Domesticating the Cold War: Household Consumption As

Domesticating the Cold War: Household Consumption as Propaganda in Marshall Plan Germany Author(s): Greg Castillo Reviewed work(s): Source: Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 40, No. 2, Domestic Dreamworlds: Notions of Home in Post-1945 Europe (Apr., 2005), pp. 261-288 Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30036324 . Accessed: 18/10/2012 17:32

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http://www.jstor.org Journalof ContemporaryHistory Copyright c 2005 SAGEPublications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi,Vol 40(2), 261-288. ISSN0022-0094. DOI:10. 1177/0022009405051553

Greg Castillo Domesticating the Cold War: Household Consumption as Propaganda in Marshall Plan Germany

In 1951, sociologistDavid Reismanpublished a fictitiousaccount of a bomb- ing campaign involving consumer goods rather than explosives. What US officials called 'OperationAbundance' was soon dubbed'The Nylon War' by Reisman'simaginary reporters following its initial barrageof the USSRwith women's stockings.The offensivestrategy was inspiredand devious: Behindthe initialraid of June 1 were yearsof secretand complexpreparations, and an idea of disarmingsimplicity: that if allowedto samplethe richesof America,the Russianpeople would not long toleratemasters who gave them tanksand spies insteadof vacuumcleaners and beautyparlors. The Russianrulers would thereuponbe forcedto turn out consumers' goods, or facemass discontenton an increasingscale.' OperationAbundance 'was both violentlyanti-Soviet and pro-peace',according to Reisman'sparody, and entailed 'recruitmentof top-flight production and merchandisingtalent from civilian life'. Successivewaves of air-dropped free sampleswere said to throw socialistsociety into disarray'as Soviethouse- wives saw for their own eyes Americanstoves, refrigerators,clothing and toys'. Reisman described the war's outcome as a new Soviet policy that attempted to enfranchise consumers, but strained state resources. '[T]he Russianpeople, without saying so in as many words, are now puttinga price on their collaborationwith the regime.The price- "goodsinstead of guns".'2 Less than a decade after its publication,Reisman's fiction came to seem prophetic.In the summerof 1959, Russiansgot their first taste of the US consumer lifestyleat the AmericanNational Exhibitionin Moscow. Advisingon exhibition strategies,Llewelyn Thompson, the US ambassadorto the USSR, proposedthat displaysshould 'endeavorto make the Sovietpeople dissatisfied with the share of the Russian pie which they now receive'.3Consequently, the show's perfunctorysampling of American'high culture'was dwarfed by a consumer spectacle which showcased cosmetics, clothing, televisions, kitchens, soft drinks, mail order catalogues, fibreglass canoes and sailing- boats, automobilesand a prefabricatedsuburban house. Sovietpremier Nikita

1 David Reisman, 'The Nylon War' in Abundance for What? And Other Essays (Garden City, NY 1964), 67. I wish to thankGy6rgy Peteri for bringingthis essayto my attention. 2 Ibid., 68, 69, 73. 3 Llewelyn Thompson quoted in Walter L. Hixson, Parting the Curtain. Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 1945-1961 (New York 1998), 167. 262 Journalof ContemporaryHistory Vol 40 No 2

Khrushchevseemed testy on the firstof his two visits.He lost his composure whenconfronted by the 1100sq. ft tracthome, dubbed 'Splitnik' by American journalistsfor the rampsplitting the structurein half to allow crowdsof visitorsto moveunimpeded past the furnishedinteriors. Arriving at Splitnik's lemon-yellow,all-electric, GE kitchen, Khrushchev and his tour guide,Vice- PresidentRichard M. Nixon,confronted each other. Khrushchev declared that the US had no exclusivefranchise on advanceddomestic technology and claimedpreposterously that 'all of our houseshave this kindof equipment'.' Humiliatedby inadequacieson the Russianhome front, the Sovietpremier madea rashwager: 'In anotherseven years we will be on the samelevel as America.When we catchup withyou, while passing by we will waveto you.'" Officialsin Washingtonwere ecstatic,proclaiming the exhibition'probably the mostproductive single psychological [warfare] effort ever launched by the US in anycommunist country'.' Althoughhistorians sometimes credit the KitchenDebate with inducting modelhomes and household goods into the ColdWar, the American National Exhibitionwas the partingvolley of a successfulpropaganda campaign rather thanits openingshot. The US State Department had begun developing domestic consumptionas a propagandaweapon ten yearsearlier in dividedBerlin, a cityreconstructed as a set of competingideological showcases. Just as singular as the constructionof a habitablemetonym for Europe'spartition was the opportunityto constructa dailylife thattransgressed Cold War boundaries. Untilthe infamousWall went up in 1961,Berlin's socialist capital and capitalist metropolismet at relativelyopen border crossings. Especially at thepeak of WestGerman unemployment in 1950, WestBerliners shopped in the 'Second World'for cheapgoods at favourableexchange rates.' East Berliners crossed overto the 'FirstWorld' for nylonsand jeans, or to takein a Hollywoodfilm at a matinee.8Propagandists from both sides, inspired by the waysconsumers exploitedBerlin's oddness for theirown ends,devised new strategies to reach audiencesacross the city's sector boundaries.9 Justas in Reisman's'Operation Abundance', household goods exhibitions sponsoredby the MarshallPlan in West Berlinrecruited 'top-flight' civilian talents,including Edgar Kaufmann Jr, design curator at New York'sMuseum

4 Khrushchev quoted in Hixson, Parting the Curtain, op. cit., 179. 5 Robert H. Haddow, Pavilions of Plenty. Exhibiting American Culture Abroad in the 1950s (Washington, DC and London 1997), 215. 6 1960 USIA Annual Report, quoted in Hixson, Parting the Curtain, op. cit., 210. 7 Katherine Pence, 'The Myth of a Suspended Present. Prosperity's Painful Shadow in 1950s East Germany' in Paul Betts and Greg Eghigian, Pain and Prosperity. Reconsidering Twentieth- Century German History (Stanford, CA 2003), 153. 8 Uta G. Poiger, Jazz, Rock and Rebels. Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Divided Germany (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA 2000), 2. 9 Paul Steege uses the term 'messy location' in the context of the Cold War imperative to segre- gate ideological realms, to describe Berlin's geopolitical site. Paul Steege, 'Making the Cold War. Everyday Symbolic Practice in Postwar Berlin' at the 'Revising Alltagsgeschichte', paper presented at the German Studies Association Conference, New Orleans 2003. Castillo:Domesticating the ColdWar 263 of ModernArt (MoMA).They were assistedin their effortsby a federal employee,Peter G. Harnden.A California-bornarchitect, Harnden's wartime workas a US ArmyIntelligence officer was followedby a postwarcareer in exhibitiondesign and production- first for the MarshallPlan and later workingunder Federal sponsorship as an independentconsultant based in Paris.His useof modelhomes to promotethe US political economy was honed in occupiedGermany and culminateda decadelater in Moscow.The path towardKhrushchev's humiliating encounter with a lemon-yellowkitchen can be traceddirectly back to USpropaganda spectacles staged in WestBerlin. JohnConnelly has noted that 'the precise function of the openborder is one of the mostpressing questions in the historicalsociology of the GDR'.1'In an erabefore television could beam images of Westernlifestyles directly into East Germanhomes, the US StateDepartment exploited the geopoliticalanomaly of dividedBerlin to exposecitizens of theWest and East to householdexhibi- tions trumpetingthe MarshallPlan's social contract, which conflated demo- cratic freedomwith risingprivate consumption. US-sponsored exhibitions were scheduleddeliberately to coincidewith major socialistholidays, a strategywhich exploited the ease with whichEast Berlinerscould visit the city's westernhalf beforethe constructionof the infamousWall in 1961. MarshallPlan shows poached attendance from East Berlin's political rallies, whichwere stocked with crowdsshipped in fromacross the socialistnation. Bargain-rateadmissions for those holdingEast Germanidentity cards pro- videdan addedincentive for a daytrip to the capitalistwest, andallowed US officialsto keepa precisetally of socialistvisitors. To competewith the 1951 WorldFestival of SocialistYouth (Weltfestspiele), for example,Marshall Plan propagandistsintroduced colour television and projection-screen broadcasting to Europe.US techniciansbroadcast a programmeof live entertainmentvia closedcircuit to televisionsets displayedin shopwindows and to two large outdoorprojection screens, one at PotsdamerPlatz, just a blockfrom the East Berlinborder. Crowds began to gatherat 2 p.m.to claimperches atop piles of wartimerubble to securean unobstructedview of the eveningtelecast. This mediated,real-time communion with televisionviewers in outdoorlocations acrossWest Berlin was the MarshallPlan's capitalist analogue of Stalinism's embodiedsocialist collectivity, the latterexpressed in choreographedmasses flowingdown East Berlin's boulevards. A MarshallPlan press release crowed:

While 100,000 young men and women crowdedthe Soviet sectorof Berlinfor the communist-inspiredworld festival of youth,the freesector of the Germancapital got its firstlook at both color and black-and-whitetelevision. A steadyflow of wide-eyedvisitors ... who had come to Berlinfrom many parts of the world 'playedhooky' ... and saw for themselvesthe exhibitsput on by CBSin color, and RCAin black-and-white."1

10 John Connelly,'Ulbricht and the Intellectuals'in GyorgyP6teri (ed.), Intellectual Life and the First Crisis of State Socialismin East CentralEurope, 1953-1956, TrondheimStudies on East EuropeanCultures and Societies,no. 6, 103. 11 'FreeBerlin Exhibits Draw CommunistYouths', 24 August1951 pressrelease, RG 286 MP Ger. 1088-1106, Visualrecords, US NationalArchives, College Park, MD. 264 Journalof ContemporaryHistory Vol 40 No 2

