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Graphic art in Weimar Berlin: the case of Jeanne Mammen

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Graphic art in Weimar Berlin: the case of Jeanne Mammen

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Content GRAPHIC ART IN WEIMAR BERLIN:
THE CASE OF JEANNE MAMMEN
by
Suzanne Nicole Royal
______________________________________________________________________________
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ART HISTORY)
May 2007
Copyright 2007 Suzanne Nicole Royal
ii
AC KNOW L E DG ME NT S
Many people deserve thanks for the completion of this dissertation. First of all, I
extend my gratitude to the members of my dissertation committee, Todd Olson and
Camara Holloway, who saw me through the first stages of coursework, exams and my
initial dissertation proposal. I greatly appreciate their challenging, engaging seminars and
their encouragement to pursue this topic. Three remaining members of the dissertation
committee, my readers, deserve special mention. Nancy Troy first sparked my interest in
fashion and its relation to modernity in her seminar, “Fashion and Transgression,” as well
as through her own pivotal research into fashion and the decorative arts. Paul Lerner
helped guide me through the maze of German history. Professor Lerner’s knowledge and
interests were decisive for the development of my own research and dissertation. Above
all, I wish to express my gratitude to my advisor, Karen Lang. Professor Lang has
encouraged me from the beginning of my studies at USC, always making time to read
grant proposals, write recommendations, and to read and insightfully comment on the
progress of my dissertation. I hold her in the highest regard not only as a mentor but also
as a friend.
I have been the recipient of generous fellowships and grants throughout my
graduate studies at USC. I am particularly grateful to the Department of Art History for
providing me with teaching assistantships while I was still taking classes, as well as
numerous, generous grants during the research and writing phases of my dissertation. A
year long fellowship from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) allowed me
iii
to undertake research in Berlin. The Borchard Foundation provided a crucial fellowship
in my final year to complete the writing the dissertation. Grants from the Getty Memorial
Fund permitted me to continue to research during the summer, as well as to attend
important conferences related to my research interests.
A special thank you goes to the Förderverein der Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung e.V.
in the artist’s former atelier, in Berlin, for allowing me to research and work with original
artwork. Marga Döpping and Lothar Klünner, members of the board, have maintained the
archive to this day, making it available and accessible to scholars such as myself. Both
have provided a fascinating glimpse of the artist they knew personally. I am particularly
indebted to Cornelia Pastelak-Price, who also works at the Förderverein, for her undying
patience in providing me with details related to Jeanne Mammen, as well checking, and
double-checking, facts and my German translations. She also worked tirelessly with me
to organize, label and print the images that accompany the dissertation. During the
research and writing of the dissertation she was an engaging interlocutar; most recently,
she has become a valued friend.
Other friends gave me academic as well as emotional support in a new city – Axel
Dopjans, Christine Mani, Claudia Jansen, and Maria Torvinen. My fellow graduate
students Stacey Sloboda, Kristin Arioli, and Maria Webster have made graduate school a
rewarding experience. Maria Webster in particular has read and edited my work,
challenged my views and been my sartorial double. Lucy Williams has also read and
edited my chapters, always providing new and valuable insight. Jason Patt made
formatting and computer problems seem manageable, and sustained me with his humor
iv
and positive outlook. My parents, Ruth and Nick Royal, encouraged and supported me
throughout graduate school. Finally, for being there and believing in me from the early
beginnings of my project to last words of my dissertation, my biggest thanks goes to my
partner in crime, Günther Primig.
v
T A BL E OF C ONT E NT S
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS...................................................................................... ii
LIST OF FIGURES.................................................................................................. vii
ABSTRACT.............................................................................................................. xvi
INTRODUCTION..................................................................................................... 1
Chapter
1. JEANNE MAMMEN.................................................................................... 33
Jeanne Mammen’s Early Years
A Room of One’s Own
The Importance of the Atelier
Self-Portraiture
Portraits
Jeanne Mammen and neue Sachlichkeit
2. THE NEUE FRAU IN CONTEXT................................................................ 102
Formation of Germany and the Women’s Movement
The neue Frau
Rationalizing Sex and Sexual Identity
Visibility of Women in Germany
The Prostitute as New Woman
Male and Female Representations of the Prostitute
3. BEAUTIFUL BERLINERS:
JEANNE MAMMEN AND BERLIN’S FASHION INDUSTRY................ 165
The neue Frau and Fashion
Weimar and Advertising
Fashion and Jeanne Mammen
The End of Weimar Fashion
4. WEIMAR HOMOSEXUALITY AND THE GUIDEBOOK........................222
Lesbian Life in Berlin
Magnus Hirschfeld and Berlin’s Sex Institute
Unofficial Views and Sites of Pleasure Navigated by the Guidebook
Inside Moreck’s Guidebook
vi
CONCLUSION......................................................................................................... 291
BIBLIOGRAPHY..................................................................................................... 295
APPENDIX I............................................................................................................. 314
APPENDIX II............................................................................................................ 315
vii
LIST OF FIGURES
I.1 Before the Mirror, c. 1927, A238
Watercolor and pencil, published in Jugend, Lost*....................................24
I.2 Three Women in Society Clothing, c. 1927, A245
Watercolor, pencil, gouache and silver on carton
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Preussischer Kulturbesitz,
Kunstbibliothek (Hdz Lipp 639).................................................................25
I.3 In an “Educational” Film, c. 1929, A313
Watercolor and pencil, published in Jugend, Lost......................................26
I.4 Shooting Gallery, c. 1929, A330
Watercolor and pencil, published in Ulk,
Marvin and Janet Fishman Collection, Milwaukee, Wisconsin................. 27
I.5 Window Shopping II, c.1931, A410
Watercolor and pencil, published in an unknown magazine, Lost............. 28
I.6 Negerrevue, c. 1926, A167
Watercolor and pencil, published in Der Junggeselle, Lost....................... 29
I.7 Revue, (Five Girls on a Hobbyhorse), c. 1925, A158
Chalk and pencil, Lost................................................................................ 30
I.8 Untitled (Metropolis), c. 1927, A212
Watercolor and pencil, published in Die Grossstadt
Berlinische Galerie, Landesmusuem für Moderne Kunst,
Photographien und Architektur (Inv. Nr. BG-G 688/78) ...........................31
I.9 Loneliness in a Bar, from The Poison in Woman, c. 1917, A93
Watercolor and pencil, Lost............................................................ ........... 32
1.1 Family House in Paris, Garden
Photo Courtesy of the Förderverein der Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung e.V. 73
1.2 Wave of Dreams, c. 1910, A37
Watercolor, pencil and India ink
Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung...........................................................................74
viii
1.3 St. Anthony and the Seven Deadly Sins, c. 1908-14, A4
Watercolor, pencil and India ink
Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung.......................................................................... 75
1.4 Untitled, c.1913 SB X Page 41
Watercolor and pencil, Sketchbook
Förderverein der Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung e.V. ...................................... 76
1.5 Place Broukère, c. 1913 SB X Page 4
Watercolor and pencil, Sketchbook
Förderverein der Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung e.V. ...................................... 77
1.6 Mammen’s Inner Courtyard,
Entrance and Atelier Window, Fifth Floor, 2005
Photo Courtesy of the Förderverein der Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung e.V. 78
1.7 Interior of Atelier, Two Views, 2005
Photo Courtesy of the Förderverein der Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung e.V. 79
1.8 Potsdamer Platz at Night in the Twenties
Published in Der Potsdamer Platz: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
und der Untergang Preussens, 2001........................................................... 80
1.9 Self Portrait, c. 1932, Z365
Pencil
Private Collection....................................................................................... 81
1.10 Portrait of Marie Louise, 1907, A1
Watercolor
Förderverein der Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung e.V. ...................................... 82
1.11 Sister in the Atelier, c. 1913, G1
Oil on canvas
Berlinische Galerie, Landesmusuem für Moderne Kunst,
Photographien und Architektur Berlin (Inv.-Nr. BG-M 3982/87)............. 83
1.12 Die Garçonne, c. 1931, A400
Watercolor and pencil
Private Collection....................................................................................... 84
1.13 Jeanne and Marie Louise (Mimi) Mammen in Their Studio,
Brussels, c. 1912
Photo Courtesy of the Förderverein der Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung e.V. 85
ix
1.14 Miss Artist, c. 1925, A136
Watercolor and pencil
Published in Der Junggeselle, Lost.............................................................86
1.15 Woman with Cat in her Arms, c. 1927, A237
Watercolor and pencil
Published in Die Dame, Lost...................................................................... 87
1.16 Mammen with a Cat
Photo Courtesy of the Förderverein der Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung e.V. 88
1.17 Model in Atelier, c. 1918-1920, A97
Watercolor and pencil
Förderverein der Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung e.V. ...................................... 89
1.18 Artists’ Marriage, c. 1928, A287
Watercolor and pencil
Busch-Reisinger Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge,
Massachusetts............................................................................................. 90
1.19 Hanna Nagel, The Imperfect Marriage, 1928
Published in We Weren’t Modern Enough: Women Artists
and the Limits of German Modernism, 1999............................................. 91
1.20 Standing Female Nude, c. 1930, Z87
Pencil, Lost................................................................................................. 92
1.21 Portrait of Woman with Bangs and Tie, c. 1931, Z236
Pencil
Förderverein der Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung e.V. ...................................... 93
1.22 Chess Players, c. 1929/1930, G17
Oil on canvas
Private Collection........................................................................................94
1.23 Georg Grosz, Sex Murder in the Acker Street, 1922/23
Lithograph
Published in Kritische Grafik in der Weimarer Zeit, 1985.........................95
1.24 The Tarot Card Reader, Uhu, c. 1928, A286
Watercolor and pencil
Axel Springer Verlag AG, Berlin............................................................... 96
x
1.25 The Red-haired Woman, Ulk, c. 1928, A278
Watercolor and pencil
Berlinische Galerie, Landesmusuem für Moderne Kunst,
Photographien und Architektur (Inv.-Nr. BG-G 691/78)........................... 97
1.26 Berliner Café, Simplicissimus, c. 1930, A356
Watercolor and pencil on yellow paper
Städtische Galerie Albstadt, Stuttgart (Inv.-Nr. GS 82/14)........................ 98
1.27 Girlfriends, c. 1930-32, D19
Lithograph
Private Collection....................................................................................... 99
1.28 Mammen Selling Prints and Books
Photo Courtesy of the Förderverein der Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung e.V. 100
1.29 Kurfürstendamm after World War Two
Photo Landesbildstelle Berlin
Courtesy of the Förderverein der Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung e.V. .............101
2.1 Photo of Women in the Twenties
Published in New Objectivity: Neue Sachlichkeit –
Painting in Germany in the 1920s, 2003.....................................................147
2.2 Movie Poster, Freund oder Weib, c. 1922, A103
Mixed media (graphite, charcoal, watercolor, ink)
Original lost, color lithograph at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin
Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Kunstbibliothek (Inv.-Nr. 14003690) ............. 148
2.3 Advertisement for Fa. Herz AG, Elegant Shoes, c. 1924, A121
Watercolor, original lost
Förderverein der Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung e.V. ...................................... 149
2.4 The Girlfriends, Der Junggeselle, c. 1926, A177
Watercolor and pencil, Lost........................................................................150
2.5 Coat Cape, Styl (Stars in the Window), c. 1923, A108
Watercolor and pen, Design for the Viennese Model House, Max Becker
Förderverein der Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung e.V. ...................................... 151
2.6 Bored Dolls, c. 1929, A324
Watercolor and pencil, Published in Jugend
Marvin and Janet Fishman Collection, Milwaukee, Wisconsin................. 152
xi
2.7 Revue in the Twenties (Elliot Ballett)
Postcard, Sammlung Eickemeyer, Berlin................................................... 153
2.8 Edgar Degas, Party for the Madame, 1878-79
Pastel over monotype
Musée Picasso, Paris...................................................................................154
2.9 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, In the Salon of the Brothel of the
Rue des Moulins,
1894, Oil on canvas
Musée Toulouse-Lautrec, Albi................................................................... 155
2.10 Café Stadtmitte, c. 1929, A345
Watercolor and pencil, Lost.........................................................................156
2.11 Stock Trader, c. 1928, A271
Watercolor
Private Collection....................................................................................... 157
2.12 Die Garçonne, c. 1931, A400
Watercolor and pencil
Private collection........................................................................................ 158
2.13 Brüderstrasse, c. 1931, A422
Watercolor and pencil
Marvin and Janet Fishman Collection, Milwaukee, Wisconsin................. 159
2.14 In High Boots, c. 1931, A398
Watercolor and pencil, Lost........................................................................160
2.15 Otto Dix, Big City Triptych, 1927-28 (Detail, central panel)
Mixed media on wood
Galerie der Stadt Stuttgart, Stuttgart...........................................................161
2.16 Otto Dix, Three Prostitutes on the Street, 1925
Tempera on plywood
Private Collection....................................................................................... 162
2.17 Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler, Lissy, 1931
Watercolor
Marvin and Janet Fishman Collection, Milwaukee, Wisconsin................. 163
xii
2.18 Georg Grosz, Beauty, Thee Will I Praise, 1922/23
Color lithograph
Published in Kritische Grafik in der Weimarer Zeit, 1985. .......................164
3.1 Annie Offterdinger, Sport im Bild, 1926
Title page, 17, September 1926
Published in Die 20er Jahre: Mode, Graphik, Kunstgewerbe, 2005...........203
3.2 Edouard Malouze, Gazette du Bon Ton, 1920
Published in Die 20er Jahre: Mode, Graphik, Kunstgewerbe, 2005...........204
3.3 Lieselotte Friedlaender, Slim and Simple, 1923
Published in Lieselotte Friedlaender 1898-1973: Schicksal einer Berliner
Modegraphikerin, 1998...............................................................................205
3.4 Photo of Camille Clifford, S-Shape, 1905
Published in The Culture of Fashion, Manchester, 1995............................206
3.5 Advertisement, Für den Bubikopf, Elegante Welt, 1926
Published in Die 20er Jahre: Mode, Graphik, Kunstgewerbe, 2005...........207
3.6 Julius Ussy Engelhard, Advertisement, Fashion Ball, 1928
Lithograph
Published in Die 20er Jahre: Mode, Graphik, Kunstgewerbe, 2005...........208
3.7 Celebrity Photo, Die Dame, Anna May Wong, 1927
Published in Die Dame: Ein Deutsches Journal für den Verwöhnten
Geschmack 1912 bis 1943, 1980................................................................ 209
3.8 Marlene Dietrich, in the Film Morocco, 1930
Published in Eldorado: Homosexulle Frauen und Männer in Berlin
1850-1950: Geschichte, Alltag und Kultur, 1984...................................... 210
3.9 Rosa Valetti, c. 1929, Z61
Pen and ink
Private Collection....................................................................................... 211
3.10 Valeska Gert, c. 1929, Z58
Pen and ink
Förderverein der Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung e.V. ...................................... 212
xiii
3.11 Valeska Gert, c. 1929, G11
Oil on canvas
Berlinische Galerie, Landesmuseum für moderne Kunst,
Photographie und Architektur.................................................................... 213
3.12 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Woman with Dog, 1916
Color woodcut, Page from the dress catalogue of Irene Eucken
Published in Der Potsdamer Platz: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
und der Untergang Preussens, 2001............................................................214
3.13 Resting, from The Poison in Woman, c. 1917, A85
Watercolor and pencil, Lost........................................................................215
3.14 Woman with a Fur and Muff, c. 1910-14, SB IV Page 24
Watercolor and pencil, Sketchbook
Förderverein der Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung e.V. ...................................... 216
3.15 Untitled, Cover, Die Schöne Frau, c.1926, A172
Watercolor and pencil
Förderverein der Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung e.V. ...................................... 217
3.16 In the Tram, c. 1925-28, Z28
Pen and ink and charcoal
Berlinische Galerie, Landesmusuem für Moderne Kunst,
Photographien und Architektur (Inv.-Nr. BG-G 7225/93)........................ 218
3.17 Advertisement, Laxin-Konfekt, c. 1915
Published in Die Dame: Ein Deutsches Journal für den
Verwöhnten Geschmack 1912 bis 1943, 1980........................................... 219
3.18 Goldfish, Tea Dress, c. 1923, A107
Watercolor, pen and ink
Design for Kuhnen, published in Styl
Förderverein der Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung e.V. ...................................... 220
3.19 Goldfishing, c. 1925, A143
Watercolor and pencil, published in Der Junggeselle
Förderverein der Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung e.V. ...................................... 221
4.1 The New Hat, c. 1929, A331
Watercolor and pencil
Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Graphic Collection (Inv.-Nr. GL 1868).................270
xiv
4.2 You Have Very Beautiful Hands, c. 1929, A312
Watercolor and pencil
Axel Springer Verlag AG, Berlin............................................................... 271
4.3 Two Women in the Library, c. 1928, A272
Watercolor, pen and ink, published in Ulk
Lost............................................................................................................. 272
4.4 Two Women, Dancing, c. 1928, A273
Watercolor and pencil
Private Collection........................................................................................273
4.5 In the Morning, c. 1930-32, D21
Lithograph
Förderverein der Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung e.V. ...................................... 274
4.6 Siesta, c. 1930-32, D23
Lithograph
Förderverein der Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung e.V. ...................................... 275
4.7 Two Women on the Balcony, c. 1931, Z172
Pen and ink, published in Simplicissimus
Lost............................................................................................................. 276
4.8 In the Women’s Club I¸ c. 1929, A346
Watercolor and pencil, Lost........................................................................277
4.9 Jealousy, 1930-32, D20
Lithograph
Förderverein der Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung e.V. ...................................... 278
4.10 Charlotte Berend-Corinth, Anita Berber Portfolio, 1919
Lithograph
Published in Femme Flaneur: Erkundungen zwischen Boulevard und
Sperrbezirk, 2004........................................................................................279
4.11 Cover of Die Freundin, 1928
Published in Eldorado: Homosexuelle Frauen und Männer in Berlin
1850-1950: Geschichte, Alltag und Kultur, 1984.......................................280
4.12 Die Garçonne, c. 1931, A400
Watercolor and pencil
Private Collection........................................................................................281
xv
4.13 At the Butchers’, c. 1931, A401
Watercolor and pencil
Busch-Reisinger Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge,
Massachusetts............................................................................................. 282
4.14 Café Reimann, c. 1931, A397
Watercolor and pencil, Lost........................................................................283
4.15 Christophe, Right Around the Corner, undated
Published in Führer durch das ‘lasterhafte’ Berlin, 1931........................... 284
4.16 Beer Philosophy I, c. 1930, A340
Watercolor and pencil
Private Collection........................................................................................285
4.17 Christian Schad, Bürger-Casino an der Friedrichgraacht, 1930
Lithograph
Published in Führer durch das ‘lasterhafte’ Berlin, 1931........................... 286
4.18 Café Nollendorf, c. 1931, A394
Watercolor and pencil
Private Collection........................................................................................287
4.19 She Represents, c. 1928, A274
Watercolor and pencil
Private Collection........................................................................................288
4.20 Demimonde, c. 1931, A395
Watercolor and pencil, Lost........................................................................289
4.21 Kurfürstendamm/Uhlandeck, c. 1931, A396
Watercolor and pencil, Lost........................................................................290
II.1 Mammen in her Atelier, 1975
Photo Gert Ladewig
Courtesy of the Förderverein der Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung e.V. .............294
* The numbers next to Jeanne Mammen’s work correspond to the Förderverein
der Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung e.V. inventory numbers as well as the catalogue
numbers in her catalogue raisonné.
xvi
AB ST RA CT
Cigarette smoking, fashionable, working, and sexually active – these are just a
few of the words that come to mind when describing the neue Frau of Weimar Germany.
While these attributes were in many ways accurate, what else did it mean to be a woman
in Germany after World War I, living in a world with a variety of new technical
advances? My dissertation examines the myths and realities of the New Woman in
Weimar Germany (1918-1933) using the artwork of Jeanne Mammen (1890-1976) as a
case study. Mammen’s work, like that of other, numerous female Weimar era artists, has
been all but forgotten. While neue Sachlichkeit artists Otto Dix and George Grosz are
familiar names within the art historical canon, Mammen and most of her female
colleagues, who did work in the neue Sachlichkeit style, are not. Women in general and
female artists in particular are frequently marginalized for not being modern enough, to
paraphrase the title of a recent study by Marsha Meskimmon. Their art making has come
to be regarded either as a hobby or as mere illustration, a category which falls under the
rubric of craft rather than the fine arts. However, by examining the artistic production of
the period more closely, one finds that women artists worked in a myriad of ways as
successful, producing artists.
My dissertation historically situates the neue Frau by examining her against such
popular Weimar subjects as rationalization, the new visibility of women, the women’s
movement, as well as the figure of the prostitute. Within these contexts, I examine
Mammen’s fine art production, her work for the popular press, and her book
xvii
commissions. Mammen’s work offers a view of the counter-culture of 1920s Berlin as
seen through the eyes of a young artist observing and recording the changing city around
her. In addition to her work for popular women’s magazines, by 1927 Mammen had
made a name for herself in Berlin, working alongside George Grosz, Karl Arnold, Rudolf
Schlichter and Ludwig Kainer on illustrations for liberal, upper middle class intellectual
journals such as Ulk, Uhu, and Simplicissimus.
I pay particular attention to the cultural critic Curt Moreck’s book of 1931, The
Guide to Immoral Berlin, (Führer durch das ‘lasterhafte’ Berlin). Moreck’s Guide
presents a virtual roadmap through the underbelly of the metropole. My interest in
Moreck’s Guide lies not only in the subject matter it explores – the celebrated if seedy
nightlife of Weimar Berlin – but also in the color illustrations that accompany the text,
particularly those by Mammen, the only female artist to be included. Mammen’s artwork
often highlights aspects of mass culture, while her illustrations for Moreck’s guidebook
represent a cultural object in itself, focusing on “low-brow” entertainments such as
nightclubs, bars and cafes. The dissertation examines the ways her commercial and non-
commercial art may have informed one another. In doing so, my study aims to understand
the relation between mass culture and the visual arts during the Weimar Period.
1
I N T ROD UCT I ON
Berlin is a girl in a pullover, not much powder on her face, thighs like those of
Atlanta, an undigested education … Berlin stimulates like arsenic, and then when
one’s nerves are all a jingle she comes with her hot milk of human kindness; and
in the end, for an hour and a half, one is able, gratefully to go to sleep.
Harold Nicholson (1929)
1
Both Jeanne Mammen and Hannah Höch took an interest and pleasure in viewing
images of women and the world of women in the twenties, and both artists used images
from the media in their artwork. Unlike Mammen’s art, Höch’s has been placed into the
art historical canon and has been the subject of recent scholarly investigation.
2
Moreover,
Höch’s images and papers are housed in an archive within a major Berlin museum (Die
Berlinische Galerie), while major exhibitions of her work have traveled outside of
Germany, to England and the United States. Mammen, by contrast, is still relatively
unknown within Germany, and most certainly outside of the German-speaking world.
While numerous factors contribute to the recovery (and non-recovery) of artists, in
Höch’s case, her participation with the predominantly male group, the Berlin Dadaists,
can be cited a key factor for her later recognition. It can be argued that Höch’s artistic
technique of photomontage slid more easily into the high art of the avant-garde, and
consequently, into the canon of modern European art.
3
The technique of photomontage is

1
Harold Nicholson, “The Charm of Berlin,” in Der Querschnitt, 5, 1929, quoted in Dorothy Rowe,
“Desiring Berlin: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Germany,” in Visions of the ‘Neue Frau’: Women and
the Visual Arts in Weimar Germany, ed. Marsha Meskimmon and Shearer West, Aldershot, England:
Scolar Press: 1995, 1997, 155.
2
See, for example, Maud Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife: The Weimar Photomontages of Hannah
Höch, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993, Maria Makela and Peter Boswell, The
Photomontages of Hannah Höch, Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, exhibition catalogue, 1996.
3
The Berlin Dadaists did not single-handedly invent photomontage, as they liked to insist. Montage
actually began quite early, predating photography, to around 1830. British caricaturists were some of the
2
considered a more subversive, modern art form than Mammen’s use of watercolor, which
has traditionally been the accepted medium of women who paint as a hobby. Like Höch,
Mammen had a critical, carefully observant eye for the modern Berlin woman: yet, the
majority of her images from this time are lumped together as illustrations, regardless of
their final form: fashion illustrations, images for intellectual journals, scenes from city
life or personal sketchbooks.
Höch and Mammen were not alone in their interest in and representation of
women in post-war Germany. Although many of the names of the numerous other
professional working women are even more obscure today than Mammen, artists such as
Lea Grundig, Elsa Haensgen-Dingkuhn, Lotte Lasserstein, Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler,
Hanna Nagel and Gerta Overbeck worked and participated in Weimar Germany’s art
world. This dissertation examines the work of Weimar women artists, in particular the
work of Jeanne Mammen, through the lens of visual culture, as a means for better
understanding what it meant to woman and an artist in the modern period. Utilizing the
field of visual culture within an art historical study is a useful way to not only understand
the artwork but look beyond it to the subject matter and the importance it held for the
period as a whole. Marsha Meskimmon notes the importance of studying women artists
and visual culture from this period, stating, “to explore the practices of women artists
who worked during the Weimar Republic is to brush history against the grain, but the

first to use the technique, often combining mismatching heads and bodies torn from advertising posters for
a comic effect. Early photographers utilized montage as well (1850-60s), creating composite photographs
for both the private and public sphere. The photomontage process did not really take hold until the 1880s,
after the birth of the half-tone process “which allowed photographically derived images to be reproduced in
ink on the same presses as type.” Christopher Phillips, “Introduction,” in Montage and Modern Life, 1919-
1942, ed. Matthew Teitelbaum, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, exhibition catalogue, The Institute of
Contemporary Art, Boston, 1992, 22-26.
3
political task of the scholar is to render this material recognizable – to ‘see’ it and to
ensure that others can see it as well.”
4
Maud Lavin broadens the use of the term montage to refer to modern media forms
such as films, newspapers, magazines, as well as to modernity (the modern Weimar
experience) itself. These distinctions are useful for my own study, for though Mammen
did not utilize photomontage as a pure art form, it can be argued that as a modern visual
artist living in Berlin in the twenties, Mammen experienced the montage of modern life,
and this came through in her own artwork.
5
Lavin has noted that in the Weimar period
avant-garde art and mass culture were more closely linked than ever before.
6
Both looked
towards the other, influencing and informing the look of theater, such as, Bertold
Brecht’s Epic Theater, and advertising, in new types of newspaper lay-outs, typography
and photography. Artists such as Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948) and Laszlo Maholy-Nagy
(1895-1945) worked in commercial advertising and advocated this connection between
the commercial and fine artist. Although remembered today primarily as avant-garde
artists, they were “among the many modernists who believed in advertising with a
reformist, pedagogical zeal.”
7
Schwitters even went so far as to found his own advertising
agency, the Merz Werbezentrale (Merz Central Advertising).
Like Höch, Mammen worked in advertising. Höch had a regular position at
Ullstein, the magazine and newspaper publishing house, while Mammen was freelance,

4
Marsha Meskimmon, We Weren’t Modern Enough: Women Artists and the Limits of German
Modernism, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999, 2.
5
Lavin, op. cit., 9.
6
Ibid, 51.
7
Ibid, 62.
4
working for a variety of different magazines.
8
Ullstein published the photo-weekly BIZ
(Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung), Die Dame, an “ultramodern social magazine of women’s
fashions,” Blatt der Hausfrau, a magazine aimed at housewives; Die Grüne Post, a petit-
bourgeois Sunday photo-weekly; Koralle, a magazine covering science, technology and
nature; Querschnitt, a magazine for intellectuals, originally published by Alfred
Flechtheim, and Uhu, “an urbane culture and humor magazine,” to name a few.
9
The
picture press agencies of Weimar (Pressebildagenturen) brought together a variety of
professions – photojournalists, writers, and newspaper editors in creative and diverse
working environments. The Weimar illustrated magazine typically consisted of serialized
novels, poetry, lithographic prints, and high quality color reproductions of paintings,
photomontages, and photographs that brought together old and new techniques. Patrice
Petro has noted that while these new methods were seen as modern, they were not
considered avant-garde.
10
Unlike Mammen, who was busy illustrating fashion designs, advertisements and
movie posters, Höch worked at Ullstein as a part-time Entwurfzeichnerin (pattern
designer), a job more often filled by women than men. Höch’s job was in the handicrafts
department, “which produced individual brochures on knitting, crocheting, and

8
Ullstein Verlag was the largest publishing house in Berlin. It was founded in 1858 by Leopold Ullstein, a
wholesale paper merchant who became successful selling paper to the growing newspaper business. Aside
from the popular Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung with a readership of approximately 1.85 million in 1930,
Ullstein published mass-market books, nineteen newspapers and magazines, and he had a large advertising
department, and a successful sewing pattern business.
9
The publications were liberal and modern; in fact, Herman Ullstein (with others) founded the Deutsche
Demokratische Partei (DDP), a liberal, bourgeois, pro-Republican party active from 1919-1929. Lavin, op.
cit., 226.
10
Patrice Petro, Joyless Streets: Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimar Germany, Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989, 89.
5
embroidering, and which also contributed to a bi-monthly two-page spread on women’s
handicrafts to the tony women’s magazine, Die Dame.’’
11
The magazines and newspapers
had a wide and numerous readership. Die Dame featured upscale fashion and offered
escapism, fantasy and entertainment for its readers. Lavin has drawn connections
between the illustrated weeklies and contemporary film, noting “the multi-class appeal of
technical innovations (such as serial photography), novel points of view, access to
unfamiliar worlds (aerial shots, glimpses of exotic lands, enlargements through a
microscope), dazzling montage layouts, and the general sensuous appeal of the images.”
12
In the illustrated weeklies directed toward women, readers would have encountered the
illustrations of Mammen in dress designs, advertisements, or drawings that were used to
illustrate stories or articles.
Advertising played a major role in the new magazines, offering a wide array of
consumer goods: perfumes, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, homeopathic medicines, and
tobacco products. The image of the New Woman was repeated constantly in order to sell
these products.
13
Lavin argues that the “evolution of woman-as-commodity” occurs
“hand-in-hand with the rise of advertising expenditure in photo-weeklies.”
14
Indeed, the
relationship between femininity, consumerism, and the illustrated weeklies were truly
cemented at this time. Thus began the era when women were persuaded, harder than ever
before, to conform to the unobtainable ideals of beauty featured in these magazines.

11
Lavin, op. cit., 10. See also, Boswell and Makela, The Photomontages of Hannah Höch, op. cit.
12
Ibid, 55.
13
See chapter two for an in-depth discussion of the New Woman.
14
Lavin, op. cit., 56. BIZ for example devoted 35% of the magazine to advertising between 1926-32.
6
With advances in film and photography, fan and movie magazines were also
popularized during the 1920s. These magazines, cheaply produced and inexpensive, were
selling at approximately 5-25 cents or Pfennig, available to a broader segment of the
population. Fan magazines were especially popular with women; for the most part, these
magazines assumed a female readership, featuring stories, talent searches, editorials, star
interviews and advice columns all aimed primarily at the female reader.
15
The star system
created through German and American films was heavily promoted in these publications
and then emulated by the women and girls who read them.
16
In order to keep costs low,
these magazines relied heavily on their advertising, resulting in a wealth of beauty and
health products for the modern woman. Gaylyn Studlar has noted that while fan
magazines were by no means radical publications, they did offer at least a “progressive
view of women’s changing sexual and economic roles” by including stories that explored
and encouraged careers for women, as well as sexual emancipation.
17
The look of the New Woman featured in magazines such as Die Dame changed
during the Weimar Republic. At the beginning of the twenties, and with the advent of
suffrage for women, there were many inspirational images of expressive dancers and
women being athletic; in the mid-twenties, during economic stabilization, women were
featured more often with material items such as cars. Towards the end of the Weimar
Republic, around 1930, “in Die Dame and Uhu, there was a sudden proliferation of

15
Gaylyn Studlar, “The Perils of Pleasure? Fan Magazine Discourse as Women’s Commodified Culture in
the 1920s,” in Wide Angle, vol. 13, no. 1, January 1991, 9.
16
Susanne Meyer-Büser, Bubikopf und Gretchenzopf: Die Frau der Zwanziger Jahre, Museum für kunst
und Gewerbe, Hamburg: Braus, 1995, 16.
17
Studlar, op. cit., 10.
7
woman-as-mannequin images, inflected by a homogeneity measured by a particular fad
for ‘looking Greek’.”
18
This trend was used as a way to link “women to the world of
mass-produced commodities.”
19
Magazines such as BIZ also moved in this direction, and
began to produce many images connected to the concept of mass ornament and
androgyny.
Patrice Petro suggests that magazines like Die Dame “succeeded in destabilizing
both male and female iconography, and thus in generating an image of gender identity
that was manipulable, producible, and readable by the woman.”
20
In addition to the
masculine female, the feminized male was a media construction that frequently appeared
at this time. However, by the late twenties and early thirties, Die Dame began to publish
articles by various sociologists and psychologists which “attempted to define the
‘masculinization’ of female gender identity as a problem for the sexually mature
woman.”
21
This problem was said to manifest itself in the form of bisexuality. As a
consequence, many felt that a return to traditionally defined gender roles and sexual
orientation would be the only way to return to an ordered society.
As early as 1925, the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung (BIZ) published an article that
reacted against the masculinization of women. Entitled “Enough is Enough! Against the
Masculinization of Woman,” the article argued:

18
Lavin, op. cit., 57.
19
Ibid, 132. See chapter three on fashion, for further discussion of mannequins in the twenties.
20
Petro, op. cit., 118.
21
Ibid, 119.
8
What started as a playful game in women’s fashion is gradually becoming a
distressing aberration … It is high time that sound male judgment take a stand
against these odious fashions, the excesses of which have been transplanted here
from America … And the masculinization of the female face replaces its natural
allure with, at best, an unnatural one: the look of a sickeningly sweet boy is
detested by every real boy or man.
22
Noting clothing styles and articles espousing more traditional views in fashion and
fashion magazines of the early thirties, Petro has noted a reversion to more traditional
appearances.
23
At this time the oscillation between masculinity and femininity in
women’s magazines ended. Images of female masculinity and bisexuality were replaced
by excessive femininity in fashion and the feminized male was “replaced by a virile,
overly masculine male in fashion layouts.”
24
Although Lavin’s study focuses on the artwork of Hannah Höch, her thesis seeks
to complicate rather than to simplify Höch’s two roles as avant-garde artist and consumer
- fan of Weimar mass culture. Mammen’s work can also be examined through this lens.
Rather than view her commercial illustrations as separate from the works she created “for
herself,” one can begin to acknowledge the pleasure and interest she, like other women,
took in new media in the twenties. This view complicates and adds interest to our
perception and understanding of modern artists and what it meant to be female in Weimar
Germany.
The Weimar period witnessed many technological breakthroughs that greatly
altered the face of printing in magazines and newspapers. Suddenly newspapers saw a

22
First published as “Nun aber genug! Gegen die Vermännlichung der Frau,” Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung,
March 29, 1925, 389, translated in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, Edward
Dimendberg, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1994, 659.
23
Petro, op. cit, 119.
24
Ibid, 124.
9
significant increase in the number of photographs per issue. As photography and
technology advanced so did the look of the dailies. The avant-garde photomontage
technique was also influential, and new forms of layout in newspapers, particularly in
advertising, reflected this. New techniques in photography, film and photomontage were
employed to record modernization. Avant-garde artists were not exempt from
participating in mass media and they “contributed to the images of modernization
propagated by mass media. The disorientating viewpoints of New Vision photography,
for instance, which transformed the appearance of photojournalism, had tremendous
influence in attracting readers to and selling products.”
25
Although photojournalism had been present earlier, it was not until 1923-34 that
photojournalism became a recognizable field. Most of the photojournalists at this time
were employed on a free-lance basis; they were discouraged from being overtly political.
In the words of Lavin: “photographs or photo-stories were often shot without the
assurance of a commentary, and apolitical material could be sold either to the liberal
magazines (such as those from the Ullstein Verlag) or to the more conservative ones
(such as magazines from Alfred Hugenberg’s right-wing publisher, Scherl House). On
the other hand, “the communist-affiliated Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung was not so
adaptable; in AIZ there was a direct relationship between image, form, and text.”
26
Much
of Mammen’s work from the Weimar period falls into the former category insofar as it

25
Lavin, op. cit., 48. The term ‘New Vision’ photography was coined by Bauhaus teacher Lazslo Maholy-
Nagy at the beginning of the twenties. Modern photography of the twenties and thirties was rooted in the
technological culture of the twentieth century and included innovations using abstract photograms,
photomontages, and photographs combined with modern typography and graphic design in posters and
magazine pages.
26
Ibid, 54.
10
was often left untitled or only loosely titled in order to appeal to the broadest number of
magazines or journals as possible illustrations for stories, jokes, or commentaries.
Lavin has noted the intersection of the avant-garde and mass culture during the
twenties. Both avant-garde and mass culture were interested in utilizing the new
technologies and symbols created in order to reach a broader audience. Instead of fighting
against mass culture, artists in the twenties utilized it, borrowed from it and adapted it to
their own needs. “In Weimar, the notion of modernity was tied less to the latest advances
in studio painting than to factories, speed, movies, newspapers, cars, urbanism, and
internationalism, in short, the representation and experience of modernization.”
27
Both
Mammen and Höch included such imagery in their own work, Höch in her paintings and
photomontages, and Mammen in her watercolors. The repeated representation of such
imagery cannot be dismissed and should be read as interest on behalf of both artists in the
modern world around them.
All of Mammen’s artwork from this period is situated within the modern, urban
city. The symbols of the contemporary city surround her predominantly female
characters, from the visible advertising in the background, the up-to-date clothes and
hairstyles, to neon lights and sporty cars. These symbols of modernity, combined with the
newly available imagery of women, could be exciting and encouraging for women in the
1920s, especially when compared to the pre-war Wilhelmine imagery. Mammen’s oeuvre
repeatedly includes subjects from ‘modern’ life. I have noted the following subjects
within her work: in the category “Modern Forms of Entertainment” I cite Mammen’s

27
Ibid, 51.
11
many examples of amusement parks, revues, cabarets, dance clubs (homo- and
heterosexual), Negerrevue (one image with Josephine Baker), boxing, film, including
educational films (Aufklärungsfilm), female impersonators, stars and celebrities. Under
the theme “The Modern City” I include her paintings of prostitution, cars, shopping
(department stores), visible women, street scenes, cafes, neon lights, fashion, streetcars
and the S-Bahn, newspapers and skyscrapers. Her most frequently represented topic,
however, is the “Modern Woman”. In addition to this woman being placed in the
aforementioned scenes, she is often shown smoking, drinking, exercising, or working
(often in a modern office), and is fashionable in clothing, makeup and hairstyle (figures
I.1 - I.8).
Although texts from the 1960s onward, for example, Peter Bürger’s Theory of the
Avant-Garde, have posited avant-garde culture of the twenties as somehow resistant to
and fighting against mass culture, much of the writings and activities of artists from this
period speak against this thesis.
28
More recent scholars, such as Maud Lavin, Andreas
Huyssen and others have attempted to correct this myth in order to explore and gain a
deeper understanding of how Weimar artists appreciated and utilized mass culture.
29
Lavin states that more often than not utopian images of pleasure are representations of “a
celebration of modernity and a reworking of its terms.”
30

28
Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, Trans. Michael Shaw, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1984.
29
Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism, Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1986.
30
Lavin, op. cit., 67.
12
Modernity in this period was always conceived of as feminine and, more often
than not, journalists described Berlin’s modernity in the twenties as a woman. This image
was often sexualized and demonized, as in the playwright Carl Zuckmeyer’s description
of Berlin:
This city devoured talents and human energies with a ravenous appetite, grinding
them small, digesting them, or rapidly spitting them out again. It sucked into itself
with hurricane force all the ambitions in Germany, the true and the false … and,
after it swallowed them, ignored them. People discussed Berlin … as if Berlin
were a highly desirable woman, whose coldness and capriciousness were widely
known: the less chance anyone had to win her, the more they decried 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 capacity for cruelty
made them the more aggressive. All wanted to have her, she enticed all … To
conquer Berlin was to conquer the world. The only thing was – and this was the
everlasting spur – that you had to take all the hurdles again and again, had to
break through the goal again and again in order to maintain your position.
31
Although Zuckmeyer presents the common image we have of Berlin from written and
visual descriptions, female artists of the Weimar period tried to move beyond this narrow
stereotype in order to create images that were more multifaceted and multidimensional
than heretofore. No longer was woman merely the whore or the mother, Weimar women
sought to explore new and different roles for women, just as real women in this period
sought - albeit not always successfully - to move beyond these traditional and limiting
roles.
Marsha Meskimmon has noted that the modernist canon usually leaves women
out, marginalizes them, and devalues what they do, especially if they were not members

31
Carl Zuckmeyer, Als Wär’s ein Stück von mir, 1966, Reprinted in translation as A Part of Myself, Trans.
Richard and Clara Winston, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970, 217.
13
of an artistic group or were not married or related to a recognized male artist.
32
As
previously mentioned, the Dada artist and Berlin contemporary of Mammen, Hannah
Höch, has gained much more notoriety than Mammen in part because of her tumultuous
relationship with Berlin Dada’s founder, Raul Hausmann. Although generally ignored as
an artist by the group, Höch was begrudgingly allowed to participate in their exhibitions
and this early exposure, as well as connections she made to the art world through
Hausmann, helped further her career and contributed to her recognition today.
Besides the detriment of being female in a man’s art world, Mammen was faced
with other strikes against her success. Having grown-up and gone to school in Paris and
Belgium, she did not attend art school in Berlin. While these schools were probably better
than those available to her as a female student in Berlin, attending school in Berlin had
the advantage of professional connections to other artists, colleagues and professors,
collectors, job possibilities and exhibitions. Nor was Mammen connected to the art world
through artistic relatives, such as a father or artistic husband or lover. This artistic
connection through father or lover has been a major stepping-stone for many women
artists, such as Käthe Kollwitz and Hannah Nagel. Instead, Mammen lived with her sister
Mimi until the end of the twenties and the two were close until Mimi left the country to
work in Teheran as a secretary in 1937.

