Project status: ongoing

Funded by: Gerda Henkel Foundation

This research project uses the public consumption of ice cream as an analytical tool to examine the development, negotiation, and appropriation of knowledge during the transition to modernity. This opens up a new, everyday-history perspective on the emergence of the modern knowledge society and the associated struggles for participation, visibility, and a voice in the industrial world. The study focuses on urban street vending, which turned ice cream consumption into a mass phenomenon beginning in the second half of the 19th century. Drawing on newly explored, rich source materials, knowledge-based practices of popularization and regulation are situated across three levels of analysis:

In a first step, the project reconstructs the increasing spread of ice cream carts and ice cream parlors in the physical environment. Attention is focused, on the one hand, on interregional knowledge transfers within the German nation-state—including Austria-Hungary and Italy—and, on the other hand, on the small-scale expansion of ice cream sales on public streets and squares within urban areas. In this way, the project identifies actors and networks that disseminated knowledge across national and regional borders.

A second step involves examining the negotiation of conflicts in the social sphere. Mobile vendors sold their goods in city centers, at tourist destinations and sports fields, and in front of schools and factories. In doing so, they competed with cafés and pastry shops, tapped into new consumer spaces and target groups, transformed the urban landscape, and made indulgence a publicly visible phenomenon. This was accompanied by diverse debates and conflicts surrounding hygiene and health, competition and freedom of trade, pleasure and morality. This project examines these dynamics and explores the specific perspectives of vendors and government officials, consumers, and critics of consumerism.

In a third step, the project examines the cultural ideals and notions of social order that accompanied, limited, or promoted ice cream consumption. These included hopeful visions of prosperity and peace, but also culturally critical warnings about disease, crime, and materialism. The project situates these interpretive patterns within contemporary discourses and examines their role in guiding action within the context of local conflicts.