MarshallPlan publicistsgrabbed photo-ops of uniformedmembers of the FDJ (FreieDeutsche Jugend, the East Germancommunist youth organization) at Americanexhibitions, and documented'Americanized' teenagers - 'Ami- Jiinglinge'as they were known in party rhetoric- being beaten by Volks- polizisten, or 'people'spolice', while tryingto cross the borderback into East Berlin.'12Walter Ulbricht, the leader of the East Germanparty, laid down the law for such youths in June 1952: 'Everyyoung person at a universityor any other kind of school will be immediatelyexpelled if he has any connections with West Berlin.Whoever is a memberof the stateyouth organizationwill be kicked out of the FDJ. . . . There is no other way."' Among East German teenagers, that critical cadre of socialist citizens-in-the-making,the party programmeof Sovietization'from above' was under mortal threat from a countervailing process of Americanizationinitiated 'from below' - the consumer-drivenvector of influenceemphasized by scholarsof the East/West interface of popular culture - but choreographed'from above' through Marshall Plan spectacles,which confronted socialist citizens with domestic environmentsthat were the antithesisof Stalin-eramaterial deprivation.14 In the wake of Stalin's death in 1953, economic and social reforms sup- ported by Khrushchevforged a tenuoustruce between socialist collectivity and capitalistconsumption. A cornucopiaof new householditems suddenly graced the pages of Soviet bloc magazines.Kultur im Heim (Cultureat Home), an East German home-decoratingjournal founded in 1956, showed kitchen gadgets and domestic technology formerlyassociated with Americanexcess, but now celebratedas the practical accessoriesof a contemporarysocialist lifestyle. Modernist home furnishings,decried by party leaders a few years earlieras symptomaticof Westerndecadence, became heralds of communism's 'New Course'- even if they were nowhereto be found in state retail outlets. Over the courseof a generation,a Stalinistconstruct of domesticityemphasiz- ing the presenceof culturewas abandonedfor one that highlightedthe absence of objects."Of even greaterportent than the Sovietbloc's embraceof the kind

12 'Caught Red Handed', 15 October 1951 press release, RG 286 MP Ger. 1180, Visual records, US National Archives, College Park, MD. On the East German party reaction to 'Americanized' socialist youth, see Poiger, Jazz, Rock and Rebels, op. cit., 58-70. 13 Ulbricht's comments at a conference of regional secretaries of the SED, 4 June 1952, cited and translated in Michael Lemke, 'Foreign Influences on the Dictatorial Development of the GDR, 1949-1955' in Konrad H. Jarausch (ed.), Dictatorship as Experience. Towards a Socio-Cultural History of the GDR (New York and Oxford 1999), 102. 14 The concept of 'Americanization from below' in contest with 'Sovietization from above' is developed in Michael Lemke, 'Deutschlandpolitik zwischen Sowjetisierung und Verwestlichung 1949-1963' in Konrad H. Jarausch and Hannes Siegrist (eds), Amerikanisierung und Sowjetisierung in Deutschland 1945-1970 (Frankfurt-am-Main 1997), 94-9. 15 On the use of socialist consumption as a culture of resistance, see C. Humphrey, 'Creating a Culture of Disillusionment. Consumption in Moscow, A Chronicle of Changing Times' in Daniel Miller (ed.), Worlds Apart. Modernity through the Prism of the Local (London and New York 1995). On the role played by consumer dissatisfaction at the collapse of the East German state, see Jeffrey Kopstein, The Politics of Economic Collapse in East Germany, 1945-1989 (Chapel Hill, Castillo:Domesticating the ColdWar 265 of commoditiesdisplayed in US StateDepartment household goods shows was the party'simplicit adoption of the MarshallPlan's notion of citizen enfranchisementthrough rising purchasing power: a consumerrewards pro- grammeimpossible to maintainin an economyfounded on the primacyof state-ownedheavy industry. As fantasizedin Reisman'sfictional 'Nylon War', a runawayinflation of consumerdesire ultimately bankrupted the political economyof Soviet-stylesocialism.

US occupationgovernance in postwarGermany faced a two-frontcultural battle.Communist propaganda depicted the USA as a militaryempire ruled by philistineparvenus. German intellectuals and opinion leaders, who constituted the secondfront in America'scultural cold war, typically regarded America as the purveyorof 'a primitive,vulgar, trashy Massenkultur, which was in effect an Unkultur,whose importation into postwarEurope had to be resisted',in the words of historianVolker Berghahn.'1 More than merelyhumiliating, perceptionsof a degradedAmerican 'non-culture' also subvertedUS plans for Europe'spostwar future. The Marshall Plan set out to linkcapitalist democracy and economicgrowth to low-costmass consumption:the Fordist mechanismby whichworkers would be enfranchised,and agitation by com- munistlabour unions neutralized.17 'Today's contest between freedom and despotismis a contestbetween the Americanassembly line andthe Commu- nist Partyline', declared Paul G. Hoffmann,the formerCEO of Studebaker who headedthe Marshall Plan's European Recovery Programme (ERP).'8 The ERPblueprint for unleashingpostwar consumer desire effectively redefined FranklinDelano Roosevelt's 'Four Freedoms', transforming 'freedom from want'into the freedom to want. A classifiedUS intelligencereport of 1947 examinedSoviet propaganda ridiculing'the American Way of Life'and recommended that the USAinitiate a counter-propagandaoffensive based on themeslike 'Americanliving standards'and 'tryit ourway'."9 In the springof 1948, the Officeof the Military Governmentin US-occupiedGermany (OMGUS) contracted Frederick Gutheim,a Germanexpatriate architectural historian, as a consultantfor an exhibitionabout postwar housing trends in the USA.Patricia van Delden, chief officerof the OMGUSInformation Centers and ExhibitionsBranch, doubtedthe wisdom of suchan exhibit:

NC and London 1997), 192, 195-7, and Charles S. Maier, Dissolution. The Crisis of Communism and the End of East Germany (Princeton, NJ 1997), 89-97. 16 Volker Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars (Princeton, NJ 2001), xvii. 17 The origins and ideological underpinnings of a Fordist consumer culture are traced in Susan Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed. The Making of the American Mass Market (New York 1989). 18 Paul G. Hoffman, Peace Can Be Won (Garden City, NY 1951). 19 US Army Intelligence, 'Russian Propaganda Regarding the American Way of Life' (Project 3869), 10 October 1947. RG319, 270/9/23/7, Box 2900, US National Archives, College Park, MD. 266 Journalof ContemporaryHistory Vol 40 No 2

In the yearssince the war, the Congresshas failedto pass an adequatehousing bill, and our own publications,easily available to the Germans in [US] InformationCenters, draw constantattention to that fact. Unlesswe are in the positionto explainto the Germanpeople howthey can acquire these houses, . . . we couldbe criticized for raising false hopes.

VanDelden's alternative, to 'confineourselves to materialshowing American conceptsof architecture',was disregardedby her superiors.Photographs showingnew homesand neighbourhood planning trends were solicited from architectureschool libraries at Harvard,Columbia and MIT. The images were enlargedfor displaypanels at the OMGUSExhibitions and Information Center,where Joost Schmidt, the formermaster instructor of graphicsat the DessauBauhaus, was in chargeof design.So wohntAmerika (How America Lives)opened in Frankfurtin August1949 (Fig.1). Despitestellar production talent,the exhibition attracted only a modestaudience and was largely ignored by local journalists.Photographs and scalemodels of suburbanhomes had failedto capturethe imaginationof postwarGermans. The headof the US InformationCenter in Frankfurt,Donald W. Muntz,recognized the error:'If realhonest-to-god electric stoves, refrigerators and deep-freeze units had been on hand,the generalattendance figures would have been astronomic. I can well imaginethat the problemsin bringingthese gadgets together would be manifold,but an efforthere would havepaid off.'20The show's'particular failure',as Muntztermed it, would not be repeatedin StateDepartment exhibitsof domesticmaterial culture. Whateverthe popularresponse to the American'good life' pitchedat the Frankfurtexhibition, its underlyingvalues were alien - evenalienating - to Germansacross all fouroccupation zones at the endof the war.For postwar citizensstruggling for sustenanceand basicshelter, images of overseasafflu- ence were foreignin everysense of the word. The consensusamong many intellectualswas that Germanywas at the thresholdof a new historicalera that would muzzlecapitalism and materialexcess. Spartan lifestyle choices complementedboth the economicrealities of life in the wakeof Armageddon as well as the searchfor an indigenousGerman socialism. The nation's modernistsrediscovered the minimalistdesign traditions of the Weimarera, whichthey embraced for theirpotential to aestheticizecollective poverty. The DeutscheWerkbund's 1949 Neues Wohnen (New Living)exhibition in Cologneprescribed ascetic domestic appointments as a catalystfor Germany's spiritualredemption - a theme repeatedlymentioned in opening-day addresses.The Ministerof Economicsof Nordrhein-WestfalenErik N61ting observedof the existenzminimum designs devised by Weimarera modernists: 'Hardtimes in thepast also forced downsizing and thrift upon us, butit was a

20 Donald W. Muntz to Patricia van Delden, 'Special Report re America House Publicity Efforts on Behalf of the "So Wohnt Amerika" Exhibition, 24 August 1949', RG260, 390/42/21/3, Box 323, OMGUS Information Control, Records of Information Centers and Exhibits Branch, 1945-49, US National Archives, College Park, MD. Castillo:Domesticating the ColdWar 267

FIGURE1 Germanvisitors examine a model and photographsof 'housingfor the prosperous' at the OMGUSexhibition 'How AmericaLives', Stuttgart 1949. US NationalArchives at CollegePark, MD.

