Glamor and gloom: The female-white collar worker in mainstream cinema and popular fiction of the late Weimar Republic.
Item
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Title
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Glamor and gloom: The female-white collar worker in mainstream cinema and popular fiction of the late Weimar Republic.
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Identifier
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AAI3283132
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identifier
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3283132
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Creator
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Muller-Matits, Aranka.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Tamara S. Evans
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Date
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2007
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, Germanic | Cinema | Women's Studies
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Abstract
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This dissertation is a study of the female white-collar worker and her representation in mainstream cinema and popular fiction during the late Weimar Republic. At the center of my analysis lie the questions of how cinematic and literary texts inform on the material world, and whether female employees turned to secretary films and weibliche Angestelltenromane to negotiate their identities. In particular, I focus on the films Die Privatsekretarin (1931) and Arm wie eine Kirchenmaus (1931) as well as the novels Schicksale hinter Schreibmaschinen (1930) by Christa Anita Bruck, Das Madchen an der Orga Privat (1930) by Rudolf Braune and Das kunstseidene Madchen (1932) by Irmgad Keun. Together, these texts reflect both the emancipatory as well as the regressive aspects that shaped the lives of women in white-collar professions at the time. They echo the ambivalence that was a key factor in working women's experience of the Weimar period.;Conservative contemporaries were quick to dismiss female commercial employees as unfair competitors in the workplace or unwomanly creatures, and critics like Siegfried Kracauer, Max Horkheimer or Theodor Adorno saw them as passive consumers. I set out to challenge these perspectives. First, by identifying the reasons underlying women's entry into white-collar employment as well as their actual living and working conditions. And further by exploring the cultural phenomenon of the New Woman, created by the media for female clerks to identify with. Germany's mass media satisfied women's desire for entertainment: movies and Unterhaltungsliteratur addressed female audiences more directly than traditional culture and allowed them to draw on the popular for their subjectivity formation, turning their objectification into an opportunity.;The resemblances and differences between films and novels, between fiction and reality, rendered visible in this dissertation point to the emancipatory potential inherent in the figure of the female white-collar worker. They also explain why the tensions of modernity were never successfully synthesized for these women and resulted in disillusionment. By investigating popular and gendered aspects of modernity I hope to broaden the understanding of the Weimar Republic as a whole and contribute to the process of (re)constructing women's history.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
