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Berlin, city of Bertolt Brecht, Marlene Dietrich, cabaret and German Expressionism, a city identified with a female sexuality - at first alluring but then dangerous. In this fascinating study, Dorothy Rowe turns our attention to Berlin as a sexual landscape. She investigates the processes by which women and femininity played a prominent role in depictions of the city at the end of the nineteenth and into the early twentieth centuries. She explores how in the aftermath of the horrors of World War I, increasing anxieties about the liberation of women and the supposed increase of female prostitution contributed to the demonization of the city not as a focus of desire and pleasure but rather as one of alienation and anxiety.
List of contents
Contents: Preface; Introduction; The Rise of Berlin in Imperial Germany: Theorizing Berlin; City theory in Imperial Germany; Berlin transformed: from trade exhibition to world city; A shop window of modernity; Gender and Modernity in the work of Georg Simmel: The subjective and objective character of culture; The sociology of space; Sexuality and the City in Imperial Berlin: Feminism and prostitution; Hans Ostwald and Die Großstadt Dokumente; Representing Berlin: Transitions: from Imperial Weltstadt to Weimar vamp; Painting the city: the lure of Berlin; Impressions of the Imperial Großstadt; Expressions of the modern metropolis; Bibliography; Index.
About the author
Dorothy Rowe
Summary
This text demonstrates how the sexualized image of Berlin in Weimar Germany arose at the same time as radical social changes in the history and position of women were taking place. It argues that this specific image related to anxieties regarding the role of women in the public realm at this time.
Additional text
'Rowe has provided a valuable service in bringing together important discussions of different disciplines, through a range of fascinating sources.' Belinda Davis, German Studies Review
