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  • Berlin Coquette: Prostitution and the New German Woman, 1890–1933 by Jill Suzanne Smith
  • Katie Sutton
Berlin Coquette: Prostitution and the New German Woman, 1890–1933. By Jill Suzanne Smith. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013. Pp. 221. $69.95 (cloth); $27.95 (paper).

Berlin Coquette offers an exciting contribution to the gender and cultural history of Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany, demonstrating that prostitution discourses during this period went far beyond ideas of moral panic or oppressive regulation to encompass “frank, productive discussions about sexuality, ones that defied the double standard in order to contemplate potential nonmarital outlets for women’s desire” (21). In a series of nuanced close readings, Smith maps the shifting boundaries between respectable and nonrespectable female sexuality and highlights the complexity of early-century debates around bourgeois marriage, ideal heterosexual relationships, women’s labor, consumerism, and sexual commodification. The emergence of new sexual identities for women prompts one of this study’s central questions: “What happens when we can no longer distinguish between prostitutes and nonprostitutes?”

Smith’s approach to this question draws on an impressively interdisciplinary array of texts: well-known cultural critics such as Georg Simmel and Siegfried Kracauer; bourgeois and radical feminists, including Anna Pappritz and Helene Stöcker; novels by popular Weimar authors such as Irmgard Keun and Vicki Baum; and the visual realms of the cinema, cabaret, and visual arts, including an overdue analysis of Weimar artist Jeanne Mammen. Consequently, Berlin Coquette represents an important complement to recent studies of German prostitution based on more archival, social history approaches—notably, studies by Julia Roos and Victoria Harris—adding new layers to the questions [End Page 204] raised in such scholarship concerning the sociocultural repercussions of police regulation of prostitution under the 1871 Criminal Code and its decriminalization under the 1927 Law to Combat Venereal Diseases.1

Berlin Coquette sets out to challenge dichotomizing representations of the female prostitute as either victim or villain, destitute or deviant. Such stereotyping, Smith provocatively argues, characterizes not only the thinking of contemporaries such as Otto Weininger, with his “outrageous” assertion that all women were either mothers or prostitutes, but also more recent feminist scholarship. Too many studies by Weimar art and literary historians, she insists, conflate representations of the sexually devouring “whore” and the emancipated, “honest” woman without critical reflection, positing these too simply as products of male anxiety and misogyny. Likewise, Smith criticizes the perpetuation in such scholarship of the “Whore of Babylon” analogy for the feminized, debauched German capital, seeking instead to explore the multiple meanings attributed to prostitutes by contemporary social actors.

This attempt to uncover the richness of early twentieth-century prostitution discourses is at its most original when it comes to identifying more “playful” instances of confusion between prostitutes and “respectable” women, particularly the boundary-crossing figure of the New Woman. Such confusion is, in turn, repeatedly linked to Berlin itself as an exceptionally “irreverent” space of urban modernity (9). Examples include: the “erotic ambiguity” (18) and multiple desiring gazes—male and female, heterosexual and same-sex—in Jeanne Mammen’s watercolors of Berlin cafés and streetscapes; Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s fashionable “cocottes,” whose respectable façade is directed toward a bourgeois clientele as they stroll the city’s promenades; the sassy prostitutes’ songs of the cabaret; and the New Women of Weimar popular literature, whose experiments with various forms of commodified sexuality cannot be reduced, as Smith convincingly argues, to simple dichotomies of success or failure, respectability or victimhood.

Smith uses the term “self-conscious commodities” to describe such alternative models of female sexuality and morality, savvy models of female agency who strategically manipulate male desires for financial or other benefits. Yet she also cautions against the “ubiquitous” and “simplified” focus on agency in many feminist studies of prostitution, singling out Harris’s study as a particularly crass perpetuation of the notion of prostitutes as either agents or victims (22). Instead, her approach is shaped by Gayle Rubin’s linkage of prostitution and broader discourses of nonnormative sexuality, and it draws on Kathleen Canning’s notion of “relentless relationality”—gender history that examines “both the social and symbolic [End Page 205] relations between...

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