Abstract
Paul Lerner brings together two topics seldom treated in the same context: the department store in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany and the role of émigrés from German-speaking Europe in post-World War II American consumer culture. In both cases, Jews were disproportionately active as creators and shapers of new forms of consumption and consumerism. Lerner finds the roots of such quintessentially American forms as the mall, manipulative TV advertising, and the visual iconography of American power in pre-war European and particularly Austrian culture. He treats several of the key figures, such as Ernest Dichter and Victor Gruen, who in emigration adapted European styles and priorities to American landscapes and the American mass market. Showing that department stores were inextricably linked with Jews in the pre-war German context, Lerner argues that in the postwar U.S. context, these new forms and sites of consumption were not associated with Jews. Instead, they were viewed and celebrated as European in their sophistication and glamour.
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Notes
- 1.
The discussion that follows draws above all on Paul Lerner, The Consuming Temple : Jews, Department Stores, and the Consumer Revolution in Germany, 1880–1940 (Ithaca, NY, 2015).
- 2.
One exception is the commentary on Jews and commercial real estate and in particular Jewish mall developers in North American cities and suburbs in more recent times.
- 3.
Among the many important studies of department stores in this period in Europe and North America, see, in addition to sources cited below, Jeffrey Crossick and Serge Jaumain, eds., Cathedrals of Consumption: The European Department Store, 1850–1939 (Aldershot, UK, 1999); Gudrun M. König, Konsumkultur: Inszenierte Warenwelt um 1900 (Vienna, 2009); William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York, 1992); Alarich Rooch, Zwischen Museum und Warenhaus: Ästhetisierungsprozesse und sozial-kommunikative Raumaneignungen des Bürgertums (1823–1920) (Oberhausen, 2001); Godela Weiss-Sussex and Ulrike Zitzlsperger, eds., Das Berliner Warenhaus: Geschichte und Diskurse / The Berlin Department Store: History and Discourse (Frankfurt a.M., 2013); Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890–1940 (Urbana, IL, 1986).
- 4.
Quoted in Ellen Furlough, Consumer Cooperation in France: The Politics of Consumption (Ithaca, NY, 1991), 3.
- 5.
For key works on consumer culture in the United States, see, among many others, Lawrence B. Glickman, Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America (Chicago, 2009); Celia Lury, Consumer Culture, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA, 2011); Daniel Miller, Stuff (London, 2009); and works cited below. On German-speaking émigrés and American culture more broadly, see Jan-Michel Palmier, Weimar in Exile: The Anti-Fascist Emigration in Europe and America (London, 2006); Ernest Wilder Spaulding, The Quiet Invaders: The Story of the Austrian Impact upon America (Vienna, 1968); Matthias Boeckl and Otto Kapfinger, eds., Visionäre und Vertriebene: Österreichische Spuren in der modernen amerikanischen Architektur (Berlin, 1995); and Hennig Engelke and Tobias Hochscherf, “Between Avant-Garde and Commercialism: Reconsidering Émigrés and Design,” Design History 28 (February 2015): 1–14.
- 6.
Hermann Tietz, der grösste Warenhaus-Konzern Europas im Eigenbesitz: Ein Buch sichtbarer Erfolge (Berlin, 1932); Erica Fischer and Simone Ladwig-Winters, Die Wertheims: Geschichte einer Familie (Berlin, 2004).
- 7.
See above all Siegfried Gerlach, Das Warenhaus in Deutschland: Seine Entwicklung bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg in historisch-geographischer Sicht (Stuttgart, 1988).
- 8.
Lerner, Consuming Temple; Heidrun Homburg, “Warenhausunternehmen und ihre Gründer in Frankreich und Deutschland,” Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte 33 (June 1992): 183–219.
- 9.
Werner Sombart, “Die Reklame,” Morgen: Wochenschrift für deutsche Kultur, March 6, 1908, 281–86; “Das Warenhaus: Ein Gebilde des hochkapitalistischer Zeitalters,” in Probleme des Warenhauses: Beiträge zur Geschichte und Erkenntnis der Entwicklung des Warenhauses in Deutschland, ed. Verband deutscher Waren- und Kaufhäuser e.V. (Berlin, 1928).
- 10.
Margarete Böhme, W.A.G.M.U.S., (Berlin, 1911), 17–18.
- 11.
Lerner, Consuming Temple, esp. Chap. 1.
- 12.
See, among others, Heinrich Uhlig, Die Warenhäuser im dritten Reich (Cologne, 1956).
- 13.
Lerner, Consuming Temple, 6.
- 14.
