Why another article about the “new woman” in Weimar Germany, which for at least twenty-five years has been a favorite topic of historical scholarship in various disciplines? Earlier studies in history, art history, and German and Gender Studies unmasked the “new woman” as a media construction unrelated to the life-world of women after World War I,Footnote ¹ and newer studies emphasize the liberating tendencies, especially for younger women in Weimar Germany.Footnote ² Broadening these perspectives, I will argue that the concept of the “new woman” and its specific temporal structure can be seen further as a paradigm case for Weimar political and intellectual debates in general. “New women” were conceptualized as anticipations of the future and thus need to be situated and understood in front of the broader horizon of expectation, in the words of Reinhart Koselleck, of Weimar Germany. Because the realm of politics is constituted by expectations of the future, of what will happen and of what may be done, an analysis of the “new woman” and concurring anticipations of the future can, in turn, elucidate the structure and dynamics of political discourse in Weimar Germany.

So far, historians have given three explanations as to why and how the “new woman” figured prominently within the popular culture as well as in the intellectual and political debates in Weimar Germany. A first group of authors diagnoses a “crisis of masculinity” resulting from the defeat in World War I, the mutilation of male bodies in combat, and the turbulence of gender roles during and after the war.Footnote ³ In the newly founded Republic, the presence of women in politics and larger parts of the economy supposedly challenged male supremacy and triggered reaffirmations of masculinity. Second, historians working on eugenics and biopolitics locate the debates on the “new woman” within the context of demographic concerns in Weimar Germany.Footnote ⁴ Against the backdrop of a wide pro-natalistic consensus, the “new woman,” unmarried and conscious of her sexual desires, seemed to pose a threat to the “racial” future of the German nation. Finally, following Detlev Peukert, authors argue that the “new woman” epitomized “modernity” and the “modern” way of life, hence arousing furious reactions from groups that were discontent with or in opposition to the modern world.Footnote ⁵

These three explanations are not mutually exclusive, but compatible and capture important aspects of the debates about the “new woman.” The assumption of a “crisis of masculinity” after World War I may hold for some of the homecoming soldiers, in particular the now well-researched mentally or physically disabled war veterans.Footnote ⁶ It is less convincing, however, for those German soldiers returning from the eastern front who considered themselves victors who had just been bilked out of their victory. Even though extreme nationalists and Freikorps soldiers expressed male anxiety about an aggressive, dominating femininity in autobiographical and fictional literature, most of the literature dominantly and straightforwardly emphasized manliness and masculinity.Footnote ⁷ Some explain the emergence of a “male fundamentalism” (Bernd Weisbrod) and the display of violent masculinity demonstrated by paramilitary formations marching in the streets by a foregoing insecurity of male identity. This explanation, however, inserts a psychological step that historical research cannot establish. By contrast, there was a close connection between demographic concerns and debates about the “new woman.” From the perspective of the omnipresent demographic and racial concerns, women postponing marriage and having fewer children posed a serious threat. Fears of “racial decline,” however, only partly elucidate why many observers from the political right were obsessed with the outer appearance of the “new woman.” The third explanation suffers from the difficulties in establishing explanatory connections between the “new woman” and such abstract concepts as “modernity” or even a “crisis of modernity.”Footnote ⁸ Besides, embracing at least some distinctively modern elements, most of the relevant political groups had an ambivalent attitude toward modernity. Hence, pointing to “modernity” cannot be sufficient to interpret their intellectual utterances and political behavior.

One way of concretizing the notion of modernity is by referring to its specific conception of time. As Reinhart Koselleck and Niklas Luhmann argue, a constitutive element of modern times was the orientation of the temporal self-conceptions of societies toward an open future.Footnote ⁹ Conceiving of the present as a “modern” time depended on establishing and widening a gap between the space of experience (Erfahrungsraum) and the horizon of expectation (Erwartungshorizont).Footnote ¹⁰ The rapid and fundamental changes of the economic, social, and political orders during and after World War I and the Russian Revolution seemed to prove not only that the very basic structures of society, politics, and the economy could change relatively quickly, but also that they could be intentionally altered. Thus, in Weimar Germany, the future appeared to be malleable and various visions of radically alternative futures or even utopias were vigorously debated.Footnote ¹¹ Although the contents of these visions of the future were different, their structures consisted of basic assumptions that cut across the classical divisions of the political spectrum.Footnote ¹² According to one of these assumptions it was possible in the present to define bearers of the future. Depending on the political preferences, this intellectual pattern could be filled in various ways, one of which was the “new woman,” concurring with other beings of the future and thus being subject to vigorous debates.

