Abstract

"Occupation to Oktoberfest: American GIs, German Beer, and the Business of Postwar Festivity"

Kaete O’Connell, Southern Methodist University (kaete.oconnell@gmail.com)

In the aftermath of World War II, the American occupation of Germany generated a surprising site of cultural and economic exchange: the beer hall. When American soldiers arrived in occupied West Germany, they entered a landscape marked by scarcity. And yet, they were soon raising steins alongside locals in a shared ritual. This paper investigates how American GIs’ participation in Germany’s revived festival culture, especially Oktoberfest and local Festhalle traditions, generated new circuits of consumption that shaped both German recovery and American postwar business culture. Drawing on scrapbooks, photographs, and letters from service members, I argue that U.S. soldiers functioned as informal cultural intermediaries whose consumption practices co-created a commercial revival of Bavarian identity.

By tracing how GIs’ enthusiasm for Gemütlichkeit, or conviviality, traveled home through memory, tourism, and entrepreneurial imitation, the paper reveals how occupation-era experiences informed the growth of Oktoberfest celebrations, themed restaurants, and Bavarian “villages” across the United States. These ventures, often launched by veterans and immigrants, reimagined German beer culture as a marketable blend of authenticity, nostalgia, and performance.

Reading these developments through the lens of co-creation, the paper contends that postwar cultural exchange was neither consensual nor symmetrical. It emerged from encounters structured by power and desire. Yet through these uneven relationships, soldiers and civilians together helped construct new transatlantic economies of taste. By viewing the beer industry and festival culture as arenas of co-creation, this paper highlights how informal social practices (drinking, souvenir collecting, celebrating) intersected with processes of commercialization and identity-making. The case complicates familiar narratives of occupation and recovery, revealing how leisure itself became a form of business innovation in the early Cold War.