| dc.description.abstract | This dissertation explores the many aspects of what it meant for beer to be a cultural commodity in German and Czech societies of postwar Central Europe. By demonstrating how leaders and ordinary individuals treated this beverage in their words and actions, I argue that beer and its constitutive natural ingredients held tremendous power in postwar West Germany, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia owing to their hybrid cultural and economic importance. The “hard” business aspects of the beer market drew great attention on matters such as employment, tax revenue, and export value not only for beer itself, but for the industry’s second and third order impacts on other sectors. That, combined with the “soft” power of beer culture, especially its social role in reinforcing popular notions of gender or national identity, gave German and Czech beer an unusual degree of gravity in politics and everyday life. The influence of beer on such disparate and varied historical developments as the process of postwar justice and retribution, the emergence and struggles of welfare states, and the political and economic integration of Europe into two competing supranational blocs both demonstrates the validity of the argument that I put forward in this study and reflects the remarkable continuity of beer’s cultural and economic importance across the second half of the twentieth century. Only an investigation of the extent and scope that I present here, covering more than four decades of history in three countries on both sides of an ideological Cold War with scales of analysis from the micro-local to the multinational, can fully display the underrecognized importance of a product such as beer by showing the diffuse but steady pressure that it exerted on events across such a wide breadth of circumstances. Even as political and social life in Central Europe experienced extreme ruptures, to put it mildly, from 1945 to 2000, beer’s role as a cultural commodity and its ability to warp political power to its benefit shows remarkable continuity. | |
