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Women’s History Review

Vol. 15, No. 4, September 2006, pp. 625–636

ISSN 0961–2025 (print)/ISSN 1747–583X (online)/06/040625–12 © 2006 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/09612020500530778

Gendered Spectatorship, Jewish Women and Psychological Advertising in Weimar Germany

Darcy Buerkle

Taylor and Francis LtdRWHR_A_153060.sgm10.1080/09612020500530778Women’s History Review0961-2025 (print)/1747-583X (online)Original Article2006Taylor & Francis154000000September 2006DarcyBuerkledbuerkle@smith.edu

While approaches to advertising had been evolving since the mid-nineteenth century,

Germany in the 1920s saw an increase in the conceptualization of the consumer as a subject

who could be both anticipated as a type and addressed as an individual. Weimar Berlin

was the site of crystallization for a growing interest in the psychology of advertising:

women’s private lives and sexuality were being mined, reconfigured and marketed in the

public sphere. This article investigates the problem of the Jewish woman as an entity in

1920s advertising texts and visual culture. It argues that while well-studied post-1933

advertising was typified by the imprint of Nazi ideology, the emergence of images coded

Jewish in Weimar Berlin represents a moment that has garnered little attention in its spec-

ificity. By focusing on it, the author makes suggestions about the degree to which the image

of the New Woman as consumer in Weimar Germany situated Jewish women’s spectral

desire and thus resulted in historical circumstance characterized by symbolic domination

and social death. This development precedes the Nazi takeover which would, of course,

capitalize on it. Using visual material and advertising manuals from the Weimar period,

the article will both assert an invocation of images coded Jewish and female as images that

could ‘sell’ and, also, theorize German Jewish women’s spectatorship of mass-produced

‘images of self’ in the 1920s and 1930s.

Although debates about the history of consumer culture have proliferated in the last

two decades, they have been slow to take hold in German historical studies.

1

Recent

Darcy Buerkle is a Professor of History at Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts. Her research focuses on

modern European women’s history with an emphasis on German and German Jewish women’s intellectual and

cultural history. She has also worked extensively on German visual culture of the early twentieth century. Presently

she is completing a book manuscript entitled,

Visual Rhetoric of Suicide: German Jewish women and spectatorship

in early twentieth century Germany

. Correspondence to: Darcy C. Buerkle, Department of History, 13 Wright Hall,

Smith College, Northampton, MA 01063, USA. Email: dbuerkle@email.smith.edu

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D. Buerkle

work on gendered experiences of early twentieth-century Germany and consumer

culture increasingly stresses the degree to which the consumer had a particularly female

identity in Germany, especially during and after World War I. Belinda Davis, for

example, notes that:

consumer was an ill-defined term, and German consumers were a fractured groupwithout considerable societal significance or power. It was not until World War I thatthe consumer acquired a prominent and positive place in national life… Althoughboth men and women saw themselves in this way, they envisioned the figure of theconsumer as female.

2

On a pragmatic level, German and American advertisers maintained that ‘85 percent of

consumer purchases are made by women’ though, as Jackson Lears writes, ‘no one ever

seemed able to cite a source for that figure’.

3

Recent contributions by feminist scholars have started to examine the subtleties of

consumer culture’s status in Weimar historiography but they have yet to address the

interlocking issues of gender and ethnicity, specifically gender and Jewishness. Schol-

arship has considered both how Jewish men publicly elided their Jewishness and how

not doing so risked a feminized and compromised masculinity.

4

Meanwhile, the public

imaginary perceived the ‘Jewess’ as seductive and dangerous long before this image

entered early twentieth-century consumer culture. And although she appeared in the

visual culture of advertising and magazines, only to ultimately disappear, scholars have

yet to examine what this disappearance implies about fascism’s entry into the symbolic

realm of German culture.

5

The Weimar visual address to a woman consumer testifies

to circumstances within consumer culture that propose a particular range of feminine

identities by constructing a more specific visual address than the advertising textbooks

and journals suggest. These circumstances can only be teased out by attention both to

advertising directives and the visual record itself. Read together, these sources show that

a symbolic public effacement of Jewishness occurred in the visual address to woman.

Whereas nineteenth-century antecedents primarily announced products, twentieth-

century advertisement sought to seduce through increasingly calculated visual codes:

the field of advertising psychology found legitimation in Weimar Germany.

6

Manufac-

turers mobilized psychological insight to make their products more appealing. Early

German advertising psychology imported via the United States conjured the interac-

tion between the way women saw—women’s specular relationship—and an ever

expanding and ambitious specularized image of womanhood in the public sphere’s

visual economy. This interaction mirrored the ideologically malleable nature of such

specular relationships. In the early twentieth-century, advertising images specifically

tried to conjure a relationship of desire between objects and their potential consum-

ers.

