Introduction
Consumer culture is topical these days. Academics from disciplines as
diverse as economics, sociology, advertising, literature and psychology
continue to publish books analyzing how consumption impacts our society
and shapes the way we understand ourselves. The prognosis, especially as
it relates to children, is often grim. Juliet Schor warned that the growing
commercialization of our society is undermining the well-being of children
as marketers displace parents and dictate what constitutes a normal childhood. Leo Bogart, one of the leading public intellectuals in the United
States, argued that advertising aimed at youth threatens to destroy the
more civilized aspects of American culture in a sea of pointless crudity
that precludes the formation of critical intellects. Literary critic Rachel
Bowlby demonstrated that in both the United Kingdom and the United
Sates children learn that the consumer is the ultimate modern citizen.
The message is you cannot be patriotic if you do not rack up credit card
debt around Christmas and you have not lived if you have not shopped.
These interpretations suggest consumer culture has reached crisis proportions and threatens to fatally damage Western Civilization.1 On the
one hand their work shows academics at their best, utilizing their specialized knowledge to engage with issues of broad interest to our democratic
society by highlighting real problems. On the other hand, however, these
issues and fears are not new. Scholars who have looked back through the
20th century such as historian John Gillis and advertising expert Daniel
Cook have shown that it is more accurate to state that consumption has
1
Juliet B. Schor, Born to Buy: The Commercialized child and the New Consumer Culture,
(New York: Scribner, 2004); Leo Bogart, Over the Edge: How the Pursuit of Youth
by Marketers and the Media has Changed American Culture, (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee,
2005); Rachel Bowlby, Carried Away: The Invention of Modern Shopping, (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2000).
2
Introduction
allowed adults to remake the meaning of childhood.2 A consumer culture
that you and I would recognize has existed in North America and Europe
for at least 100 years. If we want to understand what is happening in our
own society, it is sometimes advantageous to return to a bygone exemplar.
Not only is this politically simpler, but we have the advantage of knowing
how changes worked themselves out. This book tries to answer questions
about how consumer culture impacts the ways adults and children make
sense of the world by taking a close look at toys in Imperial Germany from
1890 to 1918.
After World War II and the Holocaust it is understandable that we
forget Germany was the original home of modern toys and the marketing
of youth culture. Contemporaries accepted this as given. At the Columbian
World Exhibition in 1893 an American reporter wrote, “Is it not wonderful that Germany should be the land of toys, and that the world should
go to her for [them].”3 His comments on the German exhibit in Chicago
reflected a view held by many in the West at the end of the nineteenth
century. If one wanted modern, culturally sophisticated toys, one looked
to the Kaiserreich. Sales figures confirmed the dominance of producers
based in Germany. By 1900, companies located in the German Empire controlled 60% of the world market. This astonishing figure paled against their
domination (95%) of domestic consumption. In 1890, Germany exported
27.8 million Marks of toys and 40 million Marks five years later. By 1901
this figure reached 53 million Marks, in 1906 70.5 million Marks, and in
1911 90.1 million Marks. On the eve of World War I, the Reich accounted
for 125 million out of 230 million Marks of world toy production. Firms
based in Germany held strangleholds over markets in Europe, North and
South America, Asia and Australia. Great Britain and the United States
represented by far the largest export region, accounting for 60 million
2
3
John R. Gillis, A World of the Their Own Making: Myth, Ritual, and the Quest for
Family Values, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996); Daniel Thomas Cook,
The Commodification of Childhood: The Children’s Clothing Industry and the Rise of the Child Consumer, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).
James W. Shepp & Daniel B. Shepp, Shepp’s Worlds’ Fair Photographed, (Chicago:
Globe Bible Publishing Co, 1893), p. 114.
Introduction
3
Marks (larger than domestic sales). France, Argentina, Russia and Japan
provided another 10 million Marks of total revenue.4 Middle-class people
in these regions bought German as opposed to British or French toys at an
unprecedented rate from the 1890s onward.
