Department stores in Germany like their predecessors in France Britain and the United States generated great excitement when they appeared at the end of the nineteenth century Their sumptuous displays abundant products architectural innovations and prodigious scale inspired widespread fascination and even awe at the same time however many Germans also greeted the rise of the department store with considerable unease In The Consuming Temple Paul Lerner explores the complex German reaction to department stores and the widespread belief that they posed hidden dangers both to the individuals especially women who frequented them and to the nation as a whole Drawing on fiction political propaganda commercial archives visual culture and economic writings Lerner provides multiple perspectives on the department store placing it in architectural gender historical commercial and psychiatric contexts Noting that Jewish entrepreneurs founded most German department stores he argues that Jews and Jewishness stood at the center of the consumer culture debate from the 1880s when the stores first appeared through the latter 1930s when they were Aryanized by the Nazis German responses to consumer culture and the Jewish question were deeply interwoven and the Jewish department store framed as an alternative and threatening secular temple a shrine to commerce and greed was held responsible for fundamental changes that transformed urban experience and challenged national traditions in Germany s turbulent twentieth century