Description
Book SynopsisDepartment 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 dep
Trade Review
This book does more than just providing another economic or business history of the rise of the centralized, rationalized and scientifically managed department store in Germany.... In comparison with the existing literature, which has often taken the 'Jewishness' of German department store owners for granted, Lerner excels at questioning and reflecting the multiple perspectives on the ‘figure of the Jew’ while analyzing their implications for the development of the German department store in general.
-- Gerulf Hirt * Oxford Journals: German History *
Table of ContentsIntroduction1. Jerusalem's Terrain: The Department Store and Its Discontents in Imperial Germany2. Dreamworlds in Motion: Circulation, Cosmopolitanism, and the Jewish Question3. Uncanny Encounters: The Thief, the Shopgirl, and the Department Store King4. Beyond the Consuming Temple: Jewish Dissimilation and Consumer Modernity in Provincial Germany5. The Consuming Fire: Fantasies of Destruction in German Politics and CultureConclusionNotesSelected BibliographyIndex
