Hannah Höch, Til Brugman, Lesbianism, and Weimar Sexual Subculture

Home , Alfred Flechtheim, Alfred Zwiebel, Anita Berber, Anna Elisabet Weirauch, Berlinische Galerie, Carl Froelich

HANNAH HÖCH, TIL BRUGMAN, LESBIANISM, AND WEIMAR SEXUAL SUBCULTURE

JULIE NERO

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements

For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Department of Art History and Art

CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY

January, 2013

CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY

SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES

We hereby approve the dissertation of

______Julie Nero______

candidate for the Doctor of Philosophy degree*.

______Anne L. Helmreich ______(Chair of the committee)

______Ellen G. Landau ______

______Catherine B. Scallen ______

______T. Kenny Fountain ______

September 10, 2012

*We also certify that written approval has been obtained for any proprietary material contained therein.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Table of Contents iii

List of Figures ix

Acknowledgements xxi

Abstract xxii

Introduction 1

Chapter I

Dada’s “Good Girl” and her Recurring Obsessions

Introduction 20

Hannah Höch’s early life and career 24

Höch and the Dadaists 29

Photomontage: Conflict and Rupture 31

Höch and her Contemporaries: Aesthetic and Technique 34

Words not Pictures: Language and Sexism? 37

The 1920 Dada Fair and Höch’s Cut with the Kitchen Knife 40

Beyond Berlin: Höch and her Contemporaries 46

Höch and the Human Hybrid 48

Der Vater and Dada-Ernst: Höch and Female Sexual Agency 51

The Lighter Side of the New Woman: Höch’s Da-Dandy and Die Mädchen 60

Höch’s ‘fluid’ Sexual Identity? 63

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Chapter II

The Lesbian in Weimar and Hannah Höch’s Russian Dancer and English Dancer 71

Representations of Lesbians in Weimar 75

Mädchen in Uniform 78

Lesbian Books and Magazines and Popular Weimar Culture 83

Weimar Lesbian Representations of Female Nudity 85

Lesbian Subculture and Weimar Körperkultur 88

Berlin Lesbians and Weimar Entertainment and Dance Culture 92

Pornography, Sexual Depravity, and Lesbian Representation 97

Lesbian Ecstasy 102

Depicting Lesbianism: Mirroring 103

The Contribution of Weimar Lesbian Print Media 110

Conclusion 111

Chapter III

Lesbian Representation, Weimar Ethnography, Politics, and Hannah Höch

Visual Contrast and Lesbianism 112

Jeanne Mammen and Weimar Lesbian Representation 113

Weimar Ethnography and Lesbian Representation 117

Exoticism and Eroticism 118

Weimar Ethnography and the Russian 120

The Russian Ballet 126

Ballet and Weimar Eugenics 128

The Healthy Weimar Lesbian: the ultimate New Woman 130

Hannah Höch’s Liebe 132

Dreams and Utopia: Höch, Lesbian Representation, and the Rise of Nazism 137

Chapter IV

Hannah Höch and Til Brugman: Creative Collaboration, Social Critique, and Political Resistance

Introduction 144

Til Brugman 146

Til Brugman and the avant-garde 147

The literary Grotesque 149

Gender and the avant-garde 151

Hannah Höch and Til Brugman: A Lesbian Couple 156

Repression and Censorship 160

“Brave or foolish:” Höch hides Brugman’s Manuscripts 165

Hannah Höch and Til Brugman: Joint Commercial Projects 169

“Von Hollands Blumenfelder” 170

Scheingehacktes 180

“Scheingehacktes” 183

“Schaufensterhypnose” 186

Weimar Sexism: Brugman’s female Victims and Höch’s disturbed Brides 188

Brugman’s “Himilia” 189

Höch’s English Dancer and “Himilia” 194

The Fetishization of the Female Body in Weimar and Höch’s Marlene 197

Conclusion 201

Chapter V

Hannah Höch’s Tamer, Sexology, and Weimar Sexual Subculture

Introduction 203

The New Woman 204

Nineteenth-century Sexology:

Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, Carl Westphal, and Richard von Krafft-Ebing 207

Magnus Hirschfeld 212

Hirschfeld and Sexual Intermediacy 215

Hirschfeld: Sexology and Photography 218

Hirschfeld’s Transvestites, 1910 220

Sexual Deviancy and Weimar “Life through the eyes” 221

Weimar Culture and the Cross-dresser 222

The Feared Masculinization of Women and the Garçonne 226

Bearded Women and “Terrifying News” 229

Weimar Subculture and the Cross-dresser 230

Gertrud Liebherr’s “Moderne Fotokunst” 231

The Weimar Transvestite Voo-Doo and Höch’s Tamer 234

Sexual Intermediacy and Höch’s Tamer 235

Höch’s Tamer and Weimar Criminology 239

Conclusion 241

Chapter VI

The Wonders of Weimar Endocrinology: Höch’s gender-hybrids and Brugman’s literary Grotesques

Introduction 243

Eugen Steinach and Surgical Rejuvenation 245

Der Steinach Film 248

Hannah Höch’s Strong Men 252

Til Brugman and Weimar Sexology 256

“Revision am Himmel” 257

“Warenhaus der Liebe” 257

Weimar Sexology and “Extreme Transvestites” 263

Gender Reassignment Surgery 267

Gender Reassignment and the Weimar Print Media 269

Hannah Höch’s Sweet One: The Surgical Construction of Gender? 271

Einar Wegener: “Aus Mann wird Frau” 273

Einar becomes Lili: Constructing Femininity 275

Transsexuals, Homosexuals and Gender Montage 279

Conclusion 280

Chapter VII

Conclusion 283

Hannah Höch’s Nazi-era Oeuvre: Nature Studies and Abstraction 292

“Ich fühlte die Freiheit—die Freiheit!” 297

Certain recurring Obsessions: Höch and the ‘new’ New Woman 299

vii

Figures 303

Bibliography 445

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LIST OF FIGURES

1.1 Hannah Höch, 1915. Hannah Höch Archiv (HH Archiv), Berlinische Galerie, Landesmuseum für Moderne Kunst, Fotografie und Architektur, Berlin. 303

1.2 Til Brugman, ca. 1905. HH Archiv, Berlinische Galerie. 304

1.3 Hannah Höch, Dada-Puppen (Dada-Dolls), 1916-1918. Cloth and diverse materials, c. 60 cm. Berlinische Galerie. 305

1.4 Hannah Höch, Entartet (Degenerate), 1969. Collage, 34. 4 x40.5 cm. Collection Landesbank Berlin AG. 306

1.5 Entwurf für das Denkmal eines bedeutendes Spitzenhemdes (Design for a Memorial for an Important Lace-Shirt) 1922. Collage, 27.6 x 17 cm. Hamburger Kunsthalle. 307

1.6 Raoul Hausmann, Photo Hannah Höch, 1919. Berlinische Galerie. 308

1.7 Hannah Höch, Oz, der Tragöde (Oz, the Tragic Actor) 1919. Photomontage, dimensions unknown. Lost. 309

1.8 Raoul Hausmann, ABCD, 1923-24. Photomontage, 40.6 x 28.6 cm. Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. 310

1.9 Kurt Schwitters, Miss Blanche, 1923. Collage, 15.9 x 12.7 cm. Collection Dr. Werner Schmalenbach, Düsseldorf. 311

1.10 Hannah Höch, Collage (Dada), 1922-24. Collage, 24.7 x 32.8 cm. Collection Merrill C. Berman, Scarsdale, New York. 312

1.11 George Grosz and John Heartfield, Sonniges Land (Sunny Land), 1919. Photographic reproduction, dimensions and whereabouts of original unknown. Berlin, Akademie der Künste, John Heartfield Archiv. 313

1.12 Hannah Höch, Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser Dada durch die letzte weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands (Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through

the last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Weimar Germany), 1919-20. Photomontage, 114 x 90 cm. Neue Nationalgalerie Staatliche Museen, Preussischer Kulturbesitz Berlin. 314

1.13 Hannah Höch, Die Mädchen (The Girls), 1921. Photomontage, dimensions unknown. Lost. 315

1.14 Hannah Höch, Da-Dandy, 1919. Photomontage, 30 x 23 cm. Private Collection. 316

1.15 Hannah Höch, Dada-Ernst (Dada-Serious/Grave), 1920-21. Photomontage, 18.6 x 16.6 cm. Collection Vera and Arturo Schwarz, Milan. 317

1.16 Max Ernst, Le Cygne est bien paisable (The Swan is quite Peaceful), 1920. Gouache on photographic enlargement of photomontage, 21 x 29 cm. Collection Düsseldorf WestLB. 318

1.17 Johannes Baargeld, Typical Vertical Misrepresentation as a Depiction of the Dada Baargeld (Self-portrait), 1920. Photomontage, 37.1 x 31 cm. Kunsthaus Zürich. 319

1.18 Max Ernst, Jean Hatchet and Charles the Bold, 1929. Collage, 34 x 20 cm. Cleveland Museum of Art. 320

1.19 Marcel Janco, Oscar Dominguez, Jean Arp, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Cadavre Exquis, 1937. Mixed media on paper, 30.6 x 23.6 cm. Stiftung Arp, Rolandseck. 321

1.20 Hannah Höch, Grotesque, 1963. Photomontage, 25 x 17 cm. Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, Stuttgart. 322

1.21 Hannah Höch, Der Vater (The Father), 1920. Galerie Berinson, Berlin. 323

1.22 Abtreibungsinstrumente (Abortion-instruments). Magnus Hirschfeld, Vol. 4. Bilderteil: Geschlechtskunde auf Grund dreissigjähriger Forschung und Erfahrung bearbeitet (Stuttgart: Julius Püttmann Verlags- buchhandlung, 1930), 341. 324

1.23 Gustave Courbet, L’Origine du Monde (1866). Oil on Canvas, 46 x 55 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. 325

1.24 Sheela-na-Gig, Corbel in the Church of St. Mary and St. David, Kilpeck, Ireland, 12th-century. Pictured in Monica Sjöö, The Great Cosmic Mother of All (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987), p. 320. 326

1.25 Max Ernst, Les Hommes n’en Sauront Rien (Of this Men Shall Know Nothing), 1923. Oil on canvas, 81 x 64 cm. Tate Gallery, London. 327

1.26 Eric von Stroheim as Count Karamzin. Foolish Wives, Universal Jewel (1922). 328

2.1 Hannah Höch, Rüssische Tänzerin (Russian Dancer), 1928. Photomontage, 30.5 x 22.5 cm. Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museums Braunschweig, Kunstmusem des Landes Niedersachsen. 329

2.2 Hannah Höch, Englische Tänzerin (English Dancer), 1928. Photomontage, 23.7 x 18 cm. Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, Stuttgart. 330

2.3 Romaine Brooks, Una, Lady Troubridge, 1923. Oil on Canvas, 127.3 x 76.4 cm. Smithsonian American Art Museum. 331

2.4 Anonymous cover photograph (Three Nude Women). Liebende Frauen, 3. Jg., no. 36 (1927). 332

2.5 Hannah Höch, Album (Scrapbook), undated, ca. 1933, unpaginated. Berlinische Galerie. 333

2.6 Hannah Höch, Equilibre (Equilibrium), 1925. Photomontage, 30.5 x 20.3 cm. Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, Stuttgart. 334

2.7 Nacktkultur im Film. Aus der Zeitschrift: Schönheit [Wilhelm Prager, Film Still, Wege der Kraft und Schönheit, 1925]. Albert Moll, Polizei und Sitte: Die Polizei in Einzeldarstellungen, mit Genehmigung des Preuss. Ministerium des Innern. Herausgegeben von Dr. W. Abegg, Staatssekretär im Preussischen Ministerium des Innern (Berlin: Gersbach und Sohn Verlag G.M.B.H., 1926), vol. 9., p. 31. 335

2.8 Kupfer und Meyer, Tänzerinnen (Female Dancers). Die Freundin, August 8, 1927. 336

2.9 Anonymous cover photograph (Three Nude Women on a Beach). Die Freundin 7. Jg., no. 39, Sept., 16, 1931. 337

2.10 Anonymous cover Illustration. Ruth Margarete Roellig, Berlins lesbische Frauen, mit einem Vorwort von Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld (Leipzig: Bruno Gebauer Verlag für Kulturprobleme, 1928). 338

2.11 Otto Hahn, cover Illustration. Marie-Renée Mecke-Daumas, Die klugen Jungfrauen, eine Sittenbild aus Berlin W. (Leipzig: W. Borngräber, 1924). 339

2.12 Foto Angela, Die Tänzerinnen Schwestern Karolewna (The Dancing Sisters Karolewna). Die Dame, 3. Novemberheft (Berlin), 1929, p. 11. 340

2.13 Heinz von Perchkhammer, Ecstasy, 1930. Photograph, dimensions, whereabouts unknown. www.tumblr.com/tagged/heinz-von-perckhammer?before=1307366646 (accessed January 5, 2012). 341

2.14 Heinz von Perchkhammer, Heliogravure. Edle Nacktheit in China mit 32 Originalaufnahmen von Heinz von Perckhammer (Berlin: Eigenbrödler Verlag, 1928). 342

2.15 Anonymous photograph. Frauen-Liebe 3 Jg., no. 5 (1928). 343

2.16 Anonymous, Die Badenden (The Bathers). Photograph. Die Freundin 4. Jg., no. 8, April 16, 1928. 344

2.17 Anonymous, Ideale Schönheit (Ideal Beauty). Photograph. Die Freundin, 4. Jg., no.3, Feb. 6, 1928. 345

2.18 Anonymous erotic postcard, 1920s. http://www.delcampe.de/list.php?cat=7894&searchMode= all&searchTldCountry=net&searchInDescription=Y Seite 4 (accessed March 1, 2012). 346

2.19 Fernand Khnopff, Avec Gregoire le Roy. Mon couer pleure d’autrefois (Along with Gregoire the King. My heart cries once again), 1889. Colored pencil and white chalk on paper. Private collection. 347

2.20 Franz Roh, Selbstbegrüssung (Greeting Oneself) 1927-33. Gelatin silver print, 15.4 x 19.8 cm. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. 348

2.21 Claude Cahun, Self-Portrait in Mirror. Photograph, 179 mm x 237 mm, 1928. Jersey Heritage Trust/1995/00030/g. 349

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3.1 Masculine/feminine lesbian sartorial configuration, undated. Postcard, France. Collection author. 350

3.2 Jeanne Mammen, Two Women Dancing, ca.1928. Watercolor and pencil, 48 x 36 cm. Förderverein der Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung, Berlin. 351

3.3 Jeanne Mammen, Zeebrugge, c. 1930. Watercolor and pencil, 39 x 34 cm. Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, Iowa. 352

3.4 Josephine Baker in modernen Revuekostüm. Hirschfeld, Vol. 4. Bilderteil: Geschlechtskunde, Plate 51. 353

3.5 Magnus Hirschfeld, Gesichtsbemalung einer Indianerin aus Arizona; Gesichtsbemalung der Haussa-Frauen im Westsudan (Face-painting of an Arizona Indian; Face-painting Haussa-woman of West Sudan). Hirschfeld, Vol. 4, Bilderteil: Geschlechtskunde, 1930, p.768. 354

3.6 S’ent Marona, orientalische Tänzerin (oriental Dancer). Die Freundin, March 5, 1928. 355

3.7 Rudolf Koppitz, Studie russischer Tänzerinnen (Study of Russian Dancers), ca. 1926. Bromide Print, 33.4 x 17.9 cm. Private collection, Vienna. 356

3.8 Anonymous photograph (Entwined Figures). Liebende Frauen, 3. Jg., no. 41 (1928). 357

3.9 Lenare, Lydia Sokolova “Queen of English Dancers.” The Illustrated London News, Oct., 6, 1926, 683. 358

3.10 Hannah Höch, Liebe (Love), 1931. Photomontage, 21 x 21.8 cm. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. 359

3.11 Anna Pawlowa “Libelle” (Anna Pavolva “Dragonfly”). Postcard, undated. Collection author. 360

3.12 Libellule, Postcard, undated. http://www.delcampe.de/list.php?searchString=libellule&cat- 7894&searchMode=all&searchTldCountry=net&searchInDescription=Y (accessed March 9, 2012). 361

3.13 Young Girl with Wings, Postcard, undated. http://www.delcampe.de/page/item/id,153841928,var,Libelle- originele-foto-rond-1915,language,G.html (accessed March 1, 2012). 362

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3.14 Herta Wasserkampf, Postcard, Felix Korn Verlag, Stuttgart, ca. 1930. Akpool.de/ansichtskarte-postkarte-nixe-sitzt-auf-rosenblatt-libelle-fisch (accessed January 15, 2012). 363

3.15 Hannah Höch, Album (Scrapbook), undated, ca. 1933, unpaginated. Berlinische Galerie. 364

3.16 Hannah Höch, Vagabunden (Vagabonds) 1926. Photomontage, 35 x 25 cm. Collection Guido Rossi, Milan. 365

3.17 Hannah Höch, Von Oben (From Above, or Two Children above the City), 1926-27. Photocollage on paper mounted on cardboard, 30.6 x 22.2 cm. Private collection, Des Moines, Iowa. 366

3.18 Hannah Höch, Auf dem Weg im F. Himmel (On the Way to F. Heaven) 1934. Photomontage, 36.8 x 25.4 cm. Private collection, New York. 367

3.19 Anonymous, Märchenland (Fairy-Tale Land). Photograph. Die Freundin, 7 Jg., no. 43, Oct., 28, 1931. 368

3.20 H. W. Mager, Traumbild (Dream-picture). Photomontage. Die Freundin, 4. Jg., no. 9, April 30, 1928. 369

3.21 Hannah Höch, Flucht (Flight), 1931. Collage, 24.5 x 18.1 cm. Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, Stuttgart. 370

3.22 Hannah Höch, Siebenmeilenstiefel (Seven-League Boots), 1934. Photomontage, 22.9 x 32.2 cm. Hamburger Kunsthalle, Kupferstichkabinett. 371

3.23 Hannah Höch, Nur nicht mit beiden Beinen auf der Erde stehen (Don’t Stand with both Feet on the Ground), 1940. Photomontage, 32.2 x 20.8 cm Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, Stuttgart. 372

4.1 Til Brugman “SHE HE” (1917-1922), collection Gerrit Jan de Rook, Den Haag. 373

4.2 Til Brugman, undated photograph. Berlinische Galerie, BG-HHC-F 191/79. 374

4.3 Damenklub Violetta, Der Vorstand [Charlotte ‘Lotte’ Hahm]. Frauen-Liebe, 2. Jg., no. 49 (1927): 12. 374

4.4 Hannah Höch and Til Brugman with their cat Ninn, 1928. Photograph, HH Archiv, Berlinische Galerie. 375

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4.5 Hannah Höch, Büsingstrasse, 1929. Linocut, 14.1 x 14. 9 cm. Berlinische Galerie, Berlin, BG-G 6840/93. 376

4.6 Hannah Höch, Tulip Farmer, Atlantis: Länder, Völker, Reisen 5 (1933): 431. 377

4.7 Hannah Höch, Tulip Field, Atlantis: Länder, Völker, Reisen 5 (1933): 430. 378

4.8 Nazi Rally, May-Day 1933, Interfoto Müchen. Pictured in Udo Pini, Liebeskult und Liebeskitsch: Erotik im Dritten Reich (Munich: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1992), 36-37. 379

4.9 Hannah Höch, Der Schandfleck im Tulpenbeet, 1927. Ink on paper, 213 x 202 mm. Pictured in Herbert Remmert und Peter Barth, eds., Hannah Höch: Werke und Worte (Berlin: Fröhlich & Kaufmann, 1982), 47. Present whereabouts unknown. 380

4.10 Hannah Höch, cover Illustration. Scheingehacktes (Berlin: Verlag der Rabenpresse, 1935). 381

4.11 Hannah Höch, hand-colored cover Illustration. Scheingehacktes, 1935. Berlinische Galerie, BG-HHC 560/79. 382

4.12 Hannah Höch, Cabbage Patch, Scheingehacktes, 1935, p. 15. 383

4.13 Hannah Höch, Schaufensterhypnose, Scheingehacktes, 1935, p. 23. 384

4.14 Hannah Höch, Die Braut (Pandora) (The Bride [Pandora]), 1927. Oil on canvas, 114 x 66 cm. Die Berlinische Galerie, Landesmuseum für Moderne Kunst, Photographie, und Architektur, Berlin. 385

4.15 Hannah Höch, Traum Seines Lebens (His Life’s Dream), 1925. Photomontage, 30 x 22.5 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York. 386

4.16 Hannah Höch, Bäuerliches Brautpaar (Peasant Wedding Couple), 1931. Photomontage with collage, 21.6 x 20.9 cm. Private collection, Berlin. 387

4.17 Hannah Höch, Die Braut (The Bride), ca. 1933. Photomontage, 20 x 19.7 cm. Collection Thomas Walther, New York. 388

4.18 Hannah Höch, Bürgerliches Brautpaar (Bourgeois Wedding Couple), 1920. Watercolor, 39 x 107cm. Private collection. 389

4.19 Man Ray, Garderobe, 1920. Gelatin silver print, 25 x 16.5 cm. Kunsthaus Zürich. 390

4.20 Advertisement, Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung, August 17, 1924, p. 942. 391

4.21 Beinfetischismus (Leg-fetishism). Hirschfeld, Geschlechtskunde, p. 741. 392

4.22 Hannah Höch, Marlene, 1930. Photomontage, 36.7 x 24.2 cm. Collection Dakis Joannou, Athens. 393

4.23 Hannah Höch, Der Schuss (The Kick), 1935. Photomontage, 18 x 23 cm. Berlinische Galerie. 394

5.1 Hannah Höch, Dompteuse (Tamer), 1930. Photomontage, 35.5 x 26 cm. Graphische Sammlung, Kunsthaus Zürich. 395

5.2 “und im Wintergarten, Barbette, das geheimnisvolle wesen am Trapez” (and at the Wintergarten [theatre], Barbette, that mysterious creature on a trapeze).“Blick in die Welt,” Das 12 Uhr Blatt, July 31, 1931. 396

5.3 Félicien Rops, Dirne in Männerkleidung (Prostitute in Men’s Clothing) (undated, late 19th-c.). Albert Moll, Polizei und Sitte (Gersbach & Sohn Verlag, Berlin, 1926), p. 22. 397

5.4 Männlicher Transvertit. Benutzung der Bubikopfmode (Male Transvestite. Use of Bubikopf hairstyle). Moll, Polizei und Sitte, p. 23 398

5.5 Männlicher Transvertit (Male Transvestite). Moll, Polizei und Sitte, p. 23. 399

5.6 Eine Frau die es liebt Uniform zu tragen; der Bart ist angeklebt (A Woman who loves to wear Uniforms; the beard is glued-on). Magnus Hirschfeld, Berlins drittes Geschlecht (Leipzig: Verlag Max Spohr, 1904), p. 122. 400

5.7 Androtrichie (feminae barbatae) (Bearded Women). Magnus Hirschfeld, Geschlechts-Übergänge; Mischungen männlicher und weiblicher Geschlechtscharactere (sexuelle Zwischenstufen) (Leipzig: Verlag der Monatsschrift für Harnkrankheiten und sexuelle Hygeine, 1905), Plate 14. 401

5.8 Eine Schreckensnachricht (Terrifying News). Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung, no. 41, Oct., 12, 1924, 1216. 402

5.9 Gertrud Liebherr(?), Portrait Photograph. Liebende Frauen, 5. Jg., no. 16 (1930). 403

5.10 Advertisement for Gertrud Liebherr’s portrait studio. Die Freundin, Oct., 17, 1927. 404

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5.11 Gertrud Liebherr, Die Frau als Mann (A woman as a man). Die Freundin, March 5, 1928, p. 5. 404

5.12 Gertrud Liebherr, Die Frau als Mann, Die Freundin, March 5, 1928, p. 4. 405

5.13 Der Elegante Herr (The Elegant Man). Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung, August 10, 1924, p. 271. 406

5.14 Gertrud Liebherr(?),Portrait photograph, Liebende Frauen, 4 Jg., 18 (1929). 407

5.15 Voo Doo. Magnus Hirschfeld and Max Tilke, Der erotischen Verkleidungstrieb (Die Transvestiten.) Illustrierter Teil (Berlin: Alfred Pulvermacher & Co., 1912), Plate 16. 408

5.16 Gerlach, Voo-Doo. Die Freundin, 4 Jg., no. 14 (1927): 27. 409

5.17 Pseudohermaphroditismus masculinis bei überwiegend weiblichen Habitus. Error in sexu (Pseudohermaphrodite with dominant feminine behavior). Hirschfeld, Geschlechts-Übergänge, Plate 7. 410

5.18 Male Cross-dresser, undated police Photograph. Lothar Goldmann, “Über das Wesen des Umkleidungstriebes,” Geschlecht und und Gesellschaft 12 (1924/25): Plate 1. 411

6.1 Der Steinach Film, Advertisement, 1923. Humboldt Institut, Online Archiv für Sexology, http://www2.hu berlin.de/Sexology/GESUND/ ARCHIV/COLLSTE.HTM Tab “Der Steinach Film” (accessed March 1, 2012). 412

6.2 Der Steinach Film, Film Still (detail), 1923. Humboldt Institut, Online Archiv für Sexology http://www2.hu berlin.de/Sexology/GESUND/ ARCHIV/COLLSTE.HTM Tab “Der Steinach Film” (accessed March 1, 2012). 413

6.3 Eugen Steinach, Verjüngung durch experimentelle Neubelebung der alternde Pubertätsdrüse (Berlin: Verlag von Julius Springer, 1920), pp. 20-21. 414

6.4 Hannah Höch, Die Starken Männer (The Strong Men), 1931. Photomontage, 24.5 x 13.5 cm. Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, Stuttgart. 415

6.5 Max Schmeling, Ullstein Bild, 1926. Photograph. The Granger Collection, New York. 416

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6.6 Boxer Schmeling and Aphrodite Kallipygos. Hirschfeld, Vol. 4. Bilderteil: Geschlechtskunde, Figs. 206, 207. 417

6.7 Hannah Höch, Die Süsse (Sweet One), 1926. Photomontage with watercolor, 30 x 15.5 cm. Museum Folkwang, Essen. 418

6.8 Gerda Wegener, Portrait of three Women (Lili in the centre), undated. Niels Hoyer, ed. Man into Woman, An Authentic Record of a Change of Sex, trans. H.J.Stenning (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1933), facing page 224. 419

6.9 Gerda Wegener, Moderne Demimondänen. Moll, Polizei und Sitte, between pp. 128-29. 420

6.10 Einar Wegener (Andreas Sparre) about 1920. Frontispiece, Hoyer, Man into Woman, 1933. 421

6.11 Einar Wegener (Andreas Sparre) posing as Lili, Paris 1926. Hoyer, Man into Woman, 1933, facing page 40. 422

6.12 Einar Wegener (Andreas Sparre) after definitely assuming the name of Lili, Paris, January, 1930. Hoyer, Man into Woman, 1933, facing page 96. 423

6.13 Einar Wegener (Andreas Sparre) as Lili Elbe, Dresden, May 1930, between second and third Operations. Hoyer, Man into Woman, 1933, facing page 112. 424

6.14 Einar Wegener (Andreas Sparre) as Lili Elbe, Copenhagen, February, 1931. Hoyer, Man into Woman, 1933, facing page 208. 425

6.15 Dust-jacket, Neils Hoyer, ed., Lili Elbe, ein Mensch wechselt sein Geschlecht: Eine Lebensbeichte (Dresden: Carl Reissner Verlag, 1932). 426

6.16 Schnittbild aus Zeitschriften die vorzugsweise in homosexuellen Kreisen gelesen Wurde (Collage from newspapers primarily read in homosexual circles). Moll, Polizei und Sitte, p. 101. 427

7.1 Claude Cahun [and Marcel Moore], Self-portrait, ca. 1928. Photograph. Jersey Heritage Trust (JHT)/1995/0036/b print. 428

7.2 Claude Cahun, Photomontage prefacing Chapter III, Aveux non avenus (Paris: Édition Carrefour, 1930). 429

7.3 Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore (signed Moore). Photomontage. Frontispiece, Aveux non avenus, 1930. 430

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7.4 Leonor Fini, Travesti á l’oiseau (Transvestite with a Bird), c. 1932. Oil on canvas, 100 x 65 cm. Private Collection. 431

7.5 Leonor Fini, Le supplice de l’allure (The Torture of Allure), 1940. Oil on canvas, 64.8 x 40.7 cm. Private Collection. 432

7.6 Hannah Höch, Schöne Fanggeräte (Beautiful Trapping-Machines), 1946. Photomontage, 30 x 22 cm. 1946. Collection Landesbank Berlin AG. 433

7.7 Hannah Höch, Möhn (Poppies), 1935-40. Goauche, 63 x 47 cm. Berlinische Galerie 434

7.8 Hannah Höch, Maske und Vase (Mask and Vase), 1940. Gouache, 45 x 32 cm. Berlinische Galerie. 435

7.9 Hannah Höch, Tümpel (Pond), 1936. Watercolor 40 x 57 cm. Berlinische Galerie. 436

7.10 Hannah Höch, Flora 1942, Watercolor, 35 x 48 cm. Berlinische Galerie. 437

7.11 Hannah Höch, Der Mond zu Besuch (The Moon comes for a Visit), 1943. Watercolor, 72 x 57 cm. 438

7.12 Hannah Höch, Und die Freunde der Keime (And the Friends of Sprouts), 1943. Ink on Paper, 23 x 23 cm. Berlinische Galerie. 439

7.13 Hannah Höch, 1945, 1945. Oil on canvas, 92.8 x 81.4 cm. Landesbank Berlin AG. 440

7.14 Hannah Höch, Liebespaar am Hang (Romantic Couple on a Slope), 1948. Gouache, 45 x 62 cm. Berlinische Galerie. 441

7.15 Hannah Höch, Schwebende Formen (Floating Forms), 1957. Oil on canvas, 90 x 60 cm. Berlinische Galerie. 442

7.16 Hannah Höch, Um einem roten Mund (Around/About a Red Mouth), ca. 1967. Collage, 20.5 x 16.5 cm. Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, Stuttgart. 443

xix

7.17 Hannah Höch, Hommage á Riza Abasi (Homage to Riza Abasi), 1963. Photomontage, 35.5 x 17.7 cm. Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, Stuttgart. 444

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This dissertation would have not been possible without the generous support of the Art History Department at Case Western Reserve University. I am grateful to Tirza

True Latimer, whose insight and suggestions helped me to develop my thesis in its early stages. I would like to thank my committee members Catherine Scallen, T. Kenny

Fountain, and above all, my advisor Anne Helmreich, whose intellectual clarity helped me to structure my argument. I am especially indebted to my second reader Ellen G.

Landau, whose invaluable assistance in the final stages of the writing process enabled me to complete this dissertation. I would like to thank the staff of the Kelvin Smith

Library and Inter Library Loan for their professional and friendly assistance. I am indebted to Sabine Balke of the Berlin Spinnboden Lesbenarchiv who generously allowed me to acces Weimar materials and Ralf Burmeister of the Berlinische Galerie who was never too busy to locate information and provide valuable advice.

I am grateful to my parents and my sisters and the many friends and accomplished individuals who have inspired, encouraged, and generously supported me throughout the years. These include Mary Christine LeBlanc, Sr. Mary Regis Flannery, Isa

Hesse, Verena Loewensberg, Valerie Hylton, Trixie Rosen, Mary T. O’Connor, Dana

Deville, Ekkehard Kaemmerling, Bob Ciofani, Jeannette Hug, Sabine Richebächer, Katja

Gantenbein, Diane Scillia, Susan Furrer, and Cathy Egloff.

xxi

Hannah Höch, Til Brugman, Lesbianism, and Weimar Sexual Subculture

Abstract

JULIE NERO

Hannah Höch was an avid collector of Weimar print media and her signature

medium was the photomontage. Because of this, her work is generally explored within

the context of mainstream media and, to a degree, this is adequate. Yet this dissertation

questions the completeness of this path of enquiry and newly examines Höch’s oeuvre

within an expanded context of media generated by sexology, ethnography, medicine,

and sexual subculture. Furthermore, while diverse contemporary media were integral to

Höch’s oeuvre, the close correlation between her artistic themes and her intimate

relationships has yet to be fully examined.

In her early photomontages, Höch’s engagement with gender largely reflected

her relationship with Raoul Hausmann and her difficult status as the sole woman among

the Berlin Dadaists. Her engagement with gender grew and became more focused after

1926 when Höch entered into a ten year lesbian partnership with the Dutch writer

Mathilda ‘Til’ Brugman. While this relationship has received cursory scholarly attention,

it was arguably the artist’s most significant personal bond and influenced her oeuvre

considerably. Moreover, during her years with Brugman, Höch’s photomontages clearly

reflected lesbian subculture, as this dissertation will definitively establish. Höch and

Brugman collaborated on a number of creative projects that satirically and critically

xxii addressed social and political issues, particularly those related to concepts of gender identity. Knowledge of Weimar sexual and medical discourse found expression in both women’s work and indicates that they were familiar with vanguard surgical procedures.

Although the two women separated in 1936, Höch’s exploration of the social construction of gender remained a key theme in her photomontages and continued to occupy her well into the 1970s.

xxiii

INTRODUCTION

As a young woman, Hannah Höch (1889-1978) was affiliated with the Berlin

Dadaists, a loosely federated group of artists known for their oppositional and anarchic

aesthetics and activities. The Dada movement, which began in Zürich’s Cabaret Voltaire

in 1916, was launched in Berlin by Richard Huelsenbeck with an artistic soirée at the

Gallery Neuman in 1918.1 In his Dadaist Manifesto (1918), Huelsenbeck attacked

Expressionism, stressing the immediate experience of reality in the street, as opposed to

the soul-searching anguish of the Expressionists.2 In accord with his polemic, the

Dadaists embraced urban experience and set themselves apart from their Expressionist

predecessors who had found the city an oppressive and disturbing space.3

In early twentieth-century Germany, the media represented a major aspect of

urban experience and included newspapers, posters, shop signs, and advertisements.

The Dadaists engaged with these media both as a raw material in their art, and as

publishers.4 Unsurprisingly, the group is primarily known for their photomontages. In

their hands, the photomontage, composed from contemporary media fragments,

constituted a politically and culturally disruptive act. Like her colleagues, Höch deployed

1 Matthew Gale, Dada and Surrealism (London: Phaidon, 1997), 121. 2 Gale, Dada and Surrealism, 121. 3 Gale, Dada and Surrealism, 127. Referencing Expressionist artists E.L. Kirchner and Ludwig Meidner, Gale remarks that when they engaged with urban themes, they were generally depicted as alienating or as apocalyptic visions. 4 Wieland Herzfelde’s Berlin-based publishing venture Malik Verlag was launched in 1917 when he acquired the magazine Die Neue Jugend. The Malik Verlag served as a political platform for pacifist and communist-informed texts and satirical illustrations. the photomontage, yet her artistic style, her engagement with the figure, and her focus on gender set her decidedly apart from her fellow Dadaists.

Höch was employed at the Ullstein Press, a major Berlin publishing company, from 1916 through 1926, and because of this, her photomontages are generally examined in close conjunction with Weimar print culture. Maud Lavin’s seminal and unrivaled monograph represents the most complete exploration of Hannah Höch’s

Weimar era oeuvre. In her study, Lavin foregrounds the artist’s critical, satirical, and frequently humorous engagement with popular print culture.5 This methodological focus is supported by Höch’s biography; her part-time employment at Ullstein placed her at the epicenter of popular Weimar print culture and provided access to a large reservoir of graphic materials. Indeed, Ullstein magazines served as raw materials for a number of the artist’s collages.6 Yet, and central to the following discussion, scholars have been unable to trace more than half of the graphic material Höch used in her collages to mainstream sources. While this may be attributed to the vast Weimar publishing industry, it also reflects the artist’s interest in alternate media, which will be discussed later.

5 Maud Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife: The Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). 6 For a discussion of Höch’s Scrapbook, see Melissa A. Johnson, “On the Strength of my Imagination: Visions of Weimar Culture in the Scrapbook of Hannah Höch” (Ann Arbor: UMI, PhD dissertation, Bryn Mawr, 2001), 11-12. Johnson identifies Jula Dech’s 1978 master’s thesis as the first attempt to locate the mass media sources for Höch’s collage materials. See also Lavin, “Hannah Höch’s Mass Media Scrapbook: Utopias of the Twenties,” Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 71-123; Maria Makela, “By Design: The Early Work of Hannah Höch in Context,” in The Photomontages of Hannah Höch, Peter Boswell, Maria Makela and Carolyn Lanchner (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center; New York: The Museum of Modern Art; Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1997), 49-79.

As Melissa A. Johnson writes, “after the war a glut of illustrated magazines hit

the newsstands.”7 Weimar was literally saturated with mass-media and over 2,000

magazine titles circulated in Berlin alone during the 1920s.8 Höch had continual and

easy access to an unfathomable amount of print media; thus, in addition to Ullstein

magazines, it is likely she looked to other sources. This suggests that Höch’s oeuvre

merits critical examination beyond the context of mainstream publications.9

Höch’s photomontages demonstrate a highly personal engagement with

contemporary print culture. As art historian Peter Boswell observes, the complex

interplay between public and private that permeates Höch’s photomontages confounds

our historical associations with the medium. However, he continues, other factors

intrinsic to Höch’s production, such as her “disconcertingly uneven output in a variety of

media,” make it difficult to present a concise view of her artistic personality.10 As the

following study will reveal, Höch’s artistic production was shaped by the discourses of

Weimar print culture, but above all, her biography, and her intimate relationships

informed, and to a large degree, determined the tenor of her oeuvre.

Notable among those experiences that influenced Höch’s artistic production was her affair with Raoul Hausmann (1886-1971). The Berlin Dadaist was Höch’s first love

7 Johnson, “On the Strength of my Imagination,” 62-63. 8 Hanne Lorek, “Auch Greta Garbo ist einmal Verkäuferin gewesen: Das Kunstprodukt ‘Neue Frau’ in den zwanziger Jahren,” Frauen, Kunst, Wissenschaft 9, no. 10 (1990): 18, cited in Barbara Kosta, “Unruly Daughters and Modernity: Irmgard Keun’s Gilgi-eine von uns,” The German Quarterly 68, no. 3 (Summer 1995): 284n18. 9 Höch’s Album contains 429 images. Johnson has identified the sources of 201 images; however, the sources of the remaining 228 images have yet to be determined by Johnson, or others. 10 Peter Boswell, “Hannah Höch: Through the Looking Glass,” in Peter Boswell, Maria Makela, and Carolyn Lanchner, The Photomontages of Hannah Höch (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center; New York: The Museum of Modern Art; Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1996), 8.

and her intimate partner from 1915 through 1922, yet her experience with him was

bittersweet. When they met, Hausmann was married and had a seven year old

daughter. He wanted to have a child with Höch; however, she refused because he was

married. In 1916, and again in 1918, Höch decided to terminate two pregnancies by

abortion, then an illegal and potentially fatal procedure.11 Höch’s identification with the

New Woman figure (to be discussed in a later chapter) and her turbulent affair with

Hausmann appear to have inspired what became a lifelong engagement with gender

issues. Indeed, upon closer examination, a number of Höch’s early works already appear

to explore the commodification and victimization of women in patriarchal culture. As

will be seen, these themes reflected aspects of Höch’s personal experience and

remained significant to her throughout her life.12

Höch’s stormy liaison with Hausmann, combined with the sexism of the

Dadaists,13 sensitized her to women’s reproductive rights and gender issues and clearly

informed her artistic sensibilities. However, Höch’s lesbian relationship with the Dutch

writer Mathilda ‘Til’ Brugman (1888-1958) was undoubtedly the most transformative

experience in her life. The artist’s intimate partner for nearly a decade (1926-1936),

11 Ralf Burmeister, Hannah Höch: Aller Anfang ist DADA! (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz; Berlin: Berlinische Galerie, Landesmuseum für Moderne Kunst, Fotografie und Architektur, 2007), 163-64. 12 Cara Schweitzer, Schrankenlose Freiheit für Hannah Höch: Das Leben einer Künstlerin, 1889- 1978 (Berlin: Osburg Verlag, 2011), 147. Having experienced two illegal abortions likely prompted Höch to participate in the 1931 Berlin exhibition Frauen in Not (Women in Need). Organized by the international Arbeiterhilfe (Worker’s Assistance), Käthe Kollwitz played a central role in the marketing and planning of the exhibition. Frauen in Not was intended to raise awareness for the plight of women faced with unwanted pregnancies with no alternatives but illegal and medically risky procedures, or suicide. Friedrich Wolf’s 1929 controversial drama Cyankali-Paragraph 218 (Cyanide- Paragraph 218) thematized this serious problem. Before the play went on tour in 1930, Höch saw it in Berlin. Cyankali was shut down by Nazi eugenicists in 1931. 13 Boswell, “Through the Looking Glass,” 8. As Boswell remarks, “In short, she was not ‘one of the boys.’”

Brugman shared and encouraged Höch’s artistic engagement with a variety of themes

and the couple’s complementary sensibilities are patently evident in their collaborative

works.

During Höch and Brugman’s years together, Höch’s photomontages accrued

clarity and salience, and, as will be seen, similar developments are evident in Brugman’s

writing. Her travel reportage “Von Hollands Blumenfelder” (“Holland’s Flower Fields”)

(1933) and short-story collection Scheingehacktes (Mock-mincemeat) (1935) are

illustrated by Höch and demonstrate the couple’s mutual pursuit of social and political

criticism. Importantly, these projects also represented Brugman’s introduction to a

broader reading public and attest to her growing professionalism.

Höch’s subject matter and artistic style markedly changed during her years with

Brugman. From the mid 1920s, as Boswell points out, her work became “more focused

on gender roles and the relationship between the sexes.”14 Similarly, Lavin observes a

“conspicuous increase” in Höch’s depictions of same-sex couples after 1926 and claims that her relationship with Brugman seems to have “intensified and expanded gender concerns” already evident in work.15 Like them, Maria Makela writes that during this

period, Höch’s oeuvre underwent a “subtle metamorphosis” marked by an increase in

the “appearance of same-sex couples.”16 The unanimous tenor of these observations

confirms how art historians have observed that, during her years with Brugman, Höch’s

sensibilities and her art significantly changed. This dissertation suggests that the artist’s

14 Boswell, “Through the Looking Glass,” in Boswell, Makela, and Lanchner, 12. 15 Maud Lavin, “Androgyny, Spectatorship, and the Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch,” New German Critique, no. 51 (Autumn 1990): 67. 16 Makela, “By Design,” in Boswell, Makela, and Lanchner, 66.

oeuvre, especially after 1926, merits increased consideration in relation to her lesbian

sexuality.

Furthermore, and central to the following discussion, Höch’s lesbian partnership

with Brugman fortuitously coincided with Weimar’s thriving sexual subculture and the

advent of lesbian media.17 Weimar lesbian books and periodicals were instrumental in

enabling, influencing, and augmenting the contemporary perception of lesbianism and,

as will be argued, significantly informed Höch’s oeuvre.

Hannah Höch’s engagement with Weimar print culture was central to her oeuvre

and will provide a starting point for this discussion. Yet, unlike other studies, the primary

focus of this one will not be popular, i.e. heteronormative, media. Instead, her oeuvre will be newly considered in relation to publications that, while available to the average reader, nevertheless fell at the fringes of Weimar culture. These materials include sexological publications and, because Höch lived in a lesbian partnership from 1926, lesbian books and magazines. Depictions of women in the Weimar media were generally informed by patriarchal heterosexism, yet lesbian print culture offered an alternative to this model. However, as will be seen, on occasion, and somewhat ironically, lesbian publications reflected or appropriated popular representational tropes: a phenomenon

also evident in Höch’s contemporary oeuvre. As this study newly reveals, mainstream

and lesbian print media were often, for all practical purposes, interchangeable.

Understanding these similarities and subtle differences is crucial to an expanded

17 Heike Schader, Virile, Vamps und wilde Veilchen: Sexualität, Begehren, und Erotik in den Zeitschriften homosexueller Frauen im Berlin der 1920er Jahren (Königstein: Helmer, 2007), 42. Lesbian journals newly emerged in Weimar and were regularly published and distributed in Berlin between 1924 and 1933.

comprehension of Weimar media, and will establish the basis for a new discussion of

Höch’s oeuvre. As will be shown, Höch’s 1928 photomontages Russische Tänzerin

(Russian Dancer) (fig. 2.1) and Englische Tänzerin (English Dancer) (fig. 2.2) reference

both. The artist’s photomontages Liebe (Love) (1931) (fig. 3.10) and Auf dem Weg im F.

Himmel (On the Way to F. Heaven) (1934) (fig. 3.18) will also be analyzed in the context

of Weimar lesbian materials. Visual evidence suggests that Höch’s contemporary

depictions of same-sex female couples were much like those in the lesbian media,

influenced and informed by popular ethnographic and political discourses.

The chapters in the following study will be organized thematically and

chronologically and begin with an overview of Höch’s life and art that establishes a

contextual frame for the more specialized and in-depth discussions in later chapters. An

analysis of Höch’s early biography and career will consider the influence of her

upbringing, her artistic training, and her relationship with Hausmann upon her creative

production.

Hannah Höch’s status as the sole woman among the Berlin Dadaists naturally

raises issues of sexism, and the misogyny of the early-twentieth century avant-garde.

Just as history attests to the sexism of her male colleagues, by today’s standards, Höch

may be classified as a feminist.18 Importantly, however, Höch distinguished herself from the Dadaists in ways that had nothing to do with her gender: a comparative examination

18 Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 113. De Lauretis lists the following elements as essential to feminism: “a critical reading of culture, a political interpretation of the social texts and of the social subject, and a rewriting of our culture’s ‘master narratives.’”

7 of her photomontages and theirs reveals key differences in style and content and attest to Höch’s originality and artistic independence.

While Höch’s relationship with Brugman represents her most significant intimate bond, any discussion of Höch’s oeuvre must consider the influence of her affair with

Hausmann and her Nazi-era marriage (1938-1944) to Kurt Heinz Matthies (1910-?).19

Despite her marriage, after Höch separated from Brugman, she was often alone and led a solitary life. In 1942, Höch officially separated from her husband and it was then that she turned away from figural representation and increasingly pursued nature studies and abstraction. Generally, Höch’s focus on the figure was most pronounced when she was involved with others; this suggests the strong influence of personal relationships, or lack thereof, upon her artistic production. During the 1950s, as Höch began to renew contacts that had been disrupted or severed by the war, figures and gender-related themes resurfaced in her oeuvre.

Hannah Höch’s lifelong interest in gender and sexual identity began during the late ‘teens and is evident in her Dada-era photomontages. While the grotesque figures in Höch’s early works often overwhelm more subtle aspects of human representation, they nonetheless signal and, as will be seen, anticipate Höch’s engagement with morphology and sexual identity that flowered during her years with Brugman.

Höch and Brugman’s significant, yet underexplored, joint artistic projects will be a primary focus of this dissertation. The couple’s collaborative works humorously and

19 The date of Matthies’ death is unknown. For the last mention of Matthies in Höch’s papers, see Burmeister, Aller Anfang ist DADA!, 189. Matthies contacted Höch in 1965 while he was visiting Berlin but she refused to see him.

8 critically engage with a variety of social issues including conformity and greed. However, their satire was especially vitriolic when addressing sexism and gender-related themes.

In addition, this dissertation will examine collaborative works that, under closer scrutiny, reveal the couple’s critique of contemporary politics and medical discourse.

One of the main aspects of this study will be to foreground Höch’s engagement with sexual subculture and the medicalization of Weimar sexology. This line of enquiry was initiated by Maria Makela, who has examined Höch’s photomontages in relation to

Weimar medical practice and sexual discourse.20 While plastic surgeries were developed to ameliorate battle wounds, they were soon deployed to shape faces and bodies to conform to Aryan beauty standards. Makela perceptively claims that the influence of endocrinological and sexological discourses upon Weimar surgical practice is akin to the cutting and pasting of Höch’s photomontages.21 While she briefly, and tantalizingly, links

Höch’s 1926 photomontage Die Süsse (The Sweet One) (fig. 6.7) to early gender- reassignment surgery, Makela’s focus is, for the most part, discursive, and not visual. As will be shown, Höch’s photomontages not only reflect sexual discourse, but importantly, may be linked to medical illustrations. Moreover, as will be seen, this aspect of Höch’s oeuvre suggests Brugman’s influence; while they were a couple, Brugman translated contemporary medical materials.22

20 Maria Makela, “Grotesque Bodies: Weimar-Era Medicine and the Photomontages of Hannah Höch,” in Modern Art and the Grotesque, Francis S. Connelly, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 193-219. 21 Makela, “Grotesque Bodies,” 193. 22 Unfortunately, the exact nature of these materials is unknown.

Chapter I

Dada’s “Good Girl” and her Recurring Obsessions

Chapter I, which focuses on Höch’s early biography and her Dada-era works, will

provide a basis for an extended examination of the artist’s oeuvre. While Höch’s Dada

and early Weimar-era oeuvre predates the focus of this study, and arguably, her artistic

maturity, Höch’s life and art during these years represent a starting point and

foundation for her later work. Building upon previous scholarship, this study will train a

new focus on Höch’s oeuvre in relation to her sexual identity.23

Höch’s psycho-sexual biography, which included an illicit liaison with Hausmann,

a ten-year lesbian partnership with Brugman followed by a brief marriage to a man

twenty-three years her junior, attests to the radically unconventional nature of her

intimate bonds. Importantly, it will be shown, these relationships found reflection in

Höch’s treatment of gender. Likewise, the artist’s wartime oeuvre, which is often

abstract or devoid of figures, ‘documents’ what Höch later described as a period of

radical loneliness.24

23 For the most complete discussion of Höch’s work, see, Lavin’s monograph, Cut with the Kitchen Knife. For the most developed biography, see Cara Schweitzer, Schrankenlose Freiheit für Hannah Höch: Das Leben einer Künstlerin, 1889-1978 (Berlin: Osburg Verlag, 2011). For a discussion of Höch’s Dada-era artistic production, see, Ralf Burmeister, Hannah Höch: Aller Anfang ist DADA! (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz; Berlin: Berlinische Galerie für moderne Kunst, Fotografie und Architektur, 2007); see also, Boswell, Makela, and Lanchner, The Photomontages of Hannah Höch. 24 Schweitzer, Schrankenlose Freiheit, 193-370. Höch made this statement in a 1958 interview. The artist’s “radikale Vereinsamung” (radical loneliness), which Schweitzer dates from 1935-1945, had much to do with the rise of Nazism; even before Höch separated from Brugman in 1936, many of her friends were compelled to leave Germany or go underground. The subsequent war only exacerbated the process.

Chapter II

Weimar Lesbian Representation and Höch’s Russian Dancer and English Dancer

This chapter will set the tone for a new reading of Höch’s photomontages in the

context of Weimar lesbian print culture. Detailed analysis will reveal that the artist’s

Russian Dancer (2.1) and English Dancer (fig. 2.2) (both 1928) reflect the artist’s intimate

relationship with Brugman and include a number of clues that clearly reference lesbian

subculture.

During the 1920s (for the first time in history), Weimar lesbians expressed

themselves via public media, especially with magazines and books. However, the

women involved in the authorship of these materials were faced with the task of

representing what had traditionally been represented by men,25 and often within a

prurient or pornographic context.26 Moreover, lesbians had to navigate and distinguish

themselves in the midst of a number of popular feminine tropes. Staple media

representations included dancers, show girls, nudists, and New Women (a term that will be expounded upon later). As will be seen, these same figures graced the covers of

Weimar lesbian periodicals and featured prominently in Höch’s photomontages and

25 Susan J. Wolfe and Julia Penelope, eds., “Sexual Identity/ Textual Politics: Lesbian {De Com} positions,” in Sexual Practice/Textual Theory: Lesbian Cultural Criticism (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1993), 10. “For centuries, men have produced literature about Lesbians, about how men think lesbians think, how men imagine Lesbians behave as Lesbians, how men imagine it might feel to be a Lesbian. But these are not works within a Lesbian literary tradition.” Emphasis original. 26 Merriam-Webster defines pornography as follows: 1. the depiction of erotic behavior (as in pictures or writing) intended to cause sexual excitement; 2. material (as books or photographs) that depicts erotic behavior and is intended to cause sexual excitement; 3. the depiction of acts in a sensational manner so as to arouse a quick intense emotional excitement. http://www.merriam- webster.com/pornography (accessed December 10, 2011).

Album, the artist’s personal scrapbook-style collection of magazine imagery.27 Evidence

based on contemporary lesbian codes suggests that the Russian Dancer and English

Dancer comprise a double portrait and represent the artist and her partner. While the

two works, cannot, with absolute certainty, be characterized as a pair, as this chapter

will argue, they may nevertheless be situated firmly within Weimar lesbian subculture.

Chapter III

Lesbian Representation, Weimar Ethnography, Politics, and Hannah Höch

This chapter will identify discursive intersections between popular, sexological, and ethnographic materials in Weimar. It will trace their reflection in lesbian representational codes and in the work of Höch and her contemporaries. As will be shown, Höch’s early engagement with lesbian themes in her photomontages, evident in

the Russian Dancer and English Dancer, was soon followed by patently unambiguous

depictions of lesbian sex and partnership. This suggests that Höch‘s years with Brugman

enabled her to more freely engage with lesbianism; a development evident in the

artist’s photomontages Auf dem Weg im F. Himmel (On the Way to F. Heaven) (1934)

(3.17), which depicts a female couple and, Liebe (Love) (1930) (fig. 3.10) an image that

evokes lesbian lovemaking.

As stated, Höch’s representations of female couples reflected changing imagery

in contemporary lesbian periodicals; as Weimar lesbian print media was inventing new

ways to represent lesbianism, Höch, too, was engaged in a similar process. While Höch’s

27 Lavin, “Hannah Höch’s Mass Media Scrapbook: Utopias of the Twenties,” in Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 73. The Scrapbook includes imagery from the 1920s and 1930s and was most probably assembled in 1933. See also Hannah Höch, Album (Scrapbook), Gunda Luyken, ed. (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz; Berlin: Berlinische Galerie, Landesmuseum für Moderne Kunst, Fotografie und Architektur, 2004); and Johnson, “On the Strength of my Imagination.”

straightforward depictions of female couples have much in common with late Weimar

lesbian magazines and contemporary ethnographic discourse, as will be shown in this

chapter, after 1929, and especially after Adolf Hitler assumed power in 1933, repressive

politics and the rise of censorship in Germany had a substantial impact on both Höch’s

photomontages and the representation of lesbians in the media.

Chapter IV

Hannah Höch and Til Brugman: Creative Collaboration, Social Critique, and Political Resistance

This chapter examines the creative collaboration between Höch and her partner

Til Brugman. While Brugman’s extant literary oeuvre is somewhat patchy,28 evidence

linking her texts to Höch’s oeuvre confirms the couple’s joint artistic production.29 An in-

depth study of Höch and Brugman’s creative collaboration has not yet been undertaken.

As noted, their joint publications include a Dutch-themed travel-reportage, “Von

Hollands Blumenfelder” (Holland’s Flowerfields) (1933), and the 1935 volume

Scheingehacktes (Mock-mincemeat). Both are satires: “Hollands Blumenfelder” is a

thinly veiled polemic aimed at eugenic and racial discourse, while the short story

“Scheingehacktes” parodies the blind pursuit of fads, advertising, consumer-culture, and

sexism. As will be discussed at length, Höch, who critiqued and illustrated Brugman’s

texts, played a major role in expressing these themes.

28 Marion Brandt’s study represents the most complete discussion of Til Brugman. See Brandt’s Til Brugman: Das vertippte Zebra, Lyrik und Prosa (Berlin: Hoho Verlag Hoffmann, 1995), 160. Brandt’s book includes 17 poems, and 20 literary grotesques. Brandt writes that her choice of less than half of a possible 47 extant texts is “purely subjective” yet “representative” of Brugman’s oeuvre. 29 See, Mineke Bosch and Myriam Everard, guest eds., “Til Brugman and Hannah Höch,” special issue Lust en Gratie 18 (Fall 1988); Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife; Maria Makela, “Grotesque Bodies: Weimar-Era Medicine and the Photomontages of Hannah Höch,” in Modern Art and the Grotesque, Frances S. Connelly, ed. (Cambridge: University of Cambridge, 2003), 193-219.

Contemporary politics will be central to the discussion in this chapter. By 1930,

the National Socialists (Nazis) had become so powerful that they dominated Weimar

politics. Höch, who began her artistic career with the revolutionary anarchist Dadaists,

and her partner Brugman, a foreign national who worked in an experimental literary

genre, felt the brunt of repressive sanctions. Yet, despite these developments, each

woman continued, either in her art or writing, to courageously resist Nazi policy and

politics.

Along with their political engagement, as this chapter will demonstrate, the

couple’s joint and individual works worked to expose the sexism of patriarchal culture

and its deleterious social and psychological effects. Höch’s satirical, and often

disturbing, late Weimar bride-themed photomontages reflect, or directly engage with

Brugman’s texts, particularly, as will be seen, the writer’s 1927 grotesque, “Himilia.”30

Thematic similarities suggest the couple’s shared intellectual concerns in an ongoing, yet

largely undocumented, creative partnership.

Chapter V

Hannah Höch’s Tamer, Sexology, and Weimar Sexual Subculture

While chapters one through four provide a largely linear, chronological framework for the discussion, which moves from Höch’s Dada-years, the influence of

lesbian subculture on the artist’s photomontages, and the effect of National Socialism

upon her creative collaboration with Til Brugman, the subsequent chapters of this study will focus on thematic concerns in Höch’s 1920s and 1930s oeuvre and support claims of

30 Til Brugman, “Himilia,” in Brandt, Vertippte Zebra, 141-150.

14 the significance and centrality of Weimar sexual discourse and subculture upon Höch’s visual expression. Hannah Höch’s 1930 photomontage Dompteuse (Tamer) (fig. 5.1)

(one of the most gender-ambiguous images ever created) is the focus of this chapter.

The dual and ambiguously gendered Tamer will be shown to reflect, in a significant way, contemporary sexological publications and Weimar sexual subculture. Höch’s Tamer, which combines “oscillating”31 and unresolved male and female elements, attests to the artist’s ease with gender ambiguity, which was largely inspired by her lesbian relationship. Importantly, the Tamer speaks to, and, somewhat radically, anticipates late twentieth and early twenty-first century queer theory which argues for the “elasticity” of gender beyond a binary model.32 And while queer theory, much like gender itself (at least according to its advocates) resists definition, it nevertheless debunks the concept of stable sexual identity and considers gender a “shifting and contextual phenomenon.”33

Along with the artist’s own lesbian relationship, Weimar sexological discourse was also crucial to Höch’s artistic development at this time. This chapter will present an overview of the nineteenth-century theorists whose research laid its foundations.

Weimar sexology was largely based upon the work of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825-1890),

Carl Westphal (1833-1890), and especially Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing (1840-

1902). Westphal’s model of homosexual pathology was adopted by the Austrian

31 Lavin uses this term often to characterize Höch’s representations of gender. See, Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 190-97, 200-03. 32 Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 1. 33 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999), 15.

physician and psychiatrist Krafft-Ebing, the most widely published and influential

nineteenth-century European sexologist.34 While Krafft-Ebing’s work provided the basis

for Weimar sexology, his research methods were altered and greatly improved by the

leading Berlin sexologist, and homosexual, Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935). Hirschfeld’s

ideas, and above all, the illustrations from his many publications, suggest a critical visual

context for situating Höch’s photomontages.

Contemporaneous popular debates surrounding the New Woman figure will also

play a key role in Chapter V. The concept of the New Woman revolutionized the gender

status quo and is central to understanding Höch‘s photomontages and Brugman’s

literary oeuvre. Both artists may be characterized as New Women; they were

economically and sexually independent and lived in an urban environment. The New

Woman was an international phenomenon largely generated by historical events. After

World War I, in what has been described as the feminization of the city, vast numbers of

women flocked to European urban centers in search of employment.35 These

developments, and the masculine fashions that their lifestyle inspired, were widely, and

rightly, perceived as a threat to the stability of bourgeois social tradition. The resultant

destabilization of sexual roles generated by this phenomenon is suggested in a number

of Höch’s photomontages. The artist’s Tamer, to a degree, references the New Woman,

34 Harry Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of Nature: Krafft-Ebing, Psychiatry, and the Making of Sexual identity (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000). 35 For a discussion of the New Woman in Weimar, See, Katharina von Ankum, ed., Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Katharina Sykora, et al. eds., Die Neue Frau: Herausforderung für die Bildmedien der Zwanziger Jahre (Marburg: Jonas Verlag, 1993).

yet, even more so, as will be seen, engages with sexual discourse and the practice of

cross-dressing in Weimar sexual subculture.

Chapter VI

The Wonders of Weimar Endocrinology: Höch’s gender-hybrids and Brugman’s literary Grotesques

Continuing the thematic approach, this chapter will explore ways in which Höch

and Brugman engaged with Weimar endocrinology and the medicalization of gender.

Along with the Tamer, Höch’s photomontages Die Starken Männer (The Strong Men)

(1931) (fig. 6.4) and Die Süsse (The Sweet One) (1926) (fig. 6.7), to be discussed in this

chapter, can be linked to both discourses. In addition, these photomontages suggest the

artist’s interest in and knowledge of hormones and gender reassignment surgeries that

these discourses inspired. While Tamer, Strong Men, and The Sweet One disrupt

stereotypical representations of gender, above all, the latter two imply its increasing

medicalization.

Höch’s Strong Men depicts the legendary boxer Max Schmeling (1905-2004) and

addresses the conflated cultural and political concepts of strength and masculinity at

the time. Beginning in the 1920s, the boxer and boxing became a favorite and frequent

motif among artists. However, unlike her contemporaries, who celebrated the boxer as

a virile hero, Höch’s Strong Men presents a disrupted masculine avatar. Furthermore,

the inside/outside view of the subject’s body suggests Weimar medical illustrations and

gender-altering procedures.

Like Höch, Til Brugman engaged with the newly interrelated discourses of

sexology and endocrinology. For the first time, a detailed analysis of their efforts along

these lines will be presented in tandem. Brugman’s literary grotesques “Revision am

Himmel” (Revision/Adjustment in Heaven) and “Warenhaus der Liebe” (Department

Store of Love/Sex) (1931-33) satirize sexology, endocrinological research, and vanguard surgical practice.

Höch’s exploration of the medicalization of sexology in her art is clearly

suggested in the 1926 photomontage Sweet One, in which she cut, altered, and

recombined male and female components. While the artist’s rough-hewn Sweet One

rather crudely implicates surgical gender reconstruction, it nonetheless reflects

vanguard medical practice and efforts to remedy what sexologist Hirschfeld classified as

“extreme transvestism.” Extreme transvestites, like Einar Wegener (1888-1931), were

not content to cross-dress or to change their names legally, but longed to physically

alter their sex. Correlations between the illustrations and, above all, the dust-jacket of a

book about Wegener and Höch’s photomontage oeuvre will be made clear: both

combine and redeploy fragments from the popular media and represent gender as a

construction.

Conclusion

Examining Hannah Höch’s photomontages within the context of her personal

biography allows new readings of key works in the artist’s oeuvre. Arguably, Höch’s

unconventional personal relationships had an impact on her sensibilities and artistic

production. As will be shown, a closer examination of Höch’s intimate biography reveals

important, yet, frequently overlooked information. Crucial details regarding the artist’s

unhappy liaison with Raoul Hausmann, and the odd circumstances of her short-lived

marriage to Kurt Matthies, which ended her partnership with Brugman, are often buried

in footnotes. Most notably, details surrounding her Nazi-era marriage, which have only

recently found their way into the scholarship, overturn unfounded speculation

pertaining to Höch’s sexuality in the years following her lesbian relationship.36 This

information is important and enables a fuller understanding of Höch’s sensibilities and

her artistic production.

Moreover, this dissertation will establish how Höch’s photomontages engage

with salient aspects of Weimar lesbian print culture and gender discourse, a topic not

fully explored in previous scholarship. It will trace in much greater detail than ever

before exactly how selected works, both before and after her years with Brugman, were

influenced by the dynamic discourse of gender and sexual identities in Germany. As will be argued, Höch’s photomontages reflect her intimate biography, but, echoing diverse contemporary dialogues, also suggest the intersection of sexual subculture, scientific practice, and the popular imagination.

36 Cara Schweitzer, “Der Fall Kurt Heinz Matthies,” in Schrankenlose Freiheit für Hannah Höch: Das Leben einer Künstlerin, 1889-1978 (Berlin: Osburg Verlag, 2011), 212-46.

CHAPTER I

Dada’s “Good Girl” and her Recurring Obsessions

Introduction

Hannah Höch (fig. 1.1) reinvested the photomontage, a key artistic medium

associated with the Berlin Dadaists, with new associations and meanings. In Höch‘s

hands, the photomontage, deployed by leading members of this male-dominated

movement to further their own radical artistic and political agendas, became a tool with

which she explored gender and the representation of women.

In his memoirs, the Berlin Dadaist Hans Richter described Höch as a “good girl”

who served sandwiches and coffee during dada-meetings.37 Höch understandably

balked at this oft-cited remark; it confined her to the margins of the movement and rendered her a Dadaist by default: “married into the radical clan rather than a member by right.”38 Richter’s characterization of Höch as a helpmate lessened and belittled her

status as an artist, and is symptomatic of the misogynism of the early twentieth-century

avant-garde. Because she was a woman, Höch was only begrudgingly included in Dada

activities. Nevertheless, as will be seen, these experiences appear to have inspired her

lifelong engagement with gender-related themes. Unlike her male cohorts, whose

ridicule and satire was most often directed toward contemporary political and

37 Lora Rempel, “The Anti-Body in Photomontage: Hannah Höch’s Woman without Wholeness,” in Sexual Artifice: Persons, Images, Politics, Ann Kibbey, Kayann Short, and Abouali Farmanfarmaian, eds. (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 155;169n6; See also, Hans Richter, Dada, Art, and Anti-Art (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965), 132. See also, Ruth Hemus, Dada’s Women, “Hannah Höch: The ‘good girl’ and the Dada club,” in Dada Women (Yale University Press, 2009), 92, 221n7; 101. 38 Rempel, “The Anti-Body,” 155.

advertising culture,39 Hoch’s oeuvre suggest a more personal engagement with her key themes, most notably, sexism and the artifice of gender.

This chapter will begin with an overview of Höch’s early life, and examine her

association with the Berlin Dadaists and intimate relationship with artist Raoul

Hausmann, whom Höch met in 1915. This will be followed by a discussion of photomontage, a medium characterized by the cutting and recombining of photographic and other readymade graphic imagery.40 The photomontage and collage were central to the Dadaists, however, as will be seen, Höch deployed these mediums

much differently than her colleagues.41 While Höch’s photomontages are on occasion

akin to those of her colleagues, unlike theirs, hers more fully explore the cultural

construction of gender and the commodification of women.

Höch’s engagement with gender and sexuality grew significantly during her

lesbian relationship with the Dutch author Til Brugman, which lasted from 1926 through

1936. Brugman clearly supported Höch’s engagement with gender in her

photomontages, which, after they met, became increasingly audacious. Active within

international avant-garde circles, Brugman (fig. 1.2) was known for her sound poems

and literary grotesques which often parodied bourgeois social conventions, including

sexism and patriarchy. Brugman was clearly not afraid of controversy, yet her forceful

personality was at times a liability. Above all, male artists with whom she was affiliated

rejected and feared her bold critique and sarcasm, which was often at their expense.

39 Sherwin Simmons, “Advertising Seizes Control of Life: Berlin Dada and the Power of Art and Commerce,” Oxford Art Journal 22, no. 1 (1999): 121-46. 40 Dawn Ades, Photomontage (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976), 7-8. 41 Unless otherwise noted, the terms photomontage and collage will be used interchangeably throughout this discussion.

Initially, when Höch and Brugman met, Höch was charmed by the writer’s unfettered manner, yet later, she too felt overwhelmed by Brugman’s dominant nature.

Höch’s relationships, especially those of an intimate nature, informed her oeuvre. She claimed that lived experiences were einverleibt (became a part of one’s

body) and that they were integral and vital to her character and her creativity. As she wrote, “I am convinced of this through my work; much lives in me latently, but is always readily awakened.”42 Höch’s oeuvre confirms this claim; a number of works appear to

revisit important personal themes from her past. Images from the 1920s and 1930s,

especially those depicting children, for example, suggest that she had not yet fully come

to terms with her terminated pregnancies which took place in 1916 and 1918.43

Höch’s oeuvre similarly reflects the solitary years following her separation in

1936 from Brugman. From the mid 1930s, figures all but disappear from her work and

her brief marriage with Matthies seems to have had little influence on this

development. Until 1960, Höch’s oeuvre is dominated by nature studies and

abstraction. While the many plant and garden themed works from this period attest to

the artist’s perennial interest in nature, they also suggest her isolation in a rural

42 Cara Schweitzer, Schrankenlose Freiheit für Hannah Höch: Das Leben einer Künstlerin, 1889- 1978 (Berlin: Osburg Verlag, 2011), 354-55; 423n538. This c. 1942-1943 statement is an excerpt from an unsent letter to her then estranged husband Kurt Matthies. 43 Notable among them is the artist’s oil painting Symbolische Landschaft III (Symbolic Landscape III) (1930). In the foreground, the bodies of two children emerge from the open belly of a nude woman whose face bears a striking resemblance to Höch’s.

environment.44 As Höch later claimed, these years represented “a time of radical

loneliness.”45

Höch’s pursuit of nature studies and abstraction was supported by her move to

the suburb of Berlin Heiligensee in late October 1939 with Matthies, her husband, who

intermittently lived with her until 1942. From the mid 1930s until the late 1950s, Höch’s

oeuvre also reveals a shift away from photomontage to other media such as ink,

gouache, or oil. In part, this may be attributed to dramatic changes in the German

publishing industry. During the ‘teens and ‘twenties, popular magazines, Höch’s primary

source of artistic materials, were abundant. However, under Nazi rule, censorship, and,

especially after 1939, war-related shortages and disrupted distribution channels

curtailed the availability of print media. Central to her earlier oeuvre, the female figure

played only a peripheral role in Höch’s art after 1936, although it would eventually

reemerge during the late 1950s. Her later reintroduction of the figure may, in part, be

explained by the renewed availability of color print media in postwar Germany.

Following the culturally conservative hiatus of the 1950s which emphasized

marriage, domesticity, and childbearing, the next decade coincided with a renewed

feminist thrust advocating women’s civil and reproductive rights. During the 1960s,

women, much as they had in the 1920s, sought greater economic opportunities yet,

unlike their predecessors, they now gained a significant measure of sexual

independence through contraceptive drugs. These combined developments inspired a

44 Heinz Ohff, ed. Hannah Höch: Ein Leben mit der Pflanze (Gelsenkirchen: Städtisches Museum Kunstsammlung Gelsenkirchen-Buer, 1978). 45 Hannah Höch, “Lebensüberblick 1958,” in Hannah Höch: eine Lebenscollage, Eberhard Roters, et al. (Berlin: Kunstlerarchiv der Berlinische Galerie, Landesmuseum für Moderne Kunst; Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 1995), vol. 2, 199. 23

new generation of New Women that seems to have roused Höch to revisit key artistic

themes of her youth: gender and female representation.

Hannah Höch’s early life and career

Hannah Höch was born Anna Therese Johanne Höch on November 1, 1888 in

Gotha, a small city in the German province of Thuringia and was the oldest of five

children in a well-situated bourgeois family. Hannah’s father Friedrich was an insurance

inspector. Her mother Rosa, born Sachs, was interested in music, literature, and

painting, which, in the late nineteenth-century, was not uncommon among women of

her class. In 1904, Hannah’s education was interrupted when her parents removed her

from school so she could tend to her younger sister Marianne.46 Höch cared for her

sister until 1910, and in 1911, began to work in her father’s office. In 1912, at the age of

23, Höch left Gotha for Berlin to study art.47

Höch wanted to pursue fine art, but her parents insisted her course of study be

practical and enable gainful employment. Höch accepted this compromise, and enrolled

in the Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Applied Arts) in Berlin Charlottenburg where she

studied ornamental graphic design. In August 1914, due to the outbreak of World War I,

the Kunstgewerbeschule was closed, and Höch returned to Gotha where she was

compelled to work for the Red Cross for a number of months.48 In 1915, Höch returned

46 Schweitzer, Schrankenlose Freiheit, 13. 47 Kristin Makholm, “Chronology,” in The Photomontages of Hannah Höch, Peter Boswell, Maria Makela and Carolyn Lanchner (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center; New York: The Museum of Modern Art; Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1997), 185-210. Höch’s studies were interrupted in 1914 when the Berlin School of Applied Arts was closed due to the outbreak of war. She was forced to return to Gotha and work for the Red Cross. In 1915 she resumed her education and in 1916 began working as a graphic artist in Berlin for the Ullstein Press. 48 Schweitzer, Schrankenlose Freiheit, 18.

to Berlin and enrolled at the Unterrichtsanstalt des Kunstgewerbemuseums (School of

the Museum of Applied Arts) where she pursued graphic and Buchkunst (Book-arts). The

school was located in the Kunstgewerbemuseum, which housed the object-based

portion of the monarchy’s official collection.49 The Museum School also had a library,

and it was there, in April 1915, where Höch met her first love, Raoul Hausmann.50 By the end of April, the two had become intimately involved and although turbulent, their relationship would prove highly influential upon Höch’s artistic development.

Emil Orlik, Höch’s teacher at the Museum School, had learned woodcut techniques in Japan and brought his expertise into the German classroom.51 Soon, Höch was working as Orlik’s assistant and cutting blocks according to his designs. In 1916

Höch was hired as a part-time graphic artist in the handicrafts department at the

Ullstein Press, at the time Germany’s largest newspaper and magazine publisher. Höch’s

duties there included designing knitting and embroidery patterns, then an integral

rubric in periodicals geared to the female reader. In addition to her designs, Höch compiled short texts for the Ullstein fashion magazine and Paris Vogue equivalent, Die

Dame (The Lady), as well as Die praktische Berlinerin (The practical Berlin-woman), a

publication geared to the domestic tasks of a 1920s housewife.52

49 Schweitzer, Schrankenlose Freiheit, 19. In late 1914 or early 1915, a portion of the School had been transformed into a makeshift military clinic and, as a result, the war was always present. The emergency shelter unit at the hospital was managed by Richard Cassirer, the brother of the Berlin gallery owner Paul Cassirer. 50 Schweitzer, Schrankenlose Freiheit, 20. 51 Schweitzer, Schrankenlose Freiheit, 20. George Grosz was also in Orlik’s class, but Höch had little contact with him while at school. 52 Ralf Burmeister ed., “Biografie,” in Hannah Höch: Aller Anfang ist DADA! (Berlin: Berlinische Galerie; Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2007), 16e; See also, Schweitzer, Schrankenlose Freiheit, 30. See also, Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 10.

Höch’s sexual and economic independence and her professional ambition epitomized salient aspects of the New Woman’s lifestyle. While the neue Frau (New

Woman) informed and inspired countless young German females, their hopes were often dashed by the harsh realities of surviving in urban Weimar where they earned much less than their male counterparts.53 As a self-supporting young woman, Höch was undoubtedly aware of the gulf between dreams and reality and, on occasion, as will be seen, her oeuvre reflects this discrepancy.

Through her work at Ullstein, Höch came to value the textile arts and regard them as viable artistic forms which she herself would ultimately pursue. In a 1918 article for a women’s handicraft magazine, Höch appealed to her readers by claiming “As modern women who believe to be engaged in intellectual work, you must recognize that your needlework documents your experience.”54 Indeed, the artist’s early engagement with applied textile arts found reflection in a number of doll figures she constructed between 1916 and 1918. Made from a combination of cloth and other materials, these figures also reflect a revived contemporary interest in puppets and dolls.55 Merging handicraft, dance culture and theater arts, dolls were a favorite motif

53 Katharina von Ankum, ed. Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture (Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 1997), 3-5. Von Ankum claims that the economic disadvantages woman faced were largely responsible for a reactionary trend in late Weimar to idealize more traditional, and ergo, financially more secure, female roles of marriage and motherhood. 54 Schweitzer, Schrankenlose Freiheit, 29. This article appeared in the Darmstadt magazine Stickerei-und Spitzen Rundschau, in September 1918. See also, Bettina Schascke, “Schnittmuster der Kunst: Zu Hannah Höchs Prinzipien der Gestaltung,” in Hannah Höch: Aller Anfang ist DADA!, Ralf Burmeister, Ausstellung Katalog, Berlinische Galerie Landesmuseum für Moderne Kunst, Fotografie und Architektur (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag; Berlin: Berlinische Galerie, 2007), 120. 55 Juliet Koss, “Bauhaus Theater of Human Dolls,” Art Bulletin 85, no. 4 (December 2003): 728. Koss locates the historical sources of the early twentieth-century fascination with the doll among the artistic avant-garde, and their frequent substitution of the human with the puppet, in the German Romantic literary imagination. As she claims, works of E.T.A. Hoffman and Heinrich von Kleist influenced

26 among many early twentieth-century avant-garde artists and writers. During the ‘teens,

Höch made six dolls, but only two have survived.56 German artist Charlotte ‘Lotte’ Pritzel was famous for her Künstlerpuppe (Artist’s-dolls), for example, and, in 1921 the poet

Rainer Maria Rilke wrote the text for a book that featured Pritzel’s wax dolls.57 Two of

Höch’s lost dolls were briefly featured in the 1923 film Die Pritzelpuppe (The Pritzel- dolls/puppets).58

Höch’s 1919 Dada-Puppen (Dada-Dolls, or Puppets) (fig. 1.3), while whimsical and humorous, were not playthings, nor precious like Pritzel’s decorative and highly prized figures.59 Instead, Höch’s dolls are irreverent and grotesque: their costumes were partially made of cheap cardboard and mismatched buttons, and their facial features are grossly simplified. In addition, they are among Höch’s first works to engage with the

female couple. Their exaggerated breasts foreground Höch’s perennial interest in the

cultural construction and fetishization of femininity, which was reiterated visually a half

a century later in the artist’s 1969 collage Entartet (Degenerate) (fig. 1.4), the title of

which most likely references the 1937 exhibition Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art).

developments in nineteenth-century theatre and ballet and inspired a number of later works including Oskar Schlemmer’s 1922 Triadic Ballet. 56 Janina Nentwig, “Dada-Puppen,” in Burmeister, Aller Anfang ist DADA!, 58. 57 Rainer Marie Rilke and Lotte Pritzel, Die Puppen (Munich: Hyperion Verlag, 1921). See also, René Schickele et al., Das Puppenbuch (Berlin: Erich Reiss, 1921). Schickele’s volume discusses the dolls of Pritzel and Erna Pinner. Schickele was a member of the original Dada group in Zürich. See, Antje Olivier, “’Die Sammlung gehört in die Charité!’ Hannah Höch: die einzige Frau unter den Berliner Dadaisten,’” in Anpassung oder Verbot: Künstlerinnen und die 30er Jahre, Antje Olivier and Sevgi Braun (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1998), 82. 58 Nentwig, “Dada-Puppen,” 58n7. Directed by Ulrich Kayser, the film was produced by Universum Film AG (UfA) and featured the popular dancer Niddy Impekoven, a figure Höch also referenced in Cut with the Kitchen Knife. Höch is not credited in the film. 59 Lotte Pritzel’s (1887-1952) Künstlerpuppe (Artist-puppets/dolls) were prized among collectors and later served as templates for a series of porcelain figurines.

Höch’s creative interest in textile design and her sense of political irony are

equally reflected in her 1922 collage Entwurf für das Denkmal eines bedeutendes

Spitzenhemdes (Sketch for a Monument to an Important Lace-Shirt) (fig. 1.5). Made from

paper embroidery pattern scraps, the humble materials and irreverent title of Sketch

suggest the mocking tone of the Dadaists. However, the work’s geometric composition

also indicates the influence of Russian Constructivism.60 Maud Lavin notes that the collage may have been intended as an “ironic reference to Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International.”61 Although never built, Tatlin’s grandiose architectural

testimonial to Soviet Communism (1919-20) represented the melding of politics and art

that characterized and inspired a number of European artists in the late ‘teens and early

‘twenties. Links between Höch and Tatlin are feasible when one considers that the

Dadaists and the Russian Constructivists organized a joint Berlin exhibition in 1922 and

shared similar political and aesthetic goals.62 While Höch was invited to participate in this exhibition, she was unable.63 However, she later remarked, “I did not want to define myself as a Constructivist at all.”64

60 Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 41. 1922 marked the year Höch left Hausmann, and, “in the art world, a shift of interest from the anarcho-communism of much of Dada to the more concrete political ideals of Soviet Constructivism.” 61 Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 224n57. 62 Here, Raoul Hausmann’s photomontage Tatlin lebt zu Hause (Tatlin Lives at Home) (1920), which prominently features Tatlin’s face, also comes to mind. 63 Susanne Meyer-Büser, ed. Die Andere Seite des Mondes: Künstlerinnen der Avantgarde (Düsseldorf: Kunstsammlung Nordrhein Westfalen; Cologne: Dumont Verlag, 2010), 276. Höch was invited to participate but received the invitation too late; it reached her Berlin studio while she was traveling in Southern Germany. Artists represented in the exhibition included El Lissitzky, László Moholy-Nagy, Theo and Nelly Doesburg, Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp. 64 Schweitzer, Schrankenlose Freiheit, 104; 397n296. Heinz Ohff, Hannah Höch (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1968), 27.