7

Advertising psychology made claims about how to best use images to present

products so that potential consumers would be compelled to want and purchase them.

While relevant for the history of advertising generally, these claims and the images they

engendered also reveal presuppositions about how women’s spectatorship factored

into the composition of the public sphere.

Advertisers understood that to address women’s desires, they had to establish just

the right identificatory equation: for images to do their magic, female spectators would

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627

have to ‘see themselves’ in them. As Sneeringer notes, ‘[Weimar-era] theorists dreamed

of discovering the perfect suggestive technique’

8

Although this economy of desire

became a commonplace in post-World War II continental theory and related decoding

of advertising, the early twentieth-century visual record of the German public sphere

has not yet been subjected to the same critical analysis.

9

However, although the field of

advertising psychology and its visual record began in earnest in the early twentieth-

century United States, some of its most ardent devotees worked in Germany, the

writings and the resulting visual language of early advertising psychology in pre- and

post-Word War I Germany are the site of conscious and unconscious processes. The

record of these processes is in the historical reading of the interplay between text and

image in the advertisements themselves.

Even if German advertising psychology offers ample evidence that it targeted female

consumers, it offered no specific guidelines for the advertiser’s visual content. National

Socialism, however, aggressively regulated visual culture and changed it in both subtle

and dramatic ways.

10

Such changes produced historical ramifications relevant both to

the construction of consumer identity and the affective circumstances of the early

1930s for German Jewish women. Moreover, the specularization of women during the

Weimar period produced habits of seeing: to market specifically to women and to

encourage them to identify with the women in advertisements, sellers had to under-

stand and cultivate specular desire. Choices about which kinds of women did and did

not appear in advertising articulate the contours of what I term a historicized identifi-

catory practice. By ‘historicized identificatory practice’ I mean specifically the relation-

ship between what women saw and the way in which this experience of ‘seeing’ defines

a range of identities. This practice alternately included and excluded certain kinds of

women. My argument focuses specifically on how Weimar advertisements mobilized

femininity in so far as that visual record interacts with the status and shifting charac-

terization of the Weimar New Woman.

Two aspects of this situation merit particular attention. The first is the most imme-

diate genealogy of the cultivation of the specular relationship of women to visual

culture during this period as an instrumentalized energy that could be directed for

economic gain. Women were not ‘victims’ of advertising. Rather, advertising func-

tioned then (and now, for that matter) as constitutive of a visual public sphere that is,

conversely, constitutive of identities. The interpellation of gendered identity through

the public, visual sphere means that historicizing the public visual sphere—in this case

advertising—enables thinking about a history of symbolic violence that relates to the

history of gender identity even more generally.

The second is the way the visual record mobilized a response to these ‘psychological’

insights. I will argue that programmatic psychological theories address image produc-

tion only superficially. The visual record itself thus provides the content to the form

that the advertisements outline. I will survey how pre-World War I German advertising

psychology set the stage for later developments. By the interwar period, advertising

copy began to reflect the challenges women in the public sphere articulated about what

‘a woman’ looked like. Further, an increasingly unstable economy and the growing

fascist presence at the end of the Weimar period caused certain traits of certain kinds

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D. Buerkle

of women to disappear from the visual record. This disappearance constitutes a subtle

act of symbolic violence against women and anticipates pervasive and programmatic

violence after 1933.

11

I

The earliest nineteenth-century antecedents to the twentieth-century frenzy of adverti-

sing psychology included Karl Knies’ 1857 important book,

The Telegraph as Mode of

Transportation

, which cautioned that announcements must ‘awaken consumption…

give the crucial push to purchase…’

12

But it took half a century for others to introduce

a methodology designed to ‘awaken consumption’. In

The Working Principle of Adverti-

sing

, Bernhard Wities developed a ‘working principle’ that for the first time connected

an object’s presentation to the likelihood of its purchase: ‘Through a precisely calcu-

lated association of ideas’, Wities claimed, ‘[advertising will] bring to the fore an

uncontrolled and unconscious determination that the recommended object is particu-

larly well-suited’.

13

Victor Mataja’s 1910

The Advertisement: an investigation about modes of announce-

ment and advertising in economic life

became a standard work.

14

Mataja articulated a

conception of advertising as an acceptable but growing violent force in the social world:

The violent force to fill a large group of people with a particular idea is social power…Do you think that I overestimate the power of advertising? Advertising reaches theman through the woman… the most unsuspicious conversation can lead to contam-ination. Put directly, whether you recognize the individual workings of it or not,whether you deny it or admit it, advertising is a social power… [It has a] power thatdoes not diminish because you don’t feel it…

15

Mataja understood and instructed his readers to distinguish between rhetoric and the

‘reality’ of visual desire. While Mataja here focuses on the spectatorship of men to make

his point; the spectral relationship and related consumer activity requires women. This

insight (and others like it) illustrates an emergent understanding of the possibilities of

presentation. Nevertheless, a systematic psychology of advertising only began to take

hold in Germany with Hugo Münsterberg’s (1863–1916) year-long visit to Berlin in

1910 and subsequent 1912 publication of

Psychology and Economic Life

.

