Konsumkultur und Warenrausch bei Vicki Baum: Lecture with Dr. Lisa Wille

Former visiting researcher Dr. Lisa Wille returned to the German Department for a lecture on Tuesday, March 26, 2024. Her talk focused on the writer Vicki Baum, who worked as a mass-consumed bestselling author for the influential Ullstein publishing house in the Weimar Republic and was very familiar with the processes and mechanisms of the mass media. As a “pioneer of the new media” (Nottelmann 1998), she also achieved great success in the USA, where she ultimately emigrated. It is therefore not surprising that the link between consumption and entertainment culture, against the backdrop of contemporary Americanization, is significantly present in Vicki Baum’s work. Literary texts such as the new objective comedy Pariser Platz 13 or the department store novel The Big Sale testify to the economic narrative of consumption and its effect on the goals and dreams of the characters. In this context, Dr. Wille’s lecture reflected on the connection between consumption and industrial-media mass society and provided a new perspectives on the relationship between literature and economics.

Dr. Lisa Wille is a postdoc at the Technical University of Darmstadt in the field of modern German literature. Her research focuses on the construction of identity and gender in 18th century drama, cultural economization in the early 20th century, and contemporary literature with a view to intersectional representations of precarity. Her first book Between Autonomy and Heteronomy: Bourgeois Identity Problems in Heinrich Leopold Wagner’s Dramatic Work (2021) is devoted to the discursive formation of bourgeois identity in the 18th century; the textbook Introduction to Gender Studies (2022, together with Prof. Dr. Franziska Schößler) examines gender history from the 18th century to the present day and presents a variety of gender theoretical and methodological positions. In her projects, Dr. Wille analyzes Americanization in the mirror of consumer culture in the Weimar Republic and post-war Germany.