in the center of the Western world of market competition. Such themes again echoed advertising claims familiar from the first half of the twentieth century. The putative success of such goods during the economic miracle of the 1950s, argues Scholz, shows how “symbolically charged commodities…let both recent and older German dreams of global influence and racial supremacy hide inside and thereby become a constitutive part of their redemptive function…. As a result, this mythical present made a new home for structures of feeling that had survived the 1945 break without ever being denormalized” (219).
In her epilogue Scholz underscores the connections between postwar modernity, colonialism, and the recent experience of National Socialism and defeat that came together to “haunt” the vaunted goods produced by the Federal Republic in the 1950s. Postwar discourses and mass-produced goods cast such objects as shiny new items devoid of any problematic past, when in fact the material and “cultural world” of postwar West Germany was full of the ghosts of violence and racial oppression (224). This remarkable book offers a new way to conceptualize postwar West German history, which integrates familiar historical topics: sites of memory, the Nazi past, consumer society, racial ideologies, and imperialist imaginaries. What emerges is an uncanny whole, a broad perspective on the time period that should spark further historical studies.
In a half-serious joke, Scholz describes herself as a “slow professor” doing “slow scholarship” (xiii)—if that’s the case, going slow is a model for others. Redeeming Objects offers a fresh take on postwar West German history but also a new way to think about other nations, other imaginaries, other traumas, other myths. I reflect on my own postwar past, extending into the 1960s for the sake of argument. I played with Fort Apache (look it up online to see pictures of this cowboy and Indian toy set), followed James Bond’s exploits, laughed at ugly jokes, watched Dr. Strangelove, ate pancakes with Aunt Jemima syrup—my personal immersion in a shared structure of feeling, rooted in objects and ideas that conjured ghosts and voided history. After reading Scholz, I’m convinced it’s not just West Germany that needs redemption. Repressed vestiges of the past resurface in different places, in different ways, at different times, some accompanied by guilt that may or may not become symptomatic. We’re all haunted.
Joe Perry is associate professor of European and German history emeritus at Georgia State University, where he taught courses on modern Germany, World War I, intellectual history, race and masculinity, consumer society, the history of emotions, and the Holocaust. His first book Christmas in Germany: A Cultural History (2010) explores the invention and various appropriations of Germany’s favorite national holiday. He is currently writing a book about the Berlin Love Parade and the history of that city’s techno clubs and culture.