16

Hugo Münsterberg’s lectures in Berlin in 1910 represent a combination of prescient

influence on the German advertising business, his own biography and German intel-

lectual history and they signify an inaugural moment in the German psychology of

advertising. Münsterberg delivered his remarks after he had already accepted an invi-

tation from William James to join the faculty and taken up residence at Harvard; his

theories of advertising emerged out of a convergence of his training in psychology

under Wilhelm Wundt and his exposure to American insights in advertising.

17

The

German interest in the force of advertising and its quantitative systematization centered

on the philosophical problem of ‘the will’. This conjunction of system and will is

precisely where Hugo Münsterberg began. He had, in fact, parted with Wilhelm Wundt

over his interest in the quantitative measurement of the will, which clearly prefigured

his later interest in advertising; a preoccupation he announced unequivocally during

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his above mentioned visit to the University in Berlin in 1910: ‘Practical life wants to

know, which feelings, which thoughts, which willful decisions and which moods are to

be expected under particular sets of circumstances, how to influence all of these and

conquer them’.

18

Münsterberg’s abiding emphasis on quantitative data, however, still

allowed for such concepts as ‘psychic harmony’; an idea that was specifically linked to

women in advertising, but which actually had more to do with Kantian aesthetics—

and,

a priori

, universalist aesthetics—than the specificities of shrewd advertising.

19

Advertising with women in mind and image was already key to Münsterberg’s insights;

this notion only continued to gather currency as the field developed.

Münsterberg reported that women require twice as many exposures as men do to an

advertisement before it becomes part of their memory. His results epitomized the bias

of quantitative research. He also claimed that an advertisement’s size should be

adjusted to account for gender: smaller advertisements for women, large ones for men.

His dubious results aside, Münsterberg’s experiments stand out for the key reason that

they established gendered responses to advertising as a fact. This category remained

operative and highly influential to further work in the field.

20

Through Münsterberg’s

interventions, advertising psychology began to acquire institutional legitimacy in

Germany before World War I.

21

Weimar era claims about advertising demonstrate the ways in which advertising

psychology elaborated on themes central to its development before World War I.

Theodor König’s dissertation in 1922,

Psychology of Advertising

, was programmatic for

the field and remained influential until well after 1945. His systematic explanation of

the workings of advertising specifically focused on the need for images in advertising.

Yet the discussion did not consider specific kinds of images. Rather, it sought to under-

stand the will and its workings more elaborately. A 1919 article in the trade publication

Reklame

announced this preoccupation; here, good advertising was likened to hypno-

sis. Like hypnosis it also delivered a kind of ‘waking subliminal suggestion’.

22

The

author of a leading textbook from the period,

Psychology of the Business/Business

Psychology

, Edmund Lysinski, also commented in 1923 that ‘The weaknesses of think-

ing are becoming the strengths of advertising’.

23

Lysinski is the intellectual link

between König and another key publication in the field, Dr Ch. von Hartungen’s

Psychology of Advertising

.

24

Von Hartungen too thematized ‘the will’ as a philosophical problem reducible to

elemental human characteristics, subliminally activated and measured physiologically.

He also rendered the connection between effective advertising and the-woman-as-

consumer especially explicit:

Women are more easily influenced by feelings that men are; she… reigns over greaterimpulsiveness and has less ability to censure herself… Women’s greed is also a drivingforce that presses her toward a purchase… her desire to have an object, even if shedoes not need it…

The wholly textual insert is less likely to unleash a creeping desire tospend than the appropriate visual representation which is in the position to bring herfantasy in direct connection with her own person

… [These] are primarily objects thathave to do with her appearance or specifically with her household… (emphasisadded)

25

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D. Buerkle

The primacy of women’s spectral fantasy is inescapable in this passage. Effective adver-

tising requires that one discover how to awaken and police women’s desire to consume

(her ‘greed’); it must clearly link what the consumer sees and what she wants.

Modernity incorporated women into its public sphere partly by constructing them

as addressees, and modern business adjusted its advertising practices accordingly. The

increasingly visible presence of unchaperoned women in public life was converted into

an aspect of the cityscape and the market itself. The specifics of personal appearance

suggested access to identity that connoted independence. Yet although such scholars as

Münsterberg and von Hartungen primarily sought to ground advertising practices on

the need to appeal to women’s desire, they provided no guidance about what, precisely

and literally, those necessarily seductive images might look like. A discussion of images

beyond the Kantian categories is a discussion that is strangely absent. Of what, then, did

this seemingly all-important visual address consist? The answer lies not in advertising

psychology texts; it appears in the visual record itself.