In order to show how “new women” appeared as beings of the future, I will first provide a short survey of the temporal structures of the discourse about the future in Weimar Germany and then sketch the relationship between gender and visions of the future in general as well as their specific interaction after World War I. After that, I will offer a closer analysis of the ways in which the “new woman” was seen and attacked as an anticipation of the future and, finally, show how this reconceptualization changes our understanding of both the “new woman” and the political dynamics of the Weimar Republic.

Temporal Structures of Expectation after World War I

People entertain expectations of the future and act in accordance with them, but most of these visions are private and not easy to access historically. Analyzing the horizon of expectation in Weimar Germany, one has to focus on the utterances of journalists, intellectuals, and politicians concerning the future of the collective. In newspapers, journals, pamphlets, and books, they discussed the future of politics, the economy, science, and living conditions in Germany, Europe, and the world. Despite the differences in content, these texts formed a coherent discourse about the future since, in one way or another, the authors had to address the following basic questions: Will the future be better or worse, and is it something to be feared or hoped for? Will future changes occur as the result of a continuous development, or will there be a rupture? What are the spatial and temporal dimensions of expectation; is the better future near, or far away, or has it already begun? Is it possible to achieve a change for the better through one's own activity, and which activity is most likely to do so?Footnote ¹³

Analyzing a representative sample of seven newspapers and six journals as well as a great variety of autonomous publications that cover the whole range of the political spectrum, one can determine a common discursive formation beyond the classical political divisions.Footnote ¹⁴ These common elements constituted the basis on which the vigorous and heated political conflicts could occur. Above all, and contrary to the widespread depiction of Weimar Germany as an era of pessimism or as a janus-faced epoch drawn between an overly optimistic delusion of feasibility (Machbarkeitswahn) and cultural pessimism (in Peukert's words), there were hardly any expressions of pessimistic attitudes. Rather, pessimistic scenarios were always narrowly circumscribed and formulated only against a fundamentally optimistic belief in the malleability of the future and the possibility of achieving a “better” or a “new time.”Footnote ¹⁵ This attitude corresponded to a widespread rejection of fatalism and passivity. In their public statements Weimar intellectuals and politicians of all backgrounds shared an activist tendency, a belief in creative activity and the opportunity to change the path of the future. Because of these assumptions and the necessity of positioning themselves against concurring expectations of the future, they had to concretize their expectations and locate the beginning of the “better world” in space and time. In general, long-term expectations lost ground in Weimar Germany, and short-term visions became more and more attractive: utopia seemed to move closer to reality, as the sociologist Hans Speier summarized a central idea of Karl Mannheim's Ideology and Utopia.Footnote ¹⁶ Particularly popular, however, was the intellectual figure of locating the future or at least the beginnings of the “new time” in the present.

Since many Germans had entered World War I with high expectations concerning a cultural and spiritual renewal and because of the transformations during the war, many held the assumption that Germany was about to enter a new age when the war ended.Footnote ¹⁷ During the German revolution, in particular, the political left formulated far-reaching hopes of renewal. For example, the Independent Social Democrat Kurt Eisner declared after his appointment as prime minister of Bavaria on November 8, 1918, “A new time is beginning!,” and he urged his contemporaries to join him in the “construction of a new world.”Footnote ¹⁸ Many titles of papers edited by the Councils of Workers and Soldiers indicate the consciousness of standing at the threshold of a new time, and some of the councils even complained about measures taken by the revolutionary government because they were not “born out of the fully grasped spirit of a new time.”Footnote ¹⁹ Founded at the turn of 1918/19 and until the failure of the “March action” in 1921, the Communist Party expected a revolutionary reordering of the world to be very close.Footnote ²⁰ Yet, during the revolution, not only leftist or liberal intellectuals and politicians, but also young radicals on the political right entertained optimistic expectations of a coming fundamental renewal.Footnote ²¹

