Fanta’s Nazi Roots
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
For those besotted by the Fantanas — the synthetic girl group pitching Fanta soft drinks — news August 5 that the sugary sodas have Nazi origins left a sour aftertaste. In an otherwise innocuous dispatch about Fanta’s popularity overseas, the online magazine Slate slipped in the factoid that “the original Fanta was a Nazi product” created by a German Coca-Cola Co. executive who “sported a tiny Hitler-style mustache.”
But Slate had actually scooped itself back in 2002, when then-advertising columnist Rob Walker deconstructed Fanta as parent Coca-Cola Co. was preparing to revive the defunct brand. Fanta’s origins, he wrote, lay partly in the unpopularity of foreign-owned firms in Nazi Germany. Both stories relied on the same book to reveal Fanta’s DNA: Mark Pendergrast’s “For God, Country, and Coca-Cola,” was originally published in 1998 and hailed by The Washington Post as “an encyclopedic history of Coke and its subculture.”
Regardless of all the exposure, Fanta’s brand doesn’t seem to have suffered. “In cases where the connection to something awful is in the definitive past, it doesn’t have much impact,” said Walker, now the writer of the New York Times Magazine’s Consumed column and the author of the 2008 book “Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are,” to the Forward via e-mail. “Wasn’t the Volkswagen a Nazi car?”
Nor has guilt by association been a problem for Fanta 70 years later, he said. “I don’t think people are scandalized by that. And I assume that’s because nobody concludes that anyone involved in making or selling Volkswagens or Fanta today are secretly Nazi sympathizers.”
A spokesman for Coca-Cola said the company would decline comment about the Fanta kerfuffle.
This is a moment of great uncertainty. Here’s what you can do about it.
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news. All donations are still being matched by the Forward Board - up to $100,000 until April 24.
This is a moment of great uncertainty for the news media, for the Jewish people, and for our sacred democracy. It is a time of confusion and declining trust in public institutions. An era in which we need humans to report facts, conduct investigations that hold power to account, tell stories that matter and share honest discourse on all that divides us.
With no paywall or subscriptions, the Forward is entirely supported by readers like you. Every dollar you give is invested in the future of the Forward — and telling the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
The Forward doesn’t rely on funding from institutions like governments or your local Jewish federation. There are thousands of readers like you who give us $18 or $36 or $100 each month or year.
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
