Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

  Youth culture was a constant headache for socialist regimes. Ulbricht’s public celebration of the virtuous reciprocal relationship between leisure and work was belied by an internal report on the leisure activities of 8,000 apprentices, students and teenagers: ‘Freizeit 69’.192 According to this, every second young East German in 1969 had a portable radio, one in three a moped, one in five a leather jacket. An active biker scene sprang up. For most teenagers, the goal in life was to earn money to buy goods, to be free and mobile. They liked listening to music, swimming or just hanging out, far more than spending time in the socialist youth group, the Freie Deutsche Jugend (FDJ). Working-class teenagers, in particular, disliked the FDJ. At first, regimes tried to ban beat music and crack down on drinking. Sex, drugs and rock’n’roll were an affront to socialist ideals. This only drove them underground. Many youth clubs kept going. Some held drinking championships. The Wall kept people in. To keep out radio waves, jeans and bootleg copies was more difficult. In 1971, the XI parliament of the FDJ openly conceded that ‘bourgeois consumer culture’ had taken root. With Honecker in power, after May 1971 the strategy shifted to greater tolerance for long hair and denim, including state-sponsored rock bands.193 It is unclear what else the regime could have done, but it was an admission of defeat. The ideal of a uniform socialist culture had failed.

  In one sense, consumer culture did the same in the East as in the West: it eroded the monopoly claim of one ‘legitimate culture’. The crucial difference was that socialist regimes were built on an assumed symmetry between politics and culture, public and private. The proliferation of private lifestyles ran roughshod across this. Nor did greater tolerance win back hearts and minds. By the end of the 1970s, even the most ‘socially engaged’ young workers spent at best two hours a month with the FDJ, while they watched almost one hour a day of (mostly Western) television. Discos and gardening were vastly more attractive than FDJ clubs. What clothes one wore was a matter of private taste and social cliques, not Party directive. One in five teenagers wore badges with American stars and stripes or other Western logos on their clothes.194 Hungary introduced youth shows where teenagers dressed like members of British rock bands. In the Soviet Union, sociologists found that the young no longer aspired to become communist leaders or join the intelligentsia: rather, they wanted to be manager of a shop and gain access to goods.195 By the late 1970s, socialist culture had become a minority affair.

  This Kulturkampf swept across the Eastern Bloc. In Hungary in the early 1960s, there was a lively debate about the social effects of consumerism. Fundamentalists warned that private possessions created political apathy. Far from it, revisionists argued. To succeed, socialism needed to raise the standard of living. Consuming was a socialist virtue. If possessions were anti-socialist, some said, then the most revolutionary people would be African bushmen, who had a loincloth and little else.196 In Poland, commentators observed that people looked to private possessions for stability (ideał małej stabilizacji). When inhabitants of Łódz´ were asked in 1968 what they saw as the role of material goods in life, the majority answered that they were for convenience and fun. Hardly anyone worried about negative side-effects. However unrealistic, the many promises of more goods made by leaders such as Edward Gierek in 1970s Poland reinforced a materialist outlook. Young Polish workers looked for quick improvement in the standard of living. For university students, happiness meant material comfort.197 Many dissidents maintained a distaste for ‘consumerism’, sometimes drawing on an older critique of technological domination stretching back to Heidegger, but, significantly, Václav Havel celebrated young people sitting around a record player listening to underground music for ‘living the truth’ and asserting the ‘independent life of society’ against totalitarian lies and encroachments.198

  Greater openness to the West in the 1970s and ’80s magnified the effects of stratification. It did not cause them. In East Germany, luxury shops first opened their doors in the 1960s. Exquisit sold fashionable dresses and fine lingerie, Delikat dry gin, olives and Western cigarettes, all at exclusive prices. There was a kind of luxury fever, and the freer flow of Western gifts and hard currency raised its temperature. So did the transmission of West German TV and packages from family across the Wall. We know from looking at Central America and China how remittances sent home by migrant workers can set off a spiral of rivalry and emulation that unsettled existing hierarchies.199 Honecker’s East Germany was an experiment of remittance-based consumerism on a national scale. Hard-currency-only Intershops had originally been introduced for foreigners. By the mid-1970s, the bulk of their revenue came from purchases made by the citizens of the GDR. A third of teenagers now got their clothes as presents from family in the West. East Germany was becoming two nations, those with access to Deutschmarks and those without. Instead of ‘each according to his ability’ – the official formula – the new reality was ‘each according to the residence of his aunt’, in the words of the dissident singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann.200

  For the regime, it was a vicious circle. The economy simply could not satisfy more private tastes and build more public housing at the same time. Oranges did not grow in Leipzig. They had to be imported and paid for with exports. This, however, meant that an already weak consumer goods industry was further starved of investment. And the deficit was escalating. The regime was living beyond its means. Western credits provided temporary relief but, to service them, the regime needed to attract hard currency. One way to do this was to allow citizens to buy a Volkswagen Golf and other expensive goods as long as they found an aunt to send them the required Deutschmarks. The regime was on Western life support. To keep it going, it encouraged the people to want more.