Because of the brutal destructions of the attempts to establish Soviet Republics and the realities of the Weimar parliamentary democracy, however, radicals on both the right and the left were soon disappointed.Footnote ²² Thus, only the parties of the Weimar coalition and the intellectuals in their vicinity continued to refer to the Republic itself as a “new time.” Yet even the Social Democrats who called their followers at the beginning of 1919 to move together into the new time renewed the call two years later as if the “new time” had not begun, but was still to come.Footnote ²³ Accordingly, after the reunion with parts of the Independent Social Democrats, the re-ideologized Heidelberg program defined socialism as a “great becoming economic and political fact” that was still to be realized.Footnote ²⁴ Besides, the technical elites shared this sense that the new time had only partly begun when they planned an exhibition in the late 1920s under the title, “The New Time,” in order to “realize, grasp, and implement the new reality.”Footnote ²⁵

As a consequence, the Weimar Republic seemed to be the realization of hardly anyone's optimistic expectations of the future. At most, it was seen as the beginning of something that still had to be realized, but for the extremists on the political right and left who expected a fundamental renewal in the near future, the Republic was rather an impediment that had to be overcome. After a period of reduced revolutionary enthusiasm in the middle years of the Weimar Republic, the communists began to discern signs of a coming revolution from 1929 onward, and the intellectuals of the conservative revolution intensified their visions of a coming break and renewal.Footnote ²⁶ Thus, in general, the “new time” remained a concept of expectation during the existence of the Republic. Does this mean that the young conservative Edgar Julius Jung was mistaken when he declared in his attack on the political system as a “Rule of the Inferior” (Die Herrschaft der Minderwertigen) that it had become customary since 1918 to “babble” of the “beginning of a new time”?Footnote ²⁷ Despite Jung's polemic undertones, he correctly observed that authors from all parts of the political spectrum concurred in their diagnoses of the beginning of a “new time.” They saw its realization not in Germany as a whole, however, but only on a smaller scale in individuals, groups, or brief temporal manifestations of communities. Looking at the intellectual and political debates, “new people” and “new communities” seemed to grow almost everywhere, and even Jung himself put forward his own vision of a new people's movement that had started to develop outside the state institutions.Footnote ²⁸

Unfortunately, in the 1920s there were no systematic opinion polls, but from time to time newspapers and journals asked their readers what they thought about the future. For example, the conservative Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, which was politically close to the Deutsche Volkspartei and industrialist circles, conducted several surveys concerning Germany's present and future. At the turn of 1923–24 the paper asked eighteen prominent figures of public life if at present “the decay of the old or the beginning of something new” was dominant, and they all agreed that the present time was one of new beginnings.Footnote ²⁹ Two years later representatives of various occupations overwhelmingly concurred in their assessments that they could already observe the beginnings of a new time.Footnote ³⁰ And at the turn of 1927/28 the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung polled more than 3,000 of its readers concerning the most important fact since the end of the war. Neglecting minor differences of opinion, almost two-thirds of the readers located the beginnings of a better future or maybe a “new time” in the recent past.Footnote ³¹

Locating the future in the present was a convenient way to circumvent the problems usually connected to predictions of the future. By definition, secure knowledge of the future cannot be obtained, but it is an open space for projections, hopes, and fears. Purporting to assume a realist stance, the politically conservative intellectuals in particular denounced optimistic visions and utopias as unrealizable and dangerous plans and claimed to talk only about actual forces in the present. For them, locating the future in the present offered a means of talking about the future without being accused of utopianism. In 1926 the right-wing historian Karl Alexander von Müller, who later joined the National Socialists, clearly formulated this approach. In his introduction to a survey concerning “Germany's future” conducted by the conservative journal Süddeutsche Monatshefte, von Müller argued that the future was uncertain and no present could “know what future it bore in itself.” Even though it was certain that the people who would later form and create the future were already living among the contemporaries, Müller thought it impossible to know who they were. Yet the intellectual did not have to confine himself to the statement of this uncertainty and lack of knowledge. According to Müller, he could and should define the people in the present to whom he would like to entrust the future and try to pave the way for them: “The people who will leave their mark on tomorrow and the future are already living among us today. But who are they? We do not know. But we can still help, as far as we are able, to pave the way for those to whom we would like to entrust that course.”Footnote ³²

