Critique Article

Journal of Contemporary History

2014, Vol. 49(4) 675–701

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DOI: 10.1177/0022009414538472

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Article

The Fortress Shop: Consumer Culture, Violence, and Security in Weimar Berlin

Molly Loberg California Polytechnic State University, USA

Abstract

Antisemitic attacks on shops are a well-known facet of the history of National Socialism.

But patterns of violence against commercial targets during the Weimar Republic are less

familiar. Widespread theft and vandalism initially corresponded with periods of emer-

gency, such as the Spartacist Revolt or Hyperinflation. By the early 1930s, looting

became a regular rather than an exceptional part of urban commercial life.

Shopkeepers and police officials struggled to comprehend and categorize these

crimes and to implement effective responses. By 1931, in the context of a general

breakdown in public security, the police promoted a fortified shop as the best means

for crime prevention. In contrast to ‘invisible’ security measures invented by department

stores to deter crime without inhibiting consumption, these measures made explicit a

defensive posture of the shop toward the street. Violence against shops shaped com-

mercial practices and policing tactics not only during the Weimar Republic but also

during the National Socialist era. As evidenced by the April 1933 Boycott, Nazi officials

strategically unleashed and contained public violence. In response, shopkeepers

struggled to comprehend and adapt old protections to new threats. More broadly, I

argue that attacks on shops reveal the precariousness of modern consumer culture and

how easily domestic unrest can destabilize its fundamental assumptions and practices.

Keywords

Berlin, boycott, consumer culture, looting, National Socialism, Weimar Republic

Corresponding author:

Molly Loberg, Department of History, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, CA 93407-

0324, USA.

Email: [email protected]

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In his 1927 film, Berlin: Symphony of the Big City, director Walter Ruttmann captured the transition of night to day with the lifting of protective iron shutters that exposed shop windows to the morning light.

1 This gesture revealed many

assumptions about the daily patterns and practices of urban commerce. The plate glass window was the shop owner’s single most expensive and most fragile investment. During the day, light fell through the glass, illuminated the interior, and reduced electricity costs. The transparency of the glass created a field of visual communication between shop and street. Window dressers developed elaborate schemes such as pyramids of abundant goods or dramatically staged mannequin tableaux to elicit and hold pedestrians’ gazes. But the gaze through the shop window went in the other direction as well. The window was the ‘eye of the shop.’

2 From this vantage point, shopkeepers observed the move-

ments of vehicles and pedestrians and anticipated the approach of potential customers.

Raising the protective barrier made the window useful, but it also rendered the shop vulnerable. This model of shop architecture took for granted a dynamic, peaceful street on the other side of the glass. Yet at several moments during the Weimar Republic, violent disturbances in Berlin’s public spaces erupted into shops through these windows. These instances initially coincided with states of emergency such as the Spartacist Revolt (January 1919), the March Unrest (March 1919), and the climax of Hyperinflation (October–November 1923). In the early 1930s, a wide- spread and prolonged wave of looting posed a less acute but more sustained threat to the practice of modern commerce. These lootings took place in almost every district of Greater Berlin but concentrated geographically within the urban core. Rather than occurring during a few tumultuous days or weeks, the lootings extended over a period of years and totaled in the hundreds. Moreover, the lootings did not take place within the context of political demonstrations. Instead, the perpetrators, usually groups of four to 20 young men between the ages of 15 and 25, emerged from and disappeared back into the ‘normal streetscape.’

3 Such

disturbances became part of the pattern of urban commerce rather than the exception.

How did the violence associated with Berlin streets during the Weimar Republic shape the practices of commerce and consumption? And how did commerce and consumption shape the violence of Berlin’s streets? This article brings together two key approaches in the study of the Weimar Republic often treated as distinct: the rise of modern consumer culture and the fragmentation and collapse of political authority. Scholars of Weimar culture have described the period as an extreme expression of capitalist modernity. They draw on texts from novelists, architects, journalists, and Frankfurt School theorists as guides to Berlin streets and

1 Berlin: die Sinfonie der Großstadt, directed by Walter Ruttmann (1927; Los Angeles, CA 1999), DVD. 2 ‘Schaufenster-Mörder,’ Die Reklame (April 1919), 78. 3 See, for example: Polizei Oberwachtmeister report, 2 December 1932, Landesarchiv Berlin (here- after: LAB) A Pr. Br. Rep 030, Nr. 7538.

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spectacles. 4 Through scholars’ and contemporaries’ descriptions of office buildings,

department stores, movie palaces, grand hotels, and traffic hubs, an urban land- scape emerges that appears designed to generate and manipulate crowds and their desires. Scholars of Weimar politics convey a noticeably different urban landscape populated by demonstrators, street fighters, and police.

5 A different source base –

newspapers, government reports, and party papers – informs these accounts. These two research areas remain insufficiently integrated both in terms of sources and narrative. Instead, they seem to describe two very different worlds or two separate chapters of German history.

6

The disassociation of urban consumer culture from street politics and violence mirrors broader historiographical trends. Historians of consumer culture have not extensively researched methods of security and surveillance.

7 Instead, desire has

dominated the narrative of consumer culture: the various means by which ‘produ- cers’ aroused the desire to purchase, the various resistances and demands that ‘consumers’ exercised against ‘producers,’ and, more recently in the historiography, the role of the state in mediating these interactions.

8 True, shopkeepers during

4 A. Gleber, The Art of Taking a Walk: Flanerie, Literature, and Film in Weimar Culture (Princeton, NJ 1999); J. Ward, Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany (Berkeley, CA 2001); D. Frisby, Cityscapes of Modernity: Critical Explorations (Cambridge 2001); S. Hake, Topographies of Class: Modern Architecture and Mass Society in Weimar Berlin (Ann Arbor, MI 2008). On consumer culture, urban space, and gender: P. Petro, Joyless Streets: Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimar Germany (Princeton, NJ 1989); K. von Ankum (ed.) Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture (Berkeley, CA 1997). 5 Some more recent examples include: E. Rosenhaft, Beating the Fascists?: the German Communists and Political Violence, 1929–1933 (Cambridge 1983); G. Paul, Aufstand der Bilder: die NS Propaganda vor 1933 (Bonn 1992); E. Weitz, Creating German Communism, 1890–1990: From Popular Protests to Socialist State (Princeton, NJ 1997); M.-L. Ehls, Protest und Propaganda: Demonstrationen in Berlin zur Zeit der Weimarer Republik (Berlin 1997); D. Blasius, Weimars Ende: Bürgerkrieg und Politik, 1930– 1933 (Göttingen 2005); P. Swett, Neighbors and Enemies: The Culture of Radicalism in Berlin, 1929–1933 (Cambridge 2007); D. Schumann, trans. T. Dunlap, Political Violence in the Weimar Republic: The Fight for the Streets and the Fear of Civil War, 1918–1933 (New York, NY 2009). 6 Synthetic works tend to separate these topics by chapter, e.g.: D. Peukert, trans. R. Deveson The Weimar Republic and the Crisis of Classical Modernity (New York, NY 1993); E. Weitz, Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (Princeton, NJ 2007); E. Kolb, Deutschland 1918–1933 (Munich 2010). The essential sourcebook has a similar thematic organization: A. Kaes, M. Jay, and E. Dimendberg (eds) The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (Berkeley, CA 1994). A recent synthetic work on European streetlife in the twentieth century similarly divides politics and culture into distinct chap- ters: L. Jerram, Streetlife: The Untold History of the Twentieth Century (Oxford 2011). 7 A few exceptions: E. Abelson, When Ladies Go A-Thieving: Middle-Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store (Oxford 1989); U. Spiekermann, ‘Theft and Thieves in German Department Stores, 1895–1930. A Discourse on Morality, Crime, and Gender,’ in G. Crossick and S. Jaumain (eds) Cathedrals of Consumption: The European Department Store, 1850–1939 (Aldershot 1999), 135–59. 8 P. Stearns, ‘Stages of Consumerism: Recent Work on the Issues of Periodization,’ The Journal of Modern History, 69, 1 (March 1997), 102–17. For historiographical essays on German consumer cul- ture: H. Siegrist, H. Kaelbe, and J. Kocka (eds) Europäische Konsumgeschichte: zur Gesellschafts- und Kulturgeschichte des Konsums (Frankfurt 1997); A. Confino and R. Koshar, ‘Regimes of Consumer Culture: New Narratives in Twentieth Century German History,’ German History, 19, 2 (2001), 135–61; K. Jarausch and M. Geyer, ‘In Pursuit of Happiness: Consumption, Mass Culture, and Consumerism,’ in Shattered Pasts: Reconstructing German Histories (Princeton, NJ 2002), ch. 10; and P. Lerner, ‘An All-Consuming History? Recent Works on Consumer Culture in Modern Germany,’ Central European History, 42, 3 (2009), 509–43.

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Weimar depended on heavy traffic and dynamic street scenes for business. They used tantalizing displays behind plate glass windows to kindle consumer desire. But, as this article reveals, shopkeepers also feared the violent potential of crowds and passersby, particularly in times of economic and political crisis, and the dan- gers of desire run amok.

Political and social historians have long studied violence against property, espe- cially as a target of collective action.

9 They have measured the scale and frequency

of such actions as an ‘index of social tension’ and situated these examples within larger histories of working-class protest. As part of these studies, historians com- monly cite a statistical decline in large-scale violent disturbances from the second half of the nineteenth century until the First World War, although they dispute whether the cause lay in the maturing and modernization of working-class politics, in increased interventions by authorities through both greater public assistance and more systematic repression, or simply in a temporary improvement in living stan- dards.

10 Regarding the Weimar period, historians have integrated lootings into the

dominant political narratives about the collapse of the Republic and the rise of National Socialism.

11 And yet lootings remain a somewhat awkward fit within

these narratives. After all, the targets of these actions were not explicitly political figures or sites but rather shops and their merchandise. If we as historians focus only on the potential motives of the perpetrators, we follow the investigatory lead of the police for whom solving the crime was the primary objective. We miss the opportunity to examine how the police and shopkeepers responded to threats against shops and how violence shaped the culture and practice of commerce and consumption.

