Women in German Expressionism

Front matter

WOMEN in GERMAN EXPRESSIONISM

GENDER/SEXUALITY/ACTIVISM

Anke Finger and Julie Shoults, Editors

Contents

List of Illustrations vii

Introduction: Flipping the Prostitute: German Expressionism Reexamined after One Hundred Years

(Anke Finger and Julie Shoults) I Chapter 1

Index

343 349

Digital materials related to this title can be found on the Fulcrum platform via the following citable URL https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub. 12298135

Illustrations

Figure 5.1. Marianne von Werefkin, Sonnenaufgang (Sunrise), n.d., tempera on paper on cardboard.

Figure 5.2. Gabriele Miinter, Lower Main Street, Murnau, 1910.

Figure 5.3. Alexej Jawlensky, Black Tree—Bordighera, 1914.

Figure 7.1. Vally Wieselthier, Head with Flower, polychromed glazed red earthenware, 1928.

Figure 7.2. Gudrun Baudisch, Heads, earthenware, ca. 1929.

Figure 7.3. Vally Wieselthier, Sitting Figure with Flower Pots, 1928. Red earthenware, white slip, blue, green and orange glaze.

Figure 7.4. Vally Wieselthier, Flora, 1928. Red earthenware, white slip, colored glazes.

Figure 7.5. Gudrun Baudisch, Kneeling Girl, 1927-29. Red earthenware, white slip, colored glazes.

Figure 13.1. Else Blankenhorn, Ohne Titel (Roter Reiter) [Untitled (Red Rider) ].

Figure 13.2. Else Blankenhorn, /. Milliarde Thaler (Geldschein) [One Billion Thalers (Banknote) ].

Figure 13.3. Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler, Die Nachtwandlerin [The Sleepwalker].

Figure 13.4. Elfriede Lohse-Wachtler, Lissy.

Figure 13.5. Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler, Selbstportrdat (erste Zeichnung |der Serie Friedrichsberger Köpfe) [Self-Portrait (first drawing in the Friedrichsberg Heads series) ].

124 126 128

167 171

174 176 177 300 302 305

Introduction

German Expressionism Reexamined after One Hundred Years

Anke Finger and Julie Shoults

In 2005, in her seminal essay “Intimate Strangers: Women in German Expressionism,” Barbara D. Wright remarks on the paltry state of research available on women writers in the German Expressionist era by launching an overdue call for action: “Given the meager amount of work that has been devoted to the recovery of women Expressionists, the scholarship of German Expressionism clearly lacks the texts necessary for a thorough comparison of male and female writers” (290). More significantly, she demands a reexamination of “our fundamental understanding of Expressionism,” beyond a mere “recovery” of forgotten women authors, a reexamination that would take to task the Expressionists’ plea for a reinvention of humanity, the Neue Mensch (New Human), by applying the complex catalog of feminist and gender theory and scholarship to the outpouring of literary works that emerged from the entire movement. At the beginning of the 2020s, such scholarship still remains to be accomplished. For reasons discussed below, not only have the majority of the over three hundred women associated with Expressionist publications such as Der Sturm (The storm) or Die Aktion (The action) not been recovered by posterity, but the historiography and literary analysis of German Expressionism have largely been left untouched by gender theory, intersectionality, and numerous other women’s studies and feminist scholarship approaches. Befittingly, Wright’s essay, published within an epistemologically and internationally solid context of women’s studies scholarship and feminist literary history, is itself categorized as “interdisciplinary” in the book section within which it was placed, not under “gender” or “women’s writing.”