This quote by von Müller neatly captures the ambivalent task many intellectuals in Weimar Germany assigned themselves: they tried to locate the bearers of the future in the present and encourage them to bring about the future they desired. Thus, diagnostic and prognostic elements always coincided in their analyses of the present. This attitude was most obvious in the various theories of utopias that were developed at the time. Social scientists of such different intellectual backgrounds as the conservative revolutionary Hans Freyer, the unorthodox Marxist Ernst Bloch, and the liberal Karl Mannheim concurred in their theories of utopia, defining it as a mental force in the present that would usher in future change. Trying to determine these utopian forces in the present, that is, to define concrete persons or groups that were capable of creating the future (zukunftsfähig or zukunftsträchtig), they wanted to formulate self-fulfilling prophecies in order to bring about what—according to their theories—resulted from forces of nature or history.Footnote ³³ In this sense sociological discourses about utopia were not only scientific reflections of contemporary debates about the future, but they also directly derived from and took part in these debates.

Although anticipations of the future in the present were common to the whole political spectrum, they came in various guises. On the political left, not only the Communists claimed to be the future, but also the Social Democrats purported to embody the “future of the nation, yes, the future of the world.”Footnote ³⁴ For Communist and other leftist intellectuals, the proletariat constituted the raw material that had to be formed in order to become the future.Footnote ³⁵ On the political right, the authors of the so-called conservative revolution, for example around the journals Die Tat and Die Deutsche Rundschau, repeatedly saw anticipations of the future in certain groups or communities. For the editorial board of Die Tat in 1930, the “new man” already existed: “Der neue Mensch ist bereits da in Deutschland!”Footnote ³⁶ In dialectical and sometimes tautological argumentative cascades, its leading editor Hans Zehrer defined his primary task as the preparation of the new time for the new human and of the new human for the new time.Footnote ³⁷ Similarly, in the Deutsche Rundschau, Edgar Julius Jung discerned in the present the simultaneous becoming of “a new human, a new society, and a new state” and tried to foster and encourage this process in his articles. His vision was that all of those who already shared the new spiritual state should be brought together and entrusted with the national renovation.Footnote ³⁸

Among various other groups on the radical right, the National Socialists were the most successful at presenting themselves as the movement anticipating Germany's future. Depicting the other political forces as part of a national disarray and decay, Hitler claimed that, in the present, the NSDAP was the only true bearer of German statehood and would, one day, form the whole state: “Thus, while our people are about to crumble, a new community is arising within them, built on honor, loyalty, and allegiance, and although it is currently only a state within a state, it will thus become the state of the German people.”Footnote ³⁹ Not only the NSDAP derived its legitimacy from anticipating the future in the present, but the S.A. also was conceptualized as the “bearer and creator of the German future” because of an inner, almost metaphysical quality of carrying the German people's spiritual rebirth.Footnote ⁴⁰ On New Year's Eve 1929, the Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg ambiguously declared in the Völkischer Beobachter that with “the creation of Adolf Hitler a new Germany had been born,” leaving it open whether he referred to the creation of Hitler by divine or other forces or to Hitler's creation of the National Socialist movement.Footnote ⁴¹ This might have been an intentional ambiguity because, according to their agitation and propaganda, the future was not only manifest in the movement as a whole, but also personified by its “Führer,” Adolf Hitler. In the 1932 presidential elections the NSDAP presented Adolf Hitler as the “man of the future” against Hindenburg, whom they called the “past.”Footnote ⁴²

The idea of the “Führer,” which is often closely linked to National Socialism and the extreme right, pervaded the whole political spectrum in Weimar Germany.Footnote ⁴³ The concept of the “Führer” was still politically uncontaminated and used in an allegedly neutral way—just as the American notion of “leadership” today. Not only right-wing journals, such as Die Tat and Die Deutsche Rundschau, but also the liberal Neue Rundschau and the leftist Die Weltbühne described the German predicament as a “crisis of leadership.”Footnote ⁴⁴ The Socialist Workers' Youth even named its journal Der Führer—Monatsschrift für Führer und Helfer der Arbeiterjugendbewegung. In accordance with political preferences, only the concrete characterizations of the “Führer” varied, but the general concept remained the same.Footnote ⁴⁵ The “Führer” was supposed to fulfill the central function of guiding the collective from the present into a future and better state. In order to perform this task, the “Führer” himself had to be a personification of the future in the present.Footnote ⁴⁶ Most prominently, in his theory of the state, the sociologist and right-wing revolutionary Hans Freyer argued that it was not enough for a political actor to want something, but he had to have realized the goal already for himself: “He who should have the right to act must not only desire the new structure of the mind, but must also already be [that structure] himself. He must not only strive for that goal, he must have already reached it for himself.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Freyer formulated the condition for the real “Führer” that his essence was already the first anticipation of the future which his deed was supposed to realize, because only somebody who had the future could create the future: “Nur wer Zukunft hat, kann Zukunft tun.”Footnote ⁴⁸ According to this conception, which was not bound to a specific political position, it was not sufficient to envision the future in advance, but the “Führer” had to be the first man of the “new time” in order to guide the collective from the present into the future.

