Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Consuming Temple: Jews, Department Stores, and the Consumer Revolution in Germany, 1880 1940

The Consuming Temple: Jews, Department Stores, and the Consumer Revolution in Germany, 1880 1940

Lerner, Paul

Hardcover

Business GeneralEconomicsGerman History

ISBN10: 0801452864
ISBN13: 9780801452864
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: May 5 2015
Pages: 280
Weight: 1.10
Height: 0.90 Width: 6.40 Depth: 9.50
Language: English

Department stores in Germany, like their predecessors in France, Britain, and the United States, generated great excitement when they appeared at the end of the nineteenth century. Their sumptuous displays, abundant products, architectural innovations, and prodigious scale inspired widespread fascination and even awe; at the same time, however, many Germans also greeted the rise of the department store with considerable unease. In The Consuming Temple, Paul Lerner explores the complex German reaction to department stores and the widespread belief that they posed hidden dangers both to the individuals, especially women, who frequented them and to the nation as a whole.Drawing on fiction, political propaganda, commercial archives, visual culture, and economic writings, Lerner provides multiple perspectives on the department store, placing it in architectural, gender-historical, commercial, and psychiatric contexts. Noting that Jewish entrepreneurs founded most German department stores, he argues that Jews and Jewishness stood at the center of the consumer culture debate from the 1880s, when the stores first appeared, through the latter 1930s, when they were Aryanized by the Nazis. German responses to consumer culture and the Jewish question were deeply interwoven, and the Jewish department store, framed as an alternative and threatening secular temple, a shrine to commerce and greed, was held responsible for fundamental changes that transformed urban experience and challenged national traditions in Germany's turbulent twentieth century.

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