HISTORY 322 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Weimar Culture, Josephine Baker, Fornication
Mass Culture
Visual Modernity: Mass Culture and its sexed-up public
● Newspapers
○ Democratic because huge access and cheap
■ Available to working class
● Unlike opera etc
■ Visual entertainments/images - performance art = very sexual
● Created some anxiety from more conservative individuals
○ Fashion: hiking up of hemlines - so much shorter
■ Public display of bodies
● Discussion around gender norms
● Identities thro. clothing
○ Access to mass produced clothing
■ Department stores catered to fashion
■ Consumerism - what is hip/in
● Middle class people
● Consumption associated w women → thought
to be corrupted
○ Sus. to male advances/uncontrollable
fornication
○ Women activist - bourgeois women's movement - morally conservative
■ Protecting youth, mothers, making sure women don’t give in to mindless
pleasures
● Central argument - mainly about protection of youth
○ Law of 1926, protection of youth against smut - censorship only
for children’s exposure
● Weimar culture = superficial art, ornament for masses → turned masses into a spectacle
○ Minimal in expression
■ Shallow but crucial - appeals to everyone
● Appeal to middle classes → new middle class: white collar workers
(civil service, department stores, etc)
○ Catered thro consumer mindset
● Josephine Baker - french musician/dancer/artist
○ 1st black performer who attained world fame
○ Great sense of cultural novelties in sensationalists and in the name of being forbidden
○ New women - predominantly on the screen
■ Media representations, fantasies that had some parallels in real life
● Depicted in literature/on screen - emphasized empty rational of weimar
culture (response of imagination of new women)
● New women - sexually aggressive, androgynous (short hair), confident
■ Jazz + cinema = new art form that incited/threatened cultural norms of an earlier
age
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● Women facing most anxiety
■ Early film - not narrative at all → cinema of attraction
● Fascinating to see moving images captured
■ Cinema in Weimar Germany became very expressionistic
● Films were mimicking other styles
○ Films educate - not just entertain
■ I.e. - Berlin built on environment
■ Not erotic - bodies into machine parts
○ Women as inversion of traditional gender role --
■ Idea of traditional woman vs. new woman
● Actual new women as the were running around - not as presented in the
media
○ New woman as she actually existed was less “new than you
would expect”
■ Associated with middle classes
○ Eugenics = Galton - not just prerogative of far right
● Wherling and female sexuality -
○ Is he concerned about men? Biological degeneration of society?
■ Women w/ contraceptives → control over reproductive capabilities
(threatening)
■ World doesn’t make as much sense
■ Women sexuality - way to articulate a social critque, underlying fears and
dangers occupying scientists minds are articulated thro. fears about demographics
● Modernism: sense that modernity produces a crisis
○ Flipside - modernity - cultural solution to previous problems
■ Social leveling
● Women of higher social standings give themselves to base acts
● Sense of power/access control over family units is under threats
○ Modernism solution:
■ Rationalization:
● Arts - architecture
○ Bauhaus - art movement geared towards improving conditions of
working class
■ Modernist style - politically motivated, functionalist
understanding to art (art should be useful)
● Art grows out of workshop
● Mass produced - democratically dispersed at
cheap costs - working classes
○ Make lives better/more interesting for a
broader spectrum of population
■ Left leaning
○ Artists understand city as corruption
■ Crime / prost. - corrupt minds
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Visual modernity: mass culture and its sexed-up public. Visual entertainments/images - performance art = very sexual. Created some anxiety from more conservative individuals. Fashion: hiking up of hemlines - so much shorter. Consumption associated w women thought to be corrupted. Protecting youth, mothers, making sure women don"t give in to mindless pleasures. Central argument - mainly about protection of youth. Law of 1926, protection of youth against smut - censorship only for children"s exposure. Weimar culture = superficial art, ornament for masses turned masses into a spectacle. Shallow but crucial - appeals to everyone. Appeal to middle classes new middle class: white collar workers (civil service, department stores, etc) 1st black performer who attained world fame. Great sense of cultural novelties in sensationalists and in the name of being forbidden. New women - predominantly on the screen. Media representations, fantasies that had some parallels in real life.