What happened to Wright’s call to action? These last decades have seen tremendous upheaval, innovation, and growth in the study of modernism as a practice that not only invites us to commemorate countless centennials—if we assume German modernism to begin with the 1890s and last through 1933, the traditional period frame—but also helps us to place ourselves within certain trajectories, contradictions, and historical déja vus. Professional organizations, such as the Modernist Studies Association,' dedicate themselves to reviving and enriching the study of a period representative of worldwide artistic, social, technical, and political changes that has resulted in entirely novel approaches to this complex and fascinating time period in our immediate past. Not so for the study of German Expressionism, especially literary Expressionism. It seems that, in the over one hundred years since its beginnings around I9II with the secessions, German Expressionism, as an object of scholarly inquiry, has attracted attention from interdisciplinary approaches, but not from gender studies. Irritating and curious as that may be, given the multiplicity of methods and approaches applied to the almost feverish research in modernism, two very simple facts underscore what we observe in this subfield: books and articles published on German Expressionist literature are written by men and about male authors and artists. Thomas Anz, one of the most prominent scholars in this field, maintains in the second edition of his pivotal introduction to the Literatur des Expressionismus (Literature of Expressionism), published in 2010, that “the literary youth movement of Expressionism was a men’s movement” (34), one that constructed itself as “manhood of the highest potency” (35),? devoid of the “femininity” inherent to impressionism and naturalism. He concedes that the Expressionists themselves employed such gender stereotyping for their own purposes. He also readily admits that while “the category of gender and the strong domination of male authors should not be overlooked, their appropriate evaluation, which has yet to be accomplished in greater detail, demands considerable capabilities for differentiation and competencies in gender theory” (36).* Unsurprisingly, Anz leaves the gender question at that, and the entire volume engages German Expressionist literature with just a smidgen of references to women authors in its midst.

Other introductory volumes present the same or similar contents. The 1957 collection of Expressionist prose Ahnung und Aufbruch (Foreboding and awakening), edited by Karl Otten, includes fifty-six texts, fifty-four by male authors and one each by Claire Studer-Goll (1890-1977) and Else Lasker-

Schüler (1869-1945). Fritz Martini’s Reclam collection, Prosa des Expressionismus (Prose of Expressionism), from 1972, includes no women authors at all. Silvio Vietta and Hans-Georg Kemper, in their 1975 volume on literary Expressionismus, mention five women one time each, with only Lasker-Schüler referred to five times. The sixth edition, published in 1997, remained unchanged and lacking any inclusion of additional women writers or gender theory, despite more than two decades of gender studies research in the interim. The 1976 Begriffsbestimmung des Literarischen Expressionismus (Definition of literary Expressionism), published in a highly regarded series, collects articles by male scholars about male writers, with one article about Georg Kaiser by Annalisa Viviani. Augustinus P. Dierick’s German Expressionist Prose: Theory and Practice, published in 1987, peripherally mentions four women, Käthe Brodnitz, Ricarda Huch, Lasker-Schüler, and Annette Kolb. Volume 7 of Hansers Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur (Hanser’s social history of German literature), edited by York-Gothart Mix and published in 2000, focuses on naturalism, fin de siecle, and Expressionism, with all chapters on Expressionism written by male scholars and no mention of gender or women’s literary history, although a review of the volume generously points out that women authors and artists are at least mentioned by name.‘ Finally, Ralf Georg Bogner’s Einführung in die Literatur des Expressionismus (Introduction to the literature of Expressionism), published in its second edition in 2009, dedicates one page to the construction of gender by a few male authors, listing the oft-cited image of the prostitute, women as mothers and/or erotic objects, and the female sex drive as viewed by the other sex. He concludes this short section by highlighting the dearth of women’s perspectives, given the “numerically small presence of women authors within the Expressionist movement” (68), taking his cue from Hartmut Vollmer’s work.” According to Bogner, only Emmy Hennings (1885-1948), Goll, and Lasker-Schüler gained some “semblance of recognition” by getting published and adding their voices to the plethora of topics established by male authors. It is particularly unfortunate, in the case of Bogner, that the historiography of literary Expressionism, one hundred years after the movement’s emergence, perpetuates the myth of women writers as absent by misquoting those actively engaged in rewriting that same history.

