Reading Germany

By closely examining the interaction between intellectual and material culture in the period before the Nazis assumed power in Germany, the author comes to the conclusion that, contrary to widely held assumptions, consumer culture in the Weimar period, far from undermining reading, used reading culture to enhance its goods and values. Reading material was marked as a consumer good, while reading as an activity, raising expectations as it did, influenced consumer culture. Consequently, consumption contributed to the diffusion of reading culture, while at the same time a popular reading culture strengthened consumption and its values. Thus the book presents the argument that the Weimar period, characterized as it was by economic hardship and political instability, witnessed a constant widening of the gap between the world of print as a “virtual” area in which the world of symbols and images of the new consumer culture developed, and the daily realities of most social strata. In the German context of the 1920s, this was a fateful and ominous trend.