Working Girls: White‐Collar Workers and Prostitutes in Late Weimar Fiction1

Abstract

This article examines the conflation of the white‐collar working woman and the prostitute in late Weimar fiction, documentary literature and social discourse. In so doing, it traces the emergence of a modern discourse on prostitutes as “sex workers” in German cultural products that predate international feminist debates held in the final decades of the twentieth century. Conducting close readings of Vicki Baum's 1929 serial novel Menschen im Hotel and of Irmgard Keun's Das kunstseidene Mädchen (1932), the article explores how these two women writers use the figure of the prostitute to deliver a critique of white‐collar work and, at the same time, examine both the limitations of and possibilities for women's work in the final years of the Weimar Republic. It investigates how women's quotidian experience of work and the increasing fluidity of gender boundaries may have changed perceptions concerning the viability of prostitution as a chosen occupation (sex work) or, at the very least, a mode of survival in turbulent times.