An All-Consuming History? Recent Works on Consumer Culture in Modern Germany

Abstract

In a 2001 essay, the introduction to a special journal issue on consumption in twentieth-century Germany, historians Alon Confino and Rudy Koshar noted the relative lack of scholarship on consumption and consumerism in European, especially German, historiography, as compared to the explosion of interest in the topic among historians of the United States. For Confino and Koshar, this disjuncture appears all the more remarkable in view of the centrality of consumption and consumer goods to the political and ideological struggles of the German twentieth century and indeed the potential power of consumption, as a historiographic subject, for linking daily life and individual experience to the sweeping trajectories of the century's history. It turns out that Koshar and Confino did not have to wait very long for this gap to be filled; in the several years since that journal issue appeared, works on consumption in modern Germany have been coming out at a furious pace. In addition to several broad surveys of and edited collections on consumer society in the modern period, over the last few years there has been a wave of specialized studies of consumption and consumer goods in Nazi Germany, in the Federal Republic, and notably in the GDR. The problem of consumption has also been a key concern in recent works on Wilhelmine and Weimar cultural history, although historical studies of the period's consumer culture—or the institutions and mechanisms for its dissemination—remain fairly rare.