9 Classic studies include: G. Rudé, The Crowd in History: A Study in Popular Disturbances in France and England 1730–1848 (New York, NY 1964); E.P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd,’ Past and Present, 50 (February 1971), 76–136; C., L., and R. Tilly, The Rebellious Century, 1830–1930 (Cambridge, MA 1975). 10 Subsequent studies confirm this overall pattern of limited incidents of mass collective violence in the last decades before the First World War even as they raise important exceptions with case studies. R. Evans, ‘‘‘Red Wednesday’’ in Hamburg: Social Democrats, Police, and Lumpenproletariat in the Suffrage Disturbances of 17 January 1906,’ Social History, 4, 1 (January 1979), 1–31; K. Tenfelde and H. Volkmann (eds) Streik: zur Geschichte des Arbeitskampfes in Deutschland während der Industrialisierung (Munich 1981); M. Gailus (ed.) Pöbelexzesse und Volkstumulte in Berlin: zur Sozialgeschichte der Straße, 1830–1980 (Berlin 1984); H. Volkmann and J. Bergmann (eds) Sozialer Protest: Studien zu traditioneller Resistenz und kollektiver Gewalt in Deutschland vom Vormärz bis zur Reichsgründung (Opladen 1984); R. Evans, Proletarians and Politics: Socialism, Protest, and the Working Class in Germany before the First World War (New York, NY 1990); M. Gailus and H. Volkmann, Kampf um das tägliche Brot: Nahrungsmangel, Versorgungspolitik und Protest, 1770–1990 (Opladen 1994). For the entire period 1850–1914 in Berlin, archival evidence shows roughly 30 isolated incidents in which crowds damaged persons and property. Reports from these events do not mention looting, with two important exceptions: riots in the working-class districts of Wedding and Moabit in 1892 and again in 1910. Beginning in 1918, however, the number of reported cases of damages from crowds and unrest rose exponentially. LAB A Rep 000-02-01, Nr. 462, 1648, 1649. Also: Bundesarchiv Berlin (hereafter: BArch) R1501/116424-116439. 11 Schumann, Political Violence in the Weimar Republic, 1, 11–16; Weitz, Creating German Communism, 160–87; Swett, Neighbors and Enemies, 195–6; M. Schartl, ‘Ein Kampf ums nackte Überleben: Volkstumulte und Pöbelexzesse als Ausdruck des Aufbegehrens in der Spätphase der Weimarer Republik,’ in Gailus (ed.) Pöbelexzesse und Volkstumulte in Berlin, 142–3.

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This alternative perspective shows us that the Weimar period distinguished itself not by violence against property but rather by the collision of a modern commer- cial landscape with a period of extreme and extended political and economic unrest. Looters during the Weimar Republic did not move through the same kinds of spaces as the food rioters of the early nineteenth century. During the period of comparatively peaceful streets from roughly the 1850s to the First World War, a remarkable commercial transformation had taken place.

12 Cities expanded at an

exponential rate. The population of Berlin alone rose from 824,484 to 2,029,852 between 1871 and 1914.

13 Commerce increasingly moved indoors with a significant

rise in the number of shops and enclosure of many public markets in the glass and iron structures of centralized market halls. Commercial practices adapted to serve a more massified public. Plate glass, first manufactured at a reasonable cost in the 1840s, found regular use in commercial architecture by the turn of the century. Advertising, in particular the alluring displays in shop windows, supplemented and even supplanted intimate consultations with customers. Department stores and chain stores, which came to Germany in the final decades of the nineteenth century, exemplified such practices. But even small shops standardized and depersonalized relations with fixed prices and service by employees rather than owners. Such innovations in shop architecture and business practices set the stage and deter- mined the tactics of looters in the Weimar period: the easy accessibility of goods, the anonymous escape, and the fearsome crash of shattered glass.

Violence against shops and their defenses, therefore, offers means to integrate and complicate the spaces of commerce and politics.

14 Most significantly, I argue

that the attacks on shops revealed the precariousness of modern consumer culture and how easily domestic unrest could destabilize its fundamental assumptions and practices. Modern shop design depended on political and economic stability and secure public space. Extensive crime and political unrest forced officials and shop- keepers to consider a more fortified commercial sphere, but they approached the problem from different angles and this divergence widened in the final years the Republic. Police argued for a defensive rather than seductive positioning of the shop to the street. Shopkeepers pressed for a greater occupation of public space

12 On this transformation in Germany: U. Spiekermann, Basis der Konsumgesellschaft: Entstehung und Entwicklung des modernen Kleinhandels in Deutschland, 1850–1914 (Munich 1999), W. Schivelbusch, trans. A. Davies, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, CA 1995), 146; A. Artley, The Golden Age of Shop Design: European Shop Interiors, 1880–1939 (New York, NY 1976); D. Reinhardt, Von der Reklame zum Marketing: Geschichte der Wirtschaftswerbung in Deutschland (Berlin 1993), 435–41. For transnational comparisons: Crossick and Jaumain (eds) Cathedrals of Consumption; M. Miller, Bon Marche: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869–1920 (Princeton, NJ 1981); R. Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth Century France (Berkeley, CA 1982); P. Nord, Paris Shopkeepers and the Politics of Resentment (Princeton, NJ 1984), ch. 2; W. Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of New American Culture (New York, NY 1994); E.D. Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End (Princeton, NJ 2000). 13 H. Silbergleit, Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Berlin (Berlin 1920), 4–5. 14 For more on integrating the spaces of politics and commerce as well as the precariousness of modern consumer culture: M. Loberg, ‘The Streetscape of Economic Crisis: Politics, Commerce, and Urban Space in Interwar Berlin,’ The Journal of Modern History, 85, 2 (June 2013), 364–402.

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and greater protection of shops by security forces. Proposals for surveillance and security, as well as the crucial question of how to pay for these, evolved according to shopkeepers’ and police officials’ understanding of the specific nature of the threat. Such understandings were neither static nor abstract but rather embedded in historical circumstances and informed by memories of previous violent encoun- ters. Therefore, the violence that defined the contours of the Weimar commercial landscape also shaped the Nazi regime’s attacks against Jewish-owned shops as well as shopkeepers’ efforts at defense, as demonstrated by the example of the April Boycott of 1933. And yet, as experiences of the Weimar Republic and early Nazi period would prove, neither the older seductive nor the newer defensive model of commercial space could withstand a sustained period of economic and political instability.

During its brief run in 1920 and 1921, the Berlin magazine, Self-Defense, harkened back to a more innocent time before 1914 when shopkeepers left display windows illuminated and uncovered at night and simply trusted Berliners’ honesty.

15 In a

1921 article entitled ‘Display Windows: For Burglars Only,’ the author lamented the contrast of the secure past to the anxious present. ‘Today the windows are outfitted with fantastic security apparatuses. They are covered with thick, overhead iron bars as if they were lion cages,’ he wrote. Shopkeepers hung warning signs in their display windows for would-be burglars: ‘Self-firing Guns!’ Liquor stores still aroused thirst with fantastic pyramids of champagne bottles, but signs in bold red letters read: ‘ATTENTION! BOTTLES EMPTY!’ and diminished the effect. Likewise did the signs below hams and sausages in butchers’ shops stating: ‘MADE OF WOOD!’ or ‘MADE OF CARDBOARD.’ Daring shopkeepers slept in windows to prevent thefts. As a response to heightened insecurity, shop- keepers designed display windows that treated passersby not only as potential customers but also as potential criminals.

Nostalgia, heightened by the rupture of wartime experiences both on the battle- field and the home front, undoubtedly colored the author’s memory of the safety of Berlin’s pre-war streets and the openness of its commerce. Despite the appearance of accessibility, modern shop design had always incorporated security features, but these features were tailored to milder expectations of crime, namely shoplifting and nocturnal break-ins. Department stores cultivated the sensual experience of shop- ping through the perceived proximity of goods. The ubiquitous use of glass, how- ever, served a dual function: it created the illusion of openness but a barrier to touch. Mirrors, like transparent glass, were security measures in disguise.

16 They

gave impressive dimensions to stores but also provided shop assistants a means to watch customers in secluded corners. In smaller shops, the sales counter obstructed the customer’s reach toward more expensive goods on display. At night, a time of

15 ‘Schaufenster, nur für Einbrecher,’ Selbstschutz: einzige Fachzeitschrift für die Sicherheit von Person und Eigentum (1 July 1921). 16 Abelson, When Ladies Go A-Thieving, ch. 3.

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particular anxiety for shop owners, security measures became more visible. In prime districts, electric lighting advertised shops but also broke the cover of darkness.

17 Elsewhere locks, iron shutters, private security personnel, and warn-

ing signs about vicious dogs deterred break-ins. 18

Private security measures proved insufficient, however, for a postwar atmosphere of political violence and economic insecurity. Measures originally designed to thwart occasional shoplifters and nighttime burglars failed to suppress crime waves or deter belligerent crowds. Property crime rates across Germany rose in the final years of the war and peaked in 1923.

19 These statistics included common

crimes such as break-ins and robberies. But many of these crimes occurred in the context of political disturbances, food uprisings, and a general breakdown in public security, all of which plagued Germany in the postwar period and magnified the scale of destruction and theft. From small towns such as Aachen and Gotha to major urban areas such as Cologne and Munich, thousands of shopkeepers reported looting and damage by crowds, whose numbers and agitated state obscured the identity of individual perpetrators.

20 Replacement of shattered display windows

was the shopkeepers’ greatest cost, especially as glass prices spiked. Because of inflation and sudden demand, many glass companies refused payment in any cur- rency other than US dollars by 1923.

21 In the early period of the Weimar Republic,

incidents in Berlin exemplified broader patterns of property crime. And because so many political authorities, parties, professional associations, and newspapers main- tained their headquarters in the capital, the visible and visceral experience of its streets necessarily shaped their perceptions of the problems of the day. In the midst of the Spartacist Revolt in January 1919, a crowd looted a clothing store in the Mitte district of Berlin. For weeks afterward, suits, fur coats, women’s gloves, and umbrel- las found their way onto the black market.

22 On the evening of March 4, at the

beginning of the so-called ‘March Unrest,’ a parade of demobilized soldiers fresh from protesting at Alexanderplatz mingled with a crowd that had been dancing in the streets to the music of a hurdy-gurdy.

23 Together they tore the protective iron

shutters from a clock and jewelry shop and demolished its interior. Police estimated the losses and damages at this store, one of many looted in those weeks, at over 100,000 marks. As inflation reached its climax in 1923, crowds demonstrated, broke display windows, robbed bakeries, and raided public markets.

