Implicit Codes of Conduct in the Weimar Novels of Vicki Baum and Irmgard Keun

THE PEDAGOGY OF POP: IMPLICIT CODES OF CONDUCT IN THE WEIMAR NOVELS OF VICKI BAUM AND IRMGARD KEUN A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY ADAM RYAN KING IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY RICHARD W. MCCORMICK, ADVISER APRIL 2009 © Adam Ryan King 2009 i Acknowledgements This dissertation would not have been written without the continued support and encouragement of numerous people. I would especially like to thank my adviser, Richard W. McCormick, for providing detailed and insightful comments at every stage of this dissertation, and Patrizia McBride, Leslie Morris, and Mary Jo Maynes, who not only served as members of my dissertation committee, but are also provocative teachers and mentors both inside and outside the classroom. I would also like to thank Thomas O. Haakenson for providing in-depth and thought-provoking questions, the resulting discussions of which helped to expand the horizons of my research. My scholarly work would not be possible without the financial support of the Department of German, Scandinavian & Dutch, and I would like to acknowledge the exceptional guidance I received from Charlotte Melin, both in her role as Director of Language Instruction and as Chair of the Department of German, Scandinavian & Dutch. I would also like to thank Hella Lindemeyer Mears Hueg for her dedication to the future of Germanic Studies as evidenced by her establishment of a generous fellowship to support scholars such as myself while we are writing our dissertations. My gratitude also goes to Christoph Heydemann and Hartmut Schulz for opening their home to me while I was conducting my archival research in Berlin; to Beth Kautz for sharing with me her extensive archival materials on Weimar women; to ii Jean-Nikolaus Tretter, the founder of the Jean-Nikolaus Tretter Collection in Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Studies at the University of Minnesota, for being not only a model student, activist, and Germanist, but also a shining example of how to encourage community involvement with the University; and especially to my parents, Ronald and Jeanne King, and to my husband, Matt, for their never-ending support and encouragement. iii Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter One: 12 The Masks of the Metropolis: The kalte persona, the Radar Type, and the Creature in Vicki Baum’s Menschen im Hotel Chapter Two: 61 “Wat biste so kalt—”: The New Woman as kalte persona Chapter Three: 124 “Man kann nie wissen, ob man nicht lernt dabei”: Popular Novels as Social Critique Chapter Four: 184 “Kunst / Kitsch / Leben?”: The Pedagogy of Popular Discussion Conclusion 230 Works Cited 237 1 Introduction In his book Verhaltenslehren der Kälte: Lebensversuche zwischen den Kriegen,1 Helmut Lethen argues that during the Weimar Republic—a time of social unrest when the overarching political and social structures regulating behavior were no longer supported—“das desorientierte Subjekt bedurfte der ‘äußeren Stimme’, die sagte, wo es langging.”2 Lethen argues that the residents of the newly-established Weimar Republic, no longer able to look towards a stable government for a sense of moral and social stability in their lives, abandoned faith in their own conscience and instead looked outside of themselves for examples of how they should live. By looking to literature, the residents of the Weimar Republic could find a plethora of codes of conduct: explicit codes of conduct providing concrete rules, typologies that helped to define the self through the identification and (implied) moral categorization of others, and even literary figures that provided examples of behavior that could be used as models for survival. The strict observance to a set of external rules, Lethen argues, promised a sense of relief from self-reflected moral responsibility, in turn offering a sense of stability in an otherwise volatile and uncertain time. 1 Translated by Don Reneau as Cool Conduct: The Culture of Distance in Weimar Germany. All quotations citing Lethen’s Verhaltenslehren der Kälte will be designated by “VdK” followed by the page number, and the English translation, Cool Conduct, will be designated by “CC.” 2 VdK 64; “the disoriented subject was clearly in need of an external voice to tell it where to go and what to do” (CC 42). 2 Lethen argues that this call for a modern figure who rejects his inner-directed moral compass in favor of externally-oriented codes of conduct explains the renewed interest by many writers of the Weimar Republic in the works of the 17th century Spanish Jesuit Balthasar Gracián. In his analysis of the literature of the Weimar Republic, Lethen sees Gracián’s externally-directed pre-bourgeois figure combining with the cold armoring of the psyche as advocated by the Weimar anthropologist Helmuth Plessner, among others, to create the figure of the kalte persona. By adopting attitudes of coldness and rejecting demands for authenticity and inwardness, the mask of the kalte persona offers the individual protection from the uncertainties of modern society by transforming him into a mobile, psychologically armored subject whose actions are unhampered by the restrictive nature of the conscience. In 1911, the German sociologist Georg Simmel wrote that “im großen und ganzen bleibt also das Haus die große Kulturleistung der Frauen,”3 arguing that women are the time-honored guardians of bourgeois morality whose true place is in the home, not the public sphere. As Inka Mülder-Bach argues, “die Pointe von Simmels Theorie der Weiblichkeit besteht darin, daß das Weibliche in der modernen Kultur keinen Ort haben kann.”4 Society, however, changed dramatically during the years of the Weimar Republic. As a result of modernization, the introduction of new technology— specifically adding machines and typewriters—reduced many aspects of office work to the level of simple mechanical tasks, tasks that could be easily performed by low-paid, 3 Simmel, “Weibliche Kultur” 307; “the home remains the supreme cultural achievement of women” (“Female Culture” 97). 4 Emphasis in original; Mülder-Bach, “‘Weibliche Kultur’”125 – 126; “the point of Simmel’s theory of femininity consists of the fact that women can not have any place in modern culture.” 3 semi-skilled female labor. A new class of white-collar workers or Angestellten, many of whom were women, emerged as the result of the creation of numerous low-skill clerical jobs. In addition to working, these young “New Women”—portrayed in films, illustrated newspapers, and advertisements as athletic, sexually emancipated, lacking sentimentality, economically independent, and resistant to traditional conceptions of femininity and motherhood5— openly challenged traditional notions of femininity. In his analysis of literature from the Weimar Republic, Lethen perpetuates Simmel’s notion that women, many of whom were just beginning to exercise their new- found freedoms, were less capable than men of successfully negotiating the dangers of society associated with the public sphere. Unlike the kalte persona, who uses attitudes of cold calculation to consciously adopt a series of masks for protection, Lethen relegates women to the passive role of the Radar Type. Like the kalte persona, the Radar Type, too, looks outside of the self for the behavioral guides; however, the Radar Type, instead of consciously manipulating its behavior, merely scans the horizon, passively absorbing and adopting, or rather imitating, the latest trends. It is true that many men and women were actively influenced by the images portrayed in popular culture. In the 1920s, Berlin—after New York—was considered “die Zirkulationsmetropole der westlichen Welt,”6 and images of glamour, strength, and a carefree, independent lifestyle for women were utilized by both the advertising and film industries, creating an elusive role-model that many women in the Weimar Republic strove to imitate. By presenting glamour as an achievable goal for the average 5 McCormick 2, 4; Petro 109; von Ankum, “Material” 160. 6 Anselm 253; “the circulation metropolis of the western world.” 4 woman, the advertising industry successfully encouraged many women to “transfer a part of their screen dream to everyday life.”7 As a result, numerous women, low paid as they were, reordered their spending and consumption priorities, spending money that might earlier have been saved in preparation for marriage on body and health care products, fashion, entertainment, and tobacco.8 These idealized images of successful New Women were not limited to the screen, but were also created and perpetuated— and I would also argue critiqued—by the increased number of illustrated newspapers, magazines, and paperback novels specifically targeting this new class of white-collar working women.9 The presence of the New Woman was at the center of numerous popular and political debates regarding the “proper” role of women in the Weimar Republic. One of the many fears associated with the increased presence of women in the workplace was that “modernization had incorporated women into public life and wage labor too quickly, with the result that women had become ‘masculinized’ or alienated from their bodies and resistant to childbearing.”10 There were concerns that the presence of New Women was having a detrimental effect on German civilization as a whole: “Was the modern woman too selfish, too physically degenerated by the luxuries of civilization, or too exhausted from the rigors of wage labor to reproduce?”11 The

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