32
Meskimmon, We Weren’t Modern Enough, op. cit., 2. The Weimar era photographer Yva, for instance,
suffered a similar fate to Mammen’s neglect. Like Mammen, Yva “worked independently at her own
studio and was not personally or institutionally associated with the Bauhaus and its prominent
photographers. Thus, she did not benefit from the venues of publicity and self-promotion accessible to the
Bauhaus artists.” Quoted from Mila Ganeva, “Fashion Photography and Women’s Modernity in Weimar
Germany: The Case of Yva,” National Women’s Studies Association Journal, Vol. 15 No. 3, Fall, 2003, 4.
14
Mammen’s connection with other artists during this period was also limited. In
the late twenties she became friends with the sculptor Hans Uhlmann. He widened
Mammen’s circle of friends and acquaintances, introducing her to other artists and
collectors at salons and exhibitions. In 1935 Mammen met the young scientist Max
Delbrück at mutual friends’, the Wohl and Gaffron families, where artists and scientists
often gathered for discussions as well as playing and listening to music. Delbrück became
a lifelong friend and one of Mammen’s primary collectors. He established a slide
collection of Mammen’s work, which later served as the basis for her catalogue
raisonné.
33
Their close friendship continued to be a lifelong one, documented in a witty
and touching correspondence, even after Delbrück’s immigration to the United States in
1937. His generous care packages after the war helped Mammen to survive. Later, after
the war, she became associated with a larger group of artists, but these were mostly actors
and writers, who did little to promote Mammen’s own art.
Mammen’s outsider status was not entirely detrimental, however. Although the
artist claimed never to have felt completely at home in Berlin and to have felt more
comfortable speaking French than German, there were ‘advantages’ to not being a
Berliner. For example, much of Mammen’s work has the advantage of critical, removed
observation. In many of Mammen’s descriptions of the city, Berlin is characterized as
conservative and provincial. In one of her earliest memories of Berlin she states: “the
streets were dark, without light or shops, … the houses plump and pompous, everything
buttoned up and frosty, highly respectable, … the military stiff, the Herren shabby and

33
Jeanne Mammen: 1890-1976: Gemälde, Aquarelle, Zeichnungen, exhibition catalogue, Berlinische
Galerie Landesmuseum für Moderne Kunst, Photographien und Architektur, Köln: Wienand-Verlag, 1997.
15
obnoxious. Even the bohemians in the Café des Westens were refined, ordering drinks
from Herr Ober (the waiter) with a friendly distance. They crawled before money, those
who didn’t have any were treated like dirt” (figure I.9).
34
While modern in style and neue Sachlichkeit in subject matter, her works retain
the influence of late nineteenth century French artists, as well as Parisian fashion design.
In addition to Mammen’s exposure to the widely visible French Impressionists and post-
Impressionists, she undoubtedly observed the fashions and artistic techniques present in
the high-end fashion magazines and catalogues of the teens and twenties. During my
research, I have found in Mammen’s atelier, where she lived and worked from 1916 until
her death in 1976, copies of the French magazines The Gazette du bon Ton, as well as
German translations of French fashion catalogues. While these copies are all from the
1920s, I think it is safe to assume she had access to and purchased such magazines earlier
as well, for inspiration and for the enjoyment of viewing such images. Very few of
Mammen’s effects exist from the teens, due primarily to her families’ uprooting and
return-emigration to Berlin, as well as to her relative poverty upon arrival in the city
without a job. Unfortunately, many of her things from her earlier years are missing, or
destroyed (she did this both purposefully and by accident). Photos, letters and early
artwork are extremely scarce, so some speculations about the material must be made. In
addition to complete magazines, I also discovered in Mammen’s atelier several
scrapbooks, as well as stacks of various images cut out from magazines, obviously

34
Jeanne Mammen quoted in Annelie Lütgens, “The Conspiracy of Women: Images of City Life in the
Work of Jeanne Mammen,” in Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture, ed.
Katharina Von Ankum, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1997, 89.
16
intended for use in a scrapbook, but never glued into one of the small books she used for
this purpose. Mammen used small notebooks as her scrapbooks, arranging images in
loose groupings together. In some of the scrapbooks, previously glued down images or
entire pages have been removed (cut out) at some point by the artist.
The scrapbooks contain a variety of subjects, from animals (especially monkeys
and cats), to images from other countries, with an emphasis on costumes and traditional
dance. Some of the notebooks are filled with notes to herself and quotes on topics as
varied as astrology, astronomy, philosophy, metaphysics, psychology, history and
literature. Additionally, she included photo-reproductions of artworks in her scrapbooks,
for example, a reproduction of Edouard Manet’s early painting of his wife Camille (with
the same title, 1866), which is interesting for its emphasis on dress and the fashionable
woman. One scrapbook contains primarily contemporary images from the twenties,
focusing on women and modern dancers. Although for most of the images dates can only
be estimated by examining clothing and hairstyles, one image had not been trimmed of its
corresponding reference, and is clearly labeled “Frauenmode von Heute” Ballfest,
(Women’s Fashions from Today, Ball) 1926, Die Welt. Clearly, these scrapbooks are
strong indicators of Mammen’s keen interest in the modern world around her and the
pleasure she gained from participating in it. They signal her involvement with popular
culture through the consumption and collecting of contemporary women’s magazines and
imagery, and are a possible indicator of her interest in contemporary fashion, film, and
dance, as well as current debates on the role of the New Woman in Weimar Germany.
17
This thesis explores Jeanne Mammen’s art in the context of Weimar Berlin. Each
chapter examines the artist’s work in relation to a different theme. Chapter one, “The
Case of Jeanne Mammen,” provides biographical background on the artist, including a
brief chronological overview of her artistic career, laying the groundwork for the
dissertation as a whole. Mammen’s early years and training in Paris and Belgium were
fundamental for her development as an artist, and as a person. This French ‘influence’
comes through artistically, in both style and her choice of subject matter. Whether
fashion illustrations for magazines or sketches in her sketchbooks, the influence of
French fashion and haute couture can be seen in the attention to sartorial detail.
It can be said that most of the artists in the Weimar Republic were affected by
Germany’s rapid urbanization, the development of mass culture through the immense
popularity of film, radio and magazines, as well as by post-war economic and political
instability. Although this period has been designated as the “golden twenties,” more
recent scholarship has demonstrated the political, economic and cultural effects of
runaway inflation and massive unemployment. The tenor of the times was registered in
the “cynicism, sarcasm, violence and despair” of neue Sachlichkeit art.
35
Situating
Mammen within her historical and art historical contexts, chapter one provides the
necessary background for the themes and issues addressed in the subsequent chapters.
Chapter one also examines the neue Sachlichkeit movement and how it pertains to
Mammen’s work in the Weimar Period. Neue Sachlichkeit artists are often identified as
embracing a realistic, verist style. They were also fascinated with, and committed to, the

35
Shearer West, The Visual Arts in Germany 1890-1937: Utopia and Despair, Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1988, 159.
18
depiction of all things modern – the city, technology, display, spectacle and mass media.
Although Mammen and her male counterparts often share a similar style and subject
matter, the first chapter seeks to identify what sets Mammen’s work apart from her
contemporaries who worked in this style. Chapter one, and the chapters that follow,
establish Mammen as part of the neue Sachlichkeit movement. For although Mammen
did not work alongside a group of like-minded neue Sachlichkeit artists (few working in
this period did), she did share a deep commitment to and interest in the modern city
around her, particularly in the role of the neue Frau in this environment.
Siegfried Kracauer’s collected writings, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays,
serve as a suite of culturally and critically informed primary source documents for my
dissertation.
36
The scope of Kracauer’s writings, unlike those of his colleague, Walter
Benjamin, are fairly unknown to an English speaking audience. Most of the essays in this
collection (and much of Kracauer’s writings in general) were published in the daily
newspaper, Die Frankfurter Zeitung. Kracauer wrote for the paper’s prestigious
feuilleton. The Weimar-era feuilleton was avant-garde and covered many topics – book
reviews, conference reports, mass sporting events, dance troupes, boredom, neon lights,
and so forth. These early articles “shed an important new light not only on Kracauer’s
own later work, but also on the Frankfurt School (and especially its analysis of mass
culture), on the genealogy of film theory and cultural studies, on Weimar cultural politics
and, not least, on the exigencies of intellectual exile.”
37

36
Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, Translated, Edited and with an Introduction by
Thomas Y. Levin, Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1995.
37
Thomas Y. Levin, Introduction, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, Ibid, 4.
19
Especially pertinent to the dissertation is Kracauer’s essay entitled, “The Mass
Ornament,” which analyzes the changing state of body culture, particularly the
representation of this culture in illustrated magazines. According to Kracauer, a change in
body culture occurred with the advent of the Tiller Girls, whom he calls the product of
“American distraction factories,” although they were actually British.
38
Instead of
dismissing the Girls outright as a form of cheap, mass-produced commercial
entertainment, Kracauer argues that the “aesthetic pleasure gained from ornamental mass
movements is legitimate.”
39
Offering a contemporary reference point for life in the
Weimar period, Kracauer’s essay also indicates the ways one might place these new
forms under critical pressure.
More than a decade has passed since the first serious scholarly inquiries on the
Weimar New Woman. It seems, then, an appropriate time to complicate a concept that
has by now become rather familiar. Chapter two, “The neue Frau in Context,” analyses
what has previously been written on the neue Frau while relating this to the artwork of
Jeanne Mammen. Literature on Mammen is limited, to say the least. A major
retrospective of her work by the Berlinische Galerie traveled throughout Germany in
1997-98. A catalogue raisonné that includes scholarly essays was published to
accompany the exhibition, but this has not been translated into English. Annelie Lütgens
published a biography of the artist and her work in German in 1991.
40
While Lütgens’
thorough research has been invaluable, her study is broad, covering Mammen’s entire

38
Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, Ibid, 75.
39
Ibid, 79.
40
Annelie Lütgens, “Nur Ein paar Augen sein …” Jeanne Mammen – eine Künstlerin in ihrer Zeit, Berlin:
Reimer Verlag, 1991.
20
life. My dissertation focuses primarily on Mammen’s work produced during the Weimar
period, emphasizing themes which were under debate at the time.
The literature on Mammen in English consists for the most part of essays in
collected volumes, such as Marsha Meskimmon’s, We Weren’t Modern Enough: Women
Artists and the Limits of German Modernism, or Annelie Lütgens’, “The Conspiracy of
Women: Images of City Life in the Work of Jeanne Mammen”, which was published in
the 1996 book, Women in the Metropolis. These studies and Lütgens’ early research have
been helpful in forming a basis for my own work; my dissertation seeks to move beyond
these studies by examining Mammen’s involvement with modernity and the neue Frau.
Chapter two historically situates the neue Frau within the context of Weimar
culture through an examination of such popular Weimar subjects as rationalization, the
new visibility of women, the women’s movement, as well as the figure of the prostitute.
Shearer West has noted the ways in which “modernity was frequently configured through
women. Women were more regularly the subjects, consumers and producers of cultural
artifacts than they had been before the war, and their greater presence in cultural life led
to a reconsideration of the role of the feminine to modernity.”
41
By now it is evident that
many of the ‘victories’ for the New Woman were merely superficial. Women did not
receive equal pay and most were employed in low-status jobs as shop assistants and
typists, with no hope of moving up the career ladder. While some sort of New Woman
existed, she was also a construction of the media. Mammen’s work from the twenties
concentrated primarily on women, and often women at work. The artist seemed to see all

41
West, The Visual Arts in Germany 1890-1937: Utopia and Despair, op. cit., 174.
21
the work women did during this period as equal, be it that of the young office worker, the
salesgirl or the prostitute. Chapter two will analyze Mammen’s images of working
women and prostitutes, and consider what it meant to be a prostitute during the Weimar
Republic.
An often forgotten, yet important component of Weimar modernity is fashion. In
a period where surfaces and outward appearances mattered greatly, in order to truly
understand the period one must consider fashion and the fashionable body. To quote
Janet Ward, “It is on the body of the New Woman that Weimar surface culture was most
vividly inscribed in all its force – despite the fact that the figure of modernity was
predominantly male, and despite the traditional view of woman as a figure of
Unsachlichkeit.”
42
The third chapter of the dissertation, “Beautiful Berliners: Jeanne
Mammen and Berlin’s Fashion Industry,” examines Mammen’s artwork during the
twenties and its connection to fashion. After laying the historical groundwork for the
fashion industry in Berlin, the role of the neue Frau is examined in conjunction with
fashion in this period. This is an area of study that has been neglected in the past, and this
chapter aims to fill in this lacuna.
Fashion could also indicate sexual preference in the Weimar period, and sexual
preference was a popular topic of debate in magazines, newspapers and films. The fourth
and final chapter, “Weimar Homosexuality and the Guidebook,” examines
homosexuality, particularly lesbianism, during the Weimar Republic. Jeanne Mammen’s
oeuvre includes numerous images of women together, many of whom are of lesbians.

42
Janet Ward, Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London:
University of California Press, 2001, 87.
22
These images are analyzed within the context of the society as a whole, including an
examination of what it meant to be homosexual at the time. Mammen was well known for
her illustrations of women together and was often commissioned to create lesbian
imagery. Her largest completed commission was for illustrations to Curt Moreck’s 1931,
Führer durch das “lasterhafte Berlin (Guide to “Immoral” Berlin), a guidebook to the
“underbelly” of Berlin, which emphasized trendy homosexual locales. Studying the
images Mammen produced for Moreck’s Guide alongside the better-known imagery she
created for the popular press, this chapter explores the place of lesbian identity within the
concept of the Weimar New Woman. While Mammen’s illustrations for Moreck’s Guide
have been mentioned in passing, no one has analyzed these images in relation to
Mammen’s oeuvre or the contemporary concept and imagery or the neue Frau and
homosexuality. My dissertation examines Mammen’s illustrations for the “Immoral”
Guide within their art-historical and cultural contexts, addressing, along the way,
illustrations by other artists included in the Guide as well as other, contemporaneous
guidebooks, traditional and less traditional.
The myth and reality of the neue Frau in Germany is the overarching thematic
strand of my dissertation. Jeanne Mammen’s imagery provides a compelling case study
through which to examine the neue Frau and the various roles she played in the newly
formed Weimar Republic. Recent scholarly debates surrounding mass culture are
specifically germane to the issues raised here. Mammen’s work often highlights aspects
of mass culture, while her illustrations for Moreck’s guidebook is a cultural object in
itself, focusing on “low-brow” entertainments such as nightclubs, bars and cafés.
23
Mammen’s employment as a graphic artist and her commercial production intersect with
her own, non-commercial work in interesting ways. My dissertation examines the ways
her commercial and non-commercial art may have informed one another. In doing so, my
study aims to understand the relation between mass culture and the visual arts during the
Weimar Period. While often discussed separately under the rubrics of either art history or
visual studies, I argue for a close interrelation between “high” and “low” art in this
period, something that is clearly evidenced in the graphic art of Jeanne Mammen.
Figure I.1
Before the Mirror, c. 1927, A238
Watercolor and pencil, published in Jugend,
Lost
2 4
Figure I.2
Three Women in Society Clothing, c. 1927, A245
Watercolor, pencil, gouache and silver on carton
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Preussischer Kulturbesitz,
Kunstbibliothek (Hdz Lipp 639)
2 5
Three Women in Society Clothing, c. 1927, A245 Three Women in Society Clothing, c. 1927, A245
Figure I.3
In an “Educational” Film, c. 1929, A313
Watercolor and pencil, published in Jugend,
Lost
2 6
Figure I.4
Shooting Gallery, c. 1929, A330
Watercolor and pencil, published in Ulk,
Marvin and Janet Fishman Collection, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
2 7
Shooting Gallery, c. 1929, A330
2 8
Figure I.5
Window Shopping II, c.1931, A410
Watercolor and pencil, published in an unknown magazine,
Lost
Window Shopping II, c.1931, A410 Window Shopping II, c.1931, A410 Window Shopping II, c.1931, A410
2 9
Figure I.6
Negerrevue, c. 1926, A167
Watercolor and pencil, published in Der Junggeselle,
Lost
Negerrevue, c. 1926, A167 Negerrevue, c. 1926, A167
3 0
Figure I.7
Revue, (Five Girls on a Hobbyhorse), c. 1925, A158
Chalk and pencil,
Lost
Revue, (Five Girls on a Hobbyhorse), c. 1925, A158 Revue, (Five Girls on a Hobbyhorse), c. 1925, A158 Revue, (Five Girls on a Hobbyhorse), c. 1925, A158
3 1
Figure I.8
Untitled (Metropolis), c. 1927, A212
Watercolor and pencil, published in Die Grossstadt
Berlinische Galerie, Landesmusuem für Moderne Kunst,
Photographien und Architektur (Inv. Nr. BG-G 688/78)
Watercolor and pencil, published in Die Grossstadt
Untitled (Metropolis), c. 1927, A212 Untitled (Metropolis), c. 1927, A212 Untitled (Metropolis), c. 1927, A212
3 2
Figure I.9
Loneliness in a Bar, from The Poison in Woman, c. 1917, A93
Watercolor and pencil,
Lost
33
CH APT E R ON E
JE ANNE MAM ME N
Jeanne Mammen recounted her early years as student at the Brussels Académie Royale
des Beaux-Arts some fifty years later.
Things got serious. There we had lessons in anatomy and mythology, and
architecture and aesthetics, and literature. We had to work terribly hard: from
eight in the morning to ten at night. The Academy was in an old cloister with
gigantic rooms and huge coal ovens for winter. One spent the entire day on one’s
feet: painting in the morning, drawing evenings, afternoons painting, like that the
entire course. There was a marvelous library where we were enthusiastic guests. I
was the youngest in the class. As an eighteen year old I received the medal for
composition: I was given a kiss and 150 francs.
43
While the work was hard and she sometimes felt unappreciated by her professors,
Mammen’s memories of her childhood in Paris and her artistic training in Brussels are
always described with fondness. The artist’s upbringing and early training were
somewhat unusual for her time, and would have been even more unusual for a woman
living in Germany. Women were allowed to study art (with restrictions) and yet, women
were still expected to marry and raise families. Art was generally looked upon as a hobby
or bourgeois pastime, and only certain subject matter - still-life, flower painting, the
world of mothers and children - were considered acceptable artistic subjects for women.
This chapter will examine how Mammen managed to move beyond these confines
through the choices she made as an artist. The quickly changing political climate and new
art movements, particularly neue Sachlichkeit, will also be examined insofar as it relates
to Mammen’s own work.

43
Jeanne Mammen quoted from an interview with the art historian Hans Kinkel in from Hildegard
Reinhardt, “La Tentation de Jeanne - Jeanne Mammens symbolistisches Frühwerk (1908–1914),” Jeanne
Mammen: 1890-1976 Gemalde, Aquarelle, Zeichnungen, Exhibition catalogue, Berlinische Galerie,
Landesmuseum für Moderne Kunst, Photographie und Architektur, Berlin, 1997, 35.
34
Jeanne Mammen’s Early Years
Gertrud Johanna Louise (who went by the French version of her name, Jeanne)
was born into a comfortably upper middle-class family in Berlin, on November 21, 1890.
Her father, Gustav Oskar Mammen, was a German businessman, while her mother,
Ernestine Juliane Karoline del Haes, was Dutch, and came from a family of pharmacists.
For business reasons Jeanne’s father moved the family a number of times between Berlin
and Paris: by 1895 the family was back in France.
44
Most of the biographical information
available on Mammen focuses on her childhood after 1900; there exists scant record of
her earliest years in Berlin.
Mammen was the youngest of three sisters and one brother. Not much is written
about her oldest sister, Louise Ernestine (Loulou) and her brother, Oskar. More is known
about Maria Louise (Mimi), who was two years older than Mammen and very close to
her. In 1900 Mammen’s father bought a glassblowing factory in Paris and moved the
family into a spacious villa on the Rue Boulainvilliers in Passay. In a huge, enclosed
garden they kept many pets - birds, parrots, cats, dogs, turtles and a monkey - animals
which are often included in Mammen’s later artwork (especially cats and monkeys)
(figure 1.1). The family lived a cosmopolitan, liberal lifestyle. Mr. and Mrs. Mammen
encouraged the children’s creativity through drawing, music and other activities. In
letters from later life, Mammen described these years as a “carefree childhood and youth

44
The exact date for the Mammen families’ return to Paris has been recorded as both 1895 and 1900, I am
using the earlier date, which is the most often used, including in Mammen’s catalogue raisonné.
35
in Paris.”
45
While Mammen’s statement is typically brief and not overly descriptive,
photographs and records attest to an opulent lifestyle in the sophisticated Parisian district
of Passay.
From an early age Mammen and her sister Mimi showed an interest in and talent
for drawing, and by 1905 they were taking art classes. Mammen later recalled: “Already
as a small child I painted everything I could get my hands on. I always had big stacks of
paper in front of me which I completely covered with my paint (…) I never wanted to do
anything else, wished for anything else, did anything else.”
46
At the liberal arts high
school the Lycée Molière Mammen developed her interest in art and literature. In 1906,
at the ages of sixteen and eighteen, respectively, Jeanne and Mimi were accepted at the
female atelier of the private art school, The Académie Julian in Paris. Although the
Académie Julian accepted women and provided an exceptional art education for them,
tuition costs for women attending Julian were twice as much as they were for men.
The Académie Julian was founded in 1868 by the painter Randolphe Julian (1840-
1907).
47
In the beginning only a small, insubstantial school in the Passage des Panoramas,
by Julian’s death in 1907 it was considered a world-renowned art school, with many

45
Annelie Lütgens, “Jeanne Mammen oder die Kunst des Verschwindens,” Jeanne Mammen: 1890-1976
Gemalde, Aquarelle, Zeichnungen, op. cit., 10.
46
Hans Kinkel, “Begegnung mit Jeanne Mammen,” in Jeanne Mammen 1890-1976, produced by the
Jeanne-Mammen-Gesellschaft and the Berlinischen Galerie, Stuttgart-Bad Canstatt: Edition Cantz, 1978,
93.
47
For more information on the French and Belgian Academies see, for instance, Tamar Garb, “The
Forbidden Gaze: Women Artists and the Male Nude in Late Nineteenth Century France,” in Kathleen Adler
and Marcia Pointon, eds., The Body Imagined, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, 33-42 ff., J.
Diane Radycki, “The Life of Lady Art Students: Changing Art Education at the Turn of the Century,” in
Art Journal, Spring 1982, vol. 42, no. 1, 9-13 ff., Overcoming All Obstacles: The Women of the Académie
Julian, eds., Jane Becker and Gabriel Weisberg, New York: The Danesh Museum and New Brunswick and
London: Rutgers University Press, 1999.
36
branches scattered throughout Paris. Julian was the first school to admit women in Paris.
The public and therefore cheaper École des Beaux-Arts did not begin to admit women
until 1897 and women were not included on Salon juries until 1898. By the time
Mammen began to attend art school in 1906, more opportunities were opening to women.
Annelie Lütgens notes that the Académie Julian had a “free atmosphere, where students
could express their artistic individuality,” which no doubt played a role in Mammen’s
choice of Julian as a school.
48
The school was considered to be unconventional as well as
international. Anti-academic painters, such as Paul Sérusier, Pierre Bonnard, Edouard
Vuillard, Maurice Denis, Félix Valloton, and Paul Ranson, often chose to study at Julian
as opposed to the more conservative École des Beaux-Arts. German women artists such
as Paula Modersohn-Becker and Käthe Kollwitz spent time at Julian because of the
variety of classes offered for women, in particular drawing from the nude, a practice that
was highly controversial and not available for women in Germany until after World War I.
Although female would-be artists found more opportunities in Paris and Brussels
than in Germany, it was nevertheless harder for women to practice art than for their male
counterparts. One of the greatest complaints from women artists concerned the lack of
attention from professors. It was common for the professor to come by the classroom
only once a week to check in and offer critique. Mammen recalled in 1972 in a letter to
her friend Hans Thiemann that the professors at Julian had little to say to the students.
“After curiously perusing the students’ work he [the professor] always said two words,
either ‘continue’ or ‘start over’ and was completely finished with the entire class,

48
Annelie Lütgens, “Nur Ein Paar Augen sein …” Jeanne Mammen – Eine Künstlerin in ihrer Zeit, Berlin:
Reimer Verlag, 1991, 10.
37
consisting of thirty-six students, after half an hour.”
49
Mammen’s recollection
demonstrates the dismissivness with which the female students were treated, and suggests
that they were not really taken seriously as artists.
While women were accepted into the Parisian Academy, they were often
derisively regarded as Malweiber (a negative term for amateur female painters).
50
Rosemary Betterton has noted that this time “was a period [particularly in more
conservative Germany] in which contradictions between nineteenth century ideals of
femininity and new and emergent representations of women came to the fore.”
51
As late
as 1908, German art historians such as Karl Scheffler were arguing that women, being as
they lacked the drive and ambition to become professional artists, were more suited to the
performing arts.
52
Women were often encouraged to paint in their spare time, as a hobby;
endeavoring to pursue a career as an artist was looked down upon. In his popular book of
1908, Die Frau und die Kunst (Woman and Art), Scheffler, for instance, explains how
women are inherently less spiritual than men and for that reason incapable of being
creative enough to be artists. Scheffler, along with many of his contemporaries, believed
that women could not be original and were only capable of copying their male
counterparts. Not surprisingly, it was perfectly acceptable for women to be the muse or
source of inspiration for male artists. Popular magazines of the day such as Jugend and
Simplicimuss also took part in ridiculing female artists in articles and cartoons.

49
Lütgens, 11.
50
Jörn Merkert, “Allein im Sturm der Zeit oder Jeanne Mammen, die Aussenseiterin,” Jeanne Mammen:
1890-1976 Gemalde, Aquarelle, Zeichnungen, op. cit., 28.
51
Rosemary Betterton, An Intimate Distance: Women, Artists and the Body, London and New York:
Routledge, 1996, 4.
52
Betterton, 28.
38
Interestingly, ten years later, Mammen was providing illustrations for both of these
magazines on a regular basis. By the twenties, women were slightly more accepted in the
art world, however begrudgingly.
As part of a thorough artistic training, the Academy prepared all of its students for
the entrance exams to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. However, after two years at the
Academy, Jeanne and her sister Mimi chose to move to Belgium, where they would
continue their studies at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts. Founded in 1711, the
Academy offered traditional classes taught by artists such as Fernand Khnopff, Constant
Montald and Charles van der Stappen. Special courses were also offered for female
students in figure drawing by Jean Delville, Herman Richir, and others. One of the
reasons Mammen chose the Brussels Academy was her growing interest in Symbolism,
which was one of the hallmarks of the Academy. Around the age of thirteen, she first
became familiar with Symbolism through French literature, in particular the works of
Gustave Flaubert, Charles Baudelaire, Victor Hugo, Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud.
Symbolism in art also appealed to the young artist. Two books Mammen recalled reading
and re-reading were Flaubert’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony, 1874, and Hugo’s Les
Miserables, 1862. At the end of her life Mammen attested: “these two books have been
fundamental for my entire development.”
53
The themes of temptation, asceticism, self-
denial, and the world of the under-privileged, presented in these two books were ones she
would explore again and again.

53
Mammen quoted in Hildegard Reinhardt, “La Tentation de Jeanne – Jeanne Mammens symbolistisches
Frühwerk (1908-1914),” Jeanne Mammen: 1890-1976 Gemalde, Aquarelle, Zeichnungen, op. cit., 36. See
the appendix for a partial list of books important to Mammen and found in her library.
39
From 1908 to 1910 the two sisters lived in Brussels, attending the Academy and
fully immersing themselves in the art and culture around them. During this time Brussels
was considered one of the prime places to view art by French and English Symbolists,
and art by Gustave Moreau, Fernand Khnopff, Aubery Beardsley, Jan Toorop, Georges
de Feure, and Jean Delville would have been readily available.
54
Mammen recalled that
while living in Brussels she went to all the local museums, saw Richard Strauss conduct
the operas “Salome” and “Elektra” and Chaliapin sing “Mephisto of Bonito.” She
remembered seeing many paintings by James Ensor, such as Portrait of his Father, Fish,
and Little Girl in Black. She was also impressed by the collection of artwork by Breughel
and Goya on view at the State museum.
55
Her interest in culture was not limited to the
“high” culture of museums and the theatre, however. She also formed a lifelong love of
the cinema, recalling, “We went to the Paradies [movie theater] for fifty centimes, at
least three times a week.”
56
Mammen was happy with her new school, especially its emphasis on
Symbolism. She was fascinated with the mysticism and fanaticism of the art, especially
the duality of the social consciousness and the exploration of the world of dreams.
57
Although the Brussels Academie was a very conservative school, Mammen was not
deterred by its traditional leanings. Lütgens notes that “Mammen’s earliest works

54
Katharina Sykora, “Jeanne Mammen,” Women’s Art Journal, vol. 9, no. 2 (Autumn, 1988 – Winter,
1989), 27.
55
Hildegard Reinhardt, “La Tentation de Jeanne – Jeanne Mammens symbolistisches Fruhwerk (1908-
1914)”, 35.
56
Jeanne Mammen quoted in Reinhardt, Ibid., 35.
57
Annelie Lütgens, “Jeanne Mammen oder die Kunst des Verschwindens,” op. cit., 10.
40
combine the symbolist decadence of Deville with the realistic and grotesque traits of
Ensor.” She adds that Mammen “passed her academic courses with ease and bravura.”
58
While Symbolist art is often characterized by the image of woman as a femme
fatale or otherwise dangerous being, Mammen’s Symbolic works generally focuses on
religious themes and dreamlike imagery. Although women are present, Mammen does
not focus on their evil nature. Rather, women, too, are tormented by nightmares,
hallucinations and visitations by death. In artist’s watercolor, Traumwoge, (Wave of
Dreams) c. 1910, for instance, an androgynous female figure is tormented by her own
dreams (figure 1.2). The barely visible figure clutches her hands to her face in an attempt
to ward off the hallucinatory images that seem to hover above her. In a style that appears
to be very much influenced by work of the Dutch artist Jan Toorop and by Jugendstil art,
Mammen, at twenty, already exhibits her facility for drawing and creating a mood, two
skills which were to become her artistic hallmarks in the 1920s.
Lütgens states that Mammen’s early Symbolist work developed themes that
would be important to her for the rest of her life, themes which reoccur especially in her
later paintings.
59
Her earliest artistic high point was a series of fourteen Symbolist
inspired watercolors illustrating Flaubert’s Temptation of Saint Anthony, c. 1908-10; it is
unknown today if these works were part of an assignment for school or an extra-
curricular project (figure 1.3).
60
Her early heroes, John the Baptist, Buddha and St.
Anthony, were ones she reflected on again and again – but particularly during her

58
Ibid.
59
Ibid.
60
Ibid.
41
Symbolist period. It has been suggested that the idea of withdrawing into a spiritual
artistic existence was for Mammen a way to avoid the many temptations of life, a quality
she retained until her death. For her, temptation and withdrawal manifested itself in
themes of irony, spiritualization and death.
After two years in Brussels, Mammen was finished with her studies. Her work
was recognized at the Academy with a first prize for her student painting, Maria and
Martha, c. 1910, now lost. In 1911 she was awarded the prestigious Prix de Rome, which
had only been open to women since 1903, an honor that was considered the “crowning of
an art student’s achievements.”
61
Jeanne and Mimi spent a year in Italy, as guests at the
Scuola Libera Academia, Villa Medici, often traveling back to Brussels and Paris to see
family and friends.
62
At the end of her Rome Prize year the sisters moved back to Paris,
sharing a large, sparsely furnished studio. Here, together, they organized the first
exhibition of their works, which was held in their studio. In 1912, Mammen participated
in her first exhibition (outside of art school), together with 1300 other artists, at the Salon
des Indépendants, and in 1913 she exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in Brussels.
63
During her years in Brussels, Mammen began to sketch everyday life in small
books she always kept with her. She continued to record her observations in sketchbooks
in Paris, focusing primarily on bourgeois women on the streets. She was especially
attentive to the clothing of the women she observed, hinting at what her later work in

61
Lütgens, “Nur ein Paar Augen sein …”, op. cit., 11.
62
Ibid. Lütgens has noted that although a photo from 1911 shows Mammen on the roof terrace of the Villa,
no artwork has been identified from this time period.
63
Ibid, 216. Mammen is not included in the catalogue of the Salons des Indépendants, but she included this
exhibition on a handwritten curriculum vita.
42
Berlin would look like.
64
Her sketchbooks record pairs in cafes, women walking together,
and nannies looking after young children. The images are fascinating studies in
contemporary fashion, from hats to gloves, to footwear. The drawings are usually
accompanied by Mammen’s tongue-in-cheek humor. For example, a variety of dogs often
mirror their owners in stance or appearance (figures 1.4-1.5).
It is evident from these early sketchbooks that Mammen (and her sister Mimi)
were afforded a great deal of freedom of movement in Brussels and Paris. In many ways
they enjoyed a flâneur-like existence not enjoyed by many young women their age.
65
Mammen would often ride the train around Paris, all the while making quick sketches of
people. This would not have been possible for female artists of the late nineteenth century
– Griselda Pollock has demonstrated that late nineteenth-century artists such as Berthe
Morisot and Mary Cassatt could not roam the streets or experience life the same way as
men. As opposed to Mammen’s free wanderings through the city, Morisot and Cassatt
were confined to feminine spaces – cordoned off by the balcony, the terrace, or limited to
images of bedrooms and private gardens. These women, and others from this period,
could have explored the city only with a chaperon. Even then, only certain areas were
considered acceptable for a lady: the opera, parks, and respectable restaurants.
66
However, modern art at the turn of the century demanded views of the street, the café,
passages, bordellos, and concert halls. While some of these places were off limits for

64
Mammen’s fashion illustrations and detailed analysis of her sketchbooks as they pertain to fashion are
discussed in chapter three.
65
For more discussion of the concept of the flâneur, see chapter three.
66
Griselda Pollock, “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity,” in Vision and Difference: Feminism,
Femininity and the Histories of Art, London: Routledge, 1988, 2004.
43
women, artists like Mammen could adopt the point of view of the flâneur by moving
through the city on foot or with public transportation, or observing life in a café.
Life changed drastically for Jeanne Mammen in 1914. The outbreak of World
War I forced the family to flee France; as German citizens they were considered enemies
of the State. Mammen’s family home, as well as her father’s business and fortune, were
confiscated and the family faced the possibility of internment. The family first
immigrated to Holland via Brussels, but after one year they made their way back to
Berlin, the artist’s birthplace. There, the family lived on Motzstrasse, and everyone
sought work doing whatever they could to make ends meet. The two oldest sisters,
Loulou and Mimi, learned stenography, which was considered an acceptable career for a
woman, while Jeanne continued to pursue a career as an artist, primarily in graphic
design and illustration, in the commercial (male) world.
Mammen’s earliest memories of Berlin were negative. “I didn’t know anyone, I
cried like a lapdog, so horrible did I find Germany to be. I spoke only French and had a
difficult time making myself understood. For instance, I suddenly could not remember
what the word for potatoes was.”
67
Mammen never felt truly comfortable in Berlin, and in
an interview at the end of her life, she still claimed “to never have reconciled with
Berlin.”
68
Life was difficult. She later recalled having to take whatever jobs she could
find: “meager income through retouching photographs, fashion illustrations, designing
movie posters and cobbling shoes,” she recounted, “then food coupons and rations, the

67
Lütgens, “Nur ein Paar Augen sein …”, op. cit., 36.
68
Ibid, 38.
44
English hunger blockade, the War’s end, inflation. The situation eventually improved
through my work for Simplicissimus and several other magazines.”
69
Mammen was not alone in her dislike of Berlin. While Paris was considered the
capital of aesthetic modernity, Berlin was usually appreciated for its technological rather
than visual qualities. London was also praised in comparison to Berlin. London was
considered “a classic industrial metropolis with a sense of tradition, [whereas] Berlin
seemed an economic-industrial center, brutal and uncultivated in the American style.”
70
Indeed, Berlin was often considered to be the “capital of all modern ugliness.”
71
While Mammen may never have fully “reconciled” with Berlin, during the
twenties she seems to have at least made peace with the city. During the mid to late
twenties, Berlin’s cityscape became the recognizable backdrop for much of Mammen’s
work, and while she may not have found Berlin “beautiful,” she appears to have found
worthy of illustration the city’s wide offerings of entertainments and the signs of the
modern city. Other artists also commented on what made Berlin interesting and different.
The German Expressionist painter Ludwig Meidner, for example, found beauty in the
“unnatural, fabricated environment of the city – the tumultuous streets, the elegance of
iron suspension bridges, the gasometers … the howling colors of the autobuses and
express locomotives, the rolling telephone wires, the harlequinade of the advertisement

69
Jörn Merkert, “Allein im Sturm der Zeit oder Jeanne Mammen, die Aussenseiterin,” Jeanne Mammen:
1890-1976 Gemalde, Aquarelle, Zeichnungen, op. cit., 30.
70
Lothar Müller, “The Beauty of the Metropolis: Toward an Aesthetic Urbanism in Turn-of-the-Century
Berlin,” in Berlin: Culture and Metropolis, ed., Charles W. Haxthausen and Heidrun Suhr, Minneapolis and
Oxford: University of Minnesota Press, 1990, 38.
71
Lothar Müller, “The Beauty of the Metropolis: Toward an Aesthetic Urbanism in Turn-of-the-Century
Berlin,” Ibid, 41.
45
pillars.”
72
Mammen, as well, began to celebrate Berlin in her images, examining the
unnatural, artificial landscape of the city. Mammen’s later work from the Weimar period
(1929-33) turned to Berlin’s world of pleasures again and again – Luna Park, Berlin’s
permanent amusement park, strolling, café culture, clubs and women shopping.
A Room of One’s Own
By 1919 the war had ended and Mammen and her sister Mimi sought a apartment-
studio to share. They found a small studio at 29 Kurfürstendamm, in West Berlin,
centrally located, close to cafés, entertainment, shopping and galleries. While the
apartments in her building facing the street were grand and expensive, Mammen’s small
apartment was situated on the fifth floor, in the garden-filled inner courtyard or
Gartenhaus (figure 1.6). The apartment had formerly belonged to a Jewish photographer
who used the light-filled space as his studio before vacating it on account of its lack of
electricity. Mammen recalled this studio apartment in an interview: “The landlord
thought artists don’t need nothing (sic), they live on air and water. When we moved in,
there was only gas light with two chairs, two easels, we slept on the ground on
mattresses.”
73
Mimi shared this small space with Mammen for a number of years,
working primarily as a secretary, but occasionally illustrating fashion magazines as

72
Ludwig Meidner, “Antleitung zum Malen von Grosstadtbildern,” Kunst und Künstler, 12, (1914), 299,
quoted in Charles Haxthausen, “A New Beauty: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Images of Berlin,” in Berlin
Culture and Metropolis, op. cit., 63.
73
Lütgens, “Jeanne Mammen oder die Kunst des Verschwindens,” op. cit., 12.
46
well.
74
Mammen remained very close to her sister until the latter’s move to Teheran
around 1937.
75
There, she continued to work as a secretary for an export company until
her untimely death in 1956 from an automobile accident.
Although located in the sophisticated and wealthier western section of the city,
the area famous in the twenties for its many bars, cafés, cabarets, movie theaters and
street life, Mammen’s small apartment, located behind the impressive main part of the
building on the Ku’damm, seemed a world away. Up five flights of stairs, two small art
filled rooms still await the visitor today. Light bathes the rooms through large windows,
making it an ideal studio environment. High ceilings help to alleviate the smallness of the
space. Luckily for scholars, the apartment looks much like it did eighty-five years ago
when Mammen first moved in and made it her own (figures 1.7). One small room served
as her bedroom, facing the inside of the courtyard; her slightly larger atelier has a large
window and small balcony, which look out onto the small park-like grounds of the
famous Kempinski Hotel. The workroom contains a service sink with cold water and an
electric hotplate for boiling water and preparing food. While electricity was added to the
apartment after World War II, Mammen never had a toilet or shower added, feeling it
wasn’t necessary. The toilet is outside, up another flight of stairs. No shower or bath was
available, so sponge baths were taken with water heated in the apartment. She lived in
this sparse apartment from 1919 until her death in 1976, doing without amenities that she
considered unnecessary luxuries.

74
Mimi began working as a secretary for an export company in the mid-twenties. She traveled to Iran
occasionally for her work, moving to Teheran around 1937. Lütgens, “Nur ein Paar Augen sein …”, op.
cit., footnote 104, 215-16.
75
Lütgens, “Nur ein Paar Augen sein …”, Ibid, 104.
47
In contrast to the simplicity of Mammen’s apartment, Karl Scheffler, in 1931,
described the neighborhood in which Mammen lived:
The western center between Wittenbergplatz, Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedachtniskirche
and Kurfürstendamm is the western center of pleasure … This whole area of the
city burns at night with bright and colorful lights from advertisements. Most of
the ugly houses diminish in the dusk, emitting strange and romantic, unreal rays
of light. The masses of people push themselves into the colorful light, most
seeking pleasure … (figure 1.8)
76
Although Mammen seemed to live a generally solitary existence, one that has been
described at times as ascetic, the neighborhood around her was an exciting one, one that
she turned to frequently for inspiration. In fact, Mammen has been described as an ascetic
outsider who constructed an essentially self-denying existence. Jörn Merkert has
characterized her as the outsider “par excellence,” and “even when her art appeared to be
contemporarily matched, she was outside of her time.”
77
Annelie Lütgens and Hildegard
Reinhardt have described Mammen in a similar manner. While some of these
observations may hold some truth, they help construct a certain image of the artist, one
that conforms to the traditional, modern male construction of the artist as solitary genius
and outsider.
Gill Perry and many other feminist scholars have been critical of the form of the
biographical monograph for women artists, since “it tends to reproduce a traditional form
of narrative applied to individual male artists.”
78
Moreover, the monograph is often

76
Karl Scheffler, 1931 quoted in Eckhard Gillen, Berlin – ein Mythos der Moderne. Text-Bild Collage in
Mythos Berlin – Wahrnehmungsgeschichte einer industriellen Metropole, hrsg. Von Ulrich Baehr: Berlin,
1984, 86.
77
Jörn Merkert, “Allein im Sturm der Zeit oder Jeanne Mammen, die Aussenseiterin,” op. cit., 26.
78
Gill Perry, Women Artists and the Parisian Avant-garde, Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1995, 11.
48
associated with (male) artistic individual personalities and their ‘genius’. Tamar Garb has
posited that this notion of genius “has been both exclusive of women and has mystified
the process by which art is produced, tied up as it is with the concepts of inspiration,
genius, inexplicable talent, virility, seminality, potency, precociousness, and so on.”
79
Additionally, the biography has become outmoded as art historical writing seeks to
include a broader social history of art as well as a post-structuralist approach. In this way,
my dissertation also attempts to move beyond the narrow confines of ‘genius’ or focusing
solely on an artist’s biography in order to understand artistic production. Instead of using
Mammen’s biography or her artwork as a way to ‘read’ her, I propose to use Mammen
instead as a case study for the period, in order to better understand the issues that were at
the forefront of contemporary Weimar debates.
The Importance of the Atelier
With the rental of this atelier, Mammen and her sister had taken an important first
step towards pursuing careers as artists. Marsha Meskimmon has noted the importance of
a private work space, especially for women artists. She states that it is in this space that
“a woman artist could begin to define herself and lay claim to an identity located literally
and figuratively, in the making of art.”
80
For centuries the private space of an artist has

79
Tamar Garb, “Gender and Representation,” in Modernity and Modernism: French Painting in the
Nineteenth Century, Francis Frascina, Nigel Blake, Briony Fer, Tamar Garb, Charles Harrison, New Haven
and London: Yale University Press in association with the Open University, 1993, 232.
80
Marsha Meskimmon, “Das Atelier: Spaciality and Self-Portraiture in the Work of Grethe Jürgens,”
Womens Art Journal, vol. 21, no. 1, (Spring – Summer, 2000), 22. See also: Eva Mongi-Vollmer, Das
Atelier des Malers. Die diskurse eines Raumes in der zweiten Hälfte de 19. Jahrhunderts, Berlin: Lukas
Verlag, 2004.
49
been crucial not only for the contemplation and production of work but also for the
concept or notion of what it meant to be an artist. Like other opportunities that were not
available to women artists, the private studio was often a luxury they could not afford. A
space used solely for the creation of art was seen as excessive and female artists were
often not granted such luxuries or able to afford them. This condition was exacerbated by
the fact that women were associated with amateur art production. In short, they were not
viewed as professional artists. However, by the teens and twenties, when women’s
traditional roles were in flux, more women were able to make choices that enabled them
to obtain a space for making art.
The Weimar artist and fashion illustrator Lotte Laserstein was one such artist who
was able to take advantage of newly afforded freedoms and obtain her own studio. Like
Mammen, Laserstein “self-consciously eschewed domesticity in order to promote her
professional artistic practice.”
81
Lasserstein chose not to marry, being aware of the ways
marriage and children could hamper her artistic career. Instead, she identified with the
neue Frau – setting up her own studio and wearing the androgynous clothing which
became associated with modern women of the twenties. Many female artists, of whom
Hannah Höch might be the most well-known example, were critical of the institution of
marriage for it usually added to the difficulty of being taken seriously as an artist.
Meskimmon notes the popular debates about the creation of “manly women”
(vermännlichte Frauen) through the adoption of professional rather than domestic
careers. As she writes, “Laserstein’s purposeful assumption of this androgynous or even

81
Marsha Meskimmon, The Art of Reflection. Women Artists Self-Portraiture in the 20
th
Century, New
York: Columbia University Press, 1996, 61.
50
‘masculinized’ self image in her self-portraiture was unmistakably an assumption of a
powerful, masculine position – that of ‘the artist.’”
82
Although Mammen painted very
few self-portraits, we know that she did adopt a similar ‘manly’ or androgynous style in
dress and overall appearance, thus declaring her own position as ‘artist’ (figure 1.9).
While other scholars have posited that Mammen’s clothing and her adoption of a short,
bobbed hairstyle are indicators of her involvement in Frauenkultur (women’s culture
movement which boomed during the twenties) it could also be read as a statement of her
choice of independence and desire to be taken seriously as an artist rather than as a
woman who paints “pretty pictures” in her spare time.
83
Self-Portraiture
Self-portraits were a popular theme for neue Sachlichkeit artists in general and
female artists in particular. In this period, male and female artists alike sought to
understand themselves and their role in society and the self-portrait lent itself to this sort
of self-examination and analysis. Especially visible in the self-portrait was a desire to
come to terms with traditional and new roles available to women. Women often portrayed
themselves before an easel, showing themselves at work. As opposed to male artists,
women also included signs of domestic life in their self-portraits, depicting themselves as
housewives or holding children.