Hartmut Vollmer, in the introduction to his 1996 groundbreaking anthology Die Rote Periicke: Prosa expressionistischer Dichterinnen (The red wig: Prose by female Expressionists) that includes thirty women authors, does not bemoan or legitimize the lack of women’s voices; in fact, he calls attention to the “incomprehensible and deplorable” notion of “absence” of Expressionist women authors, given that they were both numerous and vociferous (9).°

Rather, with this second anthology following his first on women Expressionist lyrics,’ Vollmer hopes that his anthology on women’s prose will finally “prove that future discussions of Expressionism will not be able to ignore the women authors of this movement” (17).° By misquoting Vollmer, Bogner quite directly does just that. The artificially maintained belief that women writers were absent within the Expressionist movement or, at the very least, without voice and without access to publication, demands not only their texts’ recovery, as required by Barbara Wright, but a thorough reinvestigation of the traditional tropes and topics established by the scholarship of literary and artistic Expressionism. These include illness, the city, the New Human, insanity, utopia, war, ugliness, literary aesthetics, genres, emotion, sexuality and the body, and more—topics that call for the integration of perspectives and literary aestheticization by women authors. These are topics, moreover, that necessitate analysis from perspectives and approaches informed by gender theory, by intersectionality, by notions and perspectives of difference, and by viewpoints and methodological and interdisciplinary approaches that push the boundaries of how German Expressionism has been defined. For however “male” the Expressionist movement constructed itself to appear at the time, it is incumbent upon the scholars of and experts on this movement to question and challenge previous readings of Expressionist texts, artworks, and projects such that we can understand them with the sophistication and understanding of twenty-firstcentury readers. This is the goal of this volume, and the editors and authors hope that future anthologies and introductions of German Expressionism will productively avoid excluding gender theory and viewpoints of difference. No twenty-first-century discussion of German Expressionism can expect to produce serious research without acknowledging that gender marks this movement—perhaps more than others. No twenty-first-century scholarship can ignore the approximately 310 women who participated in and represented German Expressionism, as documented in Paul Raabe’s Index Expressionismus from 1972 and meticulously listed by Barbara Wright in her handwritten notes. The fact that, over one hundred years later, literary scholarship is just now facing these questions and challenges by, finally, adding the movement’s women authors and artists to the entire oeuvre, is astounding and exhilarating at the same time.

Although female figures are prevalent in the works of male Expressionists, particularly in the roles of the New Woman, mother, and prostitute, their possibilities for self-expression and self-sufficiency are decidedly limited in these works. This collection, for the first time, explores women’s self-conceptions and representations of women’s and gender roles in society in their own Expressionist works. Oskar Kokoschka’s depiction of a brutal “battle of the sexes” in his 1907 play Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen (Murderer, Hope of Women) introduced a motif that was taken up by many Expressionists. How did women interpret this “battle” and depict gender relations? How did women approach themes commonly considered to be characteristic of the Expressionist movement, and did they address other themes or aesthetics and styles not currently represented in the canon? How do the language and imagery employed by female Expressionists compare to that of their male counterparts? Is the historical and sociopolitical context reflected differently in the writings of authors outside of the male, white, and privileged gaze? In what ways do intersections of ethnicity, class, and gender play a role? How do mental health, social status, immigrant status, identity, regional affiliation, and notions of difference inform these texts? Finally, do current perceptions and receptions of German Expressionism shift once we take into more thorough consideration the works of woman artists and authors and the above perspectives on and experiences of difference?

This collection seeks to broaden the theorization, scholarship, and reception of German Expressionism by—much belatedly—including works by women, and by shifting or redefining firmly established concepts and topics carrying only the imprint of male authors and artists to this day. While there is renewed interest in women artists of the period,” women authors remain largely unknown, unpublished, and unexamined. This presents a significant and alarming gap in the research and reception of German Expressionism, as the archives are full of uncovered materials. However, very few have challenged this staid reception. As a result, works by male artists and authors continue to characterize the canon a century after the Expressionist decade of 1910-1920.! Here, the contributors present and analyze primarily new voices, integrate them into the canon productively by challenging parameters that have remained too tight, unforgiving, and exclusive, and thereby change the reception of and future scholarship on German Expressionism in the twenty-first century.

