Strength Through Joy: Consumerism and Mass Tourism in the Third Reich

The giant Nazi leisure and tourism agency, Strength through Joy (KdF)'s low cost cultural events, factory beautification programs, organized sports, and, especially, mass tourism mitigated the tension between the Nazi regime's investment in rearmament and German consumers' desire for a higher standard of living. Shelley Baranowski reveals how Strength through Joy de-emphasized the sacrifices of the present while its programs presented visions of a prosperous future--that would materialize as soon as "living space" was acquired. As an agency open to racially acceptable Germans only, it segregated the regime's victims from the Nazi "racial community."

Author: Shelley Baranowski
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 03/29/2004
Pages: 274
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.13lbs
Size: 9.26h x 6.32w x 0.90d
ISBN: 9780521833523

Review Citation(s):
Choice 12/01/2004 pg. 727

About the Author
Baranowski, Shelley: - Shelley Baranowski is Professor of History at the University of Akron. Her previous books include The Confessing Church: Conservative Elites and the Nazi State (1986) and The Sanctity of Rural Life: Nobility, Protestantism and Nazism in Weimar Prussia (1995). She has also co-edited Being Elsewhere: Tourism, Consumer Culture and Identity in Modern Europe and North America (2001), with Ellen Furlough.