82
Meskimmon, Ibid, 62.
83
Katharina Sykora, “Jeanne Mammen,” Women’s Art Journal, vol. 9, no. 2, (Autumn, 1988 – Winter
1989), 29.
51
Unlike many female artists, Mammen did not often represent herself. In over 70
years of artistic production, only three images have been positively identified as self-
portraits; these are from c. 1918, c. 1926 from a sketchbook, and c. 1933. These images
are small in format, almost insignificant and sketched on paper. Lütgens and Meskimmon
have suggested that self-portraiture can be represented in ways other than the traditional
portrait of the artist. Lütgens convincingly argues that Mammen’s many paintings and
drawings of her older sister, Mimi, function in the way to self-portraits do for other
artists.
84
During the teens and twenties Mammen focused intensely on the representation
of her sister. Lütgens describes this transfer from self-portrait to image of her sister as the
“sisterly mirror of myself,” where “one sister stands for the other.”
85
Due to the intense
and close nature of their relationship, this characterization is apt. This displacement of the
self-portrait from Mammen to her sister suggests that she may have felt herself unworthy
of this type of painting. Yet the closeness of the two sisters and the physical similarities
show that Mammen was interested in self-examination, but found portraiture of her sister
Mimi an easier or more enjoyable subject.
The earliest known dated work of Mimi dates to 1907 and is titled Portrait of
Marie Louise (figure 1.10). The Jugendstil inspired profile is painted with watercolors on
an oval cut from a heavy carton. Mimi’s hair is piled high on her head, in a style
reminiscent of a Gibson Girl. A thick scarf wraps around her neck, the end thrown
jauntily behind her. Mimi’s expression is one of extreme concentration; perhaps it is an
image of Mammen’s sister at work as an artist? Mammen paints Mimi again, in a work

84
Lütgens, “Nur ein Paar Augen sein …”, op. cit., 60.
85
Ibid.
52
from a few years later titled, Schwester im Atelier (Sister in the Atelier), c. 1913 (figure
1.11). In this image Mimi faces the viewer, her expression one of calm and confidence.
She sits, spread out on a divan, pillows surrounding her, a golden shawl covering her
shoulders and arms. The studio is light and bright and with oriental and folkloric touches.
The pillows and bedspread are covered with exotic fabrics, while, in the background, the
corner of an armoire painted with a country motif is visible. The exotic surroundings of
the studio show the current vogue in the teens for all things oriental, as well as paying
homage to the richly decorated studios of late-nineteenth century artists.
During her career Mammen rarely signed and, “as a matter of principle, [almost]
never dated her pictures, believing that knowledge of the date at which it was created
added nothing to one’s understanding or appreciation of a work of art.”
86
As she herself
put it “you must always write: my pictures were created between 1890 and 1975 (…)
because I live timelessly.”
87
This has no doubt made exact dating difficult, with the
exception of works that were published in magazines or books. The dating of Mammen’s
works is generally based on stylistic criteria, which is often problematic. Moreover, titles
are also rare for the artist’s work. Although much of her work now has titles, these were
usually added later by the magazine or book that purchased the work. The same images
were often purchased by one or more magazines, and a variety of captions or jokes were
added to her work by the editors, much like the cartoons in The New Yorker magazine.
By changing titles, the same work could come across with completely different meanings,

86
Peter Vergo, “Jeanne Mammen 1890-1976, ‘Street Girl,” The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection of
Twentieth Century German Painting, München: Klinkhardt and Bierman, 1992, 261.
87
Hans Kinkel, “Begegnung mit Jeanne Mammen,” op. cit., 97.
53
for example Prostitute on a Green Couch, c. 1931 was also published as Die Garçonne,
(The Bachelorette) as well as Blondes Mädchen, (Blonde Girl) (figure 1.12).
88
The
woman in this image therefore becomes interchangeable with the prostitute, the neue
Frau with the lesbian.
In photographs from the teens and twenties Mammen and her sister Mimi are
often interchangeable, twin-like in appearance. In an early photograph from around 1912
the two sisters sit in their Paris atelier (figure 1.13). Both young women have bobbed
haircuts and wear loose, somewhat non-descript clothing, and are surrounded by
paintings. Jeanne strums a guitar and both women look shyly but directly at the camera.
The similarities between the two sisters supports the argument that Mammen’s portraits
of her sister can also be read as self-portraits. Not only is the argument of Mammen
appearing throughout her work in the guise of Mimi plausible, but there may also be
many more of these ‘Mimi’ images than heretofore suspected. The watercolor Fräulein
Kunstmalerin, (Miss Artist), c. 1925, now lost, could serve as one such case in point
(figure 1.14). This image shows a young woman, quite possibly Mimi, applying makeup
on a couch, as a black cat watches in the background. In the watercolor Dame mit Katze
im Arm, (Woman with Cat in her Arms), c. 1927, now lost, a young woman snuggles her
face against a fluffy, tiger-stripped cat (figure 1.15). A number of photographs from this
period show both Mammen and Mimi holding a similar looking cat (figure 1.16). While it
is unknown whether this cat actually belonged to Mammen, cats are a reappearing motif,

88
See chapters three and four for further discussion of the Garçonne.
54
and this tiger-stripped tabby appears in numerous photos and watercolors from the
period, possibly inspiring Mammen’s image.
Meskimmon has suggested that the artist’s studio can also be read as self-
portraiture.
Women’s self-portraiture by necessity involves negotiations with traditional
models of self-representation premised upon the conceit of the universal subject
as ‘self.’ Such conventional models of subject reinforce the very mind/body
dualism that enables masculine subjectivity to appear as a transcendent norm
while banishing female subjectivity to the margins. In order to bring marginalized
female subjectivity into view, it is crucial to reinstate the embodied, sexed, and
situated subject of history and discourse.
89
Viewing the atelier as a kind of “self-portrait” is to locate the artist as a “situated subject
of history and discourse.” The space in which Mammen lived and worked for over fifty
years often appears in her work. The studio is visible in the background of portraits, and
provides the setting for still-lifes replete with signs of everyday life: wine bottles, fruit,
and empty glasses. The fact that Mammen’s studio still exists presents the scholar with an
unusual situation. It has been maintained since her death in 1976 by the Jeanne Mammen
Förderverein.
90
Walking into the studio today, one has an immediate feeling of getting to know
someone closely. The small and intimate quarters have changed little from how they
appeared in the 1970s and earlier. There is a computer and other office equipment used to
run the Foundation, but aside from that the furnishings are original. One is surrounded

89
Meskimmon, “Das Atelier: Spaciality and Self-Portraiture in the Work of Grethe Jürgens,” op. cit., 23.
90
The Jeanne Mammen Gesellschaft (Die Jeanne Mammen Gesellschaft) was founded the year after the
death of the artist. Her friends Johannes Hübner, Marga Döpping, Lothar Klünner, Stanislaw Kubicki, Hans
Laabs and Eberhard Rothers founded the Society. As of 2003 the Jeanne Mammen Förderverein was
formed as separate entity and is now part of the Stadtsmuseum Berlin.
55
not only by the artist’s paintings and other works of art. Her well-loved collection of
books on the shelves to the small knick-knacks she collected on trips or received as small
gifts convey a feeling for her as a person. Postcards from friends, or those she found
otherwise inspiring, are still tacked to the walls, and there are a number of small works of
art she created out of found objects such as wire, string or scraps of paper. This space,
then, where she lived and worked for so many years, provides a strong impression of the
artist. In this sense, her atelier, as well as her images of it, may be considered self-
portraits.
In the early watercolor with pencil titled, Modell im Atelier, (Model in Atelier), c.
1918-1920, an unidentified woman (probably Mimi) lounges on a divan before a large
window, which is partially draped to diffuse the light (figure 1.17). The room is sparsely
decorated, a few unidentifiable paintings hang on the far wall; an empty easel and a small
table with brushes reinforce the scene as a working artist’s studio. The image is
traditional and ungendered in its subject matter. After all, studio and the female model is
a popular topic for male artists. Mammen has utilized her own atelier for this classic
theme, without revealing her gender. Her images of her studio (as well as earlier photos)
show a professional and functioning artist’s studio, one that is neither distinguishably
feminine nor a symbol of domesticity.
In a later watercolor and pencil, also set in the studio, Künstlerehe, (Artists’
Marriage), c. 1928, Mammen deals with what for her is an unusual subject (figure 1.18).
The image depicts two artists, who, based on the title of the work, are a man and woman,
presumably a married couple. The female artist in the foreground is also an image of the
56
laconic neue Frau. Her hair is bobbed; she wears a short skirt which exposes her knees
and legs, and flat, practical shoes. Around her lie the signs of an artist’s existence: an
overstuffed portfolio, sheets of paper. A simple meal is on a table between the two artists:
a teakettle, a loaf of bread and cheese. The female artist pulls her arms in towards her
body, resting her chin resignedly on her hands. Her expression is one of discouragement
and defeat, while behind her sits a male artist, her partner, calmly smoking a pipe. He is
seated somewhat above her, a smug expression on his upturned face, a cat lounging on
his knee. The image seems to echo many female artists contemporary concerns that being
a serious, working artist and having a relationship, with or without another artist, often
does not work. For a woman artist, in the early part of the twentieth century, her career
almost always suffered as she was expected simultaneously to care for a household and
possibly children. A number of female artists from this period attested to these problems.
For example, Charlotte Berend-Corinth (the wife of the early expressionist painter Lovis
Corinth) sacrificed her own career to be wife and mother to Lovis’ children, eventually
caring for him as well after he had a debilitating stroke. Hannah Höch’s career suffered
early on from her relationship with the Dadaist Raoul Hausmann. Not only was the
relationship difficult (Hausmann refused to separate from his estranged wife and was
abusive towards Höch), but she was also considered primarily as muse and coffee server
for the group, rather than as an artist in her own right. Meskimmon states that “marriage
was, for many women of the period seeking artistic and professional independence, at
best a burden and at worst an untenable position to undertake.”
91

91
Marsha Meskimmon, We Weren’t Modern Enough Women Artists and the Limits of German
57
Mammen never married and little is known about her intimate relationships, with
men or women. She had one close friend at the end of the twenties and beginning of the
thirties: the sculptor Hans Uhlmann, ten years younger than herself. The two were close
for many years; they traveled to Moscow and Hamburg together. There is documentation
(both written and illustrated) that Mammen visited Uhlmann regularly during the two
years (1933-35) he was imprisoned for distributing Communist leaflets. Their friendship
later ended bitterly for Mammen when Uhlmann decided to marry in 1941. Lütgens has
noted that friends of Mammen said she “never got over the decision of her close friend
[Uhlmann] to live a ‘conventional’ life. She hardly ever mentioned his name. Those who
knew her sensed a deep emotional wound from this behavior.”
92
While it has not been
recorded that Artist’s Marriage is an image Mammen created of herself and Uhlmann, I
believe it is possible that Mammen was contemplating the difficulties of artistic
partnerships at this time.
The artist Hanna Nagel also produced a similar image recording the problems she
had juggling the roles artist, wife and mother. In the etching of 1928, The Imperfect
Marriage, Nagel paints a self-portrait of herself as mother and wife (figure 1.19). She sits
in the foreground holding a young baby in her arms, while behind her, turned away from
the viewer, her husband draws a nude. Nagel has represented herself as a modern young
woman, with a short haircut and short skirt that ends above the knees. The artist’s
expression is one of tight-lipped dissatisfaction, as she is unable to fulfill the roles of wife
and mother while producing art as well. Interestingly, this image was created a number of

Modernism, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999, 127.
92
Lütgens, “Nur ein Paar Augen sein …”, op. cit., 94.
58
years before Nagel and her artist-partner Hans Fischer were married or had had any
children. Her concern and anxiety about these types of roles was palpable enough to find
their way into representation before she had yet to experience these conflicts herself.
93
The title of Nagel’s work is a play on a widely read and popular book by
Theodoor Van de Velde, entitled The Ideal Marriage, which was translated into German
from the Dutch in 1928. Mammen too, would have probably known this book, which was
revolutionary in its conception of an equal partnership between married couples,
including domestic chores, sexual activity and care of the children.
94
These were ideals
that many women in this period would have whole-heartedly embraced, especially
women who were also interested in pursuing careers as artists. But both Nagel and
Mammen mock the reality of this concept, illustrating instead the more common image of
a dissatisfied female artist with her more successful male counterpart. Later in her life,
Nagel reflected on the difficulties women experienced as artists:
For a long time I have known, that the job of being an artist is impossible for a
woman. It is filled with daily disappointments and a difficult fight; one needs
unending patience and an unending hardness. One must have a talent for drawing
but also many other talents, talent as a manager, as well as talent within society.
95
Meskimmon notes that in Nagel’s image of The Imperfect Marriage:
Despite the modern ideals, the woman artist is left ‘holding the baby’ while the
male artist is supported in his practice by a wife, mother to his child, model for
the nude and muse to his creativity. Hence, Nagel made visible the underlying
female support of the successful male artist which can only serve to reiterate his

93
Meskimmon, We Weren’t Modern Enough Women Artists and the Limits of German Modernism, op.
cit., 126.
94
Meskimmon, Ibid, 125.
95
Hannah Nagel quoted in Britta Jürgs, ed., Leider hab ich’s Fliegen ganz verlernt: Portraits von
Kunstlerinnen und Schriftstellerinnen der Neuen Sachlichkeit, Berlin: Aviva Verlag, 2000, 30.
59
power when it remains invisible. Once seen, the structure locates and negates the
myth of the autonomous male creative genius.
96
In Mammen’s watercolor Artist’s Marriage, one also wonders where the male artist
would be without his muse and someone to run the household. For example, the teakettle
in the foreground, resting on a pile of drawings, can be seen to imply that household
chores such as food preparation are taking precedence over this woman’s creative output.
Both Nagel and Mammen have chosen to illustrate this topic of artistic
partnership in the sharp, verist style popularized in the 1920s. While Verism was widely
used during the twenties and is considered one of the hallmarks of the neue Sachlichkeit
style, Mammen in particular often employed a softer, more ‘impressionistic’ touch when
rendering her images, but she was still an objective observer. Yet, by choosing a
‘harsher,’ more ‘realistic’ style for Artist’s Marriage, she has strengthened and
heightened the reality of the subject matter, rather than diffusing it with a softer pallet and
brushstroke.
Portraits
Portraiture was very popular during the Weimar Republic. From the middle of the
twenties to the end of the Weimar period, artists - both photographers and fine artists
alike - took a great interest in the ways portraits revealed aspects of the sitter as well as
society as a whole. At the end of the twenties and the beginning of the thirties, Mammen
began creating numerous pencil drawings on inexpensive packing paper

96
Ibid, 130.
60
(Zuschneidepapier) (figure 1.20). The drawings were primarily busts that concentrated on
the facial features, hairstyles and clothing of the sitters, who were usually women.
Reinhardt states that Mammen was primarily interested in physiognomy, head form,
haircuts and the shoulders of people.
97
At the same time that she became interested in
these types of portraits, she also began to draw nudes (exclusively of women). Both types
of drawings were made in private evening drawing classes that she began attending at the
end of the twenties. Mammen later described one of these classes in an interview:
The [class] was around the corner, so I thought to myself, you have enough
spunk, go there. It was a very small place, I was drawing there ‘til I was crooked
and lame, four hours a day. Those were my finger exercises, 2000 pages I still
have, I don’t know how many pages I threw out into the ash heap. […] I went
there for years; I had dreadfully bad paper, the better kind was much too
expensive. I also drew a terrible lot of students, they didn’t even notice that, the
Sauerkrautbärte (silly old fools). It was a completely open thing.That was nice, I
liked that a lot. The session cost fifty Pfennige, you could come and go as you
wanted. I kept on going until the bombs came.
98
While Mammen’s nudes from this period are mostly full body drawings, her
sketches of her fellow classmates are usually busts. Drawn in both profile and straight-on
views, she captures a wide variety of Berliners in the 1930s. Interestingly, the nudes she
drew in this period are sketchier and more ephemeral than the portraits of her fellow
students. In her portraits she concentrated on the details of the sitter. In a relentless verist
style she records all of the flaws and imperfections of the sitter, be it age, weight, or an
unflattering hairstyle they have chosen. Sometimes she draws her sitters sketching, pencil

97
Hildegard Reinhardt, “Jeanne Mammen (1890-1976) Gesellschaftsszenen und Porträtstudien der
Zwanziger Jahre,” Niederdeutsche Beiträge zur Kunstgeschichte, Band 21, Sonderdruck, München, Berlin:
Deutscher Kunst Verlag, 1982, 177.
98
Klara Drenker-Nagels, “Die Zwanzige und Frühen Drieziger Jahre,” in Jeanne Mammen: 1890-1976, op.
cit., 49.
61
and paper in hand, a concentrated expression on their face. At other times she leaves out
these attributes, such as in her drawing, Portrait einer Frau mit Pony und Krawatte,
(Portrait of a Woman with Bangs and a Tie), c. 1931 (figure 1.21). In this image she has
chosen a young woman with a Bubikopf with bangs as her subject, presumably a fellow
student from her drawing class, but less identifiable without her drawing tools. She is
therefore identified as woman and not as an artist equal to Mammen. The sitter is dressed
in the sporty and trendy style of the neue Frau, hair in a short pageboy. A casual pullover
sweater and large tie complete the look. Her darkly painted lips are pursed, while her
small eyes squint in a look of boredom. These portraits have none of the stylized features
of Mammen’s earlier commercial illustrations, and are more comparable to individual
snapshots that examine the differences between her subjects.
Mammen’s portraits of her classmates are not dissimilar to the earlier sketches she
made in sketchbooks on the streets of Brussels and Paris. Like those earlier images, these
attest to her interest in drawing and skill as a draftsperson. The majority of these images
were not published or exhibited until after Mammen’s death, although some were used as
studies for larger paintings, such as the figures featured in the oil painting, Schachspieler,
(Chess Players), 1929/30 (figure 1.22). The drawings she created in her class are
probably the most verist or Sachlichkeit of Mammen’s oeuvre and are reminiscent of
62
August Sander’s photo series of German types.
99
Mammen’s numerous portraits create a
virtual gallery of the 1920s. As Hans Puttnies puts it, these are “snapshots of society.”
100
Jeanne Mammen and neue Sachlichkeit
The term “neue Sachlichkeit” has never had a fixed meaning.
101
The first uses of
the term can be traced to as early as 1919, when an edition of the Berlin art magazine,
Das Kunstblatt, edited by Paul Westheim, published a review of the Roman periodical
Valori Plastici, which first discussed the trend of neue Sachlichkeit as Verisimo (verism).
This was described as a style in which the artist deployed uncompromising realism, using
meticulous, hard lines.
102
The use of neue Sachlichkeit as a blanket term for art with
realistic tendencies was made popular in May, of 1923 by Gustav Hartlaub, the new
director of the Mannheim Kunsthalle. Hartlaub’s first mention of neue Sachlichkeit came
in a letter circulated to various art galleries and museums requesting to include specific
neue Sachlichkeit artists in an exhibition he was planning. The letter read:
I wish in the autumn to arrange a medium-sized exhibition of paintings and prints,
which could be given the designation “die neue Sachlichkeit.” I am interested in
bringing together representative works of those artists who in the last ten years
have been neither impressionistically relaxed, expressionistically abstract, who
have devoted themselves exclusively neither to external sense impressions, nor to
pure inner construction. I wish to exhibit those artists who have remained
unswervingly faithful to positive palpable reality, or who have become faithful to

99
August Sander is probably the most well known of neue Sachlichkeit photographers. He focused
primarily on portraits of regular German people. This interest coincided with the study of physiognomy,
which began at the turn of the century but continued to be popular during the Weimar Republic.
100
Hans Puttnies, Das Gesicht der Weimar Republik, Katalog-Deutschen Historischen Museums, Berlin,
2000,121.
101
The term verism is derived from the Latin word “verus” meaning “true”. The Italian word “verismo”
first related to naturalistic trends in opera.
102
Neue Sachlichkeit and German Realism of the 20s, Hayward Gallery, London, 11 November, 1978 – 14
January, 1979, Arts Council of Great Britain, 1978, 8.
63
it once more. You will understand readily enough what I mean. Both the right
way (the neoclassicists, if one cares to describe them) as exemplified by certain
things of Picasso, Kay H. Nebel, etc, and the “veristic” left-wing, to which
Beckmann, Grosz, Dix, Drexel, Scholz, etc., can be assigned, fall within the scope
of my intentions.
103
Although the exhibition was not carried out until the summer of 1925, postponed
primarily on account of transportation problems and unforeseen costs, the name began to
be associated with this type of artwork as early as 1923. Schmalenbach notes that the
names’ real popularity took hold with the Mannheim exhibition, after the summer of
1925. The term neue Sachlichkeit was not confined to a description of an artistic style.
After 1926, it began to be used commonly among the young and fashionable, although
Schmalenbach notes that those who used it probably did not know of its original ties to
art.
104
Hartlaub’s exhibition, “Neue Sachlichkeit: Deutsche Malerei seit dem
Expressionismus” (New Objectivity: German Painting since Expressionism), included
the artists Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Alexander Kanoldt, Carlo Mense,
Kay Nebel, George Scholz, Georg Schrimpf and the Swiss painter Niklaus Stoecklin, to
name a few. Although women certainly painted in the neue Sachlichkeit style and many
were admired at the time for their work, no women were included in Hartlaub’s
exhibition. This, then, was another sign of the exclusion female artists experienced.
Interestingly, most of the male authors writing about neue Sachlichkeit,
contemporarily or later, repeatedly stated what unified neue Sachlichkeit artists: namely,

103
Gustav Hartlaub, from a circular sent out to museums and galleries, quoted in, Fritz Schmalenbach,
“The Term neue Sachlichkeit,” in The Art Bulletin, September 1940, vol. Xxii, no. 3, 161.
104
Fritz Schmalenbach, “The Term neue Sachlichkeit,” Ibid, 163.
64
that they did not look back romantically. Rather, they examined and portrayed their own
time.
105
Sergiusz Michalski notes that Otto Dix and other neue Sachlichkeit (male) artists
were motivated by an aversion to and rejection of Expressionist emotion and
utopianism.
106
Michalski states “neue Sachlichkeit counters the Expressionist exuberance
of unlimited possibilities with an insight into the constraints imposed by reality.”
107
The
only thing neue Sachlichkeit and Expressionism seemed to have in common was a
continued fascination with the modern city. While this may indeed be an overarching
theme present in the art of neue Sachlichkeit, female neue Sachlichkeit artists did not
usually adhere so strictly to such concepts. Britta Jürgs suggests that for female artists, art
movements rarely contrasted so starkly with one another. They usually contained
elements from the previous movement or other movements.
108
This was due primarily to
women’s exclusion from male dominated artistic circles, and other arenas of artistic
promotion and exchange. While neue Sachlichkeit is often characterized by its sobriety
and lack of sentimentality, female artists during the period were more likely to retain
elements of sentimentality, especially when examining issues which closely pertained to
them, for example, coping with motherhood, marriage or work. In this way, many images
by female neue Sachlichkeit artists vacillated between what were considered “traditional

105
See for example; Fritz Schmalenbach, op. cit. and Die Malerei der Neuen Sachlichkeit, Berlin: Gebr.
Mann Verlag, 1973, Sergiusz Michalski, New Objectivity: Painting, Graphic Arts and Photography in
Weimar Germany, Köln: Taschen, 1994, 2003 English translation, Franz Roh, Nach-Expressionismus
Magischer Realismus, Leipzig: Klinkhardt and Biermann, 1925, and Wieland Schmied, Neue Sachlichkeit
und Magischer Realismus in Deutschland 1918-33, Hannover: Fackelträger-Verlag, 1969, 1979 English
translation.
106
Sergiusz Michalski, New Objectivity: Painting, Graphic Arts and Photography in Sachlichkiet und
Magischer Realismus in Deutschland 1918-33, op. cit., 54.
107
Ibid, 159.
108
Britta Jürgs, ed., Leider hab ich’s Fliegen ganz verlernt: Portraits von Künstlerinnen und
Schriftstellerinnen der Neuen Sachlichkeit, op. cit., 10.
65
‘women’s’ paintings and images of the forward-looking, professional, emancipated New
Women.”
109
However, neue Sachlichkeit as a whole is generally only loosely described. Neue
Sachlichkeit does not feature manifestos, as we find in German Expressionism, or
organized artistic groups, such as Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter. Although neue
Sachlichkeit did begin to develop in the years just after Germany’s defeat in World War I,
and was in many ways a reaction to the false utopianism of the earlier Expressionists, no
manifesto officially stated this position. Neue Sachlichkeit was less about a new style and
more about a new way of seeing based on a commitment to the modern environment and
everyday life. Like many trends of the twenties, neue Sachlichkeit was closely tied to the
cult of Americanism.
110
Waldemar George stated in 1927, “the neue Sachlichkeit is
Americanism, the cult of the objective, the hard fact, the predilection for functional work,
professional conscientiousness, and usefulness.”
111
While George Grosz is probably the most well known of the neue Sachlichkeit
artists, his imagery hardly gives a complete picture of Berlin or the Weimar Republic.
There are no cheerful mothers, no schoolchildren, or pretty girls, just “apathetic whores,
or matrons with sagging breasts … over and over again sex murderers, real or potential,
brandishing knives or hatchets (figure 1.23).”
112
More than that of any other neue

109
Britta Jürgs, Ibid, 11.
110
Americanism will be more fully discussed in chapter three.
111
Waldemar George, “Frankreich und die ‘neue Sachlichkeit,” Das Kunstblatt II, Nov. 1927, quoted in
Dennis Crockett, German Post-Expressionism: the Art of the Great Disorder 1918-1924, University Park,
Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State Press, 1999, 2.
112
Otto Friedrich, “Before the Deluge,” A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s, London: Michael Joseph, 1972,
152.
66
Sachlichkeit artist, Grosz’s imagery was rooted in caricature, which was born in the
eighteenth century. Caricature is noted by the “distortion of ideal canons [as] it seeks to
ridicule and expose.”
113
While Mammen also employs caricature in her work, hers is
closer to Honoré Daumier’s (1808-1879) ironic humor than it is to Grosz’s “biting
derision.”
114
Grosz’s Prussian Protestant upbringing and sharp criticism of Berlin
decadence come through in his works, while Mammen’s Parisian, more liberal youth
resulted in similar city imagery without the moralistic and judgmental overtones.
However, in the end both artists recorded the profiteers, the prostitutes, and the pleasure
seekers alongside the beggars and the dope fiends. Both artists had objective eyes as
social documenters.
For Grosz and other male neue Sachlichkeit artists, “pleasure was subjected to the
sober gaze of the artist, who saw in the stimulation a repeated attempt to drown out the
emptiness of the time, the ‘dead, unbearable present,’” as Hugo Ball put it, “with the
phantasmagoria of the lust for pleasure.”
115
Female artists also adopted a sober, cool eye
in the twenties. However, the hopeless bleakness and corruption of the city seemed to be
topics relegated to male artists, due in large part to their vastly different experiences of
World War I. While both men and women experienced the horrors of war, women did not
see war firsthand. Like many other male artists who were originally enthusiastic
participants in the first World War, Grosz soon found it to be a place of “filth, lice,

113
Beth Irwin Lewis, George Grosz, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1971, 1991, 121.
114
Beth Irwin Lewis, Ibid, 122.
115
Hanne Bergius, “Berlin: A City Drawn from the Linear Network to the Contour,” German Realist
Drawing of the 1920s, Exhibition catalogue, ed. by Carol O. Selle and Peter Nisbet, Cambridge, MA:
Busch-Reisinger Museum, Harvard University Art Museums, 1986, 27.
67
idiocy, disease, and deformity.”
116
Not long after volunteering for service he was
discharged for “brain fever [and] he returned to dark, gloomy Berlin and started to set
down on paper the horrors that he had seen.”
117
Not only was the beginning of the Weimar Republic overshadowed by the great
losses and defeat of World War I, but also various domestic, economic and foreign policy
issues constrained the new government’s ability to act. The Treaty of Versailles, of
January 10, 1920, was not only an economic burden, but it was also a psychological one
for defeated Germany. By January 1921, the Paris Conference agreed on reparations to be
paid by Germany in the staggering amount of 269 thousand million gold Deutsch Marks,
which was later reduced to 132 thousand million Marks. Part of the reason for the high
sum resided in the fact that Germany was not only to pay for war damage the nation itself
had caused, but also for the costs of the war as a whole. The price was steep because this
war was a “total war – a war in which each county, the entire national economy and the
‘home front’ had been mobilized, and not just the military machinery.”
118
Although most Germans were angered by what they felt was an outrageous sum,
in actuality the financial burden during the ten years Germany paid reparations was much
less.
119
Due to the complexity of the repayment plan (which was split into three separate
sets of bonds) contemporary experts, as well as historians today, are unable to agree on
the actual amount paid and on what was the actual burden of reparations on the German

116
Otto Friedrich, “Before the Deluge,” A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s, op. cit., 37.
117
Ibid.
118
Detlev Peukert, The Weimar Republic: the Crisis of Classical Modernity, translated by Richard
Deveson, New York: Hill and Wang, 1987, 1996, 53.
119
Detlev Peukert, The Weimar Republic: the Crisis of Classical Modernity, Ibid.
68
economy. While the reparations no doubt created an added burden on the economy,
Germany’s economic woes were mostly due to low post-war economic activity.
In this difficult economic environment, Mammen and other artists of her day
struggled to make ends meet, taking whatever jobs came their way. In 1924 Germany’s
economy improved, bringing a short period of stability, and Mammen too felt a relative
sense of financial security. From the period between 1924 and 1933 she was able to
support herself solely through the production of art and it was during this time that she
also began to experience a modicum of recognition, although this was primarily relegated
to her skill as an illustrator. Between 1928-33 Mammen was publishing an average of
three to four drawings per week, mostly in the satirical journals Simplicissimus, Lustige
Blatter, Ulk, and Uhu (figures 1.24-1.26).
120
For each full-page, color illustration she
received approximately three hundred marks, which was considered a very good
payment.
121
Kurt Tucholsky, a writer and reporter on contemporary Weimar culture, paid
homage to Mammen in a 1929 issue of Die Weltbühne. The “tender, gossamer-light
watercolors that you publish in magazines and satirical journals surpass the undisciplined
scribblings of your colleagues so far that one owes you a little declaration of love. Your
figures … are so graceful and at the same time austere, and they seem almost to spring
vividly from the paper into reality.”
122
At the beginning of the thirties, as the realization of Mammen’s skills at
illustration expanded, she was commissioned to illustrate a number of books, such as

120
Katharina Sykora, “Jeanne Mammen,” op. cit., 29.
121
Klara Drenkel Nagels, Jeanne Mammen: 1890-1976, op. cit., 41.
122
Kurt Tucholsky, Die Weltbühne, August 6, 1929, 225, quoted in Michalski, op. cit., 24.
69
Octave Uzanne’s 1928 novel The Parisian, Magnus Hirschfeld’s A Moral History after
the First World War, 1931, and Curt Morek’s Führer durch das Lasterhafte Berlin, (Guide
to “Immoral” Berlin), 1931. In 1930, at age forty, Mammen was approached by gallery
owner Fritz Gurlitt and offered representation through his gallery and her first solo
exhibition. The exhibition took place in October of that year and included nineteen
paintings and a small selection of drawings, lithographs and watercolors. It is difficult to
recreate exactly what works were shown, as the small catalogue listed only the title of the
artworks.
123
The catalogue essay was written by the art critic Hermann Sinsheimer, who
expressed astonishment that a female artist could create such “relentless, sharp (harsh)
observations and that she was an extremely talented caricaturist.”
124
Sinsheimer, while
complimenting Mammen on her skills as an artist, was still inherently sexist in his
expression of disbelief at the quality of Mammen’s work and that a woman could have
created it. This was not an uncommon view at the time. After all, the very definition of
Sachlichkeit is linked first and foremost to a cool “male,” rational style.
Nevertheless, the exhibition was favorably received, and in 1931-32 Gurlitt
commissioned Mammen’s largest and last illustrations, a series of twelve color
lithographs for the illustration of Pierre Louÿs’ (1870-1925) Lieder der Bilitis, (Songs of
the Bilitis) (figure 1.27).
125
The book was a German translation of the popular French
novel of lesbian love, based on the poems of Sappho. It was first published in France in

123
Lütgens, “Nur ein Paar Augen sein …,” op. cit., 77.
124
Lütgens, Ibid.
125
Pierre Louÿs was a popular turn of the century poet who specialized in orientalizing poetry. He wrote
many volumes of poetry, combining neo-Classical with oriental themes, and bringing in his experiences of
traveling in North Africa.
70
1911 and later reprinted in English translation, in New York in 1926. The 1926 version
was produced in a small, privately printed edition, on handmade paper, with pen and ink
drawings by Willy Pogony, an artist whose work resembled that of Aubrey Beardsley and
Marcus Behmer.
126
The Gurlitt Gallery was interested to have Mammen create similar
high quality drawings in a limited edition. In her commission Mammen used the 1911
edition as a reference, with illustrations by Notor in a stylized version of antique vase
painting.
127
Mammen’s images and the text are faintly colored in pink, green, black,
brown and gray tones. Unlike previous illustrators, Mammen illustrated the story with
contemporary women, creating a “modern” Sappho in her time.
128
By using
contemporary rather than classicizing imagery, Mammen relates her images to fashion,
mass media, and the Berlin lesbian underground scene.
129
While the commission was
considered a highpoint of Mammen’s career, the print portfolio was never printed beyond
the artist’s proofs, on account to the Nazi seizure of power and the ensuing conservatism.
While the series was not banned outright, censorship and prohibitions prevented the
Gallery from completing the project.
130
It seems that with the rise of the Nazis Mammen’s career reached a standstill, just
as she was beginning to gain some artistic recognition. Between 1933-34, she began

126
Lütgens, “Nur ein Paar Augen sein …,” op. cit., 71.
127
Ibid.
128
Ibid. See chapter four for an in depth discussion of Mammen’s illustrations in regard to their lesbian
subject matter.
129
Marsha Meskimmon, We Weren’t Modern Enough: Women Artists and the Limits of German
Modernism, Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999, 222.
130
Mammen kept the lithographs in her studio. Unfortunately, during the war the skylight in her studio was
destroyed due to bombing in her neighborhood. The lithographs and many other artworks were destroyed,
but luckily the artist’s proofs were spared, as these were kept in a secure storage space. This information is
from a letter written after the war by Mammen to the Gallery Valentin, explaining the history of the
lithographs.
71
retreat into an “inner exile,” as she sought to survive in an increasingly conservative and
repressive atmosphere. On March 13, 1933, the National Socialist newspaper, the
Völkische Beobachter, negatively reviewed her and other artist’s work in the group
exhibition at the Verein Berliner Künstlerinnen (Organization of Berlin Women Artists).
This was to be Mammen’s last exhibition in Germany for the next twelve years. She
continued to create paintings and drawings, mostly on cheap paper and cardboard, but did
not show them outside of her studio. Again, she was forced to look elsewhere for ways to
earn money. At first she sold antique books, magazines and graphic art in an old cart she
pulled through her neighborhood (figure 1.28). Selling books and prints did not bring in
much money, so Mammen supplemented her income by designing window displays in
the department stores on the Tauenzienstrasse, painting marionette heads for the
marionette theater Harro Siegel, and making orthopedic wooden shoes.
131
Later, during
World War II, she survived on food stamps and unemployment, amidst bombing raids
and forced labor. Mammen later recalled her “forced training to become a ‘fireman’,
keeping fire watch until after the all-clear signal at three o’clock in the morning. No
windows, no heating, no gas, no electric light, no food. Paintings, lithos, drawings for the
most part burned, drowned, or stolen (figure 1.29).”
132
The writer and journalist Erich Kuby noted in a letter to a mutual friend, “Jeanne
is obsessed with painting. I was only in the studio a few minutes and I caught out of the
corner of my eye giant canvases covered with degenerate art. Wasn’t she afraid of

131
Lütgens, “Jeanne Mammen oder die Kunst des Verschwindens,” Jeanne Mammen: 1890-1976, op. cit.,
16.
132
Ibid, 17.
72
discovery and being denounced?”
133
Mammen was able to avoid attention. “I
camouflaged myself,” she writes. A “woman as a graphic artist (illustrator), she paints
little flowers, I painted and painted. I had a guardian angel.”
134
In this way Mammen
survived the Nazi era and War without notice or persecution. However, like most artists
who survived this period, National Socialism and World War II profoundly affected her
art. She completely detached from the art world she had recently begun to enter officially
and her style went through drastic revisions as she attempted to cope with her experience.
Although Mammen re-entered the art world after the second World War, with an
exhibition in 1947, it was not until the last few years of her life, around 1976, and after
her death, that she began to receive recognition for her seventy-plus years of art making.

133
Ibid, 18.
134
Ibid.
7 3
Figure 1.1
Family House in Paris, Garden
Photo Courtesy of the Förderverein der Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung e.V.
7 4
Figure 1.2
Wave of Dreams, c. 1910, A37
Watercolor, pencil and India ink
Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung
7 5
Figure 1.3
St. Anthony and the Seven Deadly Sins, c. 1908-14, A4
Watercolor, pencil and India ink
Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung
St. Anthony and the Seven Deadly Sins, c. 1908-14, A4 St. Anthony and the Seven Deadly Sins, c. 1908-14, A4 St. Anthony and the Seven Deadly Sins, c. 1908-14, A4
7 6
Figure 1.4
Untitled, c.1913 SB X Page 41
Watercolor and pencil, Sketchbook
Förderverein der Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung e.V.
Untitled, c.1913 SB X Page 41
7 7
Figure 1.5
Place Broukère, c. 1913 SB X Page 4
Watercolor and pencil, Sketchbook
Förderverein der Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung e.V.
Place Broukère, c. 1913 SB X Page 4
7 8
Figuure 1.6
Mammen’s Inner Courtyard,
Entrance and Atelier Window, Fifth Floor, 2005
Photo Courtesy of the Förderverein der Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung e.V.
7 9
Figure 1.7
Interior of Atelier, Two Views, 2005
Photo Courtesy of the Förderverein der Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung e.V.
8 0
Figure 1.8
Potsdamer Platz at Night in the Twenties
Published in Der Potsdamer Platz: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
und der Untergang Preussens, 2001
Published in Der Potsdamer Platz: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Published in Der Potsdamer Platz: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
und der Untergang Preussens, 2001 und der Untergang Preussens, 2001 und der Untergang Preussens, 2001 und der Untergang Preussens, 2001
8 1
Figure 1.9
Self Portrait, c. 1932, Z365
Pencil
Private Collection
8 2
Figure 1.10
Portrait of Marie Louise, 1907, A1
Watercolor
Förderverein der Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung e.V.
8 3
Figure 1.11
Sister in the Atelier, c. 1913, G1
Oil on canvas
Berlinische Galerie, Landesmusuem für Moderne Kunst,
Photographien und Architektur Berlin (Inv.-Nr. BG-M 3982/87)
8 4
Figure 1.12
Die Garçonne, c. 1931, A400
Watercolor and pencilv
Private Collection
Die Garçonne, c. 1931, A400 Die Garçonne, c. 1931, A400
8 5
Figure 1.13
Jeanne and Marie Louise (Mimi) Mammen in Their Studio,
Brussels, c. 1912
Photo Courtesy of the Förderverein der Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung e.V.
8 6
Figure 1.14
Miss Artist, c. 1925, A136
Watercolor and pencil
Published in Der Junggeselle,
Lost
Miss Artist, c. 1925, A136
Published in Der Junggeselle, Published in Der Junggeselle,
8 7
Figure 1.15
Woman with Cat in her Arms, c. 1927, A237
Watercolor and pencil
Published in Die Dame,
Lost
Published in Die Dame,
8 8
Figure 1.16
Mammen with a Cat
Photo Courtesy of the Förderverein der Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung e.V.
8 9
Figure 1.17
Model in Atelier, c. 1918-1920, A97
Watercolor and pencil
Förderverein der Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung e.V.
9 0
Figure 1.18
Artists’ Marriage, c. 1928, A287
Watercolor and pencil
Busch-Reisinger Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Artists’ Marriage, c. 1928, A287 Artists’ Marriage, c. 1928, A287
9 1
Figure 1.19
Hanna Nagel, The Imperfect Marriage, 1928
Published in We Weren’t Modern Enough: Women Artists
and the Limits of German Modernism, 1999
Hanna Nagel, The Imperfect Marriage, 1928 Hanna Nagel, The Imperfect Marriage, 1928 Hanna Nagel, The Imperfect Marriage, 1928
Published in We Weren’t Modern Enough: Women Artists Published in We Weren’t Modern Enough: Women Artists
9 2
Figure 1.20
Standing Female Nude, c. 1930, Z87
Pencil,
Lost
Standing Female Nude, c. 1930, Z87 Standing Female Nude, c. 1930, Z87
9 3
Figure 1.21
Portrait of Woman with Bangs and Tie, c. 1931, Z236
Pencil
Förderverein der Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung e.V.
Portrait of Woman with Bangs and Tie, c. 1931, Z236 Portrait of Woman with Bangs and Tie, c. 1931, Z236
9 4
Figure 1.22
Chess Players, c. 1929/1930, G17
Oil on canvas
Private Collection
Chess Players, c. 1929/1930, G17
9 5
Figure 1.23
Georg Grosz, Sex Murder in the Acker Street, 1922/23
Lithograph
Published in Kritische Grafi k in der Weimarer Zeit, 1985
Georg Grosz, Sex Murder in the Acker Street, 1922/23
9 6
Figure 1.24
The Tarot Card Reader, Uhu, c. 1928, A286
Watercolor and pencil
Axel Springer Verlag AG, Berlin
9 7
Figuure 1.25
The Red-haired Woman, Ulk, c. 1928, A278
Watercolor and pencil
Berlinische Galerie, Landesmusuem für Moderne Kunst,
Photographien und Architektur (Inv.-Nr. BG-G 691/78)
The Red-haired Woman, Ulk, c. 1928, A278 The Red-haired Woman, Ulk, c. 1928, A278
9 8
Figure 1.26
Berliner Café, Simplicissimus, c. 1930, A356
Watercolor and pencil on yellow paper
Städtische Galerie Albstadt, Stuttgart (Inv.-Nr. GS 82/14)
Berliner Café, Simplicissimus, c. 1930, A356 Berliner Café, Simplicissimus, c. 1930, A356 Berliner Café, Simplicissimus, c. 1930, A356
9 9
Figure 1.27
Girlfriends, c. 1930-32, D19
Lithograph
Private Collection
1 0 0
Figure 1.28
Mammen Selling Prints and Books
Photo Courtesy of the Förderverein der Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung e.V.
1 0 1
Figure 1.29
Kurfürstendamm after World War Two
Photo Landesbildstelle Berlin
Courtesy of the Förderverein der Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung e.V.
102
CH APT E R T W O
T H E NE UE F R A U I N CON T E XT
Through a close examination of the women’s movement, the laws pertaining to
abortion and birth control, and male fears and fantasies in the Weimar republic, this
chapter aims to provide a more nuanced view of the New Woman. Where early
scholarship focused on images of the carefree and beautiful new woman promoted
through contemporary media and works of art, more recent writing considers the neue
Frau in the context of Weimar culture as a whole.
135
This chapter follows the lead of this
recent scholarship and examines what conditions were actually like for women during
this period. Focusing on images of prostitutes and others who did not conventionally
subscribe to the image of the free and beautiful new woman promoted by the media, this
chapter will open the concept of the new woman out onto its historical and artistic
contexts and, in so doing, will analyze the work of Mammen in particular as part of an
enlarged and multi-layered understanding of the Weimar New Woman.
Formation of Germany and the Women’s Movement
Between the founding of Germany as a nation in 1871 and the end of World War II in
1945, there existed in Germany three different types of government: a monarchy from
1871-1918, a democratic republic until 1933, and a dictatorship until 1945. After the

135
Berlin: Culture and Metropolis, ed. Charles W. Haxthausen and Heidrun Suhr, Minneapolis: Minnesota
University Press, 1995, When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany, ed. Renate
Bridenthal, Atina Grossmann and Marion Kaplan, New York: New Feminist Library, Monthly Review
Press, 1984, and Atina Grossmann, Reforming Sex: the German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion
Reform, 1920-1950, New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
103
1871 unification numerous groups sought political and economic advancement. The
women’s movement was among these groups, although among the women in these
groups there was a division between two factions. This divide reflected the “class
polarization of German society.”
136
By 1894 two distinct groups had formed, a bourgeois
wing, led by Helene Lange (and later, Gertrud Bäumer) which called itself the Federation
of German Women’s Associations (Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine; BDF). On the other
side was the proletarian women’s movement, led by Clara Zetkin, and connected to the
SPD (Social Democratic Party). Although they were political opponents, both groups
advocated separate spheres for women and held fairly conservative values when it came
to women and family, as the family unit continued to play an important role in women’s
lives and politics. The BDF sought improved legal status for women, better education,
professional and career opportunities, sexual hygiene (“incorporating notions of health
and moral reform”), improved work conditions for women, and, after 1902, female
suffrage.
137
Prior to 1902 the SPD was the only party to support female suffrage.
However, the SPD’s main goal was class equality over gender equality.
The radical period of the German women’s movement occurred at the end of the
nineteenth century to 1908. During this time the two branches came closer together to
fight for women’s suffrage, social reform, and new sexual ethics. Up until 1908 the
feminist movement was motivated by a number of intellectuals and “effective

136
When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany, ed. Renate Bridenthal, Atina
Grossmann and Marion Kaplan, New York: New Feminist Library, Monthly Review Press, 1984, 1.
137
When Biology Became Destiny, 2.
104
campaigners.”
138
After this period, “a coalition of moderates, conservatives and
nationalists removed liberal and radical feminists from all leading positions within the
BDF, and the direction of the bourgeois feminist movement was fundamentally
altered.”
139
Women’s political issues retreated into the background at the outbreak of World
War I in 1914, as opposing women’s groups rallied for solidarity in support of the war
effort. The War did bring about many new jobs and roles for women (mostly in the
middle and working classes). With men leaving the labor force, women were called upon
to fill in. This was especially noticeable in the industrial labor force. Women made more
money in these positions than they had before, although not as much as their male
counterparts. Women were heavily employed in agricultural work, textiles, food
processing, and assembly-line production. Most of the jobs available to women required
little or no skills, which meant low wages. 1916-17 was a turning point in the War for
many, especially women. Known as the “turnip winter,” it was a time of mass starvation
and this difficult time led to an increased call for peace. More and more radical factions
formed, and many women rallied for peace. 1918 saw the end of the war and in 1919 a
new constitution was formed which was hailed as being one of the most democratic in the
world. It included suffrage for adult women as well as extensive civil liberties and social
welfare guarantees.
140
However, abortion, still a key issue for women, remained illegal

138
Günter Berghaus, “Girlkultur - Feminism, Americanism, and Popular Entertainment in Weimar
Germany,” in Journal of Design History, vol. 1, no. 3-4, 1988, 195.
139
Günter Berghaus, 195.
140
Suffrage in Germany in 1919 was universal; thereby no one was excluded based on race, sex or class.
The legal voting age was 20.
105
and access was restricted to birth control. Women’s rights in marriage and divorce were
also restricted.
141
Despite the illegality, women continued to obtain abortions during this period and
many rallied against the law. Indeed, abortion became a central focus for the sex reform
and communist women’s movements. Atina Grossmann notes that working-class women
were directly and negatively affected by two sections of the German penal code
outlawing abortion (Paragraph 218). “Paragraph 218, as amended and reformed by the
Reichstag in 1926, called for jail sentences for women who aborted their fetuses and
anyone who aided them. Paragraph 184 prohibited the advertising, publicizing, or display
of contraceptive methods and devices because they were ‘objects intended for indecent
use.’”
142
Both laws posed problems for poor, working women, making contraceptives
expensive and difficult to find. Instead of receiving safe, effective treatment, as many as
1 million women per year were visiting back-alley and quack doctors, who provided
ineffective and dangerous services.
143
Abortion was generally seen as a class issue. For
wealthy women contraceptives were readily available – at a price. Abortions could be had
abroad; in countries such as Switzerland, abortion was also illegal, but rarely prosecuted.
There, one could pay a doctor a fee and obtain a certificate for a ‘legal’ abortion.
144

141
This civil code had been on the books since 1900 and remained unchanged throughout the Weimar
period.
142
Atina Grossmann, “Abortion and Economic Crisis: The 1931 Campaign Against Paragraph 218,” in
When Biology Became Destiny, op. cit. 68. Paragraph 218 and 184 were originally part of Imperial law,
written into the criminal code in 1871, and modified slightly during the Weimar Republic.
143
Ibid, 69. These numbers were from 1931.
144
Ibid, 74.
106
At the beginning of the Weimar Republic, women seemed to be welcomed with
open arms into the political sphere. Consequently after 1919 women did begin to see
political gains, such as a 10% increase in women delegates within the Weimar
parliament. Women responded well to their new right and as many as 80% of eligible
new voters cast their votes.
145
In political and non-political magazines, such as the
increasingly popular genre of “women’s magazines,” the tone was upbeat and positive
about the new period into which women were entering. Sadly, this optimism did not
continue, as political parties did not integrate women’s groups into the political system
and “wages, job security and working conditions continued to be more favorable for men
than for women.”
146
Women who were involved in politics were kept out of the real
decision making process and pushed instead into dealing solely with “women’s issues.”
The women in the SPD, for instance, were encouraged to focus their attention on non-
controversial projects such as the Arbeiterwohlfahrt, a working-class welfare
organization.
As the SPD moved further and further towards the center, towards, that is to say,
bourgeois influence, naturally so did their women’s journals, Die Gleichheit and Die
Frauenwelt, “which gave up their theoretical and political tone and turned into innocuous
family magazines, emulating the popular bourgeois press of the period. Working-class
women were presented with bourgeois or petty-bourgeois life-styles and advised on how

145
Bridenthal and Koonz, “Beyond Kinder, Küche, Kirche: Weimar Women in Politics and Work,” When
Biology Became Destiny, op. cit., 35.
146
Bridenthal and Koonz, 36.
107
to fulfill these role models.”
147
The magazines moved away from serious political
discussions to mundane “house-hold tips, instructions on how to make simple but stylish
clothing, feuilletons with short stories, puzzles, songs and poems.”
148
The SPD’s
publications began to mirror the current fashion in women’s magazines with a new
‘modern’ image of her reader, one type of neue Frau: youthful, slender with a Garçonne-
like figure, sporty and made up, her hair cut into a Bubikopf (a fashionable bobbed
haircut) and with fashionable clothes (figure 2.1). At the same time these magazine
instructed this new woman how to behave in a world vastly different than Wilhelmine
Germany.
Before long, what first began as serious, political journalism soon diminished into
frothy entertainment. The final blow came when these journals began to accept consumer
and entertainment advertising. Suddenly the pages were filled with images of how to
improve oneself through makeup, slimming pills, crèmes, and gadgets, as well as new
forms of entertainment – films, trashy novels, revues, and so forth. What began to emerge
from these magazines was an embrace of modern everyday consumer culture. The
magazine’s female readership began to “frequent dancehalls, movie palaces, revue
theatres, and other forms of popular entertainment.”
149
In the middle and later half of the 1920s women’s political involvement steadily
declined. The War had widened the gap between men and women – due to their very
different experiences of it. After the War, many women had to give up their new

147
Berghaus, 198.
148
Ibid, 198.
149
Ibid.
108
employment positions to men, which only increased tensions. Women, like the Jews,
were often blamed for the loss of the War. The fact that they had made inroads into
politics and public life was seen as another symbol of the way women (and Jews)
supposedly profited from the decline of Germany.
Mass unemployment reached a peak in the winter of 1923-24 at 1.5 million. At
the same time the government faced massive war debt and reparations, which forced
them to print excessive amounts of money to cope with the economic situation. This
resulted in unprecedented inflation. Money became worthless and those living on fixed
incomes such as pensions, suffered terribly. Widows and the elderly suffered
disproportionately. Many middle class women were forced to work, sometimes in
unsavory jobs such as prostitution. “Traditional moral distinctions between respectable
and indecent women blurred as sexual taboos seemed to loosen to the point of
demoralization.”
150
The mid-twenties saw relative stabilization due in part to American loans and
repayment plans such as the Dawes and Young Plans of 1924 and 1929 respectively.
Meanwhile unemployment remained extremely high, at an average of 12%. Problems
arose in the labor market as hard times forced more women to seek employment.
151
Many
men objected to this, advocating that married women should not be allowed to work as

150
When Biology became Destiny, op. cit., 9.
151
Popular belief has it that women made enormous economic gains in the 1920s. In reality the number of
working women only increased slightly, from 33.8 to 35.6 percent, which coincided with population,
increases. The positions women filled were more often than not in the lowest paying jobs. It was rare for
women to break into fields such as medicine, for example, “in 1925 only five percent of all doctors were
women, and of these only half had an independent practice.” Berghaus, op. cit., 193, 194.
109
they were considered double earners.
152
Renate Bridenthal notes that “women may have
seemed to be in the vanguard – on assembly lines, in mechanized offices, behind
department store sales counters, and in the expanded social welfare bureaucracies – but
they rarely displaced men.”
153
White-collar professionals were the fastest growing
segment of the workforce in the Weimar Republic. In 1925, 90% of these female
employees were single and 69% were under thirty years old.
154
Most lived with their
families. However, even with this increase, only 1% in 1925 was in a managerial
position.
Many of these young working women came from upper-middle class families
who had lost their fortunes during the War or post-war inflation period. The young
daughters of the family often sought “respectable” jobs in offices to help their families
ease their financial burden. Berghaus states “these jeunes filles de bonnes families were
different in their attitudes and aspirations from the petty-bourgeois women who had
dominated the small contingent in the white-collar profession at the turn of the
century.”
155
In the relatively stable period between 1924-29 more and more working-class
girls were trained at technical colleges, which allowed them to move beyond manual
labor jobs.
Many technical breakthroughs occurred in the offices of the 1920s, which led to a
greater demand for low-skilled workers. Women typically filled these positions where
“outer appearance and willingness to sexual role-playing were often considered to be the

152
Biology, op. cit., 10.
153
Ibid, 10.
154
Berghaus, 194.
155
Ibid, 195.
110
only criteria of qualification.”
156
This was a workforce (and society) that honored youth
and beauty; many women over thirty hardly had a chance. The magazines read by the
new white-collar workers encouraged a new type of youthful ‘Girlkultur,’ which
emphasized the concept of the healthy, young, beautiful Girl marrying ‘up,’ in order to
promote her social standing. Berghaus notes that women’s magazines after 1925
repeatedly used language such as “young, graceful, slender, animated, healthy, athletic,
fresh, supple, lissome, sun-tanned, smooth-skinned, with strong muscles, youthful, sturdy
form, etc.” to describe the “It” girl.
157
Weimar era films also promoted the image of the youthful, healthy Girl who
succeeded in life and love. Petro states that these films were a source of pleasure and
enjoyment for their viewers. Mammen not only took pleasure in viewing these films as a
consumer, but also these films, magazines, and advertisements played an important role
in her work. Her commercial production was directly linked to this market, as she herself
created some of the advertisements, movie posters and fashion illustrations. The women
who occupied her less commercial work were the consumers, often the white-collar
workers she encountered on the streets, in the cafes and clubs in Western Berlin.
Mammen also contributed to the neue Frau or ‘Girl’ imagery in her
commissioned film posters of the early twenties. For example, in her poster for the film
Freund oder Weib, c. 1922, she utilizes one of the period’s stereotypes of the neue Frau.
In this instance she is depicted as androgynous, with short bobbed hair and clothing that

