After the end of World War II, the presence of the United States in post-war West Germany changed the dynamics of the country’s culture. With the implementation of the Marshall Plan in 1948, the Americanization of German advertising occurred: Media began to represent the female body in a more erotic manner, and sexually-suggestive topics became more commonplace. This sexualization of the media, therefore, set an early foundation for the Sexual Revolution in West Germany.

Through research and the analyzation of primary sources — such as speeches, government directives, and American and German advertisements from the  1940s and 1950s — and secondary sources like scholarly articles and lexicons, this work explores the transformation and objectification of the representation of women in German advertising in the late 1940s and the early 1950s.

This work sets itself apart from other similar works, as these works focus more on the recent sexualization of women in German media (i.e. the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s) rather than on the potential roots of this objectification.

Although this project is still a work-in-progress, it aims for an outcome that proves that this Americanization of German advertising and media in the late 1940s and early 1950s became an element that encouraged the Sexual Revolution in West Germany.