Commodities of Desire: The Prostitute in Modern German Literature

Abstract

Schonfeld, Christiane, ed. Commodities of Desire: The Prostitute in Modern German Literature. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2000. 270 pp. $59.00 hardcover. Commodities of Desire consists often essays that document and analyze the prostitute figure in German literature and film from approximately 1890 to 1930. The essays emphasize how literary and filmic texts exist as part of contemporary social, cultural, political, and legal contexts, displaying, enforcing, and/or undermining prevailing ideologies. Tackling works by both well-known (Schnitzler, Wedekind, Brecht) and lesser-known (Bohme, Hartleben) authors, these scholars offer a comprehensive view of the treatment of prostitution in artistic products of the period. Schonfeld's contextualizing introduction traces the evolution of the prostitute from counterexample of moral behavior in medieval through early modern literary texts to madonna of sexual liberation in expressionist works (5). She justifies her decision to focus on 1890-1930 by reference to industrialization and urbanization, phenomena that led to an upsurge in the number of registered prostitutes in Germany and Austria, an increased interest in the Prostitutionsfrage in the political arena, and more literary and artistic representations of prostitutes. Analyzing how fin-de-siecle pseudo-scientific and sociological texts construct the prostitute, Schonfeld shifts the emphasis from frequently (Weininger, Ferrero, Lombroso) to rarely invoked authors (Franz Seraph Hugel, Julius Kuhn, Robert Hessen, among others). In her synopsis of the social and legal predicament faced by female sex-workers, she presents fascinating details (that prostitutes were forbidden to go to the zoo, for example) and underscores the double standard on prostitution. A tacitly acknowledged necessity for men, prostitution was nevertheless a criminal offense for women, who could be forced to submit to invasive medical examinations and experimental treatments for sexually transmitted diseases. The essays vary greatly in quality, though all are well signposted and all, even those that seem to lose their sense of argument and dissolve into summary and description, offer new and suggestive ideas about modernist literature. Barbara Hales' and Alan Lareau's essays are notable because each limits its analysis to only one or two works and is therefore more attentive to textual detail. Hales explores the connection between female sexuality and criminality, drawing our attention to how the criminal woman is invariably sexualized in psychological and sociological treatises and demonstrating how that sexualization is carried over into popular entertainment in two Weimar street films, Die Strasse and Asphalt. …