26

II

Visual culture mobilized to respond to advertising psychology’s directives. It reveals

aspects of a public imagination that advertising textbooks and related ruminations

obscure, even if at times inadvertently. Most importantly and strangely, textbook

advertising guidelines did not mention the regularity and ubiquity with which print

media invoked the New Woman; she appears nowhere explicitly in their thinking, yet

she appeared persistently in visual culture of the 1920s.

27

A rhetorical double absence

becomes apparent: Advertising psychology texts suggest no

particular

woman, yet

particular

women appear repeatedly in advertisements. The particularity of that

woman remains effaced. But this circumstance suggests more than mere lack of content

or description.

Images of women in advertisements of the 1920s fall, generally, into two categories:

the housewife and the New Woman.

28

Studies of the Weimar New Woman’s fate focus

primarily on the shift between Weimar images of women and the emergent and ulti-

mately firmly installed image of womanhood under National Socialism. Even as recent

scholarship has shown the fluidity of the Nazi-aesthetic and demonstrated the degree

to which ‘modern’ Weimar elements of femininity survived in National Socialist visual

culture, this narrative focuses on continuities and hence fails to attend explicitly to the

undeniable

omission

of certain elements of femininity. These elements served as an object

of desire in public visual culture in the early and mid-Weimar years, and then disap-

peared. There was a specificity to what was drained away from the visual address through

the figure of ‘woman’.

29

That specificity concerns the aspects of her appearance that

could be construed as Jewish. This may seem an obvious point, but it is not a minor one.

In his books and articles on the status of the German Jew in public life, Sander

Gilman has written that the ‘stereotype of the Jew is articulated through visibility’. This

emphasis on the visuality of Jewishness is operative in the ubiquitous representations

of New Womanhood in the 1920s. Often ridiculed, the New Woman also appeared

regularly in advertising directed at the feminized consuming public.

30

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Grossmann has documented extensively how the Weimar New Woman was often

linked to Jewishness in its most negative connotations, in so far as she was understood

as a symbol of modernity and danger—sexualized, inextricably bound up with

economic markets as consumers and as, themselves, purchasable.

31

The convergence

between, as Mary Louise Roberts puts it, a ‘relationship between a woman’s social role

as consumer and her symbolic role as commodity’, was most literalized in the figure of

the German Jewish woman in the Weimar cultural imaginary.

32

Even so, scholars have

not interrogated images of New Womanhood and Jewishness as linked in ways outside

of anti-Semitic undertones and outright assault.

33

The New Woman as calculated

visual appeal is a difficult argument to make because the material evidence for the

precise ways in which decisions were made about advertising campaigns is virtually

non-existent. However, my argument here is based on the observation that the image

of the New Woman was connected to Jewish women during the 1920s simply in so far

as features of the women who appeared in advertising and in cover art of the bourgeois

women’s magazine,

Die Dame

, were coded as

Jewish-enough

so that both the image and

the addressee of that image

could be

a Jewish woman.

34

In the 1920s, advertisements

regularly feature women who bear the markers of Jewishness. By the early 1930s,

however, they have all but disappeared.

35

What are the implications of this disappear-

ance, beyond the obvious observation that visual culture capitulated to the ideological

and representational codes of National Socialism?

Among her many deployments, the New Woman was a mode of visual address who

functioned so effectively because she was both desirable and recognizable. As we have

already seen, advertisers understood that visual address must meet certain criteria. It

must be ‘harmonious’ for the spectator and awaken her will to buy. The representation

of a woman who could sell was, as we learn from advertising psychology, the most

desirable woman. She also needed to be believable as the woman who would make a

purchase. In so far as she was coded Jewish, the New Woman fitted both cultural and

social stereotypes of the consummate consumer. Indeed, von Hartungen’s contempt

for women’s desire reads much like the contempt leveled specifically at assimilated

German Jewish women for their ‘excessive’ ways.

36

German Jews worried about

conspicuous consumption in their own publications and appealed to one another for

moderation. The newspapers of the liberal

Central Verein

and the more orthodox

Israelistischer Familienblatt

implore Jewish women to refrain from drawing attention to

themselves; specifically by wearing of modern fashion and jewels as instigators of anti-

Semitism.

37

‘After the turn of the century’, Sander Gilman has stated plainly, ‘the

discourse about the destructive Jewish female as the epitome of the modern woman

becomes a common place’. That discourse, however, extended in another direction as

well: to a visual record that necessarily also included her image.

