Private Anxieties/Public Projections: "New Objectivity," Male Subjectivity, and Weimar Cinema

The so-called "New Objectivity" in the arts and culture of the Weimar Republic was characterized by an erosion of the boundary between the "high culture" associated with the bourgeois public sphere and new forms of mass culture directed at other classes in the emerging modern consumer society. Related to this erosion of boundaries were anxieties about the destabilization of traditional models of (national, ethnic, class, gender, sexual) identity. Change seemed especially threatening in its effect on traditional ("natural") gender roles, as can readily be demonstrated in G.W. Pabst's film Geheimnisse einer Seele (1926). Similar anxieties about gender are also crucial to subsequent developments in German culture and society. (RWM)