The birth of Christ has always had an important place on Christianity's sacred calendar, but the Christmas we celebrate is a modern invention, the product of those extraordinarily fecund decades that span the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As Joe Perry argues in this bold and original book, Christmas is also a distinctively German holiday, the nation's most popular annual celebration and a powerful reflection of its politics and culture.

Perry traces the history of Christmas in Germany from 1800 to the 1960s, with an emphasis on the twentieth century. His account is based on an impressive array of sources: government documents, autobiographies, newspapers, magazines, fiction, songs, and illustrations. He is a perceptive and sensitive reader of texts. Some of them are familiar, such as E. T. A. Hoffmann's inescapable The Nutcracker and the Mouse King and canonical hymns such as Silent Night, but Perry also uncovers many forgotten descriptions of the holiday's rituals and symbols. His comparison of two pictures of a Berlin Christmas market, one from 1796, the other from 1865, is a model of how to use visual evidence for cultural analysis, while his examination of the importance of Christmas in Wolfgang Staudte's The Murderers are Among Us deepens our understanding of this classic postwar film.

At the core of Perry's narrative is the paradoxical fact that Christmas, supposedly a celebration of private pleasures and social harmony, was quickly appropriated for a variety of national, political, and cultural purposes. It thus became a site of controversy and contestation, between Catholics and Protestants, Social Democrats and the establishment, supporters and enemies of the Weimar Republic, and, of course, East and West Germany. Perry has a moving chapter on the role of Christmas in wartime, from the famous but all too brief Christmas truce in 1914 to the bogus broadcast of Christmas carols in 1943, which supposedly came from Stalingrad but was in fact made in a Berlin studio. The Nazis had trouble with Christmas. They did not like its private, familial focus, and the party's more radical members abhorred its religious origins. But the holiday was too deeply imprinted on Germans’ ordinary lives to be erased. Some efforts to translate traditional forms into the Nazi argot were not successful, such as a new version of “Tannenbaum” that asked, “Oh, Christmas tree, oh, Christmas tree/how do you greet us Hitlerites?/Do you affirm our German valor?/Do you feel our German blood?” In the end, the Nazis dealt with Christmas as they dealt with so many other aspects of German culture: appropriating certain features, creating parallel celebrations, and tolerating—at least temporarily—what they could not change. After 1945, Christmas became the occasion for underscoring the differences between the Christian, capitalist, and consumer-oriented west and the secular, communist, and austere east. Perry's account of consumerism in the postwar era fits nicely into the growing literature on the importance of consumption in twentieth-century Germany. As he shows, East Germany could neither counter nor compete with the rising tide of goods that flooded streets such as Berlin's Ku'damm. In the end, this tide swept away all but a few residues of Christmas past. By the 1990s, secularization and consumption had fundamentally changed what it meant to celebrate Christmas in Germany.

Running alongside Perry's account of Christmas as an object of political conflict is another narrative thread, more directly concerned with the holiday's cultural meaning. One purpose of his book, Perry writes in the introduction, is to use Christmas “to explore the history of the modern self across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries” (p. 3). The changing nature of the self “is rooted in and informed through everyday cultural practices,” among which the celebration of Christmas had an especially important place. The holiday's rituals and symbols, he argues, both created and expressed a world of private sentiments and family values in which selfhood took on new forms. This is a provocative claim that deserves further elaboration. But it is worth noting how often this thread of Perry's analysis disappears, obscured by the national, political, and social developments that command most of his attention, and only emerges again in the conclusion. Questions about “the ways emotions are evoked, authenticated, and defended” (p. 290) are notoriously difficult to address. Their empirical basis is usually thin and uneven and their connection to national experiences elusive and problematic. There may well be a “modern self,” but is there a German self, clearly distinguishable from Swiss, or Danish, or Austrian selves?

Christmas in Germany is an important book, not simply because of the rich material it presents about German life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but also because it so vividly illustrates the difficulties of fitting the history of everyday cultural practices into a national frame.