Typewriting in Mass-Media Culture of the Weimar Republic, 1918-1933

Home , Even working, Fly (clothing), Hemline, Irmgard Keun, Maly Delschaft, Oskar Karlweis

Mechanical Women and Sexy Machines: Typewriting in Mass-Media Culture of the Weimar Republic, 1918-1933

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

Jaclyn Rose Kurash, M.A.

Graduate Program in Germanic Languages and Literatures

The Ohio State University

2015

Dissertation Committee:

John E. Davidson, Advisor

Katra Byram

Jill Galvan

Jaclyn Rose Kurash

2015

Abstract

This dissertation is an investigation of portrayals of the female typist and the typewriter in popular literature, film, and advertising of Germany’s interwar period. This study offers a departure from the dominant narratives that posit the technologized woman as a product of male anxiety or a conflation of woman and machine. Alternatively, I find that early images of typewriting women are better understood in terms of feminist theories of the body and the cyborg that highlight the intimate connection between the body and machine. I argue that the Weimar typist-typewriter assemblage is a fusion of a specific type of New Woman and machine within the Weimar cultural imaginary, a merger of the organic and the mechanical that I call the New Woman-Machine. Through this concept, I attempt to highlight the existence of a different narrative about women and machines as visions of productivity, automatism, machine skill, and discipline. Beginning with analyses of two popular, late-Weimar novels written by former professional typists,

Irmgard Keun’s Gilgi—eine von uns (1931) and Christa Anita Brück’s Schicksale hinter

Schreibmaschinen (1930), I show that the authors depict typewriting as a form of automatic writing, which serves as a coping mechanism for their protagonists. Then, the study turns to an investigation of German typewriter advertisements, in which female embodiment of the machine is promoted through images of the docile, disciplined female body engaged in mechanical production. The study’s final thrust is made up of an interrogation of popular romantic comedies of the late-Weimar era, in which the ii typewriting woman becomes a source of visual pleasure that celebrates machine skill, speed, and productivity within women’s embodiment of the machine. My study, thus, comes to the conclusion that such images offered real women of the Weimar era powerful alternative identities in their relationship with technology.

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Dedication

This document is dedicated to Charlie and my family.

Acknowledgments

Ernest Hemingway notably quipped, “It is easy to write. Just sit in front of your typewriter and bleed.” This visceral metaphor for the relationship between writer and instrument is an essential point of interest for this study, and it is, for this author, reflective of how much of oneself – time, energy, and life force – is poured into a project such as this. As I bring this project to a close, I am also reminded that this thesis would not have been possible without the support of my teachers, colleagues, friends, and family.

I would first like to thank my dissertation committee for so generously devoting their time to helping me improve this project and for offering such invaluable advice over the course of the past three years. I owe my deepest gratitude to my advisor, John E.

Davidson, without whose keen insight, tireless guidance, and concrete feedback this document would not be what it is. I am so grateful for his critical eye and sage advice about the challenges of writing, as well as his patience and encouragement throughout the dissertation process. It was also an honor for me to work with Jill Galvan, whose book played a central role in the inspiration of this project. Her wealth of knowledge about devices of communication helped to push my thinking beyond conventional wisdom toward newer and more interesting considerations. I would also like to thank Katra

Byram for her thought-provoking and detailed feedback, sound advice, and astute observations about important moments in my work. I am very grateful to have had a committee so invested in my progress.

Several institutions played an important role in helping to make this project a reality. First, I would like to express my gratitude to the Ohio State Department of

Germanic Languages and Literatures and the faculty for their consistent support of my research throughout the course of the dissertation. I am also grateful for additional financial support from the OSU Department of Film Studies, the OSU Dresden Summer

Program, and the College of Arts and Humanities for making it possible for me to travel and perform the necessary archival research for this project. I owe a special thanks to the

Max Kade Institute for a generous two-semester fellowship, which allowed me to focus solely on my research. I would also like to express my sincere gratitude to the German

Museum for Film and Television (die Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek) and the German

Federal Archives (Bundesarchiv) in Berlin for providing me access to their rare film collections, image archives, and early film journals.

Over the years, other scholars have read parts this project in its various stages and have provided helpful commentary, including Barbara Becker-Cantarino, Helen

Fehervary, May Mergenthaler, Bernd Fischer, and the graduate students who participated in the Dissertation Colloquium. Thank you for your insightful questions and feedback.

To some of my dearest friends Kristen Hetrick, Sara Luly, Briana Lewis, and

Wonneken Wanske, thank you so much for the roles that you played throughout my time at Ohio State. At one time or another all of you have helped me through this process in

vi various ways. Thank you for letting me bend your ear, for being my sounding board, for lifting me up, for sharing your own experiences with me, or for simply lamenting the process along with me.

To my parents Denise and Joseph Brozich, my brother Dylan, my aunt Marie, and uncle Kenny, thank you for all of your love, patience, and support throughout my graduate education, including this project! Your encouragement sustained me in ways you will never know. A special thank you goes to my grandmother Rita Rose Magnone, who left this world too soon, but always urged me to learn, explore, and have adventures.

I am also grateful for the incredible kindness and support of Deborah and Charles G.

Ruggiero. Finally, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Charlie Ruggiero. Thank you for keeping me afloat throughout this process. I love you, and I could not have done this without you!

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Vita

1993-1997 ...... High School Diploma, Ambridge Area High School

1997-2001...... B.A. German & English, Allegheny College

2001-2003...... Foreign Language Teaching Assistant, Fulbright

Program, Austria

2003-2005...... M.A. German Studies, University of Maryland

2006-2008...... Graduate Teaching Associate, Department of

Germanic Languages and Literatures, The Ohio

State University

2008-2009...... Visiting Assistant Professor, Allegheny College

2009-2010...... Graduate Teaching Associate, Department of

Germanic Languages and Literatures, The Ohio

State University

2010-2012...... Visiting Assistant Professor, Allegheny College

2012-2014...... Graduate Teaching Associate, Department of

Germanic Languages and Literatures, The Ohio

State University

viii

2014-2015...... Max Kade Fellow, Department of Germanic

Languages and Literatures, The Ohio State

University

Fields of Study

Major Field: Germanic Languages and Literatures

Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii

Dedication ...... iv

Acknowledgments...... v

Vita ...... viii

List of Tables ...... xiii

List of Figures ...... xiv

Introduction: The Female Typist as Cyborg in Weimar Mass-Media Culture ...... 1

I. Cyborgs, Gendered Bodies, and Communications Technologies ...... 7

II. Organization of the Study ...... 17

Chapter 1: Typewriting: A Social and Cultural History or (How Women Became

Typewriters) ...... 22

I. A Social History of Typewriting: Positioning the Female Typist ...... 26

1.1 In Service of Love: Women’s Work in the Early Nineteenth Century ...... 26

1.2 Clerking in the Early Nineteenth Century ...... 30

1.3 Women’s Entry into Clerical Work and Typewriting ...... 32

1.4 Social Tensions over Typewriting: Clerking Organizations ...... 40

1.5 Typewriting in the Weimar Republic (1918-1933) ...... 50

II. A Brief Cultural History of the Typewriter and Its Significance ...... 61

2.1 Automatons ...... 64

2.2 Writing Machines, Music, and Constructing the Feminine Machine ...... 70

2.3 From Blind-Writers to Writing Blind: The Perils of Seeing when Typewriting . 83

Chapter 2: The New Woman-Machine: Rationalized Bodies and Automatic Minds ...... 98 in Weimar Popular Fiction ...... 98

I. Cyborg Imagery: Visions of the New Woman ...... 100

II. The Female Typist as Literary Subject in Weimar’s New Objectivity ...... 111

III. Traces of Automatism in Christa Anita Brück’s Schicksale hinter

Schreibmaschinen...... 125

IV. Rationalized Bodies and Hybrid Identities in Irmgard Keun’s Gilgi – eine von uns

...... 148

V. On (Type)Writing: Keun and Brück’s Self-Reflective Impulses ...... 166

Chapter 3: The Feminine Machine: Docility and Female Embodiment in Early German

Typewriter Advertising ...... 172

I. Advertising and Consumer Culture in the Weimar Republic ...... 184

II. Mechanization in Graphic Design ...... 189

III. “The Feminine Touch” – Wedding the Female Body to the Machine (1899-1914)

...... 195

IV. The Female Embodiment and Docility in Weimar Typewriter Advertising ...... 224

Chapter 4: Racing the Machine: Pleasure and the Productive Body in Narrative Cinema of the Early Thirties ...... 246

I. Reading Gender and the Typist in Entertainment Film ...... 249

II. Eyeing the Keys: The Gaze and Typewriting in Silent Film ...... 254

III. Aural Daydreams: Typewriting in Sound Film of the Early Thirties ...... 269

IV. The Pleasure of Rapid Productivity in Oswald’s Arm wie eine Kirchenmaus...... 280

Conclusion ...... 317

References ...... 323

xii

List of Tables

Table 1. Division of male and female salaried employees in professional fields ...... 53

xiii

List of Figures

Figure 1. Mechanized office work: transcribing remote dictation in the machine, the typist is fixed in a world of mechanical functions...... 5

Figure 2. Type-Writer with piano-keyboard orientation, patented June 23, 1868...... 73

Figure 3. Lillian Sholes at the Type-Writer in 1872 (left) and Victorian woman playing piano (right)...... 75

Figure 4. An image from the "Schreib- und Handels-Lehrinstitut Grone," established by

Heinrich Grone in Hamburg, circa 1905/1910...... 88

Figure 5. Male teacher shielding the typewriter keys from his female student’s line of vision...... 176

Figure 6. Two black-and-white newspaper ads: Seidel & Naumann ad from 1900 (left),

Frister & Rossmann ad from 1898 (right)...... 198

Figure 7. Black-and-white Remington ad from 1896 (left) and Jugendstil brochure cover for Seidel & Naumann's “Ideal” (right) from 1904...... 201

Figure 8. Mercedes Schreibmaschine poster, lithography, circa 1910/11. Designed by

Ernst Deutsch (1887-1938)...... 207

Figure 9. German typewriter postcards: Jugendstil postcard (left) shows the dreamy typist and another postcard (right) pictures a subdued version of the erotic scenario between male boss and female office worker...... 212 xiv

Figure 10. Mentor (left) and Continental (right) black-and-white advertisements both appeared in 1913...... 217

Figure 11. Ad for “Mentor” (left) from 1913, and “Mercedes” ad (right) from 1911 designed by Ernst Deutsch...... 221

Figure 12. Black-and-white print advertisement for Elida skin cream featuring an office scene (1928)...... 228

Figure 13. “Triumph” ad (left) appeared in 1926, and “Die neue Kappel” (right) was designed by Ludwig Hohlwein and appeared in 1929...... 232

Figure 14. Continental typewriter ad appeared in 1924...... 234

Figure 15. Full-color poster designed by Ludwig Hohlwein and printed in 1926...... 236

Figure 16. Black-and-white Torpedo ad (left) by Ludwig Hohlwein (1924) and Adler advertisement (right) appeared between 1926-1929...... 238

Figure 17. Full-color Triumph poster promoted the Model 10, appeared in 1927...... 242

Figure 18. Screen shots from the opening of Der karierte Regenmantel (1917)...... 258

Figure 19. The typist starts her day in Ruttmann’s Berlin...... 265

Figure 20. Select images from the typewriting montage in Ruttmann's Berlin...... 268

Figure 21. Screen shots from Die Drei von der Tankstelle (1930)...... 275

Figure 22. President's private secretary, Olly Frey...... 293

Figure 23. Baron Ulrich dictates to Olly Frey...... 294

Figure 24. The Kirchenmaus asks for a job...... 298

Figure 25. Susi typewriting for the Baron Ulrich for the first time...... 303

Figure 26. Bank executives marvel at Susi's talents...... 305

Figure 27. Susi takes dictation on the train...... 308

Figure 28. Dictation and a moment of romance in the Paris hotel...... 311

Figure 29. Ulrich dictates a love letter to Susi...... 313

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Introduction: The Female Typist as Cyborg in Weimar Mass-Media Culture

“The typewriter thus makes potential cyborgs of us all, in our attempt to match its machine-tooled perfection.” 1

The Weimar era has been called “a laboratory for modernity,” out of which an array of images depicting the effects of new technologies have emerged.2 Cultural production from this period reveals that some viewed it with optimism, as “the dawn of a modern technological age,” whereas for others it signaled a trajectory cultural decline marked by anxiety, distraction, and decadence.3 Weimar cultural producers’ obsession with the human body and the machine played a central role in this discourse on the effects of modernity. From the films of Fritz Lang and Walter Ruttmann to the paintings of Georg Grosz and Christian Schlichter, the Dadaist photomontages of Hannah Höch and Raoul Hausmann, and the late-Weimar novels of Irmgard Keun, Erich Kästner, and others, cultural production in the Weimar Republic was preoccupied with the more prevalent role of technology in daily life and with body-machine interaction.

This dissertation explores the relationship between the body and the machine through the specific interaction between the female typist and the typewriter. By focusing explicitly on the female body and this distinct machine, I am not only able to consider the

1 Scott Bukatman. Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century. Duke University Press, 2003. 40. See also Chapter 2: Gibson’s Typewriter, 32-47. 2 Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg. “Preface.” The Weimar Republic Sourcebook. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. xvii. See xvii-xviii. 3 Ibid. xviii. 1 socio-economic and historical factors impacting female office workers during the interwar period, but also how the typewriting female body was displayed. In so doing, I consider what typewriting and the typewriter have to do the cultural construction of femininity and the social imaginings of “woman.” The typewriter’s reputation as a

“woman’s machine,” as a machine that had been feminized in its design and creation, and a machine used at work by an overwhelming majority of female office workers, helped to motivate my choice to focus on female embodiment in relation to the typewriter.4 I focus on the typewriter specifically, because of its privileged and multifaceted social and cultural position: its alleged role in women’s emancipation from the domestic realm, its perceived impact on the materiality and gender of writing, its valorization as an instrument of literary production, and its celebrated part in rapid communication and modernization.

In Germany, images of typewriting women appeared with great frequency in mass-media culture (literature, film, and advertising) during the mid- and late phases of the Weimar Republic (1923-1928 and 1929-1933 respectively). I consider why this is, and how women’s engagement with the machine was imagined and portrayed in literary and visual culture of this era. How was the intimate connection between the body and machine configured, and what can this connection tell us about how women’s typewriting and machine use was perceived?

To examine this complex connection between woman and machine, I use feminist theories of the body and the cyborg. As my epigraph from Scott Bukatman suggests, the

4 The typewriter was commonly dubbed a “woman’s machine.” See for example, Judy Wajcmann’s Technofeminism. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004. 2 typewriter “makes potential cyborgs of us all,” and it does so by making us all aspire to the machine-tooled “perfection of the typewritten standard.”5 To this I say, the typewriter makes cyborgs of some of us more than others. While all of us, women and men alike, aspire in some measure to the precision ideal of uniform, evenly spaced, and legible characters in our writing, it is the female typewriter user who has served as the standard image of that ideal in mass-media culture. With her machine, she not only produces uniform characters, she shapes herself and her body in that uniformity through ready-to- wear clothing and cosmetics. It is not only the typescript that she produces that is evenly spaced, but she sits in evenly spaced rows in the typing pool, and sometimes her desk is designated with a number, so that she becomes a metaphorical typewriter key ready to be utilized. Her recognizable appearance and common presence in the business office make her a legible type, so that we can anticipate much about her, such as her attraction to a male supervisor and the ensuing romantic relationship, her dissatisfaction with the monotony of mechanical work, her frivolous consumerist behavior, her sexual promiscuity, and her desire for promotion (to wife or private secretary). Even in the first decade of the twentieth century, these attributes of the female typist were engrained in the cultural imaginary. With this foundation, media images surfacing during the Weimar era that diverged from these early twentieth-century ideas were also legible because of this existing basis. Overall, the images of the typewriting woman, as an aspect of the cultural imaginary, is made a potential cyborg in multiple ways, and within the multivalent

5 Bukatman 40. 3 configurations of woman and typewriter, woman is made cyborg, or assembled, during her engagement with the machine.

How does this assembly, this making of the cyborgian typist, take place? When serving as an amanuensis – a copyist or someone taking dictation – woman is often imagined as entangled with the machine both mentally and physically. In some cases, the rhythms of typewriting cause a physical alignment of her movements with those of the machine, resulting in the dynamic and intimate coupling of writing bodies and machines.

This entanglement is created through the forces and rhythms of bodies in motion, “not the demotion of the living body to the machine but their intimate correlation.”6 In other cases, female figures take on a form of mental and physical automatism in the completion of their work, which comes to serve as a coping mechanism in their emotional lives. In still other accounts, such the one depicted in Figure 1, woman becomes part of a physical mechanical assemblage that involves the machine and a source of the dictation, which may be a male supervisor or a recording device. As I will show, the multivalent configurations of woman, machine, and dictator appearing in mass-media culture of the

Weimar era offer a rich tapestry of images that can inform our understanding of cultural perceptions of women’s machine use during this time.

6 See Mark Seltzer. Bodies and Machines. Routledge, 1992. See pages 13-15. My overall concept of the body-machine interaction is indebted to Seltzer’s notion of the body-machine complex. 4

Figure 1. Mechanized office work: transcribing remote dictation in the machine, the typist is fixed in a world of mechanical functions. 7

This imagined cyborgian assemblage of the female typist and the typewriter within the specific historical conditions of the Weimar era is what I am calling the “New

Woman-Machine.” Much like Haraway’s cyborg, this figure is a creature related to the lived reality of the modern woman and a figure within the cultural imaginary. The New

7 In the magazine Uhu 7 (1930/1931) Heftnummer 7, page 84. Accessed online at http://magazine.illustrierte-presse.de/ on May 1, 2015. My caption is paraphrased from the original image caption, “Mechanisierte Berufsarbeit: Am Ohr den Hörer, am Fuß den Stop-Hebel und unter den Händen die Tastatur, eingespannt in eine Welt von Zahlen und mechanischen Funktionen. Ferntelefonisches Diktat in die Maschine.” 5

Woman-Machine is “new” for two reasons: this assemblage incorporates recognizable aspects of the Weimar New Woman and the relatively new office technology of the typewriter. As I understand her, the Weimar New Woman is the image of the modern woman, who refused “to lead the life of a lady or a housewife,” but was also under substantial pressure to conform to these traditional expectations for women.8 A vision of self-reliance and economic independence, the modern woman sought to support herself through gainful employment. In 1929, Else Herrmann described her in the following manner:

The new woman has set herself the goal of proving in her work and deeds that the representatives of the female sex are not second-class persons existing only in dependence and obedience but are fully capable of satisfying the demands of their positions in life. The proof of her personal value and the proof of the value of her sex are therefore the maxims ruling the life of every single woman of our times, for the sake of herself and the sake of the whole. 9

Herrmann’s notion of the new woman is reflective of a historically rooted ideal, and women’s desire to verify through work that they can be something more than subordinates. This desire to demonstrate one’s worth and attain financial independence are common themes that resonate throughout Weimar portrayals of the female typist and secretary. But, we must remember that the female typist and her cyborg component the

New Woman-Machine exist in partiality, between worlds. As we will see, she embraces her new role as one separate from housewife and lady, but she exists in the domesticated office and, as a secretary in particular, performs service-oriented duties to take care of her

8 Else Herrmann. “This is the New Woman.” (In: Kaes, Anton. Jay, Martin, Dimendberg, Edward. The Weimar Republic Sourcebook. University of California Press, 1994. pp. 206-208.) First published as So ist die neue Frau (Hellerau: Avalon Verlag, 1929), 32-43. 9 Ibid. 207. Italicized in original. 6 male supervisor, much like a wife. Her position is, thus, both new and a reprisal of the traditional. In addition, although she strives for such ideals as the one laid out by

Herrmann, to rise above dependence and obedience, we witness her struggle with independence and self-reliance. By locating and investigating the New Woman at the machine, we gain valuable insight into this uncertain space between worlds and between the social binary of emancipation and oppression, and common gendered binaries

(active/passive, organic/mechanical, natural/artificial, strength/weakness). What emerges is an image of the New Woman-Machine, which I will show, involves a refunctioned kind of docility that accommodates an active, self-regulating, and socially disciplined body, demonstrating productivity and machine skill at the typewriter.

I. Cyborgs, Gendered Bodies, and Communications Technologies

My conceptual framework based on feminist theories of the cyborg and the body allows me to complicate images of woman and machine, typist and typewriter, beyond dichotomous socio-historical readings that view typewriting as either an emancipatory act or a new form of women’s oppression. Donna Haraway, Allison Muri, Matthew Biro, and others contribute to a framework for reading the cyborg that suggests a departure from such dualisms, which limit how we imagine “woman” and her connection to technology. Traditional notions of woman as mother, nurturer, and caretaker insist on her association with the home and nature. With the introduction of new technologies, like the typewriter, and women’s increasing engagement with these technologies, the imagined

7 conception of woman appeared to drift away from her so-called “natural roles.” In the case of Weimar cultural production, images of the technologized woman became associated with male anxieties about the destabilization of gender roles and the uncertainty surrounding the effects of new technologies. In this study I am concerned with female embodiment of the machine, so that I may bring to the fore a very different narrative about women and machines as a vision of productivity, automatism, machine skill, and discipline, that is a distinct departure from the prevailing narrative about male anxiety in the Weimar era. This study also seeks to go beyond the common reading of the technologized woman as simply conflated or equated with the machine.10 Instead, this study looks closely at woman-machine interaction to consider the other implications of this entanglement.

Through model of the cyborg, I access the nuanced space between the common binaries that arise when we try to understand images of women and technology. The typewriter, specifically, has been both lauded by scholars as integral for women’s emancipation and as a device that reinscribed women’s oppression. For example, Frank J.

Romano claims that “typewriting was the opportunity that opened the door for the emancipation of women.”11 In contrast, some feminist scholars have pointed out the oppressive aspects of typewriter work, which left female employees grossly underpaid, suffering from exhaustion and other related illnesses, and relegated to the drudgery of

10 See Hales, “Taming of the Technological Shrew.” See also Andreas Huyssen. “Vamp and the Machine.” After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1986. 11 See Romano’s Machine Writing and Typesetting: The story of Sholes and Mergenthaler and the invention of the typewriter and linotype. Salem, NH: GAMA, 1986. 15. 8 repetitive mechanical work with little opportunity for advancement.12 It is by way of the conceptual model of the cyborg that I aim to access the space in between such binaries and focus on how female embodiment of the machine was imagined with regard to the typewriter.

Articulating a pivotal set of ideas for this framework, Haraway’s widely influential “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” suggests a break in the tradition of feminist thought which links technology to masculinity and oppression.13 Haraway’s concept of the cyborg presents a potent solution to this antitechnological stance and unlocks valuable ways for thinking about the interaction between the female body and machine. Within the following discussion, which includes a brief history of the cyborg in terms of its existence as a material being and as a discursive construct, I position this study within cyborg discourse and further clarify my concept of the New Woman-Machine.

The cyborg, as a material being embodying scientific achievement, grew out of

Norbert Wiener’s 1948 notion of the field of “cybernetics” as “the science of control and communication in the animal and the machine.”14 Coined by Wiener from the Greek word for “steersman,” cybernetics was predicated on the synthesis of control and communication to create a self-regulating system. One of the world’s first “cyborgs”

(“short for cybernetic organism”) was a white laboratory rat living at New York’s

12 See for example Ursula Nienhaus’s Berufsstand weiblich. Berlin: Transit Buchverlag, 1982. 13 Donna Haraway. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” Sex/Machine: Readings in Culture, Gender, and Technology. Ed. Patrick D. Hopkins. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. 434-467. 14 Quotation cited from Stuart Umpleby, “Cybernetics: Definitions and Descriptions,” Introduction. A Larry Richards Reader. Web. 21 Nov. 2014. http://polyproject.wikispaces.com/file/view/Larry+Richards+Reader+6+08.pdf. 9

Rockland State Hospital in the late 1950s.15 The rat had a tiny pump inserted in its body that injected chemicals at regular intervals. In 1960, Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S.

Kline, research scientists at Rockland State, defined the cyborg a “self-regulating human- or animal-machine hybrid: a sentient body altered biochemically, physiologically or electronically so that it could live in environments for which it was not adapted.”16

Specifically, these scientists of the Space Race era were testing ways to alter “man’s body” to provide an “earthly environment for him in space.”17 Therefore, in scientific terms, cyborgs are made up of mechanical parts or “artifacts” meant to transform the body so that humans may transgress physical boundaries.

In many ways, Haraway co-opts this notion of transgressing boundaries and revises it in terms of feminist discourse. In her 1985 “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,”

Haraway conceives of her “cyborg” as a discursive concept of socialist-feminist theory conveyed in a “postmodernist mode.” Haraway expands on Clynes and Kline’s definition stating that “[a] cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.”18 By arguing that the cyborg is an imaginary or mythical figure, Haraway offers an alternative approach to reading social and bodily reality, which, according to her, is a cultural fiction in which women’s lived experiences and perceptions of the body are born and rehearsed. The notion of hybridity

15 Donna Haraway, “Cyborg and Symbionts: Living Together in the New World Order.” Forward. The Cyborg Handbook. Ed. Chris Hables Gray. New York: Routledge, 1995. xi-xx. See especially page xi. 16 Matthew Biro. Dada Cyborg: Visions of the New Human in Weimar Berlin. Introduction. University of Minnesota Press, 2009. 2. 17 Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline. “Cyborgs and Space” Rockland State Hospital, Orangeburg NY. September 1960. Digital file accessed Dec. 4, 2014. http://web.mit.edu/digitalapollo/Documents/Chapter1/cyborgs.pdf 18 Haraway. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” 434. 10 is important to Haraway’s cyborg, because it calls the identity of the various parts into question: “The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence.”19 With this articulation of the cyborg, Haraway resists the notion of wholeness (of the body and its meaning), and, instead, proposes taking pleasure in blurring and transgressing boundaries.

Like Haraway’s cyborg, the New Woman-Machine exists in a state of partiality, in which parts of the female body may be fragmented and may belong to the machine. In this regard, the typewriter is not only an extension of the body, as Marshall McLuhan understood communications technologies, but an aspect of the body and the self, so that a hybrid image of the modern woman and machine emerges. The New Woman-Machine is also about transgressing (physical) boundaries, but not the ones that we might expect.

The social boundaries that allowed her access to gainful employment in the business office were long since breached before the turn of the century. Alternatively, the New

Woman-Machine represents the blurring of the physical boundaries between typist and typewriter, so that she takes on qualities of the machine: perfection in uniformity, discipline, docility, and a readiness to be instrumentalized. However, it should be noted that the New Woman-Machine does not signify just any typist and typewriter, but rather, a merger of the Weimar New Woman and the mechanical typewriters of the interwar era.

Soon after its publication, Haraway’s cyborg became a frequently cited metaphor for radical change. She points out herself that within a decade the discourse on the cyborg

19 Ibid. 436. 11 and cybernetics had “mutated, in fact and fiction.” In response, Haraway continued to elaborate on her concept of the cyborg. In her 1995 forward to the Cyborg Handbook, she claims that “cyborgs are about particular sorts of breached boundaries that confuse a specific historical people’s stories about what counts as distinct categories crucial to that culture’s natural-technical evolutionary narratives.”20 In 1997, Haraway revised her idea again and, as I understand it, becomes more inclusive of historical, even pre-cybernetic machines.

The cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a fusion of the organic and the technical forged in particular, historical, cultural practices. Cyborgs are not about the Machine and the Human, as if such Things and Subjects universally existed. Instead, cyborgs are about specific historical machines and people in interaction that often turns out to be painfully counterintuitive for the analyst of technoscience.21

In this iteration, Haraway explains that the cyborg concept cannot be generally applied to just any human and machine interaction. Rather, the cyborg refers to “specific historical machines and people in interaction,” and this interaction must be based on

“communication, command, and control.”22 This criteria is key to my construction of the

New Woman-Machine. As an interaction of the typewriting amanuensis, the New

Woman-Machine is both a passive and active cyborgian figure. She communicates and

20 Donna Haraway. “Cyborgs and Symbionts: Living Together in the New World Order.” Forward. The Cyborg Handbook. Ed. Chris Hables Gray. New York: Routledge, 1995. xi-xx. See especially pages xix and xvi. 21 Donna J. Haraway. Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience. New York: Routledge, 1997. 51. 22 Donna Haraway. “Cyborgs, Dogs and Companion Species.” European Graduate School Video Lectures, 2000. Accessed video on December 3, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yxHIKmMI70. (Minute 7:20) In this talk, Haraway stated that the cyborg echoed the need for specificity of humans, machines, and the historical context. She also emphasized (with some frustration) that the cyborg figure “has been used to mean almost anything about the join between human and machine in some kind of deeply ahistorical way that I find maddening.” 12 transmits communications. She gives her device specific commands with every keystroke, and she takes commands from her supervisor. But, as we will see, it is the aspect of control or obedience that is subverted in some Weimar portrayals of the female typist, particularly in literature and film.

Inspired by Haraway’s cyborg concept and its various articulations, scholars have identified a long tradition of the human- or animal-machine hybrid in art, philosophy, literature, and film that anticipates the cyborg. Allison Muri, for example, takes

Haraway’s call for historical specificity and a connection based on “communication, command, and control” into consideration in The Enlightenment Cyborg.23 By composing a history of the cyborg in the human-machine, Muri successfully demonstrates that the concept of the cyborg (and its ancestors) is an enduring figure of imagination that has existed for centuries and that predicts the actualization of the cyborg in the mid-twentieth century. As another relevant example, Germanist Matthew Biro draws on Wiener’s and Haraway’s ideas of the cyborg to establish a conceptual framework to synthesize cyborg imagery in 1920s Berlin Dadaist art. In Dada-Cyborg,

Biro argues that the origins of the Weimar cyborg can be found in the work of artists Kurt

Schwitters, Raoul Hausmann, and Hannah Höch and in Fritz Lang’s iconic film

Metropolis (1927).24 By expanding the concept of the cyborg beyond Norbert Wiener’s definition in the 1940s and Haraway’s ideas of the cyborg in the 1980s and 1990s, Biro

23 Allison Muri. The Enlightenment Cyborg: a History of Communications and Control in the Human Machine, 1660-1830. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007 24 See Matthew Biro’s article “The New Man as Cyborg: Figures of Technology in Weimar Visual Culture” in New German Critique, No. 62 (Spring - Summer, 1994). 71-110. See also Biro’s Dada Cyborg: Visions of the New Human in Weimar Berlin. University of Minnesota Press, 2009. 13 attempts to “encompass a series of interrelated meanings, including the cyborg as representing hybrid identity in a broad sense and as the locus of new modes of (interior and exterior) awareness created by the impact of technology on human experience.”25

Biro essentially constructs the Weimar cyborg as a means to comprehend how Weimar cultural producers viewed the emergence of new technologies and hybrid identities.

Like Biro’s study, my project is located in the social and economic upheaval of the Weimar era; however, my focus specifically on women and the communication technology of the typewriter allows me to draw on cyborg discourses in very different ways. Communications technologies and biotechnologies play an important role in how

Haraway imagines our embodiment of machines. According to her, these forms of technology are the “crucial tools recrafting our bodies,” and they “embody and enforce new social relations for women worldwide.”26 Anne Balsamo agrees, calling communications technologies “the premier technologies of culture.”27 Communications technologies include today’s laptops, tablets, smartphones, and early, pre-electric communications technologies, such as the telephone, telegraph, and typewriter. These technologies are central to the construction and transfer of knowledge, and their use creates an intimate connection between mind, body, and tool that thoroughly blurs the boundaries of each. Similarly, according to Haraway, biological technologies distort the difference between machine and organism by building “natural-technical objects of

25 Ibid. 1-2. 26 Ibid. 447. 27 Anne Balsamo. Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women. Durham: Duke University Press, c1996. 39. 14 knowledge.”28 Reproductive technologies that inhibit, imitate, or replace functions of the human body, such as birth control or in vitro fertilization, serve as a good example here.

Haraway comments on the fundamental role of these fields of discourse and their products:

Technologies and scientific discourses can be partially understood as formalizations, i.e., as frozen moments, of the fluid social interactions constituting them, but they should also be viewed as instruments for reinforcing meanings. The boundary is permeable between tool and myth, instrument and concept, historical systems of social relations and historical anatomies of possible bodies, including objects of knowledge. Indeed, myth and tool mutually constitute each other.29

According to this passage, communications technologies and biotechnologies create objects, tools, or devices that simultaneously reshape our bodies and are shaped by our social interactions. This passage also implies that Haraway conceives of technology in the same way she does the concepts of gender, the body, and woman. For her purposes and for mine, technology is not a whole or unified concept. It is devised of material reality, social relations, and cultural constructions, or myth. Feminist theorist Judy

Wajcman presents a related conception of technology in material reality. Wajcman defines technology as 1) a form of knowledge, 2) a set human activities and practices that serve that knowledge, and 3) the physical objects – instruments or tools – created from that knowledge. These forms of knowledge, practices, and tools shape and are shaped by culture. In Feminism Confronts Technology, Wajcman presents a view of technology that is in line with Haraway’s: “technology is more than a set of physical objects or artefacts.

It also fundamentally embodies a culture or set of social relations made up of certain sorts

28 Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs”, 448. 29 Ibid. 15 of knowledge, beliefs, desires, and practices.”30 As I understand them, technologies simultaneously embody and reflect a specific culture or set of social relations. This understanding of a kind of symbiotic relationship between technology and culture/social conditions is common among feminists and corresponds to their tendency to reject a purely determinist worldview, in which technology is the single driving force for social, cultural, and historical change.

My interest in the typewriter in the historical context of the Weimar Republic means that I am interested in early, pre-cybernetic technologies and “machines,” a term that can refer to physical artifacts, as in mechanical or electric devices, whose operation requires a distinct set of processes. Haraway distinguishes between two types of machines: cybernetic and pre-cybernetic. Cybernetic machines are self-regulating mechanisms akin to robots, the likes of which surfaced after World War II. Pre- cybernetic machines, including industrial machinery, automobiles, telephones, typewriters, and gramophones, are not self-regulating and require an operator to control the machine. I maintain that pre-cybernetic machines, especially the typewriter as an ancestor to the computer, breach many of the same boundaries as cybernetic machines and suggest important “potent fusions” that have not yet been thoroughly explored. If, as

Haraway suggests, writing really is “preeminently the technology of cyborgs,”31 then typewriting, also known as “mechanical writing,” is closely aligned with the cyborgian territory that she constructs. The intense physicality of work at the typewriter shaped

30 Judy Wajcman. Feminism Confronts Technology. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991. See 14-15 and 149. 31 See Haraway “A Cyborg Manifesto,” 458. 16 bodies and the lived social reality of the typist, just as the typist shapes the machine through daily use. The conditions of pre-cybernetic machine interface essentially blur the boundaries between mind and body, natural and artificial movement, and the human body and machine. In the case of one pre-cybernetic machine of the Weimar era, the mechanical typewriter, and its female user, a vision of the New Woman, this interface generates an image of the New Woman-Machine.

II. Organization of the Study

Chapter 1 presents a social and cultural history of the typewriter and the female typist that accomplishes two primary goals, one concerning the female typist and one concerning the typewriter. First, the chapter situates women’s typewriting within nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discourses on women’s work. It elucidates the social, economic, and historical forces that made way for women’s entry into clerical work, and it identifies the introduction of the technology of the typewriter as one of many factors that led to women’s employment in mechanical office work. With this in mind, this chapter emphasizes social and cultural perceptions of women’s typewriting: how the bourgeois women’s movement and women’s clerking organizations shaped the recruitment field at the turn-of-the-century; how men’s clerking organizations resisted women’s entry into office work with complaints about deskilling and decreasing wages; and how, in spite of this early push-and-pull, women came to dominate the field of typewriting during the Weimar Republic.

The second thrust of this chapter focuses on the typewriter as a device of communication that has historical ties to other types of machines and scientific discourses. The typewriter’s connections to a wide range of writing machine inventions date back to the eighteenth century. Of these, the oddities of writing automatons reveal the perceived interconnectedness between body and machine, as well as a cultural propensity for replicating the human body and its movement through the machine. The link between the typewriter and the automaton raises interesting questions about governing the machine and exposes the act of writing as something inherently human, but perpetually yoked to an instrument or machine. From there, we move to the typewriter’s structural connection to musical instruments, primarily the piano, and the gendered use of these devices in domestic spaces. The final section of this chapter considers the relationship between typewriting and vision by examining German typewriter manuals and the efforts of psychologists of technology to rationalize typewriting.

With this social and cultural background as a foundation, I provide three more chapters with analyses of mass-media images of typewriting women in literature, advertising, and film appearing during the Weimar Republic. Through the organization of the chapters in this sequence, we are also able to observe the relationship between these various forms of mass media. Therefore, the project builds from late-Weimar literary images constructed purely through text to still visual images in Weimar advertising that combine illustrations and short taglines, and to a combination of moving visual images and sound in early German sound film.

Accordingly, Chapter 2 presents an investigation of novelistic representations of the New Woman-Machine amidst the harsh economic conditions of Depression era. In this chapter, I examine two autobiographical novels, Gilgi--eine von uns (1931) by

Irmgard Keun and Schicksale hinter Schreibmaschinen (1930) by Christa Anita Brück, which were written by former typists. Containing narratives reflective of the real life experiences of the authors, these novels feature detailed depictions of women’s typewriting that explore the mind-body-machine connection. Taking these novels as case studies, I analyze their moments of typewriting and what they mean for the protagonists, who are living and working in the Depression era. In each of the novels, the protagonists’ lives are riddled with emotional conflicts concerning motherhood, romantic relationships, their lack of opportunities for advancement in the workplace, sexual harassment, and basic human survival in the wake of mass unemployment, rampant poverty, and hunger during the late-Weimar era. Within this emotional and economic landscape, I show that the routines of typewriting are a source of pleasure for the female protagonists and that the practiced automatic modes involved in typewriting come to serve as a coping mechanism or emotional retreat for the female figures in their daily lives.

Chapter 3 extends the ideas from the previous two chapters into visual culture with an analysis of typewriting imagery in prewar and Weimar print advertising. In each of these periods, I identify common trends concerning the construction and display of typewriting women (or simply women with typewriters, since they were not always pictured using the machine) for Weimar consumers. I view print advertisements as not merely surface phenomena, but as images that are intimately connected with the ways in

19 which social changes were represented and perceived, as well as part of the process of change itself. Within this analysis, I examine configurations of the sexualized female typist and her physical connection to the machine during the prewar era. From this period, we can see a clear shift in advertising into the interwar period, where the female typist abutted to the machine takes on a “feminine docility,” while engaging with it.

These images of the New Woman-Machine display her as obedient, disciplined, regulated, and restrained in her movements. With this evidence, I argue that these images in typewriter advertising celebrate the refunctioned docile body in typewriting and, ultimately, bind it to the promise that rationalization and modernization will provide women with greater freedom and mobility in the Weimar era.

In Chapter 4, we move to a discussion of the pleasures of dynamic rhythms and rapid speeds of typewriting in films of the Weimar era. By examining cinematic moments of typewriting in the silent films Der karierte Regenmantel (Dir. Max Mack,

1917) and Berlin. Sinfonie der Grosstadt (Dir. Walter Ruttmann, 1927), we are able to observe the dramatization of typewriting without the sound of the clickety-clack of typewriter keys. Aspects of vision and “the gaze” are key to reading the New Woman-

Machine in these silent moving pictures. Ruttmann’s displays of speed and rhythm link typewriting with the use of other machines, office as well as industrial. In addition, the structure of the montage with its fast pace, rhythm, and movement assembles and disassembles the productive body of the New Woman-Machine. The bulk of this chapter is comprised of an examination of two entertainment films of the early sound era, Die

Drei von der Tankstelle (Dir. Wilhelm Thiele, 1930) and Arm wie eine Kirchenmaus (Dir.

Richard Oswald, 1931), that contain distinctive treatments of typewriting women. By closely inspecting portrayals of typewriting in each of these sound films, we can observe the technical methods through which these filmmakers depicted women’s typewriting.

But, more important for this study overall, these films celebrate women’s machine skill as a means by which they are able to prove their worth and become productive bodies.

To sum up, I argue that images of the female typist and typewriter in Weimar literature, advertising, and film display a pre-occupation with female embodiment of the machine, the manifestation of which I have named the New Woman-Machine. This project is focused on the specific and intimate entanglement between the female typist and the typewriter displayed in Weimar mass-media culture. It is this unique approach to the woman-machine interaction that sets this study and its results apart from other studies with related concerns in the interwar period. This study offers a departure from the dominant narratives that posit the technologized woman as a product of male anxiety or a conflation of woman and machine. Alternatively, through the concept of the New

Woman-Machine, I attempt to highlight the existence of a very different narrative about women and machines as visions of productivity, automatism, machine skill, and discipline.

Chapter 1: Typewriting: A Social and Cultural History or (How Women Became Typewriters)

Introduction

Up until the late nineteenth century, the business office was considered a strictly male domain in Germany. The work of clerical professions, that is, transcribing and copying texts, as well as other office and administrative duties, were occupied exclusively by men. Writing, in particular, was viewed as a masculine skill, since the pen

(or the quill) was understood as “the actual symbol of male intellectual activity.”32

Likewise, technological competence regarding the knowledge and use of machines was, and to a great extent still is, viewed as part of a masculine skill set. Alternatively, women of the middle classes traditionally worked in the home, typically managing the household, caring for the children, and supporting their husbands in their endeavors in the public realm. Kaiser Wilhelm II’s adage “Kinder, Kirche, Küche” (children, church, kitchen) was a prescription for middle-class women’s priorities and the primary spaces, in which they operated since the late nineteenth century. Yet, by the time of the Weimar Republic

(1918-1933), Germany’s culturally booming and economically turbulent inter-war period, almost exclusively women were employed as typists and typing as a woman’s profession had become normalized. So, just as the pen had served as a symbol of male intellectual

32 Quoted in Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 186. Originally appeared in Ferdinand Schrey’s “Schreiben,” 1889. 22 activity, the typewriter became a symbol for women’s work, which was largely mechanical rather than intellectual in nature. Moreover, female operators were conflated with their typewriters, suggesting that woman and machine were perceived as a single entity. In the U.S. at the turn of the century, the word “typewriter” was commonly used to refer to both the machines and the women who operated them. In Germany, evidence of conflating the female typist and machine surfaced in advertising of the Weimar era. One

1928 ad for “Adler” typewriters pictured a male supervisor approaching a female typist working at her machine, and the caption states: “Eine treue Gehilfin im Büro u. Geschäft, wer sie kennt, will sie nicht missen!”33 The use of the feminine gender for both substantives, “die Schreibmaschine” and “die Stenotypistin/Sekretärin,” left room for the seamless conflation of woman and object in German. All of these changes raise the questions: How did this dramatic gender reversal in writing happen, how did women’s typewriter use come to be seen as the natural order of things, and why were women so closely associated with the typewriter?

One compelling perspective on this topic that exemplifies the recently emerging critical discourse on women’s emancipation, the typewriter, and the workplace comes from German literary scholar and media theorist, Friedrich Kittler. Drawing on Marshall

McLuhan’s writings on communications technologies, Kittler views the emergence of the female typist as symbolic of the transformative effects of technology. Kittler explains that the shift from the pen to the machine resulted in a “desexualization of writing,” which

33 For a reproduction of the Adler advertisement, see Dingwerth, Historische Schreibmaschinen-Anzeigen, 31. Translation: “A true (female) assistant in the office and in business, those who know her/it, do not want to miss her/it.” 23 occurred because typescript transformed writing into word processing and neutralized the gender of writing making way for women’s employment as typists. He gives the typewriter and other devices of communication introduced around the turn of the century a privileged position, in that he views them as the main causal agents of historical change. In so doing, Kittler ascribes to an attractive brand of technological determinism, distilled versions of which have characterized scholarly work on the typewriter throughout the twentieth century. Technological determinists perceive technology as an external, autonomous force driving social, cultural, historical, and economic change.34

For determinists, technology is not merely “entrenched in our history,” as Heidegger put it, technology is the primary catalyst of change.35 As a result, some scholars have tended to overstate the typewriter’s impact on women’s work by crediting it with “opening the office doors to women” and with helping women “conquer the office.”36

Feminist scholars, and I count myself among them, have found these ideas troubling for several reasons. First, feminists have typically read typewriter work

(transcription, word processing) as thoroughly gendered, in that it was assigned to the female sex and coded as feminine for its mechanical, rather than intellectual quality.

Second, feminist scholars investigating the typewriter have typically pushed back against technological determinism, because it unduly credits a single technological device with

34 Definition derived from Judy Wajcman. Technofeminism, 33. Also, much of the following assessment of technological determinism relies on her critical feminist perspective. 35 See Heidegger, Parmenides (1942-43). Trans. Andre Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992. 86. 36 For an example, see Hermann Scholz. Die Schreibmaschine und das Maschinenschreiben. Wiesebaden: Springer Verlag, 1923. 16. For more on the exaggeration of the typewriter’s role in social change, see also Ute Frevert. “Vom Klavier zur Schreibmaschine – Weiblicher Arbeitsmarkt und Rollenzuweisungen am Beispiel der weiblichen Angestellten in der Weimarer Republik.” Frauen in der Geschichte. Düsseldorf: Pädogogischer Verlag Schwann, 1979. 93. 24 profound socio-historical changes while neglecting all of the other social, political, and economic factors that contributed to women’s movement into typewriting and secretarial work. As a result, they have contested the notion that women appeared in the office as

“dea cum machine,” (a goddess with a machine), as Karen Lüsenbrink succinctly put it.37

In the same vein, I resist the determinist perspective that the typewriter served as the chief catalyst of social and cultural change. As I will show here, powerful social, economic, and historical forces led to women’s employment in office work. Yet, and perhaps this makes me a soft-determinist, I do support the idea that the introduction of new technologies is one of several factors that can play a causative role in social and cultural change, but technology is not the sole catalyst.

With this perspective in mind, the purpose of this chapter is to uncover the contributing factors – social, political, historical, economic, and technological – that led to women’s employment in typewriter work and that impacted women’s typewriting, once their employment had become part of the workforce landscape. Concerning this study on the whole, this chapter serves to lay the groundwork for the investigation of mass-media images of women’s engagement with the typewriter surfacing during the

Weimar Republic. Accordingly, it is my intention to give added weight and meaning to my readings of literary works, advertisements, and film discussed in subsequent chapters.

Structurally, this chapter is divided into two distinct sections, one on the social history of the female typist and the evolution office work throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and one providing a brief cultural history of the typewriter and its

37 Karin Lüsebrink. Büro via Fabrik: Entstehung und Allokationsprinzipien weiblicher Büroarbeit 1850- 1933, (Edition Sigma, 1993). 107. 25 significance in German-speaking countries. This cultural-historical investigation makes clear the vital relationship between the typewriter and early automatons, other instruments used by women in domestic spaces, and the human sense of sight.

I. A Social History of Typewriting: Positioning the Female Typist

This chapter section engages with the on-going socio-historical discourse concerning women’s movement from their duties in the sharply designated domestic realm into the masculine realms of commerce and clerical work. Significant to this discussion is the coding of certain tasks and jobs as masculine or feminine, as well as how and why this gender-coding came to be subverted. Of particular importance to my discussion of women’s typewriter use is the persistent association of women with mechanical work, mechanization, and automatization to varying degrees throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Accordingly, this section traces the shifting gender boundaries surrounding writing and the catalysts of these shifts that led to women’s entry into clerical work. Along the way, I point to the feminization of typewriting in its relation to “mechanical” factory production, and how clerical workers’ perception of themselves as a unified middle-class group resulted in very real social tensions.

1.1 In Service of Love: Women’s Work in the Early Nineteenth Century

During the first half of the nineteenth century, the realms for men’s and women’s activities were strictly differentiated in bourgeois society, a division that amounted to a

26 kind of gender-specific segregation of life realms signifying “Haus-Frau” and the “Welt-

Mann.” In this section, I follow Ute Frevert’s exemplary work on the shifting relationship between bourgeois women and labor. According to the ideology of the Restoration era, a middle-class man performed his predetermined role by engaging in professional and public activities in the external world. As a citizen and a professional, he was to participate in and help to shape public institutions, organizations, and discoveries.

Middle-class women, on the other hand, had been selected by nature to serve as caretakers and nurturers for their husbands and children in the household. While men’s achievements were associated with change, movement, and progress outside of the home, women were to maintain stability and consistency in the home, seeing to repetitive daily chores and preserving the “well-ordered intimacy” of the household.38

In bourgeois society, women’s “work” in the home was not designated as such.

While “arbeiten” (to work) was used to describe men’s activities outside of the home, a woman was to seek her identity through the love of her husband, and it was his love that motivated her to carry out all of her duties in the household. Essentially, women’s housework did not mean “arbeiten,” but was “liebend gestalten” (lovingly created or shaped) and idealized as “Liebesdienst” (a service of love).39 Thus, the domain of bourgeois women was the home, in which they performed, or had someone perform for them, the duties of a devoted wife and mother, which were associated with service,

38 Ute Frevert. Women in German History: From Bourgeois Emancipation to Sexual Liberation. Trans. Stuart Mckinnon-Evans. New York: St. Martin’s Press and Berg, 1989. See pages 63-67. Quotation on 67. 39 Ute Frevert. “Vom Klavier zur Schreibmaschine – Weiblicher Arbeitsmarkt und Rollenzuweisungen am Beispiel der weiblichen Angestellten in der Weimarer Republik.” Frauen in der Geschichte. Düsseldorf: Pädogogischer Verlag Schwann, 1979. 82. See also Frevert, Women in German History, 67. 27 compassion, and the continual replication of orderliness. For women of the lower classes, the meaning of work was more closely tied to manual tasks. Although much of their work was also bound to the domestic realm, serving as kitchen or parlor maids in bourgeois households, performing needlework or piecework, and even working as farm hands in more rural settings, women of the lower-stratum also found work in factories.

Even though their role in public life was limited, bourgeois women had their own organizations and meetings that allowed them to be active outside of the home. Within the context of charitable and religious organizations, middle-class women helped to care for the poor and the sick by setting up soup kitchens, teaching destitute women needlework, and providing support for impoverished women and their children. One such organization, the Weiblicher Verein für Armen und Krankenpflege (Women’s Association for the Care of the Poor and the Sick) was established in 1832, and members would offer support to local families suffering under poverty. Of course, men were also active in social work, but for them it was considered one step on the road to local politics and political administration. For women, the altruism and compassion linked to social work meant that it corresponded to women’s feminine nature. Just as they were self-sacrificing, nurturing, and service-oriented in their domestic duties, women’s public activities were to be in line with the idea of a “woman’s station.”40

This contemporary belief that women’s work outside of the home should be consistent with her feminine nature persisted in the women’s movement of 1848, as well as in the bourgeois women’s movement throughout late nineteenth and early twentieth

40 See Frevert, Women in German History, 69-71. 28 centuries. In the years preceding the 1848 movement, journal and newspaper articles by women drew the public’s attention to the need for women’s access to higher and better education. For example, one primary demand of the women’s movement was that

“higher schooling for girls should include more than the usual female subjects such as languages, needlework, drawing and music.”41 Although women would not be given access to universities until the early twentieth century in Germany and, therefore, could not become scientists, doctors, lawyers, etc., women were permitted to occupy other viable realms of employment in the mid-nineteenth century. Writer and first leader of the

German women’s movement, Louise Otto insisted in 1847, for example, that women be given (greater) access to work in teaching and commerce, so that the institution of marriage would not continue to be reduced to a “welfare institution.”42 Otto recognized that for unmarried bourgeois women – women who never had the opportunity to marry, divorced women, or women who chose not to marry – above all, reasonable long-term employment was necessary for their independence. By the mid-nineteenth century, the groundwork had already been laid for women to enter teaching. However, the field of commerce and clerical work was more closely associated with men’s realm of

“intellectual” work and the paternalistic structure of early nineteenth-century firms. As a result, it would be at least forty years before women would enter office work in noteworthy numbers.

41 Ibid. 76. For more details on the 1848 Women’s Movement and their demands, see pages 73-82. 42 Ibid. According to Frevert, women already had very limited access to teaching positions. 29

1.2 Clerking in the Early Nineteenth Century

During the first half of the nineteenth century, neither the industrial nor the service sector of Germany’s economy was fully developed. Most entrepreneurs at the time operated in the realms of trade and commerce, rather than in industrial manufacturing. As a result, most firms were small and their structures were modeled on traditional guilds, in which young men began their training with three-year apprenticeships and then became “commercial assistants” (Handlungsgehilfen).43 Before

1870, the German business office was an exclusively male domain, drawn from the relatively small social stratum that could read and write. Clerking was considered a bourgeois profession requiring skilled, “intellectual” work and offering a respectable salary. The paternal relationship between the commercial assistant and his employer was often one of close supervision, in which the assistant boarded with his employer. In essence, commercial assistants were not much different than journeymen artisans with the ambition to gain the education and knowledge to one day run their own businesses independently.44 Therefore, as burgeoning entrepreneurs, commercial assistants in the first half of the nineteenth century were apprentices seeking to acquire a diverse set of skills to enable their individual advancement.

This picture of clerking in early nineteenth-century Germany was very similar to that in Great Britain and the United States. In all three countries, “small paternalistic

43 See Carole Elizabeth Adams. Women Clerks in Wilhelmine Germany: Issues of Class and Gender. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988. 6. Where not otherwise noted, the following discussion on nineteenth-century shifts in the development of the clerk profession is drawn from Adams pages 6-8. 44 See Wolfgang Muth. “‘Was würden unsere Vorfahren sagen…’ Männerarbeit im Handelskontor und ihre Veränderungen im 19. Jahrhundert.” Frauenarbeit im Büro: “Ich hab’ mich hoch getippt.” Ed. Bärbel Böhnke. Quickborn: Braun & Behrmann, 1998. 10. 30 firms with small, predominantly male, staffs that included apprentices” were prevalent.45

Commercial assistants earned salaries and thus viewed themselves as part of the middle- class, but their assistant positions were considered just a phase to achieving independence. Labor historian Carole Elizabeth Adams explains that “[o]nly in Germany, however, was clerking viewed as predominantly commercial, as training for independence as a merchant.” Adams proposes that the goal of autonomy may not only have motivated office and sales clerks to preserve the label “commercial assistant”

(Handlungsgehilfen), but perhaps also to join clerks’ associations that gave them “a strength unknown elsewhere.”

Facilitating the learning process, commercial assistants were responsible for a wide variety of tasks in the day-to-day operations of early nineteenth-century offices.

There was little division of labor in smaller firms, which allowed each commercial assistant to gain experience in more than one role. For example, a commercial assistant might perform the duties of a copyist and a salesman and, thus, advance his knowledge of the challenges of each position. In larger firms, there was more division of labor, but commercial assistants enjoyed considerable mobility within the company, which allowed them to follow a clear path of advancement: “an assistant worked his way up a clerking ladder, from a messenger boy to copyist or salesman and then to a more responsible job that might involve specialized tasks.”46 In the end, this path still allowed him to gain the experience and knowledge to strike eventually out on his own.

45 Adams 7. 46 Ibid. 31

In both large and small firms, one primary task of the clerk was to maintain correspondence and records, for which skills in writing and arithmetic were central.

Scriveners composed and copied documents with ink and quill and also practiced dry writing methods, which involved a pencil or colored pencil. Both time-consuming and meticulous processes, composition and copying required scriveners to be skilled at written communication and penmanship. Consider the drafting, writing, and signing of a simple business letter. Since it must be sent to other parties, and copies must be made for the office, every letter must be written with ink and quill at least twice, which took a considerable amount of time, even more when errors were made.47 Therefore, clear, concise handwriting was a frequently utilized and fundamental skill required of commercial assistants.

Cultural assumptions about writing with a pen as “intellectual” work helped to characterize even lower-level clerical work as masculine. Although Louise Otto identified business and commerce as a suitable field of employment for bourgeois women in 1847, it was not until the 1870s that women finally began to enter the clerking professions.

1.3 Women’s Entry into Clerical Work and Typewriting

Within the last third of the nineteenth century, economic crisis helped to destabilize, at least partially, the strict gender segregation of men’s and women’s activities in the public and private realms. Just after the unification of Germany in 1871

47 See Robert Walter Kunzmann, Hundert Jahre Schreibmaschinen im Büro: Geschichte des maschinellen Schreibens. Rinteln: Merkur Verlag, 1979. 21. 32 came the “Gründerkrach,” the stock market crash of 1873, which resulted in a phase of economic depression and slow growth that lasted into the 1890s. This economic panic impacted the financial situations of petite-and middle-bourgeois families in such a way that it became difficult for them to continue to support unmarried women. Since the factory – a place of filth and moral corruption – was out of the question for petite- bourgeois women, and since domestic piecework did not bring in sufficient funds to supplement the family budget, women of the bourgeois classes sought out other opportunities to earn money. Because work in retail required little training, comparably less training than to be a teacher, many of these women sought out employment as shopgirls.48 The mass production of ready-to-wear clothing, known as Konfektion, and the emergence of department stores in the late nineteenth century also created new possibilities for women to find gainful employment in this field. As business concerns restructured and expanded, so came the need for a semi-skilled workforce to fill the lower-level positions.

Beginning in the 1870s, Germany’s rapid industrialization caused the congruently rapid expansion of businesses. These economic conditions resulted in the extensive reorganization of industrial and trade concerns into more well-defined structures of authority and a skilled commercial workforce. This restructuring not only strengthened the hierarchical boundaries between employers and employees, and thus, limited the clerk’s potential for future autonomy, but it also allowed for tremendous growth, namely

48 See Frevert, “Vom Klavier zur Schreibmaschine,” 85-86. 33 the radical expansion of lower and lower-middle level clerking positions.49 According to

David Blackbourne,

[t]he expansion of the white-collar labour force was dramatic. In a sophisticated firm like Siemens, it grew from around fifty in the 1870s to 12,500 in 1912. This was much faster than the growth of the manual workforce. […] While the number of blue-collar workers in Germany as a whole increased by 38 per cent between 1882 and 1907, the number of white-collar workers nearly tripled, from 1.2 to 3.3 million.50

This rapid growth in the number of clerical workers meant that the physical size of offices was also forced to expand. Clerical workers performing administrative tasks were relocated from individual offices to large halls, in which employees were occupied with the same – often mechanical – tasks. The reorganization of the office established even more barriers hindering the advancement of individual employees, as well.51 Therefore, in the course of nineteenth century, commercial assistants went from being individual entrepreneurs in-training to “replaceable parts in a more complex industrialized economy.”52 Commercial assistants viewed the move toward specialization as part of a process of “deskilling” the clerking profession, and in a sense, they were right. No longer were they expected to acquire such a broad skill-set, and instead, often performed repetitive tasks requiring fewer learned skills. But, as we will see, the introduction of new

49 Wolfgang Muth. “‘Was würden unsere Vorfahren sagen…’ Männerarbeit im Handelskontor und ihre Veränderungen im 19. Jahrhundert.” Frauenarbeit im Büro: “Ich hab’ mich hoch getippt.” Ed. Bärbel Böhnke. Quickborn: Braun & Behrmann, 1998. 10. 50 David. Blackbourn. The Long Nineteenth Century: A History of Germany, 1780-1918. New York, Oxford University Press, 1998. 134. 51 See Christel Patzak and Wolfgang Muth. “‘Jede Frau, die eine gute Klavierspielerin ist, kann eine hervorragende Maschinenschreiberin werden.’ Entwicklung der Frauenbüroarbeit im Kaiserreich 1871 bis 1918.” Frauenarbeit im Büro: “Ich hab’ mich hochgetippt.” Ed. Bärbel Böhnke. Quickborn: Braun & Behrmann, 1998. 19. 52 Adams 7. 34 devices of communication into offices meant that employees who operated these devices also needed to acquire new skills.

Among these changes contributing to deskilling, administrative tasks were divided into smaller jobs, in order to accommodate the increase in communications, transport, and business, all of which generated new masses of paperwork. With this accelerated development of firms in the late nineteenth century came the demand for clear and concise methods of communication. In the 1870s and 80s, some businesses implemented paper forms in order to impose uniformity and structure on the various types of information, which needed to be collected and dispersed. Suppressing the uniqueness of handwriting and promoting simplified, legible script (Formschrift or form script) became an essential strategy for streamlining business processes. This increased need for unvarying forms of communication eventually led to the widespread adoption of the typewriter beginning in the 1890s. Germany’s late adoption of the typewriter may have been, at least in part, a result of the Prussian legal administration, which did not permit or recognize machine-written documents until 1887.53 The result of all of these administrative changes, including the formalization and standardization of procedures, was the demand for less-qualified personnel to perform simple routinized tasks.

It was within this rapidly changing economic climate that women began to enter the clerical workforce. In the early 1870s with the onset of the brief Franco-Prussian War

(1870/1871) bourgeois women, in small numbers, replaced men, who had departed for the battlefield, in administrative positions. Business offices remained primarily male

53 Muth 11. See Muth for more on the formalization and mechanization of office work. 35 domains until the 1880s, although some daughters of bourgeois families worked in

“Vertrauensposten” (positions of trust) in bookkeeping and pay offices already in the

1860s.54 But, even in the 1880s, bourgeois women were often shunned socially for earning money outside of the home at all. In spite of this, the profession of clerking fell into the set of professions that were considered suitable for middle-class women.

