Handmaidens of Modernity: Gender, Labor, and Media in Weimar Germany

Abstract

This dissertation examines the professions, subjectivities, and social and cultural forms associated with new media for storing, transmitting, and processing information during the Weimar Republic—Germany’s first democratic state (1919-1933). I focus on three technologies—telephone, typewriter, and film—that propelled German women into the workforce in unprecedented numbers and were marked, from their nineteenth-century beginnings, by gendered patterns of labor. Informed by feminist cultural studies, labor history, film studies, literary studies, and recent German media theory on Kulturtechniken, or cultural techniques, the dissertation demonstrates the gendered logics of these new media. I challenge German media theory’s ostensibly gender-neutral approach to the history of technology and complicate dominant understandings of women as consumers and spectators of modern media. The project reveals women’s multiple (often hidden) roles in the production of media in order to retheorize relationships of gender, labor, and technological change in modern Germany.

Focusing on the white-collar occupations of telephone operator, typist, or film editor, each chapter analyzes texts that construct, and thereby help theorize, women’s roles as the “handmaidens” to Weimar modernity. Chapter 1 provides historical background, central concepts, theoretical frameworks, and a literature review. Chapter 2 examines the cultural figure of the telephone operator as depicted in a variety of Weimar-era texts: psychotechnic study, prose vignettes, poem, journalistic article, and film. Chapters 3 and 4 attend to the typewriter’s implications for female authorship and experience in the media, literary, and labor history of the Weimar era. These chapters analyze poems by Mascha Kaléko; the New Woman novels of Irmgard Keun—Gilgi, Eine von uns (Gilgi, One of Us, 1931) and Das kunstseidene Mädchen (The Artificial Silk Girl, 1932); Siegfried Kracauer’s prose piece “Das Schreibmaschinchen” (“The Little Typewriter,” 1927); and Christa Anita Brück’s novel Schicksale hinter Schreibmaschinen (Destinies behind Typewriters, 1930). Chapter 5 examines the role of the film editor in the production of German silent cinema, turning to the depiction of editing in a little-known comedy film from 1925, O.F. Mauer’s Wenn die Filmkleberin gebummelt hat (When the Film Gluer Dawdled). In Chapter 6, I revisit Fritz Lang’s iconic Weimar film Metropolis (1927).

The materials I examine—which range from modernist literary texts to popular entertainment films—depict breakdowns in communication, often involving a woman who fails to fulfill her expected role. Reading these texts with and against the grain of early twentieth-century instructional manuals, critical theory, and German cultural studies scholarship, I argue that such instances of failure, disruption, and malfunction offer a compelling counternarrative to discourses of rationalization that promoted efficiency and productivity while frequently equating women workers with machines. At the same time, this project demonstrates that women workers, authors, and subjects were central actors in the creation of Weimar modernity, even though their very human labors have been largely effaced.