This roundtable brings together a range of scholars whose work collectively sheds light on the startling insights the history of consumption brings to Central European history. Cutting across standard periodizations, these scholars represent a variety of methods and encourage us to interrogate our assumptions about the history of the region through the practices, habits, and costs, of consumption. Many of the durable and recurring questions of Central European history can be seen in new ways through debates about the relationship between material culture and historical change that are integral to the history of consumption, including not just questions of labor, industrialization, and production, but also modernity, democratization, and ideology. Consumption was embedded in individual, community, and political spheres and inseparable from national/ist ideologies, religious prescriptions, rituals of culture, technological change, and the long arm of imperialism. Consumption seeped into domestic relations and the structure and economics of the household. It was reflected in the desires and the realities of empire. It could both define and undermine social hierarchies. It developed distinct locations in the coffeehouse, the restaurant, the department store, and the battlefield. It created a bespoke media in the advertising that increasingly conditioned consumers and shaped their habits. New goods, technologies, or entertainments and the drive to control them, was connected to law and to political and moral desires to control substances and behaviors that were considered socially destabilizing. Consumption is also revealing in its absence, ie in the impact of scarcity, denial, or lack and the rupture of war can be explored as a particular regime of consumption.

Our participants reflect these overarching questions. Robert Terrell has examined how brewers, regulators, and others influenced narratives of belonging in Germany and has begun a larger research project that interrogates the role of the restaurant (and all it entails) in urban consumer culture and labor. Carolyn Taratko works on late nineteenth and twentieth century food security from variety of perspectives, including chemistry, economics, and medicine. Robert Nemes investigates the quotidian and global reach of commodities and cultural practices in Budapest and beyond. Claudia Kreklau, Amy Millet, and Katya Motyl turn the focus to the gendered aspects of consumption and to the media that shaped it. Looking at cookbooks, menus, posters, and advertising, they connect us to the ways that consumption (and efforts to control or to spur it) was affected by gendered, national, and imperial contexts. Consumption, gender, nation, and empire were profoundly intertwined in discussions of the normative household and the orderly city. And importantly, both the household and the city were attuned to the clarion call of a nationalizing rhetoric that reverberated in the media of consumption. Anne Berg (University of Pennsylvania), a self-described historian of destruction, brings these various scales and approaches together. As her work on garbage makes clear, studying consumption allows us to move through different scales of historical analysis, from the micro to the transnational. That movement and its implications for understanding Central Europe is the focus of the roundtable.