The East German consumer supply lobby? Admittedly, the very idea strains our credulity. That it has yet to receive its scholarly due is hardly surprising in view of our assumptions about everyday consumer reality in socialist societies: empty shelves, long lines, poor quality merchandise, frustrated customers, surly salespeople, monochromatic drabness. What evidence, if any, is there to suggest the existence of a consumer supply lobby in the German Democratic Republic in the 1950s?

“Our dead are above the petty quarreling and the wretched, empty phrases that we cherish. A deep remembrance of our fallen brethren can only strengthen the will to reconcile differences and awaken the spirit that one of their number once expressed in this fashion: ‘Germany must live, even if we must die.”’ Thus a conservative nationalist representative to the Reichstag in Berlin addressed his colleagues in March 1927. His words reflect several notions current in Weimar Germany. They voice a call, still impassioned eight years after the armistice, for commemoration of the war dead, and they register a frustration with the contentious fragmentation of contemporary political culture, so dissonant with the image of soldiers unified in selfless sacrifice for the German fatherland. Finally, these words articulate the widespread sense that it was in the memory of the fallen of the Great War and in the emulation of their heroic sacrifice that Germans could find the bond to unify them as a people during the postwar period.