Julia Roos . Weimar through the Lens of Gender: Prostitution Reform, Woman's Emancipation, and German Democracy, 1919–33 . (Social History, Popular Culture, and Politics in Germany.) Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 2010. Pp. viii, 314. $70.00.

Abstract

At first sight this work seems to be a conventional history from above about a narrow topic. Unlike Victoria Harris's Selling Sex in the Reich: Prostitutes in German Society, 1914–1945 (2010), which focuses on the experience of sex workers themselves, Julia Roos is concerned with the changing regulation of prostitution from Wilhelmine to Weimar to Nazi Germany. But she offers much more. This book is a meticulously researched study of the factors behind the successful passage of the 1927 Law For Combating Venereal Diseases, undoubtedly the most important new hygiene law in the Weimar Republic, and one that contained the most tolerant prostitution policies in the West. It decriminalized prostitution, outlawed brothels, gave prostitutes better rights to work, and ended the double standard of sexual morality that held women alone responsible for the spread of venereal disease. Roos's ambitions, however, are larger. First, using the example of prostitution, she seeks to reassess the impact of the women's movement and its allies on the political left in transforming the old patriarchal order into a much more equal gender order. Like a number of recent studies by, for example, Atina Grossmann, Kathleen Canning, and this reviewer, she takes issue with the well-known negative judgments of the women's movement by historians such as Richard J. Evans, Renate Bridenthal, Claudia Koonz, Ute Frevert, and Karen Hagemann. Second, Roos boldly claims, as her title indicates, that only through the lens of gender can we truly understand why the Weimar project ultimately failed. Based on her close scrutiny of the battle to reform prostitution, she claims that liberalization mobilized “antidemocratic sentiments and opposition” and thereby significantly contributed to the rise of Nazism (p. 4). She argues that “conflicts over gender and sexuality were perhaps as important for the crisis and ultimate demise of the Weimar Republic as class antagonism and the bitter political divisions between Left and Right” (p. 8).