Clerking positions open to women included employment as a secretary or stenotypist – work that dealt with a series of short organizational jobs, which were often administrative, and thus, service-oriented and involving the qualities of a caretaker. As a part of the service industry, clerking was an occupation that also conformed to women’s gender role of caretaker and it allowed women to maintain “ladylike dress and behavior.”55 In this regard, a few thousand daughters of independent merchants and factory owners became the pioneers of women’s clerical work in the 1880s.56

In their first office positions, which did not include typewriting, women were arguably able to make greater, and more meaningful contributions. Women made strides

“nicht über die maschinelle Schreibarbeit, sondern über traditionelle Funktionen als

Buchhalterinnen und Korrespondentinnen sowie als ‘Sachbearbeiterinnen’.”57 These professions were entryways and without a doubt also foundational probationary fields for women’s employment in offices. Since women of the petite bourgeois classes were often partially being supported by their families, they were able to accept lower wages and,

54 Neinhaus 16-17. 55 Adams 12. 56 Neinhaus 16-17, and see Adams 12, for statistics on women in clerical work at that time. 57 Lüsebrink 107. Translation: “not in their mechanical writing work, but rather in their traditional functions as bookkeepers and correspondents, as well as ‘administrators/clerical assistants’.” 36 thus, became a resource for employers looking to fulfill the need for a cheap clerical workforce. Women’s employment in these positions was steady and their roles in administrative offices grew and continued to grow even before the position of the

“Maschinenschreiberin” (the female typist) had been firmly established in Germany in

1895.58 Therefore, women had already gained a foothold in the clerical workforce before office work began to be mechanized with the introduction of the typewriter, the adding machine, and other office technologies in the 1890s and first decade of the twentieth century.

In the 1890s, the widespread introduction of the typewriter was viewed as a move toward automation that contributed to the deskilling of the clerking profession. For, even though it, in essence, opened up a newly acquirable skill, proficiency at typewriting was considered both specialized and mechanical, so it did not garner high pay. Women’s entry into office work during the deskilling of the profession also began a process of feminization, which has been understood as the development of an association “between the low status, reward for the job, and the fact that it is performed by women.”59 When a particular job is feminized, the notion of “skill” is redefined. For example, the male clerical skill of copying documents retained a low status but was valued in the early nineteenth century. However, once the skill of typewriting came to be understood as

“feminine,” it was not a skill at all. Instead, male clerks commonly attributed the introduction of the typewriter and the female typist as changes that threatened to “deskill”

58 See Lüsebrink 107-108. 59 Gertjan de Groot and Marlou Schrover. “General Introduction.” Women Workers and Technological Change in Europe in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. London: Taylor and Francis, 1995. 8. 37 the clerical professions. For, once typewriting became associated with women, it quickly came to be viewed as an “automatic” or “mechanical” function, in spite of the rigorous training it required and its association with the “intellectual” work of writing. In this regard, as Gertjan de Groot and Marlou Schrover have pointed out, the notion of “skill” becomes a social construct.60 The uncoupling of typewriting from the construction of

“skill” is most likely a result of the association of women’s labor with repetitive, non- intellectual, mechanical tasks – an assumption stemming from women’s “natural” occupation as homemaker.

In work outside of the home, the link between working-class women and mechanical work had been established before the widespread introduction of the typewriter in Germany. In her essay “Die Arbeitsteilung zwischen Mann und Frau”

(1874), Hedwig Dohm, German feminist and author, claimed that two basic principles emerge clearly and sharply in the division of labor between men and women: “die geistige Arbeit und die einträgliche für die Männer, die mechanische und die schlecht bezahlte Arbeit für die Frauen.”61 For the thousands of women working in factories, it was “die niedrigsten, schwierigsten und schmutzigsten Arbeiten” that fell to them, for the common attitude was “je gröber, je anstrengender die Arbeit, desto besser für die

Frauen.”62 Although Dohm paints a grim picture of the devaluation and disregard for

60 Ibid 5. See also 1-14 for more on this perspective. 61 Hedwig Dohm. “Die Arbeitsteilung zwischen Mann und Frau.” Frauenarbeit und Beruf. Ed. Gisela Brinker-Gabler. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1979. 124. Translation: “The mental/intellectual and profitable work for the men, the mechanical and poorly paid work for the women.” Emphasis in original. 62 Ibid. Translation: “the lowest, most difficult, and filthiest jobs” and “the more crude and more strenuous the work, the better it was for the women.” Emphasis in original. 38 women’s work, the gender division of work she describes – men are assigned

“intellectual” work, whereas women are relegated to “mechanical” work – continued well into the twentieth century. Within this paradigm, typewriting in the context of office work was not considered “intellectual,” but rather a physical task linked to the mechanized (re)production of text, i.e., word processing. As a result of their perceived lack of skill, female clerks, who were on the bottom rung of the hierarchy, often found that professional advancement was nearly impossible.63

As in industry, many employable skills switched from “typischen Männer-” to

“typischen Frauenarbeiten,” and in the process depreciated considerably in value and prestige.64 Ursula Neinhaus confirms that this gendered division of work also impacted office work, when she points to the devaluation of writing:

Schönschrift gehörte traditionell neben Rechnen zu den wichtigsten Lehrfächern der kaufmännischen Unterrichtsanstalten. Als jedoch zunehmend Frauen die Schreibarbeiten übernahmen, wurde darin eine geistlose Tätigkeit gesehen, die entsprechend niedrig entlohnt werden konnte. Die fortschreitende Mechanisierung diente als zusätzliches Argument: ‘Die Arbeitsleistungen der Frauen, der Schalterdienst bei den Verkehrsanstalten, der Apparatdienst der Post, die Manipulationsvorrichtungen, Schreib- und Rechenarbeiten im Bureau, sind vorwiegend mechanischer Natur und stellen an sich keine gröβeren

63 Patzak and Muth, 19. 64 Ursula Neinhaus. Berufsstand weiblich. Berlin: Transit Buchverlag, 1982. 24. Translation: “typical men’s to typical women’s work.” 39

Anforderungen an die körperlichen und geistigen Kräfte. Anstrengend und nervenaufreibend ist nur der Telegraphen- und Telephondienst.’65

Therefore, once women were assigned certain tasks, like executing written work, these tasks were subsequently deemed “mechanisch” or “automatisch,” justifying decreased wages for the female employee and a lower status of the position. In the last few lines of this passage, Neinhaus quotes from Hans Nawiawski’s Die Frauen im österreichischen

Staatsdienst, Wien/ Leipzig (1902), which states that writing tasks “keine gröβeren

Anforderungen an die körperlichen und geistigen Kräfte.” This text principally underestimates the strain of mechanical writing on the human body, regardless of gender.

As we proceed, we will see that such questions about the human body and typewriting are picked up again in typewriter handbooks and psycho-technical studies appearing during the Weimar era. These texts, however, come to very different conclusions on the (female) body’s dynamic interface with the machine (see section 2.4 on “Blindschreiben” in this chapter).

1.4 Social Tensions over Typewriting: Clerking Organizations

Within the last decade of the nineteenth and the first decade of the twentieth centuries, male clerks, or more specifically members of the men’s labor organization

65 Neinhaus 24-25. Translation: “Penmanship, next to arithmetic, belonged traditionally to the most important subjects taught at mercantile educational establishments. As women increasingly took over writing work (paperwork), the more it came to be seen as a mechanical task, which could be awarded correspondingly low compensation. The gradual mechanization served as an additional argument: “Women’s on-the-job performance, counter service at commerce institutions, apparatus work at the post office, the manipulation of equipment, tasks in writing and arithmetic in the office, are all of a predominantly mechanical nature and places no great demands on the physical and mental faculties. Only telegraph and telephone service is strenuous and nerve-wracking.” 40

Deutschnationalen Handlungsgehilfen-Verbands (DHV), voiced vehement protests against the deskilling of the profession through women’s entry into the clerical workforce. They feared that women’s employment in clerking would exert a “downward pressure on wages and undermine male prestige,” and they complained about the

“Schmutzkonkurrenz” (dirty competition) from unskilled female employees.66 But, women were not really a direct threat to the occupation of male clerks, because they only held low-status positions with less responsibility, received lower compensation, and fewer chances for professional advancement than men. The real problem was that the employment of women was viewed as a symptom of the broader degradation of the clerking profession.

To contextualize this organization, the DHV was established in 1893 and had particularly decisive political and social influence throughout its existence which extended throughout the Weimar Republic. It was largely made up of

“Kaufmannsgehilfen,” and they chose this word deliberately over “Handlungsgehilfen” because of its emphasis on the masculine form. Women were not allowed to be a part of the association. Furthermore, the DHV also took steps to differentiate between white- collar workers who performed “geistige Arbeit” and “die technischen Angestellten,” whose work they viewed as similar to highly qualified blue-collar workers in manufacturing:

Während die technischen Angestellten und die Werkmeister noch unmittelbar in der Produktion mitwirken und ihre Arbeit mehr derjenigen hochqualifizierterer Arbeiter ähnelt, sind die Kaufmannsgehilfen von der

66 See Frevert, Women in German History, 114. 41

eigentlichen Güterherstellung getrennt und in einem weiteren Sinne ökonomisch produktiv.67

Occupied predominantly with non-physical work (“nicht-körperliche Arbeit”), white- collar employees were charged with the transfer of information, not goods or material items. Office work, as well as other white-collar jobs, were perceived to be quiet, clean, and with minimal physical demand, in comparison to work in agriculture or industry.

These perceptions led to a cultural and social divide between laborers (Arbeiter) and white-collar employees (Angestellten). However, the boundaries of this division were challenged and sometimes blurred by several factors: the rapid expansion of industry leading to increased demand for laborers and white-collar employees, dramatic historical and economic shifts (e.g., WWI and the following hyperinflation), and the mechanization and automatization white-collar work, effecting office work most prominently through the introduction of new office technologies. 68

Although white-collar workers were and still are today not a determinable sociological group or social class, the DHV sought to maintain an image of themselves as a distinguished, middle class, and “economically productive” group. In Germany, the primary basis for the assertion of their higher status and privilege over blue-collar

67 Quoted in Christina Bargholz. “‘Tastschreiben’ oder ‘Tippen’? Angestelltenarbeitsplätze unter Rationalisierungsdruck.” Großstadtmenschen: Die Welt der Angestellten Ed. Burkhart Lauterbach. Büchergilde Gutenberg, Frankfurt am Main, 1995. 197. From Sittart 1912, 9. Translations: “mental/intellectual work” and “the technical white-collar workers”; “While the technical white-collar workers and the foremen/head-workmen still directly participate in production and their work resembles that of the highly qualified blue-collar workers, the trade assistants are separated from the actual manufacturing of the goods and are economically productive in a broader sense.” 68 For more on the rich history of German white-collar workers and how they differentiate themselves from blue-collar workers, see Jürgen Kocka. Die Angestellten in der deutschen Geschichte, 1850-1980. Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1981. 7. 42 workers was the 1911 law passed by the German parliament, the

Angestelltenversicherungsgesetz (AVG), which gave them access to insurance benefits unavailable to blue-collar workers and was intended to codify white-collar workers as the

“neuen Mittelstand” (the new middle class).69 Although white-collar workers saw the

AVG as a distinction, they were still troubled by the fact that at the end of the nineteenth century, the salaries of the white-collar worker partially fell behind the wages of the industry workers, who were at length organized into unions.70 This leveling development in income continued until WWI creating tensions between these two groups. According to Kocka, it is this deeply formed division between laborers and white-collar employees that differentiated the German context from others formed in Western Europe and North

America.71 The DHV tried to maintain a high status by resisting the entry of women and members of the lower classes into the clerical workforce.

At the turn of the century, for instance, some members of the DHV even viewed women’s entry into business offices as a sign of “Entfraulichung,” and they would refuse to address their female colleagues: “verweigern ihr doch die männlichen Kollegen den

Gruß auf der Straße, denn: eine Dame, die ins Geschäft geht ist keine Dame mehr.”72 The notion that dealing in commerce and trade would corrupt feminine virtue persisted into

69 See Bargholz 195. Translation: Law for Insuring White-collar workers. Note: Reinforcing this privilege again in the Weimar era, this law was revised in 1924 ensuring that Angestellten would receive a retirement pension. 70 Fritz, Hans-Joachim. “Der Weg zum modernen Büro – Vom Sekretär zur Sekretärin.” Vom Sekretär zur Sekretärin: eine Ausstellung zur Geschichte der Schreibmaschine und ihrer Bedeutung für den Beruf der Frau im Büro. Mainz: Gutenberg Museum, 1985. 53. 71 Kocka 9. 72 Quoted in Frevert, “Vom Klavier zur Schreibmaschine,” 93. Translations: “De-woman-ization” and “the male colleagues refuse to greet her on the street, because: a woman who goes into the business office is no longer a woman.” 43 the early twentieth century. Therefore, while employers welcomed women into low level and low paying clerking positions, male clerks of the DHV insisted on the notion that

“Frauenarbeit” outside of women’s “natural vocation” in the home, should be viewed as

“eine schwere soziale und sittliche Gefahr für unser gesamtes Volksleben.”73 Regardless of these harsh protests, female employees fought to gain some acceptance of their new roles in the public realm, taking important steps during the 1890s and first decade of the twentieth century.74

On the other side of this debate stood women’s clerking organizations, like the

Verband der weiblichen Handels- und Büroangestellten (VWA) and the more localized

Berlin Aid Association for Female Salaried Employees in Commerce and Trade, which had found common ground with the bourgeois women’s movement at this time.75 For the bourgeois women’s movement, women’s employment in clerking jobs became emblematic for their emancipation from the private sphere and their professionalization.

In 1894, the Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine (BDF) was founded as an umbrella organization to unite 34 radical and moderate feminist groups (approx. 50,000 members in 1894, growing to 500,000 by 1914). Although moderate and radical bourgeois feminists viewed the roles of female work and education in their missions differently, both groups recognized the importance of expanding the opportunities for women to work outside of the individual household and family. Moderate bourgeois feminists, in

73 Ibid. 86-87. Translation: “women’s work” was viewed as “a great social and cultural danger for the lives of our entire people.” 74 Adams 20. 75 See Adams, especially pages 53-57. Note that Adams attends to the Socialist Women’s movement, which was also concerned with women’s equality in work, but they found the hierarchy of social class to be more oppressive and, thus, a more pressing issue than discrimination because of sex and gender. 44 particular, believed in women’s unique nature and that women could contribute to the economy and culture by bringing their maternal and wifely qualities, e.g. nurturing and supporting others, to public life. This group considered leadership positions to be

“unladylike” and “aggressive,” but work as a typist or secretary, with its emphasis on service and support for upper-management, allowed bourgeois women to maintain their

“feminine” nature. With their goals aligned, the bourgeois women’s movement and female clerks’ organizations shared a close relationship, in which clerks’ organizations participated in feminist campaigns and vice versa. They maintained this relationship until

1906, when the Berlin clerks’ organization insisted that professional unity took priority over women’s solidarity.76

Within the debates concerning women’s clerical work during the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, protecting the clerking profession’s association with middle-class values and status was actually a central issue for each of these men’s and women’s organizations. An 1897 study by the female clerks’ organization, the VWA, determined that the social make-up of these early female office workers reflected a homogenous group. They concluded that 49% of the women were daughters of high- ranking civil servants, doctors, factory owners, or businessmen. The second half was divided evenly among white-collar employees and independent craftsmen, restaurant owners and farmers. Only 4% of these female office workers had fathers who were laborers/blue-collar employees or attendants.77 Therefore, female white-collar employees

76 See Adams 42-57 for a more extensive discussion on the relationship between the women’s movements (and their organizations) and the female clerk’s organizations. 77 Lüsebrink 107. 45 at the end of the nineteenth century were almost completely members of the middle or upper-middle classes. In the early twentieth century, leaders of female clerks’ associations and bourgeois feminists in the BDV accepted the need to prevent

“unsuitables,” as suggested by the DHV, from entering the clerking profession, including becoming typists. In an effort to preserve clerks’ middle class status, the Berlin Clerks’

Aid Association with the help of the BDV provided career counseling to women, in which they reportedly guided “unsuitable elements,” e.g. working class women, away from clerking by emphasizing the benefits of domestic service.78

Also in the early twentieth century, male clerks of the DHV hailing largely from the petite and middle bourgeois classes also expressed concerns that the introduction of office equipment, like the typewriter, would lead to “proletarianization” of clerical work.

Proletarianization essentially referred to diminishing the status of office work by linking it with the dirty, manual labor of working classes in factories.79 When it came to the typewriter, male clerks feared that the association of clerking with “Maschinenarbeit”

(machine work) would eventually reduce their social status to that of factory workers and, hence, proletarianize the clerking profession.80

The association of the typewriter with mechanized factory work also had much to do with the assaulting noise it created and the hierarchical restructuring of the office that this noise caused. In fact, the adoption of the typewriter into German offices received

78 See Adams 68-70. 79 For more on the so-called threat of “Proletarisierung” see Frevert. “Vom Klavier zur Schreibmaschine,” especially pages 86-87. 80 Patzak and Muth 19. See Patzak and Muth for more information on the proletarization of the clerking profession. 46 heavy resistance among white-collar employees, in large part, because of the noise. With its machine-gun-like Geklapper, the typewriter raised several organizational issues as it was gradually introduced within the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As one bank clerk remembers, “Die ersten Schreibmaschinen, amerikanische Modelle, kamen kurz nach der Jahrhundertwende. Die beiden Fräulein wurden weit weg plaziert, weil niemand das Geklapper haben wollte.”81 The persistent noise problem forced new measures to be taken with the organizational structure of the business office. The reorganization of the workplace was dictated by the status of the employees and the degree of noise – the louder the noise and larger the room, the lower the social status of the working people.82 But, enduring this Geklapper became a necessary part of holding a job in clerical work. In order to counteract these impressions and to divorce the act of typewriting from its association with drudgery of mechanical mass-production, early product advertisers of typewriters portrayed it as a graceful activity easily adopted by members of the comfortable middle classes.

Another complaint held by the DHV and a great concern for women’s feminist and clerking organizations was female clerks’ lack of education and vocational training.

The employment of uneducated or simply untrained female employees stirred fears in the widely educated male clerks of the degradation of their profession. Beginning in the mid-

81 Fritz, Hans-Joachim. “Der Weg zum modernen Büro – Vom Sekretär zur Sekretärin.” Vom Sekretär zur Sekretärin: eine Ausstellung zur Geschichte der Schreibmaschine und ihrer Bedeutung für den Beruf der Frau im Büro. Mainz: Gutenberg Museum, 1985. 53. Translation: The first typewriters, American models, came shortly after the turn of the century. Both girls were placed far away, because no one wanted to hear that noise (rattle). 82 Ibid. 47

90s, economic demand for semi-skilled workers created the subsequent need for vocational training to be made available to women.

With regard to training on the typewriter, there were very few opportunities before 1905 in Germany to receive proper lessons in typing, let alone “touch typing,” so much of the responsibility for training proficient typists fell to the manufacturers. For instance, during the 1890s in Germany, almost all of the typewriters were imported from the United States, and the firm Remington, in particular, had established several distributors in Germany. In order to fill the need for qualified typists, Remington was one of several companies that created in-house vocational schools to train – primarily female – typewriter operators. Thereafter, the Remington firm began “delivering” trained writing personnel with their machines.83

But, German employers needed a more long-term solution to remedy the lack of trained typists and provide female typists with further education in foreign languages, correspondence, and other useful skills for clerical work. In response to this need, private trade schools were founded, which offered young women and girls – frequently in the form of crash courses – the basics of mechanical writing with a typewriter and stenography.84 The oldest of these vocational schools in Germany is “Die Hamburger” established in 1892.85 One such school that is still in operation today is the “Grone-

Schule” in Hamburg, which was founded in 1895 as the “Schreib- und Handels-

Lehrinstitut Grone.” In 1895 it offered courses in stenography, arithmetic, bookkeeping,

83 Patzak and Muth 19. 84 Ibid 16. 85 Scholz 16-17. Otto Burghagen, who will be mentioned later, worked for this school and published the first German typewriter handbook, Die Schreibmaschine: Ein praktisches Handbuch enthaltend illustrierte Beschreibung aller gangbaren Schreibmaschinen, Handels-Akademie, 1898. 48 and German grammar. Only in 1905 did the school begin to teach typing with the “10-

Finger-System” or “touch typing.”86 Not all schools were equal, however, and sometimes the methods taught did not correspond to contemporary methods of operation, i.e. “touch typing,” resulting in few competent typists.87 But, it was not only the schools’ inadequate methods that prevented typists from becoming proficient in “touch typing.”

According to the VWA, female typists were responsible for not completing their education, which usually lasted 1.5 years. Although women of the middle-classes had greater access to training programs, were more likely to be able to afford private schooling, and possibly had more time to complete the programs, many women of the bourgeois and working classes left their training early, so that they could earn money as soon as possible. The result was that untrained “Tipperinnen” and trained

“Stenotypistinnen” were put in competition with each other in the office.88 More and more vocational schools sprang up throughout the early twentieth century allowing women greater access to post-secondary training.

With more possibilities for vocational training, the numbers of women in the clerical workforce continued to steadily increase throughout the early twentieth century.89

As we have seen, male clerks felt threatened by the growing numbers of women entering clerking, but also by the introduction of new office technologies, like the typewriter. In

86“Historie: Vom Tintenfass zum Terminal,” Grone: wissen, das sie weiterbringt. N.p. n.d. Web. 29. July 2013. http://www.grone.de/seite/%C3%9Cber%20uns/historie 87 Scholz 16. See also Gerd Krumeich. “Maschinitis oder die Schwierigkeiten des technischen Fortschritts.” Vom Sekretär zur Sekretärin: eine Ausstellung zur Geschichte der Schreibmaschine und ihrer Bedeutung für den Beruf der Frau im Büro. Mainz: Gutenberg Museum, 1985. 13. 88 For more on women’s education in vocational schools, see Bargholz 210-11. 89 Neinhaus 10. 49 the first half of the nineteenth century the production of the written word was viewed as a higher, mental skill requiring the precision of a steady hand, attention to detail, and intellect of an individual. Widely implemented in offices in prewar Germany, the typewriter and women’s use of it were perceived to have diminished one of the fundamental tasks of the clerk – writing.

The outbreak of the First World War in 1914 made room for women to enter the workforce by allowing them to replace men who had left to join the fight. Many businesses hired female white-collar employees for the first time during the war, and these women worked in such positions as “Schreibkräften” (typists) and

“Buchhalterinnen” (accountants) in business offices.90 After the war’s end, many of these women, as was expected of them, returned to their wifely and motherly duties in the home. But, the women’s movements had made some great strides: German universities allowed women to study (process took place gradually, 1900-1909), then in 1918,

German women won the legal right to vote. As a result, the boundary between the public and private realms that had been drawn so sharply in the first half of the nineteenth century progressively became much more permeable.

1.5 Typewriting in the Weimar Republic (1918-1933)

Germany’s interwar period, known as the Weimar Republic, was an era of cultural renaissance amid political and economic turmoil. The period was bookended by economic crises, the postwar financial crisis (1920-1923) and the world economic crisis

90 See Frevert, “Vom Klavier zur Schreibmaschine,” 88-89 and 93-94. 50

(1929-1933), with a period of stabilization (1924-1928) taking place in between. This turbulent economic climate helped to destabilize boundaries of class and gender. Women entered the workforce in greater numbers than ever before, and the white-collar professions, which were previously the domains of the comfortable middle classes, opened up to the working classes, as well.

Contributing to women’s need for employment was the extreme economic upheaval caused by catastrophic hyperinflation in the early twenties that resulted in the collapse of the German currency in 1923. In order to pay vast sums for war reparations required of them in the Treaty of Versailles, the German government raised the war loans and increased the volume of money in circulation. In so doing, they also gradually abandoned the connection between paper money and gold reserves that had been upheld before the war. As a result, hyperinflation began in 1922 and the German Mark became almost completely worthless. This ruinous economic event caused citizens of the upper and comfortable middle classes to lose their fortunes and even become impoverished. It was only in late 1923 that Germany adopted a new currency, and in 1924 the nation began its economic recovery with the assistance of the Dawes Plan.91

As a result of this economic instability, the white-collar professions got an influx of workers: women from the middle classes (medium income groups), who had recently been dispossessed by the hyperinflation of the early twenties, as well as the young female generation of the bourgeoisie. The former driven to work out of need and the latter out of

91 For more on hyperinflation and the postwar financial crisis, see Detlev Peukert. The Weimar Republic. The Crisis of Classical Modernity. Trans. Richard Deveson. New York: Hill and Wang, 1989. Especially pages 52-66. 51 the disposition to work, sought work in the white-collar fields.92 In addition to these groups, many working-class women during the Weimar era viewed typing as a step up the economic and social ladder, and to them inequitable wages were insignificant. Thus, as Suhr points out, working-class women were turning away from other careers in factory work and clothing production and choosing to work in the white-collar professions:

Es strömen heute ganz offenbar die weiblichen Jugendlichen von den früheren typischen weiblichen Berufen wie Hausarbeit und Bekleidungsgewerbe fort und den Angestelltenberufen zu. Aber auch aus den Scharen gewerblicher Arbeiterinnen erfolgt ein Zuzug zu den Angestelltenberufen […] Hier zeigt sich deutlich eine Umschichtung in der Struktur der Frauenarbeit, die für die Lage der weiblichen Angestellten aufmerksame Beobachtung erfordert.93

This shift from “traditional women’s professions” to white-collar work may also be explained by working-class women’s perceptions of this type of work. Clerical work was appealing to young women from all social strata, because it was considered “clean,”

“intellectual,” and “respectable,” as opposed to dirty, physically exhausting factory work.

In comparison to other employment opportunities open to them, namely nursing, seamstress, domestic servant work, or factory work, clerical work appeared to be a new opportunity to break into male-dominated realm of business and industry.

With flocks of women from both sides, the female white-collar workforce went

“von einer kleineren Truppe zu einer typischen Berufsschicht der Frauen.”94 According to

92 Susanne Suhr. “Die weiblichen Angestellten (1930). Frauenarbeit und Beruf. Ed. Gisela Brinker-Gabler. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1979. 331. 93 Suhr 330. Translation: It is quite evident today that young girls are moving away from the previously typical feminine professions like domestic work and the clothing trade and to the white-collar professions. But also from of the droves of female workers in industry there is an outflow to the white-collar professions. These movements clearly demonstrate a shifting/regrouping in the structure of women’s work, which requires thoughtful observation for the situation of female office workers. 94 Suhr 331. Translation: “From a small troupe to the typical professional stratum for women” 52

Suhr, of the 11.5 million working women in 1925, the greatest numbers were employed helping family members, and following them were the masses of handworkers (laborers) and domestic workers. Women working in white-collar positions only show up in fourth place with 1.2 million. But while all the other groups only grew at the same proportion as the population increased – or like domestic workers – actually decreased in numbers – the numbers of female white-collar workers increased far beyond this proportion/rate.95 By

1930 numbers of female white-collar workers had reached 1.4 million, and very nearly half of the lower level clerical positions were occupied by women. According to a 1931 study by the Gewerkschaftsbund der Angestellten (Federation of Trade Unions for White-

Collar Workers) in Berlin, women dominated in typewriter work and 91.5% of typists were female. (See Table 1). But, women also had a firm footing in clerking and sales positions, occupying almost half of the available positions.

Gliederung der männlichen und weiblichen Angestellten in den einzelnen Berufszweigen96 männlich weiblich Stenotypisten / -innen 8.5% 91.5% Kontoristen / -innen 55.6% 44.4% Buchhalter / -innen 82.1% 17.9% Kassierer / -innen 63.7% 36.3% Verkäufer / -innen 53.3% 46.7% davon 2. Verkäufer / -innen 44.9% 55.1%

Table 1. Division of male and female salaried employees in professional fields

Women’s employment in the clerical professions was not only accepted in the

Weimar era, but female white-collar employees – a group from disparate class origins –

95 Suhr 330. 96 Table replicated from image in Bargholz. See page 202. 53 had become a crucial part of the white-collar workforce. New kinds of positions were being created that were regarded as “typical” for women, and others were being increasingly vacated by men, e.g., shorthand typist and shop assistant. Therefore, it was not necessarily the great numbers of women entering these positions that made such an impact, but rather, it was the appearance of distinct shifts within the gender-based division of labor that altered “the perceived image and social role of women.”97 The visibility of the female white-collar worker – moving through the streets or interacting with customers – also drew public attention to this shift in gender roles. Women were more present in the public realm than ever before. Suhr characterizes the presence of female white-collar workers as quite powerful: “Sie geben der Groβstadtstraβe das beherrschende Bild, sie geben dem Warenhaus, dem Schreibbüro des Betriebes die charakteristische Prägung – mehr noch: sie sind heute eigentlich zum Typus der berufstätigen Frau geworden; die weibliche Angestellte ist die typische erwerbstätige

Frau der Masse.”98 For this sociologist, the female white-collar worker – typists hammering at the keys in the typing pool or selling goods at the department store – typified the modern working woman. In this particular description, Suhr, rather optimistically, points to how these working women have influenced the character of their workplace and the urban landscape more broadly. Such developments led observers to

97 On shifts in the gender-based division of labor and new jobs for women, see Peukert 96. 98 Suhr 330. Italics in original. Translation: They lend a commanding image to the big city street, they give the department store, the typing pool of the firm its characteristic imprint – even still: today they have actually become the prototype of the working woman; the female white-collar worker is the typical gainfully employed woman of the masses. 54 call the Weimar era the “Zeitalter der emanzipierten Frau,” yet, this so-called emancipation and revolutionary presence in the office were not so triumphant.99

Women’s new roles created new problems and obstacles, particularly concerning their dissatisfaction with mechanical work, grim working conditions, the very limited opportunities for advancement, and poor compensation. During the Weimar era, women’s employment was viewed as an acceptable temporary life-phase, before they settled into their subsequent long-term roles as wives and mothers. The general expectation was that young women worked until they married, after which they were to leave the workplace to attend to their husband and children. Those who married and did not resign from their jobs were branded “Doppelverdiener” (double earners), a term connoting a woman earning a second set of wages. These women often met fierce criticism for their refusal to give up their position in an oversaturated job market and for not fully dedicating themselves to their domestic duties. In 1932, during the world economic crisis, a law was passed that made it possible to dismiss women who were second earners from their jobs in public service.100 So, while women’s employment in white-collar positions was heralded as revolutionary, female employees were also viewed as temporary, tertiary personnel with strict temporal and spatial boundaries.

Adding to these limitations, women seeking work in the white-collar workforce also commonly experienced age discrimination. Although the general perception was that these new jobs were appropriate for young unmarried women and older unmarried or widowed women, young women were highly favored on the job market. For instance,

99 Quoted in Frevert, “Vom Klavier zur Schreibmaschine,” 93. 100 For more on Doppelverdiener, see Peukert 96-97. 55

Käthe Leichter, a contemporary of Suhr, wrote that women in their thirties and even twenty-five year olds were unemployed because of “fortgeschrittenen Alters.”101 By the time they reached thirty years of age, women were expected to have left the profession for marriage or otherwise; therefore, Louise Otto’s 1847 program that unwed women should be given access to long-term employment had still not been achieved. What made women’s prospects for marriage additionally challenging was that WWI had seriously reduced the (able-bodied) male population, leaving many women without the possibility to marry, and discrimination against women over thirty left them without employment, as well.

Diminishing wages were yet another troubling aspect of women’s white-collar work that had continue to decline in the Weimar era. In 1928 and 1929 firms even succeeded in paying women below the minimum wage, but women still accepted positions in the field, in part because the job market was so saturated. In general, female white-collar workers performing the same work as men were compensated 10 to 15 percent less.102 Therefore, contemporary critics, as well as scholars today, have critiqued the representation of women’s move into white-collar work in terms of overstatements, such as: “Die Eroberung der Büros durch die weiblichen Angestellten ist die größte

Revolution in der sozialen Stellung der Frau.” When one considers the reality of these women’s lives – the poverty-level wages, the long hours, the resulting illnesses, and the

101 See Käthe Leichter. “Die Frauenarbeit der Gegenwart [1930]” Frauenarbeit und Beruf. Ed. Gisela Brinker-Gabler. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1979. p. 339-345. Translation: “advanced age.” 102 See Suhr 337. 56 lack of fulfillment in mechanical work, -- then such assertions lose their potency.103 Other social critics, like T.W. Adorno have astutely pointed out the essential lack of change in women’s situations. In Minima Moralia Adorno writes,

[…] durch den Anteil der Frauen am Angestelltentum, in dem sie so selbständig sind wie die unselbständigen Männer […] In der Zulassung der Frauen zu allen möglichen überwachten Tätigkeiten verbirgt sich die Fortdauer ihrer Entmenschlichung. Sie bleiben im Groβbetrieb, was sie in der Familie waren, Objekte.104

The conflicting perspectives presented here – Suhr’s representation of liberated women in the streets and Adorno’s perception of women’s work as a continuation of the dehumanizing and objectifying role they held in the home – represent the broader social and cultural tensions regarding women’s role in the clerical workforce. New opportunities for women (however routine and mechanical) allowed them to leave the home and enter the previously male domain of the office; however, the types of work assigned to women in this new workspace limited any opportunity for advancement and minimal growth beyond their “service” and “nurturing” duties in the home.

One factor not yet mentioned that helped to shape the nature of women’s typewriting in the Weimar era was the rationalization of office work. With the confidence that they were assisting in nation’s economic recovery after hyperinflation and the

103 Quoted in Frevert, “Vom Klavier zur Schreibmaschine,” 93. Originally quoted in Fritz Croner. Soziologie der Angestellten, Köln/Berlin 1962, 180. See Frevert’s work as an example of how scholars have contested this claim. 104 Theodor Adorno. Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben. Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1951. 162. Translation: “…through the participation of women in salaried employment, where they have as much or as little independence as men … The admittance of women to every conceivable supervised activity conceals continuing dehumanization. In big business they remain what they were in the family, objects.” (92). Translation from Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life. Trans. E.F.N. Jephcott. London: Verso, 2005. (originally published 1951 by Suhrkamp.) 57 collapse of the German currency in the early twenties, German employers enthusiastically implemented American industrial production methods. Beginning in 1924 and continuing throughout the Weimar era, employers rationalized, i.e., modernized and streamlined, the procedures of industrial production.105 Particularly influential was Frederick Winslow

Taylor’s system of “scientific management,” which was developed in the 1890s and was widely introduced in factories in the 1910s in the U.S. In Germany, Taylorist methods were discussed and tried out before WWI, but only widely implemented after 1924. As an efficiency expert, Taylor developed his methods by using stopwatches to time the performance of short repetitive tasks and estimate the possible production of an employee in a given day. In so doing, Taylor sought to increase labor productivity by standardizing best practices and eliminating waste, the result of which was the workplace “quota.”

Taylor’s methods not only had transformative effects on factory work, but they also impacted daily practices and procedures in business offices and were particularly visible in the efforts to increase typists’ production.106

Since white-collar employees were charged with the transfer of information, not goods or material items, their work was less tangible and more difficult to regulate and measure than that of the factory- or hand-worker. But the work of the typist, the repeated pushing of the keys and the fragmented production of individual letters, could be easily timed, quantified, and regulated. The work processes of the typist, therefore, presented an opportunity for scientific analysis and, ultimately, regulation. Typists’ performance was

105 For a lengthier discussion of the rationalization movement and the debates surrounding it, see J. Ronald Shearer. “Talking about Efficiency: Politics and the Industrial Rationalization Movement in the Weimar Republic.” Central European History. Vol. 28.4 (1995): 483-506. 106 See Shearer and for more on rationalization and Taylorism, see also Peukert 112-117. 58 measured in keystrokes per second, their body position – posture, finger placement, arms, even eye movement – was measured with extreme precision to determine best practices.107 In some cases, typists were also highly monitored. Segregated into typing pools, typists were subject to time checks, they were given strict quotas to ensure production, and managers even measured their rate of speed and accuracy by using devices that attached to the typewriters. The rationalization of typewriting resulted in the thorough regulation of the human body interfacing with the machine, and since women most often worked as typists, these rationalizing processes had the most serious impact on them.

As one example, in a 1925 issue of the magazine Büropraxis, one description of proper body posture appeared:

Aufrecht, in kerzengerader Haltung sitzt die moderne arbeitende Stenotypistin vor der Maschine, den Kopf erhoben, die Augen geradeaus auf das Stenogramm gerichtet, während die Hände bei leicht abwärts gerichteter Armhaltung ruhig und ohne Aufregung über die Tastatur liegen und nur die Finger arbeiten.108

Bodily movement of the typist was, thus, controlled and shaped to an optimal posture. If they adhered to the recommended posture and degree of movement, typists, most of them women, were bound to their seats for the entire day, where they obediently and without interruption operated levers and keys. Of note in the above passage is also the descriptive use of “ruhig and ohne Aufregung” (quietly and without agitation) to describe the typists’

107 For more on this topic, see section 2.4 in this chapter. 108 Quoted in Fritz 49. Translation: “Erect, in bolt upright posture sits the modern working typist in front of the machine, head lifted, eyes directed straight at the shorthand report, while the hands with light downward directed arm position, quietly and without agitation, rest over the keyboard and only the fingers work.” 59 hands, because by 1925 the typewriter had acquired a reputation for making typists and those around them nervous, and it had even come to be associated with particular illnesses, including nervous disorders.109 The intent behind the above description is, rather, to encourage typists to keep calm (and carry on).

In response to the implementation of Taylorist methods, both the DHV

Männerverband and the VWA Frauenverband stood up against “Akkordarbeit,” or the use of stop watches and time checks to regulate efficiency. It was of relevance to the DHV, because it also affected male dominated positions held by correspondents, as well as typists. The VWA, in particular, claimed that it was detrimental to women’s health.110

The objections of labor organizations to the process of rationalization suggest that rationalizing measures had profound effects on white-collar workers and their daily lives.

Interestingly, Suhr points out that rationalization loomed large over all tasks in white- collar work, not only their work with office machines:

[…] in der Zeit, wo die Maschine ihren siegreichen Einzug auch in die Büros gehalten hat, in der Zeit, wo das Wort “Rationalisierung” unsichtbar auch über den Bürotüren steht, 60 Proz. aller im Büro tätigen Angestellten mit handschriftlichen und nur 40 Proz. mit maschinellen Arbeiten einschlieβlich Schreibmaschinenarbeit beschäftigt waren! […] Allerdings scheint auch ohne Einführung von Büromaschinen das Tempo der Arbeit gesteigert zu sein.111

109 See Fritz 49-50. 110 Bargholz 214. 111 Suhr 335. Translation: In the time, when the machine has triumphantly found its way into the office, in the time, when the word ‘rationalization’ hangs invisibly over the office doors, 60 percent of all white- collar workers employed in offices are occupied with handwritten work and only 40 percent with machine work including typewriter-work! […] Certainly it seems that the pace of office work has increased even without the introduction of office machines.

The reason for this had nothing to do with the size of the firms under investigation, claims Suhr, but rather that the rationalization and mechanization of office work were progressing more slowly than the discussions allowed us to believe. According to Suhr, the introduction of the typewriter had not completely transformed all office work leading employees to abandon the almighty pen. Instead, the typewriter simply aided the changes in speed and production that were already underway.

To conclude this section, we should keep in mind that the existence of the female white-collar worker was impacted in positive and negative ways by the rise of new office technologies like the typewriter. But, the typewriter did not simply serve as women’s ticket to office work. Instead, women’s entry into clerical work was largely shaped by the outbreak of war, the growing economic demand for cheap labor, and the goals and desires of women of all classes to gain access to the “intellectual” work of the business office in the turbulent interwar years. Efforts to rationalize clerical work, including typewriter work, loomed large over offices and impacted the speed and intensity of production. And, as we will see in the following section, the human-machine relationship has been a subject of fascination and subjected to disciplinary forces out to control the body since the eighteenth century.

II. A Brief Cultural History of the Typewriter and Its Significance

Although the typewriter is today commonly understood to be an American gadget, the story of its development is just as much a European one. In this section, I briefly shed light on the European roots – particularly those in German-speaking countries – of the

61 typewriter’s technological ancestry by tracing its foundation in the early eighteenth century through its initial manufacture and improvement in the late nineteenth century in the U.S. and Europe. To be clear, I do not recount in great detail all of the pivotal moments of invention in typewriter history taking place on European or even

German/Austrian soil. Rather, I highlight how and why the device came to be culturally and economically significant for German-speaking countries. For, although the typewriter has been viewed as an American export to Europe, the roots of manufacture and adoption of the typewriter in German-speaking areas are deep and thoroughgoing.

When writing about the typewriter and the devices that came before it, one is faced with potential terminological confusion, since the typewriter and devices like it have been given many names, general and specific. For example, of the numerous precursors to the device we call “typewriter” today, some were christened by their inventors with clear designations: “Schreibapparat” (Mitterhofer), “Typographer” (Burt),

“Pterotype” (Pratt), “Chriographer” (Thurber), “Tachigrapho” (Conti), “Cembalo

Scrivano” (Ravizza). However, the names of others were lost, forgotten, or never specified. To eliminate, or at least reduce any confusion, I adopt the term “writing machine” to refer to the general category of devices appearing before 1873 that were designed to speed up the writing process, ease the labor of writing, or generate writing automatically by producing (printed or otherwise) “characters or groups of characters in succession, according to the will of the operator.”112 Hence, I reserve the lowercase term,

112 For its concision, I adopt only a part of Adler’s definition for the “writing machine.” For, Adler defines the “writing machine” as possessing “two vital features in order to qualify here: it must first of all be a mechanical contrivance, and then it must print characters or groups of characters in succession, according 62 sans hyphen, “typewriter” – a simplified form of the original Sholes “Type-Writer” – to designate machines that appear after 1873 when the term came into widespread usage.

If, like many American historians, one dubs Christopher Latham Sholes the

“father” of the typewriter, then Johannes Gutenberg of Mainz, Germany must have been its great-grandfather, for the typewriter “carried the Gutenberg technology to every nook and cranny of our culture and economy.” 113 With his 1455 invention of mechanical movable type, Gutenberg created the printing press and a Gothic-type Bible, thus, originating the mass production and circulation of books throughout Europe. Well over two centuries after Gutenberg’s revolutionary invention, records of writing machines for use by individuals began to surface. For example, the first patent for a writing machine was awarded to Englishman Henry Mill in 1714.114 Mill’s machine for “impressing or transcribing letters” essentially tapped into the need for a writing machine for individual printing in administrative and legislative contexts.115

According to independent accounts from correspondents working at the beginning of the eighteenth century, writing already constituted an increasing part of European business and trade professions at that time.116 Although the need for a writing machine to increase the pace of production was there, “society was not yet ready for mechanization,

to the will of the operator” (47). I, however, see his requirement that the device be “mechanical” as rather nebulous, for he fails to define what he considers “mechanical” or how he defines the term “machine.” 113 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 262. See also R. Current. The Typewriter and the Men who made it, (Illinois, 1954); Herkheimer County Historical Society. The Story of the Typewriter, 1873-1923, (New York, 1923); and other early American histories. 114 Beeching 4. For typewriter histories identifying Mill’s device as the first writing machine, see Blivens; Adler; Kunzmann; Scholz; Lang and Krüger. 115 qtd. in Adler p. 48. 116 Karin Lüsebrink, Büro via Fabrik, 109. 63

[but] it was at least being prepared.”117 Throughout this long-term process of invention and preparation, long before the Industrial Revolution incited the rapid expansion of administrative tasks in trade and industry, “as many as 112 inventors may have beaten

[American inventor] Christopher Latham Sholes […] to the proverbial punch.”118 Yet, at least in part because writers and scriveners were not quite ready to relinquish their quills, none of these initial inventions took hold. Although the contributions of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century inventors are sometimes overlooked, their technical designs reveal the writing machine’s relationship to other instruments and awe-inspiring machines. Three prominent categories arise here: 1) writing automatons, 2) writing machines with piano- keyboards, and 3) writing machines for the blind and “blind-writers.” The following sections examine each of these types of writing machines and highlight their cultural and historical significance to women’s typewriting and their relationship to machines more generally.

2.1 Automatons

One trend in writing machine design was the creation of automatons from the mid-eighteenth to early-nineteenth centuries in Europe. To some extent, these curiosities were a reflection of inventors’ responses to Enlightenment discourses on the concept of

“body as machine.” These pseudo-living machines were designed to uncannily mimic

117 Adler 56. 118 Wershler-Henry 35. See also Adler. Typewriter histories from the first half of the twentieth century often cite only 52 predecessors to Sholes’s “Type-Writer,” but Adler convincingly proposes that there were more. He is able to draw these conclusions, because his broader definition of “writing machines” allows him to include inventors of “music writers” and other devices that printed mechanically, but were not designed to print the Latin alphabet. (Blivens’s The Wonderful Writing Machine, is one example of a history that counts 52 predecessors). 64 human movements and activities as a means of capturing and replicating some aspect of what it means to be human. Recent research has shown that these early automatons are still significant to ongoing discourses about bodies interfacing with machines and the history of the cyborg.119

Far from machines designed for practical use, automatons were essentially created for the amusement of spectators, particularly those of the noble classes and royal courts.

During the 1750s in Vienna, the Stuttgart-born professor of Physics, Count Friedrich von

Knauss, created the first writing automatons, which recent histories have associated with early robots or androids, since they reportedly “had to be programmed to produce a predetermined message, thereby making [them] ancestor[s] of the computer.”120 Unique to their design was the integration of disembodied mechanical hands, one grasping a writing quill and the other an inkwell, while the machinery driving their movement remained concealed in a large metal globe. The sensation of von Knauss’s writing automatons inspired a host of sophisticated robot-like creations performing uncannily human-like movements – they could dance, play musical instruments, draw, speak, and write. Most notably, Pierre Jaquet-Droz, a watchmaker from Neuchâtel, Switzerland, adapted and miniaturized the machines of von Knauss and his successor in Vienna, Count

Leopold von Neipperg. Jaquet-Droz developed several moving dolls, one of which, named “L’Ecrivain” of 1772, famously inscribed text with quill and ink while seated at a

119 See, for example, Allison Muri. The Enlightenment Cyborg: A History of Communications and Control in the Human Machine, 1660-1830. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. See also Gaby Wood. Living Dolls. A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life. London: Faber and Faber, 2002. 120 Adler 50. 65 tiny desk.121 Additionally, the Frenchman Henri Maillardet, Joseph Neussner of Vienna, and Hungarian Baron Wolfgang Kempelen emulated the automata-like writing machines of von Knauss and Jaquet-Droz with varying degrees of success.

These early attempts at mechanizing writing with automatons had little, if any, practical application for office work, but the machines themselves mark a fascination not only with replicating human movements with a machine, but also with (re)creating human life independent of the womb. Allison Muri’s study has shown that the notion of the human body as mechanism weighed heavily on Enlightenment thought.122 For example, she notes that for Descartes, the bodies of animals and humans function like a clock or an automaton; they are machines in which the immortal, immaterial soul remains separate from the corruptible flesh. The rational soul serves as the body’s steersman or pilot, which, although it possesses imperfect judgement, is allied with God.123

Alternatively, Julien La Mettrie took the notion of “body as machine” a controversial step further in his famous work L’homme machine (Man a Machine, 1747) by arguing that man is a machine and that the soul is a material mechanism shaped by the construction and movement of the body.124 According to La Mettrie, “Words, language, laws, science and arts” are inscribed (re: programmed) into the mechanism of our brains through

121 See Kunzmann 23 and Adler 51-2. It should also be noted that von Knauss, and writing automaton creators like him (von Niepperg and Jaquet-Droz included), are sometimes neglected in typewriter histories. This is because the devices exceed the parameters set by some historians for what they consider a “typewriter.”(See Beeching). 122 For more on this discourse, see Allison Muri. The Enlightenment Cyborg: A History of Communications and Control in the Human Machine, 1660-1830. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. 123 See Muri 111. 124 See La Mettrie, Man a Machine, Chicago: Open Court Publishing Co., 1912. 128-129. (Accessed on www.archive.org.) See also Ann Thomson, ed. “Introduction.” La Mettrie. Machine Man and Other Writings. Cambridge University press, 1996. Especially page xiii. 66 education, and we have, thus, been trained like an animal.125 He also suggested that the automatic functions of the body in reflexes and mechanical movements were the essential key to life: “Given the slightest principle of movement, animate bodies will have everything they need to move, feel, think, repent, and, in a word, behave in the physical sphere and in the moral sphere which depends upon it.”126 Following Le Mettrie, it is the animation of the body that prompted the necessary development of thought and moral behavior.

This early modern discourse overlapped with inventors’ efforts to replicate mechanically human movement with the invention of automatons, some of them of the writing variety. Whether these inventors believed in the notion of the soul as steersman or not, creating machines that could write, particularly ones in human form, like Jaquet-

Droz’s “L’Ecrivain,” must have forced inventors to consider such philosophical questions, especially since the act of writing was symbolic of human, intellectual activity, in that it requires thought/knowledge, proficiency in language, and disciplined training in handwriting. The animation of such writing machines mimicked mechanisms of the human body, principally in the mechanical movement of writing, and of the mind by imitating moments of “thought” with the pauses between letters.

The Cartesian model of the body-as-machine also played an important role in the beginnings of cyborg history. Robbie Davis-Floyd and Joseph Dumit have suggested that the body-as-machine idea divorced the body from the soul and from the territory of religion, which allowed for the scientific investigation of the body and the suggestion that

125 La Mettrie 103. 126 Ibid. 128. 67 it could be enhanced through technology. In 1998 Floyd and Dumit’s Cyborg Babies:

From Techno-Sex to Techno-Tots, explains that in the eighteenth century the male body served as a prototype of the human machine, while the female body was perceived as

“abnormal, inherently defective, and dangerously under the influence of nature, which … was itself regarded as inherently defective and in need of constant manipulation by man.”127 To these ideas, Muri adds that the woman-machine is mostly and mysteriously absent from early modern medical texts. When the woman-machine did appear, however, she was differentiated from the man-machine only through her “automatic” reproductive functions and her “nervous sensibility and ‘hysteria’” viewed as a “mechanical interface of mind and womb where sensibility or sensuality was constantly at war with rationality,” ideas that contributed to the view of women’s “defective” body.128 Consequently, Muri suggests, the female cyborg engendered by fiction and film appears as “dangerous in her intellectual and physical facility, and in her overtly seductive but non-reproductive sexuality, while the mechanical womb or matrix is fearsome, monstrous, and grotesque.”129 Fictional portrayals of the woman-machine (female automaton or cyborg) readily appear in German literature and film as “dangerous” and “defective” women that provoke simultaneous desire and anxiety.

Although they are separated by over a century, the two female automata in the

German tradition that have arguably received the most scholarly attention, Olimpia from

E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann (1817) and Robot-Maria from Fritz Lang’s

127 Robbie Davis-Floyd and Joseph Dumit. “Introduction.” Cyborg Babies: From Techno-Sex to Techno- Tots. Routledge, 1998. 4. 128 Muri 177. 129 Ibid. 68

Metropolis (1927), have much in common. E.T.A. Hoffmann’s haunting narrative focuses on the protagonist, Nathanael, whose perception of reality has been twisted by the magical and mysterious figure Coppelius. When Nathanael encounters the female automaton, Olimpia, he perceives her near speechlessness and cold responses as parts of a coy flirtation, and he is essentially blind to her rigid mechanical movements. In

Metropolis, Robot-Maria represents the Whore of Babylon, the antithesis of the real

Maria, a motherly figure who cares for the children of the city and serves as a moral center, whose name suggests her likeness to the Virgin Mary. Alternatively, Robot-

Maria incites the workers to revolt and hypnotizes men of the upper-classes to do her bidding, which leads to the near destruction of the city. It should be noted that each of these fictional female automatons is explicitly the product of male scientists’ inventions, which, therefore, position the male creator as (would-be) steersman to the soulless woman-machines. However, by disobeying both the mad scientist, Rotwang, and the city’s leader, Joh Frederson, Robot-Maria quickly proves that she cannot be truly controlled. As a result, she signifies the merger of unchecked female sexuality and technology running rampant. What is more, both female automata also seduce or hypnotize male figures with the life-like, yet uncanny movement of their bodies in dance:

Olimpia enchants Nathanael by dancing with him and Robot-Maria performs her strange erotic dance before an audience of men, in order to hypnotize them. Divorced from maternal and reproductive functions, these machine-women are devices of deception that are able to pass as human and are, therefore, dangerous creations coupling the femme fatale with the perils of technology. More than Olimpia, Robot-Maria “emphasizes the

69 female android or cyborg as a sign of malevolent techno-sexual desires” and signifies “a threatening association of technology with the female body that is explicitly sexual, seductive, and menacing.”130 These figures exemplify perhaps the most common topographies of the fictional female automaton: in romantic literature, the cold, distant, speechless woman-machine that is an object of male affection, and in twentieth-century cultural production more generally, the woman-machine is an object of “simultaneous techno-lust and techno-trepidation.”131 As we have seen, these fictional nineteenth- and twentieth-century cyborgian images have historical ties to the Enlightenment discourse on the body-as-machine and the real-world automata that playfully simulated human life through movement, e.g., writing, dance, speaking, etc. Most important for this study, however, is that the most notable images of the woman-machine surfacing in nineteenth- and twentieth-century cultural production present her as a constellation of deception and danger. She is the nightmarish manifestation of the fears and fascination associated with newly emerging technologies and the destabilization of gender roles.

2.2 Writing Machines, Music, and Constructing the Feminine Machine

To address the idea of women and machines from a sociological perspective, this section sets out to show that the technological artefact of the typewriter was actually socially shaped as feminine, not merely in its usage, but especially with regard to its early

130 Muri 168. See also Claudia Springer’s reading of machine-Maria as cyborg in Electronic Eros: Bodies and Desire in the Post-Industrial Age. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996. Especially “Chapter 2: Pleasure of the Interface,” pages 55-60. 131 Muri 169. 70 design features.132 The piano-keyboard, for example, not only served as an important feature of writing-machine design since the mid-eighteenth century, but it also helped to initiate the prevalent connection between women’s domestic piano playing and typewriting in the late nineteenth century. The intersection between musical instruments and writing machines began with Johann Friedrich Unger, a German inventor whose

1745 “music writer” was intended to inscribe musical notes. Unger’s design, which consisted of a supplementary piano-keyboard that would attach to an existing instrument, purportedly “inspired a host of inventions and provided a starting point for many typewriters which relied upon a piano keyboard.” 133 Indeed, throughout much of the nineteenth century, the piano-keyboard design feature resurfaced again and again. In

1830, Baron Karl Freiherr von Drais built the first German writing machine for the Latin alphabet, and his invention marks one of the first historical mergers of the piano- keyboard design feature on a writing machine for practical use. By the mid-nineteenth century, the piano keyboard became a design convention and, in retrospect, a design flaw that would be repeated by many of his successors, including inventions by Italian

Giuseppe Ravizza (“Cembalo Scrivano” or “Writing Harpsichord,” 1855), New Yorker

Samuel Francis (“Printing Machine,” 1857), Alabaman John Pratt (“Pterotype,” 1864), and Sholes, Glidden, and Soule (“Type-Writer” initial patent, 1868).134

Upon the exhibition of his machine in Frankfurt in 1831, Drias reportedly boasted that one could transcribe speeches as quickly as they took place saying that it was capable

132 This perspective is in line with what Judy Wajcman identifies as a “new sociology of technology” in Technofeminism (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2004). See especially pages 33-34. 133 Adler 48. See Adler 48-50 for more on the details and flaws of Unger’s music-writer design. 134 Adler 61. See Lüsebrink 110. 71

“of keeping pace with, and even overtaking, the fastest dictation, but that also speeds of over a thousand characters a minute (or a million a day) were ‘often’ achieved.” 135 These assertions were quickly disproven, since the device could only produce shorthand characters at a slow pace, no faster than by handwriting. But Drais had taken an important step for writing machines, since he was perhaps the first to recognize that improving the speed of textual production needed to be a first priority.136 Although it had always been a factor, speed only became a priority in the early 1830s. Standards of success were no longer bound to the machine’s ability to print text – plenty of devices had achieved that – but rather, success was measured by the invention’s ability to overthrow the pen and replace it with a faster mechanized means of communication.

Thus, this new quest for high writing-speeds marked the beginning of the modernization of the writing process. Just six years after Drais, the demand for rapid communication was punctuated by Samuel Morse’s invention of the telegraph in 1837, Alfred Vail’s printing telegraph in the same year, and in 1838 yet another telegraph device by German

Professor C.A. Steinheil. 137 New developments in telegraph communication also led to the invention of writing machines for transcribing incoming telegraphic messages in the

135 Kunzmann 51-2. See also Adler 61-62. Regrettably, the model no longer exists, but recorded descriptions of its mechanism indicate that it was made up of a small box with piano-like black and white rectangular keys. The machine produced sixteen letters which were part of Drais’s abbreviated alphabet. 136 See Adler 62. 137 See Adler 64 and 66. Unfortunately, Vail’s device failed because of a faulty mechanism. Steinheil also created a telegraph machine, but it is considered much less noteworthy than his “earth return” discovery. 72

1840s and 1850s – some of them using piano keyboards.138 In this way, the piano keyboard, as a design feature, became associated with the race to modernize writing.

Figure 2. Type-Writer with piano-keyboard orientation, patented June 23, 1868.139

Sholes and his team are said to have created the first practical commercial machine to reach mass production.140 The group’s first patent application (see Figure 2) showed a sketch of a primitive model with casing made of wood and piano-keys. Sholes and his team produced over fifty different prototypes, each of which were put through

138 See Beeching 14-17, esp. 15. Beeching uses British inventor, Charles Wheatstones’s 1851 type-printing telegraph, which had a piano-keyboard, as an example of a writing machine designed specifically for use with the telegraph. 139 Patent copy from the U.S. National Archives (www.archives.gov). 140 For more on Christopher Lantham Sholes’s biography, influences, and personal motivations for developing the typewriter, see Bliven, Wonderful Writing Machine, and see Romano, Machine Writing and Typesetting. See also Adler. For a fuller account of the development of typewriter construction (including model specs) with emphasis on German typewriter production, see Kunzmann. 73 rigorous testing with professional telegraph operators and stenographers.141 The most noteworthy among them was James Ogilvie Clephane, the stenographer of choice at the

National Capitol, who would later play promoter for Ottmar Mergenthaler’s linotype machine, an apparatus which principally combined the keyboard technology of the typewriter with the typesetting of a printing press.142 By the late nineteenth century, the invention of the phonograph, the cinematograph, the telephone, the laying of the trans-

Atlantic telegraph cable, the linotype machine, the mimeograph, and the adding machine had transformed the way that information was communicated and recorded. These new communications technologies, the typewriter among them, sped up the transmission of information, which made the world feel smaller and more connected.

Beyond the piano-keyboard’s new association with the modernization of communication, the social inscription of the typewriter as feminine is observable in the construction of early promotional materials for Sholes’s “Type-Writer.” In 1872, for example, Sholes’s daughter posed with one of his experimental models in photographs, which later served as the basis for early advertisements.143 In one of the most well-known images (see Figure 3), “the world’s first typist,” Lillian Sholes sits at the machine with relaxed but upright posture. Though the photograph is a profile shot, it is apparent that her eyes are turned downward, and her face appears quiet and calm, but concentrated.

141 See Romano 6. Romano, however, does not mention that telegraph operators were used to test the prototypes. Rather, more recent research on the development of the QWERTY-keyboard, done by Kyoto University Researchers Koichi Yasuoka and Motoko Yasuoka and described in their 2011 paper, “On the Prehistory of QWERTY,” has revealed that telegraph operators were indeed consulted and even influenced the keyboard-orientation still employed on many devices today. 142 Romano 7. For more on the developmental phases of Sholes’s machine, see Romano 1-22. For more on James Clephane, Ottmar Mergenthaler, and the linotype machine, see Romano. 143 Julie Wosk. Women and the Machine: Representations from the Spinning Wheel to the Electronic Age. Baltimore & London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. 24. 74

While her right fingertips are poised atop the typewriter’s keys, as if she were about to play a tune, her left arm is outstretched delicately adjusting the paper-feed roller, as if turning a page of music. This image must have appeared to consumers in the late nineteenth century as uncannily familiar, since it possesses striking similarities to the common images (drawings, paintings, photographs) of nineteenth-century bourgeois women playing piano in their family parlors. Therefore, the picture of Lillian Sholes already began the association of women’s typewriter use with their use of other instruments in spaces socially coded as feminine.

