Consumer Culture and Political Transformations in Twentieth‐Century Germany

Generally, Frankfurt School theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's critique of mass culture as merely an instrument of totalitarianism dominates German historiography on consumption. 1 According to this view, elites use the media to control how people think. Another member of the school, Walter Benjamin, is famous for arguing that the industrial production of goods removed the “aura” from unique things (paintings, for example) and turned them into commodities, devoid of higher social value. 2 The widespread acceptance of their views meant German historians generally disdained consumer culture as a field of study. 3 Recently, however, some have discovered another and more accurate conceptualization of consumer culture from an often‐overlooked Frankfurt School scholar, Siegfried Krakauer. He agreed authoritarians could use consumer culture to control the polity, but “the mass ornament is [also] ambivalent.” Additionally, it offered the opportunity to think of things in new ways, to imagine oneself differently through film, for example. Krakauer's problem with consumer culture and capitalism in Weimar was that “it rationalizes not too much but rather too little.” The more people that could participate in capitalism through consumption, he reasoned, the more receptive the system could become to new voices. 4 Much of the best contemporary historiography on twentieth‐century Germany produced by scholars in the UK, USA and the Federal Republic is now premised on this insight.