Höch and the Dadaists

Hannah Höch’s early contacts with the Berlin art scene were made through her

schoolmate Maria Uhden.65 Like Höch, Uhden was a Gotha native and studied at the

Kunstgewerbeschule. Uhden introduced Höch to the Berlin gallery of Herwarth Walden,

around which the Expressionist and proto-Dada Der Sturm group had gathered.66 It was

through her lover, Raoul Hausmann, that Höch came into close contact with the Berlin

Dadaists, a group united by an “ironic cynicism and a desire to provoke.”67

Höch met Hausmann (fig. 1.6) in 1915, and, despite his marriage and child, the

two quickly became romantically involved. Like Höch, Hausmann was raised in a

sheltered bourgeois milieu; however, art, merely a tasteful hobby in the Höch

household, was an integral part of the Hausmann family. Hausmann’s father, Victor, was

a native of Hungary and studied art in Vienna, where he soon established a reputation

as a history and portrait painter. In 1900, Victor Hausmann was invited by Kaiser

Wilhelm II to come to Berlin and work for him as a court painter. After the Hausmann

family relocated, Victor no longer forced his unruly fourteen year-old son to attend

school. Instead, as Raoul Hausmann later reported, he spent his time “riding a bike or

painting,” and, unlike Höch, who pursued formal art training, he was an autodidact.68

When Höch and Hausmann met, his relationship with his parents was strained. Shortly

65 Schweitzer, Schrankenlose Freiheit, 20. 66 Schweitzer, Schrankenlose Freiheit, 20; See also, George Heard Hamilton, Painting and Sculpture in Europe 1880-1940 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 474. Herwarth Walden [born Georg Levin] (1878-1941?), “musician, composer and man of letters, was the best known as the energetic proprietor of the activities embraced under the title Der Sturm (The Storm). These consisted of a publishing house and journal, founded in 1910, to which Walden added a gallery two years later.” 67 Maud Lavin, “The Berlin Dada Photomontages,” in Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 14. See also, Hemus, “Hannah Höch: The ‘good girl’ in the Dada Club,” 91-127. 68 Schweitzer, Schrankenlose Freiheit, 23; 388n5.

29 after the First World War, in 1920, his mother and father committed suicide together.69

No references in the Hausmann/Höch correspondence address this tragic event.

However, as scholars suggest, the runaway inflation and collapse of the Hapsburg monarchy after the war destroyed the court painter’s livelihood and devastated his sense of social identity.70

As they reported, Höch and Hausmann jointly developed the technique of photomontage while vacationing in 1918.71 Scholars define photomontage as the

“piecing together of photographic media and typographic sources, usually cut from

printed mass media.”72 However, their colleagues Heartfield and Grosz also claimed to have invented the medium.73 While this debate has never been put to rest, the artists involved in the purported ‘invention’ of the photomontage greatly relied upon−−indeed appropriated−−a popular mid-nineteenth-century practice in which the cutting and pasting of disparate photographic elements was used to create fanciful scenes or comic

69 Schweitzer, Schrankenlose Freiheit, 23. 70 Schweitzer, Schrankenlose Freiheit, 23; 388n7; See also, Karoline Hille, “. . . über den Grenzen, mitten in Nüchternheit: Prothesenkörper, Maschinenherzen, Automatenhirne,” in Phantasmen der Moderne, ed. Pia Müller-Tamm and Katharina Sykora (Cologne: Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, 1999), 41. 71 Ralf Burmeister, et al., Hannah Höch, 1889-1978: Ihr Werk, Ihr Leben, Ihre Freunde (Berlin: Berlinische Galerie; Argon Verlag, 1989), 17. In August 1918, during a vacation in Heidebrink, a fishing village on the island of Wollin, they report inventing photomontage. They claim that this technique was inspired by popular German Erinnerungsblätter der Regimentszeit, souvenir prints that feature pasted portrait heads of soldiers onto pre-printed figures in uniform. 72 Peter Boswell, Maria Makela, Carolyn Lanchner, and Kristin Makholm, The Photomontages of Hannah Höch (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center; New York: The Museum of Modern Art; Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1996), 2. 73 Brandon Taylor, Collage: The Making of Modern Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 2004), 40- 41. The use of photographic fragments marked a watershed-semantically, aesthetically, politically.” “We can well believe John Heartfield’s claim that he began cutting and pasting photo-images in the trenches as early as 1915…this is a slightly different version than George Grosz tells:…” “In 1916 . . . Johnny Heartfield and I invented photomontage in my studio.”

postcards.74 While the Dadaists may have invented the term, they did not invent the technique: photomontage is as old as photography itself.75 The Dadaists’ integration of

the word “montage” to describe the technique was significant to them and derived from

the French, Monteur (assembler).76 They chose this term over the “too dainty and too

French papier collé,” to signal their political identification as workers, rather than fine artists, and their desire to disrupt existing cultural and political hierarchies.77

Photomontage: Conflict and Rupture

The paradox of photomontage, as Dawn Ades writes, enables a distortion of reality deploying the medium of photography “which is its truest mirror.”78 In the same vein, the photograph, Jonathan Crary claims, is a “mechanical, mass-produced form of exchangeable truth.”79 The question whether a photograph is a slice of “truth,” or

whether it is a manner of representing that “tags onto the tradition or genre of pictorial

realism,” Lora Rempel concludes, “verges on the metaphysical. Suffice it to say that, broadly speaking, photomontage undermines the concept of empirical truth.”80

In 1925, the German art historian and photographer Franz Roh recognized this

discrepancy when he insightfully characterized the photomontage as a “precarious

synthesis between the pictorial techniques of modernist abstraction and the realism of

74 Makela, “By Design: The Early Work of Hannah Höch in Context,” in Boswell, Makela, and Lanchner, 59. 75 Ades, Photomontage, 7. 76 Before the Nazis came to power, French terms were commonly used in Germany. The Nazis were instrumental in the systematic Aryanization of the German language, i.e, expunging Fremdwörter (Foreign language words) from usage. 77 Taylor, Collage, 41. 78 Ades, Photomontage, 19. 79 Jonathan Crary, The Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth- Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 99. 80 Rempel, “The Anti-Body,” 153-54.

31 the photographic fragment.”81 Roh’s formal observations referencing the fragment resonate with similar remarks made by cultural theorists who symbolically linked photomontage and film to the “fractured” experience of everyday life in urban

Germany.82 Yet, the experience and characterization of modern urban life as fragmented and fractured was not limited to contemporary Germany. In a 1934

interview, Höch claimed that photomontage “happened independently after the war in

a number of diverse countries simultaneously.”83 She attributed this to strides in modern photographic techniques, the proliferation of film, and the common practice among graphic artists of cutting-up and/or reconfiguring photographs to manipulate and enhance advertising imagery and journalistic reportages.84

Höch, who was familiar with both commercial and fine art practice, was able to bridge the two. In 1921 her photomontage of a carnivorous potted plant leaning over a dinner plate was published by Ullstein as an “April Fool’s joke” (Aprilscherze). This

81 Carolyn Lanchner, “Later Adventures of Dada’s ‘Good Girl’: The Photomontages of Hannah Höch after 1933,” in The Photomontages of Hannah Höch, Peter Boswell, Maria Makela and Carolyn Lanchner (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center; New York: The Museum of Modern Art; Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1997), 130. 150n7; See also, Christopher Phillips, “Introduction,” in Montage and Modern Life, 1919-1942, exh. Cat. (Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1992), 26; Franz Roh, Nachexpressionismus (Leipzig: Klinckhardt und Biermann, 1925), 45-46. 82 In his seminal 1903 essay “Die Grossstadt und das Geistesleben” (The Metropolis and Urban Life), German cultural theorist Georg Simmel characterized urban experience as “fractured.” Simmel claimed that the accelerated pace of the city led to “the intensification of emotional life due to swift and continuous shift of external and internal stimuli.” See, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” On Individual and Social Forms: Selected Writings, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 325; See also, Barbara Kosta, “Unruly Daughters and Modernity: Irmgard Keun’s Gilgi-eine von uns,” The German Quarterly 68, no. 3 (Summer 1995): 272. 83 Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 219-20, cites Höch’s statement in the Czech journal, Stredisko 4, no. 1, (Brno, Czechoslovakia, 1934). In the article, Höch mentions Switzerland, Russia and Germany. 84 Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 220. Stredisko 4, no. 1. Translated from the original German into Czech by František Kalivoda. Translated from Czech into English by Jitka Salaguarda.

32 demonstrates Höch’s ability to navigate between commercial and artistic production.85

Höch dismissed her work at Ullstein as a Broterwerb (job-for-bread), and reportedly

remained there only out of financial necessity; however, it nonetheless allowed her to

successfully reconcile art and commerce.86 Later, she would support herself by designing book-jackets.87 Höch, however, distinguished between the commercial and journalistic use of photomontage and its fine art application when, in 1934, she spoke of

“free-form photomontage” which she described as

an art form that grew from the soil of photography. The peculiar characteristics and its approaches have opened up a new and immensely creative field for a creative human being: a new magical territory, for which freedom is the first prerequisite; but not a lack of discipline, however. Even these newly discovered possibilities remain subjects to the laws of form and color.

Höch concluded by observing, “wherever we want to force this photomatter to yield new forms of discovery, we must start without any preconceptions: most of all, we must be open to the beauty of fortuity. Here more than anywhere else, these beauties,

85 Pictured in Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 60. The image was published on two occasions. The first time it was captioned “Interessante Neuwerbungen des Botanischen Gartens” (Interesting new acquisitions at the Botanical Garden) and was printed in BIZ 30, no. 14 (April 1, 1921): 200. The same image was published again in 1925 as a “Fleischfressende Pflanzen,” (Meat-eating Plant) in Uhu (April 1925): 96. While the 1921 version appears on a neutral blank background, in 1925, the plant is surrounded by text. Interestingly, the text addresses the theme of photographic manipulation: a fragment reads, “selbst die Straussennrennen, die der Photograph im Jahre 1907 nur durch kühne Retouche konstruieren konnte, würden im vergangenen Sommer nicht nur ehrlich photographiert, sondern auch mit allen Zwischenfällen . . .gefilmt.” (An Ostrich-race which in 1907 could only be reconstructed by boldly retouching the photograph was honestly photographed this Summer [1925] and even filmed with all its ups and down.) This commentary implies that by 1925, the public had grown accustomed to images enhanced through photomontage. In addition, it also suggests that they could appreciate the increased veracity of unadulterated photographic and filmic reportage made newly possible through technical advances. 86 Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 61; 229n56. Kurt Schwitters apparently liked Höch’s carnivorous plant so much that he reproduced the image as a postcard sometime in the 1920s; See also Ohff, Hannah Höch, 43. 87 Schweitzer, Schrankenlose Freiheit, 160-61. All in all, Höch would earn significantly more as a graphic rather than fine artist throughout her career. In 1932, she began to work in a freelance capacity for her friend, the Dutch publisher Anthony ‘Tony’ Bakels. Bakels and his wife Miek lived in Berlin until political developments forced them to leave in the late 1930s.

wandering and extravagant, obligingly enrich our fantasy.”88 Höch’s statement, and especially her remark regarding “wandering and extravagant” fantasy, gains added significance when we consider that it was made during the fascist era when, to many, fantasy was an indispensable tool of subversion and survival.

Höch and her Contemporaries: Aesthetic and Technique

Hannah Höch foregrounded the artistic possibilities of the photomontage and clearly distinguished her creative intentions from those of her politically motivated colleagues.89 The rise of Berlin Dada coincided with that of the radical political left, and significantly informed and colored its production. Dada represented and provided a voice of opposition when the leftist revolution was suppressed by the Weimar government.90 As Sabine Hake has observed, the creative possibilities of

“photomontage to thematize conflict and rupture” were immediately recognized and

eagerly adopted by the German Dadaists to express their political agenda.91 Like them,

Höch deployed the medium as an instrument of social criticism, yet, her emphasis on

the beauty of fortuity and the enrichment of fantasy it made possible implied a different

sensibility. Höch’s unique sensibility is even more apparent when we consider her

distinctive representation of the human figure, her unmediated technical practice, and

her minimal deployment of textual elements. As will be discussed below, these

88 Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 220. Höch’s statement appeared in the Czech magazine Stredisko 4, no. 1 (1934). 89 Magdalena Dambrowski, “Photomonteur: John Heartfield,” MoMA, no. 13 (Winter-Spring 1993): 13. 90 Gale, Dada and Surrealism, 135. 91 Sabine Hake, “Imagining the New Berlin: Modernism, Mass Utopia, and the Architectural Avant-Garde,” in Legacies of Modernism: Art and Politics in Northern Europe, 1890-1950, eds., Patrizia C. McBride, Richard W. McCormick, and Monika Žagar (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 113.

34 characteristics link Höch’s oeuvre to that of her acquaintance, Surrealist Max Ernst

(1891-1976).

Hannah Höch’s associations with Dada and, to a lesser degree, with Surrealism, suggest that her oeuvre may be considered in relation to the work of those artists affiliated with these early-twentieth century artistic movements. While many of Höch’s photomontages are easily distinguished from those of her contemporaries, on occasion, they are almost interchangeable. For example, the large typographic elements in Höch’s photomontage Oz, der Tragöde (Oz, the Tragic Actor) (1919) (fig. 1.7) are echoed in

Hausmann’s ABCD (1923-24) (fig. 1.8). Commonalities between the two works suggest a similar visual aesthetic, which is understandable when one considers that Höch and

Hausmann were intimately involved for seven years. However, a closer comparison of

Hausmann’s ABCD and Höch’s Oz reveals significant differences.

Hausmann’s ABCD suggests an anxious exploration of self and personal identity.

Arguably, the early 1920s was a difficult emotional period for Hausmann; he had lost both parents to suicide in 1920, and Höch broke off her seven-year relationship with him in 1922. Framed by typographic elements, one of which is his own name,

Hausmann’s face dominates the image. These bold acts of self-reference suggest that, at the time, Hausmann’s identification as a Dadaist anchored both his art and his concept of self. The claustrophobic visual quality of ABCD is underscored by Hausmann’s alarmed, yet frozen, expression. Near the bottom of the image, a medical illustration depicting a cross-section of a female torso with two fingers penetrating a vaginal canal and pushing toward a uterus may simultaneously reference birth, his mother, or

intimate sexual relations. Yet the intensity of the filial or sexual intimacy that this image

suggests is relativized by the two hemispheres of a globe pictured nearby. In the early

decades of the twentieth-century, the globe was a symbol of expansion, and, among

Western European colonial powers, a visual cipher for spaces and lands to be

conquered. Here, the dual hemispheres, pasted over with meaningless letters snipped

from a cheap newspaper, suggest the rootless emotional state of the orphaned

emigrant artist, Raoul Hausmann.

While large typographic elements in Hausmann’s ABCD echo those in Höch’s Oz,

the Tragic Actor, unlike Hausmann’s anxiously self-referential image, Höch’s Oz suggests

playfulness and humor. In her photomontage, Höch whimsically combines a female

dancer’s body with a male head. The head pictured is that of Grosz’s brother-in-law Otto

Schmalhausen. Schmalhausen, an Antwerp native whose nickname was “Oz,” exhibited

on occasion with the Berlin Dadaists.92 This photomontage attests to Höch’s

pronounced interest in morphology and reiterates configurations in Cut with the Kitchen

Knife. In addition to a dual-gendered figure, in the lower right corner of the image, the

body of a fat baby is capped by the tiny face of an old man, another provocative

composite.

Similarities between Höch’s oeuvre and that of her Dada-colleague Kurt

Schwitters (1887-1949) are also evident. The tight geometric patterning of Schwitters’

1923 Merz collage Miss Blanche (fig. 1.9)93 is easily linked to, and may have even

92 Gale, Dada and Surrealism, 121-22; See also Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 37. 93 Gale, Dada and Surrealism, 153. His version of Dada, Schwitters one-man-movement Merz was named after a fragment of the German Kommerzbank (Commerce-bank). Schwitters launched Merz

inspired Höch’s Collage (Dada) (1922-24) (fig. 1.10). However, parallels between the two

artists’ works are not surprising; neither Höch nor Schwitters ever allowed politics to

overcome their aesthetic. Furthermore, Kurt and his wife Helma were her good friends;

Höch joined the Schwitters on vacation on the German island of Rügen in 1923.94 A

Hanover native, Schwitters stored material and worked in Höch’s studio when he was in

Berlin,95 and in 1923, hosted an artistic soirée there.96 Höch also assisted Schwitters in

the construction of his legendary Merzbau, an architectural installation in his own home

which he began sometime between 1919 and 1923.97

Words not Pictures: Language and Sexism?

A penchant for the photomontage medium and a program of social criticism

clearly links Höch to the Dadaists. Yet, viewed against the heavy-handed politicizing of

her Berlin colleagues, who routinely deployed words, phrases and letters to express

anarchic or satirical political commentary, Höch’s photomontages, which rely on visual

instead of textual clues to convey meaning, are easily distinguishable from theirs. As

evident in Raoul Hausmann’s ABCD, and as will be seen in George Grosz’s and John

Heartfield’s Sonniges Land (Sunny Land) (1919) (fig. 1.11), the Dadaists generally

in January 1919 after unsuccessful attempts to join the Berlin Dadaists. He was excluded from the group because Huelsenbeck and especially Grosz were not convinced of his political commitment. 94 Burmeister, Aller Anfang ist DADA!, 169. 95 Schweitzer, Schrankenlose Freiheit, 46. Indeed, Höch’s studio served as a meeting and storage place for a number of her colleagues who stuffed things under the slanted roof of her Büsingstrasse studio. Artist Hans Arp also worked in Höch’s studio while in Berlin in 1923. See, Heinz Ohff, ed., Hannah Höch: Ein Leben mit der Pflanze, Ausstellungs Katalog Städitisches Museum Kunstsammlung Gelsenirchen- Buer (Gelsenkirchen: Kunstsammlung, 1978), 10. 96 Burmeister, Aller Anfng ist DADA!, 170. 97 Boswell, “Hannah Höch: Through the Looking Glass,” 22n3. While visiting Schwitters in Hanover, Höch helped in the construction of two grottoes in his Merzbau sculpture. For a discussion of the Merzbau, see, Elizabeth Burns Gamard, Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau: The Cathedral of Erotic Misery (New York: Princeton university Press, 2000).

foregrounded textual elements in their images. This common practice is evident in such

diverse works as Hausmann’s Poéme phonétique affiche (1918),98 Theo van Doesburg’s

Dada Poster (1922),99 and Russian artist Ivan Puni’s watercolor La Fuite des Formes

(1919),100 all of which are comprised solely of letters. While these images often convey meaning, they are on occasion unintelligible. Nonetheless, the primacy of letters and

textual fragments in these images emphasize the aesthetics of typography: an indication

that a number of the Dadaists were formally trained and professionally active in the

graphic arts.101

In contrast, and despite her formal training as a graphic artist, Höch deployed

textual elements only minimally and, with rare exceptions, they disappear from her

photomontages entirely by the mid-1920s. This suggests that if Höch intended to

express political or social messages in her work, these were not to be literally conveyed.

The significance of typography and language among male avant-garde practitioners, as correspondence suggests, was a contentious issue between Höch and Hausmann.102

While Höch’s original critique cannot be reconstructed, in a 1918 letter to her,

Hausmann rebuked what he felt to be an insult on her part, and wrote, “You think the

woodcut is good except for the many letters.” In his defense, Hausmann explained, “The

98 Two of these Poémes are pictured in Gale, Dada and Surrealism, 127. 99 Gale, Dada and Surrealism, 160. Van Doesburg came into contact with the German Dadaists through his close friend Kurt Schwitters. Van Doesburg’s Dada Poster is pictured in Gale (162). 100 Gale, Dada and Surrealism, 157. Ivan Puni was a Russian Constructivist who moved to Germany during the 1920s to escape Soviet oppression. His watercolor La Fuite des Formes is pictured in Gale (160). 101 Höch was trained as a graphic artist, as were John Heartfield, his brother, Wieland Herzfelde, and George Grosz. 102 See, Marion Brandt, ed., Til Brugman: Das vertippte Zebra, Lyrik und Prosa (Berlin: Hoho Verlag Hoffmann, 1995), 161; 213n3. 38

Dadaist uses letters because he wants to distinguish himself from typography that is purely mechanically-generated . . . and call attention to this ‘small,’ difference that is

‘larger’ in realm of art.”103 Here, Hausmann was not only defending his aesthetic choices, but also using them to support his claim of artistic superiority based on the culture of language.104 Furthermore, he ‘masculinizes’ language by symbolically equating it with the male sex, and, in the process, makes no effort to conceal—indeed he uses--this very argument to rationalize his sexism. Hausmann’s emphasis on “der

‘kleine’ Unterschied, der eben in der Kunst ‘grosser’ ist,” or “the ‘small’ difference” that is clearly ‘larger’ in the realm of art,” clearly references a popular German expression used to describe the anatomical difference between men and women.

As feminist scholars maintain, early twentieth-century European modernism was clearly gendered masculine.105 Literary theorist Monika Faltesjskova writes, “The modernist redefinition of culture was a strongly selective process of an exclusionary nature and as such was often conducted in the form of sex war metaphors.”106 This

103 Schweitzer, Schrankenlose Freiheit, 49. Cites letter from Hausmann to Höch, May 5, 1918, reproduced in Eberhard Roters, et al. Hannah Höch: eine Lebenscollage (Berlin: Kunstlerarchiv der Berlinische Galerie, Landesmuseum für Moderne Kunst; Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 1995), vol. 1, 394. 104 Monika Faltesjskova, Djuna Barnes, T.S. Eliot and the Gender Dynamics of Modernism (New York: Routledge, 2010), 132. The inherent paternalism of language was thematized by Jacques Lacan. According to Lacan, the pre-oedipal child is not yet formed as subject and identifies with the mother as one. The interruption of this unity comes in the form of speech from the father. Hence, language removes the child from his mother and substitutes this bond with the law of the father, and relatedly, of the culture; See also Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as formative of the function of the I,” in Écrits: A Selection, trans. A. Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977). 105 Gill Perry, Gender and Art (New Haven: Yale University Press; London: The Open University, 1999), 196. Perry writes, “Despite their technical radicalism, many forms of avant-garde practice in fact perpetuate and privilege a predominantly masculine or patriarchal value system.” See also, Carol Duncan, “Virility and Domination in early-twentieth-century Vanguard Painting,” in Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, eds. Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), 292- 313; Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), vol. I, The War of the Words, 227. 106 Faltesjskova, “Engendering Modernism,” 18.

suggests that Hausmann’s comments were both symptomatic and representative of the

sexism embedded in the misogynistic rhetoric of the modernist avant-garde that sought

to diminish and exclude women. Even though he supported her at times, as Antje Olivier

observes, Hausmann was jealous of Höch’s professional success and that “whenever

Höch’s name was included in a Dada publication, he made sure that it was

misspelled.”107 As Cara Schweitzer remarks, sexism and “misogynistic attitudes”

(frauenfeindliche Haltung) were even evident in progressive contemporary art journals such as Simplicissmus and Jugend. In these publications, Malweiber (a derogatory,

disrespectful, and sexist term for “female painters”) were often portrayed standing next

to easels sporting beards and wearing men’s clothing. As will be seen in a later chapter,

images of bearded women were deployed in the Weimar media as an intimidating and

powerful anti-feminist tool. However, with regard to women artists, the message was

“clearly aimed at discrediting them. If they should ever achieve anything beyond being a

dilettante, they would mutate into men.”108 Because the misogyny of the early twentieth-century European avant-garde will be more thoroughly addressed later, I will forego an extended discussion here and, instead, continue my analysis of Höch’s Dada- era photomontages and those of her contemporary colleagues.

The 1920 Dada Fair and Höch’s Cut with the Kitchen Knife

Höch’s 1919 photomontage Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser Dada durch die letzte weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands (Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Weimar Germany) (fig. 1.12) is one of the

107 Olivier, “Die Sammlung gehört in die Charité,” 88. 108 Schweitzer, Schrankenlose Freiheit, 17; 388n19.

artist’s best known works. One of her earliest collages, it represents a baseline for

examining Höch’s continued critical engagement with gender stereotypes.

Cut with the Kitchen Knife was included in the Erste Internationale Dada Messe

(First International Dada Fair), a legendary 1920 exhibition held in a backroom of the

Berlin gallery owned by Dr. Otto Burchard.109 An incident leading up to the Dada Fair

demonstrates the blatant sexism of her colleagues at that time. John Heartfield (1891-

1968) and George Grosz (1893-1958) initially refused to let Höch be in the show; it was

only due to the efforts of Hausmann, who threatened to withdraw from the exhibition if

they did not allow her to participate, that her work was shown.110 Ultimately, Höch was

represented in the show with eight works. However, Heartfield and Grosz, the

organizers of the Dada Fair, exacted revenge in the exhibition catalogue by writing that

Höch and Hausmann were the Dolls “parents.”111 Intended primarily to humiliate

Hausmann, their sarcastic remarks also rather cruelly alluded to Höch’s terminated

pregnancies.

Cut with the Kitchen Knife hung prominently at the 1920 Dada-Fair and not only

represents the artist’s hard won participation in the activities of the Berlin Dadaists, but,

as will be seen, is significant to her oeuvre in other ways. Höch’s deployment of industrial imagery and her irreverent depictions of powerful men in this collage once

109 Schweitzer, Schrankenlose Freiheit, 72. The exhibition ran from June 30 through August 25, 1920. The initiative and organization of the Dada-Fair largely reflected the efforts of George Grosz who convinced Burchard, a dealer who specialized in Chinese porcelain, to support the project and provide an exhibition venue. Unsurprisingly, Grosz’s works dominated the show. The Dada-Fair brought together the Berlin Dadaists Hausmann, Höch, Grosz, Wieland Herzfelde and his brother John Heartfield with the Cologne-based Max Ernst, Johannes Baargeld, and Hans Arp. Francis Picabia, Rudolf Schlichter and Otto Dix also participated in the exhibition. 110 Meyer-Büser, Die Andere Seite des Mondes, 275. 111 Schweitzer, Schrankenlose Freiheit, 75.

41 again have much in common with the work produced by the other Dadaists. Yet, as will be seen, subtle differences, such as Höch’s use of textual elements, and her unique treatment of the human figure, set her work apart from theirs.

Cut with the Kitchen Knife is easily linked to other Höch photomontages, and taken together provide a context with which to frame other works. Photomontages from Höch’s Dada-and early Weimar-era oeuvre, such as Die Mädchen (The Girls) (1921)

(fig. 1.13) and Da-Dandy (1919) (fig. 1.14), which will be discussed later, attest to her aesthetic and, in some cases, erotic appreciation of the female body. Furthermore, these photomontages indicate a critical engagement with reproductive rights and the commodification of women’s bodies.

As stated, Hannah Höch’s photomontages were comprised largely of images gleaned from the mainstream media and reflected the publications at Ullstein press where, as an employee, she had access to numerous magazines. Unsurprisingly, Höch’s works resonate with diverse popular themes such as dance, fashion, industry, politics, and current events. While Cut with the Kitchen Knife visually references an array of female types such as actresses, dancers, and the graphic artist and teacher Käthe

Kollwitz (1867-1945), women were even more prominently featured in her later works.

Höch’s photomontages Dada-Ernst (Dada-Serious) (1920-21) (fig. 1.15), Da-Dandy, and

Die Mädchen, emphasize the sexualized, eroticized, and/or commodified female body and clearly anticipate later works such as Sweet One (1926), Russian Dancer (1928),

English Dancer (1928), Tamer (1930), and Liebe (Love) (1931) that will be the focus of this dissertation. Indeed, often the primary difference between Höch’s early and late

Weimar oeuvre is the clarity and salience of their visual narratives: after 1926, the year

she met Brugman, extraneous visual elements such as peripheral figures, consumer

objects, or industrial imagery increasingly fall away. This key distinction served to isolate

and amplify themes which were often obfuscated by the visual clutter that

characterized the artist’s earlier photomontages. Indeed, the visual crowding typical in

Höch’s Dada-era oeuvre appears to mirror the work of the artist’s Berlin colleagues and

reflect her early artistic affiliations with them.

Salient thematic, compositional, and technical disparities between Höch’s

photomontages and those of her Dada colleagues can be exemplified by examining two previously mentioned 1919 works: Höch’s Cut with the Kitchen Knife, and Heartfield and

Grosz’s collaborative work, Sonniges Land (Sunny Land) (fig. 1.11). While both photomontages include textual elements and human figures, a closer comparison of the two works reveals key differences based on content, iconography, and technique.

In Sonniges Land dozens of textual references in the form of political headlines dominate the image.112 Höch’s Berlin colleagues redeployed graphic elements from

popular print culture, and because of this, their photomontages often have the

appearance of commercial advertisements gone awry. As Lora Rempel observes,

superimposed slogans and captions are often all that separate the collages of Höch’s male colleagues from straight photographs. “The reliance on words,” she continues, “to convey, confuse, or complete a narrative meaning . . . places these works solidly within

112 Taylor, Collage, 41.

the indexical, symbolic realm of language.”113 However, in contrast to her colleagues,

“rarely does Höch employ textual language in her photomontages.”114 Höch herself claimed, in a 1976 interview, that she did not rely on words to convey meaning but instead was more comfortable making her pronouncements and criticisms “through the medium of art.”115 Furthermore, a number of Höch’s photomontages are untitled, or

were only given titles years after they were made.116 Höch’s reluctance to deploy text or to name her works enabled her to avoid the limitations automatically imposed when words are affixed to an image. This practice renders Höch’s photomontages open to interpretation, and, as a result, more evocative. Moreover, her emphasis on imagery rather than language served to distance Höch even further from the sexist tenets of early twentieth-century avant-garde; zealous advocates of masculinist modernism strove to break away from figurative representation which they conflated with the inferior feminine principle.117

Furthermore, despite their blaring identification as radical avant-gardists, Höch’s

Dada colleagues often deployed conventional representational formats. Indeed, the

figures in Grosz and Heartfield’s Sonniges Land appear much as they might have in a

Weimar daily newspaper. With the exception of one cleanly severed head floating at an angle (a visual configuration that also evokes the millennial tradition of a monarch’s

113 Rempel, “The Anti-Body,” 159. 114 Rempel, “The Anti-Body,” 159. 115 Rempel, “The Anti-Body,” 157; Suzanne Page, Hannah Höch (Berlin: Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, 1976), 23. 116 Karoline Hille, “Der Faden, der durch alle Wirrnisse das Leben hielt: Hannah Höch und Max Ernst,” in Burmeister, Aller Anfang ist DADA!, 101-02. 117 The masculinist and misogynistic conflation of materiality and femininity runs like a thread through early twentieth-century avant-garde artistic manifestos and is evident in Futurist, Constructivist, and De Stijl materials.

head on a coin) the figures in Sonniges Land appear in quotidian full-length, ‘head-to-

toe’ or bust formats. While one could hardly dispute the dynamic visual quality of the

image, which is underscored by rows of densely packed and obliquely placed headlines

that disrupt horizontal reading practice, Sunny Land does not upset viewing conventions

in the same way as Höch’s photomontages.

Admittedly, Höch’s Cut with the Kitchen Knife has one of the longest titles in the

history of art, yet unlike her colleagues who often relied primarily on textual elements

to convey their messages, the literary quality of Cut with the Kitchen Knife seems to end

with its extended appellations that reference Dadaism. Words and phrases randomly

affixed to the montage appear to have been cut from Dada-generated rather than

mainstream print materials. Woven throughout the image, they indicate that Höch too,

like her cohorts, deployed textual elements for compositional purposes, and, on

occasion, to convey a message. However, while a smattering of political and cultural

references in Cut with the Kitchen Knife were clearly intended to satirize aspects of

Weimar society; Höch was perhaps also poking fun at her self-involved colleagues.

German words and phrases strewn throughout the image include (in translation) “Hey

young man, Dada isn’t really art,” “Come along,” as well as, “Invest your money in

Dada!”118 Along with an invitation to “Join the great anti-art movement dada,” these

directives reflect the noisy self-promotion and aggressive ‘marketing’ of the Dadaists.

Unlike her colleagues, Höch rarely engaged in self-promotion, nor did she participate in

118 The texts read, “He He, Sie junger Mann, Dada ist keine Kunstrichting,” (hey young man, Dada is not an art movement) “Komm,” (C’mon) “Tretet Dada bei” (Join Dada) and “Legen Sie ihr Geld in Dada an!” (Invest your money in Dada).

raucous public spectacles. This suggests that, in some ways, she considered her fellow

Dadaists as not unlike the horn-blowing politicians they themselves so vehemently

disdained.

Beyond Berlin: Höch and her Contemporaries

While Höch’s limited deployment of language clearly distinguishes her from the

long-winded Berlin Dadaists, it aligns her more closely with the visually evocative

practice of the Cologne-based artists Max Ernst and Johannes Baargeld (1892-1927).119

Ernst’s 1920 collage Le Cygne est bien paisable (The Swan is quite Peaceful) (fig. 1.16)

frames the heads of small children over an image of a biplane and, similar to Höch’s

contemporary photomontages, combines images of modern technology with figural

fragments. Like Ernst’s Swan, Baargeld’s 1920 self-portrait, Typical Vertical

Misrepresentation as a Depiction of the Dada Baargeld (fig.1.17) is devoid of textual

referents. In addition, the seamless elegance and disarmingly simple combination of a

man’s head and a female torso in this image might easily have served as a template for

Höch’s 1930 Tamer (fig. 5.1), a later focus of this study.

While Höch was acquainted with the Cologne Dadaists, it is unclear to what

extent she was familiar with the work of her Parisian contemporaries. In 1924, Höch visited Theo and Nelly van Doesburg in Paris and her notebook from this trip includes the addresses of Man Ray, Constantin Brancusi, Fernand Léger, Sonia Delaunay, Pablo

119 Gale, Dada and Surrealism, 141. Born Alfred Grünwald, Baargeld’s pseudonym is derived from Bargeld, or the German word for “cash.” Gale claims it was chosen in mocking reference to his banker father, but was also a “teasing provocation in times of rampant inflation.”

Picasso, and Max Ernst (who relocated to Paris in 1922).120 Although, Schweitzer claims that Höch never met many of these artists, through Nelly and Theo van Doesburg she was able to visit a number of studios.121 Among them were Brancusi’s, and, importantly, the atelier of Tristan Tzara, to whom she gave a number of photomontages; one of these was later exhibited in New York in the legendary 1936 exhibition Fantastic Art,

Dada and Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art curated by Alfred H. Barr, Jr.122

After 1920, Max Ernst was likewise drawn to Paris and forged a relationship with the French rather than German sensibility.123 As already stated, Höch avowedly valued

the work of this Cologne native, who later became a Paris-based Surrealist.124 In 1951, she testified to the “kinship she felt with Ernst: Through all phases of development, he has been my closest relative. It began with Dada.”125 Both Höch and Ernst deployed mass-mediated materials. However, unlike Ernst, who often utilized entire catalogue pages for his collages, as in Jean Hatchet and Charles the Bold (1929) (fig. 1.18), Höch radically dismembered and reconfigured her graphic sources.126 While the photomontages of Höch and Ernst suggest a related and on occasion comparable

120 Gale, Dada and Surrealism, 148. 121 Schweitzer, Schrankenlose Freiheit, 100. 122 Maria Makela, “Dadadame und Urfeministen,” in Ralf Burmeister et al., eds., Hannah Höch: eine Lebenscollage, vol. III, (1946-1978) (Berlin: Künstler-archiv der Berlinischen Galerie, Landesmuseum für Moderne Kunst, Fotografie, und Architektur, 2001), 202. Höch’s Collage (1920) was included in the exhibition. 123 Taylor, “Max Ernst and Collage in Surrealist Paris,” Collage, 55-58. 124 For a discussion of their personal and artistic relationship, see, Karoline Hille, “Der Faden, der durch alle Wirrnisse das Leben hielt,” in Burmeister, Aller Anfang ist DADA!, 84-107. 125 Boswell, “Hannah Höch: Through the Looking Glass,” in Boswell , Makela, and Lanchner, 15. 126 Taylor, Collage, 58. Emphasis Taylor. Moreover, as Taylor claims (57), this practice endows Ernst’s work with a pseudo-psychoanalytical effect, which prominent Ernst scholar Werner Spies rejects. Spies has long maintained that discussions of Ernst’s oeuvre “have been somewhat lost under the weight of recent art historical scholarship which has tried to retrieve the psychoanalytical determinants of Ernst’s. . . scenes . . . but few, if any, of these interpretations reflect prevailing patterns of viewing and reading at the time” (emphasis mine). Werner Spies, The Return of La Belle Jardinière, Max Ernst 1950- 1970 (New York: Abrams, 1971), 46.

47 aesthetic, Höch’s deployment of visual fragments shatters uncomplicated readings and instead suggests contingent and supplementary meanings.127

Höch’s photomontages may be further distinguished from those of her Surrealist colleague in other ways. While Ernst’s works, and especially his depictions of the human figure, often rupture the unity of an image, they ultimately “uphold the ruling tradition of rational, empirical vision and much that is concomitant with that way of seeing.”128 In this aspect, Ernst’s collages may be linked to a popular Surrealist parlor game, the cadavre exquis (exquisite corpse) (fig. 1.19).129 Played by two or more, each participant adds an element to a pre-folded sheet of paper that serves to conceal previous markings. When the paper is unfolded, surprising visual configurations are revealed.

Generally the genus and scale of the figures generated rarely find semiotic resolution.

However, while the unconventional manner in which these images are generated suggests that the game was an extension of Dada-like practices, cadavre exquis requires a high degree of procedural rationality such as symmetrical folding and strict linear demarcation of heads, torsos, and legs.130 In contrast, Höch did not adhere to these restrictions and, as a result, her photomontages often disrupt the tenets of rational or empirical vision.

Höch and the Human Hybrid

Another way in which Höch’s representation of the figure differs from that of the more conventional representational modus of her Surrealist and Dada contemporaries is

127 Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 23-24. 128 Rempel, “The Anti-Body,” 154; 168n5. 129 Taylor, Collage, 69. 130 Taylor, Collage, 69.

revealed in Cut with the Kitchen Knife by a number of petit grotesqueries embedded in

its densely layered surface. Much like the mechanical objects with which they are

surrounded, these grotesque figures are dismantled and recombined to create

monstrous hybrids, including the aforementioned baby’s body topped with the face of a

bearded man, and a ballerina with three heads.

The grotesque typically characterizes a class of imagery that does not fit

comfortably within the boundaries traditionally set by aesthetics or art history.131 Both the grotesque and, relatedly, the monstrous, rupture the Enlightenment underpinnings of modernism to suggest those fears and anxieties inspired by what French Surrealist

Georges Bataille characterized in 1929 as the informe (formless), or that which falls beyond the boundaries of reason and control.132 While the grotesque, the monstrous,

and relatedly, the abject, provoke anxiety, their transgressive power generates new

perspectives. Peter Fuss argues that although the grotesque is generally regarded with

trepidation, it is an indicator of, and an active agent of cultural change.133

The disturbingly funny figures in Höch’s Dada-era photomontages are evident

throughout her entire oeuvre and, hence, early works such as Cut with the Kitchen Knife,

Die Mädchen, and Da-Dandy, are easily linked to the artist’s collages well into the 1960s.

The monstrous quality of figures that conjoin and/or cross gender and age in any

131 Frances S. Connelly, ed., Modern Art and the Grotesque (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 5-6. 132 For an overarching discussion of these closely related concepts, see Nina Athanassoglu- Kallmyer, “Ugliness,” in Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff, eds. Critical Terms for Art History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 291; See also, Yves-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997). 133 Peter Fuss, Das Groteske: Ein Medium des kulturellen Wandels (The Grotesque: A Medium for Cultural Transformation) (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2001), 12-14.

number of Höch’s Weimar-era images attests to a critical and sustained engagement

with, and rejection of, Körperkultur (Body-culture), a 1920s movement focused on the body (to be addressed at length in chapter two). Running like a thread throughout

Höch’s oeuvre, these grossly mismatched hybrids clearly anticipate photomontages such as Englische Tänzerin (English Dancer) (1928) (fig. 2.2) and foreshadow the artist’s 1963

Grotesque (fig. 1.20). Comic and horrific, the cobbled figures in these works satirize

beauty standards, disrupt social order, and perennially confound the modern mania to

impose classification.134

Much like her handling of the human figure, Höch’s technical practice also

differed significantly from that of her colleagues. The Dadaists generally re-

photographed their photomontages to create a smooth and seamless surface.135 In

contrast, Höch never re-photographed her work, a practice which Thomas Haakenson

attributes to her refusal to engage with “photographic artifice or to assume that visual

representations conveyed truths.”136 This, he argues, demonstrates and confirms that

Höch accepted and preferred “evidence of hand-cutting over the creation of a seamless image.”137 Furthermore, in leaving these evidentiary traces, “Höch reminded the viewer

134 Connelly, Modern Art and the Grotesque, 14. 135 Thomas O. Haakenson, “Science, Art, and the Question of the Visible: Rudolph Virchow, Hannah Höch, and “Immediate Visual Perception,” in Legacies of Modernism: Art and Politics in Northern Europe, 1890-1950, Patrizia C. McBride, Richard W. McCormick, and Monika Žagar, eds. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 102. 136 Haakenson, “Science, Art,” 102 137 Haakenson, “Science, Art,” 102; See also, Boswell, Makela, and Lanchner, The Photomontages of Hannah Höch, 2.

that her images had been manipulated and, implicitly, of the material limitations of the

medium of photography.”138

Der Vater and Dada-Ernst: Höch and Female Sexual Agency

Höch’s photomontages Der Vater (The Father) (1920) (fig. 1.21) and Dada-Ernst

(Dada Serious) (fig. 1.22) (an interestingly titled work of 1920-21), are highly personal images in which the artist even more boldly engaged with sexuality and gender. The dynamic centrifugal composition of Der Vater is anchored by a dual-sexed ‘father’ with

an infant on his lap. His immobility contrasts sharply with the female dancers leaping

joyously around him and supports Lavin’s observation that Höch’s images frequently

oscillate between pleasure and anger, ironic distance and intimate identification.139 In

Der Vater, many future gender themes are already stated. The artist polarizes, yet conjoins gender: the man’s head is connected to a woman’s torso, extended by a pair of ill-fitting legs ending in fashionable high-heeled shoes. While feminine components and

attributes serve to emasculate the male head, the figure’s twisted posture and unhappy

expression suggests the burden of child-rearing then commonly perceived as a woman’s

exclusive and primary duty. A boxer, the largest of the figures surrounding the seated

Father, is the only figure that actively engages with the infant. A symbol of heroic

masculinity in Weimar, the boxer in The Father punches the baby on the cheek. This

aggressive act, coupled with the feminized and helplessly immobile Father, suggests

anger and frustration. It also connotes an inability or a reluctance to assume a paternal

role. Höch was clearly disappointed with Hausmann; he refused to leave his wife and

138 Haakenson, “Science, Art,” 102. 139 Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 29.

51 marry her when she became pregnant in 1916 and again in 1918. This played a decisive role in the artist’s subsequent childlessness; although Höch wanted to have children, she refused to bear them out of wedlock.

Another densely packed and personally resonant image, the artist’s photomontage Dada-Ernst more definitively foregrounds the female body. Höch created

Dada-Ernst about a year before she finally broke off her relationship with Hausmann.

Close examination of the image suggests that it is an expression of Höch’s growing independence and emotional and artistic maturity. Dada-Ernst engages with and articulates Höch’s interest in popular representations of women and prompts general questions concerning the mediated depiction of the female body. The image, as Lavin observes, suggests violence, alienation, and anger, yet also aligns the modern woman with signs of physical pleasure signaled by a gymnast and a dancer.140 The commodification of women is also a central theme in Dada-Ernst, and is implied by two gold coins positioned near the groin area configured by two female legs that dominate the image.141 Lavin argues that the coins suggest the runaway inflation of early Weimar and the looming threat of poverty, which, at the time, rendered prostitution a frighteningly “real possibility” for many.142 Did Höch embed a commentary on prostitution in Dada-Ernst? Perhaps she did; however, in 1920-1921, Höch was gainfully

140 Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 6-9. 141 Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 6-9; See also Ruth Hemus, Dada’s Women, “Hannah Höch: The ‘good girl’ and the Dada club,” in Dada Women (Yale University Press, 2009), 109. 142 Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knfe, 6-9. Lavin writes that the theme of prostitution as a last-ditch chance for survival found expression in Georg Wilhem Pabst’s 1925 film, Die freudlose Gasse, starring Asta Nielsen and Greta Garbo. While this is an interesting suggestion, it folds the image into much broader social issues, and deflects from Höch’s personal experience and arguably her artistic intention.

52 employed and poverty did not represent an issue of pressing personal concern.143

Instead, as will be seen, Höch’s Dada-Ernst more powerfully suggests themes of sexual

agency and reproductive rights.

In 1920-1921, Höch, an unmarried and sexually active woman, was painfully aware of the contemporary discrepancy between a “liberalized awareness of the body and female sexuality” and the unavailability of contraceptives which “lagged far behind sexual practice.”144 In her discussion of Dada-Ernst, Lavin writes that the juxtaposition of

metal with flesh is violent and potentially anger-producing in the feminine viewer,145 and describes the image as “an allegory of pleasure and anger.”146 Dada-Ernst may reference the artist’s two unwelcome pregnancies (suggested by the two coins?) and the trauma of their subsequent termination through illegal and potentially fatal procedures.147 Höch obtained the first of two abortions in May 1916 and the second in

January 1918.148 Lavin ventures that the work’s title may reference her colleague Max

143 Maria Makela, “The Misogynist Machine: Images of Technology in the Work of Hannah Höch,” in Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture, Katharina von Ankum, ed. (Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 1997), 107. An employee of Berlin’s Ullstein Press as a graphic artist in the late 1910s and early 1920s “she not only supported herself and her lover [Hausmann] with her salary as a handiwork designer, she simultaneously produced prodigious amounts of artwork and maintained her own apartment in Berlin.” 144 Kosta, “Unruly Daughters,” 277. 145 Lavin. Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 6, and reiterates her reading, 8: “[C]lusters of allegorical fragments suggest violence, alienation, and anger.” 146 Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 6. 147 Kosta, “Unruly Daughters,” 277. Paragraph 218 criminalized the intentional termination of pregnancy and Weimar women were subject to “immense dangers of back alley abortions.” See also, Willem Melching, “A New Morality: Left-wing Intellectuals on Sexuality in Weimar Germany,” Journal of Contemporary History 25, no. 1. (Jan., 1990): 74, who discusses the double-standard in the enforcement of paragraph 218 in Weimar Germany; there were 4,000 abortion-related convictions compared to an estimated yearly total of 800,000 abortion procedures. Also see, Renate Bridenthal, “Beyond Kinder, Küche, Kirche: Weimar Women at Work,” Central European History 6, no. 2 (June 1973): 148-66. 148 Kristin Makholm, “Chronology,” in Boswell, The Photomontages of Hannah Höch, 187-88.

Ernst,149 yet Höch’s punning use of the German word Ernst (grave and/or serious), if tied

at all to Dada activities, is also plausibly linked to the magazine Der blutige Ernst, the title of which, much like an illegally terminated pregnancy in Weimar, translates as

Bloody Serious.150

Indeed, themes of conception and violence are closely intertwined in this image.

In the background of Dada-Ernst, two boxers closely engage in physical struggle. Their combative physicality, much like the aggressive boxer in the artist’s 1920 photomontage

Der Vater, allegorizes the intensity and violence of passionate sexual exchange.

Moreover, they suggest a nod to the pugilist’s contemporary popularity among

Weimar’s avant-garde artists, and foreshadow Höch’s later engagement with the legendary Max Schmeling in her 1931 photomontage The Strong Men (fig. 6.4), to be discussed extensively in connection with Weimar sexology and endocrinology.151

Dada-Ernst incorporates other noteworthy iconographic signs. Along the length of Dada-Ernst’s left side, a partially draped heraldic figure blowing a trumpet balances a vase of flowers located on the other side of the collage. Both iconographic elements are common in Northern Renaissance Nativity and Annunciation images and suggest the

interrelated themes of childbirth and conception. In the center of Dada-Ernst, hovering

above a heavy wooden cross (a Christian symbol reminiscent of a grave-marker), a large

bow-like technical object is positioned near the woman’s open legs to suggest the

invasiveness of a surgical tool. The similarity of this mysterious oversized object with

149 Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 8, 221n12. 150 Gale, Dada and Surrealism, 126. In 1919, critic and writer, Carl Einstein launched the periodical Der blutige Ernst (Bloody Serious). The publication regularly featured cartoons by George Grosz. 151 See, David Bathrick, “Max Schmeling on the Canvas: Boxing as an Icon of Weimar Culture,” New German Critique 51 (Autumn 1990): 113-36.

54 contemporary Abtreibungsinstrumente (Abortion Instruments), pictured as a

photograph in a 1928 police manual and later reproduced as a drawing in Hirschfeld’s

1931 publication Sexualkunde (Sexual Science) (fig. 1.22), strengthen these associations.

The instruments, much like the strange bowlike object in Höch’s collage, connoted

illegal and dangerous medical procedures.152 Höch was obviously painfully familiar with

such tools, experiences that may have inspired her to integrate an overt or subtle attack on paragraph 218 of the German penal code, which prohibited abortion, when she was conceptualizing Dada-Ernst.

Although first and foremost a highly personal image, Dada-Ernst may also be

read as a larger political statement that addresses a woman’s right to control her

reproductive fate. From the outbreak of the First World War, Höch stated that, she too

“lived in a very conscious political way.”153 Höch was committed to women’s issues and participated in the 1931 Berlin exhibition, Frauen in Not (Women in Need), which, as previously noted, was intended to raise public awareness and garner support for the legalization of abortion.154 At a time when reproduction was increasingly controlled and

152 E. Wulffen, Encyklopädie der Kriminalstik. Der Sexualverbrecher: Ein Handbuch für Juristen, Polizei-und Verwaltungsbeamte, Mediziner und Pädagogen (Encyclopedia of Criminalogy: A Handbook for Jurists, Police and Government Officials) (Berlin: Dr. P. Langenscheidt, 1928), 642-43. A photograph of these instruments is prominently pictured in Wulfflen as a double-page spread. The image was later replicated as a slightly altered drawing in, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, vol. 4, Bilderteil of Geschlechtskunde auf Grund dreissigjähriger Forschung und Erfahrung bearbeitet (Stuttgart: Julius Püttmann, 1930), 341. 153 Hemus, Dada’s Women, 101-02, “She [Höch] participated in numerous exhibitions of the November Group but also maintained a critical stance, signing an open letter to the Group published in Der Gegner (The Opponent) in 1920. This letter appealed for more revolutionary aims: for commitment to a radical aesthetic and social changes and closer alignment of the artist with the average worker. It effectively criticized the group’s stance as having become too commercial and too concessionary to bourgeois norms.” 154 Schweitzer, Schrankenlose Freiheit, 146-49. Käthe Kollwitz played a large role in the organization of this Berlin exhibition and formally launched the show with an opening speech. Frauen in

restricted by eugenically-inspired Nazi mandates, Frauen in Not represented a bold

show of organized political resistance.

Dada-Ernst, even more so than Höch’s laconic commentary on Hausmann’s

inability to assume paternal responsibility in Der Vater, implies the artist’s growing

disillusionment with her self-centered lover. Furthermore, a number of references to

the female body in Dada-Ernst signal an increasing engagement with gender and

sexuality, themes that would soon become central to Höch’s oeuvre.

The theme of sexuality in Dada-Ernst is most strongly suggested by a prominent

eye placed between the two legs near the center of the image. While the position of the

eye suggests the “beaver-shot” (a staple of pornographic imagery) in which the dominant trope is “the disappearance of the woman’s face or for that matter, the rest of her body,”155 this eye disrupts and counteracts these obvious associations. In contrast to Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du Monde (1868) (fig. 1.23), commissioned by the

Turkish diplomat Khalil Bey for erotic delectation, Höch’s substitution of the vagina with

a large eye that ‘looks back’ and obstructs the unimpeded objectification of the

woman’s sex, in effect transforms a sexually passive female body into an active subject.

In addition, the likelihood that Dada-Ernst was at least in some measure an expression of Höch’s sexual agency and her growing emotional independence is further supported by the eye’s tradition as an iconographic staple in apotropaic imagery primarily meant to frighten men.

Not featured the work of a number of prominent international male and female artists. See also, Burmeister, Aller Anfang ist DADA!, 173. 155 Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “The Legs of the Countess,” in Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, Emily Apter and W. Pietz, eds. (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press), 297.

Historically, spiritual leaders deployed vaginal imagery to incite respect and fear in their enemies; later, however, with the spread of patriarchal culture and resultant loss of women’s status and her sexual objectification, the vagina was increasingly depicted more in an erotic or pornographic context. Yet, in Dada-Ernst, the eye

functions much like a talisman and suggests the vaginal imagery of the mysterious

Sheela-na-gig figures found throughout Northern Europe (Fig. 1.24).156 Feminist scholars characterize these figures, along with the related eyes of the mythical Medusa, as

“antidote[s] to the male gaze, and an avenue of women reclaiming their own sexuality.”157 As Susan R. Bowers observes, the conflation of the vagina with the eye

“demonstrate[s] how the same image that has been used to oppress women can also help set them free.”158

Höch’s bold appropriation of a theme which had long been depicted by men radically disrupted cultural tradition. Her use of female genitalia differs in significant ways from that of Ernst, whose painting, Les Hommes n’en Sauront Rien (Of this Men

Shall Know Nothing) (1923) (fig. 1.25) is steeped in esoteric alchemical references, yet

156 A post-Romanesque era Sheela-na-Gig style carving of a woman holding and exposing her genitals is located at Marienhafe, in Ostfriesland Germany. Höch may have known of this object. See, Barbara Freitag, Sheela-na-Gigs: Unravelling an Enigma (London: Routledge, 2004), 1-12. Sheela-na-gig figures may be “ancient goddesses, vestiges of pagan cults,” [or] “protective talismans.” While they are generally found on medieval buildings, they are “often undatable.” Generally, Sheela-na-Gigs are ancient high-relief style stone carvings which were re-set onto later façades that replaced earlier churches or pagan places of worship. See also, Anthony Weir and James Jerman, Images of Lust: Sexual Carvings on Medieval Churches (New York: Routledge, 1986); See also, H.C. Lawlor, “Two typical Irish ‘Sheela-na- gigs,’” Man, vol. 31 (January 1931): 5. Lawlor claims that the etymological basis of the term Sheela-na-gig cannot be traced. 157 Susan R. Bowers, “Medusa and the Female Gaze,” NWSA Journal 2, no. 2 (Spring 1990), 217. More recently Francesca Woodman’s (1958-1981) placement of a mask at the pubis in a series of 1977-79 photographs diverts and returns the viewer’s gaze. Similar to Höch’s Dada-Ernst, the eyes in Woodman’s photographs suggest the apotropaic gaze of the Medusa and the mysterious Sheela-na-gig. 158 Bowers, “Medusa,” 218.

clearly suggests an abstract and highly symmetrical depiction of sexual intercourse and

foregrounds what appears to be a vagina penetrated by a penis.159 During the 1920s, male artists were more readily sanctioned to represent a woman’s nudity, and in particular her sexual organs, than their female counterparts.160 Thus, Höch’s depiction of vaginal imagery comprised a remarkable and groundbreaking proto-feminist act. In addition, Höch’s emphasis on female genitalia in Dada-Ernst suggests the symbolic reappropriation of her own physically ravaged femininity, perhaps an early signal of the artist’s budding sexual independence.

Much like a talismanic eye −or like a monocle, a single lens worn as a visual aid, which, as will be shown, was critically significant in lesbian representation--the eye in

Dada-Ernst emphasizes the gaze. Despite its placement between a woman’s legs, its presence resists (visual) penetration. As Lavin has observed, in general, the eyes of women in Höch’s photomontages “draw attention to vision, and problematize its representation.” These eyes lack a controlling gaze and often suggest “a subjective position that is frustrated or disoriented,”161 a situation exemplified by the mismatched

eyes in Höch’s Da-Dandy (1919), and the cockeyed gaze of the protagonist in her 1928

photomontage English Dancer (fig. 2.2). However, unlike the frustrated or disoriented

eyes in these works, the ‘vaginal’ eye in Dada-Ernst is a masterful and remarkable

addition that subverts and “reverses the viewer’s searching gaze” so that he or she

159 For a discussion of this painting, see, Geoffrey Hinton, “Max Ernst: ‘Les Hommes n’en Sauront Rien,’” Burlington Magazine 117, no. 866 (May 1975): 292-297+299. 160 For a discussion of male artist’s representations of female nudity as a cultural reflection of masculinist privilege, see, Duncan, “Virility and Domination.” 161 Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 154.

58 becomes its object.162 Indeed, despite the impending menace of physical violation suggested by the large technical instrument and by the tip of a pointed cap from below,

the eye in Dada-Ernst boldly returns the observer’s view and thwarts sexual

objectification of the female body. In this aspect, Dada-Ernst also anticipates the artist’s

emphasis on the eye in her 1928 photomontage Russian Dancer (fig. 2.1), a critical point

to be discussed later.

The single eye’s suggestion of the monocle in Dada-Ernst may have been meant to lampoon the artist’s soon-to-be ex-lover Raoul Hausmann (fig. 1.9), who generally sported this form of visual correction.163 Hausmann was nearly blind from childhood in his left eye, and, as Höch was to remark, “I think he was born wearing a monocle.”164

The monocle was an important Weimar accessory synecdochic with patriarchal and military power, as a photograph of German actor and silent-film villain Eric von Stroheim confirms (fig. 1.26).165 However, despite these masculinist associations, as we have seen, the single eye in Dada-Ernst also strongly suggests a woman’s appropriation of scopic power, active looking, and independent sexual agency.166 Both the single eye and

162 Hemus, Dada’s Women, 109. 163 Extant contemporary images of Hausmann, including Conrad Felix-Mueller’s 1920 painted portrait, depict him with a monocle. Certainly Höch was not beyond poking fun at Hausmann; her ca. 1920 short prose narrative “Der Maler” (The Painter) is generally recognized as a satire of Hausmann. “Der Maler” is reprinted in English translation in Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 216-18. 164 Schweitzer, Schrankenlose Freiheit, 21. See also, Hannah Höch, “Erinnerungen an DADA: Ein Vortrag 1966,” in Berlinische Galerie e.V. Museumspädagogischer Dienst, Cornelia Thater-Schulz and Armin Schulz, eds. Hannah Höch, 1889-1978: Ihr Werk, ihr Leben, ihre Freunde (Berlin: Berlinische Galerie, 1989), 201. 165 For related comments regarding actor Eric von Stroheim’s monocle, see, Lucy Fischer, “Enemies, a love story: Von Stroheim, women and World War I,” Film History 6 (Winter 1994): 522-34. The “Kriegsnummern” [War Issues] of the Lustige Blätter magazine published from 1914-1918, are a case in point. Soldiers—and especially ranking superiors--are generally depicted wearing monocles. 166 As stated, the power of this visual constellation has retained its impact; the similarity between this salient detail and Woodman’s series Providence Rhode Island (1976) is striking: See also

the monocle emphasize the act of looking, which, in Weimar, was a privilege associated

with the patriarchal gaze. But, perhaps unsurprisingly, the monocle became a

recognized sexual fetish in Wilhelmine Germany and, by the 1920s, was a popular

lesbian accoutrement.167

A close examination of Dada-Ernst reveals therefore a dark and disturbing

narrative, one that suggests Höch’s growing frustration and anger. While this

photomontage may be a response to the inequities Höch suffered at the hands of

Hausmann and her sexist Dada colleagues, it seems also to have initiated a series of

images in which she began to engage seriously with feminist issues.

The Lighter Side of the New Woman: Höch’s Da-Dandy and Die Mädchen

In contrast to Dada-Ernst, other contemporary photomontages that foreground

women, such as the artist’s Da-Dandy and Die Mädchen (The Girls), appear more light-

hearted. In these alluring images, Höch explored fashion and feminine beauty. Höch’s

1919 photomontage Da-Dandy (fig. 1.7) conflates objects of adornment and the female

body and signals a growing engagement with the commodification of women. Die

Mädchen (The Girls) of 1921 (fig. 1.6) references dance and mobility and depicts a

number of young women engaged in physical activity. Even more so than Da-Dandy,

Ohff, ed., Hannah Höch: Ein Leben mit der Pflanze, 6-7. Höch revisited the theme of the eye several years later in her 1965 collage Strauss (Bouquet), an image that emphasizes the eye/gaze yet conflates it with her well-documented love of gardening. 167 R. K. Neumann, “Das Monokel als erotischer Fetisch,” (“The monocle as an erotic Fetish”) Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft 1, nr. 10 (January 1915): 393. Neumann closes his discussion with the following words: “The ladies that wear monocles fall into an emancipated group, and the few with which I am acquainted, are either homosexual, or live in companionate marriages with men. While Hirschfeld does not discuss this, I have observed several pictures of homosexuals [both male and female] wearing monocles in his publications.” Translation mine. For a discussion of the monocle as a sexual fetish and lesbian accessory, see, Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1992), 152-55.

which largely confines its imagery to women’s faces and extremities, Die Mädchen

foregrounds Höch’s fascination and aesthetic appreciation of the female body.

Höch’s Da-Dandy, the title of which conjoins the words “Dada” and “Dandy,” again pokes fun at the Dadaists. Much like the artist’s Cut with the Kitchen Knife of the

same year, the use of text, albeit in different ways, sarcastically references the vanity of

her colleagues, who considered themselves superior to women and belittled Höch’s artistry. However, Da-Dandy is dominated by female figures and hence, as Lavin points out, also evokes the “twenties version of a female dandy, upscale and flamboyant.”168

Da-Dandy foregrounds the more pleasurable aspects of contemporary female commodification and feminine beauty. The fashionable and expensive accessories pictured in it include turban-like hats, pearls, fancy shoes, a ring and gold bracelets. All objects that Höch herself may have desired, these accoutrements signaled superior

economic status and, to a large degree, the social position of the women who wore

them.

The visual repetition of the figures in Da-Dandy, and the close-ups of their

accessories clearly reflect a way of seeing inspired by the new medium of film. As Lavin

has observed, Da-Dandy’s depiction of fragmented images of fashionable women

suggests an overlapping film montage.169 At the time, cinema was a new medium, one

in which Höch was clearly interested.170 Höch loved going to the movies and was a

member of both the Rotterdam and Berlin sections of the Filmliga (Film-group), an

168 Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 37. 169 Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 37. 170 Ralf Burmeister, “Das statische und das dynamische Bild: Hannah Höch und der Film,” Museums Journal 14 (July 2000): 11.

61 international European collective that supported independent film practice free of commercial interests.171

Höch clearly recognized the similarities between the two media and characterized photomontage as “a close neighbor of film,” while her Dada-era partner

Raoul Hausmann described the medium as “static film.” 172 Indeed, during the 1920s, photography, film, and photomontage were so close culturally that artists working with these media often shared exhibition venues, the most prominent example of which was the exhibition Schau der Deutschen Werkbunds Film und Foto (Exhibition of the German

Film and Photo Workers Alliance) (FiFo). Held in Stuttgart, the May 1929 Fifo brought together the work of international photographers, photomontage artists, and filmmakers.173 Initially reluctant to participate in the Fifo, at the bidding of her friend,

artist László Moholy-Nagy, Höch agreed and exhibited 17 photomontages,174 including

Russian Dancer and Da-Dandy.175

171 Schweitzer, Schrankenlose Freiheit, 118-119; See also Burmeister et al., Lebenscollage, vol. 2, 229n1. 172 Burmeister, “Das statische und das dynamische Bild,” 10. 173 Photographers included Berenice Abbot, Eugene Atget, Herbert Bayer, Cecil Beaton, Anton Bruehl, Francis Brugière, Florence Henri, George de Hoyningen-Huené, André Kertész, Germaine Krull, Man Ray, Moholy-Nagy, Paul Outerbridge, Renger-Patsch, Hans Richter, Maurice Tabard, Jan Tchichold, Edward Weston, and Edward Steichen. Photomontages were contributed by Marianne Brandt, Lajos von Ébneth, George Grosz, John Heartfield, El Lissitzky, Kurt Schwitters, Karel Tiege, Otto Umbehr (Umbo). 174 Gustav Stoz et al., Film und Foto (Stuttgart, 1929: repr., New York: Arno Press, 1979), 62-63. Höch is identified in the Fifo catalogue as a resident of Den Haag, and her first name is misspelled as “Hanna.” Höch’s 1923-25 photomontage Die Kokette (The Coquette) is pictured in the catalogue (30). The catalogue does not list all of Höch’s works by name. Works identified with titles include Russische Tänzerin, Die Gymastiklehererin, Negerplastk, Von Oben, Die Soubrette, Die Kokette, Amerika balanciert Europa, Vagabunden, Die Sängerin, Das Schöne Mädchen, Bürgerliches Brautpaar, Der Vater, and, Der Dandy (possibly Da-Dandy). Two works are listed as Portraits, and another as a Fotomonage. See also Burmeister, “Das statische und das dynamische Bild,” 10. See also, Boswell, “Through the Looking Glass,” 10, who discusses Maholy-Nagy’s role in Höch’s participation. 175 Schweitzer, Schrankenlose Freiheit, 135. Launched in Stuttgart in May, in July 1929, the Fifo travelled to Zürich, Danzig, Vienna, Agram, Tokyo, and Osaka. Before Fifo left Stuttgart, Höch removed Russian Dancer, and six other photomontages from the show so they could be exhibited in the Fall of

Whereas the visual fragments that dominate Da-Dandy are limited to depictions

of women’s faces and their adorned extremities, Höch’s focus on feminine physique is

more apparent in her 1921 photomontage Die Mädchen. The work celebrates popular

representations of women and features three scantily clad figures engaged in dance.

Like them, other girls pictured in the photomontage are not fully dressed, rather, they

are shown in sports attire or bathing costumes. Like Da-Dandy, the visual overlapping of

figures in Die Mädchen also appears to have been inspired by cinematic techniques. In

addition, the dynamism of these figures reflects Weimar Körperkultur (Body-culture), a

major trend celebrating the healthful benefits of outdoor exercise.176 The many visual

references to movement in Die Mädchen are underscored by a car pictured in the lower left corner. The ultimate contemporary symbol of personal mobility, the car became a cipher for freedom and independence and a requisite accessory of liberated and wealthy Weimar New Women.177

Höch’s ‘fluid’ sexual identity?

Hannah Höch’s status as the “least known member”178 of the “loosely federated short-lived Berlin Dada movement,” is clearly undeserved.179 While in recent decades,

Höch has rapidly gained in art historical status, before Heinz Ohff published a biography

1929 at the Galerie d’Audretsch in Den Haag. While Fifo guaranteed international exposure, Schweitzer suggests that Höch’s decision to pull works for another show was a financial one; the Haag exhibition, unlike Fifo, represented a chance for the artist to sell her work. 176 For a study of German Körperkultur, see Eric N. Jensen, Body by Weimar: Athletes, Gender, and German Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 177 Here, the 1925 Autoportrait (Self-portrait in Green Bugatti) of Polish artist Tamara de Lempicka (1898-1980) comes to mind. The image, later a cover illustration for the leading German fashion magazine Die Dame (July 1, 1929), depicts an elegant woman at the wheel of a car. While very different, both Höch’s and Lempicka’s images conflate the automobile, female beauty and independence with fashion culture. 178 Rempel, “The Anti-body,” 155. 179 Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 14.

63 of the artist in 1968,180 she was best known as the partner of fellow artist Raoul

Hausmann and self-proclaimed Dadasoph (a dada-play on the German word Philosoph or philosopher).181 Höch’s affair with Hausmann was, mildly stated, turbulent, and she herself characterized their relationship as a “difficult and painful learning experience.”182 As we have seen, while with him, Höch underwent two psychologically and physically traumatic abortions.183 Fearing for her life at the hands of the abusive

Hausmann, she finally ended the relationship in 1922.184

Höch’s affair with Hausmann and her marriage to Kurt Matthies during the war years suggest that, both before and after her relationship with Brugman, she identified as heterosexual. However, while the ‘facts’ of Höch’s biography support this classification, such a superficial assumption deserves reconsideration.185 As a young woman, Höch was undoubtedly in love with Hausmann, with whom she conducted a protracted and passionately sexual affair. However, in 1926, after she met Til Brugman,

180 Heinz Ohff, Hannah Höch (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1968). 181 Rempel, “The Anti-body,” 155; See also, Hemus, Dada’s Women, 91-93. In a similar play on words, Johannes Baader was dubbed the “Oberdada” (the Chief-dada). See, Alexis, “A Visit to the Cabaret Dada,” The Drama Review 18, no. 2 (June 1974): 128. 182 Götz Adriani et al., Collagen: Hannah Höch, 1889-1978 (Stuttgart: Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, 1984), 74, 85n10. Adriani cites Höch’s characterization of her affair with Raoul Hausmann to Pagé as a “harte und schmerzliche Lehrzeit.” See also, Susanne Pagé, “Interview mit Hannah Höch,” in Hannah Höch, Paris-Berlin, 1976, 30; See also Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 27. “Hausmann was violent; he hit Höch on several occasions.” 183 Makholm, “Chronology,” in Boswell, Makela, and Lanchner, 187-88. Höch had two abortions: one in May 1916 and another in January 1918. 184 Schweitzer, Schrankenlose Freiheit, 53. With regard to Hausmann’s escalating physical abuse, Hannah wrote to her sister Grete, April 8, 1918, “Es ist eine Schreckliche Zeit für mich, ich komme aus der Todesangst nicht heraus.” (“It is a terrible time for me and I fear for my life.”). This letter is also cited in Burmeister, et al., Hannah Höch: eine Lebenscollage, vol. 1, p. 356. 185 For a discussion of phallocentric bias and the resultant assumption of heterosexuality unless proven otherwise, see, Linda Garber, “Necessity is the Invention of Lesbians,” in The Lesbian Premodern, Noreen Giffney, Michelle M. Sauer, and Diane Watt, eds. (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011), 187-92; Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men (New York: Morrow, 1981). 64

Höch declared to her sister that she had “definitively finished the chapter men.”186

While Höch’s correspondence should be enough to convince any skeptic with regard to

her shifting sexual orientation, it is curious that she nevertheless married in 1938.

However, Höch’s marriage to Kurt Matthies, a convicted pedophile who was castrated

before the couple lived together, was evidently companionate in nature.

Höch, whose health had long been weakened due to thyroid problems, met

Matthies in the autumn of 1935 while she was vacationing alone in the Dolomite

Mountains and recuperating from an operation.187 Matthies was twenty-five and Höch

was forty-six. After the vacation, Matthies visited Höch in Berlin, but Brugman did not

welcome the young man’s interest in her partner. He was, however, persistent, and in

early 1936, Höch, who had begun to grow weary of Brugman’s dominant personality,

convinced Til to consider a temporary separation. Brugman reluctantly agreed, and, in

April 1936, she traveled to Holland for a week. By the time she returned, Höch had decided to leave her for Matthies. Brugman did not accept the situation passively and attempted to win Hannah back; she was, however, unsuccessful, and in May 1936,

Brugman moved out.188

Höch and Matthies shared a love of travel and undertook a number of road

trips.189 During the 1930s, owning an automobile in Germany was a luxury and Matthies,

who had studied jurisprudence but worked as a traveling salesman, was often on the

186 Letter, Hannah Höch to Grete Höch Konig, Den Haag, October 14, 1926, Höch Archive Murnau, cited in Lavin, Cut, 241n17. 187 Schweitzer, Schrankenlose Freiheit, 195. 188 Schweitzer, Schrankenlose Freiheit, 198-99. Brugman and Höch remained friends, spent Christmas together in 1938 when Matthies and Höch were estranged, and met sporadically until Brugman’s death in 1958. 189 Schweitzer, Schrankenlose Freiheit, 202-12.

65 road for extended periods. On November 7, 1937, while Höch and Matthies were in

Nürnberg, he was arrested for registering under a false name at a hotel. While this infraction was slight and carried a one Mark penalty and a maximum two day jail sentence, bureaucratic pursuit of this matter revealed that a German-wide search warrant for Matthies had been issued the previous month by the Munich police.190

Matthies was charged with exposing himself and masturbating in front of two pre- pubescent girls while in Munich on business in May 1937. He had been arrested and jailed for similar incidents earlier in 1932 and in 1936.191 While Matthies had discussed his sexual compulsions with Höch before this incident, he apparently did not reveal their true extent.

Matthies was transferred from Nürnberg to a Berlin jail on November 21, 1938 where he remained until July 21st. During his incarceration, Matthies was subjected to extensive medical and psychological evaluations.192 His physicians agreed that he was untreatable and that only castration would diminish his sexual compulsions. Under the

1932 Erbgesundheitgesetze (Hereditary Health Laws), eugenically motivated laws instituted to curtail the transmission of hereditary weaknesses and diseases, castrations

190 Schweitzer, Schrankenlose Freiheit, 213. As Schwetzer claims, Matthies used a false name for a reason; he knew the police were looking for him. The police had sought him unsuccessfully for questioning at his employer’s place of business on July 15, and again on August 3, 1937. In October 1937, the police issued a nationwide warrant for him. 191 Schweitzer, “Der Fall Kurt Heinz Matthies,” in Schrankenlose Freiheit, 212-46. Matthies was a pedophile and was arrested for indecent exposure for the first time in Berlin in 1932 and again in 1936. The first time he was arrested he was fined 100 RM (Reichsmark) and ordered to undergo hypnosis- therapy, which, as medical expert Viktor Müller-Hess later claimed in 1938, had been unsuccessful. 192 Until Schweitzer published the details regarding the circumstances surrounding Matthies’ incarceration, this episode was described in the scholarship as “several months of hospitalization due to emotional illness.” See Burmeister, Aller Anfang ist DADA!, 177.

were routinely performed on incurable sexual criminals and male homosexuals.193

Matthies consented to a castration, which was performed at the prison hospital Berlin

Moabit on March 29, 1938.

Although, as Cara Schweitzer remarks, Höch was “hopelessly overwhelmed in

her role as Matthies’ partner, mother, and psychoanalyst,” she remained supportive of

him throughout the ordeal.194 Höch petitioned for Matthies’ release and submitted

letters to the police on his behalf in May and again in July 1938; the latter was influential

in obtaining a suspended sentence and his release on parole.195 After Matthies was

freed, the couple vacationed and, in mid-August, registered to be married. Matthies and

Höch were joined in a small civil ceremony in Berlin on September 16, 1938, Brugman’s fiftieth birthday.196

Matthies’ sexual proclivities and his castration suggest that Höch’s relationship with him probably did not include conventional heterosexual intimacy. And, while some physical contact is indeed possible, the evidence presented above, coupled with the artist’s lesbian history, suggests that the complexities of her sexual orientation deserve more than cursory consideration. Höch’s relationship with Matthies clearly reflects her fascination, both in her life and in her art, with non-normative gender. While this was

193 Schweitzer, Schrankenlose Freiheit, 236-37. 194 Schweitzer, Schrankenlose Freiheit, 225. 195 Schweitzer, Schrankenlose Freiheit, 245-46. Matthies would remain on parole for three years until July 30, 1942. Matthies served only nine months and avoided the remainder of his three year sentence by subjecting himself to castration and arguing that he wanted to marry Höch. 196 Schweitzer, Schrankenlose Freiheit, 246-48. The honeymoon did not last very long. While the couple fought during the 1938-39 New Year holidays, Höch was enjoying the financial advantages of the Jewish Pogrom. Beginning April 26, 1938, the net value of Jewish-owned businesses could not exceed 5000 Reichsmark. Matthies, who was employed by the Jewish-owned company Schönthal, purchased the company car in August 1938, and by December 1938, the Schönthal’s grand piano stood in Höch’s apartment.

patently obvious as she lived openly with a female lover, Matthies’ dysphoric sexuality

was not necessarily visible to others. However, his castration rendered him, at least to

those with whom he was physically intimate, sexually ambiguous.

For awhile, and especially during their many short trips together, Höch and her

husband enjoyed each other’s company. Höch, however, often remained in Berlin while

Matthies was away on business. In 1941, she spent most of the year alone in Heiligensee

working in the garden of her rural Häuschen (small house), while he was in Italy for

business.197 The last time the ‘couple’ traveled together, Matthies’ friend Hubert came

along and Höch felt left out; she spent most of the time by herself collecting plants and

taking photographs, while the two men went mountain-climbing.198

In September of 1942, Höch’s old friend, Nell von Ébneth, a concert violinist (and

the estranged wife of Hungarian artist Lajos von Ébneth) came to Berlin and was a guest in Höch’s house. While Nell’s musical engagement in Berlin was brief, she stayed for

over a month. In a strange twist of events, it would again transpire that Höch’s intimate relationships were oddly intertwined with hers: In 1926, Höch had met Til Brugman while vacationing at Ébneth’s seaside home in Kijkduin. In November 1942, Matthies took back Höch’s diamond wedding ring and abruptly left her for Nell. Höch and

Matthies were officially divorced in 1944.199 While Höch and Matthies later saw each

other sporadically, Heinz Ohff reports that, while he was compiling Höch’s biography,

she quietly crossed her ex-husband’s name from the manuscript and later commented,

197 Schweitzer, Schrankenlose Freiheit, 340. 198 Schweitzer, Schrankenlose Freiheit, 344-45. The artist noted these impressions in her datebook. 199 Schweitzer, Schrankenlose Freiheit, 346-47.

“Ich brauchte ein Kind, er brauchte eine Mutter” (I needed a child, he needed a mother).200

It is not difficult to argue that Höch’s unconventional intimate relationships

informed her aesthetic and political choices and found reflection in her art. Moreover,

they may in part explain the artist’s radical visual treatment of the human body and her

critical--and somewhat cynical--distance from acceptable gender-based social

conventions. Höch’s oeuvre reveals a marked emphasis on the female body and the

feminized male, but also suggests that she viewed patriarchal and heterosexist

institutions--among them courtship and marriage--with irony. These impressions are

perhaps predictable in light of Höch’s difficult relationship with Hausmann and the

curious circumstances of her six year marriage to Matthies, a castrated pedophile

twenty-two years her junior.

Considered in tandem, Höch’s oeuvre and her intimate biography, which

includes lesbianism at a critical juncture in her artistic career, support related and

complementary claims that her personal life strongly informed her artistic production.

Carefully analyzing Höch’s oeuvre supports a key finding in this dissertation: although

she was clearly interested in gender themes before she met Brugman, Höch’s lesbian

relationship was most instrumental in transforming her artistic sensibilities and visual

production. While with Brugman, Höch’s feminist sensibilities and her erotic

200 Schweitzer, Schrankenlose Freiheit, 378; See also Heinz Ohff, “Heiligensee,” in Ralf Burmeister, et al, Hannah Höch: Eine Lebenscollage (Berlin: Künstlerarchiv der Berlinischen Galerie, Berlinischen Galerie, 1995), vol. 2, 306. See also, Burmeister, Aller Anfang ist DADA, 176. Matthies contacted Höch in 1965 while he was in Berlin, but she refused to see him.

69 appreciation of the female body were more emphatically expressed. This suggests that, in particular, this relationship heightened the artist’s sensitivity to gender issues.

Chapter II

The Lesbian in Weimar and Hannah Höch’s Russian Dancer and English Dancer

Hannah Höch’s photomontages generally exhibit compositional variety, yet the

1928 Russian Dancer (fig. 2.1) and English Dancer (2.2) are nearly identically configured.

Both depict over-sized heads perched on tiny legs against empty backgrounds. Due to

their similarity, the two are often discussed in tandem.201 Mineke Bosch and Myriam

Everard correctly claim that the two photomontages constitute “a double portrait” of

Höch and her partner Til Brugman.202 However, along with reflecting her current relationship, as this chapter reveals, the Russian Dancer and English Dancer also suggest the artist’s engagement with lesbian media.

Maud Lavin has undertaken the most in-depth analysis of the Russian Dancer

and English Dancer to date, offering possible readings informed by Höch and Brugman’s relationship. Foregrounding their physical characteristics she remarks, Brugman had a

“slightly fuller face” and was “more stout,” while Höch was “lithe and wiry.”203 “Many observers,” she continues, “have recognized the Englische Tänzerin as a montage self-

portrait, and it seems likely that (as some have speculated) the Russische Tänzerin was

201 Mineke Bosch and Myriam Everard, guest eds., “Redactioneel” in “Til Brugman en Hannah Höch” special issue, Lesbisch Cultureel Tijdschrift Lust en Gratie 18 (Fall 1988): 8; See also Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife: The Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 143-47. 202 Bosch and Everard, Lust en Gratie, 8. The two photomontages illustrate the front and back covers of their 1988 discussion: “Afbeeldingen van werk van Höch in Kleur en aan omslag bestaande uit de Englische Tänzerin (voor) en de Russische Tänzerin (achter) maken het dubbelportret complet.” (The English Dancer (front) and the Russian Dancer (behind) make this double-portrait complete). 203 Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 146.

