Bodily Desire, Desired Bodies: Gender and Desire in Early Twentieth-Century German and Austrian Novels and Paintings by Esther K. Bauer (review)

This monograph affirms the richness that interdisciplinarity brings to Austrian and German studies. Esther Bauer skillfully weaves connections among four novels: Baum's Menschen im Hotel (Grand Hotel) (1929) and stud. chem. Helen Willfüer (Helene) (1928), Kafkas's Der Verschollene (Amerika: The Missing Person) (written 1911–1914, published 1927), Mann's Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain) (1924), and fifteen paintings (including four by Christian Schad, three by Otto Dix, and two by Egon Schiele). She compellingly demonstrates how each subverts the traditional, bourgeois system of order—specifically the gender binary. In accessible language, Bauer synthesizes her meticulous and probing dissections of the literary and visual artworks with historical and contemporary discussions of social context, critical theory, and philosophy (for instance, Butler, Barthes, de Beauvoir, Lacan); plus she includes deft biblical and art-historical references to ground her probing interpretations.

The complicated analyses of images of women and men within each of Bauer's five chapters maintain a readability that is surprising. The succinct introduction both tempts and assures the reader that much original evidence is to come. In the first chapter Bauer juxtaposes characters in Vicki Baum's novel Grand Hotel with two paintings by Schad and one by Dix, suggesting that the visual art illuminates the forward-looking nature of Baum's figures but also shows the constraints of her feminism. In each chapter, Bauer sets her art and literary interpretations in art-historical, philosophical, biographical, and contemporary social contexts with a remarkable breadth of references. With additional information about "New Objectivity," the "New Woman" of the 1920s, and the marketing of the author by her publisher Ullstein, the first chapter is the longest. Bauer successfully argues in the second chapter for the importance of the paintings of women that happen within the text of Baum's novel Helene as she examines the rhetorical use of ekphrasis—"most typically a description of an historical painting or other artifact in literature" (47). Bauer points out how this device creates an exploratory space in the novel; for instance, through the depiction of a male African American painter's portrait of the nude femme fatale figure, Yvonne Pastouri, Baum can include an extreme corporeality in her text, but she remains distanced from the impropriety through the retelling. Bauer thoroughly dissects this scene with critical deconstructions of blackness and exoticism such as one finds in Edouard Manet's painting "Olympia" (1863) and Franz von Stuck's 1906 painting "Salome."

Part of the titles of the third and fourth chapters, "The Body Between Sex and Violence" and "Looking to Dominate," respectively convey an immense fact and a distortion, as far as the main characters are concerned. Using Kafka's Amerika as the literary text in these chapters, Bauer skillfully persuades the reader of the body as the "site of struggle for dominance" (72). Further, she aligns Kafkas's and Dix's techniques to show "sexualized corporeality" in both Kafkas's aging opera singer Brunelda and Dix's obese prostitute in the cramped portrait, "Three Women," techniques including exaggeration, allusions to stereotypes of femininity and biblical figures, and references to characters' animality (73). Brunelda's considerable size in Amerika determines much of the interactions around her, and Bauer points out how the matter-of-fact narration by the young hero, Karl Rossmann—likened here to Dix's realistic style—ill prepare readers and viewers for the sexual deviance in each. In the fourth chapter, Bauer compares Kafkas's Amerika to one of Egon Schiele's self-portraits, "Seated Male Nude (Self-Portrait)" (1910); Bauer's chapter title speaks to dominance, but clearly, each main figure is not in that role of power. Innovative in this chapter are Bauer's contentions that Schiele's works engaged in the gender discourse of the time and thus are not mere expressions of an eccentric artist, and that Kafkas and Schiele should...