This is not a Pipe

Abstract

Over the course of the Weimar Republic, cigarettes began to replaced pipes and cigars as the preferred method of tobacco consumption among urban-dwelling German men. Simultaneously, gender-specific advertising campaigns increasingly pitched cigarette smoking to German women. Through this visual advertising, the cigarette served as a site of mediated contention for the gendered meaning of a consumptive good. While tobacco ads helped to co-create the often-competing gendered conceptions of the cigarette, the ultimate goal of tobacco companies was to sell their products. Using ego documents, period literature, and advertisements in the Berlin press, this study argues that, in coordination with practical changes in consumer tastes, these ads helped to install cigarettes as a popular method of smoking for men in Weimar Berlin while simultaneously creating a media flashpoint for political and cultural contestations over gender.