71 meant to represent Brugman.”204 Höch’s “portrayal of herself and her lover as dancers, each balancing delicately on one foot, suggests a desire for equilibrium . . . or grace in the midst of instability.”205 Moreover, she claims the Dancers’ complementary poses

“take up the theme of doubling (the couple, the other as self),206 both visually and psychologically.”207 Echoing Lavin, Matthew Biro writes, “The two dancers evoke a sense of human identity formation. The various signs of shadowing or doubling suggest an intimate and interactive practice in which two women mirror and change one another.”208 While these readings are perceptive, they fail to address well-worn conventions of lesbian representation (i.e. visual contrast). Moreover, both ignore the

Russian Dancer’s monocle, in Weimar, the defining lesbian accessory.209

Myriam Everard astutely recognizes that the Russian Dancer’s monocle

“positions the image in a lesbian context.”210 Furthermore, she claims that the Russian

204 Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 146; Lavin notes that in his 1968 Hannah Höch catalogue, “art historian Götz Adriani places the Englische Tänzerin opposite the painted self-portrait Selbstbildnis, 1929, whose features it resembles,” 146, 236n26. 205 Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 147. 206 Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 146. Lavin’s remark regarding “the other as self,” calls to mind Bonnie Zimmerman’s observation that “the tendency to interpret pairs of female characters as aspects of the self sometimes serves to mask a relationship that a lesbian reader [viewer] might interpret as bonding or love between women.” See, “What Has Never Been: An Overview of Lesbian Feminist Criticism,” in Sexual Practice, Textual Theory: Lesbian Cultural Criticism, Susan J. Wolfe and Julia Penelope, eds. (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993), 36. 207 Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen knife, 146; See also, Cassandra L. Langer, “Transgressing Le Droit du Seigneur,” 311. This theme dovetails with lesbian theorists who identify “a twinning and doubling of the self as [one of] the archetypal patterns of lesbian love.” 208 Matthew Biro,”The New Woman as Cyborg: Gender Race and Sexuality in the Photomontages of Hannah Höch,” in The Dada Cyborg: Visions of the New Human in Weimar Berlin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 237. 209 Ruth Roellig, Berlins lesbische Frauen (1928), reprinted in Adele Meyer, Lila Nächte: die Damenklubs im Berlin der zwanziger Jahre (Berlin: Edition Lit. Europe, 1994), 17. Emphasis Roellig; See also Lavin, Cut with the kitchen Knife, 146. While Lavin discusses the Russian Dancer’s monocle, she curiously regards it as a “sign often associated in Höch’s work with Dada” despite its contemporary currency as a lesbian marker and the near decade that separates the heyday of Berlin Dadaism from 1928. 210 Myriam Everard, “Man lebt nur einmal in Patchamatac: Die groteske Welt von Til Brugman, Lebensgefährtin von Hannah Höch,” in Jula Dech and Gertrud Maurer, eds., Da-da zwischen Reden zu

Dancer’s monocle constituted a cross-cultural sapphic signal link to Romaine Brooks’

1923 painting Una, Lady Troubridge (fig.2.3), an iconic example of early twentieth- century lesbian representation.211 In Brooks’ austere portrait, the subject’s monocle clearly identified her as a stylish interwar lesbian. Troubridge was the partner of

Marguerite ‘Radclyffe’ Hall (1880-1943), the British author of the infamous lesbian- themed novel The Well of Loneliness (1928), which was available in German translation in 1929 and marketed in Berlin’s lesbian periodicals.212

Scholars recognize the importance of the ‘dancer’ in Weimar culture and its key role in Höch’s oeuvre; they often symbolized female empowerment and the freedom women newly enjoyed.213 In Weimar, as in the artist’s collages, the dancer was

“powerful, active, and attractive, and also represented an athletic and desirable modern type of woman.”214 Höch’s fascination with dance and dancers is obvious in a number of her works; dancers feature prominently in the artist’s photomontages, and her

Hannah Höch (Berlin: Orlanda Frauenverlag, 1991), 94. “Die Russische Tänzerin, in der sich der Künstlerin mit dem Attribut des virile preußischen Offiziers dem Monokel («mein Double»), um sich so -ironisch, doch immerhin− in eine lesbische Kontexte stellt.” 211 Everard, “Patchamatac,” 97n31; Cassandra L. Langer, “Transgressing Le Droit du Seigneur: The Lesbian Feminist Defining Herself in Art History,” in New Feminist Criticism: Art, Identity, Action, Joanna Frueh et al. eds. (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), 306-26. See also, Joe Lucchesi, “Romaine Brooks’ Portraits and the Performance of Lesbian Identities” (PhD. diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2000); Joe Lucchesi, “The Dandy in Me: Romaine Brook’s 1923 Portraits,” in Dandies: Fashion and Finesse in Art and Culture, Susan Fillin-Yeh, ed. (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 153-84. 212 Liebende Frauen 4 Jg., no. 47 (1929): 7. Quell der Einsamkeit, the German title of Hall’s infamous publication, was available in paper or hardcover through the Berlin publisher Bergmann. Written in large font, the advertisement for Quell emphasizes that the scandalous book was publically burned. 213 Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife. Lavin stresses Höch’s “symbolic investment in the figure of the female dancer” (23), describing the dancer as “an active, empowered woman,” or as “a symbol of postwar modernism . . . and the myth of the bohemian artist” (32). Moreover, Lavin conflates the New Woman and the dancer: “The makeup and large earring identify the subject as a New Woman—according to Höch, a dancer” (128). 214 Biro, “The New Woman as Cyborg,” 236.

Scrapbook contains dozens of dance and dance-related images.215 As Lavin observes,

Höch’s “pleasurable and largely uncritical association of dance with exoticism”216 reflects popular Weimar representations.217

While Höch might have easily chosen other figures to depict a female-female

couple, the artist’s portrayal of herself and her lover as dancers reflects common

associations between women in the performing arts and lesbianism. By contemporary standards, this automatically lent Höch’s Dancers a homoerotic subtext. In 1927, the

Weimar sexologist Dr. Leo Perry declared, “It’s a well known fact that women active in the theatre are often lesbians.”218 Like him, prominent British sexologist and Hirschfeld colleague Havelock Ellis (1859-1939) claimed, “passionate friendships among girls, from the most innocent to the most elaborate excursions in the direction of Lesbos, are extremely common in theatres, both among actresses, and chorus and ballet girls.”219

This suggests that while Höch redeployed mainstream materials in her photomontages, similar to her Weimar lesbian contemporaries she infused them with subcultural signals.

215 Hannah Höch, Album, ed. Gunda Luyken (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz; Berlin: Berlinische Galerie, Landesmuseum für Moderne Kunst, Fotografie und Architektur, 2004); See also Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 147. 216 Höch’s Album includes numerous images of African and Asian women dancing, as well as a photograph of African American dancer Josephine Baker performing in a grass skirt. 217 Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 96. 218 Dr. Leo Perry, “Auf diesem nicht mehr ungewöhlichen Wege . . .”: Der Liebesmarkt des Zeitungs-Inserates (Vienna; Leipzig: Verlag der Kulturforschung, 1927), 179. “Die Tatsache, dass Theaterdamen nicht selten ‘der andere Fakultät’ angehören regte den Versuch an, Lesbos und Theatre zu kombinieren.” Perry’s “Sappho” (179-194) is included in the chapter “Die Abseitigen” (The Abject) (153- 219), which clearly reflects the contemporaneous illicit status of lesbianism in Weimar. 219 Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex: Sexual Inversion, vol. 2. (Philadelphia: F.A. Davis and Company Publishers, 1908), 130. Similar remarks were also made by Edward Carpenter. See, The Intermediate Sex: A Study of some transitional types of Men and Women (1908; repr., New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1983), 155.

Representations of Lesbians in Weimar

Before Höch’s Russian and English Dancers are more closely examined within a subcultural context, Weimar lesbian media must first be discussed. The history of

Weimar lesbian subculture can be most effectively reconstructed and investigated through print media. Not only did lesbian magazines and lesbian-themed books leave a

tangible trace that can still be accessed today, but they were a key means by which the

subculture was expressed. Weimar lesbian media served to interrupt representational

conventions in which the lesbian was invisible, the object of male fantasy, or a sidebar

within homosexual subculture.220 Lesbian media, however, was entrenched in an

environment of patriarchal heterosexism, which traditionally subordinates the female.

This problematized lesbian expression yet, as history has proven, it was a surmountable

challenge. As the following discussion confirms, Weimar lesbian media newly lent the

lesbian subject a visible contour and was ultimately effective in extricating it from a

heterosexist cultural matrix.

Hollis Clayson writes that “the recognition that an artwork’s ‘meaning’ is not

fixed, [and] that its message depends upon the investments of the onlooker, is one of

the most fertile discoveries, indeed one of the themes, of post 1970 art-history.”221 The

significance of Clayson’s observation is especially apparent when applied to the weighty

gendered tradition of Western European female representation. While images of women are a staple of Western art, they are often produced by men and geared to the

220 Carolyn J. Dean, Sexuality and Modern Western Culture. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996), 25-26. 221 Hollis Clayson, “Materialist Art History and its Points of Difficulty,” The Art Bulletin 77, no. 3 (Sept. 1995): 369.

male heterosexual viewer.222 The age-old configuration of the male subject and female

object inspired, in part, Laura Mulvey’s seminal concept of the gaze. The gaze, a central

principle of critical feminist theory, explores the process of looking “in a gender-

imbalanced world.” In such a world, “males assert their power through the ‘subject’

position of looking, while females are “passive, powerless objects of their controlling

gaze.”223 This dynamic has perpetrated a tradition in which images of women are created by men for male consumption.

A similar, yet hyperbolized (because it involves two female subjects) spectatorial

logic informs the representation and reception of lesbianism. A culture of hetero-

patriarchy empowers masculinist viewing practices and, in effect, weakens or negates

lesbian agency. In part, this dynamic explains the subordination of the lesbian figure to

the masculine imagination.224 As Robert Stam elaborates, “lesbian scenes are almost

always invariably staged in view of the imperious needs of the straight male

spectator.”225 Images of lesbians “are constructed to embrace the male” who “is invited

to enter and master the scene−that is —to dominate the two women, thereby ‘doubling

his pleasure.’”226

222 Thalia Gouma-Peterson and Patricia Mathews, “The Feminist Critique of Art History,” Art Bulletin 69, no. 3 (Sept., 1987): 326-40. 223 Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, eds. The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History (New York: Harper Collins, 1992), 7. 224 Noreen Giffney and Katharine O’Donnell, eds. Twenty-First Century Lesbian Studies (Binghamton, NY: The Haworth Press, 2007), 13. 225 Robert Stam, Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1989), 167. 226 Becki L. Ross, “’It’s Merely Designed for Sexual Arousal’: Interrogating the Indefensibility of Lesbian Smut,” Bad Attitudes on Trial: Pornography, Feminism, and the Butler Decision, Brenda Cossman, et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 167; 168. “The women pictured in ‘lesbian spreads’ do not attend to each other; they stare out coyly at the male viewer and their bodies are positioned to maximize both his arousal and their own submission to his needs. . . The figuring of lesbians to attract and

Moreover, in contrast to the male homosexual who is embedded in a culture that privileges men, male experience, and in which “phallic agency is the reality denoted by the word sex,”227 sex without a penis, i.e. lesbianism, is generally regarded as negligible and, hence, less threatening than homosexuality.228 This rationale complements 1929 arguments offered by the minor, yet controversial, Weimar sexologist Franz Scheda who claimed, “the reason woman-to-woman love is not given notice is twofold: It is not illegal in Germany, and most people do not find it distasteful.”229 The traditional unimportance and invisibility of lesbians and lesbianism within sexual discourse was also demonstrated by leading sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, who, in a 1912 study, discussed seventeen cases of transvestites, only one of which was a female.230 Indeed, as Carolyn J. Dean observes, “with some exceptions, historians have included lesbians in larger discussions of homosexuality, which remains primarily a history of men,”231 Clearly, “in a heterosexual matrix that privileges masculinity, it is obvious how and why female homosexuality—whatever it might be—simply drops out accommodate the male gaze confirms age-old myths of the gargantuan, ever-ready sapphic appetite best satisfied by horny straight men.” 227 Joanne Glasgow, “What’s a Nice Lesbian Like You Doing in the Church of Torquemada?: Radclyffe Hall and Other Catholic Converts,” in Karla Jay and Joanne Glasgow, eds., Lesbian Texts and Contexts: Radical Revisions (New York: New York University Press, 1990), 243. Glasgow explores the moral arguments that enabled a number of prominent twentieth-century lesbians, including Renée Vivien, Una Troubridge, Radclyffe Hall, and Alice B. Toklas, to convert to and effortlessy embrace Catholicism. 228 This situation is similarly reflected in the historic contrast between the illegality of male homosexuality and the general ‘legality,’ or what lesbian scholars correctly perceive as a dismissal, or non- acknowledgment of lesbianism. A double-edged sword, the epistemological non-status of lesbians protected them from persecution, but also rendered them culturally invisible. 229 Franz Scheda, Die Abarten im Geschlechtsleben, Band 1: Die lesbische Liebe (Berlin: Schwalbe- Verlag, 1929), 8. Scheda regarded lesbianism as a pleasure pursued by overly-stimulated and bored women and as an inferior ersatz for heterosexuality. Alternately, he claimed lesbian ‘practice’ stemmed from disgust with males (hence, locating it among prostitutes), or common among women in harems compelled to share one husband sexually. 230 Magnus Hirschfeld, trans. Michael A. Lombardi-Nash, Transvestites: the erotic drive to cross- dress (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1991). 231 Carolyn J. Dean, Sexuality and Modern Western Culture, 25-26.

of the cultural symbolic.”232 Thus, historically, and in accordance with phallocentric cultural tradition, lesbians were either represented within a pornographic context or were relatively invisible.

Due to the hegemony of phallocentric culture, before the advent of Weimar

lesbian media, lesbians were compelled to transgressive readings of texts and imagery; this strategy enabled them to participate, albeit clandestinely, in an otherwise inaccessible culture.233 Obviously, lesbian-authored Weimar publications altered this

situation to a degree. Nevertheless, lesbian materials, much like those who consumed

them, circulated in a subcultural milieu. However, on those rare occasions when

lesbianism was addressed in the Weimar mainstream, it was either sensationalized, or,

as in the case of the film Mädchen in Uniform (Girls in Uniform), symbolically erased.234

When it was released in late 1931, the film’s lesbian theme was either ignored or only

circuitously acknowledged.

Mädchen in Uniform

Mädchen in Uniform was a collaborative project of lesbian film director Leontine

Sagan (née Schlesinger) (1889-1974), and the lesbian playwright Christa Winsloe (1888-

232 Jodie L. Medd, “Extraordinary Allegations: Scandalous Female Homosexuality and the Culture of Modernism” (PhD. diss., Ithaca: Cornell University, 2001), 3. 233 Reina Lewis, “Looking Good: The Lesbian Gaze and Fashion Imagery,” Feminist Review 55 (Spring 1997), 92. Lewis’ characterizes lesbian reading “against the grain of mainstream culture” as a “subcultural competence” which enables pleasurable, yet subversive, reading of heteronormative material. Lewis, writing in the ‘liberated’ post Stonewall era of the late 1990s, does not lament the repressions of the closet, but detects a mixed response among lesbians to lesbian magazines. Due to their “learned habits” of subversive reading, she contends that lesbians may actually prefer a marginalized social position because it enables a transgressive mode of reading and “the potential to construct fantasy that ensures eroticized pleasures.” 108. 234 Mädchen in Uniform, director Leontine Sagan, 1931, 89 minutes, Janus Film.

1944). Mädchen in Uniform was also the first film in history to have an all female cast.235

The film is set in a conservatively-run boarding school for girls and narrates the story of

a student’s crush on her female teacher. Among most Weimar commentators, Mädchen

in Uniform was regarded as a critique of Prussian authoritarianism and celebrated for its

anti-militaristic message. Although, as Richard W. McCormick comments, “the two

discourses--anti-authoritarianism and lesbian rights--are intertwined and not only within

the text of the film. To separate political struggles is a mistake.”236 While McCormick’s

remark is certainly valid, it reflects similar claims which have perennially weakened

lesbian agency by contextualizing it within larger ‘more important’ issues. Arguments

such as these rationalize and unwittingly sustain the purported minor position of

lesbians within gay history and offer additional insight into the muted Weimar reception of Mädchen in Uniform.237

Lavin comments that “ironically, although the film pivots around the crime of

publically naming lesbian passion, lesbianism is never spoken of directly.”238

Unsurprisingly, contemporary reviewers also skirted the issue. Weimar critic Hans

Wollenberg declared, “Filming such a difficult theme convincingly and yet so tastefully is

235 Rosa Kreische, “Lesbische Liebe im Film bis 1950,” in Michael Bollé, et. al., Eldorado: Homosexuelle Frauen und Männer in Berlin, 1850-1950, Geschichte, Alltag und Kultur (Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 1984), 193; Mädchen in Uniform (1931) predates George Cukor’s film The Women by nearly a decade. Based on a play written by Clare Boothe Luce, The Women was produced by Metro Goldwyn Mayer in 1939. 236 Richard W. McCormick, Gender and Sexuality in Weimar Modernity: Film, Literature, and “New Objectivity” (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 162. 237 For a discussion of Mädchen in Uniform, see Richard Dyer, “Less and More than Women and Men: Lesbian and Gay Cinema in Weimar Germany,” New German Critique 51 (Autumn 1990): 31-58; B. Ruby Rich, “Mädchen in Uniform: From Repressive Tolerance to Erotic Liberation,” Jump Cut 24/25 (1981): 44-50. 238 Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 201.

79 a remarkable achievement.”239 While others commented that the “sensitive subject”240 of a female “pupil’s idealized crush [on her female teacher] is a perverted confusion.”241

Mädchen’s narrative and dialogue not only renders lesbianism unmentionable, but also represents it as pathological: Immediately after Manuela declares her love for her teacher, she is sent to the school’s infirmary. When one of her classmates asks why she is not permitted to visit Manuela there, a long pause truncates the headmistress’ reply, emphasizing the taboo nature of the young woman’s social transgression: “I can’t explain it to you, Manuela is . . . for this you are too young.”242 The dramatic break in the dialogue equates lesbianism with silence, and, in effect, constitutes its erasure, which, as Jodie L. Medd writes, operates to “exclude lesbianism as a possible category of desire or identity.”243

Mädchen in Uniform’s artistic director, Carl Froelich,244 was represented in the media as lording over the lesbian film team. Described as “der liebe Gott” (dear God

239 Kreische, “Lesbische Liebe im Film,” in Bollé, 194, cites Hans Wollenberg, Licht und Bühne 24, no. 285, November, 28, 1931. 240 Kreische, “Lesbische Liebe im Film,” in Bollé, 195, cites Die Weltbühne Berlin 27, no. 47, December, 8, 1931. 241 Kreische, “Lesbische Liebe im Film,” in Bollé, 195, cites Mein Film, nr. 317, 1932. 242 Kreische, “Lesbische Liebe im Film,” in Bollé, 195. 243 Medd, “Extraordinary Allegations,” 3. A similar link between lesbianism, silence and the dynamics of narrative is suggested by Shari Benstock who writes: “Ellipsis is both a threshold and a place of trespass.” Benstock, Textualizing the Feminine: On the Limits of Genre (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 139. See also, Benstock, “Expatriate Sapphic Modernism: Entering Literary History: Imagination and Identity,” in Lesbian Texts and Contexts: Radical Revisions, Karla Jay and Joanne Glasgow, eds., (New York: New York University Press, 1990), 192. “The ellipse serves to figure woman-in- culture, where she denotes absence (of the phallic signifier), silence, and non-presence . . . I believe that this form of grammatical-rhetorical deviation figures not merely the experimental or avant-garde, but the Sapphic. The ellipsis is an example of a structural term that is unread and unheard in the text: we are trained as readers to ‘skip over’ it, and as writers (often) take ellipses, dashes, and other marks of punctuation . . . as ‘unverbalized allusions.’” 244 Obviously the same figure, for unexplained reasons in Das 12 Uhr Blatt, Rich, and Dyer, the director’s name is written as “Froelich” while in Kreische his name appears as “Fröhlich.” For the sake of clarity and consistency, I will use “Froelich” throughout.

80 himself) and as “wunderbare weisshaaarig” (wonderfully white-haired), Froelich lent

this all woman production, at least in the popular press, a traditional (almost biblical) patriarchal authority figure.245 Froelich’s marketing acumen and his close adherence to contemporary cultural conventions,246 coupled with Mädchen in Uniform’s mainstream venue, curtailed the acknowledgement of the film’s lesbian content.247 The film premiered in the luxurious newly built Gloria-Palast cinema on the Kurfürstendamm 10, in the heart of Berlin’s most fashionable and prestigious shopping district.248 One could argue that had Mädchen, like Richard Oswald’s 1919 homosexual-themed Anders als die

Anderen (Different than the Others), been launched in an alternate venue and promoted as a plea for sexual acceptance, its lesbian theme would have been more openly discussed.249 Unlike Oswald’s film, Mädchen did not address the theme of sexuality, hence, unsurprisingly; both its narrative and critical reception resonated with Terry

245 m-s., “Christa Winsloe gleich Bollenhagen? Besuch bei Froelich’s Film-Studio,” Das 12 Uhr Blatt, June 25, 1931. 246 Carl Froelich (1875-1953) was able to continue his work during the culturally tumultuous National Socialist era. In 1939, Froelich was named president of the Reichsfilmkammer (Nazi Film Department), a highly influential position which would have been impossible for him to achieve had he not adhered closely to stringent Nazi directives. 247 Kreische, “Lesbische Liebe im Filme,” in Bollé, 193. Froelich was primarily interested in appealing to the German consumer: He reportedly chose the title Mädchen in Uniform over that of the stage play on which the story was based (Gestern und Heute [Yesterday and Today]). According to Kreische, Froelich thought his title “suggested young girls romping around and people would want to come see their legs.” 248 Kreische, “Lesbische Liebe in Fim,” in Bollé, 193. Mädchen in Uniform premiered on 27. November 1931 in the Gloria-Palast Theater. Built in 1926 by the Berlin film company UFA, the Baroque- inspired Gloria Palast boasted seven staircases, two elevators, and a telephone free of use to customers making calls within the city. Arguably, the Palast (Palace) venue, at the time, an epithet often reserved for luxurious hotels, did not conjure associations of political activism or sexual subculture, but instead was intended to attract an affluent and respectable bourgeois movie-goer. 249 Oswald’s Anders als die Anderen was the first film to critically address the discrimination and persecution of male homosexuals. Conceived as an Aufklärungsfilm ([sexual]-instruction-film), the prominent Berlin sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld participated in the project, playing himself in a cameo-role as “The Doctor.”

Castle’s theory of the “apparitional lesbian” or, what Tirza True Latimer describes as the

lesbian’s “visible invisibility.”250

Due to the repressive contemporary political environment (an overwhelming

Nazi dominance in the German parliament), it is, however, not entirely surprising that lesbianism was not named or directly addressed in the mainstream media. Nonetheless, the obscure discussion of the topic in the Weimar lesbian press is rather curious. Even a

favorable 1932 review in Die Freundin (The Girlfriend) relies primarily on innuendo. The

anonymous author lauded Mädchen in Uniform for tackling such a “difficult theme,” and

the actresses’ ability to “convey through words and gestures, the conflict between

impulse and self-control.”251 Certainly, the political atmosphere in 1932 Germany (in

contrast to the earlier and more libertine Weimar years) largely explains the film’s

awkward and oblique critical reception in the lesbian press.

Despite its circuitous message and muted reception, Mädchen in Uniform was an

international success and represented a significant cultural contribution. Now

considered a film classic,252 Mädchen offered a “representation of lesbianism which was

legitimized and sanitized by its critical reception” and was “of tremendous importance

250 Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); Tirza True Latimer, Women Together/Women Apart: Portraits of Lesbian Paris (New Brunswick; London: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 12. 251 Die Freundin, 8 Jg., no. 3, January 20, 1932, unpaginated. 252 Kreische, “Lesbische Liebe im Film,” in Bollé, 194; To date there have been two remakes, one in Mexico, Muchchachas de uniforme, 1950, and another in Germany, 1958. The 1931 version of Mädchen in Uniform was resurrected from historical oblivion by German feminists in the 1970s and is now considered a lesbian cult film. Unlike Oswald’s Anders, the lesbian content of Mädchen was only circuitously acknowledged. While this weakened lesbian agency, the film’s circuitous message ultimately spared it from censure and saved it for posterity. Unlike Oswald’s film which was banned and almost completely destroyed by the Nazis, Mädchen was not considered morally subversive.

82 for the identity of lesbian subculture.”253 Mädchen in Uniform gratified contemporary lesbians who longed to see themselves (even if their presence was somewhat obscured) mirrored in the media. While the critical reception of Mädchen in Uniform rendered lesbianism, to a degree, invisible, Weimar lesbian print culture demonstrated the contrary.

Lesbian Books and Magazines and Popular Weimar Culture

In contrast to their near invisibility prior to World War I, and later cultural

erasure due to Nazi prohibitions,254 lesbians enjoyed unprecedented freedom and

public presence in Weimar.255 As stated, print media was a crucial factor in this process; lesbian periodicals marketed books with lesbian themes (as opposed to ‘lesbian- themed’ pornographic materials geared to heterosexual male consumption).256 In contrast to earlier depictions of lesbianism as an illness or as an indication of moral depravity, Weimar authors created likable lesbian figures. Anna Elisabet Weihrauch’s

The Scorpion reflected the progressive contemporary theory of the ‘third sex; her

253 Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 200; Similarly, Kreische, “Lesbische Liebe im Film,” in Bollé, 196, comments, “The women who made the film were able to counter Froelich’s intentions and salvage the film’s lesbian’s message . . . this may be explained because even today, homosexuals are versed in cloaking their messages so they are only visible to those in the know.” 254 Katharina Vogel, “Zum Selbstverständnis lesbischer Frauen in der Weimarer Republik: Eine analyse der Zeitschrift Die freundin, 1924-1933,” in Eldorado: Homosexuelle Frauen und Männer in Berlin 1850-1950, Geschichte, Alltag und Kultur, Michael Bollé et al. (1984; repr., Berlin: Edition Hentrich; Berlin: Verlag rosa Winkel, 1992), 162. The last issue of the lesbian magazine Die Freundin appeared on March 8, 1933. 255 Harry Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of Nature: Krafft-Ebing: Psychiatry, and the Making of the Sexual Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 206-07. “In contrast to male homosexuality, female homosexuality largely remained a muted discourse . . . For women there were no public meeting places or an established sexual underground . . . In Germany and Austria, a self-defined lesbian identity did not emerge until the 1920s.” See also Lillian Faderman and Brigitte Ericksson, Lesbians in Germany: 1890s-1920s (Tallahassee: Naiad Press, 1990), xx-xxi. 256 The Berlin Radzuweit publishing house regularly advertised mail-order books in lesbian magazines. A typical list of titles, as advertised in Die Freundin 3 (1927): 7, includes a variety of well- known erotic ‘classics’ by Diderot, Oscar Wilde, Sacher-Masoch as well as a number of lesser known works which thematize all manner of obscure sexual practice and deviancy.

83 protagonist was a happy, well-adjusted young woman whose sexuality was inborn and

natural.257

Lesbians were not only newly represented in a positive way in lesbian-authored novels, but lesbian magazines were publically posted. These periodicals were instrumental in establishing a lesbian cultural network and offered new possibilities for social identification.258 As one Weimar lesbian claimed, it was through the magazines

“that I received valuable enlightenment about my own nature and also learned that I am not, by any means, unique in the world.”259 The magazines “reported social events in

Berlin’s lesbian bars, of which at the time there were about fifty.”260 In addition, numerous organizations and meeting places facilitated social exchange and kindled a sense of group identity, lending this heretofore invisible figure a visible contour.261

Available at every newsstand in the city, lesbian periodicals were marketed alongside

257 Anna Elisabet Weihrauch’s Der Skorpion (The Scorpion) is a trilogy of novels that narrate the life and loves of a young lesbian woman. It was serially published as three separate volumes in 1919, 1921, and 1931. Der Skorpion See, Weirauch, The Scorpion, Vol. 1, 1919; Vol. 2, 1921; Vol. 3, 1931 (1919; 1921; 1931, repr., New York: Arno Press, 1975). See also Claudia Schoppmann, “Ein Lesbenroman aus der Weimarer Zeit: Der Skorpion,” in Michael Bollé, et al., Eldorado: Homosexuelle Frauen und Männer in Berlin, 1850-1950, Geschichte, Alltag und Kultur (Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 1984), 197. Weihrauch’s novel was highly popular in homosexual circles and a film version was planned, but for “unexplained reasons, never realized.” 258 Katharina Vogel, “Zum Selbstverständnis lesbischer Frauen in der Weimarer Republik: Eine Analyse der Zeitschrift Die Freundin, 1924-1933,” in Bollé et al., Eldorado, 162-68; See also, Angeles Espinaco-Virseda, “’I Feel that I belong to You,’: subculture, Die Freundin, and Lesbian Identity in Weimar,” spacesofidentity 4, no. 1 (2004), 93. 259 Espinaco-Verseda, “I Feel that I Belong to You,” 93, 100n72, cites “Halb-transvestiten,” (Half- transvestites) Die Freundin, 16 September 1931: 5. 260 Ilse Kokula, “Lesbische Leben von Weimar bis zu Nachkriegszeit,” 104, in Meyer, Lila Nächte. Ruth Roellig’s lesbian 1928 guide to Berlin, Berlin’s Lesbische Frauen, highlights only a fraction of these. Presented as short chapters, Roellig’s book devotes a few pages each to fourteen of the most popular locales. See also Faderman and Eriksson, Lesbians in Germany, xx-xxi. Before the rise of fascism during the 1930s, Berlin’s lesbian subculture was unmatched anywhere in the world and boasted roughly sixty locales where lesbians could meet and socialize. 261 Ilsa Kokula, “Lesbische Leben von Weimar bis zu Nachkriegszeit,” in Adele Meyer, Lila Nächte: die Damenklubs im Berlin der zwanziger Jahre (Berlin: Edition Lit. Europe, 1994), 101-23.

mainstream periodicals, and represented a site at which subculture and mass culture

intersected.262 Readers could also choose from at least two magazine titles weekly.263

Importantly, however, in many ways, a number of conspicuous visual and

thematic similarities existed between lesbian print media and the popular press. A

cursory examination of Weimar materials reveals that lesbian print media borrowed

from the mainstream; the cover photographs of lesbian journals often reflect popular

discourses. Indeed, when one disregards their titles, Weimar lesbian magazines are

often indistinguishable from mainstream publications. This, potentiated by the lesbians’

‘visible invisibility,’ makes lesbian imagery somewhat difficult to detect. While contemporaries could obviously recognize subtle visual signals more easily than early twenty first-century art historians, I would suggest that this state of affairs is most responsible for the inability or reluctance of present-day scholars to discuss Höch’s photomontages in a lesbian context. Hence, a familiarity with both popular and lesbian print media is indispensable to fully comprehend Höch’s oeuvre.

Weimar Lesbian Representations of Female Nudity

An untitled magazine cover image depicting three nude women (fig. 2.4) compellingly illustrates how Weimar lesbian media appropriated mainstream visual

262 Heike Schader, Virile, Vamps und wilde Veilchen: Sexualität, Begehren, und Erotik in den Zeitschriften homosexueller Frauen im Berlin der 1920er Jahren (Königstein: Helmer, 2007). 61. Certainly, not all women felt comfortable purchasing lesbian periodicals, and some reported buying them in an area of town where they were less likely to be recognized, hiding them from others, or reading them in secret (62-63); See Kokula, “Lesbische Liebe,” in Adele Meyer, Lila Nächte, 106-08. While public lesbian culture ended with the Nazis, sanctions had begun earlier. In 1925, an unsuccessful attempt was launched in the German parliament to criminalize lesbians and include them under Paragraph 175 (which outlawed male homosexuality). In 1926, the lesbian magazines Die Garçonne and Frauenliebe (Women-love) were temporarily banned, but resumed publication only to be permanently banned later in 1931. Finally on February 23, 1933, under the new pornography laws, all public homosexual activities and related publications, including lesbian periodicals, were declared criminal and prohibited by law. 263 Schader, Virile, Vamps, 61.

motifs. In addition, the anonymous 1927 photograph also demonstrates how lesbian

representation could be easily confused with the “male dominated genre of the female

nude,”264 which, as Patricia Mathews remarks, “historically frames representations of the female body and female sexuality.”265 Although the magazine’s title and subtitle

Liebende Frauen (Loving Women) clearly announce the publication as lesbian,266 the nudity of the women pictured potentially attracted non-lesbian or prurient interest.

Moreover, “the realist mode of the photograph presents the illusion of unmediated access to the bodies they display.”267 (As we shall see, this observation may also be

applied to the majority of lesbian cover images which, almost without exception, were

photographs, and often depicted nude women.) Pictured from behind, two of the three

women pictured, somewhat coquettishly, render their breasts visible in profile,

underscoring their status as accessible sexual objects. Their heads turned, the eyes of

the subjects do not meet those of the viewer; their lack of scopic agency emphasizes

their passivity. All three are pictured, somewhat artificially, with their arms raised. This,

coupled with an exaggerated contrapposto, suggests the mannered and frozen ‘artistic’

poses of early twentieth-century dance imagery. Printed on the cover of a lesbian

magazine, the photograph obviously represents Weimar lesbian subculture. Yet, it may

264 Patricia Mathews, “Returning the Gaze: Diverse Representations of the Nude in the Art of Suzanne Valadon,” Art Bulletin 73, no. 3 (Sep., 1991), 415. 265 Mathews, “Returning the Gaze,” 417. 266 The complete title of the journal is as follows: Liebende Frauen: Wochenschrift für Freundschaft, Liebe und sexuelle Aufklärung (Loving Women: Weekly journal for Friendship, Love and sexual Education). 267 Ann Millet-Gallant, The Disabled Body in Contemporary Art (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 12.

also be linked to Weimar dance culture, pornography, or historical Western European themes.

The three nude women in the photograph easily suggest the Three Graces, or the Judgment of Paris. Similar to the Judgment of Paris, the women symbolically invite the viewer to mentally offer a golden apple to his or her favorite; a narrative which perpetuates the myth that women compete amongst themselves to garner male attention and favors.268 Moreover, this narrative accommodates patriarchal tradition

and, perhaps for this reason, is a perennial one.269

While the photograph in question is emblematic of the intersection between

mainstream and lesbian print culture, it also suggests a hetero-patriarchal narrative

which is intrinsically antithetical to lesbian agency. Yet, as Mathews observes, the

conventional meanings associated with traditional allegorical themes “can be at odds

with other meanings derived from other narratives that intrude upon the initial

allegory.”270 I would argue that the lesbian appropriation of the Judgment of Paris (a

theme that foregrounds the primacy of male scopic and sexual agency) disrupts hetero-

normative viewing conventions and represents an eloquent—and successful--example of what Mathews describes as intruding upon the initial allegory. Along with

268 Paris was asked by Zeus to decide who was the most beautiful of the three Olympian goddesses, Aphrodite, Athena, and Hera. His prize to the most beautiful goddess was a golden apple. The contest, however, inspired strife and later led to war. 269 It has generated a number of significant works which include paintings by Lucas Cranach (1512-1514), Peter Paul Rubens (1639), Suzanne Valadon (1909-1912), and a plaster-relief by Pierre- Auguste Renoir (1914). 270 Mathews, “Returning the Gaze,” 419. Mathews references Suzanne Valadon’s The Judgment of Paris (1909-1912).

87 appropriating historical themes, Weimar lesbian print media also reflected Körperkultur

(Body-culture), at the time, a dominant mainstream discourse.

Lesbian Subculture and Weimar Körperkultur

Körperkultur, a mass movement devoted to improving the physical health of the

German population, was inspired by diverse late nineteenth-century social reform, health, and hygiene movements, and burst upon the scene after World War I.271 The rise of Korperkultur was reinforced by “Germany’s stunning military defeat [which]

prompted demands for a complete overhaul of society, culture, government, and even

the body itself.”272 A powerful overarching national impulse to improve and reform fostered the rise of health and fitness movements with “diverse and sweeping agendas,” most of which promoted some idea of “remaking one’s body and oneself.”273 While the focus of Körperkultur was the improvement and glorification of the body, the movement, and subsequently, the body itself, became analogous to social progress and modernity.

271 The Dresden native Heinrich Pudor (Heinrich Scham 1865-1944) was instrumental in launching Körperkultur and nudism in Germany. It is understandable and somewhat ironic that Pudor, born “Scham” changed his name: Scham means “shame” in German and was obviously antithetical to his message of liberated nudity. Pudor’s writings illustrate the close interrelationship of popular themes such as health, hygiene, Dress Reform, and nudism. His bestselling book Nacktende Mensch: Jauchzen der Zukunft (Naked People: The Happy Cry of the Future) (Dresden: Verlag der Dresdner Wochenblätter, 1893), was followed by Die Frauenreformkleidung: Beitrag zur philosophie, Hygiene und Aesthetik des Kleides (The Clothing of Women’s Dress Reform: a contribution to the Philosophy, Hygiene, and Aesthetic of Dress) (Leipzig: Seemann, 1903). Pudor also published Nackt-Kultur (Nude-culture) (Berlin, Steglitz, 1906), and Hygiene durch Bewegung (Hygiene through Movement) (Langensalza, D: H. Beyer & Söhne, 1906). 272 Erik N. Jensen, Body by Weimar: Athletes, Gender, and German Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 4. The growing interest in Volkshygeine (public health and hygiene) led to the emergence of Körperkultur (Body-culture). Contemporary movements with a focus on achieving a healthy body included nudism, vegetarianism, temperance, and all manner of sexual and familial reform. 273 Jensen, Body by Weimar, 6.

Due to the focus on the body in Körperkultur, nudity became naturalized and

publically acceptable in Germany.274 This generated a unique environment in which depictions of nudity were ubiquitous in a variety of contemporary materials.275 The

force of the movement, strengthened significantly by the vast Weimar publishing industry, swept away any lingering vestiges of prewar Wilhelmine prudery.276 Nude or

nearly nude outdoor activities were a hallmark of Körperkultur and the related nudist movement Freie Körper Kultur (Free Body-culture, or FKK). Relaxed Weimar attitudes

toward nudity clearly facilitated lesbian representation: Nude female couples were a visual staple of Körperkultur and also routinely pictured on the covers of Berlin lesbian

magazines.277

Hannah Höch’s interest in Körperkultur is evident in her Album (Scrapbook) and

in her contemporary photomontages.278 While a number of photos in her Scrapbook

depicting attractive nude men and women are in step with Körperkultur (2.5), in sharp

contrast, her photomontages--among them, Höch’s ironically titled Equilibre (1925)

(2.6), depicting two ambiguously-sexed figures engaged in what appears to be athletic

training--suggests neither balance, nor physical health. Instead, their “ill-fitting parts

274 Albert Moll, Polizei und Sitte (Berlin: Gersbach & Sohn Verlag, 1926), 30-40. Moll discussed the cultural processes that eventually led to the naturalization of nudity in Germany during the 1920s. 275 Toepfer claims that by the late 1920s, books on nudism outnumbered books devoted to sports. 276 Karl Toepfer, “Nudity and Modernity in German Dance, 1910-1930,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 3, no. 1 (Jul., 1992), 68. The most popular promoters of Nacktkultur were Adolf Koch (1894- 1970) and Hans Suren (1885-1972), both Berlin natives. Nude culture, as Toepfer claims, “was an invention of the big city, with Berlin providing by far the largest number of club members.” Berlin was also the contemporary publishing center and this also explains the popularity of Körperkultur in the Weimar press. 277 Moll, Polizei und Sitte, 36. Moll claims that when Körperkultur began in the 1890s, it was largely practiced by males in secluded wooded areas on the outskirts of Berlin. 278 Hannah Höch, Album (Scrapbook), Gunda Luyken, ed. (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz; Berlin: Berlinische Galerie, Landesmuseum für Moderne Kunst, Fotografie und Architektur, 2004).

89 stuck together with humorous awkwardness” lampoon the tenets of Körperkultur which celebrated the body as a “well-oiled machine.”279

Among the most representative, influential and popular expressions of Weimar

Körperkultur is Wilhelm Prager’s 1925 film, Wege der Kraft und Schönheit (Paths to

Strength and Beauty).280 Wege der Kraft und Schönheit was primarily a propaganda vehicle designed to promote the movement and the countless nude and nearly nude figures depicted in the film clearly contributed to the film’s popularity.281 A well known still-photograph from Wege der Kraft (fig. 2.7) depicts two women mirroring each

other’s poses and was obviously intended to promote Körperkultur and FKK.282

A similar photograph on the cover of a contemporary lesbian periodical captioned Tänzerinnen (Female Dancers) (2.8), with a title referencing dance culture, appears to have been inspired by Prager’s image. However, in contrast to the statuesque formality of the figures in Prager’s photograph, the nude bodies of the

“Dancers” pictured on the lesbian magazine cover are touching and imply sexual intimacy. Bearing these intersecting contemporary visual contexts in mind (Körperkultur,

279 Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 147. 280 Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 197, 242n30, notes that stills from Prager’s film Wege der Kraft und Schönheit infiltrated fashion magazines and health pamphlets. 281 Wege der Kraft und Schönheit is interspersed with educational commentary, but is predominantly comprised of a string of cinematic vignettes depicting men and women performing athletic and dance-inspired gymnastic activities. The film’s action is alternately located in the gymnasiums of ancient Greece and in the streets and landscape of modern day Germany. Many scenes take place outdoors in natural surroundings. 282 See Moll, Polizei und Sitte, 31. This photo was immediately recognizable by contemporaries and apparently so popular that neither Prager, nor the film Wege zur Kraft und Schönheit, is mentioned in the caption. Instead, the photograph is labeled “Nachtkultur im Film. Aus der Zeitschrift: Schönheit.” (Nude-culture in film. From the magazine: Beauty). In addition to its popular currency, the caption also ties the photo to a fashion magazine, which links it further to consumerism and advertising culture.

90 dance, lesbian subculture) we recognize that lesbian print media was often nearly indistinguishable from other Weimar materials.

The influence of Körperkultur and FKK upon lesbian representation is evident in a

photograph of three nude women relaxing on a beach in what appears to be a dune

landscape in a northern German seaside location (fig. 2.9). Much like Körperkultur

materials depicting nude figures in idyllic outdoor settings, the women in this lesbian

magazine photo are enjoying the healthy benefits of sunlight and sea air.283

Significantly, the photo depicts three women instead of two (which would suggest a romantic couple) and reflects and emphasizes the importance of group identity and

political organization among Weimar lesbians.284 While bar culture was integral to their networking systems, a range of other venues fostered social opportunities.285 Just as

lesbian representation was influenced and inspired by Körperkultur and FKK; it also mirrored key aspects of Weimar entertainment culture.

283 Karl Toepfer, “Nudity and Modernity in German Dance,” 68, 68n21. For a typical FKK publication, see Hans Suren, Der Mensch und die Sonne (Stuttgart, 1924), which contains a number of photographs depicting nude people romping outdoors. An English edition (Man and Sunlight, trans. David Arthur Jones) was published in London in 1927. As Toepfer claims, Der Mensch und die Sonne, was so popular in Germany that it ran through sixty eight printings (250,000 copies) in its first year of publication. Suren joined the Nazi party in May 1933 and made changes in subsequent editions of the book during the 1930s to accommodate Nazi ideology; despite the disruptive effects of war on the German publishing industry, Suren’s Der Mensch und die Sonne remained in print without interruption until 1945. 284 Vogel, in Adele Meyer, Lila Nächte, 162. Founded in 1919, the Bund für Menschenrecht (BfM, or (Alliance for Human Rights) rallied both male homosexuals and lesbians to fight for civil liberties. Along with the lesbian periodical Die Freundin, the BfM also published Blätter für Menschenrecht (Pages for Human Rights), Das Freundschaftsblatt (Friendship Page), and Die Insel (The Island), which was geared to a male homosexual public. The BfM had a Damenabteilung (Ladies Section) which represented the specific concerns of both the prewar feminist generation and a younger lesbian public. Gay and lesbian leaders in Weimar continually emphasized the centrality of the Gemeinschaft (Group) over the individual in their efforts to establish and strengthen gay culture and rights. 285 Announcements for lectures, river cruises and group outings were advertised in the periodicals. See also Katharina Vogel, “Zum Selbstverständnis lesbischer Frauen in der Weimarer Republik,” in Adele Meyer, Lila Nächte, 162; In her study of the lesbian periodical Die Freundin, Vogel writes that these announcements routinely fill one entire page per issue.

Berlin Lesbians and Weimar Entertainment and Dance Culture

Germany’s wartime Tanzverbot, a law prohibiting public dancing, was repealed shortly after the end of the war on New Year’s Eve of 1918 and significantly informed and influenced developments in Weimar lesbian subculture. The lifting of the

Tanzverbot, combined with the optimism and cultural momentum following the war, unleashed a collective dance craze (Massenwahn) in Germany which continued throughout the following decade.286 As Weimar contemporary Renate Berger later claimed, “Dance was the hallmark of the 1920s,”287 and Germany became the dynamic epicenter of an international modern dance movement.288

The cultural vibrancy of Weimar Berlin and the modern dance movement generated a flourishing cabaret scene of countless bars, clubs, and revue-theatres.289 A number of Berlin’s lesbian bars were modeled after the contemporary cabaret scene

286 Schader, Virile, Vamps, 27. “An Silvester 1918/19 wurde das Tanzverbot der Kriegszeit aufgehoben. Tanzen wird zur Massenwahn. Immer neue, immer wildere, immer skandalose Tänze werden kreiert.” 287 Renate Berger, trans. Martin Davies, “Moments can Change your Life: Creative Crises in the Lives of Dancers in the 1920s,” in Visions of the ‘Neue Frau’: Woman and the Visual Arts in Weimar Germany, Marsha Meskimmon and Shearer West, eds. (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995), 77. 288 Isa Partsch-Bergsohn, Modern Dance in Germany and the United States: Crosscurrents and Influences (Chur, Switzerland: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1994). The New Dance in Europe had been set in motion before the war by the American Isadora Duncan with her performance at the Imperial Theatre in St. Petersburg in 1904, where she met luminaries of the Russian ballet Diaghelev, Bakst, Benois, Anna Pavlova and Stanislavsky (2). “Her free-flowing quality particularly impressed Michel Fokine.” Later, dancers of succeeding generations, including such diverse figures as Emile-Jacques Dalcroze, Vaslav Nijinsky, Rudolf Laban and Mary Wigman, opened a number of schools throughout Europe. Alone, Dalcroze launched schools in Hellerau, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Vienna, Prague, Frankfurt, Breslau, Nürnberg, Warsaw, London and Kiev by 1914. Laban opened the Schule der Bewegungskunst (a school for artistic-movement) in Zürich and a dance colony in Monte Veritá, Switzerland; the Wiesenthal sisters were active in Vienna and Mary Wigman disseminated new dance as a performer and teacher in Germany, 1-48. 289 Berger, “Moments can change your life,” 78.

and hosted elaborate events with live entertainment.290 Cross-dressed women in

tuxedos performed for lesbian audiences in the Monokel-Diele (Monocle-Room) and the

Manuela Club.291 Ruth Margarete Roellig’s 1928 guide to lesbian Berlin, Berlins lesbische

Frauen (Berlin’s Lesbian Women), describes lesbian nightlife and includes addresses and detailed descriptions of the décor and clientele of fourteen of the roughly fifty social

clubs and venues that catered to the city’s lesbians.292 Roellig’s celebratory guide

contributed to Berlin’s reputation as an international hub of sapphic subculture.293

Roellig made this clear when she wrote, “the days of Berlin’s lesbians emulating the

London and Paris scene” are gone; the Berlin scene “has long since surpassed the

others.”294 As Ilse Kokula confirmed, during the 1920s, Berlin, even more so than Paris, was a “pulsating” center of the lesbian world.295 The prominent Berlin sexologist

Magnus Hirschfeld wrote the Introduction to Roellig’s guide, a contribution boldly

announced on its cover. To the contemporary reader, Hirschfeld’s participation in the

volume automatically lent Roellig’s voice an aura of legitimacy. Moreover, it also attests

to his active support of sexual subculture.

290 Every Weimar lesbian periodical included multiple addresses of lesbian bars and meeting places and large advertisements for women-only balls. 291 Adele Meyer, Lila Nächte, 33. Lea Manti performed in both clubs wearing a tuxedo and monocle. 292 Ruth Margarete Roellig, Berlins lesbische Frauen, mit einem Vorwort von Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, 1928; reprint in Lila Nächte: die Damenklubs im Berlin der zwanziger Jahre, ed. Adele Meyer (Berlin: Edition Lit. Europe, 1994), 11-55. 293 Roellig, Berlins lesbische Frauen, mit einem Vorwort von Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, 1928. Reprint in Meyer, 11-55. 294 “Und während man früher, oft aus blosser Nachahmungssucht, von London und besonders von Paris als von der Stadt geheimnissvoller Freuden sprach- hat Berlin ihnen längst den Rang abgelaufen.” Roellig, in Adele Meyer, Lila Nächte, 25-26. 295 Kokula, in Adele Meyer, Lila Nächte, 106.

The cross-dressed woman pictured on the cover of Roellig’s guide (fig. 2.10)

appears to have been inspired by the city’s thriving cabaret milieu. The anonymous

image depicts a slender woman in a tuxedo jacket on a shallow stage. She is holding a

cane and surveys her public like a haughty ringmaster. Much like Höch’s Russian Dancer,

the figure pictured on Roellig’s volume has closely cropped black hair and a gleaming monocle in her eye, both of which define her as a sexually aggressive vamp.296 The

monocle and the shallow stage on which she is positioned visually link the image to

Höch’s 1928 Russian Dancer. While the sexually aggressive monocle-sporting vamp, a

figure often pictured alone, was frequently featured in lesbian publications (fig. 5.7), the motif of the dancing female couple was wildly popular among Weimar lesbians and the general public alike.

As dance theorist Karl Toepfer explains, female couples “enjoyed special appeal”

in Weimar because they “dramatized competing models of femininity and exposed

conditions under which one model of femininity dominated or achieved equilibrium

with another.”297 Indeed, it comes as no surprise that “the homoerotic dimension” of

this imagery “was not negligible in supporting their appeal.”298 Otto Hahn’s dancing

female couple (fig. 2.11) attests to the popularity of this visual motif. Hahn’s drawing

appeared on the dust-jacket of Marie Renée Dumas’ 1924 novel Die klugen Jungfrauen:

eine Sittenbild aus Berlin. W. (The clever maidens/virgins: a moral tale from West

296 Schader, Virile, Vamps, 168. The slender legs of Roellig’s figure end in a pair of red pumps. Among WEimar lesbians, red clothing and accessories denoted feminine passion, while red and black combined characterized the “worldly, feminine woman who was also passionate and sensual.” 297 Karl M. Toepfer, Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910-1935 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 216. 298 Toepfer, Empire, 216.

Berlin).299 The novel’s title, paired with Hahn’s illustration, suggests the free-wheeling

independence and sexual adventurousness of the modern New Woman. However,

despite the close embrace of the women pictured, lesbianism is not the novel’s theme.

This illustration, much like the 1929 photograph, Die Tänzerinnen Schwestern Karolewna

(The Dancing Karolewna Sisters) (fig. 2.12), which was printed in Die Dame, at the time,

the most popular German fashion magazine, are only two examples of countless

contemporary images of dancing female couples that suggest, but were not intended to

represent, lesbianism. Images such as these used the female couple as enticing and, on occasion, erotically suggestive visual decoration, which, to a degree, degraded and negated lesbian agency. One could argue that the proliferation of popular imagery in

Weimar depicting female couples weakened lesbian expression. Nonetheless, these same images also represented an ‘image bank’ that significantly enabled and supported contemporary lesbian expression. Clearly, the producers of Berlin’s lesbian periodicals deployed images such as these to enhance sales and promote their public agenda.

Berlin lesbian periodicals deployed images depicting female couples to delight

and lure the lesbian reader. These images, however, did not delight all lesbian readers.

Professionally published, lesbian periodicals were produced and written largely by

amateurs,300 and contemporaries, such as the professional writer Ruth Roellig, openly

299 Marie Renée Dumas, Die klugen Jungfrauen: eine Sittenbild aus Berlin. W. (Leipzig: Wilhelm Borngräber, 1924). 300 On occasion, articles by guest columnists were reprinted in serial-form on their pages, as in the case of Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, “Über den Fetischismus” (About Fetishism) Liebende Frauen, 4 Jg., no. 31 (1929).

criticized their lack of artistic and literary niveau.301 She particularly disapproved of

cover photographs that depicted nude women, because, in her opinion, they attracted

and fueled a prurient non-lesbian readership.302 While Roellig’s criticism fell on deaf

ears, her misgivings anticipate key issues and debates that would resurface much later

in the century.303

The production of erotically suggestive [lesbian] imagery remains a contested

theme among lesbian feminists who take issue with the “trafficking of lesbian images

from a non-lesbian [i.e. heterosexual male voyeur] standpoint.”304 Yet, as Becki L. Ross

remarks, “it is important to remember that in lesbian-made imagery, the protagonists

are women, hence the gender-based inequities that pervade commercial pornography

(and society in general) are neither represented nor reinforced.”305 While Ross’ late

twentieth-century rationale resonates with Weimar lesbian representation, it only

minimally reflects the historical reality of 1920s Berlin. Indeed, this issue, which has

retained much of its volatility into the present-day, enhances our appreciation of

Weimar lesbian cultural agency and the fragility of its production.

301 Publisher and homosexual activist Friedrich Radzuweit (1876-1932) was prominent in the homosexual and lesbian emancipation movement. Radzuweit was head of the Deutsche Freundschaftsbund (German Friendship Alliance), which, in 1923, was renamed the Bund für Menschenrecht (Alliance for Human Rights). While Radzuweit’s name is well known, many of the women involved in the production of lesbian magazines chose to protect their identities and remain anonymous; some signed their articles with their first name only, while others adopted pseudonyms. 302 Roellig, Berlins lesbische Frauen (reprint 1928) in Adele Meyer, Lila Naechte, 21. In contrast, Roellig praised male homosexual publications for their quality content and professional appearance. 303 For a related discussion of the female nude as a site of gendered cultural production, see Lynda Nead, “The Female Nude: Pornography, Art, and Sexuality,” Signs: Journal of Women and Culture and Society 15, no. 31 (1990): 323-35. 304 Ross, “It’s Merely Designed for Sexual Arousal,” 169. 305 Ross, “It’s Merely Designed for Sexual Arousal,” 168.

Pornography, Sexual Depravity, and Lesbian Representation

As stated, images of nude female couples in Weimar lesbian magazines often reflected diverse mainstream discourses. Nude female couples, however, were also a major motif in contemporary pornography. For obvious reasons, the visual intersection of (heterosexist) pornographic materials with feminist-informed lesbian self- representation constituted an awkward juncture for Weimar lesbians. Due to an overwhelming visual tradition based on phallocentric hegemony, Weimar lesbians clearly faced significant challenges in establishing their own visual vernacular independent from the hegemonic parameters of patriarchal culture. Their appropriation and redeployment of erotically-charged female-female imagery is nothing less than remarkable, and compels brief consideration.

As stated, before the advent of Weimar lesbian print media, lesbians were largely represented by male-authored, and often pornographic, materials. The following discussion will explore lingering discursive associations which, at the time, continued to conflate lesbianism, sexual depravity, and pornography. As Toepfer observes, Weimar

Germans “tended to perceive modernity and freedom in relation to expanded capacities for ecstasy.”306 Toepfer qualifies this observation with another of equal significance:

“Ecstasy is only possible through the perpetration of excess,”307 a claim which resonates strongly with contemporary attitudes regarding sexuality. This discursive link is also evident in sexological materials. For example, the title of Ludwig Levi Lenz’s planned

306 Toepfer, Empire, 384. 307 Toepfer, Empire, 384.

publication, Genuss, Rausch, Ekstase (Pleasure, Rapture, Ecstasy), explored the byways

of sexual deviance.308

Despite a self-conscious sense of modernity, perceptions of sexuality in Weimar

were not entirely free of historical influences. They were determined largely by earlier

medical and moralizing discourses that privileged biological determinism before sexual

pleasure.309 As a result, if sexual activity contributed to procreation and was connected

to marriage, it was applauded; but if sex was illicit, excessive, or motivated by lust, it

was considered subversive.310 Moreover, the fundamental difference between male and

female physiology was central to this paradigm. Accordingly, male sexuality was

regarded as a powerful independent force that built within the body until it was

released through ejaculation.311 Women, in contrast to men, “were defined as

essentially asexual.”312 Well into the early decades of the twentieth century, dominant medical opinion held that motherhood and domesticity made such vital demands on women that their sexual desire was basically extinguished. From this, many doctors concluded that female sexual desire was intrinsically unnatural, and hence, established a sharp distinction between respectable (i.e. asexual) women and the depraved prostitute, whose choice of profession was regarded as driven by ‘unnatural’ desire

308 Ludwig Levi Lenz, The Memoirs of a Sexologist: Discretion and Indiscretion (New York: Cadillac Publishing Co. Inc., 1951), 469. For years, Lenz was a gynecologist at Hirschfeld’s Berlin Institute of Sexology. Lenz’s manuscript was unfortunately destroyed in May 1933 during a Nazi raid on the Berlin Institute. 309 Harry Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of Nature: Krafft-Ebing: Psychiatry, and the Making of the Sexual Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 26. 310 Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of Nature, 26. 311 Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of Nature, 30. Oosterhuis links this paradigmatic concept of male sexuality, or what he describes as the “drive model,” to the Romantic understanding of human self- expression as well as the materialist-mechanical view of the body as a steam engine or motor. 312 Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of Nature, 30.

98 rather than financial need.313 Thus, the prostitute and the lesbian, who similarly pursued sexuality outside the confines of procreation, were considered depraved. Above all, as

Dean writes, the lesbian embodied the “excessive pursuit of pleasure.”314 Clearly, these

correlations are irrational, yet this line of reasoning was largely responsible for the

stubborn conflation of sexual excess, ecstasy and lesbianism in modern European

discourse.315 Because Weimar attitudes towards sexuality were informed largely by nineteenth-century models, it comes as no surprise that “male sexologists gained control of the definition of the lesbian.”316

Otto Weininger’s 1903 Sex and Character set the tone for a number of subsequent publications regarding female sexuality.317 In Sex and Character, the twenty- three year old Weininger “portrayed women as soulless creatures who . . . were eternally in a state of arousal, receiving pleasure from every object with which they came into contact.”318 Steeped in the language of fin-de-siècle decadence, Sex and

Character influenced and informed sexual theorists well into the new century. In 1927,

313 Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of Nature, 30-31. 314 Dean, Sexuality and Modern Western Culture, 28. 315 As Medd, “Extraordinary Allegations,” observes, unrelated or irrational “chains of association” such as these served to link lesbianism to “a realm of inarticulate but potent affects.” In England, it enabled symbolic links between sexual excess and political subversion. By early twentieth-century standards, lesbianism increased the potential of “the nation’s downfall” (109). Medd also cites Lucy Bland, “Trial by Sexology?: Maud Allan, Salome and the ‘Cult of the Clitoris Case,” in Bland and Doan, Sexology in Culture, 184, 195n3. In 1918, the British press, warning of the potential political dangers of lesbianism, contended that “In lesbian ecstasy the most sacred secrets of the state were betrayed.” These remarks, made during the 1918 libel trial of the English dancer Maud Allan, appeared in The Imperialist, 26, January, 1918 (184, 195n3). 316 Marilyn R. Farwell, “The Lesbian Subject: A War of Images,” in Heterosexual Plots and Lesbian Narratives (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 63. 317 Ignaco-Virseda, “I Feel that I belong to You,” 91. Espinaco-Virseda laconically characterizes Weiminger’s sex and Character as “unfortunately, but indicatively influential.” Otto Weininger (1880- 1903), Geschlecht und Character: eine prinzipielle Untersuchung (Sex and Character: a Study of basic principals) (1903; repr. Vienna and Leipzig: Wilhelm Braumüller, 1908), 4th printing. 318 Eric Naiman, “Historectomies: On the Metaphysics of Reproduction in a Utopian Age,” in Costlow, 262-63.

99 the Swiss psychiatrist and sexologist Auguste Forel, echoing Weininger, wildly claimed that among lesbians “orgasm follows orgasm, day and night almost without break,”319 and a woman’s intrinsic sensuality “makes it easy for a lesbian to seduce a normal girl.”320 At the time, remarks such as these would not necessarily be surprising had they been expressed in a non-scientific or popular venue.321 However, Forel was a respected member of the European medical community, and a colleague of Hirschfeld.322 Forel

and others similarly reasoned that because lesbian sexuality involved two women, it

doubly indicated insatiable female desire and atavistic depravity.323 Due to attitudes such as this, it comes as no surprise that lesbianism “is the core of the culture’s fear of women’s sexuality, for it is ultimately unregulated by men or by reproduction.”324 As

Dean claims, this fear, compounded with the related notion of women’s sexual insatiability, compelled early twentieth-century sexologists “to attribute female

homosexuality to vice, that is, to moral turpitude and the apparently irresistible quest

for pleasure rather than to congenital instinct.”325 The conflation of lesbianism with vice

319 Naimann, “Historectomies,” in Costlow, 262; 344n25. 320 Auguste Forel, Die Sexuelle Frage (Erlenbach Zürich: E. Rentsch Verlag, 1927), 257. 321 Associations such as these were common. For a seminal discussion of the discursive relationship between decadence and lesbian sexuality, see, Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in fin-de-siecle Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 322 Forel and Hirschfeld, along with the prominent British sexologist Havelock Ellis, co-presided over the World League for Sexual Reform. The World League for Sexual Reform was created on the occasion of the Sexual Reform Congress in Copenhagen, 1928. Its international advisory board also included the German-native and naturalized American Harry Benjamin (1885-1986), and the Russian Socialist, Alexandra Kollontai (1872-1952). The League met in London in 1929, in Vienna in 1930, and in Brno in 1932. Due to the combined historical influences of the Great Depression and the rise of fascism, the League dissolved during in the 1930s. 323 Carolyn J. Dean, Sexuality and Modern Western Culture, 28. 324 Farwell, “Narrative: The Elastic Project,” in Heterosexual Plots and Lesbian Narratives (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 33. Farwell writes, “Female sexuality is a source of cultural fear, for an uncontrolled female sexuality spells chaos and destruction in the patriarchal mind. The myth of the vagina dentata is only one locus of this fear.” 325 Carolyn J. Dean, Sexuality and Modern Western Culture, 27.

100

was reflected in representations of prostitutes, “who were frequently portrayed as

lesbians” because they “allegedly engaged in their trade less for money than for love of

vice.”326 This perception was commonly held in Weimar and confirmed by a Félicien

Rops’ illustration (fig. 5.11) of a cross-dressed prostitute in a sexological publication

which will be discussed in chapter five.327

Weimar sexologist Franz Scheda claimed that women are easily seduced into

lesbianism because they are “by nature more sensual than men.”328 Scheda’s

sensationalistic and controversial 1929 study of lesbianism largely subscribes to what

can only be described as the lesbian vice model.329 Scheda linked lesbianism (and male

homosexuality) to prostitution and criminality. Furthermore, he uncritically adopted the

tenor of like-minded authors who claimed lesbianism appeals to “rich, bored, and

elegant women that have exhausted all other pleasures and can only be thrilled by the

unnatural and the abnormal.”330 Such women, he wrote, “are driven by a brutal, fiery

sensuality and frequent brothels where they recruit 10 to 15 year old girls for their

tribadic pleasures.”331 In addition to these ridiculous claims, he remarked “most lesbians

are either writers or prostitutes,” and “50% of Berlin’s prostitutes are lesbians.”332

326 Dean, Sexuality and Modern Western Culture, 28-29. 327 Rops’ illustration appears in Albert Moll, Polizei und Sitte (Gersbach & Sohn Verlag, Berlin, 1926), 22. 328 Franz Scheda, Die Abarten im Geschlechtsleben, Band 1: Die lesbische Liebe (Berlin: Schwalbe Verlag, 1929), 14. 329 Scheda, 14. Lesbian love, he wrote, “is an unbridled culmination” that is “preceded by, yet exceeds, different forms of masturbation. “Der andere Endpunkt ist das zügellose lesbische Liebesleben und dazwischen anderen Formen der Selbstbefriedigung.” 330 Scheda,”Die lesbische Liebe,” cites Dr. Erik Hoyer’s Das Lusterne Weib, and Eulenberg, 32. 331 Scheda, “Die lesbische Liebe,” 32. 332 Scheda, “Die lesbische Liebe,” 30; While Scheda does not explain why female writers are so often lesbian, he writes that “because prostitutes do not find love (etwas fürs Herz) through their customers, if given the choice between a pimp and a girlfriend, they will choose lesbianism.”

101

Scheda added, however, that Dr. [Magnus] Hirschfeld, “who both knows and vigorously defends members of the third sex, estimates that only 20% of Berlin’s prostitutes are lesbians.”333 Scheda’s claims are emblematic of the sensationalized and perverted representations of lesbianism in Weimar. Understandably, contemporary activists

“defensively asserted the moral rectitude of lesbians and distanced them from prostitution.”334

Lesbian Ecstasy

The following analysis explores the uneasy, yet significant, discursive intersection between Weimar pornography and lesbian representation. Ecstasy (fig. 2.13), a 1930 photograph attributed to Heinz von Perckhammer, depicts two women locked in an explicity sexual embrace.335 The nature of the image is obvious; the figures are nude, lying on a bed, and one woman has her mouth on the other’s breast. During the Weimar years, von Perckhammer was best known for monographs featuring nude, yet

decorously posed, pubescent Chinese girls (fig. 2.14).336 In contrast, the subjects of

333 Scheda, “Die lesbische Liebe,” 31. 334 Ignaco-Virseda, “I Feel that I belong to You,’: Subculture, Die Freundin, and Lesbian Identities in Weimar Germany, spacesofidentity 4, no. 1 (2004), 100n71. In a rare front page editorial (printed in Die Freundin (Berlin) 4. June, 1930), gay publisher and homosexual rights activist Friedrich Radzuweit (1876- 1932) refuted Scheda’s claims. He argued that a distinction should be made between homosexual women and prostitutes in the same way that one does not automatically assume that heterosexual women are prostitutes. The prominent lesbian social organizer, political activist, and frequent contributor to Berlin’s lesbian journals Charlotte ‘Lotte’ Hahm organized a lecture entitled “Are Female Homosexuals Prostitutes?” as a rebuttal to Scheda’s outrageous claim that 50% of Berlin’s prostitutes were lesbians. See also, Else Meissner, “Sind die Weiblichen Homosexuelle Prostituierte?” (“Are female homosexuals prostitutes?”) Die Freundin, March, 1930, 5. 335 Pictured in Toepfer, Empire, 162. Austrian native Heinz von Perckhammer (1895-1965) was active in Germany and was able to sustain his career throughout the politically tumultuous 1930s. During the NS era he “produced appealing photographs of nude ‘Aryan’ women posed heroically in beautiful farm lands and wheat fields.” 336 Heinz von Perckhammer, Edle Nacktheit in China: mit 32 originalaufnahmen (Tasteful Nudity in China: with 32 Original Photographs) (Berlin: Eigenbrödler Verlag, 1928); See also, von Perckhammer,

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Ecstasy are clearly European, and their sexual exchange is unmistakably lesbian.

However, the sexually graphic nature of the photograph suggests that it was not intended for broad dissemination or publication. Despite extensive research, I have been unable to determine if, and in what venue, this image circulated.337 Nonetheless,

considered within the contexts of von Perckhammer’s published oeuvre and

contemporary visual culture, it seems likely that in 1930, Ecstasy would have been

regarded as shocking and most probably circulated as pornography (if at all). In sum,

images of female couples in Weimar might easily suggest a number of visual discourses

that included Körperkultur, advertising, dance culture, lesbian subculture, or

pornography.

Depicting Lesbianism: Doubling and Mirroring

Weimar depictions of lesbian couples can be generally divided into two types of

visual configurations: One is based on similarity, while the other is based on contrast

and will be addressed in chapter three. Mirroring is a well-established trope that

deploys sameness or symmetry to identify female partners. Jungians tersely

characterize doubling and mirroring as the “like to like” model.338 As Cassandra L.

Langer confirms, theorists identify “a twinning and doubling of the self as [one of] the

Peking (Berlin: Albertus, 1928); Von Perckhammer, Von China und die Chinesen: 64 Bilder mit Text (China and the Chinese: 64 Pictures with Text) (Zürich: Orell Füssli, 1930). 337 A less explicit von Perckhammer photograph depicting nude lesbian lovers is pictured in Ulrich Domröse, ed., Bilderlust: erotische Photographien aus der Sammlung Uwe Scheid (Berlin: Altes Museum Berlin; Heidelberg: Edition Braus, 1991), 106. 338 Claudette Kulkarni, Lesbians and Lesbianisms: A post-Jungian Perspective (London: Routledge, 1997), 105. Kulkarni repudiates what she characterizes as “internalized heterosexism,” and taking fellow Jungians to task queries, “Why introduce the masculine at all? If lesbians do not need men for individuation, why do we need the ‘masculine’? If we argue . . . that love between women is an attraction of ‘like to like,’ why not simply declare that ‘complementarity’ and ‘contrasexuality’ are irrelevant to lesbians?”

103 archetypal patterns of lesbian love.”339 Mirroring often depicts two stereotypically feminine women together; a representational trope cultural theorist Melissa Solomon

labels “lesbian symmetry.”340 Due to its familiar currency, mirroring was frequently deployed in Weimar lesbian periodicals. Two scantily clad revue-dancers striking the same pose pictured on the cover of Frauen-Liebe (Women’s Love) (1928) (fig. 2.15) attest to the suggestive power of this motif. Like them, the nude Badenden (Bathers)

(1928) (fig. 2.16) pictured on a Freundin cover who closely mirror each other’s bodies imply lesbianism. Moreover, similar to the previously discussed photograph suggesting the Judment of Paris, the Bathers references and appropriates (for lesbian purposes) a

traditional Western European artistic motif.341 Much like the mirroring Bathers, the

identically configured revue-girls, akin to Höch’s Russian Dancer and English Dancer,

indicate lesbianism.

However, the issue of doubling is also relevant to the Russian Dancer

symbolically. Largely because the phrase Mein Double (My Double) is inscribed on the

339 Cassandra L. Langer, “Transgressing Le Droit du Seigneur: The Lesbian Feminist Defining herself in Art History,” in Joanna Frueh et al. eds., New Feminist Criticism: Art, Identity, Action (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), 311. See also, Gillian Spraggs, “Hell and the Mirror: A Reading of Desert of the Heart,” in Sally Munt, ed., New Lesbian Criticism: Literary and Cultural Readings (New York: Columbia University Press, 192), 123; 130n20; 130n21. “In 1633, in the work of John Donne (or one of his followers) Sappho proclaims to her lover ‘Me, in my glass I call thee.’ Like him, in his 1857 poem collection Fleur du Mal, Charles Baudelaire says of the notorious female inhabitants of Lesbos, ‘they engage only with mirrors.’” 340 Melissa Solomon, “’The Queer Twin’: Sarah Orne Jewett and Lesbian Symmetry,” in Nineteenth-Century Literature 60, no. 3, Special Issue: Lesbian Aesthetics, Aestheticizing Lesbianism (Dec. 2005), 356. Solomon defines this as “the symmetrical correspondence of size, shape, beauty, proportion, form, or feeling allegedly visible or operative between, and in turn supposedly the result of, corresponding bodies of lesbians, lesbians, ever and always illustrating symmetry of form, of one kind or another.” 341 Like it, an anonymous photograph of a nude Ruhende Venus (Resting Venus) appropriates and redeploys a traditional artistic motif. See, Die Freundin 4. Jg., no. 4 (Feb., 20, 1929). 104

mount, the photomontage is often discussed as a self-portrait.342 “This double,” Lavin claims, “could refer to either her lover (Brugman) or another side of herself.”343

Similarly, Matthew Biro writes, “Höch subtitles the Russian Dancer ‘my double,’ an

appellation that suggests the figure is like her in many ways.”344 Like them, Everard

ventures that “my double” may indicate that the Russian Dancer is a self-portrait.345

While these arguments are fascinating, they are informed by theories that did not

circulate at the time. In 1928, the phrase “my double” did not automatically conjure the

psychoanalytic associations that it does in late twentieth, and early twenty-first century

culture.

In 1936, the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan initiated a theory that proposed

the self as a “decentered subject.”346 Lacan’s theory of the mirror-stage newly

formulated the subject “as uncertain, shifting, and in the process of becoming”347 and

ushered in “a period in which the idea of a sovereign self came under attack.”348 During

this period, “psychiatrists, psychoanalysts and Surrealists, all, in various ways, theorized

and constructed the self out of a new and changing interest in the other and, in so

342 Myriam Everard, “Man lebt nur einmal in Patchamatac: Die groteske Welt von Til Brugman, Lebensgefährtin von Hannah Höch,” in Dech and Maurer, 83, 94. Everard considers the image as both a portrait of Brugman, and a Höch self-portrait; it is also titled Mein Double (My Double). Höch scholar Maud Lavin writes, “Many observers have recognized Englische Tänzerin as a montage self-portrait and it seems likely (as some have speculated) that Russische Tänzerin was meant to represent Brugman.” Cut with the Kitchen Knife: The Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 146, 236n26. 343 Lavin, Cut with the kitchen Knife, 146. 344 Biro, “The New Woman as Cyborg,” 237. 345 Myriam Everard, “Patchamatac,” 94. 346 Carolyn Dean, The Self and its Pleasures: Bataille, Lacan, and the History of the Decentered Subject (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 2. 347 Caroline Evans, “Masks, Mirrors, and Mannequins: Elsa Schiaparelli and the Decentered Subject,” Fashion Theory 3, no. 1 (March, 1999), 8. 348 Evans, “Masks, Mirrors, and Mannequins,” 18.

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doing, unraveled it.”349 While Höch’s reference to ‘doubling,’ Surrealism, and Lacan’s

mirror-stage are roughly contemporary, Lacan’s theory (and to a degree Surrealism,

which was inspired by early psychoanalytic discourse) should not be confused with

lesbian representation at the time. Weimar lesbian imagery was not based on

psychoanalytical models, but rather clearly redeployed well-established visual tropes.350

Based on this argument and on a thorough first-hand examination of Russian

Dancer, I would suggest that the photomontage was not intended as a self-portrait, but rather, as a ‘portrait’ of Brugman. Moreover, the notion that the Russian Dancer is a

self-portrait disregards physical evidence indicating that the photomontage was not

intended by Höch, at least in 1928, as a self portrait. “Russian Dancer” and “1928”

appear to have been written in black ink with a metal-tipped quill pen and frame the

bottom outer edges of the image. In their discussion of what they characterize as the

work’s “alternate title,” scholars fail to acknowledge that the phrase “Mein Double” was

added much later. Close examination of the work reveals that Mein Double, which is

located between what is obviously the original title and date, is written in ball point

pen.351 While Russian Dancer is dated 1928, the ball-point pen was patented ten years

349 Dean, The Self and its Pleasures, 248-49. Thus, “self dissolution is implicit in the construction of some forms of modern (and postmodern) subjectivity” (251). 350 At the time, and as will be discussed in subsequent chapters, visual evidence was universally regarded as the most trustworthy form of empirical proof. Nonetheless, while it is improbable that in 1928 images depicting mirroring and doubling were conceived in anticipation of and/or intended to express Lacan’s [future] psychoanalytic theory, it is feasible that artists may have intuited Lacanian theory long before it was formulated. In retrospect, cultural historians often recognize that artists are among the first to grasp and express the zeitgeist. While this is a compelling possibility, pursuing this line of enquiry exceeds the scope of this study. 351 My personal observation was corroborated by Katja Pylen of the Anton-Ulrich Museum’s Kupferstichkabinett in August, 2009. Patented in Hungary in 1938, the ball-point pen was initially mass- produced in England beginning in 1944. Ball-point pens first became available in Germany after the war in 1950 and was sold for the exorbitant price of 20 Deutsch Marks. No evidence exists to suggest that Höch

106 later.352 Russian Dancer was in the artist’s possession until 1964 when it was sold to a

Braunschweig collector.353 Most likely, Höch added the words Mein Double many years after its creation. While Höch’s practice of modifying an existing work was unusual, it was not unprecedented.354 This suggests that in 1928, Höch’s Russian Dancer was not a self-portrait but instead, a portrait of Brugman.355

While claims that the Russian Dancer is a self-portrait may, in part, be discounted, Maud Lavin nonetheless offers valuable insight into its status and meaning

in relation to the artist’s English Dancer:

Whether or not these two montages are intended as portraits . . . they take up the theme of doubling (the couple, the other as self) in their complementary subjects and poses −the English dancer balances on one foot, the Russian dancer on the other mirroring her. Allegorically, they reflect each other and they share one identity, the dancer, as if they are two sides of one coin. Tensions existing between individual identity and that of a couple are magically resolved in the shared identity of the dancer.356

Lavin’s eloquent description of what reads as a state of blissful emotional fusion not only reflects Weimar models of lesbian intimacy, but also echoes more recent arguments in support of lesbian relationship psychology.357 Julie Mencher, who

was acquainted with the inventor of the ball-point pen, and even if she was, it would have been impossible for her to have used a ball point pen to write an ‘alternate title’ on the collage before 1938. 352 See also, Joe Mills and Peter Boswell, “Dating the Dompteuse: Hannah Höch’s reconfiguration of the Tamer,” Photo Review 26/27, no. 4/1 (2003/2004), 19n3. In his discussion of the Dompteuse, Mills writes, “H.H. is written in ball point pen, a post-WWII invention. It is therefore no help in securing an early 1930s date for the piece.” 353 As a receipt held by the Anton-Ullrich Museum in Braunschweig Germany confirms, Adolf Dörries purchased the collage Russian Dancer from the Berlin Galerie Nierendorf in March, 1965. 354 Mills and Boswell, 19n7. Höch dramatically altered the background of the Dompteuse (1930) sometime between March 9, 1959, when the photograph she used from Life magazine was published, and before 1964 when the collage was exhibited in its present state. 355 Götz Adriani, ed. Hannah Höch (Cologne: Dumont Verlag, 1980), 178-79. 356 Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 146. 357 Julie Mencher, M.S.W. “Intimacy in Lesbian Relationships: A Critical Re-Examination of Fusion,” (Wellesley, Mass.: Stone Center Colloquium, 1990), 2. “Fusion in lesbian relationships is a topic

107 challenges the classic psychoanalytic viewpoint that privileges a sharp differentiation between partners in intimate relationships, writes that “the lesbian pattern, a more fused pattern, is not inherently disturbed.”358 The psychoanalytic tradition, with its emphasis on “difference,” she contends, not only “privileges heterosexuality,” but also has “unwittingly pathologized women’s ways of being and loving.”359 Mencher argues that the psychoanalytic tradition has falsely “cast [lesbian] experiences of union, merger, and self-other harmony as regressive opposites to differentiation and self-other distinction.”360 Mencher’s characterization of lesbian relationship dynamics, which celebrate lesbian love as the dissolution of self-other distinction, is clearly analogous to

Lavin’s reading of the Russian Dancer and English Dancer and to Weimar lesbian

prose.361

Images of women gazing or engaging with themselves in mirrors indicate the traditional Vanitas genre and suggest a subtext of lesbianism. Pictured on the cover of a

Weimar lesbian periodical in 1928, a photograph of a young woman lovingly gazing at which has received much air time…In the relatively small body of literature on lesbian couples, at least fourteen articles have appeared in the last ten years which feature fusion as the prominent issue; it is rare to find an analysis of lesbian couples which does not address fusion.” 358 Mencher, “Intimacy,” 8. A number of feminist scholars repudiate “the male bias of traditional theoretical frameworks which emphasize separation and autonomy as the hallmarks of healthy human development.” 359 Mencher, “Intimacy,” 8. As Mencher notes, this may merely reflect his personal emotional attitude; writing to a colleague, Freud claimed he “frankly couldn’t relate to the concept of oceanic feeling.” 360 Mencher, “Intimacy,” 8. 361 The vocabulary used by Weimar lesbians to express feelings of love, resonate with Mencher’s oft-used terms “union and merger.” For example, see Schader, Virile Vamps, 131, 272n102, who quotes Töppsdrill, “Die Alternde,” Freundin, no. 14 (1932): “In dieser Nacht schenkte ich mich ihr ganz.” (That night I gave myself to her entirely.); See also, Espinaco-Virseda, “I Feel that I belong to you,” 87, 98n33. This mode of expression is also evident in early nineteenth-century German lesbian correspondence. See, Christiane von Lengerke, “Homosexuelle Frauen, Tribaden, Freundinnen, Urninden,” in Bollé, Eldorado, 133. Von Lengerke quotes an excerpt from an 1818 lesbian love letter: “Ihre Laune, Ihre Sinne. Die Dinge zu hören, zu sehen, zu fühlen, wie ich. Ihr Leben, unser Leben. . .” (Your moods, your senses. To hear the things you hear, you see, you feel, like me. Your Life [is] our life. . .”

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her reflection in a hand mirror clearly represented lesbianism. This reading, however, is

somewhat complicated by the caption, Ideale Schönheit (Ideal Beauty) (fig. 2.17); it may

suggest the lesbian’s ‘ideal’ partner, or the woman pictured may embody a type of

beauty to which a lesbian aspired. In any case, the woman’s reflection in Ideal Beauty,

limited to a hand-mirror, is unlike the full body mirroring common in contemporary

pornographic imagery. Often, in pornographic representations that include mirrors, the

subject(s) appear to simultaneously engage with an off-stage, yet implied, heterosexual

male viewer. Hence, this anonymous erotic postcards from the 1920s (fig. 2.18), and

countless others like it, are generally understood as erotic invitations.362 Moreover,

because the subject’s body is doubled, mirror images such as these stubbornly persist in representations of lesbian desire.363

As if in a trance, the female subject of the Belgian Symbolist Fernand Khnopff’s

(fig. 2.19) drawing Avec Gregoire le Roy. Mon couer pleure d’autrefois (Along with

Gregoire the King. My heart cries once again) (1889), kisses her reflection in morbid self-

absorption, but also suggests lesbian doubling.364 Roughly four decades later, Bauhaus photographer and art critic Franz Roh (1890-1965) took up the theme of a woman at a mirror. While the subject of Roh’s Greeting Oneself (Selbstbegrüssung) (1927-33) (fig.

362 Images of women who appear to erotically engage with mirrors are not limited to popular or pornographic representations. A painting depicting a partially clothed woman kissing a mirror, Antoine Magaud’s (1817-1899) A Kiss in the Glass, ca. 1885, is printed in Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity, 148. 363 A cursory internet search of erotic postcards 1910-1930 at delcampe.de reveals countless, and by contemporary early twentieth-century standards, pornographic images of fully and partially nude women posing before mirrors. Similary configured images continued to suggest lesbianism well into the twentieth century. Paul Rader’s (1906-1986) painting of a bare-breasted woman pressing her body to a mirror appears on the cover of March Hastings’ (pseud. Sally Singer) 1963 lesbian pulp novel, Her Private Hell: Lesbian Love, Can a Hunger so Strong be wrong? (Brooklyn, NY: Midwood, 1963). 364 For a brief discussion of this image, see, Lynne Pudles, “Fernand Khnopff, Georges Rodenbach, and the Dead City Bruges,” The Art Bulletin 74, no. 4 (Dec., 1992): 647.

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2.20) engages with her mirror reflection, the photograph suggests much more than a mere greeting. The kiss the subject directs toward her own reflection clearly implies lesbian eroticism.

The erotic subtext of the images discussed above is clear when they are considered in relation to a photograph by Claude Cahun (1894-1954) (fig. 2.21) that incorporates a mirror, yet resists enticing desire. Cahun generally staged her photographs in close collaboration with her female partner Marcel Moore, née Suzanne

Malherbe (1892-1972). Moore’s 1930 photograph pictures Cahun in a corner of their shared domestic space. In contrast to the sexually suggestive or pornographic images discussed above, Cahun is fully clothed and does not flirtatiously engage with her reflection, but instead, looks directly toward her partner/photographer. Although similarly configured, Cahun’s photograph cogently demonstrates the difference between images that deploy mirrors and are designed to erotically entice, and those in which the subject resists sexual objectification.

