Paradox in the City: Women, Gender, and Modernity in the Weimar Metropolis
Lindsay C. Gajownik Bachelor of Arts in Fine Arts, Art History
The University of New Mexico Albuquerque, NM
May 2014
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Table of Contents
I. Introduction: Crisis and Emancipation……………………………………. 1
II. New Objectivity: Historical Context………………………………………… 9
III. The “New Woman”: Marker of Modernity………………………………. 13
IV. The Prostitute: Sexuality in the City……………………………………….. 23
V. The Mother: Antidote to the New Woman……………………………… 30
VI. Conclusions: Paradox and Ambivalence……………………………….... 32
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List of Figures
1. Otto Dix, Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia van Harden, 1926. Oil on canvas.
2. Otto Dix, Three Women on the Street, 1925. Oil on canvas.
3. Karl Hubbuch, The Dream of the Tietz Girls, 1921. Engraving.
4. Unknown, “The Woman and the City,” Die Dame magazine, 1930.
5. Otto Dix, Whore with War Cripple, 1923. Pen on paper.
6. Georg Grosz, Suicide, 1918. Watercolor and pen on paper.
7. Georg Grosz, Metropolis, 1917. Oil on canvas.
8. Georg Grosz, The Big City, 1916-‐17. Oil on canvas.
9. Otto Dix, Sex Murder, 1922. Oil on canvas; lost.
10. Georg Grosz, John, the Lady Killer, 1918. Oil on canvas.
11. Otto Dix, The Big City Triptych, 1927-‐28. Three panels, oil on canvas.
12. Otto Dix, Pregnant Woman, 1930. Oil on canvas.
13. Otto Dix, Newborn Baby on Hands, 1926. Oil on canvas.
14. Georg Schrimpf, Midday Rest, 1922. Oil on canvas.
15. Otto Dix, Mother and Child, 1921. Oil on canvas.
16. Otto Dix, Mother and Child, 1923. Oil on canvas.
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Introduction: Crisis and Emancipation
Emerging abruptly out of the defeat and chaos of the First World War, the Weimar
Republic witnessed one of the more jarring transitions into modernity experienced by any
European nation in the early years of the twentieth century. Following the dissolution of
the German Imperial Government in 1918 and the institution of the fledgling republic’s
constitution in 1919, the young German Republic endured a trying, if relatively short-‐lived,
period of widespread political, social, cultural, and technological turmoil. Perhaps no
segment of the population was as wholly affected by these changes as were German
women, who bore both the brunt of society’s expectations for the future prosperity of the
nation, and its many anxieties evoked by the uncertainties of modernization. As a result,
the female body became the site of numerous intense discourses concerning a wide variety
of topics ranging from employment, declining birth rates, sex reform, and gender roles, to
consumerism, mass culture, and the sociological effects of industrialization and
urbanization.
In many ways, the Weimar Republic anticipated the cultural milieu of European and
North American culture that has persisted since the end of the Second World War.
Historian and author Richard McCormick has argued that Weimar’s emphatic embrace of
“distracted consumerist culture” was merely an attempt to conceal deep-‐seated anxieties
about the, “destabilization of traditional identities—above all class, gender, and national
identities;” it may certainly be argued that such a consumerist culture of distraction
subsists to this day.1 McCormick also provides a comparison between many of the
1 Richard McCormick, “Private Anxieties/Public Projections: ‘New Objectivity,’ Male Subjectivity, and
Weimar Cinema,” Women in German Yearbook 10 (1994): 3.
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characteristics of Weimar’s culture with those of the current/recent phenomenon of
postmodernism, suggesting more than a passing similarity between the two. Along with a
shared passion for consumerism, McCormick notes an increased acceptance and use of
mass media, the apparent renunciation of modernist manifestoes by “sober” artists and
intellectuals, and an interest in undermining the strict dichotomy between high culture and
mass culture.2 Additionally, it may be argued that the central public discourse of the
Weimar era began—or, at the least, directly and appreciably contributed to—one of the
more significant societal issues our culture is still grappling with today: gender inequality.
All of these points make the cultural and artistic history of the Weimar Republic both
fascinating and highly relevant to any contemporary study of gender and modernity.
There is a tendency among traditional historical interpretations of the Weimar
Republic to view the era as a mere steppingstone on the path towards National Socialism
and the ascendance of the German Nazi Party to political power. This point of view
generally considers the Weimar Republic as a superbly fascinating—yet ultimately
tragically flawed and futile—attempt at democracy, whose self-‐indulgence and degeneracy
brought about its own demise.3 Such a viewpoint inevitably propagates a traditionalist,
misogynistic analysis of political, social, and cultural events, blaming Weimar’s “shock of
modernity” for the upset of conventional gender roles and identities, and ultimately
disparages the so-‐called “decadent” and “immoral” cultural products of the period.4
Fortunately, this perspective has largely fallen by the wayside following more
contemporary scholarship that reveals the tremendous contributions to modern European
2 Richard McCormick, Gender and Sexuality in Weimar Modernity (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 167. 3 See Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1968). 4 Shearer West, ed. Visions of the ‘Neue Frau’: Women and the Visual Arts in Germany (Brookfield, VT:
Ashgate, 1995), 3.
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culture provided by German female activists, intellectuals, and artists, and which highlights
the advances gained by women in terms of political and social equality.
However, a contemporary feminist approach questions both of these perspectives,
arguing that the ostensible advances in gender equality were superficial and merely served
to mask the continued oppression and subjugation of German women. As Richard
McCormick argues, correctly in my opinion, it is important to reevaluate canonical
interpretations of Weimar “decadence” and “effeminacy” in order to celebrate that which
has previously been derided as a weakness.5 At the same time, however, a moderate
feminist historical approach recognizes that: “Crisis and emancipation are inseparable.
While a destabilization of the rules governing gender and sexual relations does indeed
allow some more powerful groups to exploit others sexually in new ways, the same
situation also allows opportunities for greater autonomy to the less powerful.”6 It is on this
historical understanding—that crisis and emancipation are inseparable—that my analysis
of gender and modernity in works of art of the Weimar Republic is based.
Of central concern to this paper are the visual manifestations of the relationship
between gender and modernity, as made evident in artistic productions by male artists
during the Weimar Republic. In order to challenge the traditional hegemonic masculine
interpretations of the Weimar period, I will use a predominantly socialist feminist
approach to study the various aspects of gender relations during the lifespan of the
Republic. This particular branch of feminism regards the inequality of the sexes as a result
of the social relations and economic structures created under a capitalist system.7 As such,
5 Richard McCormick, Gender and Sexuality, 5. 6 Ibid. 169. 7 Laurie Schneider Adams, The Methodologies of Art (Boulder: Westview Press, 2010), 97.
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some elements of historical materialism will emerge in the discussion, particularly in terms
of mass culture, and the commodification of human relations and the female body through
the form of prostitution.
