170 FRANK UEKÖTTER
1958 and 1961, two books appeared in translation just a year after their
original publication, Der geheimen Verführer (The Hidden Persuaders) and
Die große Verschwendung (The Waste Makers).^94 Furthermore, it is diffi -
cult to write West German consumer history without Stiftung Warentest,
a kind of German equivalent to Consumer Reports in the United States,
created in 1964. Tests of Stiftung Warentest have been a cornerstone of
responsible consumption ever since. Just how far the critique of con-
sumption resonated in East Germany is still up for debate: could average
GDR citizens even begin to understand the concerns of Western consum-
ers? Postconsumerist Westerners, at any rate, tended to be quite con-
descending of their Eastern neighbors on these matters, as Otto Schily
showed on live television when he fl ashed a banana on the evening of the
GDR’s free election of 1990 as his no-word commentary to the election
results. The legendary move refl ected a deep suspicion of the consumer-
ist spree that East Germans embarked on at the time.^95
The alternative milieu was a crucial incubator for the socialization of
West Germans who were critical of consumerism. In his groundbreaking
study, Sven Reichardt points out that environmentalism was more than
just a political agenda because it was also a decision about lifestyles—
even though, at the end of the day, smoke-fi lled neighborhood pubs may
have been more popular than health food stores and green tea.^96 But the
alternative milieu had its center in large cities and thrived on personal
contacts, and that made it diffi cult to diff use eastward. Even if it did make
it across the Wall, East Germans who sought to adopt such a lifestyle
faced political and social hurdles. A church organization, the Kirchliches
Forschungsheim Wittenberg, published an alternative cookbook with
vegetarian recipes in 1983, but that was an anomaly rather than a harbin-
ger of new food choices.^97
According to Reichardt, the alternative milieu fell apart in the 1980s,
but its cultural shock waves resonate in Germany to the present day. It
lives on in the alternative farming community, whose growth has been
strikingly steady ever since the heady days of 1970s counterculture. Given
that organic products can now be found in every supermarket, it is hard to
image what it must have been like as consumers and farmers found them-
selves confronted by ideas of alternative farming methods around 1980. It
was a diff erent world, far removed from the factory farming methods that
changed agricultural production across Western Europe, and engaging
with alternative farming was a vertigo-inducing experience. After visiting
thirteen organic and biodynamic farms in West Germany and Austria in
1982, two offi cials from the Chamber of Agriculture in Westfalen-Lippe
summed up their fi ndings as follows: “In our democracy, people can still
do business in any way they like. And it should stay this way.”^98