Figure 3. Lillian Sholes at the Type-Writer in 1872 (left) and Victorian woman playing piano (right). 144

As is the nature of such representations, each of the images in Figure 3 are fundamentally disingenuous. Writing with a mechanical typewriter was neither a passive

144 Image of Lillian Sholes, copy owned by the State Historical Society of Wisconsin: Negative No. WHi (x313) 2865 http://www.library.wisc.edu/etext/wireader/Images/WER0773.html. Victorian woman playing piano, found at “Women and Music Gallery” http://avictorian.com/women_music_gallery.html. 75 nor delicate matter, for, to produce clean, even, and easily readable text, the user was required to remain in motion while simultaneously moderating the output of kinetic energy, so that the force was equally distributed throughout all of her fingers. Like piano playing, the act of typewriting was both physically active and restrained at the same time

– a tension that is absent in both photographs shown above. The noise of the typewriter alone, which Friedrich Kittler likened to machine-gun fire, prevented the activity of typing from being at all restful.145 Therefore, both of the above images diminish the physicality of typewriting and piano-playing to small, quiet motions that could be undertaken without disruption in a domestic space – a nuance that is vital in the construction of the image of feminine activity. In addition, by associating typewriter use with an already socially accepted skill for bourgeois women, domestic piano-playing, it appears that Sholes and his team had identified a target audience even before the device was sold to Remington. According to Petra Meyer-Frazier,

Instrumental music-making, especially playing the piano, was considered an essential domestic skill for middle- and upper-class women. […] It was important for women to understand that music rendered for pious, humble, domestic endeavors was constructive and uplifting, while music-making for the purposes of flaunting virtuosity for its own sake was destructive. Domestic music-making treated as a specifically female skill is presented as an illustration of separate spheres.146

So, while middle- and upper-class women in the nineteenth century were encouraged to play the piano in the home and to pass this skill on to their children, public displays of music-making were strictly taboo. Music-making on the piano in the domestic realm, as

145 Kittler, Gramophone, 191. 146 Petra Meyer-Frazier. “Music, novels, and women: nineteenth-century prescriptions for an ideal life.” Women & Music. 10 (2006): 45. 76 well as the instruments themselves, were coded as feminine in the early nineteenth century. This feminine coding was also reflected in alternative constructions of pianos for women. For example, in 1815 and almost exclusively in Germany and Austria, pianos were built into fine pieces of furniture, the very smallest of which were “dressing-table” and “sewing-table” pianos.147

Moreover, promotional images helped to domesticate the typewriter and engender its use by women in the domestic realm. The 1872 image of Lillian Sholes invokes the family parlor setting, implying that the strict social norms dictating women’s music- making also apply to their use of the typewriter, thus limiting women’s creative production of not only music, but also printed text to the confines of the home. Although the typical drapery was omitted from the background, the framing of the image – close enough to show the details of the device, but far enough away to capture its user with sensible pinned-up hair and long tiered pleated dress – reveals a young middle-class woman leisurely “playing” (as she does not appear to be working) on the new device in domestic surroundings. Since the household duties of bourgeois women at that time were not viewed as “work,” but rather were idealized as a “labor of love” by bourgeois society, this characterization of typewriting as a leisure activity would have fit with conventional gender norms.148

But, these early promotional images associating typewriting with domestic piano- playing were merely a first step toward coding the typewriter as feminine. As we have

147 Burnett, Richard. Company of Pianos. London: Finchcocks Press, 2004. 119. 148 Frevert, “Vom Klavier zur Schreibmaschine,” 82. Frevert outlines bourgeois perceptions of women’s housework: “[Die Frau sollte] in der sich entwickelnden bürgerlichen Gesellschaft nicht mehr ‘arbeiten’, sondern lediglich ‘liebend gestalten’; Hausarbeit wurde als Liebesdienst idyllisiert.” 77 seen in the promotional photographs with Lillian Sholes, the version of the Sholes and

Glidden “Type-Writer” sold to Remington in 1873 had outgrown its piano-keyboard from the initial patent. Yet, before its distribution in 1874, Remington mechanics revised the

Type-Writer for production and dressed it up like a sewing machine. The first Remington

No. 1 Type-Writer (manufactured 1873-1878), was positioned on a sewing-machine table and had a foot-treadle carriage. The model also donned elaborate gold and rose color stencils of flowers on the external cover and delicate portraits of women reading or wistfully gazing into nothing painted onto its façade.149 The overt ornamentation of

Remington’s first typewriter design has been viewed as a reflection of the company’s intention to promote its adoption in the home and its use by women.150 However, given the typewriter’s historical connection to apparatuses coded as feminine, it appears that

Remington was merely capitalizing on and reinforcing the gendered coding that had been built into the machine’s early design.

By understanding the sewing machine and piano as technological ancestors of the typewriter, we can begin to view typewriter’s hybridized construction as part of a long cultural process of imagining the feminine in terms of women’s bodies abutted to instruments of feminine crafts in domestic spaces. With this in mind, I argue that it was not only women’s active use of the typewriter in the office that coded the device as feminine, but gendered attributes of the users were potentially already inscribed in the object itself long before its introduction into the office. So, when women moved out of

149 For examples, see Dingwerth, Historische Schreibmaschinen, 107. The Technische Sammlungen Museum in Dresden, Germany also possess a well-preserved model with flowery ornamentation. 150 Bliven 57. 78 domestic spaces to use the device in the public realm of the office, this move would be both a liberating one and an already predetermined one. By portraying typing as a respectable and constructive activity fit for the home, advertising not only made way for the typewriter in the household, but also may have played an important role in establishing the female typist in the clerical workforce. Designs and advertisements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reinforced the notion of the typewriter as a specifically “feminine tool” with a “domestic nature” – pointing to the typewriter’s unspecified, but allegedly intrinsic feminine qualities. To support this marketing scheme, advertisers propagated associations between the techniques of typing and piano-playing, which lent credibility to the popular myth that “shorthand-typing seems to have been created for young women,” because piano lessons had uniquely prepared them with exceptional dexterity.151 Confirming the propagation of this myth in Germany, Otto

Burghagen, author of the first typewriter handbook in German, titled Die

Schreibmaschine: Ein praktisches Handbuch (1898), wrote:

Das Maschinenschreiben ist nicht schwerer und erfordert keine grössere (sic) Geschicklichkeit wie das Klavierspiel. Die Fingerfertigkeit, welche sich die jungen Damen beim Klavierspiel erworben haben, kommt ihnen beim Arbeiten auf der Schreibmaschine sehr zu statten. Überhaupt scheinen die weiblichen Finger an sich schon viel geeigneter für diese Beschäftigung zu sein, wie die ihrer männlichen Kollegen.152

151 Quoted in Gardey 326. See Delphine Gardey. “Mechanizing Writing and Photographing the Word: Utopias, Office Work and Histories of Gender and Technology.” History and Technology. Vol. 17.4 (2001): 319-352. 152 Otto Burghagen. Die Schreibmaschine: Ein praktisches Handbuch enthaltend alles Wissenswerte für Lernende wie für praktische Maschinenschreiber. Hamburg: Verlag der Handels-Akademie, 1898. 27. Translation: “Typewriting is not more difficult and demands no greater skillfulness than piano playing. The dexterity, which young women have acquired with piano playing, benefits them very much when working at the typewriter. Overall, the female/feminine fingers seem to be much more suitable for this occupation than those of their male colleagues.” 79

With this passage Burghagen continues to promote the misconception that women’s fingers are more adapted to typewriting. He even suggests that unlike men, women are able to achieve “eine so erstaunliche Virtuosität im Arbeiten auf der Maschine,” so that at the competition level, they are able to type a text as quickly as it is read.153 This connection between women’s piano-playing and typewriting persisted into the 1920s, when “Psychotechniker,” psychologists of technology, asked the question: if women from the middle classes had learned to play the piano, is it really easier for them to learn the Zehnfinger-Blindschreibmethode? Their technical study came to the conclusion that the amphitheater-like arrangement of the keys on the typewriter makes it unlike playing the piano. Also, when they surveyed professional female typists on the matter, typists with training in the piano stated that they perceived no detectable advantages over those who had never played an instrument. Bourgeois women did, however, have better education in language and orthography, so that enabled them to get better/easier employment as secretaries.154

Although the myth about the link between women’s piano playing and typewriting was popular with advertisers, they used the typewriter’s connection to the piano to market the device to male consumer demographics by characterizing it as a device for literary composition. Early American advertisers reportedly “thought of the typewriter as a literary machine, not a business machine. They went so far as to call it

‘the literary piano,’ expecting that novelists and poets would compose at it, much as

153 Ibid. Translation: “an astonishing virtuosity in working at the machine” 154 This data is based on a questionnaire cited in Bargholz. See especially page 215 for a discussion of this study performed by Weimar Psychotechniker. 80 musicians composed at the piano.”155 In the 1880s the act of creative composition, whether it be in literature or music, was still viewed as a chiefly masculine endeavor.

American music critic of the 1880s George P. Upton contended that “it does not seem that woman will ever originate music in its fullest and grandest harmonic forms. She will always be the recipient and interpreter, but there is little hope she will be the creator.”156

Therefore, the type of advertisement promoting the typewriter as a “literary piano” largely targeted men, within whom the ability for superior artistic production supposedly resided. Ultimately, late nineteenth-century advertisers used a variety of strategies to appeal to both men and women as individual prospective typewriter users and consumers.157

Although the connection between the typewriter and other “feminine” devices had been made, consumers still needed to be convinced that women’s machine use would allow them to maintain their femininity. Art historian Julie Wosk points out that patterns of representation in typewriter advertisements are part of a greater phenomenon in marketing new machines during the rise in product advertising in the late nineteenth century. Wosk underlines the overall goals of advertising campaigns at that time:

These advertisements and stories – selling women on the idea of machines and selling men on the idea of women using machines – were again shaped by conventional ideas about women’s inherent nature and proper social roles. Infused with stereotypes, they became a revealing reflection of pervasive cultural attitudes about women’s mechanical abilities and about women themselves. 158

155 Hoke 82-83. 156 Quoted in Randall 106. Randall, Annie Janeiro. “Eyes on the Composition Prize.” Contemporary Music Review Vol. 16 (1997): 105-111. 157 Hoke 83. 158 Wosk 23. 81

Selling men and women on the idea of women’s machine use is particularly observable in typewriter advertising, where advertisers made efforts to create the connection between femininity and typewriting. According to Christopher Keep, typewriter ads by both

Remington and its American competitors “invariably showed a fashionably-dressed and attractive young woman posing alongside a new machine” and that “[t]hese advertising campaigns helped to produce the cultural ‘fit’ between the normative values of femininity and typing.”159

Efforts to create this “cultural fit” between women and the typewriter also took place in Germany, but because of Germany’s late industrialization, marketers began selling the idea of woman and machine much later. Business offices in Germany began widely adopting the typewriter in the 1890s, and for the first decade, American machines

(and their advertisements) dominated the market. It was only after the turn of the twentieth century that German manufacturers more broadly commenced with their own production of typewriters. Therefore, by the time German companies were marketing their typewriters, advertising campaigns in the U.S. had already been shaping the gender identity of typewriting as feminine for almost two decades, since the 1880s.

While the shift from a more gender-neutral approach in advertising to a focus on women took place in the 1880s in the United States, Germany’s comparatively late arrival to the typewriter industry near the turn of the century, meant that this shift only became visible in the 1910s, when images of women first began to appear in German typewriter advertisements in significant numbers. In spite of this, these attitudes about the

159 Keep 405. See Christopher Keep’s article “The Cultural Work of the Type-Writer Girl.” Victorian Studies 40.3 (Spring 1997): 401-426. 82 feminine quality of typewriting cultivated in the U.S. did not immediately carry over.

During the first decade of the twentieth century, German ads were largely informational and not gender specific, perhaps because of the vehement protests from male clerking organizations about women’s entry into office work. All of this signifies that Germany experienced similar trends in advertising the typewriter, but on a different timeline that only began to inextricably link women and typing in the 1910s. During this time, women were portrayed as users of the machine, and even if they are not actually typing, female figures are displayed with some sort of bodily connection to the device. For more on how the physical connection between women and typewriters manifests in German advertising from the turn of the century through the Weimar era, refer to Chapter 3.

2.3 From Blind-Writers to Writing Blind: The Perils of Seeing when Typewriting

Another cultural and historical thread related to the typewriter, and one that is particularly relevant to the German context, concerns the association between mechanical writing and vision. Typewriter history has gone from writing machines for the visually impaired to “blind-writers” and “visible type” to “writing blind.” In essence, writing machines and typewriters not only tear “writing from the essential realm of the hand” as

Heidegger famously put it, they have tested and ultimately severed the connection between the eye, the hand, and the text.160 This thread raises important philosophical questions about the materiality of writing with a machine that also allow for the critical examination of pedagogical methods for training (female) typists.

160 See Heidegger, Parmenides, 80. 83

Several early writing machines were developed specifically for use by the visually impaired, such as the Fantoni writing machine (1802), Charles Thurber’s “Chirographer”

(1843), the Foucauld writing machine (1839/1850), and Malling Hansen’s “Writing Ball”

(1865/1867), among others.161 The Writing Ball (or “Skrivekugle” in Danish) was invented by Pastor Rasmus Malling Hansen specifically for use by blind and mute patients at a Copenhagen institute. This device also holds a special place in German intellectual history, since a nearly blind Friedrich Nietzsche used the device for a short period in 1882. With regard to its writing mechanism, the Writing Ball employed a push rod system (also known as a plunger system), in which the keys were positioned on the heads of small spring-loaded rods protruding from a central cylinder, an aesthetically pleasing design feature which resembles the stamen emerging from the center of a flower that has also been described as “crown-like.”162 The device’s fast writing-speed made it practical enough for administrative use in offices and other official means of communication.

For almost two months, from early February to late March 1882, Nietzsche composed short two- and four-line poems, as well as letters and unaddressed postcards – a total of 34 pages of typed text – with his “Schreibkugel.”163 Nietzsche was not only the

161 See Kunzmann, Hundert Jahre Schreibmaschine, for a more complete list. See also Adler, 152-157. Adler explains that patent dates for the Writing Ball are deceptive, since patents were not granted in Denmark at that time. As a result, the first patent on the Malling-Hansen Writing Ball was at the time of its manufacture 1870 in Britain, although Hansen reportedly delivered his second improved model to the manufacturer Jürgens Mekaniske Establissement sometime between 1867 and 1869. 162 See Kunzmann for a description of the technical features of Hansen’s Writing Ball (56-57). For more detail, see Adler 152-157. The description comparing the Writing Ball’s structure to a flower is my own. 163 Stephan Günzel, “Nietzsches Schreibmaschine,” In: Friedrich Nietzsche’s Schreibmaschinentexte. Vollständige Edition Faksimiles und kritischer Kommentar. Ed. Stephan Günzel and Rüdiger Schmidt- Grépály. Bauhaus-Universität Weimar: Universitätsverlag, 2002. 9-14. For more details on Nietzsche’s use of the Writing Ball and reproductions of the texts, see Schreibmaschinentexte. 84 first philosopher to compose on a writing machine, but he also became the first thinker

“to fully recognize that theoretical and philosophical speculations are the effects of the commerce between bodies and media technologies.”164 Nietzsche’s typed letters and poems contain observations about how Hansen’s Writing Ball transformed the writing process. At the end of February 1882, for example, Nietzsche observed that “Die

Schreibmaschine ist zunaechst angreifender als irgend welches Schreiben (sic),” and most famously, “Unser Schreibzeug arbeitet mit an unseren Gedanken.” 165 Nietzsche’s ruminations on the effects of mechanical writing motivated later theorists and philosophers, Heidegger, Kittler, and Jacques Derrida, among them, to investigate the writing process more closely.

Along with the writing machines designed explicitly for the visually impaired, the nineteenth century also witnessed the simultaneous invention of “blind-writers.” These devices were also known as “up-strike” machines, because that they printed on the underside of the platen, so that the operator could not see the characters at the moment of inscription. In order to see the typed print, the operator had to stand up and lift the hinged carriage.166 Versions of this type of machine included Pietro Conti’s “Tachigrafo”

(1823), Austrian inventor, Peter Mitterhofer’s five experimental writing machines (1864-

164 See Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz’s Translators’ Introduction in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 1999. xxix. 165 Günzel and Schmidt-Grépály 18, 19. Both letters were written by Nietzsche at the end of February, 1882, and clear reproductions are shown here in Schreibmaschinentexte. Presumably, the Writing Ball did not have a shift mechanism, for Nietzsche wrote each of his texts in all uppercase letters. I have transcribed them here in conventional upper- and lowercase print, as a means of not assigning them undue emphasis. Translations: “The writing machine (or Writing Ball) is at first more aggressive than other types of writing.” “Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts.” 166 See Bliven 55-57. 85

1869), and the Remington models No. 1 and 2 (1873/1878), among others.167 Although this specific category of machines have come to be known as “blind-writers,” the truth was that most of the early writing machines obscured the printed text it produced. It was not until German-American Franz X. Wagner’s invention of “visible type” on the

“Underwood” typewriter in 1896 that the visibility problem of the “up-strike” machines was solved by the development of the “front-strike” mechanism. This meant that the type-bar would hit the front of the platen instead of the underside, which allowed the typewriter user to see the printed character at the moment of inscription.168 Although the invention of “visible type” marked an important turning point in typewriter design that had the potential to restore the connection between the mind, hand, and eye during inscription, the necessity of vision when typewriting had already been called into question by the 1890s.

In 1888, American Frank E. McGurrin demonstrated his “touch typing” method, known as “Blindschreiben” or the “Zehnfingersystem” in German, at the first typewriter speed-competition. With his success, McGurrin essentially proved that the typewriter

167 See Lang and Krüger and Ernst Martin’s Die Schreibmaschine und ihre Entwicklungsgeschichte (Pappenheim, 1949). The first writing-machine history to shed light on Mitterhofer’s inventions was Dr. Rudolf Granichstaedten-Czerva’s monograph Peter Mitterhofer, Erfinder der Schreibmaschine (1923), in which he claimed that Carlos Glidden saw Mitterhofer’s machine while in Vienna, copied it, and went back to the United States to have it manufactured. Other early German typewriter histories, like Ernst Martin’s Die Schreibmaschine und ihre Entwicklungsgeschichte, claim that were Mitterhofer’s machine taken up by German arms manufacturers, that the typewriter would be considered a German gadget today. In Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Friedrich Kittler points to “unconfirmed rumors” that “have suggested that Sholes sold the Remington company a patent that he had stolen from the poor Tyrolean Peter Mitterhofer” (190). Several more recent histories engage with Peter Mitterhofer’s life and work, see Richard Krcal and Peter Basten’s “1864/1964 Peter Mitterhofer und seine Schreibmaschine,” Dr. Anton Hager and Anny Schwarz’s “Bayrische Blätter für Stenographie 1977,” and Alfred Waiz’s “Peter Mitterhofer und seine fünf Schreibmaschinen-Modelle.” See also Kunzmann 58-60. 168 See Kunzmann 111-112. Wagner was born in Heimbach bei Neuwied am Rhein in 1837 and emigrated to the U.S. in 1864, where he contributed to the development of several typewriter models (e.g., “Caligraph,” “Densmore,” then finally the “Underwood”). 86 was still uniquely adapted to the blind, because it was only by locating the symbols through touch, shown to be much faster than sight, that the typist could reach the typewriter’s full potential as an instrument of speed. Keep astutely points out that, “if there was an irony in this revelation, it lay in the fact that what was once an aid to the visually impaired now seemed to produce the very condition it was designed to allay.”169

More than just a set of exercises or a method learned through disciplined practice, “touch typing” was about “writing blind,” i.e. translating individual signs into physical impulses with little or no visual contact with the inscribed text and without reading or comprehending the content of the original message. Therefore, good practice in typewriting came to be associated with limiting or eliminating one’s visual contact with the text. When teaching touch typing, instructors even restricted students’ vision by using blindfolds or by simply obscuring the keys with a notebook. (See Figure 4).170

169 Keep, “Blinded by the Type,” 150. For more on McGurrin, the subject of “touch typing,” and its cultural effects, see Keep’s full article. 170 For more about the Lehrinstitut Grone and its practices, see: www.grone.de. Image in Figure 4 accessed February 2015. See Bargholz, especially page 209, for a lengthier discussion on the introduction and instruction of the “touch system” in Germany. Blindfolds and music were used during typing lessons to teach "Blindschreiben." 87

Figure 4. An image from the "Schreib- und Handels-Lehrinstitut Grone," established by Heinrich Grone in Hamburg, circa 1905/1910.

In the U.S., the touch-typing method became a convention in the professionalization of typists in the 1890s.171 In Germany, however, Handelsschulen

(vocational schools), like the Schreib- and Handels-Lehrinstitut Grone in Hamburg, only began to teach the touch system in the first decade of the twentieth century, and it was only during the interwar period that the “Blindschreibmethode” had become a fixed component in the training programs offered by vocational schools. Contributing to the methods of instruction for this discipline in the German context were typewriter manuals

(“Lehrbücher” and “Handbücher”) beginning with Burghagen’s famous book in 1898, and continuing with Ferdinand Schrey’s Der tüchtige Stenotypist (1910/11), Josef

Weißer’s Die gangbarsten Schreibmaschinen (1929), and Erich A. Klockenberg’s technical-psychological study, Rationalisierung der Schreibmaschine und ihrer

Bedienung (1926). Each of these works has received recent critical attention by scholars,

171 See Keep, “Blinded by the Type,” 157. 88 because they not only introduced a set of practices and exercises used to train generations of typists, but they also contributed in different ways to a quasi-medical discourse

(physiology and psychology) that explained and justified these practices.172

Burghagen, for example, points out that although the typewriter had been used in offices for several years, the majority of typists have not had formal training, and that there is a distinct “Mangel jeder Methode in diesem Unterrichtsfach.”173 To fill this need,

Burghagen sets out to offer the first “systematischen Lehrgang für den

Schreibmaschinen-Unterricht, und zwar nach der Methode des Zehn-Finger-Systems,” so that one may type “ohne einen Blick auf das Tastenbrett werfen zu brauchen.”174

Consequently, Burghagen claims, there are quite a few health benefits to typewriting over writing with the quill: “Arbeiten mit der Feder erschöpft Körper und Geist!” Writing by hand caused debilitated hand-muscles leading to writing cramps, and bending the torso over the desk while writing restricted the chest and weakened the lungs. With a kind of fairytale optimism, Burghagen proposes that the typewriter may counteract the health risks associated with handwriting. He claims that if one sits upright at the typewriter, one feels relatively “frisch” and “nicht im geringsten angegriffen,” even after many hours of work: “In dieser Lage kommt die Schreibmaschine als ein Retter in der Not. Sie verhütet

172 See Keep’s “Blinded by the Type” for a discussion of this discourse in English-speaking contexts. See also Bargholz and Kittler for examples of scholarly responses to these handbooks. 173 Burghagen 4-5. Translation: a distinct “lack of any method in this field of instruction” 174 Ibid. Emphasis in original. Translation: the first “systematic course of instruction for typewriter classes that would be according to the ten-finger-system” so that one may learn to type “without the need to cast a glimpse at the keyboard.” 89 das Übel nicht nur, sondern sie heilt es auch.”175 Burghagen casts the typewriter as a technological savior liberating copyists from the slow, exhausting drudgery and health hazards associated with writing by hand. For him, the typewriter is neither merely an extension of the body, nor a mechanical prosthetic; rather, it has the ability to heal or cure the defective body in labor. The typewriter allegedly benefits the eyes in particular, since the typist “schont ferner seine Augen, die beim Arbeiten mit der Feder (namentlich beim

Lampenlicht) stark angegriffen werden. Bei einiger Übung kann man sogar im Dunkeln auf der Maschine arbeiten, denn Blinde lernen bekanntlich sehr leicht auf derselben schreiben.”176 All in all, Burghagen regards “visible type,” and, thus, the eye as completely unnecessary, even inconsequential, once one has become a practiced typist.

For him, relinquishing the use of one’s eyes altogether, e.g. writing in the dark, is the most natural mode of interfacing with the typewriter. While Burghagen describes writing blind as the height of a typist’s training, he does not cite any serious negative repercussions for using one’s eyes while typewriting.

Over a decade later, Schrey continues this pseudo-medical discourse, not by noting the healing effects of typewriting, by emphasizing the appearance of a

“typewriter-illness,” which he claims is a negative consequence of using a poorly constructed typewriter model. Instead of attributing this illness to typewriter users’ improper form or technique, Schrey faults typewriters with a particular design flaw, the

175 Ibid. 25-26. Translations: “Work with the quill exhausts the body and mind!” “fresh” and “not affected in the least” “In this situation the typewriter comes as a knight in shining armor. It not only prevents evil/illness, but it heals/cures it as well. Emphasis added. 176 Ibid. 26. Translation: The typist “conserves moreover his eyes, which while working with a quill (especially by lamplight) are strongly affected. With some practice one can even work at the machine in the dark, because the visually impaired, as is well-known, have learned to write very easily on the same machine.” 90 type-bar mechanism. According to him, the sharp “staccato”-strikes of the type-bar typewriter cause “Schreibmaschinenkrankheit, einer besonderen Art von Nervenkrankheit ausgesetzt, die unter den Schreibern von Typenhebelmaschinen, besonders bei Damen, so große Verwüstungen angerichtet.”177 These nervous disorders, much like hysteria at the turn of the century, were regarded as diseases specific to (working) women. Women’s sensitivity and essential defectiveness were perceived as part of their nature that made them vulnerable to such diseases. It is also important to note that Schrey’s typewriter manual functioned both as instructional and promotional material for the Hammond typewriter, which employed an alternative keyboard to the “universal” (QWERTZ) keyboard used by Remington. Since the true causes of typewriter-illness were rather ill- defined, this disorder became a way for writers of typewriter manuals to justify their claims, including their proposed methods of instruction and, as is the case with Schrey, the promotion of a specific the typewriter model.

“Maschinenschreiberin, Tipperin oder Stenotypistin?” According to the opinions of the experts of rationalization during the 20s and 30s, this was the most meaningful question a hiring manager should ask before employing a typist, i.e. Is she trained and does she use the “touch system” or “Zehnfinger-Blindschreiben” system? In the times before the mass introduction of electric typewriters in the 50s and 60s, this question was extremely important and often debated by those contributing to the pseudo-scientific discourse on typewriting, as well as sociologists and clerks’ organizations.178

177 Ferdinand Schrey. Der tüchtige Stenotypist auf der Hammond-Schreibmaschine. Berlin: Ferdinand Schrey Verlag, 1910/1911. 6. Translation: “Typewriter-illness, a particular type of nervous disorder that have seriously depredated operators of type-bar machines, particularly women.” 178 Bargholz 209. 91

With the drive to rationalize the office and the adoption of Taylorist methods of production, typewriter manuals of the Weimar era display a new intensity for shaping and regulating the body in typewriting. Weimar handbooks typically tout the power of

“Blindschreiben” to maximize typists’ productivity and efficiency in ways that capture the “Rationalisierungseuphorie” of the late-Weimar era.179 In essence, these handbooks examine the “Mensch-Maschine-Beziehung” more closely, even scientifically, and attempt to create of a stronger system of supervision, which subordinates the entire body to the disciplining force of rationalizing and mechanizing forms of work.180

To justify their systems, typewriter handbooks appearing during the late-Weimar era, Josef Weißer’s 1929 book among them, warned of the dangers, not of stop-watches or specific machines, but of “Tippen” or “Sehendschreiben.” No longer was the typewriter an extension of the body, a technological prosthetic with the potential to heal the defective body, as Burghagen proposed. Instead, it was a device that could be hazardous to its user’s health if used incorrectly (re: inefficiently). According to Weißer, straning the eyes, in particular, led to typewriter-illnesses.

Bei diesem Zusammenarbeiten von Kopf, Finger und Auge haben die Augen eine Riesenarbeit zu leisten, die man viel zu wenig beachtet. [...] Ist es da noch verwunderlich, wenn die Maschinenschreiber über Nervenanspannung, Kopfschmerzen und Müdigkeit klagen, wenn sie schliesslich eine Schädigung der Gesundheit feststellen müssen? Aber auch das viele Umherwandern der Finger im Raume der Tastatur ist anstrengend. Darum fort mit dem unzweckmäßigen, Körper und Geist unnötig belastenden Sehendschreiben oder Tippen. Die einzig richtige Art

179 See Bargholz 210 for “rationalization euphoria” 180 See Fritz 49-50. 92

Maschine zu schreiben ist das Blindschreiben, das Maschinenschreiben unter Ausschaltung des Gesichtssinnes.181

In this account, it was not the typist’s unnecessary use of the eyes to check her work, a reflection of her desire to find visual traces of the self in the uniform typed text, a prevalent feature of English-speaking discourses on this subject, as Keep has shown.

Instead, according to Weißer, vision itself is the problem. Weißer is, of course, troubled by the issues of reduced productivity and efficiency, as a result of the typist’s undisciplined eye movement from the keyboard to the original copy and the printed output. Yet, at the same time, Weißer is of the opinion that vision is not inconsequential, as Burghagen sees it, and in fact, the visual faculty is a burden, an encumbrance to production that can even wreak havoc on the body.

Suhr’s 1930 sociological study confirms the real physical damage women experienced in typewriter work.182 Many of the survey’s participants complained that they could not long endure the intensely rapid and stressful pace demanded of them by firms, for it was negatively impacting their health. Indeed, the most frequent damaging effect of modern businesses on employees’ health was nervous exhaustion. Suhr cites comments from several of her survey-participants, who refer to their work on the machine as “nervenzerstörend” and “eine derartige nervenaufreibende Tätigkeit” that no

181 Josef Weißer. Die gangbarsten Schreibmaschinen und die Entwicklungsgeschichte der Schreibmaschine. Hilfsbuch für Maschinenschreiber und für Prüfungskandidaten der Stenotypisten- und Lehramtsprüfung. Leipzig: Franz Deuticke, 1929. 95-96. Translation: With this cooperation of head, finger, and eye, the eyes have a huge job to do, to which one pays far too little attention. [...] Is it still a wonder, whenever the typists complain about nervous tension, headaches and tiredness, whenever they must finally declare damage to their health? But also that lots of wandering around of the fingers in the space of the keyboard is strenuous. For that reason, away with the inexpedient, body and mind unnecessarily irksome hunt-and-peck typing. The only correct way to write with the machine is touch typing, mechanical writing under the elimination (switching off) of the visual sense. 182 Susanne Suhr. Die weiblichen Angestellten. Berlin: Zentralverband des Angestelltenbund, 1930. 93 one could endure for eight-and-a-half hours a day for long. 183 After seven years working at such a pace, one typist explained that she “muβte wegen Zerrüttung der Nerven aufhören,” and another secretary from an editorial department stated, “da bei dem ganz und gar überhasteten Arbeitstempo die Nervosität immer stärker wird.” 184 Among the negative health effects associated with typewriting reported in insurance statistics of the

1920s, included headaches, eye pain, pelvic complaints, foot and leg ailments, hearing damage, hand-swelling, and others. In 1925, a questionnaire conducted by the German federal trade commission (Staatliche Gewerbeaufsicht) determined that “die Arbeit einer

Stenotypistin” could last on average not longer than ten years. Unfortunately, a legally regulated set of health and safety measures to protect female white-collar worker, has not yet been established.185

Taking rationalization to new heights and contributing to this quasi-medical discourse on typewriting and vision during the twenties and early thirties was the work of

“Psychotechniker.” They tested various models of typewriters, which manufacturers advertised as the ultimate equipment for the touch-typing system, and they explored health-related arguments explaining why “Tippen” could damage one’s health.186

Klockenberg, in particular, performed thorough investigations into the benefits and drawbacks of both writing methods “Blindschreiben” and “Tippen” (hunt-and-peck typing). In so doing, he attempted to identify the best ways to create “eine organische

183 Suhr 335. Translations: “nerve destroying” and “such a nerve-wracking occupation” 184 Ibid. Translations: “she had to stop because of disruption to her nerves” and “the overly-hasty work speed made their nervousness stronger.” 185 Ibid. 336. 186 See Bargholz 209 for more on the work of Psychotechniker and their work about typewriters during the Weimar era. Also, in the case of Klockenberg’s tests, he notes that he mostly used Mercedes model machines. 94

Verbindung des Komplexes Mensch und Maschine.”187 With the goal of establishing an

“optimal” physical connection between body and machine that included the eye,

Klockenberg systematically dissects every physiological aspect of the typewriting body.

To be clear, Klockenberg’s work is not of the handbook variety, but rather a peculiar kind of psycho-technical scientific study that sought to rationalize and ultimately discipline the

(female) body at work. It presents a remarkable, even grotesque level of detail with full chapter sections each individually dedicated to the position of a different body part: the back, the underarms, upper arms, wrists, fingers, etc.

For example, in his section on eyes, titled “Augenbelastung (Blickrichtung,

Beleuchtung)” (eye strain, line of sight, lighting), Klockenberg describes an experiment meant to determine the optimum angle and distance for a typist’s sightline to the original text to be copied. In the experiment, the participants were asked to focus on a table containing numbers, then they were to close their eyes. Upon opening them, they were to read the numbers aloud as they saw them. As the participants read, the scientist measured whether their pupils stood in the center of their eyes or not. Klockenberg uses information, such as this, to determine the optimum conditions for mechanical writing with a typewriter. Ultimately, he determines that “Die zweifache Beanspruchung der

Augen beim Tippen, die im Überfliegen des Tastfeldes und im Ablesen der Vorlage besteht,” make this method “unbrauchbar.”188 Klockenberg’s assessment of

“Blindschreiben” as superior and “Tippen” as corrupt and untenable is essentially in line

187 Klockenberg. 3. Translation: an organic connection of the complex human and machine. 188 Klockenberg 116. See also 116-125 for his experiments with sight. Translation: “The dual operational demands of the eyes while hunt-and-peck typing, which consist of scanning the key-field and reading the original text,” make this method “corrupt/unusable.” 95 with the opinion of handbook writers. But, what is striking about his work is the precision with which he measures the body’s impulses and movements to arrive at these conclusions.

Klockenberg’s detailed investigation of the body in typewriting also contributed to how female clerks’ organizations, namely the Verband der weiblichen Handels- und

Büroangestellten (VWA), debated the usefulness and long-term viability of

“Blindschreiben” in the late-Weimar era. In particular, an article appeared in the magazine “Die Handels- und Büroangestellte” in 1927 with the title “Tastenschreiben und Tippen,” in which the VWA sought to describe the advantages of touch typing, described here as “Tastenschreiben.” The article and the organization referenced “die psychotechnischen Untersuchungen Klockenbergs” and argued that hunt-and-peck typing is “in höchstem Grade gesundheitsschädlich” because the wandering of the eye from the notes to the machine can make one nervous and likewise, “die ungesunde, gebeugte

Körperhaltung” can make one sick.189 The dissemination of these ideas increased competition between “Stenotypistinnen” (touch typists) and “Tipperinnen” (hunt-and- peck typists) in the office, putting greater pressure on their abilities to maintain high speeds and efficiency.

Klockenberg’s highly detailed examination of the body in typewriting was characteristic of the “Rationalisierungseuphorie” at the end of the 1920s. During this time, the alleged knowledge gathered by “Psychotechniker” was used as a pretense for implementing strict disciplinary practices: “Mit dem Mittel des militärischen Drills

189 Bargholz 110. Translations: “Klockenbergs psycho-technical investigations,” “is damaging to one’s health in the highest degree,” “the unhealthy 96 sollten Frauen unmerklich an die gleichförmigen, mechanisierten Arbeitsabläufe gewöhnt und zu Höchstleistungen angetrieben werden.”190 Female typists, trained in the production of uniform print, were also taught to operate in highly regulated uniform, mechanical ways. Above all, the egotistic visual faculty, i.e. the dangerous desire to find traces of the self in the typed script or to see one’s fingers on the keyboard, was to be abandoned, surrendered so that they may more seamlessly join the ranks of homogeneity.

In this strict regulation of the body, we see the movement towards mechanizing the female body that will let us understand more about how the relationship between the body and machine was imagined by cultural producers as we move along.

Conclusion

The multivalence of the woman-machine connection, often manifested as the female automaton, resonates deeply within Weimar cultural perceptions of the female typist interacting with her machine. Efforts to rationalize the mechanized female body in typewriting were simply about maintaining control and discipline over women’s new movement in the public realm of the office, for, the collective drive to rationalization itself, particularly in the late-Weimar era, became merely a way to establish a sense of control amidst a time of chaos.

190 Bargholz 217. Translation: “By means of military drills, women were supposed to imperceptibly adapt to the homogenous, mechanized operational procedures and be driven to maximum performance/output.” 97

Chapter 2: The New Woman-Machine: Rationalized Bodies and Automatic Minds in Weimar Popular Fiction

Introduction

Having determined the perceived link between women and mechanical work in the last chapter, we can now turn to an investigation of portrayals of typewriting women in popular literature of the late-Weimar era, in order to unpack the imagined physical and mental connection between woman and machine. I first demonstrate that writers took up the literary subject of the female office worker, and more specifically the female typist, as a symbolic and historical figure of the turbulent socio-economic and political conditions of the interwar era. Of the novels focused on female typists, Christa Anita Brück’s

Schicksale hinter Schreibmaschinen (1930) and Irmgard Keun’s Gilgi-eine von uns

(1931) present particularly astute visions of female typists and typewriting that draw on the authors’ own experiences as former professionals. In doing so, Keun and Brück construct realistic narratives that can be read as meditations on women’s lived experiences within the shifting social and cultural codes of the Weimar period. Brück and Keun cast their female typists in the idealized mold of the New Woman: ambitious, disciplined, and independent. According to Angelika Führich, these two narratives present very different perceptions of women’s roles in modernization in Weimar

Germany.191 She points out that while Keun’s figure embraces the typewriter as a machine that empowers her to lead an independent life, Brück’s narrative rejects the machine as a medium of dominance that dismembers and alienates its users.192 Führich’s reading essentially polarizes the novels: Keun’s narrative is optimistic with regard to the opportunities open to women with typing skills, and Brück’s novel tends to cast the female typist as a victim without the possibility to achieve independence. I take this socio-historical reading a step further by closely examining moments when the female protagonists interface with the machines. Such moments point to the destabilization of the boundaries of the female body/mind, as well as tensions between the body and the machine, the biological and mechanical—tensions within the edifice of the cyborg.

Contrary to Führich’s analysis, the results of this examination show that Keun and

Brück’s perspectives on typewriting women are similar. I argue that, in their intimate portrayals of female typists interfacing with typewriters, Keun and Brück ponder female embodiment of the automatic and mechanical modes that were considered valuable for

(textual) production and reproduction at the time. I read the figures’ automatism and mechanical physicality as coping mechanisms, means of retreat from the stress and emotional trauma in their lives. It is in these terms that Keun and Brück implicitly respond to the attempts to rationalize the female body and mind during the specific historical moment of the Weimar era, namely the new restrictions imposed upon women by the Sex Reform movement, Paragraph 218, and the rationalization of office work.

191 Führich, “Typewriters: Discursive Technology in Women’s Narratives of Weimar Germany,” 92. 192 Ibid. 99

To construct this analysis, I map Muri’s and Haraway’s concepts of the cyborg onto literary depictions of the Weimar New Woman operating the mechanical typewriter.

In this chapter, I propose that a form of the cyborg emerges in Brück and Keun’s late-

Weimar novels that is specific to the historical moment of the Weimar era: the New

Woman-Machine. With these readings and the autobiographical nature of the novels in mind, I also contest Friedrich Kittler’s claim that Brück and Keun owe their transition to authorship to their careers as typists.

I. Cyborg Imagery: Visions of the New Woman

My concept of the cyborg is the successor of the seventeenth- and eighteenth- century iterations of the cyborg identified by Allison Muri,193 and a precursor to Donna

Haraway’s socialist-feminist formulation of the late twentieth-century cyborg.194 In this section, I situate my notion of the Weimar New Woman-Machine within this ongoing discourse and distinguish it as distinctly bound to Germany’s interwar era.

In The Enlightenment Cyborg, Muri extends Haraway’s notion of the cyborg by looking back to seventeenth-century notions of the body as machine and by highlighting the various configurations, the human-machine, man-machine, and woman-machine, which emerged in the Enlightenment era. Muri differentiates the twentieth-century cyborg from its earlier versions, like the Woman-Machine, which is wedded to a more

193 See Allison Muri. The Enlightenment Cyborg: A History of Communications and Control in the Human Machine, 1660-1830. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 2007. 194 See Donna Haraway. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.’ Sex/Machine: Readings in Culture, Gender, and Technology. Ed. Patrick D. Hopkins. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. See also Haraway’s “Cyborg and Symbionts: Living Together in the New World Order.” Forward. The Cyborg Handbook. Ed. Chris Hables Gray. New York: Routledge, 1995. 100 specific set of questions and problems concerning the mechanized female body. Muri reports that the discourse surrounding the male-body-machine is quite different from the treatment of the female body with its reproductive mechanisms that enable it to change, react, and adapt automatically during pregnancy.195 In seventeenth-century Western

Europe, the male body was viewed as a prototype of the human machine, while the female body was conceived as “abnormal, inherently defective, and dangerously under the influence of nature,” which left it “in need of constant manipulation by man.”196 This metaphor of the “female body as a defective machine” was used to form the philosophical foundations of modern obstetrics, a series of developments that led to the decline of the midwife and increase in the “male-attended, mechanically manipulated birth” in the late nineteenth century.197

Muri’s history of the Woman-Machine reveals that woman was never perceived as a perfect machine. In the Weimar era, in particular, women contended with a number of forces that sought to discipline and regulate the female body in its biological reproductive functions as well as in its new role in industrialization and modernization of the German nation. The Sex Reform movement, the anti-abortion law Paragraph 218,

Weimar body culture, and the adoption of rationalization and Taylorist methods of efficiency and productivity, all supported the notion that women’s bodies were sites of disorder and defect in need of regulation.

195 See Allison Muri’s fifth chapter entitled “The Woman-Machine: Techno-lust and Techno-reproduction” in the Enlightenment Cyborg. Especially pages 175-179. 196 Robbie Davis-Floyd and Joseph Dumit. Cyborg Babies: From Techno-Sex to Techno-Tots, 1998. 3-4. 197 See Muri 175-179. 101

With regard to the politics of reproduction, women’s lived experience in the

Weimar era was to some extent shaped by the Sex Reform movement, the basic mission of which was, at least in part, still yoked to the seventeenth-century European ideals about the regulation of the female body that Muri outlines. Sex Reform was a mass movement made up of working-class organizations and members of the medical professions, who sought to correct and discipline sexual behavior. Clinics were set up to provide working-class women with reliable birth control, family planning resources, and therapy to combat sexual dysfunction. In so doing, sex reformers “aimed to bring a certain order, regularity, and discipline into working-class lives” by extending the rationalization of industrial production and work processes to the household.198 Like the rationalized workplace, the bedroom became a highly regulated space, in which husbands were expected to rely on reformers’ sex manuals to arouse their wives.199 In this way, women’s domestic lives became more structured than ever before, and their bodies were viewed as birthing and pleasure machines in need of performance training. At the core of these attitudes toward the female body was the rational discourse of machine culture that played a central role in communicating best practices for their parts as wives and mothers.200

Sex reformers also sought to harness the image of the New Woman as

“independent and sexy” and reform her identity as one who could negotiate marriage,

198 Atina Grossmann. “Girlkultur or Thoroughly Rationalized Female: A New Woman in Weimar Germany?” Women in Culture and Politics: A Century of Change. Eds. Judith Friedlander, Blanche Wiesen Cook, et al. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. 63. 199 See Barbara Hales. “Taming of the Technological Shrew: Woman as Machine in Weimar Culture.” Neophilologus Vol. 94.2 (April 2010): 301-316. 302. 200 Grossmann. “Girlkultur or Thoroughly Rationalized Female,” 71. 102 family, work, and a healthy sex-life. To do so, they “posited a New Woman who was no longer either an angel in the home nor a working drudge, but a thoroughly rationalized female: the efficient juggler of the double burden.”201 Atina Grossmann’s identification of the “thoroughly rationalized female” highlights new dimensions of the figure of the

New Woman, by demonstrating how sex reformers imbued her with values of their cause.

In their view, the female body was to be functional, efficient, and mechanized in all forms of labor – domestic, industrial, and reproductive. So, it was not merely the woman’s reproductive mechanism that was viewed as defective, as in the seventeenth century, but also her ability to manage the multiple burdens of her existence.

Because of the established connection between the female body and the mechanical, recent scholarship has pointed to the tendency of Weimar cultural production to conflate or equate woman and machine in the Weimar era. 202 For example, Germanist

Barbara Hales claims that this conflation of woman and machine is rooted in “a deep- seated notion resulting from women’s role in the reproductive process” and that the metaphor of woman as birthing machine takes on new meaning in the context of industrialization.203 Contrary to conventional wisdom, I believe that the connection between woman and machine, female typist and typewriter as it is portrayed in Brück and

Keun’s novels is much more nuanced and complex than a relationship of conflation or equation. Instead of simply conflating woman and machine, these texts posit that the

201 Ibid. 63. 202 See Hales, “Taming of the Technological Shrew.” See also Andreas Huyssen. “Vamp and the Machine.” After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1986. 203 See Hales 301. 103 female figures take on automatic and mechanical modes when interfacing with the typewriter, and that these modes serve as coping mechanisms for them in their emotional lives. As we will see, this notion of automatism as a kind of coping mechanism or mental retreat also adds another dimension to the claims by contemporary techno-psychologists that mechanical and automatic modes can protect typists from the health risks and

“dangers” of typewriting for long hours.

In the mid-1920s, methods for shaping and regulating the body in typewriting intensified due to the adoption of a plan of rationalization, that is, new methods to maximize productivity and lower production costs through measures of organizational efficiency. According to the rhetoric of the time, rationalization was supposed to assist with the recovery and reorganization of the nation after the economic upheaval and tremendous losses incurred after WWI and hyperinflation by modernizing and streamlining the German economy.204 Under the umbrella term “rationalization,”

German businesses enthusiastically implemented American industrial production methods, including Ford’s assembly line and Taylor’s system of “scientific management,” including the workplace “quota.” In order to understand how the body could most efficiently write with the machine, “Psychotechniker” (technical psychologists) tried to identify the best ways to create “eine organische Verbindung des

204 For a lengthier discussion of the rationalization movement and the debates surrounding it, see J. Ronald Shearer. “Talking about Efficiency: Politics and the Industrial Rationalization Movement in the Weimar Republic.” Central European History. Vol. 28.4 (1995): 483-506. 104

Komplexes Mensch und Maschine” (an organic connection of the human-machine- complex) by shaping the machine-construction to its user, and vice versa.205

This notion of establishing an “organische Verbindung” (organic connection) is based on contemporary experts’ assumption that human and machine can and should fit together naturally and harmoniously as necessary parts of a whole. One way of achieving this organic connection between user and machine that was proposed by psychologists and authors of typewriter handbooks was by training typists in the practice of

“Blindschreiben” (the touch-typing system). As we discussed in the previous chapter, touch typing required typists to train with limited visual range, and they were not permitted to look at the typewriter keys or the final product of inscribed text. Therefore, as I understand it, this organic connection was imagined as a chiefly physical one favoring the kinesthetic sense over the visual, so that the typewriter user would cultivate a symbiotic relationship with the machine through the sense of bodily movement, i.e. through touch, body position, muscle movement, and controlled force. One result of developing this relationship through bodily movement is that it confounds the organic (as in natural and living) and mechanical by blurring the boundaries between human and machine movement: when the typist pushes a key, the tension in the key’s spring pushes back. Gradually, muscle memory allows the typist’s movements become more automated, and the machine begins to respond to its use. The keys, levers, and springs become worn, and the machine itself is slowly shaped by its user. The emphasis on

205 Erich A. Klockenberg. Rationalisierung der Schreibmaschine und ihrer Bedienung. Psychotechnische Arbeitsstudien. Berlin: Verlag von Julius Springer, 1926. 3. Translation: an organic connection of the complex human and machine. 105 training typists to take on mechanical and automatic modes in “Blindschreiben” intensified in the Weimar era with the adoption of rationalization and Taylorism. Not only was touch-typing supposed to increase productivity, but psychologists promoted the idea that taking on mechanical modes would help to protect one’s mental and physical health while engaging with the machine. The emphasis on mental health indicates that this organic connection between human and machine is not entirely a physical one.

According to contemporary experts like Scholz, not abiding by the proper procedures when typewriting was said to cause “Schreibmaschinenkrankheiten”

(typewriter-disorders). One typewriter instruction manual reported the following:

[…] übermäβiger Anstrengung der Augen und Nerven, ferner eine Einengung der Brust und damit der Lunge und des Herzens, also eine Schädigung der Gesundheit verbunden ist, liegt auf der Hand, ist auch von Ärzten an erkrankten Maschinenschreibern nachgewiesen worden. ‘Anstatt der mangelhaften Ausbildung die Schuld beizumessen, heiβt es einfach, die Schreibmaschine mache den Menschen nervös.’206

As this passage indicates, the intensity of professional typewriting had already come to be associated with a number of physical and mental disorders, beyond basic physical and mental exhaustion. In addition, the notion that the typewriter “made people nervous” lent credence to the belief that it also triggered a kind of psychological imbalance in its users.

This rhetoric about the typewriter was widely accepted and propagated beyond psychological and instructional discourses on the typewriter. As one noteworthy example,

206 Hermann Scholz’s Die Schreibmaschine und das Maschinenschreiben, (Leipzig: B.G Teubner Verlag, 1923). 72. See also Ferdinand Schrey’s “Der tüchtige Stenotypist auf der Hammond Schreibmaschine.” Berlin: Ferdinand Schrey Verlag, 1901. Translation: extreme strain of the eyes and nerves, also a constriction of the chest along with the lungs and the heart; therefore, it is connected to damage to the health, obviously, has also been verified by doctors who have examined diseased typists. ‘Instead of ascribing the blame to the lacking education, it simply means, that the typewriter makes people nervous.’ 106 cultural critic, Siegfried Kracauer pointed to the typewriter’s ability to unhinge its operators psychologically. In his essay “Working Women,” he described how half of all female typists,

[…] suffer from nervous afflictions, which almost qualify as a new occupational illness. These nervous problems are not caused solely by the immediate strains of the job, by the din of all the machines in the room, by the exaggerated tempo of work, etc., but also by disturbances to the psychological balance, which appear just as frequently under the pressure of the same conditions in other occupations.207

These nervous disorders, much like hysteria at the turn of the century, were regarded as diseases specific to (working) women. Women’s sensitivity and essential defectiveness were perceived as part of their nature that made them vulnerable to such diseases.

Alternatively, Psychotechniker and, in turn, writers of handbooks repackaged these long- standing associations about women’s sensitivity, their susceptibility to nervous disorders, and their essential defectiveness by blaming the typists’ lack of proper training for their nervous afflictions, since most typists were still using the “hunt-and-peck system”

(Tippen or Sehendschreiben) rather than the touch-type system.

In order to help women cope with or even combat these nervous disorders, these alleged experts in typewriting pushed hard for the strict use of the touch-system in instruction, one handbook author even calling for a new federal policy requiring it. The automatic modes adopted during “Blindschreiben” were recommended to alleviate the strain of guiding the eye to the keys for long hours at the machine. As one example, Josef

Weiβer’s 1929 handbook claims, “Ein Blindschreiber schreibt, ohne sich anzustrengen,

207 See Kracauer’s “Working Women,” (In: Kaes, Anton. Jay, Martin, Dimendberg, Edward. The Weimar Republic Sourcebook. University of California Press, 1994. pp. 216-218.) 107 doppelt so rasch wie ein Tipper. Da das Schreiben völlig mechanisch geschieht, wird der

Geist entlastet.”208 Typing was to “happen” automatically, and these automatic modes were believed to unburden the mind by dividing one’s consciousness. Performing automatically meant that one operated unconsciously, so that the body continued to function partially or completely without guidance from the conscious mind.209 This left the conscious mind room to wander, so that one’s thoughts would (ideally) not interfere with the process of textual production at the typewriter. This automatic condition is not possible when attempting to connect one’s own thoughts to their signifiers while composing a document. According to early typewriter handbooks, it was only through the disciplined training of the body that this mechanical/automatic mode could be achieved, so that the conscious mind could be freed, almost completely divested from the task of writing.

In this chapter, I employ a conceptual framework that is inspired by, but distinctly different from Muri’s “Woman-Machine,” which implies a certain holism or totality that strips the cyborg of its parts. My concept of the “New Woman-Machine” relies on hybridity as a more advantageous model for cyborgian imagery from the historical moment of the Weimar era. The “New Woman-Machine” is a creature of fiction that emerged during the “Rationalisierungseuphorie” (euphoria of rationalization) in the late-

208 Josef Weiβer. Die gangbarsten Schreibmaschinen und die Entwicklungsgeschichte der Schreibmaschine: Hilfsbuch für Maschinenschreiber und für Prüfungskandidaten der Stenotypisten- und Lehramtsprüfung. Leipzig/Wien. Franz Deuticke, 1929. 96. Weiβer is also the author that called for government oversight of typewriting instruction. Translation: The touch-typist writes, without straining themselves, twice as fast as a hunt-and-peck typist. While touch-typing, the writing happens completely mechanically, so that the mind is unburdened. 209 See Galvan 62-66 for a lengthier discussion of automatic modes and their connection to femininity. 108

Weimar era. Put simply, the New Woman-Machine refers to a thoroughly rationalized image of the New Woman interfacing with a machine, which, in this case, means technologies of communication, of which the typewriter is the primary vehicle of the image. Like the cyborg, the New Woman-Machine stakes out territory within the category of “woman” and the female body and does so within the social, historical, and economic context of the Weimar era. As a “thoroughly rationalized” being, the New

Woman-Machine embodies the mechanical processes and embraces the automatic modes recommended to her. The mechanical processes help her to shape and protect her body for mechanical writing, and the automatic modes serve as a coping mechanism to guard her from psychological imbalance. By exposing the presence of the New Woman-

Machine in Keun and Brück’s novels, I argue that the authors implicitly respond to the rationalization processes of the late-Weimar era.

In terms of the category of “woman,” the “New Woman” of Weimar society was both an imagined figure and one bound to material reality.210 Much debate has taken place over whether the figure of the “New Woman” actually existed in the Weimar era, or if she was simply a media-constructed ideal upon which markers of sexual autonomy and economic independence were projected. In a 1920 essay, Russian émigré Alexandra

Kollontai announces the existence of the New Woman:

Wer ist das, die neue Frau? Existiert sie überhaupt? Ist sie nicht das Produkt der schöpferischen Phantasie moderner Belletristen, die nach sensationellen Neuheiten suchen? Schauen Sie um sich, sehen Sie scharf,

210 Biro, Dada Cyborg, 203. 109

überlegen Sie, und Sie werden sich überzeugen: die neue Frau ist da – sie existiert.211

Kollontai reveals the interdependent relationship between the mass-media representations and historical presence of the modern woman.212 In agreement with Kollontai,

Grossmann’s studies on the New Woman and her existence have become standard references for research on the female experience during the Weimar era. Grossmann works from the premise that the New Woman “was not merely a media myth or a demographer’s paranoid fantasy,” but rather “a social reality that can be researched and documented. She existed in office and factory, bedroom and kitchen, just as surely as in café, cabaret, and film.”213 I agree with Kollontai and Grossmann that the Weimar New

Woman existed in various forms in social reality. Though the actual existence of the modern woman may not have lived up to the mass-media ideal of the emancipated New

Woman, financially independent and liberated from the domestic realm, women of the

Weimar era certainly shaped aspects of their lives and appearances in her image. The female typist, as we will see, frequently appeared as a version of the New Woman in late-

Weimar literary production, which attempted to capture the social reality of the female office worker.

211 Alexandra Kollontai, “Die Neue Frau.” Neue Frauen: Die zwanziger Jahre. Eds. Kristine von Soden and Maruta Schmidt. Berlin: Elefanten Press, 1988. Originally from: Alexandra Kollontai, “Die neue Moral und die Arbeiterklasse” (1918), Berlin (1920). Translation: “Who is that, the new woman? Does she even exist? Is she not the product of the inventive fantasy of modern belletrists, who are searching for newness/innovation? Look around (for yourself), look keenly, think, and you will be convinced: the new woman is there – she exists!” 212 For more discussion on Kollontai and the existence of the New Woman, see Barbara Kosta. “Unruly Daughters and Modernity: Irmgard Keun’s Gilgi—eine von uns.” The German Quarterly. Vol. 68. (Summer 1995) 271-86. See especially 271 in which Kosta supports Kollontai’s statement about the historical appearance of the modern woman. 213 Atina Grossmann, “Thoroughly Rationalized Female,” 64. 110

II. The Female Typist as Literary Subject in Weimar’s New Objectivity

Literary and artistic trends beginning in the stabilization phase of the Weimar

Republic (1924-1929) have been characterized with the collective term “Neue

Sachlichkeit” or New Objectivity. 214 This dominant category was not championed by a cohesive group, but rather was used to describe the cultural production by a disparate cluster of artists and writers with varying social and political agendas. New Objectivity not only challenged the avant-garde artists of Expressionism and Dadaism, but sought to erode the boundary between the “high culture” of the bourgeois classes and rising forms of mass culture, which was made consumable to all classes.215 In the production of literature, practitioners at least gestured to sober and rational modes to move away from the focus on subjective approaches that dwelled on the psychological state of the individual. In doing so, they frequently formed social critiques by producing objective and authentic representations of current working-class and petite-bourgeois conditions.

Novelists employing this version of realism often composed Zeitromane, in which they sought to capture the mental profile of a particular generation or social class, with the belief that their work would reveal not only the fate of the individual, but also the fate of the time.216 Accordingly, the novelistic figure is generalized to represent a collective

214 Eigler, Friederike. “Neue Sachlichkeit,” The Feminist Encyclopedia of German Literature. Eds. Friederike Eigler and Susanne Kord. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1997. 215 McCormick, Richard W. “Private Anxieties/Public Projections: ‘New Objectivity,’ Male Subjectivity, and Weimar Cinema.” Women in German Yearbook. Vol. 10 (1995): 1-18. 216 Carla Scheunemann’s study Die weiblichen Angestellten in der Literatur der Weimarer Republik, provides a clear description of the dominant cultural category of “die Neue Sachlichkeit” and its impact on the Angestelltenroman. Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag Dr. Müller, 2008, 40-42. Print. 111

“social type” whose living conditions, consciousness, and attitude come to stand for those of an entire social stratum. In spite of their efforts, however, authors of the neu- sachlichem Zeitroman were seldom successful in overcoming their subjective tendencies.217 Yet, it is because of this limitation that the Zeitroman remains valuable as documentation of widely circulated subjective experiences.

In response to this new wave of literary production, Siegfried Kracauer noted,

“Die Angestellten beginnen literaturfähig zu werden. Ihr gemeinsames Schicksal, das in der Nachkriegszeit eine feste Kontur erhalten hat, kann nicht mehr übersehen werden und verpflichtet zur Darstellung.”218 The unique socio-economic circumstances surrounding the white-collar worker demanded literary treatment, and writers, sometimes members of the white-collar workforce themselves, responded with a variation of the Zeitroman, aptly named the Angestelltenroman or “novel of the salaried employee.”

Authors of Angestelltenromane took up the clerical worker as a literary subject in order to portray the collective social reality of this emerging “neue Mittelstand.”219 While adopting the quasi-reportage and realist modes of New Objectivity, producers of this type of novel constructed narratives that explored the consciousness of white-collar workers and echoed the reality of their everyday lives. Because the salaried employee’s intermediary position blurred the boundaries of class, the existence of this disparate

217 Becker, Sabina. Neue Sachlichkeit im Roman, Stuttgart, 1995. 12. Print. 218 Siegfried Kracauer’s review of Christa Anita Brück’s novel Schicksale hinter Schreibmaschinen, “Ein Angestelltenroman,” was originally published in the Frankfurter Zeitung (vom 6.7.1930, Literaturblatt). I accessed it online at: http://www.angestellten.de/rezensionen/rez_brueck01.html. See the website: http://www.angestellten.de/ for comprehensive lists of literary works, films, and advertisements depicting the Angestellte. 219 I am invoking Kracauer’s expression here. See Chapter 1 for a more complete discussion of Kracauer’s Die Angestellten: aus dem neusten Deutschland (1930). 112 social group generated the possibility for valuable sociological as well as literary discourses concerning their modern plight, uncertain economic foothold, and rapidly increasing numbers. Many Angestelltenromane brought to light the issues facing the 3.5 million white-collar workers (1.2 million of them women) pervading Germany’s city streets.220 In a wave of literary production during the late twenties and early thirties, writers attempted to depict the reality of the economic crisis in terms of its impact on the salaried employee. The social injustices and economic need faced by white-collar employees informed the socio-political critiques contained within these novels, which typically took issue with the poor working conditions, meager compensation, unemployment, and gender and class conflicts within the white-collar milieu.

Bourgeois authors like Hans Fallada and Erich Kästner composed some of the most successful and enduring novelistic portrayals of the anxieties of male white-collar employees. Fallada’s Kleiner Mann, was nun? (1932) highlights the struggle of his petty-bourgeois protagonist Johannes Pinneberg to remain a part of the new middle class during the increasing implementation of sales quotas. At the end, Pinneberg falls into despair and poverty, and he appears to the reader in the final scene beaten bloody and “im

Dunkeln, wie ein verwundetes Tier.”221 Overall, Fallada’s novel demonstrates the lack of solidarity amongst white-collar employees, which makes them vulnerable to exploitation.

Although the figures of the father and male white-collar worker are the primary foci of

Fallada’s novel, representations of working women, albeit women performing typically

220 Siegfried Kracauer documents these statistics at the beginning of Die Angestellten. (Trans. The Salaried Masses: Duty and Distraction in Weimar Germany) 29. 221 Fallada, Kleiner Mann, was nun?, 362-363. 113

“women’s work” like nursing, housekeeping, and piecework, pervade its backdrop. Most noteworthy for this study is Pinneberg’s brief encounter with the organized chaos of a typing pool while he applies for a sales position at a department store. Fallada constructs

Pinneberg’s entry into the personnel office as follows: “Eine Barriere. Dahinter fünf

Schreibmaschinen. Hinter den fünf Schreibmaschinen fünf Mädchen, jüngere, ältere. Alle fünf sehen hoch und alle fünf sehen sofort wieder nieder und schmettern weiter: keine hat gesehen, daβ jemand reingekommen ist.”222 The message on the office door stating

“Bewerbungen zur Zeit zwecklos” is reiterated by the physical barrier, the machines, and the curt responses of the five rapidly typing women, all of which signal layers of obstruction to the protagonist’s employment.223 Fallada’s parodic rendition of the typing pool is telling; the women’s purely uniform movements, their undivided focus on their work, and their continued hammering on their machines make them appear as a small, highly disciplined troupe performing structured, rationalized tasks. The staccato rhythm of Fallada’s prose also assists the reader in imagining the short, precise movements of this typewriting troupe.

While the dire economic circumstances in the late-Weimar period dominate

Fallada’s social analysis, Erich Kästner’s program in Fabian, Die Geschichte eines

Moralisten (1931) expands beyond a purely socio-economic critique to include a moral assessment of female sexuality and vulnerable masculinity. In his novel, Kästner portrays the highly-educated and upwardly mobile Fabian, who is condemned to a menial job as

222 Ibid. 128-129. Translation: “A barrier. Behind it five typewriters. Behind the five typewriters five girls, younger, older. All five look up, and all five look down again and hammer on: no one has seen that someone came in.” 223 Ibid. Translation: “Applications are futile/pointless at this time.” 114 an advertising copywriter because of the depression. By and large, Fabian is stylistically in line with the sober perspectives of Neue Sachlichkeit as well as its tendency toward social critique, which surfaces in the novel in Kästner’s depictions of rampant unemployment, deviant sexual behavior, and the moral degeneration of women at every turn. However, Kästner departs from the prevailing neu-sachliche sobriety in a dream sequence in which half-naked workers shovel babies into a machine for “mechanische

Seelenwanderung” (mechanical transmigration) and a sexually voracious woman unwraps and consumes men like bonbons.224 This vivid dream sequence, along with the tragic drowning of the protagonist while trying to save a child at the novel’s conclusion, is central to Kästner’s social commentary, for in it he articulates male anxieties about the dominance of modern technologies and the dangers of women’s unchecked sexual desires. Although Kästner and Fallada do not take up the female clerical worker as literary subject, the fabric of their textual realities remain indelibly marked by the link between the modern office/industrial machine and the modern woman.

