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NWSA Journal 15.3 (2003) 202-205



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Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity—A Cultural Biography, by Irene Gammel. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002, 534 pp., $39.95 hardcover.
Gender and Sexuality in Weimar Modernity: Film, Literature, and "New Objectivity", by Richard W. McCormick. New York: Palgrave, 2001, 240 pp., $21.95 paper.

The extent to which gender marks modernity in both material and cultural form is the object of two new studies. Irene Gammel's biography of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, deemed "the mother of Dada" by her contemporaries, provides the first comprehensive scholarly look at a neglected and enigmatic figure. Richard McCormick's analysis of gender in Weimar culture, particularly the movement known as "New Objectivity," moves through familiar historical territory by analyzing some of its best-known texts and films. If scintillating, scandalous tales of a dime-store Baroness walking the streets of New York, Paris, and Berlin in a tomato-soup can bra would seem to compel more than yet another reading of the film The Blue Angel, then McCormick's study is ultimately more original and satisfying than Gammel's.

There is no denying, however, the achievement in Gammel's richly detailed account and analysis of a woman otherwise familiar only to [End Page 202] scholars of international modernism. If largely unknown today, Freytag-Loringhoven's "body art"—or utilitarian objects like a taillight worn as a skirt bustle, teaspoons as earrings, and postage stamps as rouge—was photographed by Man Ray and Berenice Abbott, painted by Theresa Bernstein, and captured in lithography by George Biddle. Her poetry appeared in the Little Review and her artwork has lately been exhibited in major museums. The Baroness also knew and often collaborated with some of the major figures of dada and modernism, including Marcel Duchamp, Djuna Barnes, William Carlos Williams, and Hart Crane. Despite such contacts, however, she subsisted on the wages of an artist's model and lived the last decade of her life in abject poverty.

From her bourgeois origins in the Baltic town of Swinemünde (now part of Poland), she fled an abusive father to Berlin, as it was becoming the center for Germany's modernist avant-garde. Here she tried out various identities: flaneur, androgyne, erotic-art worker, chorus girl, prostitute, cross-dresser, and syphilitic patient. Through it all, Gammel argues, sex was the tool that enabled Freytag-Loringhoven to infiltrate modernist circles and artistic spaces. Her various relationships and marriages, the last of which made her a (poor) baroness, took her to Berlin, Munich, Italy, Kentucky, and New York, back to Berlin, and finally Paris. She had an amazing knack for being in the right place at the right time, especially in New York, where she became the dada queen of Greenwich Village. Gammel documents the Baroness's early appropriations of everyday objects as art, two years before Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia. Whereas Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase created a semi-abstract representation of movement in space, the Baroness's "kinesthetic body art," Gammel argues, literally enacts Duchamp's aesthetics. Gammel also offers compelling evidence that the Baroness may well have been the bearer of the urinal, one of Duchamps's most famous artworks.

Subtitled "A Cultural Biography," Gammel's work dabbles here and there in the kind of critical theory that would subtend cultural analysis, but often in a superficial, unsatisfactory manner. She states in her introduction, for instance: "As for the body theories of the 1990s, and in particular Judith Butler's notions of gender performance, they not only apply to the Baroness, but appear to have been anticipated by her, as she brilliantly challenged conventional gender roles in public spaces" (14). This statement remains unsubstantiated until Butler finally makes a brief reappearance on page 195. Throughout the volume, Gammel insists on Freytag-Loringhoven's border-crossing talents. Superficial lip service to thinkers like Butler, however, reduces a highly complex concept to a buzzword. Gammel does offer compelling readings of the Baroness's...

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