With this impressive entrepreneurial dominance as a backdrop, I argue
that consumer culture, specifically toys, enabled ordinary Germans to
define their identity in relation to the nation, gender, class and technology far earlier than is generally imagined. Most scholars have assumed that
Germany did not develop a consumer culture until after World War I.5
I define consumption as a process of personal self-fashioning revolving
around shopping for standardized items.6 Since such a culture existed in
Germany after 1890, this means that German concepts of nurturing, middleclass childhood developed in a distinctively consumer space. Buying toys
allowed adults to fashion themselves as modern consumers committed to
a progressive, unified vision of the nation-state as the logical form of political organization for all Westerners. It is also my opinion that recognizing
Germany possessed a developed culture of consumption changes the way
we make sense of the Imperial Period. It is not uncommon for historians
4
5
6
Rudolf Anschütz, Die Spielwaren-Produktionsstätten der Erde, (Sonneberg: Gräbe
& Hetzer, 1913), pp. 8, 15, 19, 24, 26–27; Gertrud Meyer, Die Spielwarenindustrie
im sächsischen Erzbegirge, Inaugural Dissertation, (Leipzig: A Deichert’sche
Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1911), pp. 6–9; Karl Reible, Die deutsche Spielwarenindustrie,
ihre Entwicklung und ihr gegenwärtiger Stand, Inaugural Dissertation, (Nuremberg:
Eric Spandel, 1925), pp. 37–40; “Die Metallspielwaren-Industrie in Deutschland,”
Deutsche Spielwarenzeitung, No. 10, 1 May 1914, pp. 7–13.
See Konrad H. Jarausch & Michael Geyer, Shattered Past: Reconstructing German
Histories, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). Geyer argued that it not
possible to speak of a consumer culture in Germany before the Weimar Republic.
Victoria de Grazia defines consumer culture as “a society-wide structure of meaning
and feeling organized primarily around the act of purchase.” See The Sex of Things:
Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective, ed. Victoria de Grazia and Ellen
Furlough, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 7. I also find this to be an
excellent definition but it is very broad. I want to emphasize the power of individuals
to define themselves within certain broad limits provided by the market. While this
definition is more limited I hope that it is also more precise.
4
Introduction
of Germany to look at the late 19th century as a time when intellectuals
and middle-class elites withdrew from the public sphere into the politics of cultural despair.7 According to this interpretation, they (and their
compatriots in other parts of Europe) gave up the political playing field to
extremists on the left and right. An examination of debates surrounding
toys, consumption and childhood poses serious challenges to this interpretation. This was a project parents, artists, industrialists and intellectuals took very seriously, and it played out in industry periodicals, the daily
press, specialty magazines, and in every middle-class home at Christmas
and on birthdays. It was a public display. Nearly everyone agreed that girls
needed to do feminine activities such as caring for dolls. Boys built erector
sets or played with toy trains, developing technical proclivities. Most adults
wanted to teach children about the superiority of middle-class lifestyles,
but no consensus on how to do this emerged. Male producers wanted to
present girls with life-like dolls, while female artists argued for more generic
figurines possessing fewer feminine characteristics. Most entrepreneurs
and parents trumpeted technology as the solution to the Reich’s many
7
The classic articulation of this argument is Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair:
A Study in the Rise of the German Ideology, (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1961); Fritz Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic
Community 1890–1933, (New York: Wesleyan University Press, 1990); Erich Eyck,
Bismarck and the German Empire, (New York: Norton and Company, 1950); Fritz
Fischer, Germany’s Aims in the First World War, (New York: Norton & Company,
1967) Dieter Langewiesche, Liberalism in Germany, (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2000); Fritz Stern, Gold and Iron: Bismarck, Bleichroder, and the Building of the German Empire, (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1977); Hans-Ulrich Wehler, The
German Empire, (New York: Berg, 1997). A convincing critique is provided by David
Blackbourn & Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois society and
Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984);
Harry Liebersohn, Fate and Utopia in German Society, 1870–1923, (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1988). Despite these successful counter-interpretations, many scholars working
in the Federal Republic still see the politics of cultural despair, part of the Sonderweg
thesis suggesting a pathological Teutonic path to modernity, as the best framework
for interpreting German history. See Heinrich August Winkler, Germany: the Long
Road West, Vol. 1 & Vol. 2, trans. Alexander Sager, (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2007).
