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23 - Consumer capitalism and the end of the Cold War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2010

By
Emily Rosenberg
Edited by
Melvyn P. Leffler  and
Odd Arne Westad
Melvyn P. Leffler
Affiliation:
University of Virginia
Odd Arne Westad
Affiliation:
London School of Economics and Political Science
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Summary

During the chaotic days of the Cold War’s end in East Germany and throughout Eastern Europe, capitalist-made consumer goods often seemed both the symbols and the substance of freedom. Throngs of East Germans helped hack down the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and made their way into West Berlin to enter the hallowed halls of the Kaufhaus des Westens. Media images of thousands of new shoppers, carrying coveted consumer products back to East Berlin, seemed to mark both the disintegration of Cold War barriers and the victory of capitalist mass consumerism.

Over the following months, image after image linked the rapid implosion of Soviet power to the triumph of consumerism. Pepsi rushed out a television advertisement that positioned its product amidst pictures of the crumbling Berlin Wall and strains of the “Hallelujah Chorus.” McDonald’s cranked out press releases boasting how East Europeans were developing a taste for American cuisine, and American exporters struggled to meet the demand for Western brassieres, nylon hosiery, lipsticks, and other symbols of what the Kremlin had once derided as consumerist decadence. Prague sprouted new signs reading “I am a billboard. I sell your products,” and Barbie became the prestige commodity for young girls. In a full-page advertisement in the New York Times of December 15, 1989, Playboy proclaimed itself to be “Exporting the American Dream” by becoming “the first American consumer magazine published in Hungarian.”

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The Cambridge History of the Cold War , pp. 489 - 512
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

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