Gendered Spectatorship, Jewish Women and Psychological Advertising in Weimar Germany

Abstract

While approaches to advertising had been evolving since the mid‐nineteenth century, Germany in the 1920s saw an increase in the conceptualization of the consumer as a subject who could be both anticipated as a type and addressed as an individual. Weimar Berlin was the site of crystallization for a growing interest in the psychology of advertising: women’s private lives and sexuality were being mined, reconfigured and marketed in the public sphere. This article investigates the problem of the Jewish woman as an entity in 1920s advertising texts and visual culture. It argues that while well‐studied post‐1933 advertising was typified by the imprint of Nazi ideology, the emergence of images coded Jewish in Weimar Berlin represents a moment that has garnered little attention in its specificity. By focusing on it, the author makes suggestions about the degree to which the image of the New Woman as consumer in Weimar Germany situated Jewish women’s spectral desire and thus resulted in historical circumstance characterized by symbolic domination and social death. This development precedes the Nazi takeover which would, of course, capitalize on it. Using visual material and advertising manuals from the Weimar period, the article will both assert an invocation of images coded Jewish and female as images that could ‘sell’ and, also, theorize German Jewish women’s spectatorship of mass‐produced ‘images of self’ in the 1920s and 1930s.