The Contribution of Weimar Lesbian Print Media

Despite the contemporary claims of sexual theorists linking lesbianism to vice and women’s epistemological status as the object of male scopic privilege, Weimar lesbian print media resisted and reversed women’s primary cultural status as an object for male definition and consumption. Images of female couples were ubiquitous in the

Weimar media, but were also deployed by lesbians and pornographers to represent lesbianism. While female couples in mainstream and pornographic materials alike automatically implied heterosexism or male voyeurism, self-generated lesbian media

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wrested depictions of female couples from these contexts. The public and unapologetic

nature of Weimar lesbian media represents a radical disruption of gendered visual production and reception. Through the appropriation of well-worn motifs, Weimar

lesbians subverted and dislodged the hegemony of heteronormative viewing practices,

gained independent cultural agency, and established a lesbian visual vernacular.

Conclusion

Höch’s 1928 photomontages Russian Dancer and English Dancer clearly suggest a lesbian couple. The two photomontages may convincingly be linked to a variety of contemporary discourses, most notably Weimar dance; inarguably, a theme in which the artist was perennially interested. However, as I have shown, in accordance with lesbian visual codes, the English Dancer and the Russian Dancer represent Höch and her partner Til as feminine (English Dancer) and virile (Russian Dancer) partners. The two photomontages not only indicate Höch’s engagement with Weimar lesbian subculture, but, largely because they ironize and disrupt visual conventions adopted uncritically by the producers of lesbian print media, also demonstrate the artist’s sophistication and humor.

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Chapter III

Lesbian Representation, Weimar Ethnography, Politics, and Hannah Höch

Visual Contrast and Lesbianism

As shown, among lesbians and non-lesbians alike, mirroring, doubling, and visual symmetry traditionally denoted the lesbian couple. Yet, as this early twentieth-century

postcard implies (fig. 3.1), sartorial and color-coded contrasts were also well-established

conventions that signaled female-female couples.365 Among Weimar lesbians, sexual

roles were associated with sartorial signals and, relatedly, linked to ethnicity.366 This

chapter will examine contemporary sartorial and ethnic codes, and explore their

reflection in the work of Höch and her Weimar contemporaries. It will also identify and

trace changes in Höch’s photomontages that indicate the shifting political climate of late

Weimar and early Nazi Germany and examine parallel developments in the lesbian print

media.

Among Weimar lesbians, dark-skinned brunettes were considered more

passionate than their fairer blonde counterparts and their sensuality was symbolically

intensified with black hair and eyes. As German scholar Heike Schader writes, “almost

without exception,” the predatory “seductive figure of the femme fatale or virile vamp

365 For a historical discussion of these representational tropes, see, Dorothy M. Kosinski, “Courbet’s Sleeper: The Lesbian in nineteenth-century French Art and Literature,” Artibus et Historiae 19, no. 18 (1988): 187-99. 366 Heike Schader, Virile, Vamps und wilde Veilchen: Sexualität, Begehren, und Erotik in den Zeitschriften homosexueller Frauen im Berlin der 1920er Jahren (Königstein: Helmer, 2007), 135.

112 was depicted with black hair.”367 In contrast, blondes suggested femininity; “the whiter the skin, the more feminine the figure.”368 Apparently, in Weimar these codes were so widely recognized that even male authors claimed that the phrase “blonde preferred” in a lesbian personal ad signaled a desire for a sexually submissive partner.369 In accordance with these codes, Höch’s blond, blue-eyed (i.e. feminine) English Dancer clearly contrasts with the virile Russian Dancer.370

Jeanne Mammen and Weimar Lesbian Representation

Lesbian artist and Berlin resident, Jeanne Mammen (1876-1976), created a number of works that celebrate lesbian subculture.371 Yet, due to the ubiquity of mainstream images in Weimar portraying female couples, and an unfamiliarity with

367 Schader, Virile, Vamps, 174. “Die femme fatale oder Vamp hat fast ausnahmslos schwarzes Haar.” Among Weimar lesbians, “dark, fiery eyes,” or “dark burning eyes” were considered both “fascinating and frightening,” and symbolized a passionate nature and “implied sexual willingness.” 368 Heike Schader, Virile, Vamps, 173. 369 Schader, Virile, Vamps, 173, 278n55, cites Heinz Martenau, Sappho und Lesbos (Leipzig, 1931), 44. See also, Franz Scheda, Die Abarten im Geschlechtsleben, Band 1: Die lesbische Liebe (Berlin: Schwalbe-Verlag, 1929). 35-36. Scheda discussed the use of code-words [Stichwörter] in lesbian personal ads: “Quite often, one can assume that the phrase ‘Blonde preferred’ indicates an active lesbian looking for a passive lover.” He muses that because these ads appear “in such significant numbers in the daily newspapers,” they “force one to reflect upon how lesbianism has infiltrated the higher social classes.” 370 The virile/feminine sartorial model was not limited to female same-sex couples, but is also evident in contemporary photographs of male homosexual couples. See, Hirschfeld, Berlins Dritte Geschlecht (1904), and Volume four (1930) of Geschlechtskunde. Abundant evidence confirms that cross- dressing was widespread in gay and lesbian circles. Furthermore, the deployment of stereotypical masculine and feminine sartoria to construct and express gendered difference within a same sex couple is neither chronologically nor geographically limited to Weimar Germany. For a discussion of early twentieth-century dress codes among British lesbians, see Katrina Rolley, “Love, Desire and the Pursuit of the Whole: Dress and the Lesbian Couple,” in Chic Thrills: A Fashion Reader, Juliet Ash and Elizabeth Wilson, eds. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 30-39; For a discussion of mid twentieth- century lesbian dress codes, see Joan Nestle, “Butch-Femme Relationships: Sexual Courage in the 1950s,” in A Restricted Country (Ithaca: Firebrand Books, 1987), 100. Nestle defends and supports this relationship model rejected by many lesbian feminists who she claims erroneously consider it a “phony heterosexual replica.” During the 1980s, the butch-femme model was a contentios theme among lesbians and, as the book’s back cover declares, typified “the hot headed feminist sex wars of today.” In the wake of Butlerian performativity and Queer theory, however, recent lesbian scholarship no longer automatically or flatly rejects the butch/femme dyad. 371 Jörn Merkert, ed., Jeanne Mammen 1890-1976: Monographie und Wekverzeichnis (Cologne: Wienand Verlag, 1997).

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Weimar lesbian codes among present-day art historians, this content does not generally receive the acknowledgement it merits.372 Analyzing visual references to lesbian subculture in Mammen’s ouevre enables a fuller recognition and understanding of similar signals deployed and embedded by Höch in her photomontages.

During the 1920s, Mammen worked as a graphic artist. She created fashion plates and contributed illustrations to the Ullstein publications Die Dame,

Simplicissismus, Lustige Blätter, Ulk, and Uhu.373 Between 1928 and 1933, Mammen

often published four or more drawings per week and was compared to George Grosz

and Otto Dix.374 She created a number of images depicting independent New Women as

“flappers” or “butch types” who lived without men.375 A significant portion of

Mammen’s oeuvre portrays “the interactions of women, usually in pairs, pursuing exclusively female activities” or “women’s club-meetings and the festivities in Berlin’s lesbian bars.”376

Based on the sheer volume of images she created depicting lesbian couples, we may assume that Mammen was a lesbian.377 Clearly, her familiarity with lesbian

372 An exception to this is Marsha Meskimmon, who claims that Mammen’s watercolor Masked Ball (1928) ”epitomized the variety of performative masquerades which women in the lesbian underground were exploring in developing their own perspectives on the issue of female sexual identity in the Weimar Republic.” See, “Masquerade, Performance, and Multiplicity,” in We weren’t Modern Enough: Women Artists and the Limits of Modernism (Berkeley: University of California Press), 216. 373 Katharina Sykora, “Jeanne Mammen,” Woman’s Art Journal 19, no. 2 (Autumn 1988-Winter 1989): 28. 374 Sykora, “Mammen,” 29. 375 Sykora, “Mammen,” 29. 376 Sykora, “Mammen,”29. Mammen was “especially fascinated with the extreme third gender type best exemplified by the strong, hard lines and severe look of women with plain outfits and masculine haircuts.” 377 Notable among Mammen’s lesbian-themed images is a lithographic suite of eight (or ten lithographs, according to Sykora WAJ, “Jeanne Mammen,” 29) commissioned in 1931/32 by Wolfgang Gurlitt (owner/manager of Fritz Gurlitt gallery) to illustrate Pierre Louys’ poetic celebration of sapphism

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subculture was no secret; in 1931, Leipzig social scientist Curt Moreck asked Mammen

to create lesbian-themed illustrations for his book, Führer durch das Lasterhafte Berlin

(A Guide to Scandalous Berlin).378 While Mammen’s work is obviously very different from Höch’s, like her, she deployed coded lesbian signals. However, they often remain undetected in the work of both artists: While coded lesbian references in Höch’s ouevre are frequently obfuscated by the mainstream (i.e. heterocentric) graphic source materials she redeployed in her photomontages, the lesbian content in Mammen’s work is embedded in, and on occasion overshadowed by, the broader representational matrix of the Berlin streets or Weimar nightlife. Yet, as will be seen, well-established subcultural visual signals to convey lesbian themes are evident in the work of both artists.

Jeanne Mammen’s 1928 watercolor Two Women Dancing (fig. 3.2) depicts an elegant female couple in what appears to be a stylish nightclub. The image may−or may not—represent a lesbian couple; its title does not define them specifically as such, moreover, it was not uncommon for two women to dance together in a social setting during the 1920s. Nonetheless, the image clearly reflects Weimar lesbian codes. The bodies of the two women are closely entwined and both sport the signature garçonne

Les Chansons des Bilitis (1894). Nazis, however, banned publication and the lithographs never circulated as an edition; See also Britta Jürgs and Ingrid Herrmann, Leider hab ich’s fliegen verlernt: Portraits von Künstlerinnen und Schriftstellerinnen der Neuen Sachlichkeit (Berlin: Aviva, 2000); Annelie Lütgens, “The Conspiracy of Women: Images of City Life in the Work of Jeanne Mammen,” in von Ankum, Women in the Metropolis, 89-105; Annelie Lütgens, “Jeanne Mammen,” in Three Berlin Artists of the Weimar Era: Hannah Höch, Käthe Kollwitz, Jeanne Mammen (Des Moines: Des Moines Art Center, 1994); Louise R. Noun, et al., Jeanne Mammen: Köpfe und Szenen, Berlin 1920 bis 1933 (Kunsthalle in Emden; Bonn: VG Bildkunst, 1994), 92-127. 378 Sections of Moreck’s book devoted to male homosexuality include illustrations by Christian Schad (1894-1982).

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coif.379 In addition, the contrasting color of their hair and clothing suggests virile/feminine roles. While Mammen does not identify the club where they are dancing as a lesbian locale, the figures surrounding them appear to be female or ambiguously gendered and easily suggest the women-only clubs and balls that were a cornerstone of

Weimar lesbian nightlife.

Similar to Two Women Dancing, Mammen’s watercolor Zeebrugge (1920s) (fig.

3.3) deploys coded visual signals to configure sexual roles within a female-female couple. The contrasting dress of the two women positions them at opposite ends of the virile/feminine spectrum. The smaller and, ostensibly, more ‘feminine’ of the two has long blonde hair and is wearing a trench coat that reveals a skirt below. Both her hair and attire define her as more feminine than her companion. Her companion’s hair is darker and shorter (i.e. more ‘masculine’) and she is wearing trousers which squarely place her in the lesbian role of the Bubi (short for Buben, or Boy).380 The two windswept

figures appear somewhat aloof. They stare cooly outward in opposite directions and

seem estranged. Yet, despite what may be emotional tension, or perhaps merely

boredom, the figures overlap and appear to be touching. Taken together, their physical

proximity and the coded gender contrasts signaled by their hair and clothing indicate

that they are a lesbian couple.

379 The Garçonne was a female type popularized by Viktor Margueritte’s 1923 novel of the same name, and also the namesake of a Weimar era lesbian magazine. 380 Schader, Virile, Vamps, 109.

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Weimar Ethnography and Lesbian Representation

Similar to Mammen’s Two Women Dancing and Zeebrugge, Hannah Höch’s

photomontages Russian Dancer and English Dancer reflect Weimar lesbian codes. As in

Mammen’s watercolors, Höch’s Dancers are consistent with sartorial and ethnic “color-

coded virile/feminine binary constellations.”381 While the Russian Dancer’s virility, as

previously stated, is signaled by her black hair, eyes, and monocle, the English Dancer’s

flowers and blonde hair clearly indicate ‘femininity,’382 and lend the figure an “aspect of

lightness.”383 The following excerpt from a Weimar lesbian magazine includes a number

of coded references which symbolically define the subject as feminine and might easily

double as a poetic description of Höch’s English Dancer:

Ein zartes duftiges Sommerkleid mit frohem, bunten Blumengesichtern umgab ihre schlanke Figur, auf ihrem blonden Haar spielten die Sonnenstrahlen und ihre blauen Augen gingen in unendlichen auf. 384

A fluttery sweet-smelling summer-dress with a gay and colorful floral pattern [flower-faces] lightly drapes her lithe figure. Sunbeams playfully glisten on her blond hair and her blue eyes open into eternity.

As this text suggests, in accordance with Weimar lesbian codes, everything about the

English Dancer signals femininity.385 In sum, the striking visual contrast between the

381 Schader, Virile,Vamps, 173. 382 Schader, Virile, Vamps, 175. In the Weimar Republic, flowers generally symbolized womanliness (Weiblichkeit). 383 Maud Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife: The Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 144. 384 Claere Angel, “Mara,” Garçonne, no. 6 (Berlin, 1932), cited in Schader, 173. 385 Schader, Virile,Vamps, 173. “While blonde hair as an incarnation of the German-Aryan type increasingly gained popularity, terms such as ‘Germanic’ or ‘German’ were absent in Weimar lesbian magazines. The blond German woman, so central to the National Socialists, in no way represented the ideal of an attractive homosexual woman among lesbians. The type of woman popular among the National Socialists was healthy and her body was geared to reproduction. This ideal contrasted with the body type popular among lesbians; a boyish figure (often combined with ‘virile’ qualities), or a tender feminine body type.”

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ethereal pastel-colored English Dancer and the swarthy Russian Dancer represents a

feminine/virile couple and eloquently illustrates lesbian sexual desire. However, Höch’s

intentions with regard to their ‘nationalities’ must be largely conjectured. Moreover,

these mysterious titles are particularly puzzling when one considers that Höch was

generally reluctant to name her works, or only did so when pressed. Nonetheless, an

examination of Weimar materials offers insight into contemporary perceptions of non-

German ethnicities and races.

Exoticism and Eroticism

Weimar lesbian associations that linked dark hair and eyes to a sexually

passionate nature reflected commonly held stereotypes. Moreover, at the time, ethnically and racially exotic others were generally regarded as sexually ‘exotic’ (i.e. non-normative), a perception evident in a broad range of scientific, popular, and subcultural materials.386

In 1930, Berlin sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld included an image of the African

American dancer Josephine Baker in his opus Geschlechtskunde (Sexual Knowledge) (fig.

3.4).387 Baker, pictured in a “modern revue-costume,” is visually configured with two

tribal women: a juxtaposition that tellingly indicates the extent of racial stereotyping

among contemporary scientists. The faces of the Arizona Indian woman and Sudanese

Haussa tribe member pictured opposite Baker are adorned with paint (fig. 3.5) and their

386 For general discussions of the discursive link between racial and sexual ‘exoticism’ in Western European culture, see, Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighton, “Primitive,” in R. Nelson and Richard Schiff, eds. Critical Terms for Art History (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996), 170-84; Jody Blake, Le Tumulte Noir: Modernist Art and Entertainment in Jazz-Age Paris, 1900-1930 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. 1999); Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978); 387 Magnus Hirschfeld, Bilderteil, Geschlechtskunde auf Grund dreissigjähriger Forschung und Erfahrung bearbeitet (Stuttgart: Julius Püttmann, 1930), Vol. 4, Plate 51.

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designs echo the geometry of the dancer’s beaded costume. Clearly Hirschfeld intended

these images, one generated by mass culture (Baker) and the others (non-Western

natives) in an ethnographic context, to empirically reinforce links between exotic race and exotic sexuality. In addition, their juxtaposition illustrates the discursive proximity— indeed, intersection--of popular culture and science in Weimar. While Magnus

Hirschfeld was undoubtedly a progressive figure, as the discussion above indicates, he clearly subscribed to racial stereotypes.388 Be that as it may, Hirschfeld was not alone, and, as will be seen, at the time, the conflation of exoticism with non-normative (or

heightened) sexuality was not only prevalent in Germany, but common throughout

Western Europe. Like Hirschfeld, in a discussion of Josephine Baker, Weimar critic Fred

Hildenbrandt focused on the race and linked the dancer to non-Western culture.389

Baker, he lamented, “has confused Europe.”390 She “was marvelous for a time,” but now, exposed and “polished” by European culture, she has lost her [primitive] appeal.391

Similar to Hirschfeld’s volume, Hildenbrandt’s 1931 review confirms that the concept of

intrinsic racial difference was deeply embedded in Weimar culture.

Weimar lesbians were not immune to the cultural hegemony of racial and ethnic

stereotyping; a 1928 Freundin headine rhetorically asked “Wie Nackt tanzt die Baker?”

(How nude does [Josephine] Baker Dance?) and attests to their fascination with dark-

388 This statement is in no way intended as a negative critique of Hirschfeld, nor does it suggest he was a ‘racist.’ 389 Fred Hildenbrandt, Tänzerinnen der Gegenwart: 57 Bilder (Zürich: Orell Füssli, 1931), 8. The author links Baker to “Negerinnentänze” (Female-Niggerdances) of the “South Seas and Honolulu, Hawaii.” 390 Fred Hildenbrandt, Tänzerinnen der Gegenwart, 8. 391 Hildenbrandt, Tänzerinnen der Gegenwart, 8-9. “Josephine Baker [hat] Europa durcheinander gemacht, nicht? . . . [S]icher war sie herrlich eine Zeit lang. Dann kam mit Europa allmählich der Schliff. Vorbei.”

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skinned others.392 Yet despite their allure, romantic relationships between non-

Caucasian beauties and German women were rarely a theme in lesbian materials.393

Instead, sexual attraction between two women was (analogous to gender-coded

sartorial contrast) indicated by inter-ethnicity, as demonstrated in the case of Höch’s

Russian and English Dancers. Ethnic contrasts such as these constellated erotic interest

and lent the non-German woman an aura of exoticism. However, in Weimar, as Schader

explains, to be perceived as exotic (and automatically as sexually adventurous), a

woman “merely had to be from another world, i.e., not from Berlin;” and comments

laconically, “a French accent was enough.”394 The most “common exotic clichés” among

Weimar lesbians were the “mysterious dark-eyed Gypsy” and the “lonely melancholy” of

the “Russian soul.”395

Weimar Ethnography and the Russian

Russia’s geographical position has traditionally placed the country’s inhabitants

in an ethnic and anthropological grey area between Western Europe and Asia.

Historically, this has informed the Western European perception of the not quite

European, nor Asian, Russian. Weimar ethnographers commonly held that the Russian was racially distinct from other European peoples and Hans F. K. Günther’s The Racial

392 “Wie nackt tanzt die Baker?” Die Freundin 4 Jg., no. 9, April 30, 1928. 393 Schader, Virile, Vamps, 134-35, 272n115, however briefly discusses J. Schröder’s novella, Braune Nuela (Brown Nuela) which was published in the lesbian periodical Ledige Frauen (Single Women) in January 1928. Braune Nuela narrates the story of a German businesswoman who imports coffee from Java. She falls in love with the beautiful Javanese Nuela, “a person of an uncultivated race,” and brings her to Germany. 394 Schader, Virile, Vamps, 118. 395 Schader, Virile Vamps, 136; 118, discusses the exotic Arab and Gypsy. “Es fiel ein Reif in der Frühlingsnacht” (A frost Fell in the Spring Night) is a short story about a young Russian woman Ilonka and was printed in Garçonne, no. 7 (1931), unpaginated. See also, “Die Augen der Ljnbiza” (Ljnbiza’s Eyes), Die Freundin 4. Jg., no. 3 (Feb., 6, 1928). Italian women were regarded as equally exotic, see, “Fiametta: eine römische Novelle” (Fiametta: a Roman Short Story) Die Freundin 4. Jg., no. 5, March 5, 1928.

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Elements of European History, reflects this.396 Günther, “Germany’s most influential racial theorist of the Weimar era,”397 claimed Europeans are comprised of five distinct races and classified the central Russian Caucasus as “an area on the whole predominantly settled from Asia [where] Europeans and Asiatics meet.”398 He classified

“the short, mesocephalic, dark-haired, brown-eyed people, south and south-east from

Moscow . . . and their flat, broad foreheads and cheekbones set at an outward slant . . .

as Asiatic . . . and proto Mongoloid.”399 Indeed, the dark hair and eyes, low forehead, and slanted skull of Höch’s Russian Dancer visually conform to the physiognomy that, according to Günther, characterized the Russian type.

In addition to being perceived as racially other, the Russian was generally touted as vigorous and sturdy.400 However, as James L. Rice explains, this stereotype was inspired by historical events tainted by nihilism and aggression401 and these latent, yet

396 Hans F. K. Günther, The Racial Elements of European History, trans. G.C. Wheeler (London: Methuen and C. Ltd., 1927). 397 Maria Makela, “Grotesque Bodies: Weimar-Era Medicine and the Photomontages of Hannah Höch,” in Modern Art and the Grotesque, Frances Connelly, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 202; 217n28. 398 Günther, 102. 399 Günther, 101-02. 400 James L. Rice, “Russian Stereotypes in the Freud-Jung Correspondence,” Slavic Review 41, no. 1 (Spring 1982), 19, 19n1. In a 1909 letter to Jung, Freud refers to the Russian race, and not Russian ethnicity. See, The Freud Jung Letters, ed. William MacGuire, trans., Ralph Mannheim and R.F.C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 226; See also, Anonymous, “Anthropologist Sees Russian Becoming One Physical Type,” Science Newsletter 36, no. 10 (2. Sept. 1939): 155. In 1939, Dr. Ales Hrdlicka of the Smithsonian Institution claimed that the Russians are “becoming one physical type, marked by sturdiness.” 401 Rice, “Russian Stereotypes,” 30. “The romantic capstone to these clichés of national character may be found in the familiar phrase coined by Bakunin in 1842, which still enjoyed a . . . free-floating currency as the ultimate Russian aphorism: “Die Lust der Zerstörung ist auch eine schaffende Lust” (The desire to destroy is also a creative one.“ This statement from Bakunin’s essay ‘The Reaction in Germany,’ was quoted in S.L. Frank in “Etika nigilizma” (Vehki, p. 194) with the ironic remark that the word “also” (auch) had long since vanished from the aphorism” (29; 29n43).

121 threatening, undertones should not be ignored.402 Moreover, the label of Russian vigor

(as construed by correspondence between Freud and Jung) was infused with “an archaically unbridled libido.”403 These associations were exacerbated by early twentieth- century political developments; among many Western Europeans, the Russian embodied elements considered perilous and antithetical to modern civilization.404

Especially after the Bolshevik Revolution, Russians were often characterized as a dangerous horde:405 a perception reiterated in popular, eugenic, and ethnographic discourse.406 While stereotypical Russian strength carried a sexual, and, on occasion, a negative brutish subtext, it nonetheless was also greatly admired in Weimar as it was in keeping with the tenets of Körperkultur.

402 Anonymous, “Anthropologist Sees Russian Becoming One Physical Type,” Science Newsletter 36, no. 10 (2. Sept. 1939), 155; Hrdlicka is quoted as describing “the stockiness and vigor of the present day Russian.” See also Rice, “Russian Stereotypes,” 33, 33n52. In 1930, Sigmund Freud mused, “One only wonders, with concern, what the Soviet will do after they have wiped out the bourgeoisie.” Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, ed. J. Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton), 61-62. 403 Rice, “Russian Stereotypes,” 30. 404 Michael Schwartz, “’Proletarier’ und ‘Lumpen,’: Sozialistische Ursprünge eugenischen Denkens,” Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte 42, Jhg. 4 (Oct., 1994): 537-70. 405 H. Dennis Bradley, “Socialism” The Nation and The Atheneum (July 1, 1922), 479. In an editorial-like advertisement for the Bond St. Military and Naval Tailors Pope and Bradley, the author writes, “What is Socialism? It is a disgustingly sordid level to which the muddy majority, in their impotent jealousy, seek to drag down all refinement; a degrading plain of thought . . . a blank illusion, a mirthless myth, a momentary nightmare . . . If it were conceded . . . it would rapdly accomplish the destruction of the arts, the negation of all joys of life, the annihilation of all incentive to progress . . . Personally, the Socialist, the Bolshevist, and the Communist leave me chillingly amused.” See also, David Schimmelpenninck Van der Oye, “Russia’s Asian Temptation,” International Journal 55, no. 4 (Autumn 2000): 603. A contingent of radical Russians identified with this stereotype and represented themselves as an imminent threat to European civilization. In 1918, the Russian poet Alexandr Blok wrote: “You have your millions. We are hordes, and hordes, and hordes./ Just try it! Take us on!/ Yes We are Scythians! Yes, we are Asians too with slanting eyes bespeaking Greed…Triumphant yet in sorrow…Awash in dark blood…” 406 Weiss, “The Race Hygiene Movement,” 212, 212n57. In a paper presented at the First International Eugenics Congress in London in 1912, the leading German eugenicist Alfred Ploetz (1860- 1940) indicated that the “Slavic threat” was biological as well as political: while Western Europeans and Americans exhibited a decline in fertility, Ploetz lamented, the "Poles, Hungarians, Russians, and South Slavs-nationalities with strong Asiatic traits-have an extremely high birth rate such that they are everywhere successfully pushing westward. . . The preservation of the Nordic race," he argued, "is severely threatened as a result." 122

In addition to perceiving the Russian as racially other and physically strong,

Russia was seen as “a locus of exotic sexuality, a hot bed of vice, and a country of sexual

. . . excesses.”407 Due to Western European associations linking exotic sexuality to exotic environs, lesbianism was often considered “endemic to Asia, the Near East, and . . .

Russia.”408 The projection of non-normative sexuality upon ethnic or racial others

supports the claim that “there is a tendency in all cultures to locate homosexuality far

away from themselves in foreign countries.”409 Hence, as Diana Burgin Lewis writes,

“Lesbian love got its name from a small island . . . cut off, so to speak, from the mainland

of human love and sexuality.”410

A sexually suggestive 1928 photograph captioned “S’ent Marona, orientalische

Tänzerin” (S’ent Marona, oriental dancer) (fig. 3.6) attests to the contemporaneous discursive link between ethnic exoticism and eroticism. Moreover, the anonymous photograph, which appeared on a lesbian magazine cover, suggests that Weimar lesbians generally subscribed to and accepted these associations. The bare breasts and

Bugatti-inspired costume of the “oriental dancer” scandalously imply a hyper-sexualized

407 Jane T. Costlow, Stephanie Sandler, and Judith Vowles, “Introduction,” Sexuality and the Body in Russian Culture, Jane T. Costlow, Stephanie Sandler, and Judith Vowles. eds., (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 8. 408 Diana Lewis Burgin, “Laid out in Lavender: Perception of Lesbian Love in Russian Literature and Criticism of the Silver Age, 1893-1917,” in Sexuality and the Body in Russian Culture, Jane T. Costlow, Stephanie Sandler, and Judith Vowles. eds. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 177; Here, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928) also comes to mind. Dedicated to her lesbian lover Vita Sackville West, portions of her four-hundred year biographical narrative are set in the ‘exotic’ locales of Russia, Persia and Constantinople. 409 Barbara Fassler, “Theories of Homosexuality as Sources of Bloomsbury’s Androgyny,” Signs 5, no. 2 (1979), 237-57; paraphrased by Burgin, “Laid Out in Lavender,” 324. 410 Burgin, “Laid Out in Lavender,” 177.

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vamp.411 By contemporary standards (inferred through the figure’s exotic name and

near nudity), the sexual implications of the photograph are clear. Significantly, it worries

the boundaries of lesbian agency and contemporary pornography and may easily be

linked to phallocentric pornography. Yet, one could nonetheless argue that Weimar

lesbians boldly deployed images such as this for their own erotic enjoyment.

In accordance with contemporary associations linking ethnic others and

eroticism, Höch’s Russian Dancer and Rudolf Koppitz’s photograph Study of Russian

Dancers (1926) (fig. 3.7) potentially imply lesbianism, yet the two works operate much

differently.412 In contrast to Koppitz’s nude couple, Höch’s Russian Dancer is a lone

clothed subject. While the two bodies in Koppitz’s photograph intimate female-female

sexual exchange, the Russian Dancer’s monocle--even more audaciously than Koppitz’s

intertwined nudes--links Höch’s photomontage to lesbian subculture. For example, two

infamous lesbian bars took the monocle as their namesake: the Berlin lesbian bar,

Monokel, and the Parisian lesbian haunt Le Monocle, immortalized in a suite of early

1930 Brassaï photographs. An examination of photographs of Gertrud Liebherr, a Berlin

photographer more fully discussed in chapter five, offers clear evidence of the

monocle’s popularity among Weimar era lesbians. Indeed, every cross-dressed female

411 Obviously a stage name, the lesser known S’ent Marona suggests the well-known Weimar dancer Sent Mahesa (née Elsa von Carlsberg [1883-1970[). The pseudonyms of both dancers were clearly intended to conjure exotic ‘oriental’ associations. The fascination with ‘oriental’ exoticism was not limited to Weimar or Western Europe but also evident in Hollywood. The Sheik, a successful 1921 film starring Italian actor and screen legend Rudolf Valentino was celebrated in the popular American song “Sheik of Araby” (1921) and spoofed in Fanny Brice’s “The Sheik of Avenue B,” (1922). In a similar fashion, Cincinnati native Theodosia Goodman gained fame as Hollywood screen vamp Theda Bara. 412 Rudolf Koppitz (1884-1936) was born in Austria, and active in Germany. Study of Russian Dancers appears in Toepfer, Empire, figure 79, unpaginated, and in Monika Faber, Tanzfoto: Annährungen und Experimente 1880-1940 (Vienna: Österreiches Fotoarchiv im Museum moderner Kunst, 1991), 61.

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subject in Liebherr’s photographs has short hair, is wearing elegant masculine dress, and

a monocle.413 This confirms Ruth Roellig’s 1928 observation that the lesbian who

“strongly identified as masculine wore an Eton crop, a tuxedo, and a monocle.”414

Similar to the monocles worn by Liebherr’s subjects as well as other women portrayed

in lesbian print culture, Höch’s Russian Dancer importantly includes this significant

accessory. When worn by a woman in 1928, the monocle disrupted the femininity of the

wearer and the sartorial expression of patriarchal authority.415 Like Höch’s Russian

Dancer, the face of the anonymous woman pictured on the lesbian magazine cover (fig.

5.14) is dominated by a black-rimmed monocle. Yet, unlike her earnest investment in replicating masculine sartoria, Höch’s ludicrous and ironic tagging of a ballerina with a gentleman’s monocle offers evidence of her resistance −and perennial humor− in the face of gender roles.

Returning to Rudolf Koppitz’s Study of Russian Dancers, an image that may be linked visually to a similarly configured photograph on a Weimar lesbian magazine cover

(fig. 3.8), insight may be gained into how the investments of the onlooker can structure and determine an image’s reception. Moreover, the two photographs illustrate visual links between the discourses of dance, lesbian subculture, and pornography. The lesbian

413 While the cross-dressed woman pictured in Figure 5.11, does not wear the monocle on her face, it nonetheless dangles as an accessory on a chain. 414 Ruth Roellig, Berlins lesbische Frauen (repr. 1928), in Lila Nächte: die Damenklubs im Berlin der zwanziger Jahre, Adele Meyer, ed. (Berlin: Edition Lit. Europe, 1994), 42. Roellig describes “die stark vermännlichten Typen mit Etonkopf, smoking und Monokel.” 415 The same anonymous photograph of a cross-dressed woman was printed in lesbian journals on two separate occasions. It is captioned Der moderne Frauentyp (The modern Type of Woman) in Frauen Liebe und Leben (Women: Love and Life) no. 2 (1928): 19, and later, the same photo appears uncaptioned on the cover of Liebende Frauen, no. 18 (1929). Admittedly Liebherr’s name does not appear on either photograph, yet based on the Weimar lesbian periodicals held in the Berlin Spinnboden lesbian archive, and Liebherr’s avowed professional dedication to “modern” types, it seems highly likely that she is also responsible for this image.

125 magazine photo (similar to Koppitz’s Dancers) portrays two nude women embracing (fig.

3.8), a highly legible visual configuration that conveys sapphism.416 While the photograph in the lesbian magazine is uncaptioned, we may assume that it represents a sapphic embrace because of its context in a journal aimed at a specifically lesbian audience. However, the photograph, Koppitz’s, and countless others like them, reintroduce the murky issue of differentiating lesbian-generated images from those intended to sexually arouse heterosexual male viewers (i.e. pornography).

In accordance with the conventions of Western European viewing tradition, the female body is generally regarded as an object of male scopic pleasure. Yet, in the absence of a caption or authorial context, how do we interpret images of nude women?

(Clearly an issue ‘doubly’ challenging when we consider images that portray [nude] women engaging with each other sexually.) As stated, Weimar lesbian periodicals were largely created and controlled by lesbians, yet, photographs of nude female couples, much like those appearing on their covers, are often indistinguishable from contemporary pornography.

The Russian Ballet

In Weimar, representations of dance helped to fuel concepts of ethnic difference and supported common cultural perceptions linking ‘exotic’ ethnicity and ‘exotic’ (i.e. non-normative) sexuality. The Russian Ballet was not immune to the cultural dynamism of the early twentieth-century and played a leading role in the rejuvenation of European

416 Liebende Frauen 3. Jg., no. 41 (1928).

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dance culture.417 While German dancers were responsible for the theoretical

formulation and dissemination of the modern dance movement, Russian dancers

inspired an almost mythical fascination in Weimar. Their reputation was so great that a

series of collector cards entitled Das Tanzgenie der Russen (The Dance Genius of the

Russians) were distributed in German cigarette packages.418 This, coupled with the

contemporary fascination with everything exotic, guaranteed the company’s mass

appeal.419

Because the Russian Ballet toured extensively, it was influential in the

construction of Russian national character beyond the country’s borders. However,

evidence suggests that every aspect of the Russian Ballet was carefully crafted to project

and reaffirm a desired public impression. Ulla Holt claims that Diaghilev's artists

assumed “double identities, posing as the East to the West, while displaying a

Eurocentric attitude towards Russia's non-European ethnic groups.”420 A 1926 British

advertisement, with the heading “Exhausting Work and Virol-and-Milk” reflects this (fig.

3.9). In a purported “behind the scenes” interview, Lydia Sokolova characterizes the members of the company as “supreme actors and perfect acrobats” and describes the

417 D. L. Murray, “The Future of the Ballet,” Music and Letters 7, no. 1 (Jan., 1926), 36. According to Murray, under the creative influence of Sergei Diaghilev (1872-1929), the company was infused with a modern spirit, which, according to contemporary observers, was implemented later by choreographer Michel Fokine (1880-1942). Fokine, as Murray commented in 1926, “was powerfully influenced by Isadora Duncan,” and had “a profound effect upon the Ballets Russes.” 418 Dresden’s Orami cigarette company issued the cards in the early 1930s. 419 Popular in Germany, the legendary fame of the Ballet Russes was international. The company performed throughout Europe and the United States. See, Lynn Garafola and Nancy von Norman Baer, eds., The Ballet Russes and its World (New Haven: Harvard University Press, 1999). 420 Ulla Holt, “Style, fashion, politics, and identity: The Ballets Russes in Paris from 1909 to 1914” (PhD., diss., Brown University, 2000).

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company as a “little self-contained village moving about Europe.” 421 Posed in a Lenare

photograph much like Höch’s Russian Dancer, Lydia Sokolova “The Queen of English

Dancers” balances on one leg with her hand extended.422

The odd, yet emblematic, story of how Sokolova got her name attests to the

contrived ‘exoticism’ of the Russian Ballet. Sokolova, née Hilda Munnings (1899-1972),

was born in the London suburb of Wanstead and joined the Ballet Russes in 1913,

becoming the company’s first English member. Diaghilev himself renamed her Sokolova to strengthen associations between Russian ethnicity and dance prowess.423 Munnings’

adoption of a Russian name was, however, not unique; at the time, a number of dancers

did the same. During the interwar period, it was not uncommon for Western European

artists to boost their appeal by assuming ‘exotic’ or Russian-sounding stage names.424

Ballet and Weimar Eugenics

The words of British dance critic D. L. Murray indicate significant contemporary

correlations between dance culture, Weimar Körperkultur, and eugenic discourse in

Western Europe. Murray’s 1926 characterization of ballet as a mainstay of Western

European culture offers insight into growing discursive trends (especially in Germany)

421 “Exhausting Work and Virol and Milk,” The Illustrated London News, Oct., 6, 1926, p. 638. 683. “We do not go much into society. We have to save ourselves for our art.” The advertisement is dominated by Lenare’s photograph “Lydia Sokolova-‘Queen of English Dancers.’” 422 Lenare (Leonard Green) (1883-?) opened the portrait studio Lenare in 1924. Later, maintained by his assistant Jim Cawthorne, the Lenare studio closed in 1977; See, Nicholas de Ville, Lenare: The Art of Society Photography, 1924-1977 (London: Allen Lane, 1981). 423 Lydia Sokolova, Dancing for Diaghilev: The Memoirs of Lydia Sokolova, ed. Richard Buckle (New York: Macmillan, 1961), 68-69. 424 During the years she performed in England, the Dutch dancer Lil Green assumed the Russian- sounding name Vallya Lodowska, while, Berlin native, dancer Else von Carlberg (1893-1970), adopted the Egyptian pseudonym inspired Sent M’ahesa. Toepfer, Empire, 148-49. See also, Frank-Manuel Peter, Valeska Gert, Tänzerin, Schauspielerin, Kabarettistin: Eine dokumentarische Biographie, mit einem Vorwort von Volker Schlöndorff (Berlin: Frölich und Kaufmann, 1985), 36.

128 which ultimately rejected anything at odds with classical aesthetic principles.425 Murray described ballet as “a normal love of bodily fitness and grace” and located “its basis within the Pheidian canon.”426 In words that resonate with Körperkultur, a movement

that found its inspiration in ancient Greek ideals, he wrote “the art that produced the

Parthenon frieze is the art with which those who are seeking the measure and grace of human movement must always be primarily concerned.”427 It is certain, Murray continued, that “no dancer will enjoy a wide and lasting popularity except by satisfying our instinctive and normal love of bodily fitness, strength, and grace.”428 These words are indicative of the contemporary discursive interface between dance practice,

Körperkultur, and eugenics, associations even more apparent when he declares, “If you

reject the canons, ballet will fall into eccentricity, feebleness, and chaos.”429 In 1926,

“eccentricity, feebleness, and chaos” were key terms within volatile debates that

crosscut cultural, political, medical, and eugenic discourses.430 Murray’s description of

425 D.L. Murray, “The Future of Ballet,” Music and Letters 7, no. 1 (Jan., 1926): 25-37. 426 Murray, “The Future of Ballet,” 36. 427 Murray, “The Future of Ballet,” 36-37. 428 Murray, “The Future of Ballet,” 36. Murray’s words link dance discourse to concepts associated with art. “The dancer will never realize the square lines of archaic sculpture . . . or the whirring synthesis of a Futurist canvas. He will only appear what he is, a man making himself uncomfortable.” 429 D. L. Murray, “The Future of Ballet,” 37. Murray’s emphasis on the Pheidian canon also significantly resonates with links between classical Greek culture and contemporary homosexual discourse at the time. This theme will be more fully explored later in my discussion of sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld. The title of Hirschfeld’s first publication in support of homosexuality (published in 1896 under the pseud. Theodore Ramien), Sappho und Sokrates: Oder Wie erklärt sich die Liebe der Männer und Frauen zu Personen des eigenen Geschlechts? (Sappho and Socrates: Or, how do we Explain the Love of Men and Women for their own Sex?), foregrounds ancient Greek figures. 430 Weimar discourse and rhetoric routinely linked racial inferiority and/or otherness to the artistic avant-garde and positioned it negatively in relation to ideal models as represented by the classical Greek canons. While the socio-cultural implications of these arguments are too great to be enumerated or examined here, their association with subsequent political developments should not be ignored. See, Sheila Faith Weiss, “The Race Hygiene Movement in Germany” Osiris, 2nd Series, vol. 3 (1987): 193-236. See also, Alfred Werner, “Hitler's Kampf against Modern Art: A Retrospect” The Antioch Review 26, no. 1 (Spring 1966): 62. Before the Munich opening of the 1937 Degenerate Art Exhibition, thirty thousand,

129 ballet as an instinctive love of bodily fitness, strength, and grace, contrasts sharply with

Höch’s Russian Dancer, a work, which, in addition to its “Russian” reference implicating exotic sexuality and lesbian subculture, clearly resists canonical aesthetics. Her blatant disregard of classical principles in the photomontage lent an additional subversive and ironic subtext to this monstrously non-Pheidian ballerina.

The Healthy Weimar Lesbian: the ultimate New Woman

Remaining physically fit was a matter of particular concern among self- supporting Weimar women. As Barbara Kosta explains, the modern woman’s early morning gymnastics were intended to “improve her marketability;”431 and her pursuit of physical fitness was reflected in contemporary popular fiction. The morning gymnastics and cold showers described in Irmgard Keun’s pulp-novel Gilgi, the story of a Berlin office-worker modeled after the New Woman reflect, almost verbatim, the directives of

Weimar lesbian feminists.432

packing the huge square on Prinzregentenstrasse, heard Hitler thunder against works of art that "cannot be understood but need a swollen set of instructions to prove their right to exist and tortured canvases find their way to neurotics," and also against those "degenerate halfwits who on principle see blue fields, a green sky, and sulphurous clouds." True to form, he added a sharp warning: "If they really paint in this manner because they see things that way, then these unhappy persons should be dealt with in the department of the Ministry of the Interior, where we sterilize the insane." Hitler contrasted the "conspiracy of Jews and Bolsheviks” with “noble Aryan artists who were seeking after the true and genuine quality of our national being and after a sincere and upright expression of the inwardly-divined law of life." The posters announcing the Degenerate Art exhibition foregrounded terminology derived from Nazi-informed eugenic discourse. The phrases “spiritual decay, sick visionaries, and lunatic incompetents” negatively characterized both avant-garde art and artists. See also, Wolfgang Willrich, Säuberung des Kunsttempels: Eine kunstpolitische Kampfschrift deutscher Kunst im Geiste nordischer Art (Munich: J.F. Lehmanns Verlag, 1937). 431 Barbara Kosta, “Unruly Daughters and Modernity: Irmgard Keun’s Gilgi-eine von uns,” The German Quarterly 68, no. 3 (Summer 1995), 272. 432 My research of lesbian periodicals has revealed conspicuous thematic correlations between popular figures, such as Keun’s Gilgi and the contemporary lesbian print media. These similarities attest to the infiltration of mainstream discourses in Weimar lesbian print media and subculture. See also Irmgard Keun (1905-82), Gilgi-eine von uns (Gilgi—one of us) (1931; repr., Munich: Deutsche Taschenbuch Verlag, 1990). This popular novel was filmed in 1932, with actress Brigitte Helm in the starring role.

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Herta Laser, a regular contributor to the lesbian periodical Frauen Lieben und

Leben (Women Love and Life), stressed the importance of a daily gymnastic routine to

her readers. In a 1928 article, she declared “it is especially important for homosexual

women to remain youthful, because they must engage in a fight for professional survival

99% of their lives.”433 For “homosexual women,” she continued, “youthful appearance is

especially necessary in today’s industrial circles where there is a fear of aging

employees.”434 Of particular relevance with regard to Höch’s Russian Dancer is Laser’s

recommendation that “manly women” practice a leg exercise “often performed by

Russian dancers.”435 Laser’s essay was published the same year Höch created the

Russian Dancer. Whether Höch was familiar with the essay, or acquainted with its

author, cannot be determined; however, Laser’s remarks regarding “manly women” and

“Russian dancers,” implicate Höch’s photomontage.

An additional reference linking lesbian subculture, a Russian dancer, and Höch’s

photomontage of the same name, may be found in Ruth Roellig’s previously mentioned

guide to lesbian Berlin.436 In her description of a typical night in the exclusive bar

Monbijou, Roellig wrote, “occasionally . . . a young, interesting Russian girl will be in the mood to perform a folkloric dance-to which the easily animated women enthusiastically

433 Herta Laser, “Richtiges Lüften und Frauenturnen,” (Correct Ventilation and Women’s Exercise) Frauen Liebe und Leben: Organ des Deutschen Freundschafts-Verbandes (Women Love and Life: Representing the German Friendship Union [an early homosexual organization]) no. 2 (Berlin 1928): 5. 434 Laser, “Richtiges Lüften,” 5. 435 Laser, “Richtiges Lüften,” 7. 436 Ruth Roellig, Berlins lesbische Frauen: mit einem Vorwort von Sanitätsrat Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld-Berlin (Leipzig: Bruno Gebauer Verlag für Kulturprobleme, 1928).

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respond.”437 As these examples confirm, in Weimar, Russian stereotypes were commonplace in mainstream, scientific, and lesbian materials and represent a rich additional context for Höch’s photomontage. The dark-eyed Russian Dancer, whose sexual virility is emphasized by a tell-tale lesbian monocle, reflects the vigorous, artistic,

and soulful Russian subject depicted in diverse Weimar media.

Hannah Höch’s Liebe

Hannah Höch’s late Weimar photomontage Liebe (Love) (1931) (fig. 3.10) reflects

the artist’s new found ease with the uncoded visual expression of lesbian intimacy. Yet,

upon closer examination, Liebe obliquely references the Russian Ballet, contemporary

decorative and graphic arts, and juvenile literature.

In the early decades of the twentieth-century, the Russian ballerina Anna

Pavlova (1881-1931) was one of the most prominent dancers in the world and was renowned in Berlin for her signature piece, Die Libelle (The Dragonfly).438 An undated

early twentieth-century German postcard of Pavlova as the Libelle (fig. 3.11) portrays

the legendary ballerina, much like the hybrid flying figure in Höch’s Liebe, as a woman

wearing wings. Pavlova died in 1931, the same year Höch created the photomontage.

And while Liebe, above all, implies lesbian sexuality; it may also be a tribute to Pavlova;

her fame, recent death, and signature Libelle costume may have inspired Höch to

integrate a winged-insect in the work.

437 Roellig, Berlins lesbische Frauen (1928), 62. “Zuweilen gibt es ein sentimentales Lied, gesungen zu vorgerückter Stunde von irgendeinem Operetten Star, oder eine junge, interessante Russin ist in der Stimmung, einen heimatlichen Tanz aufzuführen, der diese leicht zu entflammenden Frauen so begeistert.” 438 Viennese composer Josef Strauss (1827-1870) wrote the Libelle, also known as Opus 204, a polka mazurka for orchestra in 1866. Pavlova premiered the piece in St. Petersburg in 1914.

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Nonetheless, whether or not Liebe references Anna Pavlova, the two interacting

nude females in the photomontage clearly suggest lesbianism and, because of this, it is

considered part of Höch’s love series.439 Named by scholars, the photomontages from the series examine courtship, marriage, and sexuality and “are highly psychologically charged-something that is not surprising, given their focus on human emotion and interpersonal relationships.”440 After Höch became involved with Brugman (1926), the photomontages in the artist’s love series began to include representations of lesbianism.441

Yet Höch’s Liebe is significant in other ways; unlike photomontages from the series that present a sardonic view of human relations, Liebe is positive. It depicts a hybrid female/insect hovering above a recumbent nude woman, and its straightforward depiction of lesbian sexuality suggests that by 1931, the artist had largely abandoned any previous inhibitions she may have had engaging with the theme. Because it clearly implies lesbianism, scholars regard Liebe as Höch’s “most radical engagement” with contemporary Weimar debates regarding sexuality.442 According to Maria Makela, Liebe

is “unique in its portrayal of homosexual love.”443 She claims that it “focuses on the

underbelly of human relationships—in this case a homosexual liaison,” and describes

439 Makela, “By Design,” in The Photomontages of HH, 66, and 77n88. The series includes Die Kokette I (1923-25), Die Kokette II (1925), Liebe (1926), Liebe (1931), Platonische Liebe (Platonic Love)(1930), Liebe im Busch (Love in the Jungle) (1925), and Vagabunden (Vagabonds) 1926. I would, however, suggest, that Höch’s 1934 photomontage, Auf den Weg in den Siebten [F.] Himmel (On the Way to Seventh [F.] Heaven), which depicts a smiling, hand-holding female couple levitating above a landscape, and is nearly identical to Höch’s earlier photomontage Vagabunden (Vagabonds) (1926), may also be considered part of the artist’s ‘love’ series. 440 Biro, “The New Woman as Cyborg,” 246, 302n49; See also, Boswell, “HH,” 12; Makela, “By Design,” 66, 69; and Lavin, Cut, 124-5, 136. 441 Biro, “The New Woman,” 246. 442 Matthew Biro, “The New Woman as Cyborg,” 250. 443 Makela,”By Design,” in The Photomontages of HH, 66.

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the scene as “unmistakably ominous.”444 Makela writes that it is “unique for the level of

anxiety that it generates in the viewer,” and that “only the most unusual viewer would

feel no discomfort at the sight of the drowsy female reclining on ‘pillows’ at the bottom

of the picture, who is either unaware of or undisturbed by the bug-headed, winged pair

of legs that hovers directly above her.”445

This unusual viewer disagrees. The harmonious colors and configuration of the

two figures suggest a tender romantic exchange. The warm ochre background and

closely framed figures the ambient lighting of an intimate space; while the line of the horizon, possibly suggesting a bed, is perfectly level. The over-sized silk pillows

supporting the recumbent figure’s torso conjure the exotic accoutrements of a luxurious

‘oriental’ boudoir. Combined, these details indicate that Liebe is a lyrical and

undisguised depiction of lesbian sexual intimacy.

However, in addition to its lesbian theme, Liebe may also be linked to the artist’s

personal papers which include a noteworthy reference to a dragonfly. In 1924, the

artist’s colleague and admirer, Mynona, sent Höch an erotically charged love poem in

which he likens her tender manner to the wings of a Libelle (dragonfly).446 Insects,

especially dragonflies, were not uncommon in late nineteenth and early twentieth-

century romantic imagery and a frequent motif in jewelry, and the decorative and

444 Makela, “Exhibition Plates 26-75: The Interwar Period,” The Photomontages of HH, 115. 445 Makela, “By Design,” in The Photomontages of HH, 66. 446 Götz Adriani, Hannah Höch, 1889-1978: Collagen (Stuttgart: Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, 1984), 44. Salomon Friedländer (1871-1946), aka Mynona, (anonym [German anonymous] spelled backwards) specialized in literary grotesques. He sent the sexually graphic poem, Verzückung in Dich (Charmed by You), to Höch in 1924. He writes, “Du bist ein Phänomen. Ausserdem zart wie ein Libellenflügel…” See also, Ellen Otten, ed., Mynona: Rosa die schöne Schutzsmannsfrau und andere Grotesken (Arche Verlag: Zürich, 1989), 201.

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graphic arts. As a number of contemporary images confirm (and as seen in Pavlova’s

Libelle), winged females did not automatically inspire anxiety in early twentieth-century viewers. Instead, as in the case of the postcard Libellule (fig. 3.12), they were sexually suggestive, or, as in this depiction of a pubescent girl (3.13), might have implied innocence and/or an affinity to nature.

The contemporary popularity of romantic and whimsically humanized insects is further evidenced by a dragonfly motif on a Weimar era postcard (fig. 3.14). The image, perhaps designed to appeal to children, depicts a mermaid sitting on lotus leaves being approached by a friendly dragonfly. Strikingly similar to Liebe; one must merely reverse it and substitute the lotus petals with overstuffed pillows to evoke Höch’s photomontage.447 Like Liebe, the simplicity of the postcard’s narrative and composition

suggests one of Höch’s lesser known projects: the 1945 children’s book, Bilderbuch

(Picture-book), and features a number of non-threatening animal/insect hybrids.448

Indeed, cross-genus figures are ubiquitous in Höch’s oeuvre. As Matthew Biro comments, the insect/human hybrid in Liebe suggests a “blending of different species– an implication that could equally imply an evolutionary or a devolutionary

447 According to information verso, card was published by “Korn Künstlerkarte nach einem original von H. [Herta] Wasserkampf. Nr. 816, Verlag Felix Korn, Stuttgart.” akpool.de/ansichtskarten/ 82074-ansichtskarte-postkarte-nixe-sitzt-auf-rosenblatt-libelle—fisch [accessed January 9, 2012]. 448 Hannah Höch, Bilderbuch, 1945, Hans Marquardt and Manfred Hamm, eds. (Düsseldorf: Claasen Verlag, 1985). Höch’s whimsical hybrid creatures include Boa Perlina, Schnippeldebonchen, and Der Schwanzgemsen. After World War II, both Höch and Til Brugman wrote children’s books. Til Brugman’s many publications include, Wiben en de Katten (Amsterdam: Wereld-Bibliothek, 1951): Maras Puppe: eine Puppe erzählt aus ihrem Leben (Reutlingen: Ensslin und Laiblin, 1952); Kinderhand (Amsterdam: De Boeuk, 1954); De avonteren van Korreltje Zondervan (Amsterdam: Ploegsma, 1956); Noes is niet voor de poes (Amsterdam: C.P.J. van der Peet, 1956); Penny: het geheim van de jonk van de vriendlijke oostenwind (s’-Gravenhage: G.B. van Gloor, 1957); Wat de pop wist (Den Haag: H.P. Leopold, 1963). Brugman collaborated with her lesbian partner ‘Hans’ (Johanna) Mertineit on Maras Puppe, Penny, and, Noes is niet.

135 development.”449 Yet, he remarks, “It is not clear how the photomontage’s various main lines of association . . . connect with one another.”450 I would suggest that the

connection Biro seeks may, in part, be found in Höch’s 1927 statement in which she

rejected Western European androcentrism. Amply demonstrated throughout Höch’s

oeuvre, plants, insects, and animals often dwarf humans and emphasize man’s relative

unimportance.451

Furthermore, racially exotic African and non-human [insect] elements in Liebe do not indicate that Höch subscribed to contemporary perceptions that linked exotic race to sexual depravity, or considered lesbianism devolutionary. While lesbians were often

represented as primitive and/or sexually depraved in Weimar, all evidence confirms that

Höch rejected these associations.452 Instead, as Biro ventures, because the eyes of the recumbent figure in Höch’s Liebe are closed, she “could also be read as asleep and

dreaming of the figure above her” and imagining a utopian form of love.453 Certainly the

449 Biro, “The New Woman,” 252. 450 Biro, “The New Woman,” 252. 451 Excerpt from catalogue Kunstzaal De Bron exhibition, Den Haag, 1927, later translated from Dutch into German and reprinted in Cara Schweitzer, Schrankenlose Freiheit, 127. “lch mochte die festen Grenzen auswischen, die wir Menschen mit einer eigensinnigen Sicherheit um alles, was in unseren Bereich kam, gezogen haben. Ich male, um diesem Wunsch Form zu geben und ihn anschaulich zu machen. Ich will aufzeigen, dass klein auch gross sein kann und gross auch klein ist; allein der jeder Begriff Begriff seine Gultigkeit und all unsere menschlichen Gesetze verlieren ihre Gultigkeit. Ich wurde heute Standpunkt, von dem wir bei unserem Urteil ausgehen, muss anders gewahlt werden und sofort verliert die Welt aus der Sicht einer Ameise wiedergeben und morgen, so wie der Mond sie vielleicht sieht.” 452 Kelly Hurley, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the fin-de-siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1996), 71-72. As Hurley explains, deviant sexuality could be classified as “degenerate” in four senses: its recapitulation of the less evolved sexuality of so-called primitivism, its hereditability, its deteriorative effect on mind and body, and its general corrupting influence on public morals . . . deviant sexuality . . . constituted a sort of behavioral recapitulation of some ancestral state, and a betrayal of the socioevolutionary process that distinguished the modern Caucasian from the present-day non-European “primitive.” 453 Biro, “The New Woman,” 252-53.

136 sleeping woman and the unreal figure hovering over her indicate a dream or dreamlike state of mind: a state of mind regularly evoked in Weimar lesbian print media.

Dreams and Utopia: Höch, Lesbian Representation, and the Rise of Nazism

In Weimar, Maud Lavin observes, “images associated with dancers and flight abound.”454 However, because the horizon is often cropped from contemporary dance photographs, dancers appear to be flying and this illusion “propels the figures into idealized realms.” Lavin elaborates, “this seems to dissolve the distinction between material and the utopian.”455 A number of dance photographs in Höch’s Scrapbook (fig.

3.15) confirm Lavin’s observations and also resonate visually with a number of Höch’s photomontages in which female couples appear to be suspended above the ground in

“utopian” realms. These include Liebe, Vagabunden (Vagabonds) (fig. 3.16) (1926), Von

Oben (From Above) or Two Children above a City (1926) (fig. 3.17), and Auf dem Weg im

F. Himmel (On the Way to F. Heaven) (fig. 3.18) (1934). Moreover, symbolic correlations link these images and Höch’s attitudes regarding her lesbian relationship.

In a 1926 letter to her sister Grete, Höch described her partnership with Til

Brugman in spiritual terms: “To be closely connected with another woman . . . means being taken by the spirit of my own spirit.”456 Lavin claims that in an effort to express her unorthodox sentiments, Höch (like other contemporary lesbians) adopted a

454 Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 96. To illustrate this point, she discusses a female dancer touted in the popular press as a “Human Butterfly.” The dancer, “leaping with outstretched veils/wings,” appears to be suspended in space was pictured in the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung 32, no. 15 (15. April 1928): 288. The dancer is juxtaposed with drawings of bird anatomy and captioned: “A Human Butterfly: The American Dancer Lada doing dance exercises in her garden.” 455 Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 96. 456 Lavin, Cut with Kitchen Knife, 189. Höch’s letter to her sister Grete König (14. Oct., 1926), Höch Nachlass, Murnau. See also, Lavin, 241n17 for original German text.

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“German vocabulary of spirituality.”457 This, Lavin writes, was “not necessarily meant to

mask the physical side of lesbian attachments, but rather an attempt to express them as

intense and viable love relationships.”458

Höch’s characterization of lesbian love in spiritual terms also reflects aspects of

Weimar lesbian print culture: The extended title of Die Freundin reads “Ideale

Freundschaftsblatt” (Ideal Friendship Paper) and “Halbmonatschrift für Aufklärung über

Ideale Frauenfreundschaft” (Bi-monthly periodical for the Understanding of Ideal

Women’s Friendship). Emphasizing lesbianism as “ideal,” this principle is also reflected

in other ways. An FKK-inspired photograph of three nude women in an outdoor setting

pictured on a 1931 Freundin cover positions them in a utopian context. Although the

image is uncaptioned, it appears next to the poem Märchenland (Fairy-Tale Land) (fig.

3.19).459 Idealism is similarly implied by H.W. Mager’s cover image Traumbild (Dream-

picture) (fig. 3.20). Both its title and medium infer fantasy: the photomontage (rarely deployed in the Weimar lesbian print media!) depicts a recumbent woman with open eyes ‘dreaming’ of three beauties floating above her.460 Their Egyptian-inspired poses,

similar to the previously discussed cover photograph of S’ent Marona (fig. 3.6), imply exoticism and sexual excess. Moreover, the floating figures are akin to the suspended female couples in Höch’s Liebe, Vagabonds, Two Children, and Auf dem Weg. Much like the sleeping subject in Höch’s Liebe, the women hovering above the recumbent figure in

Traumbild appear to come to her as if in a dream.

457 Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 237n32. 458 Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 237n32. 459 Die Freundin 7 Jg., no. 43 (28. Oct., 1931). 460 Photograph by: H. W. Mager, Berlin, “Traumbild,” Die Freundin 4 Jg., no. 9 (30. April 1928).

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As one Weimar contemporary fondly reminisced, in the 1920s, “heaven was not a place somewhere way up above us, but here on earth, in the German capital,

Berlin.”461 However, as the political atmosphere in Germany darkened towards the end of the decade and Berlin grew less hospitable, the lesbian print media increasingly evoked dreamlike, bittersweet utopias. While magazine headings such as “I wait alone,”

“Goodbye,” “The Lonely One,” “Left Behind,” “Together!”, “Like it was before,” and

“Just One Glance,” reflected the romantic fantasies (and realities) of the lesbian reader, illustrations conjured imaginary realms in which they could interact freely.462 Much like

her lesbian contemporaries, Höch’s photomontages at the time portrayed female

couples in utopian or otherworldly spaces.

Beginning in 1930, lesbian magazine covers with the added bold title Diese

Zeitschrift darf überall aufgehängt werden! (This magazine may be legally displayed

anywhere!), reminded both the vendor and the reader that despite a repressive political

atmosphere, it was not illegal to display or purchase lesbian magazines.463 However, in

1933, under newly instituted Nazi pornography laws, all public expressions of homosexuality were officially banned and punishable by law.464

461 This statement was made by Weimar dancer Charlotte Wolff in her memoirs, Augenblicke verändern uns mehr als die Zeit: Eine Autobiographie (Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag, 1986), 81-82. Cited in, Renate Berger, trans. Martin Davies, “Moments can change your life: Creative Crisies in the lives of dancers in the 1920s, in Marsha Meskimmon and Shearer West, eds., Visions of the ‘Neue Frau’: Women and the Visual Arts in Weimar Germany (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995), 78. 462 “Ich warte einsam” (I wait alone); “Abschied” (Goodbye), Frauen Liebe, 3 Jg., no. 5 (1928); “Die Einsame” (The Lonely One), Liebende Frauen, 3. Jg., no. 41 (1928); “Werde wie einst” (Like it was Before) Liebende Frauen, 2. Jg., no. 49 (1927); “Verlassen” (Left Behind); “Vereint!” (Together!), Liebende Frauen, 2. Jg., no. 36 (1927); “Ein einziger Blick” (Just one Glance), Liebende Frauen, 4 Jg., no 31 (1929). 463 One such headline appears in Liebende Frauen 5 Jg., no. 16 (Berlin, 1930). 464 Ilse Kokula, “Lesbische Leben von Weimar bis zu Nachkriegszeit,” in Adele Meyer, Lila Nächte: die Damenklubs im Berlin der zwanziger Jahre (Berlin: Edition Lit. Europe, 1994), 106-08. Public lesbian culture “ended with the Nazis,” but “sanctions had already begun during the Weimar era.” In 1925,

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Similar to Liebe, Höch’s photomontage Auf dem Weg im F. Himmel attests to a

shift in the contemporary political atmosphere and the artist’s changing treatment of lesbian sexuality in her photomontages. Auf dem Weg (On the Way) unambiguously

implies female-female partnership and may be linked to contemporary lesbian print

media. As Lavin writes, the title “probably refers to [F.]rauen Himmel [Woman’s Heaven, or Sky].” Moreover, “as with the English and Russian Dancers, one's face is light and the

other’s dark. It immediately suggests itself as another double-portrait of Brugman and

Höch.”465 It should, however, be mentioned here that Makela labels this photomontage

differently as Auf dem Weg im Siebten Himmel (On the Way to Seventh Heaven).466

While both titles indicate a heavenly place, I am more inclined to accept Lavin’s.

Makela’s description of lesbian love as “the underbelly of human relationships,” does

not suggest that she would entertain the happy possibilities of a celestial realm

populated solely by women. Nevertheless, either label may be correct: In European

script the letter “F” and the number “7,” which is always crossed, are similarly written

and almost interchangeable.

Höch’s smooth configuration of the composite bodies in Auf dem Weg is typical

of her late Weimar oeuvre and indicates a newfound ease depicting same-sex couples.

The fashionably draped bodies of the two women pictured lean toward each other in

near mirror symmetry (a traditional lesbian visual trope) and imply harmony. The two

attempts were made to criminalize lesbians and include them in paragraph 175 of the German penal code which outlawed male homosexuality. In 1926 the lesbian magazines Die Garçonne and Frauenliebe (Women-love) were temporarily banned, only to be later banned completely in 1931. A new pornography law, which prohibited all public homosexual activities and publications, was enacted on February 23, 1933. 465 Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 236n27. 466 Makela, in Boswell, Makela, and Lanchner, 124.

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figures appear to float above a mysterious landscape against a variegated sky. Here, as

in Liebe, Höch positions the couple in an otherworldly and perhaps utopian context. The

two women in On the Way are elegantly clothed, which, during the Nazi era and the

Great Depression, was a fantasy few German women could actually enjoy. Suggesting costly silk stockings, the topless figure’s perfect legs shimmer while her goggle-eyed companion wears an extravagant ruffle, a shiny corset, and glamorous open-toed shoes.

The improbable elegance of Höch’s 1934 figures is confirmed by the infamous Italian fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli who, in her memoirs, discussed the “rather shabby people” who populated Berlin during the 1930s.467

While the utopian spaces of the artist’s 1926 Vagabonds and Two Children above

the City can be linked to contemporary lesbian media, they also importantly reflect the

early ‘honeymoon’ phase of Höch and Brugman’s relationship. Both photomontages imply the couple’s extended travels during their first year together. Somewhat differently, Höch’s Nazi-era portrayal of a female couple in On the Way (1934) is dominated by clouds; and although both women are smiling, their exaggerated clownlike expressions suggest that they may have found themselves in a strange and uncomfortable world.

In contrast to Vagabonds, Two Children, and Auf dem Weg, a sense of restless urgency is conveyed in Höch’s late Weimar photomontages Flucht (Flight) (1931) (fig.

3.21) and the Nazi-era Siebenmeilenstiefel (Seven-League-Boots) (1934) (fig. 3.22). In

467 Evans, “Mirrors, Masks,” 14, cites Elsa Schiaparelli, Shocking Life (London: Dent, 1954), 107. Schiaparelli (1890-1973) recalls attending a party in Berlin in the 1930s: “As I mounted the imposing staircase, surrounded by mirrors, I saw in the centre of a rather shabby people one who reminded me of Paris.” [Here, she relates misrecognizing her own “smart” reflection.]

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addition, the also seem to indicate the political upheaval in contemporary Germany. The

wing-headed figure in Flucht appears to be hastening (along with a grimacing

uncomfortably limping man) over a downwardly sloping blue ground into an abyss.

Similar to these harried and unfortunate figures, the subject of Siebenmeilenstiefel implies an uncertain and hasty escape. Unlike other Höch photomontages that feature couples and emphasize partnership, Siebenmeilenstiefel depicts a sole ‘figure’

(comprised only of two legs) soaring high above a German hamlet, and may reflect tensions between the artist and her partner at the time; in 1934 Höch and Brugman briefly considered separation but soon reconciled.

When considered in the context of current German politics, Siebenmeilensteifel automatically suggests flight and immigration; yet, the large shell, prominently placed between a woman’s legs (similar to the ‘vaginal’ eye in Höch’s Dada-Ernst) boldly and humorously alludes to the German word Muschel (shell), a colloquial epithet used with affection to label a woman’s sex. Ironically, however, and, emblematic of Höch’s oeuvre in general, the shell is not analogous with intimate female anatomy; instead, it protrudes starkly and, much like a dildo when worn by a woman, masculinizes her. The disrupted ‘femininty’ of the figure implies sexual agency (lesbian virility?) and renders her gender ambiguous.

The artist’s 1940 photomontage Nur nicht mit beiden Beinen auf der Erde stehen

(Don’t Stand with both Feet on the Ground) (fig. 3.23) depicts a group of ballerinas in a celestial blue space. While its narrative (and level composition) does not convey the sense of frantic urgency seen in Flucht or Siebenstiefel, it nonetheless implies a longing

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to be elsewhere. Drawing on one of her perennially favorite themes, the female dancer,

the artist transports her subjects far beyond war-torn Germany into a peaceful

otherworldly realm.

While Flucht and Siebenmeilenstiefel suggest anxiety and distress, the subjects of

Vagabonds, Liebe, Auf dem Weg, and Nur nicht mit beiden Beinen auf der Erde Stehen, hover happily in utopian realms and implicate fantasy narrative. In lesbian fantasy narrative “the laws of nature and causality often do not work; magical ability is commonplace and the unexpected turns out to be the norm.”468 Moreover, the floating figures in Höch’s photomontages (comparable to those in the Weimar lesbian print media) resonate with A.H. McNaron’s claim that “Stepping through the firmament,

suggests escaping patriarchal constraints.”469 Much like the Fairy-Tale Lands and Dream-

pictures celebrated in contemporary lesbian print media, Höch’s Weimar

photomontages Vagabunden, Liebe, and subsequent Nazi-era works Auf dem Weg, and

Nur nicht mit beiden Beinen auf der Erde stehen, evoke idealized spaces wherein

romance thrives and lesbian love triumphs.

468 See Phyllis M. Betz, “In a Kingdom Faraway: Lesbian Fantasy,” in The Lesbian Fantastic: A Critical Study of Science Fiction, Paranormal, and Gothic Writings (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company Inc., Publishers, 2011), 103. 469 Toni A.H. McNaron, “Mirrors and Likeness: A Lesbian Aesthetic in the Making,” in Sexual Practice/ Textual Theory: Lesbian Cultural Criticism, Susan J. Wolfe and Julia Penelope, eds. (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1993), 300. McNaron discusses the lesbian implications of Emily Dickinson’s poem #533: “Two butterflies went out at Noon/ And waltzed upon a Farm/ Then stepped straight through the Firmament/ And rested, on a Beam/ And then together bore away/ Upon a shining Sea/ Though never yet, in any Port/ Their coming, mentioned be.” McNaron writes, “How do I know that the two butterflies are female? Partly because I have read thousands of poems by heterosexual white men for whom celebrating equality is not a major theme.”

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CHAPTER IV

Hannah Höch and Til Brugman: Creative Collaboration, Social Critique, and Political Resistance

Introduction

Lesbian partners, Hannah Höch and Til Brugman were inspired by, and explored,

similar themes and this suggests their artistic collaboration. Largely undocumented, the

couple’s joint projects were first examined by Mineke Bosch and Myriam Everard in

1988 in the Dutch lesbian cultural magazine Lust en Gratie. The special issue, “Til

Brugman and Hannah Höch,” presented an overview of their collaborative projects, and

previously unpublished materials regarding their relationship.470 Bosch’s and Everard’s seminal study significantly linked the creative oeuvre and emotional lives of Höch and

Brugman, and represents a starting point for the following discussion.

Together as a couple from 1926-1936, Höch and Brugman collaborated on two

known published projects, both were Brugman texts illustrated by Höch. Brugman’s

“Von Hollands Blumenfeldern” (Holland’s Flower Fields) was published in the cultural

journal Atlantis in 1933,471 and Scheingehacktes (a German word invented by Brugman

which roughly translates as Appearing cut-up, or Mock-mincemeat), a thin volume

printed by a small Berlin art press in 1935.472 Unfortunately, and partially due to the contemporaneously tumultuous and politically repressive times in which they lived,

470 Mineke Bosch and Myriam Everard, guest eds., “Til Brugman and Hannah Höch,” special Issue Lesbisch Cultureel Tijdschrift Lust en Gratie 18 (Amsterdam) (Fall 1988). These materials include previously unpublished personal correspondence and a number of private photographs. 471 Til Brugman, “Von Hollands Blumenfldern,” Atlantis: Länder, Völker, Reisen 5 (1933): 429-32 472 Til Brugman, Sheingehacktes, mit Illustrationen von Hannah Hoech (Berlin: Verlag der Rabenpresse, 1935).

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additional Brugman/Höch projects were interrupted, while others can merely be

conjectured.473

This chapter begins with a discussion of Til Brugman and will establish her

pivotal, yet under acknowledged, role within the interwar European avant-garde.

Brugman openly identified as lesbian, however, clearly, the negative perception of

lesbianism at the time adversely influenced her creative production and reception. As a

lesbian in the early twentieth century, Brugman’s cultural situation was in no way unique, and she, like other lesbian artists of her generation, was compelled to develop creative and professional strategies to ‘compensate’ for this challenge.474 Lesbian

feminist scholars convincingly argue that largely due to the liminal status of lesbian

sexuality at the time (and even today), Brugman’s writings have garnered only modest

critical attention and appreciation.475

The discussion of Brugman’s biography and early work is followed by an

overview of diverse, yet interrelated, contemporary discourses that inspired and

influenced Höch and Brugman’s individual and joint artistic production. A deeper

understanding of the contemporary cultural and political backdrop will provide insight

473 Myriam Everard, ““Man lebt nur einmal in Patchamatac: Die groteske Welt von Til Brugman, Lebensgefährtin von Hannah Höch,” in Da-da zwischen Reden zu Hannah Höch, Jula Dech and Gertrud Maurer, eds. (Berlin: Orlanda Frauenverlag, 1991), 91. During the 1930s, the couple collaborated on Brugman’s unfinished novel, Gewächse (Plants). Höch executed a title drawing for an unpublished collection of Brugman’s grotesques Sonderbare Himmelschlüsel, and created illustrations for two additional Brugman manuscripts. 474 For a general discussion of women’s strategic circumvention of masculinist modernism, see Katy Deepwell, ed. Women Artists and Modernism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998); Bridget Elliot and Jo-Ann Wallace, Women Artists and Writers: Modernist (im)positionings (London: Routledge, 1994). 475 Marion Brandt, ed., Til Brugman: Das vertippte Zebra, Lyrik und Prosa. Berlin: Hoho Verlag Hoffmann, 1995), 160; See also, Everard, “Patchamatac,” 84. 145

into their joint creative projects. The extraordinary and dynamically shifting atmosphere

of late Weimar and early Nazi Germany undoubtedly informed Höch and Brugman’s

themes and genres. Due to the cultural complexity of the era, however, the couple’s

engagement with timely, and controversial, gender-related and political themes was

often a clandestine and a potentially dangerous undertaking. This analysis will offer new

readings of individual and jointly produced works and enhance our appreciation of Höch and Brugman’s mutual interest in similar themes.

Til Brugman

Born in Amsterdam in 1888, Mathilda Maria Petronella Brugman, or Til, was the oldest of nine children in a Roman-Catholic family. Her father dealt in wine and spirits and owned vineyards in the South of France and Spain.476 Brugman’s parents

encouraged their daughter’s gift for languages from an early age. Her mother taught her

to read, and Til’s father taught her to speak French by the time she was three.477 In

contrast to her father’s easy-going cosmopolitanism, Brugman’s mother was close-

minded, which Til attributed to her mother’s staunch Catholicism. This alienated the

young Brugman and caused her to leave home in anger. In 1911, Til rented a room in

Amsterdam and supported herself as a secretary and translator. In 1917, Brugman

moved to Den Haag and set up residence with her first lesbian partner, the Dutch

concert singer Sienna Mastoff (1892-1959). Brugman lived with Mastoff until she met

Höch in 1926.

476 Marleen Slob, De mensen willen niet rijpen, vandaar: leven und werk van Til Brugman (Amsterdam: VITA, 1994), 12. Til’s father was Hermanus Johannes Brugman (1852-1931), and her mother was Adriana Geertruida Johanna Zoons (1859-1939). 477 Slob, De mensen, 15.

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Til Brugman and the avant-garde

Til Brugman’s earliest contacts with the artistic avant-garde were through Piet

Mondrian (1872-1944), whom she met in Amsterdam at dance lessons in 1908.478 Soon,

Brugman became acquainted with a number of writers, architects, and artists affiliated with Dutch Dada and De Stijl circles. Many years later, Höch would describe Brugman as a “contemporary Eulenspiegel,” and as “friends with half of the world, and acquainted with the other half.”479 Indeed, Brugman’s many social contacts and her creative

versatility confirm Höch’s remarks. As scholars claim, Brugman co-authored Dutch Dada

manifestos and translated a number of articles for the magazine De Stijl, but was rarely

acknowledged or credited by contemporaries for her contributions.480 Til Brugman managed Kurt Schwitter’s magazine Merz in Holland, and helped her colleagues sell their work, finding buyers for Schwitters, Hans Arp (1886-1966), El Lissitzky (1890-1941), and Piet Mondrian.481

Til Brugman’s sound poems, which she began to write in the ‘teens, and her use

of experimental typographic techniques, reflect her proximity to notable avant-garde

figures. Moreover, they cogently represent theories regarding the roots of avant-garde

typography, which “are entwined with those of twentieth-century painting, poetry, and

478 Brandt, Vertippte Zebra, 180. 479 Heinz Ohff, Hannah Höch (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1968), 25. Till Eulenspiegel is a folkloric German ‘trickster’ said to have died in 1350 in Braunschweig (Brunswick). Anecdotes first surfaced in 1500, and the figure was later the subject of musical and literary works. Composer Richard Strauss’ symphonic poem Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche (Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks) was written in 1894-95. The popular German writer Gerhart Hauptmann (1862-1946) wrote the epic poem “Till Eulenspiegel” in 1928. Both Brugman’s nickname, ‘Til,’ and her reportedly irreverent sense of humor support Höch’s association. 480 Everard, “Patchamatac,” 84; See also Brandt, Vertippte Zebra, 160, 481 Brandt, Vertippte Zebra, 160.

147 architecture.”482 In addition to reflecting her ties to leading international avant-garde figures, Brugman’s early artistic production also demonstrates her remarkable linguistic abilities. Fluent in more than a dozen languages,483 Brugman’s sound poems were published in Dutch, German, and French magazines. “W” was published in De Stijl and

Merz in 1923,484 and, in 1924, “Engin d’Amour” was printed in the Lyonnaise magazine

Manomètre, positioning Brugman among other avant-garde artists who engaged with

the theme of mechanized sexuality and love.485 Til Brugman’s English and French language poem “SHE HE” (fig. 4.1) not only offers evidence of her playful command of foreign languages, but, like “Engin d’Amour,” also deploys sophisticated typographic techniques. Through contrasting masculine and feminine coded words, “SHE HE”

482 Rick Poynor, intro. to the 2nd rev. ed. of Pioneers of Modern Typography, by Richard Spencer (London: Lund Humphries, 1982), 11. Early twentieth-century sound poems playfully, yet radically, re- incorporated the decorative two-dimensional graphic potential of individual letters and words into poetry. Typically the typographic organization of sound poems suggest movement across the page that disrupts the traditional Western left to write progressive reading and writing modus. Sound poems frequently feature obliquely written words, or individual letters, which are isolated from their context and defy conventional formatting practice. The sense of motion suggested by sound poems also resonates with the then revolutionary new medium of cinema which disrupted the Newtonian space-time continuum. Similar modes of typography used in sound poems were deployed by the Dadaists. Due to their similar radicalism, Dada and sound poems are easily, yet erroneously confused. While their techniques are related, the Dadaists routinely generated texts based on random composition and/or accident. These techniques are distinct from the compositional and contextual organization and unity typical of sound poetry. See also, Matthew Gale, Dada and Surrealism (London: Phaidon, 2002), 63, 76. Gale discusses Hans Arp’s use of chance in his dada poetry. This clearly contrasts with Francis Picabia’s more organized technique in his 1919 poem “Mouvement Dada.” 483 Jula Dech “Til Brugman oder Eine Liebe in Holland,” in Sieben Blicke auf Hannah Höch, Jula Dech, ed. (Hamburg: Nautilus, 2002), 56, “She learned her first foreign language at three, and later learned another twenty languages.” See also Bosch and Everard, Lust en Gratie, 52. Brugman’s extant business cards advertise her services as a language teacher and offer reading courses in Dutch, French, German, English, Spanish, Danish, Norwegian, Italian, Russian, Japanese, Latin, and Greek. 484 Brandt, Vertippte Zebra, 181; 198-99; Til Brugman, “W,” in Merz 6 (Oct., 1923) Hannover, 61. 485 Brandt, Vertippte Zebra, 181. Brugman’s poem Engin d’Amour was published in Manomètre (August 6, 1924): 102. Based on the manuscript, however, Brandt dates the poem to 1918 (202). This places Engin d’Amor much closer to other avant-garde artists working in a related mode. Examples include Francis Picabia’s Portrait d’une jeune Fille américain dans l’êtat de nudité (1915) and Fernand Leger’s film Ballet mécanique (1924). Lyon-based Manomètre was a sophisticated international Dada-Surrealist revue with a Dutch constructivist component and was in print from July 1922 through January 1928.

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suggests the social and sartorial exchange of men and women at a fashionable thé

dansant.486 Furthermore, “SHE HE,” written sometime between 1917 and 1922,

anticipates Brugman’s later “Himilia” (1927) and “Warenhaus der Liebe” (1931-33), both

of which critically address gender and sexual identity and will later be discussed at length.

Soon after she met Höch in 1926, Brugman began writing in German; moreover,

it is likely that Höch was instrumental in inspiring her to take up the literary grotesque genre. While affiliated with the Berlin Dadaists, Höch had experimented in this genre.

Although Höch’s graphic oeuvre far outweighs her literary production, the artist wrote grotesques and presented one of them during a Grotesken-Abend (Grotesque-Evening)

in 1921 at the Berlin Secession. According to a poster for the event, the Abend featured

readings by Hannah Höch, Salomo Friedlaender (alias Mynona), and Raoul Hausmann.487

The literary Grotesque

The rise of the literary grotesque in Weimar Germany parallels the rapid

expansion of the publishing industry following World War I. The popularity of the genre

also attests to the growing sophistication of the German reading public; its production

and erudite appreciation began where the appeal of quotidian popular journalism

ended. Ellen Otten characterizes the literary grotesque as a quintessentially

486 Til Brugman, “SHE HE,” in Brandt, 9, 200. Brandt writes “SHE HE” was first published in 1981 in Til Brugman, ed. W. de Graaf, 5 Klankgedichte (5 Sound poems) (Heemstede, NL: Lojen Deur Pers, 1981). The typewritten manuscript of “SHE HE” is reproduced in Bosch and Everard, Lust en Gratie, 77. 487 Eberhard Roters, ed., “Dada- Ausklang und Nachhall,” in Hannah Höch: eine Lebenscollage, vol. 2.1 (Berlin: Berlinische Galerie, 1995), 25-29. Höch read Italienreise (Italian-Travels) and a favorable review of this “unabashedly spirited” performance appeared in the 8-Uhr Abendblatt on Feb. 10, 1921.

