Table of Contents

Introduction 1. Jerusalem's Terrain: The Department Store and Its Discontents in Imperial Germany 2. Dreamworlds in Motion: Circulation, Cosmopolitanism, and the Jewish Question 3. Uncanny Encounters: The Thief, the Shopgirl, and the Department Store King 4. Beyond the Consuming Temple: Jewish Dissimilation and Consumer Modernity in Provincial Germany 5. The Consuming Fire: Fantasies of Destruction in German Politics and Culture Conclusion Notes Selected Bibliography Index

About the Author

Paul Lerner is Associate Professor of History at the University of Southern California where he directs the Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies. He is the author of Hysterical Men: War, Psychiatry, and the Politics of Trauma in Germany, 1890-1930, also from Cornell, and coeditor of Jewish Masculinities: German Jews, Gender, and History and Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry, and Trauma in the Modern Age, 1870-1930.

Reviews

"This book does more than just providing another economic or business history of the rise of the centralized, rationalized and scientifically managed department store in Germany...In comparison with the existing literature, which has often taken the 'Jewishness' of German department store owners for granted, Lerner excels at questioning and reflecting the multiple perspectives on the 'figure of "the Jew"', while analyzing their implications for the development of the German department store in general." - Gerulf Hirt, Oxford Journals: German History (June 2016) "Based on exhaustive research in primary archival, printed, and visual sources, The Consuming Temple persuasively argues that contemporaries characterized the department store as a Jewish phenomenon. Such associations were most often in the context of a critique of this new form of merchandising and anti-Semitic in nature. Paul Lerner's elaboration and specification of the linkage of department stores, Jews, and women is particularly original. This impressive book is, furthermore, an important intervention in the literature on the association between Jews and capitalism."-Leora Auslander, University of Chicago, author of Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France "This is a phenomenally rich and revelatory book. Paul Lerner brilliantly uses fiction and drama as well as a vast array of other sources to plumb the complexities of Germans' ambivalence about that most enthralling and threatening 'Jewish' marvel: the department store. He captures the magic and magnetic pull of the stores and all they stood for. Long before anticonsumerism became the property of the Left, it had its home on the Right. Lerner explicates what makes the German aspects of this story so unique."-Dagmar Herzog, Distinguished Professor of History, Graduate Center, City University of New York, author of Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth-Century History "In The Consuming Temple, Paul Lerner draws on the methodologies of both business and cultural history to demonstrate the multiple meanings and profound social significance of the department store in imperial and Weimar Germany. Engagingly written and filled with fascinating analyses of images and literary texts, The Consuming Temple bristles with insights about the globalisation of commerce, urban modernism, gender anxieties, and anti-Semitism in modern Germany."-Derek Penslar, University of Oxford and University of Toronto, author of Shylock's Children: Economics and Jewish Identity in Modern Europe "Paul Lerner's new book offers an exemplary study of the ambivalence and anxieties surrounding consumer culture in modern Germany. In an analysis that sparkles on every page, Lerner explores how contemporaries experienced the department store as a thoroughly Jewish institution, one able to exert uncanny power over women in particular. The Consuming Temple should be required reading for anyone interested in European history, Jewish studies, or the history and theory of consumer culture."-Jonathan M. Hess, Moses M. and Hannah L. Malkin Distinguished Professor of Jewish History and Culture, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, author of Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity