Manuel Schramm offers an ambitious, suggestive, and wide-ranging study of how various consumer goods and practices became associated with a particular region during the last century and a quarter. As the book’s title suggests, Schramm places his monograph at the intersection of several large, growing, and increasingly interconnected fields of study: consumption, national identity, local and regional identity, and globalization. These fields reflect at least in part the institutional framework behind the creation of the book, which is a slightly revised version of Schramm’s 2001 dissertation written with support from the “Consumption and Region. Saxony and Bavaria 1890-1995” subproject within the “Regionally Related Processes of Identification” Special Research Area (Sonderforschungsbereich 417) at the University of Leipzig.1

Schramm defines his book’s primary contribution as linking and answering “questions from two previously separated areas of research, namely the history of consumption and research on regionalism and regional identification” (p. 11). Specifically, these questions are: “Which consumer goods or practices are seen as typical for a region and why? Are there different forms of regionally related consumption, and if so, which? Can one make out a development from 1880 to today, for example, the decrease or increase or change of reference to region? Which actors try to give consumer goods or practices a regional meaning? Finally: how (if at all) do consumer goods and practices contribute to identification with a region?” (p. 11) Schramm proposes to address these questions primarily through “the analysis of the assignment of meaning for individual goods through discourses and displays/productions [Inszenierungen] like exhibitions and festivals” (p. 12). His goal is to construct “a historical-systematic typology of regionalized consumption” (p. 12) and “to follow the processes of regionalization and identification over a longer time period” (p. 13).

After discussing the definitions and theoretical literature on his terms in chapter 1, Schramm provides 11 main case studies of consumer goods and practices in the next four chapters. Chapter 2 explores the display/production (Inszenierung) of Saxon consumption in public spaces by using the examples of industrial exhibitions, the Striezelmarkt in Dresden, and the Tag der Sachsen. Chapter 3 turns to types of food (coffee, cakes, and potatoes) and consumers’ nutritional habits that accurately or inaccurately became identified as typical for a specific region. Wooden toys from the Erzgebirge, Christmas traditions in the Erzgebirge, and traditional costumes (Trachten) are the main examples of the construction and marketing of “folk art” examined in chapter 4. Chapter 5 returns to questions surrounding the construction of “quality” discussed in chapter 1 by examining three consumer goods produced in Saxony: porcelain from Meißen, lace from Plauen, and automobiles from Zwickau. Chapter 6, the book’s conclusion, uses these diverse case studies to posit five “phases” of regionalization from 1880 to 2000, to briefly discuss the phenomenon of nostalgia for East Germany after 1990 (Ostalgie), and to identify four “historical-systematic types of regionalized consumption.”

The limited space available here precludes even a brief summary of Schramm’s findings on each of these individual topics and chapters, which are based on an impressive number and variety of archival and printed primary sources. The book’s empirical content, theoretical concerns, and methodologies reflect in part the eclectic, multi-disciplinary, but often inchoate scholarship on the history of consumption and regional identity in general. The source materials range from industrialists’ comments about the popular reception of their exhibitions to depictions of the stereotypical coffee-drinking and potato-eating Saxon in late-nineteenth-century of popular literature and cabaret. But this reader was often left wanting more in-depth, complex, and nuanced analyses in the case studies. For example, within the first 34 pages of chapter 1, Schramm examines five industrial exhibitions – in 1897, 1914, 1922-29, 1938, and 1945/46, respectively – as displays of Saxon quality. Here and throughout the book, the treatment of so many case studies in such limited space may contribute to Schramm’s goal of constructing “historical-systematic types” but inevitably entails glossing over the individual political, social, cultural, and economic contexts. The inclusion of so many case studies also means that Schramm often can only consider a relatively small number of perspectives in his efforts to discover the meanings assigned to various consumer goods and practices.

The number and variety of the book’s empirical case studies is matched by its theoretical ambitions and interpretive methodologies. This mixture sometimes results in the conflation of discourses about consumption with consumers’ actual practices. Although Schramm states that the book focuses on discourse analysis, he makes rather sweeping conclusions about actual “lifestyles” based primarily on market researchers’ statistics on large-scale consumption patterns. Perhaps most problematic are the book’s rather one-dimensional conceptions of the processes of consumption and identity production. Schramm tends to conclude that consumer goods and practices were “regionalized” primarily either by cultural elites, producers, and marketers (whom he calls “producers of meaning”) or by consumers through their practices and consumption of goods. The book contains virtually no analysis of the crucial and complex interaction between producers and consumers. Instead Schramm often conflates the assignment of a regional meaning to goods by producers with consumers’ actual identity.

The book’s title should have made the more modest claim of providing an examination of the production of meanings associated with a region rather than promising a study of “regional identity.” Similarly, readers will be disappointed if they expect the book to fulfill its subtitle’s promise to relate consumption and regionalization to the extremely complex processes of nationalization and globalization. The latter are mentioned only in brief theoretical discussions primarily in the introduction and the conclusion.

Schramm demonstrates that cultural elites and producers sometimes succeeded and sometimes failed in their attempts to have Saxons associate certain consumer goods and practices with Saxony or another region like East Germany. He also argues that consumers themselves contributed to the “regionalization” of other consumer goods and practices through their own practices. Schramm does a good job of tracing who produced and marketed selected stereotypes and associations between certain products and a region at various times since the late nineteenth century in Saxony. However, he did not persuade this reader that these stereotypes and products necessarily constitute part of the shared or individual identities of the region’s inhabitants. Moreover, the mechanisms through which meanings are created and assigned to commodities, the consequences of that process, and the relationship between regional, national, and global identity all remain unclear.

Sociologists may be more satisfied by the book’s construction of patterns and “types,” which may seem somewhat superficial, formulaic, and ahistorical to many historians. But regardless of any theoretical difficulties, the book’s four empirical chapters provide informed and concise mini-histories of interesting consumer goods and practices, many of which have not previously received scholarly attention. Schramm’s suggestive findings certainly raise interesting questions and provide helpful material for future research into the deeper implications of the connections between consumption and regional identity.

Note:
1 All translations from the German are my own.