Régimes of Consumer Culture: New Narratives in Twentieth-Century German History

Abstract

I Germans chewed gum before World War I, but it was only after 1925, the year in which American chewing gum manufacturer William Wrigley opened a factory in Frankfurt am Main, that the product and its annoying use became truly widespread. 'Divided in the popular referenda, the Germans appear to want to become for Wrigley a united nation of gum chewers', wrote cultural critic Ernst Lorsy of the new craze. 'The Fordson tractor lags far behind Wrigley's Spearmint.' 1 Lorsy decried the coming of the 'hour of chewing gum', arguing it was the result both of a massive advertising campaign and of the Germans' desire to chase (or taste) anything that smacked of American culture. Serious political consequences followed, according to Lorsy, who attributed American workers' lack of revolutionary ardour to the fact that their jaws were too busy to allow their minds to work. Surely chewing gum would have the same unfortunate effects in Germany. Critiques of the kind Lorsy developed appeared in many different variations and with reference to scores of different objects, images and practices in the 1920s. Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin gained praise, both from contemporaries and (even more) from subsequent generations of readers, for their perspicacious observations on the commercial culture of the era. But there were many more commentators, labouring away in the trenches of illustrated magazine publishing and the daily press, in popular novels and in travel literature, who were concerned with such issues. From cars 2 to cigarettes, from tourist guidebooks 3 to furniture, the issue of what to consume and why and how to consume it garnered enduring and often contentious interest. Those concerns were not unprecedented, of course. Economic prosperity-its extent, form and

Young Finnish and German consumers’ furniture acquisition – wooden, inherited or just low price?

“…Uusitalo, 1979), there is relatively scant research on the German consumer culture (Confino and Koshar, 2001). It can be argued, however, that what Finnish and German consumer cultures have in common is an emphasis on thrift, in which consumer idealism is based on frugality, careful consideration and rationality (Wildt, 2003;Wahlen, 2011;Heinonen and Autio, 2013).…”

The Legacy of Luxury

“…It is a legacy that has persisted not only in works such as that of the Frankfurt School, which has positioned consumers as the passive victims of a manipulative culture industry (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1973), but also in the willingness of scholars to regard consumption as either too trivial and beneath serious academic scrutiny or as a causal factor to explain the absence of any revolutionary political activity. For instance, it is only in relatively recent years that German historians have turned to studying consumption, for too long having assumed that the mass market was simply the root of the decline in civil society and the real politics of the public sphere (Confino and Koshar, 2001).…”

The Most German of Towns: Creating an Ideal Nazi Community in Rothenburg ob der Tauber

“…Yet rather than eliminating commercialism in Rothenburg, local leaders advocated a more ''German,'' or perhaps even Nazi, commercial culture marked by tradition, self-restraint, and discipline in consumption (see , Schäfer 1981;Reichel 1991;Scheck 1995;Schmidt 1995;Strasser, McGovern, and Judt 1998;Koshar 2000b;Baranowski 2001;Berghoff 2001Berghoff , 2003Confino and Koshar 2001). Yet rather than eliminating commercialism in Rothenburg, local leaders advocated a more ''German,'' or perhaps even Nazi, commercial culture marked by tradition, self-restraint, and discipline in consumption (see , Schäfer 1981;Reichel 1991;Scheck 1995;Schmidt 1995;Strasser, McGovern, and Judt 1998;Koshar 2000b;Baranowski 2001;Berghoff 2001Berghoff , 2003Confino and Koshar 2001).…”

“…It is noted above that there were definite anticommercial overtones in Rothenburg's ''cleansing program.'' Yet rather than eliminating commercialism in Rothenburg, local leaders advocated a more ''German,'' or perhaps even Nazi, commercial culture marked by tradition, self-restraint, and discipline in consumption (see , Schäfer 1981;Reichel 1991;Scheck 1995;Schmidt 1995;Strasser, McGovern, and Judt 1998;Koshar 2000b;Baranowski 2001;Berghoff 2001Berghoff , 2003Confino and Koshar 2001). By the end of 1936, the town council had banned advertisements and signs considered obtrusive to Rothenburg's medieval landscapes as shown in Figure 3.…”