Interest in German Expressionism remains strong a century after the movement flourished, and we remind our readers of more work that needs to be accomplished by reprinting Barbara Wright’s essay from the 2005 collection to open our volume. Her essay appeared in A Companion to the Literature of German Expressionism (Camden House) alongside just two contributions that mention a few well-known women writers such as Lasker-Schüler and Goll. Wright identifies three major facets in the research on women and

Expressionism, including the portrayal of women and the recovery of their works (287). She notes that “the bulk of scholarly work on women in Expressionism has confined itself to the first category, that is, the portrayal of female figures in Expressionist works largely by men” (288).!! Wright further notes that the work of recovery is lagging when it comes to women’s contributions to the movement, yet there has been promising progress in this area in recent decades. For instance, several key texts by Emmy Hennings, including Gefängnis (Prison) and Das Brandmal (The stigma), appeared in new editions in 2016 and 2017 thanks to the efforts of Nicola Behrmann and Christa Baumberger, and an English translation of Mela Hartwig’s Bin ich ein iiberfliissiger Mensch? was published as Am I a Redundant Human Being? in 2010. Also, alongside his volumes of poetry and prose, which are both now in their second editions, Hartmut Vollmer edited a collection of poems and short stories by Henriette Hardenberg, Südliches Herz (Southern heart, 1994). And Hartwig Suhrbier republished two volumes of literary sketches by female Expressionist El Hor / El Ha in 1991, Die Schaukel (The swing), originally published in 1913, and Schatten (Shadows) from 1920. The next step, according to Wright, is for scholars to work productively with these texts at a theoretical level and to compare them to other works in order to understand the movement more deeply and to potentially redefine prior readings of Expressionism (287).

Since Barbara Wright’s important work, several women Expressionists have garnered attention in recent scholarly projects: Cristanne Miller includes Lasker-Schiiler in her examination of literary works in Cultures of Modernism: Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, & Else Lasker-Schiiler (2005), Caroline Rupprecht discusses texts by Henriette Hardenberg in Subject to Delusions: Narcissism, Modernism, Gender (2006), and Marsha Meskimmon focuses solely on German women in the visual arts in We Weren’t Modern Enough: Women Artists and the Limits of German Modernism (1999). More recently, Nicola Behrmann’s Geburt der Avantgarde: Emmy Hennings (The birth of the avantgarde, 2018), which accompanies her volumes of Hennings’s work previously mentioned, examines the impact Hennings had on various movements in the early 1900s with her innovative literature. Although the introduction and conclusion of Frank Krause’s Expressionism and Gender / Expressionismus und Geschlecht (2010) reference works by women, the essays included in the collection focus overwhelmingly on works by male Expressionists. Lorella Bosco and Anke Gilleir’s volume Schmerz. Lust. Kiinstlerinnen und Autorinnen der deutschen Avantgarde (Pain. Desire. Female artists and authors of the German avant-garde, 2015) includes essays on women’s contributions to a variety of artistic movements, not just Expressionism, and many focus on well-recognized women, including Lasker-Schüler, Hannah Höch, and Käthe Kollwitz. The journal Expressionismus, established in 2015, published an issue devoted to Expressionistinnen (female Expressionists) in 2016.

While this issue includes valuable contributions to the field, there is very little overlap with the authors and artists to be addressed in our volume, and gender theory remains un(der) developed. Women in German Expressionism: Gender, Sexuality, Activism seeks to fill a gap still in existence one hundred years after the Expressionist movement by moving beyond initial biographical recoveries, such as Britta Jürgs’s 1992 collection of portraits of Expressionist women artists and writers, Wie eine Nilbraut, die man in die Wellen wirft (Like a bride of the Nile one throws into the waves). It is time to focus on the output of women Expressionists to, finally, represent and showcase all of the Expressionist oeuvre and make it available to analysis and research about the movement as a whole. How much of this work lies ahead of us and beyond this volume becomes apparent when considering the colossal interart project that German Expressionism ultimately represents: in this volume, we address primarily women authors and literary Expressionism, with a focus on Expressionist art history interlaced to discuss sexuality, gender, and activism. Significantly, in-depth research on women, gender, intersectionality, ethnicity, and identity in Expressionist film, drama, architecture, and dance, to name a few other areas and disciplines, is still t0 be accomplished if we seek a thorough reinvestigation of German Expressionism in the twenty-first century.

