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

Abstract

The origins of the US use of model home exhibitions as Cold War cultural propaganda are traced in this article from the campaign’s inception in occupied Germany in the late 1940s, to the Nixon/Khrushchev debate at the American National Exhibition in Moscow in 1959. The US State Department employed federal design specialists and civilian talent, including Edgar Kaufmann Jr of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, to mount exhibits that broadcast the Marshall Plan’s conflation of democracy and rising private consumption to both West and East Germans in divided Berlin. As the campaign evolved, straightforward ‘Americanization’ strategies were shed in favour of a more complex approach that promoted International Style modernism to define a visionary world of postnational consumerism and its ‘new man’ (most convincingly engendered as a ‘new woman’) echoed the interwar era’s avant-garde utopianism — a motive usually considered absent from the postwar period’s International Style. The American programme of cultural influence in Western Europe reached into the East Bloc, where consumer socialism incorporated the Marshall Plan vision of commodified domesticity, as well as exhibition technique employed by the USA in divided Berlin, capitalism’s showcase ‘behind the Iron Curtain’.