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Inhaling Democracy: Cigarette Advertising and Health Education in Post-war West Germany, 1950s–1975

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the West German government was faced with the challenge of addressing a damaging health behaviour, smoking, in the context of an emerging late modern democracy, when the precedent for addressing that behaviour was set in the Nazi past. This paper details the two-pr...

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Autor principal: Elliot, Rosemary
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Oxford University Press 2015
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4513888/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26217071
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkv004
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author Elliot, Rosemary
author_facet Elliot, Rosemary
author_sort Elliot, Rosemary
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description In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the West German government was faced with the challenge of addressing a damaging health behaviour, smoking, in the context of an emerging late modern democracy, when the precedent for addressing that behaviour was set in the Nazi past. This paper details the two-pronged approach which the government took: seeking restrictions on cigarette advertising, whilst educating young people to adopt positive health behaviours in the face of pressure to smoke. This approach can be understood in the social and economic context of the time: an economic commitment to the social market economy worked against restrictions on the sale of cigarettes; whilst concerns about past authoritarian structures prompted the health authorities to seek novel ways of addressing smoking, emphasising choice. In a nuanced way, post-war anti-smoking strategies were a response to West Germany's National Socialist past, but more importantly, a signal of an increasingly international outlook.
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spelling pubmed-45138882015-07-27 Inhaling Democracy: Cigarette Advertising and Health Education in Post-war West Germany, 1950s–1975 Elliot, Rosemary Soc Hist Med Original Articles In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the West German government was faced with the challenge of addressing a damaging health behaviour, smoking, in the context of an emerging late modern democracy, when the precedent for addressing that behaviour was set in the Nazi past. This paper details the two-pronged approach which the government took: seeking restrictions on cigarette advertising, whilst educating young people to adopt positive health behaviours in the face of pressure to smoke. This approach can be understood in the social and economic context of the time: an economic commitment to the social market economy worked against restrictions on the sale of cigarettes; whilst concerns about past authoritarian structures prompted the health authorities to seek novel ways of addressing smoking, emphasising choice. In a nuanced way, post-war anti-smoking strategies were a response to West Germany's National Socialist past, but more importantly, a signal of an increasingly international outlook. Oxford University Press 2015-08 2015-03-15 /pmc/articles/PMC4513888/ /pubmed/26217071 http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkv004 Text en © The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for the Social History of Medicine. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
spellingShingle Original Articles
Elliot, Rosemary
Inhaling Democracy: Cigarette Advertising and Health Education in Post-war West Germany, 1950s–1975
title Inhaling Democracy: Cigarette Advertising and Health Education in Post-war West Germany, 1950s–1975
title_full Inhaling Democracy: Cigarette Advertising and Health Education in Post-war West Germany, 1950s–1975
title_fullStr Inhaling Democracy: Cigarette Advertising and Health Education in Post-war West Germany, 1950s–1975
title_full_unstemmed Inhaling Democracy: Cigarette Advertising and Health Education in Post-war West Germany, 1950s–1975
title_short Inhaling Democracy: Cigarette Advertising and Health Education in Post-war West Germany, 1950s–1975
title_sort inhaling democracy: cigarette advertising and health education in post-war west germany, 1950s–1975
topic Original Articles
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4513888/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26217071
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkv004
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