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  • Berlin Coquette: Prostitution and the New German Woman, 1890–1933 by Jill Suzanne Smith
  • Julia Roos
Berlin Coquette: Prostitution and the New German Woman, 1890–1933. By Jill Suzanne Smith (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013. xii plus 221 pp. $71.95 hardcover; $27.95 paper).

Though the historical literature on prostitution in modern Germany has grown significantly in recent years, Jill Suzanne Smith adds something new by integrating social history perspectives with creative analyses of prostitution’s representation in art, fiction, and film. It is one of Smith’s central contentions that by studying cultural discourses about prostitution, we can gain vital insights into the broader renegotiation of gender during a time of momentous changes in German society. According to Smith, debates over prostitution helped launch “frank, productive discussions about sexuality, ones that defied the double standard in order to contemplate potential nonmarital outlets for women’s desire” (21). Like Gisela Bock, Judith Walkowitz, and others, Smith is critical of analytical approaches casting prostitutes solely as passive victims. Instead, she conceives of streetwalkers as “self-conscious commodities” (22) with significant agency. For Smith, the progressive blurring of the line separating professional prostitutes (the cocottes) from other women engaging in nonmarital sexuality (the coquettes) is an indicator of meaningful gains in women’s sexual freedom in 1920s Berlin.

The book draws on a rich array of fictional texts, cultural criticism, visual sources, social reform literature, and archival sources from Berlin public archives and the Swarthmore College Peace Collection. Smith’s ability to weave together these very different types of sources into an easily flowing narrative attests to her strengths as a writer. Her translations of difficult German texts are elegant. Chapter 1 explores critiques of marriage in Wilhelmine Germany (18901918) by focusing on the ideas of socialist leader August Bebel, sociologist Georg Simmel, and playwright Otto Erich Hartleben, respectively. Despite their political differences, what connects these authors is their use of the topic of [End Page 439] prostitution to criticize the hypocrisy of middle-class sexual morality. Particularly intriguing is Smith’s thoughtful discussion of Simmel’s notion of the alienating effect of money on heterosexual relationships and his view of lesbian love among prostitutes as a way of countering this alienation. Though they offer astute critiques of women’s subjection in marriage, all three authors ultimately have difficulty imagining “a world in which women can be both sexually and economically autonomous” (62). Chapter 2 looks at radical bourgeois feminists’ contributions to the debate over prostitution. The main protagonists are Anna Pappritz, a prominent “abolitionist” opponent of state-regulated prostitution, and leading sexual reformer Helene Stöcker. At the chapter’s center is Margarete Böhme’s bestselling 1905 novel about a middle-class-woman-turned-prostitute, Tagebuch einer Verlorenen (Diary of a Lost Girl), a movie version of which was released in 1929 (G. W. Pabst, director). Smith uses contemporary responses to Böhme’s novel to “demonstrate the cross-fertilization between the cultural and social discourses on prostitution” (68). The chapter pays careful attention to the tensions in feminists’ attitudes towards “fallen women.” Many bourgeois feminists criticized prostitutes for resisting efforts at moral reform. Still, Smith warns of a reductionist reading of feminists’ ideas, “for although they were clearly condescending and dismissive toward prostitutes ... their texts empowered women to speak out against male oppression” (74).

According to Smith, the dramatic expansion of visual culture after 1918 was a powerful catalyst in advancing more affirmative notions of female sexuality. The third chapter examines the role of space—from the streetscape to the cinema—in shaping prostitution and its cultural representations during the Weimar Republic (19191933). Smith stresses the ubiquity of “public women” (many of whom were not professional prostitutes) in postwar Berlin. The upheavals of World War I and the cultural and sexual experimentation of the 1920s led to a profound “erotic confusion” (108) epitomized by the figure of the androgynous, sexually liberated New Woman. After the temporary lifting of film censorship in November 1918, prostitutes “became a pervasive cultural presence on the movie screens” (116)—to the great chagrin of male cultural critics like Siegfried Krakauer, Kurt Tucholsky, and Berthold Brecht, who worried about...

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