24

17 ‘Die Unsicherheit in Groß-Berlin,’ Selbstschutz (1 December 1920). 18 J. Schlör, trans. P.G. Imhof and D. Rees Roberts, Nights in the Big City: Paris, Berlin, London, 1840–1930 (London 1998), 71–91. 19 For a thorough listing and discussion of these statistics, see: P. Wagner, Volksgemeinschaft ohne Verbrecher: Konzeptionen und Praxis der Kriminalpolizei in der Zeit der Weimarer Republik und des Nationalsozialismus (Hamburg 1996), 28–42. 20 BArch R1501/116424-116439. 21 Reichskommissar für Aufruhrschäden to Reichsminister des Innern, 5 October 1923, BArch R1501/116439. 22 ‘Böttcher u.a. wegen Hehlerei, 1919,’ LAB A Rep 358-01, Nr. 493. 23 ‘Siebert u.a. wegen Plünderung eines Uhrengeschäftes,’ LAB A Rep 358-01, Nr. 321; see also, LAB A Rep 358-01, Nr. 500. 24 For 1923 cases, see: LAB A Rep 358-01, Nr. 402, 404, 924.

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The state’s traditional defenses against violence in public space and protec- tions for property foundered. Police appeared unable or unwilling to manage the revolutionary context to the satisfaction of the diverse citizenry of Berlin. The faith of conservatives in the imperial police plummeted after officers’ abandonment of the streets during the 1918 revolution.

25 The republican

police force too became suspect in January 1919 with the dismissal of the new Independent Socialist police chief on charges of corruption, an event which sparked the Spartacist Revolt. Those loyal to the Republic resented the inaction of the heavily armed security police units during the right-wing Kapp Putsch in 1920. In reaction to police shortfalls in times of unrest, militias recruited particularly in middle-class Berlin neighborhoods.

26 The

Prussian Ministry of the Interior sanctioned such groups until Versailles nego- tiations prohibited them.

27 During their brief existence, militia groups did not

eagerly risk confrontations. Nevertheless, the recruitment of militias reveals a clear skepticism among citizens toward government capacities. In the early 1920s, a restructured and augmented police force deployed special brigades to combat surges in looting and to cordon off areas of disturbance.

28

Despite the guarantee of freedom of assembly in the Weimar Constitution, police and higher authorities limited or suspended this right for 43 per cent of the period of the Republic.

29 Such expansive bans show that authorities did

not trust ordinary police means to contain demonstrations and provide ade- quately for ‘security and order’ at moments of heightened political and eco- nomic tension. Because of security failures, suspect political loyalties, and international pressures, the police underwent constant reorganization in the early Weimar era. The early disarray of the police set the tone for shop- keepers’ attitudes throughout the period: they resented state failures to main- tain order and the consequent increased responsibilities and rising costs of private security.

Unwilling to rely fully on public institutions for protection, shopkeepers adapted their own established security techniques to new crisis experiences. During episodes of domestic unrest, shopkeepers followed essentially the same procedure as for the regular nighttime closing of shops but did so in broad

25 P. Lessmann-Faust, Die preußische Schutzpolizei in der Weimarer Republik: Streifendienst und Straßenkampf (Düsseldorf 1989); R. Bessel, ‘Policing, Professionalization, and Politics in Weimar Germany,’ in C. Emsley and B. Weinberger (eds) Policing Western Europe: Professionalism and Public Order, 1850–1940 (New York, NY 1991); J. Buder, Die Reorganisation der preußischen Polizei, 1918–1923 (Frankfurt am Main 1986); Hsi-Huey Liang, The Berlin Police Force in the Weimar Republic (Berkeley, CA 1970). 26 For a list of Berlin recruitment centers, see: BArch R 43 I/2729; LAB Plakatsammlung F Rep 260- 01, A 0052. But such groups also failed to master the security situation and seldom willingly risked violent encounters, according to Schumann, Political Violence in the Weimar Republic, 25. 27 D. Clay Large, The Politics of Law and Order: A History of the Bavarian Einwohnerwehr (Philadelphia, PA 1980), 66. 28 ‘Die Berliner Polizei. Schnelle Hilfe bei Gefahr,’ Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, 19 November 1922, in BArch R 8034/4452. 29 Ehls, Protest und Propaganda, 226.

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daylight: they locked up and, when possible, left the area. 30

They used security barriers such as metal shutters and gates to make shops as impenetrable as possible. Market vendors sold goods through small gaps in their shutters.

31 Some shop-

keepers invested in more technologically sophisticated burglar alarms or sturdier window coverings such as the so-advertised ‘Revolution Rolling Walls.’

32

According to a 1923 review in the Berliner Tageblatt, the new invention protected against gun shots and clawing mobs better than the older iron blinds first developed to foil nighttime break-ins. Such products advertised themselves not only as secur- ity against criminal elements but as bulwarks against politicized crowds. Shopkeepers petitioned the state for direct monetary compensation for its security failures and, when these petitions failed, invested in private insurance products such as the new riot insurance that covered damages exempted by traditional theft and fire policies.

33 As an ominous precursor to tactics used a decade later,

some shopkeepers during the riots of 1923 pre-emptively used signs in the display window to distinguish their shops as a ‘Christian Business’ from the presumed ‘Jewish’ businesses around them.

34 Thus, shopkeepers developed a set of emergency

tactics during the early postwar period. These tactics addressed intense but rela- tively short outbursts of political unrest and assumed failures by public security forces. But such solutions were temporary. Modern commerce, premised on stable public space, could not function in an atmosphere of persistent agitation.

An examination of a single day of incidents in the late Weimar Republic reveals the ineffectiveness of these emergency tactics during extended periods of wide- spread yet diffuse insecurity and crime. Property crime rates, especially for theft, dropped across Germany with economic stabilization in the mid-1920s.

35 The

incident numbers, however, climbed by the thousands each year in cities with the onset of the Great Depression in 1929 and with spiraling unemployment. Window smashing during demonstrations and aggressive boycotts, which police and shop- keeper associations usually attributed to rising political tensions, amplified the sense of commercial insecurity.

36 In this context, 3 June 1931 was a bad

though not exceptional day in Berlin. At approximately 10 a.m., the sound of

30 ‘Arbeitslosenkrawalle im Zentrum Berlins,’ Berliner Tageblatt und Handelszeitung (16 October 1923); ‘Die Teuerungsdemonstrationen in Berlin,’ Berliner Tageblatt und Handelszeitung (17 October 1923); see photographs of the arrests after the November 1923 Scheunenviertel riots in: G. Feldman, The Great Disorder: Politics, Economics and Society in the Germany Inflation, 1914–1924 (Oxford 1997), 781. 31 Dr. Gaupp, ‘Markthallenpsychose. Zur Psychologie der Teuerungskrawalle,’ Berliner Tageblatt und Handelszeitung (8 August 1923), BArch R 8034/4452. 32 S. Nelken, ‘Schutzvorrichtungen für Schaufenster,’ Berliner Tageblatt und Handelszeitung (22 November 1923), section ‘Technische Rundschau.’ 33 G. Feldman, Allianz and the German Insurance Business (Cambridge 2001), 3; also BArch R 1501/ 116424-116431. 34 D. Walter, Antisemitische Kriminalität und Gewalt: Judenfeindschaft in der Weimarer Republic (Bonn 1999), 153. 35 Wagner,Volksgemeinschaft ohne Verbrecher, 33–42. 36 ‘Der Berliner Einzelhandel wehrt sich,’ Der Konfektionär (16 October 1930); ‘Boykott von Geschäft aus parteipolitischen Gründen,’ Lebensmittel-Zeitung: Generalanzeiger für Lebensmittel (31 August 1932).

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glass crashing onto the street disturbed the usual heavy traffic around Alexanderplatz.

37 Seconds later, witnesses observed a group of young men running

from the scene of shattered display windows and jumping into a taxi, which van- ished into the stream of traffic. Throughout the day, teletype messages about further disturbances came over the wire to police headquarters. Looting bands elsewhere in the city had become more violent. At midday in the north of Berlin, a female shop assistant who tried to intervene was knocked to the ground.

38

A gathering crowd in the Mitte district beat, kicked, and stabbed a police officer trying to make an arrest. Towards evening, bike-riding vandals broke more store windows near City Hall. During the night, members of the Nazi paramilitary SA marauded down the main shopping streets in West Berlin calling out ‘Jews out of Germany!’ and physically harassing pedestrians.

39 One of the SA men waved a gun.

On the following day, newspapers placed the diverse and geographically dis- persed actions within a recognizable pattern of extremist street politics perpetrated by the National Socialists (NSDAP) and the Communists (KPD).

40 Several news-

papers characterized window smashing as a typical Nazi tactic. Others suspected KPD agitation among the unemployed, who demonstrated near town hall against Chancellor Brüning’s austerity measures and especially against sharp benefit cuts. The KPD paper, Die Rote Fahne, emphasized widespread desperate conditions and drew connections to similar protests in Düsseldorf and Hamburg with the headline: ‘Hunger Revolts Everywhere.’

41 But several of the lootings on 3 June suggested an

emerging pattern of attacks with no direct connection to open-air demonstrations and no explicit link to party politics. And this is precisely what made them so disconcerting and uncontrollable. These lootings typically occurred during high traffic hours, at midday and at closing time, when shops expected to do their best business. Police reports described how perpetrators rushed the shop at an opportune moment, executed a looting within minutes, and then disappeared in plain sight. Rather than disrupt the street scene as a show of political power, these looters hid in well-lit and heavily trafficked streets. The lootings that occurred in Berlin in the early 1930s, thus, had a particularly modern and urban quality. Rather than the disorder of a demonstration, the looters relied on the anonymity of the big city and the geographic dispersion of chain grocery stores to obscure their identities and enable their escape.

37 ‘Scheibe zerkrache! Sturm auf Schaufenster—Die neueste Form des Kampfes,’ Der Abend (3 June 1931); police memo ‘Beabsichtigte Erwerbslosenkundgebung,’ 3 June 1931, in file LAB A Pr. Br. Rep 030, Nr. 7538. 38 ‘Krawalle in Zentrum. Fenster-Sturm und Geschäftsplünderung,’ Berliner Tageblatt und Handelszeitung (4 June 1931). 39 ‘Hakenkreuzler-Pöbeleien am Kurfürstendamm,’ Berliner Tageblatt und Handelszeitung (4 June 1931). 40 Der Abend and Berliner Tageblatt und Handelszeitung linked breaking windows to Nazi tactics. Der Tag, Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, and Vossische Zeitung assumed that com- munist ‘wire pullers’ stood behind these actions. 41 ‘Hungerrevolte überall,’ Die Rote Fahne (9 June 1931).

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As so many looters escaped with their identities unknown, perceptions of the perpetrators became the basis for interpreting the attacks and strategizing pre- ventative measures. Shopkeepers and the police turned their eyes to the crowds. Their perspective reveals a different kind of urban gaze than the dispassionate, voyeuristic, and aimless viewpoint of the flâneur, often described by cultural historians as the archetypal mode of visually engaging the modern city.

42

Instead, it was a purposeful assessment of potential danger: reading urban inhabitants as they passed before the windows, stood at corners, or entered stores to deduce their capacities and intentions to loot or to shop. And yet such predictions depended on fleeting impressions amidst an urban environment largely defined by anonymity and distraction. The police engaged the street primarily as managers of traffic, and their duties to prevent accidents and to notice suspicious behavior conflicted. Similarly, customers busied shop assistants and kept them close to their counters. Advertisements, street hawkers, and loiterers obstructed the view of the street. Thus, glimpses of the looters’ bodies and snatches of a few terse words served as the basis to comprehend and categorize these attacks. These interpretations then determined police tactics and shop security.

Reports fixated on the gender of the perpetrators. Because of starkly perceived differences in men’s and women’s public roles as well as in their respective capa- cities for violence, this category struck observers as particularly significant for interpreting crime. An entrenched discourse held that women stole spontaneously out of psychological, physiological, or moral weakness rather than out of conscious intent and rational planning. From the late nineteenth century through the 1920s, the female kleptomaniac – typically a respectable, married, middle-class woman shoplifting in a department store – became a prevalent figure in medical and psychological studies as well as popular narratives and jokes.

43 In the contempor-

ary discourse, theft was a pathological extension of women’s role as shoppers. Kleptomaniacs, according to physicians and psychologists, shoplifted in a state of biological excitation brought on by menstruation, pregnancy, menopause, or frustrated sexual desire. Small shopkeepers, too, accused department stores of preying on women’s moral as well as biological frailty with sensual temptations. Police officials and journalists deployed similar psychological and biological para- digms to explain mob actions by working-class women during the Meat Revolt of

42 For the classic description of the flâneur: W. Benjamin, trans. H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin, R. Tiedemann (ed.) The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA 1999); for more recent scholarly studies, see: S. Buck-Morss, Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA 1989); A. Gleber, The Art of Taking a Walk; David Frisby, Cityscapes of Modernity: Critical Explorations (Cambridge 2001). 43 For the United States of America: Abelson, When Ladies Go A-Thieving. For Germany: U. Spiekermann, ‘Theft and Thieves in German Department Stores, 1895–1930’; P. Lerner, ‘Consuming Pathologies: Kleptomania, Magazinitis, and the Problem of Female Consumption in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany,’ WerkstattGeschichte, 42 (2006), 46–56. For France: M.B. Miller, The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869-1920 (Princeton, NJ 1981), 197–206.

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1912, the First World War, and the Hyperinflation. 44

But, they ascribed a different emotional spectrum to these acts: desperation to feed their families and rage at the long lines, high prices, and insults of shopkeepers. According to the prevailing view, women regardless of class stole as frustrated shoppers rather than as wanton criminals or political agitators.

Looters during the late Weimar Republic were almost exclusively male. Because men’s presence in shops ran counter to assumed gender roles, an interpretation of male looters as desperate shoppers found little resonance. An unsourced but fre- quently cited statistic held that women made 85 per cent of all purchases.

45 But

practices changed faster than the common wisdom. Rising unemployment in the early 1930s turned shopping into an increasingly male responsibility.

46 Novels such

as Hans Fallada’s Little Man, What Now? (1932) thematized harassment of unem- ployed male shoppers as undesirable intruders in an established consumer land- scape.

47 In the final scenes of the novel, a policeman mistakes the protagonist

Pinneberg for a potential looter as he tries to buy bananas for his young son. For the unemployed Pinneberg, the shame of public harassment pushes him to the edge of despair and, ironically, toward the camps of notorious window- smashers, either the Communists or the Nazis. Witness testimony from looting cases confirms widespread suspicion of men’s presence around and in shops. As an example from a 1931 looting in the Prenzlauer Berg district, an eyewitness identified a male shopper as a looter but later recanted with the excuse that the accused bore a ‘deceptive similarity’ to one of the young male perpetrators.

48

Whereas police accepted thefts by women as spontaneous, reports overwhel- mingly characterized male lootings in the early 1930s as ‘planned’ or ‘systematic’ and, thus, ‘political.’ In other words, the young men were not shopping or standing in line when the impulse to loot overwhelmed them, rather they approached the

44 Police reports and journalistic accounts of these incidents suggested that women goaded men into action or that a female agitator spurred on other women to loot. Nevertheless, descriptions generally remained sympathetic because of the presumed political innocence of women and perhaps identification with their material struggles. T. Lindenberger, ‘Die Fleischrevolte am Wedding. Lebensmittelversorgung und Politik in Berlin am Vorabend des Ersten Weltkriegs,’ in Gailus and Volkmann (eds) Der Kampf um das tägliche Brot, 283–304; B. Davis, Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin (Chapel Hill, NC 2000); Dr. Schneikert, ‘Frauen als Anstifterin von Verbrechen,’ Berliner Tageblatt und Handelszeitung (29 October 1918); D. Goebeler, ‘Die Teuerung,’ Berliner Hausfrau (5 August 1923); Dr. Gaupp, ‘Markhallenpsychose. Zur Psychologie der Teuerungskrawalle,’ Berliner Tageblatt und Handelszeitung (8 August 1923), BArch Berlin, R 8034/4452; ‘Unruhen in Berlin und im Reich,’ Die Zeit (14 October 1923). 45 J. Sneeringer, ‘The Shopper as Voter: Women, Advertising, and Politics in Post-inflation Germany,’ German Studies Review, 27, 3 (2004), 487, 499; A. Hertz, ‘Reklamespaziergang mit einer Frau,’ Die Reklame, (June 1928), 335; M. Jecker, ‘Werbung und Verbraucherschaft,’ Die Reklame, (March 1932), 193; ‘Damen oder Herren als Verkäufer,’ Die Reklame, (June 1928), 458; C. Meithner, ‘Die Frau als Käuferin und Verkäuferin,’ Die Reklame, (January 1929), 55. 46 K. Hagemann, Frauenalltag und Männerpolitik: Alltagsleben und gesellschaftliches Handeln von Arbeiterfrauen in der Weimarer Republik (Hamburg 1990), 90–2; M. Jahoda, P. Lazarsfeld, and H. Zeisel, Marienthal: The Sociography of an Unemployed Community (1933, 1971; New Brunswick, NJ 2010), 67–73; Swett, Neighbors and Enemies, 82–7. 47 H. Fallada, Kleiner Mann, Was Nun? (1932; Hamburg 1994), 299–300. 48 Witness report, 20 October 1931, LAB A Rep 358-01, Nr. 1027.

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store with the intention to loot. Reports highlighted signs of premeditation and coordination: a timed approach, a gang leader, a division of labor, the use of look- outs, sacks to carry goods, and bicycles as getaway vehicles. Precinct officials admitted, for example, that a patrol had passed by a store only five minutes before it was attacked: ‘It seems that the youths, who later invaded the shop, waited for the departure of the patrol from under good cover.’

49

Although these attacks were relatively unsophisticated, especially when com- pared with the spectacular robberies by gentlemen cat burglars and criminal orga- nizations that filled the tabloids of the time, the police took these common tactics not only as clear signs of premeditation but of a larger political conspiracy, most likely instigated by the KPD. The police admitted that they had no direct evidence of such a connection but nevertheless anticipated that the arrest and interrogation of the looters would lead back to this ‘center.’

50 Such interpretations meshed well

with the traditional assumptions and tactics of the detective division responsible for looting investigations, the Political Police. Established in the aftermath of the 1848 revolution, the Political Police suppressed democratic and socialist agitation through press censorship and control of associational life in imperial Germany.

51 After the 1918 revolution, the coalition government, including the

formerly-targeted Democrats and Social Democrats, reformed the division to target subversion against the Republic from the extreme right and left within a newly constituted political spectrum.

52 But tactics did not change significantly: the

Political Police inspected and banned publications, infiltrated working-class mili- eus, monitored demonstrations, and hired informants as a way to uncover subver- sive networks.

53

To insist upon an interpretation of the attacks as premeditated and political, the Political Police dismissed the looters’ own explanation for the crime: hunger. Looters typically announced their purpose with phrases like ‘We are hungry!’ or ‘Don’t be afraid, we’re hungry, we don’t want money.’ They stole bread, sausage, bacon, chocolate, sardines, and other foodstuffs but seldom cash. Moreover, gath- ering crowds regularly sympathized with the looters and their motives, physically intervened to aid their escape, and verbally abused arresting officers with shouts such as: ‘Let them go’ and ‘They’re hungry!’

54 Looters invoked hunger as a legal

defense. Two youths, arrested for looting amid the street violence of 3 June 1931, denied any participation in the demonstrations of that day or a political motive.

49 113 R. to Si. Kb., 2 November 1931, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep 030, Nr. 7538. 50 S1a, ‘Dienstanweisung für z.b.V. Beamte, 6 July 1931, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep 030, Nr. 7538. 51 A. Funk, Polizei und Rechtsstaat: die Entwicklung des staatlichen Gewaltmonopols in Preußen, 1848– 1918 (Frankfurt am Main 1986), 67. 52 Liang, The Berlin Police in the Weimar Republic, 6. 53 Funk, Polizei und Rechtsstaat, 257–60; R. Wilms, Politische Polizei und Sozialdemokratie im Deutschen Kaiserreich: zur Tätigkeit der politischen Polizei in der Provinz Hannover von der Zeit der Reichsgründung bis zum Ende des Sozialistengesetzes 1871–1890 (Frankfurt am Main 1992), 79–80; Ehls, Protest und Propaganda, 399. 54 Kriminalassistent Mehwald, 20 October 1931, LAB A Rep 358-01, Nr. 1027.

