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

by Paul Lerner

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.

281 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 5, 2015

Reviews

[The Jewish Book Council]

Review by Carol Poll for the Jewish Book Council.

[Joseph Hirsch · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very informative, fairly accessible book on the phenomenon of the department store in Germany, with especial focus on the fin-de-siecle period up through the Weimar Years. Anyone who's been to Germany, or is just familiar with the country, knows that it has some incredible department stores. Some of them are true wonders, with innovative architectural features, imposing edifices, rooftop gardens and even direct service lines from the city's underground trains.

We in the 21st century are used to the consumerist lifestyle (especially here in America), i.e., the all-consuming nature of the business model that has seen Amazon pretty much conquer the world. This was not the case but a mere century ago. It was certainly somewhat of a novelty in the late nineteenth century, and the appearance of such shops bred a special kind of anxiety in Germany, where the place of the artisan, craftsman, and guild member were sacrosanct things. That so many of the department stores were believed to be in the hands of upstart Jewish sons of shtetl schmatta merchants made a tense situation truly combustible.

Scholar Paul Lerner uses everything from advertising copy to plays, films, and previous studies on the Warenhäuser phenomenon to produce a fascinating tome that captures the ambivalence present in consumerism- the attraction, the repulsion, the addictive behavior that shopping encourages. Some of the more revelatory sections of the book deal with sexual tensions between a mostly female workforce and mostly male (and Jewish) management and owners, as well as how fantasies of setting department stores on fire animated everyone from Nazis to radical communists.

It's an academic text, but lively and accessible enough that an undergrad wouldn't groan excessively if assigned a chapter or two. Recommended. With photos and artwork.