Rewriting the Expressionist Movement

In the first part of the volume, “Situating Female Authors and Artists in the Expressionist Movement,” we address the need to look at the origins of Expressionism and reconsider the dates of its beginnings. While there are ample pamphlets and manifestos that speak to the meaning of Expressionism, collected, for example, in a 1990 edition by Thomas Anz and Michael Stark, we emphasize more generally the elements at the core of Expressionist work: the focus on raw emotionality and its translation into forms and media whose affordances allow for a new aesthetics in writing, in colors, in shapes, on the stage, and in many more art forms. For the women writers, 1911 and the first usages of the term as representing French art (in exhibition catalogs and elsewhere) does not speak to the slow emergence of the “New Woman” well before 1910/1911, nor does it specify changes in the aesthetics of literary style that overlapped with naturalism or Jugendstil. Curtis Swope, in “Elsa Asenijeff and

German Expressionism,” for example, showcases Asenijeff (1867-1941), who was a generation older than the group of writers around whom the canonical account of German Expressionism has been fashioned. The thematic concerns of her poetry and prose ranged from the role of art in society to the horrors of patriarchal marriage. Her formal choices overcame the empty, gestural quality of Jugendstil and symbolist poetry and, as early as the late 1890s, heralded the social urgency of the Expressionist movement. Despite the numerous rich literary essays in which she outlined her idiosyncratic feminism and despite the fact that her poems were published alongside those of Walter Hasenclever and Kurt Pinthus, her writings have never received sustained scholarly treatment. In his contribution, Swope traces Asenijeff’s development as a feminist theorist and poet with particular attention to how her unique brand of feminism affected her literary work in its formal dimensions. He also places Asenijeff’s writings in relation to the emergence of full-blown Expressionism in literature around 1910 and to the artistic currents, such as symbolism and decadence, that paved the way for that emergence. In Swope’s analysis, Asenijeff’s take on gender polarity seemingly flips the prior “norm,” depicting men as automatons while women have boundless potential for individuality, and men are destructive toward women, particularly through the psychological violence they inflict. He further notes that women, by Asenijeff’s account, have greater capacity for humanity—a thought that echoes throughout our volume, such as in Julie Shoults’s exploration of literary empathy.

Finally, Swope posits that we should reread the movement in terms of gender, noting that such an approach might illuminate that the concept of gender is behind other dichotomies that are essential to Expressionism. His call here epitomizes the goal of this volume, drawing on the importance of reading with a gendered lens and raising important questions about who is considered an Expressionist and why. Another important trailblazer of this generation was Franziska zu Reventlow (1871-1918). Carola Daffner, in “Between Bohemian Brotherhood and the New Man: On Gender and Writing in F. Gräfin zu Reventlow’s Herrn Dames Aufzeichnungen (1913), casts her as a change agent, emphasizing that the uncertain, liminal state of “betwixt and between,” as labeled by cultural anthropologist Victor Turner, is often regarded as undesired. Turner, however, stresses that the lack of attachment to a space or a system offers a “realm of pure possibility” as it encourages reflections on existing social norms and alternative models. Germany’s bohemian circles around 1900 as well as Expressionist groups after 1910 celebrated their positions at the margins for this very reason. Inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the Umwertung aller Werte (transvaluation of all values), participants in both groups radically criticized contemporary Western civilization and questioned patriarchal Christian values. Unsurprisingly, the Expressionist movement not only grew out of Bohemian circles but also found its first followers among la Boheme. At the same time, many Expressionists passionately rejected la Bohéme’s “Apollonian” mentality, its lack of leadership vision, and its attachment to a Romantic ancestry. A few select women, such as Lasker-Schiiler and Hennings, are well known for their active participation in both scenes. Daffner argues that Franziska Gräfin zu Reventlow’s later work is another important, yet often neglected example, showcasing both points of contact as well as points of tension between la Boheme and early German Expressionism. While considered a staple of Schwabing’s bohemians and never officially affiliated with the Expressionists, Reventlow uses the epistolary form in her roman à clef Herrn Dames Aufzeichnungen (1913) to negotiate her own limited role as a writer in between the two male-dominated movements. Mirroring the writer’s own difficulties in her quest for sexual and creative self-determination in the midst of the “Bohéme-Bruderschaft,’ the novel’s catastrophic ending can and should be read as a warning to messianic Expressionism and its own euphoric visions of a “New Man.” Furthermore, Daffner notes the importance of the androgynous protagonist in this work, a concept that is gaining increasing attention in scholarship on literary Expressionism. !*