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They claimed that they accidentally happened upon a group of looters, followed out of ‘curiosity,’ and stole food because of ‘hunger.’

55

True, such justifications served a practical purpose: ‘theft of food’ (Mundraub) carried a lighter sentence than ‘violation of the public peace’ (Landfriedensbruch), the usual charge for looting. But it is striking that police insisted that in such cases hunger and politics were mutually exclusive motives. Whereas police had accepted desperation and rejected politics as a motive for female looters during the 1912 Meat Revolt, the First World War, and the Hyperinflation, they rejected this possibility for male looters during the period of the Great Depression – even as these crimes typically occurred in working-class neighborhoods and near unem- ployment offices. The Political Police saw in the choice of target, grocery stores, political theater rather than a genuine reflection of need. In other words, the looters wanted to make a statement that the population suffered desperately from hunger even as the looters themselves did not. As they read newspapers such as Die Rote Fahne or Vorwärts, police furiously scribbled exclamation points and question marks over sympathetic portrayals of the looters.

56 On the scene, they scanned

the bodies of looters for indications of class. One officer who witnessed an escape by looters noted their clothing, bicycle, and backpack as well as their apparent health as marks of ‘a certain prosperity.’

57 He concluded:

It was the work of an organized gang, which carries out lootings either for party

political reasons or in order to prevent any deprivations in their spoiled lifestyle.

The desperation, always credited to these people as an excuse, was not visible on a

single perpetrator.

Later scholars have noted affinities between the actions of looters and the attitudes of the KPD leadership.

58 They have not doubted the membership of some looters

in KPD organizations. But they generally dismiss the notion that the leadership directed such actions from above. For the longer history of protest in Germany, scholars have argued for a more expansive and more nuanced view of politics that includes the concerns of daily life, that accepts the possibility of multiple and blurred motives behind actions, and that does not see party membership as a prerequisite for political interest and influence.

59 Indeed, memoirs recall the fluid

55 ‘Schwere Strafen gegen Lebensmittelplünderer,’ Vossische Zeitung (20 June 1931), LAB A Pr. Br. Rep 030, Nr. 7538. 56 Clippings marked by S1a: ‘Überfälle auf Lebensmittelgeschäfte,’ Vorwärts (2 June 1931); ‘Sturm auf Lebensmittelläden,’ Die Rote Fahne (2 July 1931), LAB A Pr. Br. Rep 030, Nr. 7538. 57 Kriminalassistent Mehwald, 20 October 1931, LAB A Rep 358-01, Nr. 1027. 58 Schumann, Political Violence in the Weimar Republic, 1, 11–16; Weitz, Creating German Communism, 160–87; Swett, Neighbors and Enemies, 195–6; M. Schartl, ‘Ein Kampf ums nackte Überleben,’ 142–3. 59 For the pre-war period, see T. Lindenberger, Straßenpolitik: zur Geschichte der öffentlichen Ordnung in Berlin 1900 to 1914 (Bonn 1995), ch. 1. For the First World War see Davis, Home Fires Burning, 93. For the lootings in the early 1930s, see P. Steege, ‘Staging a Revolution: Political Struggle ‘‘betwixt and between’’ in Weimar Era Berlin,’ in B. Davis, T. Lindenberger and M. Wildt (eds) Alltag, Erfahrung, Eigensinn: historisch-anthropologische Erkundungen (Frankfurt am Main 2008), 365.

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movement of young men between the neighborhood milieu, party youth organiza- tions, and informal gangs.

60 I do not aim to settle the question of the looters’

motives in this article but rather contrast the breadth of possibilities with the limited interpretations and their effect on security measures. For the Political Police during Weimar, the issue of motive was a dichotomous one. Such an approach understood politics only as ‘party political’ and drew a noteworthy divide between personal circumstances and political identification. The primary dissent within the police department came from uniformed police in working- class precincts. They described desperation as a general condition and the primary motivation for looting and, in the process, denied the possibility of direct political connections. A precinct in Wedding dismissed a political motive as ‘out of the question.’ They contextualized the crimes within neighborhood conditions observed on their beat patrols: ‘If one considers the desperate circumstances in general and that of the residents of Wedding, the majority of whom are part of the lowest classes of the needy population, . . . so must the number of lootings be considered as completely tolerable.’

61

Even if some accepted that economic hardship motivated looters, this premise offered neither police nor shopkeepers feasible security solutions because of the magnitude of the Depression. Police in the Wedding district instructed shopkeepers and shop assistants who saw young men ‘standing around in a suspicious way’ to ‘immediately call the police precinct or the riot squad.’

62 This instruction was

almost impossible to follow. Young men filled the streets of Berlin during the Depression. By the end of 1932, 600,000 of the four million Berliners were unem- ployed. Crowds gathered in the thousands outside unemployment offices where they waited in long lines segregated by gender and commiserated over conditions.

63

Approximately one in five registered unemployed persons was male and under the age of 25.

64 The desperation of these young men intensified after the Second

Emergency Decree of 5 June 1931, which effectively eliminated unemployment insurance for those under 21.

65 As young men spent less time in the workplace,

60 H. Benekowski, Nicht nur für die Vergangenheit: streitbare Jugend in Berlin um 1930 (Berlin 1983); G. Staewen-Ordemann, Menschen der Unordnung: die proletarische Wirklichkeit im Arbeitsschicksal der ungelernten Großstadtjugend (Berlin 1933); also H. Lessing and M. Liebel, Wilde Cliquen: Szenen einer anderen Arbeiterjugendbewegung (Bensheim 1981); E. Rosenhaft, ‘Organising the ‘‘Lumpenproletariat’’: Cliques and Communists in Berlin during the Weimar Republic,’ in R.J. Evans (ed.) The German Working Class, 1888–1933: The Politics of Everyday Life (London 1982); D. Peukert, Jugend zwischen Krieg und Krise: Arbeiterjugend in der Weimarer Republik (Cologne 1987). 61 Si. Wd. to Sg. Nd., 15 December 1931, in LAB A Pr. Br. Rep 030, Nr. 7538. 62 Report, R. 42 to Sg. Nd., 30 May 1931, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep 030, Nr. 7538. 63 D. Crew, Germans on Welfare: From Weimar to Hitler (Oxford 1998), 157–65. For images of the unemployment lines, see: Swett, Neighbors and Enemies, 89; D. Kerbs, (ed.) Auf den Straßen von Berlin: der Fotograf Willy Römer (Berlin 2004), 171. 64 D. Peukert, ‘The Lost Generation: Youth Unemployment at the End of the Weimar Republic,’ in R.J. Evans and D. Geary (eds) The German Unemployed: Experiences and Consequences of Mass Unemployment in Germany from the Weimar Republic to the Third Reich (New York, NY 1987), 176. 65 W. Patch, Heinrich Brüning and the Dissolution of the Weimar Republic (Cambridge 1998), 163; E. Harvey, ‘Youth Unemployment and the State: Public Policies towards Unemployed Youth in Hamburg during the World Economic Crisis,’ in Evans and Geary (eds) The German Unemployed, 145.

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streets provided an escape from the confines of tight living quarters that characterized working-class neighborhoods.

66 Scenes of young men out of work,

wandering the streets, riding subways, gathering on corners, or simply killing time had become a standard part of the city’s visual landscape and provided further camouflage for looters.

67 To account for the repeated attacks against a store in the

northeast of the city, one officer noted its ‘exceptionally convenient’ location. 68

‘In the [nearby] square,’ he explained, ‘there are always many young men drifting around.’

The invocation of a general condition of desperation did nothing to placate shop- keepers who already experienced such conditions through declining purchases and deteriorating profits, which looting losses exacerbated. Instead, the rising violence caused shopkeepers to doubt the capacity of the police to maintain order even as they demanded more protection. Shops had already weathered moments of acute eco- nomic and political unrest during the early Weimar Republic and had developed emergency tactics in response. But emergency tactics were not long-term solutions. Businesses could not survive for extended periods with shuttered windows, closed doors, and empty streets. Nighttime security measures such as locks, alarms, and rolling shutters were useless since looters did not ‘break-in’ but came through the open front door during normal business hours. Looted a half dozen times in late summer of 1931, the Butter Landau company complained to police headquarters, ‘It is impossible to do business in such a manner, if robber bands break into a store in broad daylight and loot and not even one of the twenty young men loaded with goods gets captured.’

69 Petitions for better security from the stores arrived regularly

at police precincts and headquarters. To petition for police protection, the Nordstern company detailed the costs and geography of 32 separate lootings in their stores between February and July 1931.

70 Total costs reached nearly 3000

RM. After looters targeted Goldacker stores across Berlin from the outer districts of Steglitz and Reinickendorf to the central districts of Schöneberg, Kreuzberg, and Prenzlauer Berg, the company threatened to take matters up the chain of command to the Ministry of the Interior.

71

In mid-August 1931, police responded to criticisms and stationed beat patrols within sight of endangered stores, thus, providing individual security for shops.

72

But almost immediately, precincts declared the order untenable. The urban geo- graphy of commerce was simply too diverse and fragmented. The police estimated

66 E. Rosenhaft, ‘The Unemployed in the Neighborhood: Social Dislocation and Political Mobilisation in Germany 1929–1933,’ Evans and Geary (eds) The German Unemployed, 202. 67 For images of the unemployed see: Kerbs (ed.) Auf den Straßen von Berlin, 180; E. Geisel, Im Scheunenviertel: Bilder, Texte, und Dokumente (Berlin 1981), 127. Detlev Peukert describes similar scenes in ‘The Lost Generation,’ in Evans and Geary (eds) The German Unemployed, 182. 68 Kriminalpolizei report, 1 April 1932, in LAB A Rep 358-01, Nr. 1137. 69 Butter Landau to Polizei-Revier, 9 September 1931, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep 030, Nr. 7538. 70 Nordstern to Polizeipräsidium, Abteilung IA, 23 July 1931, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep 030, Nr. 7538. 71 Eduard Goldacker Nachfolger to Polizeipräsidium Abteilung I, 12 August 1931, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep 030, Nr. 7538. 72 Internal memo, S1a to Sg., Si., R.,18 August 1931, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep 030, Nr. 7538.

