Gorgeous War
The Branding War between the Third Reich and the United States
"An airport book for business class" – pre-publication reviewer
Description
Gorgeous War examines ways in which modernist design ideals influenced German and American heraldry, and argues that the two visual worlds form the foundations of contemporary corporate brand programs. What is the legacy of apparently toxic signs like the swastika? Inheritors of the post–Second World War world increasingly struggle to find an escape from an intensely branded environment—to find a place in their lives that is free of advertising and propaganda.
Awards
- Short-listed, Foreword INDIES (War & Military) 2019
Reviews
For readers in cultural or media studies and those with advertising or marketing backgrounds, Gorgeous War will serve as a well-written text that should prompt questions about the motives of the advertising industry, specifically regarding the origins and uses of branding as a means of consumer enticement. -- Megan Moore Burns, Quill & Quire
- Megan Moore Burns
Gorgeous War is a tour de force through the worlds of design and propaganda—both military and corporate—in the United States and Germany. Filled with fascinating details, the book makes creative connections between worlds that were (and are) more closely connected than they first appear.
- Alexander L. Fattal
“Gorgeous War, a highly readable book, shows that the US of Walt Disney and the Third Reich of Goebbels were two variants not just of modernity but of hypermodernity, no matter how glaringly different their surface ‘styles’ and their human consequences. It shows we cannot afford to demonize and ‘other’ Nazism too hastily because there is greater affinity between Nazi Germany and aspects of modern America than we might like to admit to ourselves. ” – Roger Griffin, Oxford Brookes University