Desiring Emancipation , livre ebook

DESIRING EMANCIPATION
SUNY series in Queer Politics and Cultures —————— Cynthia Burack and Jyl J. Josephson, editors

Photograph of Claire Waldoff and Ottilie von Roeder. Reproduced with permission of Peter Finckh.
DESIRING EMANCIPATION
New Women and Homosexuality in Germany, 1890–1933
MARTI M. LYBECK
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2014 State University of New York
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lybeck, Marti M. Desiring emancipation : new women and homosexuality in Germany, 1890–1933 / Marti M. Lybeck. pages cm (SUNY series in Queer Politics and Cultures) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4384-5221-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Lesbianism—Germany—History—19th century. 2. Lesbianism—Germany— History—20th century. 3. Lesbians—Germany—History—19th century. 4. Lesbians—Germany—History—20th century. I. Title. HQ75.6.G3L93 2014 306.76 630943—dc23
2013029946
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. “Are These Women?” University Students’ Quest for a New Gender
2. Experiments in Female Masculinity: Sophia Goudstikker’s Masculine Mimicry in Turn-of-the-Century Munich
3. Asserting Sexual Subjectivity in Berlin: The Proliferation of a Public Discourse of Female Homosexuality, 1900–1912
4. Denying Desire: Professional Women Facing Accusations of Homosexuality
5. Emancipation and Desire in Weimar Berlin’s Female Homosexual Public Sphere
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Illustrations Fig. I.1 Advertisement for Das lesbische Weib, by Franz Scott Fig. 1.1 “Studentinnen,” Ernst Heilemann, Simplicissimus Fig. 1.2 Photograph illustrating “Die deutsche Studentin,” Die Woche Fig. 2.1 Drawing of “Box,” by Walter Caspari, Ernst von Wolzogen, Das dritte Geschlecht Fig. 2.2 Frieda von Bülow and Lou Andreas-Salomé Fig. 2.3 Hof-Atelier Elvira Fig. 2.4 Five Feminists, 1896 Fig. 2.5 Sophia Goudstikker on the staircase of Hof-Atelier Elvira Fig. 4.1 Hedwig Atteln and Erna Westheider Fig. 4.2 Josefine Erkens Fig. 5.1 Violetta Club advertisement with Lotte Hahm Fig. 5.2 Selli Engler Fig. 5.3 1929 advertisement page, Die Freundin Fig. 5.4 Die Freundin cover Fig. 5.5 Frauenliebe cover Fig. 5.6 1932 advertisement page, Die Freundin Fig. 5.7 Manuela advertisement with Lotte Hahm, Die Freundin
Acknowledgments
This book would not have been possible without the generous support of the Berlin Program for Advanced European Studies at the Free University Berlin, which supported the original research, and the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan, which funded time for the initial writing of the dissertation on which it is based. I thank the staffs and boards of both agencies for supporting my work. I am also grateful to the German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C., for recognizing the work in its earlier form with the Fritz Stern Dissertation Prize in 2008. The Institute’s Transatlantic Seminar in 2005 and a fellowship from the University of Michigan Institute for Women in Gender also provided valuable opportunities for presenting sections of the work, as did the Workshop for Comparative History of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at the University of Minnesota, the Yale Research Initiative on the History of Sexualities, and the Rethinking German Modernities Workshop, organized by Geoff Eley and Jennifer Jenkins.
I thank the many archive personnel who helped me navigate and use their collections. Heino Rose of the Staatsarchiv Hamburg and Ute Schumacher of the Institut für Stadtgeschichte Frankfurt deserve special mention for making me aware of the disciplinary case files that became chapter 4 . Thanks to the Frankfurt Institut, the Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz, the Lou-Andreas-Salomé-Archiv Göttingen, and the Münchner Stadtmuseum for granting permission to use illustrations. Special thanks to Peter Finckh for his enthusiastic support of the project and permission to use the photograph, from his family collection, of Claire Waldoff and Olly von Roeder for the book’s frontispiece. While doing research in Germany, I received much appreciated assistance from Claudia Schoppmann, Kirsten Plötz, Alf Lüdke, Dorothee Wierling, and Annelie Schalm.