Relying heavily on the precepts of gender theory—which, stretching from Simone de
Beauvoir’s 1949 The Second Sex to Judith Butler’s concept of gender performativity and
beyond, understand masculinity and femininity as social and cultural constructs rather
than biologically predetermined attributes—the purpose of this paper is to investigate how
these images were both shaped by and contributed to the discourses surrounding gender
and sexuality in the Weimar era.8 The relevant works of art, as with all cultural products,
did not serve as a mere passive mirror of the political, social, and cultural climate of the
time. Instead, these images actively participated in the conceptualization, formation, and
interpretation of those historical documents and conditions.
Following the contemporary viewpoint that understands woman as eternal “other”
in the hegemonic, masculine tradition of modernity, it is possible to identify and decipher
the many anxieties and fears that were projected onto the figure of the modern German
woman during the Weimar period.9 As renowned feminist author and social theorist
Simone de Beauvoir noted in 1949, “[r]epresentation of the world, like the world itself, is
the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with
absolute truth.”10 By examining representations of women by male artists, male constructs
8 See: Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972; first pub, 1949); and
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 2010). 9 Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1995), 37; Also, Andreas
Huyssen’s chapter, “Mass Culture as Woman,” posits that Woman is associated with the inferior products of mass culture, which, in turn, is set in opposition to high culture, making Woman an outsider to “authentic” culture. Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Indianapolis: Indiana University, 1986), 44-‐62.
10 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 175,
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of femininity are revealed. As Griselda Pollock queries in her book, Vision and Difference:
why is it that images of modernism so often deal with threats to masculine sexuality and
authority by using the female body as their primary signifier?11 It is informative to consider
how these images of women, constructed by male artists, reflected and contributed to the
fragmentation and perceived loss of male subjectivity and patriarchal authority. This
supposed loss of male subjectivity is considered by many contemporary scholars to be a
crucial factor in determining the cultural climate of the Weimar Republic.12
A particularly intriguing motif in many of the images to be analyzed in this paper is
the repeated association of the modern German woman with the urban city. A thorough
analysis of artistic representations of the city—the urban metropolis of Weimar Berlin in
particular—requires an understanding of the gendering of space, as well as social theories
concerning the effects of rapid industrialization and urbanization on the modern city
dweller. Fortunately, the Weimar years were among the most productive in terms of
contributions to the emerging field of modern sociology. The gendering of the modern
urban city as feminine—specifically as an aggressive and sexually threatening type of
feminine—is nearly ubiquitous in the texts and discourses of German urban sociology and
social criticism during the Weimar era. Artistic representations of gender, sexuality, and
women in urban settings during this period can therefore be analyzed with reference to
these critical theories.
11 Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and the Histories of Art (New York:
Routledge,2003), 76. 12 See, for example, Dorothy Rowe, Representing Berlin: Sexuality and the City in Imperial and Weimar
Germany. (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003), 9.
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Gender and sexuality are, of course, central to any contemporary discourse
concerning either modernism (the art and cultural movement) or modernity (the
experience and historical condition). Feminist critiques of both modernity and modernism
often emphasize the privileged masculine discourse of the modern experience in general,
and the Weimar period in particular. In light of the historical perpetuation of these
masculine myths of modernism—in which women are, at least conceptually, excluded from
the public experience of modernity—it is necessary to discover the impetus for the
seemingly paradoxical use of the female figure to allegorize the German experience of
modernity during the Weimar years.13 Furthermore, the historically masculine gendering
of the public sphere in Western cultures seems at odds with artistic use of the female figure
to personify of the city. The pejorative and apparently antithetical association between
modernity and the female figure evident in the arts of the Weimar era indicates the
complex realities of an increasingly fragile social system grappling with constant and
unnerving change to traditional gender roles. The application of current readings of
Weimar social histories and theories in an analysis of such works can assist in unraveling
the mystery of their apparently conflicting meanings.
The anxieties and fears that were projected onto the female figure in these artworks
should be understood as the visual manifestations of societal concerns that were present in
German life well before the establishment of the Weimar Republic. Significant changes in
urbanization patterns, industrial technologies, and family and social structures were
13 The concept that women have been ostensibly excluded from the experiences of modernity—and
certainly from the majority of historical accounts and theories of modernity—has been argued by many contemporary feminist theorists in a variety of fields, from history to literature to sociology, whose scholarship challenges the masculine perspectives that continue to permeate much of the discourse surrounding both the lived and the historical modern experience. See, for example, Felski, The Gender of Modernity, (1995); Witz “Georg Simmel,” (2001); and Marshall and Witz, Engendering the Social (2004).
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already occurring around the turn of the 20th century. The shock of the First World War
drastically exacerbated these concerns and contributed to the particular cultural climate of
the Weimar era. Moreover, the move away from traditionally defined gender roles towards
the supposed liberation of women and female sexuality—as a result of the political changes
introduced by the establishment of the Weimar Republic—was perhaps the biggest catalyst
for social and cultural change during the period. These changes were largely and most
visibly played out in the public sphere of the city, which was previously strictly gendered
and regulated as a masculine domain. With the entrance of the modern, wage-‐earning,
educated, and sexually unbridled German woman into the public realm, the city became the
canvas where these cultural transformations and their consequences were displayed.
As such, this paper will look at representations of women and the modern city in the
works of male artists during the Weimar Republic. After thoroughly establishing the
cultural and historical framework of the period, I will analyze three main female
stereotypes in order to understand the context of their highly gendered and polemical
representations: the “New Woman,” the prostitute, and the mother. I will initially focus on
the allegorical use of the New Woman, as the disruption of traditional gender roles caused
by her emergence into the economic, political, and social realm was (and still is) perceived
to be the greatest catalyst for cultural and social change during the Weimar era. Next, I look
at images of prostitutes, which abound in Weimar imagery and are closely related to the
phenomenon of the New Woman. The repeated conflation of the two figures—the New
Woman and the urban prostitute—reveals several cultural assumptions that are essential
to an accurate understanding of Weimar culture. Finally, I present the traditional German
mother as the quintessential counterpoint to the ignoble modern woman. I will briefly
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consider images of mothers and motherhood in relation to the New Woman, German
women’s dutiful place in modern society, and discourses on female sexuality.
I argue that evident in these images is the destabilization of social, gender, and
sexual identities that characterized the specific cultural milieu of the Weimar Republic. The
particular stylistic tendencies of the arts during this period reveal a pronounced
ambivalence towards the realities and possibilities that modernization presented to the
German nation. Representations of women, more so than representations of men, reflect
the various viewpoints and ideologies surrounding the most significant concerns of the
epoch and reveal a persistent conflict between modernization and the forces of tradition in
Weimar Germany.