156
Ibid, 195.
157
Ibid, 204, “jung, anmutig, schlank, lebendig, gesund, sportlich, frisch, gelenkig, geschmeidig,
sonnengebräunt, natürlich, mit straffer Haut, gestärken Muskeln, mit jungendlichen, festen Formen, etc.
111
was a symbol of both the lesbian and the fashionable woman in the 1920s.
158
Clad in a
men’s styled dress shirt, complete with a large tie, and long, simple skirt, this woman
wears clothing that was first adopted by lesbians in the twenties. Meskimmon notes that
this adopting of men’s clothing as well as the back and forth of styles between lesbians
and fashionable straight women in the Weimar Republic “served to throw open the
concept of fixed gender and sexual identity to debate and revision.”
159
The title of the movie, Freund oder Weib (Male Friend or Woman) played on the
common Weimar joke that it was often difficult to distinguish between young men and
women (figure 2.2). Lavin states that “these androgynous images could have provided an
important sense of identification for Weimar women involved in new gender roles. This
is most clear for the lesbian subculture with regard to images readable not only as
androgynous but also as lesbian or bisexual.”
160
Images exploring androgyny reoccur
throughout Mammen’s Weimar illustrations and can be read not only as a way of
successfully marketing her work for sale, but also as her own fascination with and
personal exploration of new gender roles.
The period between 1925 and 1928 witnessed relative economic stabilization and
women saw some small political and social gains. Abortion laws were reformed, but not
done away with. Health and maternity benefits were extended, but only for full-time
workers. In 1927 new legislation to prevent venereal disease was written into legislation,
but was difficult to enforce. The law for combating venereal disease included a

158
See chapter three for further discussion of the lesbian and the fashionable woman.
159
Meskimmon, 216.
160
Lavin, 198.
112
stipulation that lifted the ban on selling and advertising certain types of contraceptive
devices, such as prophylactics. This allowed for the installation of vending machines for
condoms in public bathrooms. The lifting of the ban can be seen as a boon to women’s
reproductive rights and personal disease prevention.
At the beginning of 1928, before the New York Stock Exchange crash,
Germany’s economy began to show signs of slowing. The economy continued to
plummet and by 1932 there were over 6 million registered unemployed. Again women
and Jews were commonly blamed and were thought to have not been as affected as men
by the economic downturn. With the economic downfall, Germany swung sharply to the
right politically.
The neue Frau
Women were seen as playing two roles in Weimar’s new culture. “They were
simultaneously seen as guardians of morality and as the chief agents of a ‘culture of
decadence.’… Thus the ‘new woman’ captured the imagination of progressives who
celebrated her, even as they sought to discipline and regulate her, and of conservatives
who blamed her for everything from the decline of the birthrate and laxity of morals to
the unemployment of male workers.”
161
It is not surprising that previous scholarly
literature has considered Mammen rather exclusively under the rubric of the new woman.
The concept of the new woman emerged after World War I as the “embodiment of the
sexually liberated, economically independent, self-reliant female [who] was perceived as

161
When Biology Became Destiny, op. cit., 13.
113
a threat to social stability and an impediment to Germany’s political and economic
reconstruction.”
162
Mammen, in many ways, fits the popular description of the new
woman through her style and persona. From 1922 until 1933, she worked as a freelance
illustrator for the popular magazines, Die Dame, Die schöne Frau, Die deutsche Elite and
Der Junggeselle. Mammen’s commercial illustrations of the new woman in popular
magazines are an important part of her oeuvre as an artist and will be examined in this
chapter in greater detail.
For progressives and conservatives alike, the new woman embodied anxiety and
modernity. She was often simultaneously construed as victim, threat, and salvation of the
Weimar era. Consequently, the declining birthrate and the rise in abortion were two
issues that provoked panic and generated hostility towards the new woman during the
Weimar period. As authors Renate Bridenenthal, Atina Grossmann and Marion Kaplan
describe, the new woman voted, used contraceptives, obtained illegal abortions and
earned wages.
163
“In fact”, Renate Bridenthal writes, “the bourgeois women’s movement
also joined in bemoaning the supposed sexual laxity of the times, urging closer
supervision of morality.”
164
While the so-called new woman was actually a “bohemian

162
Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture, ed. Katharina von Ankum,
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997, 4. The strongest, most cohesive image of
the new woman occurs after emancipation (1919) and during the Weimar period. Recent scholarship
however, argues that the new woman began to emerge before WWI, even as early as the 1890s, as a result
of such factors as, the acceptance of women into German universities in 1908, the greater visibility of
women in the teens, and the many women who moved into the workforce during the war years.
163
The essays “Introduction: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany,” “Beyond Kinder, Kuche, Kirche:
Weimar Women in Politics and Work,” “Abortion and Economic Crisis: The 1931 Campaign Against
Paragraph 218,” “Helene Stocker: Left-Wing Intellectual and Sex Reformer,” “Mother’s Day in the
Weimar Republic,” and “Professional” Housewives: Stepsisters of the Women’s Movement” in When
Biology Became Destiny, were particularly useful for my work.
164
When Biology Became Destiny, 11.
114
minority or an artistic convention.” she would continue as a symbol of degeneracy and
modern “asphalt culture” in Nazi propaganda.
165
The New Woman looked different from prewar and World War I German women,
and this also played a role in how she was represented and perceived at the time. Whereas
the wearing of makeup was previously considered to be a mark of a loose woman or a
prostitute, in the 1920s women of all classes began to wear makeup, even during the day.
Through new technological breakthroughs in the manufacturing of cosmetics, as well as
the promotion, through advertising, of makeup as a symbol of the fashionable and
modern woman, women of all classes began to wear more makeup than had previously
been deemed acceptable. In general, as more women entered the workforce and began to
earn their own money (however small), they were able to make more choices in regard to
purchases, with the result that previous cultural prohibitions, such as those for the
wearing of make up, lost some of their moral force and purchase. This fact did not go
unnoticed by advertisers who quickly began to market specifically to this new consumer
class in the newly proliferating illustrated magazines as well as through other channels.
The new woman sported a Bubikopf, wore short, looser dresses without corsets
and had an overall youthful, athletic, healthy appearance.
166
This lasting image in
advertising (one we continue to conjure up today in magazines and films) was for the
most part created by the wealth of new women’s magazines, advertising and films, which
exploded onto the market in post-war Germany. While much of the new woman image
was indeed a media construction, I am interested in why a change occurred in post-war

165
Ibid.
166
See chapter three on fashion in Weimar for more on changes in body types and clothing styles.
115
Germany and why this image was so popular, even as it was not an obtainable reality.
Were women being force-fed unobtainable models or was pleasure gained by looking at
these images, as scholars such as Patrice Petro and Maud Lavin have convincingly
argued?
167
Petro’s interpretation of German cinema during the 1920s, Joyless Streets:
Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimar Germany, helps broaden my
understanding of the representation of women in mass culture and society. Like Maud
Lavin, who argues that much of Hannah Höch’s imagery was based on pleasure, Petro
contends that there existed a commercially viable female audience for films in Weimar
Germany who not only gained pleasure from watching films, but who were fascinated by
images that called traditional representations of gender into question. Petro’s conclusions
are suggestive for the work of Jeanne Mammen, who, I will argue, also gained pleasure
from looking at and representing the new woman in Weimar Germany.
How, then, did Mammen’s images fit in to the context of Weimar culture?
Beginning around 1920 the artist began to produce images for various types of
magazines, advertisements, fashion plates and, later, small scenes (usually of women
interacting with one another), which were used to illustrate the numerous journals
available at the time, such as Simplicissimuss, Uhu, and so forth (figures 2.3-2.5).
168
While conforming in many ways to the new stereotypes of what a new woman was
supposed to look (or act) like, these images by Mammen were also true-to-life

167
Patrice Petro, Joyless Streets: Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimar Germany,
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989 and Maud Lavin, Cut with a Kitchen Knife: The Weimar
Photomontages of Hannah Höch, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993.
168
Although the majority of these magazines were established by men, Die Dame for example, others such
Ledige Frauen, Die Frau, Die Freundin, and the Blätter der Jüdischen Frauenbundes, were produced and
written by women.
116
observations of the real women around her, and give us an accurate picture of what it
meant to be a woman in 1920s Berlin. It should be noted that Mammen’s depictions of
Weimar women differed greatly from most of the representations of women created by
her male counterparts, such as Otto Dix or Georg Grosz. Taking the lead of Petro’s
Joyless Streets, this chapter will argue that the women who viewed these images in
fashion magazines like Die Dame, Jugend, and Die Junggeselle gained pleasure from
them. In this way, my account argues against the famous thesis put forward by Max
Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, whose harsh critique of popular culture and the
“culture industry” suggests only a negative outcome for the products of mass culture.
169
Here are Horkheimer and Adorno in 1944:
Amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work. It is sought after as
an escape from the mechanized work process, and to recruit strength in order to
be able to cope with it again. But at the same time mechanization has such power
over a man’s leisure and happiness, and so profoundly determines the
manufacture of amusement goods, that his experiences are inevitably after-images
of the work process itself. The ostensible content is merely a faded foreground;
what sinks in is the automatic succession of standardized operations. What
happens at work, in the factory, or in the office can only be escaped from by
approximation to it in one’s leisure time.
170
Horkheimer and Adorno analyzed the effects of the culture industry on the
working class, noting that they were especially susceptible to popular culture because of
their constant “threat of proletarianization due to the rationalization measures [at their

169
The term “culture industry” was coined by Horkheimer and Adorno. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W.
Adorno, “The Culture Industry,” in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. by John Cumming, New York:
Continuum International Publishing Group, 1976.
170
Horkheimer and Adorno, 137.
117
work places].”
171
Siegfried Kracauer argued that consumption of popular culture by the
working class and the new middle class were not all that different.
While it is true that Weimar Germany experienced an explosion in what could be
called the new popular culture industry sector and that much of this was aimed at the
newly emerging class of female, white-collar workers, not all of this new mass culture
was detrimental. Although much of the advertising relied on and catered to new, young
workers seeking to escape the dull, low paid office work they performed, the profusion of
new imagery was also exciting, empowering and different from anything published
before. To be sure, many of the young, middle-class women who read the profusion of
new women’s magazines available were also exposed to the “dominant, bourgeois culture
industry, and through the advertising sections in the socialist press they were encouraged
to become consumers of modern mass-market products and to conform to the
ideology.”
172
Yet, as Marsha Meskimmon has noted, “women artists did not simply
operate as mindless consumers of popular forms, their deliberate interventions into the
gender debates of the time were defined through their critical position on such female
stereotypes as the mother, the prostitute and of course the neue Frau.”
173
Members of the Frankfurt school like Horkheimer and Adorno were some of the
first scholars to write about the destructive qualities of mass culture and its path to
fascism; more recent scholars have also decried the sexist, capitalist post-war

171
Horkheimer and Adorno, 138. See page 18 of this chapter for more on rationalization.
172
Berghaus, op. cit., 210.
173
Marsha Meskimmon, We Weren’t Modern Enough: Women Artists and the Limits of German
Modernism, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999, 181.
118
economy.
174
Although there is some truth in this evaluation, it is also too closed in its
proclamation. The Weimar period, then, requires a more nuanced reading. If one is to
truly understand the culture and the artistic output of (female) artists such as Jeanne
Mammen, I propose that Weimar women gained something from looking at these new
images of women (whereas previously there had been few or none). Albeit sometimes
unrealistic, the magazines did provide images of women in politics, participating in sports
(dance was especially popular), driving cars (sports cars being the trendiest), and wearing
new, liberating clothing. To be sure, many of these images or situations were
unobtainable for the average magazine reader and were often connected to advertising
campaigns and the advertising industry as a ploy to get readers to purchase new creams,
diet pills, stockings, or makeup to ‘improve’ herself. Nonetheless, I will demonstrate the
positive aspects of new woman imagery in advertising and popular culture.
Mammen manifests her knowledge of and interest in popular culture in images
such as Langweilige Puppen, (Bored Dolls), c. 1929, (watercolor and pencil). This image
relates to Kracauer’s concepts of Zerstreuung (diversion or amusement), and Langeweile
(boredom) (figure 2.6).
175
Zerstreuung was a word that gained popularity during the
twenties and was often used in the bourgeois press and was considered a byproduct of

174
The Frankfurt School was made up of various researchers associated with the Institut für
Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research) founded in 1923 as an autonomous division of the
University of Frankfurt. They invented a type of Marxism known as critical theory. A number of these
more recent books and authors are noted at the beginning of chapter two.
175
The title Langweilige Puppen, has previously been translated as Boring Dollies. I propose that Bored
Dolls is probably closer to the artist’s original intention. The Jeanne Mammen Foundation also prefers this
new translation.
119
rationalization in Weimar Germany.
176
In Bored Dolls two young women sit against one
another on a couch, wearing characteristic signs of the neue Frau, such as, makeup,
smoking, fashionable hair and clothing. Both are made-up, eyes heavily lined to accent
their almond-shape. In the background a doll dressed in a clown-like carnival costume
wears similar dark make-up around her eyes. The woman in the background slowly
smokes her cigarette, while all three, including the doll, look bored. As Meskimmon
argues in relation to images such as this one:
Critical links between the images produced by Mammen and the theories of
Kracauer are greater than mere chance titular juxtapositions; Mammen actually
describes in imagery the situation Kracauer criticizes without being subsumed by
it. Mammen’s location of a critique within the cycle of pleasurable consumption
suggests an embodied maker and viewer of art and media imagery and reveals the
distanced position of the elite masculine critic to be untenable.
177
While the women in Mammen’s image in some ways mirror the toy doll in the
background, both in appearance and title of the work, Mammen simultaneously counters
this comparison. The two “real dolls,” stylized by modern trends in fashion and makeup,
still retain their individualism, especially the figure in the foreground who boldly engages
with the viewer in a manner that is more confrontational than an empty stare.
By combining modern women with a toy doll and titling the work Bored Dolls, Mammen
effectively comments on and satirizes the concepts of Langeweile and Zerstreuung.
Another interesting aspect of Bored Dolls centers on role-playing through the
hairstyles of the subjects. Both women wear modern haircuts, the woman in the

176
Sabine Hake explains the concepts of Zerstreuung and Langeweile in “Girls in Crisis – The Other Side
of Diversion,” New German Critique, no. 40, Special Issue on Weimar Film Theory, (Winter, 1987), 147-
164. See also, Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. by Thomas Y. Levin,
Cambridge MA, London, England: Harvard University Press, 1995.
177
Meskimmon, op. cit., 181.
120
foreground sports a Herrenschnitt (men’s haircut) while her friend has a Bubikopf, or
bobbed haircut. Although both styles of haircuts were popular with both hetero- and
homosexual women, by combining a masculine haircut with a feminine version, the use
of these two hairstyles may also symbolize this pair’s sexual relationship. Many women
who were lesbian did not choose to follow these roles. Nevertheless, some women during
this period did play with various identities such as Butch (Bubi) or Femme (Dame) as a
way of exploring their sexuality.
178
Mammen herself was part of this new audience, gaining pleasure from the wealth
of imagery available to her in the various magazines she illustrated as well as from the
films, photography and advertising that surrounded her. Later in her life she stated that
this work from the twenties was not her “true art” and was only created in order to earn a
living in tough times. While this may have been the case, I do not believe that this
statement made almost 40 years later tells the full story. I would argue that Mammen
herself identified with these young women as under-employed, “new” workers and was
in a similar situation to them. Because of this identification, Mammen was able
successfully to create sympathetic and engaging images of the women she observed
around her. Rather than creating work she had no interest in for purely for financial gain
(as she posited 40 years later), Mammen created images that were popular, sellable, and
yet also pleasurable for herself and her viewers. In fact, even in her earlier Symbolist

178
These roles will be discussed further in chapter four, which covers homosexuality in Weimar.
121
work, Mammen, as Katharina Sykora has noted, focused on “women and the social
conflicts constituent in their lives; themes that remained constant in her art.”
179
Irene Dolling, for instance, posits that Mammen was an embodiment of the
modern woman of the 1920s. Mammen’s work of the 1920s captures “women whose
behavior, whose style of fashion and body shape, were just as much a part of 1920s
discourse and collective fantasies of emancipation and sexual liberty, democratic
egalitarianism, progress, motorization, and enthusiasm for technology, as were warnings
against the blurring of social boundaries, endangerment of the nation and the healthy
body of the nation.”
180
Mammen depicted all types of women, from underpaid workers to
society girls. In her work she examined the lives of sex workers and factory workers,
lesbians and straight women.
Rationalizing Sex and Sexual Identity
As Horkheimer, Adorno and others have noted, the Weimar period was marked
by the rationalization of work, which affected women still engaged in traditional forms of
paid and unpaid labor.
181
Rationalization was primarily based on the ideas propagated by
the American car manufacturer, Henry Ford. Ford’s memoirs were published in 1923 in

179
Katharina Sykora, “Jeanne Mammen,” in Women’s Art Journal, vol. 9, no. 2 (Autumn, 1988-Winter
1989) 28.
180
Irene Dolling, “The ‘new woman’ of the Weimar Republic: Visualization and Standardization of
Modernization Process,” in Mirror or Mask: Self Representation in the Modern Age, Berliner
Theaterwissenschaft; no. 11, ed. by David Blostein and Pia Kleber, University of Toronto, Berlin: Vistas
Verlag, 2003, 78.
181
Rationalization is defined as bringing industrial production (or another type of process) in alignment
with the rules of scientific management. A key example of rationalization would be the installation of an
assembly line in a factory. In Weimar Germany rationalization took hold in factories, businesses, and in the
home. The effects of rationalization were especially felt by the working and middle class.
122
Germany and gained overnight success. Mary Nolan has noted that rationalization
became a hot topic in Weimar Germany, as the term became synonymous with
“productivity and efficiency, for science and prosperity, [and] for ill-defined visions of
modernity.”
182
In different forms the concept was put forward and accepted by
industrialists and Social Democrats, by engineers and architects, by academics, bourgeois
feminists and social workers, government officials and politicians. Rationalization
affected women in the public workforce as well as those in traditional jobs at home. As
Renate Bridenthal notes:
At least as a metaphor, rationalization extended from the factory and office to
public institutions and political life and into the home, even into the bedroom. The
term was used to describe developments in many areas, including the birthrate,
sexual behavior, housework, and design and architecture. Rationalization was
supposed to help women better manage the double burden of work and family
through new labor-and time saving devices and through the introduction of
efficient time – and – motion –coordinated patterns of work organization. Even
sexual techniques and birth control were not spared from attempts to “rationalize”
the most private of human activities.
183
Rationalization in the workplace brought about a new set of low-skilled jobs, and
women who were paid less than their male counterparts often filled these positions. For
most women entering or already in the workplace, this meant a “double burden” as
women working outside the home still had to juggle housework as well. As Nolan makes
clear, a wide range of people - industrialists, engineers, educators, trade unionists and
politicians - advocated rationalization, especially for changing women’s work as well as

182
Mary Nolan, “Housework Made Easy: The Taylorized Housewife in Weimar Germany’s Rationalized
Economy,” Feminist Studies 16, no. 3, Fall 1990, 549.
183
When Biology Became Destiny, op cit., 11.
123
for “improving” working-class households.
184
While women were the ones expected to
bring about rationalization, their husbands, children, the industry, the national economy,
the political parties, and the state would primarily feel the benefits of their alignment with
the rules of scientific management.
185
Rationalization had its roots in modern technology and productivist ideologies.
Some of the major proponents of rationalization were the Bauhaus school and the Neues
Bauen movement (new building movement), which included architects and artists such as
Bruno Taut and Martin Wagner. Weimar industrialists, Social Democrats and bourgeois
feminists also supported the campaign through groups such as the Home Economic
Group of the National Productivity Board. Although all of these various groups pushed
and worked for rationalization, each had a different agenda. Bourgeois feminists, for
example, saw rationalization as a way to gain acceptance and legitimacy for housework.
The Social Democrats, on the other hand, promoted rationalization as a form of
modernity. Although it was touted as beneficial to the health and efficiency of the home
(among other things), Nolan argues that in the end rationalization primarily served the
“interests of capitalism and ultimately fascism, better than those of working-class men
and women.”
186
Not exempt from reform and rationalization during the Weimar Republic was sex,
in particular female sexuality, gender identity and heterosexual relations. Sex reform was
big business in the twenties, with over 150,000 members in various sex reform related

184
Nolan, “Housework Made Easy,” 550.
185
Ibid, 550.
186
Nolan, 552.
124
organizations, which included doctors, social workers, and lay people who were
committed to the causes of “legalized abortion, contraception, sex education, eugenic
health and women’s right to sexual satisfaction.”
187
Suddenly, it was women, and
particularly the so-called new woman, who needed rationalizing and controlling, not just
machines. The sex reformers were liberal enough to note that the declining birthrate,
married women and mothers working for wages, and sexually active youth were not
going to disappear, but felt they should at least be “rationalized and controlled by
scientifically informed experts.”
188
These experts were predominately male, yet women
also contributed to the reform movement. While the movement was originally conceived
to regulate and control (especially) women’s sexuality in the opening of numerous
counseling centers for birth control, information on pregnancy, child care or abortion,
health workers were also learning of the dissatisfaction many women were experiencing
within their marriages and sexual relationships. Atina Grossmann has noted that this
newfound knowledge led to a veritable “sexual revolution” within the movement, as
frigidity was deemed a major social problem. Not surprisingly, however, it was primarily
men who defined the problem and formulated answers to it. While women, then, did
make headway in their sexual freedom and satisfaction during this period, female
sexuality continued to be officially defined primarily by male heterosexuals.
189

187
Atina Grossmann, “The New Woman and the Rationalization of Sexuality in Weimar Germany,” in
Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. by Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson,
New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983, 154.
188
Grossmann, 154.
189
Ibid, 155.
125
The birth rate and population in Germany had been slowly declining since the
1870s, but after World War I, when the number of births began to decline among the
working class, it became a worry. Much of this population decline can be attributed to
huge losses from fatalities and illness associated with this, the first mechanized war. In
addition, as early as 1870, due to an increase in education, women began having fewer
children in an effort to keep families smaller in a newly industrializing world. After the
war, government studies began to comment on the decline of the German Volk, especially
in regard to the relation between the low birth rate and the “labor and military capacities
of coming generations.”
190
These problems began to intensify during the Great
Depression of 1929-33.
The Weimar period not only saw a decline in the birth rate, but also a surge in the
number of illegal abortions (it was estimated there were 1 million annually, with about
10,000 to 12,000 fatalities), a rise in the marriage age, and higher numbers of married
women and mothers in the paid work force. Conservatives felt these statistics were causes
for alarm, for they regarded them as symptoms of an unstable society. The new woman
and her supposed sexual freedom were seen by many as a direct threat towards “a state-
encouraged population policy based on dedicated and informed motherhood, directed
toward replacing the manpower losses of WWI and healing the ravages to health and
morality precipitated by war, revolution, and economic instability.”
191
According to the
sex reform movement, women’s sexuality should be liberated and modernized, but also
controlled. With this partially liberal outlook, reformers hoped to make it more attractive

190
Ibid, 156.
191
Ibid, 157.
126
for women to remain or form heterosexual unions (marriage being the most desirable).
Sex between two heterosexual partners, with both partners achieving orgasm, was now
held up as the ideal to be achieved. The bottom line in sex reform was not female
pleasure and satisfaction, but heterosexual intercourse for procreation and marital
harmony. From their studies, the sex reformers knew full well that women could achieve
orgasm through masturbation and lesbian sex; however, the goal was to figure out how
women could be satisfied through heterosexual penetration for the goal of preserving the
family unit.
Rationalization in Weimar manufacturing affected the entertainment business as
well. This is most clearly noted in the surge of all-female dance troupes such as the Tiller
Girls from England as well as other groups of synchronized dancers in Germany. The
revues quickly became one of the most popular forms of entertainment in the twenties,
combining elegance and nudity in a ‘Parisian’ style (figure 2.7). These spectacularly and
elaborately choreographed performances were nicknamed Fleischschaurevuen (meat-
inspection shows) by the Weimar critic, Theodor Lücke, due to the amount of flesh on
display.
192
In one of his weekly feuilletons, Siegfried Kracauer described such dance
troupes as a “mass ornament” on account of their synchronicity and the elaborate
geometric patterns they formed. In his essay of 1927, “The Mass Ornament,” Kracauer
discusses the effects of precision and control on the female body. “The hands in the
factory correspond to the legs of the Tiller Girls,” he writes. “The mass ornament is the

192
Ibid, 202.
127
aesthetic reflex of the rationality aspired to by the prevailing economic system.”
193
Many
thought the Tiller Girls were American because their synchronized dancing was
associated with Americanism and Taylorism.
194
The Tiller Girls and other all female dance troupes were examples of new women
viewed by both men and women. Through the synchronicity and display of flesh the
‘Girls’ were objectified and fetishized through the spectacle of the performance. At the
same that the dancers were objectified as a mass, individual performers were also
identified by young women as seemingly attainable images to which to aspire. The
“Girls” were featured in women’s magazines on a regular basis. “Success” stories were
popular with readers and promoted the idea of the ‘Girls’ making it big, whether this
meant being discovered for film or being noticed and singled out for marriage by a
wealthy handsome man.
According to Grossmann, the factory and the bedroom were similarly treated to
“uniformity, standardization, reliability, reproducibility and predictability.”
195
Although
outside the scope of this chapter, she also notes that functionalism and rationalism
appeared in art and architecture of the period. Most sex reformers also took a sachliche
(objective) view of sex, meaning that it was just another element in the world of work, art
and architecture, which could be controlled, disciplined and regulated. The women who
were not easily regulated, who did not “fit in” with the constructed, controlled view of

193
Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, op. cit., 70. Originally published in the Frankfurter
Zeitung July 9 and 10, 1927.
194
The Tiller Girls were the highlight of the revues and the center attraction in Haller’s Theater am
Admiralsplatz. Other similar groups emerged in the 20s as competition, such as the Lawrence Girls, the
Jackson Girls, the Hoffmann Girls.
195
Grossmann, 165.
128
female sexuality, were considered eheuntauglich, or unfit for marriage. “Interestingly,
sex reformer literature usually portrayed “these women” in a manner suspiciously close
to the malicious stereotype of the new woman: short, dark hair; dressed in a unisex shift,
distinctly un-maternal – the image not only of the prostitute but also the Jewess and the
lesbian.”
196
While the declining birthrate caused anxiety among various groups, the apparent
post-war boom in working women was also considered a grave cause for concern. The
actual statistics had changed little from those of World War I, yet several factors gave the
feeling of major gains within the workplace for women. The main change in the work
force was the creation of numerous new white-collar jobs, which women often moved
into from other sectors (such as factory work) or started working in for the first time.
Many men coming home from the war felt that women had taken over their jobs while
they were at war, but in reality, this was not so. The post-war high unemployment rates
were not caused by throngs of newly working women but rather by a severely depressed
economy. However, a backlash against working women began at this time, especially
towards women who worked and also had working husbands. Dubbed Doppelverdiener
(double earners), they were chastised, ostracized and eventually a law was passed which
outlawed women from being Doppelverdiener (1932, The Law on the Legal Position of
Female Public Servants).
Under these definitions women fell into only a few negotiated categories: vapid
consumers, sexualized objects, or physically perverted types, all products of the decaying

196
Ibid, 167.
129
city. In pseudo-scientific journals to gossipy rags, links were made between the lesbian,
the prostitute and the neue Frau, for a sexually active woman was more often than not
associated with biological deviance.
197
The androgynous form associated with the neue
Frau was often connected to Germany’s fears of a falling birth rate and the conception of
the neue Frau’s inability to conceive and bear children. The fashionably thin new body
type was not only associated with infertility, but women who sported this new look were
also thought to be career driven and uninterested in raising a family. Katherina von
Ankum states in her introduction to Women in the Metropolis that “scientific’ reports
issued warnings to women that the physical strains of their new professional and leisure
activities would permanently damage their reproductive abilities” in an effort to remind
women of their duties as child rearers.
198
Visibility of Women in Germany
As a result of women’s move into the workforce, women began to be seen
unaccompanied on the streets of Berlin in the early twenties – going to work in the
morning and coming home at the end of the day. Whereas society previously forbade
respectable women from being seen in public without a chaperone, women also began to
walk the streets unattended, on their way to afternoon dances or shopping. This new
blurring of society women with sales girls on the boulevards, confused viewers as to
“whether they were ‘real’ ladies, or fast ones.”
199

197
Meskimmon, 50.
198
Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture, op. cit., 3.
199
Dolling, op. cit. 80.
130
The trend of women experiencing and enjoying the city on their own is
documented as beginning earlier in Germany, just before the First World War. Yet the
real explosion of female visibility took place in the 1920s. Historian Peter Fritzsche has
noted the early blurring of boundaries in pre-war Germany:
In this blossoming consumer culture, conventional gender roles became blurred.
By the onset of World War I it was increasingly rare for un-chaperoned women to
be denied service in public places. As a busy place of retail commerce and
exchange, the city had become a visual field of pleasure in which women as well
as men could safely move about ‘just looking.’
200
At the turn of the century women were still primarily considered to be young girls or
Damen (women or ladies). As views towards women changed in England and the United
States, a new woman also began to emerge in Germany. Aside from changes in dress and
style, there were changes in attitudes as well. This woman was typically (or culturally)
stereotyped as modern, practical, self-sufficient in relationships and love, unsentimental,
and forward thinking generally in body, mind and appearance (style). The concept of the
new woman as ‘free and easy’ was part of this myth. Yet, as previously mentioned, most
of these new working women earned very little, and it was difficult for them to find a
furnished apartment they could afford. It was expected, and much more common, for
young women to remain in their parents homes until marriage (which served as another
incentive for marriage). Those who did manage to live on their own faced suspicion from
neighbors and landlords that they were not respectable, that they were easy, or even
prostitutes.

200
Peter Fritzsche, Reading Berlin: 1900, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996, 64.
131
The Prostitute as New Woman
Frightening and fascinating notions of the metropolis combined during this period
with the rationalization of sexuality to produce images of the prostitute. While images of
prostitutes have been an integral part of art history and artists oeuvres for hundreds of
years, the production of this subject matter had been all but forbidden for women to
render. After the First World War, with the advent of women entering the workplace and
being more in the public eye, female artists also began to explore the topic of prostitution
and street scenes. In Belgium and France in the late nineteenth century, prostitutes began
to appear with more frequency as what they actually were – prostitutes - rather than
disguised or toned down in appearance, as they had been previously. During this period it
was difficult if not impossible for women to access this subject matter or even draw from
the nude. For instance, while in larger cities such as Berlin, Karlsruhe, and Munich art
schools opened up their doors earlier to female artists, many art schools in Germany did
not allow female students to join the life drawing classes (drawing from a nude model)
until 1919. Only in private lessons, or as part of a female art organization, were they able
to obtain this crucial artistic training.
201
Many German artists of both sexes did explore the theme of prostitution. The
topic was most often pursued in larger cities, especially in Hamburg and Berlin, where
prostitution was the most prominent. Each of these cities, while renowned for its
prostitution, had distinct characteristics that set it apart from the other. 1920’s Berlin was

201
Tuition at private art schools was up to six times the price of the Royal Academy in Berlin; the
curriculum was usually shorter and less intense as well. J. Diane Radycki, “The Life of Lady Art Students:
Changing Art Education at the Turn of the Century,” in Art Journal, Spring, 1982, vol. 42, no. 1, 13.
132
a city renowned for its vices with an “anything goes/anything is available” attitude. This
was due in part to its excelerated status as a Grossstadt (metropolis), which was brought
about by rapid urbanization and commodity culture. After Germany’s unification in 1871,
Berlin saw rapid industrialization and economic development which not only gave it the
status of Grossstadt in Germany, but a Weltstadt (world city) as well, embodying
technology and progress. After the First World War, Berlin was the undisputed capital of
European culture. Berlin, in particular, was well known for its extensive variety of
available prostitutes serving different needs. Throughout the 1920s Berlin had over 6,000
registered prostitutes and many more who were unregistered. Everything from virtual
children to pregnant women were available for hire, and it was this factor that often
“enticed and repulsed commentators.”
202
Whereas in Hamburg there was a legal regulation of prostitution within a brothel-
system, in Berlin prostitution was not legal, yet tolerated. The status of prostitution in
Berlin created tensions between the respectable and the unrespectable woman visible on
the street. Not surprisingly, respectable women’s attitudes towards prostitutes were
generally negative. Women in the women’s movement, although interested in fighting
against and ending prostitution, saw themselves as morally superior and in an entirely
different class, while young, left-leaning professional urban women took a different
stance against prostitution. Marsha Meskimmon has noted that many of these women

202
Marsha Meskimmon, “No Place for a Lady: Women Artists and Urban Prostitution in the Weimar
Republic,” in Urban Visions: Experiencing and Envisioning the City, ed. Steven Spier, Liverpool, UK:
Liverpool University Press and Tate Liverpool, 2002, 41.
133
viewed the prostitutes “in relation to alternative conceptions of feminine sexuality and
self more generally.”
203
Having trained in Paris and Brussels, Mammen was able to participate in life
drawing classes, where drawing from the nude would have been allowed for women.
During her early artistic education she was exposed to the work of Edgar Degas and
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who often examined the theme of the prostitute and these
works may have inspired her own interest in the topic (figures 2.8-2.9). Later, in Berlin in
the twenties, Mammen began to illustrate the prostitute in the city, a theme she returned
to frequently during the Weimar period. In her study of the image of the prostitute in art,
Rita Täuber suggests that the unlikely pairs which Mammen so frequently draws (older
men and young, beautiful women) are most certainly those of prostitute and client.
204
For example, in Mammen’s watercolor Café Stadtmitte of 1929, a man and
woman sit at a café table (figure 2.10). Contemporary advertising fills the background
and is visible across the street, through the plate-glass window. Alongside advertisements
for fur coats (fur is a symbol of female sexuality and primitive urges), men’s hats, and
furniture, is a sign for a pension, suggesting what this pair may have in mind after the
coffee. The couple is typical of one of Mammen’s illustrations from this time. A middle-
aged man sits with a youthful woman, she smokes, bored, as he watches her. It is unclear
whether this woman is a prostitute or one of the many young working women in Berlin in
the twenties who struggled to get by, who accepted dates and small gifts in exchange for

203
Marsha Meskimmon, 43.
204
Rita E. Täuber, Der hässliche Eros: Darstellungen zur Prostitution in der Malerei und Graphik 1855-
1930, Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 1997, 189.
134
their company, or perhaps more. Klara Drenker-Nagels argues, “Jeanne Mammen was
not interested in every personal, individual story, rather she was more interested in the
societal phenomenon of this ‘type’ of woman.”
205
She turned her attention to the young,
female worker in the city, the Angestellten culture (white collar workers) of typists,
hairdressers, and bar maids, their amusements and working environments. Yet, she
individualized and humanized her subjects, giving a voice to those who had none, or
when they were represented at all, were rendered as merely stereotypes or male fantasies.
In Weimar author Irmgard Keun’s first novel, The Artificial Silk Girl, (1932),
Doris, the main character notes similar situations where she accepts presents from men
which she could have never afforded herself. She writes, “And I really needed a wrist
watch, and so it was better not to give in for the first three nights…the following night he
arrived at the Rix Bar with a small golden one. I acted so surprised: ‘How on earth did
you know that I needed a watch? But your insulting me, I couldn’t possibly …’
206
Like
Mammen’s collection of types of Berliners in the twenties, the translator of the book,
Katharina von Ankum, describes Keun as a “collector of images.”
207
In fact, at the
beginning of her diaristic novel, Keun states she wants to make a movie, and that her life
is like a movie. Ankum notes that female authors such as Keun gave a previously unheard
voice to “those who had never had any real literary representation. While male authors

205
Klara Drenker-Nagels, “Die zwanziger und frühen dreissiger Jahre,” in Jeanne Mammen: 1890-1976
Monographie und Werkverzeichnis, Köln: Wienand Verlag, 1997, 42.
206
Irmgard Keun, The Artificial Silk Girl, translated by Katharina von Ankum, introduction by Maria
Tatar, New York: Other Press, orig. 1932, 2002, 6-7. Keun’s first novel became an overnight bestseller in
Germany and in 1933 was translated into English. However, by this time Keun’s books had been banned by
in Germany by the Nazi’s.
207
Katharina von Ankum, The Artificial Silk Girl, xiii.
135
had sought to ventriloquize female characters – Arthur Schnitzler’s Fräulein Else is
perhaps the most notorious example – few women had engaged their literary skills to
solving the problem of female representation in contemporary literature.”
208
Keun’s
heroine Doris, interested in “surfaces, appearances, skins, faces, and façades,” follows a
cinematic style (Kinostil) developed by the novelist Alfred Döblin.
209
Mammen, too, was
a careful observer of the city and her surroundings and could be said to have looked for
and illustrated similar topics.
In Mammen’s watercolor Börsainer, (Stock Trader), c. 1928, Täuber suggests that
the elegant woman accompanying the Bürgerlicher (upper middle-class) man is also
prostituting herself (figure 2.11).
210
Although not necessarily a prostitute, she has allowed
herself to sleep with this older man, primarily out of need. In hard times he buys for her
the fur, jewels and life she could otherwise not afford. Dark shadows under her down-
turned eyes exemplify the unhappy situation to which she has chosen or resigned herself.
The middle-aged man’s fleshy chin and face contrast dramatically with the thin, youthful
woman. Not only does the man she is with carry a copy of the stock market report, but he
also holds a large, smoking cigar between his lips, a symbol that signifies his status as an
upper middle class businessman or capitalist. The cigar is also a phallic symbol,
representing his male sexuality and power. Although subtler in its statement than Georg
Grosz’s scathing cartoon-like imagery aimed at deriding and mocking capitalists, the

208
Ibid, xviii.
209
Ibid, xiv, xv.
210
Rita E. Täuber, op. cit., 190.
136
military, and the church, Mammen’s image nonetheless addresses the inherent inequality
present in Weimar Germany, despite all of the supposed gains made by women.
Another theme often explored in Mammen’s work at this time is that of younger
women with older, wealthy men. However, in Mammen’s work, the older man, while he
may be providing the new fur, fancy jewelry, or night out on the town, is not, as the
movies and dime store novels tried to convince, all that he is cut out to be. Mammen’s
women, who are accompanied by ‘successful’ men, look, more often than not, bored,
depressed or uninterested. For Mammen, the young worker, who sought something better
than her tedious, underpaid day job, is not unlike the prostitute who is only “doing a job”
in order to get by. Mammen referred to herself and her work from the 1920s as
“Brotberuf der Gebrauchsgraphikerin” (bread and butter graphic illustrator); only later,
in the 1930s, did she begin to create “Malerei für sich” (paintings for myself).
211

212
Relying on men financially was not an uncommon situation for women in the
Weimar period. Kathy Peiss has noted a similar phenomenon that occurred among
working-class women in American cities between 1880-1920 that is applicable to
Weimar Germany. Peiss examines a custom known at the time as ‘treating,’ where men
would pay for “their female companions drinks and refreshments, theater tickets, and

211
Caroline Förster, “Im Zeichen des Widerstands: Jeanne Mammens künstlerische Auseinandersetzung
mit dem ‘Dritten Reich’,” in Jeanne Mammen 1890-1976 Monographie und Werkverzeichnis, Wien and
Verlag, Köln, 1997, 62.
212
These comments made almost fifty years later in one of her rare interviews, can be seen as reflecting the
times she was quoted in (1970s) and her desire to promote her current work rather than something created
so much earlier. Mammen made these comments in the 1970s at the height of the abstract and minimal art
movements. Her art by this point (from 1950s onward) had become increasingly influenced by abstract art.
137
other incidentals.”
213
The women, who earned far less than the men, relied on these
‘treats’ from men in order to be able to enjoy the numerous new amusements offered to
them, especially in big cities such as Berlin. Treats were reciprocated with varying
degrees of sexual favors, from flirting, to kissing, to sexual intercourse. The vast
difference in wages earned by men and women in this period, commented on earlier,
cannot be emphasized enough. Many women would give up food now and then in order
to have a little extra money for the weekend.
Life was especially hard for women who lived alone, but not much better for the
majority who lived with their families, for most of their earnings went to help their family
survive. Irmgard Keun’s heroine Doris comments on this situation of helping out family
members while wanting to purchase items for oneself:
I had a good day, because it was my last one and getting paid just does one good,
even though I have to give 70 of my 120 – Therese gets 20 more – to my father,
who just gets drunk on it, because he’s unemployed right now and has nothing
else to do. But I immediately bought a hat for myself with the 50 marks I had left,
with a feather and in forest green – that’s this season’s fashion color.
214
So after paying back her friend and giving her family and unemployed father some of her
money, Doris spends the rest on herself, on a fashionable hat, leaving herself nothing else
to live on for the rest of the week.
The acceptance of treats from regular boyfriends or men they had just met was
widespread for girls who would never have enjoyed such pleasures without them. These

213
Kathy Peiss, “Charity Girls and City Pleasures: Historical Notes on Working-class Sexuality, 1880-
1920,” in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. by Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon
Thompson, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983, 78.
214
Keun, op. cit., 4-5
138
women were known as ‘charity girls,’ “a term which differentiated them from prostitutes
because they did not accept money in their sexual encounters with men.”
215
Instead, they
received presents, dates and attention in exchange for sex. In The Artificial Silk Girl,
Doris describes this trend:
The elegant noblewoman had gone to the theater and I was home with him, and he
offered me an apartment and money – this was my opportunity to achieve
glamour. It’s easy with old men, when you’re young – they pretend it’s your fault
as if you were the one who started it. And I wanted to, I really wanted to. He had
the voice of a bowling ball that made my blood run cold, but I wanted to – he had
this slimy look in his eyes, but I wanted to – I was thinking, I’ll grit my teeth and
think of fabulous ermine, and I’ll be okay And I said yes.
216
One aspect of German life that was greatly changed by the American model was leisure.
It was during the Weimar Republic that the forty-hour work-week was created. Suddenly
the lower classes could more easily enjoy leisure pleasures once available to only the
middle and upper classes. Detlev Peukert has noted that workers began to explore new
types of leisure activities based on “the eight hour day, collective wage bargaining and
the Republic’s new social policies explicitly establishing for the first time the principals
of free time on working days, of weekends and in a preliminary way, of holidays.”
217
In Mammen’s watercolor Garçonne or Prostitute on the Green Couch, c.1931, the
prostitute is also the neue Frau (figure 2.12).
218
She smokes, is thin, has a pageboy

215
Kathy Peiss, 80
216
Keun, op. cit., 73-74
217
Detlev Peukert, The Weimar Republic: the Crisis of Classical Modernity, translated by Richard
Deveson, New York: Hill and Wang, 1987, 1996, 93.
218
See chapter four on Weimar homosexuality for more on the concept of the Garçonne and lesbianism.
The image was probably commissioned for Magnus Hirschfeld, Sittengeschichte der Nachkriegszeit, Band
139
haircut and wears French lingerie (all symbols of Weimar modernity (middle-class tacky)
and sexual liberation). She rests on a couch in the “middle of a kleinburgerlich-kitschig
room.”
219
She has casually dropped the newspaper she was reading on the floor, and
exhibits a bored demeanor. The presence of a man can be seen in the background of the
room, by the suspenders draped across the back of a nearby chair. In images such as this,
even the two separate titles suggest the fluidity between these two worlds. Is this young,
neue Frau merely a modern, sexually active woman, or is she in fact, as one of the titles
suggests, a prostitute? This image was illustrated in Magnus Hirschfeld’s
Sittengeschichte der Nachkriegszeit, (Moral History of the Post-War Era).
Mammen not only represents the nightlife and prostitutes of the more expensive
West end of Berlin, but also prostitution in the gritty working quarters of North and East
Berlin. In both regions she sincerely portrays the people in their environment. More often
than not this group is normally overlooked, forgotten or in the case of prostitutes,
exploited. In her images depicting prostitutes and the lower classes, Mammen was able to
represent her subjects sympathetically. For many male artists the individuality and
humanness of the prostitute was negated by “a fantasy of ‘woman’ as the devouring mass
against whom action must be taken,” often represented in Lustmord imagery or
“grotesque visual caricatures.”
220
Lustmord or sexual murder imagery was not new to the
Weimar period. Lustmord imagery became popular just before and during World War I,

1, Leipzig and Wien: o.J., 1931, color plate after p. 400, as the image was not reproduced in any other
contemporary publications.
219
Rita Täuber, 192.
220
Marsha Meskimmon, We Weren’t Modern Enough: Women Artists and the Limits of German
Modernism, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999, 41-42.
140
coinciding with the increased visibility of women and prostitutes on the streets.
221
At the
same time, a new lower-class entertainment industry developed, consisting of beer-halls,
cafes, cabarets, and music halls. In the first decades of the century pulp novels, sold in
installments, and cheap pamphlet stories were part of a booming business in smut. Most
of these cheap entertainments combined sex and violence in graphic description.
In the watercolor and pencil Brüderstrasse, (Brother Street) c. 1931, (image lost),
Mammen depicts the opposite of the world of upscale prostitution or escorts, the
Proletariat quarter on the Eastern side of Berlin (figure 2.13). No longer is the prostitute
fashionably dressed. Instead, these women openly wear their underwear, boldly
advertising themselves in and around an open window of a run-down tenement. A
makeshift sign on the wall reads “rooms available.” These rooms are not for honest
travelers seeking a place to sleep; rather, they are rooms available by the hour, for
prostitutes and their customers. Täuber notes that this was a common occurrence in East
Berlin.
222
During the day prostitutes displayed their availability in open windows and
were called Fensterprostitutierte (window prostitutes). At night, the same women and
girls lined the streets surrounding the area called Oranienburger Tor (not unlike today in
Berlin, a street still famous for its street walkers).
Although these women wear makeup, have short haircuts and smoke, much like
the modern Garçonne, they are visibly lower class. On a limited budget, they forgo

221
For more on Lustmord, see Beth Irwin Lewis, “Lustmord: Inside the Windows of the Metropolis,” in
Berlin: Culture and Metropolis, ed. Charles W. Haxthausen and Heidrun Suhr, Minneapolis and Oxford:
University of Minneapolis Press, 1990, and Maria Tartar, Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany,
Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995.
222
Ibid, 192.
141
expensive fashionable attire in exchange for slips and a non-descript shirt-dress. All three
women are full-figured and past their “prime,” unlike the thin, young Garçonne in the
previously discussed image, who could easily be mistaken for a fashionable and
respectable modern Berlin girl. While the Garçonne and the window prostitutes both
share similar attributes (smoking, short haircuts) there is a notable difference in the
portrayal of these types. While the Garçonne comes across as flirty, sexy and
interchangeable with a modern, Berlin girl, the window-prostitutes look run-down,
haggard and slightly dangerous by comparison. No longer placed within the semi-
bourgeois security of the Garçonne’s apartment, these women loiter on the street and in a
street-level window, staring at potential clients (or the viewer) in a challenging manner.
Mammen’s watercolor, In hohen Stiefeln (In High Boots), c. 1931 (image lost), an
image of two “boot-girls,” was probably commissioned for Curt Moreck’s Guide to
Immoral Berlin, as it refers directly to the book’s accompanying text (figure 2.14).
223
These girls are identifiable “by their furs and calf-length, Wilhelmian-era, black leather
boots or (after 1926) shiny, patent-leather versions. Lacquered gold, cobalt blue, brick,
poisonous green, or maroon, the iridescent footwear indicated the girl’s specialty.”
224
The
different colored boots enabled prostitutes to “advertise” their services without directly
propositioning a client, an act that was illegal in Berlin at the time. The colored boots (or
other articles of clothing) were a key for those in the know, and the uninitiated could
refer to books such as Moreck’s Immoral Guide in order to decode the system.

