The gulf between Germany and the United States was the least surprising of Clark’s findings. By the 1920s the standard accoutrements of twentieth-century mass consumption–the car, the refrigerator, the radio–were already establishing themselves as the norm in the United States, at a time when the enjoyment of these same commodities was limited to a restricted circle of the European upper middle class.6 As Hitler noted in his ‘Second Book’, this large differential in the standard of living could not be understood without reference to the abundance of natural resources and to the vast scale of
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