Women writers of Weimar’s older generation like Clara Viebig and Vicki Baum, who witnessed the damages of the first world war, composed novels meant to reform society by encouraging women’s civic activism and entry into the public sphere. 225

Berufromane, a category of novels for women related to the Angestelltenroman, such as

224 Kästner, Erich. Fabian, Geschichte eines Moralisten. Köln: Keipenheuer und Witsch, 1961. 140-146. Translation of title: Fabian, Story of a Moralist. 225 Stefana Lee Lefko’s dissertation entitled "Female pioneers and social mothers: Novels by female authors in the Weimar Republic and the construction of the New Woman" provides a comprehensive analysis of the older and younger generations of female writers in Weimar. (January 1, 1998). Electronic Doctoral Dissertations for UMass Amherst. Paper AAI9909181. http://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9909181 115

Clara Viebig’s Die mit den tausend Kindern (1919) and Vicki Baum’s stud. chem. Helene

Willfüer (1928), were influenced by the philosophies of the bourgeois women’s movement. By offering new perspectives on the multiple burdens that women suffered in trying to negotiate a career, motherhood, and domestic responsibilities, these writers sought to provide guidance for women trying to manage their personal and professional lives. For example, Viebig’s novel comments on the controversial question of the

“Doppelverdiener” (double earners), an expression referring to married women who continued to work even though their husbands were already earning money.226 The unstable economic conditions and mass unemployment after the First World War bred tensions around women supposedly taking jobs away from men who possessed greater earning power and greater need to work to support their families. Although the accusations that women were taking men’s jobs were grossly exaggerated, the expectation that women would quit working after they got married was very real.227

Viebig represents this struggle in the form of the secondary character Frau Halbhaus, who is unable to balance her role as wife/mother and her job as a school teacher. As a result,

Frau Halbhaus suffers from acute exhaustion and a sense of failure at home as well as work. At the end of the novel, Viebig’s protagonist gives up her chance at marriage for her teaching profession, reasoning that dedicating oneself to thousands of working-class children is a nobler pursuit. Her dedication to the underprivileged reflects a kind of altruism associated with the bourgeois women’s movement. The sort of socio-political

226 Bridenthal, Renate. “Beyond Kinder, Küche, Kirche: Weimar Women at Work.” Central European History, 6.2 (1973): 148-166. JSTOR. Web. 13. Oct. 2012. 227 Ibid. 165. 116 engagement apparent in Viebig’s novel demonstrates that some contemporary women’s writing, especially those novels dealing with women’s work, sought to articulate a critique of the social order.

The golden child of the publisher House of Ullstein, Vicki Baum broke new ground with her mass appeal. Her two bestselling novels stud. chem. Helene Willfüer

(1928) and Menschen im Hotel (1929), gained domestic and international acclaim.

Ullstein, however, had significant influence over the content, which was composed for mass media consumption and, as a result, commonly labeled “Unterhaltungs-” or

“Trivialliteratur.”228 As one example of her success, Baum’s Helene, which was serialized in Ullstein’s weekly magazine, the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung (circulation

1,900,000) beginning in October 1928, allowed her to move into the spotlight and would make her a household name by 1930.229 With it, Baum (and her publishers) portrayed a strong and determined heroine in the form of a female chemistry student, in order to take advantage of the intense public discourse surrounding the “new woman.” The sentimental and melodramatic bestseller conveys a powerful but conservative social message for young women, for Baum “ends up representing single motherhood as a rewarding path toward progressive femininity on the one hand, but on the other, endorsing marriage as

228 Lynda King provides a detailed analysis of Baum’s reception by contemporary and post-World War II critics, claiming that scholars often used the words “trivial,” “Kitsch,” or “Schriftstellerei” to describe Baum’s writing and many considered her work “substandard.” King takes issue with these hasty assessments of Baum’s work, and attempts to revitalize the scholarship on her work (375). For more on this, see: King, Lynda J., “The Image of Fame: Vicki Baum in Weimar Germany.” The German Quarterly, 58. 3 (Summer 1985): 375-393. JSTOR. Web. 22. April 2010. 229 Ibid. 378. 117 the only way out of trouble.”230 Ultimately, Baum’s protagonist does not just survive as a student and single mother under the pressures of the male-dominated scientific field, but rather she achieves a high level of success as the head of a pharmaceutical laboratory charged with producing a new vitality-enhancing drug.231 With this triumph and the marriage to her fatherly former professor, Helene offers its readers a positive role model, but an untenable and clichéd happy ending.

Although novels like Baum’s Helene and Viebig’s Die mit den tausend Kindern broke new ground by injecting the media with positive images of career-oriented women, they are steeped in bourgeois ideas of utopias devoid of practical or viable solutions for their female readership. As a subtype of the Berufsroman, the Angestelltenroman examined similar themes, like women’s difficulties of combining their work and personal lives, but these novels also explored women’s new roles in business, commerce, and white-collar culture. Weimar’s younger generation of women writers, including

Marieluise Fleisser, Irmgard Keun, Christa Anita Brück, and Gabriele Tergit, grew up under the harsh economic conditions of the interwar period and shifted their attention to

Weimar’s female white-collar workers, shop assistants, and secretaries to explore women’s new role in the previously male domains of sales and clerical work. 232 Within

230 Ganeva, Mila. Women in Weimar Fashion: Discourses and Displays in German Culture, 1918-1933. Rochester: Camden House, 2008. 172. 231 Harrigton, Renny and Elka Schloendorn. “Die Sexualität der Frau in der deutschen Unterhaltungsliteratur 1918-1933.” Geschichte und Gesellschaft. 7. Jahrg., H. ¾, Frauen in der Geschichte des 19. und 20 Jahrhunderts (1981): 412-437. JSTOR. Web. 22. April 2010. The authors present a critical discussion of Helene beginning on page 427. 232 Stefana Lee Lefko identifies this group of authors as the younger generation of women writers, who were impacted differently than the older generation by the turbulent conditions of the Weimar Republic, and this distinction is reflected in types of advice imparted by their novels. 118 the Angestelltenroman sub-genre, several novels composed by male and female writers focused specifically on the gendered experience of the female typist working with new office technologies, including Paula Schlier’s Petras Aufzeichnungen oder Konzept einer

Jugend nach dem Diktat der Zeit (1926), Keun’s Gilgi – eine von uns (1931) and Das kunstseidene Mädchen (1932), Rudolf Braune’s Das Mädchen an der Orga Privat. Ein kleiner Roman aus Berlin (1930), and Brück’s Schicksale hinter Schreibmaschinen

(1930) and Ein Mädchen mit Prokura (1932). All in all, the most critical and complicated portraits of the female typist within literary representations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries can be found in works of the late-Weimar era.

As a subset of the Zeitroman, the purpose of the Angestelltenroman was to shed light on the “social type” of the white-collar worker, whose unique living conditions, class consciousness, and overall outlook come to stand for that of the collective white- collar workforce during the turbulent economic period of the Weimar Republic.

Commenting on the modernization of the office through new technologies and the reorganization of office work through rationalization, these novels not only dealt with the plight of the clerical worker, but also their intermediary social position. At least in part, male and female authors alike took up the female office worker, and more specifically the typist, as a literary subject in order to engage with and contribute to the public socio- political discourse on the white-collar workforce more generally. The novels depicting female typists mentioned here speak to the effects of mechanical writing on women’s work and the uncertainty surrounding the image and future of the working woman.

119

Of the various literary works that offer worthy depictions of women working on typewriters, I have chosen to focus my analysis on Brück’s Schicksale hinter

Schreibmaschinen (1930) and Keun’s Gilgi – eine von uns (1931) for several reasons.

Both novels were published in the early thirties after the widespread unemployment and poverty symptomatic of the world economic crisis took hold, and these economic circumstances impacted how the writers constructed their versions of the New Woman.

Both Brück and Keun themselves formerly worked as professional typists, and they choose to anchor their commentary on women’s work to the typewriter. Although these novels have much in common, most important for this study is that Keun and Brück’s works present complex and highly nuanced representations of typewriting and the typewriting assemblage that differ from one another. In these images, the female body is shown as productive, reproductive, fragmented, tortured, and sick. Ultimately, both authors measure the impact of mechanized daily life on the female body and mind.

Often characterized by critics as works of Trivial- or Unterhaltungsliteratur, kinds of commercial fiction deemed “trivial” or for entertainment, Brück and Keun’s novels were widely read by contemporary female audiences. Keun’s Gilgi, for instance, became a bestseller soon after its release, was reprinted six times in its first year, and sold

30,000 copies.233 In spite of its classification as trivial, critics’ reviews of the novel were

233 These statistics about the novel’s release are relatively well-known, but I am citing them here from Mila Ganeva’s Women in Weimar Fashion: Discourses and Displays in German Culture, 1918-1933. 172. In addition to this, Ganeva points to women’s readership of Keun’s novel in her discussion of the “Gilgi- debate,” in which the social-democratic newspaper Vorwärts asked its readers to participate in a mass critical discussion about Keun’s novel. (See 174-175.) It urged specifically women readers to participate an essay competition sharing a “scene from life and work.” For even more on female readership, see Kerstin Barndt. “Mothers, Citizens, and Consumers: Female Readers in Weimar Germany,” Weimar 120 positive. Under his pseudonym, Peter Panter, Kurt Tucholsky wrote about Keun’s work in a 1932 review in the Weltbühne: “Sternchen; weil diese Dame gesondert betrachtet werden muß. Eine schreibende Frau mit Humor, sieh mal an!” and “Hier ist ein

Talent.”234 The novel was so popular, in fact, that the film, Eine von uns (1932), directed by Johannes Meyer, was released just one year after the novel’s publication and starred

Brigitte Helm, who was already famous for her iconic dual role as the angelic nurturer

Maria and the demonic Robot Maria in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927).

Brück’s novel also elicited positive responses from contemporary critics, and it was widely read, particularly by women of the working-class, “[…] das Buch wurde in der Tagespresse, vor allem aber in der Fachpresse solcher Verbände, denen arbeitende

Frauen angeschlossen sind, wie Gewerkschaften, Frauenorgnisationen und dergleichen viel beachtet.”235 Siegfried Kracauer’s moderated assessment of the novel in his article entitled “Ein Angestelltenroman” appeared in the Frankfurter Zeitung in July of 1930.236

In it he acknowledges the autobiographical aspects of the novel and compares Brück’s

Publics/Weimar Subjects: Rethinking the Political Culture of Germany in the 1920s. Eds. Kathleen Canning, Kerstin Barndt, Kirstin McGuire. Berghahn Books, 2010. 95-115. 234 Tucholsky, Kurt. (Peter Panter). “Irmgard Keun, Gilgi-eine von uns.” Die Weltbühne. February 2, 1932. Nr. 5. p. 177. Accessed online at http://www.textlog.de/tucholsky-keun-gilgi.html. Translation: “Starlet; because this lady must be regarded separately. A woman who writes with humor, have a look!” and “Here is a talent.” 235 This quotation originally appears in: Aenne Gausebeck’s Liebe und Ehe im Anschauungswandel des internationalen Frauenromans, Phil. Diss. (masch.) Bonn, 1934, p. 213. I have quoted it from Heide Soltau’s Trennungs-Spuren: Frauenliteratur der zwanziger Jahre. Frankfurt am Main: extrabuch Verlag, 1984, p. 123. Print. Translation: “[…] the book received lots of attention in the daily press, above all, however, in the specialized press (technical newspapers) of such organizations, with which working women are associated, like unions, women’s organizations, and others like them. 236 Siegfried Kracauer’s review, “Ein Angestelltenroman,” was originally published in the Frankfurter Zeitung (vom 6.7.1930, Literaturblatt). Accessed online: http://www.angestellten.de/rezensionen/rez_brueck01.html. See the website: http://www.angestellten.de/ for comprehensive lists of literary works, films, and advertisements depicting the Angestellte. 121 bitter expression of her traumatic experiences to that of the novels written by returning soldiers.

Das Buch, das vorwiegend die wenig heiteren Lebensläufe weiblicher Angestellten vermittelt, ist unzweifelhaft aus dem Bedürfnis entstanden, die eigenen bitteren Erfahrungen auf eine anständige Art loszuwerden. Aber wenn irgendwo so ist hier (nicht minder wie seinerzeit bei den Kriegsromanen) die autobiographische Form am Platz. Sie verbürgt die Wirklichkeitsnähe, durch die allein solche Frontberichte gerechtfertigt werden, und überdies ist der individuellen Not die allgemeine beschlossen.237

While he indicates that Brück produced the novel out of cathartic need, he also finds value in its moral: “Immerhin wird, am Anfang vor allem, eine Lehre laut, die das

Ergebnis mancher Schreibmaschinenlaufbahn zu sein scheint: die Lehre, daß der Beruf für die alleinstehende Frau stets nur ein Durchgangsstadium sein kann.”238 According to him, Brück’s novel presents a serious critique of typewriting as a career, for it can only serve as a transitional phase for the single woman. Overall, Kracauer considers Brück’s novel a significant work for women’s progress in the workforce and as a counterpart to his own sociological work, Die Angestellten.

Far more critical than Kracauer’s assessment is journalist Kurt Tucholsky’s review of Brück’s Schicksale in die Weltbühne. He disparages Brück’s white-collar- employee narrative, particularly in the lines: “Diese Angestelltengeschichte ist ein

237 Ibid. Translation: “This book predominantly communicates the uncheerful (gloomy) resumés of female white-collar workers, and it undoubtedly originated from a need to be rid of one’s own bitter experiences in a proper/decent way. But somewhere such as here (no less as than is the case with the war novels) the autobiographical form is appropriate. This form stakes a claim to realism through which such front areas alone are justified, and besides is to/for the individual plight 238 Ibid. Translatione: “At the beginning of the novel above all, Brück articulates a moral that appears to be a result of many a career in typewriting: the moral that the profession can be for the single woman always only a transitional phase.” 122

Schmarrn. Aber es ist gut, die Nase in so etwas hineinzustecken – man lernt viel. Nicht, was die Verfasserin uns lehren will; das ist dummes Zeug.”239 Tucholsky’s derisive review criticizes Brück’s novel for its exaggerated characters and the “falsche

Bürgerlichkeit” that characterizes its language and perspective.240 At the end, he emphasizes that Schicksale fails in its program as a Zeitroman, for in this case the individual’s fate (“Einzelschicksal”) does not mirror the collective fate

(“Kollektivschicksal”).241 Although Tucholsky’s review has been called “brutal, ungerecht, unterhaltsam und sehr böse,” modern critics have agreed with him that “[d]ie

Heldin ist zu gut, die Chefs sind zu schlecht,” and Brück’s novel has been viewed as a

“Sekretärinnen-Opferroman” that provides “einen Einblick in eine Terror-Welt des

Alltags.”242 The novel’s heightened melodrama and the seemingly incomplete representations of the “fates” of other female white-collar workers are certainly among

Brück’s missteps in the construction of her narrative. In spite of its weaknesses, we will see how feminist critics and sociologists have found Brück’s novel useful in their endeavors to shed light on women’s experiences in the white-collar workplace.

Some critical responses have overestimated the autobiographical element in

Brück’s novel and have read it as a pure documentation of the working woman’s

239Kurt Tucholsky’s review “Christa Anita Brück, ‘Schicksale hinter Schreibmaschinen’” was originally published in die Weltbühne (23.12.1930, Nr. 52, p. 940). I accessed it online at: http://www.textlog.de/tucholsky-christa-anita.html. Translation: “This story of white-collar workers is nonsense. But it is good to stick one’s nose in such a thing – one learns a lot. Not, what the author wants to teach us; that is rubbish.” 240 Ibid. Translation: “false bourgeois-ness” 241 Ibid. 242 Volker Weidermann. Das Buch der verbrannten Bücher. Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2008. 62-63. Translations: Although Tucholsky’s review has been called “brutal, unjust, entertaining, and very angry,” modern critics have agreed that “the female hero is too good, the bosses are too bad,” and Brück’s novel has been called a “victim novel of secretaries” that provides “insight into an everyday world of terror.” 123 experience. For example, in his sociological study Beruf und Ideologie der Angestellten, originally published just three years after Kracauer’s Die Angestellten, Carl Dreyfuss draws on a variety of materials (film, literature, statements from white-collar organizations), in order to draw conclusions about the social reality of white-collar work.

In this study, he repeatedly cites excerpts from Schicksale and other fictional narratives as accurate reflections of, or a transparent window onto, the historical reality of women’s lives as white-collar workers. Specifically, he uses passages to support his claims about the detrimental impact of mechanized work on health and the importance of appearance for employability. 243

Likewise, feminist scholars of the 1980s seeking to uncover lost or forgotten texts by women revived interest in Brück’s Schicksale and Keun’s Gilgi, which they viewed as

“thick descriptions” of the women’s experience of modernity that had been “neglected and devalued by post-war criticism.”244 Although Brück’s novel has received comparatively less scholarly attention than Keun’s Gilgi, both novels have been celebrated for their commentary on the social and cultural history of women in the

Weimar Republic. Since both authors sought to shed light on the social reality of the female clerical-worker, a tendency has arisen in feminist criticism, particularly in the late twentieth century, to read these novels against the historical reality of women in the

Weimar era. For example, Renny Harrigan investigates to what degree Keun’s Gilgi, among others novels, accurately reflects the reality of the flapper in the form of the

243 Dreyfuss, Carl. Occupation and Ideology of the Salaried Employee, Volume I. Trans. Eva Abramovitch and W.R. Dittmar. New York: Columbia University, 1938. See 194-195 and 334-336. 244 Führich, “Typewriters: Discursive Technology in Women’s Narratives of Weimar Germany,” 89. 124 female white-collar worker. Along similar lines, Heide Soltau examines women’s writing of the 1920s, including Keun and Brück’s novels, for how they mirror the achievements of the women’s movements.245 While these novels invite such readings, there is a danger of conflating representation with that which is represented and, thus, overlooking the intricate ways that real-world women engaged with popular culture and cultural production. When reading these novels, I consider how women served as agents in cultural production, how they consumed popular culture, and how popular culture played into women’s self-fashioning. Accordingly, I align myself with recent scholars like

Vibeke Rützou Peterson, who have pointed out that fictional narratives are storehouses of social observations and literary figures are constructs of the author’s creative will and life experiences, so that each of the above-mentioned aspects of cultural production play “an integral part in how modern individuals constituted their subjectivities.”246 Therefore, in the following analyses, I do not view the texts as direct reflections of reality, but rather as select storehouses in the greater tapestry of Weimar popular culture that played an important role in how women constructed their sense of self.

III. Traces of Automatism in Christa Anita Brück’s Schicksale hinter Schreibmaschinen

Ich höre nichts mehr vom Sprechen der anderen. Ich ziehe das Wachstuchverdeck zurück und die Schreibmaschine blickt mich an. An meiner Bewegtheit ermesse ich zum ersten Male die tiefe Beziehung des

245 See Renny Harrigan. “Novellistic Representations of die Berufstätige during the Weimar Republic.” Women in German Yearbook. Vol. 4 (1988): 97-124. See also Heide Soltau. Trennungs-Spuren: Frauenliteratur der zwanziger Jahre. Frankfurt: extrabuch Verlag, 1984. 246 Viebke Peterson Women and Modernity in Weimar Germany: Reality and Its Representation in Popular Fiction. Berghahn Books, 2001. 2. See also pages 1-5. 125

Arbeitenden zu seinem Handwerkszeug, durch das er überhaupt erst zu wirken vermag, diese stillschweigende, tiefinnerliche Kameradschaftlichkeit, stärker als manche Bindung von Mensch zu Mensch. […] Der Mensch strömt seine Kraft hinein in die Maschine. Die Maschine, das ist er selbst, sein äuβerstes Können, seine äuβerste Sammlung und letzte Anspannung. Und er selbst, er ist Maschine, ist Hebel, ist Taste, ist Type und schwirrender Wagen.247

In this passage from the novel Schicksale hinter Schreibmaschinen (1930), Brück highlights the deep connection between body and machine, user and typewriter, in the act of typewriting. This moment in the novel demonstrates that Brück does not simply equate the typewriter and its female user, but rather she articulates a form of female embodiment of the mechanical and automatic processes of typewriting. It is this form of embodiment

– a deep connection cultivated through movement – that I call the New Woman-Machine.

It should be noted that within the passage, Brück also universalizes this embodiment with the term “Mensch” (human). In so doing, she links the specific experience of her female protagonist operating the typewriter with a broader image of the human body performing manual labor. Phrases like “die tiefe Beziehung zwischen Arbeitenden zu seinem

Handwerkzeug” (the deep connection between laborers with their tools) locate typewriting within physical labor of the working class. In this account, female embodiment of the typewriter serves also as a representation of the more common connection between worker and tool, or human and machine.

247 Brück, Christa Anita. Schicksale hinter Schreibmaschinen, 228-229. Translation: “I no longer hear the speaking of the others. I pull back the wax cloth cover and the typewriter looks back at me. At my choppiness, I measure for the first time the deep relationship of the worker to his tools of the trade, through which he is capable of acting/functioning in the first place. This silent/implicit, deeply internal comradeship is stronger than some bonds/ties from human to human. […] The human streams his strength/energy/power into the machine. The machine, which is he himself, his outermost capability, his outermost assemblage and last exertion/stress. And he himself, he is machine, is lever, is button, is model and whirring carriage.” 126

What is more, the increased repetition and short rhythmic pattern apparent in the final sentence of the excerpt, (“Und er selbst, er ist Maschine, ist Hebel, ist Taste, ist

Type und schwirrender Wagen.”), reveal the means by which the text deconstructs the link between human and apparatus and reiterates it through a mechanized linguistic mode. This repetition and abrupt rhythmic pattern are textual expressions of the experience of typewriting, and they allow the reader to experience the repetitive movement, feeling, and sound of the protagonist’s work. Beyond merely anthropomorphizing the machine as a thing that “blickt mich an” (looks at me), Brück’s narrative indicates a profounder, even symbiotic relationship between device and user,

“stärker als manche Bindung von Mensch zu Mensch,” and rooted in the common purpose of textual inscription.248 In Brück’s narrative, the female/human body serves as the central source of power for the mechanical typewriter,249 and its output becomes a reflection of the user’s ability as well as her physical and mental exertion.250 In this case,

248 Ibid. Translations: (“And he himself, he is machine, is lever, is button, is model and whirring carriage”); “stronger than some ties from human to human.” 249 All mechanical typewriters, which basically means mostl of the typewriters in widespread use in the 1920’s and early 30’s, were powered by their users, which meant that typing required considerable energy and force to be sure that individual characters were appropriately inscribed on the page. A consensus of typewriter industry opinion in 1933 was that the electric models had proven to be “a dismal flop.” It wasn’t until 1954 that practically all typewriter manufactures were selling electric models. (172). [Bliven, Bruce. The Wonderful Writing Machine. New York: Random House, 1954. Print.] See also Kunzmann’s Hundert Jahre Schreibmaschine: “Die Besonderheit der Schreibmaschine liegt darin, daβ bei ihrem Einsatz geistige und mechanische Arbeit ineinanderflieβen und daβ nicht die Umsetzung von Energie, sondern die Umformung von Information im Vordergrund steht. Die Tätigkeit des Schreibens ist ein Mischvorgang von geistig-nervlicher und mechanisch-energetischer Beanspruchung des Schreibenden” (Kunzmann 25). 250 I intentionally continue to use the feminine pronoun here, because the device of the typewriter was used almost exclusively by women with reference to office work at the end of the 1920’s and early 1930’s. See The Wonderful Writing Machine, in which Bliven comments: “There are more women working at typing than at anything else” (3), and see Siegfried Kracauer’s “Working Women” in which he agrees: “A specifically female occupation is that of the stenotypist, since here ninety-nine of every one-hundred employees are women.” Kracauer, Siegfried. "Working Women," First published as "Mädchen im 127 the typewriter is depicted as a means of enhancing human strength and power. This bond between the human body and typewriter enables the typewriter itself to take on an aspect of the human and vice versa, so that the result is an image of the New Woman-Machine.

Throughout the passage, Brück’s portrayal of the typewriter evolves from its association with a simple external hand tool powered by manual labor, to a kind of “positive” mechanical prosthetic “knitted to the body” and responding to the intention of its user.251

Until, at last, user and machine dissolve into a singular entity, a merger of the organic and the mechanical captured in its common compound name: “Maschinenschreiber/in.”252

As the above passage and analysis demonstrate, Brück’s narrative does not purely reject the machine as a medium of dominance that dismembers and alienates its users, as some have suggested.253 Nor does it adopt the common assumption that the typewriter is an emancipatory agent that freed women from the domestic sphere.254 Rather, Brück’s treatment of the typewriter is far more nuanced, which is what makes it so interesting and

Beruf," Der Querschnitt 12, no. 4 (April 1932). In: Kaes, Anton. Jay, Martin, Dimendberg, Edward. The Weimar Republic Sourcebook. University of California Press, 1994. 216-218. 251 In Modernism, Technology and the Body, Tim Armstrong discusses at length the notion of “prosthetic modernism,” in which he defines “prosthesis” in two ways: (1) “a ‘negative’ prosthesis involves the replacing of a body part, covering a lack,” and (2) a “positive” prosthesis “involves a more utopian version of technology in which human capacities are extrapolated.” Both cases imply that the tool is “knitted to the body” in some way. (78-79) 252 Term borrowed from Hermann Scholz’s Die Schreibmaschine und das Maschinenschreiben [Leipzig: B.G. Teubner Verlag, 1923.] Translation: “Machine-writer” or “One who writes with a machine.” 253 Führich, “Typewriters: Discursive Technology in Women’s Narratives of Weimar Germany,” 92. 254 “Die Schreibmaschine brachte einen durchgreifenden Wandel für die soziale Stellung der Frau. Sie ermöglichte ihr den Eintritt in eine nicht mehr ausschlieβlich durch Haus und Familie bestimmte Arbeitswelt und schuf den auf diesem Gebiet bis dahin unbekannten Typ der berufstätigen Frau. Maschinenschreiben wurde zu ihrer Domäne” (Kunzmann 14). Kunzmann, Robert Walter. Hundert Jahre Schreibmaschinen im Büro: Geschichte des maschinellen Schreibens. Merkur Verlag Rinteln, 1979. Print. See also Friedrich Kittler’s Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. 128 worthy of discussion here. In this novel, the correlation of the typist and her instrument is often portrayed in terms of the impact of typewriting on the material female body.

Brück’s novel is told primarily through the perspective of her female protagonist,

Fräulein Brückner, a name that serves as a continual reminder of the autobiographical aspects of the novel. Brück characterizes Fräulein Brückner as an orphaned and declassed female typist, whose “Lebenshunger” drives her to seek joy in her work and rise above the misery of her lot as an over-taxed and underpaid white-collar worker.255

Structurally, the novel is divided into six chapters, or “stations,” each corresponding to the protagonist’s experiences in a different clerical position.256 When viewed as a whole, the novel chronicles the protagonist’s exploitation, career limitations, and mental and physical abuse by morally corrupt male supervisors at six different firms. Although her job titles range from typist to managing clerk, opportunities for permanent positions or for advancement in the workplace remain out of reach for Brückner.

At the outset of the novel, Brückner works as an ordinary stenotypist who quickly learns to compose letters of correspondence without dictation from her male superior.

Her competence goes overlooked and unrewarded, however, and when her boss’s position becomes available, her request for a promotion is denied. In her ambitious pursuit of economic stability and “Freude in der Arbeit,” Brückner soon thereafter gains employment as a managing clerk at a film distribution company.257 After enduring four years of the owner’s constant deception and manipulation, Brückner secures a higher-

255 Brück 24. Translation: “Hunger for life” 256 Christa Jordan in her study Zwischen Zerstreuung und Berauschung: Die Angestellten in der Erzählprosa am Ende der Weimarer Republik, Jordan identifies six “stations” in the novel. (119) 257 Brück 33. Translation: “Freude an der Arbeit” – “Taking joy in one’s work” 129 paying position at a competing firm, only to discover later that the staff not only tolerates physical and sexual abuse but accepts it in exchange for reasonable wages. When the head of the company, Herr Murawski, violently attacks her late one night at the office,

Brückner flees and never returns. Jaded and traumatized after her near escape, Brück’s protagonist is forced to start over again as a stenotypist, the bottom rung of manual labor in the clerical workforce, where she finds comfort and satisfaction in her return to the rhythm of her writing machine. Brückner refuses to see the typewriter as a “totes Objekt”

(dead object); rather, it is for her a dynamic instrument of inscription with an “unsagbar lebendige Wesenheit” (“unspeakably vivid/animated being”) that acknowledges its user with a look.258 With the protagonist’s perception of the device, the author suggests a connection between body and machine beyond the physical; rather, her image of the New

Woman in Fräulein Brückner engaging with the device generates an image of the New

Woman-Machine, in which the protagonist’s energy not only drives, but becomes one with the mechanical processes of the machine.

Further complicating this complex portrayal of the female typist is the novel’s stake in the social reality of the Weimar era. As one of numerous popular novels and films of the Weimar Republic, Brück’s Schicksale hinter Schreibmaschinen captures the experiences of a particular generation or social class, for its contours revealed not only the fate of the individual, but also the fate of the time.259 Brück, and Keun for that matter, locates her female subject more specifically in the typist, which she differentiates from

258 Brück 228. 259 Carla Scheunemann’s study Die weiblichen Angestellten in der Literatur der Weimarer Republik, provides a clear description of the dominant cultural category of “die Neue Sachlichkeit” and its impact on the Angestelltenroman. Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag Dr. Müller, 2008, 40-42. Print. 130 the private secretary, a higher ranking position with more diverse responsibilities. In so doing, the authors create a prototype, with which their readers can identify or even parse into identifiable bits, in order to adopt aspects in their own lives. In an examination of typewriting in turn-of-the-century American literature, Christopher Keep describes this phenomenon concisely:

[A]s the autobiographies of women clerks show, the commodification of the Type-Writer Girl could be turned to women’s own ends; in the interstices of the debates concerning the ontological makeup of the middle-class working women, they could write their own stories. And, in so doing, they represented the Type-Writer Girl not as a specific identity but a trajectory: the fluidity, the very unknowability of her place between masculinity and femininity, could be strategically adopted in the pursuit of a life beyond the keyboard. The Type-Writer Girl, then, was a site of cultural contestation and resistance, a focal point for the conflicts and desires which subtended the rise of the information economy [...]260

Keep’s observations hold true for Keun and Brück’s popular autobiographical novels, as well. Both authors were middle-class working women, who were formerly typists, and each present their protagonists as knowable prototypes of the female typist. Yet, at the same time, these female figures serve as critical sites of political, social, and economic impact, through which the authors communicate their agendas.

Brück’s typist is cast in the familiar mold of the New Woman, complete with

“niedlicher blonder Bubikopf,” “Jugend,” and “gottbegnadete Leibesschönheit.” 261 At the start of the novel, Brück describes Fräulein Brückner as possessing unwavering

260 Christopher Keep. “The Cultural Work of the Type-Writer Girl.” Victorian Studies. Vol. 40, No. 3 (Spring 1997), 401-426. See page 423. 261 Brück, see 35 and 37. Translations: “niedlicher blonder Bubikopf,” “Jugend,” and “gottbegnadete Leibesschönheit.” – “cute blonde pageboy (haircut),” “youth,” and “divine beauty.” 131 ambition, intelligence, and competence in the workplace, all of which are evidenced in the protagonist’s articulation of her goals:

Ich will vorwärtsstreben, ich will nicht mehr arbeiten, bloβ um zu verdienen, ich will Freude in der Arbeit suchen und über das Elend der einfachen Angestellten hinaus mir ein menschenwürdiges Leben zu gestalten versuchen. Alle körperlichen, geistigen und seelischen Kräfte will ich anspannen bis zum äuβersten, um dieses Ziel zu erreichen.262

Fräulein Brückner appears to readers initially as incredibly driven and determined to achieve independence through work, in spite of the warnings given to her by Urschl, who pleads with her, “Heiraten, Fräulein Brückner, heiraten, heiraten!” and “Denken Sie an mich, heiraten um jeden Preis!”263 Then, a short time later, her colleague and confidant,

Herr Warius, tells her that she will end up getting married. Her response to him radiates frustration about the ongoing struggle and limitations of her gender:

Ja, damit tut Ihr uns ab, unsern Kampf um das biβchen Dasein, zehnmal härter als der Eure, unser Ringen um Anerkennung, unsere verzweifelte Gegenwehr gegen die Herabwürdigung zur toten Maschine. Ihr sagt: heiratet doch! und schlagt uns die Tür vor der Nase zu. […] Es handelt sich hier nicht um die Erfüllung des Frauendaseins, nicht um Glück, nicht um Liebe. Es geht darum, daβ ich verdienen muβ oder verhungern […].264

It is within passages such as this that we can unpack Brück’s social critique of gender boundaries in the workplace. In spite of her competence and ability to compose the

262 Brück 24-25. Translation: “I want to strive forward, I no longer want to work merely in order to earn money, I want to seek joy in my work and to try to build a life fit for human beings and beyond the hardship of the simple white-collar worker. I want to exert all physical, mental, and emotional powers to their outermost limits, in order to achieve this goal.” 263 Brück 22. Translations: “Marry, Fräulein Brückner, marry, marry!” and “Think about me and get married at any price.” 264 Brück 36-37. Translation: “Yes, and with that you dismiss us, our fight for a little bit of existence, ten times harder than your fight, our struggle for recognition, our desperate resistance to being belittled to a dead machine. You say: Just get married! And slam the door in our face. It is not about the fulfillment of women’s existence, not about happiness, not about love. The point is that I must earn money or starve.” 132 necessary correspondence on her own, Fräulein Brückner’s talents are exploited by her male supervisor for his own gain. The “glass ceiling” appears as a door slamming in her face, for her choices for survival are limited to mechanical work at the typewriter or marriage. In this particular passage, Brück portrays the conflation of the female typist with the typewriter, which was quite common at the time, but in this case, the typist must resist being reduced “zur toten Maschine” (to the dead machine). This conflation with the machine may also be read as a way of reinscribing the typist’s inferior status in the workplace and beyond.

Brück’s narrative approach shifts between first-person narration, inner monologue, free indirect speech, and a more distanced third-person perspective, a blend of modes typical of the Neue Sachlichkeit. At the outset Brück transmits the first office scenes through the more distanced and arguably more objective third-person narrator. It is from this point of view that the reader is introduced to the office setting and the tragic spinster-figure Urschl. Only upon Fräulein Brückner’s visit to Urschl’s dismal apartment does the narrative shift to the protagonist’s point of view. The third-person narrator serves to situate the novel in the common context of the office and within the white-collar milieu. The shift to first-person relocates the narrative in the subjective point-of-view of

Fräulein Brückner. Brück incites this shift so that the individual destiny of her protagonist can come to represent the collective fate of female white-collar workers.

Through the figure of Urschl, Brück presents her protagonist (and the reader) with a cautionary tale about the consequences of long-term office work for the female body and psyche. Urschl explains that she has worked at forty different jobs over the course of

133 twenty-seven years, and that the stress and instability of this lifestyle has caused her to suffer from debilitating headaches and a nervous disorder. Such illnesses were labeled

“Schreibmaschinenkrankheiten” and were diagnosed most often in female typists.265 The aging and exhausted typist Urschl utters the bitter social critique and its link to the typewriter that stands at the heart of Brück’s novel.266

Zu ihrem Hund sind sie freundlicher als zu ihrer Stenotypistin. Oder es ist umgekehrt und sie erlauben sich jede Ungehörigkeit. Man hängt ja von ihnen ab. Sehen Sie, Fräulein Brückner, so eine Schreibmaschine, wenn sie ruiniert wird, kostet Geld. Aber eine Angestellte setzt man an die Luft, wenn sie reparatur-bedürftig ist und holt sich eine unverbrauchte neue. Ein Tippmädel ist billige Ware. Man bewertet sie nach der Silbenzahl, die sie in der Minute herunterklappert und damit fertig.267

Brück emphasizes the replaceability of typists in a modernized industrial society, in which production speed and technical reparability are valued. In this case, the typists and machines are presented as separate but connected economic entities that are evaluated in terms of their efficiency and function in the office. The result is that the author calls attention to subordinate position of the typist in the office. In Brück’s view, typists are evaluated in economic terms as objects worth less than the machines to which they are bound. Ultimately, Urschl’s admonitory words prove prophetic for Fräulein Brückner.

265 See Ferdinand Schrey’s “Der tüchtige Stenotypist auf der Hammond Schreibmaschine.” Berlin: Ferdinand Schrey Verlag, 1901. 6. See also Hermann Scholz’s Die Schreibmaschine und das Maschinenschreiben, (Leipzig: B.G Teubner Verlag, 1923), in which he proscribes a number of “körperlichen, seelischen und mechanischen Vorgängen fürs Maschineschreiben” (79-83). 266 For exceptions see Angelika Führich’s article “Typewriters: Discursive Technology in Women’s Narratives of Weimar Germany” and Liane Schüller’s recent work Vom Ernst der Zerstreuung: Schreibende Frauen am Ende der Weimarer Republik. (Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag, 2005. Print.) 267 Brück 20-21. Translation: “They are friendlier to their dog than to their stenotypist. Or it is reversed and they get away with every impropriety. One depends on them. You see, Fräulein Brückner, such a typewriter costs money, if it is ruined. But an employee gets the sack, if he/she is in need of repair, and one gets a fresh/unspent new one. A typewriter girl is a cheap ware. One evaluates them according to the number of syllables that they knock out per minute, and that’s the end of it.” 134

Throughout the novel, the protagonist is witness to the ruin of others and is herself

“ruiniert” (ruined), then discarded as a “billige Ware” (cheap ware).

This passage captures the author’s vitriolic critique of the callous degradation and blatant exploitation of the female white-collar worker in the Weimar era. However, the conflation of typist and typing apparatus is not unique to this novel. In the late nineteenth century in the U.S., the term “typewriter” was employed to describe both user and device interchangeably. Brück takes the relationship between typewriter and typist a step further, though, by establishing them as one of a shared commodification by an inhuman system.

As the narrative progresses, it reveals the bond of device and user to be much more diverse than those demonstrated by the straightforward devaluation contained within this economic perspective.

On the whole, this study takes issue with Friedrich Kittler’s assertion that the invention of the typewriter effectively led to the “desexualization of writing, sacrificing its metaphysics and turning it into word processing.”268 Instead, I argue not only that mechanical writing, as it is portrayed in Brück’s novel, is feminized, but that the typist must sustain a kind of feminine passivity or “docility” conducive to her function as medium for communication. To explain this state of passivity, I rely on the concept of

“feminine automatism,” which links automatic modes of communication together with constructions of femininity. In light of this concept, portrayals of typing, taking dictation, and transcription in the novel remain central for demonstrating the protagonist’s resignation to the function of unresisting body in order to perform her work.

268 Kitter, Friedrich. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford University Press, 1999. 187. 135

As the preceding close readings demonstrate, the link between body and medium takes many forms in Brück’s novel, yet it is the author’s incorporation of a kind of

“automatism” surfacing at times in the form of “automatic writing,” which points to the female typist as a conduit of communication herself. Lisa Gitelman’s Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines has shown the importance of these concepts to understanding the way typewriting women were imagined in British and American literature.

Differentiating it from the Surrealist’s conception of “ecriture automatique,” Gitelman finds that “automatic writing” was most often connected with psychological and spiritual practices in the 1890’s, during which time it was used to describe writing by hand done by partially conscious, distracted, hypnotized subjects as well as by spiritual mediums during séances. In English-speaking contexts, the term “automatic writing” was also widely applied to typing.269 The application of the term “automatic” was largely displaced, however, since it did not appropriately describe the use of mechanical typewriters of the 1920s, which could not operate without a human source of kinetic energy. At the time, automaticity indicated that the machine did not require human attention to operate certain features.270 With regard to the business office, the word

“automatic” came to refer to the fracturing and displacing of one’s attention, which

269 Lisa Gitelman’s Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era. [Stanford University Press: Stanford California, 1999. p. 186.] is a study focused primarily on moments of textual inscription, particularly by mechanical devices. Although her monograph revolves around representations of the phonograph, her fifth chapter, entitled “Automatic Writing,” investigates the origins of this phenomenon and its representation in American literature. 270 For example, many mechanical typewriters had carriages that moved left or right, automatically advancing the typing position after each character was inscribed on the page. 136 presumably freed the user from human subjectivity, allowing for fewer errors.271 In the specific case of women’s operation of the typewriter, the word “automatic” denoted an increased efficiency, basically because it implied that the machine operated at least in part independently of its user. Therefore, this automaticity came to indicate a decreased skill level for operation that was pointedly feminized.272

Automaticity was also viewed as a means to protect the female body and mind from “Schreibmaschinenkrankheiten.” To avoid such health risks, Josef Weißer, the author of a “Hilfsbuch für Maschinenschreiber” and proponent of the “Blindschreib-

Methode” claims that “[…] das Schreiben muß eine völlig mechanisierte Tätigkeit werden” and that this method allows “daß mit dem Erblicken oder überhaupt

Bewußtwerden eines Buchstabens automatisch der entsprechende Finger die richtige

Taste anschlägt.” 273 Weißer, therefore, recommends training the body to interface automatically with the keyboard by shutting down the faculty of vision. He goes on, “Da das Schreiben völlig mechanisch geschieht, wird der Geist entlastet.”274 Ultimately,

Weißer proposes that typewriting as a physically mechanical endeavor unburdens or

271 Gitelman 189. 272 Gitelman 191. 273 Weißer 55-56. Emphasis added. Translation: “Writing must become a completely mechanical activity” and this method allows “that with the glimpse or general awareness of a letter, the corresponding finger hits the correct key automatically.” For more on the touch system, see Weißer 55-60. See also Rolf Koßmann. Die Deutsche Maschinen-Kurzschrift ‘Deumaku’ ohne Umschaltung und ohne Zwischenraumtaste für jede Schreibmaschine. Karlsruhe: Deumaku-Verlag, 1930. p. 73-75. Note: The touch system was developed in the late-nineteenth century, but according to Koßmann, it came to Germany around 1910 (73). Koßmann is writing around 1930, and even still, he claims, there is no general consensus surrounding the effectiveness of the “touch system.” Although both of these handbooks recommend the touch system, they do so for very different reasons. 274 Weißer 95-96. Translation: “The only correct way to write with a machine is blind-writing (touch- typing) with the elimination of the visual sense. A touch-typist writes, without straining themselves, twice as rapidly as someone using the “hunt-and-peck” method. Because writing happens completely mechanically, the mind is relieved or unburdened.” 137 relieves the mind, thus preventing “Schreibmaschinenkrankheiten.” As we have seen, an illness similar to a typewriter disorder surfaces in the first chapter of Brück’s novel within Urschl’s cautionary tale. From this point on, elements of mechanical and automatic modes, and the resistance thereof, play a central role in portrayals of typewriting in Schicksale.

On the whole, the mechanical tasks performed by a typist, including taking dictation, transcribing, and copying documents, are almost exclusively performed by women within the novel. While authors of typewriting handbooks prescribed training methods more generally to both sexes, Brück depicts only the automatic modes of female characters. There is only one scene in the novel that describes a man using the typewriter.

While Fräulein Brückner is in the employ of Herr Lichte, her third boss, he tries to compose his own letter on a typewriter: “In den nächsten Wochen kann man Lichte hinter der Schreibmaschine sitzen sehen, mit einem Finger emsig tippend. Zuweilen flucht er und reiβt den Bogen aus der Walze, fängt von neuem an und verschreibt sich abermals.

Einmal verläβt ihn vollends die Geduld und er diktiert mir, was er lieber selbst hätte schreiben sollen.”275 The dramatization of Lichte’s repeated and resolute efforts to master the typewriter suggests that he is simply incompetent at the machine, yet, we could also read his incompetence as a display of masculine resistance to serving as a transmitter of his own thoughts. Though Lichte is diligent (emsig) in his efforts, the novel’s emphasis on the advantages of automatic modes in typewriting leads us to

275 Brück 81. Translation: “In the following weeks, one could see Mr. Lichte sitting behind the typewriter typing diligently with his finger. Sometimes he curses and rips the sheet of paper out of the carriage (roller), begins anew and commits himself once again. Once his patience left him completely, he dictated to me what he would have rather written himself.” 138 question whether Lichte’s active thoughts are perhaps interfering with his ability to use the machine (i.e., his spirit is not unburdened). The result is that he must abandon his efforts to transcribe his message independently. Instead, he is forced to communicate the information by other means, namely through his typist Fräulein Brückner, a less resistant and speedier transmitter.

In the latter half of Schicksale, internal, automatic modes surface again and again in Brück’s dramatizations of her protagonist taking dictation. For instance, after the trauma of narrowly escaping her brutally abusive boss, Herr Murawski, Fräulein

Brückner finds a temporary position as a typist at a flour factory. During her

“Probediktat,” she takes on a trance-like state indicative of an automatic mode: “Ich weiβ nichts von dem, was ich schreibe. Meine Hand erledigt das ganz von selbst. Irgendwo im

Kopf zermalmt eine selbsttätige Maschine den Sinn dessen, was die Hand, antennengleich, auffängt.”276 In this moment, Fräulein Brückner resigns herself to the self-regulating or automatic mechanism guiding her hand and linked to the mechanical processes of production. This internal machine has detached her mind from the meaning of the message she is transmitting. Yet, her body, pliable, unresistant, and obedient, reacts accordingly to the dictation, placing her male superior in control of the typewriting assemblage. While this instance of “automatic writing” associates handwriting with an internal mechanism, just a few pages later Brück’s main figure indicates that also when typing, a sense of awareness has no place: “Schon nach drei Tagen war es nur mehr

276 Brück 225. Translations: “Probediktat” – “test-dictation,” “I know nothing of what I am writing. My hand takes care of it entirely on its own. Somewhere in my head, a self-regulating machine crushes the sense, which the hand, antenna-like, intercepts.” 139 mechanische Arbeit, eine schattenhafte Wechselwirkung zwischen Augen und Fingern, an der das Bewußtsein keinen Anteil hat.”277 Only the basic physical functions required to type are engaged in the task at hand, and, momentarily in the narrative, Fräulein

Brückner appears to be “emptied out.” In this state, the protagonist signifies what Paul

Virilio would call a product of the culture of speed. The figure of the typist, in this case, serves as a “metabolic vehicle,” for the body is controlled, occupied, or “boarded.”278

This emptied-out state is short-lived, however, and appears not only to surface in connection to the speed of automatic modes in the novel. When Brück depicts her protagonist’s return to typewriting, (see passage at the beginning of this section) she compares the interaction between female body and typewriter in terms of a laborer and his hand tool, a physical, reciprocal interaction. But, one that is not exempt from being

“boarded” and controlled.

Throughout the course of the novel, Fräulein Brückner suffers under the lies and deceit of Herr Lichte and the abuse of Herr Murawski. So, when the protagonist starts a new position at the flour factory after four months of unemployment, Brück depicts

Brückner’s return to the typewriter as a kind of celebration of ritual and skill punctuated with “wieder hinter der Schreibmaschine!” (again behind the typewriter!).279 Fräulein

Brückner lifts the wooden cover to reveal the machine, and suddenly, she “hör[t] nichts mehr vom Sprechen der andern.” Once she has removed the wax-cloth cover, “die

277 Brück 238. Translation: “Already after three days it was only more mechanical work, a shadowy interplay between eyes and fingers, in which consciousness played no part.” 278 Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics, 76, 88. See also Christopher Keep’s article “Blinded by the Type: Gender and Information Technology at the Turn of the Century.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts: An Interdisciplinary Journal, July 2008. 151. 279 Brück 227. 140

Schreibmaschine blickt [sie] an.”280 Brück spends several pages depicting her protagonist’s return to her position behind the typewriter. The rituals at the start of

Fräulein Brückner’s day signal a welcomed reprisal of the automatic modes that she had left behind. Filled with delight, she personifies her typewriter as “eine Aristokratin, blitzblank das Hebelwerk, von gediegener Feinheit die Tastatur. Leichtester Anschlag genügt. Wie Perlenschnüre reihen sich die Buchstaben auf dem Papier. Hell und schwingend ist ihre Stimme. Mit lieblichem Glockenton meldet sie das Ende der

Zeile.”281 Viewed through the perspective of Fräulein Brückner, the narrative dwells on the beauty of the typewriter construction, not necessarily in terms of its mechanical and technical precision, but rather for its brightly-polished mechanism, its dignified refinement, its lovely carriage chime, and the delicacy of its strikes that creates rows of letters like strings of pearls. The text fetishizes the typewriter in this passage, but even more importantly, the material device is imbued with qualities and associations deeply wedded to the social construction of bourgeois femininity, a construction that aspired to the values of the aristocracy. The feminine name she gives it, “eine Aristokratin,” and the string of pearls are the most transparently class-related. Easily mistaken for the name of a typewriter model, “Aristokratin,” is similar to other regal names of contemporary typewriter models, like “Ideal,” “Adler,” or “Royal.” Some German models were also given women’s names or feminine designations, such as the Erika- or Sonja-

280 Brück 228. Translation: Brückner “no longer hears the talking of others” and “the typewriter looks at her.” 281 Brück 228-229. Translation: “an Aristocrat (feminine form of noun), brightly polished levers, the genuine refinement of its keyboard. The slightest pressure suffices. Like strings of pearls the letters form lines on the paper. Her/its voice is bright and vibrant/oscillating. With a lovely/sweet chime of the bell, she/it indicates the end of the line.” 141

Schreibmaschine, but the designation “Aristokratin” is a fiction. This typewriter points to a model of class gentility, one that was lost in Germany in the throes of war and economic upheaval. In this account, the typewriter, this decadent machine, serves as a way for the protagonist to reclaim a bit of what it meant to be a “lady,” “eine

Aristokratin” – something that she herself lost with the death of her parents and her dispossession during hyperinflation.

Brück establishes the device itself as feminine, not only because its users are typically women, but because it represents the new yet equally limiting role for women’s labor. In the typing pool, Brück portrays women of all ages busily serving the so-called standards of modernization in the name of progress, “Unter den Schreibmaschinen gibt es kleine behende Mädchen, die laufen wie Wiesel, geschäftige treue Tanten, niemals verdrossen, allzeit hilfsbereit, und alte Großmütter, die sich ächzend vorwärtstreiben lassen.”282 The author posits that generations of women have merely traded the societal structures that previously bound them to the domestic sphere for the burdens of women’s work “unter den Schreibmaschinen” or “hinter den Schreibmaschinen.” The prepositions

“unter” and “hinter” highlight the new set of boundaries that perpetuate women’s roles as caretakers (hilfsbereit), limit their mobility, and physically link them to mechanical work.

In short, the boundaries of the typing pool make up just another marginalizing space in which women’s role in reproductive labor gets played out. The mechanized female body, as it is portrayed in Schicksale hinter Schreibmaschinen, is linked to the re-inscription of

282 Brück 228. Translation: “Under the typewriters there are little nimble girls, who run like weasels, bustling devoted aunts, never annoyed, always ready to help, and old grandmothers, who are propelled forward while groaning.” Note: “behende” is an alternative spelling for “behände” meaning “nimble”.) 142 a bourgeois value system and patriarchal hierarchy onto the new spaces in the business office.

The linguistic representation of sound and rhythm are also important in Brück’s portrayal of women’s typewriting in the typing pool, because the sounds of the device serve as an articulation of the typist-typewriter connection. Initially, Fräulein Brückner tunes out nearby human speech, and instead, listens to her typewriter’s “voice.” Then, the sounds of the typing pool are expressed through repetition and the humming of machines,

“Vom Fenster her tönt das eilige Rasseln von Fräulein Laues Maschine. Fräulein Bartels schreibt in kurz abgerissenen Sätzen. Rhythmus, Rhythmus, Prasseln der Typen, Sausen hin- und herschwirrender Wagen, Summen, Surren, Schnarren von Rädern und

Rädchen.”283 The sounds of the other women’s machines, the hasty clatter and short abrupt sentences, function to characterize them and their work. The description then dissolves into a rapid succession of onomatopoetic and alliterative nouns, the structure of which mimics the chaotic staccato rhythm of the typing pool. When the narrative description returns to Fräulein Brückner, the rhythm of her typewriting becomes the

“Lied [ihrer] Arbeit.”284 But Brück is careful to point out that this is “kein Lied der leichten Freude,” but a, “Lied derer, die sich bücken müssen, tief, tief beugen unter das

Joch einer unerbitterlich vorwärtsstürmenden Zeit.”285 Brück likens the typist to a human yoked – a parallel to the pre-industrial worker – to the unrelenting progress and

283 Brück 229. Translation: “The hurried rattle of Fräulein Laue’s machine resounds from the window. Fräulein Bartels writes in short abrupt sentences. Rhythm, rhythm, pattering of the machines, swishing back and forth of zipping carriages, buzzing, whirring, vibrating from wheels and cogs.” 284 Ibid. Translation: “Song of her work” 285 Ibid. Translation: this is “no song of simple job,” but a “song of those who must stoop down, bend deeply deeply under the yoke of a relentlessly forwards-raging time.” 143 modernization of the industrial age. She is less troubled by women’s ability to negotiate their various roles of wife, mother, and employee, which is Keun’s concern. Rather,

Brück takes serious issue with women’s inability to survive, safely and morally intact, on the work that is available to them.

Although Brück’s protagonist escapes corruption and physical violation by Lichte and Murawski, their cruelty and brutality resonate with her throughout the rest of the narrative. To protect her consciousness from the traumatic experiences of her past,

Fräulein Brückner takes refuge in an automatic mode of production: “Nicht denken, nicht sich besinnen, weiter, weiter, geschwinde, geschwinde, tipp, tipp, tipptipptipptipptipp

…… Im Kopf beginnt ein kleiner Schwindel zu kreisen. Geschwindigkeit ist Rausch und

Rausch ist Hingerissenheit….”286 In this passage Brück effectively mimics the intoxicating mechanical rhythm and speed of the typewriter through the short punctuated fragments and repetition. As individual words and thoughts blend into a monotonous vibration (“tipptipptipptipptipp”), the author also reveals automatism as a damaged state.

While Fräulein Brückner types, she tries to escape her past traumas by slipping into an automatic mode; she maintains her quick speed of production, while “das Klappern der

Maschine lullt [ihr] Wachbewuβtsein.”287 Thus, Brückner allows herself to be “emptied out” and possessed by the processes of mechanical production that depend on speed.

By incorporating automatic modes in this context of the novel, Brück suggests feminine automatism, and particularly its association with late nineteenth-century

286 Brück 229. Translation: Do not think, do not remember, further, further, swiftly, swiftly, type, type, typetypetypetypetype …… A little dizziness begins to turn in my head. Speed is intoxication, and intoxication is enchantment.” 287 Brück 234. Translation: “the clatter of the machine lulls her waking consciousness.” 144 femininity and passivity. This claim can be understood further by considering the novel as a whole. At her first job, the protagonist resists the role of dutiful vessel through which communication passes unimpeded. Instead, she composes correspondence without the dictation of her male supervisor, and since the typewriter obscures authorship through uniform print (unlike handwriting which individualizes), her supervisor can claim the words as his own. However, driven by Urschl’s warning and her own ambition, Brückner then actively claims authorship to the letters and petitions to take over correspondence for the entire department. When her request is denied, the protagonist willingly searches for new work, because for her, “Freude in der Arbeit” means being able to combine agency and mechanical writing through creative and independent inscription. Therefore, Brück’s incorporation of automatic writing at the point in the novel, when Fräulein Brückner must start over as a typist, marks the beginning of her decline. The automatism she displays suggests a state of passive resignation indicating that she willingly yields to her position as conduit, not unlike the device upon which she labors.

In the final stages of the novel, Fräulein Brückner can no longer take dictation, nor can she transcribe words on the typewriter without error. Physically exhausted and suffering from acute headaches, she gets let go from her final job. Although Brück implies that Brückner must now give herself over to finding a husband who will care for her, the ending of the novel remains uncertain and the tone hopeful, “Erwerb ist immer ein hartes Wort. Die Forderung, die es birgt, ist grausam. Aber sie soll nicht das Leben

145 beherrschen.”288 After providing her reader this brief warning, Brück’s protagonist finds her way out of the dismal office and into the light. Instead of the whirr of typewriter carriages (“schwirrender Wagen”), Brückner hears this sound in the natural world:

“Weiße Vögel schwirren auf aus dem Rohr.” Enriching this description of the protagonist’s experience of nature are also the senses of sight (“Der See strahlt im lichtesten Blau, dunkel umsäumt vom Kranze der Kiefernwälder”) and smell (“Ein

Geruch von Erde, von Frische, von unbändiger Kraft und Fruchtbarkeit durchdringt mich bis innerste Mark”).289 Elaborate descriptions of the protagonist’s perceptions of nature such as these appear nowhere in the novel, except for the final few pages. Every other scene takes place indoors: in the protagonist’s home, in the homes of friends, in the city, or in the office. After shedding her bonds to her work, Fräulein Brückner emerges renewed and is imbued with “boundless strength and fertility.” With this imagery, Brück appears to suggest that her protagonist will seek out more “natural” roles for women as wife and mother. But, Fräulein Brückner’s future ultimately remains ambiguous: “aber ein Stück blauen Himmels steht über der engsten Großstadtstraße, Blumen gedeihen auf schmalstem Fensterbrett, und die Stimme großer und reifer Menschen findet den Weg zu uns durch die Bücher, die sie geschrieben.”290 Although the novel’s ending presents an indefinite message for the presumed female readership, Brück proposes that the way

288 Brück 361. “Acquisition is always a hard word. The demand, that salvages it, is brutal. But it should not control one’s life.” 289 Brück 361, 362. Translation: “White birds whir up out of the pipe” and “The lake gleams in the lightest blue, darkly lined by wreaths of pine forests” and “a smell of earth, of freshness, of boundless strength and fertility permeates me to the innermost core.” 290 Brück 361. Translation: “but a piece of blue sky lies over the narrowest big city street, flowers thrive on the narrowest windowsill, and the voice of greater and more mature people finds its way to us through the books that they have written.” 146 toward progress can be found in books – the process of reading and writing. It is unclear whether Fräulein Brückner will pursue authorship herself, but tone at the end of the novel is hopeful, however uncertain.

All in all, Brück’s novel raises important questions about the imagined connection between the New Woman and the machine. Brück’s depiction of the typewriter varies widely throughout the novel. She conceives of it positively as a productive tool celebrated through ritual and negatively as an oppressive yoke to the race towards progress. Equally unclear, the typewriter appears both as a hand tool for manual labor and a symbol of the refined genteel classes. The typewriter is also dead, since the typist may be reduced “zur toten Maschine,” and alive, in its ability to “look back.” For the typists in the novel, the device serves as both a sanctuary of speedy productivity and a barrier that they remain “under” or “behind.” This evidence shows that the author neither strictly valorizes nor condemns the typewriter itself. Instead, she presents readers with a frequently oscillating image of the device that reflects not only the different cultural associations with the device, but also the unstable social position and uncertain fate of its female user. It is within this realm of uncertainty that Brück’s version of the New Woman exists: framed by opportunity and obstacle, stuck between the petite-bourgeois and comfortable middle classes, between life and death.

Depictions of feminine automatism within the novel suggest a new binary embedded within the New Woman’s engagement with the machine. Fräulein Brückner’s multiple retreats into the mechanical and automatic modes of production allow her to relinquish control of her mind and body to self-regulating mechanisms. As it is depicted

147 in Schicksale, this automatic state offers some freedom in the protagonist’s release and essential retreat from her uncertain reality. At the same time, however, these self- regulating mechanisms require the typewriter user to be docile. She must give herself over to a system of control to protect her mind and guide her body. It is this complex image of the New Woman-Machine, saturated in ambiguity, that surfaces in Brück’s late-

Weimar novel. This cyborgian image of the New Woman-Machine is, thus, a product and a producer of the shifting social order during the last four years of the Weimar era, which was riddled with social, cultural, and economic uncertainties. As we will see, Keun’s version of the New Woman-Machine contains distinct variations that sets it apart from

Brück’s, but the presence of feminine automatism and the central note of uncertainty point to important commonalities between the depictions of typewriting women within these two novels.

IV. Rationalized Bodies and Hybrid Identities in Irmgard Keun’s Gilgi – eine von uns

Within the first few pages her 1931 debut novel Gilgi – eine von uns, Irmgard

Keun characterizes her protagonist Gilgi as a self-reliant, ambitious, and professional young woman, who is seemingly inexhaustible in her drive to work, learn, travel, and train her body. The first line of the novel, “Sie hält es fest in der Hand, ihr kleines Leben, das Mädchen Gilgi,” already reveals Keun’s protagonist as a self-possessed girl with a firm grasp on her modest life and destiny.291 But it is Gilgi’s self-discipline and mechanical regimen that make her so appealing and admirable, even to today’s

291 Keun, Gilgi – eine von uns, 5. Translation: “She holds it firmly in her hand, her small life, the girl Gilgi.” 148 audiences. Conveyed through the staccato rhythm of the author’s fragmented prose,

Gilgi’s rigorous morning exercise routine is one of discipline through mechanical bodily movements, “Halbsieben Uhr morgens. Das Mädchen Gilgi ist aufgestanden. […]

Rumpfbeuge: auf – nieder, auf – nieder. Die Fingerspitzen berühren den Boden, die Knie bleiben gestreckt. So ist es richtig. Auf – nieder, auf – nieder.”292 The sober, matter-of- fact language displayed in this passage is congruous with Gilgi’s unsentimental world view at the start of the novel, where she effectively guards herself from deep emotional attachment in her personal and professional life. Gilgi’s determination to discipline her body is also reflective of the ideals of Weimar body culture and the varying perceptions of its impact on labor.