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New Objectivity: Historical Context
By the 1920s, Berlin was the world’s third largest metropolis, after London and New
York. The city’s transition from a relatively nominal town to a sprawling urban center took
place over a surprisingly short period of time. During the roughly half century between the
unification of Germany (1871) and the establishment of Berlin as the capital of the new
Weimar Republic (1919), Berlin had already come to epitomize the modern urban city in
popular culture and discourses around the world.14 This was largely due to the unusually
rapid pace of industrialization in Germany, which began prior to the turn of the twentieth
century, but was hastened in the wake of World War I. According to art historian Shearer
West, “[t]he industrial and technological changes which had contributed to a fundamental
alteration in the way of life of Germans before the First World War intensified when the
war was over, as Germany became one of the most advanced industrial nations in the
world.”15
Not surprisingly, the First World War greatly impacted many elements of German
consciousness, culture, and daily life. The brutality of mechanized warfare and the sheer
number of casualties caused lasting psychological turmoil for returning soldiers and
grieving civilians alike. The excessively harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles—including
German disarmament, territorial concessions, steep monetary reparations that led to
hyperinflation, and a War Guilt Clause (Article 231) that forced Germany and its allies to
accept full responsibility for starting the war—greatly contributed to German woes.
Additionally, the young Weimar government’s first attempt at democracy allowed for
14 Shearer West, The Visual Arts In Germany 1890-1937: Utopia and Despair (New Brunswick: Rutgers
University, 2001), 162. 15 Ibid. 169-‐70.
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impassioned public debates on a great many subjects, hitherto largely avoided. These
included issues concerning class and social welfare, national identity, and gender and
sexuality. Most notable and vocal of these topics was the Women’s Rights movement. The
constitution of the new Weimar Republic, adopted in August of 1919, granted women the
right to vote for the first time in German history and subsequently introduced a wide
variety of feminist (or, at the very least, female) voices to political and social discourses.
In a more concrete manner, World War I also directly upset traditional notions of
gender roles and obscured the dichotomy of the previously strictly gendered public and
private spheres by flooding urban workplaces with female laborers. Although this influx of
women into the workforce was only temporary, with most female employees dismissed
upon the return of soldiers from war, the radical shift in the female employment and the
freedoms obtained by gainfully employed women caused prolonged tension between the
sexes. This hostility ignited further debates concerning the German woman’s rightful and
dutiful place in a modernized society. Most women who were employed outside of their
homes during the war were reluctant to return to the mundane life of domesticity. Yet, one
area where many women did, in fact, largely retain their newly gained employment
positions was in middle-‐class, white-‐collar, office settings. This employment trend created
an entirely new socio-‐economic class of female identity, which became tremendously
significant in the future trajectory of modernity throughout the Western world, and
especially within the rapidly modernizing German nation.
In response to these radical developments, the German arts began to address these
modern concerns in a more direct manner. Increasingly disillusioned with the spiritual,
introspective, and elitist qualities of Expressionism—the distinctive artistic style of modern
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German art since the turn of the century—many German artists began working in the style
of a movement that came to be known as Neue Sachlichkeit, or “New Objectivity.”16 The
term was popularized by art dealer and museum director Gustav Hartlaub after he used it
to describe a collection of works by several artists in a 1925 exhibition titled, “Die Neue
Sachlichkeit: Deutsche Malerei seit dem Expressionismus” (“The New Objectivity: German
Painting Since Expressionism”). As made clear by the exhibition’s subtitle, proponents of
New Objectivity intentionally sought to distance the movement from the traditions of
Expressionism. Hartlaub defined the term and movement as indicating:
the general contemporary feeling in Germany of resignation and cynicism
after a period of exuberant hopes (which had found an outlet in
Expressionism). Cynicism and resignation are the negative side of the Neue
Sachlichkeit; the positive side expressed itself in the enthusiasm for the
immediate reality as a result of the desire to take things entirely objectively
on a material basis without immediately investing them with ideal
implications.17
New Objectivity has since come to include a much wider array of attributes although
the defining feature still remains its sense of, “detachment and knowingness borne of deep
cynicism.”18 It has been described in more recent scholarship as displaying a seemingly
“sober” or “unsentimental” embrace of modernity, urbanity, technology, and mass
culture.19 However, visual arts of the movement may be more accurately described as
exhibiting subtly ambivalent or even explicitly contradictory feelings towards many
elements of modernity. In its rejection of all things irrational and spiritual, New Objectivity
16 Shearer West, The Visual Arts in Germany, 159. 17 Gustav Hartlaub, Quoted in Bernard S. Myers, The German Expressionists: A Generation in Revolt
(New York: Praeger, 1957), 224. 18 Shearer West, The Visual Arts in Germany, 9. 19 Richard McCormick, Gender and Sexuality, 2 and 4.
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has also come to be understood by some scholars as deliberately rejecting femininity and
effeminacy, serving as the “masculine” counterpart to the “feminine” style of
Expressionism.20 German realism of this period can be said to occupy a normative
masculine tradition in the sense that the very locations typically depicted by New
Objectivity artists frequently precluded women’s involvement in any respectable manner:
battlefield trenches, gritty urban streets, and cafés, bars and brothels (as patrons, not
prostitutes).21
Evident in the artwork of this style, then, is an attempt to address many of the
elements of modernity in a so-‐called “objective” manner that—by its own intrinsic
nature—betrays deep-‐seated gender assumptions, disparities, and anxieties. What follows
is an analysis of several works of art from the Weimar period, with the explicit intention of
revealing these underlying gendered biases.
20 Shearer West, The Visual Arts in Germany, 162. 21 Marsha Meskimmon in M. Meskimmon and Martin Davies eds., Domesticity and Dissent: The Role of
Women Artists in Germany 1918-1938 (UK: Leicestershire Museums, 1992), 22.
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The “New Woman”: Marker of Modernity
The historical association of modernity with rationality, and therefore masculinity,
has been well documented, both during the Weimar era and throughout the ensuing
decades. Indeed, influential Weimar sociologist Georg Simmel asserted that, “our objective
culture is thoroughly male.”22 According to Simmel, men are increasingly fragmented and
alienated by the rationalizing processes of modernization, while woman’s inherently non-‐
alienating and organic nature renders her unaffected by such processes.23 Stemming from
this masculine-‐modernist paradigm is the problematic assumption that women constitute a
redemptive power against the onslaught of modernization, making them the eternal,
“ahistorical other” to modernism and therefore excluded from the experience of
modernity.24
While acknowledging the historical relevance of this idea, literary historian Rita
Felski convincingly argues for an alternative reading of modernity in which women and
femininity figure prominently as both participants and allegorical representations of the
experience of modernity. She states: “For every account of the modern era which
emphasizes the domination of masculine qualities of rationalization, productivity, and
repression, one can find another text which points—whether approvingly or
censoriously—to the feminization of Western society, as evidenced in the passive,
hedonistic, and decentered nature of modern subjectivity.”25 Felski’s research focuses
largely on nineteenth-‐century European culture and notes a prominent shift towards the
22 Georg Simmel: On Women, Sexuality, and Love, trans. Guy Oakes (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1984), 54. 23 Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity, 37-‐39. And Dorothy Rowe, Representing Berlin, 64-‐69. 24 Ibid., 38. 25 Ibid., 4-‐5.