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400 chain grocery stores within Berlin. Within the district of Wedding, there were 126 grocery stores, eight weekly markets, a market hall, and a Tietz department store, all of which required some degree of protection.

73 A precinct in Wedding

weighed the use of resources: ‘The security achieved through these policies for a few shops is disproportionate to the rising danger in general to public peace, safety, and order.’

74 The precinct suspected the KPD would exploit the distraction of the

police to intensify recruitment not just on factory floors but within increasingly radicalized neighborhoods.

Only weeks after the special order to watch the streets for potential dangers to shops, the police suddenly reversed the direction of their gaze to scrutinize shops. They began a surveillance operation to determine shops’ accountability in a looting epidemic. Headquarters instructed officers to dress in civilian clothes, blend into traffic, pass as shoppers, and observe any security failures.

75 Orders instructed

police officers to pay particular attention to two features in shops: the presence of a telephone and the gender of the shop assistant. Teletype messages came over the wire during the next few days with the tally. Of the 177 stores observed, 135 had exclusively female personnel. Only 49 stores had installed telephones. The police suspended the individual protection of shops by the end of September. Afterwards, police cited the gender of employees and the lack of security apparatuses to deflect shopkeepers’ criticisms of insufficient public security and to redirect culpability back onto the shops for negligent private security.

Police characterized female shop assistants as the weak point in shop defenses. Their reports consistently described female shop assistants as cow- ering, agitated, and paralyzed. They assumed that male personnel would risk violent encounters. But this assumption ran counter to evidence from a grow- ing number of case files. Regardless of gender, shop assistants and bystanders, neighbors and strangers, seldom came to the defense of stores, especially when faced with the possibility of bodily harm. When questioned by police after the looting of a Nordstern grocery, a male bystander explained his lack of heroic intervention: ‘Even if we were not threatened, I had the feeling that the perpetrators were armed and would undoubtedly make use of their firearms. For this reason, I didn’t dare to make a stand against the youths.’

76 Residents

and passersby regularly failed to identify escaping looters because, according to the police, they did not want to have ‘their bones smashed in two.’

77

Neighboring shopkeepers, either out of fear of retribution or resentment of the competition, usually watched the looters ‘with their hands in their pockets’ and with little demonstration of ‘solidarity.’

78 Even police officers demonstrated

73 Si. Wd. 2 to Sg. Nd., 20 January 1932, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep 030, Nr. 7538. 74 Rv. 53, 21 August 1931, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep 030, Nr. 7538. 75 S1a, 2 September 1931, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep 030, Nr. 7538. 76 ‘Unbekannt wegen Plünderung, 1932,’ LAB A Rep 358-01, Nr. 1082. 77 Rv. 68 to Si. Pb., 1 December 1932, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep 030, Nr. 7538. 78 Polizeipräsident to Regierungsdirektor Goehrke, 23 October 1931, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep 030, Nr. 7538.

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reluctance to pursue looters aggressively. In one case, female shop assistants pointed out the escaping looters to a police officer, and he then walked in the other direction. In his statement, the officer shifted the blame back to ‘young, fearful, female shop assistants’ without ‘the necessary courage to take energetic steps to prevent looting.’

79

From studies of Nazi Germany, we know that Germans grumbled but few demonstrated substantive resistance to state sponsored violence against Jewish shops during the April Boycott (1933) and Kristallnacht (1938).

80 But it is important

to note that already in the Weimar period, attacks against shops seldom elicited ‘civil courage’ from urban crowds. Certainly fear of retribution played a role. Shopkeepers and police also sensed the crowds’ sympathy with looters and their apathy, even hostility, toward shops. The owners of Butter Landau in the Mitte district recounted with horror and outrage after a looting: ‘The crowd watched and laughed about it.’

81 The police concurred that the crowd reacted ‘exceptionally

passively even positively’ toward the lootings. 82

There were many possible explana- tions for such reactions. The thin ties between neighborhoods and chain stores fostered an auspicious climate for looting. Although chain stores had branches throughout the city, many of their stores were located in working-class districts to the north and the east.

83 The broad, multi-site network of chain stores frequently

meant physically distant ownership and a lack of investment in community rela- tions.

84 Hostilities lingered from the First World War, when rumors of profiteering

flourished. 85

Class differences, between middle-class proprietors and their working- class customers, marked relations between shops and the surrounding community. Police in the Wedding district attributed their failure to catch looters to the attitude of the neighborhood toward large businesses:

Ninety-five per cent of the investigations remain unsuccessful because the witnesses

here in Wedding almost always sympathize with the looters and hold back testimony

because they fear revenge by the perpetrators and their associates and the damage to

the large companies is a matter of total indifference to them. 86

In the increasingly politicized climate of the early 1930s, neighborhood newspapers called for the boycott of a shop if the political sympathies of the owner were out of step with the rest of the neighborhood, usually if a shopkeeper in a working-class

79 Stellungnahme, 2 December 1932, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep 030, Nr. 7538. 80 I. Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich: Bavaria 1933–1945 (Oxford 1983), 233, 273; D. Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition, and Racism in Everyday Life (New Haven, CT 1987), 58–60; A. Steinweis, Kristallnacht 1938 (Cambridge, MA 2009), 8. 81 Butter Landau to Polizeipräsident, 30 August 1931, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep 030, Nr. 7538. 82 Si. Ax., 18 September 1931, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep 030, Nr. 7538. 83 Brochure Butter Landau, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep 030, Nr. 7538. 84 The police recommended that the manager of a Butter Landau store move closer because the store was situated in ‘exceptionally communist area,’ report from 82. R., 13 December 1932, in LAB A Pr. Br. Rep 030, Nr. 7538. 85 Davis, Home Fires Burning, 81, 134. 86 Sg. Wedding, 10 October 1931, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep 030, Nr. 7538.

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neighborhood sympathized with the National Socialists. 87

But the National Socialists opposed the existence of large retailers in principle.

88 The ranks of the

commercial classes splintered between small proprietors and larger chains. Moreover, although not a major theme in police reports on the lootings, some shopkeepers suspected antisemitism as a motive. After multiple robberies of their shops, the Butter Landau company concluded that looters targeted ‘primarily Jewish businesses (Geschäfte jüdischer Confession)’.

89 But the company also specu-

lated that looters sought revenge after Butter Landau neglected to buy advertising space in a local political newspaper, ‘The Unemployed.’ In her studies of homicide cases during the Weimar Republic, Sace Elder has suggested that Berliners demon- strated ‘surveillance’ and ‘accusatory practices’ well before the Nazi era as they aided police in investigations driven either by personal gain or a sense of ‘civic’ responsibility.

90 Such impulses, however, are far less evident for property crimes, as

evidenced by responses to lootings. Instead, complex and diverse hostilities divided the commercial sphere and the communities that surrounded it.

By October 1931, the police increasingly pushed shop fortifications and self- defense as the most reliable means for preventing crime. This new precept tacitly admitted the inability of police to catch perpetrators. It placed greater responsi- bility for crime control on proprietors. Most importantly, it implicitly accepted a new interpretation of the crime that assumed an inherently dangerous public sphere. In contrast to the ‘invisible’ security measures of nineteenth-century depart- ment stores, these measures relied on a conspicuously defensive posture. They treated the street and its crowds as threats. Contemporary shop design featured the abundant display of goods, with cans and packages piled on counters, on shelves, and in the display windows. According to the new model, goods would sit behind the counter, sealed off by protective screens or panes of glass.

91 Iron

rolling shutters would cover display windows. The police advocated alarm bells, pistols for firing warning shots, and bags of pepper to throw in the eyes of thieves.

92

Rather than rely on protection from public security forces, the police counseled shopkeepers to hire private guards. They directed shops to develop a specific pro- tocol for robberies, to install telephones, and to train employees in their use. Despite evidence of local tensions or mere indifference, the police encouraged more cooperation among neighbors through secret knocks and other coded calls for help.

87 For several boycott cases investigated by the police in 1932 see: LAB A Rep 358-01, Nr. 1305, Nr. 1597, Nr. 1514. 88 See for example: 25-Punkte-Programm der NSDAP, 24 Munich 1920. 89 Butter Landau to Polizeikommissar Dittschlag, 10 September 1931, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep 030, Nr. 7538. 90 S. Elder, ‘Murder, Denunciation, and Criminal Policing in Weimar Germany,’ Journal of Contemporary History, 41, 3 (July 2006), 402. 91 Sj. Kb. 1., 3 November 1931, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep 030, Nr. 7538. 92 Sg. Wd., 6 October 1931; Präsidial-Beamten-Ausschuss to Kommando der Schutzpolizei, 5 October 1931; S1a report, 18 December 1931, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep 030, Nr. 7538.

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Shopkeepers wanted thoroughly policed streets, but police preferred fortified shops. At stake in this dispute between shops and police was the question: Who bears the cost of security, particularly in a time of economic crisis? In 1930 alone, 15,500 people visited the Advice Center of the Criminal Police at Alexanderplatz, a similar rate as during the crisis years of 1922 and 1923 and significantly higher than that of the mid-1920s.

93 There they could preview the latest in locks, bar-

riers, and alarms as well as receive tips on crime prevention. Publications of the various lobbying and professional associations for retailers offered similar advice.

94 But in these publications as well as in their correspondence with the

authorities, shopkeepers focused above all on the issue of state responsibility. Shopkeepers defended their rights as taxpayers and their business expertise. They resented greater financial investments such as hiring more expensive male personnel or installing unproven devices like telephones. ‘There’s no doubt that the looters would seize control of the apparatus immediately and prevent the shop assistant from calling the robbery brigade,’ the Nordstern company pre- dicted.

95 According to the Goldacker company, it took less time to loot than for

the operator to connect to the correct division in the police department. 96

The Butter Landau company proposed arming their female shop assistants – a pro- position that the police found both alarming and preposterous.

97 Shopkeepers

cast the repercussions of failed policing in broader economic and political terms. Butter Landau described the high crime rate not only in terms of the practical difficulties of retaining insurance but as damaging to the image of Germany in the eyes of the world: ‘We had an English insurance company which has can- celled our policy with the observation that if such African conditions prevail in Berlin they can no longer make such contracts with us.’