The work owes a great debt to my dissertation advisers at the University of Michigan, Geoff Eley, Kathleen Canning, Scott Spector, Kerstin Barndt, and Nancy Hunt. Each in his or her own way supported, encouraged, challenged, and pushed. I’m especially grateful for their continuing interest in my work and welfare. I’m also indebted to my mentors and friends in Arizona, Doug Weiner and Susan Crane, who encouraged and helped with the very earliest versions of chapter 5 .
I thank my colleagues at the University of Wisconsin La Crosse for their interest and support, especially those who are part of the History Authors Writing Group—Victor Maciás-González, Jodi Vandenberg-Daves, Jim Longhurst, Jennifer Trost, Heidi Morrison, Tiffany Trimmer, Gerry Iguchi, Gita Pai, and John Grider. Their comments on book chapter drafts have been invaluable. I also thank the anonymous readers for SUNY Press, whose comments significantly improved the final manuscript.
Although many supportive friends have contributed along the way and deserve thanks, I hope Roberta Pergher, Mia Lee, Karen Lybeck, and Rick Lybeck feel my deepest love and gratitude. Thanks for being there when I needed you.
Introduction
The collar-and-tie-wearing, bicycle-riding, and cigarette-smoking New Woman was a prominent international media figure of the 1890s. German writer Frieda von Bülow, one of several younger novelists who might be considered new women themselves, probed beneath the New Woman’s surface image of alternately alluring and dangerous modernity. Her story “Just Let Me Forget!” portrayed a relationship between two characters—the conventionally feminine Gunhild and the often cross-dressed, radical Senta—that represented potential strategies for aspiring new women. 1 Gunhild keeps a worried eye on the excesses she sees in her friend Senta’s embodiment of New Woman ideals. Their fictional interaction may be read as Bülow’s attempt to think through the limits of emancipated behavior. 2 The crux of the problem these characters try to sort out is the relationship between femininity and heterosexuality. Senta rejects the conventional forms of both based on her critical feminist convictions, while Gunhild defends the boundaries of acceptable emancipation using rubrics of love and normality.
The same defining elements that were in play for Bülow—emancipation, femininity, sexuality, and women’s relations with one another and with men—are the focus points of Desiring Emancipation, an account tracing historical new women in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Germany. In Bülow’s stories, as in this book’s discussion, emancipated femininity could not be thought through without coming to terms with the double import of sexuality: sexuality as the basis of the heterosexual social order and sexuality as an element in individual subjectivity. The latter aspect is the thread that pulls the diverse research landscapes of the book together. How did women seeking emancipation strive toward sexual subjectivity in and through their individual life experiences? To answer this question, Desiring Emancipation addresses the broad historical problem of how change happens at the level of the individual. 3 How did historical subjects such as those represented by Bülow decide to fight the powerful forces of social continuity and cultural construction? Although Senta and Gunhild are fictional creations, I use them here as composites that express central questions in the reworking of the New Woman’s sexuality carried on by individuals and groups in the era.
A scene early in the novella depicts Senta and Gunhild arguing angrily over the nature of femininity. Senta sees Gunhild’s mooning over a male lover as incompatible with emancipationist goals. “You are just like the others!” she accuses Gunhild bitterly. Gunhild defends her emotions as normal for women, implicitly smearing Senta’s idiosyncratic appearance and behavior as abnormal and adding, “Abnormalities belong in formaldehyde.” Senta cries, “Yes, if only there were such a thing as a normal woman! … What we are today is man-made work- and pleasure-slaves. … To develop according to our nature, we must not be put in fetters and surrounded by countless obstacles. … The normal woman belongs to the future.” 4 Senta’s robust defense of disturbing, seemingly “abnormal,” experiments in female existence and her passionate desire for emancipation from “man-made” femininity give this book its tit