Political Visions of Consumer Society in Weimar Germany

It is not possible to understand fully the role played by the figure of the consumer if we only look at the problematic claim for political representation. In addition to the discussion described above, which was closely linked to practical politics, the discursive place of the consumer was differently articulated in divergent visions of the future of German society that will now be explored. This examination conceives the Weimar republic as an experiment in mo-dernity, much as Detlev Peukert and, more recently, Peter Fritzsche and Paul Nolte have done. They have emphasized the intensity of Weimar debates on what German society was and was to be, thereby developing a non-deterministic picture of Weimar history.²⁰ It should be noted that although the visions to be analyzed here are presented in such a way that they roughly follow a chronological order, this is only true insofar as they had their heyday at different stages of Weimar history. At the same time, they competed with and overlapped each other more often than not.

The first vision to be analyzed here originated from the consumer co-operatives that had become an enormously successful movement rooted in civil society. Its appeal was twofold, since it worked to the immediate financial benefit of its members and promised to transform capitalism in the long run. After having already expanded substantially in the Imperial period, membership peaked in the early and mid-1920s when there existed, as had been the case since the split of the movement in 1903, two big associations of co-operatives. In 1927, the “Zentralverband”, which was located in Hamburg and was influenced by the Social Democrats and the free unions, counted more than 2.8 million members in 1,086 co-operatives. The “Reichsverband” in Cologne, was close to the Christian unions and had 0.8 million members in 275 organizations. The two branches hardly differed in their everyday practice, but in the scope of their political intentions there were significant differences. To the “Reichsverband”, the co-operatives were but a necessary complement to private capitalism forcing the exploitative retailers to delimit their profits. According to the revisionist socialism that was popular in the “Zentralverband”, the movement would gradually transform capitalism into socialism (not waiting for the breakdown as the orthodox view had it) with the continuous spread of co-operate organizations throughout the economy. Such was also the vision of the movement’s main proponents (like Robert Wilbrandt, Robert Schloesser, Fritz Staudinger, or Heinrich Peus), all of whom managed to disseminate their ideas in the leading political journals of the time.²¹ In order to trace the image of a future consumer society that was an important part of the co-operative utopia, I will concentrate on Robert Wilbrandt whose writings were widely received in the political public.²²

Wilbrandt explained to his readers that both competition and monopoly, the main stages in capitalist development, had inevitably generated self-governing initiatives for consumer protection against deteriorating product quality and profiteering. In 1844, the “Rochdale Pioneers”, Robert Owen and William King, had invented the principles of consumer co-operatives to which even their Weimar descendents still clung. Whenever the German companions wanted to revel in the bright future of their movement, they looked over to Great Britain where organizations had developed furthest. Apart from payment in cash, control of product quality, and political and religious neutrality, two key principles guaranteed the thriving of the associations. First, the refunding of profits to members according to the amount of money spent in stores, not according to advance deposits, would make shopping at co-operatives attractive. Second, the equality of the members’ votes on how to spend the surplus was independent of their financial investments, and, thus, made the co-operative a democratic, rather than a hierarchical institution. The trajectory imagined by Wilbrandt projected that, having organized a substantial number of consumers in co-operatives, the big associations would begin to take over production and organize it too on a co-operative basis.²³

The socialist ideal that the rising of the co-operative movement would eventually bring into being was the “Bedarfsdeckungswirtschaft”, the fixed-demand-satisfying economy. Explicitly praised by Wilbrandt as a “socialism of consumers”, this economic model was deliberately organized according to consumer needs. But far more than a distributional system, it was a mechanism of growing social harmony. A “community of consumers” was created through a “reconciliation of egoism and altruism because everbody wins more, the more he lets others participate”.²⁴ The utopian dimension of the co-operative future was pervasive, but was not so much remarked on because the ideal seemed to be in the offing with the ongoing influx of members. Wilbrandt dreamed of an international federation of co-operative associations, “that [would be] powerful in all parliaments because of the masses of members, and stand above today’s big and small nations as an institution, ready to satisfy the economic needs of all consumers”.²⁵ The legitimacy the consumer advocates laid claim to was really derived from the future: with the transformation of the economy into a co-operative system, what had been in the past the consumer’s merely partial economic interest would turn into the genuinely public interest tomorrow. The great thing about the “Gemeinwirtschaft” Wilbrandt envisioned was that it promised to relieve consumers of the three capitalist curses – crises, exploitation, and waste – and that all this could be achieved by rational planning. Social engineering with a humanist core, therefore, was the appeal of this model of consumer society.