223
Curt Moreck, Furher durch das “lasterhafte” Berlin, Berlin: H.Heenemann GmbH & Co, 1931,
Facsimile, 1987, 31-32. For further discussion of Moreck and the Immoral Guide, see chapter four.
224
Mel Gordon, Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin, Venice, CA: Feral House, 30.
142
In High Boots depicts two fashionably dressed boot-prostitutes milling around an
outdoor street corner at night. They wear the recognizable fur-collared coats, gloves and
knee-high lace-up boots of the prostitute. One prostitute faces the viewer while the other
turns toward her companion, as if deep in conversation. The prostitute turned toward the
viewer has a blank, expressionless look on her face and her eyes are closed to mere slits.
Her hair is bobbed in the fashionable Bubikopf, and she is clearly made-up with heavy,
dark lipstick and eye makeup. In the background are other signs of the city’s poor and
desperate: a blind man pedaling matches, an old woman selling newspapers, and a street
vendor cooking sausages on the street corner. This type of imagery was common among
neue Sachlichkeit artists, whose imagery, as mentioned, purported to offer “objective”
views of society. At the same time, however, images such as this also served to fetishize
the “unusual.”
Male and Female Representations of the Prostitute
While both male and female artists explored the theme of prostitution during the
Weimar era, the representation and interpretation of prostitutes was heavily influenced by
the artist’s gender. Marsha Meskimmon has noted the vast difference in the
representation of prostitution by male and female artists, in particular those painted by
Otto Dix. Dix’s infamous Big City Triptych of 1927-28 conflates the image of the neue
Frau, the prostitute, and the transsexual/transvestite into a “fetishistic display of
outrageous fashions, garish makeup and wildly distorted body types and poses (figure
2.15).”
143
[The scene] epitomized the critique of Berlin’s urban decadence as it was figured
along gender lines: a feminized mass culture of pure spectacle and
commodification lacking stable definitions of gender, class and racial identity was
destroying (male) individualism and the potential for political change.
225
In images such as Dix’s Big City Triptych, the prostitute appeared as a fleshy threat
within the city, a city regulated by imagery that confined her spatially and physically, and
placed her within a controllable space. Or she was depicted in images of violence such as
the Lustmord. As Beth Irwin Lewis has noted, Dix’s figures often have the attributes of
urban degenerates described by criminologists and anthropologists in the nineteenth
century: “sloping forehead, large nose, jutting jaw, small eyes, dark visages.”
226
This
caricature was also conflated with the stereotype of a Jew – who also stood in for a
symbol of degeneracy in the city.
Dix’s images of prostitutes contrast sharply with Mammen’s representations of
the same subject. In Dix’s painting Drei Dirnen auf der Strasse, (Three Prostitutes on the
Street) 1925, three women, past their prime, flagrantly ply their wares before and elegant
department store window (figure 2.16). In typical Dixian fashion, the grotesquely
rendered women are less representative of sexual desire than of the commodification and
degeneracy of the Grosstadt in the new Weimar Republic. Each woman holds an attribute
of her sexuality and availability- from the small dog to the suggestive red clutch – with
the figure on the far right exhibiting no less then three sexual metaphors- an
encompassing fur wrap, an overtly phallic umbrella handle, and a vagina-shaped brooch
in the middle of her hat, symbols which were readily discussed in contemporary analyses

225
Meskimmon, 50.
226
Beth Irwin Lewis, “Lustmord: Inside the Windows of the Metropolis,” in Berlin: Culture and
Metropolis, op. cit. 127.
144
of this image.
227
Dix repeatedly creates prostitutes who are sad, worn-out or sickly
looking, women who seem to erase desire, rather than create it.
Dix’s Three Prostitutes can also be considered as a commentary on the
commodity culture of the new Republic. While the three women sell themselves on the
city street, their backdrop is an elegant, gold and marble adorned department store,
testifying to the tony neighborhood in which these women work. A fragmented and
fetishized leg seems to hover in the plate-glass window behind them, a modern-day
image of Fortuna that indicates the precariousness of the women’s existence, as well as
their sexual availability in general. In contrast, Mammen’s images of prostitutes neither
glorify nor condemn these women. She achieves this by creating images that are neither
stylized to the point of fetishization nor grotesquely rendered symbols of societal decay.
Mammen’s representations of prostitutes can be compared to her imagery of young
women working in the city, be it as secretaries, stenographers or shop girls.
Female artists who explored the topic of prostitution tended to downplay the
image of the prostitute as a symbolic cipher of degeneration and focused instead on
humanized views of real individuals. The Weimar artist Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler (1899-
1940) for instance, often drew prostitutes. Unlike Dix or Grosz, however, who used the
sketch as a guide for a new and recreated painting or drawing, she sketched the subject on
the spot, simultaneously creating a finished product. Mammen also employed this
method, which “decreased the distance between viewers and sitters, emphasizing not the

227
Hans-Jürgen Buderer and Manfred Fath, Neue Sachlichkeit: Bilder auf der Suche nach der Wirklichkeit
Figurative Malerei der zwanziger Jahre, München und New York: Prestel, exhibition catalogue, Stadtischen
Kunsthalle Mannheim, 1994, 138.
145
symbolic nature of the scenes but their immediacy and actuality.”
228
As a result, in
Mammen’s images closer attention is paid to facial expressions rather than to the
commodification of the subject.
In Lohse-Wächtler’s watercolor Lissy, 1931, a strong female figure dominates the
foreground, engaging with the viewer (figure 2.17). Her large, voluptuous body fills a
tight, dark dress, while her heavily made-up face stares almost mockingly back at the
viewer. Although two men, potential customers, are visible at a table in the background,
they are more involved with one another than with the prostitute in the foreground.
Meskimmon has noted that, “Lohse-Wächtler’s works both heightened the individuality
of her female subjects and explored the seamier side of commodified sexuality. By
merging these two different approaches, Lohse-Wächtler emphasized the pleasure
inherent in displays of female sexuality without losing sight of the women who were her
subjects.”
229
While Lohse-Wächtler’s figure is marked by individuality and a self-confident
sexuality, Georg Grosz’s treatment of a similar topic is vastly different. In Grosz’s
watercolor Beauty, Thee Will I Praise, from the series Ecce Homo of 1922-23, the
prostitute sits center stage, preoccupied with her cigarette, seemingly oblivious of the
men around her (figure 2.18). She wears a small fur around her neck and her overly
made-up face appears almost to be bruised. Other than the fur, she wears nothing but a
red cap and blue, thigh-high stockings – either exposed for the perusal of the clothed men
seated behind her or suggesting the way these men undress her with their eyes. Two of

228
Ibid, 47.
229
Meskimmon, We Weren’t Modern Enough, 43.
146
these men glance surreptitiously towards her; the third is too drunk to care. These three
men represent a number of Grosz’s Weimar “types,” the businessman and the politician,
both of whom the artist saw as especially corrupt during this period. Like Dix, Grosz’s
image emphasizes a feeling of debauchery and decay, a country lost after years of
meaningless fighting, headed in a downward spiral of corruption, disease, and
disenchantment.
For both artists the prostitute became the symbol of the ills of society, not exactly
a new theme, but one that was taken to extremes in the popular Lustmord imagery. While
Mammen and Lohse-Wächtler did not necessarily condone prostitution, they and other
female artists in the Weimar period began to explore the age-old theme in new and open-
minded ways. These views varied from working women to pleasurable sexual images,
from self-confident representations to compassionate ones. Mammen, above all, was
interested in representing the neue Frau in the metropolis. Whether her subject was a
prostitute or a white-collar worker, whether her image was for a magazine or un-
commissioned, this new woman and her newly acquired visibility featured prominently in
Mammen’s work until the end of the Weimar Republic.
1 4 7
Figure 2.1
Photo of Women in the Twenties
Published in New Objectivity: Neue Sachlichkeit – Painting in Germany in the 1920s, 2003 Published in New Objectivity: Neue Sachlichkeit – Painting in Germany in the 1920s, 2003 Published in New Objectivity: Neue Sachlichkeit – Painting in Germany in the 1920s, 2003 Published in New Objectivity: Neue Sachlichkeit – Painting in Germany in the 1920s, 2003 Published in New Objectivity: Neue Sachlichkeit – Painting in Germany in the 1920s, 2003 Published in New Objectivity: Neue Sachlichkeit – Painting in Germany in the 1920s, 2003
1 4 8
Figure 2.2
Movie Poster, Freund oder Weib, c. 1922, A103
Mixed media (graphite, charcoal, watercolor, ink)
Original lost, color lithograph at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin
Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Kunstbibliothek (Inv.-Nr. 14003690)
1 4 9
Figure 2.3
Advertisement for Fa. Herz AG, Elegant Shoes, c. 1924, A121
Watercolor, original lost
Förderverein der Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung e.V.
Advertisement for Fa. Herz AG, Elegant Shoes, c. 1924, A121 Advertisement for Fa. Herz AG, Elegant Shoes, c. 1924, A121
1 5 0
Figure 2.4
The Girlfriends, Der Junggeselle, c. 1926, A177
Watercolor and pencil, Lost
The Girlfriends, Der Junggeselle, c. 1926, A177 The Girlfriends, Der Junggeselle, c. 1926, A177 The Girlfriends, Der Junggeselle, c. 1926, A177
1 5 1
Figure 2.5
Coat Cape, Styl (Stars in the Window), c. 1923, A108
Watercolor and pen, Design for the Viennese Model House, Max Becker
Förderverein der Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung e.V.
Coat Cape, Styl (Stars in the Window), c. 1923, A108 Coat Cape, Styl (Stars in the Window), c. 1923, A108 Coat Cape, Styl (Stars in the Window), c. 1923, A108 Coat Cape, Styl (Stars in the Window), c. 1923, A108 Coat Cape, Styl (Stars in the Window), c. 1923, A108
1 5 2
Figure 2.6
Bored Dolls, c. 1929, A324
Watercolor and pencil, Published in Jugend
Marvin and Janet Fishman Collection, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Watercolor and pencil, Published in Jugend Watercolor and pencil, Published in Jugend
1 5 3
Figure 2.7
Revue in the Twenties (Elliot Ballett)
Postcard, Sammlung Eickemeyer, Berlin
1 5 4
Figure 2.8
Edgar Degas, Party for the Madame, 1878-79
Pastel over monotype
Musée Picasso, Paris
Edgar Degas, Party for the Madame, 1878-79 Edgar Degas, Party for the Madame, 1878-79
1 5 5
Figure 2.9
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, In the Salon of the Brothel of the Rue des Moulins, 1894,
Oil on canvas
Musée Toulouse-Lautrec, Albi
1 5 6
Figure 2.10
Café Stadtmitte, c. 1929, A345
Watercolor and pencil,
Lost
1 5 7
Figure 2.11
Stock Trader, c. 1928, A271
Watercolor
Private Collection
1 5 8
Figure 2.12
Die Garçonne, c. 1931, A400
Watercolor and pencil
Private collection
Die Garçonne, c. 1931, A400 Die Garçonne, c. 1931, A400
1 5 9
Figure 2.13
Brüderstrasse, c. 1931, A422
Watercolor and pencil
Marvin and Janet Fishman Collection, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
1 6 0
Figure 2.14
In High Boots, c. 1931, A398
Watercolor and pencil,
Lost
In High Boots, c. 1931, A398 In High Boots, c. 1931, A398
1 6 1
Figure 2.15
Otto Dix, Big City Triptych, 1927-28 (Detail, central panel)
Mixed media on wood
Galerie der Stadt Stuttgart, Stuttgart
Otto Dix, Big City Triptych, 1927-28 (Detail, central panel) Otto Dix, Big City Triptych, 1927-28 (Detail, central panel) Otto Dix, Big City Triptych, 1927-28 (Detail, central panel) Otto Dix, Big City Triptych, 1927-28 (Detail, central panel) Otto Dix, Big City Triptych, 1927-28 (Detail, central panel)
1 6 2
Figure 2.16
Otto Dix, Three Prostitutes on the Street, 1925
Tempera on plywood
Private Collection
1 6 3
Figure 2.17
Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler, Lissy, 1931
Watercolor
Marvin and Janet Fishman Collection, Milwaukee, Wisconsi
Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler, Lissy, 1931
1 6 4
Figure 2.18
Georg Grosz, Beauty, Thee Will I Praise, 1922/23
Color lithograph
Published in Kritische Grafi k in der Weimarer Zeit, 1985
Georg Grosz, Beauty, Thee Will I Praise, 1922/23 Georg Grosz, Beauty, Thee Will I Praise, 1922/23 Georg Grosz, Beauty, Thee Will I Praise, 1922/23
165
CH APT E R T H RE E
BE AUT I FUL BE RL I NE R S:
JE ANNE MAM ME N AND
BE RL I N ’ S F ASHI ON I NDUS T RY
Beautiful Berliner. You are busy with work during the day and ready to dance at
night. You have an athletic body and your glorious skin makes makeup glow. At
the same rate that your city is turning into a metropolis from a clunky small town,
you have gained busy, beautiful legs and the necessary combination of reliability
and frivolity, of vagueness and shape, of goodness and coldness.
Franz Hessel (1922)
230
With the emergence of Berlin as a Grossstadt (metropolis) in the late nineteenth
century, more and more industry made the city its home. This was also true for the
fashion industry, which grew up around the area known as Hausvogteiplatz (nicknamed
‘Konfektionsquartier’ or fashion district) in the center of Berlin. By 1910 Berlin had a
thriving fashion industry, rivaled only by Paris and London. Whereas Paris still led the
way in haute couture fashion, that being said, Berlin nevertheless had a number of very
exclusive German couture houses, such as Gerson and Manheimer. Berlin’s greatest
specialty was prêt-a-porter (ready-to-wear) clothing. Unlike the expensive clothing from
the couture houses, which could be purchased only by a very small segment of the
population, prêt-a-porter was created in a variety of styles and price ranges. Ready to
wear was therefore more readily available to a broad spectrum of consumers. Many of the

230
“Schöne Berlinerin. Du bist Tags berufstätig und Abends tanzbereit. Du hast einen sportgestählten
Körper, und deine herrliche Haut kann die Schminke nur erleuchten. Mit der Geschwindigkeit, in der deine
Stadt aus klobiger Kleinstadt sich ins Weltstadtsich mausert, hast du fleissige schöne Beine und die nötige
mischung von zuverlässigkeit und leichtsinn, von verschwommenheit und umriss, von güte und kühle
erworben.” Franz Hessel, “An die Berlinerin”, first appeared in Der deutschen Vogue, March 1922, later
republished in Von den Irrtümern der Liebenden und andere Prosa, von Hartmut Vollmur, Paderborn: Igel
Verlag, 1994, 118.
166
Berlin couture houses saw the future potential of readymade clothing, such as shawls,
capes and small coats, and began producing their own lines. At first only outer-ware and
accessories were mass-produced. With the mass production of the sewing machine in the
late nineteenth century, however, blouses, skirts and suits also became available. By the
1920s a veritable boom of mass-produced clothing was being produced in Berlin.
Previously, high fashion had been predominantly linked to the couture houses of
Paris, and the one-of-a kind creations they produced for a wealthy clientele. The big
name Parisian designers such as Poiret, Schiaparelli, and Worth to name a few, produced
elaborate and unique designs that were sold directly to clients or upscale boutiques.
231
Germany’s relationship to fashion was decidedly different. Although, as mentioned,
couture houses did exist, they never matched the number of their Parisian counterparts.
Germany and Berlin’s in particular real forte, was the ready-to-wear industry. Berlin
designers often looked to Parisian couture designs for inspiration, adapting and recreating
styles that were cheaper to produce and sell. These appropriated designs became known
as “Berliner chic.”
232
Much of Berliner ready-to-wear was manufactured in private homes
or small tailor shops by immigrant, Eastern European (often Jewish) women. Looking for
a way to work while still taking care of their children, these women took in the piecework
to supplement their family’s income. Piecework was low paid, required no overhead and
could be performed by low-skilled workers such as women, and children.

231
See Nancy Troy’s Couture Culture: A Study in Modern Art and Fashion, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2003, for an in-depth analysis of haute couture fashion in Paris and the connection of fashion to high art.
232
Birgit Haustedt, Die Wilden Jahre in Berlin: Eine Klatsch und Kulturgeschichte der Frauen, Dortmund:
Edition Ebersbach, 1999, 70.
167
The success of Berlin’s ready-to-wear industry lay in the invention and practice of
the Zwischenmeistersystem, which was invented at the turn of the century, but still
heavily utilized well into the twenties. At the head of the system stood a Konfektionair,
who was responsible for the design of the clothing and choosing the fabric. The
Konfektionair would then give instructions on how to make clothes to a Zwischenmeister,
who would cut out the patterns before passing them onto sewers, who completed the
work.
233
Since the system involved several specific jobs done by various people, it
allowed for clothing to be rapidly and cheaply produced. In this sense, the
Zwischenmeistersystem partook of the scientific management of labor, and its concern
with efficiency and mass production, which was effecting other sectors of the
marketplace at the same time.
In addition to the Hausvogteiplatz, fashion thrived in other areas of Berlin, such
as Leipzigerstrasse, Friedrichsstrasse, Unter den Linden, and, later in the twenties, the
area around Kurfürstendamm, in the western half of the city. These streets, and the side
streets around them, became well known for small, high-end boutiques, as well as posh
department stores, where German designs were available alongside the latest trends from
Paris, London, and New York. Leipzigerstrasse boasted some of Germany’s largest
department stores, the first being the firm Wertheim. As Berlin became a center for the
fashion industry, famous boutiques and larger stores from other cities began to open
branches in the metropole. Hamburg designer Christoph Drecoll, for example, opened a

233
“Berliner Mode der Zwanziger Jahre zwischen Couture und Konfektion,” in Modesammlung
Bestandskatalog: Mode der 20er Jahre, Bearbeitet von Christiane Waidenschlager in zusammenarbeit mit
Christa Gustavus, Berlin: Berlin Museum, 1991, 20.
168
Berlin extension of his original store, in 1921. These department stores spared no expense
to lure customers; their windows have been described as a “feast for the eyes.”
234
Department stores with artistically designed interiors, such as Tietz and Wertheim, used
the relatively new technology of large, plate-glass windows that allowed an unobstructed
view of the scene within.
235
These windows served as sites of consumption not only of
the fashionable goods inside the store but also of “commodities” on the street – the
people reflected in the windows, observing themselves, as well as looking at others.
German ready-to-wear clothing was not only popular in Germany. Berlin boasted
of a large and successful export business as well. The Berlin designers were especially
known for their coats, hats and furs. Although available throughout the world, the
consumers in London and New York were the biggest customers of Berlin’s well-made
clothing. The fashion or Konfektion industry, as it known in German, played a large role
in the German economy, providing thousands of jobs in the manufacture of clothing, as
well as bringing in visitors to the city including shoppers, critics, other designers. These
guests stayed in hotels, ate at restaurants, and went to see cultural events, all of which
brought money into the city.
The outbreak of World War I in 1914 seriously curtailed Germany’s fashion
industry. Fabrics were rationed, greatly simplifying the styles of clothing produced.

234
Die Elegante Berlinerin: Graphik und modisches Beiwerk aus zwei Jahrhunderten, Stiftung Preussicher
Kulturbesitz, Berliner Museum, September bis November, 1962, 9.
235
“Around 1850 it became technically possible to produce large sheets of glass and so to have a glass
shop-front which presented ‘an uninterrupted mass of glass from the ceiling to the ground’, as an observer
pointed out admiringly in 1851.” Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of
Light in the Nineteenth Century, translated by Angela Davies, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: The
University of California Press, 1995, 146. See also: Charlotte Klonk, “Patterns of Attention: From Shop
Windows to Gallery Rooms in Early Twentieth-Century Berlin,” Art History 28, no. 4 (Sept. 2005): 468-
496.
169
Certain materials, such as wool, were in great demand for the war effort and went solely
into the creation of uniforms and supplies for the military. Other raw materials were
harder to come by as well, for these mostly came from foreign, enemy countries. For
these various reasons artificial substitute materials were improved during and after the
First World War. Materials such as “artificial silk” or rayon, first invented in 1910 and
acetate in 1924, became more widely used during the twenties. In addition, the need for
fancy clothes was greatly reduced, as wartime gave daily life a serious tone. Many
women sought out more practical clothing that allowed for more freedom of movement,
especially as they began to enter the workforce in greater numbers.
While World War I curtailed Germany’s fashion industry, one of the biggest
constraints came from wartime-induced boycotts against French products. By 1916 bans
were placed on French imports and the Verband der deutschen Modeindustrie (the
Association of the German Fashion Industry) had come together to promote the boycott.
The purpose of the boycott was two-fold; to halt the flow of German Marks into the
French fashion economy, and to keep German money in Germany to support its own
fashion industry. Although the original ban was lifted at the end of the war, in 1918, the
Verband again called for a boycott against French fashion in 1923 as a protest against the
postwar French occupation of the Ruhr valley.
236
Although the association honestly

236
First published as “Boykott franzosischer Modewaren,” Styl: Blatter des Verbandes der deutschen
Modeindustrie 2, no. I, February, 1923, 52, reprinted in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed., Anton
Kaes, Martin Jay, Edward Diemendberg, Berkeley, London, Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1994, 658. It should be noted that Styl was the monthly publication of the Verband and appeared only in
1923 and 1924. It was backed by the leading fashion houses - H. Gerson, Manheimer, E. Mossner, M.
Gerstel, Regina Friedlander, and Martha Lowental. “The goal of the organization was to elevate the
prestige of German designers and promote a ‘national style’ in fashion.” From Mila Ganeva, “In the
170
admitted their artistic dependence on French fashion, they nevertheless attempted to
move beyond this reliance on the French, calling upon the German people’s “spark of
national feeling or spark of the feeling of self-respect” to keep them from purchasing
French goods.
237
The ban, reinstituted in 1923, was never as prominent as previous
wartime prohibitions. Indeed, Germany went back to its dependence on, and interest in,
French fashion relatively quickly.
German fashion illustrators were important to the industry since it was they who
created a ‘German look’ for magazines and fashion illustrations. On account of this, the
Verband promoted high-end German illustrators such as Annie Offterdinger and Ludwig
Kainer, to provide an alternative to the French illustrators (figure 3.1).
238
Although the
German designers were heavily influenced by the French illustrators, particularly the
Frenchmen Georges Barbier, Paul Iribe, and Georg Lepape, they also looked towards
Germanic sources such as the Wiener Werkstätte and German Expressionism.
Offterdinger, for instance began to incorporate Expressionist and Cubist elements into her
fashion illustrations around 1915-16 by using the woodcutting technique, a method not
commonly employed for fashion illustrations (figure 3.2). In this case, the use of the
woodblock can be seen as a conscious, perhaps even ideological or nationalistic,

Waiting Room of Literature: Helen Grund and the Practice of Travel and Fashion Writing,” Women in
German Yearbook, 19, University of Nebraska Press, 2003, 13.
237
“Boycott franzosischer Modewaren,” 52.
238
By the first decade of the twentieth century French fashion illustration became recognized as its own
aesthetic form. In 1908, Paul Iribe, for example, working for Paul Poiret’s couture house, was
commissioned to create Les Robes de Paul Poiret racontées par Paul Iribe, a high quality album of fashion
designs, which greatly influenced later fashion illustrations. As small beautiful objects, they were works of
art in their own right.
171
choice.
239
The fashion association hoped the luxurious drawings, produced by these and
other German illustrators, would help to loosen the dependency on Parisian fashion
patterns and designs.
240
As Sherwin Simmons notes, there had been in Germany concern
over its reliance since the eighteenth century, on French fashion. This concern became
more pronounced after the formation of the Deutsche Werkbund in 1913 and the outbreak
of the First World War the following year, and was often written about in contemporary
periodicals and newspapers.
241
During the war, exports to the enemy countries France, England and the US, the
three major consumers, was for all intents and purposes, cut-off. Likewise, German
consumers were asked to end their reliance on and interest in imported (especially
French) products, which was not only a blow department stores, which sold and profited
from these products, but also ended the creative interchange of ideas between French and
German designers and illustrators. Anti-Semitism rose as Germans sought to blame
‘outsiders’ for wartime problems. This manifested itself in negativity towards department
stores, many of which were owned by Jewish families.
The end of war in 1918 saw a return to normal life, and industry such as the
fashion industry began to make a come back (figure 3.3). Fashions suddenly became
playful again, while retaining many of the sartorial reforms women had gained during the

239
See, Robin Reisenfeld on the German woodcut, “The revival, transformation and dissemination of the
print portfolio in Germany and Austria, 1890-1930,” in The German Print Portfolio 1890-1930, ed.,
Richard Born and Stephanie D’Alessandro, Chicago: University of Chicago, 1992. Because of its
prevalence in German medieval and Renaissance prints, the woodcut was seen as a traditionally Germanic
medium; particularly in a time of war, this may have seemed an appropriate medium for contemporary
artists and fashion illustrators who wished to emphasize their German roots, while distancing themselves
from any identification with French fashion and art.
240
Berlin Museum Bestandskatalog Mode der 20er Jahre, op. cit., 26.
241
Sherwin Simmons, “Expressionism in the Discourse of Fashion,” Fashion Theory #4, 2000, 77.
172
war. Gone were the constricting whalebone corsets, layers of clothing, high-necked
collars, long sleeves and floor-length gowns. Suddenly dresses were shorter, sometimes
so short as to expose the knee; arms, backs and décolleté could be seen, and lighter
fabrics were frequently employed.
The neue Frau and Fashion
The clothing reform movement illustrated changes in women’s clothing. As early
as 1851 Amelia Bloomer began wearing short dresses with loose pants underneath.
Known as “bloomers” or Turkish trousers, this effect was considered scandalous.
Although many women were interested in the freedom of movement afforded by the new
look, “the risk of social ostracism, public attack, and even police arrest prevented popular
uptake.”
242
It was not until 1909, with the influence of both popular sportswear and
Orientalism that trousers and looser, less fitted clothing again became popular for
women. French designer Paul Poiret’s influence can be seen here, with his early avant-
garde designs such as the “lamp-shade tunic,” which consisted of a loose top worn over
full pants, that tapered at the ankle. While styles from the teens onward became looser
and less confining, the wearing of trousers was not seen regularly until the later part of
the twenties, and even then it was still often considered controversial, racy, or theatrical.
In the twenties, the desired figure changed from the wasp-waisted hourglass
figure, to a boyish, athletic, small-breasted, small-hipped ideal. Although waist synching
through corsets was out, girdles were often used to help women create a smooth-line

242
Sarah Berry, Screen Style: Fashion and Femininity in 1930s Hollywood, Commerce and Mass Culture,
Volume 2, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000, 148.
173
under the light fabrics of the new styles. Waistlines of dresses and skirts dropped,
creating a tubular look, which did away with the hourglass or s-shaped figure of the turn
of the century (figure 3.4). This new look was usually accompanied by flesh-colored silk
stockings and medium-high pumps, with a t-strap, or ankle boots. For night, clothing was
still ultra-feminine and glamorous; low-cut dresses, sleek silhouettes, and accessories like
ostrich feathers, furs, and artificial flowers were popular. Clothing for night usually
favored silks, satins, taffetas and chiffons, whereas daytime fabrics were softer, such as
jersey, knits, as well as the recently introduced artificial silk, which was cheaper (and
therefore more widely available) than silk. Whereas nineteenth-century women’s fashion
has often been associated with non-productivity on account of the confinement of women
by corsets and hobble skirts, fashion in the twenties was connected to productivity and
work, which “invariably introduced the question of gender transgressions,” due to more
women entering the workplace.
243
As chapter two makes clear, analysis and discussion of the neue Frau in Germany
is extensive. And yet, the neue Frau is rarely written about in conjunction with an
examination of fashion. Indeed, fashion is left out of much scholarly literature, be it art
history, sociology, or history. Only recently, within the context of cultural studies, has
this understudied area begun to attract interest. In order to fully understand and analyze
the myths and realities surrounding the New Woman, an examination of 1920s fashion
must take place, for here, maybe more so than other decades, clothing was used to

243
Sabine Hake, “In the Mirror of Fashion,” in Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in
Weimar Culture, ed. Katharina Von Ankum, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California
Press, 1997, 195.
174
explain problems in society, be it the low birth rate (and women’s disinterest in
motherhood) or what was seen at the time as a rise in homosexuality.
244
As social
scientist Curt Moreck noted in his 1925 book, Ideal Female Beauty in the Changing
Times, there existed a danger of the neue Frau style being taken too far. Moreck writes,
in tones characteristic of his time, “when the modern woman … strives fanatically toward
equality with the man and uses the means of fashion to demonstrate her masculinization
by suppressing the female and imitating the male secondary sexual characteristics, the
sexual instinct is bound to be irritated and enter the dangerous field of perversion.”
245
The neue Frau’s hairstyle was also different from her Wilhelmine counterpart
(figure 3.5). Instead of long locks piled on top of one’s head in elaborate styles, hair, too,
became streamlined and functional. While this style was particularly practical for
working girls since it was easy and quick to style as well as safer for those working
around machinery, the new haircuts were hotly debated in magazines and newspapers.
Simply put, these styles came to represent the possibility of many things associated with
the New Woman: emancipation, sexual freedom, sexual preference and modernity.
Writing in support of the new style, as early as 1921 the upscale women’s magazine Die
Dame weighed in on the matter of short hair.
Bobbed hair is not shorn hair. The page-boy (Bubikopf) wig fashion is
extraordinarily feminine, highly stylized and thus an enhancement rather than a
denial of the original gender character. Bobbing corresponds to the rhythmic
modern taste, based on the precision of machinery, more austere than decorative,

244
Hake, op. cit., 195.
245
Curt Moreck, Das weibliche Schonheitsideal im Wandel der Zeiten, Munich: Franz Hanfstaengl, 1925,
282.
175
just as men shave because shaving makes their faces come out looking more
masculine than when they are hidden behind beards.
246
Irene Dolling argues that the new fashions and hairstyles shown in the magazines
and newspapers expressed a type of world-view and lifestyle, and were “characterized by
a objective, functional anti-elite, democratic basic attitude.”
247
It was through fashion that
these new attitudes were expressed. As Dolling notes, the new “deliberately plain fabrics
and styles, the invention of synthetic fibers and improved imitation methods (e.g.,
synthetic leather and pearls) all served to feed the illusion of a democratic culture.”
248
These new styles were homogenizing - at the same time as they signaled a retreat of the
individual into the mass they were fundamentally at odds with modernity’s quest for the
new and original. A contradiction was therefore set up between originality and
individuality on the one hand, and standardization and homogenization on the other. The
body of the New Woman became a symbol of the modernization of the Weimar
Republic, a modernization that valued standardization and homogenization in an effort to
fully modernize.
249
David Blostein observes that the “styles and habits of Weimar’s
working women support [the] view that the newly constructed body of young, unmarried
woman was less a sign of women’s freedom than a ‘screen on which to project the

246
Die Dame, Heft 11, 1921, page 1, quoted in Mode und Modeschmuck – Fashion and Jewelry in
Germany 1920-1970, ed. Christine Weber and Renate Möller, Stuttgart: Arnoldsche, 1999, [italics Royal],
33.
247
Irene Dolling, “The ‘New Woman’ of the Weimar Republic: Visualization and Standardization of
Modernization Processes,” in Mirror or Mask: Self Representation in the Modern Age, Berliner
Theaterwissenshaft; no. 11, ed. by David Blostein and Pia Kleber, University of Toronto, Berlin: Vistas
Verlag, 2003, 83.
248
Irene Dolling, 83.
249
Ibid, 85.
176
promises of modernity of technology and social progress’ in essence, a self-portrait of the
Weimar Republic.”
250
While attitudes towards the wearing of makeup also began to change, many
continued to feel that rouge and mascara were too unnatural to be worn during the day.
Moreover, they were a symbol of sexual availability.
251
In the latter part of the nineteenth
century, American women began to use make-up occasionally, for special evening
occasions. Magazines for women began to authorize the use of a moderate amount of
makeup, for evenings, especially where artificial light prevailed. Yet, as Kathy Peiss
notes, while the use of cosmetics and beauty products expanded greatly at the end of the
nineteenth century, at first women preferred primarily ‘natural’ methods of beautification,
such as pinching one’s checks to add color or rubbing a little oil into one’s hair to give it
a ‘naturally’ healthy sheen. “Until World War I,” she writes, “advertisements rarely
promoted rouge or eyebrow pencils, even though drugstores and salons carried them.”
252
Later advertisements and magazine articles did promote the ‘positive’ uses of makeup
through before and after photos, instructions for application and makeovers, which were
referred to at the time as “transformations”.
253
Through these various methods, one was to
be able to change one’s internal as well as external appearance.

250
David Blostein, “Introduction,” Mirror or Mask: Self Representation in the Modern Age, op. cit., 10.
251
In the nineteenth century cosmetics were typically associated with prostitution, barmaids and cheap
women. “In popular speech and song the stereotypical painted woman remained the prostitute, who
brazenly advertised her immoral profession through rouge and eye paint.” Kathy Peiss, “Making Up,
Making Over: Cosmetics, Consumer Culture, and Women’s Identity,” from The Sex of Things: Gender and
Consumption in Historical Perspective, ed. by Victoria de Grazia, with Ellen Furlough, Berkeley:
University of California Press, CA, 1996, 315. See also, chapter two, section: “The Prostitute as New
Woman.”
252
Kathy Peiss, “Making Up, Making Over,” op. cit., 323.
253
Ibid.
177
Through extensive advertising in the twenties, the mass cosmetics trade attempted
and succeeded in promoting cosmetics as a natural, necessary part of every beautiful
woman’s “appearance and sense of self.”
254
Peiss notes that the emergence and
acceptance of new and more varied beauty products in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries coincided with women’s emergence into the public sphere and newly
acquired freedoms. In many of the new jobs women were permitted to pursue, such as
clerical workers, saleswomen, waitresses, secretaries, along with other jobs in the public
eye, women were required to maintain a certain standard of beauty. In this way, makeup
helped women, “however inadequately, [make] new claims for cultural legitimacy.”
255
First begun in America, this trend of wearing makeup slowly expanded,
eventually making its way to Germany, where young women in the twenties began to
embrace options in makeup and new beauty products from companies such as Helena
Rubinstein and Max Factor. In conjunction with Germany’s interest in health and sports
at this time, a tanned, healthy look was also popular, but primarily for the daytime.
Evening looks favored a pale face with plucked eyebrows, dark eye shadow, red lipstick
and heavy perfumes such as Mitsuko and Shalimar. This glamorous nighttime look was
often associated with drugs and debauchery. The Berlin clothing designer Valentin
Manheimer even created an outfit in a style he called the “cocaine outfit.”
256
Consider
Sabine Hake:
Both aspects of fashion, dress and makeup, treated sexuality as a spectacle and
identity as a construction. Yet, whereas the one expanded gender definitions to

254
Ibid, 324.
255
Ibid, 331.
256
Hake, op. cit., 197.
178
include images of androgyny, the other dramatized older assumptions about
female beauty and eroticism through its use of the mask. The division of labor
helped to ease anxieties about possible gender transgressions and confirmed the
link between women and culture, while at the same time acknowledging her
physicality.
257
It is important to mention Germany’s interest in health and the cult of the body at
this point because these interests played into the construction of both the neue Frau and
the new fashions. Although an interest in health and fitness was aimed at men and
women, during the twenties it took on a much greater meaning for women, who were for
the first time included in the health craze wholeheartedly. The movement was especially
“concerned with designing exercise programs and styles of movement that sought to
develop the ‘specifically female’ body and feminine nature.”
258
Scientists and doctors who advocated a move away from the ‘degenerative’ styles
of the Wilhelmine era deemed previous styles of dress, in particular the corset,
‘unnatural’ and unhealthy. Instead, self-help books, medical texts and educational films
advocated healthy life-style reforms, which hailed Grecian, neo-Classical ideals and
styles. These reforms not only involved stylistic changes (a turn towards looser, tunic-
style dresses) but also an interest in Greek physical culture as well. The popular
educational film of 1925, “Wege zu Kraft und Schönheit,” (“Ways to Strength and
Beauty”), created new models for identification based on Greek ideals of beauty. These
models were aimed at creating a healthy (reproductive) society, generally without
political motivation, both in body and mind. While the so-called Greek styles were

257
Ibid, 189.
258
Lynne Frame, “Gretchen, Girl, Garçonne? Weimar Science and Popular Culture in Search of the Ideal
New Woman,” in Women in the Metropolis, op. cit., 29.
179
welcomed throughout the fashion world, the quest for perfect human forms was more
closely tied to “producing racial, cultural and social health through the cultivation of a
presumably lost or degenerated femininity.”
259
Weimar and Advertising
As noted above, Berlin’s fashion industry made a strong comeback after the war,
again providing the world with fashionable ready-to-wear clothing. Designers opened
new branches in Berlin, and department stores thrived despite a failing economy that
lasted until around 1924. Closely tied to Berlin’s production of clothing was its booming
production of illustrated magazines, especially the numerous new journals dedicated to a
new post-war female reader and consumer. As early as the late eighteenth-century,
fashion journals were popularized and began to play an important role in the spread of
new fashions. By the mid-nineteenth century, women’s magazines began to include
simple and practical household tips, recipes, as well as knitting and sewing patterns.
These early magazines were printed in large format so that one could cut out and use the
patterns. The magazines rarely included colored illustrations and therefore were not too
expensive. Fancier, well-produced journals began to appear during the First World War,
as the German fashion industry strove to keep up with and outdo the French. More on par
with the French fashion magazine, La Gazette du Bon Ton,
260
which boasted handmade

259
Lynne Frame, 31.
260
La Gazette du Bon Ton was a high-end fashion journal dedicated to the cultivation of good taste and
was published irregularly in Paris between 1912 and 1925. The Gazette was published by the highly
successful Lucian Vogel, whose other famous journals included, Femina, Art et Decoration, and Vu. The
180
paper, a beautiful layout and delicately designed pochoir illustrations, the German
magazines often cost upwards to ten marks each, considerably more than the earlier
publications.
261
While some fashion magazines, such as Die Dame, existed before the war, it was
during the twenties, with advances in printing and photography, as well as with the
opening of a new consumer market, that this industry exploded.
262
On a daily basis,
magazines and newspapers such as BIZ (Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung) offered readers a
wide selection of photos and illustrations of fashionably dressed celebrities at premieres
of movies and openings of nightclubs (figure 3.7). Other publications such as Der Bazar,
which focused solely on fashion, placed their emphasis on fashion shows, new fashions
and emerging designers.
263
Die Dame was by far the most popular women’s magazine; it
“offered practical advice about everything from flirting to driving and printed informative
articles about fashion, lifestyles, and the arts; it also included the popular Ullstein paper
patterns (dress patterns).”
264

Gazette was eventually purchased by Condé Nast in 1925 and merged into Vogue magazine. For example,
a year’s subscription to La Gazette du Bon Ton cost eighty marks for twelve issues.
261
The pochoir process was involved and expensive. The end result resembles a watercolor by building up
the design in gouache paint through the manual application of stencils over thirty times.
262
See chapter two on the neue Frau for further discussion of woman as a new consumer.
263
The editor of BIZ Kurt Korff was exiled to America in 1933. There he became an advisor to Henry
Luce’s Life magazine, which first appeared in 1933. “BIZ and Life shared the conviction that the image,
not the explanatory text, leaves a more lasting impression.” “Visual Culture: Illustrated Press and
Photography,” in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed., Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, Edward Diemendberg,
op. cit., 642.
264
Hake, op. cit., 192.
181
The numerous titles attest to the wide variety of magazines available.
265
Some
marketed themselves to an upscale bourgeois market, while others appealed to younger
audiences. The Communist-affiliated magazine Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung, or AIZ even
made a special appeal to the New Woman voter by including fashion and housekeeping
articles designed to appeal to female readers. Most importantly, the new magazines
supported and promoted the fashion industry, disseminating new designs and the latest
looks to its eager readership. As advertising changed from dull laundry-lists describing
products with small black and white illustrations to beautifully designed color lithographs
with innovative typography, a new type of consumer evolved simultaneously, one who
expected magazines and advertising to artfully please the eye. Artists were suddenly
needed - like never before - to create advertisements, cover designs, inner illustrations, as
well as dress patterns and fashion illustrations in the ever-growing number of women’s
magazines. In fact, there were very few Weimar artists who had never contributed to
advertising.
266
Critics praised the new styles of advertising as well as the artistry of the
designs and layouts. Werbekunst, advertisement art, now highly regarded, was noted in

265
Over four thousand daily newspapers, tabloids, weeklies, journals, illustrated press and magazines were
published in Weimar Germany on a regular basis. Berlin had forty-five morning papers (the most well-
known were the Berliner Tageblatt, Die Vossische Zeitung, Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, Berliner Morgenpost,
Berliner Börsen-Courier); two lunchtime papers (most popular was the B.Z. am Mittag); and fourteen
evening papers (among them the 8 Uhr-Abendblatt and the tabloid, Tempo). Each of the major political
parties had a newspaper as well (including regional editions): the Communist Die Rote Fahne, the National
Socialist Völkischer Beobachter, the Social Democratic Vorwarts, and the right-wing, nationalist Die
Deutsch Allgemeine Zeitung. The numerous magazines and newspapers catered to a wide variety of
interests, fashion journals, lifestyle magazines, sports papers, “magazines promoting health and nudism;
several occultist magazines; and monthlies for auto enthusiasts.” “Visual Culture: Illustrated Press and
Photography,” in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed., Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, Edward Diemendberg,
op. cit., 641.
266
Mila Ganeva, “Fashion Photography and Women’s Modernity in Weimar Germany: The Case of Yva,”
National Women’s Studies Association Journal, Vol. 15 No. 3 (Fall), 2003, 11.
182
intellectual art journals such as Das Kunstblatt. The art critic, and curator of the first
Neue Sachlichkeit exhibition, Gustav Hartlaub wrote in praise of the new media:
The art of advertisement today, along with pragmatic architecture, is the single
truly public art. It alone - as graphic art and print – speaks the aesthetic language
that reaches the anonymous masses of the cities whose enthusiasm is sparked not
by religion and politics, but by sports and fashions. It can reach those compact
majorities at the soccer stadiums, at the boxing rings and six-day races, … in
other words that large and wide “public” that feels at home everywhere but in the
galleries, exhibitions and theaters. It is today’s art of advertisement that shapes the
collective visual habits of the anonymous public.
267
One of today’s best visual pictures of the twenties comes from observations of
society and fashion journals such as Styl, Elegante Welt, Die Dame, Die deutsche Elite
and Der Modenspiegel, all of which provided varying views of life through fashion and
the material objects of everyday life. Because photography was still relatively new and
expensive, magazines at this time continued to rely heavily on printed illustrations by
artists. Next to Paris, Berlin had some of the best fashion illustrators: Annie Offterdinger,
Ludwig Kainer, Lutz Ehrenberger, Julia Haase-Werkenthin, R.L. Leonard, Lieselotte
Friedländer, and of course, Jeanne Mammen. Immediately noteworthy in this short list of
names is the strong presence of women artists. As opposed to the typically patriarchal
field of ‘fine art,’ there existed an openness towards women as fashion illustrators. Many
of these artists contributed on a regular basis to the fashion journal Der Modenspiegel, for
example, a weekly, illustrated supplement to the Berliner Tagesblatt, a middle-class

267
Gustav H. Hartlaub, “Kunst als Werbung,” [italics Royal], in Das Kunstblatt, 12, 1928, 131, quoted
from Mila Ganeva, “Fashion Photography and Women’s Modernity,” op. cit., 12.
183
liberal newspaper.
268
The Modenspiegel spoke to a wider audience than the upper class
and expensive Styl or Die Dame, but it covered many of the same topics, namely,
fashion, culture and society.
269
Even the glossy, higher priced magazines advised readers
on how to modify extreme French fashions to make them more affordable and practical
for everyday use, and more ‘normal’ bodies.
While films were an important showcase for the latest styles, the silver screen was
not the only place new fashions could be seen. The numerous theaters, cabarets, and
revues throughout Berlin were also a showcase for new looks, both on and off stage.
Famous actresses and dancers had clothing designed for them, for performances as well
as gowns they could wear to premiers and other promotional functions.
270
These ‘stars’
were also featured in magazines and advertisements, thereby endorsing designers and
cosmetics. Music was also influential for the new styles, primarily because the new music
and dances required different clothing than women had previously worn. The popular
jazz music and the new American dances which accompanied them such as the
Charleston, the One-step, the Two-step, Three-step, Tango, Shimmy, and Foxtrot were
vigorous and required freedom of movement. New styles with shorter skirts, sleeveless

268
Rudolf Mosse began The Berliner Tagesblatt in 1871. By the second half of the twenties the newspaper
had a circulation of about 140,000 and the Sunday circulation was about 250,000. Next to the Frankfurter
Zeitung, the Tagesblatt or BT was known as the German newspaper. Many well-known writers worked and
wrote for the paper, including Alfred Kerr, Fritz Stahl, Julius Meier-Graefe, Rudolf Olden, Fritz Engel and
Albert Einstein.
269
Berlin Museum Modesammlung Bestandskatalog Mode der 20er Jahre, op. cit., 36.
270
Female actresses were held in higher regard if they possessed their own extravagant wardrobe. It made
no difference if the outfits were for day or night – both had to be spectacular. The price of these clothes was
prohibitive, often greatly exceeding the salary of the beginning actresses. This problem of affording these
clothes was often remedied by sewing clothes oneself or, in greater desperation, resorting to ‘treats’ from
men who were ‘repaid’ with dates or more. See chapter two for a greater discussion of the custom of
‘treating.’
184
tops and loose waists allowed for new dance moves, whereas pre-war corseted styles,
with their long, heavy skirts, could only accommodate a slow waltz at best. The clubs
where this music was played and danced to, were also a prime place for new fashions to
be seen and shown off. Finally, cafés were another venue for the display of fashions,
though fashions in the cafés were usually more demure than those sported in nightclubs.
While much has been written on either the modernity of images from the twenties,
or on the societal commentary or criticism expressed by the artist, fashion as a subject
during this time has not been examined in an academically rigorous manner.
271
It is
generally accepted that for Jugendstil and Nabis artists in particular, crafts or the
Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) were very much a part of their overall vision. Yet, it
can be argued that neue Sachlichkeit artists were also grounded in the everyday or the
modern world, and fashion in the twenties was a primary component of this world. How
one looked, and what one wore, was not only important at this time, but it also told a
great deal about one’s identity, especially for a woman. That being said, fashion in the
twenties could be a marker of identity and sexual orientation, these markers were also
blurred and manipulated in new and exciting ways.
What had previously visually declared someone to be homosexual (lesbian)
became at this time a marker of modernity rather one of sexual identity. As styles became
more and more androgynous, lines were blurred as to whether or not a certain ‘look’ was
an indicator of sexual preference and even of the sex of the wearer. For instance,

271
Although recent scholarship has examined other artistic movements with regard to fashion (the Arts and
Crafts/Jugendstil movement, the Impressionists, the Nabis), neue Sachlichkeit artists are discussed in this,
in regard to their relative removal from craft and design. See chapter one for a thorough discussion of the
neue Sachlichkeit style and artistic movement.
185
whereas, previously, women dressing in men’s clothing had generally indicated a
woman’s sexual preference, in the twenties this style became popular and fashionable
outside of a purely lesbian subculture. Men’s-style button-down shirts, suit jackets and
ties were adopted as part of the new look. Short bobbed or mannish haircuts were de
rigueur for all who were trendy, and the monocle, which was previously considered the
marker for a lesbian, completed the look. Stars such as Marlene Dietrich and Margo Lion
promoted this look in films and cabaret acts, for example in the lyrics to one of their
popular songs, “Meine beste Freundin” (“My Best Girlfriend”) (figure 3.8).
272
Artists such as Jeanne Mammen, Lotte Jacobi and Lieselotte Friedlaender
examined the topic of stars in their work. Mammen made a number of drawings of the
cabaret artists Rosa Valetti and Valeska Gert (figure 3.9 - 3.10). That her drawings of
Gert were used as studies for one of her rare paintings during the 1920s further attests to
the importance of this theme for the artist (figure 3.11). In addition to signaling the
undeniable commodity culture of the time, these images show the pleasure these artists
experienced viewing female stars. As Maud Lavin notes in regard to Hannah Höch, in the
twenties women became avid consumers of women’s magazines, novels by and about
women, movies focusing on women as well as sports and dance events that featured
women.
To reproduce the image of a recognizable mass media star, even if fragmented
was in and of itself to celebrate the star system, a method that presents anew the
pleasures of viewing media images … for example; Höch could have seen Asta
Nielson live on stage and on the screen, in newspaper photos reporting on or
publicizing her performances, in “candid” shots in Die Dame and other