In other conceptions of the transformation to a better time, the future was not anticipated in a single individual, but rather in a group of people. In 1920, for example, the social democratic school-reformer Paul Oestreich identified people of the future (Zukunftsmenschen) involved in the various life-reform movements and already living as “aliens” in an unfriendly present.Footnote ⁴⁹ Taken together, however, the members of the life-, settlement-, community-, school-, nutrition-, cultural-, and body-reform movements were more than isolated aliens in an inhospitable environment. As early as the Kaiserreich, the life-reform groups had moved toward the center of society with a high degree of organization in societies and clubs. For example, the several hundred thousand adherents of a new body-culture through dancing, gymnastics, nudism, and fitness-training wanted to create “new people” and self-confidently presented themselves as prototypes of a new generation.Footnote ⁵⁰ Other parts of the life-reform movement entertained similar temporally structured self-images, relating the present and the future in complex ways. Entitling his article in the life-reform magazine Der Mensch von Morgen “The Coming” (“Die Kommenden”), the leftist writer and workers' activist Rudolf Rocker did not so much express the expectation of somebody in the future, but rather referred to the new humanity (neues Menschentum) that already struggled against its adversaries in the present.Footnote ⁵¹ According to the conceptions of the life-reformers, the “coming people” lived, simultaneously, in the present which they wanted to overcome and in the future which they were trying to form.Footnote ⁵²

While the life-reform movement cut across the classical intellectual divisions, “youth” featured in all parts of the political spectrum as the embodiment of the future and its potential in the present par excellence. Many authors habitually stressed that young people would become the future by force of nature and expressed their hopes that they would then create a better world. The “myth of the young generation” was attractive because it offered the opportunity to look optimistically into the future in spite of a desolate present. Moreover, “youth” was politically polyvalent, offering intellectuals from all groups the opportunity to define it according to their wishes and to claim it for their purposes.Footnote ⁵³ While a people without youth was considered to be a people without a future, to “have” the youth meant to “have” and thus “be” the future.Footnote ⁵⁴ This idea opened a tautological rhetorical space that was—most famously—exploited by Joseph Goebbels who turned the idea around, arguing that the National Socialists had the youth because the Nazis were the future: “‘He who has the future has the youth.’ The revolutionary idea of National Socialism carries within it the future of the German nation.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Taking the idea one step further, the concept of “youth” could be disconnected from biological age altogether and applied not only to political groups but also to the German people as a whole. In this way, the right-wing revolutionary Arthur Moeller van den Bruck claimed that the German people had special rights because it was a “young people” and would thus be among the peoples of the future.Footnote ⁵⁶

Discursive Traditions: Gender and Visions of the Future

The “new woman” occupied a similar conceptual space within the horizon of expectation in Weimar Germany anticipating a future state of historical development. Before World War I, there had already been three different, yet intersecting, connections between conceptions of gender and visions of the future. First, gender relations had always played an important role in classical utopian texts; second, Marxists considered the emancipation of women to be an indicator of the stage of historical development; and, third, the women's movement of the nineteenth century depicted the ideal of an emancipated woman as an orienting vision for the future.

Named after Thomas More's novelistic description of an ideal state, De optimo rei publicae statu, deque nova insula Utopia (1516), the literary genre of utopias designed perfect arrangements of state institutions and societies either in remote places or distant times. As the early historiography on utopias already noted, the regulation of marriage and the education of women was central to many utopian texts from Plato's Politeia onward.Footnote ⁵⁷ In her treatment of the “women's problem in ideal states in the past and the future,” published in 1925, Margarete Weinberg even declared that the women's question was central to all utopias, second only to education and nutrition.Footnote ⁵⁸ Aiming at the creation of an ideal society, the writers of utopias faced the problem of finding people who were capable of living the new ways of life. Thus many utopias advocated eugenicist ideas that had already been addressed in Plato's Politeia and became more important with the rise of eugenics as a social science at the end of the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁵⁹ Eugenicists promised to overcome the old anti-utopian argument that it was impossible to realize an ideal society by abolishing certain institutions because human beings were not good enough. Using the language and argumentative means of advanced science, they suggested designing new people who would be able to sustain a new and better society.Footnote ⁶⁰ For two reasons the emancipation and education of women became important in these eugenicist schemes of social improvement: On the one hand, according to Francis Galton, the founding father of eugenics, women had to be educated, because otherwise it was impossible to distinguish the genetically “better” from the “inferior” since his classifications required the testing of mental and physical abilities.Footnote ⁶¹ On the other hand, eugenicists argued that women needed to have the right to choose sexual partners in order to create happy marriages with many healthy and eugenically superior children. Thus, at least parts of the eugenicist and the feminist movement had similar interests that led to various forms of interaction.Footnote ⁶²

Like many utopias, Marxist social philosophy had an emancipative element. According to Marx and Engels, the exploitation of women was a secondary contradiction of economic development, i.e., of the antagonism between the forces and the conditions of production. Even though not standing at the center of Marxist concern, women's emancipation could indicate the stage of historical development that would finally lead toward their liberation in the communist society. In German social democracy, most prominently, August Bebel elaborated the women's question and its relation to socialism. In 1879 Bebel published Die Frau und der Sozialismus as a contribution to the debate on the “state of the future” in which the German Social Democrats tried to elaborate the goal of the socialist society in greater detail since Marx and Engels had refrained from depicting the final aim of historical development.Footnote ⁶³ Bebel's study was immensely popular, published in fifty-three editions before 1914 and among the books most often checked out in socialist libraries.Footnote ⁶⁴ Bebel envisioned the woman in the new society as socially and economically independent of and equal to the man. In accordance with Marxist theory, however, the only way to realize women's emancipation was by means of a revolution abolishing class rule and exploitation altogether.Footnote ⁶⁵ The coming “golden age” of which people had dreamed for thousands of years would end not only class rule, but also male domination of women.

Because of this still revolutionary attitude awaiting a big “Kladderadatsch” that would change women's position in society, Bebel and the socialist women's movement with him differed fundamentally from their bourgeois counterparts who tried to better women's fate within the existing economic order. In the nineteenth century, a biologically founded dichotomy of gender characters was generally taken for granted, associating masculinity with activity, technology, and the future, and femininity with passivity, naturalness, and the past.Footnote ⁶⁶ Above all, the female character was defined by motherhood, which confined women to child rearing, maternal duties, and the home.Footnote ⁶⁷ Demanding equality before the law and greater opportunities for self-expression, the German bourgeois women's movement did not challenge this gender dichotomy, but rather construed equality as a means to improve society by bringing women with their natural gender character into various new fields of society outside the home.Footnote ⁶⁸ Looking back at the history of the bourgeois women's movement before the war, one of its leaders, Helene Lange, described the dominant conviction that “equality […] should not be demanded because of the similarity but because of the difference of the genders.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Considering the gender hierarchies of the nineteenth century, however, even the bourgeois women's movement formulated an emancipative vision or maybe utopia of a “new woman” who would be an autonomous female personality characterized by social and economic independence as well as equal rights to education and politics. In addition, more radical parts of the movement even extended their demand toward a self-determined sexuality.Footnote ⁷⁰

At the beginning of the Weimar Republic these three connections between discourses about the future and about gender relations intersected, endowing the debates surrounding the “new woman” with great significance and enlarging the potential sources of conflict. First, the rise of eugenic thinking and demographic concerns stressed the importance of the women's question and the reproductive behavior of “new women.” Second, socialist utopias as well as utopias in general seemed to approach their realization since at the end of World War I fundamental transformations of state and society in short time spans suddenly seemed feasible. Third, in the realm of politics, with the concession of the right to vote, a basic claim of the feminist movement had been fulfilled, endowing women with a new civic position. Finally, after the upheavals of the war economy and in accordance with a long-term trend, women moved in greater numbers into new and different forms of employment in Weimar Germany.Footnote ⁷¹ In these contexts and in an intellectual climate in which Germany's future as a whole seemed to be at stake and was widely discussed, the debates concerning gender, and the “new woman” in particular, gained strength, urgency, and significance.