The Weimar discourse on athletics propagated exercise as a means of training the body to perform mechanical movements, and yet transcend the body’s equation with the machine. For example, in his 1925 book Der Mensch und die Sonne (Man and Sunlight),

Weimar Naturist Hans Surén heralded the notions that “[i]t is the duty of those with high aspirations to steel and train their bodies” and [that when one exercises] a “marvelous feeling of freedom flows through you, and you exalt in your work. Now you experience yourself, you experience your body! Most people do not know their own bodies; it is for them only a necessary, often burdensome, machine of existence.”293 Surén suggests a positive connection between the well-trained body and professional success. According

292 Ibid. Translation: Translation: “6:30 in the morning. The girl Gilgi woke up. Toe-touches: up – down, up – down. The fingertips touch the floor, the knees remain stretched. This way is correct. Up – down, up – down.” 293 Hans Surén. “Man and Sunlight.” The Weimar Republic Sourcebook. Eds. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg. University of California Press, 1994. p. 678-9. First published in Der Mensch und die Sonne (Stuttgart: Dieck & Coin Verlag, 1925). 149 to him, gaining an understanding of the mechanics of one’s body through exercise allows the laborer to celebrate the body engaged in mechanical work rather than reduce the body to a machine itself. Offering another perspective on the relationship between the body, exercise, and mechanical work, Surén’s contemporary, sports advocate Fritz Wildung, views athletics as a means to break away from the monotony of mechanical work in order to reinvigorate the “creative impulse” and “natural human drive to play.”294 Although

Surén and Wildung provide just two voices in the discourse on athletics and the body during the Weimar era, other reactions to Weimar body culture similarly promoting the benefits of physical fitness can be found in illustrated magazines, namely Uhu, Der

Querschnitt, and Das Leben. Articles in Uhu, such as “Sport zu allen Tageszeiten”295 and

“Das Kreuz der Frau. Aus einem neuen Buch: Anmut der Bewegung im täglichen

Leben,”296 advise readers not only on how to incorporate exercise into their daily lives, but also on correct posture, even while talking on the telephone. As these articles attest, women’s bodies were targeted as being in particular need of regulation. Returning to the cited passage from Keun’s novel, Gilgi’s repetitive movements (“Auf – nieder, auf – nieder”) and her emphasis on correctness (“So ist es richtig”) reveal the underlying purpose of her routine: to maintain her body like a precision machine. For Gilgi, exercise is not a means to liberate herself from the strictly prescriptive movements of the machine

294 Fritz Wildung’s “Sport is the Will to Culture” published in the Weimar Republic Sourcebook, pages 681-682. Wildung identifies Sport as “a rebellion against the threat of decay” caused by the reorganization of work in the capitalist era. 295 “Uhu” Band-/Heftnummer 3.1926/27, H 10. Juli. http://www.illustrierte-presse.de/ Translation: Sport/Exercise at every time of day.” 296 “Uhu” Band-/Heftnummer 6.1929/30, H 4. Januar. Article by Bess M. Mensendieck. http://www.illustrierte-presse.de/ Translation: “The woman’s cross (burden). From a new book: the grace/charm of movement in daily life.” 150 that Wildung claims reduce the body to an automaton.297 On the contrary, Gilgi embraces the notion that her body is a mechanism that she must train to perform mechanical labor through the repetitive movements of calisthenics. Feminist scholar Kathrina von Ankum reads Gilgi’s morning routine as a reflection of “her effort to ‘steel’ her body and become a perfectly functional element in the machinery of the modern office.”298 But I believe that Keun’s initial depiction of her protagonist goes a step further. Keun’s novel presents the body-as-machine as an ideal, a vision of machine perfection, clarity, and systematicity to which her protagonist aspires.

As we follow Gilgi step-by-step through her morning checklist in the rest of this scene, it becomes clear that through these exercises and other systematic behaviors

Keun’s protagonist is not only disciplining her body for mechanical work, but making herself into a likeness of the machine, a process that is also reflected in the language and narrative modes of the passage. Next comes her thirty-second shower in ice-cold water,

“Eins – zwei – drei – vier. Nicht so schnell zählen. Langsam, ganz langsam: fünfzehn – sechzehn – siebzehn. Sie zittert ein bißchen stolz auf ihre bescheidene Tapferkeit und

Selbstüberwindung. Tagesplan einhalten. Nicht abweichen vom System. Nicht schlapp machen. In der kleinsten Kleinigkeit nicht.”299 Through sheer willpower, Gilgi forces her body to overcome its natural physical reactions to the cold water. By subduing her body’s

297 See Wildung, 681. 298 Katharina von Ankum “Motherhood and the ‘New Woman’: Vicki Baum’s stud. chem. Helene Willfuer and Irmgard Keun’s Gilgi-eine von uns.” Women in German Yearbook: Feminist Studies in German Literature and Culture. Vol. 11 (1995) 171-188. See p. 181. 299 Keun 6. Translation: “One – two – three – four. Don’t count so fast. Slowly, quite slowly: fifteen – sixteen – seventeen. She trembles a bit, proud of her modest amount of courage and self-discipline. Keep to the daily schedule. Do not deviate from the system. Don’t give up/loose your nerve. Not in the smallest bit.” 151 nature, she can gains greater control over its mechanisms. Gilgi also operates systematically, strictly adhering to a daily plan or System, in which every second counts and is counted.300 Keun’s unique narrative style is demonstrated clearly in this passage, as well. Throughout the novel, the narrative flows freely from stream-of-consciousness into free indirect speech (“erlebte Rede”) and sometimes switches to an omniscient narrator. In the case of the above passage, Keun conveys Gilgi’s mediated counting through stream-of-consciousness narration, which shifts then to the omniscient narrator with the use of “sie.” The final four command-like fragments (“Tagesplan einhalten.

Nicht abweichen vom System. Nicht schlapp machen. In der kleinsten Kleinigkeit nicht.”) are communicated in the form of free indirect speech.301 Keun’s writing reflects a disjointed and fragmentary mode of language that “recalls the mechanics of writing with a typewriter.”302 The result in Keun’s narrative is that the voice of the omniscient narrator and the female protagonist at times collapse into one. The greater effect of Keun’s use of free indirect speech is that it allows the autobiographical aspects of the novel surface more prominently for the reader, because Gilgi’s voice and the author’s can be easily conflated. Since Keun herself worked as a professional typist, linguistic moments like this one may be read as reflections of her own subjective experiences.

Although the previously described scene takes place in the home, this image of the determined, systematic, machine-girl Gilgi, is most prominently displayed in the

300 See also Keun, Gilgi – eine von uns, 13. “Nein, sie hat keine Zeit zu verlieren, keine Minute. Sie will weiter, sie muβ arbeiten. Ihr Tag ist vollgepfropft mit Arbeiten aller Arten. Eine drängt hart an die andere. Kaum, daβ hier und da eine winzige Lücke zum Atemholen bleibt.” 301 For more on indirect speech or “erlebte Rede,” see Kerstin Barndt’s Sentiment und Sachlichkeit: Der Roman der Neuen Frau in der Weimarer Republik. Köln: Bölau Verlag, 2003. 124. 302 Führich 90. 152 novel’s office scenes. As we learned in Chapter 1, many aspects of office work revolved around repetitive mechanical tasks, but typewriting, in particular, required a high level of physical strength, focus, and endurance. Keun’s descriptions of Gilgi at work depict the protagonist as deeply connected to the rhythm and physical artifact of her machine.

Tick-tick-tick – rrrrrrrr – bezugnehmend auf Ihr Schreiben vom 18. des … tick-tick-tick – rrrrrrrr … einliegend überreichen wir Ihnen … tick-tick- tick im Anschluß an unser gestriges Telefongespräch teilen wir Ihnen mit … Die Stenotypistin Gilgi schreibt den neunten Brief für die Firma Reuter & Weber, Strumpfwaren und Trikotagen en gros. Sie schreibt schnell, sauber und fehlerfrei. Ihre braunen, kleinen Hände mit den braven, kurznäglig getippten Zeigefingern gehören zu der Maschine, und die Maschine gehört zu ihnen. Tick-tick-tick – rrrrrrrr … die Stenotypistin Gilgi geht zum Chef und legt ihm die Briefe zur Unterschrift vor.303

The use of onomatopoetic language (“tick-tick-tick – rrrrrrrr”) allows the reader to “hear” the sound of Gilgi’s work in terms of the movement of the typewriter’s keys and carriage.

By alternating typewriter sounds with Gilgi’s inner monologue, which merely recounts the fragmented text from the (ninth) letter she typed that day, Keun identifies inscription as mechanical work in which rhythm and automatic modes are key. The even repetition of the machine in this passage (three “ticks” and eight “r’s”) calls Gilgi’s morning exercises to mind. The two occurrences of her title, “Die Stenotypistin Gilgi,” (“the stenotypist Gilgi”) similar to the designation “Das Mädchen Gilgi” (“the girl Gilgi”)

303 Keun, Gilgi-eine von uns, 16. Translation: “Tick-tick-tick – rrrrrrrr – referring to your letter from the eighteenth of … tick-tick-tick – rrrrrrrr … enclosed we present to you … tick-tick-tick in connection with our telephone conversation yesterday, we are informing you about … […] The stenotypist Gilgi writes the nineth letter for the firm Reuter & Weber, hosiery and knitwear in bulk. She writes quickly, cleanly, and without error. Her little brown hands with honest pointer fingers, whose nails have been shortened by typing, belong to the machine, and the machine belongs to them. […] Tick-tick-tick – rrrrrrrr … the stenotypist Gigli goes to her boss and lays the letters in front of him for his signature.” 153 employed earlier, concretizes her identity in terms of her youth and profession. 304

Furthermore, Keun conceptualizes the connection between body and machine in this passage, in so far as Gilgi’s hands “belong to” the machine and it “belongs to” them. This notion of “belonging” can be read in several ways. It can indicate the sense of “feeling at home” or of ownership. In this case, the language indicates a reciprocal relationship between user and device. Gilgi appears to embrace both interpretations, since she takes pleasure in her roles as owner/caretaker and that which is owned. As an owner, the material typewriter device becomes a mechanical prosthetic for Gilgi’s pointer fingers.

She drives it with the physical force of her body, and she appreciates that it helps her transcribe printed text at great speeds. From this perspective, the “tick-tick-tick – rrrrrrrr” in this passage does not merely represent the sound of the machine, but of Gilgi’s work as the machine responds to her touch – the sound of the physicality of typewriting.

This physical connection between the machine-girl Gilgi and the typewriter is also celebrated through the rituals of work within the novel. Similar to the scene in

Brück’s Schicksale hinter Schreibmaschinen, in which Fr. Brückner begins her day by uncovering her typewriter, Keun provides a careful description of Gilgi’s morning ritual when she arrives early at the office.

Sie ist die erste. Zehn Minuten zu früh da und nie eine Minute zu spät. Beinahe liebevoll holt sie ihren Stenogrammblock aus der Schublade, streift die Wachstuchhülle von der Maschine, bürstet die Typen sauber und spannt ein neues Farbband ein. Neues Farbband ist jedesmal eine kleine Freude.305

304 Ibid. 5. 305 Ibid. 65. Translation: “She is the first. There ten minutes too early and never a minute too late. Almost affectionately/lovingly she takes the steno pad out of the drawer, strips the wax-cloth cover off the 154

When read alongside the other scenes referenced here, this passage makes it clear that

Gilgi sees great importance in refining her physical equipment (body and machine). In

Keun’s text the protagonist views the machine objectively as an extension of her work. In the passage quoted above, she tunes her device methodically, but lovingly (“liebevoll”), because she loves her work, “Arbeit. Ein hartes Wort. Gilgi liebt es um seiner Härte willen.”306 Gilgi’s drive to progress shapes the structure of her life, which is divided up into a series of small jobs. Her fixation on punctuality and efficiency reveals a kind of calculated precision, which colors and structures her practical life. For Gilgi, various forms of work dictate the tempo and rhythm of her daily life, i.e., her morning exercises, typewriting, and her coursework, and she thrives on the rigid structure and systematic manner that these tasks offer.

Contributing to Keun’s construction of Gilgi as an ambitious, self-possessed New

Woman linked to the machine is her dedication to personal and professional advancement outside of the workplace. After work, Gilgi attends the Berlitz School, where she takes courses in Spanish, English, and French for three hours, back-to-back. She also rents a room: “Dieses Zimmerchen hat sie gemietet, um ungestört arbeiten zu können.”307 In this room, she keeps “[eine] kleine Erika-Schreibmaschine und [ein] Grammophon,” devices she paid for by doing overtime.308 Keun chooses to equip her protagonist with an Erika-

Schreibmaschine, a popular, existing model that was marketed as “die wahre Volks- machine, brushes the keys clean and fix a new typewriter ribben in. A new ribbon is a small pleasure/happiness everytime. 306 Ibid. 13. Translation: “Work. A hard word. Gilgi loves it because of its hardness.” 307 Ibid. 21. Translation: “She has rented this little room, in order to be able to work undisturbed.” 308 Ibid. Translation: “a little Erika-Typewriter (German brand of typewriter) and a gramophone.” 155

Schreibmaschine” during the Weimar era.309 I read Keun’s choice as her way of situating

Gilgi as a “woman of the people,” which is also reflected in the novel’s title “eine von uns” (one of us).

Gilgi’s private room, where she operates her Erika-Schreibmaschine, is reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, published in October 1929.

Woolf declares “a woman must have money and a room of her own, if she is to write fiction.”310 Gilgi possesses financial stability and a private space to work, yet it is not her intention to individually author a document. Instead, she chooses to perform more mechanical text processing in this space, such as translating the English novel, Three

Men in a Boat, into German. “Gilgi schreibt. Schreibt, liest, streicht durch, schreibt …”311

Although it is unclear whether she is using a typewriter or simply pen and paper at this moment in the novel, Gilgi’s persistence at learning and at work is clear. Again, a short time later in the novel, “Gilgi sitzt auf ihrem Zimmer. Jetzt wird gearbeitet. […] Gilgi

übersetzt aus “Three men in a boat.”312 The copy of the novel is well-worn, and it is an early indicator of her reading choices. Three men in a boat is a comic English novel written by Jerome K. Jerome and published in 1889. The novel focuses largely on the travels of three men and a dog on the River Thames and depicts the late-Victorian

309 Leonhard Dingwerth’s Historische Schreibmaschinen-Anzeigen von 1880-1959. Delbrück: Historisches Schreibmaschinen-Archiv Dingwerth. 2000. See pages 297 and 298 (bottom) for advertisements. 310 Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own.” Online source (pdf). Accessed Sept. 14, 2014. http://victorianpersistence.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/a-room-of-ones-own-virginia-woolf-1929.pdf 311 Keun, Gilgi-eine von uns, 22-23. Translation: “Gilgi writes. Writes, reads, strikes through, writes. 312 Ibid. 80. Translation: “Gilgi sits in her room. Now work is being done. Gilgi translates from Three Men in a Boat.” 156

“clerking classes.”313 When asked what she likes to read, Gilgi mentions primarily travel writers depicting distant, exotic lands: Colin Roß, author of Mit Kamera, Kind und Kegel durch Afrika (1928), Bengt Berg, a Swedish ornithologist known for his African wildlife photography, and Jack London, well-known writer of Call of the Wild (1903) and White

Fang (1906). Pragmatism is key for determining Gilgi’s reading choices. As part of her goals for professional advancement, she studies foreign languages, wants to travel the world, and is fascinated by adventures in far-off locations, like the Yukon and Africa.

Although she is studying languages, an endeavor which should allow for individual self- expression, her pragmatic mode determines the nature of her work. All in all, Keun constructs her image of the New Woman with specific interests and ambitions, but as a woman that approaches these other aspects of her life and work mechanically.

Ultimately, Gilgi is driven by reason and objectivity, and for her, work is the essence of her rational life. Gilgi’s life goals echo the mantra of the modern woman, “Ich will arbeiten, will weiter, will selbstständig und unabhängig sein – ich muß das alles

Schritt für Schritt erreichen. Jetzt lern’ ich meine Sprachen – ich spar’ Geld – vielleicht werd’ ich in ein paar Jahren eine eigene Wohnung haben, und vielleicht bring’ ich’s mal zu einem eigenen Geschäft.”314 Consistent with the idealized figure of the New Woman,

Gilgi's emotional compass tends toward the unsentimental, rational, and practical, qualities that also keep her grounded to her “kleines Leben” (modest life). For example,

313 Lewis, Jeremy. Introduction. Three men in a boat: to say nothing of the dog. Penguin Books, Limited (UK), 2008. 314 Keun 70. Translation: “I want to work, want to progress, want to be self-reliant and independent – I have achieve everything step by step. Now I learn my languages – I save money – perhaps I will have my own apartment in a few years, and perhaps I will go so far as to get my own store.” 157 she confesses that she “kann keine Bilder malen und keine Bücher schreiben, ich bin allgemeiner Durchschnitt und bring’s nicht fertig, deswegen zu verzweifeln […] ich freue mich, wenn alles so ordentlich und geregelt in meinem Leben ist.”315 Gilgi views herself as not especially creative (she can neither paint pictures nor write books), so she relies on order and discipline to shape her appearance and achieve her aims. Within the first half of the novel Gilgi does not react emotionally, but rather in a rational manner toward her work and the prospect of human relationships.

The relevation of her adoption and her contact with bohemian writer Martin

Bruck disrupt Gilgi’s orderly existence and focus on her professional advancement.

When she finds out that she is adopted, Gilgi visits the woman who she believes is her mother, Fräulein Täschler. After learning that the old woman living in squalor is, in fact, not her mother, Gilgi falls into a state of panic that destabilizes her rational worldview.

Keun reflects this destabilization by inverting the first line of the novel: “Ihr Leben hat sie fest in der Hand, um sie aus der Bahn zu werfen, da müssen schon andere Sachen kommen.”316 The reversal of the pronoun “sie” and the neuter noun “Ihr Leben” obscures the agent of this sentence. It is only in the subsequent infinitive clause that the message becomes clearer – Gilgi’s life is throwing her off track. This derailment, then, results in feelings of alienation, “[Gilgi] hat das Empfinden, sich selbst ganz fremd geworden zu

315 Keun 71. Translation: Gilgi “can not paint pictures and cannot write books, I am of the general average and will not manage it, therefore to become desperate.” 316 Keun 45. This passage can be read as: “Her life has her firmly in its hand…” or “She has her life firmly in her hand…” The passage continues with …”in order to throw her off track, given that already other things have to come.” 158 sein.”317 Because of this moment, Gilgi begins to view her existence from new and different perspectives.

A short time later, Gilgi’s best friend Olga introduces her to Martin Bruck, and

Keun sets these two characters up in opposition to each other. In contrast to Gilgi, Martin

“hat zwei Bücher geschrieben” and is thoroughly “unordentlich.”318 Their differences also manifest physically, for unlike Gilgi’s hands which are strong and calloused by work, Martin has “nachdenkliche Hände, dünne, zerbrechliche Finger.”319 In spite of their differences, Gilgi is quickly drawn to the well-traveled writer but tries to resist adopting aspects of his unstructured lifestyle. Gilgi marvels at Martin’s storytelling ability:

“Erzählen kann er! Der ist noch weiter gereist als Olga,” and “Martin erzählt, und Gilgi sieht: Meere, Wüsten, Länder […] Daß jemand so bunt sprechen kann!”320 In contrast,

Gilgi often finds that she has “keine Worte, um sich verständlich zu machen,” or that

“Worte sterben” when she tries to express herself.321 Martin is the writer, the one with words and lively stories, and the one who scratches out text on paper, whereas Gilgi is decidedly not a writer, and she is incapable of creative expression. One explanation for

Gilgi’s lack of words is that the mechanisms that drive her are only geared toward reproduction of text, rather than expressive, creative production. For example, when

Martin stands her up, Gilgi reacts as follows: “Hab’ jetzt schöne Zeit für mich. Und sie

317 Ibid. Translation: “Gilgi has the feeling that she had become entirely foreign/strange to herself.” 318 Keun 72, 74. Translation: Martin “has written two books” and he is thoroughly “disorderly/disheveled.” 319 Keun 74. Translation: Martin has “thoughtful/contemplative hands, thin, fragile/breakable fingers.” 320 Keun 75, 77. Translation: “Can he tell stories! He has traveled even farther than Olga,” then “Martin narrates, and Gilgi sees: seas, deserts, countries […] That someone can speak so colorfully!” 321 Keun 86, 212. Translation: she has “no words, in order to make herself understood,” or that “words die” when she tries to express herself. 159 setzt sich vor die Erika-Schreibmachine, die Tasten fliegen. Sie schreibt zehn spanische

Geschäftsbriefe – zur Übung. Sieht nicht einmal auf, stützt nicht einmal den Kopf in die

Hände, um vor sich hin zu starren. Tick – tick – tick – rrrrrrrr...”322 Gilgi’s focus and stoicism in this moment, combined with Keun’s onomatopoetic rendition of the mechanical motion of the typewriter, takes the place of any kind of expressive or emotive response to her rejection. From the beginning of the novel, Gilgi sees sentimentality and romanticism as hindrances to her personal progress.323 Typing the business letters allows

Gilgi to cope by reproducing text in an automatic mode. As in Brück’s novel, automatism serves as a coping mechanism for Keun’s protagonist. Gilgi’s essential embodiment of these mental and physical automatic modes is portrayed similarly to Fräulein Brückner’s coping mechanism in Brück’s Schicksale hinter Schreibmaschinen. But, while typing business letters serves to distract Gilgi from her disappointment, the act does not carry the same melodramatic emotional weight as when Fräulein Brückner attempts to bury her traumas.

As we have seen in this chapter, a close examination of the typist’s physical engagement with the machine reveals similarities in the authors’ perspectives on typewriting in the novels. Both novels cast women’s typewriting, with its repetitive routines, mechanical movements, and automatic modes, as a figurative space of retreat

322 Keun, 82. Translation: I now have nice time for me. And she sits herself before the Erika-typewriter, the keys fly. She writes ten Spanish business letters – for practice. Not once does she look up, not once does she rest her head in her hands, in order to stare straight ahead.” 323 In her article, “Unruly Daughters and Modernity: Irmgard Keun’s Gilgi-eine von uns,” Barbara Kosta discusses women’s changed attitudes towards the realms of emotion and love, which she connects to their ultimate rejection of traditional gender roles and the development of the generational gap between mothers and daughters. 160 and refuge from trauma. We should also note that both protagonists take pleasure in the routine of typewriting (removing the typewriter cover, inserting the paper, and typewriting itself). It is these moments of pleasure, I believe, that conjure the cyborgian image of the New Woman-Machine. As readers, we witness the protagonists, to use

Haraway’s words, take “pleasure in skill, machine skill” and this skill becomes an aspect of their embodiment, and something that is completely outside of mothering, nurturing, or tending to others in the home or in the workplace.324 In both novels, the typewriter serves as a vehicle for demonstrating and taking pleasure in skilled use of the machine.

The title of Brück’s novel already puts the typewriter as machine on display. The word “Schreibmaschinen” (typewriters) emphasizes the act of typewriting over the more frequent act of handwriting in the office, and the plural form promptly evokes images of a typing pool.325 Keun’s protagonist Gilgi is depicted as being in control of the typewriter, possessing her own Erika-Schreibmaschine, and determining her own fate “vor der

Schreibmaschine.” Brück’s protagonist, however, remains “hinter Schreibmaschinen” her destiny resigned to and ultimately at the mercy of the machine’s claim to progress.326 In her novel, Keun differentiates herself from Brück’s grim narrative by directly dismissing it as a “Beleidigungstragödie” (tragedy of insults).327 After Gilgi gets an extra job taking dictation for Herrn Mahrenholz, a World War I veteran who wants to document his

324 Haraway, “Cyborg Manifesto,” 462. 325 See Susanne Suhr’s Die weiblichen Angestellten for statistics on the frequency of typewriting versus handwriting in the Weimar business office. 326 Keun 55. Angelika Führich makes this connection between Keun’s Gilgi and Brück’s Schicksale in her article “Type-writers: Discursive Technology in Women’s Narratives of Weimar Germany”. Translation: “vor der Schreibmaschine” – in front of / before the typewriter. “hinter Schreibmaschinen” – behind typewriters. 327 Keun 101. 161 memoirs, Martin asks about her experiences working closely with male supervisors. Gilgi clarifies,

“[…] ich find’, die Männer sind gar nicht so schlimm, wie sie immer gemacht werden. Die meisten versuchen natürlich ihr Glück, wenn ihnen ein hübsches junges Mädel in die Quere kommt – kann man nicht viel übel nehmen. Oder? Ich find’ das ganz normal und natürlich. Hauptsache: man versteht, ihnen geschickt auszuweichen. Bloß keine große Beleidigungstragödie à la ‘Schicksale hinter Schreibmaschinen’!”328

In this passage, Keun’s protagonist readily accepts her sexualization at the typewriter as

“normal” and “natural.” Gilgi recommends simply avoiding the sexual advances of male superiors – a skill that she demonstrates earlier in the narrative, when she dodges the affections of her boss, Herr Reuter, by passing him off to Olga.

In Brück’s fictional reality, the mechanization and sexualization of the female body “behind the typewriter” are depicted as physically oppressive forces. The most memorable example of this arises when Brück’s protagonist, Fräulein Brückner, is working in the typing pool at the flour factory. She witnesses the sexual assault of the other typists by the boss’s uncle, “der Ehrwürdige,” Ludwig Wagner, as he

“herumstreichelt, tätschelt und fingert an jungen Frauenkörpern, hier nur ein wenig animalische Wärme erbeutend, dort das leise Muskelspiel eines schlanken Rückens, die

Spannung einer festen Hüfte.”329 Brück provides detailed descriptions of the sexual abuse

328 Ibid. Translation: “[…] I find that the men are entirely not as bad as they are made out to be. Most of them naturally try their luck, when a pretty young girl gets in their way – one cannot take much offense. Or? I find it entirely normal and natural. The main thing: it is understood that one should skillfully avoid them. Just no big tragedy of insults like Destinies behind Typewriters (Schicksale hinter Schreibmaschinen – Brück’s novel). 329 Brück 248. Translation: “the venerable,” Ludwig Wagner, as he “fondles around, caresses, and fingers at young women’s bodies, here only to capture a little animal warmth, there the quiet muscle game (bravado) of a slender back, the tension of a firm hip.” 162 of the typists, particularly when Wagner molests Brückner herself. The author dwells on the victimization of the female office workers in her novel. Although this aspect of the novel contains an important message for readers, Keun’s female protagonist actively resists becoming “hilflos und wehrlos.”330 Instead, Keun constructs Gilgi as a figure fighting against the desperate and helpless conditions of the white-collar working class.

Although Keun’s novel has been read as the more optimistic of the two, her protagonist experiences several crises, including the tragic suicide of an entire family, before she is able to regain control of her life. As Gilgi and Martin’s relationship progresses, it disrupts this system of operation: “Und nun! Der Martin ist eine

Betriebsstörung. Und das schlimmste: diese Störung ist ihr lieber als der ganze Betrieb zusammen.”331 Because of Martin, Gilgi begins questioning her rationalized existence, which causes a crisis of language. She tells Olga that she “hat kein einziges Wort, das bindet – fängt nur Worte, die Seifenblasen sind.”332 Gilgi cannot understand or put her fears about her relationship into words. She continues, “Und ganz zerfetzt ist man und hat

Schreibmaschinenworte und Uhrwerkworte und Alletageworte und will nicht von sich wissen und soll etwas von sich wissen – Ich liebe ihn so, Olga.”333 Thus, Gilgi only has language or concepts for the mechanized, systematic parts of life, not for expressing aspects of emotional life. She possesses the words for these apparatuses – typewriter, clockwork, and the uniform system of daily life – but she does not possess the linguistic

330 Keun 209. Translation: “helpless and defenseless” 331 Keun 106. Emphasis in italics added. Translation: “And now! Martin is a disruption of opperations. And the worst part: she prefers this interruption to the entire operation itself.” 332 Keun 148. Translation: She “has no single word that binds – catches only words that are soap bubbles.” 333 Ibid. Translation: “And entirely frazzled is one and has typewriter-words and clockwork-words and everyday-words and does not want to know of oneself and should know something of oneself.” 163 faculties to describe herself. After discovering that she is pregnant with Martin’s child,

Gilgi’s crisis of language and expression gives way to a crisis of identity. Keun expresses her character’s disoriented perspective in the following passage.

Warum habe ich keine Worte – für Martin – und für mich auch nicht? – Da sind zwei Schichten in mir – und die obere, die diktiert – alltägliche Worte, alltäglliche Handlung – kleines Mädchen, kleines Maschinenmädchen, kleines Uhrwerkmädchen – drunter die untere Schicht – immer ein Wollen, immer ein Suchen, immer Sehnsucht und Dunkel und Nichtwissen – kein Wissen um Wohin – kein Wissen um Woher. […] Was – bin – ich – denn – nur? […] Sehnsucht nach Fleisch – nach Fleisch, das lebt, Fleisch, das atmet, Fleisch, das denkt … Zweigespaltenes Ich – tausendgespaltenes Ich. 334

In this passage, Gilgi’s internalization of the technological and automatic mechanisms is at odds with her heightened emotional state. In this regard, Keun presents a complex version of the New Woman-Machine. Gilgi’s identity has split into “zwei Schichten;” one dictates her rational everyday life, a “kleines Maschinenmädchen, kleines

Uhrwerkmädchen,” and the other she describes as “a desire” or “a yearning and darkness,” that she then associates with a desire for living, breathing flesh. With this altered state, Keun articulates a problematic dualism between the “natural” and

“artificial,” i.e. the natural body vs its transformation by the man-made materials of the

334 Keun 212-214. Translation: Why do I not have any words – neither for Martin, nor for me? – There are two layers/levels in me – the top one that dictates – everyday words, everyday actions – little girl, little machine-girl, little clockwork-girl – under this is the lower layer – always a desire, always a searching, always a yearning and darkness and ignorance – no knowledge about whereto, no knowledge about wherefrom. […] What – am – I – then? […] Yearning for flesh/substance – flesh that lives, flesh that breathes, flesh that thinks … an ‘I’ divided in two, an ‘I’ divided a thousand times. 164 machine. This merger of organic and technological has resulted in a cyborgian hybrid identity that Gigli must reconcile.335

At the end of the novel, Gilgi does manage to negotiate her divided state. She realizes that she must embrace the highly rationalized existence that she left behind, “ich muß arbeiten und Ordnung haben,” because she would become “immer nervöser und angstvoller und immer, immer kraftloser” were she to stay with Martin.336 At the same time, she chooses the “natural” reproductive role for women, and she will attempt to pave her own path as a single working mother. Keun’s ending is bold in its uncertainty, for it reads as simultaneously riddled with hope and despair. As Gilgi is about to board the train to Berlin, she feels “Eine winzige Freude […] – Sekundenblitz: man wird wieder dazugehören – eingereiht sein in Pflicht und geschaffenem Räderwerk – man wird wieder geschützt sein im gewünschten Zwang erarbeiteter Tage, in dem gewollten Gesetz eigenen Schaffens.”337 With these lines, Keun’s protagonist finds peace in the mechanical movement of the locomotive’s wheels, and she looks forward to her return to the rigid structure of the workday. Yet, just a few lines later, the scene continues with

“Gedrängter, gespannter wächst Unruhe sich bewegender Menschen.”338 The scene, thus, oscillates between moments of reassurance to tension and anxiety, until the final lines of

335 In The Dada Cyborg, Biro suggests a broadened definition of the cyborg as organic-technological hybrid. To this end, he posits the notion of a “hybrid identity” as a locus of new modes of interior and exterior awareness. p. 1-2. 336 Keun 256. Translation: “I have to work and have order/control,” because she would become “more and more nervous and anxious and more and more, more powerless” were she to stay with Martin. 337 Keun 261. Translation: Gilgi feels: “A tiny happiness […] -- a second-long flash: one will belong to it again – be queued up for obligation and constructed wheelwork (train) – one will be protected again in desired constraint of planned/designed days, in the desired law of one’s own design.” 338 Ibid. Translation: “More crowded, tenser, restlessness/disturbance grows for the moving people.” 165 the novel, where uncertainty reigns. This uncertainty manifests in Gilgi’s questions,

“Flucht vor der Wirklichkeit? Flucht in bessere Wirklichkeit?” and Gilgi forces “ein letztes, kleines Lächeln, das halb gelingt.”339 This ambiguity, or perhaps it is more appropriately described as duality, with which Keun closes her novel, is truly modernist in that it relentlessly pushes both ways – between hope and despair, optimism and anxiety

– into uncertainty. On the surface, this uncertain state amounts to Gilgi’s attempt to combine of single motherhood with employment, but it also reflects Gilgi’s now uncertain relation to machine and system. The narrative, thus, leaves us with the questions: Can Gilgi be both a mother and machine-girl simultaneously? Or must she relinquish one for the other? Overall, within Keun’s novel, the cyborgian imagery of the

New Woman-Machine comes to represent the transformative hybrid state of the modern woman in the face of an uncertain future.

V. On (Type)Writing: Keun and Brück’s Self-Reflective Impulses

There is a consensus in relatively recent scholarship concerning the positive impact of the typewriter on women’s authorship. In Understanding Media Marshall

McLuhan claims that“[t]he typewriter fuses composition and publication, causing an entirely new attitude to the written and printed word”340 Inspired by McLuhan’s claims,

Kittler addresses this connection between typewriting and authorship in his Discourse

Networks 1800/1900: “In 1882, after the typewriter was invented, two sexes, the text and

339 Keun 262. Translation: “Flight from reality? Flight to a better reality?” and “a last little smile, that only half succeeds.” 340 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 260. 166 a blind writing tool replaced the man, his thought and his authorship.”341 Ultimately,

Kittler claims that the invention of the typewriter transformed the writing process and re- shaped the nature of authorship, making room for women’s movement from mechanical medium to producer of text. In his next influential work, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter,

Kittler extends this point of view:

Empirically speaking, women employed in processing discourses are likely to have a successful career. Word processing, somewhere amidst the relays of technological communications networks, breaks up couples and families. Precisely at that gap evolves a new job: the woman author. […] A desexualized writing profession, distant from any authorship, only empowers the domain of text processing.342

To support this argument, Kittler lists several female authors who had formerly worked in offices and as secretaries: Richarda Huch, Gertrude Stein, Theodora Bosanquet, Tatjana

Tolstoy, Irmgard Keun, Paula Schlier, Christa Anita Brück, and others. About Keun,

Schlier, and Brück, he writes that “so many novels written by recent women writers are endless feedback loops making secretaries into writers. Sitting in front of autobiographical typewriters, Irmgard Keun’s heroines simply repeat the factual career of their author.”343 Kittler considers Brück’s Schicksale, “an autobiography without mention of love, only the desire to help those ‘women not interested in motherhood’ to have a breakthrough as women writers.”344 In her assessment of Brück and Keun’s novels,

Führich agrees with Kittler that since both authors worked as professional typists before

341 Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, 353. 342 Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 221. 343 Ibid. 344 Ibid. 221-222. Kittler cites a section from Brück’s novel in this passage as a way of accessing her message. 167 writing their own novels, typewriting facilitated their transition from textual reproduction to creative textual production.345

I respond to these claims with great skepticism for two reasons. First, while I agree with McLuhan that the typewriter presented the user with a perceived connection to publication, this was not the only or even most primary perception of users. Professional typists, for example, most commonly worked in offices where they simply copied correspondence or transcribed dictation. They rarely had the opportunity to type a document that would be considered for publication. Second, although Kittler’s claim connecting women’s typewriting to authorship appears to be compelling, he employs some faulty reasoning. Career opportunities for women during the Weimar period were very limited, and millions of educated middle-class women took employment in offices.

Therefore, it is difficult to reason that because a few of these women went on to become writers, that the typewriter eased their transition to authorship.

Brück and Keun serve as excellent examples here, because while they appear to report on their subjective experiences as typists in their novels, they do not link authorship to the typewriter in the contexts of their novels. In Brück’s Schicksale, for example, Fräulein Brückner writes “Kurzgeschichten, Essays und Buchbesprechungen,” as well as “kleine Gedichte, Erzählungen, die [sie] vor Jahren geschrieben und die eine

345Angelika Führich. “Typewriters: Discursive Technology in Women’s Narratives of Weimar Germany.” The Image of Technology in Literature, the Media, and Society. Eds. Wright, Will and Kaplan, Steve. Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Social Imagery, University of Southern Colorado, Pueblo, CO, 1994. 89-93. Führich states the following: “By allowing women entry into former male domains of labor such as the office, and by easing their way into the field of writing/text production, the discursive technology of the typewriter provided women with a new social space.” (89) 168 freundliche Zeitung zum Abdruck gebracht hat.”346 While she has already had some success with her writing, Fräulein Brückner handwrites her texts at home. As she continues with her “mechanische Arbeit,” she finds that she no longer has the energy to read or write creatively: “Abends, wenn ich meine hundertfünfzig Frachtbriefe ausgefüllt habe, bin ich so trägen, abgeleierten Geistes, daß ich nicht einmal mehr lesen mag.”347

Evidence of a connection between authorship and the typewriter is also absent from

Keun’s novel. As already mentioned, Gilgi owns her own typewriter and possesses a

“room of her own” so that she may work and practice her language skills. Although Keun appears to create an ideal setting for Gilgi’s writing, the protagonist uses the space to perform practical, mechanical, and repetitive tasks. Even her translation of the English novel, Three Men in a Boat, is accomplished merely to practice her language skills, a kind of text processing. The bohemian writer, Martin, performs the only instances of writing occurring in the novel. Although the reader does not witness Martin in the act of writing, there is evidence that he only writes by hand at his desk. When Gilgi enters his

“Schreibzimmer,” she finds “[a]uf dem Schreibtisch liegen bekritzelte Blätter,” the content of which “handelt sich da um Sitten und Gebräuche von Südseeinsulanern.”348

Amidst these pages, Gilgi also discovers several letters, two of which she describes. The first letter is handwritten: “Es kommt ihr gar nicht in den Sinn, den Brief zu lesen, geht

346 Brück, Schicksale. See pages 280 and 233-34. Translation: “Short stories, essays and book reviews,” as well as “little poems, narratives, that she had written years ago and that a friendly newspaper had published.” 347 Ibid. 252. Translation: “mechanical work,” “Evenings, when I filled out my hundred fifty waybills, my mind is so lethargic and reeling that I longer like reading.” 348 Keun, Gilgi, 150. Translation: “writing room,” she finds “scribbled papers lying on the desk,” the content of which “deals with habits and customs of South Pacific Islanders.” 169 sie ja nichts an, und außerdem ist er mit der Hand geschrieben. Handgeschriebene Briefe haben sowas aufdringlich Intimes.”349 However, the second letter concerning very practical financial matters is from Martin’s brother. Gilgi describes it as being written in

“[s]ympathisch klare Maschinenschrift.”350 In this scene, Keun communicates the cultural meanings behind these two forms of inscription (“Handschrift” and “Maschinenschrift”), and she also filters this meaning through her protagonist. Gilgi finds the emotional connection of handwritten text unwelcome, even intimidating, whereas the machine- script is welcome, clear, and friendly. Much like Brück, Keun associates handwritten text with emotion (intimacy), self-expression, and authorship, and machine-script is linked with the task-driven clarity and objectivity of correspondence. Overall, both former professional typists, now writers, relegate typewriting to the realms of labor, the workplace, and professional advancement and do not portray the typewriter as a vehicle to authorship.

Conclusion

To conclude this chapter, I view Brück and Keun’s novels to be very similar in their representations of typewriting and their conclusions. Regardless of their optimism or pessimism about the role of the typewriter in women’s emancipation, both women writers link the device almost exclusively with labor. Although each of the female protagonists takes pleasure in the mechanical routine of her work, such as in the rituals of uncovering

349 Ibid. 151. Translation: “It does not even occur to her to read the letter. It does not involve her, and otherwise it is written by hand. Handwritten letters have something obtrusively intimate.” 350 Ibid. 152. Translation: “likeable, clear machine-script” 170 the device and starting the day, this routine becomes a retreat for them. For both characters, this retreat to the mechanism of routine can be a positive one, a refuge, but it can also be a negative one, as in a withdrawal or defeat. Moreover, both protagonists take on forms of automatism as a coping mechanism that allows them to unburden their conscious minds while typewriting. Whether the device is portrayed in terms of its potential to emancipate or oppress, it remains bound to the mechanical processes and automatic modes of industrial production that manifest the New Woman-Machine. The indefinite endings of each novel gesture to the writers’ critiques of the Weimar social order and ultimately demonstrate a kind of cultural anxiety about the uncertain future for working women.

171

Chapter 3: The Feminine Machine: Docility and Female Embodiment in Early German Typewriter Advertising

Introduction

Extending the investigation conducted in the previous chapter on textual imagery related to the New Woman-Machine in popular late-Weimar novels, this chapter focuses on interrogating one facet of visual culture that seeks to combine words and static images: print advertising. In this last chapter, I have argued that Weimar writers problematized images of typewriting women by framing automatic writing in terms of a coping mechanism or retreat from conflict. Working with very different aims in mind, e.g., to produce effective and convincing commercial imagery, graphic artists created print advertisements celebrating the women’s intimate connection, even correlation, with the machine. From the turn of the century through the Weimar era, thousands of print advertisements from full-color posters to small black-and-white newspaper ads, not to mention catalogs, letterhead, and even collectable postage stamps, pictured the most recent, cutting-edge typewriter models and predominantly female users. At first glance, advertisements appear to depict simple, prescriptive fantasies; however, these images are profoundly cultural. So I must agree with media theorist Marshall McLuhan, when he called advertisements “the richest and most faithful daily reflections that any society ever 172 made of its entire range of activities.”351 Advertising, as a subset of popular culture, takes existing cultural perceptions, and by concentrating them and privileging them over others, it “conventionalizes our conventions” and constructs our conceptions of normalcy and deviance.352 This chapter, thus, takes a serious look at these often amusing bits of mass-cultural ephemera and unpacks the coded messages about gender, women’s typewriter work, and the mechanized female body that were implicitly communicated to male and female consumers in the first third of the twentieth century.

Early print advertisements for typewriters presented male and female consumers with a new series of – albeit sometimes conflicting – female types, e.g. the sexy female typist, the humble housewife, and showgirls that embody mechanical or geometric shapes, akin to the American performing dance troupe, the Tiller Girls. In this chapter, I uncover the diverse manifestations of the relationship between the typist and the typewriter generated in these ads. In so doing, I will show that the female typist in connection with the machine embodies aspects of the mechanical, while at the same time, the female body is configured in terms of a “feminine docility” that marks her as domesticated, unthreatening, unresisting, yet disciplined. Casting the female typist in these terms not only characterized women’s use of the machine as feminine and not far removed from their wifely and motherly roles; it also portrays the female body itself as

351 McLuhan. Understanding Media, 1964. 232. 352 My take on the function of advertising in this chapter is related to that presented by Erving Goffman in his seminal work, Gender Advertisements (Harper Colophon Books, 1979). See especially his Conclusions on page 84. A work that updates Goffman’s premise and takes it a step further: Codes of Gender: Identity & Performance in Popular Culture. Featuring Sut Jhally. Media Education Foundation, 2009. DVD. See also Jib Fowles, Advertising and Popular Culture (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 1996.) especially pages 9-17 for a detailed argument on the relationship between advertising and popular culture, in which he views advertising as its category of symbolic content that shares many attributes with popular culture, rather than viewing advertising as a subset of popular culture. 173 complicit in, and, an essential part of, the rationalization and mechanization of office work. Overall, these images in typewriter advertising celebrate female typists as docile bodies coded as feminine and, ultimately, bind them to the promise of women’s greater freedom and mobility in the drive toward progress in the Weimar era.

My concept of feminine docility, which makes up another facet of the New

Woman-Machine, broadens philosopher Michel Foucault’s notion of “docile bodies,” which he defines as bodies that may be manipulated, molded, and “subjected, used, transformed and improved,” bodies that are shaped through discipline and the regulated norms of cultural life.353 In this way, the “docile body” becomes a locus of social control:

“through the organization and regulation of the time, space, and movements of our daily lives, our bodies are trained, shaped, and impressed with the stamp of prevailing historical forms of selfhood, desire, masculinity, [and] femininity.”354 Such daily movements include those performed in contact with an object or a machine. For example, when the body interacts with an object, in what Foucault calls a “body-object articulation,” as it does when interfacing with a pen or a typewriter, “discipline defines each of the relations that the body must have with the object it manipulates.”355 Foucault uses the rules for gestures and postures for good handwriting as an example of how this disciplined body is treated.

353 Michel Foucault. Discipline and Punish: Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. 138. 354 Susan Bordo. “The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity.” Writing on the Body. Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory. Eds. Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. 91. 355 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 152-153. 174

The real bodies of female typists were, arguably subjected to forms of institutional discipline to an even greater extent than other office workers. As discussed in more detail in Chapter 1, beginning in the first decade of the twentieth century, vocational training programs communicated institutional modes of discipline meant to regulate of the body while typewriting through instructional methods using music or blindfolds to train touch typing. Additionally, authors of early twentieth-century typewriter instructional manuals emphasized correct upright body posture, finger position, and rules for eye movement, so that every part of the body was shaped regulated, and trained. For example, one such description of the “Regeln über die Körper- und Fingerhaltung” advised users to position their bodies accordingly:

Der Körper und Kopf sind stets ganz ungezwungen und aufrecht zu halten, ohne Überbeugungen. Es ist ein gewaltiger Vorzug des Maschinenschreibens gegenüber dem Federschreiben, daß der Körper seine gerade aufrechte Haltung beibehält, und nicht vornüber gebeugt wird mit Erhöhung der linken Schulter, wie beim Federschreiben, was bei allen Vielschreibern zu einer mehr oder weniger starken Rückgratsverkrümmung führt und Kurzsichtigkeit verursacht. […] Die Füße sind fest aufzustellen, nicht etwa unter den Stuhl zurückzubeugen. […] Es sind möglichst nur die Finger zu bewegen. Die Hände und der Arm bleiben fast unbeweglich.356

Standard descriptions in typewriting manuals of the early twentieth century, such as this one, recommended that the entire body, not merely the fingers but the eyes, torso, legs and feet, must be positioned correctly to prevent various types of pain, degeneration, or illness. Such instructions were meant to prepare the body for working long hours at the machine. In this account, the docile, disciplined body is a healthy body; it is well-trained,

356 Ferdinand Schrey. Der tüchtige Stenotypist auf der Hammond-Schreibmaschine. Berlin: Verlag Schrey, 1911. 9. 175 and it operates with “good form,” unquestioningly abiding by the advice of typewriting instructors, authors of typewriter handbooks, and psycho-technical scientists who possess privileged technical knowledge of the device.

Figure 5. Male teacher shielding the typewriter keys from his female student’s line of vision. 357

In the mid-1920s, methods for shaping and regulating the body in typewriting intensified due to the adoption of new methods of rationalization to maximize productivity and lower production costs through measures of organizational efficiency.

According to the rhetoric of the time, rationalization was supposed to assist with the recovery and reorganization of the nation after the economic upheaval and tremendous losses incurred after WWI and hyperinflation by modernizing and streamlining the

357 See Karl Borchert’s Illustriertes Lehrbuch für das Schreiben mit der Schreibmaschine (1915), 11. 176

German economy.358 Under the umbrella term “rationalization,” German businesses enthusiastically implemented American industrial production methods, namely Frederick

Winslow Taylor’s system of “scientific management.” Adopted both in industry and in offices, Taylor’s method imposed new standards of speed and efficiency on both factory and office workers and, thus, created a “system of industrial discipline” that was supposed to maximize productivity for manual tasks.359 Taylor’s methods thoroughly impacted office work and were particularly visible in the efforts of “Psychotechniker”

(technical psychologists) to rationalize typewriting.

The “Rationalisierungseuphorie” at the end of the twenties was largely accepted, and the alleged knowledge gathered by “Psychotechniker” was used as a pretense for implementing such practices. Treated much like an organized troupe of soldiers, female typists were expected to fall in line: “Mit dem Mittel des militärischen Drills sollten

Frauen unmerklich an die gleichförmigen, mechanisierten Arbeitsabläufe gewöhnt und zu

Höchstleistungen angetrieben werden.”360 In line with these practices, typewriting speed was measured in keystrokes per second, and no less than 2.5 keystrokes per second was acceptable. With the rise of the typing pool in the Weimar era, typists worked swiftly to meet quotas and endured long hours hammering at the machine.

Accordingly, “Psychotechniker” performed studies on the typewriter and the typist, allegedly to understand how the body could be properly prepared for such rigorous

358 For a lengthier discussion of the rationalization movement and the debates surrounding it, see J. Ronald Shearer. “Talking about Efficiency: Politics and the Industrial Rationalization Movement in the Weimar Republic.” Central European History. Vol. 28.4 (1995): 483-506. 359 See Mark Seltzer. Bodies and Machines. New York: Routledge, 1992. Especially page 157. 360 Christina Bargholz. Großstadtmenschen: Die Welt der Angestellten Ed. Burkhart Lauterbach. Büchergilde Gutenberg, Frankfurt am Main, 1995. 217. 177 manual labor. In one such study, aptly titled Rationalisierung der Schreibmaschine und ihrer Bedienung (1926), Erich Klockenberg dedicates, not simply one brief paragraph or passage as in the prewar manuals, but over one hundred pages to describing his critical investigation of proper body posture and hand position when engaging with the machine.

Klockenberg proceeds with the crucial goal of generating “eine organische Verbindung des Komplexes Mensch und Maschine” by shaping the machine-construction to its user, and vice versa.361 In his aims to calibrate human and machine with one another,

Klockenberg’s study represents one example of the efforts not only to imagine, but create an intimate connection between human and typewriter for the sake of productivity. With his identification of the “Mensch-Maschine-Komplex” (human-machine complex),

Klockenberg points to the physical connection between human and machine that only achieves an ideal state through the purely Taylorized body, which has been made both docile and mechanical.362

All of this is to say that real-world typists contended with institutional disciplinary forces that sought to shape and regulate their bodies and minds. In addition to these forces, women of the Weimar era more generally were subject to other forms of regulation of their bodies by the movement to “rationalize” every aspect of public and private life, as discussed in the previous chapter.363 In its subjection to these various

361 Erich A. Klockenberg. Rationalisierung der Schreibmaschine und ihrer Bedienung. Psychotechnische Arbeitsstudien. Berlin: Verlag von Julius Springer, 1926. 3. 362 See Klockenberg, especially pages 1-6 and 18-20. 363 Concern about young women’s sexual activity and about the falling birth rate in the 1920s led to efforts to regulate sexuality and procreation through birth control and sexual technique. Women’s housework was also subject to reorganization and labor-saving methods. Housework, office work, and even women’s sexual performance came under scrutiny. For more on the rationalization of women’s private lives, see Atina Grossmann’s “Girlkultur or Thoroughly Rationalized Female: A New Woman in Weimar Germany?” 178 forms of discipline, the real bodies of female typists were, thus, sites of struggle during the Weimar era. Disciplinary rules in schools and industry restricted typists’ physical posture and movements to maintain efficiency, while at the same time, a steady stream of mass-media images, including advertisements, communicated that the ideal female body interfacing with the machine performs mechanically while maintaining its femininity.

With the emergence of Weimar’s vibrant visual culture, in which print advertising played a central role, the rules for femininity came to be culturally transmitted, at least in part, through standardized visual images. According to Susan Bordo, it is through these transmissions that:

We learn the rules directly through bodily discourse: through images that tell us what clothes, body shape, facial expression, movements, and behavior are required. As a result, femininity itself has come to be largely a matter of constructing, in the manner described by Erving Goffman, the appropriate surface presentation of the self. 364

As we follow Bordo and Goffman, it becomes clear that print advertisements, as well as other emerging forms of visual media, implicitly told consumers that this is what female typists looked like, wanted to look like, or should look like. Within the convergence of the mechanical and the feminine, “feminine docility” arises as an ideal for the female typist, suggesting that she should be domesticated, unthreatening, unresisting, yet disciplined in her work. Even though most mass-media images of women’s typewriting conflicted with practice, popular representations of women typewriting convincingly employed the “rhetoric and symbolism of empowerment” and personal autonomy that in Women in Culture and Politics: A Century of Change. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. 62- 80. See also Mary Nolan’s “’Housework Made Easy’: The Taylorized Housewife in Weimar Germany’s Rationalized Economy.” Feminist Studies. Vol. 16.3 (Autumn 1990), 549-577. 364 Bordo 94. See also, Erving Goffman, The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, N.J.: Anchor Doubleday, 1959. 179

Bordo finds in representations of the body in literary and media imagery.365 It is, therefore, likely that young women of the Weimar era understood this image of the female typist as “an appropriate surface presentation of the self,” which played a constitutive role in how they viewed their relationship to the machine.366 While one could categorize print advertisements as merely surface phenomena that were a ubiquitous part of the urban landscape, such forms of mass culture are not only intimately connected with how social changes were represented and perceived, but also part of the process of change itself.

In the following analysis, I first trace the historical trajectory of typewriter advertising by examining patterns of representation in pre-WWI advertisements, which display the decontextualized female typist as an eroticized commodity with a physical connection to the machine. Then, using this background as a point of comparison, I show that Weimar advertisements reveal a more profound connection between typist and typewriter, where the woman was not simply equated or conflated with the machine; instead, the typist manifests in many seemingly conflicting forms in this period ranging from a rationalized, docile, and unresisting office worker to a fresh-faced motherly figure, who nuzzles and cradles the device.367 Most importantly, though, the female typist is portrayed as embodying aspects of the mechanical, while maintaining a form of feminine docility.

365 Bordo 105. 366 Ibid. 367 See Andreas Huyssen. “Vamp and the Machine.” After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1986. He has argued that conflating or equating woman and the machine was the predominant modernist tendency. 180

The discussion that I set up here is a part of the ongoing discourse on embodiment and disembodiment in typewriting. In his assessment of Kittler’s Discourse Networks

1800-1900, Scott Bukatman points out the disembodying aspects of typing. He points out that handwriting appears to emanate directly from the body with the hand physically drawing and making contact with each letter. Alternatively, typing creates printed letters distinctly apart from the body and, in so doing, “produces an information space divorced from the body: a protocyberspace.”368 Therefore, according to Bukatman, typing results in a disembodied state. In her excellent analysis of typewriting and dictation in Bram

Stoker’s Dracula, Jennifer Fleissner points to the absence of gender in Bukatman’s premise. Fleissner shows that within this new information space, this split between the dictating male writer and the printed word, the body of the female typist or secretary is manifested as a body of production.369 It is this re-embodiment, or particular type of body to which Fleissner gestures, that I am interested in here. Different from Fleissner, I view female embodiment of the machine as part of a trajectory in the portrayal of the female body at the machine in German typewriter advertising. Accordingly, in this chapter I trace the shift from the sexualized body of the female typist in early twentieth century advertising (1900-1914) to the appearance of the productive body, i.e. a body striving toward machine perfection through discipline, in advertising, of the interwar period

(1918-1933). This chapter also builds on the work of Christopher Keep, who has pointed

368 See Bukatman, Gravity Matters, 39. 369 See Jennifer L. Fleissner. “Dictation Anxiety: The Stenographer’s Stake in Dracula.” Nineteenth Century Contexts: An Interdisciplinary Journal. 22.3 (2008) 417-455. Accessed on June 25, 2015 at dx.doi.org/10.1080/08905490008583519. See page 425. For another perspective on female embodiment and the politicization of women at the typewriter, see Victoria Olwell’s “Typewriters and the Vote.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. 29. 1 (2003), 55-83. 181 to the tendency of early British and American advertising to highlight both the sexuality and functionality of the female body at the typewriter, portrayals that served to both access and shape notions of the female typist in the cultural imaginary.370 Similar portrayals appear in early German advertising, in which forms of female embodiment are often found within configurations of the typewriting that clearly express hierarchies of communication and control. Given this evidence, I argue that these images in typewriter advertising celebrate the docile, disciplined body in typewriting and, ultimately, bind it to the promise that rationalization and modernization will provide women with greater freedom and mobility in the Weimar era.

In the course of performing qualitative and quantitative research for this chapter, I examined collections amounting to over 6,000 black-and-white newspaper and magazine advertisements, full-color posters, postcards, collectible postage stamps, and brochure covers. While some of the following advertising images were derived from online sources, such as manufacturer websites and typewriter archives, the bulk of these materials were parts of Leonhard Dingwerth’s typewriter advertisement collections.371

While surveying these materials, it soon became clear that reading early advertisements

370 See Keep, “Cultural Work of the Type-Writer Girl.” 371 See for example the manufacturer website: http://www.triumph-adler.com for histories on Triumph and Adler typewriter production, including historical advertisements. See also for example, Richard Polt’s website “The Classical Typewriter Page” at http://site.xavier.edu/polt/typewriters/index.html. For larger collections, see Dingwerth’s Historische Schreibmaschinen-Anzeigen – Quellen der Geschichte – 1880- 1959 and Werbungen für Büromaschinen in alter Zeit. 182 presents some serious challenges for cultural studies scholars. The most prominent challenge is the lack of information concerning the production of the advertisements.372

With the reproduction of photographs and hand-drawn illustrations, Weimar advertisers appealed to male and female consumers. Hand-drawn illustrations of human figures appeared more often than photographs in advertisements until the late-Weimar phase. Whether a product of mechanical or hand-drawn processes, advertisements of the

Weimar era were often the result of several intersecting factors, namely the graphic designer’s vision, the needs and requests of the client, the printer and their methods, and other contributors to the layout, typography, etc. In the case of German typewriter advertisements, it was the larger, more financially robust manufacturers that could afford to commission known graphic artists for their advertising campaigns, but they rarely kept detailed records of their campaigns.373 When surveying this collection of print advertisements, my first priority was to identify important patterns of representation with regard to the female typist’s connection to the typewriter. Wherever possible, I provide information about the graphic artists and contributors to the image, and I take that information into consideration when reading the visual content and interpreting the cultural meaning of the ads. Overall, the great breadth of the collection under examination provides critical information about early advertising and the diverse mass- media tapestry of advertising experienced by Weimar consumers.

372 See Julia Sneeringer. “The Shopper as Voter: Women, Advertising, and Politics in Post-Inflation Germany.” German Studies Review, Vol. 27. No. 3 (Oct. 2004), 476-501. See page 478. She encountered similar challenges in her assessment of Weimar advertising. 373 See Dingwerth, Werbungen, 19 and Sneeringer 477. 183

I. Advertising and Consumer Culture in the Weimar Republic

The first five years of the Weimar Republic were shaped by the negative effects of hyperinflation and economic crisis. The stabilization of the German currency in 1924 with the Rentenmark brought with it a renewed confidence in the German economy and over time the emergence of a powerful consumer culture. Driving Germany’s recovery were industrial firms that invested more heavily in automation and American production methods leading to increased labor productivity and a new reliance on technology. Such advancements in technology and process reinforced the promise of economic growth and an end to hardship for the German public.374 Although the purchasing power of individuals in Germany was weak and only reached pre-war levels in 1927, the mass production of consumer goods (fashionable clothes, cars, and cosmetics) grew.375

Advertising, a field that experienced rapid expansion during the interwar period, helped to create mass markets for such products by tying them to the idea of a lifestyle of luxury and leisure available to all. With the introduction of the forty-eight-hour work week and agreements for holidays in 1919 and the reduction to a forty-hour work week in

1931 in order to reduce unemployment, the pleasures of sport and leisure, previously reserved for the middle and upper classes, were extended to wage-earners for the first time. The rising number of mass-circulated fashion magazines and illustrated press capitalized on these new attitudes and possibilities by promoting a modern, easy, and

374 See Detlev J. Peukert. The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity. Trans. Richard Deveson. New York: Hill and Wang, 1989. 118-124. 375 See Peukert 174-177. 184 pleasure-filled existence. 376 Next to Litfaßsäule displaying advertising posters in the city, newspapers and magazines (e.g. Die Dame, Elegante Welt, Uhu, Das Magazin, and die

Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung) were the most important sources of information, as well as the most meaningful modes of advertising.377 Drawing on preconceived attitudes and beliefs, advertisers devised quick and concentrated ways to communicate with the consuming public.

Recently, scholars writing about gendered experiences in early twentieth-century

Germany have emphasized that the consumer was viewed as having a predominantly female identity. Belinda Davis, for example, maintains that the term “consumer” was rather nebulous during the prewar era. According to Davis,

German consumers were a fractured group without considerable societal significance or power. It was not until World War I that the consumer acquired a prominent and positive place in national life. […] Although both men and women saw themselves in this way, they envisioned the figure of the consumer as female.378

This conceptualization of the consumer as a female subject, “who could be both anticipated as a type and addressed as an individual,” continued to evolve throughout the

1920s.379

376 See Peukert; and, Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg. Eds. The Weimar Republic Sourcebook. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1994. 655-657. For more on the 48- and 40-hour work weeks, see Ulrich Kluge. Die Weimarer Republik. Paderborn: Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, 2006. 377 See Leonhard Dingwerth. Historische Schreibmaschinen-Anzeigen – Quellen der Geschichte – 1880- 1959. Historisches Schreibmaschinen-Archiv Dingwerth, 2000. 10-11. 378 See Darcy Buerkle. “Gendered Spectatorship, Jewish Women and Psychological Advertising in Weimar Germany.” Women’s History Review. 15.4. 625-636. Published 21. Nov. 2006. Accessed online 30. Jan. 2015. See especially pages 625-627. Davis quoted in Buerkle, 626. 379 See Buerkle 625 and also Sneeringer for how these aspects evolved with regard to women’s suffrage and race. 185

In their effort to appeal to female consumers, product advertisers invoked images of the Weimar New Woman, and in turn, they were also partially responsible for shaping the recognizable characteristics of this ideal. The fashion, hairstyles, and make-up of the

New Woman were conventionalized to some extent by her appearance in the growing number of women’s magazines, advertisements, and cinema of the era. These so-called surface phenomena influenced and were influenced by cultural change, particularly modifications in the workforce and the introduction of new technologies.380 The intersection of these forces allowed for the constant renewal of the New Woman as well as the dispersion of this ideal into typologies.381 The tendency to use typologies to categorize women in terms of their physical appearance or body type was a cultural impulse that surfaced in the Weimar era. To mention a few, Lynne Frame has pointed to the categories Gretchen, Girl, and Garconne, as well as the Vollweib (complete woman) or the “intersexual” woman (a woman with masculine characteristics, behavioral and/or physical).382 Frame astutely observes that

[t]he function of typologies is thus twofold: they operate as both hermeneutic tools and behavioral guides (Verhaltenslehren). In their interpretive and normative applications are directed both inward and outward, regulating both self and other, thereby providing a new structural security [re: discipline] in the destabilized social landscape.

