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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