Recently, while channel surfing, I landed on the Twilight Zone episode “The After Hours” (1960), written by Jewish-American Rod Serling. The story is set in an urban department store that becomes a site of horror for a young woman shopping for a luxury gift. The woman experiences a succession of uncanny encounters that lead to a mental breakdown and to the final twist, when the protagonist realizes that she is a mannequin who had been on a monthlong furlough to enjoy the world beyond the store. During her time “outside,” she had forgotten that she was nothing more than an anthropomorphic facsimile. Eventually, she accepts that she must return to her life as a display dummy.
Before reading Paul Lerner’s splendid study, I would not have known this Twilight Zone episode’s long pedigree, shaped by Jewish history and the history of anti-Semitism. Sometimes Jews authored novels that exposed the dark side of the department store in Germany and its deleterious effects on the human psyche. But more often, Jews became the objects of anti-Semitic assaults on the glimmering shrines to commercial culture that sprang up between 1880 and 1933. By placing Jews and “Jewishness” at the center of a story about the consumer revolution in Germany, Lerner has produced a nuanced and multifaceted book.
Writing at the height of the boom in consumer culture scholarship, Lerner is well aware that department stores have already been the subject of historical inquiry, notably the Paris emporium Le Bon Marché. For Germany, popular and scholarly attention has been drawn to the Third Reich, during which department stores were stripped of their Jewish owners, shattered during the November 1938 pogrom, and destroyed in Allied bombing attacks. Lerner takes us back to the foundational period of the department store, when these grand edifices—Wertheim, KaDeWe, Schocken, Tietz, Kaufhof—spread throughout Germany, drawing in thousands of men and women but also provoking anxiety among independent shopkeepers threatened by the economies of scale, quick turnover, and low profit margins (but high volume) of these massive “temples.”
Because most German department stores had Jewish proprietors, they became natural villains in right-wing attacks on consumer culture, with its frenetic pace, its conspicuous materialism, and its transformation of the retail landscape. Images of the Jew as pushcart peddler-turned-rapacious capitalist merged with larger concerns about the effects of Germany’s modernization and commercialization. Department stores “seduced” women into buying goods that their husbands could not afford. And the “weaker sex” was hypnotized by the dizzying array of goods (clothes, perfumes, food, appliances, housewares), which induced neurasthenia and kleptomania. Jewish owners were sexual predators and “carriers” of a foreign disease known as the “department store idea” (p. 21). In these racialized and gendered depictions of consumerism’s ills, men were not immune from the debilitating effects of the department store, often experiencing unrequited love in front of the window display or being driven to a state of madness that ends in arson, the destruction of the multistory building, and death.
With colorful prose and restrained analysis, Lerner interweaves a history of these emporiums—with an excellent foray into their architectural genesis—and the discourses that surrounded them with compelling literary analysis. Historians can be loath to offer readings of fiction, but in Lerner’s case, there were so many stories set in the department store that he is wise to pull on these literary strands. To be sure, Lerner is forced at times to work on a metaphorical level. What does it mean that fires are so prevalent in the fiction? For him, the fire represents unease with consumer culture and the fantasy of resolving the ambivalences that attended modernity and the rapid decline of older retail forms. Lerner deftly juxtaposes literary plotlines with on-the-ground concerns about fire safety, crowded aisles, and sexual licentiousness that department stores supposedly provoked.
Where ultimately does The Consuming Temple lead us with respect to German history, Jewish history, and business history? By confidently presenting Jews as the predominant owners of department stores in Germany, Lerner is freed up to analyze the myriad ways that this minority group figured into discussions of consumer capitalism in Germany without tiptoeing around the theme for fear of mirroring discourses about “Jewish overrepresentation” in the economy. As more scholars focus on what Lerner calls “Jewish economic history,” this book continues to productively push business history into the realm of cultural and religious history. While readers will gain much information about German-Jewish entrepreneurs, their origins, their business models, and their social positioning, Lerner’s study invites further exploration into the transnational context of these German discourses. Did anti-Semitism play a similar role in response to the American emporiums (Saks Fifth Avenue, Bloomingdale’s, Gimbels, and Orbach’s), which were founded by German-Jewish immigrant families?
One of the scholarly strengths of the book is, ironically, its main disappointment from a narrative perspective; Lerner spends relatively little time on the Nazi period, perhaps for fear of stepping on well-trodden ground. He leaves no doubt that the anti–department store crusades of the fin de siècle persisted into the Third Reich and motivated anti-Semitic legislation, but he rightly eschews an easy teleology in which pre-1933 discourses culminate in Jewish economic strangulation under National Socialism. Yet a focus on the Jewish department store owners and their Jewish customers, as they struggled to maintain their businesses and homes in the face of economic depression and persecution, would have been a fascinating addition to an otherwise powerful study.