380 See Marsha Meskimmon’s We Weren’t Modern Enough: Women Artists and the Limits of German Modernism. Berkley: University of California Press, 1999. Especially pages 178-179 for a more detailed discussion of how the image of the Weimar New Woman was shaped by aggregate forces of labor and consumerism. 381 For more on typologies, see Lynne Frame. “Gretchen, Girl, Garconne? Weimar Science and Popular Culture in Search of the Ideal New Woman. Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture. Ed. Katharina von Ankum. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. 382 Ibid. 13. See also Katie Sutton. The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany. Berghahn Books, 2011. 186

As this passage emphasizes, these typologies emerged in a time when gender norms were becoming increasingly destabilized, and they functioned as both a method of understanding women through categorization and as a means of prescribing behaviors. In order to target the consumer as a female subject, Weimar advertisers drew on these known types as a way of anticipating and endorsing certain codes of conduct. This chapter illuminates the how the female typist manifested in the fiction and fantasy of advertising in the shape of these typologies that supplied the consuming public with a set of gender-determined interpretations of and expectations for women’s engagement with the technology of the typewriter.

Giving further evidence of the attention to the female consumer, Weimar advertisers also emphasized the importance of constructing their ads in ways that would appeal to women, since women held much of the purchasing power in the household. In a

1926 issue of Die Reklame, the advertising industry’s trade journal, an article titled

“Women as Shoppers” made a plea to advertisers to cater their advertising methods to the female consumer because “[s]eventy-five percent of all things are bought by women” and

“most money spent passes through the hands of women.”383 The article’s author, Hanns

Kropff, instructed advertisers to simplify the language they use in their ads, because it was “too complicated, too masculine.”384 Instead of text-heavy advertisements that, according to Kropff, “did not interest women,” advertisers were to focus on creating illustrations of genuine scenes with attractive girls, since “the majority of women would

383 First published as “Frauen als Verkäuferinnen,” Die Reklame. Zeitschrift des Verbandes deutscher Reklamefachleute (July 1926), 649-650. Cited in Kaes Anton, et al. eds. Weimar Republic Sourcebook. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. See pages 660-662. 384 Ibid. 660. 187 rather look at a pretty, appetizing girl than an ugly one.”385 However steeped in gender stereotypes this article may be for today’s readers, it demonstrates that advertisers not only recognized women as powerful consumers during the Weimar era, but they sought to accommodate their idea of the female subject as the audience of their advertisements.

As demonstrated in Chapter 2, typewriters were marketed to women from the start of their mass production in the U.S. Early advertisements featured women using the typewriter as if playing the piano at home in their parlors. German advertisers largely adopted American advertising strategies that included positioning female figures as users in their ads and even christening their typewriter models with distinctly women’s names.

For example, the first German travel typewriter model, the “Erika,” appeared in 1910 and was later joined by the “Monica” and the “Regina” in the 1920s. Advertisers not only recognized women’s purchasing power over household items, but they were also aware that women held sway over the purchase of some office technologies, particularly the typewriter. During the interwar period, the typewriter had become a fixture of the

German business office, and in this context, women, as the main users of the devices, greatly influenced purchasing decisions. By 1931, 91.5% of Stenotypisten in Germany were female, and only 8.5% were male.386 Typists, most of them women, also had the most at stake in the purchase of typewriters, because the ability of a well-trained typist to produce text at the high speeds demanded of them was dependent in large part on their

385 Ibid. 661. 386 Cited in Christina Bargholz. “’Tastschreiben’ oder ‘Tippen’?” Angestelltenparbeitsplätze unter Rationalisierungsdruck.” Großstadtmenschen: Die Welt der Angestellten. Ed. Burkhart Lauterbach. Frankfurt am Main: Büchergilde Gutenberg, 1995. Original figures determined by an “Erhebung des Gewerkschaftsbundes der Angestellten.” Berlin 1931, S. 245 (05/040). 188 machines. Thus, salesmen were urged not to underestimate their buying power. Taking cues from American marketing strategies targeting women, German typewriter-ribbon manufacturers also began to package their product in attractive round tins. These little tin canisters were difficult to ship but appealed to typists as a kind of “gift with purchase,” in which they stored little trinkets and hairpins.387 This is all to say that German manufacturers and advertisers charged with marketing typewriters were well aware of the importance of the female consumer and began targeting women in their advertisements early on.

II. Mechanization in Graphic Design

Graphic artists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries mostly worked independently to create hand-drawn illustrations and script to be printed using lithography for the consuming public. During the Weimar era, several aspects of this process shifted in ways that further mechanized the design and reproduction of graphic art. As one example, real inroads in mechanical composition were made after 1918 in

Germany, such as autotype systems in typesetting that allowed a printer or publisher to apply a body of type with merely a keyboard.388 Also in the 1920s, new offset

387 This sales tactic of using attractive tin canisters was very popular in the United States. In Germany, it appears that some manufacturers may have used it more than others. For example, according to my internet searches, the most popular surviving tins come from the companies Pelikan, Olympia (also a manufacturer of typewriters), and Wanderer Werke (manufacturer of the “Continental” typewriter.) See Bruce Blivens Jr. The Wonderful Writing Machine. New York: Random House, 1954. Especially pages 106-108 for more information on this phenomenon in the U.S. For examples of German products, see Leonhard Dingwerth. Historische Schreibmaschinen: Sammlerträume. Battenberg Verlag, 2008. Especially page 103. 388 Jeremy Aynsley. Graphic Design in Germany 1890-1945. Berkley: University of California Press, 2000. 19. 189 lithography presses replaced flat hand-presses and became the most prevalent source for mechanical reproduction of color images.389 World War I also marked a turning point for black-and-white photography. Thereafter, photographic images were also more easily reproduced mechanically, and they eventually came to replace hand-drawn and painted illustration as the dominant pictorial technique in posters and other printed graphics.390

In addition to the employment of these new technologies in graphic art, the division of labor into specialized functions placed more emphasis on design as a process involving several people. While these changes contributed to the development of graphic design as a profession, they also set it apart from traditional artistic production. Unlike artists, designers were often specialists: layout artists, typographers, illustrators of all kinds, and lettering artists. Many designers specialized in several skills in the production process, but while performing any of these jobs, they had to take the mechanical production of their art into consideration.391 For example, typographers planned headlines and text and provided instructions for typesetting, whereas layout artists determined the structure of the spaces for printing. Therefore, by the time of the Weimar era, designers no longer rendered ads entirely by hand, designers worked at drawing boards similar to architects, who produced a layout with instructions for printing.

389 Ibid. 22. 390 See Hollis, especially page 36 for more on modernizing changes to the design process. 391 See Hollis. Especially pages 7-9. See also Aynsley, Graphic Design. Before 1914, hand-rendering was used for letter-forms and page layout. Much of this shifted to a reliance on mechanical production during the Weimar era. 190

In the 1920s, graphic art and design was still a relatively new and emerging field, and the German advertising industry was still struggling to attain legitimacy.392

According to historians of graphic art, graphic design was established as a profession in the middle of the twentieth century.393 Before then, designers were essentially artists, sometimes differentiated as “commercial artists,” whose services were commissioned by advertisers and their agents. In Germany, design for the purpose of creating commercial art became known in early twentieth-century Germany as “Gebrauchsgraphik,” meaning

“graphics for use” or art with a function. Therefore, the term “Gebrauchsgraphik” essentially referred to graphic design for publication and advertising, including illustrations, layout, and typographic design.394 During the Weimar era, graphic artists contributed to trade magazines, such as Die Reklame and Gebrauchsgraphik, in their efforts to extend the goals of the Deutsche Werkbund and embrace the greater possibilities between design, commerce, and technology. With similar aims as its predecessor, Das Plakat (1910-1921), the magazine Gebrauchsgraphik blurred the lines between “high” and “commercial” art with the goal of legitimating graphic design within the realm of art.

Avant-garde artists joined commercial designers in their aims to extend art into modern life. At the end of World War I, there were two primary artistic movements in

Germany: Expressionism and Dada. Expressionists produced posters, books, and journals

392 See Aynsley, Graphic Design, 12. See also Sneeringer, especially page 478. 393 See Aynsley, Graphic Design and Hollis 8. 394 Jeremy Aynsley. “Gebrauchsgraphik” as an Early Graphic Design Journal 1924-1928.” Journal of Design History. Vol. 5. No. 1 (1992): 53-72. See page 53 and Aynsley’s article for an in-depth investigation of Gebrauchsgraphik from the mid-twenties through the late thirties when it was under the control of the National Socialists. 191 characterized by heavily weighted typefaces or freely drawn letters. Conversely, Dadaists were inspired by the Italian Futurists’ understanding of advertising “as a manifestation of modern life and as the antithesis of the museum culture they despised.”395 Like the

Futurists, the Dadaists were fascinated by technology and often re-appropriated components of industrial production to create images complicated by their use of geometric sans-serif typeface.396 These developments in graphic art and its movement from simple functionalism toward design for machine production are visible in the shifting graphic design at the Bauhaus, the prominent school of arts and crafts, established in Weimar in 1919.397

In a movement towards functionalism, Bauhaus members rejected the German craft tradition of using Fraktur and other heavy calligraphic typefaces that attempted to imitate the lettering of scribes, and instead, they devised new typographies with geometric bases that self-consciously reflected machine production. For Bauhaus members arguing for standardization and functionalism in typographic design, the typewriter represented, for better or for worse, a kind of model of standardization and rationalization of text production. For example, following Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s suggestion for a “New Typography” in 1923, Jan Tschichold became its leading proponent and published his seminal work Die neue Typographie in 1928. When writing about the “new world-view,” Tschichold mentions the typewriter three times, calling it a new mass-produced object, a product of the “inventive genius of the engineer,” a

395 Hollis 39. See also 52 for more about Expressionist and Dadaist movements. 396 Ibid. See 40-41. 397 Ibid. See page 53. 192 standardized product that meets the individual’s daily needs, and a thing with which

“standardization, rationalization, and mechanization have made great progress.”398

Overall, Tschichold upholds the device as a prominent example of the successes of rationalization and Taylorism of this era. Tschichold was not alone in this opinion.

Other Bauhaus members, like Austrian graphic designer, Herbert Bayer, whose exhibition work was inspired by assembly-line production and the mechanics of the body and machine, had a pronounced interest in the use of sans-serif typefaces and the contemporary movement towards standardization. When he created his own typeface of a single-case alphabet, which he called “Universal” in 1926, he described it as “An experiment for a simplified system of writing.”399 About his experimental typeface,

Bayer said:

There is no large and small alphabet. It is not necessary for one sound to have a large and a small sign. The simultaneous use of two characters of completely different alphabets is illogical and unharmonious. We would recommend that the restriction to one alphabet would mean a saving of time and materials (one thinks of the typewriter).400

As Bayer’s statement indicates, the artistic justifications for the movement toward a standardized typography, as well as the adoption of standardized stationary and paper sizes, were reinforced by practical considerations related to Taylorism. Bayer convincingly argued that reducing the variety of typefaces would allow for a more cost-

398 Jan Tschichold. The New Typography: A Handbook for Modern Designers. Trans. Ruari McLean. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. 11-12 See also pages 13-14 and 64-70. 399 Aynsley, Graphic Design, 109. See also Hollis 64-65 for more information on Bayer’s exhibitions in 1930 and 1931 at the Societe des Artistes Decorateurs in Paris and the later one entitled “Das Wunder des Lebens” (‘The Wonder of Life’). 400 Quoted in Aynsley, Graphic Design, 109. 193 effective printing process, would save space, and would be more legible to a wider public than traditional German scripts, which were a deterrent for international audiences.401

However, not everyone was convinced that pure standardization was the best way to modernize the printing process. Paul Renner, the designer of the “Futura” typeface, began his seminal work, Mechanisierte Grafik (1931), with this short paragraph:

Früher gab es nur Handschrift und Handzeichnung. Heute erleben wir, daβ die manuelle Grafik täglich neue Gebiete an die vordringende mechanisierte Grafik verliert. Das meiste, was wir lesen, ist gedruckt oder mit der Schreibmaschine geschrieben; und der Kunstschreiber fristet in seiner Pseudomittelalterlichkeit ein künstliches Dasein wie der letzte Elch im Naturschutzpark. Handzeichnungen sehen wir kaum noch anders also in fotomechanischen Wiedergaben, wenn sie nicht überhaupt schon durch Fotos ersetzt worden sind.402

As this passage indicates, Renner’s work essentially mourns the loss of individual character and craft of hand-drawn lettering, and he holds the typewriter with its standardized, uniform print as partially responsible for the extinction of this craft.

Throughout the remainder of the work, Renner seeks to infuse a kind of cultural meaning into mechanical print in order to regain something of this lost art.

All of this is to say that the technology of the typewriter held a special place in the typographic discourses in the field of graphic design during the Weimar era. In these discourses, the typewriter served as a model of the successes and a symbol of the losses that accompanied the rationalization and standardization of printing process. Although the overall influence of this discourse on the production of typewriter advertisements is unclear, these ideas of the typewriter must have been present in the minds of graphic

401 See Aynsley, Graphic Design, 109-110. 402 Paul Renner. Mechanisierte Grafik: Schrift, Typo, Foto, Film, Farbe. Berlin: Verlag Hermann Reckendorf G.m.b.H., 1931. 194 designers during the Weimar era. But, before we proceed to our examination of some of the products of these new processes, let us first survey hand-drawn ads of the prewar era as a point of comparison and a means of contextualizing the female typist in the history of typewriter advertising overall.

III. “The Feminine Touch” – Wedding the Female Body to the Machine (1899-1914)

Within the first fifteen years of German typewriter manufacturing, graphic designers posited a fundamental connection between the typist and typewriter that was expressed through deceptively simple configurations of physical touch. Whether they are using it, carrying it, reaching for it, simply touching the keys, or even sitting on it, the female figures within ads of this period are physically linked to the machine. Most often in prewar ads, these points of “touch” are construed in terms of feminine displays of behavior that bring the body in contact with the machine in various configurations.

However, in some constructions, we can see how “touch” becomes a potentially transgressive act if not mitigated by other indicators of social boundaries of normative feminine behaviors. Within these illustrations, German advertisers resisted portraying women’s typewriting as “work,” because the public was still divided on women’s entry into clerical professions, a divide that was articulated by men’s and women’s clerical associations and the bourgeois women’s movement. Graphic designers eroticized the female body of the typist, and thus, emphasized her subordination as a thing to be watched. In short, they created new meanings of gender that mitigated the perceived threat of women’s use of this new technology.

195

In their efforts to “sell” the public on these social changes, graphic designers inadvertently began to wed, though not yet merge, the female body to the device by making permeable the previously incompatible systems of meaning in the

“organic/natural” and the “technological/cultural.” Central to the overall argument of this chapter is that the advertisements of this pre-WWI era demonstrate the beginnings of the fusion of the body and machine, a relationship that evolves further in advertisements of the Weimar era.

Typewriters were initially introduced into German offices in the 1890s, and

American typewriter models dominated the German market. A handful of German typewriters were developed in the late 1880s and 1890s, but none of them gained much ground in the competitive market that was already flooded with American designs. At the turn of the century, a boom in German typewriter manufacturing led to the development of over forty new German typewriter models and approximately 500,000 typewriters produced in Germany before World War I.403 In order to inform the public and promote the dozens of new German typewriters, manufacturers commissioned advertisers and graphic designers to market their products. Graphic artists initially created ads in the style of Historismus, characteristic of the Gründerzeit that situated humans in history and tradition. Much like the overcrowded and excessively adorned interiors of people’s homes during the Gründerjahre, the typical layout of these ads was overcrowded with bits of information, which was meant to apprise the consuming public about the manufacturers’ original typewriter designs. The primary function of these ads was to

403 Dingwerth, Historische Schreibmaschinen, 27. 196 characterize the typewriter as a technically modern, convenient, and reliable device to a wide audience of consumers, for whom the typewriter was still very new. To make the information more eye-catching, designers employed a collage-effect that mixed several serif and sans-serif typefaces, italics, and bolding – formatting choices akin to those displayed in the black-and-white full-page advertisements for Seidel & Naumann’s

“Ideal” and Frister & Rossmann’s “Schnellschreibmaschine” displayed below (See

Figure 6). Since German typewriter manufacturers were competing directly with already well-established American companies, like Remington, and fighting the assumption that the typewriter was an “American gadget,” early German ads prominently distinguished their products as manufactured in Germany with the phrases like “Deutsche

Schreibmaschine” (German typewriter) and “Erstes Deutsches Fabrikat” (first German manufacturer).

197

Figure 6. Two black-and-white newspaper ads: Seidel & Naumann ad from 1900 (left), Frister & Rossmann ad from 1898 (right). 404

Ads without human figures, such as these, could be read as gender neutral – targeting no specific gender of consumer. Blooming flowers, such as those shown on either side of the typewriter in the Frister & Rossmann “Schnellschreibmaschine” advertisement, were one common feature on late nineteenth-century design lithograph.

These symbols of nature could be read as “feminine” or linked to the framework of the organic/natural body. The coupling of flowery or natural imagery with the typewriter had already been made common in the U.S. by the elaborate gold and rose color paintings of

404 See Leonhard Dingwerth. Werbungen für Büromaschinen in alter Zeit. Sonderausgabe der “Schreibmaschinen- und Bureau-Zeitung” Nr. 14 und “Historische Bürowelt” Nr. 60. Verlag Kunstgrafik Dingwerth GmbH, 2001/2002. Especially page 14 for more information on the “Ideal” advertisement. The “Schnellschreibmaschine” advertisement for Frister & Rossmann appears in Dingwerth’s Die Geschichte der deutschen Schreibmaschinen-Fabriken. Vol 2. page 164. Artist and printer unknown for each ad. 198 flowers on the external cover the Remington No. 1 Type-Writer (manufactured 1873-

1878), in addition to its arrangement on a sewing-machine table also displaying flower ornamentation. Some Remington models were even painted with a small portrait of a woman on its façade.405 The efforts to connect the typewriter to the “natural” world were also intended to paint it, literally and metaphorically, as a woman’s machine, akin to the sewing-machine. One unintended consequence of this connection is that it joined

“natural” imagery with the “technological” in ways that call the boundaries of both concepts, both systems of meaning, into question. Although few German typewriter newspaper and magazine advertisements contained images of human figures during this early period – approximately 10% from the 1880s through 1905 – advertisers connected women to the machine in other ways.

From the late nineteenth century through 1910, early graphic artists produced fewer images of human figures using the typewriter than in later years, but when they did, the figures usually took the form of demure bourgeois women styled in voluminous clothing of the era (See Figure 7). Upon close examination of the construction of these figures, several clear patterns of representation emerge. In the two ads pictured in Figure

7, the female figures are situated in indeterminate spaces that imply dual contexts: the home and the office, domestic and public. The black-and-white Remington advertisement

(left) displays decorative furniture that could indicate either home or office, and the female figure appears calm, even vacant, as she gazes at the viewer. She does not control her environment, or the machine for that matter, but she merely exists grounded and

405 For examples, see Dingwerth, Historische Schreibmaschinen, 107. 199 passive within this indeterminate space. The brochure cover for “Naumann’s Ideal” shows a black-and-white illustration of a woman framed by curved lines and an organic motif in the background, both typical of Jugendstil. This space is even more suggestive of both contexts. The shape of the frame implies a curtained window, and the floral-leaf background resembles the richness of a wallpaper pattern, both suggesting a domestic setting. However, these ornate Jugendstil features contrast with the simple, unadorned white furniture that support the typewriter and female user and imply a more functional setting, even an office. Further evidence can be gleaned from the position of the female figure, who, in this case, does not gaze back at the viewer, but is rather focused on the task at hand, her head tilted downward, torso upright, and hands – touching the device softly, implying a kind of quiet, restrained activity.

200

Figure 7. Black-and-white Remington ad from 1896 (left) and Jugendstil brochure cover for Seidel & Naumann's “Ideal” (right) from 1904. 406

Rather than decontextualizing women’s typewriter use, the murky contexts of these ads imply that advertisers were reluctant to represent women’s typewriting exclusively in the context of labor. This reluctance can be attributed to the ongoing debate about women’s clerical work at the turn of the century. For instance, advertisers perhaps resisted depicting women’s typewriting as clerical work because of the vehement protests by male clerks against the “deskilling” of the profession by the women’s entry into the clerical workforce.407 As I have pointed to in Chapter 1, male clerks’

406 Leonhard Dingwerth. Werbungen für Büromaschinen in alter Zeit. Verlag Kunstgrafik Dingwerth GmbH, 2001/2002. See page 11 for Remington ad and page 37 for Seidel & Naumann’s “Ideal” brochure cover. Artists and printers unknown. 407 See Adam C. Stanley. Modernizing Tradition: Gender and Consumerism in Interwar France and Germany. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008. Especially pages 143-144. Stanley claims 201 organizations also complained about the “Schmutzkonkurrenz” (dirty competition) from unskilled female employees, while women’s clerking organizations and moderate members of the bourgeois women’s movement emphasized women’s unique contributions to the economy and culture by bringing their maternal and wifely qualities, e.g. nurturing and supporting others, to public life.408 This group considered work as a typist or secretary with its service and support components to be a profession that allowed bourgeois women to maintain their “feminine” nature.409

With this socio-historical context in mind, it becomes clear that the advertisements in Figure 7 actually reflect contested spaces in the historical debates about women’s typewriting. Depicting women’s typewriting in ambiguous contexts opens the viewer/consumer up to imagining the scene in both spaces, at home and at work, while also leaving the consumer with some uncertainty about in which realm the typewriting woman actually “belongs.” These indeterminate spaces, therefore, made room in the minds of the consuming public for women to move beyond the boundaries of the domestic sphere, without advertisers having to display this change explicitly.

Contributing to the indefinite nature of the spaces displayed in these advertisements, is the uncertain physical connection between female typewriter user and the machine, which is expressed through the representations of the female figures’ hands.

In the typewriter advertisement, the hand becomes an essential visual signifier that links the machine and the female body. In both advertisements, but more discernably in the a connection between the low frequency of images of female typists in advertising and the resistance to women’s entry into clerical work. 408 Adams 42. 409 See Adams 43-45. 202

“Remington” ad than the “Ideal,” the women’s hands appear tentative, without control or command, and simply testing or probing the device, rather than confidently “at work.”

Goffman maintains that women, more than men, are pictured using their fingers to trace the outlines of objects or to caress its surface to effect a “just barely touching.”410

Because of this, he claims, female hands have a different relationship to reality than male hands displayed in advertising. They are not assertive over their environment, but are vulnerable and let their environment control them.411 Goffman’s emphasis on the

“feminine touch” is valuable for assessing how women’s typewriting, as well as the connection between the female body and typewriter more generally, is rendered in early typewriter advertisements. Whether the portrayals of women’s hands fit with Goffman’s concept of feminine displays (e.g. inactive, just resting, weak, displaying a lack of control) or step beyond them into behaviors coded as masculine can further inform our understanding of how graphic artists expressed the new interaction between the typewriter and the female body. For example, in the “Remington” ad, the female figure’s hand rests on the typewriter keys with one finger extended, presumably about to push a key. The female figure, whose heavy dress appears to fix her in position, is decidedly unengaged with the machine, with her body facing the viewer, not the device, a style of arrangement that is more reminiscent of a nineteenth-century posed photograph or portrait. The image allows the viewer no opportunity to imagine an extension of the event into the past or future. Contrastingly, the illustration of the female user in the

410 Goffman 29. 411 See Jhally, Codes of Gender, for he reformulates Goffman’s ideas and adds to them, and see also Goffman page 29. 203

“Naumann’s Ideal” advertisement shows a woman who appears to be engaged with the machine. This construction of a female user is comparatively more “active.” The portrayal of typewriting as an activity at the machine requiring focus and engagement is important here, for it pictures a moment of potentially transgressive behavior, outside of the late-nineteenth century constructions of femininity. The figure’s soft, rather than aggressive or tense, hands help to make this construction more acceptable to consuming audiences, many of whom still viewed women’s entry into business offices a sign of

“Entfraulichung.”412

Very few advertising images of the “working” female typist appeared during the pre-WWI era. Between 1905 and 1914, a visible shift took place in typewriter advertising. During this period, graphic designers began to incorporate more human figures into their ads. Female figures quite predictably appeared either as either motherly caretakers of their male bosses (or their typewriters) or typewriter users. Advertisers depicted male figures less often, and when they did, they were shown as authority figures

(managers, bosses), as inventors, as evaluators of technical quality, or as users themselves. However, when men were depicted as typewriter users, they were almost always operating the device while travelling – on a ship, in a train, or in some far off country typing as the primitive natives look upon the machine in awe.413 Thus, male

412 See Ute Frevert, “Vom Klavier zur Schreibmaschine – Weiblicher Arbeitsmarkt und Rollenzuweisungen am Beispiel der weiblichen Angestellten in der Weimarer Republik.” Frauen in der Geschichte. Düsseldorf: Pädogogischer Verlag Schwann, 1979. Especially page 93. 413 See Dingwerth. Historische Schreibmaschinen-Anzeigen / Quellen der Geschichte 1880 – 1959. Especially Volume 3, p. 800-818 advertisements for Stoewer model typewriters for images of their elaborate campaign containing 16 ads showing male figures with typewriters in varying landscapes, on camels, in primitive African villages, etc. 204 typewriter users are mobile; they move throughout the world and document their travels, and they are colonizers bringing modern wonders to the far reaches of the planet.

Although female figures using typewriters appeared in three times as many newspaper and magazine advertising campaigns as male typewriter users, illustrations of women are shown in a more limited range of spaces.414 In these illustrations, typewriting women are most often shown in decontextualized spaces, but some ads began to display spaces specifically designated as the domestic realm or the workplace. Graphic artists also continued to draw on constructions of gender displays coded as feminine, but instead of creating modest portraits of female users, they eroticized the female body and women’s use of the machine. Advertisers began mediating images of women’s typewriting with female sexuality, which had the effects of framing women’s typewriting as non- threatening to men’s clerical work while simultaneously creating a cultural bond between bourgeois femininity and typewriting.415

Christopher Keep argues convincingly that, in American and British contexts, the

“eroticized image of the Type-Writer Girl was a way of ‘making sense’ of her newness, of her distance from the more familiar images of working women as governesses or teachers,” and that “the assumed promiscuity of the female typist must be read as a compensatory effort to reestablish the failing lines between man and woman, human and

414 Note: It really depends on how one counts the advertisements from this era. Men appear as typewriter users 20 times in black-and-white ads during this period, and 16 of them are thanks to the Stoewer campaign. Male appear in 4 separate campaigns total. Female typewriter users appear 37 times in 13 separate campaigns. 415 Christopher Keep. “The Cultural Work of the Type-Writer Girl.” Victorian Studies. Vol. 40, No. 3 (Spring 1997), 401-426. See especially page 405. 205 machine, culture and nature.”416 Ultimately, Keep claims that there is a process of creating a “cultural fit” at work in prewar novels and advertisements, and his statements ring true when one considers prewar German advertisements, since prewar advertisers appear to be exploiting female sexuality to make women’s engagement with this modern technology less threatening and more acceptable in the minds of the public. As we proceed, I will elaborate on Keep’s main points about the way advertising images performed significant “cultural work” in eroticizing the typist, just as they comforted the viewer by signaling her economic and other dependence.

416 Keep, “The Cultural Work of the Type-Writer Girl,” 416 and 418 respectively. 206

Figure 8. Mercedes Schreibmaschine poster, lithography, circa 1910/11. Designed by Ernst Deutsch (1887-1938). 417

Figure 8 displays one of the most striking and most often reproduced images surviving this era, a poster advertising Mercedes typewriters designed by Ernst Deutsch

(1887-1938). Deutsch’s poster serves as one prominent example of the phenomenon of the eroticized female typist. Working in association with internationally famous poster artists Lucian Bernhard, Ludwig Hohlwein, and Hans Rudi Erdt, Deutsch was a well- known Austrian graphic designer working in Berlin. His popular rendition of the female typist appeared not only in the form of a poster, but also as a black-and-white newspaper

417 Original printing by Ernst Marx at Reklameverlag in Berlin. Rights belong to the Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Photo by Anna Russ. Accessed image on Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek on January 22, 2015. https://www.deutsche-digitale- bibliothek.de/item/BYWZUZRFPDY6LJT7TCTDCJHWNLZBMO3R?reqType=ajax&offset=20&query=s chreibmaschine&rows=20&viewType=list&firstHit=UJEITHLHVSVPY5HS6637RBJBXGF35HIB&lastH it=lasthit&hitNumber=33 207 advertisement and a collectible postage stamp.418 With the production of full-color posters, such as this one, graphic designers attempted to attract the distracted gaze of the city dweller in the overwhelming urban landscape.419

This image of the female typist and the typewriter is largely decontextualized but promotes a hyper-sexualized fantasy of the alluring secretary/typist through a series of complex coded gender displays. While the machine appears to be sturdy and mechanically complex, it is not the typewriter that is being sold here. The “Mercedes” typewriter is illustrated only in silhouette, so that the ad more easily draws the eye to the woman girlishly touching her pen to her cheek, with elongated legs and her stocking- covered ankles in view.

Much can be gleaned from Deutsch’s construction of the female body and its position. The typist’s body is situated in an exaggerated form of what Goffman and Jhally call a “canting posture,” meaning that a female figure is depicted as off-center or not upright, which when related to the animal kingdom, implies that she is ungrounded, utterly defenseless, and cannot react to her surroundings.420 Usually, a canting posture involves only a “head cant” or a “bashful knee bend” so that the woman appears tilted, off-balance, or decentered. In the case of the Mercedes poster, Deutsch uses a combination of “canting postures” to contort the female body, so that his illustration of the female typist appears particularly off-kilter, unproductive, and vulnerable to the male

418 Later versions of this image appeared again during the Weimar era in 1920 and 1926. See Dingwerth, Historische Schreibmaschinen-Anzeigen, Vol. 2, especially pages 406-408. 419 See Richard Hollis. Graphic Design: A Concise History. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd., 1994. Especially pages 8-52. See also Leonhard Dingwerth. Werbungen für Büromaschinen in alter Zeit. Sonderausgabe der “Schreibmaschinen- und Bureau-Zeitung” Nr. 14 und “Historische Bürowelt” Nr. 60. Verlag Kunstgrafik Dingwerth GmbH, 2001/2002. 420 See Jhally, Codes of Gender and Goffman pages 45-46 for more information on canting postures. 208 gaze. She is drawn with her torso bent forward, not upright, in an expression of ingratiation. She teeters on the edge of her seat with her legs crossed, one foot on either side of the desk leg – her limbs twisted around the furniture, and only one tiny high- heeled shoe touching the ground. Most conspicuously, her head is tilted and turned toward the viewer. This over-the-shoulder look is an extension of the “head cant” and makes the female figure a willing recipient of a look from the male viewer.421

Furthermore, her red lips and blushing cheeks characterize her as provocative, yet coy and gentle, the nearly incongruous qualities defining female sexuality here.

Deutsch’s construction of the figure’s hands is particularly interesting in comparision with the ads from the previous decade. With her left wrist bent, she appears to trace the outline of the typewriter and desk with her fingertips, a weak, superficial movement. A pen balances precariously between two fingers on her right hand as she touches the other end to her cheek. The pen not only directs the viewer’s gaze to her parted mouth, but it also completes a closed rectangular shape that is essential to the delicate aesthetics of this advertisement. This non-inked, negative space is the central point of (erotic) tension in the image, for it suggests that the viewer imagine the figure’s movements after this shape is broken. 422 Adding to this visual tension, the slightly open non-inked triangle shape created by the female figure’s thigh, abdomen, and arm invites the eye to trace the body, similar to the way her hand traces the machine. Although she is

421 Ibid. 422 See Hollis 9 for a brief discussion on positive and negative space. “The non-inked area can be just as important visually as the inked, and thus the background, its proportions and dimensions, its colour and texture, is an integral part of graphic design. At the same time, the background provides the physical support for the images and signs” (9). 209 seated at the typewriter, the act of typewriting is too utilitarian and has no place in this fantasy. The light, caressing touch of the female figure indicates inactivity and leisure, rather than labor. In essence, such prewar ads as Deutsch’s take “what was once enigmatic and puzzling,” i.e. woman and the machine, and bring them into focus for the consuming public “as a woman who, far from being “independent” of male attention, was always dependent on it---indeed, was tailor-made for its pleasure.”423

Although the detailed illustration of the typewriter does catch the eye, it is secondary to the simple curves of the female figure. This dynamic between female figure and machine results in the transfer of her qualities onto it. As Jib Fowles puts it, “[t]he task of the advertisement is to get consumers to transfer the positive associations of the noncommodity material onto the commodity.”424 Graphic artists typically achieve this transference by juxtaposing two orders of content within the frame of the advertisement, e.g. typewriter/technology and female body/feminine/sexuality. In the case of the

Mercedes ad, the typewriter serves, not as a symbol of labor or of the modern advantages of mechanical inscription, but rather as a prop in an erotic scenario with the female figure.

For audiences of Western popular culture, images of the overtly sexualized female typist/secretary were nothing new. For example, Keep reports that in the United States

“type-writer” had become “a code word for titillating tales of moral misdeeds between

423 Keep, “The Cultural Work of the Type-Writer Girl,” 418. 424 Jib Fowles. Advertising and Popular Culture. Thousand oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 1996. See page 11. 210 employers and their female employees.”425 Rumors about women typists who married their employers provided additional fodder for the creation of fictionalized scenarios that played out as early as the turn of the century on stages, in novels, and in print advertisements and posters like those discussed here.

In another form of display, postcard manufacturers reproduced series of photographs that featured images ranging from modest to sexually explicit. The tamer postcard photographs have the gauzy, dreamy look of typical Jugendstil (Art Nouveau) images of the early twentieth century, and they display charmingly dressed young women gazing wistfully at the viewer from behind their dimly-lit typewriters. One German postcard (see Figure 9) shows such a scene with a woman typing and the couplet: “Die kleine Tipperin. Und tipp, tipp, tipp, schreibt sie an den Schatz / Von Lieb’ und Treu sie

Satz für Satz.”426 In this case, typewriting is a labor of love and an act that leaves the woman firmly fixed in the domestic realm composing romantic love letters. A more titillating but equally common theme in these postcards is captured in an American series, titled “Our Busy Day,” in which the female typist is seated on her boss’s lap as she awkwardly types.427

425 Keep, “The Cultural Work of the Type-Writer Girl,” 417. 426 See Dingwerth, Historische Schreibmaschinen, 167. Translation: “The little typist. And type, type, type, she writes to her love / Of love and loyalty is she sentence for sentence.” 427 For examples, see Paul Robert. Sexy Legs and Typewriters: Women in Office-Related Advertising, Humor, Glamour, and Erotica. The Netherlands: The Virtual Typewriter Museum, 2003. See especially pages 36-38 and 44-51 for examples. See also, Dingwerth, Werbungen, 31. 211

Typically printed in France and in Germany, as well as the U.S., some of these postcards were intended to promote specific typewriter models, while others were printed and sold as collectibles or for the simple pleasure of gazing at the typist. Perhaps because of the popularity of these postcards and the erotic scenarios they suggested, some printers in the 1910s and 1920s even produced sexually explicit photographs of women and typewriters, which have been dubbed “typewriter erotica.”429 These postcards exhibit scantily clad and fully nude women posing seductively with the device. Common postures for these photographs included women sitting at the keyboard bashfully and coyly touching the keys or posing seated on top of a desk straddling the typewriter.

Important here is that in these erotic postcard scenarios, the typewriter, no matter how

428 Jugendstil postcard (left) reproduced in Dingwerth, Historische Schreibmaschinen, 167. Postcard with man and woman (right) reproduced in Dingwerth, Werbungen, 31. Photographer and printer unknown. Exact date of printing is unknown, but postcards likely appeared between 1900 and 1910. 429 See Robert’s chapter on “Erotica,” especially pages 74-105 for examples of typewriter erotica. 212 awkward and misplaced it appears, serves again as a kind of prop. Thus, the erotic images of women typewriting transformed typewriting into a sexual act, so that the typewriter itself became indicative of these erotic scenarios in the minds of consumers. This aspect takes us a step beyond Keep’s assertions that the eroticized female typist in advertising imagery served to comfort the consuming public about women’s engagement with this modern technology. Hence, I argue that the female typist-typewriter interaction manifests as a distinct locus of technophilia in which the technological device and eroticism intersect.

Within the last twenty years, scholars have begun to detect traces of “techno- eroticism,” meaning the celebration or veneration of technological objects through human impulses of sexual desire, within artistic renderings of machines throughout the twentieth century. About early twentieth-century representations of industrial machinery, film scholar K.C. D’Alessandro writes

Sexual metaphor in the desription of locomotives, automobiles, pistons, and turbines; machine cults and the Futurist movement, Man with a Movie Camera […]– these are some of the ways that technophiliacs have expressed their passion for technology. For technophiliacs, technology provides an erotic thrill – control over massive power, which can itself be used to control others. … The physical manifestations of these machines – size, heft, shape, motions that thrust, pause and press again – represent human sexual responses on a grand scale. There is much to venerate in the technology of the Industrial age.430

In Electronic Eros, Claudia Springer extends D’Alessandro’s insights about industrial machinery into the post-industrial era, in which electronic technology, inspite of its miniaturization, is still associated with sexuality. The typewriter, as I see it, bridges these

430 Quoted in Claudia Springer. Electronic Eros: Bodies and Desire in the Post-Industrial Age. Austin: University of Texas Press. 1996. 4. See also pages 3-15 for more on techno-eroticism. 213 two technological ages, since it has much in common with both industrial machinery and the computer. 431

Let us first consider the typewriter’s influence on post-industrial society. The ancestor of the computer, the typewriter was responsible for inciting increased record keeping, copying, and storing of information on a grand scale. Computers merely changed the method and volume in which we store masses of information. In addition, interfacing with typewriters and computers is fundamentally similar, even beyond the use of the QWERTY-keyboard configuration. Software for creating documents is designed to function in a similar, yet a more automatic and ephemeral way; symbols appear on the page in response to our touch, although we are able to manipulate them more freely. The typewriter’s similarities to industrial machinery are perhaps more obvious. Often associated with the technological advancements of the Industrial age, the typewriter made the spirit of modernization available to the everyday individual by putting s/he in contact with the speed and power of industrial machinery on a smaller scale. The early twentieth- century mechanical typewriter was a precision machine made up of a delicate system of moving parts that thrust, pause, and press. D’Alessandro relates these movements to human sexual responses, and with the typewriter, human physical energy is responsible.

As I have mentioned previously, writing with a mechanical typewriter was neither a gentle, nor delicate activity. In order to produce even and easily readable text, the user was required to remain in motion while simultaneously moderating the output of kinetic

431 Sociologist Daniel Bell describes a post-industrial society as a knowledge-based society. Instead of an economy based on heavy industry, the post-industrial is an age of information and electronic technology. I understand it as a transition that is still ongoing. See Daniel Bell. The Coming of Post-industrial Society. New York: Basic Books, 2008. 214 energy, so that the force was equally distributed – a superb gymnastic balance of dexterity and force, when performed correctly. Yet, representations of typewriting in promotional materials typically masked this physical effort, translating the rhythm of these high-pressure thrusts into a woman’s soft caress.

Typewriting-related techno-eroticism surfaces more conspicuously in Weimar avant-garde and popular film than in advertising images, but technophilic representations of the typewriter and typewriting in the realm of advertising have an important function.

Unlike techno-erotic renderings of industrial machinery or the metropolis in Italian

Futurism, in which the human body is largely absent, the female body plays a crucial role in eroticizing the typewriter and its use in visual culture. The eroticization of the female typist in typewriter advertising must not only, as Keep maintains, be read as an effort to make the activity of typewriting socially acceptable. Rather, it led advertisers to create a symbolic connection between the female body, female sexuality, and typewriting.

Perhaps even more importantly, the consistent and repeated arrangement of women in physical contact with machines ultimately suggested a figurative physical connection between the notions of “woman” and “machine” to prewar consumers. This connection also does not simply conflate or equate “woman” and “machine,” but points to a more complicated relationship that binds the female body to the march toward progress through modernization, an association that surfaces even more prominently in advertising of the

Weimar era.

For prewar advertisers, creating a connection between the social coding of the female body and the typewriter was key to communicating how, where, and by whom it

215 should be used. Class-specific enactment of gender also surfaces readily in prewar advertisements. Early ads largely sought to reformulate consumers’ perception of the device from that of a machine or a hand tool related to manual labor to an instrument of grace and refinement used by middle- and upper-class women. The two following black- and-white print advertisements for the “Mentor” and “Continental Schreibmaschine” models (see Figure 10) effectively present visual evidence of advertisers’ attention to social hierarchies.432

The “Mentor” ad displays a campaign slogan that reinforces its visual message:

“Die neue unverwüstliche Schnell-Schreibmaschine” (the new indestructible fast- typewriter). The unknown graphic designer of this image links typewriting with gentility and refinement, not with women’s work. In the illustration, an elegantly-dressed woman reclines peacefully as if on a divan. As in the Mercedes poster, the Mentor figure at the keyboard is ungrounded, as she props herself with one elbow and dangles her legs off of the calligraphy “M” while operating the device with only a single finger. With her body in an open and confident, yet exposed position, the ad implies that the female figure is

“unverwüstlich” (indestructible), much like the machine. In this regard, the ad suggests an unlikely union between the multiple contradictions displayed in the image. The woman, whose body is depicted as light, delicate, and airy, should also be viewed as indestructible. Like the female figure, the typewriter is balanced precariously on the edge

432 See Dingwerth, Die Geschichte der deutschen Schreibmaschinen-Fabriken, pages 267 and 35 for the ads, respectively. Artists and printers unknown. The ad for the “Mentor” typewriter commissioned by the manufacturer Metall-Industrie Schönebeck (left) displays a small signature in the bottom left corner “CHORN MENM.” The ad for the “Continental Schreibmaschine” commissioned by Wanderer-Werke (right) displays no discernable signature. 216 of the letter, but while they are both susceptible to falling, we are assured that their strength and durability will allow them to survive any incident.

Figure 10. Mentor (left) and Continental (right) black-and-white advertisements both appeared in 1913.

Upon close inspection, the Mentor ad conveys a more complicated message related to the divisions of social class. In early twentieth-century Germany, male clerks hailing largely from the bourgeoisie felt that the introduction of office equipment, like the typewriter, threatened to “proletarianize” what they considered “intellectual” work by mechanizing textual production.433 Likewise, leaders in female clerks’ associations and middle-class feminists in the BDV accepted the need to prevent “unsuitables” from entering the clerking profession.434 This advertisement appears to want to assuage such concerns. It portrays the female typist as a sophisticated and elegant creature, who is not working industriously, but rather occupying herself with the machine temporarily – no

433 For more on the threat of “Proletarisierung” see Frevert. “Vom Klavier zur Schreibmaschine,” especially pages 86-87. 434 See Adams 68-70. 217

“Schmutzkonkurrenz” here! By invoking nineteenth-century associations of bourgeois femininity with luxury and indulgence, the ad “implicitly declares that such work is not masculinizing, but rather reaffirms one’s femininity.”435 The ad elevates the act of typewriting from its association with the drudgery of mechanical mass-production to a graceful activity easily adopted by members of the comfortable middle classes.

Compared to the Mercedes poster and the Mentor ad, the Continental black-and- white print advertisement portrays a more complex visual narrative of a female secretary and male boss in an office workspace. Positioned at the center of the image, the female figure, bent at the waist with legs crossed, is diligently writing with a pen rather than using the machine. Her closed, canting posture with her arms folded and elbows turned inward makes her appear small and unassuming, an expression of her subordinate status next to the height and girth of her male superior and the exaggerated novelty of the oversized typewriter. Similar to the Mentor ad, the female typist’s silhouette is left empty, not filled with color, which gives her the appearance of being much lighter than the enormous device and the ample frame of her male counterpart. The graphic designer also plays with the notion of “lightness” by seating her atop two oversized typewriter keys, so that the typewriter is literally supporting her, a gesture to the support it provides in her daily written work, even when she is not using it. Again, typewriter and typist share the meaning expressed in the ad, because while the typewriter physically and figuratively supports the female typist, the typist’s essential role is one of administrative

“service” or “support” for her male superior, similar to how women traditionally served

435 Stanley 143. 218 their husbands and families in the home – accessing point of appeal for women of the bourgeois movement.

The seemingly larger-than-life typewriter also marks an important pattern of representation that is revealing of the public’s fascination with the device. In the U.S. and in Europe, illustrations of oversized typewriters were common in the first half of the twentieth century. For example, one American postcard from 1911 showed a railroad flatcar carrying a giant Remington Model 11 typewriter. In 1915, the manufacturer

Underwood made this vision of the oversized typewriter a reality by constructing a giant typewriter reportedly weighing 14 tons and standing 21 feet high. This beast of a machine put on display at the Panama-Pacific Exhibition in San Francisco.436 As I understand it, the willingness to imagine and create large-scale typewriter models is also connected to techno-eroticism. These models, whether illustrated or in reality, reflect a passionate celebration of the typewriter that also links it to large-scale industrial machinery and human sexual impulses on a grand scale.

In the “Continental” advertisement pictured above, the enlarged typewriter contributes an element of erotic thrill to an otherwise common dynamic between the female secretary and male superior. Clothed in an unadorned, form-fitting dress narrowly cinched at the waist, the female figure is actively writing, yet serves centrally as an eroticized object of the male gaze. The drawing clearly outlines the profile of the female body while highlighting her overly elongated legs and exposed ankles – a sexualized part

436 See postcards for Remington and those advertising the giant Underwood typewriter on the Early Office Museum website: www.officemuseum.com. Also interesting to note is that Underwood created another giant typewriter model of the Underwood Master in 1939 for the New York World’s Fair. 219 of the female body at the time. The point in the drawing where the tip of the woman’s right shoe meets the pin-striped pant leg of her male superior eroticizes the image by inviting the viewer to imagine the possibility of a romantic relationship between these co- workers.

Although some prewar ads clearly associated the typewriter with the bourgeois female user, other promotional images connected the typewriter with women’s social and economic progress more generally. To achieve this, advertisers employed a common image in typewriter advertisements surfacing between 1910 and 1914, to which I refer fondly as “the reaching girl.” (See Figure 11). Advertisers used this posture to sexualize the female body inconspicuously while more overtly expressing women’s desire for social progress, achievement, and change. Two promotions that characterize this pattern of representation clearly are for the Mentor Modell 3 and a typewriting competition sponsored by the manufacturer Mercedes Büromaschinen. Within these ads, the typewriter becomes, by extension, a metaphor for women’s professional and financial success.

220

Figure 11. Ad for “Mentor” (left) from 1913, and “Mercedes” ad (right) from 1911 designed by Ernst Deutsch.

Both the Mentor and Mercedes ads pictured in Figure 11 construct images connecting women and typewriters that make promises of advancement to the female consumer.437 Graphic designers illustrating women climbing on furniture – tables, cupboards, chairs – and grasping at the device (or money) attempted to capitalize on the women’s desire to work and achieve outside of the home. In this Mentor ad, the female figure is depicted in a domestic setting, signified by the wardrobe, and she appears to be straining to reach a typewriter resting on top of it. In this case, the ad addresses women of the middle or lower-middle classes, who hope to strive toward other occupations beyond the domestic realm. The “unverwüstliche Schreibmaschine” (indestructible typewriter), which is almost out of reach, comes to represent women’s aspirations for independence

437 Mentor and Mercedes advertisements are reproductions found in Dingwerth, Geschichte der Schreibmaschinen-Fabriken, Vol. 2, page 266 and Vol. 1, page 44 respectively.

221 through work, an ideal that bourgeois feminist leader Louise Otto-Peters pointed to as early as 1866.438

Set in the office workplace, the Mercedes ad, another design by the graphic artist

Ernst Deutsch, tells an only slightly different story of hope and achievement. The female figure stands on her tip-toes on a desk and chair, with one foot almost resting on the typewriter itself, thus giving the illusion that she has been physically lifted by the device.

As she reaches up, she is showered with coins and typewriter paper that signify her wealth and employment. The message behind this image corresponds with the text in the ad, which reads “Mercedes Wettschreiben Ehrenpreis und 2000 Mark in Baar (sic)”

(Mercedes Typewriting Competition Prize and 2000 Marks in cash). A common phenomenon throughout the first half of the twentieth century, typewriting competitions measuring the speed and accuracy of typists took place throughout the United States and

Europe.439 Competitions thrilled regional, national, and international audiences as contestants competed for generous prizes. Typewriter manufacturers (and producers of components) viewed the competitions as an opportunity to promote their wares, especially if the winner had used their product.440 The wish to participate and the fantasy of winning one of these competitions was also one that validated women’s almost exclusive employment in the field. By linking women’s occupational and financial

438 See Louise Otto-Peters “Das Recht der Frauen auf Erwerb (1866).” Frauenarbeit und Beruf. Ed. Gisela Brinker-Gabler. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1979. 111-124. 439 These competitions were and still are being fetishized in advertisements and films, including the depictions of competitions in the 2012 French film “Populaire” directed by Regis Roinsard. 440 The Underwood Typewriter manufacturer was particularly competitive at these events in the U.S., for the company had commissioned their own competitive “team” of typists, who were hand-picked from typing courses and vigorously trained to meet the high speeds and accuracy expected from competitors. See Blivens for more information on typing competitions. 222 success to typewriter work, these “Mercedes” and “Mentor” advertisements construct an idealized image of the liberating role of the typewriter in women’s professional advancement. Therefore, ads such as these offered Weimar women an attractive projection of a self-image regarding their typewriter use.

While advertisers appealed to female consumers by drawing on the goals and sentiments of the women’s movements in the construction of these ads, they also strategically positioned the female figures to be looked at by male viewers. With their backs arched and skirts raised exposing their calves, the physical postures of these illustrated female figures emphasize their bodies and suggest their readiness for sex. At the same time, the female figures are again defenseless in these canting postures, as they teeter atop chairs and desks on their tip-toes symbolically reaching for their goals.

Therefore, through the vulnerable postures of these illustrated female figures, advertisers managed to package women’s “reaching,” i.e. seeking financial gain and advancement through typewriting, for men as attractive, even sexy, and non-threatening to men’s clerical work.

Overall, print advertisements appearing before 1914 can provide a great deal of insight into how women’s typewriter work was sold to male and female consumers.

Debates about women’s entry into the clerical workforce and class divisions forced prewar product advertisers to consider carefully how they portrayed women’s typewriting. In reality, women’s typewriter work diverged greatly from the idealized illustrations in early advertising. Women working as typists and secretaries during this time must have viewed the messages communicated by these ads as attractive, yet deeply

223 in conflict. While some of these ads must have been puzzling for prewar era women, they also must have borrowed elements to use in the constructions of their own identities in connection to the machine. In their efforts to sell consumers the notion of women and machines, advertisers created a metaphorical physical link between the female body and the typewriter – a connection to the mechanical that becomes central to women’s work and domestic lives in the Weimar era.

By the 1920s in Germany, the fantasy of the erotic relationship between the attractive female typist/secretary and her male superior surfaced as an often revisited cliché in popular film and literature. As we have seen, the female body in prewar advertising is physically connected to the machine, but it is neither disciplined nor mechanical. Rather, the prewar typist was a coy, flirtatious, and curvaceous bourgeois sex object – a fantasy akin to the early version of the pin-up girl. The cultural shifts leading up to and during the Weimar era transform the typist into a veritable hybrid: the New

Woman-Machine. While she is still imbued with the eroticism of the prewar typist, this aspect is partially subdued by the mechanization and automatization of a body that is also thoroughly disciplined and docile.

IV. The Female Embodiment and Docility in Weimar Typewriter Advertising

At the start of the First World War, typewriter manufacturing slowed dramatically and typewriter advertising disappeared for the most part. Many of the materials used to produce typewriters were reallocated to the war effort. Typewriter production gradually picked up again after the conclusion of the war, and by the mid-1920s, Germany had 224 become the second largest producer of typewriters worldwide, with 34 large and small manufacturers. German typewriter advertisements returned to their prewar numbers during the mid-twenties during the recovery of the German economy after World War I and hyperinflation.

Advertising strategies shifted yet again to accommodate new attitudes towards women’s typewriter work in the Weimar era. As we have seen, during the late nineteenth century, female white-collar workers experienced overt discrimination. But, the special conditions of WWI supported the development of women as a reserve workforce. Many businesses hired female white-collar employees for the first time during the war, at which time women worked as “Schreibkräften” (typists) and “Buchhalterinnen” (accountants) in business offices.441 After women had replaced men in the workforce during WWI, and after women had won the legal right to vote in 1918, perceptions of women’s work outside of the home had changed. In the Weimar era, the public had come to view women’s employment as an acceptable temporary phase, before they settled into their subsequent long-term roles as wives and mothers. White-collar professions, which were previously the domains of the comfortable middle classes, opened up to women from the working classes, as well.442 Therefore, women were more present in the public realm than ever before, and typewriting had come to be viewed as an occupation for women. By

1928, the number of female typists had tripled, and by 1931, 91.5% of typists in Germany

441 See Frevert, “Vom Klavier zur Schreibmaschine,” 88-89. 442 See Ibid. 93-94. 225 were female and only 8.5% were male.443 Such developments led observers to call the

Weimar era the “Zeitalter der emanzipierten Frau,” in which women’s employment in offices was celebrated as revolutionary: “Die Eroberung der Büros durch die weiblichen

Angestellten ist die größte Revolution in der sozialen Stellung der Frau.”444 Feminist scholars, and I count myself among them, have found such (over)statements troubling, and they have taken a closer look at what this so-called emancipated state looked like by highlighting the thoughts, perceptions, and wishes of female typists of the era, who had found this work monotonous and unsatisfying.445 As one contribution to typists’ dissatisfaction, German businesses enthusiastically adopted rationalization and Taylorist methods of production and efficiency to assist with the nation’s economic recovery.

These social and economic conditions were visibly reflected in advertising of the interwar era.

As I will show, some patterns of representation from the prewar era were reintroduced and became conventions in typewriter advertising, while other new patterns in the representation of typewriting emerged. In many ways advertising images became more conservative with less focus on the sexualized female body. Rather, Weimar advertising images appear to be more concerned with firmly re-establishing gender

443 Cited in Christina Bargholz. “’Tastschreiben’ oder ‘Tippen’?” Angestelltenparbeitsplätze unter Rationalisierungsdruck.” Großstadtmenschen: Die Welt der Angestellten. Ed. Burkhart Lauterbach. Frankfurt am Main: Büchergilde Gutenberg, 1995. Original figures determined by an “Erhebung des Gewerkschaftsbundes der Angestellten.” Berlin 1931, S. 245 (05/040). 444 Quoted in Frevert, “Vom Klavier zur Schreibmaschine,” 93. Original source: Fritz Croner. Soziologie der Angestellten. Köln/Berlin, 1962, 180. Translations: the “time of the emancipated woman” and “The capture of the office by female white-collar employees is the greatest revolution in the social position of women.” 445 See Frevert and Bargholz for more historical information on women’s perceptions of typewriting. 226 boundaries in the workplace and at the same time endorsing the promises of rationalization. For example, advertisers pictured female figures predominantly as mothers/wives and typists, but in Weimar advertising they were also frequently portrayed working in office contexts. Another telling shift occurred in graphic designers’ depictions of men as authority figures and assessors of quality. Male figures appeared in a supervisory capacity three times more often in Weimar ads than they did in the decade before WWI.446 Such clear representations of workplace hierarchies may be read as an effort to re-establish gender norms after women served as replacements for men, who had left to join the fight during the First World War.

While these patterns are not without exception, exceptions are rare. Although the illustrations of social situations shown here cannot be taken as representative of gender behavior in real life, they are “visually accessible instantaneous portraits of our claimed human nature.”447 I argue that in their representations of individuals and social hierarchies, these advertisements propose ideal images of the Weimar female typist in connection with the machine that are configured in terms of a “feminine docility” and mark her as domesticated, unthreatening, unresisting, yet disciplined. To this end, I will show that Weimar advertisers essentially retooled prewar fantasies of carnal relationships between the sexy female typist/secretary and her male superior. Although a residue of the erotic and technophilic remains, Weimar advertisements portray the typewriting female

446 Data derived from my own quantative analysis. I counted the number of male figures appearing in Dingwerth’s ad collection (Historische Schreibmaschinen-Anzeigen) in the decade before WWI and compared it to ads appearing in the Weimar era. 447 Goffman 27. See also pages 28-29 for a discussion of “Relative Size” and “The Feminine Touch” in advertising. 227 body in the midst of the controlled activity of work. Competent, attentive, and upright, the typist is no longer a symbol of leisure but of productive labor.

Figure 12. Black-and-white print advertisement for Elida skin cream featuring an office scene (1928). 448

Ads such as the one for “Elida Hautpflege” in Figure 12 aestheticized office work during the Weimar era and clearly depicted women “at work.” Although this ad does not promote German typewriter models, but rather a skincare product, its existence demonstrates that images of women’s typewriting appeared in all types of product advertising as a recognizable archetype of women’s work. In this rendering, the female typist is in the midst of the ritualistic motions of her work. Her left hand is active, yet soft

448 Ad appeared around 1928, Unilever GmbH, Hamburg. Accessed online at http://edoc.hu- berlin.de/dissertationen/schug-alexander-2007-05-09/HTML/N15AC5.html on June 30, 2015. 228 and delicate as she feeds a sheet of paper into the machine. No longer is the typist depicted as “teetering” or off-balance as in prewar ads, but as firmly seated at her desk.

Her movement and the open notebook on the extended table indicates that this is a space of well-organized labor and productivity. It is a space in which disciplined work takes priority, but it is also an extension of the domestic realm as indicated by the vase full of blooming flowers. She does not appear overtly sexualized, but her raised arms and upright posture expose her slender waist for the viewer. A closed space created by her arms, her waist, and the typewriter draws the viewer’s eye to her figure and connects her body to the machine. Unlike the female figure in Deutsch’s Mercedes ad, she is not seductively gazing at the viewer, but she turns her head, presumably, to meet the gaze of her male supervisor dictating to her right.

Office hierarchies are very clearly delineated in advertisements of the interwar era. Advertisers depicted male figures most often as authority figures (managers or supervisors), whose status is demonstrated by their height and sometimes their girth.

Masculinity is coded with strength, easy confidence, and dominance in these ads. These masculine qualities are visualized in the postures of male figures that are almost always standing upright with self-assurance and appear to be “taking charge” or making a decision. In the Elida advertisement, for example, the male figure is pressing his thumb to the inside of his index finger as he dictates, a gesture associated with an assertion or command.

Male figures are also cast as evaluators of quality. They are depicted as evaluating the quality of typewriters, the typist’s work, or the typist herself. The typist’s quality is

229 assessed not only through the accuracy and efficiency of her work, but also through her pleasing appearance. The text in the Elida ad reads, “Manchmal entsteht eine Pause beim

Diktat, denn der Chef denkt: ‘Wie macht sie es eigentlich, bei ihrer Arbeit so gepflegt auszusehen?’ Sie weiβ, wie wichtig gutes Aussehen im Berufsleben ist, […].”449 The narrative established by the text and image of the female typist looking away from the viewer indicates that the ad targets the female consumer in a way that insists on the convention that she wants her appearance to be pleasing to her male superior.

Historically, this ad highlights the emphasis on clothing and cosmetics that led women to be more competitive with one another, because “Jugendlichkeit” (youthfulness) and

“Attraktivität” (attractiveness) became attributes of the profession.450 Thus, the ad unapologetically communicates woman’s looked-at-ness and her desire to be looked at.

Within this advertisement, the aspect of “feminine docility” is fully formed. The typist’s posture is upright and confident, indicative of thorough training and discipline in her work. She also appears attentive in her role of support and service to her male colleague, a role deeply connected to the wifely duties to which she is expected to return later. Thus, the Elida female typist appears to the viewer as domesticated and well- trained, disciplined yet unthreatening, and active yet feminine.

Posing a meaningful contrast to this image of the female typist and reinforcing my previous claims about representations of male figures in typewriter advertising, the

“Triumph,” and “Kappel” ads in Figure 13 display constructions of masculine roles in

449 Translation: “Sometimes a break occurs during dictation, because the boss thinks: ‘How does she actually look so well-groomed at her work?’ She knows how important a good appearance is in professional life, …” 450 Frevert, “Vom Klavier zur Schreibmaschine,” 101. See also 100-102. 230 office work. Graphic artists most often drew male figures hovering over the shoulders of female typists or standing alone as they measure the quality or speed of the typists’ work.

Men were almost never depicted touching the machine; rather, they are often physically separated from it by descriptive text, thick borders, or empty space. Product advertisers defined the masculine role in typewriter use as a supervisory one supported by

“masculine interest in a product’s quality.”451 When pictured with the female typist, male figures are also depicted in a position of authority – paternally standing over female typists or near the device, but rarely in contact with it, seated at it, or using it. From this position, the male figures are presumably either monitoring the typist’s progress, dictating a text, or giving a satisfied grin at the pristine final product. Advertisers asserted a fundamental “discursive connection between masculinity and an interest and aptitude for quality […] by touting the production and durability of the [product] in question.”452

The black-and-white “Triumph” advertisement (Figure 13) contains an example of such portrayals of men and typewriters. The ad claims that their typewriters “halten schärfer

Kritik stand” (“stand up to the harshest critique”). The ad depicts a businessman scanning some newly typed pages. If male figures are bestowed with the aptitude to assess quality of the output, female figures are only given access to that technical quality in their use of the machine itself. Early advertisers also repeatedly linked masculinity with technical knowledge by displaying exclusively male figures as inventors, engineers, and

451 Stanley 83. 452 Ibid. 231 repairmen.453 Within advertisements depicting female subjects alone, “quality” is not being assessed directly; rather, advertisers depicted female subjects linked to the process of textual production.