Introduction
5
problems. On the other side pedagogues rejected such a view of Bildung
and demanded that mothers and fathers buy children handcrafted wooden
toys that would connect youngsters to a more humanistic cultivation of the intellect. Toys form a site around which we can explore how these
contentious political debates played out in everyday, middle-class spaces.
Diaries from the period contain loving accounts of childhood memories
centered on miniatures. Such reminiscences suggested Germany represented
a particularly hopeful modern society with new possibilities. As much as
anyone in Europe, Germans seemed to be engaged in fashioning a modern,
middle-class utopia that promised to iron out all the troubling class and
gender problems that pervaded fin-de-siècle society.8 While we may not
be happy with the outcome, it is wrong to suggest that ordinary Germans
did not publicly fight over the nature of their identity.
A brief look at images of a toy store and a playroom (Kinderstube)
gives us insight into the stakes adults invested in miniatures, consumption, and childhood and the possibilities these offer modern researchers.
Cartoonist and satirist Heinrich Zille produced a color print entitled In
Front of the Christmas Shop at the beginning of the Weimar period. An
impossibly bright picture window contained an array of toys including
Zeppelins, dolls, drums, and toy soldiers, all arranged around a shiny Star
of David. Outside in the cold, wet Berlin weather, nearly a dozen poor
children pressed their faces against the shiny glass, trying to reach the
wonders on the other side of the pane. They are clearly part of the great
unwashed, the working classes that haunted the dreams of all middle-class
citizens. Something remarkable has happened to these members of the Pöbel
(dirty, unruly poor), however. The power of German toys metaphorically
pulled them towards the values of middle-class life. Despite all the calls
for a socialist revolution in 1919, these children wanted the commodities
that symbolized entrance into polite society, even the toddlers so young
they could not stand without help. To many middle-class reformers, this
suggested that the Proletariat could be assimilated into mainstream culture
8
Modris Eksteins, The Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age,
(New York: Mariner Books, 1989).
6
Introduction
via commodities, much the same way that the Jewish owner of the shop
has become the bearer of progressive middle-class values about the nation
via toys. Commodities like miniatures held out the promise of remaking
German identities in a nurturing and unifying fashion. Nonetheless Zille,
an inveterate critic of capitalist society, illuminated the complex and contradictory nature of modern consumer cultures. Everyone wants to participate in them, but they seem to require the exclusion of part of society
to function. In Imperial Germany, working class children like the ones in
the cartoon worked eight hours a day making many of the wonderful toys
in the shops, with little hope of ever playing with them.9
That is why the poor children outside the shop still present an unruly
picture. There clothes are old and mis-matched. The one boy we can clearly
see is not wearing a sailor uniform, the store-bought symbolization of loyalty to the idea and nation of Germany that dominated visual representations of male youth. Nonetheless, pedagogues insisted such children could
be saved, but first they had to be symbolically moved from the outside to
the inside of the shop window. Intellectuals maintained that socially constructive play could only take place in the privacy of a specially furnished
playroom, not the public space of the street.10 There it could be regulated,
controlled and directed in a nurturing fashion by loving mothers, caring
builders of good citizens. The journal Kind und Kunst, conceived by members of the childhood reform movement as a means to disseminate artistic
precepts, regularly contained photographic examples of ideal Kinderstuben.
They were bright, orderly, airy rooms with high ceilings and white walls
filled with things parents had to buy. Mostly these spaces consisted of Heimat (folk) motifs, numerous toys and functional furniture. One was
as big as a living room; it included a table and chairs for doll tea parties, a
doll kitchen, a rocking horse, a 1.5 meter Spielecke (play corner) that functioned as a dollhouse for the children (not the dolls), and numerous other
Klassiker der Karikatur: Heinrich Zille, ed. Matthias Flügge, (Berlin: Eulenspiegel
Verlag, 1986), p. 67.
