Chartbook 421: The end of American soft-power? From Coca-colonization to Fanta-ization

“I felt a great disturbance in the force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror”.

Source: Columbia University Press

American power in its heyday was hegemonic. It was anchored in soft power. Not only that, it spawned a theory of something called “soft power”.

The most dynamic and vital element of that system were not agencies of the American state but private or public-private networks. A short list might include:

• The financial networks of a JP Morgan.

• The alumni of influential American universities.

• American philanthropy and religious and other civil society organizations - think everything from the Gates Foundation to evangelical missions.

• The inspiration of American politics from civil rights to MAGA.

• The production systems of American multinationals, from Fordism to the platform economy.

• The worldwide consumption of distinctive American products e.g. SPAM.

• Broad cultural influences such a Hollywood and Hip-hop.

• “Iconic” corporate branding.

As one of the smartest interventions in the cultural history of the Cold War pointed out, this was always a matter of a circulation of influence. American development through the mid 20th century was powerfully shaped by the hopes and dreams of European migrants whose real impact then reverberated back in the “old country” as a “dream come true”.

The Marshall Plan was for many Europeans experienced as a visceral encounter with a better world. My father growing up in wartime Britain never forgot the experience of running after GIs begging for gum. And Britain’s situation was relatively easy compared to that of the rest of Europe.

But such circuits - soft as they are - are malleable. Influence and money can run in different directions.

All the more striking to see this year in Berlin a series of branding efforts by local branches of US multinationals engaged in a deliberate and knowing localization - uncoupling German consumer desires from their familiar American attachment.

McDonald’s “Made in Germany”:

And Coca-Cola made by “Heike”.

As Bertrand Benoit reported in the WSJ:

McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski told CNBC earlier this month that the company had commissioned four global consumer surveys since the end of last year. “Maybe the aura around America has dimmed a little bit… We are seeing in those surveys as well that consumers are making choices to not maybe frequent American brands as much,” Kempczinski said, though he added traffic at McDonald’s restaurants didn’t seem to be affected. … Coca-Cola is taking no chances. The brand’s Made in Germany campaign, developed by ad agency fischerAppelt, launched over the summer. It claims that 97% of the drinks Coca-Cola sells in the country are produced there. The ads say the company, its suppliers and partners contribute €9.1 billion to Germany’s annual gross domestic product. Coca-Cola has been present in Germany for almost 100 years and is its largest drinks company, according to its made-in-Germany brochure. In a podcast ad, it says some of its products—Fanta, an orange soda, and Mezzo Mix, a mixture of orange soda and cola—were even invented there. One of its videos focuses on workers, featuring upbeat testimonials from Jana, Daniel, Mohammed and Jessy, four employees in its Mannheim plant, in Germany’s southwest.

Now, it is true that Fanta was invented in Germany. As this piece of self-promotion rather coyly admits, “Coke Germany’s” fruit-flavored alternative to Coca-Cola was the product of corporate inventiveness at a time when the normal ingredients ran short …

… wonder when Coke Germany might run out of the secret formula?

World War II. Not Nazi Germany. Not Hitler’ accession to power. But a shooting war that in due course involved America.

I’ll let Matthew Blitz writing at Atlas Obscura take up the tale:

The soft drink Fanta was invented by Coca-Cola, an American company, inside of Nazi Germany during World War II. Developed at the height of the Third Reich, the new soda ensured the brand’s continued popularity. Fanta became a point of nationalistic pride and was consumed by the German public, from the Fraus cooking at home to the highest officials of the Nazi party. The drink was technically fruit-flavored, but limited wartime resources made that descriptor not wholly accurate. Its ingredients were less than appetizing: leftover apple fibers, mash from cider presses, and whey, a cheese by-product. “[Fanta] was made from the leftovers of the leftovers,” says Mark Pendergrast, who, as the author of For God, Country, and Coca-Cola, revealed this hidden past. “I don’t imagine it tasted very good.” … In 1933, right when Hitler and the Nazi Party were assuming power, German-born Max Keith (pronounced “Kite”) took over the company’s German subsidiary, Coca-Cola GmbH. Keith was an imposing figure: tall, intimidating, possessing a “little whisk-broom mustache” (not unlike Hitler’s), charming but quick-tempered, and utterly devoted to Coca-Cola. “[Keith] valued his allegiance to the drink and to the company more than his allegiance to his own country,” says Pendergrast. For that reason, he saw no quarrel with boosting sales by tying Coca-Cola to every aspect of German life and, increasingly, Nazi rule. Back in America, the Coca-Cola Company—led by Robert Woodruff—did not discourage this. The company sponsored the 1936 Berlin Olympics, which Woodruff attended, and made banners featuring the Coca-Cola logo alongside the swastika. Keith used a 10th anniversary party for Coca-Cola GmbH to order a mass Sieg-Heil (Nazi salute) in honor of the dictator’s 50th birthday. He declared that this was “to commemorate our deepest admiration for our Fuhrer.”

