Different Paths to Mass Consumption: Consumer Credit in the United States and West Germany during the 1950s and '60s

Abstract

This article shows how differences in the way Americans and West Germans financed their consumption during the postwar decades underlines differences in social and cultural meanings of consumption. Consumer debt rose rapidly in postwar America. Many Americans came to regard credit as a means of ensuring democratic access to the American dream and to an expanding middle class. The federal government regarded installment credit as a viable way of expanding mass purchasing power and to reinforce a nascent consumer culture built on emulative spending and the rapid diffusion of new goods. By contrast, many West Germans consumers as well as retailers and regulators were more reluctant to embrace consumer credit. Financing consumer goods on credit did not become the hall-mark of new-found middle-class respectability in West-Germany. Rather, to many West German elites and middle-class consumers credit buying retained the stigma of a working class life-style. While the use of consumer credit became more common, it never reached the importance it had across the Atlantic. Far from being a model, the United States stood out as a peculiar case with regard to credit financing and household savings during the postwar period.