healingforce that led to new form and a modestyet refineddomestic culture.'21 'Privationpurifies and tests every object, narrowingit down to just what it should be: a bed, a table, a kettle', pledgedarchitect Rudolf Schwarz.'All of these simplethings . . . arriveat pure design in the home of the poor, and are no more embellishedthan their use.'22Salutary penury had to be defended

21 Erik N1olting, Neues Wohnen. Werkbundausstellung deutscher Architektur seit 1945 (Cologne 1949), unpaginated. 22 Rudolf Schwarz, Neues Wohnen (Cologne 1949), unpaginated. 268 Journalof ContemporaryHistory Vol 40 No 2 againstthe diseaseof materialism.'Our men and women . . . shouldlearn to distinguishfor themselveswhich perceived needs are real and which are false', architectHans Schmidtwarned. 'False needs can be awakenedby appear- ances,by envy,by advertising.It is essentialto inducewariness and introspec- tion in people.'23Konsumterror, as the West Germansociologists Theodor Adornoand HelmutSchlesky later called it, ranrampant at the Werkbund's firstexhibition of postwardomestic design. TheUS MarshallPlan set its sightson the notionof Konsumterror.Private consumptionwas integralto 'theAmerican way of life',and the antithesisof Stalinism'sinstrumental asceticism, which redirectednational economies towardthe statistproject of buildingsmokestack socialism. Marshall Plan strategiesfor reconstructioninstrumentalized private spending instead. Con- sumptionwould fuel economicexpansion and, as a worker'sreward for co-operationwith industrialmanagement, stabilize capitalist democracy. A continuoussurge of productivity,profits, wages and private spending would avertthe class warfarethat plaguedEuropean interwar capitalism, with its focus on a zero-sumdistribution of wealth.America's promulgation of the public benefitof privateconsumption was nowheremore evidentthan in Germany'sformer capital. In 1950,West Berlin received a newtrade pavilion, courtesyof theUS State Department. The George Marshall-Haus, designed by municipalarchitect Bruno Grimmek, was the formerGerman capital's first exampleof the postwarInternational Style modernismcelebrated by the curatorsof New York'sMuseum of ModernArt. Built in Berlin'sexposition park,the pavilionhosted exhibits and conferences which promoted industrial productivity,tariff-free trade and mass consumption. The Marshall-Hausmade its debutin October1950, with construction finishedjust in time for the annualWest GermanIndustrial Exhibition and the socialistholiday coinciding with East Germannational elections. West GermanMinister of EconomicsLudwig Erhard opened the tradefair with a speechthat referred to theBundesrepublik as 'a freenation of consumers',one in whichcitizens would determine whether production would 'be employed for the ends of humanand social welfare'.24However, the US State Departmentseemed to havea differentconsumer economy in mind.It shipped in a six-roomprefabricated tract home by Page and Hill of Minneapolis, repletewith furnishings.This exhibit's curator was an architecton loan from the US Homeand HousingFinance Agency, Bernard Wagner, whose father, Harvardprofessor Martin Wagner, had beenBerlin's Weimar-era municipal planningchief. Germancarpenters working in round-the-clockshifts took onlyfive days to assemblethe homeon a site besidethe new Marshall-Haus.21 Attractivefemale American Studies majors from West Berlin's newly-opened

23 Hans Schmidt, Neues Wohnen (Cologne 1949), unpaginated. 24 Ludwig Erhard, trans. J.A. Arengo-Jones and D.J.S. Thomas, The Economics of Success (London 1963), 80. 25 Amerika zu Hause. Deutsche Industrie Ausstellung, Berlin, 1.-15. Oktober 1950 (n.p.), unpaginated. Castillo:Domesticating the ColdWar 269

FIGURE2 Crowdsat the policedfront door of the 'Americaat Home' exhibition, WestBerlin 1950. US NationalArchives at CollegePark, MD.

Free Universitywere selected as tour guides and trainedto answer questions about 'such household miracles as the . . . electric washing machine, illumi- nated electricrange, vacuum cleaner, mix master,toast master,etc.'.26 Predictions of astronomical attendance at an exhibition featuring 'real honest-to-godelectric stoves, refrigeratorsand deep-freezeunits' provedaccu- rate. When Amerikazu Hause (Americaat Home) swung open its front door, the exhibit was promptly mobbed. Visitors thronged in such numbersthat police had to be posted at the front and back doors, and foot trafficlimited to groups of ten to avoid structuraldamage to the wood-framebuilding (Fig. 2). Accordingto a US press release, Germanswere impressedby the thermostat- controlled central heating and 'a model American kitchen with gleaming electrical applianceswhich are already the talk of Berlin'.27These domestic comfortswere boundto createa sensation,given the fact that, in 1950, 15 per cent of the West Germanpopulation was crowdedinto housing with three or more inhabitantsper room, and the averageworking-class family of four spent

26 Memorandum,Paul A. Shinkmanto Henry J. Kellermann,3 November 1950, RG59 862A.191 (InternalAffairs of StateRelating to Exhibitionsand Fairsin Germany),Box 5225, US NationalArchives, College Park, MD. 27 'News release',15 October1950; 'ModelUS Home at West BerlinFair No. One Attraction for Awed Germans',undated; RG59 862A.191 (InternalAffairs of StateRelating to Exhibitions and Fairsin Germany),Box 5225, US NationalArchives, College Park, MD. 270 Journalof ContemporaryHistory Vol 40 No 2 nearlyhalf its disposableincome on food. At a timewhen the WestGerman Wirtschaftswunderwas stillin its infancy(and felt lastof all in WestBerlin), this displayof extravagantprivate consumption was madecredible by pre- ciselythose prejudices that US culturaldiplomacy was attemptingto neutral- ize, namelythe view that America was a superpowerparvenu awash in wealth, butdevoid of Bildung. In the two weeksthat it was open,America at Homewas seen by 15,000 EastGermans. That number fell far shortof spectatordemand, frustrated by the structurallimitations of the smallhouse and its inabilityto processvisitors en masse.Nevertheless, the tracthome proved an effectivepropaganda tool, accordingto a reportfiled by US StateDepartment representative Paul A. Shinkman,and was capableof disarmingeven the most recalcitrantof East Germanagitators: At least one of the latter,a 20-year-oldyouth who had whippedup a forumof 200 protest- ing West Germansto expound his well-worn Communistline of 'Americaneconomic slavery',changed his views at the end of a speciallyconducted tour of the house undermy personaland friendlyguidance. He admittedruefully that the Americanway of life looked good to him - but that a visit to the Model AmericanHome was about as far as he could expect to travelin that direction.28 A closing-dayassessment sent to the US Secretaryof Statecrowed that 'whileresidents of the Soviet-sponsoredEast GermanRepublic were being instructedto "marchin festivespirit" to the pollsto vote for a singleslate of candidates,their countrymen in WestBerlin ... werevoluntarily spending the sunnyholiday by the thousandsat the industrialexhibition'.29 US officials judgedAmerica at Home'a gratifyingdemonstration of whatcan be accom- plishedin sellingthe Americandemocratic way of life fromthe Berlin"showcase"behind the ironcurtain in an incrediblyshort space of time'.30As under- scoredby a StateDepartment decision not to raffleoff the displayfor use on anothersite, as originallyplanned, in orderto avoidthe 'possibility[of the] housefalling into undesirablehands', the suburbantract home had becomea new weaponin America'sCold War arsenal and, correspondingly, had to be securedagainst unauthorized use.3"

The next US foray into the Cold War'sdomestic front attemptedto undermine the predominantEuropean belief in an inherentcontradiction between high

28 Memorandum,Paul A. Shinkmanto Henry J. Kellermann,3 November 1950, RG59 862A.191 (InternalAffairs of StateRelating to Exhibitionsand Fairsin Germany),Box 5225, US National Archives,College Park, MD. 29 PaulShinkman to Secretaryof State, 15 October1950, RG59 862A.191 (InternalAffairs of State Relatingto Exhibitionsand Fairsin Germany),Box 5225, US National Archives,College Park,MD. 30 Memorandum,Paul A. Shinkmanto HenryJ. Kellermann,3 November1950. 31 Webb, FrankfurtOffice of the US High Commanderfor Germany(HICOG) to HICOG Berlin,12 September1950, RG59 862A.191 (InternalAffairs of StateRelating to Exhibitionsand Fairsin Germany),Box 5225, US NationalArchives, College Park, MD. Castillo:Domesticating the ColdWar 271 culture and American mass consumption. For this undertaking, the State Department hired Edgar Kaufmann Jr, MoMA's industrial design curator, as an independent consultant. Kaufmann staged the museum's annual 'Good Design' exhibit of modern household products, which was produced by the museum in partnership with the Chicago Merchandise Mart. Just as the 'Good Design' shows blurred the distinctions between the museum and a department store, Kaufmann's collaboration with the Marshall Plan's Economic Co- operation Administration (ECA) also eroded the institutional boundaries - in this case, those separating US foreign policy from MoMA's mission to pro- mote modernism as America's new establishment culture. For the 1951 ECA exhibit Industrieund Handwerkschaffen neues Haus- gerdt in USA (Industry and Craft Create New Home Furnishings in the USA) Kaufmann assembled nearly 500 examples of 'progressive American design' characterized by 'simple lines and functional forms', and oversaw their display for the show's Stuttgart debut. The exhibition was also booked for subsequent venues in Berlin, Munich, Milan, Paris, London, Amsterdam and Trieste.32 Kaufmann's selection of furniture, ceramics, glassware, kitchen appliances and other household goods for display in Europe recycled the contents of previous Good Design exhibitions, which juxtaposed upscale collectibles by design luminaries like Ray and Charles Eames, Eero Saarinen, Isamu Noguchi and George Nelson with prosaic functional items, including a Chemex coffee carafe, Pyrex measuring cups and Tupperware containers. This demonstrated that 'a contemporary lifestyle' mixed 'many low-cost items and a few luxury items', according to a US press release.33Kaufmann's writings ascribed a far greater significance to domestic modernism. His pamphlet, What is Modern Design?, published a year earlier by MoMA, asserted: 'Modern design is intendedto implementthe lives of free individuals'(emphasis in original),and pronounced household modernism indispensable to democracy. German critic Heinrich K6nig was correct on many levels when he noted that the products displayed at the New Home Furnishings exhibition were not 'representational' in style. Rather than merely representing an 'American way of life', these domestic goods were its physical embodiment, according to Kaufmann's mani- festo. The New Home Furnishings show also staked a claim to Weimar-era modernism as America's inherited cultural capital. Kaufmann's essay for the show catalogue proposed a family tree for American industrial design that placed it at the culmination of pioneering German efforts, such as Peter Behrens's commissions for AEG, the work of the Deutscher Werkbund and the