The economic and moral foundations on which the professed superiority of the co-operative economy rested, implied a specific conceptualization of the consumer. If exchange was to be replaced by planning as the governing principle of socio-economic organization, then it was necessary to calculate demand in advance if one was to make it the basis of a production plan. That way “sales uncertainty is removed by the organization of customers. And with sales uncertainty gone, all the worries and competition for sales disappear, all the costs of salesmen and advertisement, together with the artificial excess of needs instilled by it, and all the over-production that is now crushing us.”²⁶ The tremendous costs eliminated by a foresighted calculation of demand could be used to lower the price of necessary consumer goods. The precondition of this was, of course, that consumers’ needs be thought of as rather static and that they not develop uncontrollably as they had done before 1914 when, as was commonly believed, the finery and frippery of consumer culture had begun to spread among the masses. Thus, to promote the demand-satisfying economy was to believe that consumers were almost exclusively interested in the satisfaction of certain necessities, and that the dynamic desire for luxuries was nothing more than a bad habit acquired in supply-driven capitalism that would eventually fade away.

Apart from efficient organization, Wilbrandt emphasized another point that he praised as the true mission of the movement. In the co-operatives, consumers did much more than just shop cheaply, they were being socially educated to become morally better persons. As long as capitalism held sway, Wilbrandt argued, Christianity was condemmed to a transcendent exist-ence; the communal work in the co-operatives now granted the chance to practice Christian virtues in real life. Yet, there was a catch in the promise of moral betterment in that it would not flow automatically from organization. It became clear that many members (of the next generation, as Wilbrandt remarked) were not so enthusiastic about devoting their time to voluntary work for the co-operatives. These members also lacked foresight when they pressed for a complete refunding of surpluses instead of voting for reinvestment into the betterment of facilities. Last, but not least, the bureaucratic ways of the corporate associations tended to eviscerate the idealistic fervour that had contributed to their founding. If, to some extent, common benefit in the future hinged on personal sacrifice in the present, then the educated consumer was a prerequisite for, and not just the result of, the success of co-operatives. That it was, in fact, not easy to instill a sense of duty in consumers is evident from Wilbrandt’s disbelieving criticism of those members who shopped occasionally at private retailers and seemed not to understand “that it is their own shop they boycott”.²⁷

To sum up, consumers were entitled to be provided with necessary goods. At the same time they were asked to take political considerations into account in their consumer behaviour because they participated in a collective project to transform capitalism into a “socialism of consumers”. This was a vision of future German society that promised to “heal the national disunity”²⁸ that came from the rifts of class and political allegiance.
American affluence²⁹

In the mid-1920s, a competing model of consumer society was on the rise and received increasing support from liberals like Anton Erkelenz and Lujo Brentano and was continued to be supported well into the world economic crisis. In the following, Erkelenz, a leading member of the liberal Deutsche Demokratische Partei and co-editor of Die Hilfe, serves as an exemplary proponent of this position. Before proceeding to a discussion of Erkelenz’s thought, it should be noted that he and his like-minded contemporaries did not talk explicitly about “consumer society”, when they explained their political strategy, and “consumers” were not addressed as the main actors. Still, as we shall see, the consumer played the key role in this view and was conceptualized in a fashion radically different from that favoured by the co-operatives.

Under the slogan of “Kaufkraftförderung”, which meant the stimulation of purchasing power, an economic growth policy was advocated that tied an increase in productivity to a rising standard of living. Such a view had already existed in the 1880s when the “purchasing power of the masses” had received attention as being a necessary counterpart to the surging production.³⁰ In the decade-long break from the path to affluence between 1914 and 1924 the satisfaction of basic needs had occupied first place in the concepts of consumer policy. As the German economy was beginning to recover, the dynamics of needs regained prominence. In Erkelenz’s writings we can trace how the scheme of a distributional management of scarcity was giving way to the idea of general economic growth and of expanding cultural needs.³¹ In 1920, Erkelenz had still suggested a plan, to be carried out by a strong state, to reduce the consumption of “the superfluous and the unnecessary”. In 1924, he warned entrepreneurs against a tight wage policy arguing that a decreasing standard of living, which came from real wage losses, had been the cause of all kinds of disruptions in the past, including the political upheavals of 1918 and 1919. Later, under the spell of American mass consumer society, Erkelenz became convinced that the economy, “in order to live and not to rust, had to create new needs, had to satisfy new needs, and had to conjure up the means for larger and smaller sections of the population to be able to afford these needs.”³²

