Maria Leitner was a female investigative journalist working for some of the biggest newspapers and magazines of the Weimar Republic. Her reportages mostly describe the life of women in the new German democracy, from sales assistants to show dancers. In Mädchen mit drei Namen, her work is published as a book for the first time, including a novel about a village girl moving to the big city.
Category: Gender
New Book on 1920s Avant-garde in Cologne
Dorothy Rowe has published a new study on Marta Hegemann (1894–1970) and her role in the 1920s avant-garde in Cologne:
‘What happened in 1920s Cologne ‘after Dada’? Whilst most standard accounts of Cologne Dada simply stop with Max Ernst’s departure from the city for a new life as a surrealist in Paris, this book reveals the untold stories of the Cologne avant-garde that prospered after Dada but whose legacies have been largely forgotten or neglected. Continue reading “New Book on 1920s Avant-garde in Cologne”
New book on Maria Leitner
This new book unearths some texts by Maria Leitner, a socialist reporter working in Weimar Germany who sadly is nearly forgotten today. As a female investigative journalist, she paved the way for the likes of Grace Drummond-Hay and Marie Colvin.
Julia Killet, Helga W. Schwarz: Maria Leitner oder: Im Sturm der Zeit
Marlene on the Radio
Resonance FM, a London-based radio station, has produced a great feature on Marlene Dietrich and her role in gay culture, with much material from the 1920s and 30s. Featuring – among others – art historian Simon Watney and activist Terry Sanderson:
Marlene Dietrich – Beyond Top Hat and Tails
Thanks to Sabine Schereck.
Gender and the State in Weimar Germany and Austria
For the whole of its existence, Weimar democracy was a contentious and hotly debated topic: which form should the new state take exactly? The volume Staat in Unordnung? Geschlechterperspektiven auf Deutschland und Österreich zwischen den Weltkriegen sheds some light on the contemporary debate in Germany and Austria, with a focus on the aspect of gender. In these countries, the profoundly changed image of the role of women in society after the Great War was often related to the establishment of a democratic regime, so this study promises some important insights for this field of study.
The volume has been edited by Stefan Krammer, Marion Löffler and Martin Weidinger, all based at the University of Vienna’s research centre ‘Tropen des Staates‘.
Journal Review: German History 2/2012
The current issue of German History (June 2012) features several interesting reviews of:
Anna von der Goltz: Hindenburg: Power, Myth, and the Rise of the Nazis (by David Thomas Murphy)
Katie Sutton: The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany (by Helen L. Boak)
Ernst Hanisch: Der Grosse Illusionist: Otto Bauer (1881–1938) (by Nancy M. Wingfield)
There is also a very insightful article about ‘German Polycentrism and the Writing of History’ by H. Glenn Penny
Guest Post: Julia Roos’ Response to Victoria Harris
Julia Roos, the author of Weimar through the Lens of Gender, has asked the Weimar Studies Network to publish her response to Victoria Harris’ review of her book in the current issue of German History. We happily comply with her request, as the support of a lively scholarly debate is the stated aim of this forum. However, the opinions expressed in the following text are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of the editors.
Continue reading “Guest Post: Julia Roos’ Response to Victoria Harris”
German History in Documents and Images
German History in Documents and Images (GHDI) is a comprehensive collection of primary source material documenting Germany’s political, social, and cultural history from 1500 to the present, created by the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C. in cooperation with the Bildarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, and IEG-MAPS (Institute for European History, Mainz). It comprises original German texts, all of which are accompanied by new English translations, and a wide range of visual imagery, including maps.
The section on Weimar Germany has been curated by Eric Weitz and Eric Roubinek and is divided into 14 categories, including Politics, Economics and Society, Architecture and Urban Life and Bodies and Sex. Featured documents include the Stinnes-Legien Agreement of 1918, Walter Gropius’ Program of the State Bauhaus in Weimar (1919), data on regional secondary school enrollment (1911, 1926/27, and 1938) and George Grosz’s painting ‘Pillars of Society’ (1926).
