Modernist Magazines and the Social Ideal by Tim Satterthwaite;

Author:Tim Satterthwaite;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781501341618
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

7

Sunlit Dancers

How can beauty be immoral? … No woman has ever prudishly veiled true aesthetic forms. The cult of life, which is built on beauty, has never accepted that she stay hidden from view.

Prof. G. Heimdall, ‘The Nude’, Revue des Monats, December 1926

For critics of Weimar magazine culture, such as the novelist Edlef Köppen, the superficial character of the popular monthlies was defined by their casual eroticism, the ‘legs or bosoms of naked girls’ that formed an ‘inexhaustible’ element of the magazines’ photography.1 Images of nubile dancers were, in Köppen’s view, simply part of the photographic parade, alongside the other desirable objects of modernity: the ‘dress of an elegant woman … boxers, horse races’ and so forth. Reduced to fetishised body parts, photographic nudes were pure ephemeral product, a response to consumerist demands for distraction and visual variety.

Taken as a whole, Köppen’s characterisation of the revue magazines is not unreasonable. Responding to the new permissive climate and relaxed censorship regime of the Weimar Republic, the new monthlies offered images of a youthful body culture – predominantly, unclothed, and semi-clothed female dancers – projecting the ideal of an emancipated, leisured, and sexually liberated future society.2 Much of this material was, as Köppen states, mildly erotic studio photographs of ‘naked girls’, peppered among the diverse, proliferating imagery of aesthetic modernity. Marking the magazines’ self-identity as progressive, worldly, and pleasure-seeking, nude and semi-nude photographs were included in the first issues of some of the post-1924 monthlies, and had a constant – though always constrained – presence in one or other leading title throughout the Weimar era.

There were, however, considerable variations in how nude photography was presented: in the prominence of nude images in the editorial mix, and in the aesthetic and symbolic conventions that were employed. The body culture imagery in UHU, in particular, went far beyond the commercialised eroticism of some of its competitors. Whilst the magazine published some of the formulaic nude studies that were the staple fare of titles such as Das Magazin and Das Leben, UHU was both more selective in its images and more comprehensive in its treatment, in that the nude – both female and male – was incorporated, discursively, within the magazine’s organic-modernist social ideal.

‘Hothouse flowers’

The female nudes in Weimar monthlies were embodiments of a resonant modern archetype that emerged in popular culture in the years after the First World War: the alluring, transgressive figure of the emancipated, and sexually liberated, new woman.3 For the revue magazines, trading in visions of a utopian modernity, the new woman’s eroticism was key both to her spectacular appeal, and to the construction of a normative ideal of modern femininity more in tune with the dominant, patriarchal values of Weimar society.4 At the heart of this was an implicit continuity between the fantasy figure – the pliant nudes in studio portraits – and her ‘real world’ sisters, captured in the proliferating images of modern leisure with which the revue magazines filled their pages. The exuberant gymnasts, bathers, film stars, and

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