272
The popular revue song stated “Before there was the houseboy/ but that was yesterday/ instead of
houseboys/ I have a housegirl today.”
186
magazines, and in advertisements. To repeat images of this admired star in an
avant-garde context was, for Höch, to participate in this thoroughly pleasurable
cycle of media reproduction.
273
Sabine Hake has also remarked on the importance of film for women in the twenties.
Going to the movies alone was suddenly considered a respectable activity. Not
surprisingly, then, at this time “the cinema also becomes advisor and trendsetter for the
world of fashion, manners and home design.”
274
As going to the cinema alone became
more respectable for middle-class women, it was also appreciated as a realm where
women could watch – voyeuristically - safe from judgment, harassment or
misinterpretation without being observed.
Fashion, advertising and mass culture have always been connected, yet it was not
until the twenties that these areas became much more intertwined and involved with one
another. At the turn of the century, artists struggled against industrialization and the
encroachment of mass culture, which was often perceived as low culture. Although some
artistic groups were more open to modernization and mass culture than others (the arts
and crafts movement or Jugendstil movement, for example) other groups such as the
early Expressionists (Die Brücke, for example) advocated a “back to nature” primitivising
element, yet contradictorily also embraced and were fascinated by the modern city and its
various entertainments such as the circus, the dance hall, the street, and the café. It was
here, through the interaction with the city and modernity, that fashion entered into the
popular depictions of big-city life. Although fashion in painting has often been present, a

273
Maud Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, the Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch, New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1993, 34.
274
Sabine Hake, “Girls and Crisis – The Other Side of Diversion,” New German Critique, no. 40, special
issue on Weimar Film Theory (Winter, 1987), 161.
187
critical discussion of fashion has generally overlooked fashion’s association with low
culture.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner is a prime example of an artist whose early Expressionist
work was strongly grounded in primitivising elements. After 1910 and his move to the
metropolis of Berlin, however, he began to focus more and more on the surrounding signs
of modernity, including fashionable woman. German Expressionists such as Blau Reiter
member August Macke paid attention to the fashionably dressed woman. Macke’s
faceless women resemble mannequins that became popular in store windows in the teens
and twenties.
275
The artist’s pre-war work anticipates the popular pastimes of the
twenties. Women window-shop and explore on their own, blending into their modern
environment on escalators, in front of mannequins in department store windows and in
trendy cafes. Both artists paid detailed attention to what was worn on the city streets,
especially by women. Kirchner in particular was interested in the tension produced
between the prostitute and the respectable woman, who were often confused at this time,
due to changes in dress and the new visibility of women. The difficulty in identifying
prostitute from proper woman was played out in pre-war Berlin, and often included in
Kirchner’s paintings from this period.
Interestingly, in 1916 Kirchner was commissioned to produce a small brochure of
fashion illustrations for the opening of a friend’s dress boutique (figure 3.12). Using his

275
The mannequin ‘look’ for real women also became popular at this time, especially in advertising and
magazines. Maud Lavin notes that this trend coincides with Depression era anxieties about the role and
visibility of New Women in Weimar society and manifested itself in idealized and fetishized
representations of women. Maud Lavin, “Ringl + Pit: The Representation of Women in German Adverts,
1929-33,” Print Collectors Newsletter, vol. XVI, no. 3, July-August, 1985, 89.
188
signature woodcut style he created a series of images that were not dissimilar from his
‘normal’ artwork, yet engaged with the world of high fashion and commercialism.
Although this catalogue appears to be an isolated project, the well-dressed female city
dweller played a major role in Kirchner’s oeuvre, especially during the period from 1911
to 1916. For Kirchner and other German Expressionists, Berlin embodied the truly
modern experience they sought to explore. Kirchner’s friend, the Expressionist author
Alfred Döblin captured this experience in the following memorable description; “the city
as a whole has an intensely inspiring, energizing power; this agitation of the streets,
shops, and vehicles provides the heat I must have in order to work, at all times. It is the
fuel that makes my motor run.”
276
Fashion and Jeanne Mammen
Between 1908 and 1910 Mammen began creating small works in sketchbooks
executed in Brussels and Paris.
277
These sketches were not originally produced for
selling; rather they were quick impressions made on the city streets, often to be used later
as inspiration for finished drawings or paintings. Carefully observing and recording the
people she encountered, Mammen paid special attention to the clothing of women.
Although the illustrations in the sketchbooks are quickly composed and usually without
backgrounds, they can most certainly be considered the building blocks for Mammen’s

276
Alfred Döblin, cited in Harald Jahner, “Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz,” in Berlin: Culture and
Metropolis, eds. Charles W. Haxthausen and Heidrun Suhr, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1990, 142.
277
The Jeanne Mammen Archive holds a number of Mammen’s sketchbooks the earliest dating from 1910-
14. The latest sketchbook in the collection has two different dates, one from 1932 and one from her 1969
trip to Morocco.
189
later commercial fashion illustrations. On the other hand, little is know of her early years
in Brussels and whether or not she produced illustrations for advertising or fashion at this
time. While it is known that she took a variety of different art courses throughout her
training, it is not known if she ever participated in any specifically practical classes in
draftsmanship, commercial illustration or fashion design.
Mammen’s bourgeois youth as well as her training in Belgian and Parisian art
schools greatly influenced her style and choice of subject matter. Her early drawings in
particular reveal her fascination with the late-nineteenth century artists such as Edgar
Degas and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec. “Like Lautrec, Mammen was interested in the work
of varité singers, dancers, street singers, whores, everything to satisfy the industrial
proletariats.”
278
Not only her style but also her choice of subject matter, with an emphasis
on her subject’s clothing, echoes work by the aforementioned artists. In nineteenth
century Paris, fashion was considered to be an important element of the modern city. Not
only painters, but authors too, examined the theme of fashion in their work. Charles
Baudelaire, probably the best known author on the subject, devoted an entire essay, The
Painter of Modern Life, to this topic.
279
Baudelaire also introduced the concept of the
flâneur, a modern, generally male figure, who wandered and observed the city. As Anke
Gleber, puts it, the flâneur, “both defines and is defined by his perception of the outside

278
Annelie Lütgens, “Nur Ein Paar Augen sein …” Jeanne Mammen – Eine Künstlerin in Ihrer Zeit,
Berlin: Reimer Verlag, 1991, 78.
279
Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in Selected Writings on Art and Artists, trans. P.E.
Charvet, Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1972. “The Painter of Modern Life” was first written between 1859
and 1860. It first appeared in installments in Figaro in 1863.
190
world. He experiences city streets as interiors; he views traffic, advertising, displays, and
the world of commodities as Denkbilder, as images that evoke reflection.”
280
It can be argued that Mammen herself began to adopt the persona of the female
flâneur in her early twenties, while she was still living in Brussels. It was here that she
began her careful observations of people (particularly women) in the street. While
traditionally considered, off limits to women, recent feminist scholarship has begun to
examine the concept of the female flâneur and whether or not one could possibly be said
to have existed at this time.
281
Most often, women were only admitted into the realm of
flanerie when chaperoned, dressed in men’s clothing or otherwise covered. Author
George Sand describes the freedom she experienced when she was dressed as a man:
With those little iron-shod heels, I was solid on the pavement. I flew from one end
of Paris to another. It seemed to me that I could go around the world. And then,
my clothes feared nothing. I ran out in every kind of weather, I came home at
every sort of hour; I sat in the pit at the theater. No one paid attention to me, and
no one guessed my disguise … no one knew me, no one looked at me, no one
found fault with me; I was an atom lost in that immense crowd.
282
George Sand’s description is not unlike many other women’s experience of finding
freedom in the city through partial or total disguise. Mammen, too, expressed her joy of
going unnoticed through the city. “I have often wished: to only be a pair of eyes,” she

280
Anke Gleber, “Female Flanerie and the Symphony of the City,” in Women in the Metropolis, op. cit.,
67.
281
See for example, Anke Gleber, “Female Flanerie and the Symphony of the City,” in Women in the
Metropolis, op. cit.; Anne Friedberg, “Les Flâneurs du Mal(l): Cinema and the Postmodern Condition,”
PMLA 106, no. 3, May, 1991; Susan Buck-Morss, “The Flâneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The
Politics of Loitering,” New German Critique, no. 39, 1986: 119; Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference:
Femininity, Feminism and Histories of Art, London: Routledge, 1988; Patrice Petro, Joyless Streets:
Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimar Germany, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1989; Janet Wolff, “The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity,” Theory, Culture and
Society, vol 2, no 3, 1985.
282
George Sand from 1831, quoted in Janet Wolff, op. cit., 41.
191
writes. “To go unseen throughout the world only seeing the others. Unfortunately, one
was seen.”
283
While Mammen did not dress as a man, many photos attest to her choice of
inconspicuous asexual clothing that typically consisted of a large overcoat and black
beret pulled low over her head.
In contrast to the conservatism of the Wilhelmine society, Weimar Germany
afforded women new opportunities for female flanerie. However, women in the twenties
still had to fight against an inherent societal sexism that continued to assume that women
alone in the streets were prostitutes. Another change in cities and flanerie occurred with
the invention and installation of gas lamps. As electric and neon lights began to populate
the city, more spaces for men were opened up while women were provided with the
ability to work around the clock as prostitutes or be subjected to greater surveillance.
While for men it was considered normal to loiter, this was not true for women, who could
not stand around for too long, not even to window shop.
284
The world of the newspaper feuilleton was another area in Weimar Germany
where women were able to break in and participate as flâneurs.
285
In a manner that

283
Hans Kinkel, “Begegnung mit Jeanne Mammen,” quoted in Annelie Lütgens, “Jeanne Mammen oder
die Kunst des Verschwindens,” in Jeanne Mammen 1890-1976: Gemälde, Aquarelle, Zeichnungen,
Exhibition catalogue, Berlinische Galerie Landesmuseum für Moderne Kunst, Photographie und
Architektur, Berlin, 1997, 9.
284
Katharina von Ankum, “Gendered Urban Spaces in Irmgard Keun’s ‘Das Kunstseidene Mädchen,’” in
Women in the Metropolis, op. cit., 172.
285
The feuilleton achieved extreme popularity during the Weimar period, attracting and accepting a large
number of women authors as well. The feuilleton was also called writing “unter den Strich,” which carried
a double meaning. “In its idiomatic usage it means ‘of lower quality,’ ‘below par,’ and refers to the way the
genre of the feuilleton is looked upon by literary and journalistic establishments. For writers of literary
fiction, it is too journalistic, and for journalists, it deals with issues less serious than politics and economy.”
The phrase “unter den Strich” also literally described the thick line, usually at the bottom of the page,
which separated the feuilleton’s cultural discussions, short essays, and book reviews from the rest of the
paper. Quoted from Mila Ganeva, “In the Waiting Room of Literature,” op. cit., 12.
192
parallels the case of fine arts, however, many of the male feuilleton writers were
rediscovered in the early 1970s by German literary historians, while female feuilleton
writers have largely been ignored. Mila Ganeva has written about the author Helen Grund
(1886-1982) as a prime example of a well-known and respected writer in the genres of
the feuilleton and travelogue.
286
Although Grund is not widely known today, Ganeva
proposes that her work serves “as an example of the representation of a specifically
feminine experience in the modern metropolis and can be read as a testimony of the
German flâneuse.”
287
Grund, along with other female feuilleton writers of the twenties
created a verbal picture of the modern world around them, as they “constantly engaged in
the incessant and conscious process of ‘reading’ the street and deciphering the signs of
electric city lights, old facades, or display windows.”
288
Such as engagement with, and
processing of, modernity occurs in Mammen’s work as well, as she too traversed the big
city, observing, recording, and participating as a flâneur would.
Another notable similarity between fashion writing and Mammen’s illustrations
for the popular press is that both genres have fallen into relative obscurity, disregarded
until only recently. Yet, as Ganeva astutely notes in her essay on Grund, fashion writing
is inherently modern, since it focuses on “the fragmentary experiences of everyday life,

286
Helen Grund wrote fashion journalism and short prose primarily for the Frankfurter Zeitung and Die
Dame between 1925 and 1935. Grund was widely read, primarily by a middle-class female audience, but
she was also admired by Benjamin and Adorno, who felt her writings “revealed some of fashion’s hidden
implications for an understanding of modernity and mass culture.” Today, Grund often only appears in the
footnotes of essays on her husband Franz Hessel, who was also a feuilleton writer and author of Spazieren
in Berlin, 1929. Quote from Mila Ganeva, Ibid, 2.
287
Ibid, 1.
288
Ibid, 4.
193
on the apparently ephemeral, the trivial, and the deeply inauthentic.”
289
The genre of the
feuilleton, and especially essays on fashion in the feuilleton, can be linked to Mammen’s
fashion illustrations and to the small scenes she drew. Hermann Hausler’s
groundbreaking work of 1928, Kunstformen des feuilletonistischen Stils: Beitrage zur
Asthetik und Psychologie des modernen Zeitungs Feuilletonismus (The Forms of
Feuilleton Style: On the Aesthetics and Psychology of the Contemporary Newspaper
Feuilleton) examined the importance of the feuilleton as a genre that studied daily life
through contemporary events and trends. “Further requisites of the genre are its vivid
descriptions through the eyes of an expert (Anschaulichkeit des Speziellsehens) as well as
its preference for concrete detail (Bevorzugung des Konkreten) and sensory image
(sinnliches Bild), especially when it comes to the description of clothes, textures, and
colors.”
290
As Ganeva and Hausler assert, the feuilleton genre serves as a mirror of
contemporary society that aids historians, art historians, and others studying the past, in
their quest for understanding and recreating a true picture of the times. I propose that we
consider fashion illustration in this way, too.
Mammen’s work created in Belgium and her early years in Berlin was primarily
Symbolist in style. Following in the footsteps of her somewhat old-fashioned teachers at
art school, the artist’s style quickly evolved when she moved to Berlin. In Berlin she
would have had the opportunity to see a wide range of contemporary exhibitions. As a
result, her symbolist style gave way to a more realistic, less fantastic vision of everyday

289
Ibid 7.
290
Hermann Hausler, Kunstformen des feuilletonistischen Stils: Beitrage zur Asthetik und Psychologie des
modernen Zeitungs Feuilletonismus, quoted in Mila Ganeva, “In the Waiting Room of Literature,” op. cit.,
7.
194
life. While she had been commissioned early on to illustrate a couple of books in the
Symbolist style, her move towards the realism of neue Sachlichkeit was more conducive
to contemporary fashion illustrations and modern advertising. With her arrival in Berlin
in 1916, Mammen was desperate for work and began producing illustrations for books,
advertisements and movie posters. Her sister Mimi often collaborated with her. The two
women shared a commission for the illustration of the 1917 book by Paul Schüler, for
example, Das Gift im Weibe, (The Poison in Woman).
291
Mimi created the color cover
page while Jeanne completed twelve black and white illustrations for the text (figure
3.13).
The artist’s introduction to the world of fashion began on the streets of Brussels
and Paris, but her first paid work was for designing fashion plates for the Berlin couture
houses Kuhnen and Manheimer. In works created at the beginning of the 1920s,
Mammen began to perfect her signature style of the Weimar period, which depicted
bored, young women, fashionably dressed and made-up, smoking, shopping and chatting
with one another. Men are less often present in these works. When men do appear, they
are often used as props, accompanying the women or dancing with them. Mammen’s
male and female couples rarely interact with one another, while pairs of women seem to
have more of a connection to each other.
As previously mentioned, Mammen’s skill of careful observation, especially her
close recording of clothing and styles, began with her earliest Belgian sketchbooks and

291
The Poison in Woman, published by Lustige Blätter. The book consisted of ‘strange tales’ about
encounters between men and women, illustrated in a Symbolist style. Annelie Lütgens, “Jeanne Mammen
oder die Kunst des Verschwindens,” op. cit., 12.
195
continued throughout her life. These sketchbooks were of utmost importance to the artist
for her entire life. She proudly showed them only to her close friends.
292
Sadly, not many
of these early sketchbooks (or other work from this period) exist today, since many were
destroyed or lost during the artist’s emigration to Germany in 1916. The use of
sketchbooks and sketching was a working method Mammen continued to use the rest of
her artistic career. Careful observation was her forte, and the Sachlichkeit style of the
twenties highly valued this skill. Whereas her earlier work had more in common with late
nineteenth-century images of women, her work of the Weimar Period was completely
modern, illustrating the contemporary neue Frau, as opposed to the slightly outdated
Symbolist images she had produced in Belgium. Lütgens states that Mammen’s adoption
of the verist (Sachlichkeit) style in Berlin came from her “disillusioned, distanced
position toward her new environment … [which] distinguished her from her male
German colleagues, whose vision was rooted in expressionism and the experiences of the
war and revolution.”
293
Mammen’s sketchbooks from Paris and Belgium focus primarily on the upper
classes and occasionally the people who work for them, those who take care of their
children, clean their houses, and so forth. This is probably related to the fact that
Mammen herself was part of this class, and as a consequence, the people of this class
were more accessible to her. In an early sketchbook, from around 1910-1914, she

292
From a conversation with Marga Döpping of the Jeanne Mammen Förderverein, who stated that
Mammen treasured her sketchbooks and often wanted to take them out and look at them with her.
293
Annelie Lütgens, “The Conspiracy of Women: Images of City Life in the Work of Jeanne Mammen,” in
Women in the Metropolis, op. cit., 90.
196
illustrates Dame mit Pelz und Muff, (Lady with a Fur and Muff) (figure 3.14).
294
The
image is delicately rendered with lightly applied watercolors and pencil. While the
woman depicted has not yet taken on the stylized, emotionless countenance of
Mammen’s later advertisements, the attention to, and importance of, sartorial details is
clearly evident. The subject is elegantly draped in a heavy blue coat with a black fur
collar and matching muff. She wears a fashionable, feathered hat, also in black. In fact,
almost all of the women in Mammen’s early sketchbooks wear hats, a testimony to the
popularity and importance of hats at this time. “Finely-dressed women almost always
wore hats outside and sometimes wore them indoors as well. Once essential for
protection from the elements, by the early twentieth century hats had largely become
fashion accessories that functioned as emblems of status, style, and fashionability and as
markers of feminine beauty and grace.”
295
It was not until her move to Berlin that Mammen began to include the new middle
class, and less frequently, the working class in her imagery. However, her commercial
production, for advertisements and fashion illustrations, continued to focus singularly on
the bourgeois or members of the nouveau riche. These women are more fantasy than
reality, as their beauty and opulence was unrealistic for most women at this time.
Mammen’s advertisements and commercial work from the twenties very often included
recognizable symbols of modernity, such as skyscrapers, sport cars, dance and music and,
of course, the modern woman. Interestingly, she did not limit her representations of

294
Lady with a Fur and Muff, watercolor and pencil, from sketchbook SB IV/24, c. 1910-14.
295
Marie Reilly, “From the ‘Shoe Hat’ to the ‘Mad Cap’: Fashion and Transgression in Early Twentieth-
Century Hat Design,” in Fashion and Transgression, exhibition catalogue, University of Southern
California Fisher Gallery, Los Angeles, 2003, 58-59.
197
modernity to her commercial work. These signifiers appeared in her private work as well.
The primary difference between commercial and private production appears to have been
the focus on the representation of the upper classes and the reduction of the use of verism
in her work produced for magazines, especially advertising and fashion illustrations. The
women illustrated in these instances were slick and stylized, without any signs of
imperfection (figure 3.15). In contrast, her private work played up verist tendencies,
portraying a variety of classes such as the working girl as well as people who were tired,
bored, overworked - and above all real - Berlin types one would encounter day to day in
the shops, restaurants, cafes, and places of entertainment (figure 3.16).
Mammen’s advertisements portray the slightly unobtainable, desirable look of the
upper classes. The women who model dresses, demonstrate perfumes and face creams, or
who adorn the cover of women’s magazines, are perfected and idealized. Then, as now,
no one wants to buy eye crème from a woman who looks bored and haggard from a long
day at a dull job. Advertising has always relied on fantasy and dreams in order to sell its
products. Even more so than in the teens, the twenties saw the birth of fantasy
advertising. Whereas, previously, advertising took a matter-of-fact approach, providing
facts or information about a product so one could decide if they needed it or not, during
the twenties advertisements began to indicate that particular products were necessary in
order to live life more fully or satisfactorily (figure 3.17). To this end, advertising began
to play more heavily on fantasy and desire as one firm competed against another in an
effort to appeal to and obtain customers.
198
In a recent essay, Burcu Dogramaci examines the element of fantasy present in
German fashion illustrations from the twenties. She notes the artistic license taken in
these images, especially in regard to the representation of actual clothing. “[Berlin
fashion illustrator’s] illustrations were quite far from actual pictorial representations of
specific items of clothing. They were the interpreters of fashion.”
296
In this way,
Dogramaci notes, that the fashion illustrators played a key role in disseminating the ideas
of the designers and couturiers to the public, and did so through various artistic
techniques such as pen and ink, watercolor, gouache, woodcuts, and lithography.
297
Mammen, too, made use of fantasy in her fashion illustrations, in the clothing she drew,
as well as in the small scenes in which the clothes were often worn. These scenes fit
perfectly with the clothing that was being presented, be it a woman wearing an Art Deco
inspired dress within her Art Deco interior or the fashionably dressed and easily
identified neue Frau in the modern city.
Mammen’s early fashion illustration of a ‘tea dress’ for the designer Kuhnen is a
fitting example of this. Entitled, Teekleid von Kuhnen (Goldfische), (Tea Dress,
Goldfish), c. 1923, now lost, the image uses bright, primary colors within a modern Art
Deco interior as the backdrop for the illustration of a simple drop-waisted dress, with an
exaggerated bow (figure 3.18). The woman modeling the dress is stylized to the point of
appearing more mannequin-like than human, a trend that was popularized with the advent
of the new, abstracted mannequins in the twenties, that could be seen in magazines as

296
Burcu Dogramaci, “Elegante Welt. Künstlerische Modegraphik der Weimarer Republik,” Weltkunst,
Heft 14, 15 November 2001, 2226.
297
Dogramaci, “Elegante Welt. Künstlerische Modegraphik der Weimarer Republik,” Ibid.
199
well as in department stores. To add to the fantasy of the image, Mammen has given this
model a light-blue tinted skin, a color that blends nicely with her surroundings, but
simultaneously lessens her reality. The image is also interesting, for while clearly created
as a ‘neutral’ advertisement for the latest designs from Kuhnen, Mammen has also
inserted some of her trademark humor. In the foreground, the woman gazes dreamily
towards a bowl of swimming goldfish, in the background, lounging luxuriously on a large
pillow, lies a dozing cat, whose attention is languidly turned toward the woman and fish.
In a similar image, created around 1925, Mammen again depicts fashionable women, a
cat and goldfish. Entitled, Goldfischfang, (Goldfishing), now lost, she creates a play on
words and image (figure 3.19). Here, two bored, New Women smoke and ‘fish’ for tiny
men in the fishbowl in the foreground, tempting them with bags of money on fishing
poles. A man is visible in the background; his hands cover his face as he watches the
scene in agony. Behind him, a small, devil-like figure rides on his shoulders, pulling his
hair and tormenting him. Sitting before the two women is a white cat, decorated with a
large bow. Again, the cat’s closed eyes resemble those of the heavily made-up women
behind it. In both images Mammen plays with the symbol of the cat, as evil and cunning,
an animal that doesn’t hesitate to play with its prey, not unlike the women who ‘fish’ for men.
Annelie Lütgens notes that for Mammen:
to publish in bourgeois humorous or fashion journals meant, after all, that she
affirmed existing social conditions, and adapted to market constraints to escape
the most serious economic difficulties. In that respect Mammen differed little
from her contemporaries (her audience) who week after week contemplated her
illustrations in the magazines, projecting their own desires on to them.
298

298
Lütgens, “The Conspiracy of Women: Images of City Life in the Work of Jeanne Mammen,” op. cit.,
103.
200
In watercolors such as the previously mentioned Gold-fishing, Mammen
simultaneously embraces the genre of fashion and bourgeois journals, while
simultaneously presenting a wry and humorous commentary on it. Mammen’s
commercial work fell into this new type of advertising - slick, polished and beautiful.
These types of women also appeared in her private work, especially when she explored
relationships between classes. However, these class differences never came up in her
advertisements, where the class represented was always upper middle-to-upper class.
Mammen’s carefully observed and executed drawings quickly helped her to make
a name for herself in Berlin. By 1927, she was well known and sought after for all kinds
of illustrations. In a rare interview, given toward the end of her life, Mammen remembers
the work she produced primarily for the humorous journal Simplicissimus in the late
twenties: “I sent a gigantic package to them every week [with drawings] that had to be
suitable for jokes or punchlines.”
299
They were especially interested in “everything that
was anti-Wilhelminish, feisty, liberal and socially strong.
300
While she was known and
respected for these drawings, outside of her illustrations for magazines, Mammen was
little known as an artist. Unlike her male counterparts, she did not obtain an academic
teaching position in an art school and begin her climb up the academic ladder. It is often
difficult to compare women artists with men. And, as the conditions were different and as
mentioned with Mammen, they often did not participate in the major ‘isms’ and groups

299
Jeanne Mammen quoted from an interview in Lütgens, “Jeanne Mammen oder die Kunst des
Verschwindens,” op. cit., 12.
300
Jeanne Mammen quoted from an interview in Lütgens, ‘Nur Ein Paar Augen sein’… Jeanne Mammen –
eine Kunstlerin in ihrer Zeit, op. cit., 40.
201
associated with avant-garde art. Meskimmon notes that women more then men “worked
at the interstices of fine art and mass culture” and it is this interstice where I believe we
should examine Mammen’s work.
301
The End of Weimar Fashion
Just before 1930 the use of photography became more popular and common in
fashion magazines. Although drawings were still used, they were often placed next to
large photographs that took up most of the space on the page. Rarely did drawings now
get full-page spreads. That being said, the end of the use of illustrations in fashion
magazines was not entirely due to the increase in photo-spreads. Rather, it had more to do
with the rise of National Socialism and the closing of many Jewish-owned journals.
Those journals that did remain had to let all Jewish employees go and conform to new
publishing rules imposed by the Nazis. The fate of the illustrator Lieselotte Friedlaender
is a case in point. The women’s journals or section of the paper devoted to women’s
issues began to focus less on fashion and more on conservative Hausfrauenthemen or
housewife themes, such as travel, childrearing, and religion. For Jewish illustrators like
Friedlaender, this was the end of a career. For others, like Mammen, who chose not to
conform to the new rules, this meant the end of a source of income as well as not being
able to continue creating the artwork she had previously created.
The New York stock market crash of 1929 and the subsequent worldwide
depression certainly began the decline of Germany’s, and Berlin’s, fashion industry. The

301
Meskimmon, op. cit., 16.
202
1933 rise of the National Socialists to power saw the rapid demise of Berlin’s fashion
quartier and Germany’s fashion industry in general, since the designers, boutiques,
department stores, and textile shops were predominantly run and owned by Jews. The
Nazis slowly staged boycotts, closed stores, and forced Jews to emigrate or face
prosecution and death, effectively bringing Germany’s fashion industry to a halt. While
an all-out attack on Jewish businesses was made, foreign fashion styles from France,
America and England were also shunned and dubbed as ‘anti-German.’ Even as attempts
were made to conservatively Aryanise the industry and continue a profitable segment of
the economy, the fashion industry had been fundamentally changed and Berlin was never
to recover to its Weimar era success and productivity.
2 0 3
Figure 3.1
Annie Offterdinger, Sport im Bild, 1926
Title page, 17, September 1926
Published in Die 20er Jahre: Mode, Graphik, Kunstgewerbe, 2005
Annie Offterdinger, Sport im Bild, 1926 Annie Offterdinger, Sport im Bild, 1926
Published in Die 20er Jahre: Mode, Graphik, Kunstgewerbe, 2005 Published in Die 20er Jahre: Mode, Graphik, Kunstgewerbe, 2005 Published in Die 20er Jahre: Mode, Graphik, Kunstgewerbe, 2005 Published in Die 20er Jahre: Mode, Graphik, Kunstgewerbe, 2005 Published in Die 20er Jahre: Mode, Graphik, Kunstgewerbe, 2005
2 0 4
Figure 3.2
Edouard Malouze, Gazette du Bon Ton, 1920
Published in Die 20er Jahre: Mode, Graphik, Kunstgewerbe, 2005 Published in Die 20er Jahre: Mode, Graphik, Kunstgewerbe, 2005 Published in Die 20er Jahre: Mode, Graphik, Kunstgewerbe, 2005 Published in Die 20er Jahre: Mode, Graphik, Kunstgewerbe, 2005 Published in Die 20er Jahre: Mode, Graphik, Kunstgewerbe, 2005 Published in Die 20er Jahre: Mode, Graphik, Kunstgewerbe, 2005
2 0 5
Figure 3.3
Lieselotte Friedlaender, Slim and Simple, 1923
Published in Lieselotte Friedlaender 1898-1973: Schicksal einer Berliner Modegraphikerin, 1998
Lieselotte Friedlaender, Slim and Simple, 1923 Lieselotte Friedlaender, Slim and Simple, 1923
Published in Lieselotte Friedlaender 1898-1973: Schicksal einer Berliner Modegraphikerin, 1998 Published in Lieselotte Friedlaender 1898-1973: Schicksal einer Berliner Modegraphikerin, 1998 Published in Lieselotte Friedlaender 1898-1973: Schicksal einer Berliner Modegraphikerin, 1998
2 0 6
Figure 3.4
Photo of Camille Clifford, S-Shape, 1905
Published in The Culture of Fashion, Manchester, 199
2 0 7
Figure 3.5
Advertisement, Für den Bubikopf, Elegante Welt, 1926
Published in Die 20er Jahre: Mode, Graphik, Kunstgewerbe, 2005
Advertisement, Für den Bubikopf, Elegante Welt, 1926 Advertisement, Für den Bubikopf, Elegante Welt, 1926 Advertisement, Für den Bubikopf, Elegante Welt, 1926 Advertisement, Für den Bubikopf, Elegante Welt, 1926
Published in Die 20er Jahre: Mode, Graphik, Kunstgewerbe, 2005 Published in Die 20er Jahre: Mode, Graphik, Kunstgewerbe, 2005 Published in Die 20er Jahre: Mode, Graphik, Kunstgewerbe, 2005 Published in Die 20er Jahre: Mode, Graphik, Kunstgewerbe, 2005 Published in Die 20er Jahre: Mode, Graphik, Kunstgewerbe, 2005
2 0 8
Figure 3.6
Julius Ussy Engelhard, Advertisement, Fashion Ball, 1928
Lithograph
Published in Die 20er Jahre: Mode, Graphik, Kunstgewerbe, 2005
Julius Ussy Engelhard, Advertisement, Fashion Ball, 1928
Published in Die 20er Jahre: Mode, Graphik, Kunstgewerbe, 2005 Published in Die 20er Jahre: Mode, Graphik, Kunstgewerbe, 2005 Published in Die 20er Jahre: Mode, Graphik, Kunstgewerbe, 2005 Published in Die 20er Jahre: Mode, Graphik, Kunstgewerbe, 2005 Published in Die 20er Jahre: Mode, Graphik, Kunstgewerbe, 2005
2 0 9
Figure 3.7
Celebrity Photo, Die Dame, Anna May Wong, 1927
Published in Die Dame: Ein Deutsches Journal für den Verwöhnten
Geschmack 1912 bis 1943, 1980
Celebrity Photo, Die Dame, Anna May Wong, 1927
2 1 0
Figure 3.8
Marlene Dietrich, in the Film M o r o c c o, 1930
Published in Eldorado: Homosexulle Frauen und Männer in Berlin
1850-1950: Geschichte, Alltag und Kultur, 1984 1850-1950: Geschichte, Alltag und Kultur, 1984 1850-1950: Geschichte, Alltag und Kultur, 1984 1850-1950: Geschichte, Alltag und Kultur, 1984
2 1 1
Figure 3.9
Rosa Valetti, c. 1929, Z61
Pen and ink
Private Collection
Rosa Valetti, c. 1929, Z61
2 1 2
Figure 3.10
Valeska Gert, c. 1929, Z58
Pen and ink
Förderverein der Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung e.V.
Valeska Gert, c. 1929, Z58
2 1 3
Figure 3.11
Valeska Gert, c. 1929, G11
Oil on canvas
Berlinische Galerie, Landesmuseum für moderne Kunst, Photographie und Architektur
Valeska Gert, c. 1929, G11
2 1 4
Figure 3.12
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Woman with Dog, 1916
Color woodcut, Page from the dress catalogue of Irene Eucken
Published in Der Potsdamer Platz: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner und der Untergang Preussens, 2001
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Woman with Dog, 1916
Published in Der Potsdamer Platz: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner und der Untergang Preussens, 2001 Published in Der Potsdamer Platz: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner und der Untergang Preussens, 2001 Published in Der Potsdamer Platz: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner und der Untergang Preussens, 2001 Published in Der Potsdamer Platz: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner und der Untergang Preussens, 2001
2 1 5
Figure 3.13
Resting, from The Poison in Woman, c. 1917, A85
Watercolor and pencil,
Lost
Resting, from The Poison in Woman, c. 1917, A85 Resting, from The Poison in Woman, c. 1917, A85
2 1 6
Figure 3.14
Woman with a Fur and Muff, c. 1910-14, SB IV Page 24
Watercolor and pencil, Sketchbook
Förderverein der Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung e.V.
Woman with a Fur and Muff, c. 1910-14, SB IV Page 24
2 1 7
Figure 3.15
Untitled, Cover, Die Schöne Frau, c.1926, A172
Watercolor and pencil
Förderverein der Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung e.V.
Untitled, Cover, Die Schöne Frau, c.1926, A172
2 1 8
Figure 3.16
In the Tram, c. 1925-28, Z28
Pen and ink and charcoal
Berlinische Galerie, Landesmusuem für Moderne Kunst, Photographien und Architektur
(Inv.-Nr. BG-G 7225/93)
2 1 9
Figure 3.17
Advertisement, Laxin-Konfekt, c. 1915
Published in Die Dame: Ein Deutsches Journal für den Verwöhnten Geschmack 1912 bis 1943, 1980
2 2 0
Figure 3.18
Goldfi sh, Tea Dress, c. 1923, A107
Watercolor, pen and ink
Design for Kuhnen, published in Styl
Förderverein der Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung e.V.
Design for Kuhnen, published in Styl Design for Kuhnen, published in Styl
2 2 1
Figure 3.19
Goldfi shing, c. 1925, A143
Watercolor and pencil, published in Der Junggeselle
Förderverein der Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung e.V.
Goldfi shing, c. 1925, A143
Watercolor and pencil, published in Der Junggeselle Watercolor and pencil, published in Der Junggeselle
222
CH APT E R FO UR
WE I MAR HOM OSE X UAL I T Y A ND T HE G UI DE BOOK
Lesbianism is not specifically prohibited because it has not even made its way
into the thinkable, the imaginable, that grid of cultural intelligibility that regulates
the real and the nameable … To be prohibited explicitly is to occupy a discursive
site from which something like a reverse-discourse can be articulated; to be
implicitly proscribed is not even to qualify as an object of prohibition.
Judith Butler (1991)
302
Paragraph 175, which outlawed homosexual acts between two men, was written
into law with the unification of Germany in 1871.
303
Lesbians were not considered under
this law, either because a union between women was considered less threatening or
because, to use the words of Judith Butler, it was “implicitly proscribed.” As a
consequence, lesbianism did not enter into political and moral debates of the time. During
the twenties, Paragraph 175 was relaxed, yet it was never completely abolished. In big
cities such as Berlin, homosexuality became more open and accepted, and efforts by sex
reformers to do away with Paragraph 175 gathered some support among the public.
304
However, this all changed in 1933 with the rise of the National Socialists to power.
Under the Nazis, laws against homosexuals were strengthened, and those found guilty of

302
Judith Butler, “Imitation: a Gender Insubordination,” from Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories,
ed. Diana Fuss, New York and London: Routledge, 1991, 14.
303
France and Belgium had abolished laws against homosexuals more than one hundred years earlier.
304
Before World War I, Magnus Hirschfeld and other sex reformers worked to end the persecution of
homosexuals and to abolish Paragraph 175. “The committee attempted to establish the viewpoint, based on
undeniable facts, founded on scientific investigations and the experience of thousands, that homosexuality
was neither a crime nor a vice but an emotional tendency deeply rooted in the nature of many human
beings.” Magnus Hirschfeld, The Sexual History of the World War, New York: Cadillac Publishers, 1941,
127. Although in East Germany Paragraph 175 was no longer rigorously enforced, after World War II, it
was not officially stricken from the books until 1988. After unification, in 1994, West Germany abolished
Paragraph 175.
223
this charge were often persecuted or sent to death camps. Incidentally, the Nazis did not
consider lesbianism a crime. This is not to say that the Nazis condoned lesbianism; rather,
this “implicit proscription” suggests that they did not take it seriously.
This chapter examines homosexuality in the Weimar era, including the years just
before and after the Weimar Republic. After establishing changes in the homosexual
climate of these years, I will analyze Jeanne Mammen’s many representations of
homosexuals. During the twenties, Mammen created numerous images of homosexuals,
particularly of lesbians. This chapter sets these images in the context of women’s culture
(Frauenkultur), paying special attention to Mammen’s participation in this world. The
text and illustrations to Curt Moreck’s guidebook, The Guide to “Immoral” Berlin
(Führer durch das “Lasterhafte” Berlin), was an important commission for Mammen.
305
I
will examine Moreck’s Guide as a case study of the representation of Weimar
homosexuality.
As previously mentioned, lesbianism was not regulated in Germany or included in
the law books as deviant behavior until 1910. While lesbians were officially recognized
as ‘deviant’ at this time, they still were not officially included and prosecuted under
Paragraph 175 until the early 1930s. The laws passed in the eighteenth century
prohibiting sex between women were local laws applicable only to specific regions, such

305
Curt Moreck, Führer durch das “Lasterhafte” Berlin, Berlin: H. Heenemann GmbH & Co, 1931, 1987.
Curt Moreck was a pseudonym for the well known cultural critic, writer, translator and publisher, Kurt
Haemmerling. He was blacklisted under the Nazis and his books were burned in 1933, on account of his
“Jewish mentality.” Born in Cologne in 1888, he was the member of several radical artists’ groups during
the Weimar Republic.
224
as Prussia.
306
Women’s sexuality was virtually ignored - either it was considered
unthreatening to heterosexuality or because the idea of two women together was often
considered sexually titillating to men. This was especially true for the representation of
lesbians in art. Marsha Meskimmon notes that “contemporary lesbian feminist critics
have argued that definitions of lesbianism subsumed under those more appropriate male
homosexuals have often negated the possibility of ‘woman-centeredness’ in favor of
proof of physical, sexual encounters between women.”
307
As opposed to homosexual
males, then, lesbians were often thought to be “pseudo-homosexuals;” this “condition”,
moreover, based primarily on the absence of male partners, in school or prison settings,
for instance, was considered curable.
While lesbians have often been ignored politically, they have often been
considered an erotic and titillating topic for artists. Images of homosexuality (especially
lesbians) are nothing new to the history of art, especially in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. Neue Sachlichkeit artists often represented this subject, and Mammen
was no exception. While her work of the twenties includes a variety of themes, images of
lesbians reoccur with a notable frequency throughout the period. Mammen’s work
commonly includes images that focus on women interacting with one another. Many of
these images, for example, Der neue Hut (The New Hat) and Sie haben sehr schöne

306
Until 1794, the Prussian code punished both male and female homosexuals by burning them at the stake.
Later, in 1834, a revision of this law sentenced “those found guilty of ‘unnatural acts’ [to] imprisonment
followed by life-long punishment.” In 1851 this law applied to males. In 1910 an attempt was made to
reintroduce punishment for homosexual women, yet this failed due to the large outcry women who opposed
the criminalization of women, regardless of their sexual orientation. Lillian Faderman and Brigitte
Eriksson, Lesbians in Germany: 1890’s-1920’s, Florida: Naiad Press, 1980, 1990, xv.
307
Marsha Meskimmon, We Weren’t Modern Enough: Women Artists and the Limits of German
Modernism, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999, 202.
225
Hände (You have very beautiful Hands), both from circa 1929, have absolutely no
homosexual undertones (figures 4.1 - 4.2).
Although Mammen had always concentrated her artistic eye on the depiction of
women, it was not until the 1920s that she began to represent women in lesbian
relationships and at lesbian locals. The compositions from this period that focus on
lesbianism range from two female friends playfully and suggestively leaning into one
another in the library, Zwei Mädchen in der Bibliothek (Two Young Women in the
Library) to two women dancing together in Zwei Frauen, tanzend (Two Women,
Dancing), both from around 1928, to intimate moments together in bed Am Morgen, (In
the Morning) and Siesta, both from the series Lieder der Bilitis (Songs of the Bilitis),
1930-32 (figures 4.3 - 4.6). While some of these works were indeed commissioned
images (for example, Songs of the Bilitis), other representations of lesbians were created
without this sort of prompting.
This chapter will examine the various reasons these images were created. Was it
possible Mammen merely began to create such imagery because it was popular and
saleable in the open atmosphere of Weimar Berlin? While this argument certainly holds
some weight, I believe Mammen also derived pleasure from creating and viewing such
images.
308
The artist enjoyed observing and representing this type of imagery, as well as
frequenting the clubs and bars where these scenes took place.
309
Whether or not one can
label her as lesbian based on these activities is highly debatable and is made difficult by

308
See chapter two for an in-depth discussion of pleasure and viewing for women in the twenties.
309
Although no written documents by Mammen stating her interest in such activities exist, I have made this
claim based on her obvious interest in contemporary culture, from statements she made regarding visiting
movies or other entertainments, to her collection of magazines and contemporary imagery.
226
the fact that such labels were not so clearly defined at the time. While quite possibly
fueled by Mammen’s own personal interest in the subject matter, her images of lesbians
were do doubt timely and trendy.
Almost overnight, homosexuality and lesbianism moved from the sub-cultural
underworld to the forefront of fashion, style, film and literature. In many ways the style
and look of the New Woman was adopted from the lesbian subculture. What was known
as the masculine-look consisted of a long tailored skirt, button-down shirt, tie and
mannish jacket, complete with a short androgynous haircut, a cigarette (preferably in a
cigarette holder) and a monocle (figure 4.7). This look appeared in magazines and films,
and was often described in the novels of the time.
310
Judith Williamson has noted the
attraction of lesbian attire for the heterosexual world, when she writes, “the bourgeois
always wants to be in disguise, and the customs and habits of the oppressed seem so
much more fascinating than his own.”
311
Although the masculine look often associated with lesbianism was popular
throughout Germany and in other countries, it took hold especially in Berlin. Mammen’s
watercolor of circa 1929, Im Damenclub I (In the Women’s Club I) (now lost), portrays a
scene in which women have not only taken on masculine forms of dress, but the setting
they inhabit is also full of “male” attributes (figure 4.8). Mammen illustrates a typical
club interior, with familiar “manly” activities, but in this case the club is full of women.
In the foreground, three women play cards while smoking and drinking. They each wear

310
See chapter three regarding fashion and the neue Frau in Weimar Germany.
311
Judith Williamson “Woman Is an Island: Femininity and Colonization,” Studies in Entertainment:
Critical Approaches to Mass Culture, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986, 116, quoted in Danae
Clark, “Commodity Lesbianism,” The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, New York: Routledge, 1993, 194.
227
fashionable manly black smoking jackets with white button-down shirts. Their hair is
worn short, in a bob or slicked back. In the background, on the wall, is a coat rack with
numerous top hats; on the opposite wall hangs the daily newspapers, which two women
read. All these subtle details are signifiers of masculinity. Here they have been readopted
by the Frauenkultur of the twenties. Mammen’s image, then, tells of the reinscription for
female occupation of a space previously unavailable to women.
The masculine look for women first emerged around the turn of the century, as a
response to the women’s movement.
312
Whitney Chadwick notes that the image of the
“mannish lesbian … corresponded to an early twentieth century medical model which
constructed lesbianism around notions of perversion, illness, inversion, and paranoia.”
313
Although often a limiting, homophobic view, the new type of woman did provide a
variation from the previous construction of women in female-to-female relationships.
Later, in the twenties, the image of the mannish lesbian persisted, especially in the
numerous lesbian magazines. The image of the masculine woman was closely linked to
virility and masculinity (or what is known as the ‘butch’ in many lesbian relationships).
This image connected homosexual women to men, enabling them to “claim a position
within mainstream society, as well as a way for them to view themselves as a group.”
314

312
Many turn-of-the-century, middle-class, lesbian women participated in the women’s movement. For
lesbians it was doubly important to obtain suffrage so they would not be pushed into normative
heterosexual relationships in order to maintain their lifestyle. Lillian Faderman and Brigitte Eriksson, op.
cit., xiii.
313
Whitney Chadwick, Women, Art and Society, London: Thames and Hudson, 1990, 261.
314
Heike Schader, “Konstructionen weiblicher Homosexualität in Zeitschriften homosexueller Frauen in
den 1920er Jahren,” in Invertito: Jahrbuch für die Geschichte der Homosexualitäten, 2 Jahrgang 2000,
Homosexualitäten in der Weimarer Republik 1919 bis 1933, Hamburg: Mannerschwarmskript Verlag,
2000, 171.
228
These connections to men continued to reinforce gender hierarchy, even within lesbian
relationships.
Gender hierarchy in lesbian relationships is examined in Mammen’s lithographic
series Lieder der Bilitis (Songs of the Bilitis), from around 1930-32.
315
This series
explores “the power relations between women, rather than between women and men.”
316
Songs of the Bilitis, based on a loose adaptation by Pierre Louÿs, tells the story of a
Turkish priestess named Bilitis, a contemporary of the Greek lyric poet Sappho, who
travels to the island of Lesbos and falls in love with numerous nymphs. Mammen
illustrates the central part of the fable, Elégies a Mytilène, in which Bilitis sings songs to
the nymphs of Lesbos about sleeping, bathing, touching, kissing, and her thirty-year
relationship with the younger nymph Mnasidika. The relationship eventually ends due to
the Bilitis’ jealousy of her lover. The story is written from the perspective of old age, as a
remembrance of her life, after she has experienced love in every possible way.
317
In the lithograph Eifersucht (Jealousy), Mammen explores one of the many
emotions often associated with relationships (figure 4.9). A thin, elegantly dressed
woman leans against a dressing table, laid with makeup and a hairbrush. She sports a
short, mannish haircut, but wears a low-cut, feminine evening gown, elbow-length black

315
The seven images Mammen completed for the series are: Freundinnen (Girlfriends), Eifersucht
(Jealousy), Am Morgen (In the Morning), Die Wahl (The Choice), Siesta (Nap), Beim Schminken (Putting
on Makeup), Damenbar (Ladies Club).
316
Meskimmon, op. cit., 225.
317
The Bilitis states, “These children have loved one another. They taught each other what you don’t
understand. How sweet the love song of a woman is. Man is violent and lazy … I hate him … but women
are all more beautiful. Only women understand what it is to love. Stay with us Bilitis, stay. And in your
soul you will see the beauty of your body reflected in your lover.” Quoted in Hildegard Reinhardt, “Jeanne
Mammen (1890-1976) Gesellschaftsszenen und Porträtstudien der zwanziger Jahre,” Niederdeutsche
Beiträge zur Kunstgeschichte, Band 21/Sonderdruck, München, Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1983, 175.
229
gloves, and long, dangly earrings. Behind her, another woman, presumably her lover,
kneels on the floor, arms wrapped desperately around the standing woman’s waist.
Although barely visible, it is evident that the woman on her knees has a made-up face,
and wears a dress and high heel shoes. She clings pleadingly to her girlfriend’s waist,
face turned upward, imploring her not to leave. The standing woman, on the other hand,
turns her head and closes her eyes, as if she had heard this all before. She leans her
gloved hands against the small table, steadying herself against the woman at her waist,
not wanting to touch or engage with the woman prostrating herself before her.
Opposed to merely glorifying lesbian relationships or creating images intended
for heterosexual titillation, Eifersucht deals with a negative aspect of relationships, giving
the series a realistic sense. By showing the possible ups and downs of lesbian couples,
Mammen has effectively “normalized” the lovers, examining the common theme of
jealousy in art.
318
On this account, Meskimmon describes Mammen’s series as a
“microcosm of women’s own interventions into the debates about female sexuality and
lesbian identity in Weimar.”
319
Mammen’s lithograph is also noteworthy for its
representation of two “femme” women together. Although one woman sports a mannish
hairstyle, both are femininely dressed, calling into question the various prescribed roles in
lesbian relationships.
Mammen’s illustrations do not depict one woman’s experience, but a variety of
settings, contemporary characters and compositions. Mammen never illustrates a passage

318
The theme of jealousy is a common one in art; see, for example, the numerous paintings with this central
theme by Edward Munch.
319
Meskimmon, op. cit., 225.
230
completely, the illustrations loosely interpret the text and Mammen focuses on quiet,
intimate moments between the women - putting on makeup, dancing or a bordello scene.
Annelie Lütgens notes that the Bilitis cycle is really a homage to lesbian love in all of its
forms. “Mammen translated the ‘idyllic, Arcadian drawings’ of the Symbolist Pierre
Louÿs,” she writes, “into her own contradictory time.”
320
The work also moves beyond
typical representations of lesbians or female sexuality, as women depicted through the
lenses of masculine objectification. In Mammen’s illustrations, “the women are not
displayed to the viewer to be looked at; rather the female subjects of the work are active
in their own, internal dramas.”
321
The series of twelve, two-color lithographs was commissioned by Mammen’s
gallerist Fritz Gurlitt, and intended for a small group of print enthusiasts as a luxury
edition. Unfortunately, the series was never commercially printed (only a handful of
sketches and a few prints of the abovementioned seven lithographs were completed) due
to the Nazi seizure of power and the ensuing conservatism, as well as on account of more
stringent censorship laws concerning books and images.
322
Interestingly, Mammen’s
Lieder der Bilitis was not the only erotic print series Gurlitt produced; his gallery
specialized in high-end erotic series similar to the one Mammen was commissioned to

320
Annelie Lütgens, “Nur Ein paar Augen sein …” Jeanne Mammen – eine Künstlerin in ihrer Zeit, Berlin:
Reimer Verlag, 1991, 74.
321
Marsha Meskimmon, The Art of Reflection: Women Artists Self Portraiture in the 20
th
Century, New
York: Columbia University Press, 1996, 107.
322
Fritz Gurlitt’s connection to the Nazi Party as Hermann Goering’s art advisor was not enough to allow
the scandalous and “inappropriate” print series to be published. Meskimmon, We Weren’t Modern Enough,
op. cit., 221.
231
create. In fact, the Gallery Gurlitt was well known for their commission and production
of erotic print series, many of which had homosexual themes.
In 1919, Gurlitt commissioned the artist Charlotte Berend-Corinth to create a
similar series of eight erotically charged prints of the performer Anita Berber (figure
4.10). These images featured Berber alone, in various states of undress and erotically
posed, sometimes touching herself. While it cannot be called lesbian imagery per se,
since Berber is not engaging with another woman, contemporary audiences would have
undoubtedly made a connection to homosexuality because of Berber’s open bisexuality.
The sexuality of the artist, the married Berend-Corinth, was never called into question
after the creation of this series. Mammen, on the other hand, perhaps on account of her
unmarried status, has consistently been considered a lesbian artist since the rediscovery
of her work, on no firmer evidence than the subject matter of her art.
Like Mammen’s work, Berend-Corinth’s series was produced in a limited, luxury
edition, and was intended for very specific collectors.
323
While Mammen’s Lieder der
Bilitis has often been used as evidence for her “lesbian identity,” it should be well noted
that, she was a working, professional artist seeking commissions and sales. Like other
artists at this time, Mammen’s skill and renown as an illustrator, as well as the previous
success of such print cycles for the gallery, allows one to conjecture that had the Lieder
der Bilitis lithographic cycle been completed, it would have undoubtedly been successful.
Be that as it may, one could also argue that Mammen derived pleasure from creating and
looking at such images.

