As I often quip to students, “I didn’t know what it was to be a Midwesterner until I went to college in Boston, and I didn’t know what it meant to be American until I lived in Germany.” That was in West Germany, during the 1980s – then supposedly the “most Americanized” country in the world. (As usual, Canada was being overlooked by whoever said this.) This awareness of cultural “identity” became a fascination as I started trying to untangle the threads of “the German” and “the American” within my own life and family.

Another quip I have often made is that all Ph.D. dissertations are autobiographical, in that most of us find topics that are somehow expressions of some fundamental question we are pondering in our own lives. That certainly was true for me as I started graduate school at Georgetown University’s BMW Center for German & European Studies: I wanted to do some project on “Americanization” – the intersection of German and American culture. Initially, I imagined a project looking at Wim Wenders’ idealization of America (With Paris Texas, I had discovered his films in 1985/5 while learning German in Munich) but, academically disciplined into a more historical project, I developed a thesis proposal on Coca-Cola’s past in Germany. Inspirations ranged from Richard Kuisel’s Seducing the French (1993), which includes a chapter on Coca-Cola being outlawed there in the 1950s, to my own recollection of bringing home “foreign” Coke and Pepsi bottles as souvenirs from my family’s big trip to Europe after 8th grade.

Most historians have “war stories” to recount from the trenches of archival research. I will share a couple of mines: While developing my dissertation proposal, the Naumann Foundation had funded a summer tour of German archives in 1996 when I also visited the headquarters of Coca-Cola in Germany. When there, my PR-handler had shown me a bound volume of Coca-Cola Nachrichten, Coca-Cola GmbH’s periodical for their network of bottlers and distributors. It promised to be the perfect “primary source” providing not just details of who-did-what-when, in terms of the business’s history, but also a window on how the company saw itself and insight on what it wanted to “sell” to the German public. However, when I showed up a year later and asked to review their Coca-Cola Nachrichten collection, I was told they did not have any: “destroyed in the bombing” during WWII. In this case, that clichéd excuse was mostly true, as they did eventually come up with the volume I had seen before, 1937 if I remember correctly, but that was it. So there I was, in Germany with my DAAD grant for a year of doing research, but with nothing to look at. I floundered for a few weeks trying to find something useful in government archives (e.g. around the 1936 legislation requiring “koffeinhältig” labeling) but there certainly didn’t seem to be enough to write a dissertation. And then I joined the German chapter of the Coca-Cola Collector’s Club and put an advert in their newsletter. Soon I was visiting people all over Germany who allowed me to make photocopies of some random Coca-Cola Nachrichten issue they had bought in a flea market. One of my hosts, a multi-millionaire who had inherited a Coke bottling franchise, had a huge collection of Coke memorabilia, including a gold-foil-wrapped bottle he had somehow arranged to be sent up to the then new International Space Station. He was carrying it around in the trunk of his “Dicke Daimler” (big Mercedes). He also had the smallest cell-phone I ever saw – apparently back then quite the status symbol. In any case, I now have probably the most complete set of Coca-Cola Nachrichten, albeit in 1990s B/W photocopies.

The dissertation, “Coca-Colonization, ‘Refreshing’ Americanization, or Nazi Volksgetrank? The History of Coca-Cola in Germany, 1929-1961,” was finally submitted and defended in 2003. Although there were a couple of publications drawn from it – one about Coke marketing under the Nazis “Die Erfrischende Pause ” and one about skyrocketing Coke sales in postwar Germany, I have yet to flesh out the project into a book. An overview of what I had planned was published in 2008 by the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC. Two follow up projects have since, unfortunately, grown cold on the back burner – one about Billy Wilder’s film “starring” Coca-Cola, One, Two, Three (1961)  and another about Claus Halle (1927-2004) [Halle draft], the German who rose the highest in the “globalized” Coca-Cola Company hierarchy.

In hopes that this website might play a role in helping re-boot the overall project, I am soliciting help in cataloging appearances where Coca-Cola plays a “starring” role in other films and TV shows. My start to such a list can be found here, and you can add to the list here.