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The birth of Christ has always had an important place on Christianity's sacred calendar, but the Christmas we celebrate is a modern invention, the product of those extraordinarily fecund decades that span the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As Joe Perry argues in this bold and original book, Christmas is also a distinctively German holiday, the nation's most popular annual celebration and a powerful reflection of its politics and culture.
Perry traces the history of Christmas in Germany from 1800 to the 1960s, with an emphasis on the twentieth century. His account is based on an impressive array of sources: government documents, autobiographies, newspapers, magazines, fiction, songs, and illustrations. He is a perceptive and sensitive reader of texts. Some of them are familiar, such as E. T. A. Hoffmann's inescapable The Nutcracker and the Mouse King and canonical hymns such as Silent Night, but Perry also uncovers many forgotten descriptions of the holiday's rituals and symbols. His comparison of two pictures of a Berlin Christmas market, one from 1796, the other from 1865, is a model of how to use visual evidence for cultural analysis, while his examination of the importance of...