10 See Jürgen Schlumbohm, Kinderstuben: Wie Kinder zu Bauern, Bürgern, Aristokraten
wurden 1700–1850, (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1983), p. 72; Nelly
Wolffheim, “Die Kinderstube,” Illustrirte Zeitung, No. 4062 (1922), p. 499.
9
Introduction
7
toys such as erector sets and trains. In contrast to the children in Zille’s
drawings, the boy in the photo wore a sailor outfit and the girl a dress. For
those parents that could not afford a Kinderstube, presumably much of the
Bourgeoisie and the entire working class population, Kind und Kunst recommended the Spielecke. One design by Otto Engel showed a two-meter
tall closet moved out into the middle of the study. Open in the front, a
boy and girl played inside; as a matter of course she had a doll and he built.
The boy wore the obligatory naval uniform and his sister a dress. True to
form, their mother watched over them and brought cookies.11 The toys in
these playrooms allow us to look into a moment when adult consumers
fashioned children’s class and gender roles. This shows that the intersection
of consumption, toys and childhood open a window on a Germany that
contained much more complexity and ambiguity than many historians
have been prepared to admit.
Consumption in Imperial Germany
The study of toys makes several important contributions to our understanding of German history. Although I claim that consumption was a
primary means of self-fashioning for Germans in the late 19th century, this
is not the position taken by most historians. Until very recently, Frankfurt
School theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s critique of mass
culture as merely an instrument of totalitarianism has dominated German
historiography on consumption relating to this period.12 Walter Benjamin,
peripherally connected to the Frankfurt School, is famous for arguing that
the industrial production of goods removed the “aura” from unique things
11 See Kind und Kunst, I:1 (October 1904), pp. 19–20, I:2 (November 1904), pp. 68–69,
I:3 (December 1904).
12 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John
Cumming (New York: Herder, 1972).
8
Introduction
and turned them into commodities capable of manipulation by rulers,
devoid of higher social value.13 The widespread acceptance of their views
meant that until recently German historians generally disdained consumer
culture as a field of study. Academics focusing on Central Europe can
turn to Anglo-American scholars who have been more willing to engage
with consumption as a model for political activity. Nonetheless, many
famous studies also privilege the idea that elites manipulate the rest of the population.14 At the other extreme, some scholars posit consumption as an alternative model to industrialization, socialism or imperialism
explaining the development of the modern world.15 This also seems too
13 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,”
Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, (New York: Schocken
Books, 1969), pp. 217–252.
14 J. H. Plumb views the commercial revolution of eighteenth-century England as the
primary axis for the dissemination of Enlightenment precepts of nurturing rationality, the improvability of mankind, and the knowability of the world. For Plumb and
fellow scholars John Brewer and Neil McKendrick liberal, modern England cannot
be properly viewed without the prism of consumer culture. See J. H. Plumb, “The
New World of Children,” The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization
of Eighteenth Century England, ed. Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, J. H. Plumb
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), pp. 286–316. William Leach, in his
magisterial study of American department stores at the fin-de-siècle accepts that
consumer culture organized societal beliefs, but sees something much more ominous. According to his interpretation, the commercialization of shopping and the
creation of consumer desire destroyed an older, collectivist republican ethos of thrift
underpinned by Christian values and reconstituted the American dream as a consumer paradise where the individual came first and hard work had little meaning. See
William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American
Culture, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993).
15 Consumption becomes the key to Western dominance. See Craig Clunas, “Modernity
Global and Local: Consumption and the Rise of the West,” American Historical
Review, 104 (December 1999), pp. 1497–1511. An even more forceful demand for
consumption as the new master narrative is found in Daniel Miller, “Consumption
as the Vanguard of History: A Polemic by Way of an Introduction,” Acknowledging
Consumption: A Review of New Studies, ed. Daniel Miller, (London: Routledge,
1995), pp. 1–57. Peter Stearns categorizes modern history by periods of consumption
in “Stages of Consumerism: Recent Work on the Issues of Periodization,” Journal of Introduction
9
all-encompassing; it is more likely that practices of consumption provided
a framework within which citizens could debate the shape of their society
by buying things.16 The key for us is to come up with a balanced conceptualization that grapples with the often ambivalent discourses emerging out
of consumer culture. We need a theory that neither idealizes nor rejects
consumption as a process of self-fashioning.