323
Although Berend-Corinth produced other print series for the Gallery Gurlitt, her prints of Anita Berber
were the most popular and best selling.
232
Robin Reisenfeld has noted the new, important role of art dealers and publishers
in the twenties, who “served as a liaison between the artist and client.”
324
While
printmaking in Germany was revitalized at the turn of the century, the market
experienced a renaissance at the end of World War I and the beginning of the twenties.
Many new collectors partook in this boom, as inflation soared and the economy faltered,
making prints and other works of art more secure investments than the devalued Mark.
325
For the first time original artist’s prints were available to a wider audience, primarily the
educated middle and upper middle classes, who were able to purchase original artworks
for much less than paintings or sculptures. As Reisenfeld puts it, “Fritz Gurlitt and Paul
Cassier epitomized the enterprising, innovative gallery owner in Germany who actively
supported the graphic arts as an important medium in contemporary art … Often the
dealer and publisher of prints was the same individual, [as in the case of] Fritz Gurlitt,
who published Oskar Kokoschka’s cycle Columbus Chained.”
326

324
Robin Reisenfeld, “The revival, transformation, and dissemination of the print portfolio in Germany and
Austria, 1890-1930,” in The German Print Portfolio 1890-1930, ed., Richard Born and Stephanie
D’Alessandro, Chicago: University of Chicago, 1992, 27.
325
Before the end of the nineteenth century, printmaking was seen comparable to an artist’s sketch or as a
preliminary stage before creating a finished oil painting. Later, towards the end of the century, artists such
as Max Klinger, helped revive the printmaking medium and elevate it to a fine art status. Klinger was
interested in printmaking, in particular the print cycle, as a Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art. Yet it
was not until “the invention of the dealer, who legitimized the print and print cycle as a fine art commodity,
and the introduction of marketing strategies directed towards a newly emerged prosperous middle class”,
that printmaking was again embraced in Germany. Reisenfeld, “The revival, transformation, and
dissemination of the print portfolio in Germany and Austria, 1890-1930” Ibid, 20.
326
Ibid, 28.
233
Lesbian Life in Berlin
According to Ilse Kokula, the Berlin lesbian scene developed into two groups: the
first was affiliated with the six hundred member private women’s club Klub Monbijou
des Ostens and the Deutsche Freundschafts-Verband (DFV) (German Friendship
Organization).
327
Members of the DFV typically read the magazine Die Garçonne (1930-
32), which had previously been called Frauenliebe (Women’s Love). The other group
aligned themselves with the lesbian club Violetta, which was run by the well-known and
outspoken proponent of women’s and homosexual rights, Lotte Hahn. Violetta was in the
wealthier, more fashionable western half of the city and was affiliated with the Bund für
Menschenrechte (BFM) (The League for Human Rights). Over four hundred members
strong, this group was closely associated with Magnus Hirschfeld and his sex institute.
The women of Violetta were more likely to read the lesbian magazine Die Freundin (The
Girlfriend) (figure 4.11). Die Freundin (1924-33) was the longest running journal of its
kind; it included a page for transvestites, and articles by Magnus Hirschfeld as well as
other doctors and researchers. The magazine included advertisements for women’s clubs
and activities. According to Meskimmon, these magazines, and the lesbian scene of the
day, had far less “to do with the political end of the gay and lesbian movement and more
to do with the modish forms of women’s culture. Thus the garçonne as a term entered
into multiple contexts – media, fashion, scientific typology and literature – through which
sexuality was framed in the Weimar Republic and thus suggested manifold readings of

327
Ilse Kokula, “Nachwort,” Lila Nachte: Die Damenklubs im Berlin der Zwanziger Jahre, ed, Adele
Meyer, Berlin: Edition Literature, 1994.
234
the ‘type’ and the ‘name’.”
328
Petra Schlierkamp has noted, however, that although these
magazines were not heavily politicized, they were an essential part of the lesbian,
bisexual, and transvestite culture, providing valuable information about women’s clubs
and where women could meet other like-minded women.
329
La Garçonne was also the title of a popular French novel of 1922 by Victor
Margueritte that tells the story of a young, bisexual, career girl, Monique Lerbier. “It is
from this source, rather than biological science, that the term garçonne was derived in the
period.”
330
This novel about the independent New Woman was soon translated into
German in 1924, and became an overnight success. While Margueritte’s novel set the
stage for the appearance of the garçonne as a type of New Woman, the stylized
appearance of this figure was greatly influenced by fashion design and illustration. The
garçonne’s look stood for cultural modernity and unconventional sexuality, yet critics
bemoaned the style, decrying it as a symbol of the degeneration of society.
331
Berlin was notably freer and less conservative than other German cities. After
World War I, Berlin competed with Paris as the best destination to enjoy wild,
uncensored nightlife. Both cities were renowned for their tolerance towards gays and
lesbians, and next to Paris, Berlin was considered the center for lesbian life. In the

328
Meskimmon, We Weren’t Modern Enough, op. cit., 206.
329
Petra Schlierkamp, “Die Garçonne,” in Eldorado: Homosexuelle Frauen and Manner in Berlin 1850-
1950 Geschichte, Alltag und Kultur, in conjunction with the exhibition at the Berlin Museum May-July,
1984, Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 1984, 1992, 169.
330
Meskimmon, op. cit., 206. The novel was immensely popular, selling 20,000 copies by 1922. By 1929,
it was translated into numerous languages, selling over one million copies. The Garçonne was also the
name of a popular Berlin lesbian club opened by Susi Wannowsky in 1931, at Kalckreuthstrasse 11, in
West Berlin.
331
Gill Perry, Women Artists and the Parisian Avantgarde, Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1995, 116.
235
twenties, the homosexual scene burst into full view. Suddenly gay clubs were openly
advertised, and a wealth of gay and lesbian magazines were available at newsstands.
Novels about lesbians, explanatory texts, as well as guidebooks to lesbian clubs, were
readily available. The lesbian clubs of the twenties were “more than just a sexual scene
for women, [they] were a place where artistic and independent women could go to be out
in public without the intrusion of men and a place where new, modish female identities
could be played out through fashion and performance.”
332
What caused this sudden openness and freedom, which stood in stark contrast to
the conservatism of Wilhelmine culture? Although four and a half years of war probably
could be (and was) blamed for what was seen as a ‘loosening of morals,’ the greatest
changes came from the newly elected democratic government.
333
In the early years of the
Republic, the new Weimar government relaxed and or did away with many of the strict
censorship laws which had previously existed. While some of these were re-instated in
the mid-twenties, the early years of the Republic laid the groundwork for a freer, more
open society. New magazines, publications and films were rapidly produced without the
earlier fear of persecution. In fact, during the War and in the early years of the new
Republic a spate of ‘educational’ films were released which covered controversial and
previously taboo topics, such as prostitution, drug use, and homosexuality. Although the

332
Meskimmon, “The Garçonne,” in We Weren’t Modern Enough, op. cit., 207.
333
Magnus Hirschfeld has noted that morals had already begun to change before the First World War. Due
to changes in society beginning with the French Revolution, and later the Revolution of 1848 in Germany,
morality had already begun to change in the nineteenth century. A massive shift took place right before the
outbreak of World War I. “Whereas formally sexuality had, in accordance with bourgeois concepts of
chastity, been developed in a mystical darkness, there arose at the turn of the century, a tremendous current
of thought, an erotic enlightenment movement.” Hirschfeld, The Sexual History of the World War, op. cit.,
12.
236
films provided a sympathetic view of the topic under consideration, they also retained a
sensationalist, titillating element, which caused them to be criticized often and later
banned. For Meskimmon, “the debate concerning homosexuality [in the twenties] was
both a rational request for scientific definition and at the same time an argument for
cultural change waged through such forms as film, theater, popular press, fashion and
art.”
334
After 1926, homosexuals, and lesbians in particular were more forcefully attacked
by conservatives who attempted to reign in what they saw as the degeneration of society.
For example, the conservative gynecologist Hugo Sellheim publicly decried
homosexuality, arguing “that the ‘new Germany’ could only progress by cultivating a
‘natural’ division of sex roles,” adding, to underscore his point, that, “where there is true
culture the sexes move away from one another and develop their differences to the
extreme.”
335
In 1926, a new law was brought into effect to help control and ban the
publication of Schund und Schmutz Schriften (trash and filth publications) with the
intention of protecting youth. This law was often used to ban gay and lesbian magazines
in public places, such as libraries and cafes. As a result, the lesbian magazines
Frauenliebe and Die Garçonne were both banned from public distribution in 1931, and
Die Freundin was not allowed to publish for twelve months.
336
On this account, Maud

334
Meskimmon, We Weren’t Modern Enough, op. cit., 201.
335
Hugo Sellheim quoted in Madeline A. Böcker, “Sexual Encounters: Transvestitism, Homosexuality and
Pornography in the work of Christian Schad in the late twenties.” unpublished MA dissertation for the
Courtauld Institute, London, 1998, 20.
336
In Berlin in the early twenties, Die Freundin and numerous other magazines created for women who
loved women were readily available for purchase at kiosks or from street vendors. In other German
speaking cities they were sometimes banned, censored, or at the very least, more difficult to find.
237
Lavin writes that “our popular image of wild nightlife among homosexuals in Berlin in
the twenties should be tempered by records of its precarious existence under the law. One
must also keep in mind that the participants were born in more conservative Wilhelmine
times when acknowledgment of homosexuality was in its most fledgling state.”
337
Nightlife in Berlin, and elsewhere, changed drastically after World War I.
Suddenly, people were eager to put some of the tragedy and sorrow of the War behind
them and, to enjoy life. The previously discussed new worker class which developed
during the twenties, was also a big boon to leisure-time activities, and nightlife was
certainly no exception.
338
The loosening of morals, combined with the initial relaxing or
abolishing of censorship laws, also worked towards increasing the variety of erotic
nightlife in Berlin. Suddenly, clubs were no longer monitored with the same sort of
vigilance as they were in the Wilhelmine period, when vice police would periodically
raid nightclubs in hopes of catching lewd acts or illegal behavior punishable by fines, and
in extreme cases, closure of the establishment. The relaxation of censorship laws had a
positive effect on both homosexual and heterosexual establishments. Homosexual clubs
were suddenly legal to exist as such, and heterosexual clubs enjoyed new freedoms in the
types of acts which could be performed. In this milieu of freedom, each club tried hard to
outdo the next with strip shows, nude tableaus and transvestite performances, promising
ever wilder nights than the last.

337
Maud Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife: the Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch, New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1993, 241.
338
See chapter two for a more detailed analysis of the new worker class and leisure activities.
238
Many of the numerous clubs catering to homosexuals became popular places to
see and be seen in Berlin. Heterosexuals began flocking gay clubs, such as the popular
Eldorado, to see transvestite stage acts and watch same-sex couples dancing with one
another. These clubs were not secret hideaways only available for those ‘in the know;’
rather, they were openly discussed in the magazines and literature of the day. Another
source of information on such establishments were the popular new types of guidebooks,
which offered an alternative view of the city to the one provided by the typical travel
guide. These guides will be discussed at length in the second half of this chapter.
Special clubs or organizations just for women (Frauencluben) filled a niche
which had previously existed only for men. During the Weimar era over twenty different
clubs catering solely to women were in existence.
339
These clubs frequently held fancy
dress balls and organized parties specifically for women. Klub Violetta held parties called
“Calling Card Ladies’ Bar” (Damenball mit Saalpost) and the “Dance Roulette,” while
Klub Monbijou was famous for its “Bell Dance” where “young lads” or Bubis (the more
masculine of the partners, similar to today’s term ‘butch’) would ring bells for the “gals”
or Mädis (the more feminine partner or ‘femme’). Women, both straight and gay,
frequented these locales, and they became especially popular for the many actresses,
dancers and other artists who lived in Berlin. In some of the clubs men and heterosexual
couples were welcomed, and the lesbians became tourist attractions for the curious. In
other clubs, men were completely forbidden, even if they were homosexual.

339
In addition, over 160 bars and clubs catering to homosexual men and women existed during the Weimar
period.
239
These clubs were an excellent place to socialize and network, and for artists such
as Mammen, they were places to observe and sketch. “Out” lesbians such as the
performer Claire Waldorff (1884-1957) and the openly bisexual dancer Anita Berber
(1900-1928) were frequent guests at these popular Berlin clubs. Adele Meyer notes that
many female artists, who were not lesbian, used and benefited from the camaraderie of
the female clubs as well.
340
An artist with deep socialist sympathies, Käthe Kollwitz, in
her memoirs, wrote about meeting women such as Gertrude Sandmann, Charlotte Wolff
and Gerda Rotermund at the clubs.
Mammen was well known at the end of the twenties for her images of women’s
clubs. Even today, these are some of her most popular images. This association with
women’s clubs, which also catered to Berlin’s lesbians, is yet another reason why many
have identified Mammen as a lesbian herself. While not a given, this association is not
completely off the mark, for Mammen’s oeuvre included many such images. Even when
not representing Frauenclubs, Mammen’s imagery centered on women and woman to
woman relationships. Yet, she moved through this world like a ghost, observing and
sketching, leaving no other evidence to support either the possibility of hetero- or
homosexual relationships.
Lavin’s discussion of Hannah Höch’s nine-year lesbian relationship with the
Dutch writer Til Brugman as “one of the most enduring and stable bonds of Höch’s life”
is useful as a comparison with Mammen.
341
It is not clear whether Höch identified as

340
Adele Mayer, ed., Lila Nachte: Die Damenklubs im Berlin der Zwanziger Jahre, Berlin: Edition
Literature, 1994.
341
Maud Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, op. cit., 188.
240
lesbian or bisexual, but this must be considered under the vastly different conditions of
sexual identity of the time. No one made such clear-cut distinctions about sexuality
during the Weimar period, as they do today. Lavin notes, “between themselves, Höch and
Brugman did not seem to feel it necessary or desirable to define their relationship as
lesbian; in their letters, they discussed it simply as a private love relationship.”
342
Höch’s
relationship was accepted by her family and friends, yet she and Brugman did not
participate in homosexual organizations. Höch never had a public lesbian identity.
Mammen’s work covered many aspects of the homosexual world, from small,
private Damenclubs (women’s clubs) to transvestite bars, to lesbian masked balls. Her
images depict primarily the establishments intended for women, although she does
occasionally illustrate clubs for gay men as well. Mammen was not alone in her
illustration of this world, for the subject of ‘girlfriends’ was extremely popular in Weimar
Berlin - for fine artists such as Rudolf Schlichter, Richard Ziegler and Tamara de
Lempicka, as well as for authors and songwriters.
Although many other neue Sachlichkeit artists chose similar subject matter,
Christian Schad’s drawings of (mostly) gay clubs are some of the only works to come
close to the sensitivity and sympathetic eye of Mammen.
343
Neither artist caricatures or
makes a spectacle out of the subject matter, choosing instead to illustrate tender moments
between same sex couples. This rendering of a sort of sensitive ‘knowledge’ is possibly

342
Lavin, Ibid.
343
Although Schad’s drawings of male homosexuals, in particular his images commissioned for Moreck’s
Guide are sensitively rendered, Schad is most often remembered for his highly eroticized, voyeuristic
painting of 1928, Freundinnen, (Girlfriends). The painting shows two ‘girlfriends’ lying on a bed
masturbating. Neither woman touches nor looks at the other, engaging instead, and provocatively, with the
(presumably male) viewer.
241
another reason why Mammen has often been labeled a lesbian, yet for various reasons,
Schad’s similar subject matter has not brought his heterosexuality into question. Is this
because Schad was married and had children, while Mammen was not, a lifestyle choice
that was considered somewhat unusual for a woman at the time? Was this because Schad
gained more notoriety as an artist? Because he painted more varied subject matter? Or
merely because he was male?
344
We must be careful, as historians working today, to not project too much of our
own contemporary understanding onto the art of the past. Erwin Panofsky, writing in
1940, warns scholars about the often subtle ways in which, “our estimation of those
‘intentions’ is inevitably influenced by our own attitude, which in turn depends on our
individual experiences as well as on our historical situation.”
345
We must examine the
period and cultural signifiers as best as possible, at the same time striving not to apply too
much from our own time, onto the artwork of another era. To quote Richard Meyer,
“artistic intention does not reside within the work of art … rather, [it] is shaped, and
partially produced, by the interpretive attitude and historical moment of the scholar who
retrieves it.”
346

344
Madeline Böcker states that although Schad began painting images of homosexuals in the mid-twenties,
such as his painting Count St. Genois D’Anneaucourt, 1927, his interest in the subject matter peaked after
Moreck commissioned him in 1929/30 to create a number of images of homosexuals and transvestites for
the Guide. Böcker, “Sexual Encounters: Transvestitism, Homosexuality and Pornography in the work of
Christian Schad,” op. cit., 6.
345
Erwin Panofsky, “The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline,” 1940, quoted in Richard Meyer,
“Identity,” in Critical Terms for Art History, 2
nd
Edition, edited by Robert Nelson and Richard Schiff,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.
346
Richard Meyer, “Identity,” in Critical Terms for Art History, Ibid, 2003.
242
Magnus Hirschfeld and Berlin’s Sex Institute
Magnus Hirschfeld was one of the most world-renowned sex reformers of the
early twentieth century. In the late nineteenth century, he began working and publishing
articles on sex with an emphasis on homosexuality, founding the first homosexual
organization- The Scientific-Humanitarian Committee (Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres
Komitee, WhK) in 1897. At the beginning of the Weimar Republic he opened up a sex
institute in Berlin, the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Science), the
first of its kind. Not only did the Sex Institute research homosexuality and ‘abnormal’
sexual behavior, but it was also a place to obtain contraceptives, information on family
planning, and abortions, all of which were illegal at the time. The Institute housed
Germany’s first Marriage Center as well as a clinic for the study and treatment of
venereal, and other sexually transmitted diseases. The Institute possessed a
comprehensive library, open to the public, as well as a museum, which displayed the
popular “Gallery of Derangements of the Sexual Instinct”.
347
Hirschfeld and his partner
ran the institute, which became somewhat of a center or hangout for gays and lesbians at
the time. In 1923, Hirschfeld began the Bund für Menschenrechte BfM (League for
Human Rights), which strove to protect the rights of homosexuals. The institute ran until
the Nazis came to power in 1933, when his library was pillaged and burnt and the
institute shut down. Hirschfeld, himself a Jew as well as homosexual, then immigrated to
France, dying in the south of France not long after, in 1935.

347
Mel Gordon, Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin, Venice, CA: Feral House, 2000,
165.
243
Over the years, Hirschfeld published numerous books and articles on a variety of
topics, ranging from male and female homosexuality, to morals during and after World
War I. His name was often used in conjunction with topics dealing with homo- and
heterosexuality, lending an air of authority to the study, film or book at hand. Such is the
case with the guidebook Einführung zu Berlins Lesbischen Frauen (Guide to Berlin’s
Lesbians) 1928, which prominently advertised an introduction from Hirschfeld.
Hirschfeld and the author of Berlin’s Lesbians, Ruth Margarette Roellig, explain in the
introduction that lesbians are not sick or inferior to heterosexuals. The book was seen as
an important contribution for lesbian women, for while gay men and heterosexuals had
many similar publications, women had none. The guide is similar to books like Führer
durch das “lasterhafte” Berlin (Guide to “Immoral” Berlin) in that it describes specific
locales and the type of entertainment one can expect to find there. In 1931, Hirschfeld
commissioned Mammen to create a number of drawings, including, Die Garçonne (also
titled Dirne auf grüner Couch (Prostitute on a Green Couch), and Der Herr der Welt (The
Man of the World) for his book, Sittengeschichte der Nachkriegszeit (Moral History of
the Post-war Period) (figures 4.12-4.13).
Hirschfeld was originally a firm believer in the third sex model, also called in-
between-ism, which he and fellow doctor Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825-1895) conceived
of together. Based on nineteenth-century notions of homosexuality, in-between-ism saw
gays and lesbians as a kind of “third sex.” The major promoters of this idea “shared a
view of homosexuality as natural and in some sense androgynous, whether as a
244
congenital condition or the presence of a female character in a male body.”
348
By
stressing the “naturalness” of homosexuality, proponents argued that homosexuality was
a fact of biology. “If you could show it to be a part of nature, rather than an activity going
against nature, then you could argue that society had no business trying to suppress it.”
349
The third sex was considered a ‘variation’ on heterosexuality and therefore normal. At
the time, the third sex theory was seen as a way for homosexuals to forge an acceptable
identity. The argument was also used to help in the fight for legal reform, since it stated
that homosexuality was a result of nature rather than a criminal act, and therefore should
not be punished as such. Weimar era supporters of the third sex model continued to
propose homosexuality as “neither a vice nor a crime, nor a sickness and therefore a
variation. [Because of this, it] was not to be thought of in terms of cure.”
350
By 1910 Hirschfeld had primarily moved away from this point of view, looking
instead at broader possibilities for homosexuals. However, in 1919 Hirschfeld made a
‘guest’ appearance in the film about homosexuality, entitled Anders als die Andern
(Different from the Others) in which as a scientist, he explained the third sex model. The
film, by Richard Oswald (1880-1960), fell under a new genre called Aufklärungsfilme
(‘educational hygiene’ films), which began to be produced just before the Weimar period,
yet became more explicit with the abolishment of all censorship laws in 1919 – although

348
Richard Dyer, “Less and More than Women and Men: Lesbian and Gay Cinema in Weimar Germany,”
in The New German Critique 51, Fall 1990, 19.
349
Dyer, “Less and More than Women and Men,” Ibid, 20.
350
Ibid.
245
many of these laws were reinstated in 1920.
351
The film and Moreck’s guidebook both
point to the new sexual openness and awareness in Weimar society. Although this notion
is often mythologized as part of the ‘golden twenties,’ especially in later books and films
such as Cabaret, “the richness and diversity of [gay culture] – in bars, organizations,
publications, friendship networks and much else – continues to astonish, certainly
disabusing anyone of attachment to a model of sexual history as an ineluctable linear
movement towards the enlightened present.”
352
I bring in the aforementioned film and
references to the wealth of gay culture as further evidence of the times in which Moreck’s
Guide was written and published. This was a time of numerous lesbian/gay cafes,
magazines, novels and even a gay oriented theater, such as the Theater des Eros of 1921-24.
While the third sex model continued to be espoused by many in the twenties,
lesbian magazines such as Die Freundin and Die Garçonne also discussed other
possibilities for lesbian identity, moving away from biological determinism. The
alternative to the third sex model proposed a primary bisexuality, stating that all
[people] possessed a ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ side. A popular text that
supported this notion was the oft-quoted The Love of the Third Sex (Die Liebe
des Dritten Geschlechts) of 1904. The author, Johanna Elberskirchen, writes that
‘There is no absolute man. There is no absolute woman. There are only bisexual
variations’.
353
Although Elberskirchen’s 1904 text was originally connected to a
biological model, Die Freundin’s reprint sought to move beyond fixed gender
stereotypes, proposing instead that “there are no ‘natural’ womanly heterosexuals
and ‘unnatural’ manly lesbians, but a whole range of women who identify along a
gender and sexual spectrum.”
354

351
Aufklärungsfilme were a series of films that used a melodramatic story format to deal with social
‘problems’ such as prostitution, venereal disease, alcoholism, prison reform, and homosexuality. Anita
Berber starred in two of Oswald’s Aufklärungsfilme, one on prostitution and the abovementioned film about
homosexuality.
352
Dyer, op. cit., 5.
353
Johanne Elberskirchen, Die Liebe des Dritten Geschlects, 1904, quoted in Meskimmon, We Weren’t
Modern Enough, op. cit., 222.
354
Ibid.
246
Like Hirschfeld’s original research, the Austrian sexologist Otto Weiniger also
believed that sexuality was biologically determined. However, his popular and overtly
misogynistic book Sex and Character of 1903, took a conservative stance, seeking to
define respectable bourgeois roles that would ultimately “help” men and women to fulfill
their “normal” biological needs. Many sexologists at the turn of the century and well into
the twentieth century, whether reformist or conservative, agreed that a woman was
determined by her biology, that she was overwhelmingly sexual, and that her purpose
was primarily reproductive.
The sex reform movement, which began in Germany in the late nineteenth
century, also had an impact on the lives of gays and lesbians.
355
While primarily known
for its work advocating safe and legal abortion and the legal distribution of
contraceptives, the sex reform movement (which included in its ranks Magnus
Hirschfeld) was opposed to Paragraph 175, because it limited individual rights. Most,
although not all, sex reformers felt that homosexuals should be treated equally and given
the same rights as any other individual. Although laws were relaxed and punishments
lessened against homosexuals, during the Weimar period, Paragraph 175 was never
completely abolished, and in 1933 it was renewed with increased conservative vigor.

355
See chapter two for a more detailed analysis of the sex reform movement in Germany.
247
Unofficial Views and Sites of Pleasure Navigated by the Guidebook
“Berlin is a city of oppositions, and it is a pleasure to discover them.”
356
In her book, Rome: A City out of Print, Rose Marie San Juan notes the
importance of guidebooks for fifteenth and sixteenth century pilgrims, who she posits as
an early form of tourists to Rome.
357
In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
travelogues, travel accounts and diaries became popular, as many people made the Grand
Tour. These books were read for pleasure as well as for travel information. In this sense,
they were doubly useful. While tourists and guidebooks, then, have been in existence in
one way or another for centuries, the face of tourism (and guidebooks) changed
dramatically with the industrialization and modernization of the city. Suddenly in the late
nineteenth and early part of the twentieth centuries, tourism and even the tourist began to
change. A major part of this shift was due to the economic status of the new tourist.
Previously, tourists had primarily been members of the upper classes, those who
possessed not only money but leisure time as well. With the industrial revolution and
modernization, more people were able to participate in tourism. During the 1920s the
concepts of the weekend and leisure time for all were developed, when new laws for
working hours were instituted. Additionally, the increase in dull, repetitive jobs fueled an
interest in leisure time escapes, such as amusement parks like Luna Park in Berlin, movie
theaters, and nightclubs, as well as traveling to other cities. Siegfried Kracauer noticed

356
Moreck, op. cit., 7-8.
357
Rose Marie San Juan, “Roma ricercata: The Pocket Guidebook and the City’s Tourist Itineraries,” in
Rome: A City out of Print, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.
248
this trend and referred to it as the ‘cult of distraction,’ by which he meant the urge to
distract oneself from the monotony of one’s day. In the words of Kracauer:
Critics chide Berliners for being addicted to distraction, but this is a petit
bourgeois reproach. Certainly, the addiction to distraction is greater in Berlin than in the
provinces, but the tension to which the working masses are subjected is also greater and
more tangible; it is an essentially formal tension, which fills their day fully without
making it fulfilling.
358
The new guidebooks filled a much needed new niche; distraction for the bored,
yet over-stimulated white-collar worker.
The first official tourist guidebook in Germany covering the Rhineland area, was
published by Karl Baedeker (1801-1859) in 1839. The accuracy and attention to detail of
the Baedeker made it a huge success, and he went on to write about numerous cities and
regions throughout Europe. These informative guidebooks were then published in a
variety of languages. The company Baedeker founded is still in existence today, creating
the small, information packed guides that he made popular. Tourism and guidebooks
were greatly affected by World War I. The War all but ended tourism in Germany, and
for Germans. After the War, tourism picked up again, yet, it did not reach the level of the
pre-War boom until the second half of the Weimar Republic, with the return to economic
stability.
359
Although alternatives to Baedeker’s guides began to appear before the turn of
the century, a wide variety of guides appealing to a larger cross-section of the public, did
not begin to appear until the War was over.

358
Siegfried Kracauer, “Cult of Distraction: On Berlin’s Picture Palaces,” The Mass Ornament: Weimar
Essays, translated, ed., Thomas Y. Levin, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press, 1963,
1995, 325.
359
Berlin brought in over two million tourists annually during the boom years. Rudy Koshar, German
Travel Culture, Oxford: Berg, 2000, 72.
249
The War had another effect on tourism and guidebooks in the twenties. Due to the
horrendous circumstances of warfare, the War had the effect of loosening morals. During
wartime, prostitution rose as women sought to support children on their own, rapes
increased as soldiers invaded countries and seedy entertainments for soldiers exploded.
After World War I, then, Germany could not return to prewar prudishness. Instead, the
new Republic provided a ripe environment for titillating nightlife, especially in large,
liberal cities such as Berlin. Soldiers returning from the battlefield looked for the same
titillation they had known during the wild, anarchic war years. The Weimar Republic also
boasted a freer society, vastly different from the society of pre-war Wilhelmine
conservatism and the abandonment of strict censorship laws suddenly allowed for a
flowering of adult entertainment, from books and films, to nightclubs and cabarets.
Alternative guidebooks, which emphasized seedy nightlife, were available as
early as the turn of the century. Rudy Koshar notes examples from New York and
Chicago, which were described as “gaslight guides.”
360
True to their name, these guides
were intended for those (namely men) who wished to explore these cities after dark, go to
the places to which locals went, and experience something racy, sexy, and quite possibly,
illegal. While similar guides could be found in Germany before and during the War, it
was not until the beginning of the Weimar Republic that the market for such guidebooks
exploded. Berlin in particular became known for its titillating nightlife throughout
Germany and beyond. In the early 1930s the visitors’ bureau in Berlin issued the
promotional slogan, “A Visit to Berlin for Everyone,” which Moreck notes as particularly

360
Koshar, Ibid, 79.
250
inclusionary and evidence for the usefulness of his book. During the Weimar Republic,
alternative guides became trendy coffee-table books, demonstrating the owner’s open-
mindedness, as well as challenging the authority of Baedekers. These books (as well as
many of the establishments included) pushed the envelope of respectability, something
that became quite popular in bourgeois circles that were seeking to shed the conservative,
‘correctness,’ of pre-war Germany. It became trendy, not only for artists, actors and
writers, to see and be seen, in gay, lesbian and transvestite clubs.
Like Paris in the late nineteenth-century, then, Berlin in the twenties became the
destination for pleasure seekers, and the small, unofficial guides sought to capitalize on
this. Repeatedly, Berlin was described as a kind of sightseer’s Mecca, and the new wealth
of guidebooks helped one to enjoy it to its fullest. Tourists often wrote of Berlin’s
voyeuristic attractions. Wyndham Lewis’ 1930 account, for instance, states: “The
German capital was the most diverting place in Europe for the sightseer,” adding that to
fully enjoy it one must not be “morally squeamish.”
361
Moreck writes that when
discussing the area in the middle of Berlin, the Friedrichstrassebahnhof to
Leipzigerstrasse, “The man from the provinces can experience a fairytale-like world of
light, women and the erotic.”
362
The cultural critic Curt Moreck sought to profit from the move away from
Wilhelmine sensibilities toward the new quest for leisure time activities. As he put it,
“Every city has an official and an unofficial side, and it is superfluous to add that the

361
Wyndham Lewis, The Hitler Cult, London, 1939, quoted in Berlin: Literary Images of a City/Eine
Grossstadt im Spiegel der Literatur, ed. Derek Glass, Dietmar Rösler, and John J. White, Berlin: Erich
Schmidt Verlag, 1989, 129.
362
Moreck, op. cit., 11.
251
latter is more interesting and more informative of the essence of a city … Those who are
looking for experiences, who long for adventure, who hope for sensations - they must go
into the shadows.”
363
Thus he begins his 1931 Führer durch das “lasterhafte” Berlin
(Guide to Immoral Berlin), a virtual roadmap through the underbelly of the metropole.
Unlike the Baedeker, the Immoral Guide does not highlight the war monument and the
Gothic cathedral, those traditional landmarks of German nationalism. Instead, Moreck’s
Guide focuses on the bars and nightclubs of Berlin, especially those establishments
catering to male homosexuals and lesbians.
Aside from Moreck’s offering, a wealth of other books were available for those
who sought out less traditional travels. These included Berlin: What’s Not to be Found in
the Baedeker, 1927; So It Seems-Berlin, 1927; and Berlin’s Lesbians, 1928. Some of
these were translated into English or French, while others, such as Moreck’s Guide, were
published only in German. Moreck’s Guide catered, then, to a strictly Germanophone
audience. San Juan notes that the non-translated guidebook “must have addressed a
circumscribed range of readers, many of whom were permanent or long-term residents of
the city. This rationalized conception of the city was not an outsider’s view but rather a
new detached view from within.”
364
Like the guidebooks that are the subject of San
Juan’s study, Moreck’s Immoral Berlin is an “insiders guide” to the subculture of the
metropolis. Offering a “detached view from within,” Moreck employs the “objective”
point of view of traditional guidebooks although his account offers an alternative map to

363
Curt Moreck, “Wir zeigen Ihnen Berlin,” in Führer durch das “lasterhafte” Berlin, Leipzig: Verlag
moderner Stadtfuhrer, 1931, translated in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. by Anton Kaes, Martin
Jay and Edward Dimendberg, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994, 564.
364
Rose Marie San Juan, Rome: A City out of Print, op. cit., 66.
252
Germany’s capital city.
365
Moreck wrote the following lament about the typical offerings
of the standard guidebooks, which, according to him, refer the tourist
to a tiring succession of representative sites and curries to the zeal of those who
feel an irredeemable loss in passing unknowingly by a monument, building, or
locality to which some kind of historical significance is attached. Oh this
historical significance! The landmark of boredom. It is a preservation of the past
that amounts to mummified yesterdays. Traveling, however, means experiencing
the present in all its intensity.
366
Moreck’s Berlin is the living, breathing metropolis, not the stagnant Berlin of the past.
Yet Koshar has noted that, “Berlin was a city of unending possibility that nonetheless
needed to be categorized and controlled, its darker topographies mapped and
measured.”
367
In this way Moreck’s Guide was similar to the Baedeker for it provided a
roadmap to Berlin, while allowing the traveler freedom to choose one’s own route.
Many contemporaries of Moreck shared his view. For example, the sociologist
Franz Oppenheimer cast the idea of modern tourism in opposition to the former
concentration on “dead monuments.”
368
Karl Baedeker’s Handbook for Northern

365
Ibid, 66.
366
Moreck, “Wir zeigen Ihnen Berlin,” in Führer durch das “lasterhafte” Berlin, translated in The Weimar
Republic Sourcebook, op. cit., 564. The contrast between the Baedeker upper middle class Guide and
Moreck’s Guide, lies primarily in the sights that it advises its readers to explore. The Baedeker and
Moreck’s Guide were also fundamentally different in their layout and presentation. The traditional
Baedeker was neatly broken down into sections and subsections. Historical background is provided for
each site or place to be visited and important touristic information is given as well. Opening and closing
times, addresses, and entrance fees are just some of the facts the reader finds readily available in the
Baedeker, with every written entry. On the other hand, Moreck’s Guide is for the most part devoid of such
practical information. Moreck’s Guide provides the name of the establishment and occasionally the street
name, but usually only when the establishment and the club share the same name, for example, the
Jägerkasino in the Jägerstrasse. The Baedeker provides detailed descriptions on how to find establishments
as well as fold out city maps, whereas Moreck leaves his readers in the dark, cloaking the establishments in
an air of mystery and secrecy.
367
Koshar, op. cit., 87.
368
Koshar, op. cit., 80.
253
Germany also includes a preface for the reader, although one quite different in tone from
Moreck’s Guide.
The Handbook for Northern Germany, is designed to assist the traveler in
planning his tour and disposing of his time to the best advantage, to render him as
far as possible independent of the services of hotel-keepers, commissionaires, and
guides, and thus to enable him the more thoroughly to enjoy and appreciate the
objects of interest he meets with on his tour.
369
All of the alternative guidebooks emphasized their difference from the traditional
guide through witty titles that poked fun at the well-known Baedeker and what it might
have been leaving out. Implying a certain caché and originality that could be obtained by
choosing his Guide, Moreck jokes that if you want to read what millions of others read,
than you should “pick up the Baedekers.”
370
Some of these guides get right to the point,
notifying their readers, in their titles, of the type of cliental to which the book is catered.
Publishing houses such as the Munich firm Piper released a whole series of alternative
guidebooks, titled, What’s not to be found in the Baedeker, for cities such as London,
Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Prague, Leipzig, Hamburg and Cologne. These guides differed
from the Baedeker in both style and substance. Written by popular authors of the day,
these guides were lighter in tone than the Baedeker. However, although they included
more humor, contemporary “reviewers noted that each volume also offered much of
sociological importance through pithy descriptions of neighborhoods and social life.”
371

369
Karl Baedeker, Northern Germany as far as the Bavarian and Austrian Frontiers, Karl Baedeker
publisher: Leipzig, 1910, unpaginated.
370
Moreck, op. cit., 8.
371
Koshar, op. cit., 78.
254
San Juan posits, “publishers, who vied for marketable texts and formats, forged
links with professional intellectuals who wrote and revised guides.”
372
The guidebooks
and publishing trade “increased its economic alliances with merchants and services that
also catered to travelers, forming something of an [underground] tourist industry.”
373
As
previously mentioned, some guides, such as Berlin’s Lesbians, include a foreword by a
renowned figure, such as the sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, to validate the book in the
eyes of its readers. This strategy relates to San Juan’s theory on the economic aspect of
guidebooks, which must be considered, as well, when discussing the Immoral Guide. As
a noted expert in the field of sex and sexual deviances as well as an outspoken advocate
of gay rights, Hirschfeld was a natural choice to write a foreword for such a book.
The Immoral Guide and others like it could be found at any train station, hotel
lobby, or downtown kiosk (in straight, S&M, gay, lesbian or nudist versions), offering a
nighttime extension to sightseers who utilized the Baedeker by day.
374
But these books
were not the traveler’s only option for an explanation of “the shadows”. The more
adventurous could also hire a guide, who often loitered around train stations waiting for
the inexperienced or the curious tourist (figure 4.14). Many of these “guides” were
employed by the various establishments in order to bring in customers. Koshar notes that
these “guides were also known for their ability to circumvent police closing hours: when
all the bars shut down, they could always lead thirsty carousers to another out-of-the-way

372
San Juan, op. cit., 60.
373
Ibid.
374
Gordon, Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin, op. cit., 53.
255
place open for business – for a price.”
375
This other side of Berlin could be dangerous and
surely added to the allure for many adventurous visitors.
Inside Moreck’s Guidebook
Of primary interest to this chapter is, of course Moreck’s Guide, since it included
among its illustrations one female artist: Jeanne Mammen, giving her the opportunity to
contribute to an expression of the newly liberalized Berlin. Moreck wrote numerous
studies in the late teens through the early thirties. These included guides to morals and
morality, studies of films, as well as popular culture. Führer durch Berlin was the only
guidebook Moreck ever wrote. Heavily influenced by the previous selection of similar
guidebooks, Moreck’s Guide appeared rather late in the Weimar Republic (1931). His
Guide was not particularly different from those that had come before it, such as What’s
not to be found in the Baedeker (Was nicht in Baedekers steht) and Berlin’s Lesbians
(Berlins lesbische Frauen), except, perhaps, that Moreck’s Guide intentionally catered to
a wide audience, seeking a variety of entertainment choices (although the general
perceived audience was probably male). While Moreck’s Guide included clubs for men,
women, gays and straights, these establishments were generally discussed from the
standpoint of a curious observer or voyeur. Lesbian clubs were generally mentioned more
as titillation for the male reader than as a guide to where women could enjoy one another
without men.