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expressionist form.488 While literary critic Wolfgang Kayser claimed that the literary grotesque is “neither caricature nor parody” and, while “satire may be its starting point,” it is not limited to poking fun at imperfection.489 Instead, as he explained, it lent

expression to “an untrammeled imagination which results in a higher nonsense.”490

Thomas O. Haakenson offers a succinct and recent definition of the genre:

Through the questioning of knowledge based on habit . . . the grotesque humorist encourages the modern subject to question judgments not only of aesthetics but also of logic and reason. The grotesque humorist, in other words, uses his or her medium to engender a contemplative and critical engagement with habituated sensorial responses to the empirical world.491

While Höch revisited it sporadically throughout her career, the literary grotesque eventually became Til Brugman’s signature genre. Its mutual appeal to both women, however, comes as no surprise. As Brandt and Slob comment, it is a perfect for addressing the body or human sexuality, themes in which both artists were obviously and perennially interested.492 Höch’s knowledge of and personal interest in the literary

grotesque most certainly facilitated her partner’s creative production; despite

Brugman’s exceptional linguistic abilities, she was a native Dutch speaker and relied on

Höch to edit and correct grammatical errors in her German manuscripts.493

488 Mynona [pseud], Rosa, Die Schöne Schutzmannsfrau und andere Grotesken, ed. Ellen Otten (Zürich: Arche Verlag, 1965), 238. “Die expressionistische Groteske ist erwachsen aus dem Bewusstsein ihres Schöpfers, ein Allewesen zu sein, erwachsen aus einem unendlich gesteigerten Selbstbewusstsein des Denkens, aus dem Reinheitsbewussteins des schöpferischen Geistes.” 489 Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature, trans., Ulrich Weisstein (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963), 150-1. 490 Kayser, Grotesque, 150-1. 491 Thomas O. Haakenson, “Grotesque Visions: Art, Science, and Visual Culture in Early Twentieth- Century German” (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 2006), 177. 492 Brandt, 170; See also Slob, De mensen, 50. 493 Slob, De mensen, 48; See also Brandt, Vertippte Zebra, 197.

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While only a fraction of Brugman’s grotesques have been published, those that

have attest to her distinctive literary contribution. Brugman engaged with a variety of

themes exposing and examining the dangers of capitalism, consumer culture, sexism,

and the unfortunate plight of sexual minorities. The author addressed the ruthless

control and exploitation of women’s bodies and embedded a powerful feminist subtext

in her 1927 grotesque “Himilia.” Brugman’s “Schaufensterhypnose” (Shop-window

Hypnosis) satirizes capitalist-driven consumerism. In “Warenhaus der Liebe”

(Department Store of Love) Brugman lampoons, yet simultaneously praises, Magnus

Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science. In all three texts, Brugman’s voice counters that

of the uncritical mainstream with satire and dark humor.

Gender and the Avant-garde

Despite Brugman’s prolific artistic production and professional contact with

prominent members of Dutch and German avant-garde communities, she remains a little known figure.494 Brandt attributes Brugman’s obscurity to the “common sexist

assumptions of the avant-garde” which, “almost without exception, consider women as

translators, interpreters (dancers and actresses) and ‘mediums’ for their art, rather than

as independent creators.”495 Similarly, Everard reminds us that sexism and

“Frauenfeindlichkeit” (hatred for women) were conceptually anchored in the De Stijl

movement. Artists Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian, for example, integrated

494 Brandt, Vertippte Zebra, 159, 212n1, 212n2; Til Brugman 5 Klankgedichte (5 Sound poems) (Heemstede, NL: Lojen Deur Pers, 1981); Til Brugman, Even Anders: Vier Rabbelverzen, W. de Graaf, ed., (Woubrugge NL: Avalon Pers, 1989); See also Pamela Pattynama and Inge Polak, “Dadandy Til,” Lover 10 (Amsterdam) (1983): 4, 182-88; Myriam Everard, “Graven: De Dood is de humor von het leeven,” Diva 3 (Amsterdam) (November 1984): 24-27, 35. 495 Brandt, Vertippte Zebra, 160.

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sexism into their artistic manifestos.496 According to Everard, the “contempt for women

in both life and art” is evident in the “futurist infused ideals” of De Stijl that reject the

feminine principle.497 The words of prominent De Stijl members confirm Everard’s

claims; Mondrian believed that the only true artist was a man. He wrote, “The male

artist is man and woman simultaneously: for this reason, he does not need a “Frau”

[woman/ wife]. The female artist is never a complete artist.”498

To the men of De Stijl, the world was divided between inferior feminine and

superior masculine principles. The feminine stood for everything weak, sentimental,

unclear, individual, and physical. In contrast, the male principle was characterized as

strong, fresh, pure, hard, spiritual, universal, and abstract.499 Within this gendered

hierarchy “natural representation” (natürlichen Abbildung), in all of its manifestations,

was considered feminine, and inferior to pure masculine abstraction. Perhaps even

more damaging than the conceptually anchored sexism of the European avant-garde was Brugman’s rejection by the most influential member of the De Stijl movement, Theo van Doesburg, who actively aimed to destroy her career. In 1924 he wrote to the Dutch architect J.J.P. Oud:

496 Everard, “Patchamatac,” 84. 497 Everard, “Patchamatac,” 84; See also, Christina Ujma, “Masculine Territories? Women and the Theories of the Avant-Garde,” in Practicing Modernity: Female Creativity in the Weimar Republic, Christiane Schönfeld, ed. (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2006), 21. “The avant-garde concept is to blame for the misogynist culture in high arts during the Weimar Republic, something that has been repeatedly pointed out by feminist critics;” See also Whitney Chadwick, Women, Art, and Society, 3rd Ed., 262. “Futurist attitudes towards feminism were deeply compromised from the beginning by their cult of virility, and are exemplified in this excerpt from their manifesto: We want to glorify war the only cleansing act of the world . . . and the contempt of women . . . We want to destroy museums . . . and combat moralism, feminism and all such opportunistic and utilitarian acts of cowardice.” 498 Everard, “Patchamatac,” 84; 95n5. Everard cites an excerpt from Mondrian’s sketchbook, printed in Robert P. Welsh and J. M. Joosten, eds., Two Mondrian Sketchbooks 1912-1914 (Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, 1969), 34. 499 Everard, “Patchamamtac,” 84.

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In Den Haag there lives a little monster that says it’s homosexual-but it’s as womanly as a young wet-nurse. Its name is Brugman and has the habit of daily rubbing me with Dirt, Shit and perfumed sperm. It writes volumes about crowing roosters, and turning mountains-Trouble! Her trash-verse has no place in De Stijl.500

Van Doesburg’s scathing attack of Brugman was more than an expression of

antipathy. His dehumanization of Brugman and his characterization of her as a monster

(Ungetüm) suggest that he was overwhelmed and frightened by her. One wonders what compelled him to refer to her repeatedly as a gender-neutral and non-human ‘it,’ yet

ascribe her extraordinary physical capabilities. In van Doesburg’s words, Brugman is a

hermaphroditic being, who is able to nurse children and wield perfumed sperm. These

comments suggest that with regard to Brugman, van Doesburg had encountered his

perceptual and imaginative limits.

Theo van Doesburg has been described as “the dominant personality in the [De

Stijl] movement.”501 As George Heard Hamilton writes, he, together with J.J.P. Oud and

Jan Wils, determined the formal vocabulary of the De Stijl movement.502 Furthermore,

Hamilton contends, van Doesburg’s “powers of persuasion made him an irresistible

500 “In Den Haag wohnt ein kleines Ungetüm, das vorgibt, homosexuell zu sein, doch die so weiblich ist al seine frischgeborene Amme, es heist Brugman. Es macht es sich zur täglichen Gewohnheit, mich mit Dreck, Scheisse und parfümierten Spermatozoen einzuschmieren. Es schreibt Bände über krähende Hähne und kreissende Berge-Zank. Ihre Schundverse fanden kein Platz in De Stijl.” Cited in Everard, “Patchamatac,” 86; 95n6., Theo van Doesburg an den Architecten und Stijl-Mitarbeiter J.J.P. Oud (1890-1963) from Nov. 11, 1924. The letter is cited in Evert van Straaten, ed., Theo van Doesburg 1883- 1931: een documentaire op de basis van material uit de schenking Van Moorsel (‘s-Gravenhage: Staatsuitgeverij, 1983), 128. See also, Dech, “Til Brugmann oder Eine Liebe in Holland,” 53-54. 501 George Heard Hamilton, Painting and Sculpture in Europe, 1880-1940 (New Haven; Yale University Press, 1993), 322. 502 Hamilton, 321.

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proselytizer.”503 His rejection and openly expressed hatred for Brugman, coupled with his influence, most likely had an adverse effect on her career.

Van Doesburg’s characterization of Brugman was not only hateful, but an

inaccurate account of her sensibilities; she was in no way a proponent of hyperbolized

materiality, nor did her work reflect an exaggerated engagement with the feared and

hated ‘feminine’ principle. On the contrary, Brugman actively supported avant-garde literature, art, design, and architecture and championed and collected the work of her colleagues. In 1923, her friend, Kurt Schwitters dedicated a sculptural relief to Brugman and gave it to her.504 Everard notes that Brugman’s unfinished novel, Rood, Geel, Blauw

(Red, Yellow, Blue), references a 1922 Mondrian composition of the same name which

she owned.505 Brugman commissioned the Hungarian artist and co-founder of De Stijl,

Vilmos Huszár to create a color-scheme for her Haag apartment and her good friend,

architect Gerrit Rietveld, to design its furniture.506

Slob’s and Brandt’s observations regarding the sexism of male avant-garde

‘leaders’ echo Dech’s claim that van Doesburg’s “negative commentary” about Brugman

“is representative of the deep-seated defensiveness–even among the most progressive

male artists--against women like Til Brugman who do not fit in any traditional role,”

503 Hamilton, 322. 504 Everard, “Patchamatac,” 84, Schwitters relief is inscribed, “Für Tilly” 505 Everard, “Patchamatc,” 96n17. 506 Everard, “Patchamatac,” 84; See also, Museumspublicity.com, “Rijksmuseum acquires 20th- century Masterpieces- White Chair by Rietveld and Reliefs by Schoonhoven,” (31 Aug., 2010). Brugman commissioned the chair in the spring of 1923 from Rietveld. It was intended for her girlfriend Siena Masthoff’s music room located in their shared apartment on the Ligusterstraat 20. Brugman, who died penniless, sold the chair shortly before her death to an unknown buyer in 1958. The chair was sold in a Christie’s Amsterdam auction to Leigh Keno of American Antiques in 2007 for 264,000 Euros. Through expert Marcel Bouwer, the chair was resold for an undisclosed sum to the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum in October, 2010. The chair will be placed on permanent display at the new Rijksmuseum in 2013.

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even those ascribed to the “modern woman.”507 As Dech convincingly argues,

Brugman’s “extreme intelligence, her genius for language, her talent to make light of

everything, and the biting wit, from which no one was secure, deeply upset men.”508

Brugman was “economically, financially, and sexually independent” from men; but, it

was above all her sexual independence that “made her into a female monster.”509

Brugman, as Everard observes, “was confronted with a group of bachelors (Jungesellen)

in whose world there was no room for a homosexual woman.”510

Brugman, however, was also “difficult to define;” her “outfit offered few signals

that pointed to her lesbianism; tie and vest, cigarette, flat shoes-but no monocle; no

self-conscious attitude of otherness.”511 Contemporary photos of Brugman bear out

Dech’s claim and alternately depict her in feminine attire or in masculine garb. Til

Brugman’s lesbian identification is, however, unmistakably evident in an undated mid-

1920s photograph (fig. 4.2). In the photograph, the crop-haired Brugman is dressed in male attire and holding a cigarette. By contemporary standards, Brugman’s hair and

clothing would have automatically defined her as a lesbian transvestite, while her

cigarette would have defined her as a New Woman. Brugman’s dress and demeanor

conspicuously reflect that of Charlotte ‘Lotte’ Hahm (fig. 4.3), a social activist and

president of the Berlin lesbian bar and social club, Damenklub Violetta (Violetta Ladies

507 Dech, “Til Brugman oder Eine Liebe,” 54. 508 Dech, “Til Brugman oder Eine Liebe,” 54. 509 Dech, “Til Brugmanoder Eine Liebe,” 54, emphasis Dech. 510 Everard, “Patchamatac,” 84. 511 Dech, “Til Brugman oder Eine Liebe,” 54.

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Club).512 The striking similarity between the two photographs indicates that by the mid

1920s, Brugman, like Hahm, clearly identified as a virile lesbian.

The professional difficulties Brugman faced within the male-dominated and

sexist avant-garde community were somewhat hidden by her brilliance and creative

versatility. Brugman’s biography suggests that her talent and flexibility allowed her to

remain productive despite adverse circumstances. When faced with difficulties, she took

up work in another country, another language, or in another genre. Importantly,

Brugman’s decade with Höch represents a period of sustained literary production and

professional success for both partners.

Hannah Höch and Til Brugman: A Lesbian Couple

Höch and Brugman lived openly as lesbians and were acknowledged as a couple

by a wide circle of shared personal and professional acquaintances (fig. 4.4).513 During

their years together, correspondence sent to Höch’s Berlin Atelier was generally addressed to them both. A 1926 postcard from their mutual friend Kurt Schwitters jointly addresses Hannah and Til, but also playfully reconfigures their names. Schwitters wrote, “Liebe Hannah, liebe Tillit, liebe Hanlit, liebe Tilhan, liebe Höchmann, liebe

Brug.”514 The reconfiguration of their names is not unlike Höch’s photomontages or

Brugman’s signature medium the grotesque wherein fragments are joined to create

new, and, as yet, unrepresentable identities.

512 The photograph of Halm (1890-1967) appeared in the Damenklub Violetta advertisement/announcement in Frauenliebe (Women’s Love) no. 49 (1927): 12. 513 Höch’s longest intimate relationship was her ten year partnership with Brugman. Everard, “Patchamatac,” 95n8. Everard disputes the Höch literature that generally dates them as a couple from 1926-1935. Instead she cites Höch’s 1936 journal entry, “4. May, Til leaves. Matthies moves in.” 514 Hannah Höch Archiv, Berlinische Galerie, 26.25. The postcard is also signed by the Dresden art-collector Ida Bienert.

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Lavin comments that no written evidence exists to confirm that Höch “identified

as a lesbian” or that either partner was “active in homosexual organizations.”515 I would,

however, qualify these remarks by suggesting that ‘identifying’ as a lesbian in Weimar

Germany was expressed somewhat differently than it is commonly today in the form of

declarations and the ‘coming-out’ process. It must also be noted that at the time, “for

bourgeois women, sexuality was generally a taboo and embarrassing theme.”516 Despite

this, Höch’s papers reveal that she was comfortable with her sexuality, and was socially

acquainted with two contemporary openly lesbian cultural luminaries. While in Paris in

1925, Höch spent “a very nice day” visiting art exhibitions with modernist doyenne and

publisher of the avant-garde literary magazine The Little Review, Jane Heap.517 In 1932,

in the midst of escalating sanctions against homosexuals and Jews, Höch corresponded

with German-Jewish lesbian journalist, and quintessential Weimar New Woman immortalized in Otto Dix’s 1926 portrait, Sylvia von Harden (1894-1964). Höch and von

Harden met in late August in the artist’s Berlin studio.518 It should also be mentioned

here, that in Holland after World War II, Brugman actively participated in organized gay

and lesbian politics.519

515 Maud Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife: The Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 188. “[O]utside a small circle, Höch apparently had no public identity as a lesbian.” 516 Christiane Leidinger, Keine Töchter aus gutem Haus: Johanna Elbertskirchen, 1864-1943 (Konstanz: UVK Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, 2008), 10; “Für bürgerliche Frauen war Sexualität zunaechst generell ein unaussprechliches, gerade zu peinliches Thema.” 517 HH Archiv BG, 25.51, Reisetagebuch England-Frankreich, 1925, See also Hannah Höch: eine Lebenscollage, vol. 2.2, Dokumente, 233, “Netter Tag mit ihr…” 518 HH Archiv BG, 32.19; See also, Hannah Höch: eine Lebenscollage, vol. 2.2, 458. 519 Marleen Slob, Die mensen, 59-60. Brugman was involved with the Dutch Humanistisch Verbond (Humantarian Union) between 1946 and 1953. She published a lesbian-themed short story “Voll Gnade” (Full of Grace) in 1949 and in 1953 read excerpts from her novel Spanningen (Tensions) at a special evening organized for lesbian women.

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Höch’s biographer Heinz Ohff comments that Höch “never denied the sensual nature” of her relationship with Brugman.520 Ohff, however, does not attribute this to the artist’s emotional commitment or love for her partner. Instead, he somewhat cynically regards Höch’s lesbianism as an indication of her desire to “experience all that life had to offer,” and emblematic for her need “to escape the confines of petit- bourgeois morality.”521 It was this, Ohff claims, which motivated her to “consciously

lead an unconventional life.”522 Symptomatic of Ohff’s homophobia and antipathy for

Brugman is his exclusion of the writer from a short Höch biography in a catalogue he

authored in 1978.523 Despite the fact that Höch’s liaison with married Hausmann lasted

seven years while the artist lived in a domestic partnership with Brugman for ten, Ohff

includes Hausmann and excludes Brugman from her biography. Höch’s own words,

however, eloquently overturn Ohff’s cynical dismissal of Brugman. In a previously

mentioned 1926 letter to her sister, Höch wrote, “I am and will be very happy with Til,

we will be a model of how two women can form a single rich and balanced life. Each day

I find out new and wonderful things about Til that enrich me and allow me to see life in

a new light.”524 In the same letter, Höch related how emotionally isolated she felt

before she met Brugman, and that she had “given up” on ever having another

relationship but that “Now, all the gates have been thrown open and I stroll happily

520 Ohff, “Holland,” in Hannah Höch: eine Lebenscollage, Band II, vol. 1, 1921-1945 (Berlinische Galerie, Berlin, 1995), 262. 521 Ohff, “Holland,” in HH: eine Lebensollage, 262 522 Ohff, “Holland,” in HH: Lebenscollage, BG, 262. 523 Heinz Ohff, Hannah Höch: ein Leben mit der Pflanzen (Gelsenkirchen: Gemeinde Museum Gelsenkirchen, 1978). 524 This, and the following quotes in this paragraph are from Höch’s October 14, 1926 letter to her sister Grete. Höch Nachlass, Murnau, cited in Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 188-89; 241n17. 158

outside of myself.” The artist described her experience of lesbian intimacy as

“something totally new,” yet familiar, and discretely characterized her new partnership as a “private love relationship.”

In 1929, the couple, based in Brugman’s Haag apartment from late 1926, set up residence in Höch’s Berlin studio. While in Holland, Höch enjoyed professional success and her work was the subject of critical discussion.525 She participated in the Haag

Onafhankelijken (Independent Group) exhibition of 1928 and 1929.526 In May 1929, with

Brugman’s help, a traveling solo exhibition of Höch’s work was launched at the Galerie

de Bron in Den Haag. The show went on to Rotterdam, and had its last station in

Amsterdam in mid-October.527 In contrast, Til Brugman was not successful in her native

Holland.528 Ohff contends that the couple’s move to Berlin was primarily motivated by

Brugman’s search for a publisher.529 Höch, he argues, was probably “less enthusiastic” about returning to Berlin because she had failed to maintain contacts with her

colleagues and art dealers during her absence. In addition, the political atmosphere in

Germany had taken a turn for the worse. Even later, Holland would continue to be a

positive place for Höch; in 1934 and 1935, just as she was coming under the threat of a

525 Ohff, “Holland,” in Hannah Höch: eine Lebenscollage, Band II, vol. 1, 1921-1945 (Berlin: Berlinische Galerie, 1995), 267. 526 Ohff, “Holland,” in Hannah Höch: eine Lebenscollage, 270. Ohff comments that Höch must have been very proud of her membership in this group: even in old age, she never failed to include these exhibitions in her resumé. 527 Everard, “Patchamatac,” 88. Brugman was influential in landing Höch these exhibition opportunities. She was friends with Galerie De Bron owner Ditte van der Vies, and Ditte’s intimate partner and permanently represented gallery artist, Chris Lebeau (who painted a portrait of Höch in the early 1930s). For exhibition dates, see Ohff, “Holland,” 271-73. The Den Haag exhibition was from May 11 through June 7, 1929. The exhibition was then moved to Rotterdam (exact dates unknown) and had its last station from September 28 through October 18 in Amsterdam. 528 Höch was a member of the Group Onafhankelijken (Independents) 529 Ohff, “Holland,” in Hannah Höch: eine Lebenscollage, 274.

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Nazi Berufsverbot in Berlin (a police order that forbade her to create art), she had an

exhibition in Den Haag.530

Höch announced the couple’s 1929 return to Berlin with a small linocut which

portrays the two women entering the door of her Büsingstrasse 16 Atelier (fig. 4.5).

Much like the Russian Dancer and English Dancer, the two figures are depicted in

contrasting colors. Both figures sport the Bubikopf (Boy’s-head) hairstyle, which, by contemporary standards, defined them as emancipated New Women. In contrast to her partner, Höch portrays herself as feminine with sender pink limbs. The torso, a cylinder adorned with two small breasts, underscores her Weiblichkeit (femininity). Höch depicts herself wearing a black and red fringed dress, a color combination that (among Weimar

lesbians) defined her as worldly and sensual.531 Positioned above Til, Hannah appears to

be leading her partner by the elbow into the door of their new home. In contrast to

Höch’s lithe and animated figure, Til is represented as a bulky and slow moving blue

cube. Carrying a small travel bag, Brugman clutches a cane under her arm: a standard accessory among virile lesbians.

Repression and Censorship

Before Höch’s and Brugman’s artistic collaboration are discussed further, developments that significantly influenced the cultural situation of late Weimar must be addressed. Between 1928 and 1932, the National Socialist (NS, or Nazi) Party transformed itself from an insurgent fringe group into Germany's most potent political

530 Ohff, “Holland,” in Hannah Höch: eine Lebenscollage, 274. The exhibition was at the Galerie d’Audretsch. 531 Schader, Virile, Vamps, und wilde Veilchen: Sexualität, Begehren, und Erotik in den Zeitschriften homosexueller Frauen im Berlin der 1920er Jahren (Königstein: Helmer, 2007), 109.

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force.532 While the repressive cultural policies of Nazi Germany are legion, it is worth

pointing out that the roots of these activities can be traced to the late 1920s when

history conspired to generate an atmosphere conducive to political dictatorship. The

impact of the international economic collapse of 1929 was perhaps the most important

single factor to propel Germany’s dramatic shift away from democracy.533

In a wild admixture of irrational arguments that spoke to a spectrum of political

allegiances and crosscut seemingly unrelated issues of race, politics, and culture, Nazi

rhetoric conflated racial degeneracy, the threat of socialism and the artistic avant-garde.

As Alan Steinweis explains:

Conflict between tradition and experimentation on the artistic scene reflected the profound social and ideological cleavages of Weimar Germany. The efflorescence of artistic modernism after World War I had coincided with a profound shake-up of the social relationships and economic structures that had prevailed before the war. Thus, to many Germans, artistic modernism exacerbated a more fundamental disorientation. . . They believed that Germany had lost its traditional bearings, and that the new art functioned as a . . . corrosive force.534

Nazi propagandists claimed that the threat to German culture emanated “from a

network of racially, spiritually, and even financially interconnected artistic and cultural

movements, led by Jews and Marxists, promoted by feminists, and most conspicuously

symbolized by the increasing visibility of Negroes on the art scene.”535 Exacerbated by the economic collapse of 1929, these, and other equally irrational Nazi arguments, grew louder and were soon reflected in mandated policies. While at first, the Nazis merely

532 Alan Steinweis, “Weimar Culture and the Rise of National Socialism: The Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur,” Central European History 24, no. 4 (1991): 402. 533 Steinweis, “Weimar Culture,” 404. 534 Steinweis, “Weimar Culture,” 404. 535 Steinweis, “Weimar Culture,” 404.

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belittled and mocked the artistic avant-garde, as their power grew, legal proceedings

and decrees increasingly limited the production and commerce of what they deemed

un-Aryan.536 As Steinweis relates, attacks on culture featured prominently in Nazi

propaganda “particularly in the latter, decisive phase of their rise to power in the

September 1930 Reichstag elections,” when the National Socialists gained an

overwhelming majority of seats in the German parliament.537 In what is best described as a landslide, after this fateful election, the number of NS representatives jumped from

12 to 107.538 This enabled the Nazis, from then on, to dominate and determine national

politics and policies. As a result, after 1930, those who produced cultural materials

deemed un-Aryan faced even greater problems.

These developments preceded Adolf Hitler’s appointment as German

Reichskanzler (Reichs-Chancellor) in late January 1933. NS officials sought to control all

aspects of cultural expression in Germany, and as history reveals, were nearly successful

in completely eradicating avant-garde artistic production there. Through a series of

progressively restrictive sanctions, artists who did not conform to Nazi-established

guidelines were denounced (practically synonymous with a Berufsverbot), and

ultimately humiliated as cultural Bolsheviks in the infamous Entarte Kunst (Degenerate

Art) exhibition of 1937. Awareness of this slowly, yet ever-growing climate of censure

and repression in late Weimar and early Nazi Germany is of no small significance in a

536 Mary-Margaret Goggin, “’Decent’ vs. ‘Degenerate” Art: The National Socialist Case,” Art Journal 50, no. 4 (Winter 1991): 84. While Nazi attacks on modern art and artists were more systematic after Hitler came to power, they had begun years earlier in Weimar and inspired court cases in 1928, 1929 and 1930. 537 Steinweis, “Weimar Culture,” 404. 538 Cara Schweitzer, Schrankenlose Freiheit für Hannah Höch: Das Leben einer Künstlerin, 1889- 1978 (Berlin: Osburg Verlag, 2011), 138.

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discussion that explores the radical and less radical aspects of Höch and Brugman’s

artistic collaboration.

In 1933, under the auspices of Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945), the

Reichskulturkammer (Ministry of Culture) instituted an Ankaufsverbot prohibiting the

purchase of non-Aryan and/or avant-garde artworks. In 1936, those who engaged in

unacceptable artistic practice were prohibited from painting through a Berufsverbot.

The Berufsverbot and the Ankaufsverbot rendered the production and/or purchase of

‘degenerate’ or ‘non-Aryan’ art illegal and punishable by law.539 Together, they made it

virtually impossible for avant-garde artists to survive in Nazi Germany.540

Shortly after Höch and Brugman returned to Berlin from Den Haag in 1929, Höch

found the art scene in Berlin had changed greatly. Much to her dismay, many of her earlier colleagues had been denounced. Later, she would say, “those of us who were remembered as Kulturbolschewisten (Cultural Bolsheviks) were all blacklisted and

watched by the Gestapo (secret police). Each of us avoided associating with his dearest

and oldest friends and associates for fear of involving them in further trouble.”541 While

many denounced artists were not specifically forbidden to work (like Höch), being

539 For a contemporary discussion of degenerate art, see, Wolfgang Willrich, Säuberung des Kunsttempels: Eine kunstpolitische Kampfschrift deutscher Kunst im Geiste nordischer Art (Munich: J.F. Lehmanns Verlag, 1937). 540 Schweitzer, Schrankenlose Freiheit, 343, writes, during the war, anyone who wanted to purchase art materials such as paint, canvas, brushes, or paper, had to present an official permit (Bezugsschein) issued from the Ministry of Culture (Reichskulturkammer) to merchants at the time of purchase. 541 Peter Boswell, “Hannah Höch: Through the Looking Glass,” in The Photomontages of Hannah Höch, Peter Boswell, Maria Makela, and Carolyn Lanchner (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1989), 16, 23n24,22n3, cites, Edouard Roditi, “Interview with Hannah Höch,” Arts 34, no. 4, (1959): 29.

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“mentioned in Willrich’s book implied a Berufsverbot.”542 Moreover, Höch, like others in a similar situation, “could anticipate that at any time police might unexpectedly arrive and search their studios.”543 Under these circumstances, it was practically impossible to find exhibition venues or sell work.544 Understandably, this compelled many artists to leave the city, and ultimately the country.545

Both professionally and personally, 1932 proved to be a challenging year for

Höch. An exhibition of her work at the Dessau Bauhaus was planned to run from 12 May to 10 June but cancelled due to adverse political developments. In January 1932, a year before Hitler officially came to power, members of the Nazi Party launched a concerted and sustained effort to close the Bauhaus. This must have been especially disappointing to Höch because plans for the exhibition were well underway.546 The contentious political situation surrounding steadily escalated; the Bauhaus was eventually searched

by the Gestapo and the institution’s doors were finally locked by Dessau police in April

1933.547

542 Antje Olivier and Sevgi Braun, “Die Sammling gehört in die Charité!, Hannah Höch: die einzige Frau unter den Berliner Dadaisten,” in Anpassung oder Verbot: Künstlerinnen und die 30er Jahre (Düsseldorf: droste, 1998), 100. 543 Olivier and Braun, “Die Sammlung,” 100. 544 The official list of degenerate artists was limited to individuals whose work was displayed in public museums. Höch, while not among them, is, however, mentioned in Wolfgang Willrich’s cultural Nazi polemic. See, Wolgang Willrich, Säuberung des Kusttempels: Eine politische Kamfschrift zur Gesundung deutscher Kunst im Geiste nordischer Art (Munich: J.F. Lehmanns Verlag, 1937), 42, 52, 168. Höch is listed as member of “Die rote Novembergruppe” and a fragment of her painting Roma (1925) is visible in a collage illustrating examples of non-Aryan art. See also, Heinz Ohff, Hannah Höch (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 1968), 7. “In Wolfgang Willrich’s Kampf-Fibel gegen die Kunst…wird sie ausdrücklich erwähnt.” 545 Marleen Slob, De mensen, 40-41. 546 HH Archiv BG, 32.32; Also see Ohff, “Die Ausstellungen,” Hannah Höch: eine Lebenscollage, 300. Höch sent 46 photomontages to Christoph Hertel, the exhibition organizer, from which to choose, and the posters and invitations to the exhibition had already been printed. 547 Ohff, “Die Ausstellungen,” in HH eine Lebenscollage, 304n6.

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In January 1932, the couples’ Büsingstrasse studio and domicile was ransacked and burglarized. Along with some jewelry, Höch’s Holland Journal, which contained intimate details regarding her relationship with Brugman, was also stolen. Höch reported the burglary to the police, but on 7 May 1932, the Berlin district attorney notified her that due to lack of evidence, they were abandoning the investigation.548

Although they could not prove it, Höch and Brugman were convinced that the break-in was politically motivated.549 This unsettling event prompted them to relocate in 1933 to

Rubenstrasse 66/3 in nearby Berlin Friedenau.

The oppressive cultural situation in late Weimar worsened dramatically after

January 1933. Yet, despite this, Höch and Brugman continued to create art and remained together as a couple until May 1936 (we must remind ourselves here that after February 1933, any expression of lesbianism or homosexuality was illegal and punishable by law). During these difficult years, the couple’s individual and joint projects attest to their sustained artistic production and active political resistance.

“Brave or foolish:” Höch hides Brugman’s Manuscripts

The ability to reconstruct Brugman’s oeuvre and the extent of her collaboration with Höch in the course of their relationship from 1926 to 1936 depends on the remaining literary and artistic work from this period as well as surviving correspondence. An undetermined portion of Til Brugman’s oeuvre is lost, but thanks to

548 HH Archive BG, pos. 32.8. 549 This information was conveyed to me in August 2009 and in March 2011 during conversations with Ralf Burmeister of the Berlinische Galerie.

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Höch, who hid Brugman’s manuscripts during the Nazi era, her literary production between 1926 and 1936 has survived.550

Brugman and Höch separated in May 1936, and while Brugman remained in

Berlin until the war forced her (and her new partner Dutch native ‘Hans’ Johanna

Mertineit) to return to Holland in 1939, she left a number of manuscripts behind with

Höch in their previously shared domicile. Höch left Berlin in 1939 and moved to

Heligensee, then a rural northern suburb of the city. The move helped her avoid scrutiny

by Nazi collaborators active in her urban neighborhood. The blurring of official [police]

and public civic duties that had begun in late Weimar became even more pronounced

after Hitler came to power. Sace Elder describes this slow development as a transition

from a “culture of mutual surveillance . . . to a culture of denunciation after 1933.”551

From her time as a Dadaist, and throughout the Weimar years, Höch had amassed a substantial and, after the Nazis came to power, illegal and dangerous

collection of avant-garde artistic materials. Later, as she stated, had these materials

been discovered by the Gestapo, they “would have been enough to send her and all

remaining Dada artists living in Germany to the gallows.”552 Years later, Höch would ask

herself how she “could have been so brave—or so foolish—to have stored all those

550 Maria Makela, “Grotesque Bodies: Weimar-Era Medicine and the Photomontages of Hannah Höch,” in Francis S. Connely, ed. Modern Art and the Grotesque (Cambridge: University of Cambridge, 2003), 218n41. A handwritten and typed list in the HH Archive at the Berlinische Galerie chronicles some ninety grotesques that were once in Höch’s possession. Everard writes, based on a handwritten list of Brugman titles composed by Höch (1927-1935, BG-HHA), there were 116 unpublished Brugman manuscripts in 1935; forty-six of these have survived (97n25). 551 Sace Elder, “Murder, Denunciation, and Criminal Policing in Weimar Berlin,” Journal of Contemporary History 41, 3 (2006): 402. 552 Adriani, Hannah Höch, 58.

166 incriminating materials.”553 During what she described as “those terrible years” (the

Nazi-era and war years), Höch hid them in the rafters of her house in an improvised

wood and tarpaper construction of her own making. Later, in 1945, when the Russian

army began to advance on Berlin, she packed her collection in metal containers and

buried them in her yard.554 Nosy neighbors reported suspicious nocturnal activity in her garden to the Gestapo.555 Höch was questioned by the police on a number of occasions and her house was searched, but they never discovered anything incriminating.

While scholars lament that much of Brugman’s oeuvre is lost, that which has survived offers evidence of reciprocal creative inspiration between the writer and her partner. Shared themes link Höch’s photomontages and drawings to Brugman’s manuscripts and a number of the artist’s collages might easily double as illustrations for

Brugman’s texts.556 Everard writes that between 1926 and 1936, when the two women lived together, Brugman’s influence on Höch’s work is unverkennbar (unmistakable).557

Furthermore, evidence supports claims of the couple’s ongoing, yet often non-specific

553 Adriani, Hannah Höch, 58. “Heute frage ich mich zuweilen, wie ich so mütig oder so töricht sein konnte, dieses Beweismaterial während all der schrecklichen Jahre in meinem Haus zu behalten. Der Schrank in dem ich meine Zeichnungen aufhebe, enthielt genug, um mich und alle in Deutschland lebenden früheren Dadaisten an den Galgen zu bringen. Von 1934 an begannen auch die meisten meiner Kollegen, ihre Spuren zu verwischen und dergleichen Erinnerungen an ihre Jugendsünden zu zerstören.” 554 Antje Olivier and Sevgi Braun, “’Die Sammlung gehört in die Charité!’: Hannah Höch, die einzige Frau unter den Berliner Dasdaisten,” in Anpassung oder Verbot: Künstlerinnen und die 30er Jahre (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1998), 77. 555 Adriani, 74, Höch buried them or lowered the boxes into a dry well. at night under nut trees or by lowering them into a dry well. This material included Brugman’s writings, diverse avant-garde magazines, invitations to exhibitions, and the art of fellow ‘degenerate’ artists including Kurt Schwitters, George Grosz, Raoul Hausmann and John Heartfield. 556 Everard, “Patchamatac,” 91, and Brandt, Vertippte Zebra, 160; See also, Ralf Burmeister, et al, Hannah Höch: Aller Anfang ist Dada (Berlin: Berlinische Galerie; Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag; Basel: Museum Tinguely, 2007), 208. The following drawings BG-G 6791/93, BG-G 6792/93, and BG-G 6793/93 (1930/1935) were intended as illustrations to Brugman’s grotesque, Die Javanerin. 557 Everard, “Patchamatac,”91.

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collaboration.558 In a 1930 letter, Brugman asked Höch, if she is “so inclined” to look

through her manuscripts and create illustrations for them: “If you’d like to pick out a

manuscript for illustrations, look inside the folder on top of the white cabinet.”559 In another letter, written two days later, Brugman’s excitement over their artistic collaboration is expressed in an almost manic burst of optimism:

In the mean time, rest and relax. When I get back, we’ll take up our work again! Energetic and bravely forward!!! Then we will send the whole world the ‘spit’ [Spuke] of our crazy creations (Everything the artist spits is art, Schwitters!). Then we will contact Flechtheim (make, or have photos made of your work!!!) then Nierendorf (photos also necessary!!!) then Dresden (also photos necessary!) then we will send manuscripts with drawings in every direction [in allen Windrichtungen], and everything else!!!! WE WILL MAKE IT WITHOUT A DOUBT!!!!!!”560

This, and other letters confirm, that the two women not only collaborated, but were

inspired by similar themes. Shortly before the couple separated in May 1936, in a

touching and desperate attempt to convince Höch not to end their relationship,

Brugman expressed the pain of losing someone who shared her artistic sensibilities. She

wrote, “Don’t we share that rare connection of a complete and perfect intellectual

union? Is not our work one and the same-Don’t our impressions move in the same

558 BG HH Archiv, Höch/Brugman correspondence, Folder III. In an undated love letter to Höch, Brugman wrote, “Für mich . . . sind deine Kritiken die wertvollsten . . . [und] deine Bilder die schönsten.” (To me, your critique of my work is the most valuable . . . and your pictures are the most beautiful.) 559 Brugman to Höch (Haarlem, 15/16. 7.1930); HHN, cited in Everard, 88; “Solltest du Lust haben, mal ein Manuskript für Zeichnungen vorzunehmen, dann such dir was aus meiner Mappe auf den weissen Schränkchen.” See also, Everard, “Patchamatac,” 96n18: “Erst kürzlich ist eine weitere Illustration von Höch zu einem Text von Brugman aufgetaucht: “Schlüssel-Blumen,” (um 1930, Collage und Tusche) in Hannah Höch: 100 Werke zum 100 Geburtstag. Galerie Remmert und Barth, Düsseldorf 1989, S. 4, Nr. 7. Der erste Brugman-Höchsche Koproduktion war übrigens keine Groteske, sondern eine Reiseerzählung. Siehe Til Brugman, “Von Hollands Blumenfeldern,” in Atlantis: Länder, Völker, Reisen 5 (1933): 429-32. Zeichnungen: Hannah Höch).” 560 Letter from Brugman to Höch, 17 July 1930, cited in Everard, “Patchmatac,” 88.

168 way?”561 Although Brugman could not persuade Höch to stay with her, her sustained influence upon the artist’s oeuvre is patently obvious. In a 1926 letter to Höch, Brugman wrote that she carried one of Höch’s letters in her pajama pocket, and read it every night before she went to sleep. Brugman named her Pyamatasche (pajama pocket) the happy imaginary land of Patchamatac.562 Almost twenty years later in 1945, Höch mentioned Patschamatak in her Bilderbuch (Picture-book), a place Brugman invented in

1926.563

Hannah Höch and Til Brugman: Joint Commercial Projects

Throughout their lives, both Höch and Brugman were compelled financially to work commercially. In addition to her meager income as a writer, Brugman supported herself and Höch as a journalist, translator and language teacher.564 At the time, Höch exhibited only occasionally and her training as a graphic artist generated her most lucrative income.565

The couple’s first known joint commercial project, “Von Hollands Blumenfelder”

(Holland’s Flower Fields), was published in 1933 in the German-language journal

Atlantis. Established in Leipzig in 1929, Atlantis promoted itself as a magazine for

561 Brugman letter to Höch (Berlin, 4. May, 1936) Hannah-Höch-Nachlass, Bachnang, Germany. “Haben wir nicht das so seltene Band einer vollkommenen geistige Gemeinschaft? Ist unser Arbeit nicht eine Einheit-geht unser Empfinden nicht über einer Spule?” 562 Letter cited in Everard, “Patchamatac,” 91; 96n20, Brugman to Höch (Den Haag, 12./13. Sept., 1926) Hannah-Höch-Nachlass, Bachnang. 563 Hannah Höch, Bilderbuch 1945 (Picture Book 1945) (Düsseldorf: Claasen-Verlag, 1985), 5. On page five, Höch introduces little Gamma and writes, “Im Patschamatak lebte sein Grossmama.” (His grandmother lived in Patschamatak.) 564 Bosch and Everard, “Til Brugman et Hannah Höch,” Lust + Gratie, 52. Brugman distributed de Stijl inspired business cards-apparently designed by Höch in 1928 and 1931-- promoting herself as a language teacher to business travelers and tourists. 565 Heinz Ohff, “Die Ausstellungen,” BG, Hannah Höch: eine Lebenscollage, vol. 2.1, 295-97. During the 1930s, Höch’s most profitable commissions were designing book jackets for her acquaintance, the Dutch publisher Anthony ‘Ton’ Bakels.

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Länder, Völker, und Reisen (Countries, Peoples, and Travel). The magazine reflected

Brugman and Höch’s cultural interests and complemented their nomadic lifestyle: Travel

was an integral part of their relationship from the beginning; Höch and Brugman met

while vacationing in Holland and immediately became travel partners.566 Höch would

later tell her biographer Heinz Ohff, “Til persuaded me to travel with her to Grenoble,

and we remained together for nine years.”567 It therefore comes as no surprise that the

couple’s first documented joint project was an illustrated travel essay.568

The couple’s love of travel is suggested in works Höch produced both before and after 1933, but is especially suggested in the previously mentioned 1926 photomontages Vagabonds (fig. 3.16) and Two Children above a City (3.17). The buoyant hand-holding and androgynously-clothed female couple levitating above an open road in Vagabonds indicates travel and probably “alludes to her new homosexual relationship with Brugman.”569 Like them, the Two Children above a City in the collage of the same

name giddily balance high above an urban landscape and literally have the world at their

feet.

“Von Hollands Blumenfeldern”

With a focus on distant lands and archeological sites, the editorial program of

the cultural magazine Atlantis contrasted with the xenophobic nationalism which, at the

566 Jula Dech, “Til Brugmann oder Eine Liebe in Holland,” in Sieben Blicke auf Hannah Höch (Hamburg: Edition Nautilus, 2002), 49. Höch’s friends Kurt and Helma Schwitters were staying at the summer home of the Hungarian painter Lajos d’Ebneth in Kijkduin near Scheveningen. Together with his compatriot friend, Vilmos Huszar, the two men formed a hub around which the Dutch avant-garde gathered. 567 Ohff, Hannah Höch (1968), 25. 568 Marleen Slob, De mensen, 35. During their years together, the couple visited Spain, Italy, France, Norway, Czechoslovakia, Austria and Switzerland. 569 Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 189.

170 time, was steadily escalating throughout much of contemporary interwar Europe.570

Höch’s illustrations for “Hollands Blumenfeldern” are simple, rather conventional line drawings. One is a sketchy rendition of a Dutch farmer (fig. 4.6), while the other is depicts a Tulip Field (fig. 4.7). The two ink drawings are akin to any number of pen and ink sketches that generally accompanied popular travel reportages in contemporary journals, and in no way allude to Höch’s signature collage style.571

First-person travel reportages became a common magazine rubric during the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries. A number of adventurous writers, many

of whom were women, marketed their first-person travel impressions to popular

journals.572 The travel-reportage resonated with the mid-nineteenth-century

570 Atlantis was unique among contemporary German publications. It did not reflect xenophobic nationalism nor did it engage with contemporary European politics. Instead articles in Atlantis explored distant lands and archeological themes. As a result, the magazine, unlike hundreds of others which were forced to conform to Nazi regulations or suspend publication during the war, remained in print. However, due to the threat of Allied bombing raids, Atlantis was compelled to move its headquarters from Berlin to Zürich in 1944. Atlantis was eventually consolidated into the Swiss cultural magazine, du, which is still in print. 571 It is likely that other contemporary Höch sketches with Dutch themes, such as Hollander (Dutch Man) (1926) and Zwei Kleine Holländerinnen (Two small Dutch Girls) (1927), both pictured in Herbert Remmert and Peter Barth, eds., Hannah Höch: Werke und Worte (Berlin: Fröhlich und Kaufmann, 1982), 46; may have been intended to complement or illustrate Brugman’s text “Kleine Existenzen in Amsterdam” (Modest Livelihoods in Amsterdam). Brugman’s “Kleine Existenzen” was among Höch’s papers and remained hidden until the artist’s death 1978. “Kleine Existenzen” is devoid of satire and reads as a conventional travel-reportage. Brandt dates “Kleine Existenzen” as contemporaneous with “Hollands Blumenfeldern.” Brandt notes that the manuscript is marked “Büsingstrasse,” the couples’ address from 1930-33 (208). See also, Til Brugman, “Kleine Existenzen in Amsterdam,” in Brandt, Vertippte Zebra, 82- 90. 572 From 1910 and throughout the 1930s, this genre was especially popular among creative independent women, a conspicuous number of whom were lesbians. Interestingly, these decades also coincide with the international beginnings of lesbian subculture. Arguably, travel reportage was in part inspired by the lesbian’s general cultural disenfranchisement, which compelled many women, including Höch and Brugman, to travel and explore alternate geographical and creative venues. Djuna Barnes, Janet Flanner, Vita Sackville-West, Ella Maillart, Erika Mann, and Annemarie Schwarzenbach are among those early twentieth-century lesbian writers who marketed their first-person travel accounts to popular journals. These decades also coincide with the wildly popular discourse centered on the related figure of the gypsy. The gypsies’ characteristic lack of permanent domicile suggests strong contemporary cultural links between travel reportage, the gypsy, and lesbian subculture. For a related discussion of the gypsy

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Baudelairean flâneur, a figure who celebrated the pleasures of observation and mobility closely associated with masculine social privilege. By the beginning of the new century,

however, women were increasingly free to circulate independently as travelers and

observers.573 Travel-reportage was particularly popular in Weimar,574 and the

contemporary cultural critic Siegfied Kracauer, who likened travel to dance, astutely

remarked that both activities represented an ersatz, which “compensates for those experiences denied us today.”575 Travel, he claimed, “is an experience based in reality

and the figure’s relationship to early twentieth-century lesbian expression and experience, see Kirstie Blair, “Gypsies and Lesbian Desire: Vita Sackville-West, Violet Trefusis, and Virginia Woolf,” Twentieth Century Literature 50, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 144-5. Blair astutely observes “the tantalizing presence of the gypsy as the antithesis of the familiar and entrapping in queer writing by women at the start of the twentieth century.” Gypsies, as Blair convincingly argues, “haunt texts about desire between women in this period.” Relatedly, Höch’s 1926 gypsy-like Vagabonds falls within these contemporaneously conflated discourses. Höch’s happy-go-lucky Vagabonds suggest gypsy-inspired travel as the antithesis to the entrapment of patriarchal bourgeois domesticity, which Blair describes above. Relatedly, while written somewhat later during the 1940s, Jane Bowles’ texts, which center upon her ardent pursuit of her elusive and exotic Moroccan lesbian love interest, Cherifa, fall within this general discourse. See, Carol Shloss, “Jane Bowles in Uninhabitable Places: Writing on Cultural Boundaries,” in A Tawdry Place of Salvation: The Art of Jane Bowles, Jennie Skerl, ed. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997), 112. Shloss claims that Bowles’ fiction mirrors, “with an almost uncanny exactness, the discomfort and estrangement that both Adorno and Kristeva posit as the prerequisite of human transformation. Indeed, they help us to identify her accomplishment as that of a cultural ‘vagabond,’ for without family, without regular work or customary residence, she writes always from an unhoused and transient position, confronting fixed contents as an unfixed and roving subject.” Schloss’ characterization of the “cultural Vagabond” as “unhoused, transient, and roving” strengthen the complementary early twentieth-century discourses described above that link travel writing, exotic environs, and lesbianism. Indeed, the theme of displacement continues to accompany lesbian and gay discourse. See, Cindy Patton and B. Sanchez- Eppler, eds., Queer Diasporas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000). 573 For a discussion of the relationship between women’s limited access to specific environs and its resultant effects upon their cultural contributions, see, Griselda Pollock, “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity,” in Vision and Difference, Femininity, Feminism, and the Histories of Art (London: Routledge, 1988), 50-90. 574 A quick glance through any Weimar-era issue of the most widely read German pictorial magazine Berliner Illustrierte will likely reveal a travel-reportage. Travel-reportages were generally written by ‘roving reporters’ and printed in serial form. They are generally illustrated with simple pen and ink sketches in a style much like Höch’s. The sketchy style of these drawings indicates rapid execution, imply spontaneity, and underscore the impression that the author/artist is ‘on the move.’ 575 Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 93, 233n.20, discusses the popularity of travel-reportages in popular Illustrierte, and cites Kracauer’s observations.

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that provides an illusionary double existence.”576 Certainly Höch and Brugman’s love of

travel explains the genre’s appeal to both women. However, as a closer examination of

Brugman’s “Blumenfeldern” and a related Höch illustration reveals, the narrative

suggests more than mere travel reportage.

“Blumenfeldern” portrays the Dutch tulip farmer as a respected figure who

embodies industriousness, and the text’s introduction explains this centuries-old Dutch

tradition. Stressing the aspect of family, Brugman claims that each tulip bulb, much like

a child, symbolically represents an entire lineage. “Every tulip bulb embodies the

knowledge and ability, the experiments, the disappointments, and the triumphs of an

entire family.”577 Yet Brugman’s emphasis on odd and increasingly strange details shifts

the tenor of the essay away from Dutch tulip farming into the realm of grotesque

metaphor.

Brugman relates how the tulip farmer Jansen’s reputation becomes the object of sensational village gossip when a single yellow bud mysteriously appears in his field of

red tulips. The yellow tulip is perceived as highly disruptive and a local scandal soon

ensues. Brugman writes, “It is unheard of that in a field of blue hyacinths, a single white

bloom, or a completely foreign species (artfremd) such as a tulip or daffodil would be

found in a strange bed!”578 At the time, and in consideration of contemporary

ethnographic discourse, varied flowers could have easily stood for diverse nationalites,

ethnicities, and races. Brugman wrote, “Since people can remember, only one type of

576 Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 233n.20, cites Kracauer, “Reise und Tanz,” (1925) in Das Ornament der Masse (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1963), 46. 577 Brugman, “Hollands Blumenfeldern,” 430. “Jede einzelne Zwiebel hier verkörpert das Wissen und Können, das probieren, die Enttäuschungen, die Triumphe eines ganzes Geschlechts.” 578 Brugman, “Hollands Blumenfeldern,” 431.

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flower may bloom in a field” and a mixed field such as this “would be totally

dishonorable and would disqualify the farmer’s entire family.”579 Indeed, neighboring

villagers immediately call the farmer’s character and soon his ancestry into question. On

the surface, Brugman’s satire lampoons the irrational yet dramatic social repercussions

inspired by one renegade tulip in a field of thousands, but on a deeper level, it may be

read as a critique of contemporary political and eugenic discourses.

For example, the gossiping villagers whisper, “Do you remember what happened

in Jansen’s grandfather’s field sixty years ago?”, and, “It must be some sort of inherited

weakness (erbliche Belastung).” Both their terms, and their anxious discussion of

Jansen’s ancestry clearly implicate eugenic discourse. Inherited weakness (erbliche

Belastung) was a ubiquitous and incendiary phrase in eugenic, and in the related, and

increasingly volatile, discourse of Rassenhygiene (racial hygiene).580 In 1931, even

before the Nazis had assumed total power, one of the leading German eugenicists Fritz

Lenz “at least half-seriously suggested that it would be better if the bottom one third of

the entire population did not reproduce.”581 Lenz’s remark reveals the discursive logic

that propelled Weimar disciples of racial hygiene to control human reproduction

579 Brugman, “Hollands Blumenfeldern,” 431. 580 See, Erwin Baur, Fritz Lenz, and Eugen Fischer, Menschliche Erblichkeitslehre and Rassenhygiene (Munich: J. F. Lehmann, 1927-31). 581 Sheila Faith Weiss, “The Race Hygiene Movement in Germany,” Osiris, 2nd Series, vol. 3 (1987): 230, 230n112. “Of all the various strategies and programs implemented by the Nazis in the interest of improving the racial substrate of the Reich, none reveals the continuity between pre- and post- 1933 race hygiene better than the sterilization law . . . Nazi law allowed the mandatory sterilization of those individuals who, in the opinion of an Erbgesundheitsgericht (genetics health court), were unfit for procreation.” Formally enacted on 14 July 1933, the Gesetz zur Verhütung erbkranken Nachwuchses (Law for the prevention of genetically diseased offspring) was based on a 1932 Prussian proposal. . . Unlike the failed Prussian proposal of 1932, however, the Nazi law allowed the mandatory sterilization of those individuals who, in the opinion of an Erbgesundheitsgericht (genetics health court), were unfit for procreation.” 174 through legal means.582 By 1933, the discourses of eugenics and racial hygiene became practically interchangeable and discussions regarding racial intermarriage, or

Rassenschande, would soon have juridical consequences with momentous results. In

1935, Nazi leaders mandated the Blutschutzgesetze, or Blood Purity Laws, which

officially determined and distinguished the Aryan from the non-Aryan.583 According to the Blood Purity Laws, Aryans were identified through ancestry; anyone with one non-

Aryan grandparent was considered racially mixed and, hence, impure and unfit for procreation.584 Grandchildren were classified according to their grandparent’s race, or

as in the case of Brugman’s tulip farmer, held ‘accountable’ for the ‘impurity’ of his grandfather’s field.

582 Weiss, “The Race Hygiene Movement in Germany,” 229. Those individuals deemed unfit were afflicted with, but not limited to, congenital feeblemindedness, schizophrenia, manic depressive insanity, genetic epilepsy, Huntington's chorea, genetic blindness, and genetic deafness. 583 Patricia Szobar, “Telling Stories in the Nazi Courts of Law: Race Defilement in Germany, 1933 to 1945,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 11, nos. 1/ 2 (January/ April, 2002): 144. The religious allegiance of the grandparents in Nazi racial protocol was central. As Szobar writes, “A full Jew was a person with at least three grandparents who adhered to the Jewish religion. Mischlinge (those of mixed- race) of the first degree were individuals with one Jewish parent, while Mischlinge of the second degree had one Jewish grandparent. The legal definition of an Aryan was the absence of Jewish blood. As numerous scholars have noted, this definition of Jewishness ultimately rested on the confessional allegiance of the grandparents, making a mockery of Nazi claims that Jewishness was a biological category unrelated to religion.” See also, Lothar Gruchmann, "Blutschutzgesetz und Justiz: Zu Entsehung und Auswirkung des Nürnberger Gesetzes vom 15. September 1935,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 31. Jahrg., 3 (Jul., 1983): 420, 420n9, Gruchmann writes, that in 1933, Grau, the Vice president of the Prussian Ministry of Justice, declared “Die Juden stellen ein ganz unerhörtes orientalisches Rassegemisch dar, das, wie Geschichte lehrt, überall, wo es hinkommt die Völker zu sich herunterzieht und die Rassen vernichtet." (The Jews represent an unmitigated oriental racial mixture and, as history instructs us, wherever they go, they pull people down to their level, and destroy the race). 584 Szobar, “Telling Stories,” 133. Under the Nazi regime “race defilement loomed large in the ideological and popular imagination.” On 15 September 1935, the Nürenberg Blutschutzgesetze (Blood Protection [Purity] Law) was enacted and forbade mixed marriages between Jews and non-Jews. The new law deemed a mixed marriage between a Jew and a non-Jew [“a person of German or related blood”] Rassenschande (racial-defilement); see also, Lothar Gruchmann, "Blutschutzgesetz und Justiz: Zu Entsehung und Auswirkung des Nürnberger Gesetzes vom 15. September 1935,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 31. Jahrg., 3 (Jul., 1983): 418-442.

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Brugman’s absurd tale of the negative repercussions generated by a single

yellow tulip in a red field of thousands can be understood as a satire of social uniformity

and conformity. However, within the context of contemporary eugenics, it may also be

understood as a veiled and potentially dangerous attack of Nazi ideals and, in particular,

the concept of racial purity.585 Brugman’s “Blumenfeldern” was published in April 1933

only months after the Nazis assumed complete control in Germany. Despite the political

relevance and uncanny prescience of Brugman’s “Blumenfeldern,” years would pass

before Jews were officially mandated to identify themselves in public with a yellow cloth

badge. Chillingly, Brugman presages this stigma with her description of the yellow tulip

as a “lonely, beautiful, and unfortunate flower (Unglücksblume).”586 In Nazi Germany,

the Jew, much like the disgraceful yellow tulip in Jansen’s field, had to be eradicated at

all costs. One evening, as Brugman writes, “Jansen waits until it is dark and sneaks out into the field and . . . angrily yanks the tulip out of the ground and grinds it to a pulp with one bare callused hand.”587

Brugman’s tale of a uniform field of thousands also calls to mind the

contemporary fascination with industrial rationalization. This fascination inspired

popular representations of people grouped and arranged in aesthetic visual patterns. In

1927, Kracauer dubbed this phenomenon “mass ornament,”588 a concept that fittingly

describes the tight precision and meticulous choreography of the mass rallies which

585 See Grau’s rhetoric in Gruchmann, “Blutschutzgesetze,” 420, 420n9. 586 Brugman,”Hollands Blumenfeldern,” 432. 587 Brugman, “Hollands Blumenfeldern,” 432. 588 Siegfried Kracauer, “Das Ornament der Masse,” Frankfurter Zeitung (9, 10. July, 1927). The essay originally appeared in nos. 420 and 423 of the Frankfurter Zeitung on 9 June (parts I-II) and 10 June (parts III-IV) 1927. Original publication information for Kracauer essays from Thomas Y. Levin, Siegfried Kracauer: Eine Bibliographie seiner Schriften (Marbach am Neckar: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, 1989).

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characterized, and, to a large extent, defined Nazi propaganda culture (fig. 4.8).

Comprised of thousands of identical red blooms organized in perfect rows, Brugman’s

tulip field suggests the crowd-filled stadiums of Nazi Parteitage (Party-days).589

Characterized by the Nazis as “grand celebrations,” political rallies were designed to

“demonstrate the insignificance of the individual” and to be “optically and rhetorically

overwhelming.”590 Such rallies were later immortalized by the photographer, filmmaker,

and Hitler-protégé, Leni Riefenstahl (1902-2003). Riefenstahl’s film and propaganda

tour-de-force Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will) was created in conjunction with

the Munich Olympic Games of 1936.

Nearly identical to the drawing published in 1933 with Brugman’s text, Höch’s

1927 drawing of a tulip field, Der Schandfleck im Tulpenbeet (The Disgraceful, or Defiling

Stain in the Tulip field) (fig. 4.9) may be described as conventional landscape.591 While

neither drawing demonstrates avant-garde artistic techniques nor alludes to Höch’s

critical sensibilities, the title of the 1927 drawing is odd and highly suggestive. It was not

only given a title (something Höch was generally and notoriously reluctant to do), but

includes the term Schandfleck (defiling stain), which unmistakably calls to mind eugenic

rhetoric and indicates a subtext of social criticism. The words of Höch’s title, Schandfleck

in Tulpenbeet, are repeated verbatim in Brugman’s text with the added, and, as German

589 A number of photographs depicting diverse Nazi rallies and parade formations are pictured in Udo Pini, Liebeskult und Liebeskitsch: Erotik im Dritten Reich (Munich: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1992). 590 Pini, Liebeskult und Liebeskitsch, 36. 591 Höch’s drawing Der Schandfleck im Tulpenbeet (1927) is pictured in Hannah Höch: Werke und Worte, Herbert Remmert and Peter Barth, eds. (Berlin: Frölich und Kaufmann, 1982), 47. The dimensions of this ink drawing are given as 213 x 202mm. According to my July 2011 correspondence with Herbert Remmert of Galerie Remmert und Barth, the present location of this drawing is unknown.

177 history has proven, weighted adjective “yellow:”592 the color of the cloth badge Jews were compelled to wear in Germany beginning in 1941.593 Comprised of the words

Schande (shame, scandal, and disgrace) and Fleck (stain, smudge), in Nazi Germany,

Schandfleck, and the related Schandung were practically synonymous with defilement,

rape, homosexual relations, or illicit intimacy between a Jew and a non-Jew.594 As

Patricia Szobar writes, “race defilement loomed large in the ideological and popular imagination.”595

However, despite the ease with which Höch’s Schandfleck may be linked to Nazi racial discourse, and the thinly-veiled subversive tenor of “Hollands Blumenfeldern,” the couple’s political intentions cannot be confirmed with certainty. When “Blumenfeldern” was published in 1933 readers probably regarded it a spoof; the editors of Atlantis

would not have sanctioned its publication otherwise. After the Nazis assumed power, all

592 Brugman, “Hollands Blumenfeldern,” 432. 593 Claudia Schoppman, “Flucht in den Untergrrund: zur Situation der jüdischen Bevölkerung in Deutschland 1941-1945,” in Nationalsozialismus und Geschlecht: Zur Politisierung und Ästhetisierung von Körper, Rasse, und Sexualität im Dritten Reich und nach 1945, Elke Frietsch and Christina Herkommer, eds. (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2009), 285. “Der Höhepunkt ihrere Stigmatisierung war mit der Polizeiverordnung vom 19. September 1941 erreicht, die die öffentliche Kennzeichnung aller Juden mit einem gelben Stern anwies.” See also Erwin J. Haeberle, “Swastika, Pink Triangle, and Yellow Star: The Destruction of Sexology and the Persecution of Homosexuals in Nazi Germany,” in The Journal of Sex Research 17, no. 3, “History and Sexuality” (Aug., 1981), 284. 594 See, Lothar Gruchmann, "Blutschutzgesetz und Justiz: Zu Entsehung und Auswirkung des Nürnberger Gesetzes vom 15. September 1935,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 31, year 3 (Jul., 1983): 418. See also, Szobar, “Telling Stories,” 132, “Once in power, Nazi Party members immediately began to appeal to the new regime to enact legislation criminalizing relations between ‘German’ women and Jews, suggesting that attempted contact should be punished by stripping the woman of her German citizenship and turning her over to the work camp, and by sterilization in cases of actual physical contact.” 595 Szobar, “Telling Stories,” 133. “Concerns about intermarriage and miscegenation were to become a central ideological obsession among National Socialists, who even before the demise of the Weimar Republic began to issue calls for measures to prevent the sexual contamination of Aryan women and the birth of ‘mixed race’ offspring. Indeed, fulminations against ‘race defilement’ and the sullying of ‘Aryan maidens’ featured prominently in Hitler's tract, Mein Kampf [1925-1926] and numerous other Nazi ideologists joined him in demanding an end to the mingling of races. Thus, in their 1931 convention, the organization of National Socialist physicians called for a prohibition on marriage between Jews and non- Jews (131).

178 publishers were compelled to conform to a rigid editorial program through a process known as Gleichschaltung (making-the-same) or face negative consequences which often included suspending or completely relinquishing control of their publications.596 In light of contemporary Nazi rhetoric and the imminent Blood Purity Laws, it is likely that

Brugman and Höch regarded “Blumenfeldern” as an opportunity to embed a political critique in an otherwise non-critical genre.

Artists and intellectuals in Nazi Germany shrewdly recognized that humor and parody were the safest ways to package political dissent.597 As a number of contemporaries later claimed, even under rigorous Nazi censorship, it was possible to cloak criticism in satire, a strategy infinitely less dangerous than a bold political statement.598 Brugman, a foreign national, was obviously aware of the potential dangers of political dissidence. Her intimate partner Höch would later recall the threat and fear she felt at being denounced as a cultural Bolshevik.599 Arguably, Brugman, an alien, and

596 For a discussion of Gleichschaltung see, Jan-Pieter Barbarian, Literaturpolitik im NS-Staat: von der Gleichschaltung bis zum Ruin (Frankfurt a. M: Fischer Taschenbuchverlag, 2010). 597 Erika Mann, Escape to Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1939). In her memoir, Mann (1905-1969) discusses the significance of parody and satire as a vibrant cultural vehicle in which it was possible to cloak resistance and critical political sentiments. Mann was driven out of Germany in 1933 and continued to tour with her cabaret Pfeffermühle (Peppermill) until it was finally halted by Nazi sympathizers in Switzerland. In a later interview, Mann stated that she had a loyal following of political resisters, and although she worked in the cabaret genre as an ‘entertainer,’ her audiences were well aware that her cabaret performances were anything but frivolous. 598 Wolfgang Brekle, Schriftsteller im antifaschistischen Widerstand 1933-1945 in Deutschland (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1985). After 1933, a culture of literary activism emerged in Germany. Writers who resisted fascist Nazi policies produced materials in a variety of forms. Flyers secretly produced on printing machines designed as children’s toys were posted in public by night on walls and billboards. Political newsletters that had to be read with a magnifying glass were secretly circulated in match boxes. Anyone discovered engaging with writing or distributing anti-Nazi materials was routinely jailed or sent to a concentration camp. 599 Boswell, “Hannah Höch: Through the Looking Glass,” in The Photomontages of Hannah Höch, 29. In a 1959 interview, Höch recalled that after 1929, she was forced to avoid her artistic colleagues and oldest friends for fear of implicating them as cultural Bolsheviks.

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a lesbian, was probably even less inclined than Höch, a German native, to voice social or

political criticism openly.600

While “Von Holland’s Blumenfeldern” was most probably motivated by financial

necessity, and published in a politically neutralized magazine, it provided Brugman and

Höch a vehicle through which they could criticize, albeit covertly, contemporary developments with a minimal fear of repercussions. Nonetheless, despite the sinister

political atmosphere in Germany, it is unlikely that either of them could have imagined

in 1933 that “Blumenfeldern” would subsequently resonate so darkly with actual

events. In contrast to the cloaked satire of “Hollands Flower Fields,” the critical tenor of

the couple’s 1935 collaboration, Scheingehacktes, is unmistakable.

Scheingehacktes

Published two years after Hitler was elected, Brugman’s 1935 short-story collection Scheingehacktes boldly expresses social and political criticism.601 At the time,

both its themes and the editorial independence of the book’s publisher equally

demonstrate a risky non-conformity and civil courage. Scheingehacktes is a nonsense

word created by Brugman that can be translated as “mock-ground-meat” or “appearing-

cut-up” and infers the unbridled sarcasm of Brugman’s preferred genre, the literary

600 Brekle, Schriftsteller im antifaschistischen Widerstand, 183-91. After Hitler was in power, a number of native born German writers and intellectuals wrote letters to government officials protesting the campaign against Jews. As early as 1905, the Protestant writer Ricarda Huch thematized anti-Semitism in her short story “Das Judengrab” (The Jewish Grave). Huch wrote a letter protesting anti-Semitism to Hitler himself in April 1933. After the war, she would appropriate Nazi rhetoric and refer to the years of Hitler dictatorship as “Jahren der Schande” (Years of Disgrace) and the “Reich der Hölle” (Reich of Hell). A foreign born national would have never attempted this sort of direct activism because he or she would have been either immediately jailed or deported. 601 Til Brugman, Scheingehacktes (Berlin: Verlag der Rabenpresse, 1935).

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grotesque. But, even more so, “cutting-up” significantly suggests Höch’s signature

photomontage medium.

Brugman’s “Scheingehacktes” explores the nonsensical socio-economic and

ecological implications of total vegetarianism. In the same volume, the short story

“Schaufensterhypnose” (Shop-Window-Hypnosis) addresses the economic and

psychological dangers of uncontrolled consumerism.602 As Lavin remarks, “both Höch

and Brugman shared a sophisticated critique of commodity culture, mixing explicit

humor and implicit irony with an anger at its manipulations.”603

The literary merit of Scheingehacktes and its publisher, Victor Otto Stomps,

owner of Berlin’s Rabenpresse, are cynically dismissed by Höch’s biographer Heinz Ohff,

who describes Stomp as “a helper’s-helper of all unrecognized geniuses.”604 Ohff’s

brusque dismissal of Brugman and her publisher has dissuaded scholars from fully

exploring this collaborative project.605 Yet further investigation of Stomps, as well as

Brugman’s volume, reveals that both are worthy of analysis and offer insight into artists’

books as well as Brugman’s and Höch’s collaborations. Stomps founded his small

publishing company, the Rabenpresse, in 1926 and promoted the work of ‘young’

authors.606 As Cara Schweitzer writes, Stomps experimented with different papers and

602 Til Brugman, “Schaufensterhypnose,” in Scheingehacktes (Berlin: Verlag der Rabenpresse. 1935), 20-31, 603 Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 140. 604 Heinz Ohff, Hannah Höch (Berlin: Gebrüder Mann, 1980), 20. 605 An exception to this is Schweitzer, Schrankenlose Freiheit, 190. Schweitzer acknowledges Stomp’s (1897-1970), unique contribution to Berlin publishing, and newly suggests symbolic correlations between Brugman’s Scheingehacktes and Höch’s photomontage oeuvre. 606 Schweitzer, Schrankenlose Freiheit, 190. In German, the adjective ‘young’ when applied to an author does not necessarily reference a writer’s age, but rather signifies something experimental or new. Brugman was 47 in 1935.

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typography and his publications were typically decorated with original prints and/or

hand-colored drawings.607 Despite financial and political difficulties, until the late 1930s,

Stomps did not conform to the strict conventions imposed upon publishers by the Nazis.

Unlike other contemporary publishers who were Gleichgeschaltet, Stomps allowed his

authors creative freedom. He was, however, finally forced to sell his business in 1937.608

Höch created three pen and ink illustrations for Scheingehacktes. The volume’s cover (fig. 4.10) features her pen and ink drawing of a cow’s head and the image appears later, somewhat enlarged, within the text.609 Schweitzer, who discusses Höch’s

hand-colored copy of Scheingehacktes (fig. 4.11), remarks that its decorations appear to

be “inspired by the playful linguistic nuances suggested by the book’s title.”610 However,

a copy of Scheingehacktes held in Den Haag’s Koninklijke Bibliotheek, which I have

examined, is not hand-colored or in any way decorated. Scheingehacktes was a small

printing of 150 copies and it can no longer be determined how many of them were

hand-colored, or if the artist only decorated her own personal copy. Furthermore, scholars have proven that Höch occasionally altered or later changed her work.611 Of

interest here, however, is how Höch’s hand-colored embellishments to the drawing

suggest the photomontage medium.

The segmented design Höch applied over the original cover illustration visually

mimics layered graphic elements and has much in common with the artist’s signature

607 Schweitzer, Schrankenlose Freiheit, 190. 608 Schweitzer, Schrankenlose Freiheit, 190. 609 Brugman, Scheingehacktes, (Berlin: Verlag der Rabenpresse, 1935), 9. 610 Schweitzer, Schrankenlose Freiheit, 191. 611 Joe Mills and Peter Boswell, “Dating the Dompteuse: Hannah Höch’s Reconfiguration of the Tamer,” Photo Review 26/27, no. 4/1 (2003/ 2004): 14-19.

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photomontage technique. As Schweitzer observes, the animal’s head “is divided into

colored-fields. The eyes and nose are enclosed with colored circles.”612 In this way, she

continues, “the artist separates the image into individual elements.” While Schweitzer

does not specifically reference photomontage in her discussion, her perceptive

observations regarding the compartmentalization of the image, and how it “reflects the

linguistic nuances of Brugman’s title” (i.e. cutting-up), nevertheless unmistakably links

Höch’s drawing to the photomontage medium.613

“Scheingehacktes”

In Brugman’s “Scheingehacktes,” the fifth commandment (Thou shalt not kill)

inspires a law that makes it illegal to kill for food. Vegetarianism spares animals from

slaughter, and they initially rejoice. Chickens are so happy that they lay twice as many

eggs, and cows produce double the amount of milk. Cow udders quickly evolve and

move to the center of their front legs to accommodate their sole function as milk producers. However, the ensuing overabundance of animals compels farmers to increase their crops in order to feed them. A drawing of two dwarfed figures walking between monstrously oversized cabbages (fig. 4.12) suggests the efforts of farmers to

create larger vegetables in order to accommodate the growing need for food. The

dramatically oversized cabbages also resonate with a 1927 statement in which Höch

expressed a desire to disrupt the convention of scale that regards man as the measure

of all things:

612 Schweitzer, Schrankenlose Freiheit, 192. 613 Schweitzer, Schrankenlose Freiheit, 191.

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I want to erase the boundaries that we humans have falsely erected around everything that surrounds us. . . I paint in order to give form to this idea. . . I want to demonstrate that small can be large, or large can be small. I will draw the world from the perspective of an ant, and tomorrow, from that of the moon.614

Eventually, in Brugman’s narrative, vegetarianism mutates into militancy, and, as a consequence, no living creature is permitted to eat vegetables. The volume’s cover

drawing depicts a cow chewing on a daisy and crying; the large tears rolling from the

animal’s eyes likely represent the cow’s reaction to the sad turn of events in the

narrative that banned it from eating grass and flowers. Nährpillen (food-pills) are

invented in the hope of alleviating hunger.615 However, shortly thereafter food pills are

deemed unlawful because they are comprised of organic matter. Vegetarian fanatics

discover that, with the help of technical instruments, the screams of organic compounds

and chemicals can be heard “just as well as the earlier cries of animals being

slaughtered;” “Even germs and bacteria want to live,” they argued.616 Before long, the rule not to kill is carried to such an extreme that sharpening a pencil or tearing a piece of paper is considered a moral transgression. Schweitzer comments that Brugman’s

614 Excerpt from catalogue Kunstzaal De Bron exhibition, Den Haag, 1927, later translated from Dutch into German and reprinted in Schweitzer, Schrankenlose Freiheit, 127. “lch mochte die festen Grenzen auswischen, die wir Menschen mit einer eigensinnigen Sicherheit um alles, was in unseren Bereich kam, gezogen haben. Ich male, um diesem Wunsch Form zu geben und ihn anschaulich zu machen. Ich will aufzeigen, dass klein auch gross sein kann und gross auch klein ist; allein der jeder Begriff Begriff seine Gultigkeit und all unsere menschlichen Gesetze verlieren ihre Gultigkeit. Ich wurde heute Standpunkt, von dem wir bei unserem Urteil ausgehen, muss anders gewahlt werden und sofort verliert die Welt aus der Sicht einer Ameise wiedergeben und morgen, so wie der Mond sie vielleicht sieht.” 615 Brugman’s “food-pills” resonate with the contemporary invention and commercial production of vitamin pills. See, Alfred C. Reed, “Vitamins and Food Deficiency Diseases,” Scientific Monthly 13, no. 1, (Jul., 1921): 70. The term “vitamins” was coined in 1911 by Casimir Funk (1884-1967). Funk’s study of vitamins was inspired by the earlier experiments of the Dutch physician, and 1929 Nobel-Prize recipient, Christian Eijkman (1858-1930). Brugman, a Dutch native, was likely aware of Eijkman’s experiments, who first published his findings in 1889. See also, J. Ernestine Becker, “The Vitamins,” The American Journal of Nursing 40, Issue 5 (May 1940): 507-14. 616 Brugman, Scheingehacktes (Berlin: Verlag der Rabenpresse, 1935), 16.

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satirical reference to writing implements is “difficult to ignore and unmistakably

references contemporary literary censorship under Nazi rule.”617

While the theme of vegetarianism is taken to a ridiculous extreme in

“Scheingehacktes,” the text also engages with the issue of sexism. Brugman satirically

comments on the unwritten directive that compels women to be physically attractive

and the constantly shifting, and perennially unattainable, nature of beauty standards. In

“Scheingehacktes,” because everyone is starving and underweight, corpulence becomes

newly fashionable.618 Brugman takes this opportunity to satirically opine on the causal

relationship between a woman’s physical attractiveness and her professional success; a

state of affairs similarly recognized by contemporary social critic Siegfried Kracauer, and

Weimar journalist Gabriele Tergit. As Tergit wrote, “Everywhere the smart pretty girls have a much easier time of it. The pretty girl sells more, the boss prefers to dictate his letters to a pretty girl, and people prefer to buy hats or take lessons from pretty girls.

It’s cruel, but that’s the way it is.”619 However, despite the unfair situation Tergit

describes, she perpetrates it by rounding off her remarks with a conciliatory and motivational suggestion to her readers: “Nowadays, pretty isn’t something you are, it’s

something you can become.”620

617 Schweitzer, Schrankenlose Freiheit, 191. 618 Brugman, “Scheingehacktes,” in Brandt, 102. Stomach-reduction surgery is considered as a possible solution to the problem of mass hunger, but is soon discarded because it is too expensive to be practicable on a large scale. Here, Brugman’s prescient fantasy anticipates what has become a routine twenty-first century medical procedure. 619 Mila Ganeva, Women in Weimar Fashion: Discourses and Display in German Culture, 1918- 1933 (Rochester: Camden House, 2008), 3-4. 620 Ingrid Sharp, “Gender Relations in Weimar Berlin,” in Schönefeld, Practicing Modernity, 3; 11n9. Cited in Jens Brüning, ed., Gabriele Tergit, Atem einer anderen Welt: Berliner Reportagen (Frankfurt a. M: Suhrkamp, 1994), 45-46. Translation Sharp.

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Like Kracauer and Tergit, Brugman acknowledged the contemporary correlation

between a woman’s beauty and her success, yet unlike them, her satire critiqued this

state of affairs. With sophisticated irony and anglicized jargon, she wrote, “Unattainable

obesity became synonymous with ‘sex appeal’ . . . and dominated literature and

dramaturgy.” According to Brugman, the success of these women was not merely

professional; their attractiveness also enabled them to enjoy the undivided attention of

men: “The fattest women in the world, although now as skinny as darning needles,

newly, or rather, once again, attracted the attention of countless bachelors.”621

Obviously Brugman, who was neither heterosexual nor particularly thin, was critically

commenting upon sexism and the pressure women commonly face to be, and remain, attractive. In her tongue-in- cheek satire, physical attractiveness not only guarantees

professional success, but also assures women the male attention they purportedly crave.

“Schaufensterhypose”

Brugman’s short story “Schaufensterhypnose” (Shop-Window-Hypnosis) focuses on the seductive appeal of mass merchandise and parodies the unfortunate chain of events that befall a man who must compulsively buy everything he sees.622 Brugman’s

protagonist “is overpowered by the volume of so many artfully crafted advertisements”

621 Brugman, “Scheingehacktes,” in Brandt, 102. “Die Schönheitsideal…dem unerreichbaren Volldicken Fettliebigkeit war identisch mit sex appeal…und beherrschte die Lyrik sowie das Drama.” 622 Brugman, “Schaufensterhypnose,” in Scheingehacktes (Berlin: Verlag der Rabenpresse, 1935), 20-31.

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and is helplessly driven to buy.623 Soon, he cannot sleep. Plagued by an insatiable desire

to acquire more and more, he claims,

It is fruitless to fight the department store! First, it is futile to fight against the temptation of displays, and secondly, the effects of the resulting hypnotism. Are department stores any less attractive if one is poor? On the contrary! They prey on the harmless and defenseless poor man, and turn him into a greedy craving beast.624

Eventually he buys so many things that he has to rent the apartment below his own to store them all. Soon his credit is ruined; the stores repossess nearly everything he purchased and his relatives step in and sell the rest.625 Despite this, he is still overcome

with a compulsion to buy, buy, buy, and, finally, must be incarcerated in an insane

asylum.

Höch’s pen and ink illustration for “Schaufensterhypnose” (fig. 4.13) depicts a

male figure among towers of mass-produced articles. His back turned to the viewer, the

small figure is dwarfed by the goods before him. Dumbstruck, he is apparently

“hypnotized” by the kaleidoscopic array of objects that surround him.

As the narratives in Scheingehacktes indicate, Brugman and Höch mutually

critiqued the perils of social and political conformity and consumerism. However, both

in individual and collaborative works, the couple was clearly at their vitriolic best when

engaging with gender, sexual exploitation, and the inequity of heterosexual

relationships.

623 Brugman, “Schaufensterhypnose,” (1935), 26. 624 Brugman, “Schaufensterhypnose,” (1935), 28. 625 Brugman, “Scheingehacktes,” in Scheingehacktes (Berlin: Rabenpresse, 1935), 31. Brugman’s dark humor surfaces when she writes, “Everything is gone!” all except an ebony coffin decorated with carved angel heads, which, my relatives “can’t sell because I’ve already laid in it,” and “I’m sure I will need it someday.”

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Weimar Sexism: Brugman’s female victims and Höch’s disturbed Brides

Til Brugman’s literary grotesques “Tempora lehren Mores” (Time teaches Mores)

(undated, 1920s) and “Himilia” (1927) explore fashion, beauty standards, and

rejuvenation from a female perspective.626 “Tempora” satirizes youth and beauty-

obsessed Weimar culture and the social pressure exerted upon women to remain youthful and attractive. “Tempora” parodies the fanciful claims made by the cosmetic and medical industries that promise eternal youth and beauty.627 In “Tempora,”

Brugman’s unhappy female protagonist wishes for nothing more than to be as attractive as the young women who garner her husband’s interest. To this end, she purchases a

Wundersalbe (miraculous salve) that guarantees results, but in her greed, smears a whole jar on her body at once. The salve is so powerful that within a day she is transformed into a fetus.

Analogous to Brugman’s satire, Höch’s critical engagement with sexism is expressed in her 1927 painting, Die Braut (Pandora) (The Bride [Pandora]) (fig. 4.14).

The painting, obviously modeled after a conventional wedding portrait, depicts a newly married couple. It is, however, radically disrupted by the giant head of the bride with the face of a wide-eyed toddler or baby doll.628 This suggests the fantastic rejuvenating

626 Til Brugman, “Tempora leren Mores,” Die Nieuwe Stern 4 (1949): 688-92, was published in 1949. Everard, however, in “Patchamatac,” 97n25, convincingly claims the text was most likely written during her years with Höch and certainly before 1935. Makela similarly notes, in “Grotesque Bodies,” 218n44, that she agrees with Everard’s dating of the text. 627 Makela, “Grotesque Bodies,” 218n44, notes that “Tempora leren Mores” was written in German, but initially published in a Dutch translation in De Nieuwe Stern 4 (1949): 669-88. Despite the publication date, both she and Everard date the text to the 1920s. 628 Maria Makela, “By Design,” in The Photomontages of Hannah Höch (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1989), 64, 76n87. This painting, Makela observes, is only one of four oil paintings the artist made using the principle of collage. Höch, Makela argues, apparently abandoned this artistic technique because

188 effects of the mitacle-salve described in Brugman’s “Tempora.” The substitution of a child’s head for that of an adult bride might also indicate the childlike naiveté of a young woman who has no idea what awaits her in marriage. In contrast to the stoic groom, the child-bride’s alienation and fear is evident in her wild and alarming stare. The mismatched couple is surrounded by winged symbols that suggest flight, sadness, and sorrow. Below them, a serpent encircles an apple implying the lost innocence of Adam and Eve. Above the couple, a floating heart is held down by a chain, and a single eye sheds a tear.