38

A 1926 advertisement for detergent shows a smiling woman who possesses the

stereotyped physiognomic traces of Jewishness. She examines the wash as she interacts

with her maid: soap, the advertisement reads, for all kinds of wash. Poster art from 1925

similarly abounds with images of women recognizable as at least potentially Jewish: one

example is the work of artist Lehmann-Stieglitz. Here a dark haired woman has a

mirror behind her and holds a hand-mirror to her face: ‘well-cared for skin’, the

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announcement reads, ‘is easy to gain through regular use of the bathroom water heat-

ing system’. By 1931, a similar looking dark-haired woman appears on the cover of the

bourgeois women’s magazine

Die Dame

: in this case, she sits facing a mirror; we see her

back and the back of her head and arms. The image in the mirror, however, shows a

different woman altogether. She is a blonde woman with light eyes, her skin a bit

lighter. Powder and lipstick are close at hand. The piece is titled, ‘The Beautiful

Woman’. Clearly, in this image, the beautiful woman sheds the markers of Jewishness

when she looks in the mirror.

39

The rhetorical tendency to bracket German Jewish New Women from explicit inclu-

sion in the public realm but to include them visually is pronounced in the last image in

Hermann Ullstein’s

Advertise and Become: a textbook for advertising

. It closes with a

sample advertisement

40

in which a woman with curly dark hair and other Jewish mark-

ings stands on a ladder and peers into heaven. An image of St Peter illustrates his

points: ‘Were you thrifty, Brigitte? Did you use Ullstein dress-patterns?’ This is image

could speak to the negative stereotyping of Jewish women as excessive—everything but

thrifty or making her own clothes. When it positions her on the ladder to heaven, it

situates this image of a potentially Jewish woman into a scene of Christian theodicy, but

one entirely consistent with assimilated Jewish vocabulary during the period.

In advertising psychology during the Weimar period, women’s identity as an aspect

of the visual experience of the period functioned as a presupposition that positioned

itself as women’s fantastical relationship to the world; a relationship that could be used

for economic gain. ‘Modernity’, Jonathan Crary writes, ‘is inseparable from on the one

hand a remaking of the observer, and on the other hand a proliferation of circulating

signs and objects whose effects coincide with their visuality’.

41

Liz Conor’s

Spectacular

Modern Woman

picks up on this theme when she claims ‘appearing’ as the ‘central

term… as it considers the visual as a critical element in the production of female subjects

through historically contingent signification systems… It not only underpins the claim

that modernity centers on the visual, but it implies that only spectators can be included

in the category of the modern subject’.

42

And to the question: ‘Did women come into

being as modern subjects through their practices of appearing’, she answers yes. What,

then, is the status of a woman who appears and who then disappears?

43

What, more

specifically, does it mean to suggest that the visual was mobilizing a primary spectral

relationship of the Weimar period by women who were coded Jewish and who, there-

fore, would disappear from the visual economy within a few short years? What is the

status of a subjectivity determined and driven by a visual field that became, increasingly,

an impossibility? With the narrowing of the visual possibilities under state-sanctioned

guidelines, came a narrowing of the possibility for the gendered, Jewish spectator.

III

The move from a New Woman who connoted Jewishness to one who retained elements

of the New Woman while discarding those disturbingly ambiguous ‘Jewish’ traits pre-

dates Hitler’s installation as chancellor.

44

But certainly after 1933, the fantastical

relationship theorized during the Weimar period in advertising and enacted in visual

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culture generally indicated an end to what could be construed as a visual address that

would include Jewish women. German Jewish women were subjected to what Pierre

Bourdieu termed symbolic domination which, as he explained, is exercised through

representational practices. If symbolic domination succeeds, acceptance of a partial

symbolic order is assured and social death has occurred. The psychic effects of social

death can vary, but the general assumption is that an act of symbolic violence produces

a psychic effect which the group in question may or may not thematize:

The effect of symbolic domination… is exerted not in the pure logic of knowingconsciousnesses but through the schemes of perception, appreciation and action thatare constitutive of habitus and which, below the level of the decisions of consciousnessand the controls of the will, set up a cognitive relationship that is profoundly obscureto itself.

45

The literal erasure of the woman coded Jewish in visual culture means that her social

death—in this case the erosion of her appearance in public and as the object of specular

desire—was one of the first efforts to remove her from public life. Advertising psychol-

ogy examined and explicated the fantastical link that had to be made between women

and visual culture; those insights ultimately provided the basis for the propagandistic

efforts of National Socialism.

The late-twenties image of woman was specifically constructed against conceptions

of femininity that took hold in the early and mid-1920s. The perimeter of this construc-

tion was first a decision to promote a certain kind of image of womanhood, to cast out

those aspects of the New Woman that were deemed un-German; to cause, in effect,

social death through symbolic domination. The social death at stake was not the New

Woman per se, but rather, the specific aspects of the New Woman that represented a

femininity deemed unseemly and, more precisely, coded Jewish.

