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

Abstract

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.’ 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 to cigarettes, from tourist guidebooks 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