New Women as Anticipations of the Future in Weimar Germany

Like their male contemporaries, organized women experienced the end of World War I as opening up a wide range of opportunities and space for creative activity. In 1919 especially feminist women on the political left welcomed the new options for women that the “catastrophic breakdown of the World War” had produced. In an editorial to their new pacifist journal Die Frau im Staat, Anita Augspurg and Lida Gustava Heymann saw “the becoming of a new time.”Footnote ⁷² To them the fact that within this “enormous transformation process” women received civic rights, signified that the age of the “fairy-tale princess” was over and that women in particular had to assume responsibilities and to participate in the creation of a “new time.”Footnote ⁷³ Because the time was revolutionary, female pacifists argued, women had the task of reforming the “sense of life” and improving the fate of humanity.Footnote ⁷⁴

This optimistic outlook cannot only be found among revolutionary-minded women on the political left. Immediately at the end of the war, in November 1918, Gertrud Bäumer, the liberal leader of the Federation of German Women's Associations (Bund deutscher Frauenvereine, or BDF), expressed great remorse over the loss of the war and the old order. Yet, like her counterparts on the left, she saw the present as a period “between the times.” Thus she saw new space opening up for creative power and diagnosed that something new was growing. Bäumer called upon her fellows to participate in its creation, suggesting that “new life can be excavated and formed by us.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Even on the political right women moved into politics eager to grasp new opportunities of expression. Frequently writing for German-nationalist journals such as Die Deutschnationale Frau and Frau und Nation, Magdalene von Tilling argued that the general rejection of women in politics that had prevailed among conservatives had been “destroyed by the facts.” Because of the upheavals of the war and the revolution, “the new position of the woman” had already become reality.Footnote ⁷⁶ Thus not only in the household but in all parts of society women had to do their share in working for a better future, and even the conservatives should accept that.

Because of women's improved position in the workforce and their newly acquired rights as citizens in Weimar Germany, not only their position seemed to have changed but women themselves also seemed to have changed: many intellectual observers discerned the occurrence of a “new woman.” According to their political and intellectual preferences, they described and evaluated the “new woman” in various ways as promising or terrifying. After the war, in the mass media the older ideal of the new woman as an emancipated and autonomous human being became closely linked to changes in lifestyles and female fashion. Magazines such as Die schöne Frau, Die Dame, Elegante Welt, and the German Vogue helped to create an easily identifiable visual type of a “new woman.” They presented a new generation of women that differed fundamentally from their mothers, having short haircuts (Bubiköpfe) and wearing shorter skirts, plain tops and sweaters, narrow hats, sportive clothes, and sometimes even decidedly male accessories.Footnote ⁷⁷ Advertisements that aimed at broad audiences were populated with “new women,” and in the articles film stars, artists, and sportswomen in particular appeared as personifications of the new female type.Footnote ⁷⁸ Characteristically they anticipated a future, liberated femininity which the majority of women had yet to achieve. Within the iconography of the women's magazines there were two different visual types of the “new woman,” namely the sportive Americanized “girl” and the “garçonne,” depicted as a femme fatale playing with masculine accessories.Footnote ⁷⁹

At first sight, the non-German descriptions seem to indicate a perception of the “new woman” as an international phenomenon, attributing her occurrence in Germany to foreign influences; however, the use of foreign expressions naming the “new woman” was not only a means of alienating her from German culture and stressing her foreign and international roots. Analyzing the temporal structure of the “new woman,” it is significant that she was described in French and English because these were languages from countries that traditionally had been viewed as countries of the future in general and of Germany's future in particular. In the nineteenth century, France had been constructed as the sanctuary of “civilization,” describing a future—not necessarily desirable—state of society. By the beginning of the 1920s, however, French civilization had lost its orienting function after many German intellectuals had used sets of asymmetrical dichotomies opposing it to German “culture” during World War I. Thus, France continued to function as a role model only in terms of fashion—journals such as Die praktische Berlinerin and Die schöne Frau showed their readers the latest trends from Paris which would soon come to Berlin. Considering the declining appeal of French “civilization,” it is not surprising that in the German media the “garçonne” appeared less frequently than the sportive “girl” who was considered to be distinctly American.Footnote ⁸⁰

