The Consuming Temple: Jews, Department Stores, and the Consumer Revolution in Germany, 1880-1940 by Paul Lerner (review)

The rise of the department store has been intimately linked to the history of modernity in the Atlantic world (United States, France, Britain). In Germany, as many other aspects of modernity, the full-fledged department store arrived relatively late, around 1890, but expanded exceptionally fast, surpassing all but the American stores in both number and sales within only a decade. Around 1900, the German department stores had also the highest percentage of Jewish owners, and nowhere else was the association between department stores and Jews as strong and persistent as in Germany.

Paul Lerner’s monograph on the department store in Germany between 1890 and 1940 fills sizable gaps in both the history of consumer culture in Germany and Jewish cultural history. It attends, in the words of the author, “not only to the shaping of discourse by reality, but also to the shaping of reality by discourse.” Thus, The Consuming Temple digs happily into an extremely rich and varied body of material and media, both nonfictional and fictional. Key sources include articles in the daily and illustrated press, advertisements, professional treatises on the psychology of kleptomania, and studies of mass consumption, retail, and marketing. The author has combed also through an impressive number of unpublished archival materials from department store firms and other family collections. He does not shy away from using ample antisemitic material (agitation pamphlets, political propaganda, etc.) that—despite its malicious and deceitful rhetoric—drew on images of Jews and anxieties about social change that were shared across the ideological spectrum in the time before and after World War I. Particularly noteworthy are Lerner’s abundant references to fiction—I counted over three dozen novels, revues, plays, short stories, and even songs and cartoons—where the plots and characters orbit around the daily functioning of a department store and reflect the public’s conflicting attitudes toward this form of consumer revolution. Тhe novels, ranging from Vicky Baum’s Der große Ausverkauf to Émile Zola’s The Ladies’ Paradise, from Erich Köhrer’s Warenhaus Berlin to Manfred Georg’s Aufruhr im Warenhaus, and from Maria Gleit’s Abteilung Herrenmode to Sigfrid Siwertz’s Das große Warenhaus, offer valuable perspectives on how the department stores were seen, experienced, and represented during their heyday between 1890 and 1933. Within Lerner’s own compelling narrative and analysis, references to fiction and nonfiction texts intersect in astonishing ways and form a cohesive discursive field around recurring themes that become the center of the respective chapters in the book.

The first chapter situates the spread of the department store within the broader economic, sociological and political picture in the 1880s and 1890s, including developments in France, Britain, and America that served partially as a model for the entrepreneurs in Germany. The author is very precise in outlining the specificity of the German case. It was predominantly Jewish families, newcomers that had migrated between 1824 and 1871 from the East (territories that are now in Poland) into central and western Germany, who were looking for new economic opportunities. Unlike France and Britain, where the department stores emerged in the centers of Paris and London, the early departments stores in Germany started modestly in the provinces, outside of the capital, in medium-sized cities—with the retail of dry goods and textiles—before entering the bigger metropolitan markets; also, they catered mainly to working-class and lower-middle-class customers by offering quality goods at reasonable prices. With the bold move to Berlin and other big cities, however, most German department stores underwent a major shift. They became palatial structures, grandiose temples of consumption.

Along with awe and admiration, the department store provoked fear and fierce rejection. Thus, the rest of the chapter is dedicated to a detailed analysis of the Warenhaus-Debatte and the antisemitic discourses surrounding the transformation of...