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.