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Eva Giloi, Sold! Advertising and the Bourgeois Female Consumer in Munich 1900–1914, German History, Volume 29, Issue 4, December 2011, Pages 654–655, https://doi.org/10.1093/gerhis/ghr035
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Munich 1900: the words conjure up a bright oasis of artistic production, of Thomas Mann and Franz Wedekind, art salons and artists’ cafés—Munich, the city of the muses (Musenstadt München), acting as an antidote to Imperial Berlin, the coldhearted ‘Chicago on the Spree’. Sold! demonstrates that even Munich, though, was drawn into the materialism of modern consumer culture. The book's scope is captured in its title: it examines advertising in Munich between 1900 and 1914, based on two local companies—Roeckl, a glove maker, and Loden-Frey, who specialized in outerwear—and two department stores, Kaufhaus Oberpollinger and Warenhaus Hermann Tietz. By investigating these firms’ marketing materials, Neve aims to show how advertising ‘constructed’ the female consumer. (Men, the working classes, adolescents and children do not figure here as consumers.)
Among the book's highlights are two persuasive analyses by Neve: first, how advertisers styled women as either sensible, budget-conscious housewives fulfilling their domestic duties, or as self-indulgent hedonists whose conspicuous consumption was partially excusable because it cemented the bourgeois family's social prestige; and second, how department stores used price lists, white sales and payment plans to appeal to the housewife's rationality, while covertly encouraging the hedonist's impulse-buying by setting out a phantasmagoria of goods, but also by offering entertainments in the hope that women would lose track of time, and then, in a rush to finish their shopping, would succumb to spontaneous over-buying.
