Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany (review)

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

Reviewed by: Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany Bradley Naranch Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany By David Ciarlo . Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011. At the heart of David Ciarlo's superb new study of race and visual culture in Imperial Germany is an entangled history of competing commercial and political hegemonies. The first was an advertising campaign launched by German manufacturers and retailers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that used race as a visual means of marketing brand-name products to growing numbers of German consumers; the second was a political project organized by private interest groups and sympathetic government officials that also relied on race in order to gain public consent for German colonial expansion. The objective of the former was to maximize sales of common household items like coffee, chocolate, soap, toothpaste, tobacco, bicycle tires, shoe polish, and margarine by using aggressively stereotyped depictions of race to stimulate the attention of the buying public. The goal of the latter was to promote the necessity of colonialism for German society by winning the support of voters, party activists, investors, and prospective settlers. Both projects, the commercial and the political, dramatically increased the prominence of race in German culture. But in exploring their interconnected histories, Ciarlo argues that it was the advertisers, not the imperialists, who ultimately achieved the more lasting impact. Ciarlo documents the significance of race in German consumer products advertising by analyzing an extensive collection of posters, pictures, packaging materials, trade publications, collectible stamps, and trademark patent applications. His accompanying history of the German colonial movement draws on archival records of government agencies and interest groups as well as newspaper articles, pamphlets, and numerous colonial-themed publications. German advertisers, inspired by transatlantic commercial practices and European colonial precedents, invented (or blatantly copied) a range of racial stereotypes to sell their products. Initially these took the form of dark-skinned natives of indeterminate origin, of Orientalist-inspired "Moors," or of North American "Negros," but increasingly after 1900 they crystallized into a specific set of black African archetypes, often with child-like male physiognomies, simple loincloths as clothing, and exaggerated facial features (red lips, bulging eyes, curly hair, oversized ears). German colonial interest groups contributed to the circulation of similar racialized images, notably by sponsoring trade exhibitions and staging live "people shows" (Völkerschauen), but their efforts at reaching wider audiences were hampered by the class-based prejudices and social conservatism of its organizers. Violent political events, such as the Herero and Nama Wars in Southwest Africa, or the deployment of German soldiers to China during the Boxer Rebellion, inspired colonial-themed advertising campaigns. These short-lived episodes, however, were overshadowed in the realm of commercial visuality by a steady stream of race-based advertising that had little to do with German imperialism. Instead, as Ciarlo convincingly demonstrates, many German companies looked to the United States and Britain for examples of how race could be used as a modern means of product promotion. New printing technologies that lowered the cost of color posters and packaging resulted in an array of racialized images that soon saturated daily life, appearing in newspapers, on store shelves, in railroad waiting rooms, and along city streets throughout Imperial Germany. A founding generation of advertising professionals observed how circus promoters and traveling showmen like Carl Hagenbeck and P.T. Barnum used sensationalized performances of native savagery to generate profits and publicity. To appeal to a wide cross-section of German consumers, they experimented with more "respectable" representations of race in order to mark otherwise ordinary consumer products with an aura of exoticism, including those made in domestic factories using raw materials obtained on global commodities markets, not the German colonies. By 1910, a hegemonic set of simple, easily recognizable "African" images linked to specific lines of inexpensive consumer products had become fixed features in the German commercial imaginary. These racialized advertising practices persisted in post-WWI Germany, due in part to the ongoing influence of graphic artists like Ludwig Holhlwein and the campaigns of major corporate brands like Odol mouthwash, Sarotti chocolates, and Liebig meat extracts. "Consumer-oriented visuality," Ciarlo writes in summation, "streamlined...