32 'American Home Furnishings Exhibit' press release, RG 286 MP Gen 863-1012, Visual Collections, US National Archives, College Park, MD; Edgar Breitenbach and Arthur Vogel, 'Department of State Memorandum of Conversation', 2 January 1951, RG59 862A.191 (Internal Affairs of State Relating to Expositions, Exhibitions and Fairs in Germany), Box 5224, US National Archives, College Park, MD. 33 'American Home Furnishings Exhibit' press release, RG 286 MP Gen 863-1012, Visual Collections, US National Archives, College Park, MD. 272 Journalof ContemporaryHistory Vol 40 No 2 legacy of Bauhaus design. This assertion was proudly reiterated by West German reviewers, including Bauhaus alumnus Wilhelm Wagenfeld, who assertedthat 'carefree,ingenious lightness and an obviousjoy taken in empiri- cal experiment' were the distinctive new world contributions that made Americanmodernism 'more perfectlyresolved and less problematicthan [its Germanmanifestation] the first time around,as can be observedfrom . .. the old Werkbund and Bauhaus'.3 Kaufmann's constructed pedigree for US household modernismconformed to a culturalnarrative taking root on both sides of the Atlantic over the course of the 1950s. 'In this period', historian Paul Betts observes,'the Bauhausassumed a privilegedposition within West Germanculture in part becauseit played a crucialrole in the largerCold War projectto draw the WeimarRepublic and the [postwar]Federal Republic into the same electivelineage, while at the same time conjoiningWest Germanand Americancultural modernism.'3 Kaufmann's New Home Furnishingsexhibi- tion used modernistconsumer goods bearinga transatlanticdesign pedigree to bridgethe chasm betweenvictor and vanquished. For an exhibition purportedlydemonstrating 'American design and crafts- manship as adaptedto Americanhome living', however, Kaufmann'scollec- tion of products 'was in no way typical of the contemporaryAmerican household', as more than one German reviewer quickly recognized.36The nostalgic and regional styles that dominated the US furnituremarket were nowhere to be found in the show. America'sprovision of freedom of choice for consumers,no matterwhat their taste (or lack thereof),was an aspect of marketdemocracy that seemedto embarrassMarshall Plan officials. William C. Foster, a formersteel industryexecutive who servedas deputyadministra- tor of the ECA in Europe,claimed that the 'especiallyprogressive' consumer designshowcased by the exhibitionwas in the processof displacingmore 'con- servative and conventional' products in the USA. This dissimulation of American popular taste was the stock-in-tradeof US cultural diplomacy, which projecteda national self-portraitcreated expresslyfor Europeancon- sumption. By the end of the 1950s, the US State Departmentwas exporting InternationalStyle architecture,abstract expressionist painting and sculpture, and atonal music as culturalreflections of Americanfreedom of expression.In this dubiousmarriage of art and politics,modernist abstraction - by common definition 'non-representational'- was used overseas to represent core Americanvalues: a propagandaachievement so unlikelythat it was nothing short of sublime.

34 Wilhelm Wagenfeld, 'Neues Hausgerit in USA', Baukunst und Werkform, vol. 4, May 1951, 43, 44. 35 Paul Betts, 'The Bauhaus as Cold War Legend. West German Modernism Revisited', German Politics and Society, 14, 2 (1966), 76. 36 Walter Bogner, quoted in 'Neues Hausgerit in den USA', Neue Bauwelt, no. 39 (1951), 160; Heinrich Konig, 'Neues Hausgerat aus USA', 244. Castillo:Domesticating the Cold War 273

In 1952, officials of the Mutual SecurityAgency (MSA), an ECA successor organization,proposed a basic shift in exhibitionstrategy for the US contribu- tion to the annual German IndustrialExhibition. Rather than producing separateexhibits of heavy industryand consumergoods (as had been done in 1950, with Americaat Home representingthe latter), the US display would focus exclusivelyon privateconsumption. The decisionwas motivatedlargely by its potentialimpact upon East Germans,as a State Departmentmemoran- dum clarifies:

The BerlinIndustrial Fair in 1950 was most impressivebecause it showed large machines beingproduced by the Westat a timewhen Easternfactories were sufferingfrom dismantling by the Sovietsand when raw materialsin the Eastwere in extremeshortage. Since that time, however,the Easternemphasis on heavymachinery and productiongoods has broughtabout a changed situation. It is particularlyappropriate at this time, therefore,to show West Berliners,and more especiallyEast Zone and [Soviet]Sector visitors, the progressmade in the West in developingconsumer goods designedto raise the standardof living of the averagefamily.37

Plans for the exhibition were finalized in May. The show would feature a house within a house - an 'ideal dwelling' built within West Berlin's Marshall-Hauspavilion. Just as at a nineteenth-centuryethnographic spectacle, the model home would serve as backdropfor a 'man-wife-childfamily team actuallygoing through [the] physicalactions of living in [the] dwelling, making proper use of [the] objects in it', accordingto a State Department telegraph.Thematic content was 'to be developedin terms of argumentsfor a high-production,high-wage, low-unit-cost, low-profit-margin, high consumption system .... Emphasis [is] to be placed upon [the] fortunate outcome of American economic philosophy when combined with European skills and resources.'38Wherever possible, household equipment and furnishingswere to be WesternEuropean in manufacture.A moderndomestic environment based on New Worldideals, but assembledfrom continental products, would convey the benefits of the Marshall Plan and its transatlanticpromotion of the Americaneconomic system. In producing its most ambitious German exhibition to date, the State Departmentfaced the logisticalchallenge of quicklygathering an international assortmentof householdgoods. As with the New Home Furnishingsshow, all domestic objects were to be selected by a curator at MoMA, presumably EdgarKaufmann Jr.39 A Germanarchitect, Fritz Bornemann,was contracted

37 'BerlinIndustrial Fair 1952', HICOGBerlin to US Departmentof State,5 November1952, RG59 862A.191 (InternalAffairs of State Relatingto Exhibitionsand Fairs in Germany),Box 5225, US NationalArchives, College Park, MD. 38 HICOGBonn to US Departmentof StateBureau of GermanAffairs, 31 May 1952, RG59 862A.191 (InternalAffairs of StateRelating to Exhibitionsand Fairsin Germany),Box 5225, US National Archives,College Park, MD. 39 Memorandaof two MSAmeetings of 21 and 23 July 1952 note a contractwith the Museum of ModernArt withoutnoting a specificcurator. RG59/150/71/35/04, Entry 5323 (Recordsof the InternationalInformation Administration, Subject Files, EuropeanField Program1949-1952), 274 Journalof ContemporaryHistory Vol 40 No 2 to draft plans for the model home. In Bonn, US public affairsofficer Herwin Schaefferhelped locate the requiredWest Germanfurnishings; freelance con- sultantswere hiredto trackdown productsfrom Franceand Italy.Department of Commerceofficials asked the Air Force to sponsor another Berlin airlift: this one dedicatedto the transportof stylish furniturerather than food and coal. The most harrowingmoment in the show's productionoccurred just days before the grandopening. At a press conference,Peter Harnden, chief of the presentationsbranch of the MSA, describedthe upcomingexhibition and stated that 'in the course of enacting [a] normal daily living routine [the] wife-mother would demonstratehousehold appliances and equipment' - including a bathroom shower. The next day, United Press correspondent JosephFleming announced that the US StateDepartment would be sponsoring a 'striptease' at West Berlin'sindustrial fair. A flurryof 'confidentialsecurity information' telegrams between Germanyand Washingtonfollowed. MSA administratorsvowed that Harnden'did not (rptnot) say or alludeto: (A) any sort of "strip tease" (B) [a] "lusciousyoung Germ[an]girl" hired for [the] "leading role" (C) "modeling nylons, panties and brassieres". . . . In view of [the] widespreadplay given this misleading,erroneous account, plans for [a] shower routine [havebeen] cancelled.'40A few days later,following a success- ful VIP preview, an exultant MSA official wired the US Secretaryof State to report that local journalists, industrialistsand officials, including West German Minister of Economics Ludwig Erhard, were 'delighted' by the exhibit. 'Contraryto UP story implications,there is nothing vulgar or cheap about [the] role of actorsdemonstrating household equipment.'41 Wir bauen ein besseres Leben (We're Building a Better Life) opened in Berlin,and was scheduledfor subsequentengagements in Stuttgart,Hanover and Milan. Its single-familyhome - containingtwo bedrooms,a living-dining room, bath, kitchen, laundry/homeworkshop, nursery and garden - was realized down to the kitchen gadgets and garden tools, but built without a roof. All the approximately6000 products in and around the house were modernin designand manufacturedin a MarshallPlan member nation. A bill-

