City Girls: Bubiköpfe und Blaustrümpfe in den 1920er Jahren (review)

City Girls: Bubiköpfe und Blaustrümpfe in den 1920er Jahren is a collection of essays based on a symposium held in 2009 at the Babylon cinema and the ICI Kulturlabor Berlin, and constitutes a “Festschrift” for Inge Stephan (17). The quality of the arguments developed in the essays differs greatly: some essays are descriptive, lack a critical argument, and read rather like lexicon entries (see the essays by Ariane Martin, Annegret Pelz, and Renate Berger), while others read like fashion journalism (see the essay by Heike-Melba Fendel), which makes it difficult to recommend the collection as a whole. Some of the major drawbacks of the book are the lack of new insights linked to and the numerous repetitions about the understanding of the New Woman, and furthermore a particularly striking lack of dialog with the research on Weimar women stemming from the USA.

The repetitive views about the New Woman start with the introductory essay, which merely recapitulates widely accepted scholarly opinions about women in the 1920s, such as the New Woman’s freedom of movement, visible in her fashion (9), her jobs (10), and her sporting activities (15–16); the contrast between the media-created image of the New Woman and the social realities of the time (10); and the New Woman as a figure of admiration and fear. While the introduction does bring to our attention the names of several understudied best-selling female writers (13), and of numerous forgotten female painters, photographers, and film directors of the time (15), with the exception of Dagmar von Hoff’s essay on French avant-garde film director Germaine Dulac none of the other female figures pointed out in the introduction is analyzed in the book, although some are mentioned tangentially. Unfortunately, this repetitive streak of the introduction also operates in some essays, whose introductory paragraphs inadvertently fail to captivate the reader (see the introduction of the essays by Julia Freytag and Barbara Kosta, respectively).

Some essays would benefit from better exploring the extant Weimar scholarship and situating their claims and arguments within this larger context. For example, Lydia Strauß’s essay “‘Ich bin Indianer! Bedenken Sie das!’ Else Lasker-Schülers Spiel und Verwandlung im Großstadtdschungel” explores in three brief lines the sources that inspired Lasker-Schüler’s Indianerfigur (82), without giving any consideration to the works of Karl May and to the Native American figures portrayed by Georg Grosz and Otto Dix that permeated Weimar imaginary. Alexandra Tacke’s essay “Hohenflüge und Abstürze: Fliegerinnen in den 1920er und 1930er Jahren” stands out as one of the few in the collection to explore both a German and an American source, namely films depicting female pilots. Although her comparative analysis of the US film Christopher Strong (1933) and the German film Capriolen (1937) is convincing, Tacke overlooks important aspects linked to the American context. For instance, she does not analyze Christopher Strong and its depiction of gender in light of the censorship imposed by the Hays Production Code (although enforced in 1934, the Code had existed since 1930); nor does she view the bat costume worn by the female lead in relationship to the iconic costumes of early American vamps. These oversights however, do not detract from one of the book’s most captivating essays.

Other informative essays are Isabelle Stauffer’s “Von Hollywood nach Berlin: Die deutsche Rezeption der Flapper-Filmstars Colleen Moore und Clara Bow” and Julia Freytag’s “‘Lebenmüssen ist eine einzige Blamage’: Marieluise Fleißers Blick auf stumme Provinzheldinnen und Buster Keaton,” whose strength is that they illuminate the rich artistic interconnections between Weimar Germany and the USA particularly through the medium film. Barbara Kosta’s essay “Die Kunst des Rauchens: Die Zigarette und die Neue Frau” is also worth mentioning, although the author has addressed the same topic in more depth in a previously published book chapter (see her essay...