Berlin Coquette

Berlin Coquette
Author: Jill Suzanne Smith
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2014-02-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 0801469708

During the late nineteenth century the city of Berlin developed such a reputation for lawlessness and sexual licentiousness that it came to be known as the "Whore of Babylon." Out of this reputation for debauchery grew an unusually rich discourse around prostitution. In Berlin Coquette, Jill Suzanne Smith shows how this discourse transcended the usual clichés about prostitutes and actually explored complex visions of alternative moralities or sexual countercultures including the “New Morality” articulated by feminist radicals, lesbian love, and the “New Woman.” Combining extensive archival research with close readings of a broad spectrum of texts and images from the late Wilhelmine and Weimar periods, Smith recovers a surprising array of productive discussions about extramarital sexuality, women's financial autonomy, and respectability. She highlights in particular the figure of the cocotte (Kokotte), a specific type of prostitute who capitalized on the illusion of respectable or upstanding womanhood and therefore confounded easy categorization. By exploring the semantic connections between the figure of the cocotte and the act of flirtation (of being coquette), Smith’s work presents flirtation as a type of social interaction through which both prostitutes and non-prostitutes in Imperial and Weimar Berlin could express extramarital sexual desire and agency.

Berlin Coquette

Berlin Coquette
Author: Jill Suzanne Smith
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2014-05-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0801469694

During the late nineteenth century the city of Berlin developed such a reputation for lawlessness and sexual licentiousness that it came to be known as the "Whore of Babylon." Out of this reputation for debauchery grew an unusually rich discourse around prostitution. In Berlin Coquette, Jill Suzanne Smith shows how this discourse transcended the usual clichés about prostitutes and actually explored complex visions of alternative moralities or sexual countercultures including the "New Morality" articulated by feminist radicals, lesbian love, and the "New Woman." Combining extensive archival research with close readings of a broad spectrum of texts and images from the late Wilhelmine and Weimar periods, Smith recovers a surprising array of productive discussions about extramarital sexuality, women’s financial autonomy, and respectability. She highlights in particular the figure of the cocotte (Kokotte), a specific type of prostitute who capitalized on the illusion of respectable or upstanding womanhood and therefore confounded easy categorization. By exploring the semantic connections between the figure of the cocotte and the act of flirtation (of being coquette), Smith’s work presents flirtation as a type of social interaction through which both prostitutes and non-prostitutes in Imperial and Weimar Berlin could express extramarital sexual desire and agency.

The Hygienic Apparatus

The Hygienic Apparatus
Author: Paul Dobryden
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2022-05-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0810144980

This study traces how the environmental effects of industrialization reverberated through the cinema of Germany’s Weimar Republic. In the early twentieth century, hygiene encompassed the myriad attempts to create healthy spaces for life and work amid the pollution, disease, accidents, and noise of industrial modernity. Examining classic films—including The Last Laugh, Faust, and Kuhle Wampe—as well as documentaries, cinema architecture, and studio practices, Paul Dobryden demonstrates how cinema envisioned and interrogated hygienic concerns about environmental disorder. Framing hygiene within the project of national reconstruction after World War I, The Hygienic Apparatus explores cinema’s material contexts alongside its representations of housework, urban space, traffic, pollution, disability, aging, and labor. Reformers worried about the health risks associated with moviegoing but later used film to popularize hygienic ideas, encouraging viewers to see the world and themselves in relation to public health objectives. Modernist architecture and design fashioned theaters into regenerative environments for fatigued spectators. Filmmakers like F. W. Murnau and Slatan Dudow, meanwhile, explored the aesthetic and political possibilities of dirt, contagion, intoxication, and disorder. Dobryden recovers a set of ecological and biopolitical concerns to show how the problem of environmental disorder fundamentally shaped cinema’s relationship to modernity. As accessible as it is persuasive, the book adds to a growing body of scholarship on biopolitics within German studies and reveals fresh ways of understanding the apparatus of Weimar cinema.

Embodied Histories

Embodied Histories
Author: Katya Motyl
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2024-04-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 0226832155

Explores the emergence of a new womanhood in turn-of-the-century Vienna. In Embodied Histories, historian Katya Motyl explores the everyday acts of defiance that formed the basis for new, unconventional forms of womanhood in early twentieth-century Vienna. The figures Motyl brings back to life defied gender conformity, dressed in new ways, behaved brashly, and expressed themselves freely, overturning assumptions about what it meant to exist as a woman. Motyl delves into how these women inhabited and reshaped the urban landscape of Vienna, an increasingly modern, cosmopolitan city. Specifically, she focuses on the ways that easily overlooked quotidian practices such as loitering outside cafés and wandering through city streets helped create novel conceptions of gender. Exploring the emergence of a new womanhood, Embodied Histories presents a new account of how gender, the body, and the city merge with and transform each other, showing how our modes of being are radically intertwined with the spaces we inhabit.

Servants of Culture

Servants of Culture
Author: Ambika Natarajan
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2023-05-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 1800739931

In nineteenth century Cisleithanian Austria, poor, working-class women underwent mass migrations from the countryside to urban centers for menial or unskilled labor jobs. Through legal provisions on women’s work in the Habsburg Empire, there was an increase in the policing and surveillance of what was previously a gender-neutral career, turning it into one dominated by thousands of female rural migrants. Servants of Culture provides an account of Habsburg servant law since the eighteenth century and uncovers the paternalistic and maternalistic assumptions and anxieties which turned the interest of socio-political players in improving poor living and working conditions into practices that created restrictive gender and class hierarchies. Through pioneering analysis of the agendas of medical experts, police, socialists, feminists, legal reformers, and even serial killers, this volume puts forth a neglected history of the state of domestic service discourse at the turn of the 19th century and how it shaped and continues to shape the surveillance of women.