98 Shopkeepers warned of

inhibited commerce and consumption. In late 1931, the National Association of German Delicatessens described a ‘rising disquiet’ among its members because ‘the state no longer guaranteed constitutional protections for persons.’

99

Retailers, the association threatened, might determine ‘a failure of state force’ and organize their own ‘self-defense.’

Even if police and shopkeepers had acknowledged the validity of the other’s position in this debate, each faced political and economic pressures particular to the period of the Weimar Republic that constrained their ability to compromise or find alternatives. The Chief of Police Albert Grzesinski countered in response

93 Wagner, Volksgemeinschaft ohne Verbrecher, 107–8; LAB A Pr. Br 30, Nr. 21317. 94 ‘Wie sichere ich meine Räume gegen Einbruch,’ Die Berliner Konfektion (1 August 1932); ‘Der Berliner Einzelhandel wehrt sich,’ Der Konfektionär (16 October 1930); ‘Straßentumulte und Plünderungen,’ Deutsche Einzelhandels-Zeitung, November 1931. 95 Nordstern, 2 October 1931, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep 030, Nr. 7538. 96 Goldacker, 26 September 1931, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep 030, Nr. 7538. 97 In the letter from Butter Landau of 25 September 1931, the police both underlined the phrase ‘die Verkäuferinnen zu bewaffen’ and marked it with an exclamation point. LAB A Pr. Br. Rep 030, Nr. 7538. 98 Butter Landau, 25 September 1931, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep 030, Nr. 7538. 99 Reichsverband Deutscher Feinkost-Kaufleute to Polizeipräsidium, 19 October 1931, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep 030, Nr. 7538.

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to the delicatessen association: ‘Every man is entitled and, in the interest of the general public, also obligated to self-defense within the boundaries of the law.’

100

But ‘self-defense’ meant technological innovations and private security firms. The police could neither imagine a force of armed female shop assistants nor, partly due to international treaties, could they openly advocate militia justice. In this impasse, shopkeepers too had limited options. Shopkeepers widely reported a ‘decline in customers’ and lamented that every retailer suffered from economic ‘misery.’

101 This made security investments demanded by the police difficult to

contemplate, especially because these apparatuses threatened to obscure shop- keepers’ primary means to arouse depressed purchasing desire: the shop window. Across Germany, National Socialists wooed small retailers with the promise of suppressing Communism and even offered special ‘protection’ services to sympathetic business owners.

102 But the police had also arrested SA members

for terrorizing pedestrians and smashing windows on Kurfürstendamm, a street which the National Socialists menaced as an alleged hotbed of Jewish business.

103

In their strongholds across Germany, particularly in smaller towns, local party activists had organized boycotts of department and chain stores and Jewish- owned businesses of all sizes. Thus, even as the insecurity of the streets might disillusion retailers with the Republic and its police forces, the Nazi appeal only worked for retailers who fit the ‘racial’ profile, who accepted the Nazi ideal of small-scale commerce, and who approved of violent intimidation as a means to achieve it.

And yet the dismissive stance of the police, which made shopkeepers responsible for security, posed at best a public relations problem and at worst undermined state legitimacy. If the police could not suppress violence in public space, particularly at moments of economic crisis and political agitation, then what purpose did they serve? Police officials recognized this and, in mid-October 1931, they quietly mod- ified tactics even as they maintained a hard line in correspondence with shop- keepers. Despite the massive investment of resources to prevent lootings in previous months, police had caught few looters and then only ‘by coincidence,’ the Wedding district reported.

104 The Political Police, the lead investigators, had

not captured a single suspect. The district recommended transferring the cases to the other major detective force in the police department: the Criminal Police. The Criminal Police was a significantly larger department with better resources.

105 But

perhaps more importantly, the Criminal Police put on a better show for the public, which at this moment lacked confidence in the authority of the state but seemed

100 Polizeipräsident to Reichsverband Deutscher Feinkost-Kaufleute, 13 November 1931, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep 030, Nr. 7538. 101 ‘Die ernste Lage im Einzelhandel,’ Das Spezialgeschäft (31 October 1930). 102 A. McElligott, Contested City: Municipal Politics and the Rise of Nazism in Altona, 1917–1937 (Ann Arbor, MI 2001), 176. 103 LAB A Rep 358-01, Nr. 20. 104 Reports from SJ. Wedding to SG. Nord, 10 October 1931, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep 030, Nr. 7538. 105 The criminal detective force had roughly 2360 officials in 1932 compared with 300 in the Political Police. Liang, The Berlin Police Force in the Weimar Republic, 52, 125.

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fascinated with both the criminal underworld and its investigators. 106

In contrast to the Political Police, who worked largely behind the scenes through cultivating informants and monitoring political publications, the Criminal Police arrived on the scene in special cars and brought cases of equipment for gathering forensic evidence. They interrogated witnesses. Even if such tactics failed to identify the guilty parties, they might intimidate potential perpetrators. As the Political Police explained, ‘Above all, the public will see that the police are at work and something is being done.’

107

But this shift in jurisdiction entailed a shift in interpretation. The Criminal Police focused primarily on nighttime thefts because police identified nocturnal urban terrains with the criminal underworld and crime for material gain. In con- trast, the Political Police assumed that agitators perpetrated daytime thefts to sow disorder. Through late August 1931, the Political Police claimed jurisdiction over lootings even as some precincts bypassed them. They reminded in an internal memo:

It seems necessary once again to point out that the lootings of grocery stores are

political matters that will be handled by the Political Police and for this reason

must not be handed over to the precinct Criminal Police by the precinct captain. 108

But by October of that year, the maligned and frustrated Political Police conceded that perhaps criminals had copycatted the ‘communist agitators’ who originated such attacks.

109 They noted the use of weapons and demands for cash in recent

lootings. The distinction between looting and armed robbery became blurred. The new stance of the police corresponded with ideas presented by Vice Chief of Police, Dr. Bernhard Weiß, in his 1928 study, Politics and Police. Weiß asserted that criminal opportunism flourished in periods of civil unrest: ‘The political motive that marks common crime is often only feigned. . . . Any halfway decent profes- sional criminal knows how to suck the honey from the flower of every era.’

110 And

yet the Political and Criminal Police shared some underlying assumptions. Both imagined looting as part of a conspiracy, but the Criminal Police believed that organized crime rather than political parties ‘pulled the strings.’ This assessment fit within the general interpretative paradigm of the Criminal Police, who attributed property crimes to the profit motive and, increasingly with their own failures to staunch the crime rate, to the biological pre-disposition of the ‘professional crim- inal.’

111 The interpretation was different but equally narrow. Neither department

was willing to contemplate a direct connection between economic crisis and

106 Liang, The Berlin Police Force in the Weimar Republic, 114-51; Elder, ‘Murder, Denunciation, and Criminal Policing in Weimar Germany,’ 406. 107 Politische Polizei to Kriminalpolizei, 31 October 1931, LAB A Pr. Br. 030, Nr. 7538. 108 S1a memo, 22 August 1931, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep 030, Nr. 7538. 109 Politische Polizei to Kriminalpolizei, 31 October 1931, LAB A Pr. Br. 030, Nr. 7538. 110 B. Weiß, Polizei und Politik, vol. 3, Die Polizei in Einzeldarstellung (Berlin 1928), 91. 111 Wagner, Volksgemeinschaft ohne Verbrecher, 22, 138.

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lootings. Such widespread desperation implied a security problem that far exceeded police capacities.

The question of whether politics or criminality motivated the lootings remained open even after sweeping changes in political authority, police administration, and security tactics in the second half of 1932. Despite efforts by the police to stave off public criticism, parties across the spectrum accused them of incompetence and bias. By spring, ‘civil war’ became a catchword to describe violence in public space, especially the frequent bloody clashes between the NSDAP and KPD in the streets.

112 The right-wing Chancellor Franz von Papen seized upon

the perception of a security crisis and accused Prussian state officials of leniency toward the KPD. Under the auspices of the 20 July emergency decree ‘For the Restoration of Public Order in the State of Prussia,’ Papen assumed authority over the Prussian state government, fired most high-ranking police officials (particularly those associated with the Social Democrats), subordinated the police to the mili- tary, and temporarily imposed martial law in Berlin. Afterward, this authoritarian turn manifested in everyday policing as greater tolerance of National Socialists in their political agitation in the streets and their clashes with Communists.

113 And

yet, months later, officials still argued about the relationship between the lootings and the broader category of ‘civil war.’ When department heads met months later in December 1932 to prepare for an anticipated upsurge in lootings during the Christmas season, the head of the Political Police still insisted that there was ‘not a single indication’ linking the KPD or ‘another big organization to the lootings.’

114

The Chief of Police sidestepped the wrangling between the departments and called for cooperation between the Political and Criminal Police. To combat a broad but unspecified threat as well as public scrutiny, they changed tactics to a more inten- sive occupation of the streets and greater show of force. Ninety-eight mounted police along with new motorized, free-roaming patrols converged on particularly unstable parts of the city.

115 They intensified beat patrols and grabbed more

quickly for their guns. With these spectacular measures, they successfully arrested some, albeit few, looters.

116 Ironically, a female shop assistant played a key role in

one of the few arrests in mid-January as she commandeered a vehicle and followed looters to an apartment building.

117 The police apprehended only one looter there,

who invoked the common defense for the theft of food: ‘You don’t need it, but I

112 Blasius, Weimars Ende, 35. 113 Lessmann-Faust, Die preußische Schutzpolizei in der Weimarer Republik, 373–4; Liang, The Berlin Police Force, 163. 114 S1a, 20 December 1932, LAB A Pr. Br. 030, Nr. 7538. 115 S1a, 21 December 1932, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep 030, Nr. 7538. 116 ‘Kommunistische Plünderer und Räuber entlarvt,’ Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, 17 January 1933, clipping in LAB A Pr. Br. Rep 030, Nr. 7538. 117 ‘Vier Geschäftsplünderer und eine mütige Verkäuferin,’ Vorwärts (16 January 1933); ‘Kampf ums Lebensmittel,’ Berliner Tageblatt und Handelszeitung (13 January 1933); ‘Eine Verkäuferin verfolgt eine Plünderungsbande,’ Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (13 January 1933), clippings in LAB A Pr. Br. Rep 030, Nr. 7538.

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do, because I am hungry.’ 118

Such a claim did not convince those officials and journalists who still suspected a widespread Communist plot.