Quoted in Michael B. Miller, The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869–1920 (Princeton, NJ, 1981), 177.
- 15.
Émile Zola, The Ladies’ Paradise, trans. Brian Nelson (Oxford, 1995), 427.
- 16.
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA, 1999), 61.
- 17.
Jean Baudrillard, Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (London, 1998), 195–96, emphasis in orginal. Also see Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, MA, 1994); Richard Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization (Berkeley, CA, 1997).
- 18.
Renate Palmer, Der Stuttgarter Schocken-Bau von Erich Mendelsohn: Die Geschichte eines Kaufhauses und seiner Architektur (Tübingen, 1995), 28–30. Also see Mendelsohn’s letter to Luise Maas (September 29, 1914), in Erich Mendelsohn: Briefe eines Architekten, ed. Oskar Beyer (Munich, 1961), 33–34; Lerner, Consuming Temple, Chap. 4.
- 19.
Erich Köhrer, Warenhaus Berlin: Ein Roman aus der Weltstadt (Berlin, 1909). On the KaDeWe, see Osborn, ed., KaDeWe; Antonia Meiners, 100 Jahre KaDeWe (Berlin, 2007).
- 20.
Lerner, Consuming Temple, 199.
- 21.
Köhrer, Warenhaus Berlin, 39.
- 22.
Ibid., 39.
- 23.
Ibid., 138.
- 24.
Sigfrid Siwertz, Das große Warenhaus, trans. Alfons Fedor Cohn (Berlin, 1928).
- 25.
Köhrer, Warenhaus Berlin, 144.
- 26.
Ibid., 144.
- 27.
R. Hartmann, “Großer Umsatz, Kleiner Nutzen,” in Tietz, der grösste Warenhaus-Konzern Europas, 57.
- 28.
Uwe Spiekermann, Warenhaussteuer in Deutschland: Mittelstandsbewegung, Kapitalismus und Rechtsstaat im späten Kaiserreich (Frankfurt a.M., 1994), 8–9; Detlef Briesen, Warenhaus, Massenkonsum und Sozialmoral: Zur Geschichte der Konsumkritik im 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt a.M., 2001), 78–79.
- 29.
See, among others, Paul Lerner, “Consuming Pathologies: Kleptomania, Magazinitis, and the Problem of Female Consumption in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany,” WerkstattGeschichte 42 (Summer 2006): 46–56.
- 30.
Richard Kläger, Zwischenfall im Warenhaus: Komödie in drei Akten (Vienna, 1933).
- 31.
See Lerner, “Consuming Pathologies.”
- 32.
Walter E. Schulz, “Warenhäuser,” in Tietz, der grösste Warenhaus-Konzern Europas, 5–6, emphasis in orginal.
- 33.
Hans Buchner, Dämonen der Wirtschaft: Gestalten und dunkle Gewalten aus dem Leben unserer Tage (Munich, 1928).
- 34.
T. H. Heine, “Der Teufel im Warenhaus,” in Die Märchen (1935; [East] Berlin, 1978).
- 35.
Christoph Kreutzmüller, Final Sale in Berlin: The Destruction of Jewish Commercial Activity, 1930–1945, trans. Jane Paulick and Jefferson Chase (New York, 2015).
- 36.
See, for example, Leon Harris, Merchant Princes: An Intimate History of the Jewish Families Who Built Great Department Stores (New York, 1982), Lina B. Forgosh, Louis Bamberger: Department Store Innovator and Philanthropist (Waltham, MA, 2016).
- 37.
For an exception, see Alison J. Clarke and Elana Shapira, eds., Émigré Cultures in Design and Architecture (London, 2017). Among the many works on German-speaking émigrés in the United States, see Erhard Bahr, Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Gerd Gmünden, Continental Strangers: German Exile Cinema (New York, 2004); Jean-Michel Palmier, Weimar in Exile: The Antifascist Emigration in Europe and America, trans. David Fernbach (London, 2006); and Friedrich Stadler and Peter Weibel, eds., Vertreibung der Vernunft: The Cultural Exodus from Austria, 2nd ed. (Vienna, 1995).
- 38.
Major works on U.S. consumer culture in the twentieth century include Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York, 2003); Gary Cross, An All-Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in Modern America (New York, 2002); Susan Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market (New York, 1989).
- 39.
See, for example, Daniel Horowitz, The Anxieties of Affluence: Critiques of American Consumer Culture, 1939–1979 (Amherst, MA, 2004).
- 40.
Horowitz, Anxieties of Abundance, 50.
- 41.
