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In a 2001 essay, the introduction to a special journal issue on consumption in twentieth-century Germany, historians Alon Confino and Rudy Koshar noted the relative lack of scholarship on consumption and consumerism in European, especially German, historiography, as compared to the explosion of interest in the topic among historians of the United States. For Confino and Koshar, this disjuncture appears all the more remarkable in view of the centrality of consumption and consumer goods to the political and ideological struggles of the German twentieth century and indeed the potential power of consumption, as a historiographic subject, for linking daily life and individual experience to the sweeping trajectories of the century's history. It turns out that Koshar and Confino did not have to wait very long for this gap to be filled; in the several years since that journal issue appeared, works on consumption in modern Germany have been coming out at a furious pace. In addition to several broad surveys of and edited collections on consumer society in the modern period, over the last few years there has been a wave of specialized studies of consumption and consumer goods in Nazi Germany, in the Federal Republic, and notably in the GDR. The problem of consumption has also been a key concern in recent works on Wilhelmine and Weimar cultural history, although historical studies of the period's consumer culture—or the institutions and mechanisms for its dissemination—remain fairly rare.

This article traces the responses of German psychiatrists to epidemic numbers of shell-shocked men during the first world war, surveying the diagnostic, administrative and therapeutic dimensions of the 'war neurosis' problem. First it asks why hysteria, a diagnostic label once reserved for women, was used to diagnose many thousand of psychiatric casualties, and shows how male hysteria diagnosis emerged in the late nineteenth century amid Germany's experience of rapid industrialization and modernization. The article then turns to psychiatric organization during the war, arguing that it reflected the influence of models of rationalized industrial production. In its discussion of psychiatric treatment, the article emphasizes how medical power operated through the various therapeutic procedures. whether hypnosis, suggestion or electrical current, treatments aimed to replace the patient's 'sickly' will with proper values of patriotism and self-sacrifice. The article then concludes with broader reflections on trauma, narrativity and the process of collective memory formation in interwar Germany. Using several psychiatric case histories, it shows how the traumatic and pathogenic nature of war memories was contested between doctors and patients, which it views as a microcosm of larger disputes within Weimar political culture over the meaning of the war as a whole.

Babylon Berlin (henceforth BB) premiered in Germany on the pay channel Sky TV in October 2017 and in the United States on the streaming service Netflix in January 2018. It is based on Volker Kutscher's series of crime novels set in late Weimar Republic and early Nazi-era Berlin. At its center are the lives and investigations of the laconic and tormented police detective Gereon Rath and his charismatic and irrepressible assistant Charlotte (Lotte) Ritter. In anticipation of the series premiere on public television, marathon screenings took place in 150 cinemas across Germany, where audience members dressed up in 1920s fashion and enjoyed a Currywurst break. Its viewership in the Federal Republic was topped only by the global fantasy behemoth Game of Thrones. The series is clearly modeled on American series such as Mad Men (2007–2015) and The Wire (2002–2008) as it unfolds a complex web of characters and subplots with loving attention to the history and fashions of the time. Indeed, this collaboration of seasoned directors Tom Tykwer, Achim von Borries, and Henk Handloegten is the most expensive German TV series to date. The fact that BB premiered on pay TV while having been largely produced with public funds drew some ire. German reviewers questioned both the circumstances of its production and its creative ambition. While Der Spiegel called it "a masterpiece," one much debated blog review went so far as to call it "pure crap," which neither reflected historical truth nor carried artistic merit. Many critics faulted the series for trading in postcard clichés and creating a 1920s "Berlin Disneyland." The weekly Die Zeit complained that there was a little too much cute dialect, such as "icke" and "kiek ma," which made the critic sometimes feel like wiping the dirt makeup off the proletarian faces. (And indeed, one of the numerous intertexts of this series are Heinrich Zille's unflinching depictions of proletarian misery.)

Intro -- Praise for Jewish Consumer Cultures in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Europe and North America -- Contents -- List of Contributors -- List of Figures -- Chapter 1: Jews, Consumer Culture, and Jewish Consumer Cultures: An Introduction -- The Economic Turn in Jewish History -- From the Economic Turn to Consumer Culture Studies -- Jewish Consumer Cultures -- Dreams and Reality -- Jews, Migration, and Consumption -- Hybridity and Transnational Approaches -- Case Studies -- Part I: Jews, Retail Cultures, and Modern Commerce in Europe and North America -- Chapter 2: Beyond the Bright Side of Consumer Culture: Jewish Peddlers and Second-Hand Dealers in Germany, 1800-1938 -- Second-Hand Goods and the Emerging Consumer Society in Germany -- Fashion Brokers and Agents of Modernity? Peddlers in a Changing Economic and Social Environment -- From Peddling to a Variety of Retail Businesses -- From the Core to the Niche: Consumerism and the Relative Decline of the (Jewish) Second-Hand Market -- Symbolic and Real Exclusion: The Aryanization of Second-Hand Trade in the 1930s -- Chapter 3: Advertising in the German-Zionist Press in the First Decades of the Twentieth Century: A Case Study -- On the Advertisers' Side: The Ascent of Concrete Palestine -- A Portrait of the German Zionist as a Consumer -- Conclusion -- Chapter 4: Consuming Temples on Both Sides of the Atlantic: German-Speaking Jews from the Department Store to the Mall -- Chapter 5: Stanley Marcus: Fashioning a City -- Part II: Jewish Consumer Cultures -- Chapter 6: Buy Me a Mink: Jews, Fur, and Conspicuous Consumption -- Jewish Involvement in the Fur Industry -- Representations of Jewish Fur Wearers in German and Eastern European Contexts -- Global Fashions, Visible Consumers, and Fur on Display -- Epilogue: Jews and Fur in the Twenty-First Century.

Stereotyped as delicate and feeble intellectuals, Jewish men in German-speaking lands in fact developed a rich and complex spectrum of male norms, models, and behaviors. Jewish Masculinities explores conceptions and experiences of masculinity among Jews in Germany from the 16th through the late 20th century as well as emigrants to North America, Palestine, and Israel. The volume examines the different worlds of students, businessmen, mohels, ritual slaughterers, rabbis, performers, and others, shedding new light on the challenge for Jewish men of balancing German citizenship and cultural affiliation with Jewish communal solidarity, religious practice, and identity.

Stereotyped as delicate and feeble intellectuals, Jewish men in German-speaking lands in fact developed a rich and complex spectrum of male norms, models, and behaviors. Jewish Masculinities explores conceptions and experiences of masculinity among Jews in Germany from the 16th through the late 20th century as well as emigrants to North America, Palestine, and Israel. The volume examines the different worlds of students, businessmen, mohels, ritual slaughterers, rabbis, performers, and others, shedding new light on the challenge for Jewish men of balancing German citizenship and cultural affil

A two-day conference organized by The Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies (USC) and The Wende Museum. Co-sponsored by the German Historical Institute and the Centre for Contemporary History, Potsdam (ZZF). Additional support provided by the Feuchtwanger Memorial Library, USC Dornsife Dean's Office, and USC Dornsife Departments of Art History, History, and Slavic Languages and Literature. Modern history has been marked by periodic ruptures, radical changes brought on by wars, revolutionary upheaval, or sudden political shifts that shattered existing social and political structures and belief systems. No country has experienced this more profoundly than Germany, which has witnessed five regimes across the past 100 years and experienced both the heights of national euphoria and the depths of physical and moral defeat and destruction in the twentieth century. During times of fundamental change, cultural ideas and expressions pave the way for the imagination of a new order. This conference focuses on the key role of utopian visions, both artistic and intellectual, that changed the world from the twentieth century to the present day.