Brugman’s “Tempora” and Höch’s Bride similarly represent women as helpless and powerless in relation to their male partners and bourgeois tradition. Like

“Tempora,” Brugman’s 1927 “Himilia” explores heterosexual romance, the fashion and beauty industry, and their potentially disastrous effects upon women.629

Brugman’s “Himilia”

Brugman’s literary grotesque “Himilia” is a narrative about a young woman who is engaged to be married and automatically suggests Höch’s bride-themed works, such as Traum Seines Lebens (His Life’s Dream) (fig. 4.15); The Bride (Pandora); Bäuerliches

Brautpaar (Peasant Wedding Couple) (fig. 4.16); and Die Braut (The Bride) (1933) (fig.

4.17). While “Himilia” resonates with Höch’s shocking late Weimar brides, it also may be linked to her 1928 photomontage, English Dancer.

it made her feel “uneasy.” Unlike photomontage, she felt that greatly enlarging and transposing clippings of printed photos onto oil paintings was somehow “contrary to the rules.” 629 Til Brugman, “Himilia,” in Brandt, Vertippte Zebra, 141-50.

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“Himilia” revisits the theme of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s short story, “Der Sandmann”

(1816). In “Sandmann,” Hoffmann’s protagonist falls in love with the beautiful life-like

eyes of the automaton Olimpia. Brugman, however, reverses Hoffmann’s narrative and,

instead, tells the tale of a man who transforms his human bride into a beautiful

automaton. Marion Brandt convincingly claims that Hoffmann (and later Brugman) named Olimpia after the mountain of the gods to symbolically represent “the pinnacle of feeling.”630 Yet, unlike Hoffmann’s narrative in which the male protagonist falls to his

death, Brugman’s ends in a woman’s death. As a result of her partner’s pursuit of the

perfect woman, Himilia is literally operated to death

Brugman’s narrative satirizes the sexist-based exploitation of women, yet also

resonates with the theme of the mechanized bride, a popular motif among early

twentieth-century avant-garde artists. Brandt claims that this theme reflects the discursive engagement with industrial rationality and the social effects of industrialization at the time.631 Like her, Matthew Biro observes that mechanical brides

were an indication of “the mechanization of both love and sexuality as a result of the

modernization of everyday life.”632 In 1915, in the legendary avant-garde magazine 291,

Paul Haviland addressed the contemporaneous conflation of female sexuality and

mechanization:

Man made the machine in his own image. . . . The machine is his daughter born without a mother. That is why he loves her. He has made the machine superior

630 Brandt, Vertippte Zebra, 167-68, “das höchste der Gefühle,” 215n13. 631 Brandt, Vertippte Zebra, 167-68, 215n13. 632 Matthew Biro, “Berlin Dada,” in The Dada Cyborg: Visions of the New Human in Weimar Berlin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 42.

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to himself. That is why he admires her. . . After making the machine in his own image he has made his human ideal machinomorphic.”633

Haviland’s statement serves to link Brugman’s “Himilia” to the contemporary avant-

garde and works including Francis Picabia’s sparkplug girl, La jeune fille americaine dans

l’etat de la nudité (1915), and Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Striped Bare by her

Bachelors, Even (Large Glass) (1915-23).634

Like Brugman’s texts, Höch’s photomontages criticize heterosexual courtship and

marriage through the theme of the physically altered bride. “Hoch's commentary on

marriage,” as Lavin dryly remarks, “was acerbic throughout the Weimar years.”635 In her

1920 watercolor, Bürgerliches Brautpaar (Bourgeois Wedding Couple) (fig. 4.18), Höch’s

disdain for this institution is clear. Bourgeois Wedding Couple portrays a wedding couple

in front of a church in a cubist-inspired cityscape. The faceless groom stands arm-in-arm

with a headless dressmaker’s dummy. The bride and the groom lack individual agency,

yet the bride is obviously in a weaker position than her new husband; he lacks facial

features, yet retains his mobility, while the bride has neither head nor limbs. A small coffee grinder isolated in the foreground of Brautpaar curiously resonates with the perpetual grinder of Duchamp’s Large Glass, a work that similarly addresses themes of frustrated courtship and marriage. Höch’s dress-dummy bride also has much in common

633 Paul Haviland, in 291, no. 2 (February 1915) (unpaginated); Cited in Christine Moneera Laennac, “The Assembly-Line Love Goddess,” in Bodily Discursions: Genders, Representations, Technologies, Deborah S. Wilson and Christine Moneera Laennac, eds. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 83. 634 Gale, Dada and Surrealism, 87. Gale writes of this work, “Its central subject is the unconsummated passion of nine uniformed bachelors . . . for their ‘bachelor-machine’: the bride floating seductively above.” 635 Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 149.

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Man Ray’s Garderobe (Clothing-Stand) (1920) (fig. 4.19); both of these helpless figures

reference women’s cultural function as ‘fashion horses.’

In 1925, a year before she met Brugman, Höch revisited the theme of the bride in The Dream of his Life (fig. 4.15). In the photomontage, Hoch arranged multiple images of a fashionable, yet, by contemporary standards erotically suggestive, bride throughout a grid of overlapping frames that appear to entrap and truncate her body. Ironically,

even though her figure is brutally severed, the bride smiles sweetly, and this lends the

image a subtext of satire and anger.636

The bride-cum-dressmaker’s dummy in Höch’s 1920 Bourgeois Bride, and, to a greater degree, the dismembered bride trapped in a grid of bourgeois respectability in

Dream of his Life indicates that women relinquish individual agency when they marry.

Yet, while Höch’s critique of the institution of marriage and the subtext of satire is obvious in both bride-themed works, they are tame in comparison to the scathing, yet wickedly humorous visions of heterosexual coupling which were soon to follow.

Easily one of Höch’s funniest and shockingly grotesque visions of a heterosexual couple is her 1931 photomontage Bäuerliches Brautpaar (Peasant Wedding-couple) (fig.

4.16). Lavin regards Peasant Wedding Couple a companion piece to her earlier

Bourgeois Wedding Couple (4.18). In the “schematized farm landscape of cows and barn,” two disembodied arms hold a large milk canister.637 As Lavin remarks, the

Peasant Wedding Couple, comprised of a black man’s head floating above a pair of army boots, and his ‘wife,’ a woman with a gorilla face and blond braids, “carry racist

636 Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 149. 637 Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 149-51.

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overtones.”638 Makela reads the photomontage as a critique of the types “valorized by

Nazis” and its suggestion of “racial degeneracy” made “at the expense of people of

color.”639 Similarly Biro comments that this “disturbing” couple “lampoons the Nazis’

celebration of the racial purity of the blonde German peasant.”640 Like him, Weimar

scholar Eric D. Weitz claims, Peasant Wedding Couple “reinforces conventional racial

views.”641 Höch’s vision of unstable racial and gender identities and of mass society as

“multiracial and multiethnic,” he elaborates “was a powerful rejoinder to the racial

ideology that prevailed almost everywhere in the Western world of the 1930s.”642

Considered within this context, scholars understandably stress the image’s racist

overtones, yet none have ever considered it as a critique of heterosexuality. Höch

created Peasant Wedding Couple in 1931 while living in a lesbian partnership and the same year she produced Liebe, a positive image of lesbian sexual intimacy. This suggests that Peasant Wedding Couple may be more than a critique of Nazi racial ideology. It may also be an ironic commentary aimed at the fascist valorization of procreative heterosexuality (which at the time considered childbearing a patriotic act and rewarded mothers with medals).643 Viewed within this additional context, Peasant Wedding

Couple is wickedly, and politically, subversive.

638 Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 151. 639 Maria Makela, “The Interwar Period,” in The Photomontages of Hannah Höch (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1997), 120. 640 Biro, The Dada Cyborg, 308n142. 641 Eric D, Weitz, Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 290. 642 Weitz, Weimar Germany, 290-91. 643 Erwin J. Haeberle, “Swastika, Pink Triangle and Yellow Star: The Destruction of Sexology and the Persecution of Homosexuals in Nazi Germany,” The Journal of Sex Research 17, no. 3, History and Sexuality (Aug., 1981): 277-78. The Nazis embarked on a program of redefining the role of women along traditional lines. Massive propaganda efforts through Nazi organizations for women and teenage girls

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While Höch’s Peasant Wedding Couple depicts a male/female pair, her 1933

photomontage Die Braut (The Bride) (fig. 4.17) pictures the bride alone. Reduced to bust

size, the Bride’s unnaturally long reptilian neck supports a strained-looking, composite

bi-racial face. The stiff arc of her veil appears to weigh down her head and force it

backwards, making it one of Höch’s most disturbing bride-themed visions.

An examination of Höch’s Weimar era bride-themed works reveals that their anxious discomfort appears to increase each time she took up the theme. By 1927, a year after she met Brugman, the artist began to replace her pretty and stylishly docile brides with frightening medusa-like figures. Moreover, her disturbed and unsettling late

Weimar brides suggest Brugman’s grotesque female inventions. While no evidence irrefutably confirms that Höch’s bride-themed works inspired Brugman’s 1927 “Himilia,”

or, alternately, that Brugman’s text may have inspired Höch’s collages, the stiff arc

uncomfortably bending the neck of the artist’s 1933 Bride suggests Himilia’s “veil

billowing around her head like an Indian-headdress.”644

Höch’s English Dancer and “Himilia”

While Höch’s bride-themed works may be linked to Brugman’s “Himilia” it is

feasible that the English Dancer (1928) was a creative response or intended to illustrate

the 1927 text. As previously argued, the English Dancer comprises half of a lesbian

double portrait (the other half of which is Russian Dancer). Yet, a close examination of

cultivated an ideal image of old fashioned German womanhood. Mothers with many children received a government medal, the "German Mother's Cross of Honor," as a reward for their efforts on behalf of a rising birth rate. This policy reflected both a desire to outbreed the European "inferior races" and to provide soldiers for future Nazi conquests. 644 Brugman, “Himilia,” in Brandt, 149.

194 the English Dancer suggests an alternate additional reading: English Dancer may also be linked to Brugman’s “Himilia.”

“Himilia” is a proto-Stepford Wives scenario addressing the disastrous effects of sexism on a woman’s body.645 Motivated by a desire for a perfect wife, the nameless narrator orders his fiancée’s complete physical transformation and, in an effort to please him, she cheerfully agrees to a number of painful and fantastic ‘surgical’ procedures. These procedures, however, ultimately cause her death. The body of

Brugman’s unfortunate female protagonist Himilia is cut-up, reconfigured, and, much like a photomontage is reconstructed from fragments. Himilia’s body is an “over coded composite woman” who confounds corporeal wholeness and illustrates what Lora

Rempel characterizes as an “anti-body.”646 Both Brugman and Höch addressed the objectification and the commodification of women’s bodies and their critical

engagement with the theme clearly anticipated significant late twentieth-century

debates. Roughly fifty years would pass before the insidious relationship between

beauty standards and sexism would be examined by second-generation feminists.647

645 Til Brugman, “Himilia,” in Brandt, 141-50. The original manuscript dated “Holland 1927” was first published in 1945, as “Hemelia en het Woord,” Maanblad voor de nieuwe Niederlandes Letterkunde (Amsterdam 1945/46): 233-40; Ira Levin, The Stepford Wives (New York: Random House, 1972), the movie (1975) was directed by Bryan Forbes. 646 Lora Rempel, “The Anti-Body in Photomomtage: Hannah Höch’s Women without Wholeness,” in Sexual Artifice: Persons, Images, Politics, eds., Ann Kibbey, et al. (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 150. “The multitude of referential body parts…each loaded with its own message, overcodes and overkills the resulting pastiched composites…[and] invokes[s] an abstract, disembodied “sense” of a woman—an anti-body.” 647 Susan Orbach’s Fat is a Feminist Issue (London: Arrow Books, 1978) is generally recognized as launching a feminist-informed scholarship that examined how beauty standards are conflated with patriarchal oppression and control. The list of authors who have explored this theme is considerable, and beyond the scope of this paper. For an overview of related publications, see, Sylvia K. Blood, “References,” in Body Work: The Social Construction of Women’s Body Image (London: Routledge, 2005),

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Moreover, Weimar works such as theirs eerily presage grotesque aspects of twenty-first

century cosmetic surgery.

Much like Höch’s collage English Dancer, Himalia’s transformation begins with a

new set of eyes. Her new golden glass eyes, are, however, not as attractive as the

turquoise eyes in the window the couple discovers as they are leaving the glassmaker’s

Potsdamerplatz shop.648 But, after Himilia’s eyes are replaced with turquoise, her hair

no longer matches them. This occasions her future husband to have Himila’s hair

plucked from her head in a painful five-hour process. After Himilia’s hair is completely

removed, a gardener plants “charming flowers on her head that bloom every seven

years” and suggest the oversized blossoms that jut out of the English Dancer’s head.649

The quasi-medical procedures described in Brugman’s narrative were science fiction in 1927, and their improbability served to hyperbolize patently ridiculous details.

True to the grotesque literary genre, however, Brugman interweaves fantastic details with plausible elements. For example, she mentions the manufacturing concern Zeiss, then (as today) a respected German company. Its new product, however, the

“Kardiometra, a machine that controlled the rate of Himilia’s heartbeat,” is Brugman’s

invention.650 At the time, Brugman translated a number of medical texts and was

137-44; Deborah S. Wilson and Christine Moneera Laennac, “Bibliography,” Bodily Discursions: Genders, Representations, Technologies (Albany: New York State University of New York Press, 1997), 245-62. 648 Schader, Virile, Vamps, 174, 268n64, writes that lesbian scholars claim golden eyes (goldaügigkeit) were contemporaneously associated with lesbianism and may have been inspired by Honore de Balzac’s scandalous 1834 novel La fille aux yeux d’or. In the context of Brugman’s tale, it could be that Himilia had to relinquish her golden eyes, i.e. her lesbianism, in order to become the perfect heterosexual bride. See also, Hanna Hacker, Frauen und Freundinnen: Studien zur weiblichen Homosexualität am Beispeil Österreich, 1870-1938 (Weinheim: Beltz, 1987), 210. 649 Brandt, Vertippte Zebra, 143. Brugman describes them as “entzückendes alle sieben Jahren blühendes Gewachs auf ihrem Kopf.” 650 Til Brugman, “Himilia,” in Brandt, Vertippte Zebra, 145.

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perhaps inspired by this. Yet, the author’s surgical inventions also uncannily anticipate body-altering procedures which have long since become reality such as breast-implants,

cornea-replacements, pacemakers, open-heart, and stomach-reduction surgeries.

Brugman’s surgical cut-and-paste inventions also clearly reflect the physical

improbability of Höch’s grotesque photomontaged ‘bodies.’

During the course of the narrative, Himilia’s arms and legs are replaced with

wooden prosthetics. Lacquered pink, they are set in motion with electric switches. After

their wedding ceremony, Himilia’s husband attempts to adjust the frequency of his new

wife’s blinking eyelids, but throws the wrong switch and sets her legs in motion.

“Suddenly Himilia began to kick her legs dangerously high in a cannibalistic can-can.”651

Similar to Brugman’s Himilia, the English Dancer frenetically kicks her legs and her head

appears to tip helplessly. The bristling drapery that barely covers the English Dancer’s ankles suggests Himilia’s frenzy. Due to her wild movement, Himilia’s husband is unable to approach her, and her legs knock him unconscious. When he comes to, Himilia’s body has fallen apart. Reduced to a pile of wooden fragments, glass shards, a wax nose, rubber breasts and a prosthetic hand, much like Himilia, Höch’s English Dancer looks as if she too might, at any moment, fall into a heap of inchoate pieces.

The Fetishization of the Female Body in Weimar and Höch’s Marlene

In Weimar, the commodification of women, and the expectation that they be physically attractive, was endorsed and fueled by the popular media. Due to the

651 Brugman, “Himilia,” in Brandt, 149. “[D]enn plötzlich fing Himilia an die Beine gefährich hoch zu heben und einen kannabalistische Cancan zu tanzen.” This detail is uncannily similar to the fatal, out- of-control dancing of an automated woman featured in the 1975 movie The Stepford Wives.

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influence of advertising and fashion magazine culture “The New Woman was both a

commodity and a customer.”652 Even though Weimar advertising images were designed

to attract female customers, they were, as Lavin explains,

complex representations of . . . anxieties and desires . . . In beauty product ads . . . women often were addressed as "empowered" buyers, but only insofar as their consumer function . . . would enable them to construct themselves through makeup, hair-care items, and clothes as interchangeable products or commodities.653

Within their closely interrelated roles as consumer and commodity Weimar women

were alternately empowered and/or enslaved. Their power, or powerlessness, was

largely determined by their ability to purchase products that conformed to mass-

mediated concepts of feminine beauty and lured them with the promise of desirability.

Within such an environment it comes as no surprise that in Weimar, a woman’s

appearance went hand-in-hand with her marketability and success.654

Brugman’s inventory of individual body parts in “Himilia” critiques the unnatural

compartmentalization and symbolic fragmentation of women’s bodies and selves.

Arguably, the perception of a woman as a compilation of individual body parts objectifies her and results in subjective fragmentation and self-alienation. However, in

Weimar, media representations of women as isolated and interchangeable fragments

were ubiquitous. In her discussion of Weimar fashion photography, Mila Ganeva links

the representation of individual body parts in contemporary fashion imagery to the

cultural objectification of women. In her discussion of a fashion photograph she writes,

652 Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 2. Here, one is reminded of the Weimar journalist Gabriele Tergit who wrote, “Pretty is something you can become.” 653 Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 140-41. 654 Mila Ganeva, Women in Weimar Fashion: Discourses and Display in German Culture, 1918- 1933 (Rochester: Camden House, 2008), 3-4.

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the two legs “appear as mere objects and the photograph could be considered a still-

life.”655 The photographer’s “still-life representation of body fragments instead of organic wholeness . . . seems to invite female spectatorship to reflect critically upon a prevalent fetishization.”656 A cursory examination of Weimar periodicals bears out

Ganeva’s claims; women’s bodies are often reduced into fragments such as hands, legs,

feet, or faces.

A 1924 BIZ advertisement promoting a contest (fig. 4.20), for example, highlights

a woman’s legs and hands. Her legs are ogled by a line of seven men, themselves

fetishized and reduced to heads. Three of the men pictured wear monocles, amplifying

their status as gazing subjects.657 Moreover, the men appear to be looking up the

woman’s dress suggesting that, in addition to the advertised 2500 Rentenmark, she is

also part of the prize. The image is strikingly similar to one published by Hirschfeld in

1930 (fig. 4.21) appropriately labeled “Beinfetischismus” (Leg-fetishism). The montage

depicts monumentally-sized female legs sitting upon the façade of the Berliner Dom,

which is decorated with the words “Erotik in der Reklame” (eroticism in advertising).658

Hirschfeld’s illustration, but more importantly its caption, confirms that contemporary

theorists recognized that the representation of female body parts in order to market

products constituted a form of [sexual] fetishism.

655 Mila Ganeva, “Fashion Photography and Women’s Modernity in Weimar Germany: The Case of Yva,” NWSA Journal 15, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 14. 656 Ganeva, “Fashion Photography,” 14. 657 The monocle not only symbolically served to hyperbolize the gaze by foregrounding the eye, but was generally worn by wealthy (or those who aspired to or simulated personal wealth) gentlemen. 658 As Hirschfeld’s caption explains, the image is taken from a recent issue of Die Aufklärung (The Explanation) that features an article in which modern leg-fetishism is addressed.

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Analogous to contemporary fashion and advertising imagery, Höch often represented women in her photomontages as a pastiche of individual, and fetishized, body parts. Her 1930 photomontage Marlene (4.22) foregrounds the sexual objectification and fetishization of the female body. Created the same year as

Hirschfeld’s Geschlechtskunde, the photomontage depicts oversized female legs on a

pedestal being ogled from below by two appreciative men and illustrates the dynamics

of fetishization.

Marlene obviously references Marlene Dietrich (1901-1992), yet in the

photomontage, the artist reduces the legendary German actress to a pair of legs and

erotically enticing red lips. While Höch’s Scrapbook includes several pictures of

contemporary actresses, Marlene may be linked to lesbian subculture. Dietrich, who

was rumored to have had a number of lesbian affairs, was wildly popular among Berlin

lesbians.659

In 1935, Höch foregrounded a woman’s legs on a pedestal once again in Der

Schuss (The Kick) (fig. 4.23). While the closely configured space in Marlene implies an

intimate scene, the distance between the legs and the male figures below them in Der

Schuss is vertiginous and amplified by an aerial view of an empty and austere, fascist-

inspired Platz. Nonetheless, both Marlene and Der Schuss (akin to Brugman’s “Himilia”)

emphasize the eroticized fragmentation of the female body and evoke its fetishization.

659 Kreische, “Lesbische Liebe im Film,” in Bollé, Eldorado, 188. Kreische claims that “Marlene Dietrich also privately wore men’s clothing.” Kreische cites Weimar actress Herta Thiele who, in a 1981 interview, stated, “Es gab damals einen Trend, sich wie die Dietrich anzuziehen und möglichst so zu sein unter Freundinnen, und jede nannte sich Marlene wie sie.” (There was a trend among lesbians to dress like Dietrich and everyone called themselves Marlene). See, Karola Gramann, Heide Schlüppman, and Amadou Seitz, “Interview mit Herta Thiele,” in Frauen und Film, no. 28 (Berlin 1981): 40.

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Similar to Brugman’s unfortunate Himila, Höch’s women are often grotesque composites.660 Indeed both artists often represented female bodies as crudely cobbled individual parts. While Brugman emphasized the body’s renegade uncontrollability;

Höch’s hybrids are comprised of uncomfortably alien fragments. Nonetheless, both

artists exposed and parodied the discursive logic of sexism, advertising culture, Weimar

eugenics, and ethnography.661

Conclusion

As this chapter demonstrates, an appreciation of Höch’s oeuvre is greatly enhanced when considered in relation to the writings of her partner Til Brugman.

Together from 1926 through 1935, the couple’s shared experience of, and critical engagement with Weimar culture and its subsequent shift and decline, informed, and, to a large extent, determined their individual and joint artistic production.

My examination of Höch and Brugman was significantly inspired and enabled by the pioneering contributions and independent critical thought of Bosch, Everard, Dech,

660 Further examples include, but are not limited to Die Süsse (The Sweet One) (1926), and Für ein Fest gemacht (Dressed for a Party) (1936). 661 Intrinsic to Weimar culture, fashion discourse and ethnography similarly commodified and objectified the human body, and equally rendered beauty and character quantifiable. The intersection of these discourses is patently expressed in 1932 photograph of a cage-like contraption that supposedly measures a woman’s beauty and symbolically merges fashion, technology, and racial discourse. Captioned “Eine Maschine die die Schönheit misst,” (A Machine that measures Beauty) appears in the Berliner Illustrierter Zeitung 41, no. 46 (1932): 1531, and is pictured in Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 57. The concept of measuring beauty was not limited to women or the exclusive domain of fashion magazines. In the service of racial classification, men’s facial features were also measured. See, Pini, Liebeskult und Liebeskitsch, 113, 400, Archiv Gerstenderg, Wietze. The image is easily linked to the writings of the popular Weimar ethnographer Hans F.K. Günther. Günther (1891-1968) identified five races and distinguished the superior Nordic from the other four based on skull size and bodily characteristics. See, Hans F.K. Günther, The Racial Elements of European History, trans. G.C. Wheeler (London: Methuen and Co. Ltd., 1927), 4-8. The Nordic Dolichecephalic skull was considered superior to the shorter and broader Brachycephalic skull of other races.Günther was also a respected figure among the international scientific community. Wilson D. Wallis wrote a concise and favorable review of Günther’s Rassenkunde Europas. Mit besonderer Berücksichtigung Rassengeschichte des Hauptvölkes indogermanischer Sprache (Munich: J.F. Lehmann Verlag, 1929). See, American Anthropologist, vol. 32, Issue 3 (1930): 546-47.

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and Brandt. My study, however, newly examines previously undisclosed aspects of social engagement and criticism in Höch’s photomontages and in Brugman’s literary production. While Höch and Brugman were clearly interested in similar themes, beyond

two documented joint projects, it is difficult to determine the actual extent of their

collaboration. Did Höch’s photomontages inspire Brugman’s radical linguistic inventions;

or were Höch’s composite creatures intended to illustrate and visually reinforce the

biting wit of Brugman’s literary grotesques? As an exploration of the couple’s close and

ongoing creative partnership indicates, both questions must be answered with an

emphatic ‘yes.’ While this study contributes to the critical appreciation of Brugman’s

texts, an examination of the couple’s lesser known projects enhances our

comprehension of Höch’s oeuvre.

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CHAPTER V

Weimar Sexology, Sexual Subculture, and Hannah Höch’s Tamer

Introduction

A number of Hannah Höch’s photomontages attest to her interest in exploring

gender and sexual identity. Yet, unlike the awkward and blatantly ill-matched mixed-

gendered bodies that characterize the artist’s Dada-era oeuvre, Höch’s late Weimar

photomontages are visually subtle. Most notably, the artist’s 1930 photomontage

Dompteuse (Tamer) (fig. 5.1), an image that smoothly combines gendered elements,

suggests an engagement with sexology and Weimar sexual subculture. Indeed, the

seamless combination of male, female, and androgynous body parts in the Tamer clearly

teased the contemporary boundaries of popular representation. Described by scholars

as a “bisexual mannequin,”662 “oscillating between genders,”663 or “wildly

androgynous,”664 the Tamer is arguably one of Höch’s most sexually ambiguous images.

While Höch’s Tamer clearly suggests sexual ambiguity, according to Maria

Makela, it also “intervened in medical debates about gender formation and alteration, but likewise contributed to the discourse of sexual deviancy as presented at Hirschfeld’s

Institute of Sexology.”665 While no evidence suggests that Hirschfeld or his ilk ever saw

Höch’s Tamer, it is nevertheless easily linked to contemporary sexological materials.

662 Joe Mills and Peter Boswell, “Dating the Dompteuse: Hannah Höch’s Reconfiguration of the Tamer,” The Photo Review 26/27, n. 4/1 (2003/2004): Boswell, 18. 663 Maud Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife: The Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 190-97; 200-03. 664 Joe Mills and Peter Boswell, “Dating the Dompteuse,” Mills, 15. 665 Makela, “Grotesque Bodies,” 209; 214.

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This chapter will present visual evidence that significantly expands upon

Makela’s important, yet largely unexplored claim linking Höch’s Tamer to contemporary

sexological discourse. Furthermore, I will newly tie the image to an expanded context

which includes Weimar sexual subculture, medico-scientific material, and the popular

media. My starting point in this discussion will be the New Woman, a figure that

deviated from the early twentieth-century gender status quo and whose purported

androgyny may be discursively linked to the transvestite. The transvestite, a figure

initially classified in Magnus Hirschfeld’s 1910 publication of the same name, linked

related discussions of lesbians, bearded women, and dual-gendered hermaphrodites.

Hirschfeld’s sexological publications continue to inform present-day gender discourse

and are central to this chapter. A homosexual himself, Hirschfeld declared that gender

variance was a natural phenomenon and actively campaigned for the decriminalization

of homosexuality and the acceptance of non-normative sexual identities. Moreover, he

was energetically involved in the creation and support of Berlin’s sexual subculture.

The New Woman

In Germany, the New Woman signified the tensions between Wilhelmine tradition and contemporary Weimar reality. Shortly after the war, women were granted the right to vote and new opportunities for employment in urban centers radically altered the social parameters of their lives. The New Woman, whose economic and sexual independence upset the boundaries of bourgeois tradition and propriety, embodied both the opportunities and the controversies which accompanied women’s changing roles in Weimar. In her acceptable guise, the New Woman represented the

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postwar promise of social and economic progress, yet negatively, she disrupted the

gendered status quo and posed a threat to bourgeois social tradition. Alternately

embraced and spurned in the popular media, the multi-faceted New Woman functioned

as a repository for all manner of contemporary female personae and offered a wide

range of interpretive and associative possibilities. For this reason, scholars describe the

New Woman as “a symptom of the uneasy modernity which characterized Weimar

culture as a whole.”666

The New Woman was linked to androgynous female fashions. Because gender

was primarily expressed and defined through clothing in the early twentieth-century, clothing debates were often at the center of contemporary discussions regarding women’s social and sexual roles. At the time, the idea of women’s dress as a screen for the projection of modernity was a prominent cultural feature. As Kaja Silverman observes, “every transformation within a society’s vestimentary codes implies some kind of shift within its ways of articulating subjectivity.”667 Relatedly, Barbara Kosta

observes that in Weimar, the segment of the female population that cast themselves as

modern “strove to attain the same freedoms and privileges of men and styled

themselves accordingly.”668 While others claim that women’s adoption of an

androgynous style “was not merely an expression of fashionability, but a weapon of self-

666 Marsha Meskimmon and Shearer West, eds., Visions of the Neue Frau Visions of the ‘Neue Frau’: Woman and the Visual Arts in Weimar Germany (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995), 6. 667 Kaja Silverman, “Fragments of Fashionable Discourse,” in Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture, Tania Modelski, ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 149. 668 Barbara Kosta, “Unruly Daughters and Modernity: Irmgard Keun’s Gilgi-eine von uns,” The German Quarterly 68, no. 3 (Summer 1995): 279. 205

creation and sexual assertion.”669 Scholars generally agree that the adoption of

androgynous and masculine fashions by women during the 1920s was an expression of social and economic independence. Yet, some claim it signaled an exploration of gender roles, an argument which also supports observations that early twentieth-century lesbian identity was closely tied to, and generally expressed through clothing.670

In either case, during the 1920s, clothing styles that diverged from contemporary

masculine and feminine stereotypes commonly indicated gender deviance. As a result,

New Women were often associated with non-normative sexual behavior. Whereas the

mainstream media warned of women’s imminent masculinization, Berlin’s lesbian cross-

dressers celebrated masculine clothing and hairstyles. While Magnus Hirschfeld

objectively studied “männliche Frauen” (mannish women), in stark contrast, the Weimar

press sensationalized mannish women as freaks, or linked them to prostitution.671

Given the discursive intensity surrounding women’s clothing and its relationship

to sexuality and gender, it comes as no surprise that Weimar lesbians also weighed in on

the theme. In 1928, a front page article in Frauen-Liebe addressed the historical

relationship between masculine dress and women’s emancipation. Its inconclusive tone,

however, suggests that even among contemporary lesbians, the issue was a

controversial one.

The close relationship between costume and female emancipation was

669 Meskimmon and West, Visions of the Neue Frau, 6. 670 Esther Newton, “The Mythic Mannish Lesbian: Radclyffe Hall and the New Woman,” in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 9, no. 4. (1984): 558-60. Newton explores the mannish lesbian’s impact on the new woman discourse. She claims that the late nineteenth-century new woman’s partial cross-dressing identified her as a member of a new social category ‘lesbian’. 671 The term “männliche Frauen” appears several times in Hirschfeld’s many publications and are too numerous to list here.

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evident in the women’s movement in the past. During the French Revolution Olympe de Gouges . . . summoned her female comrades to wear men’s clothing. In 1905, Anatole France‘s Sur la pierre blanche, came close to the future image of women who perform masculine work. He describes their masculine haircuts [Bubikopfschnitt] and male clothing. . . Should we adopt the belief that masculine clothing represents a conscious step toward emancipation? 672

In sum, the popular, sexological, and lesbian discourses of ‘manly’ dress and the

neue Frau were routinely linked in Weimar and their proximity is central to

comprehending Höch’s oeuvre. Moreover, the artist’s contemporary situation intersected with all three discourses; Höch was a self-supporting lesbian, lived in an

urban environment, and had a basic knowledge of sexology.673 However, before her

oeuvre is more fully examined in relation to these discourses, the major currents of late

nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sexual science must briefly be outlined.

Nineteenth-century Sexology:

Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, Carl Westphal, and Richard von Krafft-Ebing

Sexology, or sexual science, incorporates various disciplinary approaches in the

study of human sexual behaviors and relationships. In late nineteenth-century Europe,

sexology medicalized a host of behaviors that had previously been considered criminal,

immoral, or sinful. The proper channels (i.e. procreative) of sexual gratification informed early sexological debates. Hence, the focus of nineteenth-century sexologists was

ensuring reproduction and regulating sexual excess. Unsurprisingly, lesbians and

672 Dr. Eugen Gürster, “Hosenrolle und Frauenemanzipation,” (Trouser-roles and Women’s Emancipation) Frauen Liebe und Leben 2 (Berlin 1928): 17. 673 Höch’s lesbian partner Til Brugman visited Hirschfeld’s Institute in 1931, and Brandt claims that both women were personally acquainted with Hirschfeld.

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homosexuals, whose sexual activities and desires did not conform to this model, were

pathologized and stigmatized.

The Hannover native Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825–1895), an avowed homosexual, wrote the first extended study, and defense, of male same-sex desire, Forschungen über das Räthsel der mannmännlichen Liebe (Studies/ Research regarding the Riddle of “Man-

Manly” Love).674 Ulrich’s Studies, published as twelve treatises between 1863 and 1879,

deploy philosophy, law, history, literature, religion, and mythology to develop the

theory of the homosexual as belonging to a third-sex.675 Ulrich’s writings represent an early and valuable contribution to the process of homosexual self-definition; however, their humanist, rather than medico-scientific, tenor, and pseudonymous authorship,

rendered them somewhat anachronistic. Nonetheless, Ulrich contributed significantly to

what French theorist Michel Foucault characterized as a broad cultural project aimed at

defining the homosexual, a process that began during the seventeenth-century.676

According to Foucault, the definition of the homosexual was intrinsically bound to

religious, juridical, and medical institutions. The ongoing process of defining the homosexual through cultural institutions, as described by Foucault, gained momentum during the late nineteenth-century.

674 Hubert, “Karl Heinrich Ulrichs,” in Rosario, 27. 675 Hubert, “Karl Heinrich Ulrichs,” in Rosario, 29. The term “third sex” was coined by Theophile Gautier to describe the indepently-minded female protagonist of his 1835 novel, Mademoiselle Maupin. Because homosexuality was a social stigma, Ulrichs, who did not want to disgrace his family, published under the pseudonym Numa Numantius. Ulrich dubbed homosexuals “Urnings” (named after Uranian love as described in Plato’s Symposium). 676 Michel Foucault, “The Incitement to Discourse,” in The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 17-35.

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In 1870, the Berlin neurologist Carl Westphal (1833-1890) published an essay in a

medical journal which described homosexuality as a neurological illness.677 Westphal’s

model of homosexuality was adopted by the Viennese psychiatrist and sexological

pioneer, Baron Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing (1840-1902). Until it was challenged in

1895 by Hirschfeld, the concept of inversion determined the perception and

representation of homosexuality and homosexuals.

In 1886, Krafft-Ebing published Psychopathia Sexualis: eine klinische forensische

Studie (Sexual Pathology: A Clinical and Forensic Study).678 Krafft-Ebing’s study was

initially printed as a pamphlet, but eventually developed into an exhaustive compilation

of all manner of sexual proclivities and practices.679 Gender scholars aptly describe

Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis as “an encyclopedia of sexual perversions that

coined many of the terms we currently use.”680 Psychopathia Sexualis was not intended

for the general public. Its pages, the author explained, were meant to support the

research of “serious men” active in the natural sciences and jurisprudence.681 As Krafft-

Ebing intended, Psychopathia Sexualis was routinely consulted as a court manual and

enabled expert testimony in matters pertaining to sexuality in judicial proceedings.

Extended passages dealing with explicit details, erotic impulses, or sexual behavior,

677 Carl Westphal, “Die Konträre Sexualempfindung: Symptom eine neuropathologischen (psychopathologischen) Zustandes” (Contrary Sexual Feelings: Symptoms of a neuropathological (psycopathological) State), Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten (Berlin) 1869-70; 2, 73-108. 678 Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, mit besondere Berücksichtigung der conträren sexualempfindung: eine klinische forensische Studie (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, 1886). 679 By 1893, Psychopathia was in its 8th printing and 442 pages in length. 680 Vernon Rosario, Homosexuality and Science: A Guide to the Debates (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC- CLIO, Inc., 2002), 18. 681 Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der conträren Sexualempfindung: eine klinisch-forensische Studie, 8th ed. (1893; repr., Elibron Classics, 2005), v.

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were written in Latin, the contemporary language of educated men. This enabled the

author to avoid censorship and prosecution, as well as to maintain an aura of scientific

mystique. As Krafft-Ebing explained, his use of Latin “terminus technicis” was twofold:

“It dissuades the unbefitting reader,” and serves to euphemistically temper “especially

disgusting passages.”682 However, the interest in sexual deviance was apparently so great that Krafft-Ebing’s book was regularly expanded and revised to reflect the most

current research. A mere pamphlet in 1886, Psychopathia Sexualis grew at each

subsequent printing (eleven in all) and became the most translated and widely

published Victorian sexological work.683

Like most of his contemporaries, Krafft-Ebing believed that the primary purpose

of sex was procreation and classified any form of sexual desire that did not lead towards

that goal as a perversion. Homosexuality, he reasoned, was a perversion because the

sexual instinct does not lead to procreation, nor correspond with the primary and

secondary physical sexual characteristics. However, he also significantly claimed that

homosexuality was not a sin or a crime, but caused by processes occurring during

gestation which resulted in a sexual “inversion” in the brain. Hence, the term “invert”

came to designate both the male and female homosexual and was generally and widely

accepted.684 Krafft-Ebing’s classification of sexual inversion as an inborn disposition,

rather than a learned vice, opened the door to new debates regarding the causes and

nature of homosexuality.

682 Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, 8th ed., v. 683 Rosario, Homosexuality and Science, 18. 684 Toni Brennan and Peter Hagerty, “Who was Magnus Hirschfeld and what do we need to know?” History of Philosophy and Psychology 9 (1) (2007): 19.

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Despite Krafft-Ebing’s claim that sexual deviancy was a perversion, at the time

homosexuals nevertheless considered Psychopathia liberating and progressive.

Psychopathia is primarily comprised of sexual biographies and autobiographies closely

modeled after the religious confession. Foucault has argued that in Western society, the

confession is generally regarded as a liberatory practice and is valorized as a route to

truth, hence, its adoption in medical and human science.685 Furthermore, he claimed

that confession is a subjectifying process that eventually leads to normalization, an

argument particularly relevant to homosexuals who were historically regarded as

abnormal.

The process of establishing homosexual subjectivity was greatly facilitated by

many first-person accounts of sexual deviancy in Psychopathia Sexualis. Indeed, as scholars recognize, subjects become subjects through the discourses they speak.686

Importantly, as Harry Oosterhuis remarks, the individuals who provided Krafft-Ebing

with sexual testimonies were educated and highly articulate. They volunteered personal

sexual information because they considered it an opportunity to explain the naturalness

of their ascribed and perceived difference.687 Like Foucault, Oosterhuis stresses the role of the confessional relationship to the early expression of homosexuality and convincingly claims that the confession/case history was the “prototype for modern homosexual identity and has played an important role in the making of sexual

685 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 3-13. 686 Sylvia K. Blood, Body Work: The social construction of women’s body image (London: Routledge, 2005), 97. Blood writes, subjects “speak themselves into being, using the patterns available in culture.” 687 Harry Oosterhuis, “Autobiography and Sexual Identity,” in Stepchildren of Nature: Krafft- Ebing, Psychiatry, and the Making of Sexual identity (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000), 223.

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categories and identities.”688 Hence, despite Krafft-Ebing’s pathologizing discourse, his

work is largely responsible for establishing the preconditions for early homosexual

emancipation.689

Magnus Hirschfeld

The transformation of sexology from a largely inaccessible medical discourse to one suitable for a lay audience was largely the work of the German reformer Magnus

Hirschfeld. Hirschfeld is perhaps best known as the founder of the Berlin Institute for

Sexual Science (1919). Hirschfeld’s research began as an outgrowth of Krafft-Ebing’s

work. Like Krafft-Ebing, Hirschfeld was a medical doctor, however, in stark contrast to

Krafft-Ebing who wrote for an exclusive and limited community of educated men,

Hirschfeld was particularly keen on writing for, and enlightening, the bourgeois reading public. Indeed, much of Hirschfeld’s work was devoted to dispelling public ignorance regarding homosexuality. Scholars significantly remark that Hirschfeld was a reformer rather than a revolutionary “with a confirmed confidence in the legal system and the petition.”690 He was convinced that if properly informed and educated, the public would eventually accept the homosexual. Central to Hirschfeld’s activism was the notion that

homosexuality was natural, and therefore should not be punished.

688 Oosterhuis, “Autobiography and Sexual Identity,” 222-23. 689 Mark Johnson, “Transgression and the Making of Western Sexual Science,” in Transgressive Sex: Subversion and Control in Erotic Encounters, Hastings Donnan and Fiona Magowan, eds., (Oxford, UK: Berghahn Books, 2009), 172-73. 690 Toni Brennan and Peter Hegarty, “Who was Magnus Hirschfeld and What do we need to know?” History of Philosophy and Psychology 9 (1) (2007): 15.

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In 1896, under the pseudonym Theodore Ramien, Hirschfeld published his first work in defense of homosexuality, Sappho and Socrates.691 The pamphlet’s subtitle declared the author’s intention to explain the love of men and women for people of their own sex. Among late nineteenth-century European homosexuals and lesbians,

Sappho and Socrates automatically suggested homosexuality. Links to ancient Greek culture not only lent contemporary homosexuals a much desired sense of historicity and tradition, but also reflected the idealization of classical culture at the time.692 These contemporary associations explain how a familiarity with Plato’s Symposium became a coded cipher of recognition among male homosexuals, while knowledge of Sappho’s recently discovered poetic fragments implied an awareness of lesbian love, or, as it was alternately termed, sapphism.693 While Sappho and Socrates implicates ancient Greek

691 Magnus Hirschfeld, [Theodore Ramien] Sappho und Sokrates: Oder Wie erklärt sich die Liebe der Männer und Frauen zu Personen des eigenen Geschlechts? (Leipzig: Verlag Max Spohr, 1896). (Sappho and Socrates: Or How Can One Explain the Love of Men and Women for People of Their Own Sex?). 692 In Victorian England and Wilhelmine Germany, Greece was recognized as the first culture to understand the obligations and standards of intellectual morality. The influence and inspiration of ancient Greek culture upon a number of late nineteenth- and early twentieth century cultural discourses is of no small importance. It is evidenced in the flowing tunics and robes favored by late nineteenth-century clothing reformers and dancers inspired by ancient Grecian costume. This fashion foregrounded the unfettered sensuality associated with heroic classical nudity and complemented the momentous cultural discourse in favor of sexual liberation. See, Terri J. Gordon, “Fascism and the Female Form: Performance Art in the Third Reich,” Journal of History of Sexuality 11, no. 1/ 2 (Jan.-Apr., 2002): 196. As Gordon writes, “Greek cultural norms were deeply ingrained in the body culture movement, from the ideal of the sculpted, athletic male body in [Friedrich Ludwig] Jahn's gymnastics clubs to Duncan's vision of a ‘Greek dance’ of the future to [Rudolf von] Laban's open-air ‘dance temples.’” 693 Discursive lnks between ancient Greek culture and homosexuality persisted well into the 1920s. In 1926, Albert Moll, Polizei und Sitte, 102, writes that ‘Greek’ references in personal ads are codes for “perverse” homosexual and lesbian searches: “Häufig wird in den Anzeigen perverser Verkehr gesucht. Bestimmte Wörter lassen das Perverse in der Anzeige erkennen. Eine homosexuelle Frau sucht eine Freundin. Der Briefe soll unter der Chiffre Lesbos oder Sappho abgegeben werden. Sappho, die griechische Dichterin brünstiger Gedichte an Freundinnen, lebte auf der Insel Lesbos. Auch Männer haben solche Erkennungschiffren. Der Freund, Uranus, Eros, Plato und ähnliche Worte spielen in den Anzeigen eine Rolle.” Links between ancient Greek culture and homosexuality were not limited to Germany. See, R.S. Koppen, “Civilised Minds, Fashioned Bodies and the Nude Future,” in Virginia Woolf, Fashion and Literary Modernity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 137; Joseph Bristow, “Symond’s

213 culture, Hirschfeld credits Friedrich Nietzsche’s mid-nineteenth-century declaration

“what is natural cannot be immoral” as the inspiration for his text.694

In 1897, Magnus Hirschfeld founded the Scientific Humanitarian Committee

(SHC) (Wissenschaftlich-humanitäre Komittee) in Berlin. The primary aim of the

committee was to campaign against Paragraph 175 of the German penal code (the law

outlawing male homosexual acts). The Committee’s motto was per scientiam ad justitiam or, “through science/knowledge to justice” and is emblematic of Hirschfeld’s life’s work.695 Hirschfeld’s 1901 pamphlet Was muss das Volk Wissen über der Dritte

Geschlecht? (What should the public know about the Third Sex?) aimed to educate and

explain male and female homosexuality to the reader.696

Hirschfeld’s 1905 claim that all forms of sexual expression were intrinsically natural fortuitously dovetailed with the zeitgeist. During the late nineteenth century, mass production and industrialization were increasingly perceived among many

Western European artists and intellectuals as dehumanizing and inspired a renewed

History, Ellis’s Heredity: Sexual Inversion,” in Bland and Doan, Sexology in Culture, 85; The centrality of ancient Greek culture within early lesbian self-definition runs like a thread through Rodriguez’s biography of the scandalous sapphist Natalie Barney. Suzanne Rodriguez, Wild Heart: A Life: Natalie Clifford Barney’s Journey from Victorian America to Belle Époque Paris (New York: Harper Collins, 2002). 694 Brennan and Hegarty, “Who was Magnus Hirschfeld?,” 17. Hirschfeld makes this comment on page 35 of Sappho and Socrates. 695 Brennan and Hegarty, 14. Hirschfeld founded the committee with three professional colleagues, the Leipzig publisher Max Spohr, lawyer Eduard Olberg, and the writer Franz Josef von Bülow. 696 Magnus Hirschfeld, Berlins Drittes Geschlecht (1904 repr., Berlin: Verlag rosa Winkel, Schriftenreihe der Magnus Hirschfeld Gesellschaft; Bd. 5, 1991); See also Brennan and Hagerty, 15. The pamphlet was reprinted several times and by 1914 had reached 50,000 copies The title page of the pamphlet bore the motto, "The great conqueror of all prejudice is not Humanity, but Science.” What should the public know was programmatic for Hirschfeld’s desire to “make homosexuality acceptable to the intended bourgeois heterosexual audience” and is an eloquent testament of Hirschfeld’s motto in action: Through knowledge to Justice.

214 appreciation of all things natural.697 Hence, arguments that gender deviations were natural and falsely and undeservedly pathologized resonated with broader cultural trends.698 Unsurprisingly, Hirschfeld’s characterization of sexual identity and sexuality as a “Naturerscheinung” (a product of nature) was widely embraced by contemporary homosexuals and lesbians.699 Furthermore, this perception of sexuality paved the way for sexual tolerance and supported arguments for the decriminalization of homosexuality well into the century.

Hirschfeld and Sexual Intermediacy

In the early twentieth century, the concept of the homosexual as “the embodiment of a male soul trapped in a female body, or vice versa” provided the terms through which homosexual self-identity and experience was generally understood.700

Contrary to contemporary psychoanalytical discourse, the understanding of homosexuality was “largely antithetical to the Freudian project” and Freudian theory

“rarely informed” the terms through which a lesbian’s experience was understood.701

697 Stephen F. Eisenman, et al, Nineteenth Century Art: A Critical History (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002), 370. As Eisenmann writes, “During a period of wrenching economic expansion and contraction, colossal urban and industrial growth, and the final eradication in Europe of pockets of premodern community, nature came to be considered by some writers and artists as an inviolable sanctuary.” 698 Magnus Hirschfeld, Geschlechtsübergäge: Mischungen männlicher und weiblicher Geschlechtscharaktere (Sexuelle Zwischenstufen) (Leipzig: Verlag der Monatsschrift für Harnkrankheiten und sexuelle Hygeine, 1905), 5. Hirschfeld writes that the intention of his study is “die Hervorhebung nicht hinreichend beachteter Naturerscheinungen.” 699 Claudia Schoppmann, Zeit der Maskierung: Lebensgeschichten lesbischer Frauen im “Dritten Reich,” (Berlin: Orlanda Frauenverlag, 1993), 87. Hirschfeld “trug zu einer positive Identität bei, denn was ‘angeboren’ war, konnte nicht schlecht oder verwerflich sein.” 700 Chris Waters, “Havelock Ellis, Sigmund Freud and the State: Discourses of Homosexual Identity in Interwar Britain,” in Sexology in Culture: Labelling Bodies and Desires, Lucy Bland and Laura Doan, eds. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 166. Krafft-Ebing’s concept was internationally accepted. 701 Waters, “Havelock Ellis, Sigmund Freud and the State,” 165. Waters claims that especially in the English-speaking world, psychoanalytical accounts of homosexuality dominate much official thinking on the subject. Nowhere, he claims, was this more the case than in the United States, “where faith in

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Instead, contemporary lesbians commonly identified with the concept of the mannish woman, as advanced by German sexologists Ulrichs, Krafft-Ebing, and Hirschfeld, and as

circulated in Britain through the work of Edward Carpenter (1844-1929) and Havelock

Ellis.

Like Krafft-Ebing, Magnus Hirschfeld deployed the case history methodology;

however, unlike his predecessor who only collected 627 sexual case studies (187 of

them borrowed from existing legal-medical and psychiatric sources), Hirschfeld

gathered information from thousands of contemporary subjects.702 Scholars estimate that over the years, Hirschfeld’s Institute collected over thirty-thousand sexual

autobiographies and over 35,000 photographs and illustrations.703 The extraordinary

volume of information available to Hirschfeld compelled him, and ultimately others, to

reconsider traditional binary models of human sexuality and instead propose myriad

variations of gender identification. Hirschfeld based his gender model on exhaustive

modern science led not only to the valorization of psychoanalytic expertise, but to the marginalization of earlier sexological models of erotic desire that were based on premises quite distinct from those of Freud and his followers.” As Waters remarks, a Freudian understanding of homosexuality, is “very much a postwar phenomenon” and first gained currency after 1950 (165). 702 Oosterhuis, Stepchildren, 130. “The [remaining] 440 case histories Krafft-Ebing collected deal with [the sexual disorders] of patients he treated or with whom he corresponded. One hundred seventy- six of these histories or autobiographies were published in one or more of the fourteen editions of Psychopathia Sexualis that appeared between 1886 and 1903, while 238 of them appeared in other monographs or articles. Twenty-six case histories were never published.” See also, Brennan and Hegarty, 7. While Krafft-Ebing’s 1893 edition of Psychopathia Sexualis includes only 198 case histories. Between 1903 and 1904 alone, under the aegis of the SHC, Hirschfeld conducted a survey of homosexuality in Berlin distributing over 6600 questionnaires to [male] students and factory workers. Hirschfeld also significantly devised a psychobiological questionnaire composed of more than 135 sets of questions. Subjects were questioned on a wide range of themes. They were asked about kinship, family history, racial, ethnic, and class background. Information regarding personal and family medical history, dreams, memories, childhood and current sexual behavior, hobbies, and political views was also collected. 703 Vern L. Bullough, “Introduction,” Magnus Hirschfeld, Transvestites: The Erotic Drive to Cross Dress, trans. Michael A. Lombardi-Nash (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1991), 11. The institute’s library also held more than 20,000 volumes. Unfortunately the Institute’s holdings can only be estimated because much of the collection was destroyed when Nazis stormed and plundered it in May, 1933.

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computations and tables that meld a nineteenth-century naturalist’s Linnaean impulse

to catalogue and classify with a more forward looking social tolerance for sexual

variations. In his 1905 Geschlechts-Übergänge (Sexual-transitions) Hirschfeld labeled

individuals whose sexual impulses and sensibilities fell somewhere within a staggeringly

broad spectrum of masculine or feminine types as sexuelle Zwischenstufe (sexual

intermediates).704 Later, in his 1910 publication Transvestites, Hirschfeld devoted a

chapter to a discussion of sexual intermediates and illustrated his theory of sexual

intermediacy with three tables.705 Each represents a mathematically calculated model of

sexual types based on the multiplication of four basic components:

1. the sexual organs 2. the other physical characteristics 3. the sex drive 4. the other emotional characteristics706

Based on these components, Hirschfeld arrived at the staggering number of 43,046,721

possible sexual types, which he himself characterized as “enormous.”707

Hirschfeld significantly disrupted the traditional fundamental link between

gender identity and physical biology by considering subjective gender identification and

thus markedly influenced contemporary and later perceptions of gender.708 Indeed, scholars agree that Hirschfeld’s most influential and significant contribution to our

704 Magnus Hirschfeld, Geschlechtsübergänge: Mischungen männlicher und weiblicher Geschlechtscharaktere. (Sexuelle Zwischenstufen) (Leipzig: Verlag der Monatsschrift für Harnkrankheiten und sexuelle Hygeine, 1905). 705 Magnus Hirschfeld, “The Theory of Intermediaries,” Transvestites: The Erotic Drive to Cross- Dress, trans. Michael A. Lombardi-Nash (1910; repr. Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1991), 215-36. 706 Hirschfeld, Transvestites, 219. 707 Hirschfeld, Transvestites, 227; Tables one through three are printed on 224-25. 708 Manfred Herzer and J. Edgar Bauer, 100 Jahren Schwulenbewegung: Dokumentation einer Vortragsreihe in der Akademie der Künste (Berlin: Verlag rosa Winkel, 1998), 29.

217 current understanding of sexuality was the “dissolution of the over-arching order based

on the binary pattern Man/Woman, and the suggestion of an infinite number of sexes.”709 Hirschfeld thus anticipated postmodern concepts of gender.710

Hirschfeld: Sexology and Photography

While thousands of sexual autobiographies and case studies were fundamental

to Hirschfeld’s work, photographic documentation was integral to his research and

publications.711 Indeed, visual perception was the cornerstone of late-nineteenth and

early twentieth-century scientific methodology and Hirschfeld was a man of his time. In

an age in which “seeing was believing” science was based upon that which could be

seen and proven through objective visual observation.712 In the early twentieth century, the “lingering prestige of optical empiricism was sufficiently strong to ensure that the terrain of the photographable was still regarded as roughly congruent to knowledge in general.”713 Accordingly, while contemporary sexologists explored the invisible workings of the soul and described lesbianism as the “masculine soul heaving in a female

709 J. Edgar Bauer, “Der Tod Adams,” 100 Jahren Schwulenbewegung: Dokumentation einer Vortragsreihe in der Akademie der Künste (Berlin: Verlag Rosa Winkel, 1998), 29. 710 Brennan and Hagerty, 19; See also, Celia Kitzinger, The Social Construction of Lesbianism (London: Sage Publications, 1987), 47; Alfred C. Kinsey, et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders Co., 1948), 639. When one considers that Kinsey’s 1948 six point heterosexual/homosexual continuum was considered path breaking at the time, we can better appreciate Hirschfeld’s remarkable early twentieth-century contributions. 711 David James Prickett, “Magnus Hirschfeld and the Photographic (Re)Invention of the ‘Third Sex,’” Visual Culture in Twentieth-Century Germany: Text as Spectacle, ed. Gail Finney (Bloomington: University Press, 2006), 103-19. 712 Visually legible data was considered the most modern and reliable source of empirical information among late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scientists. For a discussion of this see, Thomas O. Haakenson, “Science, Art, and the Question of the Visible: Rudolph Virchow, Hannah Höch, and Immediate Visual Perception,” in Legacies of Modernism: Art and Politics in Northern Europe, 1890- 1950, Patrizia C. McBride, Richard W. McCormick, and Monika Žagar, eds. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 93-104. 713 Haakenson, “Science, Art,” 79. See, Allan Sekula, “The Body as Archive,” October 39 (Winter 1986): 373.

218 bosom,”714 they nonetheless largely defined homosexuals by their outward appearance

and lesbians (and homosexuals) generally subscribed to this notion. In 1904, a Berlin

lesbian claimed that her preference for male clothing was “the same as effeminate men who prefer to wear female garments.”715

The visual documentation of sexually deviant individuals was a major component of early twentieth-century sexological practice and generated a considerable inventory of graphic materials. From the early 1900s, Hirschfeld and others documented, i.e., photographed gender deviant individuals and observed that homosexuality frequently manifested itself in a preference for clothing of the opposite gender.716 Unsurprisingly, these materials reflected and supported definitions of the lesbian based on sartorial practice.717 Indeed, among contemporary sexologists and lesbians alike, it was “a woman’s garb and not her sexual practices that characterized her as perverse.”718

714 Farwell, Heterosexual Plots, 74, Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, F.J. Rebman, trans. (Login: Chicago, 1929), 399. 715 Paul Näcke, “Ein Besuch bei den Homosexuellen in Berlin: Mit Bemerkungen über Homosexualität,” Reprint 1904, in Magnus Hirschfeld, Berlins Drittes Geschlecht, Manfred Herzer, ed. (Berlin, Verlag rosa Winkel, 1991), 185. 716 These observations were not limited to German sexologists. In 1908, the British sexologist Havelock Ellis wrote, “The chief characteristic of sexually inverted woman is a certain degree of masculinity. As I have already pointed out, a woman is inclined to adopt the ways and garments of men. There is a very pronounced tendency among sexually inverted women to adopt male attire when practicable.” See, Havelock Ellis, Sexual Inversion, vol. 2 of Studies in the Psychology of Sex (Philadelphia: F.A. Davis Co., Publishers, 1908), 140-41. 717 R. S. Koppen, “From Symbolism in Loose Robes to the Figure of the Androgyne,” in Virginia Woolf, Fashion and Literary Modernity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 55. As Koppen writes, “The most recognizable image of the lesbian circulating in Paris, Berlin, and London, was that projected by the woman with cropped hair, dressed in a man’s tuxedo, posing with a cigarette and the signature monocle. . . The quotational and highly stylized aspects of this practice clearly point in the direction of camp, drag, and other forms of sartorial performance, though . . . contemporary sexologists were quick to inscribe such cross-dressing within a discourse of authenticity; as signs of an authentic, if inverted, sexuality.” 718 Jann Matlock, “Masquerading Women, Pathologized Men: Cross-Dressing, Fetishism, and the Theory of Perversion,” in Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, Emily Apter and William Pietz, eds. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 37.

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Hirschfeld’s Transvestites, 1910

Hirschfeld’s 1910 publication, Transvestites, was the first publication of its kind to scientifically examine the practice of cross-dressing and its relation to sexual

identity.719 Transvestites is recognized as having coined the Latin-derived term to

designate the cross-dresser and as significantly distinguishing the cross-dresser from sexual inversion (homosexuality), a category under which it had previously been subsumed.720 Hirschfeld claimed that clothing is not arbitrary, capricious or merely

lifeless fabric, but rather an indication of an inner striving “which is valid not only in

these special cases but rather in general, and to a much greater extent than is usually

believed.”721

Hirschfeld’s Transvestites includes seventeen autobiographical statements, each

of which offer intimate details regarding the subject’s sartorial and erotic predilections.

Hirschfeld’s focus, however, was the male subject; only one of the seventeen case histories (Case 15) discusses a woman who lived and dressed as a man, Berlin native

Helene N.722 Hirschfeld’s summarizing comments regarding his lone female subject stress her masculine identification and “her driving sexual urges as totally diminishing

719 Magnus Hirschfeld, Transvestites: The Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress, trans. Michael A. Lombardi- Nash (1910; repr. Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1991); Die Transvestiten: Eine Untersuchung ueber den erotischen Verkleidungstrieb mit umfangreichem casuistischem und historischem Material. 720 Susan Stryker, Transgender History (Berkeley: Seal Press, 2008), 16. According to Hirschfeld, much like the sexual intermediate, transvestites occupied a space between “pure male” and “pure female.” He argued that “absolute representatives of their sex are only abstractions, invented extremes” and transvestites represent one of many different types of sexual intermediaries, including homosexuals and hermaphrodites, who occupy the sexual spectrum (17). 721 Hirschfeld, “Clothing as a Form of Expression of Mental Condition,” Transvestites, 203; 203-14. “Clothing is the unconscious language of the spirit and clearly expresses itself all the more when the tongue is condemned to silence” (204). 722 Hirschfeld, Transvestites, 95-102. “Case 15,” Helene N. was born in 1880.

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behind her burning wish to be a man, to go as a man, and to live as a man.”723 The last

chapter of Transvestites revisits the theme of women who identify as masculine and

presents a history of women who passed as men in various military units. 724

In 1912, Transvestites was supplemented by a second volume comprised solely

of illustrations depicting historical and contemporary male and female cross-dressers.725

Photographic materials would continue to represent a major component of Hirschfeld’s

research: In 1930, he published a volume comprised entirely of illustrations, the last of

his four volume opus, Geschlechstskunde (Sexual Knowledge/Information).726 The

volume includes dozens of illustrations depicting figures whose clothing does not

conform to contemporary gender stereotypes. In an almost generic fashion, they

underpinned the claims of contemporary sexologists linking sartoria to gender identity

and reflected (perhaps even influenced?) the habitués of Weimar sexual subculture.

Sexual Deviancy and Weimar “Life through the eyes”

In Weimar, the key role of photography in scientific and diagnostic practice was reinforced by sweeping technical developments after World War I that facilitated the

production and dissemination of printed materials. New and cheaper printing

techniques, and an improved railway system, not only generated an unprecedented

volume of mass-produced imagery, but transformed popular print media into an

inexpensive and omnipresent multi-purpose cultural instrument. Concurrently, these

723 Hirschfeld, Transvestites, 102. 724 Hirschfeld, “Women as Soldiers,” in Transvestites, 393-416. 725 Magnus Hirschfeld and Max Tilke, Der erotischen Verkleidungstrieb (Die Transvestiten.) Illustrierter Teil (Berlin: Alfred Pulvermacher & Co., 1912). 726 Magnus Hirschfeld, Geschlechtskunde auf Grund dreissigjähriger Forschung und Erfahrung bearbeitet, vol. 4, Bildertheil (Stuttgart: Julius Püttmann Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1930).

221 developments radically changed the appearance of print media; interwar media was characterized by a dramatic shift away from the literary format to one that emphasized pictures.

Weimar contemporaries were not unaware of the immense implications of these developments. They astutely recognized that the new emphasis on imagery triggered a paradigmatic cultural shift. Writing in 1927, Kurt Korff, editor of the mainstream journal

Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung (BIZ), observed that unlike the preceding century, “wherein the written word dominated, life through the eyes now dictated perception.” He attributed this phenomenon to the expansion and proliferation of magazine and, relatedly, film culture. Due to both media, Korff claimed, “the public got used to visual imagery having a greater impact than the message of the written word.”727

Weimar Culture and the Cross-dresser

Due, in part, to the expansion of the print media, the Weimar discourse of sexual deviancy was no longer the exclusive domain of sexologists or the habitués of sexual subculture. In 1931, a large advertisement for the upcoming performance of the transvestite Barbette at a major Berlin theatre appeared in a popular daily newspaper

(fig. 5.2). Similarly, the theme of cross-dressing was discussed by a number of prominent

Weimar authors. In 1926, under the auspices of the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, Dr.

Albert Moll, leading sexologist and Hirschfeld colleague, published Polizei und Sitte

727 Johnson, 50n78, cites Kurt Korff, “Die Berliner Illustrierte,” in Max Osborn, ed., 50 Jahre Ullstein (Berlin: Ullstein, 1927), 290-91. Korff edited the BIZ from 1903 to 1933. A German Jew, Korff was forced to flee in 1933. In New York he became an advisor to Henry Luce’s magazine Life, first published in 1936. See also, Anton Kaes, Edward Dimendberg, and Martin Jay, The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 646-47.

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(Police and Morals).728 Ostensibly, the volume “Represents Police in Individual Pictures,”

but is, in fact, a broad discussion of moral and sexual issues with a number of historical

illustrations. Despite Moll’s insistence that sexuality is a timelessly relevant theme, his

focus is contemporary Weimar and includes the topic of cross-dressing.729 Moll,

however, handles the female and male cross-dresser with conspicuous difference.

The female cross-dresser is represented by a late nineteenth-century drawing of

a prostitute dressed in men’s clothing (fig. 5.3).730 The illustration exemplifies the

contemporary conflation of lesbianism with prostitution and fin-de-siècle decadence (a

topic addressed in-depth in chapter two). Significantly, the illustration references

neither Weimar culture nor contemporary scientific methodologies: It is an undated

sketch by “the nineteenth-century’s most talented pornographic artist,” Félicien

Rops.731 Rops’ drawing sensationalizes and mythologizes the figure and dramatically distances her from Weimar reality. Rops’ lesbian cross-dresser is 1) anonymous, 2) historical, 3) exotic (French), and 4) depraved (prostitute); in short, this cross-dresser is a product of a male artist’s pornographic imagination.732 The unfortunate inclusion of a

nineteenth-century drawing by a known pornographer in the government-sponsored

Polizei und Sitte reinforced the irrational ahistorical and metaphorical epistemology that

728 Hirschfeld, Geschlechts-Übergänge, 3, references Moll’s contributions along with those of Krafft-Ebing. 729 Moll, Polizei und Sitte, 22-28. 730 Moll, Polizei und Sitte, 22. The image is captioned, “Dirne in Männerkleidung” (Prostitute in Men’s clothing). 731 Linda G. Zatlin, “Beardsley Redresses Venus,” Victorian Poetry 28, no. 3/4 The Nineties (Autumn-Winter, 1990): 112, 123n8. Zatlin cites Ronald Pearsall, The Worm in the bud: The World of Victorian Sexuality (New York: Macmillan, 1969), 384. 732 Félicien Rops was known in Weimar Germany primarily as an artist who specialized in pornographic themes. In his monograph, Gustave Kahn characterized Rops’ imagery as “satanic and diabolical in which the painful drama and complicated lust and bitter chronic of modern prostitution takes place.” Félicien Rops (Berlin: Marquardt and Co., 1925?), 20.

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accompanied, and significantly clouded, the Weimar discourse of lesbianism. In contrast

to Moll’s publication, Weimar lesbian magazines printed photographs of contemporary

female cross-dressers. Had Moll so chosen, a photograph of an actual woman would

have, in a Foucauldian context, greatly supported the identity construction of Weimar

lesbian cross-dressers.

Moll’s skewed representation is even more apparent when it is compared to his

discussion of male cross-dressers. The unmanipulated photographs of two male subjects

suggest that they may have been borrowed from Hirschfeld’s vast archive (fig. 5.4) or

from contemporary Weimar police files (fig. 5.5).733 Both the photographic medium and probable ‘official’ institutional sources firmly anchor the male cross-dresser, unlike his mythologized female counterpart, in an actual contemporary context. The differences between the two media (drawing/photographs) are significant here because while pictures dominated Weimar mass media, photographs decidedly trumped drawings in indicating modernity and scientific veracity. Moll’s deployment of photographs to represent the male cross-dresser is also emblematic of the male-centered focus of

Weimar sexology.

In contrast to the scientific tenor of Albert Moll’s Polizei und Sitte, Weimar publications with sexual themes were often laced with a salacious subtext. In the 1931 guide to Weimar-era Berlin night life, Führer durch das ‘lasterhafte’ Berlin (Guide to

‘scandalous’ Berlin), for example, Curt Moreck discussed the cross-dresser in just such

733 Moll, Polizei und Sitte, Both photographs are pictured on page 23. Number 19 is labeled “Männlicher Transvestit. Benutzung der Bubikopfmode” (Male transvestite. Using the women’s hairstyle), while the other (20) is captioned “Männlicher Transvertit” (Male Transvestite). No further information is given. Note Moll’s term “Transvertit.” Apparently, in 1926, Hirschfeld’s recently coined term [1910] “Transvestite” was not yet universally established.

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terms.734 Under the bold heading “Here one finds Transvestites,” Moreck introduced a

short chapter revealing the names of “curious locales where one encounters girls

dressed as boys and boys dressed as girls.” This, the author wrote, “is not a carnival

joke.” Blending thinly-veiled sensationalism with the clinical vocabulary of contemporary sexology, he continued, “You have probably heard of transvestites. They are those men and women whose inversion is not limited to a feeling of difference (eine seelische Andersempfindung), but in order to be content, need to wear the clothing of the other sex.”735 Moreck’s Führer celebrates the naughtiness of Weimar and, as he

explained, “is geared to the Berlin tourist who is looking for a side of the city generally

omitted from official tourist guides.”736

Richard Salardenne’s sensationalistic 1931 Hauptstädte des Lasters (Capital Cities

of Vice) discusses sexual subculture in a number of world cities and devotes several

pages to the city of Berlin.737 In what reads as an international erotic travel guide, the

sub-heading “Eccentric Cabarets” introduces a thinly-veiled voyeuristic discussion of the

cross-dressed men and women who frequent the legendary Berlin homosexual

nightclub Eldorado.738

While the piquant revelations of Moll, Moreck, and Salardenne were primarily

geared to fantasies of provincial readers, the cross-dresser was also linked to Weimar

734 Curt Moreck, Führer durch das “lasterhafte” Berlin (Leipzig: Verlag der moderner Stadtführer, 1931), 176. 735 Moreck, Führer, 176. 736 Moreck, Führer, 7-8. 737 Richard Salardenne, “Berlin,” Haupstädte des Lasters: Vergnügungsvierteln der Weltstädte (Berlin: Auffenberg Verlagsgesellschaft, 1931), 88-110. Other cities include Amsterdam, Berlin, Budapest, London, New York, Prague, and Vienna. 738 Salardenne, Haupstädte des Lasters, 95-96.

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fashion debates. The terse caption below a male transvestite pictured in Moll’s Polizei

und Sitte (fig. 5.4) emphasizes the subject’s Bubikopf, a popular, yet, at the time, highly

controversial, boyish hairstyle for women. Its inclusion in this conspicuously short

caption succinctly demonstrates the unstable contemporaneous discursive intersection

between the male cross-dressers’ feminine masquerade and socially threatening aspects of the androgynous New Woman.739

The Feared Masculinization of Women and the Garçonne

While androgynous clothing and hairstyles lent the New Woman a positive aura

of modernity, it also potentially signaled her loss of femininity. In Weimar, this was “a

cultural phenomenon of no small importance” and “fed male anxieties about the

increasing public face of women.”740 Indeed, ridiculous claims in the media stoked

popular anxieties regarding the “vermännlichung” (masculinization) of women and,

arguably, were also intended to frighten women into conforming to conventional

stereotypes. Both the popularity and intensity of these debates are striking; and, as

Kosta claims, the resultant tensions and “conflicting ideologies played themselves out

on the female body.”741 In Weimar, public discussions of the relationship between

women’s fashion and their natures, in particular with regard to their sexuality, were

deployed as a tool for continued oppression and control. And, as Mary Russo relatedly

claims, a culture that intends to control women reflects “the misogyny which permeates

739 Moll, Polizei und Sitte, 23. 740 Meskimmon and West, Visions of the Neue Frau, 6. 741 Kosta, 280.

226 the fear of losing one’s femininity, and alienating men.”742 In mid 1920s, fashion

debates escalated when representations of the New Woman were newly infused with

the fictitious Garçonne.

The Garçonne was the title of French author Victor Margueritte’s scandalous, yet successful, 1922 novel.743 Similar to the New Woman, the garçonne was a discursively constructed and mass-mediated international phenomenon. Due to the figure’s bisexuality, the garçonne represented a “most provocative expression” of gender.744

Much like the transvestite, whose sexual identity oscillated between genders, the androgynous garçonne was described by contemporaries in similar terms as “a girl who looked like a man that looked like a girl.”745 The figure’s edgy sexual frisson was embraced and emulated by upper-class Weimar lesbians and Garçonne became the

namesake for a periodical and a trendy women’s bar.746

742 Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess, and Modernity (New York: Routledge, 1994), 12. 743 Julia Drost, La Garçonne: Wandlungen einer literarischen Figur (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2003). The title of Viktor Margueritte’s controversial Bildungsroman of the New Woman is a feminized version of the French garçon (boy). Set in Paris, the young female protagonist seeks financial and sexual independence, launches a decorating business and takes several lovers, one of which is a woman. Margueritte’s renowned literary invention represented postwar hedonism and androgynous fashion. The garçonne symbolized female emancipation, sexual freedom and also contributed to the process of early lesbian identity construction. As a result of the novel, Margueritte lost his position in the prestigious French Academy. La Garçonne was scandalous, but wildly popular; it was translated into twelve languages and followed by two sequels. The novel was published in a German translation in 1924 but was shortly thereafter banned in Germany. 744 Kosta,”Unruly Daughters,” 279. 745 Kosta,”Unruly Daughters,” 279, 285n35. Kosta cites Weimar journalist Gabriele Tergit’s contemporary description of the garçonne: “Das Mädchen sieht aus wie ein Mann, der wie ein Mädchen aussieht.” See also, Gabriele Tergit, Blüten der Zwanziger Jahre: Gerichtsreportagen und Feuilletons, 1923- 1933, Jens Brüning, ed. (Berlin: Rotation, 1984), 67. 746 Ilse Kokula, “Lesbische Leben von Weimar bis zu Nachkriegszeit,” in Adele Meyer, Lila Nächte, 101. The lesbian periodical Garçonne replaced the title Frauen Liebe and circulated from December 1930 until October 1932. According to Kokula, Susi Wanowski (dancer Anita Berber’s former lesbian partner) opened the Garçonne bar on Berlin’s Kalckreuthstrasse 11 in 1931; Gordon offers a conflicting account when he claims that “Berlin’s wild child [Berber] settled on Susi Wanowski, the owner of the Comobar, a classy lesbian locale on the Kommandanstrasse” (74). See also, Heike Schader, Virile, Vamps und wilde

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In Weimar, androgyny was a highly charged issue because it blurred what were formerly clear cut definitions of sexual identity.747 Much like androgynous clothing, boyish hairstyles similarly diffused sexual difference and, as a result, contemporary discourse commonly linked hair to non-normative sexual identity.748 In a tone alternating between humor and alarm, in 1927 a respected feminist journal reported that the Gemeinderat (town council) of the German village Zerbau decided to charge all unmarried women who sported the Bubikopf a monthly fine of 1 RM (Reichsmark).749 In

the 1920s, women who wore their hair in a Bubikopf (like a boy) were referred to in

conservative German circles as “Andershaarige” (different, or other-haired):750 At the

time, a term which also automatically inferred homosexuality.751 The discursive significance of hair was also evident among contemporary sexologists.752 Hirschfeld studied the link between hair, sexual identity, and behavior.

Veilchen: Sexualität, Begehren, und Erotik in den Zeitschriften homosexueller Frauen im Berlin der 1920er Jahren (Königstein: Helmer, 2007), 55. 747 Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 188. In Weimar Germany “any representation of androgyny . . . had the potential to signify bisexuality or a degree of homosexuality.” 748 Popular debates regarding women’s [short] hair were not limited to Weimar Germany but also conducted in France. See, Mary Louise Roberts, “Samson and Delilah Revisited: The Politics of Women’s Fashion in 1920s France,” in American Historical Review (June 1993): 657-84. 749 Helene Stocker, ed., Die Neue Generation: Publikations-Organ des Bundes für Mutterschutz, Jg. 23, no. 9 (1927): 301. This story appeared under the headline: “Besteurung des Bubikopfes” (Taxation for the Bubikopf). Married women were charged 2 RM. 750 Kosta, “Unruly Daughters,” 278. 751 Magnus Hirschfeld, and Ludwig Levy-Lenz, eds. Sexual-Katastrophen: Bilder aus dem modernen Geschlechts-und Ehehleben (Vienna: Dr. Karl Meyer Ges.m.b.H., 1927), 52. The lesbian “Margarete H.” reports being noticed and taunted on the street as a “man,” or a “man in women’s clothing” or with “the weighted” (vielsagende) term “anders” (other). As previously noted, at the time, anders inferred Richard Oswald’s 1919 film, Anders als die anderen (Different than the Others), the first film with a homosexual theme. 752 Thomas O. Haakenson, “Grotesque Visions: Art, Science, and Visual Culture in Early Twentieth- Century Germany” (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 2006), 191-92. Hirschfeld suggested that “perusal through any newspaper would demonstrate how many women seek assistance in order to remove (manly) facial hair.”

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Bearded Women and “Terrifying News”

In early twentieth-century German culture, hair conjured images of robust virility and was considered a marker of masculinity in both men and women. In part, this correlation explains the many bearded women pictured in Hirschfeld’s contemporary publications. One such photograph illustrating the contemporary discursive link between hair and masculinity (fig. 5.6) depicts a woman in a man’s military uniform wearing a false mustache.753 His 1905 publication Geschlechts-Übergänge (Sexual

Intermediates) includes several images of Androtrichie, or feminae barbatae (bearded women) (fig. 5.7).754 Hirschfeld classified falsely mustached or naturally bearded women as sexual intermediates and strengthened the link between hair and sexuality by remarking “many homosexual women have to shave on a regular basis to prevent the growth of excessive facial hair,” and “he knows one who shaves three times a week.”755

While Hirschfeld’s observations were expressed with clinical neutrality, as the following report confirms, references to ‘hairy’ women in the popular media were sensationalistic or denigrating.756

753 Magnus Hirschfeld, Berlins Drittes Geschlecht, Manfred Herzer, ed. (Reprint 1904. Berlin: Verlag rosa Winkel, 1991), 91. The caption informs the reader that “the mustache is glued-on.” Similar pictures of women in uniform with mustaches appear on 107 and 122. 754 Magnus Hirschfeld, Geschlechts-Übergänge mit 83 Abbildungen und einer Bunttafel (Leipzig: Verlag der Monatsschrift für Harnkrankheiten und sexuelle Hygeine, 1905), Plate 54. 755 Magnus Hirschfeld, Geschlechts-Übergänge, unpaginated, cited in Haakenson, 192, 192n330. 756 I have recently discovered numerous early twentieth-century photo postcards of bearded women. They suggest that bearded women were popularly regarded as a natural curiosity and folk entertainment. In contrast, men’s hair was a positive sign of masculinity and denoted sexual potency; advertisements in the back pages of the popular interwar German periodical Lustige Blätter geared to men regularly promoted products that promise to enhance mustache growth. Negative cultural associations linking women and hair persist; in Germany, even today, an uncomfortably ‘outspoken’ or ‘angry’ woman is often described as having Haare auf die Zähne (hair on her teeth).

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In 1924, the Berliner Illustrierter Zeitung (BIZ) published a manipulated

photograph of a young woman with a mustache captioned “Eine Schreckensnachricht”

(Terrifying News) (fig. 5.8). Obviously intended to frighten women from cropping their

hair, the caption warns: “When one does not allow the hair to grow on the head, it will

grow on the face and women will get mustaches.”757 Published roughly twenty years after Berlin’s Third Sex (1904) and Sexual Intermediates (1905), the 1924 image appears to be an unscientific and blatantly sensationalized version of one of Hirschfeld’s countless earlier subjects. However, the melding of feminine and masculine characteristics in the BIZ image also implicates Höch’s mix-gendered figures: in 1924 she

was employed at Ullstein, the magazine’s publisher, and likely saw the illustration.758

Weimar Subculture and the Cross-dresser

Magnus Hirschfeld was often mentioned in Weimar lesbian magazines.

Relatedly, discussions and pictures of transvestites were regularly featured in lesbian journals. A number of lesbian magazine covers depict cross-dressed women (fig. 5.9) and nearly every issue announces a transvestite-themed article on its title page. Indeed, the clothing-based cultivation and performance of gender was central to the Weimar lesbian’s construction of social identity.759 As Heike Schader explains, lesbians achieved

757 According to the caption, the comment was made by an unnamed “vice president at an American fashion congress.” 12. October, 1924, Berliner Illustrierter Zeitung. 758 Lavin, “Chronology,” Cut, 208. Höch worked three days a week at the Ullstein Press between 1916 and 1926. 759 Heike Schader, Virile, Vamps und wilde Veilchen: Sexualität, Begehren, und Erotik in den Zeitschriften homosexueller Frauen im Berlin der 1920er Jahren (Königstein: Helmer, 2007), 66-67. Weimar lesbians identified as falling somewhere between male and female and generally identified with the claims of contemporary sexologists who argued that “despite their genitals, lesbians felt, acted, and physically fashioned themselves as masculine.” Schader, however, comments that feminine lesbians were represented as “even more feminine than heterosexual women.” This, she

230 this by orienting and aligning themselves with “contemporary clichés of feminine and masculine appearance.”760 Accordingly, ‘virile’ lesbians asserted their identity through the “deliberate adoption of clothing and mannerisms stereotypically associated with men;”761 monocles and smoking jackets clearly identified them as “gigolo” or

“gentleman” figures.762

Gertrud Liebherr’s “Moderne Fotokunst”

Due the increased affordability of photography and the new image-driven

Weimar media, photography became an integral component to contemporary gay and lesbian identity construction.763 The Berlin photographer Gertrud Liebherr (life dates unknown), who specialized in portrait photographs of cross-dressers, advertised her

services in Berlin’s lesbian periodicals.764 According to her ad, Liebherr was dedicated to what she described as “Moderne Fotokunst” (modern art-photography) (fig. 5.10).765

Liebherr advertised in “Die Welt der Transvestiten” (The World of the Transvestite), a

concedes, was a “problem” because the threat of “pseudo-homosexuality hung over such discussions like the sword of Damocles” (67). 760 Schader, Virile, Vamps, 123. 761 Schader, Virile, Vamps, 123. 762 Schader, Virile, Vamp, 109. 763 Matlock, “Masquerading Women,” 37; 37n10. Well into the 1950s, “women’s homosexuality continued to be studied under rubrics that mixed clothing and costume obsessions,” and as Jann Matlock remarks, “we could say that the studies of female cross-dressing and clothes obsessions became the euphemistic space in which lesbians had their day.” 764 Jens Dobler, ed. Verzaubert in Nord-Ost: Die Geschichte der Berliner Lesben und Schwulen in Prenzlauer Berg, Pankow und Weissensee (Pankow: Museumsverband Pankow, Bruno Gmünder Verlag und Sonntags-Club, 2009). Dobler introduces Liebherr as Szenen-Fotografin (Photographer of Berlin’s homosexual scene). According to my April 2011 correspondence with him, Liebherr’s life dates are unknown. 765 This advertisement appears in the lesbian periodical Die Freundin (Berlin) (17. Oct., 1927): 7.