375
Koshar, op. cit., 87.
256
Many publications included information about Berlin’s seedy sex culture, but also
about where to find respectable hotels, restaurants and cafes. For example, Berlin
Nightlife!, 1920 listed restaurants, cabarets and nightclubs, while The International
Travel Guide, 1920/1 led travelers to Berlin’s and other cities’ gay clubs, restaurants and
hotels. Moreck’s Guide discusses cafes and restaurants as well as nightclubs, with
illustrations such as Mammen’s Café Reimann, around 1931, now lost, that depicts a
fashionable New Woman and her male friend smoking and drinking coffee in an outdoor
café (figure 4.15). Although Moreck’s Guide does focus heavily on sex establishments,
both bordellos and clubs with erotic entertainment as well as detailed descriptions about
areas to pick up prostitutes, he also includes non-sexual entertainment. Popular diversions
such as Luna Park, the six-day bike races, boxing, wrestling, cafés, and restaurants are
also reviewed in Moreck’s Guide.
Moreck’s Guide differs from other more traditional travel guides in that it does
not include street addresses or maps of exact directions on how to find the various
locales. Names of establishments are provided, neighborhoods are revealed, even
occasionally street names, but without exact addresses, the Guide takes on a slightly
illegal, forbidden air. Moreck even warns his readers of the dangers involved in exploring
some areas of the city. Although the Guide does not include street addresses or opening
and closing times of establishments, Moreck does provide suggestions on when one
should visit the various sites. In this way, the Guide retains a quality present in some of
the earliest guidebooks, those intended for pilgrims on their pilgrimages to Rome. The
following passage from the Immoral Guide is characteristic:
257
The Tauentzien is most definitively an afternoon street. It is most intensely alive
between 5 o’clock tea and dinner … Beautiful women once again stroll along the
Tauentzien, before they disappear for their 5 o’clock tea and afternoon dance …
Men, hurrying toward their afternoon jeu, review the lineup of mundane beauties
one last time, examine the flirtatious youth, and, in passing, fight a few visual
duels. Yet acquaintances are made, perfected, that characteristically Berlin genre
of street acquaintances that is bound by no obligation.
376
San Juan, in her study of sixteenth and seventeenth-century guidebooks, notes the
emphasis placed on experiential time, as she describes the guide’s instructions to visit “all
seven major churches within the course of a day and to repeat this process between
fifteen and thirty times.”
377
Not only was the pilgrim’s day mapped out by the churches
he must visit and the exact number of times he should return, but visits at particular times
of year were taken into consideration as well. Like the Immoral Guide, practical
information on how to find the churches (or nightclubs) was at a minimum, because both
guides were expected to operate within “the established networks of local communities,”
be it the gay community or the religious community of pilgrims.
378
While the Baedeker is laid out in terms various of sections of the city, Moreck’s
Guide is divided into types of entertainment. For example, his categories include cafés,
restaurants, and gay and lesbian establishments as well as other forms of entertainment,
such as the six-day bicycle races or boxing matches. Within these sections, the clubs or
events are described in a prosaic style, with a long and descriptive text about what can be
seen or experienced there. Intermittently, the text is illustrated with prints, drawings and

376
Curt Moreck, “Führer durch das lasterhafte” Berlin, quoted in Women in the Metropolis: Gender and
Modernity in Weimar Culture, “The Conspiracy of Women,” Annelie Lütgens, Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1997, 93.
377
San Juan, Rome: A City out of Print, op. cit., 70.
378
Ibid, 71.
258
photomontages from various Weimar artists, all of whom were well known at the time.
The images loosely illustrate the text as opposed to the Baedeker, which often includes a
photograph or an illustration of the architectural or historic site being described. Even
when an illustration is included in the Baedeker, a practice especially common in the
earlier editions, the image is always a technical rendering. In Moreck’s Guide, by
contrast, the people inhabiting the image are equally, if not more, interesting than the
location being described. The customers or clientele make the place special in the Guide
to Immoral Berlin, be they transvestites, lesbians, gays, drug users, or hopeful actresses.
For example, in chapter seven, Moreck titles a section “The nosy have been warned!” and
then goes on to discuss seedy bars and other “unsavory” establishments, placing
emphasis on the ‘unusual’ clientele.
379
Mammen’s watercolor Kaschemme Berlin N
(Dive Bar North), around 1930, which was commissioned specifically for the Guide,
illustrates this section (figure 4.16).
380
Moreck’s text describes in a general sense, Dive Bar North and other beer joints
like it, not naming specific establishments, but listing the streets in the working class area
in the north of Berlin where they may be found. This section focuses on the underworld
of crime rather than the subculture of gays, lesbians or sexual fetishes covered in much of
the rest of the book. Mammen’s image aptly captures the seediness of this “bar for
criminals.”
381
In her watercolor, three destitute locals gather at a simple table, nursing

379
Moreck, Führer durch das “lasterhfte” Berlin, quoted in Mel Gordon’s Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic
World of Weimar Berlin, op. cit., 212.
380
This work also carries the title Bierseidelbetrachtung I, (Beer Philosophy I), in Jeanne Mammen: 1890-
1976 Monographie und Werkverzeichnis, ed. Jörn Merkert, Köln: Wienand Verlag Köln, 1997.
381
Gordon, op. cit., 214.
259
large glasses of spirits. Cigarettes dangle limply from the corners of their mouths and add
to the smoky haze of the bar. No one in the Kaschemme pays attention to other customers
or the viewer, so caught up are they in their own survival. Nothing about this bar
Mammen has sketchily rendered is inviting or looks entertaining. The two men who share
the table with a woman in the foreground attest to this, as one slumps despondently over
his beer, his unshaven chin and greasy hair almost completely blocking the face of
another red-eyed customer. Moreck’s text is equally uninviting and describes the scene as
full of “career criminals” and not particularly friendly to gawking tourists. Yet, Moreck
jokingly adds, “Everyone once in Berlin!” implying that every corner of the city should
be experienced at least once.
382
It was trendy at the time for men and women of the better
classes to experience and “move about the underworld in their tail-coats and ball-gowns,”
and often these shady establishments were popular because they continued serving
alcohol long after the regular establishments had closed.
383
While Moreck’s Guide borrowed from previous Weimar guidebooks, he was also
greatly indebted to earlier sociological studies. Koshar notes the influence of Hans
Ostwald’s study of 1905/07, of male and female prostitution in Berlin, as well as
Ostwald’s innovative, pamphlet-sized documentary series on Berlin life, the Grosstadt-
Dokumente (Document of the Metropolis).
384
Despite earlier contributions to the genre,
Koshar nevertheless contends that Moreck’s text “provided a more honest and
informative representation of the diversity of sexual preferences in Berlin than was

382
Ibid, 217.
383
Joachim Schlor, Nights in the Big City: Paris, Berlin, London 1840-1930, translated by Pierre Gottfried
Imhof and Dafydd Rees Roberts, London: Reaktion Books, 1998, 138.
384
Koshar, op. cit, 84.
260
hitherto available for tourist audiences.”
385
Even though the reader was assumed to be
male, the sheer variety of entertainments with accurate descriptions of what was
available, was previously not available, and what made it different from the other guides
were the images.
Relying mainly on textural descriptions, the Immoral Guide is nevertheless
periodically illustrated by one of the nineteen commissioned artists, of whom George
Grosz, Heinrich Zille, Jeanne Mammen, Christian Schad and Paul Kamm, are the most
well known today, if mostly in the German-speaking world.
386
Moreck’s Guide was
different in this respect, for his was the only one that included original color artwork by
well-known artists of the day. While other guidebooks, such as What’s not to be found in
the Baedecker, did include a few illustrations by artists, the artists chosen were lesser-
known and the images were limited to black and white reproductions of sketches. Not all
of the artwork was commissioned especially for Moreck’s guidebook. Rather, he often
chose from existing artwork of the abovementioned artists, which fit in with his text.
The Eldorado and other transvestite and homosexual nightclubs became popular
settings for many of the neue Sachlichkeit artists. These nightclubs appear again and
again in paintings, drawings and prints of this time. The Eldorado club in particular,

385
Ibid.
386
The nineteen artists – illustrators of Moreck’s Guide are: Matthias Schultz, Paul Kamm, Jeanne
Mammen, Christophe, Hans Reinhardt, Imre Goth, Christian Schad, Benari, W. Krain, Kurt Wirth, Otto
Linnekogel, Hans Leu, Alois Florath, Heinrich Zille, Melchior, Duperrex, Georg Grosz, F. Meisel and F.
Hilf. The three most often represented artists are: Paul Kamm-seventeen illustrations, Jeanne Mammen-
fourteen images, and Christian Schad with ten. All but one of Mammen’s illustrations was printed in color,
while the majority of images by other artists were printed in black and white, pointing to the importance
accorded to Mammen’s images.
261
attracted a wide audience. The Weimar journalist Peter Sachse noted in the Berliner
Journal in 1927:
The latest rage of Berlin “Society” is to spend an evening at the Eldorado. Over
there sits a well-known director of a major bank, just there is a gentleman from
the Reichstag and a lot of theatre and film people … Those who are here for the
first time and are curious play a game trying to guess who out of the “special”
clientele is really a “lady” and who is really a “man”. They don’t always guess
right. The techniques of dressing up, doing one’s hair and make-up have achieved
undreamt of perfection.
387
Originally conceived of as a homosexual and transvestite club, with specific nights and
areas for gays and lesbians, during the mid-to-late twenties the Eldorado became
fashionable for heterosexuals to attend.
In many ways the Eldorado has now become synonymous with the Weimar
Republic, the twenties, big-city hedonism and debauchery. Christopher Isherwood, the
English ex-patriot who lived and wrote in Berlin for many years, describes the experience
of a tourist’s first visit to the Eldorado:
In the ‘Eldorado’ in the Motzstrasse, first of all everything is absolutely as it
should be in the best of all possible Hollywood cabarets. There is a true
appropriate glitter and a nigger-hubbub-super-sex and pink champagne. All that is
quite regular; all is comme il faut as well. No sightseer entering the ‘Eldorado’, I
imagine would ever get the fusion of the exotic and the peculiar. Nothing of the
sort. Quite the reverse, for all at first sight is depressingly normal. The sightseer
might be disappointed even – he might certainly feel that he had been misled into
visiting a respectable resort, where nothing naughtier than a simple-hearted
Victorian strumpet was to be found […] . But the elegant and usually glass-eyed
young women will receive him, with an expansive politeness, and he will buy one
of these a drink […]. After a drink or two, she will whisper to the outlandish
sightseer that they are men. Oh dear – so after all the sightseeing eyes are going to
be satisfied! And they will ogle at the slightly smiling bland Edwardian ‘tart’. His
companion will invite the skeptical tourist to pass his disbelieving paw beneath

387
Peter Sachse, “Der verkehrte Ball im “Eldorado-Kasino,” quoted in Von der Dada-Messe zum
Bildersturm: Dix+Berlin, Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin, 1991.
262
her chin. She will catch hold of it without coyness, and drag it under this
massively fashioned feature. All doubt is then at an end. There, sure enough, the
fingers of the sightseer will encounter a bed of harsh, unshaven bristles as stiff as
those of a toothbrush.
388
Numerous artists such as Otto Dix, George Grosz and Christian Schad, used the
Eldorado or other clubs as their theme or subject matter. Mammen, too, often chose
Berlin nightclubs and bars, both heterosexual, and those that catered to gays and lesbians,
as locations for her images. Since she was well known during the period for her
illustrations pertaining to this theme, she was a natural choice to help illustrate Moreck’s
Guide.
Of the five artists chosen for the project, Mammen was the only female artist, she
created fourteen images for the Guide.
389
Mammen’s images show women together, some
obviously lesbian, some not. Not only did Mammen create all of the illustrations for the
Damenclubs (clubs specifically for women), but she also provided illustrations of
prostitutes, café scenes and other diversions in the city. These works almost always
included and centered on the interpersonal relationships between women. Mammen’s
illustrations contrast sharply with her colleagues who also illustrated the Guide. Of all of
the artists featured, Christian Schad’s work comes the closest to Mammen’s in style and
tone. Schad, like Mammen, renders his subject matter sensitively, rather than with harsh

388
Christopher Isherwood, An Isherwood Selection, London: Pearson Schools, 1979, quoted in Berlin:
Literary Images of a City/Eine Grossstadt im Spiegel der Literatur, op. cit., 129.
389
Mammen’s illustrations include; Im Romanischen Café also titled Berliner Café, c. 1930, Café
Reimann, c. 1930, Damenklub, also titled Im Damenklub II, c. 1929, Diele Café König, also titled Ball-
Orchester, c. 1930, Aschinger, c. 1926, Maskenscherz In der ‘Silhouette’, also called Kroll-Redoute, c.
1928, Kurfürstendamm-Uhlandeck, c. 1930, Demi-monde, c. 1930, Ballfest, also called Sie Repräsentiert
or Faschingsszene, c. 1928, Im ‘Krug zum grünen Kranze’, also called Drei Personen in der Kneipe, c.
1930, Um den Alexanderplatz, also titled Bierseidelbetrachtung II, c. 1930, Kaschemme Berlin N., also
titled Bierseidelbetrachtung I, c. 1930, Jägerkasino (an der Jägerstrasse), also titled Café Nollendorf, c.
1930, and In hohen Stiefeln, c. 1930.
263
criticism. Although both artists employ the stark realism often used by the Berlin neue
Sachlichkeit artists, their images are not without empathy for their subjects. This is
especially true of Schad’s graphic work, both drawings and prints. Known primarily for
his large-scale paintings, Schad’s graphic oeuvre exudes an altogether different feeling
from his cool, verist paintings. While not a social critic in the manner of Grosz or Dix,
Schad’s subjects, painted in cool, bright colors, retain an icy distance not only from one
another, but also from the viewer. Schad’s works on paper convey a softness, no longer
visible in his paintings, in which he successfully erases all brushstrokes to create a
modern, machine-like precision; a look highly favored in the twenties.
The majority of Schad’s drawings reproduced in the Guide center on homosexual
subject matter. Popular gay bars and clubs are shown and Moreck describes the type of
clientele one will find in the various locations. As someone who frequented and
participated in this scene, Christopher Isherwood also describes many of these watering
holes. Isherwood’s descriptions, while often elaborated on for the sake of good
storytelling, still provide an insiders view. Moreck’s descriptions, by contrast, are often
aimed at the uninitiated and written by a heterosexual, rather than a homosexual male.
Most of Schad’s drawings appear in the section of the Guide entitled “Get
together locations for man-to-man love.”
390
Five illustrations by Schad, for different boy
bars or clubs, highlight the chapter. Moreck’s text becomes very detailed when describing
the Bürger-Casino, as well as all of the other clubs in the chapter devoted to gay and
lesbian entertainment. Moreck states: “Near the Spittelmarkts [neighborhood], on the

390
Joachim Schlor, Nights in the Big City: Paris, Berlin, London 1840-1930, op. cit., 130.
264
Friedrichgraacht, twinkles the red lamp of the Bürger-Casino, near the dark water of the
Spree.”
391
He goes on to describe the dimly lit, old-fashioned neighborhood, with quaint
houses and the unexpected club, which is identifiable only by the reddish glow of the
neon sign for the club. The light tinkle of piano music spills out onto the street, while
inside blonde Burschen (handsome, well-built, working-class men) gather around the bar
drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. “Between the tables boys dance with boys, and
men dance with boys.”
392
Schad’s drawing Bürger-Casino an der Friedrichgraacht, 1930,
echoes this description, highlighting, in the foreground, an older, balding man with a
young, attractive boy leaning against his chest (figure 4.17). The bar is decorated with a
Chinese motif popular at the time; paper lanterns hang from the ceiling, while open
trelliswork sections off the bar, creating cozy areas for flirting or more.
Mammen’s watercolor Jägerkasino, 1931 was also produced as a commission for
Immoral Berlin, and illustrates Moreck’s descriptions of this lesbian club on Jägerstrasse
(figure 4.18).
393
He advises his readers that this is “not the right club for those who are
not sexually open-minded,” but does not say much more about the club itself. Instead, he
writes more generally about the nightlife in the area around the Kurfürstendamm and
compares it to the entertainment available in other cities such as Paris. Mammen’s
Jägerkasino presents an instance of how the illustration could play a key role in helping
the uninitiated or sexually curious, by accurately illustrating what one may find there. In

391
Schlor, Ibid, 134.
392
Ibid, 136.
393
This work is also titled Café Nollendorf in Jeanne Mammen: 1890-1976 Monographie und
Werkverzeichnis, op. cit..
265
Jägerkasino, Mammen illustrates a dimly lit, yet elegant club, full of women, with only
two men, visible. One man is part of the entertainment, playing the violin, the other, has
his back to us, making it unclear whether he, too, is a musician, or a male customer. Two
well-dressed women dance close to one another, while other women are scattered at the
small tables throughout the club. A heavy-set female maitre d’ watches over the scene,
while a young waitress delivers two beers to a table. Moreck’s description of the
neighborhood, establishments and clientele is not dissimilar to Mammen’s watercolor,
where all the women are upscale and tastefully dressed, yet it is the artist’s illustration
that provides tangible clues about the atmosphere of the club and the particularity of its
clientele.
Jeanne Mammen’s She Represents, 1928, an image like many others reproduced
in Immoral Berlin, was not commissioned for the purpose of illustrating a specific club,
but combined with Moreck’s text, gave a more general description of a lesbian masked
ball taking place at a nightclub (figure 4.19).
394
Recall, that unlike more conventional
guidebooks of the period, many of the images in Moreck’s Guide do not directly
correspond to the written text; instead they seem to illustrate it in a more general sense.
This is the case in She Represents. Here Mammen has captured a carefree and happy
moment within a lesbian club or specially themed party. As a woman, Mammen was not
only able to gain entrance into the lesbian’s world, but she also seems to become part of
it, as her subjects appear confidant and unfazed as they are observed. The central figure

394
Ballfest is the title used in Moreck’s Guide, however Mammen’s catalogue raisonné and the Archive
catalogue the work as Sie repräsentiert (She Represents) and Faschingsszene (Carnival Scene), the work
was also published with the titled of Maskenball (Masked Ball).
266
in the work, dressed in a feminized version of a tuxedo, poses rakishly for Mammen. She
wears a low-cut tuxedo vest, arms bare, except for the white tuxedo cuffs. Mannish
tuxedo pants, a black top hat, scarf and dangling cigarette complete the picture of the
modern Garçonne or Bubi. Images such as this, of the androgynous type, were often
highly charged because they could “refer not only to issues of gender roles, but ones of
basic sexual identity as well.”
395
The masked ball was a reoccurring theme for Mammen,
yet it was not limited to lesbian or women-only events. The artist also illustrated masked
balls or costume parties with men and women together, evidencing her interest in gender
role reversals or role-playing, within a variety of situations. These parties were especially
popular in the Weimar Period, and attest to the interest in and possibility of exploring
various roles for men and women.
Another theme that recurs in Moreck’s Guide, is prostitution. Prostitution in
Berlin has been discussed at length in chapter two, in regard to the neue Frau; here I will
examine prostitution as a leisure activity in the city, and as it pertains to the guidebook. A
large section of The Immoral Guide is devoted to Moreck’s detailed descriptions of
where one could find prostitutes and their numerous types. Moreck describes the different
types of prostitutes available in various neighborhoods, noting that any type of perversity
can be satisfied “for a price.”
396
Mammen’s oeuvre included the depiction of prostitutes,
so it should come as no surprise to learn that some of her images of prostitutes were
included in Moreck’s Guide. Only one other artist, W. Krain, illustrated an image of a

395
Lavin, op. cit., 187.
396
Moreck, op. cit., 30.
267
prostitute in the Guide, although all of the other artists featured in the book drew
prostitutes at one time or another.
Mammen’s three images in this section show different types of prostitutes
available at locations throughout Berlin. Since the first of these, In hohen Stiefeln (In
High Boots) has been discussed at length in chapter two, Mammen’s remaining two
images of prostitutes will be examined here. Mammen’s prostitutes are the slightly more
upscale, less fetishistic variety of the Kurfürstendamm-Uhlandeck and the higher class,
demi-monde, who operated inside the clubs or club-bordello combinations. The latter
prostitutes were well dressed, flirtatious and coquettish, not unlike today’s ‘hostesses’ in
clubs in Japan. In Mammen’s watercolor Demimonde, circa 1931, now lost, two young
women dressed in the neue Frau style engage with the viewer, as if to invite ‘him’ to sit
at the empty seat at their small table (figure 4.20). A warm glow bathes the table and one
of the girl’s face and arms, as she leans forward into the light. Both women wear short,
fashionable evening dresses, bangles on their arms and hats on their heads. They smoke
cigarettes from long, elegant holders and slowly sip the drinks on the table before them.
The middle ground of the drawing shows a crowded club full of well-dressed men, some
accompanied by women; all of them wear the prerequisite tuxedo for upscale
establishments. In the background, two girls dance in revue-style, with short skirts and
legs kicked high simultaneously. Moreck’s Guide explains the difference between the
various types of Berlin prostitutes, and where one can expect to find them.
In between the ‘boot-whores’ and demi-monde are the street hookers who
frequented the Kurfürstendamm (or Ku’damm as the locals call it) around the corner
268
from Uhlandstrasse, not far from where Mammen lived and worked. In Mammen’s color
illustration, Kurfürstendamm/Uhlandeck, from around 1931, now lost, three tall, thin
prostitutes wait for their next customers (figure 4.21). Two of the three regard the viewer
somewhat suspiciously, eyes narrowed and lips pursed together. The woman in the
middle stands with her back to us, only her profile visible. All three wear short, modern
dresses, hats and high heels. One woman, to the far left, stands with her hand
provocatively resting on her hip, a fox fur draped across her shoulders. The center woman
also wears a shawl with fur pom-poms attached to the ends.
The women stand in the light of a nearby neon sign advertising an unidentifiable
snack bar; behind them a small sign on the wall advertises a hotel. Like the food available
in the nearby café, these women are also available and made all the more convenient by
the inexpensive, pay by the hour hotel in front of which they stand. In the background,
two men, possible customers, loiter facelessly nearby. Moreck describes street prostitutes
such as these in his Guide, linking them to mass consumption and the growth of the sex
market. He states, “The girls on the street corners lay out their carpet of smiles before our
feet and with a couple of sharp glances they access our suitability, [these] ‘cavaliers,’
embody the eroticism of the city.”
397
Curt Moreck’s Guide to Immoral Berlin moves beyond one’s expectation of the
guidebook to offer a view of the city unlike that which the Baedeker or other more
conventional guidebooks provided. The curious German-speaking tourist or the Berlin
native seeking to expand his or her nightlife repertoire, could have turned to the Immoral

397
Moreck quoted in Koshar, op. cit., 89.
269
Guide. The Guide not only functioned as a practical tool for decoding the signs and
symbols of the world after dark for the uninitiated, but it also doubled as a cultural
memento or sociological study of Weimar Berlin. The small pocket-sized book would
have functioned not only as a handy guide to lead one through the nighttime
establishments, but also as a coffee-table conversation piece, signaling one’s knowledge
and up-to-date-ness. The book would have appealed to men and women, gays and
straights at a relatively sexually open and relaxed time in Germany’s history - a time
which now stands in stark contrast to the years after the rise of the National Socialists in
1933, only a year and a half after the publication of the Guide to Immoral Berlin.
The choice of neue Sachlichkeit artists such as Jeanne Mammen and Christian
Schad to illustrate the Guide demonstrates their connection to this world, both as
observers and participators in the scene. As the only woman artist to be included,
Mammen’s illustrations not only accurately detail the teeming nightlife for Berlin’s
lesbians, but also the world of the neue Frau. As a New Woman herself, Mammen
examines and critiques this new type with an authority that adds to the Guide. Moreck
and the publishers of the Guide made a conscious decision to include Mammen and
contemporary neue Sachlichkeit artists. By choosing to illustrate the Guide in the gritty
verist style, these artists acknowledged and celebrated an artistic movement that
examined and embraced the supposed moral and immoral sides of Weimar Berlin, and
the intersections between them.
2 7 0
Figure 4.1
The New Hat, c. 1929, A331
Watercolor and pencil
Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Graphic Collection (Inv.-Nr. GL 1868)
The New Hat, c. 1929, A331
2 7 1
Figure 4.2
You Have Very Beautiful Hands, c. 1929, A312
Watercolor and pencil
Axel Springer Verlag AG, Berlin
You Have Very Beautiful Hands, c. 1929, A312 You Have Very Beautiful Hands, c. 1929, A312
2 7 2
Figure 4.3
Two Women in the Library, c. 1928, A272
Watercolor, pen and ink, published in Ulk
Lost
Two Women in the Library, c. 1928, A272
Watercolor, pen and ink, published in Ulk
2 7 3
Figure 4.4
Two Women, Dancing, c. 1928, A273
Watercolor and pencil
Private Collection
Two Women, Dancing, c. 1928, A273 Two Women, Dancing, c. 1928, A273
2 7 4
Figure 4.5
In the Morning, c. 1930-32, D21
Lithograph
Förderverein der Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung e.V.
In the Morning, c. 1930-32, D21
2 7 5
Figure 4.6
Siesta, c. 1930-32, D23
Lithograph
Förderverein der Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung e.V.
Siesta, c. 1930-32, D23
2 7 6
Figure 4.7
Two Women on the Balcony, c. 1931, Z172
Pen and ink, published in Simplicissimus
Lost
Two Women on the Balcony, c. 1931, Z172
Pen and ink, published in Simplicissimus Pen and ink, published in Simplicissimus
2 7 7
Figure 4.8
In the Women’s Club I, c. 1929, A346
Watercolor and pencil
Lost
In the Women’s Club I, c. 1929, A346
2 7 8
Figure 4.9
Jealousy, 1930-32, D20
Lithograph
Förderverein der Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung e.V.
Jealousy, 1930-32, D20 Jealousy, 1930-32, D20
2 7 9
Figure 4.10
Charlotte Berend-Corinth, Anita Berber Portfolio, 1919
Lithograph
Published in Femme Flaneur: Erkundungen zwischen Boulevard und Sperrbezirk, 2004
Charlotte Berend-Corinth, Anita Berber Portfolio, 1919
Published in Femme Flaneur: Erkundungen zwischen Boulevard und Sperrbezirk, 2004 Published in Femme Flaneur: Erkundungen zwischen Boulevard und Sperrbezirk, 2004 Published in Femme Flaneur: Erkundungen zwischen Boulevard und Sperrbezirk, 2004
2 8 0
Figure 4.11
Cover of Die Freundin, 1928
Published in Eldorado: Homosexuelle Frauen und Männer in Berlin
1850-1950: Geschichte, Alltag und Kultur, 1984
Cover of Die Freundin, 1928
1850-1950: Geschichte, Alltag und Kultur, 1984 1850-1950: Geschichte, Alltag und Kultur, 1984 1850-1950: Geschichte, Alltag und Kultur, 1984
2 8 1
Figure 4.12
Die Garçonne, c. 1931, A400
Watercolor and pencil
Private Collection
Die Garçonne, c. 1931, A400 Die Garçonne, c. 1931, A400
2 8 2
Figure 4.13
At the Butchers’, c. 1931, A401
Watercolor and pencil
Busch-Reisinger Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts
At the Butchers’, c. 1931, A401
2 8 3
Figure 4.14
Café Reimann, c. 1931, A397
Watercolor and pencil,
Lost
Café Reimann, c. 1931, A397
2 8 4
Figure 4.15
Christophe, Right Around the Corner, undated
Published in Führer durch das ‘lasterhafte’ Berlin, 1931
Christophe, Right Around the Corner, undated Christophe, Right Around the Corner, undated
2 8 5
Figure 4.16
Beer Philosophy I, c. 1930, A340
Watercolor and pencil
Private Collection
Beer Philosophy I, c. 1930, A340 Beer Philosophy I, c. 1930, A340 Beer Philosophy I, c. 1930, A340
2 8 6
Figure 4.17
Christian Schad, Bürger-Casino an der Friedrichgraacht, 1930
Lithograph
Published in Führer durch das ‘lasterhafte’ Berlin, 1931
Christian Schad, Bürger-Casino an der Friedrichgraacht, 1930 Christian Schad, Bürger-Casino an der Friedrichgraacht, 1930 Christian Schad, Bürger-Casino an der Friedrichgraacht, 1930
Published in Führer durch das ‘lasterhafte’ Berlin, 1931
2 8 7
Figure 4.18
Café Nollendorf, c. 1931, A394
Watercolor and pencil
Private Collection
Café Nollendorf, c. 1931, A394
2 8 8
Figure 4.19
She Represents, c. 1928, A274
Watercolor and pencil
Private Collection
She Represents, c. 1928, A274 She Represents, c. 1928, A274
2 8 9
Figure 4.20
Demimonde, c. 1931, A395
Watercolor and pencil,
Lost
Demimonde, c. 1931, A395
2 9 0
Figure 4.21
Kurfürstendamm/Uhlandeck, c. 1931, A396
Watercolor and pencil,
Lost
Kurfürstendamm/Uhlandeck, c. 1931, A396
291
CO NCL U SI ON
Peter Jelavich has demonstrated that many of the new Berlin entertainments, such
as, the circus, the cabaret, the varité show, as well as other forms of popular culture, all
formed an integral part of the modern city.
398
These entertainments make up the majority
of the subject matter of Jeanne Mammen’s art of the 1920s, a testament to her
participation in the newly formed Weimar Republic. While the modern city and its
amusements may be the theme or backdrop for Mammen’s Weimar period work, the
characters inhabiting these scenes are almost always women. Interacting with one another
as friends, sisters, mothers and daughters, or lovers, Mammen’s interest in women, and
particularly in women in the urban environment, is evident. This new world of
Frauenkultur exploded in previously unimaginable ways throughout society and spread
to all aspects of life at this time, resulting in women’s only clubs, bars, women’s groups,
women entering the workforce, and so forth.
This dissertation examines the artwork of Jeanne Mammen within the context of
the new forms of modernity of Weimar Germany. Although she has previously been
written about in relation to the idea and context of the neue Frau, I compare Mammen’s
day-to-day life with what it meant to be a female artist working at this time and how she
specifically reacted to the modernity surrounding her. Rather than merely dismissing
Mammen’s large artistic output in this period as work she produced to survive
financially, I propose that Mammen was an active participant in this period who derived

398
Peter Jelavich, Berlin Cabaret, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: Harvard University
Press, 1993, 1997.
292
pleasure from viewing the modern woman and mass culture, and from creating images
which took the neue Frau, and mass culture and its entertainments as their central forms.
Previous literature has often positioned Mammen in the traditional masculine role of
misunderstood artist as genius. I posit that it is more useful to examine her work in
relation to the Weimar period as a whole. During the twenties, Germany experienced
radical transformations throughout the urban, technological, and consumer culture, which
emphasized, like never before, display, spectacle and mass media. These themes repeat
themselves endlessly throughout Mammen’s art, and attest to her eager participation in
this new world as both a consumer and a producer. Mass media was new and played a
key role in the Weimar Republic. New forms of production and spectatorship were
developed through the completely new or revamped radio, magazines, newspapers and
film. This dissertation examines the interplay between modern art and popular culture, a
theme that as Kirk Varnedoe states, was “central to what made modern art modern at the
start of this century.”
399
Mammen was one among many talented, working women artists in the Weimar
Republic. By singling her out as a case study for my dissertation, I am neither attempting
to elevate her work above that of other artists at this time, nor trying to slot her into a
patriarchal art historical lineage that has previously favored male artists and the concept
of artist as genius. Instead, I shed light on the period as a whole, using Mammen and her
artwork as an example of the ways women worked and participated in the Weimar
Republic. In this sense, I agree with Marsha Meskimmon, who advocates several

399
Kirk Varnedoe, High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture, New York: Museum of Modern Art,
Distributed by Abrams, 1990, 19.
293
readings of women’s art as opposed to one, fixed, singular reading. As she puts it: “to
reformulate these works as having but one meaning within the context of the canon of
German modernism would be to leave those structures intact and to reduce the works to
the status of sidelined minor pieces from the past, speaking only in relation to the
masterworks of tradition.”
400
By examining Mammen’s commercial production, from
fashion illustrations to commissioned book illustrations alongside her sketchbooks and
other non-commissioned work, is to understand the artist in a new way and in a broader
context.
Heretofore, the terminology of the neue Frau has been conceived as a box or
category in which to place all women who looked, behaved, or operated outside
traditional female roles. To remain on the public or popular register, as previous
scholarship on Mammen the “female artist” or “New Woman” has done, is to miss the
finer texture of art and cultural history. According to Ann Wagner, “we have failed to
find the terms in which to see women’s art, failed to point to it in ways that make enough
cultural or aesthetic sense.”
401
Using Jeanne Mammen’s art as a case study, this
dissertation aims to provide a more adequate understanding of the roles, positions and
complexities of women and women artists in Weimar Germany (figure II.1).

400
Marsha Meskimmon, We Weren’t Modern Enough: Women Artists and the Limits of German
Modernism, Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999, 14.
401
Ann Wagner, Three Artists (Three Women), Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1997, 6.
Figure II.1
Mammen in her Atelier, 1975
Photo Gert Ladewig
Courtesy of the Förderverein der Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung e.V.
2 9 4
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Zegher, M. Catherine De, ed. Inside the Visible: an Elliptical Traverse of 20
th
Century
Art, in, of, and from the Feminine, exhibition catalogue, The Institute of
Contemporary Art, Boston: The MIT Press, 1996.
Zuckmeyer, Carl. Als Wär’s ein Stück von mir, Reprinted in translation as A Part of
Myself, trans. Richard and Clara Winston, New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1966, 1970.
314
AP PE ND I X I
Table of Contents for Curt Moreck’s Guide to “Immoral” Berlin
1. Forward-We Want to See Berlin*
1. The city in the West
2. Friedrichstrasse and Kurfürstendamm – the center of amusements
2. Introduction and Nightlife
1. Midnight tea – the big, the small and the half world
2. The five o’clock women
3. Head to head in the Mokkadielen [the name of a gay club]
4. What does one do in a coffeehouse?
3. Dawn Breaks – Strolling on the Street under Neon Signs – Looking for a Movie
House? – When one is Alone …
4. Where One can Begin the Night Right (a Culinary Intermezzo)
1. Do you long for good food?
2. What type would you like to eat?
3. The kitchen of all nations
4. All nations under one roof
5. Where Are We Going? (A difficult City)
1. Amusement Parks, Varitiés and Cabarets
6. Night Establishments, Dancehalls, and Similar Establishments
1. Get together spots for homosexuals [men]
2. Lesbian locales
3. Here are the Transvestites …
4. Night Baths
7. Do You Want a View of the Underworld? – The Underworld and What One Seeks
1. The nosy have been warned!
2. Beer joints
3. Dark street names
4. Sports palaces
Parting Note – Have a Good Journey!
* all translations are my own
315
APPENDIX II
A Selection of Relevant Books in Jeanne Mammen’s Personal Library
French Authors
Apollinaire, Guillaume: Alcools : poèmes 1898-1913, 16. edition, Paris: Éditions
Gallimard, 1920.
Balzac, Honoré de: Béatrix, Paris: Ernest Flammarion Éditeur, undated.
Balzac, Honoré de: Les contes drolatiques / illustrée par Gustave Doré, Paris: Garnier
Frères, undated.
Balzac, Honoré de: Le contrat de marriage, Paris: Éditeurs Calmann-Lévy, 1892.
Balzac, Honoré de: Le cousin Pons. Les parents pauvres, Paris: Ernst Flammarion
Éditeur, undated.
Balzac, Honoré de: La cousine Bette. Les parents pauvres, Tome premier, Vienna: Manz
Éditeur, undated.
Balzac, Honoré de: La cousine Bette. Les parents pauvres, Tome second, Vienna: Manz
Éditeur, undated.
Baudelaire, Charles: Les fleurs du mal / édition critique établie par Jacques Crépet et
Georges Blin, Paris: Librairie José Corti, 1942.
Baudelaire, Charles: Petits poëmes en prose. Les paradis artificiels, Paris: Éditeurs
Calmann-Lévy, undated.
Cocteau, Jean: Antigone. Les mariés de la Tour Eiffel, 9. edition, Paris: Gallimard, 1928.
Cocteau, Jean: Essai de critique indirecte / introduction par Bernard Grasset, Paris:
Éditions Bernard Grasset, 1932.
Cocteau, Jean: Le grand écart: roman , 28. edition, Paris: Librairie Stock, 1924.
Flaubert, Gustave: L'éducation sentimentale : histoire d'un jeune homme, Édition
definitive, Paris: Bibliothèque Charpentier, 1911.
316
Flaubert, Gustave: Salammbô, Édition definitive, Paris: Bibliothèque Charpentier, 1907.
[hs. Besitzervermerk: 'J. Mammen 2.1908']
Flaubert, Gustave: The Temptation Saint Anthony / appendice: versions de 1849 et de
1856, Paris: Louis Conard, MDCCCCXXIV [1924]
Flaubert, Gustave: Trois contes, Nouvelle edition, Paris: Bibliothèque Charpentier, 1908.
Goncourt, Edmond et Jules: La femme au dix-huitième siècle II, Édition definitive, Paris:
Flammarion et Fasquelle, undated.
Goncourt, Edmond de: La fille Élisa / illustrations de H.-G. Ibels, Paris: Calmann-Lévy
Éditeurs, undated.
Hugo, Victor: Notre-Dame de Paris, Tome 1, Paris: J. Hetzel, undated.
[Inscribed: 'Jeanne Mammen, Christmas, 1906']
Hugo, Victor: Notre-Dame de Paris, Tome 2, Paris: J. Hetzel, undated.
[Inscribed: 'J. Mammen, Christmas, 1906']
Louÿs, Pierre: Aphrodite, illustrations d'après les aquarelles de Manuel Orazi, Paris:
Arthème Fayard, undated.
Louÿs, Pierre: Les aventures du Roi Pausole, illustrations d'après les aquarelles de
Carlègle, Paris: Arthème Fayard, undated.
Louÿs, Pierre: Les chansons de Bilitis, accompagnées de 300 gravures et de 24 planches
en couleur hors texte par Notor, Paris: Librairie Charpentier et Fasquelle, 1911.
Mallarmé, Stéphane: Poésies, 35. edition, Paris: Librairie Gallimard, 1926.
Proust, Marcel: A la recherche du temps perdu, tome I: du côté de chez Swann, 35.
edition, Paris: Gallimard, 1919.
Proust, Marcel: A la recherche du temps perdu, tome III: le côté de Guermantes, I, 72.
edition, Paris: Gallimard, 1920.
Proust, Marcel: A la recherche du temps perdu, tome III: le côté de Guermantes, I, 32.
edition, Paris: Gallimard, 1920.
Proust, Marcel: A la recherche du temps perdu : tome IV : le côté de Guermantes, II.
Sodome et Gomorrhe, II, 57. edition, Paris: Gallimard, 1921.
317
Rimbaud, Arthur: Œuvres de Arthur Rimbaud : vers et proses / préface de Paul Claudel,
Paris: Mercure de France, MCMXXIX [1929]
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: Du contrat social ou Principes du droit politique : considérations
sur le gouvernement de Pologne, Berlin: Internationale Bibliothek GmbH, 1922.
Verlaine, Paul: Œuvres complètes de Paul Verlaine, Tome premier, Paris: Albert Messein
Éditeur, 1911.
Verlaine, Paul: Œuvres complètes de Paul Verlaine, Tome deuxième. - Paris: Albert
Messein Éditeur, 1911.
Voltaire: Romans et contes choisis, Berlin: Internationale Bibliothek GmbH, 1921.
Zola, Emile: Nana , Tome 1, Paris: Bibliothèque Charpentier, Eugène Fasquelle Éditeur,
1925.
Zola, Emile: Nana, Tome 2, Paris: Bibliothèque Charpentier, Eugène Fasquelle Éditeur,
1925.
Zola, Émile: Le rêve / illustrations de Carloz Schwabe et L. Métivet, Paris: Marpon et
Flammarion, undated.
German Authors
Brecht, Bertolt: Bertolt Brecht’s Poems and Songs / Auswahl von Peter Suhrkamp. - 1.
Aufl, Berlin, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, undated.
Brecht, Bertolt: Bertolt Brecht’s Hauspostille / mit Anleitungen, Gesangsnoten und einem
Anhang, Berlin, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, undated.
Döblin, Alfred: Berlin Alexanderplatz : The Story of Franz Biberkopf, Berlin: S. Fischer,
1930.
[Inscribed: For Jeanne Mammen from Hans U. (Uhlmann)]
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von: Goethe’s Faust in the Original Version, Leipzig: Insel,
undated.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von: Goethe’s Collected Works, Bde. 1 – 23, München: Georg
Müller Verlag, 1909 – 1923.
318
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von: Goethe’s Collected Works / ab Band 29, hrsg. von Curt
Noch. - Bde. 27 – 43, München: Georg Müller Verlag, undated.
Hildebrandt, Fred: The Dancer Valeska Gert / mit 27 ganzseitigen Bildern, Stuttgart:
Walter Hädecke Verlag, 1928.
Hölderlin, Friedrich: Collected Letters / mit sechs Beilagen, Jena: Eugen Diederichs,
1924.
Hölderlin: We are nothing; what we seek is everything, Hameln: Verlag der Bücherstube
Fritz Seifert, undated.
Mann, Thomas: Observations of an Apolitical Person, 1. - 6. Aufl. - Berlin: S. Fischer,
1918.
Mann, Thomas: The Starving, Beigabe zur Lotterie der Internationalen Presse-
Ausstellung Köln 1928, Gesammelte Werke: Novellen. - Bd. 1., Berlin: Fischer.
Mann, Thomas: Pfitzner’s Palestrina, Berlin: S. Fischer Verlag, 1919.
Wedekind, Franz: Spring Awakening, München, Leipzig: Georg Müller Verlag, undated.
Zweig, Stefan: The Eyes of the Eternal Brother: a Legend, Leipzig: Insel-Verlag,
undated.
Zweig, Stefan: Marceline Desbordes-Valmore: The Lifestory of a Poet / übertr. von
Gisela Etzel-Kühn, Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1920.
English Authors
Pope, Alexander: The Rape of the Lock: a comical tale with drawings from Aubrey
Beardsley, Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, undated.
Shakespeare: Shakespeare’s Work, Teile 1 - 4 / hrsg. von Wolfgang Keller. - Berlin,
Leipzig, Wien, Stuttgart: Deutsches Verlagshaus Bong & Co., undated.
Shakespeare: Shakespeare’s Work, Teile 5 - 7 / hrsg. von Wolfgang Keller. - Berlin,
Leipzig, Wien, Stuttgart: Deutsches Verlagshaus Bong & Co., undated.
Shakespeare: Shakespeare’s Work, Teile 8 - 11 / hrsg. von Wolfgang Keller. - Berlin,
Leipzig, Wien, Stuttgart: Deutsches Verlagshaus Bong & Co., undated.
319
Wilde, Oscar: The Picture of Dorian Gray, translated by J. Cassirer, Berlin: Schreitersche
Verlagsbuchhandlung, undated.
Wilde, Oscar, Oscar Wilde’s Work in German, sechster Band, übersetzt von Paul
Wertheimer, Wien, Leipzig: Wiener Verlag, undated.
Wilde, Oskar, Salome, in Deutsche übertragen von Dr. Kiefer, Leipzig: Reclam, undated.
Various Magazines and Brochures
Das Kunstblatt, hrsg. von Paul Westheim. - Heft 8, August, Potsdam, Berlin: Verlag
Gustav Kiepenheuer, 1922.
Styl: Blätter für Mode und die angenehmen Dinge des Lebens. - II. Jg., Hefte 3 u. 4,
Berlin: Verlag Otto von Holten, 1923.
Styl: Blätter für Mode und die angenehmen Dinge des Lebens. - III. Jg., Hefte 1 – 4 u.
5/6, Berlin: Verlag Otto von Holten, 1924.
Styl: Blätter für Mode und die angenehmen Dinge des Lebens, Sonderheft, February,
Berlin: Verlag Otto von Holten, 1925.
Große Deutsche in Bildnissen ihrer Zeit, Ausstellungskatalog Staatliche Museen,
National-Galerie, aus Anlaß der XI. Olympischen Spiele, August – September 1936,
Berlin, im ehemaligen Kronprinzenpalais.
Große Berliner Kunstausstellung 1927, Katalog, veranstaltet vom Kartell der Vereinigten
Verbände Bildender Künstler Berlins e.V. im Landesausstellungsgebäude am Lehrter
Bahnhof, Berlin: Verlag von G. E. Diehl, 1927.
Art History
Ostasiatische Kunst: Kunstgegenstände aus dem Besitz des Museums für Ostasiatische
Kunst der Stadt Cöln, Versteigerung in Cöln vom 13. bis 15. November 1917, Leitung
Peter Hanstein, Cöln: Math. Lempertz' Buchhandlung und Antiquariat, 1917.
Women in Caricature in France: with 448 illustrations and 72 color images from unusual
and amusing French Caricatures from all Epochs, hrsg. von Gustave Kahn, Stuttgart:
Hermann Schmidts Verlag, [Vorwort von 1907].
320
Wiener Kunstschau in der Berliner Secession, Ausstellungskatalog, Berlin, Jänner bis
Februar 1916, Berlin: Verlag Secessionshaus, 1916.
Worringer, Wilhelm: Formprobleme der Gotik, München: R. Piper & Co. Verlag, 1912.
Artist’s Monographs
Böcklin. Ostini, Fritz von: Arnold Böcklin, Bielefeld, Leipzig: Velhagen & Klasing,
1905.
Bosch, Hieronymus: Hieronymus Bosch / hrsg. von Kurt Pfister, Potsdam: Gustav
Kiepenheuer Verlag, 1922.
Campendonk. Biermann, Georg: Heinrich Campendonk, Leipzig: Verlag von Klinkhardt
& Biermann, 1921.
Cézanne. Wedderkop, H. von: Paul Cèzanne, Leipzig: Verlag von Klinkhardt &
Biermann, 1922.
Daumier, Honoré: Gemälde, Aquarelle, Zeichnungen, Plastik, Ausstellungskatalog
Galerie Matthiesen, Berlin, 21 Februar bis 31 März 1926.
Degas. Grappe, Georges: Edgar Degas: une planche en quatre couleurs, 6 dessins sur
papier mat de grand luxe, 54 illustrations teintées et 1 gravure, Paris: Librairie artistique
et littéraire, undated
Derain. Henry, Daniel: André Derain, Leipzig: Verlag von Klinkhardt & Biermann,
1920.
Ensor, James: James Ensor / Festschrift zur ersten deutschen Ensor-Ausstellung, veranst.
von der Kestner-Gesellschaft, Hannover: Kestner-Gesellschaft, 1927.
Feininger. Wolfradt, Willi: Lyonel Feininger, Leipzig: Verlag von Klinkhardt &
Biermann, 1924.
Guys. Grappe, Georges: Constantin Guys, 24 drawings on superfine unglazed art paper,
39 tinted illustrations, London, Berlin, Paris: The International Art Publishing Company,
undated.
Heckel. Thormaehlen, Ludwig: Erich Heckel, Leipzig: Verlag von Klinkhardt &
Biermann, 1931.
321
Klinger. Schmid, Max: Max Klinger, Bielefeld, Leipzig: Velhagen & Klasing, 1906.
Macke. Cohen, Walter: August Macke, Leipzig: Verlag von Klinkhardt & Biermann,
1922.
Modersohn. Uphoff, C. E.: Paula Modersohn, mit einem Beitrag Bernhard Hoetgers
'Erinnerungen an Paula Modersohn', Leipzig: Verlag von Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1920.
Moholy-Nagy, L.: L. Moholy-Nagy, hrsg. von Franz Roh, Berlin: Klinkhardt &
Biermann, 1930.
Picasso. Schürer, Oskar: Pablo Picasso, Leipzig: Verlag von Klinkhardt & Biermann,
1927 (Junge Kunst, Band 49/50).
Rops. Kahn, Gustave: Félicien Rops / 18 dessins, 28 illustrations, 1 gravure et 3 planches
en quarte couleurs, Paris: Librairie internationale, undated.
Rossetti. Jessen, Jarno: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Bielefeld, Leipzig: Velhagen & Klasing,
1905 (Künstler-Monographien, LXXVII).
Cultural History and Theory
Boehn Max von: Fashion: People and Fashion in the Middle Ages: from the Middle Ages
to the Renaissance / nach Bildern und Kunstwerken der Zeit ausgewählt und geschildert
von Max von Boehn, München: F. Bruckmann A.-G., o.J. [Vorwort: 1925].
Boehn, Max von: Fashion: People and Fashion in the 17
th
Century / nach Bildern und
Stichen der Zeit ausgewählt und geschildert von Max von Boehn, München: F.
Bruckmann A.-G., MCMXIII [1913].
Boehn, Max von: Fashion: People and Fashion in the 18
th
Century / nach Bildern und
Stichen der Zeit ausgewählt von Oskar Fischel, München: F. Bruckmann A.-G.,
MDCCCCIX [1909].
Boehn, Max von: Fashion: People and Fashion in the 19
th
Century: 1790-1817 / nach
Bildern und Kupfern der Zeit ausgewählt von Oskar Fischel, München: F. Bruckmann
A.-G., 1908.
Boehn, Max von: Fashion: People and Fashion in the 19
th
Century : 1818-1842 / nach
Bildern und Kupfern der Zeit ausgewählt von Oskar Fischel, München: F. Bruckmann
A.-G., 1907.
322
Boehn, Max von: Fashion: People and Fashion in the 19
th
Century: 1843-1878 / nach
Bildern und Kupfern der Zeit ausgewählt von Oskar Fischel, München: F. Bruckmann
A.-G., 1908.
Kant, Immanuel: Moralische Schriften, Grossherzog Wilhelm Ernst Ausgabe, Leipzig:
Insel Verlag, MDCCCCXX [1920] (Immanuel Kants Schriften in sechs Bänden, Band 5).
Simmel, Georg: Kant: Sechzehn Vorlesungen, gehalten an der Berliner Universität, 3.
Aufl., München, Leipzig: Verlag von Duncker & Humblot, 1913.
Simmel, Georg: Schopenhauer und Nietzsche: ein Vortragszyklus, Leipzig: Verlag von
Duncker & Humblot, 1907.
Weininger, Otto: Sex and Character, Wien, Leipzig: Wilhelm Braumüller, 1926.

Abstract (if available)

Abstract Cigarette smoking, fashionable, working, and sexually active -- these are just a few of the words that come to mind when describing the neue Frau of Weimar Germany. While these attributes were in many ways accurate, what else did it mean to be a woman in Germany after World War I, living in a world with a variety of new technical advances? My dissertation examines the myths and realities of the New Woman in Weimar Germany (1918-1933) using the artwork of Jeanne Mammen (1890-1976) as a case study. Mammen's work, like that of other, numerous female Weimar era artists, has been all but forgotten. While neue Sachlichkeit artists Otto Dix and George Grosz are familiar names within the art historical canon, Mammen and most of her femalecolleagues, who did work in the neue Sachlichkeit style, are not. Women in general and female artists in particular are frequently marginalized for not being modern enough, to paraphrase the title of a recent study by Marsha Meskimmon. Their art making has come to be regarded either as a hobby or as mere illustration, a category which falls under the rubric of craft rather than the fine arts. However, by examining the artistic production of the period more closely, one finds that women artists worked in a myriad of ways as successful, producing artists.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Royal, Suzanne Nicole (author)

Core Title Graphic art in Weimar Berlin: the case of Jeanne Mammen

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Art History

Publication Date 05/17/2007

Defense Date 11/29/2006

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag graphic art,Janne Mammen,Neue Sachlichkeit,OAI-PMH Harvest,Weimar Germany,woman artist

Place Name Berlin (city or populated place), Germany (countries)

Language English

Advisor Lang, Karen A. (committee chair), Holloway, Camara (committee member), Lerner, Paul F. (committee member), Olson, Todd (committee member), Troy, Nancy J. (committee member)

Creator Email royal@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m491

Unique identifier UC1313509

Identifier etd-Royal-20070517 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-501647 (legacy record id),usctheses-m491 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Royal-20070517.pdf

Dmrecord 501647

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Royal, Suzanne Nicole

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu