Das Girl: Crossing Spaces and Spheres: The Function of the Girl in the Weimar Republic

Departing from the notion of modernism as a
text-biased aesthetic this book examines not only
literary texts by women but also visual icons of
modernist popular culture during the later years of
the Weimar Republic. Linking the emergence of the
Girl to the tension between modernist mass culture
and the bourgeois public sphere both the cultural
critic Siegfried Kracauer and the psychologist Fritz
Giese see the Girl as the Germanic spiritualization
of an American beauty ideal. The phenomenon of the
Girl is discussed as a triangulation between the
magazines Die Dame, Das Blatt der Hausfrau and
Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung. In the literary sphere,
while the male perspective was often concerned with
mourning a loss of identity in the metropolis, the
female perspectives of the works of authors Irmgard
Keun and Vicki Baum attempt to create a different
space of a modern female experience. This examination
of the Girl phenomenon as an early example of the
importation of American mass culture into Germany and
its implications for cultural modernity in Germany
will be of interest to both literary, cultural and
feminist scholars as well as anyone interested in the
German Weimar Republic.