Monarchy, Myth, and Material Culture in Germany 1750–1950 (New Studies in European History)
Cambridge University Press, 7/21/2011
EAN 9780521761987, ISBN10: 0521761980
Hardcover, 452 pages, 22.8 x 15.2 x 2.5 cm
Language: English
This innovative book illuminates popular attitudes toward political authority and monarchy in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Prussia and twentieth-century Germany. In a fascinating study of how subjects incorporated the material culture of monarchy into their daily lives, Eva Giloi provides insights into German mentalities toward sovereign power. She examines how ordinary people collected and consumed relics and other royal memorabilia, and used these objects to articulate, validate, appropriate, or reject the state's political myths. The book reveals that the social practices that guided the circulation of material culture - under what circumstances it was acceptable to buy and sell the queen's underwear, for instance - expose popular assumptions about the Crown that were often left unspoken. The book sets loyalism in the everyday context of consumerism and commodification, changes in visual culture and technology, and the emergence of mass media and celebrity culture, to uncover a self-possessed, assertive German middle class.
1. Introduction
the material culture of monarchy
2. Collecting royal relics, 1750s–1850s
means, motives, and meaning
3. Relics under Friedrich Wilhelm III, 1797–1830
4. Entr'acte
culture and power - a long-term outlook
5. Frederick the Great in the Vormärz
relics and myth, 1830s–1840s
6. The Neues museum, 1850s–1870s
relics in retreat
7. Wilhelm I
relics and myth
8. Consumerism and the gift-giving economy
9. The Hohenzollern museum
10. Image as object
the carte-de-visite photograph as souvenir
11. Wilhelm II and the Hohenzollern legacy
the Kaiser takes charge
12. The fragmentation of a myth after 1888
13. Conclusion and epilogue
the success of a dynasty?
"This important book presents a new understanding of popular ideas about the Prussian royal family. Giloi’s nuanced findings shed light on attitudes toward consumption, material cultures of the nineteenth century, and everyday life over a period from the 1700s to the early twentieth century." -Lisa Fetheringill Zwicker, The Journal of Modern History