Recently, some scholars of Germany rediscovered another and more
perceptive conceptualization of consumer culture from an overlooked
colleague of Horkheimer and Adorno, Siegfried Krakauer. He agreed
authoritarians could use practices of consumption to control the polity, but
“the mass ornament is [also] ambivalent … On the one hand its rationality
reduces the natural in a manner that does not allow man to wither away,
but that, on the contrary, were it only carried through to the end, would
reveal man’s most essential element in all its purity.” Krakauer’s problem
with consumer culture and capitalism in Weimar was that “it rationalizes
not too much but rather too little.” The more people could participate
in capitalism through consumption, he reasoned, the more receptive the
system could become to new voices.17 At any rate, he posited that in an
advanced consumer culture ordinary individuals gained the possibility to
self-fashion themselves. This model, as a problematic practice that nonetheless gives voice to individuals who otherwise are marginal to the political
process, provides a better framework for understanding consumption in
modern Germany. As we will see, practices of consumption enabled citizens,
especially women, to participate in politics in ways that might otherwise
Modern History 69 (1997): 102–117; Paul Glennie, “Consumption Within Historical
Studies,” Acknowledging Consumption: A Review of New Studies, (London: Routledge,
1995), pp. 164–203. In related fields such as media studies practices of consumption
have also taken center stage. See David Morley, “Theories of Consumption in Media
Studies,” Acknowledging Consumption: A Review of New Studies, pp. 296–328.
16 See Alon Confino & Rudy Koshar, “Régimes of Consumer Culture: New Narratives
in Twentieth-Century German History,” German History 19:2 (2001) pp. 135–161.
17 Siefried Krakauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Y. Levin,
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 81, 83.
10
Introduction
have been impossible during times of crisis.18 For example, Belinda Davis has
convincingly shown that Berlin housewives influenced government policy
through buying food in World War I. Despite women not having the vote,
Germany’s military dictatorship kept a nervous eye on Berlin kitchens and
constantly switched policies in an attempt to head off discontent. Davis
showed that the October revolution owed as much to these women as other
groups. The new Weimar government wisely acknowledged the lessons of famine by giving women the vote and doing everything they could to make
sure enough food got to the cities once the blockade ended. Davis argued
“these efforts are testimony to the kind of societal power that consumers
of little means—women in particular—won under the social, economic,
and political conditions of the war.”19 I take this point further and argue
18 Remarkably similar arguments have been made by scholars looking at post-1945
Germany. After WWII, Maria Höhn found that Germans in the Saarland consciously
saw their engagement with democracy as mediated through encounters with American
soldiers and consumer culture after 1950. Although interactions with US soldiers
could be rocky on occasion, the German women who fraternized with these white
and black men fought for their democratic right to consume lipstick, beer, clothes and
domestic appliances in a society that still valued them as purely thrifty housewives.
Many conservative politicians in Germany after 1949 wanted to rebuild a democratic
society using these mothers as the foundation. German feminists took advantage of this situation to make a call for equal rights but also for a separate, female sphere of
consumption that would be off-limits to men. They became guardians of consumption and demanded “free consumer choice” as an “inalienable freedom of humanity.”
See Maria Höhn, GIs and Fräuleins: The German-American Encounter in 1950s West
Germany, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). Covering the same
period, Robert Moeller convincingly showed that Germans after 1945 used the media
to talk a great deal about concentration camps, bombings and destruction but with
themselves as the victims. Consumer culture permitted the individual and collective
self-fashioning of a usable past that played an important role in people’s psyches as
they rebuilt their country. See Robert G. Moeller, War Stories: The Search for a Usable
Past in the Federal Republic of Germany, (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2001), pp. 1–20, 123–170.