  It was a path to self-destruction. Daily tensions over consumption led to a growing estrangement between citizens and leaders. The regime maintained an extensive petitioning system which gave individuals a chance to complain directly to Party bosses. It had been designed to monitor opinion and to contain protest by individualizing grievances. Instead, it politicized everyday life. A good half a million petitions were posted every year in the 1980s. Petitioners vented their anger as frustrated consumers but in doing so began to question the fairness and legitimacy of the regime itself. Poor housing was a major grievance. Some traced the defects in public consumption to the parallel barter system for private goods and blamed the regime for doing nothing to stop it. How could it be, one Erfurt citizen complained to Party leaders, that people were able to advertise freely in the newspaper ‘exchange heating system for a Wartburg car’. No surprise that builders were unable to finish their job. ‘Something is not right here.’201 Only one in five cars were sold on legally. Many perceived shoddy products, missing parts and absent customer service as disrespect. Waiting seven to ten years for a car, not surprisingly, created a deep bond between owners and products; the Trabant, little more than a moped with a Bakelite frame, became a member of the family, often with its own pet name. When their proud new ‘fathers’ picked up the car and it turned out to be in the wrong colour, or once it started to break down without a spare part in sight, understandably, it felt like a personal attack; it was particularly cruel for those who had their car stolen and were placed at the bottom of the waiting list once again.

  Shortages and uneven distribution ate away at social solidarity. Some openly challenged the regime’s authority to decide what was ‘luxury’ and what ‘basic need’. Richard Henning, for example, had put down his name and money for a Lada in 1975 but was still waiting for his car ten years later. It was not a luxury, he emphasized. They needed it because his wife had to get home from her night shift. Why a citizen of the GDR had to wait so long for a car was ‘unfathomable’ to him.202 Sightings of Western models added to the sense that the regime was privileging some groups over others. Jealousy, corruption and intrigue spread. Anonymous writers accused their factory director of maintaining three cars: one for his wife, one for sunny days and one for rain.203 It offended regional pride as w
ell as justice to see VWs and Mazdas on the streets of East Berlin. Were Berliners better than the inhabitants of historic Leipzig? ‘I am now fifty-eight years old,’ a man from Bautzen complained in 1986, ‘and have worked forty years for our state; forty years I have helped make the state what it is today. Is that not long enough to be entitled to a new car?’ He reminded ministers that the GDR had a constitutional commitment to equality.204 Consumption raised a litany of questions about fairness. Why did the new neighbours get a telephone when a decorated member of the ‘Brigade of the Working Class’ was still waiting after years? How was a hard-working father to explain to his children that other families had things they did not? What kind of socialist justice was that?

  The regime stepped up the production of cars and fridges in the 1970s and early ’80s, but at the expense of quality. Complaints poured in about unavailable exhausts, heating coils and bicycle tubes. ‘Consumer durables’ became a misnomer. The Kombinat Haushaltsgeräte (the publicly owned enterprise for domestic appliances) was deluged by angry petitioners whose new washing machines lasted less than a year. Goods also broke down in the West, but here complaints were dispersed across firms and institutions. Accountability was diffused. In East Germany, by contrast, the petitioning system channelled frustrations and directed them at the heart of the regime. Local officials reported how difficult it was to maintain socialist morale amidst everyday frustrations. ‘Believe me, comrades,’ one old Party activist in Dresden wrote in 1981 to Günter Mittag, the prickly minister in charge of the economy, ‘I can explain the most complicated questions of international affairs to our workers, but their experiences with the thousand little things strain everyone’s consciousness and leave doubts.’ He gave the example of a mother of three who took a day off, hoping to combine buying new clothes for her teenage son – ‘nothing special, simply a durable pair of trousers, socks, and shoes’ – with the search for some coffee-filter bags, and a package of frozen spinach to make a quick dinner. ‘The result was nil!! and that in a big city with plenty of shopping opportunities . . . As hard as it may sound, her day was stolen.’ Why, he asked, should shopping be so hard? ‘What kind of demand-oriented production was this?’205 The regime had entered a crisis of legitimacy. Its end was a question of when, not whether.

  By the time the Wall came down in 1989, socialist consumer culture was suffering from visible schizophrenia. On the one hand, queuing and waiting for things had reinforced an older culture of austerity which prized longevity, repair and conservation. The first fridge and TV were treasured and cared for, repaired rather than discarded. Like the birth of a child, their acquisition was imprinted deep in people’s biographies.206 On the other hand, the emotional investment in goods undercut workers’ identity as producers. High-quality Western goods made them painfully aware of the low value of their own, socialist products. Hans-Peter Johansen, for example, worked in a factory that made typewriters and printers. For the physicist and reserve officer it was unbearably sad how East German products had fallen behind the West in every respect, from design to functionality. In his 1986 petition, he devoted an entire page to the various faults of the Granat record player, which had been in circulation for a decade. Counter to its name (the red gemstone garnet), it was a dark ‘monotonous plastic box’, so poorly designed that pressing the ‘characteristically heavy buttons’ made the needle jump across the grooves because of the lack of cushioning – ‘in complete disregard of the basic laws of physics’. ‘I dare contend, no radio amateur would have made such elementary mistakes.’ Everywhere, socialist workers were the prisoners of outdated or defunct technologies. It was hardly a surprise, he wrote, that comrades arrived late to work with little motivation.207