Figure 13. “Triumph” ad (left) appeared in 1926, and “Die neue Kappel” (right) was designed by Ludwig Hohlwein and appeared in 1929. 454

As in the ads depicting female typists, advertisers employed specific coded gendered displays to shape the supervisory role as masculine. For instance, if we return to

Goffman’s ideas about the coded construction of hands, the renderings of the male figures’ hands in the “Triumph” and “Kappel” ads characterize them as powerful and assertive. The men’s hands are not represented as tentative, but utilitarian, manipulating and molding their environment. Therefore, the claimed human nature being proposed in

453 For examples, see Dingwerth, Historische Schreibmaschinen-Anzeigen, sections on advertisements for Rheinmetall and Royal. Since this trend surfaces more prominently in the Nazi era (1933-45), see also advertisements for Continental, Hermes, Ideal/Erika, Mercedes, and Triumph. 454 See Dingwerth, Geschichte der deutschen Schreibmaschinen-Fabriken, Band 1. The Triumph ad appears on page 22. See Band 2 for the Kappel ad, page 177. Artist and printer unknown for “Triumph” ad, and printer unknown for “Kappel.” 232 these ads is that authoritarian, supervisory roles are naturally masculine. This assertion was also in line with the beliefs of female white-collar workers about “natural” male and female roles during this period:

Der (immer) männliche Vorgesetzte repräsentierte für die Stenotypistinnen, Sekretärinnen, und Telephonistinnen die gleichsam ‘natürliche’ Autorität; er war Vaterfigur und potentieller Liebhaber in einem. Die familiale Rollenverteilung, in der die Frau den gehorchenden und der Mann den befehlenden Part zugewiesen bekamen, verdoppelte sich in der rational-bürokratischen Unternehmensstruktur; die traditionelle Herrschaftspyramide, deren Trittbrett quasi ‘naturhaft’ die Frau einnimmt, bewies ihre Vorzüge auch im Betrieb.455

Female office employees of the interwar era were not only well-acquainted with this pattern of male authority, but considered it a “quasi-natural” progression of men’s familial roles as father and husband. Interestingly, the sexy female typist, along with the overtly erotic imagery of tawdry affairs between the typist and her boss, essentially disappeared in Weimar advertising. Instead, visual constructions of social relationships between the female typist and her male supervisor conform to more traditional conventions that cast the male figure as father, husband, or both. Gestures to sexual relationships between male bosses and female typists are more subtle in this period. One clear example of this observable phenomenon is pictured in the Continental ad in Figure

14.

455 Frevert, “Vom Klavier zur Schreibmaschine,” 101-102. Translation: “The (always) male supervisor represented for the typists, secretaries, and telephone operators the quasi-natural authority; he was a father- figure and potential lover in one. The familial role allocation, in which the woman was assigned the obedient part and the man the commanding part, doubled in the rational-bureaucratic corporate structure; the traditional pyramid of authority, whose footboard the woman accepted as quasi-natural, demonstrated her amenity also in the firm.” 233

Figure 14. Continental typewriter ad appeared in 1924. 456

When examining the “Continental” ad displayed above, one can easily imagine the male figure as a proud father or a satisfied lover, who has provided his secretary/daughter/wife with the “preferred” machine. The Continental ad thus appeals to male consumers. The configuration of the male and female figures here sets up a social situation in which structures of power and control in communication stake a claim in human nature, e.g., men are providers and women are to be provided for.

These claims are also consistent in the rare cases when men are depicted as typewriter users. During the Weimar era, images of female users outnumbered male users by approximately four to one.457 Although only four percent of the Weimar ads I have examined contained depictions of male users, it is useful to examine the patterns of representation displayed by these ads as a point of comparison with Weimar ads

456 Ad can be found in Dingwerth, Historische Schreibmaschinen-Anzeigen / Quellen der Geschichte 1880 – 1959. Artist and printer unknown. 457 A result from my own quantative analysis of Dingwerth’s Historische Schreibmaschinen-Anzeigen. 234 depicting female users. The juxtaposition of male and female typewriter users exposes some profound questions about space and perceived gender roles in text processing.

Figure 15 displays a representative example of a male typewriter user that was designed and illustrated by internationally celebrated poster artist Ludwig Hohlwein.458

Remembered for his stunning renderings of human figures, Hohlwein produced thousands of posters and smaller newspaper advertisements applauded by graphic designers of the day, including the editor of the trade magazine Gebrauchsgraphik, H.K.

Frenzel.

458 Dingwerth, Werbungen für Büromaschinen, 22. See also H.K. Frenzel. Ludwig Hohlwein. Berlin: Phönix Illustrationsdruck und Verlag G.M.B.H, 1926. This compilation of posters contains an incredibly vibrant original color print of this poster by Emil Gerasch G.M.B.H., Leipzig, 1926. 235

Figure 15. Full-color poster designed by Ludwig Hohlwein and printed in 1926.

In this case, Hohlwein’s image of a typewriting male figure gestures to a long- standing trend in representing men as typewriter users. In the prewar era, images of men as typewriter-toting world travelers and colonizers typing before awestruck audiences of

“primitives” surfaced often in typewriter advertising. In one case, a black-and-white advertisement for Torpedo typewriters featured a typewriter serving as the motor of an automobile being driven by three men dressed as nineteenth-century explorers.459 These images have predictably faded from view during the Weimar era after Germany’s loss of its colonies as in the punitive provisions of the Treaty of Versailles after World War I.

Yet, advertising images of men travelling with typewriters persisted – on trains, on ships,

459 For examples, see Dingwerth, Historische Schreibmaschinen-Anzeigen. Especially page 845 for Torpedo ad. For other ads associating the typewriter with travel, see pages 858 and 860. 236 and in automobiles. Advertisers closely associated men’s typewriter use with mobility,

(Western) technological achievement, and a clear mastery over that technology. In contrast, women’s typewriting remained firmly fixed in the spaces of the home or office and was very rarely linked with travel or movement beyond the domestic or newly domesticated realms.

When we examine Hohlwein’s advertisement more closely, it becomes clear that the graphic artist rendered his male typewriter user as a commuter or traveler, busily working while riding a train. Hohlwein’s illustration can be viewed as a kind of complementary piece to Deutsch’s Mercedes poster of the sexy female typist, for it presents a convincing portrait of ideal masculinity in connection with the device. The figure, which appears to tower over the travel-sized typewriter, sits steadfastly upright

(no head canting here!) as he manipulates the machine with seemingly restrained power.

Hohlwein portrays the male typewriter user’s touch as utilitarian, commanding, and firm, an impression that is reinforced by the construction of his body. His thick arms and broad chest indicate strength and influence, and his darkly shaded eyes and jaw-line make him appear tense, menacing, even threatening, qualities that Goffman points to as typically defining masculinity in advertising. Hohlwein constructs the male typewriter user as prepared or ready-to-strike at any moment, not as a well-disciplined, unresisting fixture of the office sitting behind a machine at a desk, but a powerful figure whose movement is related to success and achievement, an attractive image for the male consumer. Likewise, the messy papers next to him are an image of disarray and untidiness that is complementary to the ideal of the disciplined female typist, who is often envisioned

237 working in clean, well-organized spaces (a reflection of their homemaking skills) or at uniform desks in straight row-formations of a typing pool. While the female typist is a reflection of controlled energy in a well-regulated space, Hohlwein’s male typewriter user continues to thrive amidst discord and imbalance. In this account, the need for order and control is supplanted by the desire for productivity and masculine achievement.

Figure 16. Black-and-white Torpedo ad (left) by Ludwig Hohlwein (1924) and Adler advertisement (right) appeared between 1926-1929.

It is important to note that Hohlwein’s thoroughly masculine typewriter user is also very different from his renderings of men in managerial roles. His portrayals of male superiors do not insinuate the same degree of aggression and power as his male typewriter user, perhaps because there is no need for it when men are shown in their

“natural” roles. A second “Torpedo” advertisement (Figure 16) demonstrates how

238

Hohlwein illustrates male figures in supervisory roles differently.460 In this case, the male figure’s authority is expressed through his girth, his upright posture, and his active hands that provide direction or instruction to the female typist, a figure which Hohlwein constructs as the man’s audience, leaning over and bent at the waist. Because the male figure appears in the foreground of the ad and because the female figure’s attention is fully directed toward him, he appears to us as a figure of dominance and importance. The male figure with his darkly shaded face and shadowy torso, which partially obscures the female figure, appears to be less aggressive and threatening than Hohlwein’s male typewriter user largely because of the female figure’s cheerful reaction. It is through her that we read his gestures, just as it is through her that his thoughts and words arrive on the page so that they may be read.

Another observable trend in Weimar typewriter advertising is that the female figure is visually constructed as a conduit for communication. For example, Hohlwein renders his female figure in white and grey tones with an undefined border. The soft, even absent edges of the female figure’s form give her an ethereal presence, while the male figure remains securely “present” and grounded, since he is drawn in deeper and darker tones. This illustrative technique, which other graphic artists had adopted as well

(see Adler ad in Figure 16), has the effect of representing the typists as ghostly or spectral figures that are translucent and fading into their surroundings. I read these representations

460 Torpedo advertisement found in Dingwerth, Historische Schreibmaschinen-Anzeigen. Band 3, page 858. See also “Die neue Kappel” ad in Figure 13 for another example of Hohlwein’s rendering of a male boss. (Several other examples can be found in Dingwerth, Historische Schreibmaschinen-Anzeigen.) Adler black- and-white advertisement (right) printed in the 1929 handbook Die gangbarsten Schreibmaschinen und die Entwicklungsgeschichte der Schreibmaschine by Josef Weißer Leipzig: Franz Deuticke, 1929. Among pages in the back-matter. See also Dingwerth, Historische Schreibmaschinen-Anzeigen. Band 1. 239 of female figures as linked to women’s perceived ideal role as a permeable, unresisting body and medium of communication herself. Previous research on this phenomenon points to its foundation in the common and persistent belief in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that women lacked subjective agency, which made it easier for them to take on the automatic modes necessary for efficient typewriting. For example,

Jill Galvan points to the importance of this belief when reading constructions of women’s use of devices of communication in Victorian-era literature. As Galvan concisely puts it:

“Common beliefs about women’s capacity for ‘brain-work’ made it simple to think of them as just weak-minded conduits, and those representations assuaged fears about eavesdropping, among other distortions of knowledge transmission, by emptying out the medium’s interposed presence.”461 The perception of women’s lack of subjective agency was that it benefitted communication, allowing women to serve as conduits of communication through which information could be easily and securely transmitted.

I maintain that not only did perceptions of women’s lacking subjective agency persist into Germany’s Weimar era, but it became part a notion of an ideal automatic state that was taught and reinforced as a disciplinary practice of early twentieth-century vocational schools (“Handelsschulen”). I read the Torpedo and Adler promotions shown above, as well as others like it, as insisting on typists as “go-betweens,” as docile, unthinking bodies without consciousness or as bodies that perform automatically, so that the conscious mind was only partially if at all aware.462 Instead, the typist’s mind and body should ideally be guided by and operate according to the disciplinary forces

461 Galvan 63-64. 462 I borrow Galvan’s expression “go-betweens” here for its concision. 240 imposed by institutions of education, which have been shaped by the principles of

Taylorism and rationalization. The ads inscribe this automaticity onto the physical bodies of the female figures by displaying them as “emptied out” or permeable, so that information/knowledge may pass through them and become material in the machine. The black-and-white Adler promotion, in particular, depicts the typing pool as a pseudo-army of female typists, whose presence appears incomplete or divided. In contrast, the typewriters, the devices with which they process others’ thoughts, appear completely present and material as they are darkly inked and have clearly defined borders in the advertisement. The female figures are not equated with the machines here, but rather serve as vessels in the automatic process of making thoughts, knowledge, or information material. Overall, the Torpedo and Adler advertisements conventionalize women’s role as a docile, unresisting conduit by suggesting that it is an ideal or “natural” state for well- practiced and disciplined female typist engaged with this device of communication.

While some advertising trends represented the female typist as a spectral embodiment of automatic modes, others displayed vibrant images of typists embodying disciplined mechanical movements. The ad for Triumph typewriters shown below in

Figure 17 displays a deceptively simple image of three nearly identical women, carrying typewriters against their chests, as they parade march in unison. The styling of these female figures, with their page-boy haircuts and short fashionable dresses, would have made them immediately identifiable by Weimar audiences as pictures of the “New

Woman,” an ideal image of the independent, working woman, configured as a young, stylish “Typewriter Girl.” When we consider the posture of these women carrying

241 devices, the typewriters obscure the female figures’ breasts in the image in a way that eliminates the erotic potential of their figures and temporarily replaces their ability to

“mother,” with the capacity for women’s mobility and advancement. Yet, the female figures communicating this optimistic message remain decontextualized in their march forward as the black background and the light, jovial spirit of the ad suggests a performance, rather than a realistic portrait of women’s work.

Figure 17. Full-color Triumph poster promoted the Model 10, appeared in 1927. 463

I read this representation of disciplined bodies with uniform limbs moving in- sequence as one that connects the typing pool to the popular American dance troupe, the

Tiller Girls, who performed in Berlin in the 1920s. As Siegfried Kracauer described

463 Triumph ad (artist and printer unknown) found on company website. Accessed on January 15, 2015. http://www.triumph-adler.com/C125713A00471CCE/direct/triumph-werke-1915-1930. 242 them: “These products of American distraction factories are no longer individual girls, but indissoluble girl clusters whose movements are demonstrations of mathematics.”464

According to Kracauer, these women created “mass ornaments” with the geometrically precise movements of their bodies, and these mass ornaments served as an aesthetic reflection of the rationalizing and disciplining forces, such as Ford’s assembly line or

Taylor’s quotas, which were driving the capitalist production processes and the economic system in Germany.465 As one example, Kracauer compares the legs of the girls moving in geometric unison with the hands of factory workers, or from my perspective, the hands of typists uniformly hammering away at the keys.

This connection between girls performing in geometric configurations and women’s typewriting was compounded by other stage performances in which female performers functioned as physical parts of the machine. For example, the revue “Das lachende Berlin” (1925) featured forty-three women wearing typewriter-keys as masks over their faces, arranged on-stage in a typewriter keyboard (QWERTZ) formation.466

With this cultural thread in mind, let us return to the Triumph ad and inspect it more closely. Although the ad only displays three female figures, rather than the dozens of performing Tiller Girls, the figures in the ad have few individually defining characteristics: the first and third figure are practically identical. The female figures have also been stripped of erotic meaning and any relationship to the natural and spiritual

464 Kracauer, Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. Translated and edited by Thomas Y. Levin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. 75-76. 465 Ibid. 78-79. 466 For an image of this living typewriter and more about the performance, see Wolfgang Jansen, Glanzrevuen der Zwanziger Jahre. Berlin, 1988. Especially page 75. 243 realms. When we examine the points at which the female figure’s legs cross and where the typewriters connect with the preceding women’s backs, these figures almost appear to be physically fused together in a single controlled, even mechanical movement.

Therefore, I read these illustrated bodies as willing subjects to the Taylor system of industrial discipline, and for the Weimar consumer, they would have made a convincing portrait of women’s ideal role in modernization and economic progress. As a physical embodiment of mechanical movement, these figures epitomize the rationalized typist shaped through the application of psycho-technical testing. The advertisement promises that the typewriter will increase women’s freedom and mobility, so long as she remains docile, disciplined, and unresisting in her typewriter work.

Conclusion

Throughout this chapter, we have seen the evolution of the female typist in advertising, from the “inactive” turn-of-the-century typist to the sexy female typist in

Ernst Deutsch’s Mercedes poster, to the docile, disciplined, and unresisting typist of the

Weimar era. Distinct differences in the portrayals of men as typewriter users and authority figures provide a vital point of comparison that helps us to understand the boundaries of masculine and feminine behaviors with regard to typewriting, as well as how advertising sought to conventionalize these behaviors. Overall, the illustrations of the female typist in these ads expose her as embodying automatic modes and mechanical movements, while at the same time marking her with a “feminine docility.” This feature of Weimar advertising poses an important question: what are the consequences of

244 portraying typists in terms of a feminine docility? Although the illustrations and photographs of social situations shown here cannot be taken as representative of gender behavior in real life, they can be understood as “visually accessible instantaneous portraits of claimed human nature.”467 In the end, advertising images such as these not only reflected Weimar perceptions of women’s typewriting, they helped to shape and conventionalize these perceptions, which allowed these images to impact real women’s identity formation in relation to the machine.

467 Goffman 27. See also pages 28-29 for a discussion of “Relative Size” and “The Feminine Touch” in advertising. 245

Chapter 4: Racing the Machine: Pleasure and the Productive Body in Narrative Cinema of the Early Thirties

Introduction

The previous chapter interrogated static images of female typist in Weimar advertising and exposed representations of the typewriting female body as disciplined and controlled, conjuring an ideal of feminine docility when interfacing with the machine. As we turn to another facet of visual culture with film, a medium that is complicated by elements of movement and sound, the disciplined female body at the typewriter is celebrated as a wonder of modern speed and physical productivity.

Particularly during cinema’s silent-to-sound transition in the late phase of the Weimar

Republic (1929-1933), female typists were portrayed as demonstrating their economic and domestic value in terms of their competency at the machine. In this chapter, New

Woman-Machine emerges in overt displays of high speeds of production, the rhythms of work, the articulation of women’s work through the distinctive sounds of the machine, and machine skill outside of the realms of the domestic sphere.

By repackaging turn-of-the-century clichés and fantasies about budding office romances between the typist and her male superior, late-Weimar entertainment films hardly presented female spectators with progressive images of life beyond the ascribed gender roles of wife, mother, and temporary low-level employee. Although the films’

246 conclusions unfailingly portray a realignment of the female figures with their pre- approved roles as workers and wives, they also feature moments when the hybrid identity of the New Woman-Machine materializes. We have already established the New

Woman-Machine as disciplined and docile, and an image bound to the automatic and mechanical modes of the machine. The typists portrayed in film retain a physical connection to the machine, seeing it as part of themselves or themselves as part of it. In film, the precision machine of the typewriter is a familiar means through which these figures demonstrate their utility, work ethic, and effectiveness, characteristics that become fused to the social ideal of femininity. This chapter turns to vibrant new aspects of this embodiment: the interconnected modern concepts of machine skill, productivity, and speed.

My understanding of “machine skill” is related to Donna Haraway’s idea, when she recommends that taking “intense pleasure in skill, machine skill, ceases to be a sin, but an aspect of our embodiment. The machine is not an it to be animated, worshipped, and dominated. The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment.” 468 As I see it, machine skill can involve technical knowledge of the inner workings of the machine or its design and the ability to repair or improve the machine. But in the case of displays of typewriting in entertainment film, machine skill emerges, instead, through the potent fusion of body and machine in the productive speeds and efficient movements of machine operation. In her effort to unbind the machine from the masculine realm,

Haraway insists that women should take pleasure in machine skill as an aspect of their

468 Donna Haraway, “Cyborg Manifesto,” 462. Emphasis in original. 247 embodiment separate from motherhood and its extensions. Although Haraway views machine skill as contributing to the individual’s embodiment of the machine, this pleasure is made more complicated by its display in film. Within the entertainment films discussed here, pleasure in machine skill surfaces in two forms: the personal and the public. We will see how female figures take personal pleasure in their machine skill, productivity, and embodiment of mechanical movements. Yet, through the medium of film as well as within the filmic narrative, women’s machine skill at typewriting becomes a source of pleasure for the audience, as well. Taking pleasure in the machine skill of typewriting is to take pleasure in the confusion of the boundaries between the body and machine in simultaneous, symbiotic motion. In its expression, machine skill – with its speed and productivity – plays a constitutive role in the assembly of the New Woman-

Machine, and it surfaces as an aspect of embodiment that is thoroughly celebrated in film.

It helps to recraft the female body and create a hybrid of woman and machine.. It is also an important articulation of pleasure for this study, because it possibly allowed female viewers to construct their own relationship to the machine and to revel in machine embodiment as something powerful and modern.

Accordingly, this chapter explores the fantasies and fairytales presented in late-

Weimar cinema in order to unpack moving images of typewriting, in which the productive body trumps the sexualized body as a source of pleasure. In so doing, I uncover how these films promote pleasure in the productive body, women’s pleasure in machine skill, and the thrill of the body working at high speeds. In this chapter, I provide a brief overview of typewriting in Stummfilm and Tonfilm with representative examples

248 that served as part of the great visual tapestry of Weimar mass-media culture. Then, I have selected one late-Weimar entertainment film to serve as a case study, Richard

Oswald’s Arm wie eine Kirchenmaus (Poor Like a Church Mouse, 1931), in order to examine these aspects in more depth.

I. Reading Gender and the Typist in Entertainment Film

Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Film” (first published in 1975) initiated the discourse on gender and spectatorship in film that is still foundational for discussions today. Mulvey claims that the male, patriarchal viewpoint is dominant in cinema and that the scopophilic pleasure of looking was reserved for the “male gaze” in cinema. Mulvey argues that

[a]s the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects his look on to that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence.469

While Mulvey’s understanding of the spectator’s identification with figures on the screen is useful for us here, her lack of attention to the female spectator - female protagonist relationship is apparent (and an issue that she footnotes herself). In the eighties and nineties, other feminist film theorists rightly challenged Mulvey’s focus on the “male gaze” and the sense of power and mastery that she awards to the erotic look. Heide

Schlüpmann and Patrice Petro, among others, have addressed how Wilhelminian and

Weimar film addressed female spectators. With regard to Wilhelminian narrative cinema,

469 See Laura Mulvey. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. Eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford UP, 1999. 838. 249

Schlüpmann, for example, has shown that the frequent presence of the themes of

“marriage, motherhood, and love indicate the intrusion of women in the public sphere of cinema,” and that film production was already starting to take female spectators into consideration before WWI.470 Petro focuses on female spectatorship in the Weimar era and challenges previous claims that situate Weimar cinema in a cultural-historical narrative of male anxiety. According to her,

[…] it is the existence of a female spectator, and the function of representation for mobilizing her desires and unconscious fantasies, that analyses of the Weimar cinema have repressed or ignored in order to reproduce the same story – the story of male subjectivity in crisis – which is then taken to be the story of German history or culture itself.471

In order to break this cycle, Petro turns to an examination of gendered representation in the illustrated press and film, and she presents a thoughtful reading of how the emotional excess of melodrama, in particular, revealed spaces of empowerment and identification for female spectators.472 In approaching cinematic images of typewriting women in this study, I align myself with Petro’s take on spectatorship that considers both sides of the gender divide, male and female audiences, and asks how images of masculinity and femininity in Weimar culture addressed these audiences differently.

For the most part, the connection to the reality of the white-collar worker remained merely a superficial one in late-Weimar narrative films. The true perils of the

470 Heide Schlüpmann. “Cinema as Anti-Theater: Actress and Film Audiences in Wilhelminian Germany.” Silent Film. Ed. Richard Abel. First published in 1996. Reprinted. London: The Athlone Press, 1999. 125- 145. 132. 471 Patrice Petro. Joyless Streets: Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimar Germany. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989. Introduction, xxii. 472 For more on gender and anxiety in films of the Weimar Republic and an examination that extends Petro’s work, see Anjeana K. Hans. Gender and the Uncanny in Films of the Weimar Republic. Wayne State University Press. Detroit, Michigan: 2014. See especially Chapter 1, pages 30-35. 250

Depression were wiped clean from these cheerful, escapist representations, which were designed to make money in an era when money was scarce. In popular films, such as those mentioned above, class conflict, the drudgery of office work, and poverty either remain peripheral concerns or have been boiled down to trite themes. But, similar to my approach to popular literature and advertising, I view entertainment films as important storehouses of cultural information that communicate both coded messages to female spectators and a kind of cultural imaginary, in which aspects of woman, modernity, and technology are negotiated. In this vein, I consider how the films visualize images of the female typist as a representation of destabilized gender roles, unchecked female sexuality, and modern industrial production.

Even though these popular films appear to display a shallow artifice of real life, much like critics’ indictments against advertising and popular literature, we must resist the temptation to dismiss entirely the cultural value of entertainment cinema. Speaking to their cultural importance, Kracauer highlights how entertainment films addressed specifically female spectators of the Weimar era in very real ways. In his 1927 sequence of sketches “Die kleinen Ladenmädchen gehen ins Kino” (“The Little Shopgirls go to the

Movies”), which originally appeared in the Frankfurter Zeitung, Kracauer claims that

“sensational film” explores the connection between the “daydreams of society” and reality:

Sensational film hits and life usually correspond to each other because the Little Miss Typists model themselves after the examples they see on the screen […] the more incorrectly they present the surface of things, the more correct they become and the more clearly they mirror the secret mechanism of society […] Stupid and unreal film fantasies are the

251

daydreams of society, in which its actual reality comes to the fore and its otherwise repressed wishes take on form.473

Despite the condescending tone he uses to discuss the “Little Shopgirls” and “Little Miss

Typists” (or “Tippmamsells”), Kracauer makes important observations about the social and cultural meaning of film, its influence on its spectators, and the significance of female spectatorship during the Weimar era. According to him, entertainment films, in their explicit detachment from reality, make visually apparent the underlying mechanisms and desires that drive audiences. At the core of Kracauer’s assessment is a psycho-social approach to reading popular film, which points to how it visualizes the “repressed wishes” and “daydreams of society.” While this approach anticipates Kracauer’s post-

WWII writing on how the collective mentality of German society and its psychological dispositions are reflected in Weimar film more generally, his reading also points to how entertainment film, in particular, accessed and even shaped how audiences wanted to view their world, just as it still does today.474

Kracauer’s assessment of the influence of cinematic images on the viewing public resembles Erving Goffmann’s perception of advertising images discussed in the last chapter. In many ways these two forms of mass media operate in similar ways.

Popular films and their starlets invite (female) spectators to parse out behaviors and visual traits that they find attractive, to use in the construction of their own self-image.

Like entertainment film, advertising offers attractive escapist fantasies, yet these images

473 Siegfried Kracauer, “Little Shopgirls go to the Movies,” Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. Translated and edited by Thomas Y. Levin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. 292. Italics in original. 474 See Siegfried Kracauer. From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of German Film. Princeton University Press, 1947. Especially “Introduction.” 252 are created with the specific intention to convince viewers of a definitive consumerist need, even one of which they were unaware. Similarly, popular film is itself the product to be sold, and its sales potential is wrought with images of pleasure set in motion. Thus, in advertising, creating a need is the primary function, whereas capturing the viewer’s attention with appealing imagery or a narrative is merely a means to achieve that objective. In entertainment film, the reverse is true. The charm of the narrative, its main characters, and its escapist quality are some of the primary functions of entertainment film.

In his critique of entertainment film, Kracauer also describes female spectators, especially female white-collar employees, as willing participants in this cult of distraction, of which he is highly critical. Yet, more recently, feminist critics have emphasized that women’s interest in consuming mass-media culture had other purposes than to simply distract. Ute Frevert, for example, points out that the monotonous character of the work, the nerve-wracking burden of the machines, and women’s continued dependence on their subordinate positions created a notable lack of job satisfaction for female clerical workers.475 These factors that led to stress and frustration in the workplace were also reflected and sometimes resolved in popular films (Lustspiele

- comedies) of the day and attracted female audiences. For example, a genre convention of these films was the female protagonist’s social advancement through marriage, which, in light of the messages in Keun and Brück’s novels discussed in Chapter 2, appears

475 Ute Frevert. “Vom Klavier zur Schreibmaschine – Weiblicher Arbeitsmarkt und Rollenzuweisungen am Beispiel der weiblichen Angestellten in der Weimarer Republik.” Frauen in der Geschichte. Düsseldorf: Pädogogischer Verlag Schwann, 1979. 93. 253 regressive. But Frevert suggests that marriage became “eine Art Erlösung aus der

Knechtschaft” (a kind of deliverance from servitude) for many women.476 With this in mind, she explains that female office workers’ indulgence in the distractions of popular culture was not merely a result of their scopophilic desire to watch fairytale daydreams of fortunes and romantic engagements played out for them onscreen, as Kracauer has suggested.477 Rather, Frevert reads their consumption of trivial cinematic displays, as well as other aspects of mass culture and leisure, as a massive protest against the monotonous, unrewarding work they performed in their daily lives. Their lack of fulfillment at work leads them to seek it elsewhere.

II. Eyeing the Keys: The Gaze and Typewriting in Silent Film

Emblematic of women’s presence in the white-collar workforce and the modernization of the office, the young, pretty female typist adjoined to her instrument became a popular figuration of woman and machine in the cultural imagination of the public, appearing in a great variety of films from the late-1910s through the early thirties.

Before the end of WWI, Der karierte Regenmantel (The Checkered Raincoat, dir. Max

Mack, 1917), a “Komödie in drei Akten” (comedy in three acts), presented cinema spectators with a titillating revival of turn-of-the-century tropes about attractive and promiscuous female secretaries and typists. With its opening scene, Regenmantel offers a nuanced cinematic display of typewriting and the female typist that experiments with the

476 Frevert, “Vom Klavier zur Schreibmaschine,” 99. 477 Siegfried Kracauer, “Little Shopgirls go to the Movies,” Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. Translated and edited by Thomas Y. Levin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. See page 300. 254 look and desire in the filmic close-up. The typewriting scene is short, but arguably the most striking scene in the film. It is worthy of brief consideration here, because it casts the female typist as an erotic spectacle that anticipates the importance of techno-eroticism and vision for typewriting in silent films of the twenties and the “to-be-looked-at-ness” of the typist and mechanical work in sound comedies of the early thirties.478

The film opens with a wide shot of a small business office, in which a typist, her eyes focused downward on the keys, is in the midst of taking dictation from her male employer, the owner of a coat factory, who is seated at his desk gesticulating vigorously.479 (See Figure 18, top). Except for the desks, the mise-en-scène of the office interior gives the impression of warm, private space, rather than a purely business-like office space, an impression generated by the amber tinting of the film and the placement of the armoire, the small personal photograph hanging on the wall, and the heavy drapery of the window treatments. Without the noises of type-bars striking the roller and the right margin bell, the visualization of typewriting in silent films more generally relied on gesture and movement. In Regenmantel, for instance, Mack emphasizes the physicality of typewriting: the typist nods her head in attention to the dictator’s words as her elbows jog energetically on either side of the device. Without seeing the inscribed letters on the page, the spectator can observe the typist’s production through the regular jerky movement of the typewriter carriage and the actress’s two-handed manual carriage return.

478 I adopt Laura Mulvey’s term “to-be-looked-at-ness” in this section. See Mulvey. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. Eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford UP, 1999. 833-44. 479 Der karierte Regenmantel. Dir. Max Mack. Perf. Eugen Burg, Rose Felsegg, and Beni Montano. Max Mack-Film GmbH (Berlin) 1917. 255

This physical expression of work through gesture and mechanical movement puts the interaction between the dictator and amanuensis (woman and machine in the act of taking dictation or copying manuscripts) on display in an intimate space.

What is more, a quick cut switches the scene to a more intimate medium close-up of the female typist that reveals perhaps the most interesting moments of typewriting in the film. (See Figure 18 middle). This moment reminds me of Béla Balázs’s notion of a

“good close-up,” since it not only gives “the impression of a mere naturalist preoccupation with detail,” but as he explains, “radiate[s] a tender human attitude in the contemplation of hidden things, a delicate solicitude, a gentle bending over the intimacies of life-in-the-miniature, a warm sensibility.”480 With this medium close-up, Mack’s meditation on the typist shifts from the discourse of work and gender to a study of how the camera’s close proximity can capture “hidden things.” The newly discernable movement of the typist’s upper arms and shoulders invites the viewer to ponder the female body in the motion of typewriting in more intricate visual detail and with less emphasis on the role of the machine. The typewriting woman appears in the center of the frame, yet, except for the top of the paper, the rim of the carriage, and the silver levers sticking up from both sides of the machine, the machine is almost entirely cut out of the shot. In fact, the white paper blends in with the typist’s white blouse creating a merger of material text and textile, so that the typist’s work in transcribing the words of her male

480 Béla Balázs. Theory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art. Trans. Edith Bone. London: Dennis Dobson, Ltd., Accessed on May 29, 2015 at archive.org. See page 56. 256 boss becomes text that she is metaphorically writing onto herself.481 Her body is, thus, both driven and constructed by the act of transcription. It should also be noted that the paper is set high enough in the frame to obscure (or simply act as another layer of clothing) over her chest and a portion of her décolleté so that her torso appears to be geometric with the horizontal line across her chest and vertical lines on her sides.

481 This union of text and textile is also reminiscent of Friedrich Kittler’s discussion of the link between text and fabric. According to him, “[t]he literal meaning of text is tissue. Therefore, prior to their industrialization the two sexes occupied strictly symmetrical roles: women with the symbol of female industriousness in their hands, wove tissues; men with the symbol of male intellectual activity in their hands wove tissues of a different sort called text. Here, the stylus as singular needle-point, there, the many female readers as fabric onto which it wrote. […] Industrialization simultaneously nullified handwriting and hand-based work.” With this passage, Kittler argues that industrialization, more specifically, the introduction of the typewriter, disrupted men’s claim to the quill and women’s to the needle. See Kittler’s Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 186-187. 257

Figure 18. Screen shots from the opening of Der karierte Regenmantel (1917). 482

482 To view this scene or the film in its entirety, see www.filmportal.de/node/34549/video/1224043 to watch it online. Film source: Deutsche Kinemathek - Museum für Film und Fernsehen.

258

Also among the “hidden things” revealed by the medium close-up are the typist’s physicality, the motion of her body in the frame of moving images. She is a representation of the productive body, an image that is complicated by her position as both object and subject of the “gaze.”483 Moments of looking begin when the typist raises her eyes from the device and looks directly into the camera (for eight seconds). She does not cease typing or alter her rhythmic movements, a display that indicates her expertise at Blindschreiben, but a shy grin spreads slowly across her face. Her awareness of the camera (and possibly the cameraman/spectator) induces an awareness of herself as an object, in the sense of the Lacanian mirror phase, when a child becomes aware of her/his own physical presence, as an object among other objects in the world.484 Mulvey has theorized the gaze with regard to its connection to gender and visual pleasure in film:

In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. Women displayed as sexual object is the leitmotif of erotic spectacle: from pin-ups to striptease, from Ziegfeld to Busby Berkley, she holds the look, plays to and signifies male desire.485

Mulvey’s assessment of women’s traditional role as exhibitionists and their coding as sexual objects sheds new light on Mack’s construction of the typist to attract the “male gaze.” The nature of the typist’s styling in a delicate white blouse with her hair pinned up allow her to stand out amongst the dark shadows of the office and the black suit of the

483 See Laura Mulvey. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” 484 For a re-reading of Lacan, see Todd McGowan. “Looking for the Gaze: Lacanian Film Theory and its Vicissitudes.” Cinema Journal. 42, No. 3 (Spring 2003): 27-47. 485 Mulvey 837. 259 company’s owner. Moreover, throughout the course of the scene and even in the wide shots, she is consistently positioned with her body facing the camera as an object “to-be- looked-at.” Finally, Mack’s camera lingers on and uses the close-up to study the female typist, until she and the rhythm of her work at the machine both become fetishized objects of the male gaze.

The typist is also related to the exhibitionist showgirl. Her promiscuous reputation, already established by 1910, is part of this link, as well as her location in the scene. Typically in film, the typist is put on display for the viewer (often in the close-up) and for the male supervisor, a figure who invariably occupies the space – a kind of viewing area – in the circumference around the typewriting amanuensis. But, this sequence in Regenmantel works slightly differently. The typist’s body is not exposed to the viewer, because the machine and desk obscure the lower half of her body, and, as he dictates, the male lead sits with his back to the typist and looks away from her. Although she is neither a show- nor pin-up girl, the physicality of her performance at the typewriter contributes to her coding as an erotic spectacle that unites the technophilic with the voyeuristic. Since her body is partly obscured by the machine itself, the physicality of her performance is in tandem with the movements of the typewriter’s carriage. As the carriage putters to the right (twice since she types two full lines in the medium close-up shot), we also witness the typist’s skill: her gentle hands returning the carriage, and the calm rhythm of her upper arms and shoulders. She also nods her head in the direction of the carriage’s movement (toward her boss), as if bobbing along with the machine. The viewer takes pleasure in watching the steady movement of the typist and machine, the

260 simultaneous effort of flesh and metal. Further uniting the technophilic and voyeuristic is how the typist is manifested by two modern technologies: the typewriter and the movie camera. Her look turns from the typewriter keys to the camera lens and back again, as she recognizes herself in relation to each machine. One is activated by her own kinetic energy, creates fragments of language, and figuratively inscribes (the fabric of) her body, while the other captures her movements in fragments of celluloid and recreates them by rapidly moving the film. This fragmentation of the typist in film points to how technologies have the power to assemble and disassemble the body in motion.

This filmic moment becomes more complicated, when the typist’s shy, self- conscious grin turns into a flirtatious, toothy smile in the following frames. This shift, according to Mulvey, should be read as the woman playing to the look of the camera/spectator and signifying male desire. Yet, if we consider the filmic gaze of both male and female spectators, it can be more accurately read in terms of a “look back” at the viewer, as Todd McGowan has theorized the gaze: “[t]he gaze is not the look of the subject at the object, but the point at which the object looks back.”486 Her stare into the camera challenges the viewer’s voyeuristic power, so that this unexpected encounter upsets the spectator’s seemingly safe distance and assumed mastery over the filmic image. In this instance, the spectator is also made to realize her/his position as an object to be viewed and observed. But this powerful exchange is not about the desire to gain power over the object or to dominate, but about desire itself – the desire to look, and the look as an expression of desire. Therefore, in this sequence in Regenmantel, the typist

486 McGowan 27-28. 261 serves as both an erotic object and a challenging subject, creating a tension between her objective and subjective position. In the final leg of this sequence, the typist looks down at the keys again, then raises her eyes slyly to look up and to her left in the direction of her dictating male supervisor. We associate the desire in her look at the camera with her subsequent look in the direction of her dictating male supervisor, even though he remains outside of the frame. The film, thus, provides a glimpse into the gender dynamics of the small office that yokes the physical movement of typewriting with sexual desire. Yet, what we understand as the typist’s visible expression of desire is at odds with the outcome of the sequence.

At the end, the male protagonist forcibly tries to kiss his typist, but she resists by pushing him and turning away. He manages to kiss her, but her reactions are contrary to what we expect, lending an element of surprise to the scene and leading the spectator to reassess the connection between the gaze and desire. Near the end of the scene, the male protagonist’s wife enters, and the coupling pair break free of each other. He presents his wife, who missed the entire ordeal, with a checkered coat as a gift and the narrative continues without mention of the typist again. The female typist plays a seemingly minor role, as does the tawdry office scene, within the greater scheme of the film, which focuses on themes of marriage, infidelity, and mistaken identity.

Within the framework of this study, however, I read the opening sequence in

Regenmantel as a meditation on women’s typewriting that reveals fundamental aspects about film, typewriting, and the connection between the female body and the machine.

The power of technology, as in the typewriter and the movie camera, to assemble and

262 disassemble the body continues to be of significance for other discussions of typewriting bodies in film in this chapter. As we will see, displays of the physicality of typewriting in film also serve to highlight the pleasure of speed and machine skill and celebrate the productive body in motion.

In silent films of the twenties, typist and secretary figures appeared as representatives of the working and petit-bourgeois classes in “street” films, like G.W.

Pabst’s Die freudlose Gasse (Joyless Street, 1925). Although the typewriter and typist surface readily in narrative films of the twenties, typewriting scenes were typically very short and incidental, however, perhaps because dramatizing typewriting in a narrative film without sound was a challenge. It was not until avant-garde films began to explore the typewriter’s aesthetic qualities in the late twenties and sound films of the early thirties celebrated the female typist as a symbol of youthful energy, productivity, and modernity that the amanuensis achieved a new level of cinematic potential.

Most famously, the “city symphony” avant-garde film by Walter Ruttmann,

Berlin. Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (Berlin. Symphony of a Great City, 1927), situates images of the female typist as fixtures in the fast-paced rhythms of the modern office.

Sabine Hake has pointed out that Ruttmann’s Berlin “transforms the various elements into an urban narrative that presents the city alternately as an organism and a machine.”487 Her excellent study goes on to explain that Ruttmann uses montage to

487 Sabine Hake. “Urban Spectacle in Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin, Symphony of the Big City.” Dancing on the Volcano: Essays on the Culture of the Weimar Republic. Eds. Thomas W. Kniesche and Stephan Brockmann. Camden House, 1994. 128. 263

“celebrate the city’s machine-like efficiency” and transform everyday movement

(production, transportation, communication, etc.) into “a symphonic spectacle of modernity.”488 The typewriter and other devices of communication (telephones, switchboards) play a central role in the film’s portrayal of the lives and culture of white- collar employees. In Act II, when the film shifts to the world of business and commerce, it takes on what Hake calls “a distinctly metropolitan pace.”489 Young, fashionably dressed young women (some of them images of the emancipated New Woman) and other employees climb on and off different means of public transportation and enter office buildings in droves. Thereafter, we see a slow series of elevators presumably carrying employees to their offices, a scene musically accompanied by slow, extended sound of horns. The next sequence (lasting approx. 15 seconds) begins with clips of the hands of office workers opening desks, filing cabinets, and ledgers, all of which demonstrate routines to start the work day. We then pause on an image of a typist’s midsection, as she pulls a pair of sleeves over her forearms to protect her clothing, and finally, a pair of hands removes the wooden cover of a Torpedo model typewriter (See Figure 19). The music during this sequence is very soft, almost inaudible, a kind of deep inhale before the swell of work to come.

488 Ibid. 131. 489 Ibid. 132. 264

Figure 19. The typist starts her day in Ruttmann’s Berlin.

The film cuts from the lone Torpedo typewriter to two pairs of hands rapidly striking typewriter keys, and so begins the exceptionally fast-paced sequence that introduces the viewer to the daily experience of office work. With this cut to the disembodied typing hands, the music quickens to a hurried, even breathless pace, as does the editing. Typewriting hands quickly dissolve into a close-up of type-bars, visually merging flesh and metal, then the film shifts to several quick cuts, image fragments that appear to mimic the letters (fragments of words) produced by the typewriter. (See Figure

20). Suddenly, we see three girls typing furiously in profile, and it is as if the typing pool of productive bodies is growing (from one typewriter, to two, to three) in number and intensity before our eyes. From here, Ruttmann’s typewriting sequence in Berlin switches repeatedly between close-ups of machine parts (striking type-bars, a type guide, paper, an aligning scale, and the keyboard), high-angled shots of disembodied typewriting hands, and mixed-angled shots of the three typing girls. Until finally, the sequence concludes when typewriter keys, in what appears as one superimposed keyboard over another, rotate in a circular clock-wise motion, so that the distinctive image of the typewriter keyboard is distorted into a haze of an abstract swirling wave.

265

Hake reads this sequence and the depiction of the office more generally in Berlin as a reflection of the daily rhythms and mechanisms of the city: “The hustle and bustle of street life and the quick pulse of urban traffic carry over into smaller but equally intense movements of office workers at their typewriters, telephones, and switchboards.”490

According to Hake, Ruttmann’s depiction of the office is a micro-expression of the hasty movements of the city streets, and her insights are valuable when examining the greater framework of the film. Alternatively, the unique attention that Ruttmann gives to the typewriter, the device that appears to spark increased speeds in the office and the city as a whole, makes the typewriting sequence worthy of further inspection. Norbert M. Schmitz offers an analysis of Ruttmann’s film focused specifically on the typewriter as a motif pregnant with meaning about the aesthetic and cultural contexts of Angestelltenkultur of the Weimar era.491 For example, Schmitz explains that the circular spinning of the keyboard at the end of the sequence can be read “als suggestives Symbol der

Fokussierung des Sekretärinnenblicks wie als abstrakte Formen.” 492 More compellingly, he argues that all the moments of work in the film are structured as an abstract flood of movement, and that this movement is deeply intertwined with the symphonic structure and configuration of meaning, or “Formsinne,” of the film. We see this most clearly in the final cuts when the typewriter keys begin to spin and dissolve into each other;

Schmitz identifies this moment as “die formale Verklärung der modernen Lebenswelt als

490 Hake, “Urban Spectacle,” 132. 491 Norbert M. Schmitz. “Die Schreibmaschine oder ‘die Industrialisierung von unten.’” Motive des Films: ein kasuistischer Fischzug. Eds. Christine N. Brinckmann, Britta Hartmann, Ludger Kaczmarek. Marburg: Schüren, 2012. 281-290. Translation: as a suggestive symbol of the focusing of the secretaries’ view (of the keys) as well as the abstract form.” 492 See ibid. 286. 266

Schönheit einer musikalischen Form: absoluter Film.”493 To me, this typewriting sequence in Berlin constructs an abstract version of the New Woman-Machine through the motion of the female body/bodies in the frames of moving images, through the filmic dissolves that unite the flesh of rapidly typing hands with the internal parts of the machine, and through the association of the “Sekretärinnenblick” (view of the secretaries) with our own in a chaotic blur of keys (looking at the keys was allegedly dangerous!).

Ultimately, the structure of Ruttmann’s montage with its fast pace, rhythm, and movement assembles and disassembles the productive body of the New Woman-

Machine.

493 Ibid. Translation: The structural transfiguration of the modern environment as beauty of musical form: pure film. 267

Figure 20. Select images from the typewriting montage in Ruttmann's Berlin.

268

III. Aural Daydreams: Typewriting in Sound Film of the Early Thirties

In entertainment films of the late-Weimar era, images of typewriting women, whether they were typists or secretaries, became some of the most common representations of the modern (working) woman. The female typist almost invariably appeared in the form of a fashionable, energetic girl with cropped blond hair (a bobbed cut not always as short the “Bubikopf” or page-boy haircut), who is as capable in her work as she is at capturing the attention of her male supervisor. Within these filmic negotiations, female desirability hinges on external beauty, productive output and utility, and a willingness to comply, i.e. relinquish control to a male authority figure.

Contributing to the vibrancy of these cinematic depictions of the female typist was the introduction of Tonfilm (sound film). The spread of sound cinema in 1929 and

1930 had profound effects in the film industry, presenting filmmakers with both new limitations and dynamic new possibilities in cinematic representation. During the silent- to-sound transition, the Weimar public’s tastes shifted, creating a rising demand for films that utilized new sound capabilities, such as actors’ voices, catchy song-and-dance numbers, and elaborate revue-like musical performances. Aimed at domestic as well as international audiences, Tonfilmoperetten were favorites amongst contemporary cinema- goers, as were musical comedies that featured a few catchy Schlager (hit songs) showcasing the musical talents of the films’ stars.494

494 See Thomas Elsaesser. Weimar Cinema and After: Germany’s Historical Imaginary. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. See 407-410. See also Siegfried Kracauer. From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film. Fifth Edition. Princeton University Press. 1974. (Originally published in 1947.), Especially pages 206-208. 269

Of particular interest for this study is that the technological development of sound afforded filmmakers new opportunities to dramatize typewriting, among other acoustic expressions of everyday machines and devices (car horns, telephones ringing, and many more). The clickity-clack of typewriter keys, whether it was presented as a chaotic jumble of noise or a rhythmic pulse of music, became the most identifiable sound of office work. Filmmakers were also suddenly able to bring the experience of the typing pool, with all its noise and monotony, to life for their audiences. For example, the films

Die Privatsekretärin (The Private Secretary, dir. Wilhelm Thiele, 1931) and Keine Feier ohne Meyer. (There is No Celebration without Meyer. Dir. Carl Boese, 1931) both contain typing-pool scenes, in which the viewer hears only the hectic noise of women hammering at the machines. Most interesting is that these noise-saturated scenes force the actors to interact almost entirely through exaggerated gesture (or with only punctuated words or phrases), much as they would have in silent film productions.495

One of the most popular Tonfilmoperetten (sound film operettas) released during the early age of sound film was Wilhelm Thiele’s Die Drei von der Tankstelle (Three

Good Friends, 1930). Thiele’s experimental take on the genre, particularly with regard to his use of sound, has drawn recent critical attention for its representative role in the popular avant-garde movement of early sound film.496 Thiele presents a whimsical display of typewriting at the end of Tankstelle that is worth revisiting here because of the

495 Die Privatsekretärin. Dir. Wilhelm Thiele. Perf. Renate Müller, Hermann Thimig, and Felix Bressart. Greenbaum-Film, 1931. Film. Keine Feier ohne Meyer. Dir. Carl Boese. Perf. Siegfried Arno, Ralph Arthur Roberts, and Maly Delschaft. Aco-Film GmbH (Berlin), 1931. Film. 496 See Michael Wedel. “Tanz der Form: Die Tonfilmoperette als populäre Avantgardebewegung.” Populärkultur, Massenmedien, Avantgarde, 1919-1933. Eds. Jessica Nitsche and Nadine Werner. München, Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2012. 215-238. 270 questions it raises about the use of sound to display typewriting and our association of

“usefulness” with the operation of the device. This light-hearted film tells an uncomplicated story of three friends, Willy (Willy Fritsch), Kurt (Oskar Karlweis), and

Hans (Heinz Rühmann), who, after losing their fortune in the economic crisis, sell their last remaining possession, an automobile, to buy a gas station, which they name the

Kuckuck Tankstelle.497 While working in shifts at their new business, each of the three friends meets and independently falls in love with the same woman, Lilian (Lilian

Harvey), who makes frequent stops at the gas station in her own automobile. To resolve the misunderstanding with the three friends, Lilian invites them to meet her at the Kit Kat

Klub, but the discovery of her deception embitters them toward her. In a moment of frustration, Willy lashes out at Lilian and her father, Consul Coßmann (Fritz Kampers), stating that he hopes that she can one day be “ein brauchbarer Mensch,” (a useful person) because she is “ein herzloses oberflächliches kokettes Luxusgeschöpf” (a heartless, superficial, coquette creature of luxury). Since her father is fairly wealthy, Lilian has her own automobile in a time when the public’s perception of the car was only gradually shifting from an association with luxury to utility.498

In response to Willy’s harsh words, Lilian attempts to demonstrate her practical value, know-how, and usefulness by operating another modern device, the typewriter, which had already become representative of bourgeois women’s utility in the 1910s.

497 Die Drei von der Tankstelle (Three Good Friends). Dir. Wilhelm Thiele. Perf. Willy Fritsch, Lilian Harvey, and Heinz Rühmann. Universum Film (UFA), 1930. 498 For a reading of automobility, oil, and the use of sound in Tankstelle, see John Davidson. “Of Oil and Operetta: Fueling the Crisis Years with Die Drei von der Tankstelle (1930)” Colloquia Germanica. Special Issue: Weimar Sound Film. Band 44. Heft 3. (2014): 347-376. 271

Most interesting is that nothing in the film at all prepares the audience for Lilian – this wealthy girl and spoiled “Luxusgeschöpf” (creature of luxury) – to be proficient in typewriting; yet, it is how she chooses to fix her problems with Willy and prove her utility. Therefore, Lilian’s typewriter use implies, at least in part, a naturalized association between women and typewriting at this point, so that one fitting expression of women’s usefulness outside of the home involved typewriting and/or taking dictation. In this scene, Lilian appears unprompted at the door of the three friends’ newly founded corporation, KUTAG (Kuckuck Tank AG), and claims that she is there to assist with their correspondence and Maschinenschreiben (typewriting). Hans and Kurt raise a typewriter out of a desk where it had been stored, and Lilian readies herself to take dictation, while all three men stand over her as she types (See Figure 21, top). Then, as is appropriate for a Tonfilmoperette, three of them break into song, while Willy looks on with cynicism only to join in at the end. The song is a reprisal of one that Lilian sings earlier in the film, as she tries to hand-write letters to each of the men explaining her feelings. This iteration of the song begins with the sound of a xylophone imitating the typewriter’s right margin bell, and all four characters take turns singing verses of the playful tune: “[Lilian:] Jetzt kommt ein großes Fragezeichen […] [Hand and Kurt:] und dann kommt ein

Gedankenstrich, das heißt mein Schatz, ich liebe dich […] [Willy:] und dann kommt ein

Punkt dazu, das heißt lass mich in Ruh.”499 Between each line, Lilian types in an exaggerated, animated way that befits the series of over-the-top song-and-dance displays

499 Die Drei von der Tankstelle, Dir. Thiele. Translation: “Now comes a big question mark […] and then comes a dash, that means my dear, I love you […] and then comes a period too, that means leave me alone.” 272 in the film. At the conclusion of the musical number, Willy rushes Hans and Kurt out of the room, so that he may dictate to Lilian alone.

Most notable for this investigation of sound and typewriting is that during the musical number, Thiele replaces the staccato sound of type-bars slapping the page, a sound universally recognizable to the public as the typewriter, with the melodic tones of a xylophone. It is a distortion of sound that is reminiscent of what Balázs has called

“musical grotesque,” a moment when the sound is “at odds with the nature of the instrument producing it.”500 As we have seen in Chapter 1, the typewriter has held historical and cultural associations with musical instruments, specifically the piano, so replacing the typewriter’s sound with the xylophone is not an aggressively discordant mismatch. Yet, it achieves the desired comic effect of the scene, as Balázs describes it, since “a beautiful melody may strike us as funny if it emanates from objects which do not seem suitable to produce it.”501 Thiele’s substitution of the sound of work (typewriting) with a cheerful melody is surprising and funny for the filmic spectator, and furthermore, it jibes with the content of the following scene, in which Willy dictates his resignation letter.

With this second deployment of the amanuensis, the acoustics of the machine are genuine, implying a more earnest, less lighthearted tone than the musical spectacle of the previous scene. (See Figure 21, bottom.) Lilian appears to embrace the instrumentalized role of the typist, as she diligently drums on the keyboard supposedly transcribing

500 Béla Balázs. Theory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art. Trans. Edith Bone. London: Dennis Dobson, Ltd., Accessed on May 29, 2015 at archive.org. See page 234. 501 Ibid. 273

Willy’s words in order to prove that she, indeed, is a “brauchbarer Mensch.” But, soon after Willy signs the final document, the content of which he presumably dictated, we learn that what Lilian has actually typed is a marriage contract (“Ehevertrag”). This moment of playful trickery has some dire consequences, since our female lead has essentially usurped authorship of the document and legally bound Willy to her. Although

Lilian has established her productivity and skill at operating a machine of utility (the typewriter), as well as a luxury machine (the automobile), she remains intractable and willfully disobedient. Lilian is a kind of caricature seamlessly embodying various feminine ideals: the sexy waif, the utilitarian producer, the show-girl, spoiled

“Luxusgeschöpf,” and the modern woman (driving an automobile). Therefore, she is only momentarily a productive body, as if playing a part or trying on a hat, but not really embodying the automatic modes, discipline, and docility of the New Woman-Machine.

274

Figure 21. Screen shots from Die Drei von der Tankstelle (1930).

At different times throughout Tankstelle, the spectator is invited to identify with both the male and female leads; for example, we identify with Lilian when she is 275 struggling to articulate her affections for the three friends, just as we identify with

Willy’s frustration when he discovers that she has asked all of them to the club. Yet, the film privileges his perspective over hers, and this becomes especially clear in the scene after Willy discovers that he has signed a marriage contract. Lilian’s cheerful trickery, though it is a source of humor and pleasure for the spectator, cannot be allowed to stand in the course of the film’s narrative. Therefore, in order to rebuke Lilian’s actions and gain control over his unruly daughter, Coßmann nearly beats his daughter on her backside, as if he were disciplining a child. The farcical style of this scene allows us not to take it so seriously; yet, we are relieved when Willy saves Lilian from her father’s overt display of physical force, a scene that concludes the film’s efforts to restore properly the boundaries of gender.

With regard to women’s typewriting, Tankstelle reveals that feminine modes of productivity and utility in relation to the machine are yoked to docility and obedience, both qualities not applicable to Lilian. By the end of the film, unruly female behavior is tempered by romantic love (and the playful threat of physical discipline). Beyond that,

Thiele’s experimental use of sound, with which he unexpectedly substitutes the punchy sound of typewriting with a xylophone, effectively doubles the film’s trickery, therefore, linking the audience’s understanding of the narrative events with the use of new sound techniques, acoustic and musical. Overall, displays of typewriting in Tankstelle are unique in that they avoid association with social mobility and virtually any association

276 with the reality of the white-collar worker.502 Although Thiele’s Tonfilmoperette has been described as a “Wachtraum” (daydream) for the ways that it holds social reality and the economic crisis at a distance, it provides viewers – amidst its comedic shenanigans and musical numbers – with a distinctive perspective on femininity and modernity that links women’s utility (domestic or outside of the home) with machine operation.503

Unlike Tankstelle, many late-Weimar films treating the female typist as a cinematic subject were, albeit to different degrees, attentive to the real-life working and living conditions of the white-collar worker and the desire for job satisfaction or social mobility. For example, such films as Johannes Meyer’s Eine von uns (One of us, 1932), an adaptation of Irmgard Keun’s Gilgi—Eine von uns, or Arzen von Cserépy’s Mädchen mit Prokura (Girl with Power of Attorney, 1934), adapted from Christa Anita Brück’s novel, directly addressed problems of the economic disaster, mass unemployment, women’s work, abortion, etc. For example, Cserépy’s film opens by situating the viewer within the social panic and poverty of the Depression era by means of a montage of newspaper headlines, so that “Lebensmittelgeschäft gestürmt” (grocery store stormed) and “Hunger” spin onto the screen. The film’s narrative focuses on the trial of a female clerk, Thea Iken (Gerda Maurus), who has been accused of murdering Bankdirektor

Brüggemann (Ernst Dumcke). Influenced by Brück’s original narrative, this film offered

502 Cf. Jennifer Kapczynski, “Still Motion: Dance and Stasis in the Weimar Operetta Film.” seminar 46:3 (September 2010): 293-310. And also John Davidson. “Of Oil and Operetta: Fueling the Crisis Years with Die Drei von der Tankstelle (1930)” Colloquia Germanica. Special Issue: Weimar Sound Film. Band 44. Heft 3. (2014): 347-376. 503 See Wedel 217. 277 spectators a critical outlook on perceptions of female authority and the limitations of women’s professional advancement.

In another subgenre of films known as Bürofilme or office films, the female typist serves as the primary cinematic subject, with whom the spectator is to identify. These films focus exclusively on tales of upward social mobility, in which advancement is personal rather than professional, i.e., occurring through marriage instead of a workplace promotion. To mention just a few examples, Die Privatsekretärin (The Private Secretary, dir. Wilhelm Thiele, 1931), features the story of a female typist (not a secretary) who wants more out of life than the monotony of the typing pool, and after mistaking him for a low-level employee, she finds love (and money) with a company executive. Das häβliche Mädchen (The Ugly Girl, dir. Henry Koster, 1933), as one might expect, portrays a tale of a plain young typist who is captivatingly transformed into the most desirable woman at the company’s costume party.504 Like many German comedies that were influenced by products of the American film industry, like Hollywood’s trite, yet undeniably effective happy endings, Privatsekretärin and Das häβliche Mädchen each conclude with the coupling of its main male and female characters, and thus, promote paths that return “working girls” to the domestic realm.

Similarly, the typist was also a popular subject in Verwechslungskomödien, a term used to describe films or theater pieces with plot-driven narratives characterized by complicated twists, misunderstandings, and mistaken identities, tropes with origins from

504 A few important points to note here: Thiele’s Die Privatsekretärin was remade in an English-language version called Susie Sunshine (1931), which also starred Renate Müller, as well as French and Italian language versions. A 1953 remake was also produced. 278

Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors. For example, before his overnight success with

Hitlerjunge Quex in September 1933 that made him a star director during the Nazi era,

Hans Steinhoff directed the comedies Liebe muss verstanden sein (Love must be

Understood, 1933) and Keine Angst vor Liebe (Don’t Be Afraid of Love, 1933) earlier in that same year. Although the figure of the female typist is central in both of Steinhoff’s comedies, most of the comedic hijinks takes place outside of the office in other transitory spaces, like hotels, dance halls, and the race track. In the end the result is the same in the

Verwechslungskomödien as it is in the Bürofilme; these popular comedies conclude with sentimental admissions of romantic love followed by an engagement or a wedding that allows for the return of even the most capable typist to her traditional roles as wife and mother. But, common in each of these subgenre is that before traditional gender roles are restored in their conclusions, the typist is displayed resisting compliance to her instrumentalized role.

In order to give further consideration to these moments of obedience and defiance, as well as the role of machine skill and speed in the assembly of the New

Woman-Machine, let us move to a close reading of an entertainment film of the late-

Weimar era that contains an image of a typist who self-identifies with the machine:

Richard Oswald’s Arm wie eine Kirchenmaus (Poor Like a Church Mouse, 1931). This analysis will confirm the hybrid identity of the New Woman-Machine, which we have already come to understand as a physical and mental embodiment of the automatic and mechanical processes of production. The film under consideration here contains a female subject at the center of its narratives and uses the relatively new possibilities of sound

279 film not only to create musical numbers, but also to assist in the creation of the cyborgian female typist that this study examines as the New Woman-Machine.

IV. The Pleasure of Rapid Productivity in Oswald’s Arm wie eine Kirchenmaus

Arm wie eine Kirchenmaus was originally filmed in the D.L.S. film studio in

Staaken (Berlin) and was one of three film adaptations of stage productions that Oswald created during the transition to sound film, the other two being Der Hauptmann von

Köpenick (1931) and Ganovenehre (1932). As cinematic adaptations of theater pieces, these films were distinct in their production and genre categorization in Oswald’s cultural production in the early thirties. Kirchenmaus was based on Hungarian Ladislaus Fodor’s comedic theater piece A templom egere, which only came to be known as Arm wie eine

Kirchenmaus in 1928, when the piece was first performed on German-language stages.