Traces of a Jewish Artist

Traces of a Jewish Artist
Author: Kerry Wallach
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 311
Release: 2024-03-12
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0271098236

Graphic artist, illustrator, painter, and cartoonist Rahel Szalit (1888–1942) was among the best-known Jewish women artists in Weimar Berlin. But after she was arrested by the French police and then murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz, she was all but lost to history, and most of her paintings have been destroyed or gone missing. Drawing on a range of primary and secondary sources, this biography recovers Szalit’s life and presents a stunning collection of her art. Szalit was a sought-after artist. Highly regarded by art historians and critics of her day, she made a name for herself with soulful, sometimes humorous illustrations of Jewish and world literature by Sholem Aleichem, Heinrich Heine, Leo Tolstoy, Charles Dickens, and others. She published her work in the mainstream German and Jewish press, and she ran in artists’ and queer circles in Weimar Berlin and in 1930s Paris. Szalit’s fascinating life demonstrates how women artists gained access to Jewish and avant-garde movements by experimenting with different media and genres. This engaging and deeply moving biography explores the life, work, and cultural contexts of an exceptional Jewish woman artist. Complementing studies such as Michael Brenner’s The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany, this book brings Rahel Szalit into the larger conversation about Jewish artists, Expressionism, and modern art.

Expeditionary Forces in the First World War

Expeditionary Forces in the First World War
Author: Alan Beyerchen
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 349
Release: 2019-09-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 303025030X

When war engulfed Europe in 1914, the conflict quickly took on global dimensions. Although fighting erupted in Africa and Asia, the Great War primarily pulled troops from around the world into Europe and the Ottoman Empire. Amid the fighting were large numbers of expeditionary forces—and yet they have remained largely unstudied as a collective phenomenon, along with the term “expeditionary force” itself. This collection examines the expeditionary experience through a wide range of case studies. They cover major themes such as the recruitment, transport, and supply of far-flung troops; the cultural and linguistic dissonance, as well as gender relations, navigated by soldiers in foreign lands; the political challenge of providing a rationale to justify their dislocation and sacrifice; and the role of memory and memorialization. Together, these essays open up new avenues for understanding the experiences of soldiers who fought the First World War far from home.

Passing Illusions

Passing Illusions
Author: Kerry Wallach
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2017-08-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 0472053574

Challenges the notion that Weimar Jews sought to be invisible or indistinguishable from other Germans by "passing" as non-Jews

Grete Meisel-Hess

Grete Meisel-Hess
Author: Helga Thorson
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2022
Genre: Feminist literature
ISBN: 1640141030

Grete Meisel-Hess (1879-1922), a contemporary of Freud, Schnitzler, and Klimt, was a feminist voice in early-twentieth-century modernist discourse. Born in Prague to Jewish parents and raised in Vienna, she became a literary presence with her 1902 novel Fanny Roth. Influenced by many of her contemporaries, she also criticized their notions of gender and sexuality. Relocating to Berlin, she continued to write fiction and began publishing on sexology and the women's movement. Helga Thorson's book combines a literary-cultural exploration of modernism in Vienna and Berlin with a biography of Meisel-Hess and a critical analysis of her works. Focusing on Meisel-Hess's negotiations of feminism, modernism, and Jewishness, it illustrates the dynamic interplay between gender, sexuality, and race/ethnicity in Austrian and German modernism. Analyzing Meisel-Hess's fiction as well as her sexological studies, Thorson argues that Meisel-Hess posited herself as both a "New Woman" and the writer of the "New Woman." The book draws on extensive archival research that uncovered a large number of new sources, including an unpublished drama and a variety of documents and letters scattered in collections across Europe. Until now there have been only limited secondary sources about Meisel-Hess, most containing errors and omissions regarding her biography. This is the first book on Meisel-Hess in English.

Cities and Cinema

Cities and Cinema
Author: Barbara Mennel
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2019-05-13
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1351016172

The second edition of Cities and Cinema provides an updated survey of films about cities, from their significance for modernity at the beginning of the twentieth century to the contemporary relationship between virtual reality and urban space. The book demonstrates the importance of the filmic depiction of capitals for national cinemas in the twentieth century and analyzes the transnational transfer of cinematic images surrounding global cities in the twenty-first century. Cities and Cinema covers the different facets of the cinematic depiction of cities. It rehearses distinct methodologies and offers a survey of the history of the cinematic city. The book also deepens our understanding of tropes and narrative conventions that shape films about urban settings and that reflect the transformation of cities throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Beginning with a discussion of the Weimar “street film,” it analyzes how the city film defined modernity. The book outlines the sociological context and the aesthetic features of so-called film noir, made in 1940s Hollywood and depicting Los Angeles. Paris became the site for the development of auteur cinema, which repeatedly depicts characters moving through the city. Tokyo took up noir to signal modern crime. The volume delineates how filmic genres, such as science fiction, comment on the present by imagining future forms of urban living. After analyzing how cinema captures the relationship between sexual identity and urban anonymity, migration and urban space, and marginalized ethnic and sexual identity in ghetto films, the book emphasizes transnational dynamics and global cities in the twenty-first century. Its conclusion points to the increasing virtual mediation of cities with new media. Cities and Cinema offers a historical overview of the development of films about cities and a theoretical approach to the intersection of urban studies and film studies. This title is designed as a textbook primarily for second-year undergraduate students in Film/Media studies, Urban studies, as well as Geography and Planning.