The Weimar justice system would not have the opportunity to resolve the ques- tion. After Hitler’s appointment to the position of chancellor at the end of January 1933, the new regime adopted and intensified the occupation of streets. In February, the regime deputized the SA as auxiliary police and, thus, re-categorized them from agitators to enforcers of the new order. The traditional police and SA auxiliaries, then, rounded up thousands of suspected communist sympathizers as well as beggars and petty criminals.

119 Young men in working-class neighborhoods

no longer loitered in groups on street corners because such gatherings attracted unwanted attention from the SA.

120 For months, the area around the main unem-

ployment office, the alleged staging grounds for many lootings, remained comple- tely abandoned. The regime pre-emptively and ruthlessly targeted the people and the places most associated with looting. In an October interview with the Nazi newspaper, Der Angriff, the new director of the Criminal Police triumphantly reported a ‘constant decline in criminality.’

121 Statistics for robberies and thefts

showed a marked decrease, but the numbers for looting were astonishing. Director Friedrich Schneider boasted:

The lootings of grocery stores – in the past years a real plague of the big city – have

totally stopped. If there were 45 stores looted in Berlin in the first half of December

1932, not a single case was reported for the whole year of 1933.

He attributed the decline in criminality to the ‘perceivable revitalization of public morals in National Socialist Germany’ and to more aggressive investigation, pro- secution, and punishment of ‘professional crime.’ Crime rates fell. But such statistics also reflected changing definitions of crime. From the perspective of the new government, illicit violence against shops had stopped. But in Berlin, Jewish-owned stores accounted for 26 per cent of retail sales.

122 An estimated

3700 stores of this kind survived in the city as late as 1938. From the perspective of many shopkeepers, the experience of intimidation and violence was only just beginning.

The National Socialists, once in power, inherited a complex legacy of commercial violence, which they then selectively exacerbated and mitigated to achieve ideo- logical objectives. We can find evidence for this legacy in the 1 April 1933 boycott

118 Kriminal-Tagebuch, 12 January 1933, LAB A Pr. Br. Rep 030, Nr. 7538. 119 R. Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany (Oxford 2001), 19, 36; Wagner, Volksgemeinschaft ohne Verbrecher, 300. 120 Jan Petersen, Our Street: A Chronicle Written in the Heart of Fascist Germany (London 1938), 72, 137. 121 ‘Seit der Machtübernahme durch die Nationalsozialisten ständiger Rückgang der Kriminalität,’ Der Angriff, 26 October 1933. 122 A. Barkai, From Boycott to Annihilation: The Economic Struggle of German Jews (Hanover, NH 1989), 6–7; Stadtpräsident Berlin Report, 5 January 1939, BArch 3101/32170.

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of Jewish businesses. Although the violence experienced by many shopkeepers lessened after the Nazi seizure of power and with the implementation of a more militarized policing style, Jewish shopkeepers became targets of both grassroots and regime-sponsored attacks. The government may have deputized the SA as auxiliary police in February 1933, but in March SA troops across Germany acting on independent initiative terrorized shopkeepers, smashed windows, and demanded businesses close. In part, the new regime launched its nation-wide boycott as a means to channel widespread rank-and-file violence into concerted but contained action.

123 The tactics of the boycott drew upon the features of modern

shop design and manipulated them for new purposes. The SA hung posters or painted crude gold stars on display windows and, thus, transformed beacons of desire into instruments for terrorizing shopkeepers and repelling customers.

124

This was neither a seductive nor a defensive positioning of the shop toward the street but rather an offensive positioning of public space and German con- sumers against the shop. And yet the SA was explicitly ordered not to break shop windows or loot.

125 The regime wanted to categorically distinguish their

‘orderly’ attack against shops from the violence and crime of the late Weimar Republic, which left many shopkeepers unable to trust the streets as safe for business and, thus, made many skeptical of the government’s authority and competence. Nazi leaders, partly because of their fears of exacer- bating economic turmoil with a hostile commercial atmosphere, abandoned the boycott after one day and blocked subsequent local boycott efforts.

126 Modern

consumer culture remained precarious, and violence and intimidation destabilized its fundamental assumptions and practices even when the state coordinated such actions.

Shopkeepers, too, drew lessons from the Weimar Republic, as revealed by the photographs of the boycott. Scholarly discussion of the boycott has primarily examined the regime’s decision to launch the boycott, the staging of it, and the reaction of the public.

127 We might say, therefore, that the analysis remains focused

on the photographic foreground, that is, on the interaction between SA troops and the crowds in front of the shops. But if we shift our focus to the background to the shops themselves, the picture becomes more complex. Alerted by news stories to the pending boycott in the last days of March, many shops simply did not open for business on 1 April. SA troops hung boycott posters on closed iron shutters and

123 Reichsminister des Innern to Innenministerien der Länder, 13 March 1933, BArch R 3101/13859. 124 Photographs: BArch Bild 146-1970-083-40, Bild 102-14471, Bild 102-14468. Barkai, From Boycott to Annihilation, 19. 125 ‘Judenboykott, Tumultschäden,’ BArch R 3101/13860, 13862. 126 Barkai, From Boycott to Annihilation, 17–25; S. Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 (New York, NY 1997), 17–26. 127 P. Longerich, Politik der Vernichtung: eine Gesamtdarstellung der nationalsozialistischen Judenverfolgung (Munich 1998), 30–41; M. Dean, Robbing the Jews: The Confiscations of Jewish Property in the Holocaust, 1933–1945 (Cambridge 2008), 25; H. Ahlheim, Deutsche, kauft nicht bei Juden: Antisemitismus und politischer Boykott in Deutschland 1924 bis 1935 (Göttingen 2011), 241–62. Johannes Ludwig describes the response of a single company, Tietz, in Boykott, Enteignung, Mord: die ‘Entjudung’ der deutschen Wirtschaft (Hamburg 1989), 104–27.

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stood before locked doors. 128

We cannot with statistical precision answer the ques- tion of exactly how many shops closed and how many remained open that day. The evidence remains impressionistic. Postwar memoirs, particularly from residents of smaller towns, recall defiantly open businesses and brave customers who crossed their thresholds.

129 At the time of the boycott, the New York Times correspondent

Frederick Birchall sent cables from Berlin reporting ‘many’ closures. 130

Karstadt on Hermannplatz, whose ‘Aryan’ ownership had fired Jewish employees the pre- vious day, was the only department store to open in Berlin.

131 Indeed, in advance

of the boycott, the Association of Department and Large Stores had counselled its members to close until 4 April.

132

I raise the issue of closures neither to gauge the civil courage of shopkeepers and customers nor to measure the extent of public antisemitism in the early Nazi period, but rather to highlight the complexity of the decisions faced by shopkeepers and to situate their considerations and actions within a pre-history of Weimar experiences. The defensive posture of shops that day suggests that shopkeepers did not fully trust the ‘discipline’ of the SA. As Michael Wildt has noted, the National Socialists had already used the boycott of Jewish shops as a ‘systematic, political weapon’ before January 1933.

133 Afterward, they did so with little fear of

legal repercussions as the first months of Nazi rule had demonstrated. Shopkeepers perhaps did not know exactly how to categorize these newly deputized ‘officials,’ but during the April Boycott they certainly did not trust them as forces of order. Although shopkeepers had invoked their right to protection throughout the Weimar Republic, they had often been disappointed by the police’s inability to contain tumultuous public space, much less a police force now subordinate to Nazi leaders who embraced the redemptive power of violence against alleged enemies of the so-called ‘national community’ (Volksgemeinschaft). Shopkeepers already lacked confidence in the goodwill of crowds, much less now that acts of ‘civil courage’ could lead to arrest.

Shopkeepers therefore drew upon defenses developed in response to violent public space during the Weimar years. They had learned to weather bursts of domestic unrest until the state could restore order sufficient to the established practices of modern commerce. Both shops and police had foundered against more diffuse and persistent looting in the context of broader economic and political instability in the late Weimar Republic. And yet the theoretical principles of

128 See photographs: BArch Bild 102-14469, Bild 146-1976-135-20. Also: R. Metzger and C. Brandstätter, Berlin: The Twenties (New York, NY 2006), 380. 129 M. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (New York, NY 1998), 22; M. Richarz, Jüdisches Leben in Deutschland: Selbstzeugnisse zur Sozialgeschichte, 1918–1945 (Stuttgart 1982); Ahlheim, Deutsche, kauft nicht bei Juden, 254–62. 130 Frederick Birchall, ‘Measure Takes Effect Saturday,’ New York Times (28 April 1933); Frederick Birchall, ‘Measure is Effective,’ New York Times (2 April 1933). 131 J. Ludwig, Boykott, Enteignung, Mord, 113. 132 Verband Deutscher Waren- und Kaufhäuser to Reichministerium des Innern, 28 March 1933, BArch R 3101/13859. 133 M. Wildt, Volksgemeinschaft als Selbstermächtigung: Gewalt gegen Juden in der deutschen Provinz, 1919 bis 1933 (Hamburg 2007), 145.

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business and the practical lessons learned from specific historical experiences remained an imperfect guide to the present and future of commerce within Nazi Germany. Shopkeepers responded to the boycott as another period of emergency against which they still had a few defenses, however fragile, imperfect, and imper- manent. They drew the iron shutters down over their display windows until the boycott ended. This gesture revealed that the previous assumptions about the daily patterns and practices of urban commerce no longer held. Yet, this was only a temporary solution. In the coming years, pressures would mount against Jewish shopkeepers through new methods of legalized discrimination as well as through sporadic acts of grassroots intimidation and harassment. On the night of 9 November 1938, bands of young men would break the glass again and this time with the sanction of the state. And, against such acts, shopkeepers had no defense.

Acknowledgments

For their excellent feedback on this article, I would like to thank Christian Goeschel, James Tejani, Tom Trice, Malte Zierenberg, Thomas Mergel and his research colloquium at Humboldt Universität, Daniel Morat and the Berlin Seminar on Urban History at the Freie Universität, the Cal Poly Interdisciplinary Writing Group on Culture and Society, and the anonymous reviewers of the Journal of Contemporary History. I am grateful to the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for supporting this research.

Biographical Note

Molly Loberg is Associate Professor of History at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. She is currently completing a book manuscript on the intersection of mass politics and mass consumption in the streets of interwar Berlin.

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