Felix Salten and Heinz Goldberg adapted the Lustspiel (musical comedy) script for the screen.505

In its opening scene, Oswald gestures to the film’s origins on the stage in a preface that reveals the theater’s influence on the director’s approach to sound film and his construction of the typist.506 Kirchenmaus opens with a stationary medium shot of two men from the waist up, one a wealthy film producer who has just arrived per private plane from Hollywood, the other an actor who has received a script from Richard Oswald

505 See Michael Wedel. Filmgeschichte als Krisengeschichte: Schnitte und Spuren durch den deutschen Film. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2011. See especially 153-163, for more on Oswald’s strategies for adapting theater pieces to the sound screen. 506 Arm wie eine Kirchenmaus. Dir. Richard Oswald. Perf. Grete Mosheim, Anton Edthofer, and Hans Thimig. Richard-Oswald-Produktion, 1931. (Viewed at the Museum for Film and Television in Berlin) 280 for the Lustspiel (comedy). The conversation between the two actors functions as a structural mechanism to articulate the film’s credits with the technological innovation of sound. They speak about the director and which actors are playing the leading and secondary roles in the film, essentially replacing the rolling text credits with speech.

Standing left of screen, Fritz Grünbaum mentions that he will play Buchhalter Schünzl in the film, but also jokes that he should play the character Kirchenmaus, the leading role written for a woman. The suggestion of this gender-bending role swap is, of course, part of the charming humor of the opening scene, and instead, the role of Susi Sachs (a.k.a.

Kirchenmaus), the film’s protagonist, is played by Greta Mosheim. According to

Grünbaum, “Sie ist die Schreibmaschinenfräulein von Präsidenten Baron Ulrich” (She is the typewriter-girl of President Baron Ulrich), and, in this way, he identifies the young girl at the typewriter as the film’s primary subject. This is an important moment for the spectator’s understanding of the film, since Susi, does not appear until the film’s second act.

This initial scene has a similar function to that of a prologue or preface to a play, in which an actor, theater manager, or producer addresses the audience directly to introduce the play and its major themes. This variation of the prologue is, instead, a performance featuring two actors, who are themselves in dialogue rather than interacting with the audience. In Kirchenmaus, the prologue serves the purpose of an intermediary discourse that “ensures a smooth transition from the social reality in the house to the

281 fiction on [screen].”507 With dialogue that is more playful than believable, the prologue introduces the spectator to the film gradually in stages, while also setting the comedic tone. Overall, Oswald’s staging of the opening scene bridges the theatrical and the cinematic, while reminding the audience that they are watching a film that has already undergone an extensive production process, including the new use of sound, the adapted script, casting, and the possibility of overseas distribution indicated by the presence of the

Hollywood rep. The film’s opening is, thus, not an entirely escapist moment for the audience; rather, however light-heartedly, it blurs the boundaries between reality and fiction.

Oswald’s gestures to the theater are not limited to the opening scene; just as elements of stage production influenced many early sound films, Kirchenmaus was no exception. As contemporary film critics pointed out, Oswald’s attention to camera movement and, I would add, the film’s lavish sets, such as a ballroom-sized bank president’s office and oversized statuary, clearly differentiate Kirchenmaus from “filmed theater” (verfilmtes Theater) with its stationary camera and the limits of its mise-en- scéne.508 Yet, the film is almost completely made up of interior shots, which gives it a stage-like, rather than cinematic appearance. Furthermore, Kirchenmaus, much like other comedies of the early sound era, is less attentive to the more filmic elements of montage and editing, than it is to aspects of stage production, such as blocking and lighting.

Overall, Oswald strikes a balance between theater and cinema in this film that is

507 Patrice Pavis. ed. Dictionary of the Theatre: Terms, Concepts, and Analysis. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press Inc., 1998. See 288-289. 508 Ludwig. “Im Gloria-Palast: Arm wie eine Kirchenmaus.” Der Film. 7 November 1931. 282 reflective of the silent-to-sound transition. While silent film had managed to move well beyond the stage, particularly when we consider “city symphony” films like Ruttmann’s, the development the sound film reverted production again to the style of theater.509

With the addition of sound, film became even more comparable to stage drama in a variety of ways. The need to stay in proximity of microphones limited the actors’ range of movement, for example, and sound film created a demand for actors who had a better sense for the spoken word. According to one critic from Film Kurier, Oswald’s insistence on a link to Sprechtheater (spoken theater) had much to do with the silent-to-sound transition: “Mit der ihm eigenen Intensität versichert er, daß es eine ganz andere

Atmosphäre gäbe, sobald Leute da sind, die mit dem Wort umzugehen verstehen.”510

Once an actor of film and stage himself, Oswald made an effort to hire

Sprechtheaterleuten (theater people), because they were perceived as having a better understanding of the spoken word and could, thus, perform with their voices. For example, the actor Anton Edthofer, who played Präsident Baron Ulrich in Kirchenmaus, already had a reputation as a “kultivierter Vertreter österreichischer Bühnenkunst.”511

Fitting with his experience in the theater, Edthofer appears to act more through the use of voice and gesture, rather than through the subtleties of his face and expression. Therefore, a consequence of Oswald’s theatrical approach to the emergence of sound is that

Kirchenmaus occasionally resembles a stage performance, particularly with some of its

509 See Balázs, Theory of the Film, 240. 510 “Blick ins Glashaus. Mit Briand und Curtius halbwegs nach Staaken.” Film Kurier. 29 September 1931. Issue 228. Translation: “With intensity, he insured that there would be an entirely different atmosphere, as soon as people were there, who understood how to handle the (spoken) word.” 511 Ibid. 283 wide, stationary shots. It is important to keep this overall aesthetic, though rather conventional, in mind while examining the film for the construction of typewriting moments.

With its musical, humorous, and romance components, Oswald’s Kirchenmaus appealed to the tastes and disposition of contemporary film audiences during the silent- to-sound transition. Reviewers writing for the film journals Film Kurier, Der Film, and

Kinemathograph, which naturally had their own stake in the success of the film industry, were consistent in their reports on the warm reception of the film among audiences and critics alike.512 One critic from Kinemathograph inflated its impact asserting that

Kirchenmaus is “[e]in Film, der mit zu den größten deutschen Erfolgen gerechnet werden darf.”513 Kirchenmaus was, thus, quite popular and well-received in its day. In particular,

Mosheim’s performance as Susi Sachs, the bank president’s hard-working typewriter- girl, received critical acclaim. In a review of Kirchenmaus in Der Film, one critic made the following comments about her performance:

Die inzwischen vervollkommnete Technik der Tonaufnahme und Wiedergabe läßt auch ihre Stimme ausgezeichnet und naturnah kommen. Ihr Debut war also, rein technisch, durchaus erfolgreich. Schauspielerisch ist sie bewundernswert. Eine große Menschendarstellerin. Gleich wirkungsvoll als Arbeiterin, als verschüchterte Maus, als Liebende. 514

512 See, for example, Ludwig. “Im Gloria-Palast: Arm wie eine Kirchenmaus.” Der Film. 7 November 1931. Nr. 45. Note: Although each of these journals published pieces praising Mosheim, one film review that focuses particular on Mosheim’s contributions, calling her a new great “Tonfilmstar” is Georg Herzberg. “Arm wie eine Kirchenmaus.” Filmkurier. 6 November 1931. No. 261. 513 “Beifall um die Kirchenmaus. Neuer D.L.S.-Erfolg im Gloria-Palast.” Kinematograph. 6 November 1931. Nr. 258. Translation: “A film, which may be counted amongst the greatest German successes.” 514 Ludwig. “Im Gloria-Palast: Arm wie eine Kirchenmaus.” 284

As one representative example, this critic praised Mosheim’s believable transformation from a hungry, unemployed girl to an energetic worker, and finally to a woman in love in the course of the film. Mediated by the new technology of sound recording, her performance was viewed as near-natural and technically sound. All in all, Mosheim’s performance and the transitions between the various stages of development for her character are quite convincing; however, at the conclusion of the film, the viewer is left wondering how this work-obsessed girl, who is “ein Bestandteil einer Schreibmaschine”

(a component of the typewriter) and identifies herself as belonging to the machine and by extension the workplace, will fare in her new role in the domestic realm. Angelika

Führich has pointed out that Kirchenmaus depicts office work, i.e. typewriting, as a temporary occupation that created a path for women to return to the domestic sphere and their “natural” roles of wife and mother.515 Führich’s reading of this trend in entertainment films is on point, especially for Bürofilme more generally, which typically posit the mechanical and service aspects of the typist’s job as a kind of training ground for their future wifely duties in the home. I believe that Kirchenmaus diverges from this perspective in its conclusion. Instead of serving as a training ground, the film has us believe that typewriting is where Susi thrives. She and the machine belong together, and it is through work, i.e., the enduring Tempo, consistent productivity, efficiency, and work ethic, that she defines herself. As a result, the film’s inevitable happy ending with admissions of love by Susi and the Baron Ulrich contains some dissonance for the viewer. With the film’s conclusion in mind, following investigation presents a close

515 See Angelika Führich. “Woman and Typewriter: Gender, Technology, and Work in Late Weimar Film.” Women in German Yearbook. 16 (2000): 151-166. 285 analysis of the role of Susi as a “Schreibmaschinenfräulein” and how the film cultivates a visual relationship between Susi and the machine.

Because of its attention to the figure of the female typist and its nuanced displays of typewriting, Kirchenmaus is important to this study. Through its two female typists,

Susi Sachs (Mosheim) and her foil Olly Frey (Charlotte Ander), the film communicates to spectators the value and limits of women’s role in modernization and business in the

Weimar era. Recent scholarship on Kirchenmaus has pointed out that the film’s narrative prioritizes work ethic over the beautiful, sexualized female typist.516 The film does define the typewriter as a vehicle for the female figures to demonstrate their worth through their practicality, usefulness, and productivity. In revisiting typewriting in

Kirchenmaus, I take this interpretation a step further by reading woman and machine again through the lens of the cyborg, so that the typewriter does not merely serve as an extension of the body, but the female typist embodies the machine itself. In many ways, the film anticipates Haraway’s statement that “[i]ntense pleasure in skill, machine skill, ceases to be a sin, but an aspect of our embodiment.”517 This facet of pleasure intersects with the technophilic (pleasure in technology) and techno-erotic (machines imitating human sexual responses). In Kirchenmaus, this embodiment of the machine and machine skill plays a constitutive role in the female protagonist’s identity, and techno-erotic displays of typewriting are central in the filmic renditions of the technological interface.

516 See Führich in “Women and Typewriters” and Aranka Muller-Matits in her dissertation, “Glamor and gloom: The female-white collar worker in mainstream cinema and popular fiction of the late Weimar Republic.” City University of New York, 2007. 517 Haraway, “Cyborg Manifesto,” 462. 286

I argue that the film presents viewers with two very different kinds of typewriting female bodies: one, the consuming body of the female participant in mass-consumer culture and the other, the productive body of the industrious worker. Both typewriting female bodies are sexualized in the film at one time or another, but this aspect will not be my central focus here. The sexualized female body at the typewriter has received extensive critical attention, and I have already discussed this subject at length in Chapter

3. Instead, I take a cue from Jennifer Fleissner, who has insisted that other embedded aspects of the body “need to be extracted from its explicit attention to the sexual one.”518

By extracting these bodies from the sexual, I am able to attend to other facets of the woman-machine hybrid, the New Woman-Machine. In so doing, I show that the productive body trumps the sexualized body as a source of pleasure in Kirchenmaus. The film’s focus on the pleasure of machine skill, speed, and productivity resonates within its narrative.

One facet of the woman-machine hybrid that is a central motif in the film is

Tempo. In a very brief clip after the film’s prologue, Baron Ulrich mentions that for him,

“Tempo” is the most important thing in his work- and home-life. “Tempo,” meaning speed or pace, not only signifies the speed of work or production within the framework of the film, but it takes on a broader, multifaceted meaning in its association with productivity, modernization, and modernity. In “Metropolis and Mental Life,” for example, Georg Simmel notes that the “tempo […] of occupational, economic, and social

518 Jennifer L. Fleissner. “Dictation Anxiety: The Stenographer’s Stake in Dracula.” Nineteenth Century Contexts: An Interdisciplinary Journal. 22.3, 417-455. Accessed on June 25, 2015 at dx.doi.org/10.1080/08905490008583519. See page 437. 287 life” is an aspect of the city with a constitutive role in the “blasé outlook” of mental life.519 More recently, Jeremy Millar and Michiel Schwarz similarly maintained the idea that “to possess speed is to be modern,”520 whereas Bob Hanke has pointed out that

speed is not merely a matter of overcoming distances or the rate of dissemination and retrieval of information; it is also a matter of mobility, the perception of the visual world, the construction of time, how we measure value, the synchronization of everyday life, and how people are disciplined within the political and economic order.521

For me, this passage from Hanke raises an important point about women’s typewriting: it was speed work. With the growing widespread use of devices of communication

(telephones, phonographs, typewriters), speed had become a priority in information transfer, and it is an aspect of communication that has continued to intensify throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I have already discussed how measuring the speed of work was essential to rationalization and the implementation of Taylorism.

Recently, and in contrast to Simmel’s statement about tempo, Edna Duffy has noted that

“speed is the single new pleasure invented by modernity.”522 As I understand it, the pleasure of speed is twofold: both the driver of the automobile and the spectator of the race can take pleasure in different aspects of speed – adrenaline or a simple thrill.

519 Georg Simmel. “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” p. 11. Accessed online on June 25, 2015 at http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/content/bpl_images/content_store/sample_chapter/0631225137/bridg e.pdf . 520 Quoted in Bob Hanke. “McLuhan, Virilio and Speed.” Transforming McLuhan: Cultural, Critical, and Postmodern Perspectives. Ed. Paul Grosswiler. New York: Peter Lang, 2010. Originally published in Jeremy Millar and Michiel Schwarz. Speed-Visions of an Accelerated Age. Photographers’ Gallery, 1998. 521 Hanke 204. 522 See Edna Duffy. The Speed Handbook: Velocity, Pleasure, Modernism. Duke Univerisity Press, 2009. 3. Overall, Duffy investigates speed as pleasure and in its relationship to politics and how each of these surfaced in modernist texts. Duffy’s work on speed and pleasure is inspired by Aldous Huxley’s similar statement about speed being a new pleasure in modernity. 288

When we consider typewriting, speed typewriting competitions, which I mention briefly above, were already taking place internationally in Europe and the U.S. in the

1920s. These competitions were comparable to sporting events, attracting large audiences who gathered to watch large groups of highly proficient typists, most of them women, operating the precision machine.523 These competitions were, in essence, public celebrations of women’s machine skill and speed. This aspect of their embodiment, became a reflection of achievement that was dissociated from mothering. This dissociation was also possible because the public competitions took place separate from the domesticated realm of the office and the service components of secretarial work. Both speed and machine skill are essential to our reading of Kirchenmaus, and its staging of the ideal productive body of the New Woman-Machine.

From the outset of the story, Tempo and ethos of work, particularly in a time of economic hardship, are some of the film’s chief concerns. Sound plays an important role in the cinematic expression of work, or the lack thereof, in the film. For example, Oswald uses montage accompanied by the light melody of flute music to introduce the audience to the Wiener “Universal Bank” and its employees engaged in their peaceful morning activities. A series of lazy office scenes fade in and out for the viewer: a manager dozing in an armchair, male employees leisurely smoking cigars, a quiet typing pool in which

523 For example, Miss Millicent Woodward was the European champion and held a 1920s record of 239 wpm for memorized sentences and 173 wpm for straight dictation. Messenger, Robert. ozTypewriter: The Wonderful World of Typewriters. Web. 25. June 2015. See http://oztypewriter.blogspot.com/2012/02/more- than-mere-typists.html.

289 female typists smoke, read the newspaper, and gossip, and, in a licentious display, a female secretary kisses a male clerk at his desk. These anecdotal scenes not only aestheticize the office workplace, but capture the fantasies, clichés, and stereotypes about

Angestellten, with which Weimar audiences would have been familiar. The tone of the sequence shifts to become more urgent with a quick cut to an errand boy shouting a warning that “Der Herr Präsident” has arrived. In an extended take, the camera follows the president as he passes by the previously sleepy and unproductive work spaces that are now shown bustling with scurrying employees.524 The typing pool, in this account, is suddenly saturated with the noise of women hammering at the machines as the president walks by to enter his office, a noisy scene that only turns quiet when he shuts the door.

From the start of the story, the film links Tempo and movement to productivity couched in its comedic portrayal of the bank employees.

The walls separating these various workspaces indicate class divisions among office workers as well as the gendered division of work. The tight space of the typing pool crowded with narrow desks is made to seem even more so by Oswald’s construction of the scene. A wide shot captures the full area of the typing pool in the background, while a single typist facing away from the viewer – we only see the back of her head and that she is typing a document – occupies the bottom right corner of the frame. Her silhouette takes up any empty space that would otherwise have remained in the frame and gives the viewer the impression that the room is even more tightly packed with typewriter girls and machines. The rhythm-less clatter of their work explains, without a word, why

524 Filmmakers reportedly accomplished this scene by using a trick shot, in which part of a wall was placed on rollers so that it could be pivoted. See “Blick ins Glashaus.” Film Kurier. 290 they have been corralled into a single narrow space. The noise and congested feel of the typing pool finds its contrast in the expansive space and museum-like quality of the bank president’s office, which is complete with Roman-style columns and enormous statuary of a horse and rider. As the viewer watches President Baron Ulrich traverse the stretch between his office door and his desk, it becomes clear that the work spaces in the film characterize the various rungs on the employment ladder at the “Universal Bank” and indicate, in many ways, the level of movement (re: mobility) afforded to the members of each rung. Aspects of gender are also at work here in the organization of the modern office. As Sandra Lee Bartky has noted, “women are far more restricted than men in their manner of movement and in their lived spatiality.”525 The tightly packed room of female typists is indicative of their limited professional and social mobility, and the image confirms Bartky’s assertion by showing the typists’ restricted physical movement beyond their machines and their desks. In this account, the physical connection between woman and machine is, thus, made material by the organization of modern office spaces.

In the following scene, we encounter the protagonist’s foil and the bank president’s initial private secretary, Olly Frey. In our first glimpse of Olly, she is perched atop her desk, smoking a cigarette with one outstretched stocking-covered leg and chic high-heeled shoe resting on the carriage of the typewriter. The hemline of her skirt is raised above her knee, and she laughs with another woman in a moment of comradery.

Her physical connection to the typewriter in this scene not only indicates her position in

525 Sandra Lee Bartky. “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power.” Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory. Eds. Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. 132.

291 the company, but also visually links her desirability to the machine. This image also marks her not as a body of productivity, but a body of leisure, pleasure, and sexuality.

(See Figure 22). She is the embodiment of the myth of the sexy, promiscuous female typist that we encountered in prewar advertisements in the last chapter. But Olly represents more than a reprisal of these sex-saturated images. What sets this cinematic image of the secretary apart, or what we can extract from the sexualized body, is the film’s construction of Olly as a body molded through consumerism. Her fashionable shoes (modelled atop the typewriter carriage) and blouse are put on display when she is introduced, an image that creates a link between the consumer product of the typewriter and women’s fashion, not to mention underlining the female office worker’s reputation for enthusiastic participation in consumer culture.526 The following scene, which establishes the dynamic between Olly and Baron Ulrich, confirms this reading of Olly as a body of consumerism and distraction.

526 See Janet Ward. Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany. Berkley: University of California Press, 2001. Especially pages 229-233. 292

Figure 22. President's private secretary, Olly Frey.

When Olly hears that the president has arrived, she takes out her mirror and powders her face before going into the president’s office. Her behavior is similar to that of the other bank employees (the yawning bank tellers, the typists reading magazines, and smoking male employees), who also indulge in activities of leisure, pleasure, and distraction when out of range of supervision. At the Baron Ulrich’s desk, Olly giggles and tries to flirt with him by asking about his trip, but he does not reciprocate and, instead, steadfastly requests that she take dictation (“Schreiben Sie!”). As she fumbles to feed the paper into the machine and must ask the president to wait, not once, but twice

(“Moment, bitte …. Moment, bitte”), her lacking Tempo and productivity at work become clear. Olly’s struggle to even begin to take dictation reveals her functional connection to the machine to be shaky, at best. Instead of embodying the

“Schreibmaschinenfräulein” like Susi, Olly embodies the modern female consumer, a 293 role that the film sets up in opposition to the productive functionality of mechanical work. In her relationship to consumer culture, Olly buys it and buys into it, so that she has made herself a commodity as well. On the topic of women’s consumerism, Janet

Ward has pointed out, that woman’s new role in modernity as “she-who-consumes” effectively removes her from female fields of productivity. Likewise, Susan Stewart has observed: “The conception of woman as consumer is no less fantastic or violent than its literalization in the vagina dentata myth, for it is a conception which functions to erase the true labor, the true productivity, of women.”527 This tension that Ward and Stewart

Figure 23. Baron Ulrich dictates to Olly Frey.

describe between the productive and consumptive bodies is played out in Kirchenmaus through the figure Olly.

In a display of the amanuensis typical in entertainment films as well as in advertising, as we have already seen, Olly transcribes the president’s words as he orbits in the semi-circular space around her seat. The close proximity of his movement allows

527 Quoted in Ward 233. Originally in Susan Stewart. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Duke University Press, 2003. 168-169. 294 him to oversee her work, while also gaining sensory access to her body. Further blurring the lines between his role as a supervisor and a potential suitor is his reaction to the immediacy of her presence. He smells her perfume, picks up her tube of lipstick, and comments on her short sleeves, to which she replies that she believes she has pretty arms, an often revisited symbol of female beauty in the film’s narrative. But Olly also makes herself, her body, available to him, extending her wrist for him to smell her perfume.

Therefore, Olly is constructed as a consuming body, one who has fashioned herself with mass-produced products – perfume, cosmetics, ready-to-wear clothing. Consistent in his

Sachlichkeit (sobriety, practicality), Ulrich reacts by calculating that if she spends 8 minutes a day on her looks, then she steals 48 hours per year (6 full days of work). In this account, Olly not only consumes products, but also time during which she could be productive. She is distracted and a distraction herself (i.e., a flawed working body). As a consuming body, Olly is, thus, the figurative embodiment of the lack of functionalism and productivity of the office workplace. Confirming Ward and Stewart’s point, the film problematizes the coexistence of the consumptive and productive body in Olly. Her productivity at the typewriter is limited, and her time is slowly being eaten away by her other interests. Her resistance to the pleasures of machine skill and indulgence in the pleasures of consumerism also put her in conflict with the industrious, automatic body of the New Woman-Machine.

Within the context of the film, this consumerist tendency is also construed as an issue of class. After Ulrich fires Olly for her lack of productivity and his attraction to her,

(he comments that she is “nicht verlobt, hübsch und elegant” [not engaged, pretty, and

295 elegant]), Olly begins to pursue him romantically by following him to a Paris hotel. Since she is able to afford transport to Paris, lodging, and lavish clothing – she appears in furs, hats, and elaborate dresses, – she is likely a member of the well-to-do middle or even upper class. Like many female figures in popular films, the figure Olly pursues femininity as a route to acceptance and success (in marriage) by shaping her body to suit the norms of beauty.

Ulrich’s statements in the office scene and others establish a kind of value system within the narrative framework of the film concerning the desired role of the female body at work. To Olly, he stresses: “hier sind Sie keine Frau, sondern … Bestandteil einer

Schreibmaschine!” (here you are not a woman, rather a component of the typewriter!).

But, Olly’s distracted, consumerist behaviors put her at odds with the precision mechanism and machine-like perfection that Ulrich valorizes. We should also note that

Ulrich’s assertion effectively eradicates woman by subsuming her into the machine as a mere fragment of another greater whole. This image does not correspond to my notion of the woman-machine hybrid that is the New Woman-Machine. More interesting is the dynamic and intimate coupling of writing bodies and machines, an entanglement created through the forces and rhythms of bodies in motion, “not the demotion of the living body to the machine but their intimate correlation.”528 Subverting Ulrich’s assertion, the form of the film’s protagonist, Susi Sachs, posits this hybrid as a vision of the ideal woman, who can effectively achieve this coupling through typewriting.

528 See Mark Seltzer. Bodies and Machines. Routledge, 1992. See pages 13-15. My overall concept of the body-machine interaction is indebted to Seltzer’s notion of the body-machine complex. 296

In the scene that follows, the film revisits questions of social class as it arrives at the long-anticipated introduction of its title character and protagonist. The differentiation in social class and status displayed in the montage of the office workspaces is extended with the arrival of Susi (Mosheim). She first appears onscreen when she cautiously approaches a guard reclining in a chair at the bank’s entrance, yet another example of the bank employees’ poor work ethic. With small briefcase in hand and wearing a grey wool coat and hat – her mouse-like quality is not lost on the viewer – Susi tries to speak with the guard, but he actively ignores her by continuing to smoke a cigar and read the newspaper. She inquires about a job at the bank, and the guard replies with “alles besetzt”

(everything is occupied), a statement that the viewer knows to be uninformed, since Olly was just fired. With this scene, the film characterizes Susi as a member of the impoverished petite-bourgeois class of the late-Weimar era. When she sneaks, small and unnoticed, past the guard, through the bank, and into the bank president’s office, in effect bypassing the hierarchical structure laid out for us in the film’s initial scenes, Susi (the mouse) timidly navigates the museum-like room to the president’s desk and trembles when she finally comes face-to-face with Ulrich (der Löwe, the lion). Despite her fear, she insists on speaking to him about “eine lebenswichtige Angelegenheit! Ich kann nicht länger warten, Herr Präsident.” (a matter of vital importance! I can no longer wait, Mr.

President). At his dismissal, she refuses to leave, stating “Ich gehe nicht… Man muss um das Leben des Individuums […] kämpfen,” (I am not going… One must fight for the life of the individual). She asserts that she is “die Kirchenmaus,” who is seeking only “ein anständig verdientes Stück Brot” (a respectably earned piece of bread). When Ulrich

297 replies, “das möchte jeder Mensch haben,” (everyone would like to have that) Susi retorts, “das sollte jeder Mensch haben” (everyone should have that). Susi’s appeal is, therefore, not only for herself, but a gesture to the real-world problems of hunger and mass unemployment during the early thirties.

Figure 24. The Kirchenmaus asks for a job.

Within this scene, Oswald’s film also appears to broach its social program through the voice of its female protagonist. Unlike other late-Weimar comedies, such as

Thiele’s Tankstelle (1930) or Hans Steinhoff’s Liebe muss verstanden sein (1933), whichoffered cinema-goers fun-filled entertainment well-detached from the rampant unemployment and economic hardship of the time, Kirchenmaus has a greater stake in the real life social and economic conditions of the early thirties. The female protagonist’s desperate plea for work was meant to speak to Depression-era audiences, who could relate to being in need. In the end, the film does not fulfill the promise of a social critique, and instead, this aspect remains underdeveloped and is later undercut by its genre conventions. The love story with its predictable obstacles and the happy ending 298 dominates much of the film’s narrative and its conclusion. It is from these real-life conditions that a potent version of the rags-to-riches fairytale emerges.

Even though the film’s potential for a social program is ultimately overpowered by the fairy-tale nature of the romantic comedy narrative, its gesture to the Depression- era socio-historical context is fundamental to the construction of Susi as a productive body in the film. As we will see in the following scenes, Susi is the essential embodiment of peak physical productivity: she denies food (though hungry at her introduction), forgoes sleep, and rejects invitations from wealthy men with a single sentence, “Ich hab’ zu arbeiten,” which serves as her mantra throughout the remainder of the film. As a result of the figure’s emphasis on the opportunity to work, her energy and enthusiasm toward work and earning money (and food) can be read as echoing the deeply-rooted sentiments of a struggling working class specific to the Depression era. Therefore, her incredibly productive body at work not only represents an ideal for women’s white-collar work, but it potentially carries, at least in part, the historical weight of the masses of unemployed people with a profound need and desire to work.

Typewriting is central in the next sequence in Kirchenmaus, when Ulrich agrees to test Susi’s ability to take dictation on the machine. In response, she reveals her

“Ärmelchen,” half-sleeves that fit over her forearms to protect her clothes from dirt and ink. Proudly pulling on these unflattering self-made garments (over the sleeves of her thick wool suit jacket!) immediately puts Susi in contrast with Olly, who took pleasure in leaving her arms bare while typewriting. With this seemingly minor act, the film places value on the industrious body that even wears products of its labor, over the consuming

299 body constructed through products of the labor of others. When Susi promptly seats herself at the typewriter, resting her hands on either side of the device as if holding it, she describes her relationship to the machine, “Wir zwei, die Schreibmaschine und ich, wir gehören nämlich zusammen!” (Us two, the typewriter and I, we belong together!). Unlike

Ulrich’s statement that subsumed the female user into the machine, Susi identifies the typewriter and herself as two matching components of a common whole, an image that suggests both hybridity and the symbiotic nature of their relationship. Thus, within this fairy-tale brews a radical and intimate entanglement between the typist and her typewriter that celebrates the productive body. For example, as the president dictates at a moderate pace, Susi urges him to go faster “weiter, weiter, … schneller, schneller, … mehr Tempo, bitte mehr Tempo, Herr Präsident!” (keep going, keep going, … faster, faster, … more speed, please more speed, Mr. President), and she even interrupts him in order to request that he please use her “Arbeitskraft” (literally, work-power). In this scene, Susi more than proves herself as a proficient and efficient typist, and, in fact, Ulrich can barely keep up with her while dictating. Typewriting is for Susi a willful physical expression of her machine skill and her identity. Führich has read the connection between Susi and the typewriter in Kirchenmaus as “visualized in numerous close shots of the protagonist as inseparable from the typewriter. Her body, in particular her hands, are often shown as an extension of the machine and as a mechanical process of writing.”529 Taking Führich’s claims a definitive step further, I view Susi as coupled with the machine (“Wir gehören zusammen”) and an embodiment of the speed and perfection of machine production, an

529 Führich, “Woman and Typewriter,” 155. Note that this perspective of the machine as an extension of the body is one proposed by Marshall McLuhan in Understanding Media (1964). 300 ideal productive body of the New Woman-Machine. In addition to this, the structural elements of film – camera work, editing, and sound – play a fundamental role in how this woman-machine hybrid is assembled and visualized for cinema-goers, as well as how pleasure in the machine and machine use is constructed for audiences.

Tempo reverberates throughout this sequence and is at the nexus of the characters’ practical and pleasure-filled communication. With her tense upright posture, rapid keystrokes, and persistent haste, Susi’s performance resembles that of a speed typist in a typewriting competition. With regard to the effects of speed demonstrations,

Bukatman has keenly pointed out that “the symbiosis of typewriter (machine) and typewriter (user) probably reached an apotheosis around speed typing exhibitions.”530

Following Bukatman’s line of thought, we can reason that speed and motion play an integral role in the creation of an intimate physical entanglement between the productive body and the machine. In Kirchenmaus, Susi’s interface with the typewriter is almost always about speed, yet we also watch her take pleasure in her skill at the machine, in her embodiment of the mechanical, and in her productivity. Also, like the girls in typing competitions, Susi is a marvel of textual production, and her vigorous operation of the typewriter (and the telephone) transform what would be monotonous office work into a thrilling display of machine aptitude for the spectator. The film’s editing and visualization of the typewriting body also contributes to how she is assembled and how various forms of pleasure are activated.

530 Bukatman 41. 301

By means of its editing, the film links typewriting to pleasure: the pleasure of machine skill, the pleasure of speed, as well as the voyeuristic pleasure of watching this intimate moment between dictator and amanuensis. While Ulrich dictates, the camera follows him as he paces freely, drifting away from the typist in a medium shot. The camera only captures Mosheim in the frame when she interrupts him, and he returns to her side. From there, the film cuts to a close-up of Ulrich with a wide grin in response to

Susi’s impressive “Tempo,” then to a low-angle close-up of Susi’s hands drumming away at the typewriter, and finally to an extended close-up of Susi, upon whose face a smile gradually develops. (See Figure 25). In this exciting scene, the mechanized body in typewriting (Susi) replaces the sexualized body (Olly) as a source of productivity and voyeuristic pleasure. The close-up of Susi’s hands moving expertly over the keyboard is a celebration of the vigor, speed, and machine skill that she brings to the task. This shot is also pivotal in that it links Ulrich’s pleasure at her heightened productivity to Susi’s satisfaction at her own success. This sequence also invites the filmic spectator to identify with both figures: Ulrich while the camera follows his movement, and Susi when the camera lingers on her grin. With her sleeves and wool coat, Susi has not been coded as a physically eroticized object at the machine to attract the gaze, at least not in this sequence. Her productive body attracts the gaze, because of her incredible performance at the machine. We should also note that Kirchenmaus offers a medium close-up of the typist (lasting 8 seconds), much like that in Regenmantel, but Mosheim neither looks into the camera, nor flirts with the spectator. Instead, this competent, work-oriented figure

302 keeps her eyes on the machine and continues to urge Ulrich (Bitte schneller, Herr

Baron!).

Figure 25. Susi typewriting for the Baron Ulrich for the first time.

As the scene continues, it becomes clear that Susi is, in fact, an object to-be- looked-at, but she is not, as Mulvey proposed, “coded for visual and erotic impact” in the traditional sense. Once the bank president has finished dictating, he pauses and begins to tell Susi “Sie haben Energie und Lebenskraft…” (You have energy and vitality…), but before he can continue, a telephone rings and Susi, a master of all devices of communication, answers it. She responds only with “Er ist nicht im Haus,” (He is not in the building) and hangs up. When he asks her why she lied to the caller, she says because it was a woman. At this, Ulrich bursts into laughter. He finds her so amusing and charming that he calls other employees into his office to meet and marvel at Susi, whom he sees as a delightful prodigy of productivity. With five men present, she answers two other phone calls, and the men are impressed with her Tempo and decisiveness. Much like a showgirl (if one were cloaked a thick grey wool clothing and typewriting sleeves –

303 perhaps she is more like a trained mouse!), Susi’s performance attracts an audience that guides the reactions of the spectator. She is treated as a wonder, a kind of novelty, and, because of her energy, efficiency, and productivity, the president hires her immediately as his secretary to replace Olly Frey. To celebrate, Susi calls a grocery store and orders her mother some food (another reference to hunger) and proudly announces that she is now employed. As she leaves the office for the day, Susi sings the film’s title song, “Arm wie eine Kirchenmaus,” and as she exits, the camera follows her slow strides along the same route that Ulrich used to enter the bank. The rooms filled with bustling white-collar employees go quiet at her approach, they make up yet another audience for her performance.

The contemporary critical reception of Kirchenmaus also points to its appeal to female viewership. One critic described the film as “den märchenhaften Aufstieg einer kleinen Stenotypistin, die ihren Chef zuerst als Arbeitskraft, dann als Frau absichtslos bestrickt.” He also assesses the conclusion of the film as such: “mit dem glücklichen

Ausgang erfüllt sich der Wunschtraum tausender Mädchen, die tüchtig, anständig und gutherzig, viel zu allein und zu arm in Leben stehen.”531 With the previous analyses of

Keun’s Gilgi and Brück’s Schicksale (in Chapter 2) in mind, I am critical of this reviewer’s assumptions about the “pipe dreams of thousands of girls,” who supposedly want to marry their bosses (Gilgi even takes steps to escape her male boss’s affections,

531 “Im Gloria-Palast: Arm wie eine Kirchenmaus.” Der Film. 7 November 1931. Nr. 45. Translation: “the fairytale-like advancement/climb of a little stenotypist, who first tricks her boss into making her an employee and then unintentionally into making her his wife.” And “with this happy conclusion, she has fulfilled/achieved the pipe dream of thousands of young girls, who are capable/competent, respectable, and good-hearted, but stand much too alone and too poor in life.” 304 after all). But, what this review does not mention is that the film does present an alternative version of a fairytale-daydream, (“Wunschtraum”), in which the girl’s skills and work ethic would be noticed, valued, and even celebrated, as is the case for Susi in the next scene.

Figure 26. Bank executives marvel at Susi's talents. 532

Susi’s representation as a productive body at the machine continues throughout the film. The next typewriting scene that offers new insight into the construction of the cyborgian typewriter takes place on a train. When Susi accompanies the Baron Ulrich on a business trip to Paris, she carries on with her work in the narrow train sleeping car.

Though he appears to have had other unvirtuous motives, calling her “Susi” instead of

“Fräulein Sachs” at the door, Ulrich visits her compartment and asks her to take dictation.

This bare-bones scene is shot simply in a medium close-up with Mosheim (right of

532 “Arm wie eine Kirchenmaus.” Filmportal.de. N.p. n.d. Web. Photograph accessed on June 1, 2015 at http://www.filmportal.de/node/51291/gallery. 305 frame) and Erdthofer (left of frame) sitting shoulder to shoulder facing the camera. The plain-colored train seats serve as a simple background, so that we are focused solely on the actors’ facial expressions. Ulrich is fully captured in the frame, but Susi’s face is partly cut off by the frame while she handwrites during his dictation. Then, when he leaves the scene, the camera captures her more fully when she transcribes her notes on the typewriter (See Figure 27). This sequence complicates the way we imagine male and female embodiment, particularly through the incomplete image of the amanuensis (typist and machine). Neither Susi’s hands nor the typewriter are visible to the viewer; only the hammering sound of the type-bars indicates mechanical writing. With the absence of the physical machine, it appears as if the noise emanates from Susi herself, so that, in

Bukatman’s words, “The body is a machine, perfectible and progress oriented, while – at the same time – the machine becomes a body.”533 In this scene Susi becomes a machine body, for she is not only engaged in mechanical production, but her physical body marks the presence of the machine. This issue of embodiment also has greater implications beyond the machine becoming body. Building on Kittler, Bukatman also writes that

“[w]hat first characterizes typing as an act of writing is an effect of disembodiment […]

Typing produces an information space divorced from the body: a proto-cyberspace.”534

Although Bukatman omits any reference to gender here, Fleissner follows up on his argument by stating that in the modern office, the male body may experience a kind of disembodiment, because the inscription of his words takes place separate from him; rather, the female body is present as the producer of text at the machine. In some ways,

533 Bukatman 41. 534 Quoted in Fleissner. Bukatman 634-35. Emphasis in original. 306 the train sequence in Kirchenmaus is very much in line with the distinctions made by

Bukatman and Fleissner about embodiment. As I have already shown, Susi comes to embody the machine in this sequence; she is the productive body. Therefore, it is quite appropriate that she is only partially visible in the frame, while she is writing Ulrich’s dictation by hand, because the machine is absent from her work. She is only made whole while typewriting. As for Ulrich, he is not completely disembodied, as Fleissner suggests, for he is in some ways the physical embodiment of the dictating voice in this sequence.

But when he leaves the frame and the camera does not follow him, his disembodiment becomes more apparent. Ulrich’s words carry through two iterations, shorthand with pen and paper and transcription through the machine, both physically removed from his physical body. Adding to his disembodiment, when the camera inches to the right to capture Susi more fully, it does not center her in the frame. Instead, an empty space remains (for 5 seconds) where Ulrich once dictated, a space that implies his disembodiment through the process of mechanical text production. Susi, of course, continues to embody productivity in this scene by declining dinner service with “Ich hab’ zu arbeiten” (I have to work). Ulrich retrieves some food for her despite her refusal, and flattered by his concern, she grins and eats while typing his words onto the page.

307

Figure 27. Susi takes dictation on the train.

In the next meaningful sequence, set in a Paris hotel suite, Susi remains steadfast and productive at the machine, humming and adjusting her typewriter. When Olly Frey enters and asks for the Baron Ulrich, Susi responds curtly that he is out, so that Olly promptly returns to her room. As Susi types, a series of senior business men parade through and invite her to lunch. When one praises, “Fräulein Susi, du bist die Königin der

Schreibmaschine” (Miss Susi, you are the queen of the typewriter), she still declines his offer with “Ich habe jetzt leider keine Zeit” (I do not have any time now) and “ich hab’ zu arbeiten” (I have to work). During the brief conversations, each man comments on the

“klappern der Schreibmaschine,” and Susi types and sings cheerfully between each encounter. In this sequence, Susi insists on being a productive body by eschewing invitations and possible male companionship. She takes pleasure in her work at the machine, and it fuels her, presumably even more so than her need for food (like the

“Stück Brot” [piece of bread] that she so desperately wanted to earn earlier in the film).

Throughout the film, her connection to the machine is reinforced by her consistent location at it, perpetual use of it, and her demonstrated dedication to it, particularly in its

308 symbolic representation of her work. But, as this sequence progresses, the film suggests that she is willing to set aside the machine for the right companion. As befits a romantic comedy, when Schünzl, the film’s comic relief figure, extends an invitation to her to dine with the president Baron Ulrich, she actually stops typing and considers the invitation.

After lamenting that she did not bring a dress for such an occasion, Susi uses her French skills to purchase one. Even as a consumer, Susi is skilled and productive.

From there, the film continues to construct the romantic relationship between

Ulrich and Susi. When the Baron Ulrich returns, he is wearing a tuxedo, and Susi dons her new dress. Although he appears to be pleased with her dress (“Sie schauen mir wirklich entzückend aus” [You really look enchanting]), Ulrich tells Susi that he already has plans, then explains to Herr Graf “Ich bin an sie gewöhnt” (I am already used to her).

These short punctuated lines articulate one of the frequently revisited themes in the film:

Ulrich’s perspective of Susi fluctuates between seeing her as a possible wife or as his amanuensis. His oscillating use of the formal “Fräulein Sachs” and the familiar “Susi” is also reflective of this conflicted view of her. But how can we understand this conflation of wife and amanuensis? Friedrich Kittler has answered this question by pointing to the emergence of “desk couples,” a relationship between author and secretary that ostensibly replaces marriage.535 While Kittler’s assertion is well-argued in the case of the literary community, the “desk couple” is not quite what we see in Kirchenmaus. For Ulrich, what blurs the lines between these two roles is specifically Tempo in the use of devices of communication, primarily the typewriter, but also the telephone. It is this aspect that he

535 See Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, esp. 212-221. 309 views as essential at home and in the workplace, and, therefore, his attraction to Susi can be explained as a result of her machine skill, her speed and productivity. When Susi appears in her new dress, his attraction to her becomes more obvious as the film blurs the lines between the productive and the sexualized female body.

In the following sequence, the Baron attempts to suppress his attraction (or perhaps indulges it?) by asking Susi to take dictation. When she sits down to write, he comments on her now visible body: “Was für eine hübsche décolleté Sie haben […] schöne Arme auch” (What a pretty décolleté you have … pretty arms too). Unlike Olly’s confident extension of her hand to Ulrich in response to his compliments, Susi is made momentarily uncomfortable by these comments, and her body position remains tense and closed with her forearms on her lap and her hands presumably at the machine. (See

Figure 28). She then suggests putting on her typewriter sleeves (“Vielleicht soll ich meine

Ärmel anziehen”), in order to conceal her body and reestablish herself as the amanuensis.

Susi is also more comfortable with being desired as a productive body rather than a sexualized body. After a few chaste moments at an open window and some fluttering romantic flute music, Susi turns away and comments that Paris “ist gefährlich” (is dangerous), which also applies to matters of the heart for her. Overall, this sequence suggests that in this account of the typist, she cannot exist as both a sexualized and productive body. But it should be noted that while her sexuality is disruptive to the production process and her role as an amanuensis, her speed and productivity only contribute to her attractiveness in the context of the film.

310

Figure 28. Dictation and a moment of romance in the Paris hotel.

With protagonists’ feelings now apparent to the viewer, our romantic-comedy formula requires an obstacle. With a second visit from Olly Frey, Ulrich discovers to his chagrin that Susi has been intentionally keeping a whole list of women, whom she considers “undesired visitors” (“unliebe Besucher”), away from him. At this, he shouts angrily at her that she has him “unter Sperrung … Blockade gehalten,” (under lockup) and that he needs “gesellschaftlichen Anschluss” (social affiliations). After apologizing to him, Susi concocts a plan and (by using the telephone) arranges for him to have dinner with other (male) bankers in Paris. Susi is unwaveringly loyal (obedient) in her typewriter use; it is a part of her, after all. But, another device of communication, the telephone, serves as an instrument of defiance, much like Lilian’s use of the typewriter in Tankstelle.

Quite satisfied with her plan, Susi also telephones Olly and tells her she’ll be eating alone tonight, because the Baron is busy. Ulrich’s reaction to her second act of insubordination:

“kann man nichts machen” (cannot do anything / oh well!). With this comment, the film trivializes Susi’s act of rebelliousness and essential moment of subjective agency. In a review in Der Film, one critic read this scene as a “Kleinkrieg zwischen dem reichen 311

Mann und dem armen Mädchen, zwischen Mann und Weib. Und man gewinnt aus diesem Streit und seinem Ausgang abermals das Bewußtsein von der Schwäche des

Mannes und der Ueberlegenheit des ‘schwachen’ Geschlechtes, wenn es um Liebesdinge geht…”536 This binary reading of the sequence that casts the man as rich and strong, except when faced with the superiority of the “weaker” sex in matters of the heart, gives us insight into how Susi’s insubordination was perceived and played down as an emotional reaction supposedly typical for a woman. Through the lens of embodiment, however, we can also read these filmic events differently. Although Susi sets out to control Ulrich for her own ends, she continues to demonstrate her speed and skill by means of the telephone. As a productive body she prevents Ulrich’s unproductive intentions to fraternize with a sexualized, consuming body (Olly); instead, she swiftly crafts a situation, in which he can be both social and productive by meeting with Parisian bankers. Ulrich’s essential absence (disembodiment) in the planning process allows Susi to construct a version of social interaction that she views as sexless and appropriate.

In consequence, Susi is fired, allegedly for her insubordination but more likely so that Ulrich may ethically pursue her romantically. As she sobs and packs her things the following morning, Ulrich enters for the film’s concluding sequence. It begins with a wide shot of the room displaying the hotel suite but keeping the camera’s voyeuristic gaze at a distance. Susi, again wearing her mouse-grey suit from the start of the film, dusts off her typewriting sleeves to pack them in her suitcase. When Ulrich asks her to

536 Ludwig, “Im Gloria-Palast: Arm wie eine Kirchenmaus,” (Filmkritik) Der Film. Nr. 45. November 7, 1931. Translation: a feud (small war) between the rich man and the poor girl, between man and woman/wife. And one gains from this fight and its outcome consciousness of the weaknesses of the man and the superiority of the "weaker" sex, when it is about things of love (matters of the heart?).

312 take dictation once more for “einen lebenswichtigen Brief […] einen intimen Brief […]

Die Adresse kommt zum Schluss” (a vitally important letter… an intimate letter… the address comes at the end), his emphasized adoption of Susi’s word “lebenswichtig” from her introduction is apparent to the audience and indicative of his intentions. This time his dictation is not a business letter, but an apology and a love letter to Susi.

Figure 29. Ulrich dictates a love letter to Susi.

As Ulrich dictates, Susi types each phrase and pauses, deliberately waiting with bated breath for him to continue. Her pained frown in the first few moments of dictation disappears as she begins to understand the content of the dictated text. When he finishes dictating the body of the letter, she smiles modestly and squirms with pleasure: “Bitte die

Adresse sehr langsam, Herr Baron. Bitte die Adresse buchstabieren, Herr Baron” (Please

[give me] the address very slowly, Herr Baron. Please spell the address, Herr Baron). She articulates these words with an emphasis and pleasure as if she were providing him instructions during love-making. At this point, Edthofer crouches down and the camera moves to a medium shot of this intimate moment with the happy couple, thus increasing 313 the voyeuristic pleasure of the viewer. While Ulrich slowly dictates the address, Susi interjects with shrieks of “weiter… weiter… ich will alles!” (more … more… I want it all!). At the highpoint of the scene, she slams her hands on the desk so that her reactions to taking dictation and machine use resemble those of intense, even orgasmic, sexual pleasure.

As perhaps is already evident, this final sequence of Kirchenmaus contains an excellent example of techno-erotic interface with the typewriter. Since Susi’s body is again concealed in grey wool fabric, she is again desexualized as “the mouse.” Without concern for the sexualized female body of the typist, this moment of techno-eroticism celebrates the typewriter through the productive body. The interaction with the machine mimics human impulses of sexual desire by way of the device’s delicate system of moving parts that thrust, pause, and press.537 Taking this erotic moment a step further, after Ulrich dictates a line or phrase, Susi responds by processing his words practically and emotionally, meaning that she both records them and reacts to them simultaneously.

It is, thus, through the device that she processes a range of emotions, including her initial pain and despair, and ultimately her ecstasy at Ulrich’s professions of love. Although both figures appear quite modest, even chaste, in their dress and movements on screen during this sequence – Susi, for example, remains seated and hunched over at the machine, and Ulrich simply observes her while standing and kneeling near her – the scene is both erotically and emotionally charged through the interaction with the machine.

537 See Claudia Springer. Electronic Eros: Bodies and Desire in the Postindustrial Age. University of Texas Press, 1996. 314

For its “Happy End,” which is appropriate for the genre, the film predictably closes with a kiss between the male and female leads. Although this is the ending that the audience expects, my focus on pleasure in machine skill reveals a disconnect in this conclusion that is unique for entertainment films of this era. Even though we have witnessed Susi’s feelings for Ulrich, it is difficult to imagine Susi, this typewriter girl with Tempo, this productive body, and typewriter cyborg leaving the workforce for the domestic realm. As I have already discussed, it is this type of “Aufstieg” (advancement) that this and other entertainment films of this era clearly promoted; yet, its conclusion remains unconvincing. I am mostly troubled by the film’s lack of attention to the reconciliation between this cyborgian typewriter girl, a figure that I am calling the New

Woman-Machine, and her expected transition into the roles of wife and mother. Although the film’s portrayal of the female typist and her embodiment of the machine appears to anticipate the cyborg images proposed by Haraway and Bukatman, it also invites the viewer to imagine two distinct possibilities: that female embodiment of machine skill is transferrable to the domestic realm, or that this intimate entanglement between the female body and machine is eradicated by this move. Each of these results is at odds with the film’s blatant celebration of machine skill, a pleasure in embodiment that is also removed from motherhood and its extensions.

Conclusion

315

Early entertainment films presented male and female spectators of the Weimar era with images that celebrate women’s machine skill, speed, and productivity in unexpected ways. In this chapter, we have seen these interconnected concepts of embodiment that reveal the complex and multivalent ways that the hybridity of the New Woman-Machine is assembled. As we have seen through the elements of speed and productivity, machine skill is an aspect of female embodiment that is celebrated in Weimar entertainment film.

But, even though machine skill is essentially an aspect of embodiment separate from the female body’s (re)productive functions in motherhood and its extensions, films like

Oswald’s Kirchenmaus suggest a connection between the reproduction of text and the physical pleasure of reproduction through the techno-erotic interface. Overall, these films celebrate women’s machine skill and their embodiment of the machine as idealized visions of women’s role in modernization. Women’s impressive speed and extraordinary productivity at the machine invite the audience to look at them in awe, as visions of wondrous physical achievement.

316

Conclusion

What can we deduce from these copious variations of the female typist and her instrument emerging in visual and literary cultural production of the Weimar era? It is a celebration of woman and the machine. Even in the grimmest and most critical portrayals of the female typist suffering under the harsh economic conditions of the Depression era and her restrictions in the workplace, as we have seen in Brück’s and Keun’s novels, the female figures find pleasure in the ritual and routine of their automatic work at the machines. For them, this automatism serves as a refuge or retreat, so that they may steel themselves against the emotional traumas and strains in their personal and professional lives. Although both authors are ultimately troubled by the situation of female white- collar employees – their lack of opportunities for advancement in the workplace, the low pay that limits their ability to sustain themselves independently, and the Depression-era conditions of mass unemployment and widespread hunger, – each of the novels display moments of typewriting in terms of content reflection. Even though authorship remains divorced from the machine in each of the novels, the female figures find pleasure in production of another sort.

When it comes to advertising, celebrating the consumable product is part of the nature of the medium, and typewriter advertisements predictably relate the machine to 317

(sexual) desire, consumer satisfaction, and pleasure in visual depictions. Yet, the coded representations in these advertisements promote more than ordinary excitement over the technological product. While examining the ads, I found that the female body has been shaped in terms of a feminine docility. Such ads prompted viewers to take pleasure in the techno-erotic displays of women’s typewriting and, more meaningfully, in women’s embodiment of the machine and mechanical processes. The female body at the machine is, thus, shown operating as a disciplined, ordered part of the race toward modernization.

Each of these aspects of the celebration of typewriting are also articulated in film.

In cinema, we experience a convergence of these pleasures: the scopophilic pleasure of watching the female body in motion, mobilized for a specific task; the technophilic pleasure at the use of this modern machine; the voyeuristic pleasure of witnessing the sexual tension between her and her dictating boss; and the evolution of their interaction into techno-erotic interplays, so that the machine itself becomes a kind of sexual prop that mimics the human sexual responses. In addition to these aspects of visual and technological pleasure, I argue that film, with its emphasis on and visualization of movement, displays women’s pleasure in machine skill and allows the audience to take pleasure in it as well. Historical evidence has shown us through the cases of poor working conditions, low wages, and few, if any, opportunities for advancement that this embodiment of machine skill was not about transgressing gender boundaries or emancipatory progress. Instead, it is about carving out a new space, however small and indefinite, in which skill at the machine became part of the physical female body and a facet of the self, a source of personal pleasure, refuge, strength, and failure. It is within

318 this space that the New Woman-Machine exists. Internal and external, riddled with contradictions and fissures, the New Woman-Machine was cultivated through discipline and perseverance.

As we have seen, the New Woman-Machine is just one alternative to the dominant images of machine-women as threatening vamp figures bent on the destruction of civilization. Consider most notably the image of Robot-Maria in Lang’s Metropolis or the nightmarish machine-woman in Kästner’s Fabian, who unwrapped and consumed men, like bonbons. Scholars have read the relationship between women and machines in terms of a conflation or equation, through which male anxieties about the destabilization of gender norms and the perils of technology found its expression. This study about female embodiment of the machine has brought to the fore a very different narrative about women and machines as a vision of productivity, automatism, and docility, that is a distinct departure from the prevailing narrative about male anxiety in the Weimar era. We have only explored a small sample of the vast number of nuanced portrayals of women and machines, to which Weimar women had access. But, within these portrayals, it is through potent moments of pleasure that mass-media culture communicated with female readers, consumers, and cinema-goers. In its fascination with the female typist and celebration of her work, mass culture took women’s intense pleasure in machine skill and made it public, a thing to be watched and a thing of wonder, a spectacle that is still of interest for audiences today.

This intense pleasure at women’s embodiment of and skill at the machine continues to resonate in popular culture today. As one example, the critically acclaimed

319

French film Populaire (dir. Régis Roinsard, 2012) is a colorful retro-dreamscape that celebrates women’s typewriting in terms of skill, energy, perseverance, and most prominently, pleasure. The award-winning film’s narrative focuses on a small-town girl who moves to the city to fulfill her dream of working as a typist. Her speed at the machine impresses her male boss, and he decides to train her for competition-level typewriting. In the end, she wins the 1959 international speed typing competition in New

York City, a stadium-packed event. This link between pleasure and women’s typewriting has, thus, persisted in our cultural imaginary well into the twenty-first century.

In conjunction with this association between pleasure and typewriting, this study has opened up other areas of interest. With regard to the typewriter and its relationship to the female body and modernity, fascinating portrayals of typewriting in avant-garde films, Ruttmann’s Berlin. Sinfonie der Großstadt and Vertov’s Man with a Movie

Camera invite readings that question further the role of vision in typewriting and the overlapping links between the typewriter and the cinematic camera. Moreover, there is still room for an examination of stage performances and revues of the twenties through the fifties that involved typewriters, even full-stage-sized typewriters upon which song- and-dance numbers were performed. The aesthetic value of the device has still not been explored to its fullest.

Beyond the device of the typewriter, this study also raises questions about women’s access to and use of different types of machinery during the Weimar era, including other devices of communication (i.e., the telephone, radio, telegraph), other larger machines (the automobile and industrial machinery), and new household

320 appliances and devices. How were women’s use of these machines, in work or leisure, portrayed in Weimar cultural production and how was women’s engagement with these various technologies perceived? Was this engagement interrupted or disrupted by the rise of National Socialism? In what realms was the continuation of women’s machine use supported or discouraged during the Nazi Regime? How was the New Woman-Machine

(women’s embodiment of the machine and intense pleasure at machine skill) impacted by

National Socialism? As one example, typewriter advertising images shift dramatically after 1933, and fewer images of women and women’s machine skill are displayed.

Images of men repairing, designing, and manufacturing the typewriter increase between

1933 and 1945, creating new trends in advertising and new perspectives on the machine.

Many of these questions and materials have yet to be examined more closely.

As one final point, we should also not forget that the typewriter still holds a special place in our culture. If we expand our field of vision into the twenty-first century, it becomes quite clear that the typewriter, in particular, and images of typewriting women are not only still of interest, but are undergoing a cultural revival. In 2005, Darren

Wershler-Henry pointed out our continued obsession with the typewriter, when he wrote,

“Even in our image-saturated culture, the iconic value of the typewriter looms large.”538

His statement has been further supported by the ubiquity of images of typists and secretaries in popular television series, including retrospectives such as Mad Men (2007-

2015), Marvel’s Agent Carter (2015-), Downton Abbey (2010-), and The Americans

(2013-). But, even film and television narratives set in the twenty-first century have

538 Darren Wershler-Henry. The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting. McClelland & Stuart, 2005. Second Edition, Cornell University Press, 2007. See page 2. 321 regularly featured the device for its nostalgic quality, as a symbol of authorship, or as an instrument for “authentic” writing.539

As a cultural icon, the typewriter does indeed “loom large.” As a technological device, the typewriter is a symbol of a simpler, nearly extinct, analog era. Yet, as we become more and more entrenched in a high-tech digital age, many have sought to preserve the typewriter and the experience of typewriting. The 2014 scandal surrounding the National Security Agency, for example, sparked conversations in the German government about reverting back to non-electric typewriters to reduce instances of digital espionage, and they are not the only ones looking to “disconnect.” Richard Polt’s forthcoming book, The Typewriter Revolution, points to the typewriter as a device of rebellion in the digital age.540 Alternatively, tech companies, like Hemingwrite, have tried to update typewriters for the twenty-first century by adding an E-Ink screen and internet access, and a new app for the iPhone called the “Hanx Writer” even allows its user to digitally experience the sounds and gentler speed of a manual typewriter. These are just a few representative examples of our desire to preserve these pre-digital experiences, which are driven, in part, by the typewriter’s nostalgic quality and the relative simplicity of managing information transfer in hardcopy. More than this, these efforts are also possibly driven by a desire to recapture an aspect of our embodiment, our machine skill, our ability to physically manipulate the machine, which is falling away as we move toward post-industrial age.

539 Online searches have revealed that the television shows Scandal, Fringe, Modern Family, Two Broke Girls, Californication, The Wire, and Gossip Girl have all had at least one episode containing typewriters. 540 See Richard Polt. The Typewriter Revolution. A Typist’s Companion for the 21st Century. Countrymen Press, (available, November 12, 2015). 322

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340

Films

Arm wie eine Kirchenmaus. Dir. Richard Oswald. Perf. Grete Mosheim, Anton Edthofer, and Hans Thimig. Richard-Oswald-Produktion, 1930/1931. VHS. (Viewed at Deutsche Kinemathek – Museum für Film und Fernsehen)

Berlin. Sinfonie der Großstadt. Dir. Walter Ruttmann. (Berlin), 1927.

Codes of Gender: Identity & Performance in Popular Culture. Featuring Sut Jhally. Media Education Foundation, 2009. DVD.

Das häβliche Mädchen. Dir. Henry Koster. Perf. Dolly Haas, Max Hansen, and Otto Wallburg. Avanti-Tonfilm GmbH, 1933. VHS. (Viewed at Bundesarchiv).

Der karierte Regenmantel. Dir. Max Mack. Perf. Eugen Burg, Rose Felsegg, and Beni Montano. Max Mack-Film GmbH (Berlin) 1917. VHS. (Viewed at Deutsche Kinemathek – Museum für Film und Fernsehen. Also available online at filmportal.de.)

Die Drei von der Tankstelle (Three Good Friends). Dir. Wilhelm Thiele. Perf. Willy Fritsch, Lilian Harvey, and Heinz Rühmann. Universum Film (UFA), 1930. DVD.

Die Privatsekretärin. Dir. Wilhelm Thiele. Perf. Renate Müller, Hermann Thimig, and Felix Bressart. Greenbaum-Film, 1931. VHS. (Viewed at Deutsche Kinemathek – Museum für Film und Fernsehen).

Keine Angst vor Liebe. Dir. Hans Steinhoff. Perf. Liane Haid, Adolf Wohlbrück, and Jesse Vihrog. Ideal-Film GmbH (Berlin), 1933. 33-MM. (Viewed at Bundesarchiv)

Keine Feier ohne Meyer. Dir. Carl Boese. Perf. Siegfried Arno, Ralph Arthur Roberts, and Maly Delschaft. Aco-Film GmbH (Berlin), 1931. Film. (Viewed at Deutsche Kinemathek – Museum für Film und Fernsehen.)

Liebe muss verstanden sein. Dir. Hans Steinhoff. Perf. Rosi Barsony, Max Gülstorff, and Käthe Haack. Universum Film (UFA), 1933. Film.

Mädchen mit Prokura. Dir. Arzen von Cserépy. Perf. Gerda Maurus, Ernst Dumcke, and Rolf von Goth. Cserepy-Tonfilmproduktion, 1933. (Viewed at Deutsche Kinemathek – Museum für Film und Fernsehen).

Man with a Movie Camera. Dir. Dziga Vertov. Perf. Mikhail Kaufman, 1929. (Prime Instant Video at amazon.com). 341