Box 8, US National Archives, College Park, MD. For US State Department consumer design exhibitions, however, Edgar Kaufmann Jr had become the consultant of first choice. A memo from Elmer Lower of the HICOG Office of Public Affairs in August 1952, concerning an international 'Design for Use' show planned by Stuttgart's Landesgewerbeamt, states: 'It is my suggestion that ... the [US State] Department consult people in the design field, such as Mr Edgar Kaufmann from the Museum of Modern Art, so that a representative group of high quality materials is sent.' Elmer Lower to Richard Brecker, RG59 862A.191 (Internal Affairs of State Relating to Exhibitions and Fairs in Germany), Box 5227, US National Archives, College Park, MD. 40 HICOG Berlin to US Secretary of State, 17 September 1952, RG59 862A.191 (Internal Affairs of State Relating to Exhibitions and Fairs in Germany), Box 5225, US National Archives, College Park, MD. 41 HICOG Berlin to US Secretary of State, 19 September 1952, RG59 862A.191 (Internal Affairs of State Relating to Exhibitions and Fairs in Germany), Box 5225, US National Archives, College Park, MD. Castillo:Domesticating the ColdWar 275

FIGURE3 A bird'seye view of the toplesshome and second-storeycatwalks of 'We'reBuilding a Better Life',West Berlin,1952. A narrator,dressed in white overalls,can be seen atop the crow's-nest, upperright. US NationalArchives at CollegePark, MD.

board mounted beside the home's front door announced: 'The objects in this house are industrial products from many countries in the Atlantic community. Thanks to technology, rising productivity, economic cooperation and free enterprise, these objects are available to our western civilization' (Fig. 3). This stage set for the domestic life of 'an average skilled worker and his family' was manned by a model family, in the literal sense. Two couples and eight pairs of children, all professional actors, worked in alternating shifts, going about their household tasks and leisure rituals in a consumer wonderland. A narrator, dressed in white and perched in an overhead crow's-nest, explained the model family's interaction with its domestic environment. Visitors became voyeurs, staring through windows or crowding catwalks for a bird's-eye view, observ- ing how the use of modernist household objects created their subjects. The tour of the show ended at an installation introduced by a display panel showing a male labourer with the headline: 'This man is a worker and at the same time a consumer.' For East German visitors it was an obvious reference to the lack of material rewards for labourers under Stalinist socialism. Given the era's standard gendering of household consumption as female, the panel 276 Journalof ContemporaryHistory Vol 40 No 2

FIGURE4 The culminatingdisplay area of 'We'reBuilding a BetterLife', this photographfrom the show's secondopening in Stuttgart.Below panelsannouncing 'We possess the world'shighest living standard'and 'We possessunlimited knowledge and ability',the home furnishingsseen within the model home were availablefor closerinspection. US NationalArchives at CollegePark, MD.

also provideda cue to the presenceof an exhibitiondiscourse of importanceto men (Fig.4). In this final displayarea, the furnishingsseen earlierin the model house could be examinedat close range.Attached to everyitem was a tag indi- cating country of origin, retail price and the numberof hours of labour - as measuredby a skilled worker'swage - needed to purchasethe object. This seemingly guileless calculation of purchasingpower entailed a fundamental repudiationof Marxist ideology, which used the concept of labour value to define capitalistproduction and distributionas exploitation.Profit, according to Marx, was the unpaid labour value that industrialistsappropriated from workers when manufacturedgoods were sold at retail price. MSA planners arrogatedMarx's concept of labour value to express the amount of work needed to purchasean item, rather than produce it. This shift in emphasis radically redefinedlabour value as a means to quantifycapitalism's reward system, ratherthan indict capitalistexploitation. At A Better Life, MoMA's InternationalStyle modernismdid much more than just provide aesthetic redemptionfor bourgeois domesticity- a pre- dominant message of the Kaufmann'sNew Home Furnishingsexhibition of 1951, and its Good Design progenitors.As a primerin 'the modernapproach to interior decoration', according to an MSA press release, A Better Life showed how 'rationally designed products from different countries in the Atlantic communitycan be combined harmoniously'.42Or, as expressed in

42 'Productivityand IntegrationMake for Higher Standardof Living', March 1953, RG 286/Ger2219-2226, VisualCollection, US NationalArchives, College Park, MD. Castillo:Domesticating the ColdWar 277 anotherpress release,'the show says that just as these items from the various countries combine to form a homogenouswhole, so the nations themselves can combine to form a homogenous community'.43The exhibition's underlying messagewas reprisedin the West Germandaily, Der Tag:

The new style, realism plus simplicity, finds its strongest expression in the US Marshall-Haus .... There are differentversions of one style and one way of life typical for a 'western bourgeois' household. Nothing is foreign to us, whether it comes from Berlin or Los Angeles, from Stockholm,Sicily or New York.44

At A BetterLife, InternationalStyle modernismwas not simply an aesthetic, but also the model of productionand consumptionthat supportedthe identity politics of Cold War cosmopolitanism.An antitheticalnotion of 'realism'was concurrentlyunder constructionjust a few miles east, where East Berlin's socialist realisthousing blocks were risingwith advice from Soviet architects. East German art and architecturewere being transformed by a party- orchestratedcultural revolution intended to installsocialist realism, characterized as 'socialistin content and national in form', as a national aesthetic.By contrast,the moderniststyle promotedby the US StateDepartment at A Better Life was capitalistin content and internationalin form. To counterthe likely charge that A Better Life was an exercise in Americanization,comparable to the apparentcultural Sovietizationof East Berlin, MSA officers went to great lengths to clarify the exhibition's internationalism.'To some visitors, this home of a future "average consumer" would appear perhaps to be "American",but that is incorrect',a West Germandesign journalreported, reiteratingan opening-dayaddress by Michael Harris, chief of the German branchof the MSA. 'John Smithor Hans Schmidtwould be perfectlycapable of affordingsuch a house when certainconditions were met: we must make the Atlanticcommunity of nations a reality;eliminate tariff barriers,and raise productivity,thereby allowing us to lower prices and raise wages.'4SStalinist ideologues equated the Marshall Plan's advocacy of a common market strippedof trade barrierswith an assaultupon national sovereignty,and vili- fied modernistdesign as a capitalistplot to 'disassociatethe people from their native land, from their language and their culture, so that they adopt the "Americanlifestyle" and join in the slavery of the Americanimperialists'.46 While alarmist,the assessmentwas not baseless. The Better Life exhibition

43 'We Builda BetterLife', undated typescript, RG59/150/71/35/04, Entry 5323 (Recordsof the InternationalInformation Administration, Subject Files, EuropeanField Program1949-1952), Box 8, US NationalArchives, College Park, MD. 44 Articlein Der Tag, 22 September1952, translatedand quotedin Lyon to Secretaryof State, 22 September1952, RG59 862A.191 (InternalAffairs of StateRelating to Exhibitionsand Fairs in Germany),Box 5225, US NationalArchives, College Park, MD. 45 HeinrichK6nig, 'Ausstellung: "Wir bauen ein besseresLeben"', Architektur und Wohnform, 61, 2 (November1952), 87. 46 G. Alexandrov, cited in Edmund Collein, 'Die Americanisierungdes Stadtbildesvon Frankfurtam Main',Deutsche Architektur, 1, 4 (1952), 151. 278 Journalof ContemporaryHistory Vol 40 No 2 indeedrevealed that the US StateDepartment was groomingmodernism as the stylistic lingua franca of internationalconsumer capitalism and its idealized American'good life'. A Better Life was a hit with Germanvisitors, who seemed to embraceits vision of postwar domesticity,and, in some cases, the Cold War Realpolitik behindit. The topless house drew over half a millionvisitors, over 40 per cent of them from the East. West Germannewspaper reports were positive, 'with no (rpt no) referencewhatsoever' to the stripteasescandal, as MSA officers informedtheir superiorsin Washington.Der Tag told its readers:'Take your time to inspect this exhibition.With respectto the arts, handicraftsand tech- nics, it revealsthat Americais the grown-updaughter of Europe.... You will see there what it means to live a decent life.'47An actressportraying a housewife in the exhibitioneffused: 'This house is so perfectthat I am afraidwe will not want to move out .... What will happenif I fall in love with the kitchen too?'48German architects were also enthusiasticabout the exhibition, sometimes seeing in its celebrationof householdmodernism the promiseof super- power design patronage.In a review entitled 'The Domestic Culture of the Western People', Baukunst und Werkformeditor Alfons Leitl proclaimed: 'Whoevermight not have known it learns emphaticallythrough this exhibition: in all the countriesof the Westernworld one deals with the same questions, with the same design themes.'49The Cold War realitiesbehind A Better Life's deploymentof modernismwere apparentto Leitl- and others as well, judging by a commentoverheard at the exhibition:'You have to understand that this whole thing isn't put togetherjust from a professionalpoint of view . but with political intent.' 'A political exhibition, then?', Leitl mused. 'Domestic reform with "industrialdesign" as a responsibilityof the Foreign Minister.Not bad. Afterthe Werkbund,we'll give it a try with [WestGerman Chancellor Konrad] Adenauer and [French Foreign Minister Robert] Schumann Another advocate of modernism,design critic Heinrich Konig, interpretedA Better Life as a mandate for government-sponsoredcultural reform.In the journalArchitektur und Wohnform,he exhorted:'This exhibition is also an appeal to ministries,especially the one administeringpublic education, finally to introduce"The Study of Living"as a course of instruc- tion. . . . It goes without saying that this class is only to be entrusted to teacherswho are trulyreceptive to the New [styleof] Living.'"'Knig's call for another culturalrevolution managed from on high echoed the tactics used to