In “‘Wenn man eine Frau ist’: Female Protagonists as Social Revolutionaries,” Corinne Painter picks up Barbara Wright’s observation that “key documents of Expressionism repeatedly present woman as a means to the New Man’s end, namely his development as an artist and/or social revolutionary” (292). Painter examines the gender “battle” depicted in the works of German Jewish writer Clementine Krämer (1873-1942), who, although largely forgotten today, was a prolific writer and campaigner in the women’s movement. Her short stories were published in local and national papers and intellectual and literary magazines such as Jugend (Youth). This chapter takes up two stories from 1913 and 1916, analyzing how Krämer’s protagonists challenge the virgin/whore dichotomy, how the protagonists use men for their own means, and how Kramer challenges the traditional literary representations of women. Discussing Krämer’s status as an outsider—she was a Jewish writer in Catholic Bavaria—Painter asserts that she presented a challenge to the dominant narratives in Expressionist writing and to projections of ethnic identity. Painter also shows how Kramer used hyperbole and irony, among other techniques, and appropriated themes from Expressionism and the Grimms’ fairy tales to challenge the role and perceptions of women in the public sphere, including how men could be used by women for economic and social stability.

The final contribution in this part concerns a discussion of two important women artists, “On Their Own: Reconsidering Marianne Werefkin and Gabriele Miinter,’ by Katy Klaasmeyer. She explains that in the visual arts, the term “Expressionism” does not constitute a cohesive movement or style; rather it describes in a broader sense of art that was united by a rejection of impressionism and the search for an inner, essential reality behind the external world of appearances. As such, groups commonly classified as Expressionist, Die Brücke in Dresden/Berlin and the Neue Kiinstlervereinigung (NKV, later Der Blaue Reiter) in Munich, differed in their philosophical and stylistic approaches. Two women artists, Marianne Werefkin (1860-1938) and Gabriele Münter (1877-1962), were both active in Munich; however, they have been defined in most academic sources principally by their relationships (with Alexej Jawlensky and Wassily Kandinsky, respectively). In her chapter, Klaasmeyer “reconsiders the careers of these two women, primarily by placing their romantic relationships in an ancillary role—which is the treatment their artist partners received.” Although she discusses each woman’s relationships with fellow artists, she simultaneously critiques the ways in which these relationships have overshadowed the women’s careers and work. Furthermore, she observes that women’s influence on male artists has not necessarily been acknowledged, since it is often assumed that the women (as pupils) learned from the men, even though these women also had things to share and to teach. Through her analysis, Klaasmeyer draws attention to both women’s agency and their self-doubt at times. Importantly, Klaasmeyer focuses on the differences between Werefkin and Miinter, rather than trying to fit them in the same “box” of female artists. By delineating their individual approaches in content (themes, subject matter), formal concerns (preferred media, color palette), and meaning (philosophical underpinnings), she allows for nuanced exploration of their work and illustrates how examining women’s artworks and the female gaze can inform our understanding of Expressionism as a whole.

Gender and the Body

Given the tradition of men writing about men in German Expressionism, one might assume that perhaps masculinity studies, a substantial subfield in gender studies today, would have filtered into the analysis of Expressionist texts, artworks, drama, film, poetry and architecture. That, too, is not the case. Masculinity studies, as an approach in gender studies that seeks to “deconstruct static binaries on gender studies between victims and oppressors, difference and