Malcolm Gladwell, “The Terrazzo Jungle,” The New Yorker, March 15, 2004, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/03/15/the-terrazzo-jungle; Josh Sanborn, “Why the Death of American Shopping Malls is about More than Shopping,” Time, July 19, 2017; and in a more academic vein, Joseph Malherek, “Victor Gruen’s Retail Therapy: Exiled Jewish Communities and the Invention of the American Shopping Mall as a Postwar Ideal,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 61 (November 2016): 219–32.
- 42.
Alex Wall, Victor Gruen: From Urban Shop to New City (Barcelona, 1995).
- 43.
See, for example, Helmut Gruber, Red Vienna: Experiment in Working-Class Culture, 1919–1934 (Oxford, 1991); and Eve Blau, The Architecture of Red Vienna, 1919–1934 (Cambridge, MA, 1999).
- 44.
Above all, see Victoria de Grazia, Invisible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA, 2006); Kuisel, Seducing the French; and Reinhold Wagnleitner, Coca-Colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria after the Second World War (Chapel Hill, NC, 1994).
- 45.
This insight came in part from conversations with Jeffrey Fear. See Fear and Paul Lerner, “Introduction. Behind the Screens: Immigrants, Émigrés, and Exiles in Mid-Twentieth Century Los Angeles,” Jewish Culture and History 17 (2016): 1–21, esp. 8–9. See also Clarke and Shapira, eds., Émigré Cultures.
- 46.
Quoted in Wall, Victor Gruen, 99. Also see Victor Gruen, “Southdale: It’s Always Spring in This Roofed Market Square in the Suburbs,” Interiors 116 (May 1957): 96–101.
- 47.
For example: Leo Colze, Berliner Warenhäuser (Berlin, 1908); and Max Osborn, ed., KaDeWe: Kaufhaus des Westens, 1907–1932: Festschrift anläßlich des 25jährigen Bestehens (Berlin, 1932).
- 48.
Quoted in M. Jeffrey Hardwick, Mall Maker: Victor Gruen, Architect of an American Dream (Philadelphia, PA, 2004), 131.
- 49.
Quoted in J.M. Dixon, “Piazza, American Style: Courthouse Center and the Commons, Columbus, IN,” Progressive Architecture 57 (June 1976): 64.
- 50.
See Hardwick, Mall Maker, esp. 139.
- 51.
On Dichter see, among others, Kenneth Lipartito, “Subliminal Seduction: The Politics of Consumer Research in Post–World War II America,” in Hartmut Berghoff, Philip Scranton, and Uwe Spiekermann, The Rise of Marketing and Market Research (New York, 2012), 215–36; Stefan Schwarzkopf and Rainer Gries, eds., Ernst Dichter and Motovational Research: New Perspectives on the Making of Post-War Consumer Culture (London, 2010); and Daniel Horowitz, “The Birth of a Salesman: Ernest Dichter and the Objects of Desire,” unpublished manuscript, Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, DE, https://www.hagley.org/sites/default/files/HOROWITZ_DICHTER.pdf.
- 52.
Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York, 1963); Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (New York, 1959). See also Daniel Horowitz, Vance Packard and American Social Criticism (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004).
- 53.
Jean Baudrillard, “The System of Objects (1970),” in Mark Poster, ed., Jean Baudrillard Selected Writings (Stanford, CA, 2001), 10–28.
- 54.
Horowitz, “Birth of a Salesman.”
- 55.
See, for example, Clarke and Shapira, eds., Émigré Cultures.
- 56.
See Nils Roemer’s contribution to this volume for a discussion of the ways Stanley Marcus brought French styles to postwar Dallas.
- 57.
On the Austrians, see, among others, Matthias Boeckl, ed., Visionäre und Vertriebene: Österreichische Spuren in der modernen amerikanischen Architektur (Vienna, 1996); and Ernest Wilder Spaulding, The Quiet Invaders: The Story of the Austrian Impact upon America (Vienna, 1968).
- 58.
Lisa Silverman, “Leopoldplatz, Judenstadt and Beyond: Rethinking Vienna’s Jewish Spaces,” East Central Europe 42 (2015): 249–67.
- 59.
On Jewish émigré psychoanalysts and their prestige in American psychiatry, see Sander Gilman, “The Struggle of Psychiatry with Psychoanalysis: Who Won?” Critical Inquiry 13 (1987): 293–313.
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Lerner, P. (2022). Consuming Temples on Both Sides of the Atlantic: German-Speaking Jews from the Department Store to the Mall. In: Lerner, P., Spiekermann, U., Schenderlein, A. (eds) Jewish Consumer Cultures in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Europe and North America. Worlds of Consumption. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88960-9_4
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