Berlin Coquette

Prostitution and the New German Woman, 1890–1933

Jill Suzanne Smith

• Publisher: Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780801452673
• eBook ISBN: 9780801469695
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: German History
• Index: History

During the late nineteenth century the city of Berlin developed such a reputation for lawlessness and sexual licentiousness that it came to be known as the "Whore of Babylon." Out of this reputation for debauchery grew an unusually rich discourse around prostitution. In Berlin Coquette, Jill Suzanne Smith shows how this discourse transcended the usual clichés about prostitutes and actually explored complex visions of alternative moralities or sexual countercultures including the "New Morality" articulated by feminist radicals, lesbian love, and the "New Woman."

Combining extensive archival research with close readings of a broad spectrum of texts and images from the late Wilhelmine and Weimar periods, Smith recovers a surprising array of productive discussions about extramarital sexuality, women's financial autonomy, and respectability. She highlights in particular the figure of the cocotte (Kokotte), a specific type of prostitute who capitalized on the illusion of respectable or upstanding womanhood and therefore confounded easy categorization. By exploring the semantic connections between the figure of the cocotte and the act of flirtation (of being coquette), Smith's work presents flirtation as a type of social interaction through which both prostitutes and non-prostitutes in Imperial and Weimar Berlin could express extramarital sexual desire and agency.

1

SEX, MONEY, AND MARRIAGE: PROSTITUTION AS AN INSTRUMENT OF CONJUGAL CRITIQUE

“As long as marriage exists, so will prostitution,” wrote Georg Simmel in an essay published in the Social Democratic weekly Die Neue Zeit in 1892.1 As Simmel’s proclamation suggests, turn-of-the-century debates surrounding prostitution were inextricably linked to discussions of the current state of marriage and its possible reform. Although on the surface bourgeois morality dictated that prostitution remain outside the boundaries of respectable society, it was often understood by mainstream society to be a “necessary evil” essential to the maintenance of bourgeois women’s premarital chastity and the guarantee of men’s sexual freedom.2 The institution of the bourgeois family was considered by critics to be protected by prostitution, which offered bourgeois men an outlet for their sexual desires—desires that, if not transferred to the prostitute, could devastate the sanctity of the family.3 Bourgeois men’s patronage of prostitutes was treated with discretion within the middle classes but was publicly aired by various critics of bourgeois culture. Leaders of the burgeoning socialist movement such as August Bebel used prostitution as a polemic device, arguing that it was an integral part of the bourgeois capitalist economy. Portraying prostitutes as victims of a corrupt socioeconomic order on the one hand and as markers of bourgeois perversion and degeneration on the other, socialist and leftist-progressive writers attempted to show that the bourgeoisie had compromised its own doctrine of respectability and should therefore be denied a position of moral, social, and economic power. The image of the working class as unruly and sexually permissive and the bourgeoisie as beacons of respectability was turned upside down, and as the nineteenth century drew to a close, “it was…the bourgeoisie who embodied vice.”4

With the establishment of a unified German nation in 1871, the state regulation of prostitution was codified under Clause 361/6, and registered prostitutes, while legally sanctioned to ply their trade, were subject to police surveillance and control. The state’s regulation of prostitution was intimately connected to the maintenance of nineteenth-century bourgeois respectability, and yet this connection was supposed to remain a secret. In his examination of respectability and its formative role in the creation of German national identity, George Mosse defines one of the central tenets of respectability as “the proper attitude toward sexuality.” What constituted this “proper attitude toward sexuality” was an emphasis on restraint and moderation over excess, and on strict gender demarcations, which portrayed women as sexually passive and men as active. Manliness and virility went hand in hand, and active sexual desire was a defining characteristic of the male citizen who could create and sustain a strong and healthy nation.5 As the newly formed German state took an ever more active “regulative interest in the family as the vital site for the health of the national body,” an almost obsessive focus was placed on conjugality and reproduction.6 The bourgeois conjugal model dictated that women remain chaste until marriage, after which they were to fulfill their domestic roles as wives and mothers. Male sexuality was, in theory, also contained within marriage, but in practice, men’s pre- and extramarital dalliances were tolerated and even regarded as natural. Prostitutes, although outwardly shunned as immoral by most members of bourgeois society, were, by means of the regulatory system, made available to male citizens for discreet and allegedly disease-free sexual encounters. Defenders of regulated prostitution argued vehemently that the existence of prostitution prevented men from seducing and thereby sullying the reputations of their would-be wives. Prostitution’s existence, therefore, was crucial to maintaining bourgeois respectability, one of the pillars of late nineteenth-century civil society.

When studying nineteenth-century gender roles, one of the central paradigms that emerges is the public/private split, commonly understood to refer to men’s access to the public sphere of work, politics, and organized leisure activities, on the one hand, and women’s relegation to the private, or domestic, sphere of home and family, on the other. In regard to sexual self-determination, however, Isabel Hull draws our attention to a different, yet equally gendered, type of public/private split that developed gradually over the course of the eighteenth century and became one of the defining characteristics of the nineteenth-century “sexual system.” Tracking the evolution of German civil society with a male citizen at its center, Hull argues that active, autonomous sexual desire was increasingly gendered as masculine and that men’s sexual transgressions became shrouded in secrecy. The sexual behavior of the male citizen was private; the sexual behavior of women was not, especially if it transgressed the boundaries of marital, procreative sex. Women who “were not circumscribed within an easily recognizable domestic environment,” who “did not keep the secret of their sexual intimacy,” and who were also “economically independent” were defined as “public” women and were often labeled and treated as prostitutes. Their sexual actions were therefore open to public scrutiny, strict moral judgment, and legal penalties.7