One should read the ultimately state-sanctioned erosion of the New Woman as

preceeded by a state-ignored and

laissez-faire

market sanctioned erosion of the New

Woman. Her dissipation at the end of the Weimar period and certainly after 1933,

then, becomes a disappearance with an addressee in the same way that successful adver-

tisements directed at her worked through her spectral identification. The devolution of

the New Woman was a devolution of the possibility of a particular specular relation-

ship between Jewish women and ‘woman’ as a category of public visual culture during

the Weimar period. The historical record might account for such spectral acts of

violence as a way to historicize the affective conditions they created and to pressure the

limits of the ways in which identity and oppression are historicized. Conditions of

oppression produce circumstances and representational practices that may be opaque

to those who labour under them. To study German Jewish women is to throw those

opaque conditions into sharp relief. Or to put it plainly: German Jewish women disap-

peared before their own eyes before they knew it.

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Daniel H. Magilow for his careful reading and to Smith College

student Nora Pittis for her able bibliographic assistance.

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D. Buerkle

Notes

Unless otherwise stated, all translations are mine.

1

[1] A. Confino & R. Koshar (2001) Regimes of Consumer Culture: new narratives in twentieth-

century German history,

German History

, 19(2), pp. 135–161. See also H. Siegrist, H. Kaelble

& J. Kocka (Eds) (1997)

Europäische Konsumgeschichte: Zur Gesellschafts-und Kulturgeschichte

des Konsums (18. bis 20. Jahrhundert)

(Frankfurt: Campus Verlag); H.-G. Haupt (2004) The

History of Consumption in Western Europe in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: some

questions and perspectives for comparative studies, in H. Kaelble (Ed.)

The European Way:

European societies in the 19th and 20th centuries

(New York: Berghahn Books), pp. 161–185.

2

[2] B. Davis (1996) Food Scarcity and the Empowerment of the Female Consumer in World War

I Berlin, in V. de Grazia & E. Furlough (Eds)

The Sex of Things: gender and consumption in

historical perspective

(Berkeley: University of California Press), p. 287–310.

3

[3] J. Lears (1994)

Fables of Abundance: a cultural history of advertising in America

(New York:

Harper Collins), p. 209. This statistic was used with perpetuity in post-1933 National Socialist

advertising directed at the ‘German woman’ housewife. In the American context of the 1920s,

she was ‘Mrs. Consumer’; see Lears, Fables of Abundance, p. 118. For German context, see M.

Lavin (1985) Ringl+Pit: the representation of women in German advertising, 1929–33, Print

Collectors Newsletter, 16, pp. 89–93.4

[4] See, for instance, S. Gilman (1985) Difference and Pathology: stereotypes of sexuality, race and

madness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press); S. Gilman (1991) The Jew’s Body (New York:

Routledge); D. Boyarin (1997) Unheroic Conduct: the rise of heterosexuality and the invention

of the Jewish man (Berkeley: University of California Press).5

[5] See J. P. Sartre (1954) Réflexions sur la question juive (Paris: Gallimard) where Sartre discusses

‘une belle Juive’ (p. 61). Also see H. Mayer (1981) Aussenseiter (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp), pp. 315ff.

and F. Krobb (1993) Die schöne Jüdin: Jüdische Frauengestalten in der deutschsprachigen Erzähl-

literatur vom 17. Jahrhundert bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag).

Sander Gilman writes: ‘[B]eing a seductress is contagious and marks one as a Jewess…’ See

Sander Gilman (1996) Salome, Syphilis, Sarah Bernhardt and the Modern Jewess, in Linda

Nochlin & Tamar Garb (Eds) The Jew in the Text: modernity and the construction of identity (New

York: Thames & Hudson), pp. 97–120. The contagion of consumerism is an extension of this

equation.7

[6] See D. Reinhardt (1993) Von der Reklame zum Marketing: Geschichte der Wirtschaftswerbung

in Deutschland (Berlin: Akademie Verlag), esp. pp. 444ff., and S. Haas (1995) Die neue Welt

der Bilder: Werbung und Visuelle Kultur der Moderne, in P. Borscheid, J. Teuteberg & C.

Wischermann (Eds) Bilderwelt des Alltags : Werbung in der Konsumgesellschaft des 19. und 20.

Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag), pp. 64–77; G. Reuveni (2001) Lesen und

Konsum: der Aufstieg der Konsumkultur in Presse und Werbung Deutschlands bis 1933,

Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, 41, pp. 97–117. The most significant and lasting journals devoted

to the ‘science’ of advertising were founded in the late nineteenth century: Die Reklame

(1891), Propaganda (1897), Moderne Reklame (1902).8

[7] J. Sneeringer (2004) The Shopper as Voter: women, advertising and politics in post-inflation

Germany, German Studies Review, 3, p. 478. See also C. Lamberty (2000) Reklame in Deut-

schland, 1890–1914 Wahrnehmung, Professionalisierung und Kritik der Wirtschaftswerbung

(Berlin: Dunker & Humblot) and for gender questions see esp. pp. 406ff. Also see P. Petro

(1989) Joyless Streets: women and melodramatic representation in Weimar Germany (Princeton:

Princeton University Press), p. 121.9

[8] R. Barthes (1977) Rhetoric of the Image, in S. Heath (Ed. and Trans.) Image, Music, Text

(New York: Hill & Wang), pp. 32–51.10

[9] See Sneeringer, ‘The Shopper as Voter’, p. 488. See Kate Lacey’s work for the use of radio propa-

ganda to mobilize the NS-era woman consumer: K. Lacey (1996) Feminine Frequencies: gender,

German radio and the public sphere, 1823–1945 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press).

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Women’s History Review 635

11

[10] Mary Louise Roberts has cautioned against ‘feminist work that casts the female consumer as a

subject without will or agency, manipulated by commercial interests and diverted from politi-

cal activism in her preoccupation with shopping’ (M. L. Roberts (2002) Review Essay: gender,

consumption and commodity culture, American Historical Review, 103(3), p. 821). Historiciz-

ing symbolic violence against women can help reconstruct an aspect of the history of women

and the emotional communities that play a role in that history. See B. Rosenwein (2002) Review

Essay: worrying about emotions in history, American Historical Review, 103, pp. 821–845.12

[11] K. Knies (1857) Der Telegraph als Verkehrsmittel, Mit Erörterungen über den Nachrichten-

verkehr überhaupt (Tübingen: H. Laupp), p. 51.13

[12] B. Wities (1906) The Working Principle of Advertising. This is the first time this connection is

made.14

[13] V. Mataja (1926) Die Reklame: eine Untersuchung über Ankündigungswesen und Werbetätigkeit

im Geschäftsleben, 3rd edn (Munich: Duncker & Humblot).15

[14] Mataja (1910) quoted in Weisser (2002) Wirksam wirbt das Weib. Die Frau in der Werbung

(Bermen), p. 36.16

[15] H. Münsterberg (1912) Psychologie und Wirtschaftsleben: ein Beitrag zur angewandten Experi-

mental Psychologie (Leipzig: Johan Ambroisus Barth). On Münsterberg see P. Keller (1979)

States of Belonging: German-American intellectuals and the First World War (Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press); F. J. Landy (1992) Hugo Münsterberg: victim or visionary? Journal

of Applied Psychology, 77(6), pp. 787–802;17

[16] See H. Münsterburg (1914) Psychology and Industrial Efficiency (Boston: Mifflin). Münster-

berg’s papers are archived at the Boston Public Library.18

[17] H. Münsterburg (1912) Psychology and Economic Life (Leipzig: Johan Ambrosius Barth), p. 5.19

[18] H. Münsterberg (1906) Science and Idealism (New York), p. 164.20

[19] H. Münsterberg (1912) Psychology and Economic Life, p. 156.21

[20] P. Ruben & J. J Kaindl (Eds) (1914) Die Reklame, ihre Kunst und Wissenschaft (Berlin: Verlag

für Sozialpolitik, GMBH); R. Seyffert (1914) Die Reklame des Kaufmann (Leipzig).22

[21] The logic of spectatorship implied and activated in advertising psychology of the Weimar

period historicizes a notion of women’s participation in the visual sphere in so far as that

spectatorship was rendered as a primarily quantitative, psychological phenomenon in

response to successful visual appeals. As a record of thinking about spectatorship, then, early

advertising psychology reveals more general presuppositions about the status of gendered

spectral relationships to Weimar visual culture.23

[22] A point made all the more interesting by the virtual absence of psychoanalysis from advertis-

ing psychology. There were few exceptions to this and primarily in the late Weimar period;

see, for instance, F. M. Feller (1932) Psycho-Dynamik der Reklame (Bern: Verlag A. Francke).24

[23] E. Lysinski (1923) Psychologie des Betriebes: Beiträge zur Betriebsorganisation, (Berlin: Spaeth &

Linde), pp.168–170; 206–221; 217–220 and quoted in Reinhardt, Von der Reklame zum

Marketing, p. 93.25

[24] Ch. von Hartungen (1921) Psychologie der Reklame (Stuttgart: C. E. Poeschel), pp. 23–26.26

[25] Hartungen, Psychologie der Reklame, p. 36.27

[26] Reuveni reports that by 1928 there were 2000 advertising agencies in Germany. See G.