Weimar through the Lens of Gender
In her new book Weimar through the Lens of Gender. Prostitution Reform, Woman’s Emancipation, and German Democracy, 1919-33, Julia Roos explores the social and political struggles over prostitution reform in the Weimar Republic:
‘Until 1927, Germany had a system of state-regulated prostitution, under which only those prostitutes who submitted to regular health checks and numerous other restrictions on their personal freedom were tolerated by the police. Male clients of prostitutes were not subject to any controls. The decriminalization of prostitution in 1927 resulted from important postwar gains in women’s rights; yet this change—while welcomed by feminists, Social Democrats, and liberals—also mobilized powerful conservative resistance. In the early 1930s, the right-wing backlash against liberal gender reforms like the 1927 prostitution law played a fateful role in the downfall of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Nazism. Weimar through the Lens of Gender combines the political history of early twentieth-century Germany with analytical perspectives derived from the fields of gender studies and the history of sexuality. The book’s argument will be of interest to a broad readership: specialists in the fields of gender studies and the history of sexuality, as well as historians and general readers interested in Weimar and Nazi Germany.’
CfP: Women and Politics (1890–1938)
The aim of this international conference organized by the Chamber of Deputies of Parliament of the Czech Republic, the Centre of Central European Studies (the collectiv department of the Masaryk Institute and Archive of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic and CEVRO Institut College) and the Anna and Jaroslav Krejčí Research Endowment Fund is to delimit and define the space for women to assert themselves in public affairs and politics during the last three decades of the existence of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, under the First Czechoslovak Republic and Austrian Republic. The conference is organized under the auspices of Mrs. Miroslava Němcová, the chairwoman of the Chamber of Deputies of Parliament of the Czech Republic.
24 May 2012-25 May 2012
Veue: Parliament of the Czech Republic, Sněmovní 1, Prague 1
Deadline: 31 March 2012
New Research on the ‘New Woman’
The ‘New Woman’ belongs to the most popular topics in Weimar research and the new volume City Girls. Bubiköpfe & Blaustrümpfe in den 1920er Jahren attests to her continuing fascination. There are many articles here on the figure of the ‘Neue Frau’ in literature, but also on the role of female smoking, the German reception of Hollywood stars Clara Bow and Coleen Moore, and on dancer Valeska Gert.
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Prostitution in German History
Victory Harris’ new study Selling Sex in the Reich. Prostitutes in German Society, 1914-1945 focuses on the the voices and experiences of the prostitutes themselves and identifies a remarkable consistency in the development of public attitudes to prostitution, from Wilhelmine Germany, through the Weimar years and into the Third Reich:
‘Selling Sex in the Reich focuses on the voices and experiences of prostitutes working in the German sex trade in the first half of the twentieth century. Victoria Harris develops a nuanced picture of the prostitutes’ backgrounds, their reasons for entering the trade, and their attitudes towards their work and those who sought to control them, as well as of their clients and the wide variety of other players within the wider prostitute milieu. Public responses to the issue of prostitution are revealed through the motivations of the law enforcement agencies, social workers, and doctors who increasingly attempted to manage and contain prostitutes’ movements and behaviour and to scientifically categorize them as a group. Continue reading “Prostitution in German History”
Women in Weimar Fashion
Mila Ganeva’s new study Women in Weimar Fashion. Discourses & Displays in German Culture, 1918-1933 sheds new light on the role of fashion in the construction of female modernity:
‘In the Weimar Republic, fashion was not only manipulated by the various mass media – film, magazines, advertising, photography, and popular literature – but also emerged as a powerful medium for women’s self-expression. Female writers and journalists, including Helen Grund, Irmgard Keun, Vicki Baum, Elsa Maria Bug, and numerous others engaged in a challenging, self-reflective commentary on current styles. By regularly publishing on these topics in the illustrated press and popular literature, they transformed traditional genres and carved out significant public space for themselves. This book re-evaluates paradigmatic concepts of German modernism such as the flâneur, the Feuilleton, and Neue Sachlichkeit in the light of primary material unearthed in archival research: fashion vignettes, essays, short stories, travelogues, novels, films, documentaries, newsreels, and photographs. Unlike other studies of Weimar culture that have ignored the crucial role of fashion, the book proposes a new genealogy of women’s modernity by focusing on the discourse and practice of Weimar fashion, in which the women were transformed from objects of male voyeurism into subjects with complex, ambivalent, and constantly shifting experiences of metropolitan modernity.’
Fashion as Female Self-Expression
For her new book Wenn Frauen sich entblößen… Mode als Ausdrucksmittel der Frau der zwanziger Jahre, Sigrid Follmann analyzed fashion magazines of the 1920s to expose the discrepancy between the image of the ‘New Woman’ and the real identities of contemporary women. Follmann’s core argument is that women of the 1920s were struggling to cope with their new role in society and the resonsibilities this entailed.