  It was one of the great ironies of modern history. Marxism, which had set out to overcome alienation and make people and their work one again, ended up destroying workers’ pride in the products of their own hands. Instead of homo faber, socialism bred its own species of homo consumens. For goods like the Trabant the revolution of 1989 spelled a cruel fate. In their thousands, owners simply abandoned them on street corners as trash.208

  7

  Inside Affluence

  The capitalist West prided itself on its superiority to the socialist East, but the historically unprecedented spread of affluence in the 1950s and ’60s was not universally celebrated. Far from it: material riches triggered soul-searching about what affluence was doing to moral values and the social fabric. Half a century later, with the benefit of hindsight, we can re-examine the inner workings of these newly affluent societies. Three views have predominated. The first is that affluence from the 1950s onwards has changed the priorities of consumption from the material to the symbolic, typified by a shift in spending from food to communication. A second sees the diffusion of TVs, cars and holidays to the masses as putting an end to class society. Inequality persists, but, according to this argument, class tastes have been replaced by shared dreams and aspirations. Finally, there is the Americanization thesis. Consumer culture has tended towards convergence, spreading an American idiom at the expense of diverse national traditions. How much of this is true?

  AFFLUENT BUDGETS

  Expenditure is not everything, but our understanding of consumption would be incomplete without knowing how people spent their money. One defining feature of the post-war decades is the sharp decline of food as a proportion of Europeans’ household budget. In the mid-1950s, Norwegians, like the French, still spent around 45 per cent of their earnings on food and drink. By 1973, it was a mere quarter; by 2007 just over 10 per cent.1 There were regional and social gaps and lags – in Sicily, over 4 million people depended on food parcels and soup kitchens in 1959. Today’s poor still struggle to afford an adequate diet, and food banks are spreading in Britain, Spain and other countries hit by austerity. The overall direction, however, was the same everywhere. By the early 1990s, Greek families spent little more than 15 per cent on food. In the lives of Europeans this was a revolutionary change, even more dramatic than the fall in food prices in the late nineteenth century. In 1958, industrial workers had to sweat four hours for a pound of coffee; by 1993, a mere eighteen minutes. People started to eat fewer potatoes and more meat, and drink soft drinks rather than milk. Scandinavians today sip ten times as much wine and soft drinks as fifty years ago.2 Societies worry less about food security than about over-eating.

  Where did the freed-up money go? One view, aided by the postmodern focus on consumption as a universe of signs, sees a paradigm shift: culture and symbolic experiences have taken the place of physical needs. This is misleading, as a brief look at France and Norway shows. Spending on recreation and culture has indeed doubled in the last half-century – more books are published than ever before. But so has spending on housing. In the half-century since the 1950s, the share of private expenditure devoted to housing, routine maintenance, gas and electricity has doubled in Norway (from 15 per cent to 30 per cent) and tripled in France (from 7.5 per cent to 23 per cent). If housing, transport and food are put together, they ate up the same amount of the household budget in 2007 as they did in 1958: 60 per cent.3 It is an indication of how much the affluent society is about ‘ordinary’ rather than conspicuous consumption.4 Spending more money on the home reflects a rising standard of comfort, warmer rooms and hot showers; central heating reached most French homes only in the 1970s and ’80s. There is, then, a curious mismatch between real trends in spending and the ink most theorists have devoted to the consumer as a shopper buying yet another branded handbag. One reason, probably, is that many commentators continue to take their inspiration from Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), written at a time when people spent more on clothing than on housing.

  CLASS AND STATUS

  The second debate concerns the effects of these shifts on class. In pure numerical terms, a simple trend presents itself: what the French call moyennisation. Household budgets show that the top and bottom of society have lost their distinct consumption profiles. In
the 1960s and ’70s, workers began to spend disproportionately more on leisure and culture, while the cadres supérieurs cut back.5 As far as food and drink are concerned, the gulf between the elite and the rest has diminished, as professionals and workers embraced new recipes, products and going out. The cultural divide now opened up further down the social scale, excluding the poor from the more dynamic lifestyles of the many.6

  The trickier question is whether watching TV or going to a show means the same to a boss as to an employee. It would be nice to give a simple answer, but, in addition to countries having distinctive social structures, we have the complication that scholars have approached this question through national class preoccupations. Early American researchers took it as given that consumer culture was creating one burgeoning middle class. This was, after all, what the American dream was about; Ernest Dichter and his fellow émigré and psychologist George Katona studied almost exclusively middle-class households, as did their feminist critics. British observers, by contrast, were preoccupied with the working class and its presumed destiny of building social democracy. Were TVs and material aspirations destroying solidarity? In France, meanwhile, the focus was more on high culture, and how the elite was converting opera, paintings and table manners into social capital.