Monarchy, Myth, and Material Culture in Germany 1750–1950

A fascinating study of how ordinary German subjects collected and consumed royal relics and memorabilia.

Eva Giloi (Author)

9780521761987, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 21 July 2011

452 pages, 35 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.5 cm, 0.77 kg

"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

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?

Subject Areas: Gender studies, gender groups [JFSJ], Social & cultural history [HBTB], Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 [HBLL], European history [HBJD]