A 1950 Fanta advertisement that compares it to refreshing lemonade. INTERFOTO / Alamy

Hitler’s invasion of Europe in 1939 didn’t faze Keith or Atlanta-based Coca-Cola either: The company continuously supplied its German subsidiary with syrup and supplies. In addition, Keith followed German troops into conquered countries—such as Italy, France, and Holland—to take over their respective Coca-Cola businesses. By 1940, Coca-Cola was the undisputed soft drink king of Nazi Germany. According to legend, there’s a photo in the Coke archives of military leader Hermann Göring chugging a bottle of Coca-Cola. Hitler was rumored to enjoy the caffeinated beverage while watching American movies like Gone with the Wind. Then, on December 7, 1941, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. … Coca-Cola HQ in Atlanta also cut off communications with Keith in Germany and halted the export of Coca-Cola’s 7X flavoring (the long-mythicized, top secret formula for Coca-Cola syrup). Coca-Cola GmbH was on the verge of going flat. Keith couldn’t make Coke, and at any point, the Nazi government could seize his beloved company. But he had an idea: He needed an alternative beverage specifically for the German market. Working with his chemists, Keith patched together a recipe within the limitations imposed by wartime rationing. It was basically made from the leftovers of other food industries: fruit shavings, apple fibers and pulp, beet sugar, and whey, the liquid remaining after milk has been curdled and strained during cheese production. To name this concoction, Keith told his team to use their imagination. Joe Knipp, a salesman, pitched “Fanta,” shorthand for the German word for “fantasy.” It stuck. Fanta saved Coca-Cola GmbH. Sales rose gradually during the war, particularly as other choices became harder and harder to find. It wasn’t simply drunk either. Fanta was popular as a sweetener for soups due to severe sugar rationing, since the drink’s renown earned it an exemption from the rationing after 1941 (though Keith had to use beet sugar). It was likely used for a variety of other cooking and baking needs as well. “It was Fanta or nothing,” says Tristan Donovan, author of the book Fizz: How Soda Shook Up the World. “It had pretty much market dominance during war time.” By 1943, sales had reached nearly three million cases. .. As the liberating American troops rode into Germany in the summer of 1945, legend has it, they found Keith in a half-bombed plant still bottling Fanta. Production of Fanta ceased before the end of the year. Despite being on the wrong side of history, Keith did get his wish partially. He was hailed as a hero by the Americans back in Atlanta for keeping the company alive in Germany. The company’s VP of Sales, Harrison Jones, praised Keith by calling him a “great man” for operating in dire circumstances. He was given command of Coca-Cola Europe. In April 1955, Coca-Cola reintroduced Fanta with a new recipe, this time as an orange-flavored drink. It debuted in Italy, before making its way to the United States in 1958. According to Pendergrast, they revived the name largely because it was convenient. After all, Coca-Cola already had the copyright. “I don’t think anyone [at Coca-Cola] cared that [Fanta] had roots inside of Nazi Germany,” says Pendergrast, “I think they thought no one would pay attention.”

Clearly, the politics of local branding in an age of extremes are a complicated business.

And I’m not here to recommend that Coke Germany in the name of Antifa cut off delivery of the Fanta formula to MAGA-America. Or to suggest that anti-Trumpian reflexes in Europe are resurrecting Nazi ghosts.

The point is (perhaps frustratingly) more general:

The complex and uneven relationship between corporate capitalism and consumption is nested in a network of power that is woven out of geopolitics, government regulations, money, technology and consumers desires. Indeed, the very construction of people, as soda-drinkers, as consumers is part of that network. That network was one of the fields on which American hegemony was constructed. As the Fanta-Coke story suggests, its development is highly non-linear. Corporate money-making and survival through the harnessing of entrepreneurial energy and ingenuity and consumer desires provide forms of (changing) continuity. People want fizzy drinks but that desire can be more or less intense and can be met in different ways with differnet politics and economics. But at any given moment we can describe this network as being configured in one way or another, or as being more or less fixed. We can describe something like “structures”, sometimes even an “equilibrium”. We can point to flows and changes and attempt to read those as indicative of a balance of force or dynamics of chagne. And what we are experiencing in 2025 as far as the US-German relationship is concerned, “a great disturbance in the Force”.

This disturbance is highly one-sided. Liberal Americans worry about the country’s image abroad. But in the broader public in the US no one cares very much. America is no longer a society deeply and organically linked to Europe. That too is a distinctive part of the current configuration, compared to the 1930s or 1940s, or indeed to 1977 the release date of Star Wars (which is a WWII film projected to a “galaxy far, far away”). By comparison in Europe, in Berlin this disturbance goes so deep that it is felt not just in the offices and think tanks or in corporate HQs, but on the street, in every day life, in the articulation of desire and the taste of soda in the mouth.

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