47 Article in Der Tag, 22 September 1952, translated and quoted in Lyon to Secretary of State, 22 September 1952, RG59 862A.191 (Internal Affairs of State Relating to Exhibitions and Fairs in Germany), Box 5225, US National Archives, College Park, MD. 48 Article in Tagesspiegel, 20 September 1952, translated and quoted in Lyon to Secretary of State, 20 September 1952, RG59 862A.191 (Internal Affairs of State Relating to Exhibitions and Fairs in Germany), Box 5225, US National Archives, College Park, MD. 49 Alfons Leitl, 'Die Wohnkultur der Westlichen Volker', Baukunst und Werkform, no. 12 (December 1952), 40. 50 Ibid., 39. 51 Heinrich K6nig, 'Ausstellung: "Wir bauen ein besseres Leben"', op. cit., 91. Castillo:Domesticating the ColdWar 279 institutionalizesocialist realism in EastGermany. Coming from West German proponentsof the notionthat modernism was culturalanti-fascism, enthusi- asm for an officially-sponsoredpostwar style demonstrated how few lessons were sometimeslearned by thosewho had firsthandexperience of the nazi ventureinto aesthetic hegemony. A BetterLife may have wowed Germans,but it sparkeda controversy amongUS advisers in Europe.Donald Monson, a housingconsultant with the MSAEuropean Labour Division in Paris,objected to the displayof an 'ideal house'with twicethe squarefootage of the West Germanlegal average, as stipulatedin the enforcedegalitarianism of the nation'sfirst postwar housing law. 'It'sall verywell to put up showslike this, but in view of the extreme housingshortage in Germany... it can be questionedwhether propaganda to breakdown this [German]rule of fair sharingis a wise one.'52In response, MSAChief Michael Harris asserted that the exhibition 'was not abouthousing at all. Its main point was the attractiveand realisticdisplay of the least expensive,aesthetically acceptable mass-produced objects commonly used in everydayliving by ordinarypeople.'" The goods on display,however, were anythingbut common for everydaylife in Europeof the early-1950s.A report submittedto the US StateDepartment acknowledged that 'many of the items in the house(refrigerator, automatic dishwasher, television set, etc.) are still beyondthe averageGerman budget'. Parked around the homewere a bicycle, kayak,motorcycle, motor scooter and a Volkswagen(chosen for its 'direct appealto localpride'.) 'No averageworker could possibly own all theseforms of transportation',an MSAmemo noted.s4 The commodity culture celebrated by A BetterLife was utopianin otherways as well. Its fundamentalunit of consumptionwas the nuclearfamily, premised on a youngmarried couple withtwo children.Excluded from this vision of an 'idealhome' and its domestic economywas Germany'shistorically-unprecedented number of female- headed households.In 1950, at which time most Germansinterned in prisoner-of-warcamps had been released, there were 1000 men for every 1400 womenbetween the agesof 25 and39. Of WestGermany's 15 millionhouse- holds, nearlyone-third were headedby widowsor divorcedwomen." The

52 Donald Monson to Joseph Heath, 31 October 1952, RG469/250/79/28/03-04, Box 3 (Consumption, Housing, Propaganda Strategies; Records of the US Foreign Assistance Agencies 1948-61, Special Representative in Europe, Office of Economic Affairs, Labor Division, Country Files Related to Housing), US National Archives, College Park, MD. 53 Michael Harris to Joseph Heath, undated, RG469/250/79/28/03-04, Box 3 (Consumption, Housing, Propaganda Strategies; Records of the US Foreign Assistance Agencies 1948-61, Special Representative in Europe, Office of Economic Affairs, Labor Division, Country Files Related to Housing), US National Archives, College Park, MD. 54 Lyon to Secretary of State, 22 September 1952, RG59 862A.191 (Internal Affairs of State Relating to Exhibitions and Fairs in Germany), Box 5225, US National Archives, College Park, MD. 55 Robert G. Moeller, 'Reconstructing the Family in Reconstruction Germany. Women and Social Policy in the Federal Republic, 1949-1955' in Robert G. Moeller (ed.), West Germany Under Construction. Politics, Society and Culture in the Adenauer Era (Ann Arbor, MI 1997), 112. 280 Journalof ContemporaryHistory Vol 40 No 2 so-calledFraueniiberschufl, or 'oversupplyof women', and its accompanying discoursesabout 'incomplete' families, made the 'typical'household portrayed by actorsat the MSAexhibition a sort of speculativesocial fiction, one that reflectedthe ongoing'political reconstruction of the family'taking place in boththe USA and West Germany."6 In termsof the edificationof Westand EastGermans, A BetterLife had more to do with modelcitizens than model housing.The exhibitioncon- fronted a long-standingGerman discourse that used representationsof Americato plumbthe nation'senthusiasms and anxietiesabout moderniza- tion. In the 1920s, Fordistmass production had inspiredGerman fantasies about the twentiethcentury's 'new man', from the bourgeois'captain of industry'to the heroicproletarian of socialistmyth.S7 Modernity's potential to redefinegender relationships often lent representationsof the new world's 'new woman'an anti-Americantone, as culturalhistorian Mary Nolan has observed.The white, middle-classAmerican housewife confabulated by Weimar-eracritics like Adolf Halfeld embodied anxieties about modern con- sumptionthrough portrayals of hard-edgedwomen who preferreda job to home-making,fed their family from tins, and ruled over scientifically-efficient but comfortlesshomes - a genderedbetrayal of Kultur,Bildung and Geist.s8 The ThirdReich elaborated on this anti-Americanrhetoric, honouring the idealhousewife for her abilityto nurturea prolificbrood and inculcatethe racistnationalism that constitutednazi familyvalues. The long-termsuccess of the Marshall Plan was contingent upon underminingGerman fears of Americanconsumer modernity, which remainedan undercurrentof public opinion, the war's 'unconditionalsurrender' notwithstanding. The identitypolitics of genderwas to play a crucialrole in establishinga transnational consumer economy and the cultural cosmopolitanism that nurturedit. Beneaththe appealto Germantradition apparent in A BetterLife - expressed in the actress-Hausfrau'sapron and pinned-up braids, her kitchen bustle and Kaffee-Klatschcharm - lurked a new postwar persona. Signifiersof a putativereturn to 'normal'domestic ideals mollified reactionary anxieties,and allowed the idealized housewife to proceedwith her new household task of negotiatinga Fordistrevolution in mass consumption.Although

56 Moeller,'Reconstructing the Family',op. cit., 126. 57 On the 'new man' as an interwarsignifier of radicalsocial reform,see FritzNeumeyer, 'Die neue Mensch.Korperbau und Baukorper in derModerne' (15-31) andWilfried Wang, 'Geometrie und Raster.Der mechanisierteMensch' (33-49) in Vittorio Magnagoand Romana Schneider, Traditionund Moderne.Moderne Architektur in Deutschland1900 bis 1950 (Stuttgart1992), and WolfgangPehnt, 'The "New Man" and the Architectureof the Twenties'in JeannineFiedler (ed.), Social Utopias of the Twenties. Bauhaus, Kibbutz and the Dream of the New Man (Wuppertal1996), 14-21. For a discussionof the 'Americanized'German housewife as the 'new man' of postwar modernitysee Mary Nolan, 'ConsumingAmerica, Producing Gender' in R. LaurenceMoore and MaurizioVaudagna (eds), The AmericanCentury in Europe (Ithaca,NY and London2003), 243-61. 58 MaryNolan, Visionsof Modernity.American Business and the Modernizationof Germany (New York and Oxford 1994), 120-7. Castillo:Domesticating the ColdWar 281 her male partnermay have been 'a worker and at the same time a consumer', as the MSA proclaimed,it was the 'completelyautomatic, mechanized wonder kitchen . . somehow reminiscentof the control panel of an airplane',as the Neue Zeitunggushed, that crownedthe new lifestyle."sThe kitchen shown in A BetterLife - the only room in the dreamhouse in which nearlyevery object was importedfrom the USA- was an objectof desirefor both sexes, according to a Tagesspiegelreport. 'For women and all men interestedin mechanics, it is a white paradise. .. .'60 Images of masculine aggression had given advanced technology a sinister edge during the war. Feminizationwould render a postwar machine age gemiitlich. The MSA's 'new woman' also overcame German national chauvinism in her cultivation of the tasteful cosmopolitanismreflected in home furnishingsassembled from across the 'transatlanticcommunity'. The role of the postwarHausfrau was limiting,but also liberating,as Erica Carterhas argued,in that its restrictivegender con- struct was accompaniedby the privilegedstatus of 'housewife as consumer- citizen', situatingWest Germanwomen 'in discoursesof reconstructionas the bearerof the values of a specificform of postwar modernity,one dominated by scientificand technologicalrationality'.61 With her relentlessoptimism, will to live in the here-and-now,and devotion to a better future, the idealized housewife was the pre-eminent'new man' of West Germany'sfirst postwar decade.62

A BetterLife marked the apogeeand conclusion of StateDepartment funding formodernist household design exhibitions. In 1953,overseas propaganda was entrustedto a new organization,the US InformationAgency (USIA). It was born just as anti-communistisolationists and fiscally-conservativepopulists were launching a two-pronged assault on federal spending for foreign culturalprogrammes. Over the course of the 1950s, Congressimposed cuts in the USIAbudget so punitivethat the organizationand its missionwere rescued only throughexecutive branchintervention. President Dwight Eisenhower,a vigorous proponentof anti-communistpropaganda efforts, formulatedwhat historianRobert Haddow has called a 'McCarthy-proof'strategy for cultural diplomacy. It borrowed from the New Deal model of partnershipbetween governmentand private enterprise, but shiftedfinancing and - moreimpor- tantly- publicattention from the former to the latter.The 'American way of

