Introduction Blurred Boundaries: Modernity, Crisis, and Emancipation in the Culture of the Weimar Republic

Abstract

Why open a book on the culture of Germany’s Weimar Republic (1918–1933) with a quote from the lyrics of a Gershwin tune from America’s “Tin Pan Alley”? Given that the topic of this book is the relationship between gender, sexuality, modernity, and culture, it is a fairly transparent choice. These lyrics express the hope that amidst the constant change brought about by the technical and cultural innovations of the modern age, it is romantic love that can anchor us. This is an understandable dream, albeit naive—or perhaps tongue-in-cheek. For gender and sexual relations, too, were—and are—undergoing at least as much change in modern, mass societies as any other less symbolic aspect of life. Indeed, one destabilizing factor in modern gender relations may have been precisely the popularization of much older, bourgeois ideals of romantic, heterosexual love, directed through mass culture more at the lower than at the middle classes. If so, this particular de stabilization is especially ironic, given that those romantic ideals were originally meant to reinforce the concept of a stable, intimate private sphere that was “timeless,” immune to the changes that the rise of the bourgeoisie and capitalism were instigating in the public realm of modern life.

The radio and. die telephone And the movies that we know May just be passing fancies And in time may go But oh my dear Our love is here to stay

—Ira Gershwin, 1938