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centrality of female psychology and sexuality in cinematic, artistic and literary
representations of modernity at the fin-‐de-‐siècle.26 The most familiar of these highly
sexualized representations of modernity is, of course, the archetypal femme fatale,
notorious seductress and destroyer of men.27 Mary Ann Doane describes the literary and
cinematic femme fatale as the, “articulation of fears surrounding the stability and centrality
of the [male] ego,” and argues that her figure is symptomatic of male fears about emergent
feminisms and female sexualities, and as such, serves as a historical marker for specific
moments in history.28
In the interwar period a new female archetype emerged in the public consciousness
and, as some would argue, in the public imagination of the German nation, as well as
throughout the Western world. Sharing many of the same attributes as the fin-‐de-‐siècle
femme fatale, this new female figure was referred to as the “Neue Frau,” or “New Woman,”
the highly politicized embodiment of an increasingly modern and liberated femininity.
Broadly speaking, the New Woman in the Weimar Republic was a member of the newly
created socio-‐economic middle class that was brought into existence on the coattails of the
German industrial and technological revolution. Gail Finney provides a succinct description
of this historical figure:
[T]he New Woman typically pursues self-‐fulfillment and independence, often
choosing to work for a living. She typically strives for equality in her
relationships with men, seeking to eliminate the double standard that shaped
the sexual mores of the time, and is in general much more frank about her
sexuality than the old woman… Dismayed by male attitudes or by the
26 Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity. 3. 27 Virginia Allen, The Femme Fatale: Erotic Icon (New York: Whitson, 1983), vii. 28 Mary Ann Doane, Femme Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge,
1991), 2-‐3.
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difficulty of combining marriage and career, she often chooses to remain
single… The New Woman is physically vigorous and energetic, preferring
comfortable clothes to the restrictive garb usually worn by women of the era.
She often has short hair, rides a bicycle, and smokes cigarettes.29
Perhaps Otto Dix’s 1926 portrait of the journalist and poet Sylvia van Harden comes
closest to an authentic, sympathetic—albeit, still subjective—representation of Finney’s
definition of the New Woman (fig. 1). It is, however, also an exemplary illustration of the
ambiguous status and reception of this modern German woman. Supporting herself by
writing articles for the daily newspapers, van Harden was a regular patron of the
somewhat sordid Berlin café scene, frequented by writers, artists, and prostitutes. Dix met
van Harden at one such café and convinced her to sit for a portrait, purportedly insisting
that her visage was “representative of an entire epoch.”30
By no means a flattering portrait, van Harden appears seated in a café, smoking a
cigarette, with a half-‐empty cocktail on the table. With a distinct expression of melancholic
apathy and slight moue of distaste, she seems to deliberately disregard the viewer. She
wears a boxy, unflattering, black-‐and-‐red checker printed dress that completely obscures
her female figure. One stocking sags ever so slightly below her hemline, revealing her bare
skin, indicating a detached and (perhaps deliberate) indifference towards her appearance.
She sports a short, masculine haircut and wears a monocle, an exclusively male accessory.
Her pale skin and exaggeratedly narrow face accentuates her hardened disposition. Her
oversized hands, long fingers, and self-‐conscious pose lend her an awkward, nervous look.
29 Gail Finney, Women in Modern Drama: Freud, Feminism, and European Theater at the Turn of the
Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989),195-‐196. 30 Richard McCormick, Gender and Sexuality, 158.
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As the epitome of an androgynous, career-‐oriented, bohemian intellectual woman,
van Harden represents everything that was threatening to traditional, male-‐oriented,
bourgeois society at the time.31 Intentionally exhibiting both feminine and masculine
qualities, habits, and mannerisms, the New Woman often evoked discussion of the so-‐called
“third sex,” or “intersexual” type, as defined by the German doctor Magnus Hirschfeld, the
leading authority in the relatively nascent field of sexology during the Weimar period.32
Widely considered to possess a predisposition towards homosexuality, or at the very least
an aversion to maternal and familial instincts and duties, the New Woman was often
criticized for posing a major threat to the stability of the German family, and therefore the
German state as well. She was perceived as either possessing a self-‐serving interest in
career advancement, or as an egocentric woman who partook of base acts of sexual
depravity in order to satisfy her own desires. Dix’s portrait of van Harden falls into the
former category, in which the New Objectivity’s de-‐eroticization—which is not to say de-‐
objectification—of the New Woman is apparent33
The realities of the New Woman are often quite difficult to divorce from the myths
of her existence evident in cultural and historical texts of the time. As accurate as Finney’s
description of the New Woman and Dix’s portrait of Sylvia van Harden are, they fail to
demonstrate the persistent negative connotations of the New Woman’s threatening and
devouring sexuality, which were carried over from her traditional femme fatale progenitor.
Parallels exist between the figures of the femme fatale and the New Woman, in reality and
31 For an in-‐depth discussion of the androgynous woman and the threats she posed to the traditional
Weimar social order, see Kate Sutton The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany (New York: Berghahn, 2011). 32 Barbara Hales, “Mediating Worlds: The Occult as Projection of the New Woman in Weimar
Culture,” The German Quarterly 83, no. 3 (Summer 2010): 319. 33 Dorothy Rowe, Representing Berlin, 166.
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in the popular imagination, including a rejection of traditional feminine gender roles, the
shunning of marriage and motherhood, an increased sexual drive, and a willingness to act
on such desires without hesitation. The novelty of the New Woman’s brazen character was
both enticing and terrifying for many individuals—both male and female—who continued
to hold on to traditional social norms.
Yet, most scholars now agree that the New Woman of Weimar Germany was both, “a
media fabrication and a flesh-‐and-‐blood individual.”34 The New Woman’s actual impact on
society was far less severe than that of her exaggerated and mythologized figure in the
popular imagination. Despite the de jure political and legal advances gained by women
following the ratification of the Weimar constitution, many traditional prejudices from the
imperial era lingered. The most virulent of these lingering biases was the association of the
New Woman with the all-‐consuming femininity of the turn-‐of-‐the-‐century femme fatale.35
Loose sexual mores became the defining feature of the character of the New Woman
stereotype.
While Dix’s portrait of Sylvia van Harden captures a more sympathetic and accurate
reality of the financially independent, intellectual, modern German woman, the artist was
not ignorant of the mythical aspects of the New Woman in the popular imagination. Nor
was he innocent of perpetuating sexualized stereotypes in his own art. Works like the 1925
painting, Three Women on the Street (fig. 2), confirm his participation in a cultural
discourse that vilified women’s sexuality, consumerism, and luxury as potent symbols of an
34 Shearer West, ed. Visions of the ‘Neue Frau’, 1. 35 See Rita Felski’s chapter, “Imagined Pleasures: The Erotics and Aesthetics of Consumption,” in The
Gender of Modernity (p 61-‐90) for an in depth discussion of the association between the femme fatale and the New Woman, and the double meaning of an “all-‐consuming femininity,” which indicates both the psychosexual and the economic threat that the modern woman posed to patriarchal authority.
