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

Toward the end of Berlin Coquette, Jill Suzanne Smith writes that, “between the years 1890 and 1933, Berlin was known as a city of whores” (185). Smith’s study concentrates on the debates surrounding the figure of the prostitute and the institution of prostitution in Wilhelmine and Weimar Berlin. Informed by feminist Gayle Rubin’s work on the sociocultural import of sex, it reveals the many ways in which these debates contributed to the periods’ larger discourses on changing gender roles and the development of new paradigms of morality and female sexuality, including open lesbian relationships and the so-called New Woman. For her erudite analysis, Smith draws on her own archival research as well as scholarship in history, art history, sociology, gender studies, and culture studies.

Smith reads a wide variety of texts that deal with prostitution ranging from works of literature and art, to writings by politicians, social activists, philosophers, and cultural critics, to police reports and film reviews. This broad scope enables her to create a mosaic of different perspectives that shows that the prostitute was a central figure of the turn-of-the-century and early twentieth-century gender debates and that talking about prostitution was always also talking about the female social role and notions of female respectability as well as gender relations at large. As a result, Smith’s study offers a nuanced view of the role of prostitution and the prostitute that goes beyond the more usual conceptual dichotomy that defines the prostitute either as victim of social circumstances and patriarchal structures or as morally reprehensible source of venereal diseases and hence a threat to public health and morality. At the same time, Berlin Coquette emphasizes the extent to which social reality and cultural production were intertwined and shaped each other. Through her focus on prostitution and her careful close readings, Smith highlights often neglected connections and continuities between the gender debates before and after World War I. Equally important, her work sheds new light on familiar texts, while drawing readers’ attention to works traditionally not read in the context of the wider debates on female social roles.

Smith devotes particular attention to the figure of the Kokotte, a type of prostitute who cultivated a veneer of bourgeois respectability while fulfilling the sexual desires of her bourgeois clientele. Maintaining a balance between “titillation and restraint” the cocottes represented “a concomitant eroticization of the bourgeoisie and an ‘embourgeoisement’ of prostitutes” (13). At the same time as prostitutes came to look and act ever more bourgeois, middle-class women joined the workforce and ventured into social spheres and engaged in activities that throughout the nineteenth century had been associated with prostitution. As a result, the boundaries between cocottes and flirtatious coquettes, i.e., sexually and economically increasingly independent women who engaged in erotic exchanges in public, became fluid. Indeed, often such bourgeois coquettes flirted in the hope of finding a suitor who would financially support them. Many of the texts Smith explores engage in a similar blurring of lines and thus invite readers to reevaluate existing notions of morality, sexuality, and female social roles. Smith combines analyses of nonfictional texts with those of novels, dramas, art works, and films, and thus can highlight not only their interconnections, but also the fact that many literary, cinematic, and artistic works stretched the boundaries of gender roles and bourgeois propriety much further than did cultural critics and politicians, and thus encouraged their audiences even more strongly to think beyond the status quo.

In chapter 1, Smith reads late nineteenth-century texts by the socialist August Bebel, the sociologist Georg Simmel, and the playwright Otto Erich Hartleben, who examine the socioeconomic dynamics of prostitution and bourgeois marriage and a “double moral standard” that silently endorsed pre- and extramarital sexual contacts for men while proscribing them for women. As they present prostitution and marriage as...