JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
There is some inexplicable something about advertising in popular magazines and newspapers during war time, and how inappropriate it seems to used the circumstance of conflict to sell a product. Of course, everything doesn't come to a standstill in war time, not even in World War, as economies still run and society still functions (at least to the very end). So, even though there could be millions of soldiers in uniform, and millions dead, and tens of millions (hundreds of millions peripherally) involved in the conflict, the daily life of living and the stuff of society keep on. This is what strikes me about these ads, all seen in two consecutive weekly issues of the Leipzig-based Illustrirte Zeitung in November 1914: chocolate, cigarettes, cognac, and of course a Benz automobile, though it was the cognac that seems to me to have the most noise about it--I don't know how you relate cognac to a war effort (let alone having it being fired from a howitzer) but they did manage to wrap themselves up in a patriotic-something and associative themselves with the national war effort. Over time manufacturers and ad folks would manage to see connections between the war effort and whatever it was they were producing--scissors, laxatives, buttons, razors, toys, pool tables, and so on. Then again, in a presidential cycle such as what we are witnessing in the U.S., people can relate anything to anything else in spite of the nonsensical and mythological nature of it, like the impossible Donald Trump stating he can relate to racism because "the system" has been "stacked against" him. You can say anything you want in these circumstance, evidently--the point is not making sense, it is about making a vague memory dent, and how that dent got there is immaterial to the lingering notion of the association.
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