19 Belinda Davis, Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I
Berlin, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), pp. 3, 237; Nancy
R. Reagin, “Marktordnung and Autarkic Housekeeping: Housewives and Private
Consumption under the Four-Year Plan, 1936–1939,” German History 19:2 (2001),
Introduction
11
that consumers do not require a crisis such as military conflict. They were
able to profoundly influence societal values, for good or ill, during stable
periods of Wilhelmine Germany.
However, one of the most impressive attempts to show that consumption allowed personal self-fashioning in Germany only begins in 1919. In
a path-breaking book on twentieth-century German history co-authored
with Konrad Jarausch, Michael Geyer wrote, “mass consumption is increasingly presented as the destiny of German history, its refuge and redemption.
The emergence of a consumer-oriented society is becoming the narrative
of the age.”20 By no means is Geyer out to idealize consumer culture or
smooth out its extremes, but he does think it created a space to negotiate
political identities. Writing about post-war West Germany he argues that
its citizens increasingly came to define themselves through “a common
culture of commodities.” For a society in search of a usable past, buying
things provided a welcome and flexible means of self-fashioning oneself
as a good, democratic citizen of a nation-state anchored firmly in NATO.
When Germans bought refrigerators, radios, cars and washing machines
they did not conceptualize this as conspicuous consumption à la Thorstein
Velben but as the just rewards of years of hard work.21 Geyer also suggests
the Federal Republic could be studied using gender, post-colonial and
trans-national methodologies that rely heavily on consumer models.22
Indeed, practices of consumption may be akin to Jürgen Habermas’ notion
of the public sphere. Members of a society meet to talk about and argue
over issues of major political and cultural import via buying and displaying
things. Unfortunately, Geyer does not push his analysis further back than
pp. 162–184; Katherine Pence, “‘You as a Woman Will Understand’: Consumption,
Gender and the Relationship between State and Citizenry in the GDR’s Crisis of 17
June 1953,” German History 19:2 (2001), pp. 218–252.
20 Jarausch & Geyer, Shattered Past, p. 269.
21 Jarausch & Geyer, Shattered Pasts, p. 309.
22 See Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship, The Cultural Logic of Transnationality, (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1999); Kristin Hoganson, “Cosmopolitan Domesticity:
Importing the American Dream, 1865–1920”, American Historical Review, 107
(February 2002), pp. 55–83.
12
Introduction
Weimar, and leaves readers with the impression that something changed
fundamentally only after 1919. As this book will show, this is not correct.
Citizens of Wilhelmine Germany learned to define themselves through a
culture of commodities in the same ways as residents of the Federal Republic
as early as 1890.
For example, recent research shows that consumer culture enabled
Germans to fashion gender and class identities for themselves independently of the state after 1945, but scholars have also been slow to see if this
insight applies to earlier periods as well.23 Uta Poiger noted that teenagers
in East and West Germany listening to Jazz or rock music made ideological statements whether they wanted to or not. In the Federal Republic the
authorities worried about young women crossing gender boundaries and
engaging in illegitimate sexuality at clubs, while in the East the Communist
Party often associated jazz with black Americans and racial degeneration.
Politicians in both countries eventually accepted these changes as permanent, showing that young people’s engagement with consumer culture
broadened sexual and class choices over time.24 Maria Höhn found something similar in West German encounters with American soldiers in the
Palatinate between 1950 and 1955. German concerns about female sexuality
and race played out against a backdrop of Teutonic women engaging with
African-American men at bars run by East European Jewish concentration camp survivors. Painfully aware that Nazi racial and sexual policies
had been completely discredited, CDU officials on the right bank of the
Rhine attached American discourses regarding miscegenation to their
own concerns about illicit working-class, female sexuality to try and control interactions between troops and locals. Unfortunately for the central
23 See Klaus Tenfelde, “Klassenspezifische Konsummuster im Deutschen Kaiserreich,”
Europäische Konsumgeschichte: Zur Gesellschafts- und Kulturgeschichte des Konsums (18.
bis 20. Jahrhundert), ed. Hannes Siegrist, Hartmut Kaeble, Jürgen Kocka, (Frankfurt:
Campus Verlag, 1997), pp. 245–266.
