(Mis)Understanding Consumption: Expertise and ...

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(Mis)Understanding Consumption: Expertise and Consumer Policies in Vienna, 1918–1938 Oliver Kühschelm

“American Poster Art Lags” was how the Milwaukee Journal summed up the message of graphic designer Joseph Binder in January 1935.1 Binder, who was counted among the most distinguished commercial artists of Vienna, had travelled across the Atlantic to teach Americans “how to go modern,” as another article put it.2 The American Magazine of Art quoted him explaining, “There is a Henry Ford style just as there is a style of Louis XIV […]. And since we are living in a Henry Ford age, our art should reflect the qualities of that age. European artists have gone further than American artists in this modern style.”3 This was Binder’s sales-pitch to the US public, and whatever the factual merits of his claim, it worked for him. In 1936, he emigrated to the United States and continued his successful career. Binder belonged to a specific set of people that represented professional expertise in consumption. This chapter will combine economic, social, and political perspectives to trace the Viennese history of consumption-related expert knowledge in the 1920s and 1930s. Vienna, in both its fin de siècle version and its “red” interwar incarnation, has long received broad scholarly attention. The (forced) emigration of renowned scientists and artists in the 1930s only increased Vienna’s reputation as a former hotbed of modernity.4 The fascination with art, philosophy, and high culture sometimes overshadows the fact that Vienna was the metropolis of an industrializing state and that the emergence of mass consumption together with the corresponding professional expertise forms an essential part of this story. Following the path of British and American scholarship, history of consumption has by now become a booming research area in German-language historiography.5 Even so the history of consumption in Austria is still underresearched, although integrating consumption into the narratives of contemporary history can open fresh perspectives on Austrian and Viennese society.6 In 1910, Vienna counted with two million inhabitants, which made it one of the biggest cities in the world. Since it also served as the capital of an Empire, many of its wealthiest citizens lived there. Consequently, it was a fertile ground for the formation of professional expertise in consumption. The fall of the Habsburg Empire resulted in a dramatic loss of political power and economic clout for the former metropolitan

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Émigré Cultures in Design and Architecture

elites. This raised heavy doubts about the viability (“Lebensfähigkeit”) of the newly founded Austrian Republic, which governed only a small state and had to grapple with the consequences of a war that had depleted the economy. It took some years to make up for lost ground but it did not turn out all bad. If starting from a low level, Austria achieved high overall growth in the decade from 1920 to 1930.7 It did not fare worse than Hungary or Czechoslovakia, and Austria’s growth rates exceeded those of western and northern Europe. Admittedly, Austria’s gross domestic product (GDP) per capita remained worlds apart from the corresponding numbers for the United States, and in 1929 the figure for neighboring Switzerland was more than double that of Austria. However, the GDP only gives a rough impression of overall wealth and does not account for its distribution among different social strata. While the middle classes found it hard coming to terms with a diminished position in society and the polity, the 1920s were not a bad time for the urban working class. Mass consumption expanded during the Republic’s first decade and, as we will see, the buildup of expertise in consumption continued in Vienna during the 1920s. It came under pressure in the following decade when economic and political processes conspired to derail innovation in the field.

Basic concepts Defining traits of modern societies are the rise of the social figure of the “expert” and a widely shared disposition to trust their expertise.8 Since the late nineteenth century, it became a career to claim systematic knowledge of consumption and consumer behavior to assess needs and desires.9 This class of experts considered themselves to be capable of crafting persuasive messages or shaping products according to what was good for the people or the producers or both. Expertise in consumption drew on different areas of knowledge and it was not the exclusive realm of an established profession. Advertisers fit in the category as well as designers, architects, economists, sociologists, statisticians, the technocratic elite of the cooperatives, and managers in retail or marketing representatives of big companies. Admittedly many of these professions were not new, not even advertising. But new elements were added to the job description. Experience and craftsmanship remained important, but a growing group of consumer experts exalted scientific knowledge. Joseph Binder provides a good example. He repackaged visual art as “graphic design”: “The new style is chiefly based on the construction of forms,” which is how it made poster art fit for the “Henry Ford age.”10 A wealth of recent research has investigated the approach of “social engineering,” which characterized the experts of this era.11 Their work hinged on the conviction that society was a problem to solve and that the means to solve it was the careful application of ever more adequate social techniques. The term is tailored to analyze social, political, and economic processes in European and North American societies in a period that stretches from the early twentieth century to the post–Second World War era. It can also be read as a more specific version of Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality, which he introduced in his late work. It has by now made large inroads in the social and some in the historical sciences.12 It can be of good service for conceptualizing

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