In 1929, German audiences flocked to theaters to be captivated by G.W. Pabst’s newest film, Pandora’s Box. Those present were transported into the story of Lulu, a young, beautiful, and androgynous woman that the audience soon discovers works as a prostitute. As the story progresses, Lulu uses charm and seduction to escape dire situations and flee from undesirable circumstances. The end of the film sees Lulu’s experience the misfortune of choosing Jack the Ripper as a client, and she meets her ultimate and untimely demise. This kind of story became a schematic for tales of women produced at the time, advocating the dangers of becoming a 20th century German femme fatale. (cite)
Emerging out of the wreckage of World War I was the Weimar Republic, replacing the last Kaiser of Germany. The Weimar Republic proved itself to be liberal in its ideology, with prostitution, homosexual bars and clubs, transgender people, and cabarets seeing a rise in popularity. In line with their liberal views, women were granted suffrage as a token of gratitude for their hard work and effort during World War I. The rise of gay culture coupled with voting rights for women contributed to the subsequent blurring of gender roles. Where men had previously been seen as traditional breadwinners, there was a softening of their position in society while women were embracing a more independent role that proudly rejected the current gender stereotypes and was more sexually frank than generations of women before.
They became known as the “New Woman”, and unwittingly unearthed anxieties of of modernity across Germany.(cite) While this new identity could be perceived as empowering for women, the Weimar people were terrified of female independence and equality and how those freedoms would impact male identity. This hostility is evidenced in negative portrayals of the New Woman in art, novels, and movies (such as Pandora’s Box). Although Germany offered women voting rights, the reality of that equality was precarious due to growing apprehension of changing gender roles in society. Through novels, works of art, and propaganda, it is explicitly clear that the German citizens created a negative stigma of the New Woman due to distress surrounding changing gender roles.
127 our experts are availableright now
As millions of men were shipped off during the First World War, women stepped into the traditional roles of men, replacing them in the workforce in areas such as transport or nursing training or as heads of the household. Empress Auguste Victoria, Queen of Prussia, urged women, “to help, to lighten the struggles for our husbands, sons and brothers and to dedicate all our energies to the Fatherland in its decisive struggle.” Wartime allowed women to gain increasing political consciousness as they actively participated in protests to end the war. Meanwhile, men had the opposite experience. They were subject to feelings of fear and anxiety due to life in the trenches and traumatizing experiences during battle, as well as the feeling of emasculation and displacement due to societal changes that occured at home. Alice Rühle-Gerstel, German feminist and psychologist, observed that: “Women began to cut an entirely new figure.
A new economic figure who went out into public economic life as an independent worker or wage-earner entering the free market that had up until then been free only for men. A new political figure who appeared in the parties and parliaments, at demonstrations and gatherings.” This increase of female involvement in the workforce coupled with male feelings of emasculation, led the New Woman to be considered a threat to the social order. The public’s opinion was that emancipation made women “unromantic…destroying the notion of the ideal woman and leaving instead a woman with bodily instinct.” (cite) Many conservative Weimar citizens felt that urban women “were in danger of placing individual pleasure before family and nation, causing them to neglect their ‘natural’ duties in the sphere of motherhood and child-rearing.” (cite) This resulted in political parties emphasizing the role of motherhood to its female members. Propaganda posters such as German Woman and Mother! Think of the Future of Your Children! distributed by the German Democratic Party framed women in the stereotypical role of mothers. (cite) This also suggests that working outside of the home made women less suitable mothers and wives.
In the 1920s, mass media began to play a prominent role in German society and was most readily available in the forms of literature, film, art, and media. Movies such as Pandora’s Box and artists such as Otto Dix distributed images of the New Woman to a wide audience. They also distorted the notion of masculinity, and attributed traditionally masculine traits to women. These depictions portrayed self-determined women in a negative light, reflecting a growing fear of female self-motivation and independence, as well as a masculinization of feminine gender roles. In popular Weimar era movies, the New Woman was typically seen as liberated and self-reliant, while simultaneously turning to culturally immoral methods to support her or her family. For example, director G.W. Pabst, known for Pandora’s Box, also created the less popular The Joyless Street. In the film, a starved woman attempts to turn to prostitution only to be stopped by those close to her and ultimately “saved her from herself.” (cite) In both The Joyless Street and Pandora’s Box, the self reliant and independent femme-fatales made the immoral decision to prostitute themselves for gain, and were placed in dire situations as a result.
The cinematic portrayal of the dangerous and immoral New Woman echoed its impact throughout many other creative mediums. Painters were not immune from the influence of discrimination against the New Woman. The male experience with shifting gender roles involved processing emotions of pain, shell shock, and fear, coupled with uncertainty over their roles in society after their displacement in the workforce. For painters, this uneasiness was channeled into their work. One popular and disturbing trend was a portrayal of lust murders. This fad was defined as “sexually motivated murder/violation of female corpses” and is evidenced in work by artists such as Otto Dix and George Grosz. (cite) This is evidenced in paintings such Grosz’s John the Sex Murderer, which depicts a male figure with large black eyes walking away from a mutilated and bloody woman, presumed to have been sexually violated by the man. Dix took his work one step further than Grosz; as well as depicting women as victims of sexualized murder, he painted masculinized and distorted portraits that bore a strong resemblance to the physical appearance of the New Woman.
Although he himself was a frequenter of brothels and “found pleasure in his whores,” he condemned these women’s lifestyles and exposed their immoral traits in his art (McGreevy 47). His painting titled Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden portrays a self-reliant women in an almost eerie manner. She is hypermasculinized, depicted as chillingly pale with a boyish haircut and dark, dreary makeup, smoking cigarettes and drinking a martini. The muse of the panting, Sylvia von Harden, was an accomplished author and journalist. (cite) Von Harden wrote an article, “Erinnerungen an Otto Dix’ (‘Memories of Otto Dix’), about the initial encounter between her and Dix.
Dix met her on the street, and was enraptured by her personal history as a self sufficient woman who fled her Dutch family due to her strict upbringing in a Catholic household and begged her to let him paint her. She questioned why, asking, “So, you want to paint my lacklustre eyes, my ornate ears, my long nose, my thin lips; you want to paint my long hands, my short legs, my big feet—things which can only scare people off and delight no-one?’ (cite) He responded that her portrait would be “representative of their era” (Ruoppo 11). He was correct, as Van Harden was the quintessential New Woman; she did not regard herself as poised or conventionally attractive, but as a representation of intersexuality and drawn to the bleak and abrasive. Whether she was depicted as mutilated, masculinized, and broken as in the paintings of Otto Dix and George Grosz, or manipulative and self-centered as Lulu from Pandora’s Box, the New Woman was typically burdened with negative qualities.