59 Article in Neue Zeitung, 20 September 1952, translated and quoted in Lyon to Secretary of State, 20 September 1952, RG59 862A.191 (Internal Affairs of State Relating to Exhibitions and Fairs in Germany), Box 5225, US National Archives, College Park, MD. 60 Article in Tagesspiegel, 20 September 1952, translated and quoted in Lyon to Secretary of State, 20 September 1952, RG59 862A.191 (Internal Affairs of State Relating to Exhibitions and Fairs in Germany), Box 5225, US National Archives, College Park, MD. 61 Erica Carter, How German is She? Postwar West German Reconstruction and the Con- suming Woman (Ann Arbor, MI 1997), 225. 62 Nolan, 'Consuming America, Producing Gender', op. cit., 254. 282 Journalof ContemporaryHistory Vol 40 No 2 life'would be promoted henceforth through private businesses at international tradefairs. Corporations donated products and capital in returnfor an oppor- tunity to penetratenew marketsabroad. The US CommerceDepartment assumedresponsibility for shippingexhibits and providingoverseas support services.Under the new system, federal funds provided seed money rather than underwritingall expenses.Propaganda expertise developed over the postwar yearswould not be lost; it would be privatized.Peter Harnden, the MSA officerwho inadvertentlylaunched reports of a federally-fundedstriptease at We'reBuilding a BetterLife, became the co-ordinator of exhibitionproduction forthe Commerce Department's Office of InternationalTrade Fairs. Harnden's privateParis-based design firm boasted employees from nine different nations, andderived its profitsprimarily through commissions to createa newgenera- tion of UShousehold exhibits.63 UnderHarnden's supervision, the tracthome reappearedas an overseas emissaryof Americanliving standards, now displayedin somethingclose to its nativeform, rather than as a hybridizedvariety engineered for applicationon foreignsoil. At tradefairs staged in Milan,Bari, Barcelona and Paris in 1955, two completely-furnishedsuburban homes, complete with gardenpatio and carport,were exhibited under the co-sponsorshipof HouseBeautiful magazine,The Producer's Council, The National Association of HomeBuilders and The PrefabricatedHome Manufacturer's Institute. House Beautiful furnished and decoratedone of the homesin Lafayette,Indiana, the otherin Toledo, Ohio. Both were photographedfor publication,then disassembledand shippedto Europe.Although the magazine'seditors trumpeted the high qualityand affordabilityof the decorand 'the noticeableimprovement in taste, as comparedwith interiorsof only yesterday',the plushupholstered furniture,green and tangerine colour scheme and clutter of decorativeacces- soriesperhaps were indeed better suited to the AmericanMidwest than Milan or Paris.While MoMA'scurators certainly would have consideredthese resultsof a newly-privatizedexhibition policy a stepbackwards, USIA propa- gandastrategy took a decisiveleap forwards. Displays began to emphasizethe mechanismsby which suburbanhomes and their consumeraccoutrements wereintegrated into theirbroader capitalist economy. For a 1955 Parisexhi- bition,Harnden mocked up an Americansupermarket and placed it besidea modelhome to clarifythe relationshipof the technology-ladenkitchen to its sourceof packagedprovisions. His workat a tradefair in Viennathe following yearlinked the modelhome to a fashionshow and a colourtelevision display. This additiveapproach 'brought material culture to life and revealed how technologybenefitted the averageperson'.64 USIA exhibitions proclaimed thatforeign replication of the Americanconsumer's 'good life' meant import- ing an entireeconomic system, not just its individualproducts.

63 CynthiaKellogg, 'An AmericanBrussels Fair Designer Gives FrenchHome ModernLook', New YorkTimes, 4 December1957, 63. 64 Haddow,Pavilions of Plenty,op. cit., 60-1. Castillo:Domesticating the ColdWar 283

Harnden'sadvances beyond an earliergeneration of MarshallPlan commissions yielded a propagandatriumph at the AmericanNational Exhibitionin Moscow in 1959. Federalofficials hired GeorgeNelson, whose furniturehad been featuredin previousMarshall Plan shows, to designthe Moscow exhibition. Duringthe preliminaryplanning phase, Nelson met Harnden,who was a 'majorcontributor' to the final design.6sNelson immediatelyadded to his staff an employeefrom Harnden'soffice, Philip George, who became responsible for co-ordinating the entire Moscow exhibition as Nelson's right-hand man.66Given the establishedrecord of Americanpropaganda strategy, the Communist Party Central Committee was aware that, for the US State Department'sMoscow exhibition, 'special attention will be paid to the demonstrationof domestic appliances:electric kitchens, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators,air conditioners,etc.'.67 Soviet visitors moved through a vortex of technology,product and service displays related to the model home that awaited them at the end of their procession.They were introducedto 'the Americanway of life' by a dazzlingaudio-visual presentation, 'Glimpses of the USA', createdfor the exposition by the husband and wife team of Ray and Charles Eames, two of the nation's most celebrated modernist designers. Across seven overhead screens, impressions of a typical day in suburbia flickeredand pulsedin choreographedmulti-media imagery. The main exhibition pavilion,seen next, was conceivedby designconsultant George Nelson as 'a huge modular steel shelving system' stocked with a cornucopia of toys, stereos, sporting goods, cookware and kitchen appliances, clothing, mass- circulationperiodicals and even musical instruments.Framed by this Cold War stockpile of consumergoods, Singerprovided a sewing demonstration, Helena Rubensteinoversaw makeoversof Russian women in her cosmetic company's beauty salon, RCA operateda working colour television studio, and a 'MiracleKitchen' concocted meals from packagedingredients donated by GeneralFoods and Betty Crocker.Just as at Berlin'sBetter Life show, a second-storeycatwalk providedvisitors with a bird's-eyeview of Fordistcon- sumerpractices. By the time Sovietvisitors entered 'Splitnik', the model home supplied by All-State Propertiesof Long Island and outfitted by General Electric and Macy's, they had been exposed to a working outline of the capitalist infrastructureupon which American consumer domesticity was dependent."6 Khrushchev'svow to beat the West at its own game, made memorableby the KitchenDebate photo-op at the 1959 exhibitionin Moscow, in fact pre- dated that event by years. The Soviet Seven-YearPlan for 1958-65 had pledgedto matchthe USA in housingsupply and consumergoods, some of the

65 'American National Exhibition in Moscow', Industrial Design, 6, 4 (April 1959), 54. 66 Stanley Abercrombie, George Nelson. The Design of Modern Design (Cambridge, MA 1995), 164. 67 Report to the Central Committee of the CPSU, 23 May 1959, cited in Hixson, Parting the Curtain, op. cit., 186. 68 Ibid., 206. 284 Journalof ContemporaryHistory Vol 40 No 2 latterto be distributedfree of chargeby 1980, or so the promisewent. Abundancefor all, according to theUSSR's Third Party Programme, ratified in 1961, was one of the preconditionsfor a full transitionto communism. Anotherwas the emergenceof a citizenof a new type:educated, cultivated, sociallyintegrated and self-disciplined- especiallyin regardto consumer desire.Khrushchev-era consumption, rather than aping its capitalistcounter- part, was envisionedin reformistterms, as SusanReid has demonstrated. Ratherthan inventingneeds and inflamingdemand, socialist advertising wouldinculcate rational consumption patterns, ensuring that marketscould be predictedand managed. The 'normative consumption budget' devised for a typicalfamily, as Reidnotes, reflected 'communist morality, which in general entailedself-discipline and voluntarysubmission of the individualto the collectivewill'.69 Khrushchev's'thaw' may haveproduced the EastBloc's new subjectivity, thesocialist mass consumer, but its inspirationwas largely non-Russian. While dramaticsocial changerequired Moscow's imprimatur to becomeofficial, EastBloc cultural transformation was morecomplex than the constructof a Khrushchevian'revolution from above' might suggest.Soviet socialism's westernfrontier served as a catalystfor changein the USSR,and logically so. EasternEurope had endured Stalinism only briefly, and just barely. Consumer austeritymeasures sparked violent rebellions in EastGermany and Czecho- slovakiain 1953, whichwere quelled only througha deusex machinainter- ventionof Soviettanks. After Hungary's abortive revolution of 1956, local reformsfostered a partialmarket economy and increasedprivate consumption, yieldingwhat Khrushchev described as 'goulashsocialism'. In the wake of anotherround of protests,Poland introduced a mixedeconomy in 1957 with the aimof increasingconsumer goods. In 1959, as the USAproudly dis- playeda supermarketmock-up in Moscow,a realone of glassand concrete was risingin Warsaw.70As withthe rediscoveryof modernismin socialistart and architecture,Eastern Europe's people's republics were proving grounds for experimentsin socialistconsumer modernity. The rampartof satellite nationsassembled by Stalinto insulatethe USSRfrom the Westproved to be nothingof the sort. By the mid-1950sthe EastBloc functioned instead as a transmissionbelt on which repackagedwestern trends were shippedto Moscowfor evaluation,ostensibly as culturalinnovations from the socialist periphery. As EasternEurope devised its own variantof the MarshallPlan social contract- citizenenfranchisement through consumer rewards - strangely familiarimages invoked a post-Stalinist'new man'. In 1957 an articlein the EastGerman advertising journal Neue Werbungcarried news of a 'newform

69 SusanReid, 'ColdWar in the Kitchen',op. cit., 219. 70 David Crowley, 'Warsaw'sShops, Stalinismand the Thaw' in Susan E. Reid and David Crowley(eds), Style and Socialism.Modernity and MaterialCulture in Post-WarEastern Europe (Oxfordand New York2000), 41-2. Castillo:Domesticating the ColdWar 285

