Höch and Til Brugman, her partner from 1926 to 1935Photograph: Black & White
http://www.humanities.uci.edu/~rmoeller/HCC_Lectures/RGM_Lecture2.html
In the 1920s, the Weimar Republic, named for the town in central Germany where a new German constitution was drafted in 1919, became known throughout Europe for its encouragement of all sorts of experimentation—musical, artistic, even sexual. Although a global phenomenon, the “new woman,” characterized by her short hair cut, her androgynous dress, and her independence seemed to be particularly at home in the Weimar Republic. Particularly, in big cities like Berlin, Weimar opened up a space in which it was possible for women to enjoy same-sex relations with women in public spaces. In her 1929 book, Else Hermann described What the New Woman Is Like. Although this vision of the “new woman” was well beyond the reach of many urban working-class women and posed a threat to more traditional women of all classes, Hermann suggests some of the ways in which conceptions of appropriate femininity were subject to redefinition in the Weimar years. One such, “new woman” was Hannah Höch, a part of the Berlin Dadaist movement. In the 1920s in Germany, explicitly political art was almost exclusively produced by men and offered depictions of women that clearly reflected a male perspective. Women typically appeared as the downtrodden victims of the capitalist system, forced into poverty and unwanted pregnancy, or as prostitutes, slaves in a different way to the capitalist system. Höch was exceptional not only because she was a woman in an artistic world dominated by men, but also because she offered a much more nuanced commentary on the status of women in the Weimar Republic. (words: 258)
Reprinted in Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg, eds., The Weimar Sourcebook (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 206-7.
Comment on the above caption. What would you add or take out? What type of information is focused on in the sample? What would you do differently?
