'Times Change and We Change with Them': The German Advertising Industry in the Third Reich--Between Professional Self-Interest and Political Repression.

The article studies the relationships between Germany's advertising industry, professional self-interest and state control during the Third Reich, the German fascist state under the Nazis from 1933 to 1945. Besides, it focuses on the aims and methods as well as the successes and limits of the regime's regulation of advertising. It also analyzes the advertising industry's suppression, adaptation, and self-assertion. German economists still regarded advertising as an unproductive squandering of resources. It is hardly surprising, then, to discover that German advertisers nursed an inferiority complex and harbored social-climbing ambitions. It was not only in the economic sphere that the advertising industry came up against stiff resistance. Cultural critics on both the Right and the Left attacked it. Younger advertisers had poor prospects for the future in a career that garnered little prestige. Only very slowly, in the 1920s, did the industry become more professional and receive the concomitant social recognition.