FIGURE5 A Czechmodel housewife demonstrates a vacuumcleaner before an audiencein 'A Day at Home', stagedin the window of a state departmentstore in Pilsen. Neue Werbung,vol. 4, no. 4 (1957).

of socialist advertising'using live subjects(Fig. 5). In the Czechcity of Pilsen, a domestic 'pantomime' had been staged in a multi-room home interior mocked up along the glass frontage of a departmentstore. The storefront exhibit, entitledA Day at Home, employedadult and child actorsto portraya family engaged in household activities. During the course of the day, the housewife demonstratedan array of new domestic products and appliances. As the model family moved about their dream home, an invisible narrator described its 'practical modern appointments', explaining how the new labour-savingdevices worked, while spectatorson the sidewalkobserved them in use. This novel approachto a householdgoods exhibitionwas reportedto have generated'great interest among the public'in Pilsen- just as it had five years earlier under US State Department sponsorship at Berlin's We're Buildinga BetterLife exhibition.A Day at Home reprisedin close detail the tactics devisedby Harndenand his crew to mobilizeconsumer desire, bolster capitalismand underminethe appeal of communism.More importantthan the particularsof the householdgoods displayedin Pilsenwas the technique of putting 'consumers themselves in the store showcase, thereby turning 286 Journalof ContemporaryHistory Vol 40 No 2 them into objectsof consumptionand observation',in the words of historian KatherinePence. Another consequence of this exhibitionstrategy - deployed consciously in Marshall Plan shows, but unintended in its Soviet Bloc application- was to sensitizecitizens to the materialdeficiencies of home life under 'real and existing' socialism.71 During the 1960s, most East Bloc governmentswere able to supply the minimumrequirements of a fledglingconsumer society: one small apartment per nuclearfamily, a selectionof basic foods and a fairlydependable supply of essential household products. But Soviet-stylecommand economies, which privilegedthe state ratherthan the citizen as sovereignconsumer, were un- suited to the reproductionof a commodity culture based on unrelenting novelty across an ever-changingspectrum of goods. Perhapsmost important, the projectof creatinga cadreof socialistconsumers purged of irrationalneeds was doomed from the start. As early as 1956, foreign journalistsin Russia reportedsightings of a new subculturalspecies, the Stiliagi:stylish Western- influencedyouths who wore non-conformistidentities on their sleeve, so to speak, in contempt of Soviet taboos on extravagantconsumption and its public display.72 The legitimationof a 'consumersocialism' modelled on its capitalistcoun- terpartwas a historicalwatershed.73 It set the stage for the historically-specific political formationof 'late socialism',characterized by the desireand inability to emulate the kaleidoscopicconsumer landscape of late capitalism,with its constantshifts in inventedneeds, marketingploys and productlines; the latter providinga kit-of-partsfor identitystatements that could be continuallydis- mantled and reassembled on an individual basis. Soviet Bloc consumer durableslike televisions,washing machinesand automobilescame with long waiting-lists.74Rationing never ended, but was insteadcamouflaged by prices set high to discourage the purchase of limited stock. 'Shelf-warmers'- productsso undesirable,given the price,that they were made to gatherdust in windows - and what shoppers in Poland called 'brakorobstwo' - a term coined for unused productsthat were also unusable- epitomizedthe feeble connectionbetween socialist producerand consumer,attenuated by a Byzantineregulatory system negotiated by the party,state ministries and indi- vidualmanufacturers. Retail price, rather than being derived from the cost of makingand marketingan item,was determinedby politicalexpediency and

71 Katherine Pence, 'Schaufenster des sozialistischen Komsums. Texte der ostdeutschen "consumer culture"' in Alf Liidtke and Peter Becker, Akten. Eingaben. Schaufenster. Die DDR und ihre Texte (Berlin 1997), 110. Pence is wrong, however, to consider this demonstration a vehicle for a 'GDR-specific version of "consumer culture"' (109), not least since the production was orig- inally mounted in Czechoslovakia. 72 Susan Reid, 'Cold War in the Kitchen', op. cit., 220, fn. 30. 73 Corey Ross, The East German Dictatorship. Problems and Perspectives in the Interpretation of the GDR (London 2002), 81. 74 For example, East Germans had to pay 'for technical consumer durables, eight to fifteen times the price of their West German counterparts'. Jeffrey Kopstein, The Politics of Economic Decline in East Germany, 1945-1989 (Chapel Hill, NC 1997), 189. Castillo:Domesticating the ColdWar 287 the complex,constantly-changing politics of subsidy.Campaigns to correct pricing,improve the designand quality of goods,and develop an efficientand courteousretail distribution system were, in effect,cumbersome attempts to reverse-engineerinto socialistconsumption the qualitiesrequired for most retailbusinesses to surviveunder capitalism.7s The couplingof a Westernlifestyle ideal with a permanentlag in 'catching up' was a usefulincongruity, however. It becamethe basisof governancefor socialistclient states founded upon the rewardof consumptionin returnfor complicity.As the Sovietand EastGerman parties abandoned the projectto invent a specificallysocialist consumer subjectivity, late socialismrelied increasinglyon privilegedaccess to goods,including Western goods, as partof a rewardsprogramme for its dlites,and which established a set of valuesthat permeatedthroughout society.76 In East Germany,the socialistvision of a reformistconsumer society was abandoneddecisively with ErichHonecker's successionas partychairman in 1971 andthe so-called'unity of socialecon- omy andpolicy' forged under his leadership.In the interestof socialstability, the EastGerman Politburo uncoupled rising consumption from its logicalpre- requisiteof risingproductivity, the equation broadcast across Western Europe by MarshallPlan economists. Jettisoning the Stalin-eraprescript 'as you work today,so shallyou live tomorrow', the party rewarded citizen compliance with whateverthe socialist economy could churn out in the hereand now. Throughthe early 1970s, East Germanymade impressivestrides in its standardof living,gaining renown throughout the SovietBloc as socialism's consumeroasis. But within a decade,the 'planned miracle' had stalled. As economicgrowth sputtered, even partial fulfilment of a socialcontract based on Western-styleconsumption could be achievedonly by takingout loansfrom the capitalistworld or cannibalizinginvestment earmarked for industry. Erraticshortages of basicgoods occurred with increasing frequency. At a crisis meetingof the EastGerman Politburo in 1989, StatePlanning Commission ChairmanGerhard Schiirer remarked: 'There are poorercountries than the GDRwith a muchricher offering of goodsin thestores. ... Whenpeople have

75 This assessmentis supportedby recentinvestigations of socialistretailing, including: Julie M. Hessler,'Culture of Shortages.A SocialHistory of SovietTrade', unpublished diss., Universityof Chicago, 1996; Mark Evan Landsman,'Dictatorship and Demand. East Germanybetween Productivismand Consumerism,1948-1961', unpublisheddiss., Columbia University2000; KatherinePence, "'You as a Woman Will Understand".Consumption, Gender and the Rela- tionshipbetween State and Citizenryin the GDR'sCrisis of 17 June 1953', GermanHistory, 19, 2 (2001), 218-52, and Andr6Steiner, 'Dissolution of the "Dictatorshipover Needs"?Consumer Behavior and Economic Reform in East Germanyin the 1960s' in Susan Strasser,Charles McGovernand MatthiasJudt (eds), Gettingand Spending.European and AmericanConsumer Societiesin the TwentiethCentury (Cambridge 1998), 167-85. 76 As CharlesS. Maierhas noted:'Privilege became a pervasiveway of rationingvalued aspects of life, accessto whichwas less politicalin the West, so that the regimecould get creditfor doling them out .... [E]veryfavor finallygranted was a reminderof how easily anothermight be with- held.' CharlesS. Maier, Dissolution.The Crisisof Communismand the End of East Germany (Princeton,NJ 1997), 42-3. 288 Journalof ContemporaryHistory Vol 40 No 2 a lot of money and can't buy the goods they want, they curse socialism.'77 Late-socialistattempts to fuse egalitarianrhetoric to Westernlifestyle images yielded an unstablehybrid, momentous not so much for its resultingsurface resemblanceto capitalist commodity culture, but rather for the underlying absenceof an alternativeconceptualization of privateconsumption. As Jeffrey Kopsteinhas observed,the life-spanof East Bloc socialismundoubtedly contracted when Marxist-Leninismdefaulted on the creationof 'its own unique understandingof modernity,its own vocabularyfor it, its own discoursethat would have enabledpeople to experiencescarcity in a qualitativelydifferent way'.7"On the Cold War's crucial home front, Marshall Plan exhibitions staged early on in dividedBerlin modelled patterns of domesticconsumption that helpeddefine an emergent'First World' material culture, and auguredthe destructionof its 'SecondWorld' alternative.

Greg Castillo is an AssistantProfessor at the Universityof Miami School of Architecture.He is the authorof severalarticles and is currently preparinga monograph,Cold Waron the Home Front,which will be publishedby the Universityof MinnesotaPress.

77 GerhardSchiirer quoted in Kopstein,The Politics of EconomicDecline in East Germany, op. cit., 192. On the use of socialistconsumption as a cultureof resistance,see C. Humphrey, 'Creatinga Culture of Disillusionment.Consumption in Moscow, A Chronicleof Changing Times'in Daniel Miller (ed.), WorldsApart. Modernity through the Prismof the Local (London and New York 1995). On the role playedby consumerdissatisfaction at the collapseof the East Germanstate, see Kopstein,The Politicsof EconomicCollapse in East Germany,op. cit., 195-7, and Maier,Dissolution, op. cit., 89-97. 78 Kopstein,The Politicsof EconomicDecline in East Germany,op. cit., 195-7.