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effeminate, modern society considered to be in economic, social, and moral decline.36 In
this particular work, three women are positioned in front of a richly decorated shop
window in an apparently urban setting. None of the women appear to be interested in the
window display behind them. They each wear outfits typically associated with the attire of
the sexually mythologized New Woman: form-‐fitting, moderately luxurious dresses, short
hairstyles, and telltale cloche hats. Dorothy Rowe described this scene as indicating, “the
ambiguous position with which women in the public realm were regarded.” She describes
their figures as, “lurk(ing)…neither buying nor selling but hovering both literally and
metaphorically between the roles of commodity and consumer.”37
This interpretation becomes all the more meaningful when considering that the
work was once alternately referred to as Three Prostitutes on the Street. When analyzed in
this light, it is easy to understand the three women as being presented—or perhaps
presenting themselves—as commodified objects for sale, appropriately framed by the
picture plane in such a way that they become the items on display and we, the viewers,
become potential customers.38 Furthermore, as if to reiterate the explicit association
between commodification and female sexuality, a singular, disembodied, shod female leg is
on display in the window behind the women. Linda Nochlin has argued (in regards to an
unrelated painting) that the exposed female leg serves as, “a witty synecdoche, a
substitution of part for whole… a trope indicating the sexual availability of delectable
female bodies for willing buyers.”39
36 Dorothy Rowe, Representing Berlin, 11. 37 Ibid., 161. 38 Ibid. 39 Linda Nochlin, The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society (Boulder:
Westview Press, 1989), 47.
Gajownik 19
If we return to Rowe’s statement that this image indicates the ambiguous position of
modern women in the urban public sphere, we can further complicate our understanding
of the New Woman of the Weimar Republic. Despite the new freedoms granted to women
and the ongoing erosion of the boundaries of gendered city spaces, unaccompanied women
in the metropolis continued to be regarded as morally suspect. Additionally, in an age of
radically shifting sexual mores, the realities of sexual habits, venereal disease,
contraception, and abortion all seemed to collapse the previously rigid boundaries between
respectable bourgeois women, the partially mythical New Woman, and prostitutes.40
The New Woman’s connection with consumption and mass culture often led to
discussion of modern luxury as being effeminate and decadent, and ultimately weakening
the German state. Consequently, this sentiment effectively demonized women and modern
femininity in the eyes of German nationalists.41 The department store, the foremost site of
feminine capitalist consumption, was the epitome of modern luxury in Berlin, as elsewhere
in Europe and America at the time. Shopping was a leisure activity closely associated with
the New Woman, and the department store became an integral part of modern urban life.42
Karl Hubbuch’s 1921 engraving, The Dream of the Tietz Girls, perhaps best and most
explicitly demonstrates this correlation between female sexuality and commodification
40 Furthermore, some women, especially widowed, working-‐class mothers, resorted to occasional
acts of prostitution out of sheer desperation during the depression era the followed the First World War. Women, and mothers in particular, were disproportionately affected by inflation and reductions to social services and other governmental welfare programs. See Renate Bridenthal, Atina Grossman, and Marion Kaplan, When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984), 12, 16.
41 See for example, Walter Benjamin, “One Way Street,” (1924) and Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money (1900). For a more in depth understanding of the concept of Luxury outside the confines of Germany, see Christopher Berry, The Idea of Luxury: A Conceptual and Historical Investigation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.)
42 Dorothy Rowe, Representing Berlin, 114.
Gajownik 20
(fig. 3). Conceived of as part of a series of engravings in which Hubbuch intended to
portray the social physiognomy of the Weimar Republic, this work indicates the prevalence
with which the act of consumerism was gendered as female—and with an explicitly sexual
overtone—in popular culture.43 In the print, the naked figures of several Tietz Girls
(Tietzmädchen, as the shop assistants and regular customers of the glamorous Tietz
department store in Berlin were known) are strewn throughout an ill-‐defined and
overcrowded space, vaguely referencing and caricaturizing the department store. Headless
mannequins are interspersed with naked bodies and both are scattered among a jumble of
clothing items, shoes, porcelain and other housewares, an assortment of home-‐furnishings,
as well as a solitary nude male figure, which cannot be definitively identified as either man
or mannequin. Several of the female figures are engaged in intimate, if not explicitly erotic,
acts. The common Weimar association of femininity and commodification is taken to
bizarre extremes in this image of (male) imagined female sexuality.44 It should be
emphasized that both Otto Dix’s Three Women on the Street, and Karl Hubbuch’s The Dream
of the Tietz Girls, would be more accurately described as conflations of male fantasies of the
sexually liberated woman and the prostitute, projected onto the figure of the New Woman,
than they are accurate representations of modern German female sexualities.
As Rowe argues, “[t]he association between consumerism and gender elicited by
these images is a recurring trope of male modernist discourses of modernity and as such it
extends to the representation of other aspects of the city.”45 Invariably, the modern
43 Dorothy Rowe, Representing Berlin, 164. 44 Ibid., 164-‐5. Rowe also connects this particular work to Emil Zola’s novel Au Bonheurs des Dames
(The Ladies’ Paradise), 1883, based on the famous Parisian department store Bon Marché, as well as a broader tradition of sexualized representations of department store femininity and consumer culture in European literature since the 19th century.
45 Ibid. 165.
Gajownik 21
metropolis of Berlin was envisioned as female, and as an explicitly sexually aggressive
female at that. In his memoirs, recalling his early years spent in Berlin during the Weimar
era, Karl Zuckmayer describes the city as such:
People discussed Berlin… as if the city were a highly desirable woman whose
coldness and capriciousness were well known: the less chance anyone had to
win her, the more they desired her. We called her proud, snobbish, nouveau
riche, uncultured, crude. But secretly everyone looked upon her as the goal of
their desires. Some saw her as hefty, full-‐breasted, in lace underwear, others
as a mere wisp of a thing, with boyish legs in black silk stockings. The daring
saw both aspects, and her very reputation for cruelty made them the more
aggressive. All wanted to have her; she enticed all… To conquer Berlin was to
conquer the world.46
An image titled “The Woman and the City” from a 1930 issue of the popular
women’s magazine, Die Dame, appropriately captures this sentiment (fig. 4). In this image a
young woman leans seductively against a classically draped pedestal. She sports a
distinctive short, finger-‐wave hairstyle and is wearing a form-‐fitting dress that reveals her
shoulders and arms and exposes her bare legs from the knees down. She stares
coquettishly and deliberately outside of the frame. Her exaggerated figure dominates the
picture plane, extending from the bottom right corner where her feet rest, to the top and
left edges where her arm and the top of her head are cropped by the frame. She eclipses a
backdrop of impossibly tall skyscrapers, which serve to reinforce her rigid and inflexible
nature. Harsh shadows fall upon the left side of her face, emphasizing her unsympathetic
and daunting disposition, while her alluring sensuality remains undiminished.