231 special subsection integrated in the lesbian magazine Die Freundin and was apparently read by male and female cross-dressers alike.766

Two Liebherr portraits, Die Frau als Mann (The Woman as Man) (figs. 5.11, 5.12)

although different, share the same caption. Both appear in lesbian journals and suggest

that along with creating studio portraits for private clients, Liebherr also contributed to

the lesbian print media. Both photographs depict female cross-dressers meticulously

attired in masculine clothing and reflect lesbian cross-dressers’ engagement with

representations of elegant men in the contemporary popular media, such as those

pictured in BIZ, the most widely read German pictorial (fig. 5.13).767

Viewed in this context, Liebherr’s photographs are best understood as contemporary documents of a particular lesbian role. While to some, women dressed as men potentially suggest an ironic performance of masculinity, I would argue that

Liebherr’s clientele had no such intentions. If we consider that the women who commissioned these photographs were self-supporting lesbians and, at best, earned about 25 Marks weekly,768 relative to their wages and the cost of food and

766 Rainer Herrn, Schnittmuster des Geschlechts: Transvestitismus und Transsexualität in den frühen Sexualwissenschaft (Giessen: Psychosozial-Verlag, 2005), 145. 767 Images such as “Der Elegante Herr” (The Elegant Man) in the BIZ (August, 10, 1924) obviously served as templates for Weimar lesbian transvestites. The phenomenon of female cross-dressing was, however, not limited to Berlin and this observation is significant because it speaks to broader issues of emerging lesbian visibility, and supports Everard’s claim of a cross-cultural Sapphic link between the monocle in Höch’s Russian Dancer and that pictured in Romaine Brooks’ portrait of Una Troubridge. Furthermore, photographs depicting cross-dressed women created by the fin-de-siècle lesbian American photographers Alice Austen (1866-1952) and Frances Benjamin Johnston (1864-1952) attest to a similar practice in the United States. Relatedly, a number of cross-dressed Parisian lesbians photographed in the early 1930s by Brassaï in a lesbian bar, significantly named Le Monocle, are wearing tuxedos, neckties, and monocles. 768 For a table of wages for skilled/unskilled workers in 1928, see, C. Bresciani-Turroni, “The Movement of Wages in Germany during the Depreciation of the Mark and after Stabilization,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 92, no. 3 (1929): 411. See also, Renate Bridenthal, “Beyond Kinder, Küche,

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entertainment, Liebherr’s portrait studio, which advertised 12 photo-postcards for 8.50

Marks (more than a third of a woman’s average weekly wages), was relatively costly.769

This suggests that Liebherr’s studio photographs represent an investment in the visual

performance of lesbian identity on the part of the subjects that commissioned them.

The anonymous cross-dressed subjects in Gertrud Liebherr’s portraits greatly

facilitated the self-representation of Weimar lesbians and contributed to an ongoing

cultural process that destabilized the traditional conflation of male costume, gender

identity, and social authority (fig. 5.14). While the masculine attire of Liebherr’s female

subjects initially invested in the sartorial expressions of patriarchal authority, it

ultimately weakened that same authority and “challenged dominant modes of social

identification.”770 Indeed, images of women dressed as men aided in and hastened the demise of the power vested in male costume. As Susan Gubar elaborates, female transvestism only initially “in-vests the traditional forms of patriarchy with authority,”

for ultimately, transvestites “di-vest conventional forms of legitimacy and finally, as the

etymology of the word transvestite implies, make a travesty of sexual signs.”771

In Weimar, female transvestites, as Hirschfeld discovered much to his surprise,

were generally lesbians; however, their severely tailored clothing, a gendered sign, also

Kirche: Weimar Women at Work,” Central European History 6, no. 2 (June, 1973): 156. Bridenthal writes women earned 30-40% less than men. Based on Bresciani-Turroni’s statistics, median hourly wage for a [male] worker in 1928 was 99.35 Pfg. Bridenthal claims that women generally earned 30-40% less than men; this suggests that women earned ca. 24-27 Marks weekly. 769 The price of a lesbian periodical was 20 Pfenning (Pfg; cent), and admission to a festive evening at a lesbian club was 30- 50 Pfg. and often included a party favor. A pack of cigarettes was 50 Pfg., and a loaf of bread generally sold for 40 Pfg. 770 Marsha Meskimmon, “Masquerade, Performance and Multiplicity,” in We weren’t modern enough: Women Artists and the Limits of Modernism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 219; See also, Marvin Carlson, Performance: A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge, 1996). 771 Susan Gubar, “Blessings in Disguise: Cross-dressing as Re-dressing for Female Modernists,” The Massachusetts Review 22, no. 3 (Autumn 1981), 502.

233 clearly indicated their adherence to feminist principles and identification as New

Women. In contrast to their lesbian counterparts, male cross-dressers, as Hirschfeld

established, were not necessarily politically engaged or homosexual. Perhaps due to the

latter, male transvestites were integrated in lesbian, rather than homosexual magazines.

Between 1927 and 1931, three Berlin lesbian magazines, Die Freundin, Frauenliebe, and

Garçonne, provided a forum for female and male transvestites.772 Essays and editorial- type discussions served to normalize the transvestite. First-and third person accounts characterized cross-dressing as secret and pleasurable and these experiences were generally described without guile or shame.773

The Weimar Transvestite Voo-Doo and Höch’s Tamer

The muscular arms, sequined costume, and maquillage of Höch’s Tamer might easily belong to a male cross-dresser and suggests the celebrated Weimar transvestite,

Voo-doo. A prominent figure in Berlin’s sexual subculture, Voo-Doo (alias Willy Pape) is pictured in Hirschfeld’s Transvestites (fig. 5.15), and is described as a “highly successful

Variété artist who performs as a Snake Dancer.”774 Fifteen years later, the lesbian

772 Herrn, Schnittmuster, 144. Most notably, beginning with its first issue in 1924, the Berlin lesbian magazine Die Freundin integrated the theme of the transvestite in its publication with an unpaginated insert or Sonderteil (special section). Originally called “Der Transvestit” (The Transvestite), in 1927 the section was renamed “Meinungsaustausch der Transvestiten” (Open-discussion for Transvestites) or simply “Transvestit.” Due to censorship, for a short time Freundin ceased publication in 1928, but when the magazine resumed printing in 1929, the special section for cross-dressers was renamed “Die Welt der Transvestiten” (The World of Transvestites). See also Herrn, Schnittmuster, “Literaturverzeichnis,” 221-37. Between 1927 and 1932, numerous articles regarding transvestites were published in other Berlin lesbian and gay magazines. Herrn’s bibliography suggests that interest in this theme was highest between 1929 and 1931. 773 Anonymous, “Mann und Freundin zugleich? Kritische Betrachtungen einer Transvestitengattin,” (Both Husband and Girlfriend? Critical Thoughts of the Wife of a Transvestite) Die Freundin 4 Jg., no. 5, March 5, 1928, unpaginated. 774 Magnus Hirschfeld and Max Tilke, Der erotische Verkleidungstrieb (Der Transvestiten), Illustrierter Teil (Berlin: A. Pulvermacher, 1912), Plate 43. Voo-Doo’s moniker and “Snake-Charmer” act

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magazine Die Freundin featured a photograph of Voo-Doo alongside an article about

women’s fashion (fig. 5.16). The article, introduced by the magazine’s editor as an

“Open Forum regarding Questions of Fashion,” launched what he hoped would be a

“lively discussion regarding this timely issue.”775 In the subsequent text, the author claims that the while purpose of clothing was protection from the elements, above all, it

was intended to suggest and enhance the naked body. Indeed, Voo-Doo’s costume

reveals more than it covers. Gerlach’s 1927 photograph highlights Voo-Doo’s midriff and

leg, and reinforces the author’s claims. Captioned “The Transvestite Voo-Doo, one of the

most famous international dance-stars,” Voo-Doo obviously enjoyed continued

popularity and success.776 Much like the Tamer’s sequined bodice, Voo-Doo’s

extravagant costume suggests the theatre or an orientalized belly-dancer. However,

unlike the celebrated, while convincingly feminine performance of the “Snake-Dancer”

Voo-Doo, the masculine (e.g. distinct biceps) and feminine (e.g. costume) components

of Höch’s Tamer, can never be resolved into one gender but oscillate irritatingly

between genders.

Sexual Intermediacy and Höch’s Tamer

suggests the early twentieth-century Western European discourse of primitivism and the contemporary conflation of oriental culture with exotic sexuality. Furthermore the description of Pape as a Variété artist, a French term, suggests “inter-ethnic European exoticism.” Voo-Doo was also the name of a popular Weimar Berlin gay bar, where, according to Curt Moreck one could experience “exotic nights.” See, Curt Moreck, Führer durch das “lasterhafte” Berlin (Leipzig: Verlag der moderner Stadtführer, 1927), 138. A Christian Schad drawing of the bar Voo-Doo is pictured in Moreck on page 141. While an extended discussion of Voo-Doo is deserved, it exceeds the scope of this study. 775 Anonymous, “Meinungsaustausch über Modefragen: Ein Mann über Damenmode,” Die Freundin, Jg. 4, no. 14 (1927): 27-28. 776 Die Freundin, Jg. 3, no. 4 (1927): 27. “(Photo Gerlach) Der Transvestit Voo-Doo, einer der bekanntesten internationalen Tanzsterne.”

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The many feminae barbatae pictured in Hirschfeld’s publications represent only

one example of what he classified as sexual intermediates or alternately as

Zwischenstufe (between-steps), or Zwitter (two-thing, or two-sexed). A number of

photographs in Hirschfeld’s 1905 publication Geschlechts-Übergänge depict men with

abnormally rounded hips; muscular, flat-chested women; or dual-gendered

hermaphrodites.777 One such dual-gendered figure (fig. 5.17) is comprised of male and female elements and suggests Höch’s Tamer in its competing signifiers. Indeed, both

Hirschfeld’s “Pseudohermaphrodite” and Höch’s photomontage destabilize stereotypical representations of gender.

While figures that blend male and female characteristics automatically disrupt

binary perceptions of gender, the most subversive aspect of Höch’s Tamer is arguably

the figure’s almost seamless visual construction. While Höch combined male and female elements in photomontages throughout her career, scholars recognize a marked difference between the artist’s Dada-era and late Weimar depictions. The blatantly

mixed-gendered figures of Höch’s Dada oeuvre are carnivalesque. A detail from Höch’s

1919 signature photomontage, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, for example, connects an aging male head to a pudgy infant’s body and represents one of many abrupt visual combinations that characterize the artist’s work from this period. The patent absurdity of this, and similarly brusque visual combinations, reflects the artist’s contemporary

777 Magnus Hirschfeld, Geschlechtsübergäge: Mischungen männlicher und weiblicher Geschlechtscharaktere (Sexuelle Zwischenstufen) (Leipzig: Verlag der Monatsschrift für Harnkrankheiten und sexuelle Hygeine, 1905).

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affiliation with Dadaism, a movement known for its program of cultural impropriety and

radical impertinence.

However, by the mid 1920s, as Makela and others astutely observe, Höch had

“largely abandoned the irreverent mode of address that characterized her work from

the early Weimar period” and replaced it with a more evocative aesthetic.778 Makela ventures that this development was “influenced, perhaps by her encounter in Paris with

Surrealism.”779 Certainly Höch’s familiarity with Surrealism may in part explain the

emergence of a more subtle visual aesthetic in her late Weimar oeuvre.780 Yet, arguably, of equal, if not decidedly greater, influence upon the artist’s suave gender combinations was her contemporary lesbian relationship. It clearly altered her perception of rigid gender stereotypes and changed her aesthetic; this manifested itself in a more relaxed treatment of the human form. Concomitantly, Höch depicted visual transitions between male and female bodies by using “similarly scaled photographic fragments of body parts in her collages.”781 Makela claims that the harmonious melding

of disparately gendered elements demonstrates Höch’s “increased ease with regard to

778 Makela, “By Design,” 66. 779 Makela, “By Design,” 66, 65, 77n76; See also Burmeister, HH: eine Lebenscollage, vol. 2, 177- 90, HH Archiv BG, 24.37. On a scrap of paper dated April 22 Paris, Höch noted the names “Tzara Soupault Eluard Th. Fraenkel Huidobro Peret Ribemont-Dessaignes Satie Serner Sélavy.” Höch’s travel diary includes the addresses of Max Ernst and Man Ray. The papers from Höch’s visit to Paris in 1924 include Theo von Doesburg’s calling card, which she most probably carried with her to facilitate and socially finesse introductions to a number of artists. 780 Makela, “By Design,” 65; Höch met Tristan Tzara and Man Ray while in Paris. Other artists she met there include Constantin Brancusi, Amadée Ozenfant, and Sonia Delaunay “with whom she shared textile designs.” 781 Makela, “By Design,” in Photomontages of HH, 66, emphasis Makela.

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gender classification.”782 The smooth visual transitions that characterize Höch’s late

Weimar oeuvre also clearly suggest the artist’s new-found ease with her own sexual identity, and indicate a familiarity with contemporary sexual subculture.

The smoothly conjoined yet oscillating female and male characteristics of the

Tamer connote the concept of sexual intermediacy. As Hirschfeld’s British colleague, the prominent sexologist Norman Haire (1892-1952) explained in 1933,

We are accustomed to classify individuals as male or female, the classification being made at birth . . . But modern sexology has pointed out the inadequacy of this rough and ready classification . . . When carefully investigated even the apparently most normal male may be found to have certain physical characters approximating to the female type, and the apparently most normal female to have sex characters approximating to the male type. One is led to the conclusion that the hundred-per-cent females are theoretical types which do not exist in reality.783

Much like the inadequacy of binary male and female classifications theorized by

Hirschfeld and characterized by Haire as “rough and ready,” Höch’s Tamer is neither

male nor female but uncannily teeters somewhere between the two and suggests the

sexual Zwischenstufe. The individual masculine and feminine signifiers in Höch’s Tamer

graphically demonstrate the deconstruction and reconfiguration of gender.784

Moreover, the image may be linked to non-normative sexual practices; Makela remarks

782 Maria Makela, “By Design,” in Photomontages of HH, 66. Makela, however, tempers the significant consequences of this argument with the suggestion that this may also be attributed to “her encounter in Paris with Surrealism.” 783 Norman Haire, “Introduction,” Neils Hoyer [pseudo], ed., Man Into Woman: An Authentic Record of a Change of Sex, trans. H. J. Stenning (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1933), viii-ix. 784 George L. Hersey. The Evolution of Allure: Sexual Selection from the Medici Venus to the Incredible Hulk (London: MIT Press, 1996), 172.While the gender ambiguity of Höch’s Tamer is easily linked to Weimar sexology and sexual subcultures, Hersey catapults the 1930 photomontage into popular late twentieth-century discourse by linking it to the female bodybuilder Kristy Ramsey and the 1980s vogue for sado-masochism.

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that “the small seal cornered below, ever so discreetly recalls the many photographs in

Hirschfeld’s museum of flagellation fetishists.”785

While the gender ambiguity of Höch’s Tamer aligns it with Weimar sexology, as

well as popular and sexual subculture, the photomontage may also be linked to police

institutions and practice. Much like sexologists, the Weimar police relied primarily upon

photography to document sexual intermediacy; contemporary police materials suggest

the influence of sexological practice and publications.786

Höch’s Tamer and Weimar Criminology

In a 1928 police handbook, the Weimar criminologist E. Wulffen, using

Hirschfeld’s classification, declared “every individual that deviates from typical male and typical female is a sexual intermediate.”787 However, Wulffen alternately dubs sexual

intermediates in vernacular terms as “Mannweiber und Weibmänner” (Men-women

and Women-men).788 Similar labels circulated in lesbian subculture; in a magazine

article about a sixteen-year-old girl, the author writes, “Her peers called her the

‘Buamädel’ (combined words Buben [boy] and Mädel, or Mädchen [girl]).789 The

similarity of these terms and their usage in ‘official’ and subcultural sources confirms

that in Weimar, gender-related terminology circulated in diverse milieus and contexts.

785 Makela, “Grotesque Bodies,” 213. 786 A photograph of Abtreibungsinstrumente (Abortion-instruments) pictured in E. Wulfflen Encyclopädie der Kriminalistik: Der Sexualverbrecher (1928, p. 642-43) reappears slightly altered as the drawing “Abtreibungsinstrumente (aus dem Dresdner Kriminalmuseum.)” in Hirschfeld Geschlechtskunde, vol. 4 (1930), 448. 787 E. Wulffen, “Verbrechen auf Homosexueller Grundlage,” in Encyklopädie der Kriminalstik. Der Sexualverbrecher: Ein Handbuch für Juristen, Polizei-und Verwaltungsbeamte, Mediziner und Pädagogen (Berlin: Dr. P. Langenscheidt, 1928), 578. 788 Wulffen, “Verbrechen auf Homosexueller Grundlage,” 575. 789 “Sechzehn Jahre unter falscher Flagge: ein Mädchen, das zum Jüngling wird,” (Sixteen years [sailing] under the wrong flag: a girl that becomes a boy), Liebende Frauen, 4. Jg., no. 46 (1929).

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Significantly, all of them implicate Höch’s dual-gendered 1930 Tamer, which could easily

be described in medico-scientific language as a sexual intermediate, in the vernacular

“man-woman,” “woman-man,” or subcultural “Buamädl.”

Aspects of Weimar police practice can be partially revealed through an undated

mug-shot of a male transvestite, originally made public in the scientific journal

Geschlecht und Gesellschaft (Sex and Society) in 1924 (5.18).790 The mug-shot is

comprised of six photographs arranged in two rows of three and is representative of

modern criminal police photography. In his 1924 discussion of cross-dressers, Lothar

Goldmann captioned the image as follows: “One of the first known cases of transvestite practice. In this sequence, the same person is pictured above as a man, and below dressed as a woman.”791 Multiple photographs of this anonymous subject in masculine and alternately feminine attire include two profile and four frontal views. Because the subject is depicted as both a man and a woman, six photographs augment the then standard contemporary police procedure of three views (frontal, profile, and with hat).

While originally and primarily a police document, this six-part image suggests

much more than a standard mug-shot. It documents the contemporaneously illicit, yet

non-criminal practice of cross-dressing, but also represents ‘official’ efforts to identify

and portray sexual intermediacy and gendered multiplicity. Arguably, and perhaps what

is most interesting about the image, it cogently illustrates Hirschfeld’s theory of a gendered continuum, at the time, a radical concept. The anonymous individual pictured

790 Cited and pictured in Herrn, Schnittmuster, 135; 241. Lothar Goldmann, “Über das Wesen des Umkleidungstriebes,” Geschlecht und Gesellschaft XII, (Dresden) (1924/25), Plate 1. 791 Goldmann, “Über das Wesen des Umkleidungstriebes,” Plate 1, reprinted in Herrn, Schnittmuster, 135; 241.

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here is represented as a figure whose gender is positioned within a fluid spectrum

punctuated at opposite ends by masculinity and femininity as signified stereotypically by

hair and dress.

The multiple photographs animate and lend an almost cinematic progression to

the different faces and gendered facets of the subject’s identity. Their sequential

formatting not only illustrates the ambiguity of the subject’s gender, which literally

shifts from frame to frame, but also challenges the viewer’s perception. When viewed at

once, one’s attention oscillates between the six photos, yet is unable to rest on a single

image; similar to Höch’s Tamer, this police document does not convey semiotic resolution. Much like Höch’s Tamer, the six-part mug-shot challenges any

preconceptions of fixed gender. Yet, unlike these multiple images in which each

photograph represents an individually and separately gendered aspect of the subject,

Höch compresses and synthesizes her representation of dually and shifting genders into a single frame.

Conclusion

This chapter links Höch’s 1930 Tamer to contemporary Weimar gender discourse. As the discussion above explains, Weimar culture was dominated by pictorial media, a development supported by the rapid growth of the printing industry after

World War I. The emphasis on visual imagery in Weimar dovetailed with Magnus

Hirschfeld’s methodology which was based largely on the photographic documentation of countless gender deviant subjects.

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Due to a proliferation of illustrated sexological publications and gender debates

in the mainstream media, the Weimar public grew increasingly familiar with non-

normatively sexualities. The diverse range of materials generated by the broad

contemporary interest in sexuality undoubtedly informed, influenced and supported

Höch’s visual aesthetic. While the sensationalism of the popular media fanned the

flames of controversial gender debates and perpetuated masculine and feminine

stereotypes, Weimar sexologists explored the non-normatively gendered figures of

Berlin’s sexual subculture. Höch’s Tamer suggests the prominent transvestites Voo-Doo and Barbette, and is easily linked to imagery generated by popular media, medico-

scientific materials, and Weimar sexual subculture. Above all, the Tamer implicates the

indeterminately and/or non-normatively gendered figures studied by Hirschfeld, such as

transvestites, bearded women, and lesbians.

The impulse of Weimar sexologists to classify and visually document gender

deviancy was reflected in contemporary police practice. A six-part Weimar police mug-

shot of a male transvestite illustrates what Hirschfeld classified as a sexual intermediate

and criminologist E. Wulfflen described as “Weibmänner.” Höch’s ambiguously

gendered Tamer eloquently draws upon the inter-related contemporary efforts of the

Weimar mainstream, sexologists, official institutions and sexual subculture to cogently

represent non-normative gender.

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CHAPTER VI

Hannah Höch, Til Brugman, and Weimar Sexology

Introduction

As the arguments thus far have established, the oeuvres of Hannah Höch and Til

Brugman reflect a critical and sustained engagement with gender. This chapter will examine scientific, subcultural, and popular Weimar print materials and, with a focus on body-related medical technologies, examine select Höch photomontages and Brugman texts.

Throughout the 1920s, Weimar sexological discourse significantly changed. It was during this decade that sexologists joined forces with endocrinologists to explore the nature of sexual hormones. Inspired by the early twentieth-century discoveries of

Eugen Steinach, scientists initially studied the relationship between hormones and age-

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related physical degeneration, but soon began to consider the influence of hormones on

gendered identity and sexual behavior. This brought about a paradigmatic shift in the

understanding of human sexuality and ultimately led to gender-altering surgical

procedures.792

Certainly to anyone with a superficial knowledge of Weimar Germany, a culture

in which the body was the epistemological and material focus for a range of

contemporary discourses, it comes as no surprise that gender altering surgeries were

developed there. Because medical technologies are thoroughly embedded in contemporary cultural contexts and bound with systems of power and knowledge, they are never simply “technical” as they so often appear to be in the popular imagination, but, as scholars explain, intrinsically epistemic.793 As a result, “epistemic things become

technical things and vice versa.”794 Indeed, Weimar-era medical practice reflected the

discursive proximity and intersection of endocrinological, surgical, and sexual sciences.

These discursive interrelationships were historically unique and compelled unprecedented medical experiments and, relatedly, corresponding illustrations.

Comparable to medical technologies, the processes of scientific visualization are similarly embedded in contemporary cultural contexts. As Philip C. Ritterbush explains,

“It is this visual element, dependent upon the faculty of perception that lays science

792 Rainer Herrn, Schnittmuster des Geschlechts: Transvestitismus und Transsexualität in den frühen Sexualwissenschaft (Giessen: Psychosozial-Verlag, 2005).185; 228. In a 1933 interview, Hirschfeld claimed he was initially against such methods because, at the time, he considered them unnecessary and very dangerous. Anonymous, “Magnus Hirschfeld: L’Amour et la Science,” Violà 3, 119 (July 1, 1933): 6. 793 Nikki Sullivan and Samantha Murray, eds., Somatechnics: Queering the Technologisation of Bodies. (Surrey, GB: Ashgate, 2009), 3. 794 Lily Kay, Who wrote the Book of Life: A History of the Genetic Code (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2000), 36, cited in Sullivan and Murray, Somatechnics, 3.

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open to the influence of the general culture of its time, for we all learn to see in ways

that are conditioned by educational institutions, popular media, and the fine arts.”795

In Weimar, the medium of photography –where scientific and cultural discourses intersected– was privileged and often deployed to illustrate unprecedented surgical

procedures in the medical press. Notably, the first surgical vaginoplasty performed on two male transsexuals whose genders were altered was illustrated in 1924 with

photographs.796 However, the combined media of photography, photomontage, and

collage were also deployed in the medical press to illustrate vanguard surgical

procedures and are analogous to Höch’s signature photomontage medium. Like Höch,

who combined male and female elements in her photomontages to suggest

unprecedented gendered identities, Weimar surgeons newly conjoined male and female

elements to alter and construct gender.

Yet, whether gender is constructed with fragments from the popular print

media, as in Höch’s photomontages, or surgically assembled from human flesh, it is, in

effect, a montage which is comprised of cultural and biological components. However,

before correlations between photomontage and Weimar sexological and medical

discourse are addressed, an overview of vanguard medical developments and practices

must be presented.

Eugen Steinach and Surgical Rejuvenation

795 Philip C. Ritterbush, “The Shape of Things seen: The Interpretation of Form in Biology,” Leonardo 3, no. 3 (July 1970): 305. 796 Felix Abraham, “Genitalumwandlung an zwei männlichen Transvestiten.” Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft und Sexualpolitik 18 (1931): 223-26.

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During the 1890s, the Austrian endocrinologist Eugen Steinach determined that

animal subjects could be rejuvenated through surgically grafted hormonal tissues.797

Initially, Steinach’s experiments were of limited interest to medical specialists. However,

after World War I, sensational reports of Steinach’s procedures and their miraculous

results found their way into the popular press. While the primary goal of Steinach’s early

research was rejuvenation, he soon discovered correlations between hormones and

sexual behavior which significantly influenced and altered contemporary perceptions of

biological sex, gender, and sexual identity.798 Later, the Russian-French physician Serge

Voronoff (1866-1951) began to study the effects of administering testicular and ovarian

tissue and extracts to human subjects.799

When news of the rejuvenating effects of surgical grafts hit the popular press,

Steinach and Voronoff gained international acclaim. Unsurprisingly, endocrinology

became a burgeoning field and practitioners scrambled to administer androgens (the

generic term for hormones) and raced to publish their discoveries.800 In 1923, Voronoff

presented a paper at the London Congrés International de Chirurgie on the subject of testicular grafting. As one anonymous reviewer in the prestigious British Medical Journal commented, the procedure “tickled the fancy of laymen, and in its broad outline is

797 Herrn, Schnittmuster, 200. Steinach’s early experiments generally entailed grafting or transplanting the sexual organs or tissues into the other sex of the species. 798 Herrn, Schnittmuster, 105. 799 Norman Haire, Rejuvenation: The Work of Steinach, Voronoff, and Others (London: George Alllen & Unwin Ltd., 1924), 50. Voronoff began transplanting the testicles of sheep and goats in 1917. 800 Haire, “Bibliography,” Rejuvenation, 213-28, references related research published as early as 1786, 1849, and a few isolated examples before 1910. Apparently, there was a burst of scientific interest in this theme during the 1910s and a publishing frenzy ensued between 1918 and 1923.

246 easily understandable by them.”801 The contemporary medical community was particularly fascinated with the promise of reestablishing sexual potency among aging men. The British medical press concluded, “We must admit . . . the testicular graft is something worthy of serious consideration.”802 In the popular British press, these

experiments were known as the “monkey-ball operation.”803 The sensational reports of

Voronoff’s research in the British press were akin to the uproarious media reception

generated by Steinach’s research in Germany.804

In 1920, Magnus Hirschfeld published a much shortened and simplified version of Steinach’s research geared to the interested bourgeois reader in a pamphlet entitled,

Artificial Rejuvenation.805 In his opening remarks, Hirschfeld declared “Steinach’s sensational and astounding discoveries dominate the news and render the dramatic political situation in Germany pale in comparison.”806 This publication confirms that by

1920, the average German reader had access to expertly authored materials regarding

801 The British Medical Journal, vol. 1, no. 3299, “Testicular Grafts,” (March 22, 1924): 529. 802 The British Medical Journal, “Testicular Grafts,” 529. 803 Makela, “Grotesque Bodies,” 207. 804 Voronoff began his research much later than Steinach and was a flamboyant character who sought publicity; Voronoff’s notoriety and extravagant lifestyle overshadowed his research contributions. Voronoff’s wealth enabled him to purchase a château on the Italian Riviera previously owned by the painter Romaine Brooks’ mother. Brooks, who later inherited the property, cynically commented on this in her unpublished autobiography. “My mother’s spirit is now beyond the world she once so disdained . . . She will feel no distress to know that the grounds once consecrated by her devotion, the palm-shaded walks, the rocks, the terraces carefully planted with exotic flowers, are now built in with cages for housing monkeys. The very air she would have vibrate with loving calls . . . is now filled with the shattering plaints of Voronoff’s chimpanzees.” Romaine Brooks, “The Monkey Farm,” No Pleasant Memories (Unpublished, undated) (Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.), 193. 805 Magnus Hirschfeld, Künstliche Verjüngung künstliche Geschlechts-Umwandlung: Die Entdeckungen Prof. Steinach und ihre Bedeutung volkstümlich dargestellt von Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld (Artificial rejuvenation and Sexual reassignment: The discoveries of Prof. Dr. Steinach and their meaning, presented in lay-language by Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld) (Berlin, Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, 1920). 806 Magnus Hirschfeld, Künstliche Verjüngung künstliche Geschlechts-Umwandlung,” 3. “Durch die gesamte Tagespresse gingen und gehen in diesen Tagen Mitteilungen so aufsehenerregendster erstaunlicher Art, dass selbst die folgenschweren und für unser Vaterland verhängnisvollen aussere Ereignisse neben Ihnen an Interesse verblassen.”

247 medical rejuvenation and the effects of hormones upon gendered behavior.807

Hirschfeld’s booklet was followed in 1923 by an independently produced documentary film, which further popularized Steinach’s discoveries.

Steinach claimed that the testicles of young animals, or what he dubbed the

Pubertätsdruse (Puberty-glands), prolonged youthfulness.808 However, through his research, Steinach accidentally discovered the feminizing effects of ovarian tissue. He reported that ovarian extracts countered the masculinizing effect of the testicular glands and, when administered to male rats, they developed mammaries and were able to suckle young.809 Soon, scientists began to consider the possibility of performing similar procedures on human subjects.810

As Hirschfeld reported, by 1920 testicular transplants had been performed on fourteen men.811 While the primary aim of these procedures was to physically rejuvenate the subjects, their gender-altering potential was discovered when the testicles of a homosexual man were surgically replaced with testicular tissue taken from a heterosexual subject. According to Hirschfeld, after the operation, the homosexual

807 Hirschfeld, Künstliche Verjüngung. Hirschfeld discusses “Die Pubertätsdruse und ihr Einfluss auf die Geschlechtlichkeit,” (The ‘puberty-glands’ [testicles] and their Influence on Sexuality), 7-12; and “Verjüngung,” (Rejuvenation), 23-30. 808 Haire, Rejuvenation, 85. Steinach began investigating the relationship between sexual behavior and the gonads of animals in 1894 and reported research results in scientific journals from 1910. 809 Magnus Hirschfeld, Künstliche Verjüngung künstliche Geschlechts-Umwandlung: Die Entdeckungen Prof. Steinach und ihre Bedeutung volkstümlich dargestellt von Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld (Artificial rejuvenation and Sexual reassignment: The discoveries of Prof. Dr. Steinach and their meaning, presented in lay-language by Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld) (Berlin, Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, 1920), 14. 810 Haire, Rejuvenation, 62. Haire claims that in 1918 Steinach suggested the leading Viennese genito-urinary surgeon Dr. Robert Lichtenstern should apply the same methods to human beings. 811 Hirschfeld, Künstliche Verüngung, 21. These procedures were performed at the Berlin Virchow Klinik by the prominent surgeons Professor Eric Mühsam, and his Viennese colleague, Lichtenstern.

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man reported heterosexual impulses.812 Based on this remarkable occurence, Hirschfeld

slowly began to reconsider and augment his initial understanding of transvestites.813 He,

and other medical practioners, soon began to realize that hormones played a key role in

sexual identity and behavior. Before long, it was widely believed that sexuality could be

influenced and adjusted with hormonal extracts and gonadal surgeries.

Der Steinach Film

By the early 1920s, artificial rejuvenation and gender-ambiguity, or as it was then

termed, sexual intermediacy, had not only been discussed in the scientific and popular

press, but also inspired a feature-length film. Simply known as Der Steinach Film, it was

a co-production of the culture department of the Berlin-based UfA and the Austrian

state film agency.814 The Steinach Film was released only four years after Richard

Oswald’s 1919 homosexual-themed film Anders als die Andern. However, unlike

Oswald’s moralizing and melodramatic fiction, The Steinach Film was marketed as a

scientifically informed documentary.815

The Steinach Film premiered at the Berlin movie theatre Palast am Zoo (Palace near the Zoo) in January 1923 (fig. 6.1). Billed as an Aufklärungsfilm

(explanatory/educational film)816 that “bridges science and culture,” contemporary

812 Hirschfeld, Künstliche Verjüngung, 20. 813 Herrn, Schnittmuster, 105, 227. Herrn comments that Hirschfeld was not the first to make this correlation. In 1912 British sexologist Havelock Ellis suggested that hormonal imbalance played a key role in transvestitism. 814 UfA (Universum Film Aktien-Gesellschaft) was founded in 1917 and still exists today; it was absorbed by the Austrian German Dutch television and film conglomerate RTL. 815 The narrative of Oswald’s film addressed the controversial social and legal issues of male homosexuality. Anders argued for the repeal of paragraph 175, the law that criminalized homosexual acts between men. The story, which ends in tragedy, is about a man who is the victim of blackmail because of his homosexuality. Magnus Hirschfeld participated in the film as ‘the doctor.’ 816 Well into the 1970s, the Aufklärungsfilm genre implied sexual education.

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promotional materials claimed it would “shed light on centuries of ignorance regarding

sexual problems and problems related to vitality.”817 Ads for the film praised it because, despite its lay language, it was “scientifically informative” and explained the process and benefits of surgical rejuvenation.818 Moreover, as the same ad promises, The Steinach

Film “will wipe the grin off of any ignorant face that does not understand the relationship between the sexual glands and the homosexual and lesbian’s nature.”

While the educational and informational value of the Steinach Film was touted by early Weimar commentators, importantly, it featured several images of sexually ambiguous figures previously pictured only in medico-scientific publications. One such anonymous, and ambiguously-gendered, figure has short hair, a mustache and pendulous breasts (fig. 6.2).819 The anonymous masked subject might be described as a

collage of gendered characteristics and exemplifies, indeed, embodies two-genders. This

and similar ambiguously gendered figures pictured in the film likely shocked early

Weimar movie-goers; nevertheless, The Steinach Film supported the popular

construction and contemporary representation of sexual intermediacy. For obvious

reasons, the freakishly unfamiliar figures in The Steinach Film may not be characterized

as mainstream; however, the film’s venue at a major Berlin theatre was. The Steinach

Film represents yet another example of the accessibility and ongoing public dissemination of expertly authored sexological information and materials in Weimar.

817 Translation mine. These texts appear in a January 1923 newspaper advertisement for the film. Materials held at Archiv für Sexology, Humboldt University, Berlin and are reproduced at http://www2.hu berlin.de/Sexology/GESUND/ ARCHIV/COLLSTE.HTM Tab “Der Steinach Film” (accessed August 5, 2011). 818 http://www2.hu berlin.de/Sexology/GESUND/ ARCHIV/COLLSTE.HTM Tab “Der Steinach Film” [accessed August 5, 2011]. 819 http://www2.hu berlin.de/Sexology/GESUND/ ARCHIV/COLLSTE.HTM Tab “Der Steinach Film” 250

In Steinach’s 1920 publication, Rejuvenation, ‘before and after’ photographs of old and subsequently rejuvenated animal and human subjects [all male] confirm the success of his medical experiments.820 However, Steinach’s contemporary research was unprecedented and compelled new forms of illustration. While views inside the body, and before-and-after photography were not new in 1920, the collage medium, then a vanguard artistic technique, was deployed in the 1920 publication,821 as in an illustration depicting glands framed in a black square superimposed over a rodent’s belly

(fig. 6.3).822 Indeed the medium is analogous to the surgical procedure it illustrates; much like a collage, surgical grafts and implants conjoin previously foreign elements to

create a new and hybridic whole from their parts. These, and related early twentieth-

century medical procedures, echo art historian Brandon Taylor’s characterization of the

collage as a “competitive juxtaposition of fragments”; a medium, he claims, that

retained its “experimental quality and marginal status” well into the 1930s.823 Indeed,

820 Dr. Eugen Steinach, Verjüngung durch experimentelle Neubelebung der alternden Pubertätsdruse (Rejuvenation through experimental resuscitation of aging puberty-glands) (Berlin: Julius Springer, 1920). Test subjects include rats, a dog, and an elderly man. 821 For a broad discussion of medical illustration see, John L. Thornton and Carol Reeves, Medical Book Illustration: A Short History (Cambridge GB: Pleander Press, 1983); Jonathan Shaw and Jennifer Carling, “Spheres of Knowledge: Artistic Discovery in Renaissance Europe,” Harvard Magazine 114, no. 2 (November- December 2011): 42-27; For a discussion of the correlation between medical illustration and mid-twentieth century visual technologies, see Hans Elias, “Discovery by Illustration,” Scientific Monthly 70, no. 4 (April 1950): 229-32. The words of Weimar contemporary Hans Elias, who left Germany in 1934, emphasize the important interrelationship between scientific perception and contemporary modes of illustration. “This discipline of illustration and visualization is a great force in the process of discovery. Scientific drawing which, during the nineteenth century, was almost universally handled by the investigators themselves, has contributed greatly to the advancement of science in the past. The production of visual teaching materials, atlases, charts, models, motion pictures, film strips, lantern slides, and perhaps other devices, if handled by personnel trained both scientifically and artistically, may contribute more and more to scientific progress in the future. We may also witness in this process a renewed interest in the shape of living things, and the recognition that knowledge of structure is one of the cornerstones for the understanding of function.” 822 Steinach, Verjüngung, 20-21. 823 Brandon Taylor, Collage: The Making of Modern Art (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2004), 9.

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Taylor’s remarks regarding the then experimental practice of collage and photomontage are clearly analogous to Weimar surgical innovation.

While Steinach’s hormone-related discoveries clearly anticipate Höch’s

inconclusively sexed 1930 Tamer, the inside/outside view of the rodent’s body in

Steinach’s medical illustration suggests the artist’s photomontage Starken Männer

(Strong Men), an image which explores the relationship between biology and gender identity.

Hannah Höch’s Strong Men

Höch’s 1931 photomontage Die starken Männer (The Strong Men) (fig. 6.4)

foregrounds the boxer and his contemporary status as a cultural hero. Höch’s title

suggests physical strength and issues related to contemporary concepts of masculinity.

As scholars David Bathrick, Eric N. Jensen, and Joyce Carol Oates similarly claim, in an

age of stifling conformity, the boxer easily advances to an icon of male individuality. As

Oates pithily writes, “Boxing is for men, and is about men, and is men [it is] a

celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for being lost.”824

Indeed, the general popularity of the boxer during the 1920s was heightened by the

experiences of World War I. During World War I, age-old ideals of male heroism were

undermined through the anonymity of industrialized conflict and the physical

degradation of the trenches. In Germany, these experiences were exacerbated by the

824 David Bathrick, “Max Schmeling on the Canvas: Boxing as an Icon of Weimar Culture,” New German Critique 51 (Autumn 1990): 113-36; Eric N. Jensen, Body by Weimar: Athletes, Gender, and German Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Joyce Carol Oates, On Boxing (Garden City, NY: Dolphin Doubleday, 1987), 72.

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humiliation of defeat.825 After the war, the country mended itself by looking to the past; nineteenth-century Nietzschean individualism, which celebrated physical strength and virile dignity, was rekindled. This served to mollify the once rough and tumble figure of the boxer and rendered him newly salonfähig (socially acceptable). As historian David

Bathrick explains, after World War I the boxing arena “was to leave the ghetto of strictly lower class amusement and rapidly achieve acceptance as a respectable form of public entertainment.”826

The glorification of the body and sport in Weimar Germany (as earlier stated in

the discussion of Körperkultur) was emblematic of profound political and social

transformations. Leading intellectuals were convinced that German culture could be

rejuvenated and strengthened with sport.827 Among the Weimar avant-garde and the international cultural elite, the boxer was lionized and became “an ideal trope for an entire age.”828 In 1921, the influential Berlin art dealer and publisher Alfred Flechtheim

(1878-1937) expressed his fascination with the boxer in an editorial in Querschnitt

(Cross-section) (subtitled “a journal for artists and friends of boxing”). He wrote, “We consider it our duty to promote boxing in German artistic circles as it has been the case elsewhere. In Paris, Braque, Derain, Dufy, Matisse, Picasso, and Rodin are all

825 Ingrid Sharp, “Gender Relations in Weimar Berlin,” in Christiane Schönfeld, Practicing Modernity: Female Creativity in the Weimar Republic (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2006), 7. 826 David Bathrick, “Max Schmeling on the Canvas: Boxing as an Icon of Weimar Culture,” New German Critique 51 (Autumn 1990): 113-36. 118. 827 Bathrick, “Max Schmeling,” 114. See also, Heinz Risse, Soziologie des Sports (Berlin: August Reher, 1921). 828 Bathrick, “Max Schmeling,” 118.

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enthusiastic boxing fans.”829 Indeed, the widespread fascination with the boxer inspired

a number of artists to take up the theme; yet Höch, in contrast to her contemporaries,

disrupted the boxer’s masculinity with ambiguity and visual irony.830

Höch’s photomontage Strong Men features the legendary German boxer Max

Schmeling (fig. 6.5).831 Then, a major sports personality, Schmeling was a ubiquitous

presence in the international media, and his image, even reduced to a mere silhouette,

was easily recognizable. Höch, however, depicted Schmeling as a shell: a composite face of an old man and a young woman float inside the boxer’s hollow body. Trapped in

Schmeling’s muscular silhouette, the twisted face “can never be resolved into unity; it is always two genders.”832 The unresolved gender of the figure’s face is echoed by its

lower body; turned, the buttocks face outward and “emphasize a crevice that resembles

a feminine sign of availability.”833 Yet, while Höch’s boxer disrupts masculine

stereotypes, it may also be linked to Weimar sexual subculture or medicalized sexology;

the figure’s dual-gendered face suggests the common contemporary characterization of

male homosexuality as a woman trapped in a man’s body. Relatedly, the view inside the

Strong Man’s body evokes the surgical implantation of a feminizing hormonal

component.

829 Bathrick, “Max Schmeling,” 119, 119n22; “Ist der Boxsport Roh?” (Is Boxing raw?) Querschnitt 1 (1922): 221. 830 These include, but are not limited to, Roman native, Ernesto di Fiori (1884-1945) Max Schmeling (bronze sculpture, 1928), Marianne Brandt (1893-1983) Boxers (photomontage, 1929), Renée Sintenis (1888-1963) Boxer Paul Allner (bronze sculpture, 1925), Czech native, Frieda Reiss (1890-1957) Boxer Erich Brandl (photograph, 1925), and Dutch native, Paul Citroen (1896-1983) Boxkampf (Boxing Match) (photomontage, 1925). 831 Max Schmeling (1905-2004) became the European lightweight champion in 1928 and later defeated the African-American Joe Louis (1914-1981) in a historic match at New York’s Yankee Stadium for the World Title in 1938. 832 Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 197. 833 Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 197.

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In Weimar, the boxer was not only celebrated in the popular mass media, and a favored theme among contemporary artists, but also feted among homosexuals.834 Max

Schmeling’s homoerotic appeal, and the interrelation of sexology and popular entertainment culture, is once again confirmed by the image of “classical beauty” pictured in Magnus Hirschfeld’s 1930 Sexualkunde (fig. 6.6). Here, the nude Schmeling is depicted from behind. This eroticizes his buttocks and echoes the pose of the ancient pagan goddess Aphrodite Kallipygos pictured beside him.835 As Eric N. Jensen observes,

“this pairing invited an artistic and sensuous appreciation of Schmeling’s body, whose

own smooth and unblemished white skin mirrored that of the marble statue.”836

During the Weimar era, the boxer was widely regarded as an embodiment of

Nietzschean individuality and virile integrity and was ubiquitous in popular, artistic, subcultural, and scientific materials. In general, contemporary representations of the figure are uniformly constructed.837 Boxers, but especially Schmeling, the most popular

834 Eric N. Jensen, Body by Weimar: Athletes, Gender, and German Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 89. “The boxer’s erotic appeal extended, not surprisingly, to Weimar Germany’s remarkably vibrant gay subculture.” An anonymous man posing as a boxer pictured on the 1930 cover of the Berlin gay magazine Die Insel (The Island) attests to the contemporary allure of the boxer among gay men. 835 Hirschfeld, Sexualkunde, vol. 4 (1930), plates 206-207; also pictured in Jensen, Body by Weimar, 88. 836 Jensen, Body by Weimar, 89. 837 Here, the Weimar dancer/performance artist, and Höch contemporary, Valeska Gert [Gertrude Samosch] (1892-1978) deserves mention. Similar to Höch, Gert represented the boxer in an ironic context. Her 1927 performance Boxen (Boxing) was a circa three minute open-ended dance mimicking the poses and techniques of the boxer. Gert’s strange staccato-like dance performances were in tune with the fractured experience of Weimar daily life, and like Höch’s disjointed collage imagery, they too belie a harmonious and regulated perception of wholeness or semiotic closure. Similar to a late 1950s happening, neither Gert nor her audiences were entirely certain when a performance had begun or ended. For a discussion of Gert, see Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, “Valeska Gert,” The Drama Review 25, no. 3 (Fall 1981): 55-66. 255 of all, were represented as unambiguously masculine.838 While Höch’s Strong Men suggests Schmeling’s broad appeal, the photomontage diverges significantly from contemporary representations; it empties and re-infuses the figure with dual and

unresolved gendered elements and subverts his status as a masculine icon.

Til Brugman and Weimar Sexology

Similar to Höch, Til Brugman explored the construction of gender stereotypes

and engaged with the medical and surgical aspects of contemporary sexological

discourse in her ouevre. Brugman’s knowledge of sexology and medicine was more than superficial; according to her correspondence, she translated a number of medical texts in 1931,839 and reportedly visited Hirschfeld’s Institute the same year.840 Much like the

playful, yet subversive irony suggested in Höch’s unresolved dual-gendered Tamer and

Strong Men, Brugman’s literary grotesques demonstrate a satiric engagement with

838 Bathrick, “Max Schmeling and the Canvas,” 125-25; 125n30. In Weimar, the boxer was a perennially popular theme among contemporary artists. In 1921 Flechtheim commissioned Rudolf Grosmann to create an edition of eight lithographs with a boxing theme. George Grosz’s mid-1920s portrait of Schmeling emphasizes the figure’s muscular torso, while Renée Sintenis’ bronze sculpture, Boxer, and Paul Citroen’s photomontage Boxkampf, and Willi Baumeister’s drawing of a boxing ring, celebrate the boxer’s statuesque physique and suggest virile integrity. 839 Brandt, Vertippte Zebra, 170-71. Unfortunately, I have been unable to locate information regarding actual texts Brugman translated. Knowledge of their themes would undoubtedly be helpful in understanding her oeuvre, and possibly that of her partner Höch. Brandt however, suggests that Brugman translated sexological materials and remarks that Sexualwissenschaft (Sexual science) was at the time, a “relatively young science.” I am inclined to think Brugman had a working knowledge of Steinach materials; she references the scientist in two of her texts. See also, Norman Haire, Rejuvenation: The Work of Steinach, Voronoff, and Others (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1924), 205. Haire mentions hiring a “polyglot secretary” to read and translate materials discussing Steinach’s procedures printed into English, American, French, Dutch, German, and Scandinavian medical journals. Unfortunately Haire does not identify this talented and mysterious polyglot by name. However, a connection between Brugman and Haire is feasible. Haire was friends with Magnus Hirschfeld and, as previously noted, scholars claim Hirschfeld and Brugman were acquainted. Furthermore, Haire was involved in German publishing projects. He wrote the introduction to Niels Hoyer, Man into Woman, which was first published in Germany in 1932 as Lili Elbe: Ein Mensch wechselt sein geschlecht, eine Lebenbeichte (Dresden: Carl Reissner Verlag, 1932). 840 The Hirschfeld Institute website “Visitors and Residents,” tab confirms Brugman’s visit to the Institute in August, 1931. http://www.magnus-hirschfeld.de [accessed September 18, 2011].

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gender and contemporary sexological discourse. Brugman’s “Revision am Himmel”

(Adjustment in Heaven) explores the potentially destabilizing effects of Steinach’s

research upon fundamental Western European concepts of morality and

heteronormativity.841 Brugman’s short story “Warenhaus der Liebe” lampoons both

Steinach’s rejuvenation procedure and the sexually deviant subjects that were the focus

of Hirschfeld’s research.

“Revision am Himmel”

Brugman’s “Revision am Himmel” is a bizarre fantasy spun from contemporary

scientific discourse. “Revision” playfully engages with contemporary theories that linked

sexual identity and behavior to inborn and glandular disposition. In the narrative,

Brugman explores the social consequences of such claims and their potentially

disastrous results. In the text, even God himself is compelled to reconsider age-old

concepts of sin and guilt and revise the Ten Commandments. After much soul-searching

and consultation with the Saints, God must reluctantly concede that if character and

behavior are inalterable and reflect inborn or glandular disposition, no one can be called

a sinner. “If that be the case,” he reasons, “and glands are responsible for all behavior,

whores, street-boys . . . lesbians and homosexuals . . . are all without guilt.”842 While

“Revision” blatantly parodies contemporary sexology and Judeo-Christian morality, the

text may also be read as an argument in support of sexual tolerance. Written in late

Weimar, and possibly after 1933, when all public expressions of homosexuality were

841 Everard, “Patchamatac,” 92-93; 97n24, 25, 26. “Revision am Himmel” was among Höch’s 1927-1935 papers. After the artist’s death in 1978, Brugman’s manuscripts were moved to the Höch Archive in Bachnang; “Revision am Himmel,” printed in Brandt, 111-22. 842 Til Brugman, “Revision am Himmel,” in Brandt, Das Vertippte Zebra, 114, 118.

257 prohibited and punishable by law, Brugman’s text addressed an illicit theme and espoused a potentially dangerous socio-political message.843

“Warenhaus der Liebe”

Much like “Revision,” Brugman’s short story “Warenhaus der Liebe”

(Department Store of Love) (1931-33) explores gender and sexuality, and is a thinly veiled satire of Hirschfeld’s Berlin Institute.844 In the narrative, the Institute of Sexual

Science is allegorized as a department store wherein a variety of sex-related

merchandise and services are offered.845 Open 24 hours, the store sells a variety of objects to accommodate and support the pursuit of pleasure and customers may purchase any obscure fetish object they desire. Brugman’s abstruse inventory of merchandise, such as military uniforms, bedpans, and rubber baby behinds, lampoons the exhaustive collection of sexual paraphernalia held in the erotic museum housed in

Hirschfeld’s Berlin Institute.846 Brugman also pokes fun at strange erotic practices and

843 Ilse Kokula, “Lesbisch leben von Weimar bis zur Nachkriegszeit,” in Bollé, Eldorado, 153. While all organized lesbian and homosexual activities were forbidden by Nazis on February 23, 1933, as early as 1925, calls were made in the German parliament for the criminalization of lesbianism. In 1932, the Chief of the Berlin police department prohibited the public gathering of lesbians and launched an intimidating campaign of random identity controls and police raids of lesbian clubs. 844 Myriam Everard, “Eros in het Museum,” Lust en Gratie 18 (Fall 1988):68, 75n4; See also Brandt, Vertippte Zebra, 79. Because Brugman misspelled Hirschfeld’s name as “Herschmann” in a 1931 letter to Höch, scholars were unsure whether or not Brugman actually visited the Institute. The “visitors” tab at http://www.magnus-hirschfeld.de [accessed August 6, 2011]; however, confirms Everard’s hunch that Brugman visited the Institute; Brugman signed the guest log of Hirschfeld’s Institute in August, 1931. 845 Brugman’s discussion of different departments, suggests the actual organization of Hirschfeld’s Institute. As Herrn explains, a dermatologist, an X-ray technician, a physiognomist (Menschenkundler), an endocrinologist, and a sexual surgeon all had offices there (112-13). 846 The Institute’s collection of erotic paraphernalia was extensive. Much of it destroyed or lost, a portion of it mysteriously survived in a private collection. See, Sibylle Lewitscharoff and Ulrich Moritz, “Ein Kabinett für Sonderlinge? Die Sammlung Trautmann,” in Ästhetik und Kommunikation 7 (1981): 60-71. Haakenson, “Grotesque Visions,” 197. In 1908, Hirschfeld rationalized the necessity for a sexological museum as follows: “It appeared to me very worthwhile to create an archive of sexual science, a sexual- biological museum, analogous to the phylogenetic Institute of [Ernst] Haeckel in Jena or the bacteriological Institute of [Louis] Pasteur in Paris. Here one could collect within a discipline-specific

258 the sexologists’ penchant for minutely cataloguing them. Similarly, the author satirizes the commodification and brazen marketing of unnecessary medical procedures. As customers enter the department store, they are handed flyers with the text, “Have you already been transplanted?” (Sind sie schon betransplantiert?).847 In a sophisticated play on Steinach’s name, Brugman writes, “The elderly lady felt herself versteinacht and [ten- times] verzehnsteinacht. The price reflected this.”848

While Brugman satirizes unconventional sexual behavior and the barefaced

commercial interests that drive medical research and practice, she nonetheless portrays

sexual deviancy in a positive light. She lauds the “Warenhaus” and its proprietor for his

efforts to accommodate and normalize all manner of sexual identity and expression. The

“freedom to love the object of one’s choice,” she writes, enables the “party-like

atmosphere in the department store.”849 The congenial atmosphere described in

Brugman’s narrative reflects accounts of Hirschfeld’s Institute, which contemporaries remembered as friendly and informal.850 Because everyone can freely express themselves and find acceptance there, the department store is responsible for

library valuable or original documents and official papers for strict scientific purposes, as well as pictorial and special data for collective research, data, statistics for comparative folklore or juridical studies, further graphic representations, results of comparative measurements, specimens, photographs, slides, instruments, plaster castings, sexual symbols, etc., etc.” 847 Brugman, “Warenhaus,” in Brandt, 79. 848 Brugman, “Warenhaus der Liebe,” in Brandt, Vertippte Zebra, 75. “Die alte Dame fühlte sich versteinacht, verzehnsteinacht. Das Entgelt war dementsprechend.” 849 Brugman, “Warenhaus,” in Brandt, 79. 850 Herrn, Schnittmuster, 202. Extant Weimar era photographs taken at the Berlin Institute generally depict Hirschfeld with his co-workers and patients happily socializing. Herrn remarks that the atmosphere at the clinic was “unusual because contacts between Hirschfeld and his patients were markedly collegiate in contrast to typical patient doctor relationships.” See also Herrn, 115, for an undated photograph taken at an Institute costume party depicting male and female cross-dressers.

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“worldwide happiness,” and “peaceful coexistence.”851 As the manager of Brugman’s

fictitious store declares,

We have received telegrams from Yellowstone Park, from the middle of the ocean, from the top of the Himalayas, the North Pole and the Sahara from those who are grateful to finally be freed from the shackles of ridiculous prejudice regarding love and for the first time in their lives are able to live in happiness.852

These claims could very well double as a statement from Hirschfeld.

Certainly the ease with which Brugman jokingly addresses surgical procedures

and playfully integrates sexological jargon in her text confirms her interest in, and

professional knowledge of, contemporary medico-scientific research and publications.

Furthermore, as Brugman scholar Marion Brandt claims, Höch and Brugman were

personally acquainted with Magnus Hirschfeld.853 Brandt’s claim is feasible when one

considers Hirschfeld’s broad cultural engagement, and the public accessibility of the

Institute.

The Institute was open to visitors and its educational outreach program was

remarkably developed for the time. Makela comments that “in the first year alone

[1919] the Institute gave 4,200 guided tours, which were augmented by regularly

scheduled continuing education classes and scientific lectures that the general public

could attend.”854 Brugman, who visited the Institute’s museum in August 1931,

“remembered the collections much more clearly than she did the name and founder of

851 Til Brugman, “Warenhaus der Liebe,” in Brandt, 79. “Jeder sass mit seine Liebe wie es ihm passte.” [Everyone sat with their lover the way they pleased.] 852 Brugman, “Warenhaus der Liebe,” in Brandt, 79. 853 Brandt, 170, claims that Höch met Hirschfeld in 1926, while Brugman met him later. 854 Makela, “Grotesque Bodies,” 211. A number of Weimar era lesbian periodicals advertise Hirschfeld’s public lectures.

260 the Institute: She wrote a grotesque tale about it . . . and had the story end with a menacing vision, thereby seemingly anticipating the Institute’s imminent demise.”855

Unfortunately, Hirschfeld’s campaign of information and outreach could not prevent negative political repercussions or stop the attacks that haunted him long before the National Socialists assumed power in 1933.856 Despite his tireless efforts the

Institute of Sexual Science was destroyed by the National Socialists. On May 6, 1933, it

was one of the first targets in a series of raids organized and aimed at what the Nazi

regime deemed degenerate culture. During the raid, the Institute was looted and its

materials publically burned by a group of National Socialists, many of whom were

university students.857 As a result, over 10,000 books, 10,000 psycho-biographical questionnaires, and an estimated 30,000 hand-written sexual biographies were lost or

destroyed.858

Uncannily, Brugman’s “Warenhaus” eerily presage the Institute’s looting. In a disturbingly graphic passage, Brugman describes “violent military hordes” that “build

bonfires, break everything they get their hands on, and destroy objects invested with

855 http://www.magnus-hirschfeld.de Tab, “Visitors and Residents,” Til Brugman [accessed September 18, 2011]; See also Brandt, Vertippte Zebra, 207. 856 Brennan and Hegarty, 16. Throughout the 1920s, hecklers shouting anti-gay and anti-Semitic slurs frequently disrupted Hirschfeld's public lectures. In October 1920, after a lecture in Munich, Hirschfeld was beaten by extremists and left for dead. As a result of the attack, he was hospitalized and erroneous reports of his death were printed in the Leipziger Neuesten Nachricht on October 4, 1920. 857 Nazis carried materials out of the building and destroyed books and other archival materials with a bonfire. The building that housed Hirschfeld’s Institute in Berlin’s Tiergarten Park, was later destroyed in an Allied air attack in 1943. 858 Everard and Bosch, Lust en Gratie, 7. Hirschfeld, who had embarked on an international lecture tour in 1931, was abroad at the time of the looting. In a 1934 article, Hirschfeld likened seeing the destruction of the Berlin Institute in a newsreel at a Parisian cinema to witnessing one’s own funeral. See, Brennan and Hagerty, 16, who cite Hirschfeld in Anthropos I/2 (1934): 1. Tragically, Hirschfeld never returned to Germany and died a year later in Nice on his 67th birthday in 1935.

261 the tenderest sentiment by stamping them with their feet.”859 Indeed, these details could easily double as an eye-witness account of the May 1933 raid.

Brugman scholars claim that “Warenhaus” was written between 1931 and

1933.860 The graphic description of a looting, however, suggests that Brugman did not complete the text until after May, 1933. Yet, judging by the humorous and conciliatory tone of the text, it seems probable that “Warenhaus” was written before the Nazi

raid.861 While Brugman was undoubtedly able to see the humor in earnest situations, the violent destruction of a cultural institution was arguably not among them. Instead, I would suggest that the text, once again, reveals Brugman’s incredible and intuitive grasp of the zeitgeist. By mid-1933, Nazi raids were unfortunately no longer isolated occurrences,862 however, as German sexologist Ludwig Lenz later claimed, the raid on the Institute, “was one of the very earliest acts of government terror, preceeding by years the later well-known Nazi excesses.” As Lenz rhetorically queries, “Why was the

Institute destroyed? Whence the violence? . . . The answer is simple and straightforward enough−we knew too much.”863 Current events provided Brugman with sufficient

859 Brugman,”Warenhaus der Liebe,” in Brandt, 79-80. 860 Brandt, 270; Lust & Gratie 5 (1988): 19, 58-65. “Warenhaus der Liebe” was written in German and was first published in 1988 as a Dutch translation in the lesbian magazine, Lust en Gratie. 861 “Warenhaus der Liebe” was most probably written between 1931 and 1933. Written in German, the text was first published in a Dutch translation as “Liefdeswarenhuis” in Lust en Gratie (Fall 1988): 19, 58-65. “Warenhaus der Liebe” is printed in its original German text in Brandt, Vertippte Zebra, 72-81. 862 Long before Hitler was declared Reichschancellor, Nazis engaged in acts of terror. A cursory examination of 1931 and 1932 issues of Das 12 Uhr Blatt, a Berlin daily, reveals numerous reports of Nazi activities which are generally described in denigrating terms. Nazi Schergen (Nazi Hooligans), Nazimörder (Nazi murderers), Blutrache (bloody revenge), Gesetzwidrig (illegal) and Terror are consistently used in headlines of articles that report regular run-ins with the police and illegal and violent Nazi activities such as murders and mass riots (100 Nazi against zwei Policemen, March 25, 1931). 863 Cited in Erwin J. Haeberle, “Swastika, Pink Triangle, and Yellow Star: The Destruction of Sexology and the Persecution of Homosexuals in Nazi Germany,” in The Journal of Sex Research 17, no. 3,

262 information to generate a disturbing, and credible, fictitious scenario. We do not, however, know if, and to what extent, she anticipated her fiction would so closely and darkly resonate with actual events. Viewed from a later date, the harmless conclusion of

“Warenhaus,” wherein a fetishistic client, who is also an admiral, calls off the attack if the department store promises to deliver “one million million celluloid soldiers” to fight in future wars, is somewhat difficult to understand.864 Yet, as a number of contemporaries later claimed, many underestimated the grave implications of National

Socialism and did not consider it a serious threat until it was far too late.865

Despite its humorous tone, Brugman’s “Warenhaus” is a critique of sexual repression and an argument for sexual freedom which was, in part, likely inspired by her own illicit lesbian sexuality. Like her, homosexual Magnus Hirschfeld and other progressive sexual scientists, sought to ameliorate the lives of non-normatively gendered individuals and worked to gain their social acceptance.

“History and Sexuality” (Aug., 1981): 274; 286n7, Ludwig Lenz, “Psychoanalysis and Hitler,” in The Memoirs of a Sexologist: discretion and indiscretion (New York: Cadillac Publishing Co., 1951), 429-30. “We had a great many Nazis under treatment at the Institute . . . It would be against medical principles to provide a list of the Nazi leaders and their perversions.” Lenz adds, “The history of morals in the Third Reich will some day fill a large volume . . . It is an undeniable fact that extremists are not as balanced mentally as the average normal person, and one mental abnormality is usually accompanied by another.” Lenz continues, “In 1929 one of our patients at the Institute was a young man who had formerly had an intimate relationship with [Ernst] Roehm (leader of the Nazi Sturmabteilung [paramilitary stormtroopers]). From time to time he told me about his circle, which, in those days, we considered hardly worthy of notice and he mentioned casually the name Adolf Hitler: ‘Adi is the most perverted of us all, but at the moment he is acting the heroic male’” (439-40). 864 The admiral argued that if no one engaged in normal heterosexual sex, the population would dwindle and ultimately jeopardize the future of the army. Here Brugman conflates homophobia with war- mongering and ironizes the contemporary valorization of reproductive [hetero]sexuality. It may also be read as a subtle swipe aimed at the sexual hypocrisy which (according to Ludwig Levy Lenz) was common among high-ranking Nazis. 865 Haakenson, 237, cites Renate Bridenthal, Atina Grossmann, and Marion Kaplan, “Introduction,” When Biology became Destiny: Women in Weimar Germany (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984), xii, “Nazism did not arrive full blown, with promises of war and gas chambers. It came slowly, step by step, draped in the protective coloring of love for country, strong medicine to combat unemployment, and . . . a pledge to restore the traditional family.”

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Weimar Sexology and “Extreme Transvestites”

The concept of transgenderism was first suggested in the 1860s by Karl Heinrich

Ulrichs, who “initiated the thinking of same-sex desire through cross-gender

identification.”866 Indeed, Ulrichs’ mid nineteenth-century characterization of his own

experience as an anima muliebris virile corpora inclusa (a feminine soul confined in a

male body) would describe homosexuality, in vernacular terms, for many years to

follow. Significantly launching a discussion of the conflict between sex and gender, as

transgender theorist Jay Prosser claims, Ulrichs established the trope that later defined

transsexuality.867 Later, in 1870, German sexologist Carl Westphal addressed the

“radical gender inversion of two profoundly cross-gendered subjects: a young woman

who wants to live as a man, and a man who wants to live as a woman.”868 Ulrichs’ and

Westphal’s nearly identical model of radical gender inversion was adopted by sexologist

Krafft-Ebing. Under the heading “Effeminatio und Viraginität,” nine case studies of individuals who strongly identified as members of the opposite sex were included in

Krafft-Ebing’s 1893 printing of Psychopathia Sexualis.869

The first true pioneer in the field of cross-gender identification was, however,

Hirschfeld. Scholars now argue that because Hirschfeld’s 1910 Transvestites “was a putatively pre-transsexual work on sexual inversion,” four of the seventeen subjects

866 Jay Prosser, “Transsexuals and the Transsexologists: Inversion and the Emergence of Transsexual Subjectivity,” in Lucy Bland and Laura Doan, eds., Sexology in Culture: Labeling Bodies and Desires (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 119. 867 Prosser, “Transsexuals,” in Bland and Doan, 119. 868 Prosser, “Transsexuals,” in Bland and Doan, 119; Carl Westphal, “Contrary Sexual Feelings,” English translation: http://www.well.com/~aquarius/westphal.htm [accessed September 25, 2011]. 869 Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis (1893), 280-305. The subjects of the nine case studies are two women, and seven men.

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discussed in the volume would likely be classified as transsexuals today.870 Indeed, the

contemporary early twentieth-century label of “sexual inversion” was a largely

undifferentiated concept. As gender historian George Chauncey explains, sexual

inversion “referred to a broad range of deviant gender behavior, of which homosexual

desire was only a logical but indistinct aspect.”871 In the early 1920s, the unclear

distinction between sexual inverts and transvestites led Hirschfeld to distinguish what

he initially characterized as “extreme transvestites.”872

According to Hirschfeld, extreme transvestites were individuals who not only had

an impulse to cross-dress but also identified so strongly with the opposite sex that they

wanted to change their bodies.873 Thereafter, Hirschfeld coined the most popular and

lasting term, “transsexual,” to describe this phenomenon.874 Certainly, as gender

historians argue, transsexuals existed before they were named.875 Moreover, in

Weimar, the development of medical procedures geared to bridging the gap between

subjectivity and biological gender greatly contributed in establishing a transsexual

870 Vern L. Bullough, “A Nineteenth-Century Transsexual,” Archives of Sexual Behavior 16, 1 (1987): 84; cited in Jay Prosser, “Transsexuals,” in Bland and Doan, 122; 871 Prosser, “Transsexuals,” in Bland and Doan, 116, 128n1. See also George Chauncey, “From Sexual Inversion to Homosexuality: Medicine and the Changing Conceptualization of Female Deviancy,” Salmagundi, 58/59 (1982-3): 116. 872 Rainer Herrn, Schnittmuster des Geschlechts: Transvestitismus und Transsexualität in den frühen Sexualwissenschaft (Giessen: Psychosozial-Verlag, 2005), 184. 873 Herrn, Schnittmuster, 184. 874 Magnus Hirschfeld, “Die intersexuelle Konstitution,” Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen (Berlin 1923): 3-27. 875 Prosser, “Transsexuals,” in Bland and Doan, 128. Prosser rebukes “the critical commonplace that the term ‘transsexual’ and the availability of medical technologies such as plastic surgery and endocrinology conjoined to create the figure.”

265 identity.876 As Rainer Herrn explains, attempts to remedy their social difficulties were

undertaken as early as 1883.877 In these early cases, transsexuals were compelled to

seek the support and expertise of medical practitioners. To this end, examinations were

conducted to assess, verify, and document the degree of an individual’s gender

dysphoria.878 Hirschfeld, who contributed significantly to the theorization of the transsexual, conducted a number of gender assessments at the Institute of Sexual

Science.879 As narrated in Man into Woman, the psychological component of the evaluation was particularly intense: “By means of a thousand penetrating questions, this man explored the patient’s emotional life for hours.”880

Expert medical testimonials, especially from figures as prominent as Hirschfeld, not only contributed to the cultural legitimization of transgenderism, but also served to assuage the social and legal difficulties transsexuals inevitably faced. Generally, medical experts recommended that gender-dysphoric individuals be permitted to change their names legally and wear clothing normally worn by the other sex.881 Unfortunately,

876 For an outline of arguments regarding the relationship of surgeries to transgender identity construction, see Bernice L. Hausman, “Recent Transgender Theory,” Feminist Studies 27, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 465-90. 877 Herrn, Schnittmuster, 201. In 1883, the biological female Sophia Hedwig was, thanks to a medical dispensation, the first woman permitted to legally assume a masculine name (Herrmann Karl) and adjust her birth certificate accordingly. Herrn adds that claims Sophia, who was ambiguously gendered, was the first person whose genitals were surgically altered is erroneous. According to Herrn, she did not undergo surgery but was merely allowed to officially change her name. 878 This procedure is akin to the medical and psychological diagnostic protocol pre-operative transsexuals are subjected to today. 879 Neils Hoyer, Man into Woman: An Authentic Record of a Change of Sex, trans. H.J. Stenning. (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1933), 50. A literary account of one such examination is described as a “long and elaborate examination. As Hoyer writes, the professor “intimated to his patient that he must now submit himself for a special examination by his friend Dr. Hardenfeld [pseudonym for Hirschfeld] the sexual psychologist. 880 Hoyer, Man into Woman, 51. 881 Cross-dressing was not illegal; however, if a cross-dressed individual caused a public disturbance they were arrested and charged with criminal disorder. Until 1923, official name changes had

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Weimar procedures governing the evaluation and recognition of transgendered individuals were neither uniformly instituted nor regulated. Legal permission to live as a member of the opposite sex was not always granted, or, once granted, was on occasion, later revoked.882 While Hirschfeld vigorously supported the desire of extreme transvestites to change their names and wear the clothing they pleased, he began to explore the idea of a surgical solution for some of these cases.

Gender Reassignment Surgery

The first surgical gender reassignment procedure was performed on a woman in

Berlin in 1912.883 However, by the mid 1920s, an undisclosed number of sexual surgeries had been performed in Germany, most of which were partial, and performed on women.884 In stark contrast to the number of gender-altering surgical procedures

to be published in the Deutsche Reichsanzeiger und Preussische Staatsanzeiger (Official Newspaper of the German and Prussian Government). As Herrn laconically comments, the announcement had to paid for by the person seeking a name change, and simultaneously ‘outet’ them as transgendered by including their full name and address (128). Permits to wear clothing normally worn by the opposite sex were issued in the form of paper documents which the subject could carry with them and produce if necessary. 882 Herrn, Schnittmuster, 134. As Herrn writes, “especially in the female transvestite newspapers of the 1920s and 1930s, complaints regarding the difficulty of changing one’s name appear often.” For a discussion of official protocol which enabled a subject to legally live as a transvestite in Weimar, see, “Die behördliche Anerkennung der Transvestiten” (134-42). 883 Herrn, Schnittmuster, 104, 231. In 1926, surgeon Richard Mühsam claimed that in 1912 he removed the breasts and uterus of a 35 year old woman. The subject, he reported, was a talented painter who dressed in men’s clothing and reportedly identified as male. “Chirurgische Eingriffe bei Anomalien des Sexuallebens,” Therapie der Gegenwart 67 (1926): 455. 884 Herrn, Schnittmuster, 200. Papers published by Magnus Hirschfeld (1918), Hans Abraham (1921) and Richard Mühsam (1926) report “performing several such procedures on female subjects.”

267 performed on women, only five male-to-female operations were reported before

1933.885 Yet, when one considers the conspicuously low statistical presence of female subjects in contemporary sexological literature,886 it is curious that so many women were subjected to these unprecedented−and arguably risky − procedures.887 This not only speaks to the anatomical differences between male and female subjects but, as

Herrn and Marjorie Garber remark, also indicates the generally lesser significance of the female subject in Weimar and attests to the sexism of the male-dominated medical community.888

In 1923, based on Hirschfeld’s recommendations, a seven year surgical process, resulting in the first complete male-to-female gender reassignment, was initiated.889

However, as Herrn writes “one can only speculate on the number of women who had their breasts, uterus and/or ovaries removed during the 1920s in their efforts to change their sex, because records do not exist.” What little evidence exists indicates that the most frequent, while least invasive, procedure was breast amputation. This was apparently often performed in conjunction with an official name change. In 1930, Hirschfeld reported amputating the breasts of a woman Herta, who later changed her name legally to Gerd. 885 Herrn, Schnittmuster, 201. 886 16 of 17 case studies in Hirschfeld’s 1910 Transvestites discuss male subjects. See also, Norman Haire, Rejuvenation: The Work of Steinach, Voronoff, and Others (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1924). Haire discusses the cases of eighty-two men and those of six women. 887 Operations on female subjects were more dangerous because the ovaries and uterus, unlike the testicles, which are outside the body, are difficult to retrieve. Herrn, Schnittmuster, 105, comments that men often attempted to castrate themselves, while women, compelled by their biology, were forced to consult doctors. See also, Haire, Rejuvenation, 196. “The transplantation of young ovaries brings about somewhat analogous results to those which occur after testicular grafting in men, but it entails a major operation for both the donor and the recipient, since the ovaries are situated in the abdominal cavity. It is thus not at all such a simple procedure as in men.” 888 Herrn, Schnittmuster, 198, 198n23. Herrn comments that Marjorie Garber interprets the relative disinterest among early sexologists in developing and/or perfecting female-to-male SRS procedures as a reflection of the asymmetry of the cultural status of women and men. See also Marjorie Garber, Vested Interest: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1992), 147. 889 Herrn, Schnittmuster, 201-04. This entailed the castration of Rudolph Ri.[chter?] (1892-1933). Richter’s castration, “the first surgical step in sexual-reassignment surgery,” was performed in the Berlin Institute for Sexual Science by Heinrich Stabel. Later, Richter’s castration was followed by a penectomy and the construction of an artificial vagina. Richter, who assumed the female name Dorchen, lived and worked in Hirschfeld´s institute for more than 10 years as a housemaid. Herrn writes that Hirschfeld was aware that transsexuals often had difficulty finding work and because of this, hired a number of them as

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Although Hirschfeld and Steinach had undoubtedly paved the way for popular reports of gender reassignment, until 1931, gender-altering procedures were only discussed in the medical press or in Weimar lesbian magazines.890

The narrator of Man into Woman, a contemporary literary account of a male-to- female gender transition, remarks, “the new ovaries which the Professor proposes to ingraft . . . will be taken from a woman who is scarcely twenty-seven years old.”891

While no information regarding the identity of the female donor is given in the text, one cannot help but wonder where and how Weimar physicians procured young and healthy female ovaries.892 Was the anonymous 26 year old “female donor” an invalid, newly deceased, or perhaps the victim of a crime?893 Unfortunately, due to the destruction of

Hirschfeld’s Institute and most of its archive in 1933, mysteries such as these are

maids at the Institute. Like Dorchen, artist Hugo Otto Arno Ebel, or ‘Toni’ (born 1881), surgically transitioned from male-to female and later worked at the Institute as a housekeeper. Toni Ebel’s transition, however, unlike Dorchen’s, only took two years and his physical transformation was completed by 1931. Ebel’s 1929 surgery was performed by Dr. Levy-Lenz and Dr. Felix Abraham, two of Hirschfeld’s Berlin Institute colleagues. Felix Abraham discussed these cases of male-to-female surgeries [Dorchen Richter and Toni Ebel] in his essay, “Genitalumwandlung an zwei männlichen Transvestiten,” Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft und Sexualpolitik 18 (1931): 223-26. 890 The first popular discussion of sexual transition in the Weimar media appeared in 1931: “Wie aus dem dänischen Maler Einar Wegener eine Frau Lilli Elven wurde,” Das 12 Uhr Blatt, March 9, 1931 (Berlin), unpaginated. 891 Hoyer, Man into Woman, 172. 892 The anonymous article reporting Lili’s operation, “Wie aus dem dänischen Maler Einar Wegener eine Frau Lilli Elven wird” was printed in the popular Berlin 12 Uhr Blatt (March 9, 1931). According to the journalist, “Die Operationen führten zur Einpflanzung eines gefunden Ovariums, das durch Operation bei einer anderen Frau entfernt worden war, wodurch natürlich keine Gebärfähigkeit hergestellt werden konnte, da die Gebärmutter fehlt.” (The operations led to the transplantation of a “found” ovary that was removed from another woman; of course this will never lead to conception because the uterus is missing.) 893 Hoyer, Man into Woman, 170. A discussion woven into the narrative suggests potential sources of human female tissue and organs. “At length the Matron came into the room and conveyed her doleful news that she must wait yet a few days longer, as the invalid in question who had been operated on ‘yielded no suitable material’ for Lili” [quotes in original]. Relatedly, Haire, Rejuvenation, reports “four cases in which previously sterile women conceived and passed through a normal pregnancy after . . . the transplantation into the abdominal wall of two discs of ovarian tissue, still warm from the body of another woman. The grafts were taken from women suffering from cancer, myoma of the uterus, or pulmonary tuberculosis” (196).

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unsolvable and infuse discussions of early sexual reassignment surgeries with ominous

undertones. Einar’s casual remark regarding ‘his’ new ovaries coupled with Herrn’s

claim that the majority of body-altering operations were performed on female subjects,

darkly suggests the proverbial ‘evil scientist’ of Weimar fiction. Rotwang, the creator of

Maria’s sinister cyborgian body-double in Fritz Lang’s silent film Metropolis, immediately

comes to mind.894

Gender Reassignment and the Weimar Print Media

As Hirschfeld’s many publications, the 1923 Steinach Film, and a 1931 report of

Einar Wegener’s surgical transition in the popular Berlin press confirm,895 gender-

dysphoria, hormones and gender-altering surgical procedures were addressed in the

mainstream press. While gender-altering procedures were primarily discussed in

scientific and medical journals, human subjects were actively solicited in the lesbian

print media to participate in medical experiments.896 Weimar medical practitioners enlisted the personal ads on the back pages of the lesbian magazine Frauen Liebe to find volunteers for hormonal experiments. The discrete font, and length, of these ads renders them barely noticeable; they are easily glossed over and superficially confused with the typically terse personal ads placed by women searching for girlfriends. The two

894 Fritz Lang, Metropolis, 1927, UfA, 153 minutes. Matthew Biro succinctly describes Metropolis as “the most cyborgian film.” See, Biro, The Dada Cyborg: Visions of the New Human in Weimar Berlin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 259. 895 An anonymus report of a woman’s desire to be transformed into a man followed shortly. In sharp contrast to the respectful tenor of articles discussing Wegener as an actual patient, the female subject is only partially identified as “the ca. 40-year old Viennese society woman Hildegard R. who had long preferred to wear men’s clothing.” Moreover, she is portayed as ludicrous. Hildegard reportedly stole a ram from the Schönbrunn Zoo, then drove to an unidentified klinik in Vienna and demanded that the ram’s testicles be implanted in her body. The operation was a success. “Aus Frau wird Mann: Wieder ein Geschlechtswechsel diesmal in Wien!” Das 12 Uhr Blatt, May 22, 1931. 896 Two such ads appear in Frauen Liebe, 6 Jg., no. 13/14 (Berlin, 1931): 9.

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ads in Frauen Liebe share the same contact address and appear to have been placed by

the same anonymous person or organization.897 The first ad targets women who identify as masculine, and reads: “Appropriate Ladies/ Sought for scientific experiments with masculine glandular preparations.” A second ad guarantees larger breasts through hormone therapy and may be aimed at readers of either sex.898

Womanly/ Breasts through real glandular growth! The only natural procedure in existence based on exact science. Real and lasting success! Clinical tests performed on men and animals with complete and proven success. Guaranteed safe. Many years of experience. For informative booklet with proof and further information contact:

While both ads tout the benefits of modern medical science, like any advertisement,

they were primarily intended for marketing purposes. Importantly, these ads confirm the pursuit of research subjects for endocrinological experiments in public media.

Furthermore, they also suggest that the correlation between hormones and gender identity was widely recognized. It is likely that culturally literate contemporaries, such as

Brugman and Höch, were aware of this media discourse: While Brugman is credited with the translation of contemporary medical texts and references vanguard surgical

procedures throughout her oeuvre, Höch’s photomontages are easily linked to gender-

reassignment procedures, as in the case of the artist’s 1926 Sweet One.

Hannah Höch’s Sweet One: The surgical construction of gender?

897 Frauen Liebe, 6 Jg., no. 13/14 (Berlin, 1931): 9. Translation mine. 898 Based on Herrn’s claims regarding the botched and dangerous attempts of transgendered men to enlarge their breasts, it is likely that ads for breast enlargements in the lesbian press probably targeted male subjects. Before the discovery of hormones, procedures to enlarge men’s breasts were problematic; paraffin injections often ended with deadly infections. Hormone treatments represented a modern and safer alternative to earlier methods.

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Hannah Höch’s 1926 Die Süsse (The Sweet One) (fig. 6.7) belongs to the suite of

photomontages “From an Ethnographic Museum” created by the artist between 1925

and 1930. Kristin Makholm describes the series as “photographs of female body parts

attached to those of so-called primitive sculptures” in which the artist “combines the

strange with the unusual, the Self with the Other.”899 So named by Höch (unlike the

artist’s ‘love’ series which was named by scholars), the ethnographic series offers

evidence of a “highly self-conscious form of primitivism.” Indeed, its moniker confirms

that Höch recognized that ‘primitivism’ did not arise from an unmediated confrontation

between European artists and non-Western artifacts, “but through aesthetic discourse

and museum practice.”900

While discussions of Höch’s Sweet One generally emphasize the juxtaposition

and contrast of primitive artifacts with elements from Western consumer culture,

Makela uniquely and importantly links the photomontage to Weimar medical practice.

