(North) German readers, please brace yourselves: not only has Southern-style lager long been the dominant beverage in the German beer market, in the last third of the 20th century, Bavaria successfully transformed its regional and largely unknown 1516 Beer Purity Law (Reinheitsgebot) into a global icon of the modern German nation. Robert Shea Terrell, Assistant Professor of History at Syracuse University, traces the impact of Bavarian brewing practices on the (West) German market, from the Weimar era until reunification. In seven mostly chronological chapters, Terrell compellingly shows how Bavarian brewers shaped German consumer culture, the economy, and international relations.

Terrell’s narrative of Germany as a provincial (Bavarian) nation echoes a 1990s historiographic shift towards a Europe of regions. Applying it to (trans)regional commodity history, he draws inspiration from Kolleen M. Guy’s seminal study on the influence of champagne-producing provinces on French nation-building.1 He adds “provincial moments” (p. 194) to German history, such as the disputes over tax laws in 1906, 1919, and 1950. To this day, thanks to the lobbying of Bavarian brewers, the beer tax remains the only consumption-based tax at the disposal of the states, rather than the federal government. Throughout the chapters, the tenacity of Bavarian brewers, who persistently advocated for the nationalizing of their regional traditions and standards, stands out. In addition to taxation, Terrell places special emphasis on production standards, public health policies, consumer sensibilities, and international stereotypes. However, with regard to the latter, the study falls somewhat short of providing a comprehensive historical analysis. Related, apart from a very slim, four-page primary source bibliography at the end, the book mostly lacks any reflection on the sources or methodology.

By the 1930s, “Bavarian beer” had been transformed into the standard German lager, though it became a highly contested beverage during National Socialism. While the brewers sought to promote beer as the “the people’s drink”, the “racial state” viewed its consumption as a socio-biological weakness, particularly in the context of managing nutrition during wartime (chapter 2). As state intervention intensified, market centralization was avoided through the calculated rhetoric of the threat of social unrest, which would erupt if production standards were lowered and “sugar beer” were allowed.

After an initial prohibition period following the Second World War, Allied occupation and Germany’s division allowed southern brewers to assume an increasingly active role in shaping national policies. In chapter 3, Terrell follows Bavarian political leaders, brewers, and agrarians in reframing beer as a nutritional, agricultural, and economic necessity as the region became western Germany’s breadbasket. During the “miracle years” analyzed in chapter 4, beer’s role as a fundamental characteristic of the West German nation was solidified by the use of a new advertising technique called “community advertising” (Gemeinschaftswerbung). German brewers promoted beer regardless of brand, with a particular focus on the male worker and the female household manager. One notable example is the advertising poster “Wanderer in the Desert”: it was the single longest running advertisement of the national organization Bierwerbe, running from 1953 until 1967. As Terrell notes, its imagery evoked “the emasculated men of the Third Reich and occupation” (p. 118) while embracing abundance and an urge to drown the recent the past. Unfortunately, the author fails to address the images’ relation to Germany’s colonial legacy. While the black-and-white print of the poster may be less straightforward to decipher than the colored original, Terrell leaves the reader with a mystery: why did Bierwerbe decide to depict a person of color wandering in the desert, given the German climate and a predominantly white consumer base? Stripped off particular brands, Gemeinschaftswerbung seemed very much entrenched in West Germany’s racism and silencing of both its colonial and Nazi past.

For a long time, north German brewers opposed the implementation of uniform (southern) production standards, thereby safeguarding their brewing tradition of using sugar in ale production. However, by the 1980s, the provincial Bavarian Reinheitsgebot had become a national commercial icon and guarantee of quality (chapter 5). In the mid-1950s, Bavarian brewers began to frame the Beer Purity Law as a national, centuries-old, and consumer-oriented tradition, appropriating a “regional peculiarity into an ahistorical national touchstone” (p. 141). This appropriation initially also held off looser European food regulations. The so-called “European Beer War” ended in 1987 when the European Court of Justice repealed the purity law as a trade barrier (chapter 7). Three years later, German reunification provided a new opportunity for capital growth as western capital and production standards penetrated the East German market.

Chapter 6, “The Munich Effect: Löwenbräu, Bavarian Beer, and the Global Imaginary,” is the least conclusive. It only marginally takes into account the long durée of German beer history, both at home and abroad. In response to Allied prohibition and shortages, Bavarian brewers swiftly reopened their export channels. Ironically, Löwenbräu, a brand quite unpopular in Munich, became an export success by laying exclusive claims to Bavarian authenticity and hence, quality. Whereas Terrell describes this as a “new tactic” (p. 153), authenticity as a marketing strategy was neither a new phenomenon of the post-war period, nor was it unique to Bavarian brewers. Terrell only briefly mentions the discourse on place-based claims surrounding “Pilsner beer”, which only eventually became a style on its own, devoid of geographical peculiarity (p. 151). Similarly, a look across the Atlantic might have provided some nuance, which also connects to Terell’s second claim that German brewers and politicians globally rebranded the German nation as jovial beer drinkers. Since at least the 1870s, emigré German brewers frequently employed stereotypical Bavarian-Alpine imagery in their advertising to sell an authentic “Old Word” product. The conflation of Germanness with Bavaria was thus not “a product of postwar economic and political conditions” (p. 191), but already a central marketing strategy by the end of the 19th century.2 One significant difference to the period analyzed by Terrell is the acceleration with which, for instance, Oktoberfests, spread across the world in the 1960s.

Overall, Terrell has provided a very well written book, with smooth transitions from one chapter to the next. As one of the first to analyze rather than simply assume the relationship between beer and Germany, Terrell’s study demonstrates the significant economic and cultural influence of Bavaria, reminding us that the Reinheitsgebot is a (very recent) promotional fairy tale. Some of the source translations could have benefited from a more critical approach to address potential differences in, for example, interpreting Gemeinschaftswerbung as “cooperative” rather than “community advertising”. Despite this minor quibble and the shortcomings addressed above, Terrell’s study will undoubtedly lead to further discussions on the temporal and spatial authority of “German” brewing traditions, not only at German Stammtische, but also within the ever-growing field of translocal and global commodity history.

Notes:
1 Kolleen M. Guy, When Champagne Became French. Wine and the Making of a National Identity, Baltimore 2003. See also Suzanne L. Marchand’s Porcelain. A History from the Heart of Europe, Princeton 2020. On the provincialism of German-speaking Europe, cp. Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials. The German Idea of Heimat, Berkeley 1990.
2 For instance, in the United States the German penchant for beer was ambiguously perceived, variously derided, harshly condemned, or lauded as exemplar. This contributed to the stereotype of the German as a person with a pot-belly, holding beer stein in hand, which was reproduced in various prints since the 1850s. A prominent example of beer advertising is the reproduction of an oil painting of the Milwaukee-based Valentin Blatz Brewing Company for the Chicago Word’s Fair in 1893. The painting depicts a barmaid in a dirndl dress holding overflowing beer steins on a keg. Cp. Jana Weiss, A Lager Beer Revolution. The History of Beer and German American Immigration, in: Not Even Past, https://notevenpast.org/a-lager-beer-revolution-the-history-of-beer-and-german-american-immigration/ (07.06.2024).