Film and Fashion amidst the Ruins of Berlin: From Nazism to the Cold War by Mila Ganeva (review)

Mila Ganeva's Film and Fashion amidst the Ruins of Berlin: From Nazism to the Cold War examines German fashion practices and their representations in film against the changing political milieus of the period 1939–1955, asking, in particular, how they involved women as spectators, consumers, and professionals. Ganeva's primary foci are the "continuities, the commonalities, and the interrelations" (11) that the fashion and film industries displayed during the Nazi dictatorship, the immediate postwar years, and on the eve of the Cold War.

One such continuity is the paradoxical nature of fashion, which thrived and expanded despite the restrictions imposed onto general consumers—first by the Nazis and then by the destruction of World War II. Fashion in "the long 1940s," Ganeva's term, referred not only to elegant outfits featured in glossy magazines and on the silver screen, but also to the practices of repurposing the old into new as well as exchanging sartorial treasures for food on the black market. During "the long 1940s," fashion vacillated between reality and illusion, pragmatism and indulgence. Going beyond the familiar images of postwar German women as victims of rape, Trümmerfrauen, Amiflittchen, and Fräulein (the latter two known for their fraternizing with the occupying forces), Ganeva focuses instead on seamstresses, designers, graphic artists, fashion models, journalists, and movie stars, arguing for their vital role in the postwar economic regeneration as professionals and consumers in real life and on the silver screen.

Chapter 1 explores fashion and cinema under the Nazis, identifying their twofold purpose: to promote Germany as the world's new capital of style and to combat shortages of goods with creativity and purposefulness. The glamorous outfits made out of luxurious materials appeared side by side with detailed descriptions of the so-called Verwandlungskleid (transformation dress), which could be sewn out of old dresses, coats, or men's clothes—a content layout that would continue in the postwar fashion publications. A less explicit goal of the printed and visual fashion media, as Ganeva further illustrates in her analysis of selected films from the early 1940s (e.g., Großstadtmelodie, Achtung! Der Feind hört mit, and others), was to serve as an escape and diversion from wartime realities: the black market, the plundering of sartorial valuables by the Wehrmacht abroad, and the Aryanization of businesses.

Chapter 2 delves into the revival of the fashion media and production between 1945–1947. Fashion industry became a vital part of Berlin's postwar reconstruction and the third-strongest sector of the city's economy, partially because of the support it received from all four occupying forces, but also because it reverted to an earlier system of cost-efficient production, e.g., women sewing at home. The Flickenkleid (patchwork dress) and above-mentioned Verwandlungskleider, prompted by the scarcities of the era, not only met popular demand for new clothes but also emerged as a sign of national economic recovery, appearing in film and fashion shows. Especially for women, fashion became a source of income and opportunity.

The connection between fashion and the Jews in Germany runs as a subplot of chapter 2. The profitable Berlin Konfektion, or the stores that sold fashionable clothes for mass consumption run primarily by the Jews, was swiftly Aryanized after 1933, with Jewish owners forced to sell at low prices and/or sent into concentration camps. The revival of the Konfektion in the postwar years was characterized by a "double amnesia": the fashion discourse post-1945 not only avoided mentioning the Aryanization of the Konfektion, it also glossed over the horror of the deportation of Jewish fashion designers to concentration camps. Ganeva's archival findings about Charlotte Glückstein, a lesser-known Jewish designer, bring to light her both "exceptional" and "paradigmatic" career (68) in the industry post-1945. Glückstein's elegant if pragmatic designs, which took into account the...