Black Magic Woman: Gender and the Occult in Weimar Germany by Barbara Hales (review)

The hypnotic dance of the robot Maria in Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis manipulates men into a lustful frenzy; she triggers chaos and almost brings about the apocalypse. The female robot embodies fears of technological progress, social and political collapse, and the loss of order and wholesomeness. The robot is powerful, almost escaping male control, yet she is defeated in the end.

Barbara Hales’s book Black Magic Woman: Gender and the Occult in Weimar Germany connects examples of well-known films and texts, such as Metropolis, with discussions of lesser-known films, literary texts, performances, and media reports about “women’s involvement in the occult” as a way to explore the complexities of “gender relations in a period of German cultural chaos” (3, 133). The occult, Hales argues, is a response to uncertainty about new technological developments such as X-rays and radioactivity that seemed both scientific and spiritual. Occult practices, though, have an “ambiguous status” that, according to Hales’s main argument, mirrors the ambiguous status of Weimar’s emancipated women (13). The four chapters focus on different aspects of the occult, such as ghosts, vampires, the witch and the gypsy, and the female trance dancer and medium.

It is impressive how the book brings together a range of genres and events, including séances, expressive dance, cinematic performances, literary depictions, and court records of women who were accused of participating in illegal occult practices. Hales shows how the occult offered ways to demonize the New Woman as part of a “reactionary backlash” (24). She also highlights the agency of women who participated in occult practices, such as tarot readings, expressive dances, performing as a medium, acting, or being “empowered hypnotist[s]” (148). Women identified with aspects of the occult and saw it as a way to express themselves and their power; yet, just like in the countless stories about witches and female magic, it was that very association of women with dark forces that served as a way to stigmatize women and rein them in. The main tension lies between the social backlash against the New Woman as aligned with the occult and the experiences of women who found emancipatory power and self-expression in occult practices. This illustrates the complexity of Hales’s endeavor: to navigate the misogynist social and cultural discourses that demonized the New Woman and, at the same time, highlight the cultural agency women claimed in the Weimar period.

This tension remains somewhat unresolved in Black Magic Woman. Hales describes the “supernatural sphere [... ] as fertile ground wherein Weimar’s enigmatic Neue Frau can prosper” (145). Many of the examples she discusses, such as Lang’s trance dancer robot, emphasize the potential power of occult women but turn the story toward male anxiety and fear of these women as agents of social disorder; women’s association with spirituality becomes a tool for their marginalization rather than their prospering. When Hales discusses the beginning of the Nazi era, she describes how the “occultic Neue Frau became a casualty of Hitler’s Third Reich: women under Nazi rule lost their ability to participate meaningfully in public life” (146). But, as Claudia Koonz and others have argued, white German women actively participated in public life during the Nazi period and the Nazis had their own versions of the occult, expressed in their torch rallies and attempts to reclaim supposedly Germanic spirituality. The examples in Hales’s book show just that: Leni Riefenstahl expressed her fascination with the occult as a dancer and actress in Weimar Germany, and that self-expression and agency merged seamlessly with her career as a Nazi filmmaker whose films feature elements of Nazi cults. Yet, the Nazis violently crushed the spiritual practices of women considered gypsies, and they othered and racialized modern art as part of their anti-Semitic agenda. The racialization of associating with the occult is apparent in the impressive range of material Hales’s book covers...