Reuveni (2001) Lesen und Konsum: der Aufstieg der Konsumkultur in Presse und Werbung

Deutschlands bis 1933, Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, 41, p. 107.28

[27] Despite the Weimar-era predilection for typologies, German advertising texts do not offer the

kind of ‘guidance’, that can be found in, for instance, the Australian publication The Draper of

Australasia, which classified women shoppers into types, for instance ‘Tabbies’, ‘managing

mother’, ‘bustling spinster’, etc. See G. Reekie (1991) Impulsive Women, Predictable Men,

Australian Historical Studies, 24(97), pp. 359–377.29

[28] See U. Frevert (1990) Women in German History (Oxford: Berg); A. Grossman (1983) The

New Woman and the Rationalization of Sexuality in Weimar Germany, in A. Barr Snitow, C.

Stansell & S. Thompson (Eds) Powers of Desire: the politics of sexuality (New York: Monthly

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636 D. Buerkle

Review Press); I. Guenther (2004) Nazi Chic: fashioning women in the Third Reich (Oxford:

Berg). While she is associated in German history primarily with the 1920s, her legacy in other

national contexts precedes the Weimar period by several decades. I am arguing that Jewish

women’s relationship to this figure is more complex than has previously been discussed.

Indeed, while it is generally acknowledged that the New Woman was coded Jewish, Jewish

women as subjects are left out of the scholarly discussion of the New Woman entirely; Claudia

Prestel’s work is a singular exception—and a qualified one since she redefines the term: ‘The

“New Jewish Woman” in Weimar Germany’, in P. Pulzer & W. Benz (Eds) (1998) Jews in the

Weimar Republic. Juden in der Weimarer Republik (Leo Baeck: Tübingen), pp. 135–156.30

[29] No comparable argument exists about the rendering of the housewife in visual culture. Yet an

argument could be made about the ways the Jewish woman is increasingly cast as ‘everything

but the housewife’.31

[30] Grossman, ‘The New Woman’. See Petro, Joyless Streets, for discussion of the ‘masculinized

woman’ in the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung (BIZ) and Die Dame.32

[31] Roberts, Review Essay: Gender, consumption and commodity culture, p. 819.33

[32] Prestel (1998) ‘The “New Jewish Woman” in Weimar Germany’.34

[33] Petro has argued that the popular women’s magazine, Die Dame, for example, ‘succeeded in

destabilizing both male and female iconography and thus in generating an image of gender

identity that was, to quote Doane, “manipulable, producible, and readable by the woman”

(Petro, Joyless Streets, p. 118).35

[34] D. Buerkle (2003) Real Women: missing women, in D. Blostein & P. Kleber (Eds) Mirror or

Mask: self-representation in the modern age (Berlin: Vistas), pp. 93–108.36

[35] H. Rost (1927) Bibliographie des selbstmords mit Textlichen Einführungen zu jedem Kapitel

(Augsburg: Haas & Grabherr), p. 32.37

[36] Certainly the Jewish woman and ‘Jewish fashions’ were named in other places as the harbinger

of fashions that corrupted German women: See, for instance, E. Salburg (1927) Die Entsittli-

chung der Frau durch die jüdische Mode, Völkischer Beobachter, 18, p. 5.38

[37] Gilman (1996) Salome, Syphilis, Sarah Bernhardt and the Modern Jewess, p. 97.39

[38] The conference version of this paper included images; this was not possible for the journal.40

[39] H. Ullstein (1935) Wirb und Werde: ein Lehrbuch der Reklame (Berlin: Verlag A. Francke).41

[40] J. Crary (1991) Techniques of the Observer: on vision and modernity in the nineteenth century

(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), p. 11.42

[41] L. Conor (2004) The Spectacular Modern Woman: feminine visibility in the 1920s (Blooming-

ton: Indiana University Press), pp. 8–16.43

[42] I am referring here specifically to the spectacle of the female, Jewish body in so far as she was

reproduced through visual technologies. As historians such as Marion Kaplan and Monika

Richarz have documented, Jewish women’s experience of the public sphere was mitigated by

the specificities of their responsibilities in the private realm. Jewish women’s organizations

addressed the charge that Jewish women should refrain from being too noticeable in public.

This tactic was considered relevant to a gender-specific defense against anti-Semitism but it is

also testimony to the incorporation of anti-Semitic stereotypes into Jewish rhetoric. See, for

instance, M. Oppenheimer (192) Innere Mission, Im Deutschen Reich, 26(11), November

1920; (1921) Mitteillungsblatt des Verbandes Nationaldeutscher Juden, 1, September; (1926)

Die Jüdin von Heute, Israelitisches Familienblatt, 28(27), 25 November.44

[43] Buerkle, ‘Real Women: missing women’.45

[44] P. Bourdieu (1991) Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press). This explanation of social death can also be found in Buerkle, ‘Real Women: missing

women’.46

[45] P. Bourdieu (2000) Masculine Domination (Stanford: Stanford University Press), p. 37.

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