The plea for high wages was based on a specific diagnosis of the situation the German economy faced in the mid-1920s. According to this, the first wave of rationalization in industry did not reach workers and employees in the form of price cuts or wage raises, but rather hit them with higher unemployment rates. The strong German “trusts” had not sufficiently passed on to consumers the profits deriving from gains in productivity. Overproduction was the consequence, and it was high time that it be counterbalanced by a stimulation of demand. In addition to that, the structural transformation of the German economy that accompanied continuing urbanization had strongly privileged industrial production at the expense of agriculture. A corresponding adjustment within mass consumption (“des Verbrauchs der Volksmassen”) was necessary, as Wladimir Woytinsky explained in Die Gesellschaft, such that consumption went “less and less to food and more and more to clothes, housing, and the satisfaction of cultural needs.” The precondition for bringing such change was an increase in real wages – as every economist knew ever since Ernst Engel had demonstrated the connection between the level of income and the pattern of consumption. To Erkelenz, purchasing power had become the basis of “today’s economic system [that] could only exist through expansion, i.e., the expansion of all needs of life”.³³

To be sure, high wage policy on its own, its proponents had to admit, would just have triggered inflation; but coupled with rationalization it would become the engine of progress. At a conference of the “Gesellschaft für Soziale Reform” in 1927, Theodor Brauer and Emil Lederer explained the ingenious Fordist mechanism of a mutual reinforcement of wage raises and technical improvement. “Speculative” wage increase, Brauer recommended, stimulated demand which then induced rationalized mass production.³⁴ Heightened production and more efficient production could obviate the need for price increases, and would instead raise wages such that more mass consumer goods might be sold. The rationalizing effects of mass consumption and the stimulation of demand by rationalization, thus, combined to create an upward spiral of ever-growing affluence. This is the place neither to assess the theoretical validity of this line of argument, nor to recapitulate Borchardt’s neoclassical case against an exaggerated wage level before the world economic crisis.³⁵ It should, however, be noted that it was indeed a consumer policy that Weimar entrepreneurs resisted so strongly, even if contemporary discourse focused on talk about workers’ and employees’ rights. It was precisely workers’ financial ability to participate in mass consumption that was at stake in the clash between supply-orientated industry and demand-orientated unions.

The vision of the thriving mass consumer society had the advantage, so the advocates argued, that it did not only exist in the imagination, but had, in fact, already been realized in the United States. When Erkelenz promulgated this vision in Die Hilfe, he was not so much talking economic theory, but rather painting vivid pictures of the American present – and by implication the possible German future. From his travels, he brought home descriptions of the incredible mass motorization, of big industry’s technical superiority, and of the efficacious rationalization instantiated by the trade department under Hoover. It was beyond doubt that there really was an economic miracle in the converging of a stunning real wage level, twice as high as in Germany, with large profits for entrepreneurs. Yet, there was disagreement among the many travellers to the United States on whether American success was the result of specific domestic conditions and whether it was possible to repeat the American miracle in Germany. Unequivocally, Erkelenz told his readers that it was not natural resources, not the greater productivity of agriculture, nor the more extensive domestic market that was responsible, but rather the double strategy of high wages plus rationalization that might easily be adopted in Germany.³⁶

Even a strong supporter of the American model like Erkelenz did not embrace all its aspects whole-heartedly. He disapproved, for example, of installment plans, and was wary of the possibility of mass motorization in Germany. What made the self-propelling Fordist mechanism so attractive was the spirit of achievement and the social harmony that might flow from a rising standard of living. To increase the purchasing power of the consumer masses was the best social policy, as Erkelenz proclaimed again and again.³⁷ In this view, the promise to integrate society rested on a dynamic conception of mass consumption in which people had the right and the means to satisfy their changing consumer needs, but, in a sense, also had the duty to do so, for if consumers would not do their duty, then the system would not work.