46 Karl Zuckmayer, A Part of Myself, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1970), 217.
Gajownik 22
In Zuckmayer’s recollections, as in Die Dame’s “The Woman and the City,” an
exaggeration of the titillating seduction and cruelty of both Berlin and the modern German
woman is readily apparent. Art and film historian Patrice Petro argues that, “this tendency
to exaggerate in representing Berlin as a woman reveals less about women in Weimar than
it does about a male desire that simultaneously elevates and represses woman as object of
allure and as harbinger of danger.”47 Images and accounts such as these, in which the
female figure is absent as subject yet over-‐represented as sexualized object, are
symptomatic of male subjective desire coupled with an increasing sense of the loss of male
cultural authority following the crisis of the First World War.48 Such historical texts reveal
not only the fetishization of the German city, but also the construction of a gender-‐specific
version of Weimar modernity that is centered on exclusively male experiences.
47 Patrice Petro, Joyless Streets: Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimar Germany
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 43. 48 Dorothy Rowe, Representing Berlin, 2.
Gajownik 23
The Prostitute: Sexuality in the City
Although the liberated New Woman and her advances in legal, political, and social
equality lead to this perceived loss of male authority, it was the all too familiar figure of the
urban prostitute that embodied the greater threat to male subjectivity. Representations of
the modern city as an over-‐sexualized, aggressive, and debased prostitute are related to
anxieties elicited by the fragmentation and loss of subjectivity resulting from the alienating
nature of modern urban life.49 The prostitute served as a sort of visual shorthand for all of
the evils of modernity inflicted upon the increasingly fractured urban male psyche.
The somewhat hyperbolic theory of Weimar “castration anxiety” has been
exhaustively employed in order to explain the prevalence of this psychosexual metaphor.50
Despite the rather facile application of Freudian principles, this theory is in fact informative
contextually in the sense that psychoanalysis was finally beginning to gain credibility in
Germany at the time. Richard McCormick provides a less histrionic application of
psychoanalytic theory to Weimar culture in his discussion of Weimar cinema. McCormick
notes that, “[m]ale crisis is depicted…in order to control and ‘cure’ it, and, as was often the
case in Weimar culture, such depictions displace anxieties about losing (or having lost)
autonomy and social status onto the sexual realm. That is, the real issue was power in a
broader social context and not mere ‘potency’ in an exclusively sexual sense.”51 The female
prostitute was the figure onto which the brunt of these anxieties was displaced.
Otto Dix’s Whore with War Cripple (1923) captures this connection between the loss
of male power and the prostitute (fig. 5). In this pen and ink drawing, the awkward couple
49 Dorothy Rowe, Representing Berlin, 9. 50 Richard McCormick, Gender and Sexuality, 95. 51 Ibid., 96.
Gajownik 24
is placed facing the viewer. On the left is a ragged and aging prostitute, apparently
unclothed. Her body appears frail, as her bone structure is clearly visible just beneath her
skin. Dark circles surround her tired eyes, and her gaunt face displays several moles or
syphilitic sores and a pursed mouth. Her cold expression and blank stare starkly contrasts
with the startled look in the one good eye of her male counterpart. She sits in front of and
appears to be leaning on the injured veteran, whose face and left eye have been severely
deformed in battle.
The implications in this drawing are manifold. First, the equally unflattering—yet
somehow sympathetic—manner in which the two figures are depicted suggests an
equivalency in social status between the two types: the wretched whore and the stricken
veteran. Implicit in this image is an empathetic acknowledgement that both are
unfortunate victims of the harsh realities of modernity. In fact, this drawing was at one
point re-‐titled as, “Two Victims of Capitalism.”52 Yet Dix’s treatment of the prostitute is not
entirely without scorn. Dora Apel comments that, “Dix plays on stereotypes of the
prostitute as morally and physically corrupt, her body the site of rapacious sexualities and
dominating physicality in inverse proportion to the diminished and disfigured militarized
male. The soldier is not only subordinate to the prostitute but implicitly corrupted by the
impurity of the transaction.”53 Injured soldiers returning from war are here suggested to be
unworthy of, and undesirable to, anyone aside from the profiteering prostitute. In this
image, as in most depictions of prostitution by Dix and other artists of the period, a crisis of
male subjectivity is associated with the moral corruption of the prostitute in either one or
52 Dora Apel, “’Heroes’ and ‘Whores’: The Politics of Gender in Weimar Antiwar Imagery,” The Art
Bulletin 79, no. 3 (Sep., 1997): 371. 53 Ibid., 369.
Gajownik 25
both of two ways: through a physical and spiritual kinship between the diseased prostitute
and the wounded war veteran, or via the depiction of the emasculated soldier as a damaged
individual on whom the exploitative prostitute preys.54 Yet, despite the asymmetrical
power relation displayed in this image, the two figures are also intended to be read as a
misfortunate, homologous pair.55
Georg Grosz’s lesser-‐known work, Suicide (1918), provides further proof of the
widespread association of female sexuality and the psychological undoing of male identity
(fig. 6). This vibrant and chaotic watercolor and ink work shows a spatially disorienting
scene with several overlapping elements. Four figures are present, depicted in varying
degrees of clarity. On the bottom left is the suicide victim: a male dressed in a suit, his limbs
akimbo, his leg at an impossible and painful angle, with a gun in his left hand pointed at his
temple. While his suit is dark blue, the wash in this section of the work is violently red,
tinting his right hand, neck, and a portion of his face. On the right are two other, less
distinct, male figures. One, shown in blue monochrome profile, bares his teeth and clenches
his fists on either side of his head, a clear sign of severe mental anguish. The other, visible
just behind the first, appears to be dangerously dangling or already falling from some
unintelligible ledge. He, too, grins maniacally. Occupying the center of the painting is the
figure of a mostly naked woman, arms raised provocatively behind her head, wearing
nothing but a pair of thigh-‐high stockings. Her figure is the most pronounced in the scene.
She stares menacingly at the suicide victim as if taunting him. The glowing red of her
stockings, hair, and highlights of her flesh echo the red wash surrounding the victim’s body,
54 Dora Apel, “’Heroes’ and ‘Whores,” 371. 55 Maria Tatar, Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press:
1995), 81.
Gajownik 26
as well as the blood red moon in the dark night sky. The correlation between violent male
madness and female sexuality is undeniable in this image.
Crucial to a complete understanding of this work is an analysis of the deconstructed
cityscape that complicates the background. This confusing and spatially fractured array of
architectural elements is a characteristic feature of Grosz’s urban motifs during this period.
