Coca-Cola «erobert» den Schweizer Markt. (German)

It is not easy to answer the question, under which circumstances Coca-Cola came to be distributed in Switzerland. This article regards the entry of this soft drink into the Swiss market as part of a larger discourse about «Americanization,» and further wants to delineate how economic competitors, politics and society reacted. On the one hand, the local beverage industry employed xenophobic slogans to defend itself against this market penetration. On the other hand, politics argued for the freedom of trade, wanting to let consumers decide for themselves. Consumers themselves might even have had their interest in the new soft drink awakened precisely due to campaigns against it. Ideologically, the political left generally approved the fight against the American product, while the political right, though it had little sympathy for the new drink, rejected state-imposed restrictions. Initially, Coca-Cola may have been valued or abhorred as a part of the «American way of life.» The subsequent «triumph» of Coca-Cola suggests that after its breakthrough in the 1960s, it at least partly lost its special association with America and, like cappuccino and other beverages, came to be treated as a product that had (almost) always been here. This minor story about Coca-Cola provides an opportunity to reflect on how much self-appropriation is involved in what appears at first to be imposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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