German autarky

During the world economic crisis, a wholly different conception of consumer society gained prominence among the right-wing “young conservative” authors whose ideas largely converged, and sometimes were identical, with national socialist ideology. Earlier, the most influential writer had been Gottfried Feder who, having impressed Hitler with his “Manifest zur Brechung der Zinsknechtschaft” (Manifesto to Break Loan Servitude), had significantly shaped the party’s thin economic policy in the 1920s. When the young conservative journal Die Tat became popular in the late 1920s, Friedrich Zimmermann, alias Ferdinand Fried, who published his widely-noticed articles on the demise of capitalism there, exerted great influence.³⁸

The primacy of politics over economics was invoked as the basic principle. We find it being explored in Feder’s tedious exegesis of the 1920 party platform which had partly been informed by his ideas. It seems to me that a national socialist version of a social contract is drafted here. State and society are connected by notions of rights and duties that refer to the citizen’s double identity as consumer and producer. The party platform does not talk about wage labourers or salaried employees, but mainly about citizens (“Staatsbürger”) who are also called “Volksgenossen”. A strict reciprocity between the citizens and the state is visible; while the state is obliged to provide employment and subsistence (“für die Erwerbs- und Lebensmöglichkeit der Staatsbürger zu sorgen”), it is the citizen’s “first duty” to work, intellectually or manually. Feder elucidates this construction by stating that “the consumer and the producer are the main participants in every economy”.³⁹ On the one side, the nation is imagined as a community of producers, of the “working people” (“Werktätige”) who are characterized as being infused with the “schaffende Geist”. Feder uses this powerful image to connote hard work and creativity, in opposition to the stereotypical anti-Semitic figure of the “raffende Geist” who was identified with “the jew”, roaming about to pile up money and enslave producers through finance capital. The state’s most urgent economic task, Feder suggested, was to destroy the power of all the exploitative middlemen in trade, retail, and banking, who interrupted the relation between producers and consumers. Of course, that did not apply to “Aryan” small retailers who formed the “sound middle classes”. In the party platform, these ideas materialized in the call for the communalization of big department stores, for the socialization of trusts, and for the death penalty for profiteers.⁴⁰ On the other side, the citizens’ duty to work is counterbalanced by their right as consumers to be provided with the goods essential to their subsistence. Just like for the co-operative movement, “Bedarfsdeckung” should replace profitability as the purpose of economy. Feder defined “Bedarfsdeckung” as the “satisfaction of necessary needs at reasonable prices for all who are joint in the Volksgemeinschaft”. As food and housing were the only goods deemed necessary in this account, the state would see to it that provision of them was guaranteed. While anxious to proclaim that private property remained inviolate as long as it did not harm the public interest, the state did embark on projects like housing programmes or the expansion of Lebensraum, which were announced as a part of the national socialist food policy. Also, if it was not possible to feed the whole nation, the platform stipulated that non-citizens were to be expelled from Germany.⁴¹

However unsuccessful Feder later was in the Nazi state, and although he may not have been very explicit about it himself, the decisive point to make about his writings is that he acknowledged the double nature of citizens as consumers and producers and made it the basis of a nationalist social contract. The state was founded upon the citizens’ duty to work and upon their right to be provided with necessary goods.

The figure of the German consumer took further shape in the writings of Ferdinand Fried, who advocated far-reaching state intervention in the economy in response to the world economic crisis. He explored capitalism’s fundamental failure to allocate resources at length, and tried to demonstrate a long-term trend from free trade towards trade war in the world economy. This development would eventually lead to geographically separate economic areas, virtually forcing the nations to adopt autarky and the planned economy as the key principles of economic policy. According to Fried, a paradigm shift was on the way as the masses, having suffered most under capitalism and now rising to political power, determined how the state related to the economy. The order of the day was static national subsistence organized by the state, replacing the past axioma of dynamic development and international exchange. When Fried argued that “the demand-stimulating economy (Bedarfsweckungswirtschaft) turns into a demand-meeting economy (Bedarfsdeckungswirtschaft) again”, he was playing on familiar terminology.⁴²

The walling off of the German economy with tariffs envisioned by Fried had consequences for the consumer. Since the priority was to meet demand as far as possible through domestic production, a partial re-agrarization was recommended. Only those products which could not possibly be had from German soil should be imported. Fortunately, as Fried found out when he was sketching a minimalist import plan, most foodstuffs could be produced in ample amounts at home. When it came to extravagant import goods like coffee, tea, or cigarettes, for which there was obviously a demand, a “gradual disaccustoming” was advised. With respect to the difficult provision with fruit in the winter time, it seemed best to “work out a consumer rhythm that is in line with the conditions of the German soil”. When Fried asked whether Germans should “keep on drinking coffee only to do Brazil a favor”, he was trying to teach his readers how eminently political consumption was.⁴³