Echoing the widely accepted theories of Weimar sociologist Georg Simmel, Grosz’s
contemporary, this particular stylistic rendering of the urban metropolis has been
described as expressing the alienating and fragmenting affects of modern life.56 Grosz’s
more popular paintings, Metropolis (1917) and The Big City (1916-‐17), are the clearest and
most familiar examples of this leitmotif (fig. 7, fig. 8 respectively).
An even more disturbing variation on the coupling of male violence and female
sexuality is evident in a group of New Objectivity works that depict scenes of sexual
murder (figs. 9 and 10). Otto Dix and Georg Grosz created numerous works with this
theme. Although a small number of these lustmord images predate the First World War, the
drastically increased frequency and intensity with which these artists depicted such violent
acts following their returns from war is readily apparent. As Maria Tatar notes, “the
conflation of eros and death…comes to be played out, in the postwar years, on domestic
rather than on military battlegrounds.”57 More often than not, these images of lustmord
fantasies occur in modest apartments in urban settings, as indicated by the city streets
visible through the windows in both Dix and Grosz’s works. Although it would be a
grievous oversimplification to attribute the violation of female bodies in works such as
these solely to the artists’ traumatic war experiences, it is accurate to state that the war
56 Dorothy Rowe, Representing Berlin, 152. 57 Maria Tatar, Lustmord, 120.
Gajownik 27
appears to have caused these artists to amplify their expressions of existing hostilities
towards women.58 Or, as Tatar explains: “As the trauma of war deepened and the attendant
crisis of male subjectivity and bodily integrity intensified, the mask of sexual desire for
women fell to reveal little more than murderous aggression towards women.”59
As is hopefully evident by now, the representation of the ills of modernity through
the conflated images of sexualized women and the urban city is a repeated trope in New
Objectivity artworks. Almost without exception, this sexualized cityscape is shown in night
scenes in the fine arts of the Weimar Republic.60 Dorothy Rowe points to an informative
collection of essays, published in a 50 volume series between 1905 and 1908, that serves as
a primary source of evidence regarding the relationship between sexuality and the city in
modern Germany. These Big City Documents (Die Großstadt Dokumente), published by
journalist and writer Hans Ostwald, provide a wide array of perspectives concerning the
lived experience of modernity in Weimar Berlin. The first volume, written by Ostwald
himself, is titled, “Dark Corners in Berlin.” Rowe’s discussion of this particular volume is
worth quoting at length:
Many of the concerns regarding the sexual life of the modernist city that were
exposed by Ostwald’s series of texts were to resurface within
representations of Berlin during the Weimar period. The origins of the overt
sexualization of Berlin can be shown to have begun during the pre-‐war era
although the full extent of the conflation of the city with the image of a
58 Klaus Theweleit’s Männerphantasien (1977) provides an in depth analysis of the violent sexual
fantasies of Freikorps (paramilitary) soldiers of the Weimar era. See Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, trans. Stephan Conway (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985).
59 Maria Tatar, Lustmord, 126. 60 This is not necessarily the case for images in the illustrated press, which, as Sherwin Simmons has
demonstrated, also actively participated in discourses of female sexuality in the modern German city, oftentimes depicting the explicitly gendered activity of female consumerism in broad daylight. See “Ernst Kirchner’s Streetwalker: Art, Luxury, and Immorality in Berlin, 1913-‐16,” The Art Bulletin 82, no. 1 (Mar. 2000): 117-‐148.
Gajownik 28
sexually voracious and devouring female did not occur until towards the end
of the First World War…. The possibilities for transgressive sexual behaviour
in the darker corners and elaborate networks of the city’s Passagen are
clearly delineated here. The sexualization of the city and its role in the
playing out of secret desires becomes bound up with its spatial and
architectural construction. However, as becomes increasingly apparent as
the whole series progresses, the city as a site of sexual adventure is only
acceptable at night.61
Embodying all of these elements, Otto Dix’s Big City Triptych (1927-‐28) is a work of
New Objectivity painting par excellence (fig. 11). This work represents the height of
Weimar’s simultaneous fascination and fear of the modern woman’s presence in the public
sphere of the metropolis. The central panel is an interior view of a posh jazz nightclub,
offering us a glimpse of the glamorous urban lifestyle available to the New Woman. Her
exaggerated, archetypal character is captured in the androgynous female figure who waves
an oversized pink feathered fan and is preparing to sashay across the dance floor.
Contrasting with this scene of chic prosperity are the side panels, which depict two
different economic levels of urban prostitution. On the right, several opulent streetwalkers
parade along an upscale city street decorated with highly ornate architecture. They wear
somewhat outlandish outfits, one of which bears an unmistakable resemblance to female
genitalia, underscoring her profession. A double amputee in a soldier’s uniform sits on the
sidewalk unnoticed, begging for alms among the women who are oblivious to his presence.
In the left panel, a more sordid scene of commodified sex takes place in a grimy
cobblestone alley. Again, the prostitutes seem indifferent to the two disabled veterans
among them.
61 Dorothy Rowe, Representing Berlin, 91-‐92.
Gajownik 29
Rowe notes that in this work, “[t]he once sharp divisions between the public and the
private body are shown to be no longer applicable in the modern capitalist metropolis
where human interaction of any kind is inscribed by the economic sphere. The dissolution
of such spheres, for which the female body serves as a catalyst, is perceived to be one of the
major threats to masculine identity, presented here in the guise of the ‘big city’.”62 As the
ultimate crystallization of the modern era’s decadent, superficial, and morally corrupt
nature, this image reveals an unsound society in which destitution and prosperity
prevailed simultaneously.63 The androgynous New Women of the center image represent
the enticing yet menacing leveling of gender differentiation brought about by the effects of
urban modernity. The salacious street prostitutes and the destitute veterans represent
urban alienation and the ultimate reduction of human relations to mere commodities. Here,
the nighttime modern metropolis becomes the primary site of confrontation between male
subjectivity and increasingly liberated female sexualities.
62 Dorothy Rowe, Representing Berlin, 167. 63 Shearer West, The Visual Arts in Germany, 164.
Gajownik 30
The Mother: Antidote to the New Woman
With the figures of the urban prostitute and the New Woman commonly used to
allegorize the threat that modern female liberties and sexualities posed to the subjective
identity and cultural authority of men, images of motherhood became highly politicized
during the Weimar era. Based on the romantic correlation between femininity and nature,
mothers were understood to possess a redemptive moral power that could offset the ills of
city life and modern culture. Seen as the representation of all things wholesome, moral, and
traditional, mother-‐and-‐child images served as a visual counterpart to the debauchery of
the modern urban woman. However, a multitude of political and social meanings
eventually became attached to the figure of the mother. She was appropriated by both left-‐
and right-‐leaning factions and artists, imbuing her image with various, and often
contradictory, subtexts.