Flipping the Prostitute Il dominance, and hegemonic (or socially validated) and alternative masculinities [that] examine[s] parallelisms, interdependencies, and asymmetries between men and women” do not figure in studies on German Expressionism (Gardiner 2). An Expressionist of the first hour, Kurt Hiller, for example, was a gay rights activist and inherited Magnus Hirschfeld’s position at the Scientific Humanitarian Committee. But his writing and activism, starting in 1909, on behalf of Expressionism have yet to be analyzed under these parameters. In fact, a 2019 article on gay rights activism in Germany reports that “Kurt Hiller is the least remembered of the leading early homosexual activists” (Marhoefer 96). Similarly, texts such as Alfred Döblin’s famous short story “Die Ermordung einer Butterblume” (“The Murder of a Buttercup”) from 1910 urgently call for an analysis based on gender, given—in the case of Döblin—the “battle” between the desperately hapless civil servant and the feminized buttercup whose ontology as a flower counteracts the protagonist’s obsession with control over (mother) nature. However, the overwhelmingly conservative and negative image of women in Expressionist writing has not been theorized from the perspective of gender studies, nor have women authors, as contemporary writers or literary scholars, been allowed in to adjust the same image in its entirety, beyond focusing on individual and few-and-far-between contributions.

Making gender, together with difference, ethnicity, intersectionality, and identity, the center of analysis for German Expressionism allows us to approach artworks and texts in more nuanced ways, engaging solidly established theoretical and sociohistorical approaches that enhance and update our understanding of the material under investigation. We can move beyond the masculine, “New Man” viewpoint so firmly associated with German Expressionism and examine alternative, critical, and divergent interpretations of the changing world at the time. This approach has only just begun within scholarship on Expressionism, and while gender theory has inspired initial analyses of women Expressionist authors, it also urges a reanalysis of the ascription or avowal of masculinity, gender performance, and gender fluidity in German Expressionism in conjunction with intersectionality and positions of difference. If we think about gender theory today, the focus on fluidity rather than dichotomies, flexibility rather than rigidity in conceptions and understandings of gender and sexuality, allows for richer and more inclusive readings of texts and artworks that deserve a new and more informed investigation of the variety of lifeworlds and viewpoints lived and expressed at the time.

In “Somaesthetics, Gender, and the Body as Media in Claire Goll’s Racialized Expressionism,” for example, Anke Finger discusses gender identity and ethnicity from the perspective of an aesthesis of the body in that a woman’s own body serves as a medium for performing or expressing precisely those identities listed above. Following an introduction to the larger body of work by women writers, especially the display or integration of sensory perception, this chapter focuses on Claire Goll’s Der Neger Jupiter raubt Europa (The Negro Jupiter abducts Europe, 1926) to argue for gender and socialjustice oriented perspectives on race, somaesthetics, and the body as media. The emphasis lies in an intersensory and interarts approach to the avant-gardes and their media, supported by research on intersectionality. Importantly, the focus on sensory experience also opens up a renewed discussion about race and ethnicity, questioning markers of “whiteness” and “blackness,” class and socioeconomics that complicate the discourses of difference in the 1920s. Goll’s text, as Finger points out, foregrounds sensory perception and bodily experience, questions the assignment of color to complicated sets of identity and social and political context, and engages with everyday practices of blatant racism. Her focus, contrary to previous scholarship on Goll’s text, is on the interracial couple that embodies the colonial conflict between Europe and Africa and highlights the discourses of difference, between ethnicities, cultures, and genders, by using Expressionist aesthetics, in this case Goll’s acerbic and biting criticism of white supremacy, in distinct and subtle ways.

Megan Brandow-Faller, in “Gender, Sexuality, and the Makeup of Feminine Beauty: Viennese Expressionist Ceramics and the Wieselthier Frauenkopf,” discusses Viennese Expressionist ceramics that exploded onto the postwar art scene, laying claim to the same expressive immediacy as the easel canvas. Informed by the primitivizing currents first present at the 1908/9 Kunstschauen (art shows), Expressionist ceramics emerged out of the collaborative, experimental atmosphere of the Wiener Werkstätte Artist Workshops, an experimental design space predominated by female art students during the war. The work of Vally Wieselthier (1895-1945), head of the Wiener Werkstätte Department of Ceramics, and students such as Gudrun Baudisch defined what critics perceived as the movement’s feminine aesthetic: roughly modeled, unevenly glazed, and brightly painted ceramic vessels and figural sculptures with surface ornamentation revealing an excitement about process and spontaneity.