We Weren't Modern Enough: Women Artists and the Limits of German Modernism (review)

We Weren't Modern Enough: Women Artists and the Limits of German Modernism by Marsha Meskimmon. Berkeley: California University Press, 1999, 272 pp., $24.95 paperback.

Marsha Meskimmon's We Weren't Modern Enough: Women Artists and the Limits of German Modernism is a genuinely interesting book. As a matter of fact, I found it so engaging that I read it in one sitting, agreeing and arguing with the author on a flight from Toronto to Vancouver. The book is intriguing to me in part because my aunt and my mother grew up in the Rhineland during the 1920s, and my aunt in particular enjoyed the freedom that the Weimar period offered young women. It is also fascinating to me because my grandfather and I took daily walks in the same area less than twenty years later, shortly after World War II, and he filled me with stories of the time "before the disaster." All of these voices have since been stilled, and yet the images they evoked will forever enrich my life. The book helps me to understand what my mother meant when she described two women as being Freundinnen (friends/partners/lovers) even if she never explained what Meskimmon elucidated so well.

Meskimmon divided her book into the following chapters: "The Prostitute," "The Mother," "The Hausfrau," "The Neue Frau," and "The Garçonnne"; with an introduction and conclusion, as is customary. (The book also has an extensive bibliography.) I read the author's surely conscious placement of the chapters on the mother and the housewife at the center of the book as a statement about the changes that she discovered in these two female roles. As a consequence of World War I, women in Germany, like in other parts of the Western industrial world, began to play different roles and consequently to view themselves differently. Women not only took jobs outside the household, but they also participated in a very public discussion about the new ways in which they had emerged into society. Women left the protected apartments and houses of their families and presented themselves in ways that evoked a contrary reaction from their elders, especially men. They stood out as they went with friends to dance halls and coffeehouses in their obviously unique clothes, smoking cigarettes in long holders as they displayed their newfound freedom. Weimar society debated about and elaborated on the new women in magazines, papers, books, coffeehouses, the theater, music, and art. In the accounts of my family members, too, this was an exciting period of exploration and rejection for women.

Meskimmon concentrates on the women artists who captured the challenges that women offered their staid society as they themselves endeavored to sort out their own less than traditional way of pursuing their calling. The most obvious question was surely: How is one a mother and an artist? Other questions hover close by: Wie gibt man sich? (How does one present oneself in public?) How does one enter new sorts of relationships that avoid the traditional calling? To elaborate her quest, Meskimmon chose a painting for the opening of each of her chapters and then contextualized. Thus, for example, she was able to argue through Gerta Overbeck's and Elsa Haensgen-Dingkuhn's paintings of prostitutes that women artists saw such women not as the underbelly of society, as male artists tended to do in opposition to the new public roles of women, but rather as another set of working women. Nevertheless, some of her analyses do not succeed as well as others. For the mother, for example, she chose as the opening painting Dorothea Wüsten-Koeppen's A Woman of 1934 (1934). This painting shows a woman gingerly guiding a baby carriage and looking away from the carriage toward the viewer with a girl/daughter partially behind her. While I appreciate the approach Meskimmon took, she missed some of...