How did prostitution, which was not a contested topic during the eighteenth century, become, alongside male homosexuality and venereal disease, one of “the classic themes of nineteenth-century sexual discourse”? If Enlightenment thinkers and lawmakers were, as Hull contends, “preoccupied with laying down the principles of ‘normality’” within the sexual discourse of their time, then those who sought to define the social and sexual parameters of nineteenth-century Germany often did so through a discourse of abnormality or deviance.8 If the new nation was to be a robust and powerful one, then those groups that were deemed to put the national health at risk were viewed with suspicion, if not treated with disdain. The most tangible indicator of the health of the nation was its birthrate, and, much like the birthrate of its European neighbors, Germany’s was steadily declining in the final decades of the nineteenth century. “Abnormal” groups were comprised of individuals whose sexual behavior inhibited their ability to produce healthy offspring; in other words, these were nonprocreative people—homosexuals, prostitutes, single women, and persons with venereal diseases. Their behavior was studied, classified, and publicized by the fledgling discipline of sexual science, and in the case of prostitutes and male homosexuals, it was subject to legal discipline.9 Although the fear of the growing numbers of unmarried women was based less on reality than on “imagined demography,” Catherine Dollard argues in her study of “the surplus woman” in Wilhelmine Germany, the notable public presence of single women was an urban, middle-class phenomenon most easily observed and documented in Berlin.10 The upstart German capital was the center of debates on public health issues and became the first city in imperial Germany to open a treatment clinic for venereal disease.11 As public women who were particularly visible in Berlin and who were assumed to be the primary culprits in the spread of venereal infection, prostitutes were associated both with the perceived increase in numbers of unwed women and with the rise in VDs, making prostitution part and parcel of the anxious discussions about public health and especially about women’s economic and sexual independence.

By the early 1890s, the public outcry over prostitution in Berlin reached a fever pitch. The widespread willingness to speak so openly about prostitution was sparked by the 1891 murder trial involving the pimp Hermann Heinze and his prostitute wife Anna, who were charged with murdering a night watchman while attempting to rob a Berlin church of its silver. The extensive coverage of the trial in the urban press and the decision of the judge to open the trial to the public attracted a large crowd of spectators, a gathering that caused well-dressed bourgeois ladies to literally rub elbows with thieves and prostitutes from Berlin’s impoverished north end. The trial even captured the attention of Kaiser Wilhelm II and inspired the parliament’s passage of a slate of restrictive laws—dubbed the lex Heinze—meant to curb pimping activities and to censor “pornographic” literature, theater, and visual media. As a result of the myriad social, sexual, and moral issues it raised and the national publicity it received, the Heinze trial “was the most important legal event since the lapse of the Anti-Socialist Law” in 1890, legislation that had banned all public political activity by socialists for more than a decade.12 In fact, these two legal events—the murder trial of a Berlin pimp and his prostitute wife and the lapse of antisocialist legislation—are connected by more than the “moral panic of considerable proportions” they allegedly unleashed.13 Both events signified a growing preoccupation with the social effects of industrialization and the travails of the urban poor. Kaiser Wilhelm II charted a “new course” to improve industrial working conditions, calling for an International Conference on Labor Protection to be held in Berlin in March 1890. In its focus on working women and on issues such as maternity leave, the Kaiser’s “new course” offered state protection from exploitative working conditions by shortening the workday, yet it also expanded the state’s intervention into the familial realm. At the same time, with the resignation of Otto von Bismarck from his post as German chancellor and the contiguous repeal of the Anti-Socialist Law in 1890, new social actors became a vocal and visible part of German civil society, including Social Democrats, members of the women’s movement, social scientists, and naturalist writers, allowing for a multiplication of critical perspectives on social issues, including bourgeois marriage, gender roles, and economic equality.14

Both the lex Heinze and the renewed political activity of socialists also significantly affected the dissemination of print and visual media. The censorship laws passed as a result of the Heinze trial represented a tightening of state control within the cultural realm, and yet, as I will show in the case of Otto Erich Hartleben, Berlin theaters devised creative strategies to get around restrictive measures. With the lapse of Bismarck’s Anti-Socialist Law, the publication and distribution of socialist writings was no longer forbidden. This allowed for the broader dissemination of ideas, such as those articulated by August Bebel in Women and Socialism, a book that he had written in 1879 but that did not become available outside underground socialist circles until 1891. Both Bebel’s book and the Heinze trial, in quite different ways, broke the silence surrounding men’s sexual behavior and the role that men might play in prostitution, be it as pimps in the case of Hermann Heinze or as clients in the case of the bourgeois men that Bebel would take to task. By contemplating the class and gender dynamics that allowed prostitution to flourish in the capital city, critics like Bebel broke through the protective seal that had ensured men’s sexual privacy for most of the nineteenth century.

Challenging bourgeois norms both from the outside and from within, three men helped to shape the turn-of-the-century discourse on prostitution in Berlin: August Bebel, one of the early figureheads of the socialist movement; Georg Simmel, one of the founders of modern soc...

Table of contents

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Berlin’s Bourgeois Whores
• 1. Sex, Money, and Marriage: Prostitution as an Instrument of Conjugal Critique
• 2. Righteous Women and Lost Girls: Radical Bourgeois Feminists and the Fight for Moral Reform
• 3. Naughty Berlin? New Women, New Spaces, and Erotic Confusion
• 4. Working Girls: White-Collar Workers and Prostitutes in Late Weimar Fiction
• Conclusion: Berlin Coquette
• Bibliography