She claims that the fissure that slits the weather-worn wooden torso from head to belly

“is too clean-edged, too exact, to have been an accident of time. The body has been

deliberately cut by one who wielded a knife with the precision of a surgeon.”901 Höch’s

Sweet One suggests the surgical construction of gender; it pairs an African male idol figure with graphic fragments that signal Weimar femininity.902 In an act that signifies the ultimate deconstruction of masculine identity, the artist has “carefully removed the

899 Kristin Makholm, “Strange Beauty: Hannah Höch and the Photomontage,” MoMA, no. 24 (Winter-Spring 1997), 22. 900 Biro, “The New Woman as Cyborg,” 243-44. 901 Makela, “Grotesque Bodies,” 193. Emphasis original. 902 Makela, “Grotesque Bodies,” 195. The image of the male Bushongo idol figure that Höch used for the collage is pictured in Makela. It was printed originally in the Ullstein publication Querschnitt 5, no. 1 (1925), between pps. 8-9.

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figure’s penis to make way for a pair of female legs.”903 While Makela foregrounds the

“grotesque” aspects of the Sweet One, her remark, “the empty gaping belly need only be filled with female sex organs,” links the photomontage to gender reassignment surgery.904 Indeed, the Sweet One’s torso appears to be a masklike façade. An oversized

mouth covered with lipstick, along with a carefully arched female eyebrow snipped from

a contemporary fashion magazine, feminize the figure’s rough-hewn head. In addition,

demure hands and elegantly posed legs suggest daintiness and femininity. The blatant

juxtaposition of obviously mismatched graphic elements in this photomontage

demonstrates little of the visual subtlety that often characterizes the artist’s late

Weimar depictions of mixed-gendered figures. Nonetheless, Höch’s 1926 Sweet One

cogently illustrates the deconstruction of masculinity and the construction of femininity.

Whether or not the artist intended to reference surgical gender reassignment,

Sweet One is contemporaneous with related Weimar-era medical developments and

clearly resonates with associated discourses. Throughout the 1920s, surgeons rapidly

improved their techniques and, by 1931, male-to-female gender reassignment

procedures had become almost routine and described in the medical press as “easy.”905

However, the most widely publicized gender reassignment procedure was performed on

the Dutch painter Einar Wegener (1880-1931).906

Einar Wegener: “Aus Mann wird Frau”

903 Makela, “Grotesque Bodies,” 193. 904 Makela, “Grotesque Bodies,” 193. 905 Herrn, Schnittmuster, 201; Felix Abraham, “Genitalumwandlung an zwei männlichen Transvestiten” (Genital changes of two male Transvestites), Zeitschrift fur Sexualwissenschaft 18 (Berlin 1931): 223-26. 906 Herrn, Schnittmuster, 204. Wegener’s surgeries were performed in 1930 and 1931 at Dresden’s Frauenklinik (Women’s Clinic), by gynecologist Kurt Warnekros. 273

Höch’s dual-gendered representations Sweet One, Tamer, and Strong Men

suggest Wegener’s performance of femininity and, most importantly, his surgically

constructed gender. While both Höch and Wegener engaged with mainstream

representations of gender, Wegener’s non-critical acceptance of gender stereotypes

conspicuously differs from that of Höch. Höch’s engagement with gender and the

contemporary media in her photomontages blatantly exposes and satirizes its

artificiality, while Wegener’s construction of ‘femininity’ is almost entirely devoid of

irony. Despite this significant difference, Höch’s photomontages and Wegener’s self-

representation equally indicate their profound understanding of gender as a social and

cultural phenomenon largely constructed through popular media.

The following discussion will introduce Einar Wegener to the reader and examine

how he documented his gender identity and transition with photographs. While

Wegener’s case is generally of interest to scholars of transgender history, his visual

performance of femininity in Man into Woman has never been examined.907 The

volume’s illustrations are significant because they eloquently demonstrate discursive

intersections between surgical gender construction, popular Weimar representation,

and Höch’s photomontage ouevre. Eimar Wegener died due to complications soon after

his third gender surgery in 1931, but not before he was heralded as the world's first

transsexual.908 A 1931 press article was followed in 1932 by Niels Hoyer’s Man into

907 Niels Hoyer [pseud. Ernst Ludwig Harthern Jacobson], ed., intro. Norman Haire MD, Man into Woman: An Authentic Record of a Change of Sex, trans. H.J. Stenning (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1933). 908 Herrn, Schnittmuster, 204. The anonymous article, “Aus Mann wird Frau: Wie aus dem dänischen Maler Einar Wegener eine Frau Lilli Elven wurde” (A Man becomes a Woman: How the Danish painter Einar Wegener became the woman Lilli Elven) Das 12 Uhr Blatt (12 O’clock News), March 9, 1931.

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Woman.909 Hoyer disguised the names of the primary players,910 but, as Herrn comments, thanks to the curiosity of contemporary journalists, the names of Lili’s physicians are known to us.911

Wegener’s gender surgery was not the first of its kind; however, the publicity it received is understandable when one considers his biography and that of his wife. Due to the couple’s professional activities and flamboyant, semi-public lifestyle it comes as no surprise that Einar’s male-to-female transition was barely mentioned in medical

journals but, instead, reported in the popular press.912 The Wegeners were fine artists and traveled between Rome, Madrid, Paris, Copenhagen, and Berlin. Gerda Wegener

(1885-1940) was more successful than her husband and achieved renown with illustrations for a number of erotically-themed monographs, which clearly suggest a familiarity with contemporary sexual subculture.913 Gerda’s drawing “Moderner

Prostitutionsbetrieb” (Modern Prostitution Business) (fig. 6.8) is pictured in Hirschfeld’s

Das 12 Uhr Blatt was a ca. 8-10 page per issue Weimar-era boulevard-style publication published in Berlin by Ullstein. 909 The last sentence of the 12 Uhr Blatt article announces (and promotes?) an upcoming novel by Lili Ellven that will be used for scientific purposes. (“Im übrigen hat Lili Ellven über ihre Wandlung einebn Roman geschrieben, der wissenschaftlich verwertet warden soll.”) 910 Hoyer, “Foreword,” Man into Woman, xiii. “At Lili Elbe’s desire, fictitious names have been employed for the persons who figure in her narrative.” 911 Herrn, Schnittmuster, 206. In the book, Hirschfeld appears as “Dr. Hardenfeld,” and the operating physician Kurt Warnekros is dubbed Dr. Werner Kreutz. The Berlin Institute of Sexual Science is dubbed the Institut für Seelenkunde (Institute for the Science of the Soul). Hirschfeld and Warnekros were however mentioned in Das 12 Uhr Blatt. 912 Herrn, Schnittmuster, 204. See also, Sabine Meyer, “Mit dem Puppenwagen in der normative Weiblichkeit: Lili Elbe und die journalistische Inszenierung von Transsexualität in Dänemark,” Nordeuropa Forum: Zeitschrift für Politik, Wirtschaft und Kultur 20 (1-2/ 2010): 35. By 1912, the Wegeners were known in Denmark for their “extravagant lifestyle.” This largely motivated their move to Paris where they felt they felt they could better devote themselves to their art, and live more freely. 913 A selection of works illustrated by Gerda Wegener include: Giacomo Casanova, Une aventure d’amour à Venise (Paris: G. Briffaut, 1927); Louis de Robert, L’anneau, ou, La jeune fille imprudente (Paris, 1913); Louis Perceau, Souze sonnets lascifs pour accompagner la suite d’aquarelles initulee Les Delassements d’Eros (Paris: Erotopolis, 1925).

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1930 Sexualkunde and, according to its caption, also appeared in Albert Moll’s Polizei

und Sitte.914 Pictured in both Hirschfeld and Moll, Wegener’s illustration attests to the

slippery contemporary interface between medico-scientific and popular literature.915

Einar becomes Lili: Constructing Femininity

Einar Wegener apparently discovered his feminine side soon after he married in

1904 when he sat in as a ‘female’ model one day for his wife Gerda.916 Gerda created a

number of images depicting her husband in women’s clothing (fig. 6.9).917 In 1926, Einar

assumed a female identity and became “Lili” and later chose the surname “Elbe” in

honor of Dresden’s river, the city where he was surgically transformed into a woman.

While Wegener’s story contributed significantly to the popularization of the transsexual

subject, it also reflected the contemporary gendered status quo. As German gender

scholar Sabine Meyer astutely observes, Wegener’s performance of femininity

“perpetrated heteronormative social conventions.”918 Ironically, she claims, despite the

radicality of the surgery, Lili’s gender reassignment served to “normalize Einar by

altering his male body to conform to his feminine feelings.”919 Furthermore, even

though surgery played the central role in the construction of Einar’s female identity, Lili

emphasized cultural, rather than biological aspects of her feminine identity. In this

914 Gerda Wegener’s illustration appears in Hirschfeld’s Sexualkunde (1930), vol. 4, Plate LIV. It is also featured in Moll’s 1926 Polizei und Sitte between pages 128 and 129. Moll’s caption reads “Moderne Demimondänen,” (modern female members of the demimonde). 915 This is also similar to Lili’s literary account of her transition which, as an anonymous journalist in the popular Berlin press claimed in 1931, was intended for scientific purposes. (“Im übrigen hat Lilli Elven über ihre Wandlung einen Roman geschrieben, der wissenschaftlich verwertet werden soll.”). 916 Hoyer, Man into Woman, 63; See also, Meyer, “Mit dem Puppenwagen,” 35. 917 “Aus Mann wird Frau,” Das 12 Uhr Blatt, (1931); unpaginated; Meyer, “Mit dem Puppen- wagen, 35. 918 Meyer, “Mit dem Puppenwagen,” 33. 919 Meyer, “Mit dem Puppenwagen,” 33.

276 aspect, Man into Woman reflects Teresa de Lauretis’ observations regarding the nature of gender. As de Lauretis writes, “sexualized identities are neither innate nor simply acquired, but dynamically (re)structured by forms of fantasy, both public and private, conscious and unconscious, which are culturally available and historically specific.”920

Due to the co-authorship of Man into Woman, scholars understandably question

the veracity of Lili’s voice; however, the book’s illustrations clearly convey Lili’s subjectivity and agency.921 Photographs, as opposed to drawings, illustrate Man into

Woman and, because, at the time photographs were associated with veracity and

objectivity, they support the claims of narrative factuality made in the book’s

introduction.922 The frontispiece, however, is a drawing (fig. 6.10) and depicts Einar in pensive profile; he appears to look down and away from the narrative. The composition of the image and its traditional medium in no way reflect the book’s radical theme. The frontispiece reduces Einar to a bearded profile and sharply contrasts with the images that follow. Later in the book, Einar/Lili is generally pictured in full-length photographs

as a proud and unapologetically sexualized female.

920 Teresa de Lauretis, The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), xix. 921 Herrn, Schnittmuster, 204. Because Lili Elbe’s personal papers are lost and the book was published after she died, scholars understandably question the slippage between Lili’s voice and Hoyer’s account. See also, Sandy Stone, “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttransexual Manifesto,” in Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory, Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury, eds. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 342. Stone, commenting upon the confused conundrum of identity that characterizes the book’s narrative voice asks, “What sort of subject is constituted in these texts? Hoyer, was a pseudonym for Ernst Ludwig Harthern Jacobson; Lili Elbe was the female name chosen by the artist Einar Wegener, whose name [in the book Man into Woman] was Andreas Sparre. This lexical profusion has rich implications for studies of self and its construction” (356n15); See also Meyer, “Mit dem Puppenwagen,” 40. Meyer convincingly argues that even Lili’s surname “Elbe," which only appears in conjunction with the book’s title [and on Lili’s gravestone], was “created by journalists to promote Man into Woman.” 922 The Introduction by respected British sexologist Norman Haire lent the text a quasi-medical aura and authority.

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While the theme of sexual reassignment surgery was new in the popular Weimar media, Man into Woman conspicuously reflected the contemporary gender status quo.

As Dianne Dugaw writes, “certainly the idea of gender identity, particularly as it legitimizes surgeries and prescriptions, underlies the transsexual phenomenon.

However, ideas of art, play and parody seem to apply as well.”923 Yet in the case of Lili,

with the exception of a “posed” 1926 photograph, play and parody are curiously lacking.

Instead, Lili is pictured throughout volume in a number of popular and well-rehearsed

female guises. Much like fashion magazine imagery, Lili closely conforms to popular

gender stereotypes and her slavish identification with these contemporary

representations attests to their constructed nature.

Lili documented her first foray into femininity as an exotic, dark-eyed beauty (fig.

6.11). The contrived quality of this 1926 photograph, which may easily be mistaken for a

contemporary postcard of a long forgotten starlet, is underscored by its caption, which,

unlike other photographs in the book, emphasizes Lili’s “pose.” In the photograph, Lili’s

sensuous mouth and dark kohl-rimmed eyes mimic those of a seductive silent film

vamp. The strap of Lili’s dress tantalizingly falls off her shoulder onto her upper arm, yet

the fan she holds decorously covers whatever undress is potentially revealed. The next

photograph pictures Lili as an elegant well-dressed woman proudly posing in her

artistically-furnished Parisian apartment (fig. 6.12). Much like a young woman

constructing her feminine persona by playing ‘dress-up’ in an intimate domestic space,

both photographs picture Lili alone and in control of her environment. Yet, shortly after

923 Dianne Dugaw, “Delusions of Gender,” The Women’s Review of Books 14, no. 7 (April 1997): 10.

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her second operation, Lili incorporated another woman in her identity construction and

proudly posed with her trusted confidant, a nurse, in the garden of the Dresden

Frauenklinik (fig. 6.13).

The contrasts between the posture and clothing of the two women pictured in

front of the Klinik foreground Lili’s sophisticated enactment of femininity. Unlike the

matronly nurse standing beside her, Lili is elegantly posed and wears a tailored coat that

emphasizes her shapely figure, while the uniform of her stodgy companion reflects a

homespun simplicity. The centrality of clothing in the visual construction of Lili’s gender

is highlighted in three additional photographs, all of which feature Lili in the same

flowered dress.924

Further into the narrative, and after her second operation, Lili dares to move

beyond the safety of her apartment or the sheltered grounds of the Dresden clinic and

visually inserts herself into the crowded streets of Copenhagen (fig. 6.14). Here, in an

ultimate test of gender-performance, Lili blends in and successfully ‘passes’ as a modern

New Woman on a bustling urban street. As these illustrations confirm, Lili clearly and uncritically identified with contemporary mass-mediated representations of femininity.

Transsexuals, Homosexuals, and Gender Montage

Unlike the photographs of Lili in the volume, the dust-jacket of Man into Woman

(fig. 6.15), ostensibly the first image any potential reader interested in the topic would see, is a photomontage. Fittingly, the transsexual, then a radically new subject, is

924 Two of the photographs appear to have been taken on the grounds of the Dresden Frauenklinik on the same overcast June 1930 day, while the third pictures Lili in front of a plain cloth backdrop. The emphasis of the flower print fabric calls to mind Heike Schader’s comments regarding the strong cultural link between flowers and Weiblichkeit (womanliness) in Weimar. The photographs of Lili are pictured vis-a-vis pages 128,152, and 240.

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portrayed with photomontage and collage. Full-length male and female figures [Lili and

Einar?] joined at the feet dominate the image. The deployment of photomontage and

collage indicate the constructed nature of Lili’s gender and its composite fragmentary is

underscored by the background: The two figures are superimposed over actual press

clippings reporting Wegener’s sex change. Combined, the press clippings and the

overlapping photographs reiterate the mediated nature of gender; moreover, they

suggest the cut-and-pasted identity of the transgendered subject. Indeed, the

photomontage and collage were well-suited to represent contemporary figures that had

not yet been integrated into the Weimar mainstream, and the dust-jacket of Man into

Woman is a case in point.

Albert Moll similarly illustrated contemporary figures whose radical subjectivities

had not yet found their way into the cultural mainstream as a Schnittbild (cut-picture or

collage) (fig. 6.16). In his 1926 discussion of homosexual subculture in Polizei und Sitte, a

collage comprised of press clippings lifted from contemporary gay and lesbian

periodicals metaphorically suggests the fragmented perception of Weimar sexual

subcultures in the popular imagination. Furthermore, the deployment of subcultural

print media in the illustration reiterates the centrality of print media to homosexual and

lesbian identity construction in Weimar.

Yet, while the dust-jacket of Man into Woman and Moll’s collage are emblematic of the proliferation of print materials in Weimar culture, they also indicate that the abundance of print media did not necessarily facilitate the representation or the public’s comprehension of non-normatively gendered individuals. Indeed, despite their hyper-

280 textuality, both the dust-jacket and Moll’s illustration are, in a word, incoherent.

Comprised of mass generated media fragments, both reflect an ongoing process, which, much like the figures they were intended to represent, could merely anticipate social and cultural assimilation.

Conclusion

The early twentieth-century discovery of hormones and of their effects upon sexual identity and behavior revolutionized contemporary medical practice and the understanding of sexual identity. By the mid 1920s, the Weimar public had easy access to information regarding these correlations. Hirschfeld’s 1920 pamphlet Verjüngung and the 1923 Steinach Film facilitated the close discursive relationship between the popular media and the medico-scientific community.

These discursive developments are reflected in Höch’s Weimar-era photomontages Tamer, Strong Men and Sweet One. Much like the figures in the 1923

Steinach Film, the gender of Höch’s Tamer is ambiguous, while the artist’s Strong Men, akin to a contemporary medical illustration, offers an inside/outside view of the body.

Höch’s 1926 photomontage Sweet One is contemporaneous with early gender reassignment surgeries and, analogous to a male-to-female transsexual, the artist has removed the figure’s penis and feminine attributes have been added.

Höch’s partner Til Brugman engaged with new medical procedures through her professional activities as a translator and, more importantly, critically as a satirist. Her literary grotesques, “Revision am Himmel” and “Warenhaus der Liebe,” lampoon

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vanguard Weimar medical technologies, but also support and defend non-normative sexual practices.

While gender altering surgeries were performed as early as 1912 and discussed in German medical journals from 1918, the first mainstream media coverage of a sexual reassignment were reports of Einar Wegener. Man into Woman narrates his surgical transformation but, above all, foregrounds the cultural construction of gender. Lili’s self- representation attests to the intrinsic correlation of popular media and gender construction. While Höch’s photomontages also represent gender as a mediated construction, in contrast to Lili’s slavish replication of popular feminine stereotypes,

Höch subversively exposes and visually disrupts its artifice.

The dust-jacket of Man into Woman is a collage, a medium contemporaneously

associated with the Weimar avant-garde. The cut-and-paste technique is analogous to

the physical radicality of surgical gender reassignment. But most importantly, the

collage–in the service of both Lili Elbe’s gender identity construction and Höch

photomontage practice--redeploys culturally mediated fragments to generate hybridic

identities and imagery.

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CHAPTER VII

CONCLUSION

Unlike scholarship that foregrounds Höch’s engagement with mainstream media, this dissertation enhances our comprehension and appreciation of the artist’s oeuvre in an expanded framework that includes sexological, subcultural, and scientific contexts.

Such materials, in turn, aided in creating discourses that reflect Höch’s unique treatment of the human figure and resonate with the artist’s unconventional intimate relationships. In, or around 1919, while romantically involved with Raoul Hausmann,

Höch began to engage seriously with gender-related themes. In 1926, she entered into a ten-year lesbian partnership with Til Brugman. As visual analysis of the artist’s oeuvre both before and after her years with the Dutch writer suggests, this was the most important personal relationship in Höch’s life. As I have demonstrated throughout the

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dissertation, the correlation between Höch’s oeuvre and her psycho-sexual biography is apparent when discussed in tandem.

After 1926, Höch’s photomontages began to reflect her lesbianism and a familiarity with subcultural media concerning gender and sexuality. In addition to

Weimar sexual subculture, Höch’s work during this period references themes found in

Brugman’s texts. These developments confirm that Höch’s lesbian partnership informed

her work in a significant way not fully recognized in the literature to date.

Beginning with analysis of Höch’s Dada-era oeuvre, evidence has been presented

in the dissertation which indisputably establishes the interrelatedness of the artist’s

biography and her artistic themes. Höch’s emphasis on visual rather than textual

elements easily distinguished her oeuvre from that of her fellow Dadaists. Furthermore,

unlike her male contemporaries, she routinely foregrounded female commodification

and reproductive issues in her art. As I have shown, even Höch’s early photomontages,

most notably Dada-Ernst, reflect the artist’s budding emotional and sexual independence. In Dada-Ernst, Höch emphasized themes of sexuality and the gaze.

Above all, her placement of an eye at the vagina represented a bold re-appropriation of what had for millennia been predominantly the purview of men: the eye as the symbol

of the gaze and [sexual] dominance of the female body.925 A proto-feminist declaration

of sorts, the iconographic audacity of Dada-Ernst anticipated the women-centered imagery in Höch’s later photomontages and paved the way for her more patently

925 For a general historical discussion of the destruction of matriarchal cultures and the subsequent appropriation of the female body and vaginal imagery under patriarchal rule, see, Monica Sjöö, The Great Cosmic Mother of All (San Francisco: Harper Row, 1987).

284 lesbian images. Dada-Ernst seems also to have prefigured the work of future artists;

during the 1960s and 1970s vaginal imagery and themes became a powerful and highly

controversial component of ‘radical’ second-wave feminist art most notably in the work

of artists Carolee Schneeman, Hannah Wilke, Valie Export, Judy Chicago, and others.926

Indeed, even into the twenty-first century, as a recent New York exhibition indicates, vaginal imagery has retained its controversial aura.927

As chapter II demonstrates, Höch’s Russische Tänzerin and Englische Tänzerin

overtly reference lesbian subculture and reiterate the influence and the centrality of her

intimate relationships upon her oeuvre. My discussion of these collages expands upon

Bosch and Everard’s 1988 claim that they represent a double portrait of Höch and

Brugman. Analysis in this dissertation not only strengthens their speculations, but also

reveals additional clues that link the two photomontages, visually and symbolically, to

lesbian subculture. While Höch’s Weimar contemporaries, artists Jeanne Mammen,

Gertrud Liebherr, Gertrude Sandmann, and Renée Sintenis, produced a number of lesbian-themed works,928 Höch and the French Surrealist Claude Cahun were the only

926 Carolee Schneeman’s performance Interior Scroll (1975), Hannah Wilke’s photographic work, Venus Envy (1980), Valie Export’s 1977 Action Pants, and Judy Chicago’s 1974-79 installation The Dinner Party foreground vaginal imagery. Contemporary debates surrounding Chicago’s groundbreaking installation were decidedly fueled by the vaginally-inspired sculptural designs of the ceramic dinner plates. The controversies accompanying this work smoldered for three decades; no museum was forward- thinking, or daring enough, to add The Dinner Party to its permanent collection. In 2002 the work was donated to the Brooklyn Museum. See Anna C. Chave, “’Is this good for Vulva?: Female Genitalia in Contemporary Art,” in The Visible Vagina, Francis M. Naumann, Eve Ensler, and Anna C. Chave (New York: Francis M. Naumann, 2010), 7-27. 927 The exhibition The Visible Vagina was held at the Francis M. Nauman Gallery (January 28- March 20, 2010). 928 See, Marga Döpping, Andrea Firmenich, and Eberhard Roters, eds., Jeanne Mammen: Köpfe und Szenen, Berlin 1920 bis 1933 (Kunsthalle in Emden; Bonn: VG Bildkunst, 1994); Marcella Schmidt, “Gertrude Sandmann (1891-1981),” in Michael Bollé, et al., Eldorado: Homosexuelle Frauen und Männer in Berlin 1850-1950, Geschichte, Alltag und Kultur (1984, repr., Berlin: Edition Hentrich; Berlin: Verlag rosa

285 lesbian artists at the time to explore the theme with the avant-garde medium of photomontage.929 However, in contrast to Höch, whose representations of female doubling are rarely balanced, and if so, somewhat precariously (as in Russian Dancer,

English Dancer, Vagabonds, Auf dem Weg, and Grotesque); Cahun emphasized visual symmetry. To this end, she and her partner Marcel Moore often used mirrors (fig. 2.18) or, as seen in a 1928 self-portrait (7.1), double exposures. As Jennifer Shaw and others recognize, in accordance with the traditional lesbian motif of mirroring, Cahun’s engagement with the theme of Narcissus is all pervasive in her oeuvre.930 This is evident in her 1930 volume Aveux non avenus (Avowals null and void); both the text and the photomontage illustrations foreground individual and lesbian doubling (fig. 7.2).931

Winkel, 1992), 205-09. For a short and rare English-language discussion of Sintenis and her oeuvre, see Erich Ranfft, “German Women sculptors 1918-1936: Gender differences and status,” in Visions of the Neue Frau: Women and the Visual Arts in Weimar Germany, Marsha Meskimmon and Shearer West, eds., (Aldershot, GB: Scolar Press, 1995), 48-52. Sintenis was respected among her contemporaries, and a protégé of the prominent Berlin art dealer Alfred Flechtheim; at his suggestion, Sintenis replaced her given name, Renate Alice, with the more exotic and interesting sounding French Renée. A Weimar lesbian heartthrob, Sintenis is primarily known for her sculpted animal figures. Her sculptural self portrait, however, as Ranfft comments, “exudes a definite androgynous quality through its look of boyish adolescence “(51). While Sintenis is lesser known for her graphic oeuvre, she illustrated a volume of Sappho’s poetry in 1936. See, Hans Rupé, ed. Sappho: mit 13 Zeichnungen von Renée Sintenis (Berlin: Holle Verlag, 1936). Due to its theme, it is remarkable that the volume was published. 929 Polish artist and “leading designer of photomontages for the popular press” Janusz M. Brzeski, made a series of erotic compositions while working for Vu in Paris. His 1930 collage Lesbos II, which clearly suggests cunnilingus, is pictured in Matthew Witkowsky, Intro. Peter Demetz, Foto: Modernity in Central Europe, 1918-1945 (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2007), 190. Because it was, by contemporary standards, pornographic, Brzeski’s collage, as Witkowsky comments, was “kept wholly private.” 930 Jennifer Shaw, “Narcissus and the Magic Mirror,” in Don’t Kiss Me: The Art of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, Louise Downie, ed. (New York: Aperture, 2006), 35-36. Narcissus was also a popular motif among fin-de-siècle Symbolists, a group Cahun greatly admired. Moreover, as Tirza True Latimer observes, in the popular imagination, narcissism was linked with lesbianism. See Latimer, “Narcissus and Narcissus: Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore,” in Women Together, Women Apart: Portraits of Lesbian Paris (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 68-104. 931 Claude Cahun, Aveux non avenus (Paris: Éditions du Carrefour, 1930).

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Here, much like a playing, or Tarot, card,932 the artist’s repetitive deployment of her

own image generates a balanced design. While her shaved head renders Cahun

shockingly asexual, classical male and female statues balance the image on either side

and imply symbolically that her identity is positioned between the two sexes.

Similar to a number of Höch’s photomontages, the frontispiece of Cahun’s Aveux

non avenus (fig. 7.3) is dominated by a large eye, indicating issues of scopic agency and

the gaze.933 Centrally placed, the eye is cradled within two hands; the arms extend

downward and end, abruptly severed, in a shadow that appears to be a pair of lips. The

configuration of these elements visually suggests intimate female anatomy comprised of

an eye (clitoris), arms (labial lips), and lips/mouth (vagina). While the image shares its

balanced composition with Ernst’s copulatory vision Of this Men Shall Know Nothing (fig.

1.25), even more so, it resonates with Höch’s oeuvre and her recurrent engagement

with the gaze and the fetishization of the female body. Moreover, the eroticized lips

suggested in Cahun’s 1930 photomontage may be linked to Höch’s Marlene (fig. 4.22) of

the same year.

As this study establishes, Weimar lesbian materials were often indistinguishable

from mainstream media. The comparative visual analysis of lesbian and mainstream

materials presented in this dissertation is unprecedented and serves to disentangle

932 Moreover, the composition of the photomontage conspicuously suggests a well-known contemporary photograph of the infamous British occultist Aleister Crowley (active in Paris in the early 1900s). Cahun, who created a series of self-portrait photographs posed as a Buddha in 1927 (pictured in Shaw, Don’t Kiss Me, 114), was obviously interested in occult and esoteric subjects. 933 Related themes are also evident in the photomontage introducing Chapter II of Aveux non avenus. It features a large eye and a round element that suggests a hand held mirror. Cahun’s 1936 sculpture Object is a large eye and its symbolic implications are addressed by Steven Harris, in “Coup d’oeil,” Oxford Art Journal 24, no. 1, 2001: 89-112.

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contemporary imagery generated by different and, on occasion, antagonistic cultural

discourses such as Weimar Körperkultur, advertising, dance culture, sexology, and

pornography. Classifying and differentiating this imagery constitutes a contribution to

lesbian scholarship and art history; importantly, it also enables a new, much deeper

recognition of lesbian themes in Höch’s oeuvre that can be applied to the work of some

of her contemporaries, such as Jeanne Mammen. Much like Mammen’s 1928 watercolor

Two Women Dancing, Höch’s Russian Dancer and English Dancer suggest a

virile/feminine lesbian pair.

Before the advent of Weimar lesbian print media, lesbians were generally the

subjects of male-authored materials. As explained in this study, lesbian-authored media

catapulted illicit themes of sapphic love and female cross-dressing into the Weimar

mainstream and contributed to their popularization. My analysis of these developments

is significantly indebted to German scholarship on lesbianism, much of which has not

found its way into English language discourse. Katharina Vogel’s 1984 discussion of Die

Freundin established the magazine’s key role in early lesbian self-representation and

social community.934 Heike Schader’s (2007) ground-breaking examination of Weimar

lesbian magazine prose identified and catalogued commonly used representational

tropes and erotically-coded terms. While the work of Vogel and Schader is indispensable

934 Katharina Vogel, “Zum Selbstsverständnis lesbischer Frauen in der Weimarer Republik: Eine Analyse der Zeitschschrift Die Freundin, 1924-1933,” in Michael Bollé, et al. Eldorado: Homosexuelle Frauen und Männer in Berlin 1850-1950, Geschichte, Alltag und Kultur (1984; repr., Berlin: Edition Hentrich; Berlin: Verlag rosa Winkel, 1992), 162-68; For a related English-langusge discussion, see Angeles Espinaco-Virseda, “’I Feel that I belong to You;’ Subculture, Die Freundin, and Lesbian Identity in Weimar,” spacesofidentity 4, no. 1 (2004): 83-113.

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to this study, my in-depth analysis of Weimar lesbian visual materials and, most notably,

the extended discussion of Berlin photographer Gertrud Liebherr, is the first of its kind.

Comparative examination of Hannah Höch’s photomontages and lesbian media

in this study reveals that the artist commonly deployed visual strategies appropriated

from lesbian publications. As has been established, female couples in Höch’s

photomontages Russian Dancer and English Dancer (both 1928), Auf dem Weg (1934), and Liebe (1931) may be linked to representations in the lesbian print media and also restate the influential role of Höch’s intimate relationships upon her oeuvre.

The joint creative projects of Hannah Höch and Til Brugman are also a primary focus of my thesis. While the couple’s interest in similar themes has been generally acknowledged, their collaboration, and influence upon each other’s oeuvre, has, for the most part, been explored only in German and Dutch publications and not in the detail it requires. This dissertation builds upon the scholarship of Everard and Bosch (1988),

Lavin (1993), Everard (1993), Brandt (1995), and Makela (1993), yet examines the couple’s joint projects with greater depth in order to enable a fuller comprehension and appreciation of both women’s oeuvres.

As we have seen, Höch and Brugman’s collaborative projects not only foreground gender-related themes, but also contemporary social issues. My reading of

Brugman’s 1933 satire “Hollands Blumenfelder” reveals that scratching below the surface discloses a scathing critique of Nazi-informed eugenic discourse. The couple’s jointly produced volume Scheingehacktes, which includes the short stories

“Schaufensterhypnose” and “Scheingehacktes,” addresses the pitfalls of capitalism,

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consumer culture, and blind conformity. The latter theme especially attests to the

couple’s civil courage; in Nazi Germany, the ability to conform often became a matter of

life and death. Höch and Brugman’s sense of social satire was, not surprisingly, most

extreme when engaging with gender-related themes.

Pursuing a thematic approach, as has been done here, allows closer examination of a key trope in Höch’s oeuvre, namely, the female figure. During the Weimar years,

the female figures in Höch’s photomontages became progressively grotesque. The

artist’s crippled Brides and her English Dancer lend visual expression to shadow aspects

of Weimar eugenics and Körperkultur and represent heterosexual courtship and the contemporaneously valorized bourgeois institution of marriage rather darkly for the era.

Moreover, Höch’s cobbled monstrosities, and above all her photomontage English

Dancer, (both of which reflect Brugman’s 1927 literary grotesque “Himilia”) present a futuristic scenario of a robotic surgical female hybrid. “Himilia” addresses issues of emotional independence, bodily self-determination, and sexual agency; once again, these are themes which would later become the discursive foundation of 1960s and ‘70s feminism. Brugman’s “Himilia” may also be linked to more recent debates regarding the correlation of sexism and cosmetic surgery935 and uncannily presage the controversial oeuvre of the French artist Orlan, whose surgically altered body is her medium.936

While Maria Makela and Maud Lavin have acknowledged the influence of

Magnus Hirschfeld and The Institute of Sexual Science upon Höch’s and Brugman’s

935 Kathy Davis, Reshaping the Female Body: The Dilemma of Cosmetic Surgery (New York: Routledge, 1995). 936 For a discussion of Orlan and her oeuvre, see Simon Donger with Sam Shepherd and Orlan, Orlan: a hybrid body of artworks (London: Routledge, 2010).

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oeuvres, a comparative in-depth analysis of Höch’s photomontages and German

sexological materials had never before been undertaken. Evidence presented in this

dissertation clearly links Hannah Höch’s 1930 photomontage Tamer and its dual-sexed

ambiguity and extravagant costume to the practice of cross-dressing. Male and female

transvestites were an integral part of Western European sexual subculture and, by the

mid 1920s, compelled new forms of illustration. Höch’s Tamer evokes the habitués of

Berlin’s sexual subculture and clearly suggests the sexual intermediates pictured in

Weimar publications and ‘documented’ in contemporary police files. Höch’s

contemporary, Paris Surrealist Leonor Fini,937 similarly configured a transvestite taming

an animal in her 1932 painting Travesti á l’oiseau (Transvestite with a Bird) (fig.7.4).

Fini’s subject, her good friend André Pieyre de Mandiargues, is depicted wearing the

wings of Hermes, which traditionally suggest mercurial androgyny.938 While the

subject’s upper torso is unclothed, his lower torso (and sex) is draped with costly fabric;

both his sexual ambiguity and extravagant costume link the figure to Höch’s 1930

Tamer. This suggests that, at the time, the transvestite clearly inspired both Höch and

Fini. Moreover, Fini’s painting Le supplice de l’allure (The torture of allure) (1940) (fig.

7.5), an evocative rendition of what may be a cross-dressed young woman or an effete

young man, suggests that like Höch, she too was deeply fascinated with ambiguously

gendered individuals.

937 For a recent discussion of the artist, see Peter Webb, Sphinx: The Life and Art of Leonor Fini (New York: Vendome Press, 2009). 938 Webb, Sphynx, 30-31.

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As I have demonstrated throughout this study, popular culture, sexual subculture, sexology, ethnography, and medicine were discursively conflated in Weimar

Germany. Furthermore, German sexual discourse was increasingly medicalized and influenced by the burgeoning field of endocrinology. By 1923, correlations between non-normative gender and hormones had been established. Der Steinach Film brought images of ambiguously sexed individuals to a German-language movie-going public, clearly anticipating Höch’s photomontages Tamer and The Strong Men; the latter also alludes to endocrinology and gender reassignment surgeries.

As this study confirms, what began in Höch’s youth as a highly personal exploration of sexuality and gender in her art would become increasingly central to her oeuvre. Stung by early experiences at the hands of her misogynistic Dada colleagues and her thoughtless lover Raoul Hausmann, Höch initially approached gender-related themes with sarcasm and anger. Later, however, Höch’s wrath, as her photomontages reveal, alternates with sophisticated humor and light-hearted playfulness as well as sarcasm and a deepening exploration of dysphorically gendered identities and bodies.

The political triumph of Nazism, followed by the artist’s separation from Til

Brugman in 1936, radically disrupted Höch’s overt exploration of lesbian and transgender themes. This period also coincided with the artist’s brief marriage to Kurt

Matthies. Although short-lived, Höch’s affection for her castrated husband attests to her unconventional emotional nature and her fascination with non-normatively gendered individuals. Höch’s troubled marriage, coupled with her move to a rural Berlin

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suburb in 1939, initiated a period of “radical loneliness” in which she primarily pursued

nature studies and abstraction.

Hannah Höch’s Nazi-era Oeuvre: Nature Studies and Abstraction

Garden and landscape themes dominate Höch’s artistic output from 1933 to

1945 and while this substantiates the artist’s love of nature, it is also in tune with the

contemporary cultural environment. Under the Nazi regime, it was practically

impossible and potentially dangerous for Höch to sell her photomontages. In contrast, in

Germany at the time, nature studies and landscapes suggested a patriotic love of country and, at minimum, facilitated Höch’s attempts to market her own work. Between

1935 and 1937, hoping to sell them, Höch, left a number of landscape-themed

watercolors with a government official in Gotha (her hometown) and another eleven

with the Berlin Reichsluftfahrtministerium (Air Force Ministry).939

As mentioned earlier, from the late 1930s and through the mid 1950s, human

figures actually became peripheral to Höch’s work. While this interlude clearly reflected

her personal and cultural isolation, it also made way for new artistic paths. After Hitler

was appointed Reichskanzler in 1933, many of Höch’s friends and fellow artists fled

Germany. In the following years the situation steadily worsened as Joseph Goebbels, the

newly appointed Propagandaminister, orchestrated a highly publicized national

campaign against the artistic avant-garde.940 The National Socialist’s persecution of the

939 Cara Schweitzer, Schrankenlose Freiheit für Hannah Höch: Das Leben einer Künstlerin, 1889- 1978. Berlin: Osburg Verlag, 2011), 288-89. Höch was unsuccessful in Gotha; the details regarding her transactions with the Air Force Ministry are unknown. 940 Schweitzer, Schrankenlose Freiheit, 262-67. Goebbels (1897-1945) was assisted by Adolf Ziegler and Wolfgang Willrich, author of the Aryan art polemic Säuberung des Kunsttempels: Eine kunstpolitische Kampfschrift deutscher Kunst im Geiste nordischer Art (Cleaning the Temple of Art: A

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avant-garde climaxed in 1937 with the four-year traveling exhibition Entartete Kunst

(Degenerate Art). The exhibition, which began in Munich, was shown in a number of

German cities and featured works from German museum collections deemed un-

Aryan.941 Höch, whose work was not included in the show, was nevertheless branded by

the prominent art critic Wolfgang Willrich in 1937 as a Kulturbolschewistin (cultural

Bolshevik).942 This did not, however, deter her from going to see the Degenerate Art

exhibition in Munich on September 11, 1937. In her journal, Höch noted that the most

important art works created after the war were on view, and that despite the incendiary

publicity that had preceded it, the people viewing the exhibition were remarkably

quiet.943

Denounced as a cultural Bolshevik, Höch radically altered her artistic practice and hid much of her work during the war. However, being associated with the avant- garde was perhaps not her only concern; being identified as a lesbian after 1933 was an equally distressing prospect. German lesbian scholar Ilse Kokula writes that during the

Nazi era many lesbians kept a low profile, moved to rural areas, or entered into sham marriages with male homosexuals which provided both partners with mutual protection

Political Manifesto in Defense of German Art in the Nordic Spirit) (Munich: J.F. Lehmanns Verlag, 1937). Roughly 16,000 modern art works were confiscated and removed from German museums. 941 For a discussion of Nazi Kulturpolitik (cultural politics) leeding to the 1937 Entartete Kunst exhibition, see, Peter Adams, Art of the Third Reich (New York: H.N. Abrams, 1992), esp., 121-28; Stephanie Barron, et al. Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-garde in Nazi Germany (Exh. Catalogue, Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1991). 942 Wolfgang Willrich, Säuberung des Kunsttempels: Eine kunstpolitische Kampfschrift deutscher Kunst im Geiste nordischer Art. (Munich: J.F. Lehmanns Verlag, 1937), 54. Willrich mentions Höch and includes a fragment of her 1925 oil painting Die Journalisten (The Journalists) in a collage of “degenerate” art works. 943 Schweitzer, Schrankenlose Freiheit, 272-73.

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(strategies which also suggest Höch’s situation).944 Clearly when one considers the juridical institutionalization and police enforcement of sexual repression in Nazi

Germany, Höch’s lesbian partnership with Brugman was not only risky but also potentially life-threatening.945

Hannah Höch’s pursuit of artistic abstraction during this period, much like her landscape and nature studies, suggests a reticence to create works that would attract unwelcome attention and scrutiny. Her rekindled interest in abstraction is seen in her

1946 photomontage Schöne Fanggeräte (Beautiful Mechanical-Traps) (fig. 7.6). For an

artist who lived in solitude, the work’s title is curious; it alludes to the dangers of

seduction, yet its drab browns and bluish grays are anything but beguiling. Instead, they

reflect the war-weakened German publishing industry and the limited availability of

color inks.

944 Ilse Kokula, “Lesbisch Leben von Weimar bis zur Nachkriegszeit” (Lesbian Life from Weimar through the Postwar Period) in Eldorado, Bollé et al., 159. As Kokula remarks, research of concentration camps generally focuses on the fate of Jewish prisoners, while scholarship regarding the treatment of homosexuals in the camps does not address the fate of lesbians. Male homosexuals were systemically- especially after 1936-rounded up with police raids and interned. Their clothing was labeled with pink triangles. On occasion male homosexuals were castrated and in rarer instances, executed. In contrast, it is difficult to trace how many lesbians were actually imprisoned; lesbians integrated within larger groups of women. Labeled “Asozial” (asocial), lesbians shared this classification with prostitutes and female career criminals who, like them, wore a black triangle. In the camps, if women were caught engaging in lesbian acts, they were beaten. German lesbian survivors of the Ravensbrück camp reported that lesbians were sequestered from other women in separate cell blocks and systematically raped by Russian and French prisoners. Although sexual contact between prisoners was normally forbidden, the guards animated the foreign inmates to commit these acts by promising and rewarding them with liquor (157-59). See, G. Zorner, ed., Frauen-KZ Ravensbrück von einem Autorenkollektiv unter Leitung von der antifaschistischen Widerstandskämpfer in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik (Berlin: Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1971). For a discussion of lesbian wartime ‘survival strategies’, see also, Claudia Schoppman, trans. Allison Brown, Days of Masquerade: Life Stories of Lesbians during the Third Reich (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). 945 Schweitzer, Schrankenlose Freiheit, 299. Höch and Brugman met in Berlin in early June 1939 before she and her new partner Johanna ‘Hans’ Martineit were compelled to leave the city for their native Holland.

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Wartime lack is also evident in Höch’s 1945 Bilderbuch (Picture-book), which,

despite its humble materials, nevertheless manages to convey a happy tone.946 In the

1970 preface to the Picture-book, in the wobbly handwriting of an octogenarian, Höch

wrote, “It was 1945: the need for EVERYTHING could neither be ignored nor filled,” and,

as she claimed, “color-printing was technically impossible.”947 Höch’s exploration of juvenile themes using animal subjects resonates with the claims of lesbian artist Renée

Sintenis, who, in 1931 said that the animal domain gave her an escape from daily life and the human beings who had expectations which she could not fulfill.948 In contrast to human subjects, as James M. Saslow perceptively recognizes, animals allow artists to sublimate and express easily what may otherwise be uncomfortable or culturally dangerous.949

Höch’s relatively minimal depiction of human figures in her wartime oeuvre indicates that, upon separation from Brugman, her sensibilities changed considerably.

946 Höch’s only known artistic project for children, her 1945 Bilderbuch was originally published in 1985 and reissued in English translation in 2010. See, Hannah Höch, Bilderbuch, Hans Marquardt and Manfred Hamm, eds. (Düsseldorf: Claasen Verlag, 1985); Gunda Luyken, ed., Hannah Höch, Bilderbuch, 1945, trans. Brian Currid (Berlin: Green Box Kunst Editionen, 2010). 947 Hannah Höch, Bilderbuch, 1945, (1985). While Höch created the book in 1945, her handwritten preface is dated July 1970. 948 Gisela Breitling and Renate Flagmeier, eds. Das verborgene Museum I: Dokumentation der Kunst von Frauen in Berliner Öffentlichen Sammlungen, exh. Cat. (Berlin: Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst und Verlag Edition Hentrich, 1987), 237. Paraphrased in Ranfft, “German women sculptors, 1918- 1936,” 51; 59n45. 949 Sintenis’ comments (and Höch’s wartime pursuit of animal themes) may be linked to Saslow’s arguments. In his discussion of lesbian artist Rosa Bonheur’s (1822-79), Saslow perceptively claimed that viewed in conjunction with her biography, Bonheur’s paintings “represented an alternative vision of the modern female body, and specifically the lesbian body: For her, as for many of her contemporaries, animals figured simultaneously as symbols of freedom in their own right; as surrogates for the desire for an equivalent social freedom on the part of women in general; and as a surrogate for the parallel desire on the part of gender-deviant women (and men) in particular for release from constricting norms of masculinity and femininity.” See, “Disagreeably Hidden: Construction and Constriction of the Lesbian Body in Rosa Bonheur’s Horse Fair,” in The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History, Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, eds. (New York: Harper Collins, 1992), 196.

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Throughout this period, figures are often merely suggested by silhouettes or theatrical

masks, as in Möhn (Poppies) (1935-40) (fig. 7.7) and Mask und Vase (Mask and Vase)

(1940) (fig. 7.8). On occasion, figures are abstracted and integrated with plant or garden themes as in the gouache Tümpel (Pond) (1936) (fig. 7.9). Occasionally they appear to haunt Höch’s paintings like apparitions; this is evident in the barely visible facial features suspended in the watercolor Pond, or the small outline of a female body surrounded by swirling abstraction in Flora (1942) (fig.7.10). The artist’s love of nature and her loneliness are equally expressed in the wartime watercolor, Der Mond zu Besuch (The

Moon comes to Visit) (1943) (fig. 7.11).

Little evidence in Höch’s wartime oeuvre suggests interpersonal or gender- related themes, yet they are nonetheless subtly expressed in three of the artist’s works.

At first glance, the bold composition of Höch’s black and white ink drawing Und die

Freunde der Keime (And the Friends of Sprouts) (1943) (fig. 7.12) evokes a woodcut.

However, the sexless bird-insects in this mysterious garden themed work suggest the many cross-genus hybrids in the artist’s prewar photomontages. While the pained expressions of the humanoid figures in Höch’s painting 1945 (1945) (fig. 7.13) convey

the helpless desperation of war, their neutered bodies, much like the androgynous

heads pictured in the artist’s 1948 gouache Liebespaar am Hang (Romantic Couple on a

Slope) (fig. 7.14), clearly echo earlier gender-related themes once central to Höch’s

oeuvre.

During the 1950s, the material deprivation that characterized Höch’s art during

the war was dramatically swept away. The vibrant colors of her abstract painting

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Schwebende Formen (Floating Forms) (1957) (fig. 7.15) reflect the availability of paints

made possible through Germany’s economic recovery, yet its title bears a lingering trace

of Höch’s war-era reluctance to engage artistically with human interaction. However,

whether Höch’s palette was somber or buoyant, figurative imagery remained nominal in

the artist’s oeuvre well into the late 1950s.

“Ich fühlte die Freiheit—die Freiheit!”950

After the war, as Höch’s journal entries reveal, the artist reveled in a sense of

freedom and great relief. Yet, she was also deeply troubled and depressed by the

shocking revelations of Nazi war crimes made public through the Nürnberg Trials of

1946.951 Slowly, Höch also began to discover the fate of friends with whom she had lost

contact during the war. Despite painful personal losses, the artist’s postwar oeuvre

rapidly gained momentum and soon exhibited a rekindled interest in earlier themes as

seen in her reworking of the Tamer.

Importantly, the postwar years also coincided with Höch’s reemergence on the

international art scene. In 1953, five of her works were included in the exhibition Dada

1916-1923 at New York’s Sidney Janis Gallery and, in 1957, twenty-six Höch collages

were exhibited at the Berlin gallery Gerd Rosen. The first large-scale Dada-themed

museum retrospective, Dada-Dokumente einer Bewegung (Dada-Documents of a

Movement) organized in Düsseldorf in 1958, included Höch’s work and, in 1963, the

artist’s first retrospective was organized in Milan at the Galleria Levante. In 1968, Höch

950 “I felt freedom—freedom!” Höch’s journal entry from January 26, 1946. HH Archiv Berlinische Galerie. 951 Schweitzer, Schrankenlose Freiheit, 372-75.

298 participated in the Museum of Modern Art exhibition Dada, Surrealism, and Their

Heritage in New York.952 These global events launched a whirlwind phase in which professional recognition, interviews, and the admiration of art historians and young artists, including Fluxus performance artists Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik, as well as the Italian Abstract-Expressionist Emilio Vedova, put a definitive end to Höch’s quiet life in Heiligensee.953 Furthermore, contemporary Pop Art, or as it was then also called, Neo-Dada, supported a reappraisal of Höch’s oeuvre and that of other veteran

Dadaists.

Certain recurring Obsessions: Hannah Höch and the ‘new’ New Woman

In 1959, Höch remarked, “I suppose every artist has certain recurring obsessions.”954 This dissertation conclusively establishes, through examination of the entirety of the artist’s oeuvre, why the female figure was one of Höch’s recurring obsessions. In the early 1960s, after almost twenty-five years of absence, Höch

“abruptly reintroduced the figure–specifically the female figure—in her work.”955 After several years in which it played only a minor role, this reintroduction of the female figure suggests its lasting significance for her; a consequence, I argue, of feminism, lesbianism, and her culturally untrained sexuality.

952 Ralf Burmeister, Hannah Höch: Aller Anfang ist DADA! Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz; Berlin: Berlinische Galerie, Landesmuseum für Moderne Kunst, Fotografie und Architektur, 2007), 188-90. 953 Burmeister, Aller Anfang ist DADA!, 185-92. Interest in and recognition of Hannah Höch and her oeuvre began around 1958 and remained constant until she died in 1978. Höch met Vedova while he was in Berlin in 1965 and the two became friends. Moorman and Paik contacted Höch in 1966 (189). 954 Statement made to Edouard Roditi, “Interview with Hannah Höch,” Arts 34, no. 3 (1959), 27. 955 Peter Boswell, “Through the Looking Glass,” in The Photomontages of Hannah Höch, Peter Boswell, Carolyn Lanchner, and Kristin Makholm, eds. (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center; New York: The Museum of Modern Art; Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1997), 20; 23n39; See also Burmeister, Aller Anfang ist DADA!, 186. In the late 1950s, Höch subscribed to Life International and Magnum and, as Burmeister claims, due to the “sehr guten Druckqualität der Farbreproduktionen” (very good print quality of the color reproductions), the artist used the magazines for her collages.

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During the 1960s, Höch reengaged with women’s issues that had recently come

to the fore in Westernized countries throughout the world. This trend was reflected in

contemporary Germany where a growing economy fueled consumerism and expanded

employment opportunities for women; in addition, the invention of the birth-control pill

provided unprecedented social choices and viable alternatives to marriage there as

elsewhere in Europe and North America.956 It was then, once again, that Höch began to

explore gender in her work. Interestingly (and recently discovered by artist Joe Mills) at

the time, she also chose to rework the Tamer with materials published in a 1959

magazine.957 Höch’s revision of one of her most evocative gender-themed works

suggests that current social developments infused the artist’s earlier themes with new

relevance and inspired her to pursue them once more.

As Kristin Makholm observes, many of the artist’s photomontages from the

1960s “intentionally recall her work from the 1920s and 1930s while engaging the latest

New Woman.”958 While timely, Höch’s photomontages Um einen roten Mund (About a

Red Mouth) (1967) (fig. 7.16), Hommage á Riza Abasi (Homage to Riza Abasi) (1963) (fig.

7.17), and Grotesque (1967) (fig. 1.19) clearly echo her Weimar oeuvre. The composition

of About a Red Mouth reflects Höch’s intermittent pursuit of lyrical abstraction, while the pink and white lace petticoat that comprises the photomontage’s middle ground

956 Boswell, “Through the Looking Glass,” 20-21; 23n37. 957 Joe Mills and Peter Boswell, “Dating the Dompteuse: Hannah Höch’s Reconfiguration of the Tamer,” Photo Review 26/27, no. 4/1 (2003/ 2004): 16-18. Mills credits Kristin Makholm for finding evidence in Höch’s papers in 1996 confirming her subscriptions to Life International and Magnum. Based on materials Mills discovered in a 1959 issue of Life International, Höch reconfigured the Tamer sometime between 1959 and 1964, when it was exhibited in Berlin. 958 Kristin Makholm, “Strange Beauty: Hannah Höch and the Photomontage,” MoMA, no. 24 (Winter-Spring 1997): 23. 300

attests to the artist’s perennial interest in women’s fashion and her work during the

‘teens and ‘20s as a textile designer. The fleshy pink lips that dominate About a Red

Mouth suggest the lips of Höch’s 1930 Marlene and once again confirm her unbroken

engagement with the cultural construction and fetishization of femininity.

Hannah Höch’s erotically-tinged fascination with exoticized femininity is patently

expressed in her 1963 collage Homage to Riza Abasi. While the work’s title references

the sixteenth-century Persian miniaturist Riza Abbasi, the image evokes a number of

Höch’s earlier themes.959 The constructed and contorted subject of Riza Abasi, a dark-

eyed Audrey Hepburn look-alike, alternately suggests 1920s Ausdrückstanz

(expressionistic dance) and a sultry silent-film Vamp, both key elements in Höch’s

Weimar-era oeuvre and Scrapbook.960 Riza Abasi is also reminiscent of the artist’s

Ethnographischen Museum series, a group of Weimar-era photomontages in which

Höch combined pictures of non-Western artifacts with imagery from contemporary fashion magazines.961

Höch’s rekindled interest in and engagement with the related themes of female

beauty and commodification are equally evident in her 1963 collage Grotesque, the title

of which alludes to the bizarre extremes that often dictate women’s fashion. Grotesque

suggests and revisits what for Höch was undoubtedly a central and lifelong theme: the

959 The artist’s interest in the Iranian miniaturist of the Isfahan School Riza Abbasi (1565-1635) may have been piqued by the Persian branch of the Deutsches Archeologisches Institut (German Archeological Institute) which opened in Berlin in 1961. 960 Ausdrückstanz (expressionistic dance) flourished after World War I in Germany. For an in- depth study of the cultural significance of dance in Weimar, see, Karl E. Toepfer, Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910-1935 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 961 For a discussion of the series, see Maud Lavin, “From an Ethnographic Museum,” in Cut with the Kitchen Knife: The Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 158-183. 301

lesbian couple. Both monstrous and whimsical, this colorful female pair, one of which is

ambiguously gendered due to an aging male head, suggests a playful reprise of her 1919

Dada-Puppets (fig. 1.3). Moreover, the figures in Grotesque, which are reduced to heads and legs, also evoke the artist’s similarly configured 1928 photomontages, Russian

Dancer and English Dancer, and imply their belated and joyous unification.

As a chronological overview of the artist’s oeuvre reveals, it is critical to examine

in detail the extent to which Höch’s intimate relationships and cognizance of popular

and subcultural media media played a key role in shaping her aesthetic sensibilities and

artistic production. Although Höch’s Dada-era photomontages clearly exhibit a feminist

turn, her engagement with gender and sexuality significantly increased and found

clarification and fruition in late Weimar during her years with Til Brugman; a period that

also importantly coincides with the widespread dissemination of popular, subcultural,

and scientific materials related to sexuality and gender in Germany. While Höch’s

pursuit of gender-related themes was interrupted by war, the vibrancy and masterful

abandon of her Spätwerk attests to her perennial fascination with the female figure and

her lifelong exploration of the construction and expression of gender in its myriad

forms.

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FIGURES

1.1

Hannah Höch, 1915. Hannah Höch Archiv (HH Archiv), Berlinische Galerie, Landesmuseum für Moderne Kunst, Fotografie und Architektur, Berlin.

303

1.2

Til Brugman, ca. 1905. HH Archiv, Berlinische Galerie.

304

1.3

Hannah Höch, Dada-Puppen (Dada-Dolls), 1916-1918. Cloth and diverse materials, ca. 60 cm. Berlinische Galerie.

305

1.4

Hannah Höch, Entartet (Degenerate), 1969. Collage, 34.4 x 40.5 cm. Collection Landesbank Berlin AG.

306

1.5

Hannah Höch, Entwurf für das Denkmal eines bedeutendes Sptzenhemdes (Design for a Memorial for an Important Lace-Shirt) 1922. Collage, 27.6 x 17 cm. Hamburger Kunsthalle.

307

1.6

Hannah Höch, Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser Dada durch die letzte weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands (Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Weimar Germany), 1919-20. Photomontage, 114 x 90 cm. Neue Nationalgalerie Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz Berlin.

308

1.7

Hannah Höch, Die Mädchen (The Girls), 1921. Photomontage, dimensions unknown. Lost.

309

1.8

Hannah Höch, Da-Dandy, 1919. Photomontage, 30 x 23 cm. Private Collection.

310

1.9

Raoul Hausmann, Photo Hannah Höch, 1919. HH Archiv, Berlinische Galerie.

311

1.10

Hannah Höch, Oz, der Tragöde (Oz, the Tragic Actor) 1919. Photomontage. Photomontage. Missing, pictured in Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, 38.

312

1.11

Raoul Hausmann, ABCD, 1923-24. Photomontage, 40.6 x 28.6 cm. Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

313

1.12

Kurt Schwitters, Miss Blanche 1923. Collage, 15.9 x 12.7 cm. Collection Dr. Werner Schmalenbach, Düsseldorf.

314

1.13

Hannah Höch, Collage (Dada), 1922-24. Collage, 24.7 x 32.8 cm. Collection Merrill C. Berman, Scarsdale, New York.

315

1.14

George Grosz and John Heartfield, Sonniges Land (Sunny Land), 1919. Photographic reproduction, dimensions and whereabouts of original unknown. Berlin, Akademie der Künste, John Heartfield Archiv.

316

1.15

Max Ernst, Le Cygne est bien paisable (The Swan is quite Peaceful), 1920. Gouache on photographic enlargement of photomontage, 21 x 29 cm. Collection Düsseldorf WestLB.

317

1.16

Johannes Baargeld, Typical Vertical Misrepresentation as a Depiction of the Dada Baargeld (Self-portrait), 1920. Photomontage, 37.1 x 31 cm. Kunsthaus Zürich.

318

1.17

Max Ernst, Jean Hatchet and Charles the Bold, 1929. Collage, 34 x 20 cm. Cleveland Museum of Art.

319

1.18

Marcel Janco, Oscar Dominguez, Jean Arp, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Cadavre Exquis, 1937. Mixed media on paper, 30.6 x 23.6 cm. Stiftung Arp, Rolandseck.

320

1.19

Hannah Höch, Grotesque, 1963. Photomontage, 25 x 17 cm. Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, Stuttgart.

321

1.20

Hannah Höch, Der Vater (The Father), 1920. Galerie Berinson, Berlin.

322

1.21

Hannah Höch, Dada-Ernst (Dada-Serious/Grave), 1920-21. Photomontage, 18.6 x 16.6 cm. Collection Vera and Arturo Schwarz, Milan.

323

1.22

Abtreibungsinstrumente (Abortion-instruments). Magnus Hirschfeld, Vol. 4. Bilderteil: Geschlechtskunde auf Grund dreissigjähriger Forschung und Erfahrung bearbeitet (Stuttgart: Julius Püttmann Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1930), 341.

324

1.23

Gustave Courbet, L’Origine du Monde (1866). Oil on Canvas, 46 x 55 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

325

1.24

Sheela-na-Gig, Corbel in the Church of St. Mary and St. David, Kilpeck, Ireland, 12th century. Pictured in Monica Sjöö, The Great Cosmic Mother of All (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987), 320.

326

1.25

Max Ernst, Les Hommes n’en Sauront Rien (Of this Men Shall Know Nothing), 1923. Oil on canvas, 81 x 64 cm. Tate Gallery, London.

327

1.26

Eric von Stroheim as Count Karamzin. Foolish Wives, Universal Jewel (1922).

328

2.1

Hannah Höch, Rüssische Tänzerin (Russian Dancer), 1928. Photomontage, 30.5 x 22.5 cm. Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museums Braunschweig, Kunstmusem des Landes Niedersachsen.

329

2.2

Hannah Höch, Englische Tänzerin (English Dancer), 1928. Photomontage, 23.7 x 18 cm. Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, Stuttgart.

330

2.3

Romaine Brooks, Una, Lady Troubridge, 1923. Oil on canvas, 127.3 x 76.4 cm. Smithsonian American Art Museum.

331

2.4

Anonymous photograph (Three Nude Women). Liebende Frauen, 2. Jg., no. 36 (1927).

332

2.5

Hannah Höch, Album (Scrapbook), undated, ca. 1933. unpaginated.

333

2.6

Hannah Höch, Equilbre (Equilibrium), 1925. Photomontage, 30.5 x 20.3 cm. Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, Stuttgart.

334

2.7

Nacktkultur im Film. Aus der Zeitschrift: Schönheit (Nudism in Film: from the Magazine: Beauty) [Wilhelm Prager, Film Still, Wege der Kraft und Schönheit, 1925]. Albert Moll, Polizei und Sitte (Gersbach & Sohn, Berlin, 1926), 31.

335

2.8

Kupfer und Meyer, Tänzerinnen (Female Dancers). Die Freundin, 3 Jg., no. 15, August 8, 1927.

336

2.9

Anonymous photograph (Three Nude Women on a Beach). Die Freundin, 7. Jg., no. 39, 16. Sept., 1931.

337

2.10

Anonymous cover Illustration. Ruth Margarete Roellig, Berlins lesbische Frauen, mit einem Vorwort von Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld (Leipzig: Bruno Gebauer Verlag für Kulturprobleme, 1928).

338

2.11

Otto Hahn, cover Illustration. Marie-Renée Mecke-Daumas, Die klugen Jungfrauen: ein Sittenbild aus Berlin W. (Leipzig: W. Borngräber, 1924).

339

2.12

Foto Angela, Die Tänzerinnen Schwestern Karolewna (The Dancing Karolewna Sisters). Die Dame, 3. Novemberheft, 1929 (Berlin), detail, p. 11.

340

2.13

Heinz von Perchkhammer, Ecstasy, ca.1930. Photograph, dimensions, present whereabouts unknown. www.tumblr.com/tagged/heinz-von-perckhammer?before=1307366646 (accessed January 5, 2012).

341

2.14

Heinz von Perchkhammer, Heliogravure. Edle Nacktheit in China mit 32 Original-aufnahmen von Heinz von Perckhammer (Berlin: Eigenbrödler Verlag, 1928).

342

2.15

Anonymous photograph. Frauen-Liebe, 3 Jg., no. 5 (1928).

343

2.16

Anonymous photograph, Die Badenden (The Bathers). Die Freundin 4. Jg., no. 8, April 16, 1928.

344

2.17

Anonymous photograph, Ideale Schönheit (Ideal Beauty). Die Freundin, 4. Jg., nr. 3, Feb., 6, 1928.

345

2.18

Anonymous erotic postcard, 1920s. http://www.delcampe.de/list.php?cat=7894&searchMode= all&searchTldCountry=net&searchInDescription=Y Seite 4 (accessed March 1, 2012).

346

2.19

Fernand Khnopff, Avec Gregoire le Roy. Mon couer couer pleure d’autrefois (With Gregoire the King, my heart cries again). Colored pencil and white chalk on paper, 25 x 14.2 cm. Private collection.

347

2.20

Franz Roh, Selbstbegrüssung, (Greeting Oneself) 1927-33. Gelatin silver print, 15.4 x 19.8 cm. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

348

2.21

Claude Cahun, Self-Portrait in Mirror, 1928. Photograph, 179 mm x 237 mm, Jersey Heritage Trust (JHT)/1995/00030/g.

349

3.1

Masculine/feminine lesbian sartorial configuration, undated. Postcard, France. Author’s collection.

350

3.2

Jeanne Mammen, Two Women Dancing, ca. 1928. Watercolor and pencil, 48 x 36 cm. Förderverein der Jeanne-Mammen-Stiftung, Berlin.

351

3.3

Jeanne Mammen, Zeebrugge, 1920s. Watercolor and pencil, 39 x 34 cm. Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, Iowa.

352

3.4

Josephine Baker in modernen Revuekostüm. Magnus Hirschfeld, Vol. 4. Bilderteil: Geschlechtskunde, Plate 51.

353

3.5

Gesichtsbemalung einer Indianerin aus Arizona; Gesichtsbemalung der Haussa-Frauen im Westsudan (Face-painting of an Arizona Indian; Face-painting Haussa Woman in West Sudan). Hirschfeld, Vol. 4. Bilderteil: Geschlechtskunde, p.768.

354

3.6

“S’ent Marona, orientalische Tänzerin” (S’ent Marona, Oriental Dancer). Die Freundin, March 5, 1928.

355

3.7

Rudolf Koppitz, Studie russischer Tänzerinnen (Study of Russian Dancers), ca. 1926. Bromide Print, 33.4 x 17.9 cm. Private collection, Vienna.

356

3.8

Anonymous photograph (Entwined Figures). Liebende Frauen, 3. Jg., no. 41 (1928).

357

3.9

Lenare, Lydia Sokolova “Queen of English Dancers,” The Illustrated London News, Oct., 6, 1926, 683.

358

3.10

Hannah Höch, Liebe (Love), 1931. Photomontage, 21 x 21.8 cm. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

359

3.11

Anna Pawlowa “Libelle,” Undated postcard. Collection author.

360

3.12

Libellule. Postcard, undated. http://www.delcampe.de/list.php?searchString=libellule&cat- 7894&searchMode=all&SearchTldCountry=net&searchInDescription=Y (accessed March 9, 2012).

361

3.13

Young Girl with Wings. Postcard, undated. http://www.delcampe.de/page/item/id,153841928,var,Libelle- originele-foto-rond-1915,language,G.html (accessed March 1, 2012).

362

3.14

Herta Wasserkampf, Postcard, Felix Korn Verlag, Stuttgart, ca. 1930. Akpool.de/ansichtskarte-postkarte-nixe-sitzt-auf-rosenblatt-libelle-fisch (accessed January 15, 2012).

Reversed image

363

3.15

Hannah Höch, Album (Scrapbook), unpaginated. HH Archiv, Berlinische Galerie.

364

3.16

Hannah Höch, Vagabunden (Vagabonds) 1926. Photomontage, 35 x 25 cm. Collection Guido Rossi, Milan.

365

3.17

Hannah Höch, Von Oben (From Above, or Two Children above the City), 1926-27. Photocollage on paper mounted on cardboard, 30.6 x 22.2 cm. Private collection, Des Moines, Iowa.

366

3.18

Hannah Höch, Auf dem Weg im F. Himmel (On the Way to F. Heaven) 1934. Photomontage, 36.8 x 25.4 cm. Private collection, New York.

367

3.19

Anonymous, “Märchenland” (Fairy-Tale Land). Die Freundin, 7. Jg., no. 43, Oct., 28, 1931.

368

3.20

H. W. Mager, Traumbild (Dream-picture). Photomontage. Die Freundin, 4. Jg. no. 9, April 30, 1928.

369

3.21

Hannah Höch, Flucht (Flight), 1931. Collage, 24.5 x 18.1 cm. Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, Stuttgart.

370

3.22

Hannah Höch, Siebenmeilenstiefel (Seven-League Boots), ca. 1934. Photomontage, 22.9 x 32.2 cm. Hamburger Kunsthalle, Kupferstichkabinett.

371

3.23

Hannah Höch, Nur nicht mit beiden Beinen auf der Erde Stehen (Don’t Stand with both Legs on the Ground), 1940. Photomontage, 32.2 x 20.8 cm. Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, Stuttgart.

372

4.1

Til Brugman “SHE HE” (1917-1922). Collection Gerrit Jan de Rook, Den Haag.

373

4.2 4.3

Til Brugman, undated photograph, Damenklub Violetta, Der Vorstand Berlinische Galerie, BG-HHC-F 191/79. [Charlotte ‘Lotte’ Hahm], Frauen-Liebe, 2. Jg., no. 49 (1927): 12.

374

4.4

Hannah Höch and Til Brugman with their cat Ninn, 1928. Photograph, HH Archiv Berlinische Galerie.

375

4.5

Hannah Höch, Büsingstrasse, 1929. Linocut, 14.1 x 14. 9 cm. Berlinische Galerie, Berlin, BG-G 6840/93.

376

4.6

Hannah Höch, Tulip Farmer, Atlantis: Länder, Völker, Reisen 5 (1933): 431.

377

4.7

Hannah Höch, Tulip Field, Atlantis: Länder, Völker, Reisen 5 (1933): 430.

378

4.8

May-Day Rally, Nurenberg, 1933. Interfoto München. Pictured in Udo Pini, Liebeskult und Liebeskitsch: Erotik im Dritten Reich (Munich: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1992), 36-37.

379

4.9

Hannah Höch, Der Schandfleck im Tulpenbeet (The Stain in the Tulip Field), 1927. Ink on paper, 213 x 202 mm. pictured in Herbert Remmert und Peter Barth, eds., Hannah Höch: Werke und Worte (Berlin: Fröhlich & Kaufmann, 1982), 47. Present whereabouts unknown.

380

4.10

Hannah Höch, cover Illustration. Scheingehacktes (Berlin: Verlag der Rabenpresse, 1935).

381

4.11

Hannah Höch, hand-colored cover Illustration. Scheingehacktes, 1935. Berlinische Galerie, BG-HHC 560/79.

382

4.12

Hannah Höch, Cabbage Patch, Scheingehacktes, 1935, p. 15.

383

4.13

Hannah Höch, Schaufensterhypnose, Scheingehacktes, 1935, p. 23

384

4.14

Hannah Höch, Die Braut (Pandora) (The Bride [Pandora]), 1927. Oil on canvas, 114 x 66 cm. Die Berlinische Galerie, Landesmuseum für Moderne Kunst, Photographie, und Architektur, Berlin.

385

4.15

Hannah Höch, Traum Seines Lebens (His Life’s Dream), 1925. Photomontage, 30 x 22.5 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York.

386

4.16

Hannah Höch, Bäuerliches Brautpaar (Peasant Wedding Couple), 1931. Photomontage with collage, 21.6 x 20.9 cm. Private collection, Berlin.

387

4.17

Hannah Höch, Die Braut (The Bride), ca. 1933. Photomontage, 20 x 19.7 cm. Collection Thomas Walther, New York.

388

4.18

Hannah Höch, Bürgerliches Brautpaar (Bourgeois Wedding Couple), 1920. Watercolor, 39 x 107 cm. Private collection.

389

4.19

Man Ray, Garderobe, 1920. Gelatin silver print, 25 x 16.5 cm. Kunsthaus Zürich.

390

4.20

Advertisement, Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung, August 17, 1924, p. 942.

391

4.21

Beinfetischismus (Leg-Fetishism). Hirschfeld, Geschlechtskunde, 1930, p. 741.

392

4.22

Hannah Höch, Marlene, 1930. Photomontage, 36.7 x 24.2 cm. Collection Dakis Joannou, Athens.

393

4.23

Hannah Höch, Der Schuss (The Kick), 1935. Photomontage, 18 x 23 cm. Berlinische Galerie.

394

5.1

Hannah Höch, Dompteuse (Tamer), 1930. Photomontage, 35.5 x 26 cm. Graphische Sammlung, Kunsthaus Zürich.

395

5.2

“und im Wintergarten, Barbette, das geheimnisvolle Wesen am Trapez” (and at the Wintergarten [theatre], Barbette, that mysterious creature on a trapeze). “Blick in die Welt,” Das 12 Uhr Blatt, July 31, 1931.

396

5.3

Dirne in Männerkleidung. Zeichnung von F. Rops (Prostitute in men’s clothing, Drawing F. Rops). Albert Moll, Polizei und Sitte: Die Polizei in Einzeldarstellungen (Berlin: Gersbach & Sohn Verlag, 1926), p. 22.

397

5.4

Männlicher Transvertit. Benutzung der Bubikopfmode (Male Transvestite. Use of the Bubikopf hairstyle). Moll, Polizei und Sitte, p. 23.

398

5.5

Männlicher Transvertit (Male Transvestite). Moll, Polizei und Sitte, p. 23.

399

5.6

Eine Frau die es liebt Uniform zu tragen: der Bart ist angeklebt (A woman who loves to wear uniforms: the mustache is glued-on). Magnus Hirschfeld, Berlins drittes Geschlecht (Leipzig: Verlag Max Spohr, 1904), p. 122.

400

5.7

Androtrichie (feminae barbatae) (Bearded Women). Magnus Hirschfeld, Geschlechts-Übergänge; Mischungen männlicher und weiblicher Geschlechtscharactere (sexuelle-Zwischenstufen) (Leipzig: Verlag der Monatsschrift für Harnkrankheiten und sexuelle Hygeine, 1905), Plate 14.

401

5.8

Eine Schreckensnachricht (Terrifying News). Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung, no. 41, Oct., 12, 1924, p. 1216.

402

5.9

Gertrud Liebherr(?), Photograph. Liebende Frauen, 5. Jg., no. 16 (1930).

403

5.10

“Moderne Fotokunst.” Die Freundin, 3 Jg., no. 20 (October 17, 1927): 7.

5.11

Gertrud Liebherr, Die Frau als Mann. Die Freundin, 4. Jg., no. 5, (1928): 5.

404

5.12

Gertrud Liebherr, Die Frau als Mann, Die Freundin, 4 Jg., no. 5 (1928): 4.

405

5. 13

Der Elegante Herr (The Elegant Man). Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung, August 10, 1924, p. 271.

406

5.14

Gertrud Liebherr(?), Photograph. Liebende Frauen, 4 Jg., no. 18 (1929).

407

5.15

Voo Doo. Magnus Hirschfeld and Max Tilke, Der erotischen Verkleidungstrieb (Die Transvestiten.) Illustrierter Teil (Berlin: Alfred Pulvermacher & Co., 1912), Plate 43, detail.

408

5.16

Gerlach, Der Transvestit Voo-Doo, eine der bekanntesten internationaler Tanzsterne (The Transvestite Voo-Doo, one of the Most Prominent International Dance-stars), Die Freundin, 3 Jg., no. 14 (1927): 27.

409

5.17

Pseudohermaphroditismus masculinis bei überwiegend weiblichen Habitus. Error in sexu (Pseudohermaphrodite with dominant female behavior). Hirschfeld, Geschlechts-Übergänge, Plate 7.

410

5.18

Male cross-dresser, Police Photo, undated. Lothar Goldman, “Über das Wesen des Umkleidungstriebes,” Geschlecht und Gesellschaft 12 (1924/25), Plate 1.

411

6.1

Advertisement, Der Steinach Film, 1923 Humboldt Institut, Online Archiv für Sexology http://www2.hu berlin.de/Sexology/GESUND/ ARCHIV/COLLSTE.HTM Tab “Der Steinach Film” (accessed March 1, 2012).

412

6.2

Film Still (detail), The Steinach Film, 1923. Humboldt Institut, Online Archiv für Sexology http://www2.hu berlin.de/Sexology/GESUND/ ARCHIV/COLLSTE.HTM Tab “Der Steinach Film” (accessed March 1, 2012).

413

6.3

Eugen Steinach, Verjüngung durch experimentelle Neubelebung der alternden Pubertätsdrüse (Berlin: Verlag von Julius Springer, 1920), pp. 20-21.

414

6.4

Hannah Höch, Die Starken Männer (The Strong Men), 1931. Photomontage, 24.5 x 13.5 cm. Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, Stuttgart.

415

6.5

Max Schmeling, Ullstein Bild, 1927. Photograph. The Granger Collection, New York.

416

6.6

Boxer Schmeling and Aphrodite Kallipygos. Hirschfeld, Vol. 4. Bilderteil: Geschlechtskunde, Figs. 206, 207.

417

6.7

Hannah Höch, Die Süsse (Sweet One), 1926. Photomontage with watercolor, 30 x 15.5 cm. Museum Folkwang, Essen.

418

6.8

Gerda Wegener, Portrait of three Women (Lili in the centre). Niels Hoyer, ed., Man into Woman, An Authentic Record of a Change of Sex, trans. H. J. Stenning (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1933), facing page 224.

419

6.9

Gerda Wegener, Moderne Demimondänen. Moll, Polizei und Sitte, between pp. 128-29.

420

6.10

Einar Wegener (Andreas Sparre) about 1920. Frontispiece, Hoyer, Man into Woman, 1933.

421

6.11

Einar Wegener (Andreas Sparre) posing as Lili, Paris 1926. Hoyer, Man into Woman, 1933, facing page 40.

422

6.12

Einar Wegener (Andreas Sparre) after definitely assuming the name of Lili, Paris, January, 1930. Hoyer, Man into Woman, 1933, facing page 96.

423

6.13

Einar Wegener (Andreas Sparre) as Lili Elbe, Dresden, May 1930, between second and third Operations. Hoyer, Man into Woman, 1933, facing page 112.

424

6.14

Einar Wegener (Andreas Sparre) as Lili Elbe, Copenhagen, February, 1931. Hoyer, Man into Woman, 1933, facing page 208.

425

6.15

Dust-jacket, Neils Hoyer, ed., Lili Elbe, ein Mensch wechselt sein Geschlecht: Eine Lebensbeichte (A Person changes their Sex: a life confession) (Dresden: Carl Reissner Verlag, 1932).

426

6.16

Schnittbild aus Zeitschriften die vorzugsweise in homosexuellen Kreisen gelesen wurde (Collage of newspapers that are primarily read in homosexual circles). Moll, Polizei und Sitte, p. 101.

427

7.1

Claude Cahun [and Marcel Moore], Self-portrait, ca. 1928. Photograph. Jersey Heritage Trust (JHT)/1995/0036/b print.

428

7.2

Claude Cahun, Photomontage prefacing Chapter III. Aveux non avenus (Paris: Édition Carrefour, 1930).

429

7.3

Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore [signed Moore]. Photomontage, Frontispiece. Aveux non avenus, 1930.

430

7.4

Leonor Fini, Travesti á l’oiseau (Transvestite with a Bird), ca. 1932. Oil on canvas, 100 x 65cm. Private collection.

431

7.5

Leonor Fini, Le supplice de l’allure (The Torture of Allure), 1940. Oil on canvas, 64.8 x 40.7cm.

432

7.6

Hannah Höch, Schöne Fanggeräte (Beautiful Trapping-Machines), 1946. Photomontage, 30 x 22cm. Collection Landesbank Berlin AG.

433

7.7

Hannah Höch, Möhn (Poppies), 1935-40. Gouache, 63 x 47 cm. Berlinische Galerie.

434

7.8

Hannah Höch, Maske und Vase (Mask and Vase), 1940. Gouache, 45 x 32 cm. Berlinische Galerie.

435

7.9

Hannah Höch, Tümpel (Pond), 1936. Watercolor 40 x 57 cm. Berlinische Galerie.

436

7.10

Hannah Höch, Flora, 1942. Watercolor, 35 x 48 cm. Berlinische Galerie.

437

7.11

Hannah Höch, Der Mond zu Besuch (The Moon comes for a Visit), 1943. Watercolor, 72 x 57 cm.

438

7.12

Hannah Höch, Und die Freunde der Keime (And the Friends of Sprouts), 1943. Ink on Paper, 23 x 23 cm. Berlinische Galerie.

439

7.13

Hannah Höch, 1945, 1945. Oil on canvas, 92.8 x 81.4 cm. Collection Landesbank Berlin.

440

7.14

Hannah Höch, Liebespaar am Hang (Romantic Couple on a Slope), 1948. Gouache, 45 x 62 cm. Berlinische Galerie.

441

7.15

Hannah Höch, Schwebende Formen (Floating Forms), 1957. Oil on canvas, 90 x 60 cm. Berlinische Galerie.

442

7.16

Hannah Höch, Um einem roten Mund (Around/About a Red Mouth), ca. 1967. Collage, 20.5 x 16.5 cm. Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, Stuttgart.

443

7.17

Hannah Höch, Hommage á Riza Abasi (Homage to Riza Abasi), 1963. Photomontage, 35.5 x 17.7 cm. Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, Stuttgart.

444

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Ades, Dawn. Photomontage. London: Thames and Hudson, 1976.

Adriani, Götz. Hannah Höch. Cologne: Dumont Verlag, 1980.

Alexander, Jonathan. “Transgender Rhetorics: (Re)Composing Narratives of the Gendered Body.” College Composition and Communication 57, no. 1 (Sept. 2005): 45-82.

Ander, Heike and Dirk Snauwaert, eds. Claude Cahun: Bilder. München: Kunstverein München; Der Neuen Galerie Graz; Museum Folkwang, Essen; München: Schirmer Mosel, 1997.

Andressen, B. Michael. Brillen: von Gebrauchsartikel zum Kunstobjekt, Spectacles: from Utility Article to Cult Object. Stuttgart: Arnoldsche, 1998.

Ankum, Katharina von, ed. Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

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Apter, Emily and William Pietz, eds. Fetishism as Cultural Discourse. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993.

Bachrach, Susan. “Deadly Medicine.” The Public Historian 29, no. 3 (Summer 2007): 19- 32.

Bal, Mieke and Norman Bryson. “Semiotics and Art History.” In On Meaning-Making: Essays in Semiotics, 137-203. Sonoma, CA: Poleridge Press, 1994.

Barbarian, Jan-Pieter. Literaturpolitik im NS-Staat: von der Gleichschaltung bis zum Ruin. Frankfurt a. M: Fischer Taschenbuchverlag, 2010.

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Barta, Peter I., ed. Gender and Sexuality in Russian Civilization. London: Routledge, 2001.

Bathrick, David. “Max Schmeling on the Canvas: Boxing as an Icon of Weimar Culture.” New German Critique 51 (Autumn 1990):113-36.

Bätschmann, Oskar. The Artist and the Modern World: The Conflict between the Market and Self-Expression. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.

Baum, Vicki. Es war Alles ganz anders: Erinnerungen. Berlin: Ullstein Verlag, 1962.

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