Berlin Coquette: Prostitution and the New German Woman, 1890–1933 by Jill Suzanne Smith (review)

Smith’s book is an exciting contribution to the growing scholarship about the history of prostitution in modern Germany. With the intent of moving beyond the standard dichotomy of victim/villain, Smith uses myriad sources to sketch a vibrant picture of women in Berlin’s sex trade from the Kaiserreich to the end of the Weimar Republic. In doing so, she argues that cultural texts (popular novels, plays, social-hygiene films, police records, and sociopolitical essays) should be read not only as reflections of their historical time periods but as important shapers of contemporary debate and discourse.

For instance, Chapter 1 uses two Otto Erich Hartleben plays, Georg Simmel’s The Philosophy of Money (Berlin, 1900) and August Bebel’s influential Die Frau under der Sozialismus (Berlin, 1879) to examine fin-de-siècle debates about bourgeois marriage, “free love,” and prostitution. Smith concludes that although the authors use the sex trade to criticize the institution of bourgeois marriage, none of them is “truly able to imagine a world in which women can be both sexually and economically autonomous” (62).

Similarly, in Chapter 2, Smith examines the writings of the prominent German feminists Anna Pappritz, Helene Stöcker, and Hanna Bieber-Böhm to inform her reading of Margarete Böhme’s bestselling novel of 1905, Diary of a Lost Girl. Thus does Smith confirm what several other scholars have contended, that Germany was home to a vibrant and multifaceted reform culture in the early years of the twentieth century. For instance, although many feminist reformers placed the blame for sex-trade conditions at the feet of male johns and pimps, opinions about the culpability of female sex-trade workers were constantly shifting.

In Chapter 3, Smith focuses on such cultural artifacts as cinematic works, cabaret performances, and a visitor’s guide to “naughty” Berlin to illustrate the links between gendered public spaces, male anxiety, and female emancipation in the Weimar metropolis. In Chapter 4, Smith uses fictional works to gauge the effects of the controversial 1927 Law to Combat Venereal Diseases. As in earlier chapters, she uncovers amultiplicity of experience, which confirms one of her overarching arguments, that texts examining female prostitution should not be read “simply as indicator[ s] of women’s oppression”; in fact, a reading of diverse cultural texts “reveals the fragility of gender relations and new modes of sexual expression in the Weimar era without resorting to defeatist conclusions” (184).

Berlin Coquette is an innovative interdisciplinary work that succeeds in illustrating the complicated nature of the urban German prostitution trade in the years before and after World War I. Smith defends the book’s narrow geographical focus by qualifying Berlin as “one of the quintessential modern cities of twentieth-century Europe” (3). Although this label is tough to dispute, a sole focus on the German capital ignores rich sources in cities such as Munich, Hamburg, and Dusseldorf, let alone the smaller cities and towns that sought to deal with “prostitution problems” in their own ways. That said, Smith’s work will be read with interest by scholars and students of German history and literature, gender and sexuality, and culture and media studies.