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Rudy Koshar
Gottlieb Daimler produced cars that would become (pace Cadillac) the standard
of world automotive engineering, nonetheless ranked far behind France and
England in the production and use of the car. After World War I, the automobile
was still primarily used for leisure in Germany, and Hitler’s radical-populist vision
of a motorized nation derived much of its force from the idea of cars and roads
that gave unprecedented numbers of Germans access to a modern forms of travel
and consumption. The exigencies of planning for war, always foremost in Hitler’s
mind, called for controls on both automobile production and tourism, but this did
not mean that Germans themselves gave up the hope of driving for pleasure. The
building of the Autobahn, envisioned and planned before Hitler but realized in part
under the Nazi regime, did much to further popular hopes of motorized leisure.
The Autobahn was regarded by the regime as an important constituent of Nazi
propaganda, but some drivers insisted that it called for new, more socially
sensitive, driving practices, and new forms of interaction between Germans
themselves. While the sense of social engagement spawned by driving the new
superhighways was finally based on Nazi concepts of racial identity and “blood,”
writers such as Heinrich Hauser were also determined to emphasize the participatory
qualities of the experience. Leisure driving demanded reciprocity, a sense
of citizenship, from which many (like the Jewish literature scholar Viktor Klemperer)
were agonizingly excluded, but which also connoted involvement and selfhood.
Not for long could the Autobahn be used as an instrument of totalitarian domination,
the efforts of the Nazi culture industry notwithstanding. Closely intertwined
with the visions and practices of political community, motorized leisure travel in
National Socialist Germany revealed a multiplicity of meanings and contingencies
over which the regime had only imperfect control.
All the chapters in this volume deal in one way or another with modern
consumption practices, but in Part III the contributions put the emphasis more
directly on specific commodities, material objects, images, and modes of consumption.
Robert Goodrich discusses alcohol consumption among Catholic
workers in Cologne and other Rhenish cities in Imperial Germany, analyzing drink
as a social boundary. Goodrich demonstrates that working-class drink cultures
were part of a “whole way of life,” to use Raymond Williams’s still evocative
term. 31 Drink cultures were rooted in a habitus, the term deployed by Pierre
Bourdieu to analyze mediations between the inherent limiting and enabling
features of cultural practice. In some respects, Goodrich’s analysis parallels that
of Thompson’s discussion of French bicycling culture. Just as bourgeois cycling
groups tried to delimit and shape working-class sports in Belle Epoque France,
Cologne municipal and religious authorities as well as Catholic working-class
officials tried to deflect the worker from his Kölsch beer or schnapps. But just as
Thompson’s conclusion leads to doubt as to the broader success of cultural control,
Goodrich’s chapter presents evidence of the durability of working-class drinking
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