24 Uta G. Poiger, Jazz, Rock and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a
Divided Germany, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), pp. 1–3, 137–167;
Paul Betts, “The Nierentisch Nemesis: Organic Design as West German Pop Culture,”
German History 19:2 (2001), pp. 185–217.
Introduction
13
government, the population made so much money that local administrators
accepted a certain amount of violence and uncontrolled sexuality in order
to participate in the economic boom accompanying the Americans. Höhn
convincingly shows that this consumer encounter demolished older Nazi
notions of thrift and sobriety associated with women and helped redefine
them as independent consumers who helped the nation by engaging with
Americans and purchasing goods.25 The fourth chapter of this book shows
that similar kinds of female self-fashioning took place in Imperial Germany,
although scholars of this period have not been as adventurous as Maria
Höhn in probing the possibilities.26
Secondly, since my definition of consumer culture is based on shopping
for standardized items, this book will also demonstrate that the development of this practice as a pleasurable, national duty is not a product of
post-1945 world history. For example, Rosalind Williams argued that the
appearance of department stores in Hausmann’s Paris—Walter Benjamin’s
architectural markers of the modern condition—profoundly changed shopping practices. Where previously barter had been dominant, now money
25 Höhn, GIs and Fräuleins, pp. 126–154.
26 Historians of France, on the other hand, have already shown the possibilities of a
focus on consumer culture for understanding political choices prior to 1900. Leora
Auslander’s path-breaking work on furniture showed that this item could be ideological under widely different political regimes across time. Exploring the relationship
between style and taste she demonstrated that ruling elites used “styles” to create
public “tastes” that would legitimate their rule. Auslander’s approach demonstrates
how commodities create identities and disseminate ideologies and is particularly
interesting because she examines production, marketing and consumption as a whole.
She concludes by arguing that one learned to see the French nation through commodities like furniture at a young age in much the same way that one was taught “to
look French, sound French, write like the French” in school. This is exactly the same
way toys also allowed men and women in Imperial Germany to shape gender and class
identities independently of governmental desires. I will apply these same insights to
Germany in order to arrive at a more balanced view of how people shaped themselves
and made sense of the world. Leora Auslander, Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern
France, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 422. For Russia see Richard
Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, Vol. I & II,
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995, 2000).
14
Introduction
always changed hand for commodities with fixed prices. Standardization,
quantity and comfort of the shopper in the new palaces of consumption
slowly became the norm. Williams refers to the department stores of the
late 19th century as a “dream world” where women and men went for the joy
of shopping and browsing; one did not have to purchase things to receive
pleasure from the experience.27 In the American context, William Leach
locates a similar aesthetization of shopping through department stores in
the United States to the point that the ability to buy commodities became
an essential part of the American dream.28 Rachel Bowlby also dates the
invention of modern shopping to the years immediately prior to 1900 and
detects the same aesthetization of buying things. One of her shoppers from
1913 “[made] numerous purchases” in Florence before going home in the
evening and “undoing these parcels, pouncing, scissors in hand, on the
strings, sending the papers flying around on to the carpets, intoxicating
myself with the smell of newness on all these finely made things, sometimes
kissing them.”29 The prospect of consumption is so all encompassing that
the more historical attractions of Florence fade into the background as
the protagonist moves from shop to shop. Citizens of Imperial Germany
also learned that shopping in department stores was a prerequisite for
being modern. The transformation of shopping from a dirty chore into
a fun activity first for women and later for men and children was in full
swing by 1890. Toys played a major role in this switch. Although German
historians have done little to explore the significance of this development,
shoppers in the Reich demonstrated their loyalty to the idea of Germany
by purchasing miniatures.30
27 Rosalind H. Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century
France, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).
28 Leach, Land of Desire.
29 Rachel Bowlby, Carried Away: The Invention of Modern Shopping, (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2001), p. 18.
30 German historians have looked carefully at shopping after 1945. In the case of West
Germany, Michael Wildt has shown that the CDU governments of the 1950s and
1960s portrayed buying as a cure for the shortages that had plagued German society
since 1915. More importantly, West Germans learned they had to constantly purchase