Fears of a decline in the German national birthrate made bearing children a matter
of both official policy and patriotism during the interwar years. In light of the staggering
loss of life during the First World War, child bearing was often viewed as the German
woman’s moral duty and contribution to the war cause.64 The New Woman’s tendency to
shun, or at the very least delay, marriage and family life was cause enough to demonize her
as non-‐productive, and therefore damaging to the nation’s sustained health and political
prowess. Even among the more critical artists of the New Objectivity, like Otto Dix,
sentimental—though not necessarily picturesque—images of pregnant mothers and
newborn children abound, reflecting a widespread concern for the future prosperity of the
German nation (fig. 12 and 13).
64 Renate Bridenthal, et. al., When Biology Became Destiny,
Gajownik 31
Idyllic images of motherhood, such as those produced by somewhat less critical New
Objectivity artist Georg Schrimpf, are seen as a response to the increasingly harsh realities
of urbanized German life.65 Works like Schrimpf’s Midday Rest (1922) were intended to
promote the return to a more traditional, agrarian lifestyle (fig. 14). In this work, a peasant
mother appears napping with a small infant in her arms and a faithful dog sleeping at her
side. The scene takes place in a tranquil pastoral setting, complete with a calm stream
running into the background and across a vast spread of rolling hills. The figures of the
plump, healthy bodied, idealized mother-‐and-‐child such as these, are commonly found
throughout Schrimpf’s works. These images contributed to the vilification of the modern
urban woman by promoting and glorifying traditional notions of motherhood.
Yet, the mother-‐and-‐child subject did not always take on such an idyllic form in New
Objectivity artworks. In fact, works like Schrimpf’s are the exception rather than the rule.
More common are images like Otto Dix’s two paintings, both titled Mother and Child, from
1921 and 1923 (figs. 15 and 16). Both works show a poor, working-‐class mother holding an
infant child in her arms. Mother and child are both visibly haggard, with sickly, gaunt faces
and unnatural skin tones. The shallow depth and dark shadows of their surroundings
stress the shabby and constricting nature of their pitiable urban domestic realities. Neither
painting can be said to celebrate the joys of either modernity or motherhood. Instead,
images such as these use the destitute mother figure as a wry commentary on the state of
social inequality and economic impoverishment experienced by many during the Weimar
years.66
65 Michelle Vangen, “Left and Right: Politics and Images of Motherhood in Weimar Germany,”
Woman’s Art Journal 30, no. 2 (2009): 27. 66 Ibid. 26.
Gajownik 32
Conclusions: Paradox and Ambivalence
It would seem that although New Objectivity is generally described as possessing an
unquestioning faith in modernity, many of the most instrumental artists of the movement
visually expressed a sense of pronounced ambivalence towards the defining features of
modern life. Otto Dix and Georg Grosz, perhaps the two centermost figures of the
movement, created countless works of art which betray New Objectivity’s inherent
anxieties surrounding the realities of German modernization. The task of stabilizing the
experience of modernity largely came to be equated with stabilizing threats to male
subjectivity, which were most often understood to be the result of the recent social and
sexual emancipation of women.67 This often required the close legal and social regulation
of female behaviors that seemed to threaten masculine authority, which, more often than
not, concerned female sexuality.
Along with countless other works by Weimar artists, the images examined in this
paper not only reflect the period’s social anxieties surrounding female sexualities and
identities, but they also contribute to attempts to control the modern woman by critically
attacking her figure in a visible and public manner. The modern German woman is
viciously and literally violated in the so-‐called lustmord works of the time, and is also
caricaturized and demonized in less violent works in order to diminish her morality, her
credibility, and her political and cultural authority. In these works, her figure is
consistently and hypocritically associated with the “weakening” social forces of luxury and
decadence, which many of these artists—who often teetered between bohemian and petite
bourgeois—no doubt, participated in themselves. The modern German woman, criticized
67 Richard McCormick, Gender and Sexuality, 87.
Gajownik 33
for accepting the new liberties made available to her, is often maliciously aligned with the
corrupt and immoral urban prostitute.
New Objectivity artists, who were purported to have embraced the advancing
elements of modernity, nevertheless expressed in their works significant anxieties about
what the consequences of expanding female liberties would mean for the future of Weimar
male subjectivity and the prosperity of the German nation. These grossly exaggerated
anxieties were appeased in the minds of many male artists, writers, and intellectuals
through a complex, subconscious process of repression and projection of female sexuality,
which revealed itself in their works.68 In these images, however, the New Woman is both
mocked and vilified for her simultaneous de-‐eroticization and liberated sexuality.
In light of the hegemonic masculine nature of modernist traditions and the artistic
tendencies of the New Objectivity movement—which attempt to preclude woman’s
involvement in the experiences and discourses of modernity—it would seem paradoxical
that the female figure was adopted as the primary allegorical representation of German
modernity during the Weimar Republic. However, this paradox becomes intelligible when
it is understood to have reflected the era’s ambivalent stance towards the many
uncertainties of modernization.
68 Dorothy Rowe, Representing Berlin, 179.
Gajownik 34
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Aldershot: Ashgate, UK, 2003. Schneider Adams, Laurie. The Methodologies of Art. Boulder: Westview Press, 2010.
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Simmel, Georg. Georg Simmel: On Women, Sexuality, and Love. Translated by Guy Oakes New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984.
Simmons, Sherwin. “Ernst Kirchner’s Streetwalkers: Art, Luxury, and Immorality in Berlin,
1913-‐16.” The Art Bulletin 82, no. 1 (Mar., 2001): 117-‐148. Sutton, Kate. The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany. New York: Berghahn, 2011. Tatar, Maria. Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany. Princeton: Princeton University
Press: 1995. Theweleit, Klaus. Male Fantasies. Translated by Stephan Conway. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1985. Vangen, Michelle. “Left and Right: Politics and Images of Motherhood in Weimar Germany.”
Woman’s Art Journal 30, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2009): 25-‐30. West, Shearer, ed. Visions of the ‘Neue Frau’: Women and the Visual Arts in Germany.
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Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970.
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Images
Figure 1.
Otto Dix, Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia van Harden, 1926.
Figure 2.
Otto Dix, Three Women on the Street, 1925.
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Figure 3. Karl Hubbuch, The Dream of the Tietz Girls, 1921. Figure 4. Unknown, “The Woman and the City,” from Die Dame magazine, 1930.
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Figure 7. Georg Grosz, Metropolis, 1917. Figure 8. Georg Grosz, The Big City, 1916-‐17.
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Figure 9. Otto Dix, Sex Murder, 1922. Figure 10. Georg Grosz, John, the Lady Killer, 1918.
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Figure 11.
Otto Dix, The Big City Triptych, 1927-‐28. Figure 12. Otto Dix, Pregnant Woman, 1930.
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Figure 13. Otto Dix, Newborn Baby on Hands, 1926. Figure 14. Georg Schrimpf, Midday Rest, 1922.
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