Generally speaking, in the 1920s there were two countries many German intellectuals conceived of as countries of the future. Depending on their political preferences, they located the future either in the Soviet Union or in the United States and saw Germany and Europe drifting toward these countries by force of historical necessity.Footnote ⁸¹ Locating the future in distant countries was a popular rhetorical device since it prevented the accusation of utopianism, endowed the visions with greater plausibility, and even gave hints at how to manage the transition from the present into the future by adapting the Soviet or American example to the German situation. To many observers, the United States seemed to be further advanced in terms of economic development, and they debated the possibility of transferring Fordist and Taylorist production techniques as well as mass consumption and popular culture to Germany.Footnote ⁸² Journalists and economists visiting Henry Ford's production sites claimed to have seen Germany's economic future there and either tried to accelerate the way toward it or to avoid its worst consequences. In addition, they purported to have witnessed in the United States a feminization of culture with dominant women who were not confined to the household anymore. Along with the female emancipation went an alleged assimilation of the sexes in fashion and behavior that was disturbing to many observers.Footnote ⁸³

While the United States seemed to prefigure Germany's future at a distance, the fashionable Americanized girls appeared as anticipations of future gender relations not only in the media but also in the streets of Berlin and other cities. Because of her connection to America, the “girl” was considered to be more than a simple fashion phenomenon that comes and goes. Describing her in American terms suggested that she belonged to a future stage of historical development so that her outer appearance—the fashionable elements—might change, but the inner transformations were there to stay. Writing several books on sports and body-culture, the psychologist Fritz Giese made a very similar claim with respect to the new dancing formations such as the “Tiller Girls” which became very popular in Germany in the 1920s. In his study on Girlkultur, Giese analyzed the dancing formations that differed from Russian ballet and from German “philosophical dance” as the first expressions of a coming “epoch of enormous structural transformations.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Performing simultaneous movements in long rows, the Tiller Girls were for Giese little “movement-machines” (Bewegungsmaschinen) that symbolized the principles of Taylorism and Fordism.Footnote ⁸⁵ Yet, behind their drilled “dance-bodies,” Giese discerned new human beings that had been produced by a country of a fundamentally different and new structure. Thus, the girls were only partly a fashion phenomenon that might soon disappear. Beneath the appearance of the new girl lay deeper structural transformations that would find other expressions. Being prefigured in the United States, which had already reached the new epoch, they would soon come to Germany as well: “We must interpret the appearance of America as a symptom of a new epoch. Not that America is the fulfillment. But it does bear certain signs, exaggerated and coarsened as the result of certain economic conditions, which surge in an undercurrent in our own culture, bubble up, and will shortly break into the light of day.”Footnote ⁸⁶

The relationship of the older generation of the women's movement to the fashionable new women was—at least—ambivalent. The leaders of the BDF were particularly critical with respect to the demands of further sexual freedom and a fully equal lifestyle of women and men.Footnote ⁸⁷ Even on the political left, where authors generally shared the demands for further liberation, female activists were careful to distinguish between truly liberating tendencies and superficial lifestyle phenomena. In 1930, for example, the radical feminist and pacifist Lida Gustava Heymann discussed the question whether women would be able to dominate fashion or whether they were controlled by fashion.Footnote ⁸⁸ In general, she separated the fundamental change in female clothing with its liberating consequences for women's lives from the minor and moody changes of the fashion industry that sometimes even tried to abolish the former accomplishments. The latter might dominate the weak and unemancipated women, “das Weibchen, das Frauchen, die Puppe.” According to Heymann, however, the “thinking, working woman, the woman of cosmic activity,” would be able to dominate fashion.Footnote ⁸⁹ Despite being a minority, these women still epitomized the older ideal of the emancipated woman and prefigured a future stage of social development. Heymann concluded that it would be a good thing if they could be optically distinguished from the pure fashion victims.Footnote ⁹⁰

Communists and nonparty intellectuals leaning toward communism shared a similar vision of a new woman, embodying the emancipative ideals but not expressing them by means of fashion and consumption. In general, the ideology and propaganda of German communism was thoroughly masculinized, glorifying, above all, male factory work and conceding rather ancillary roles to women.Footnote ⁹¹ They were supposed to work and to cope with the household, and to be politically active, sexually self-conscious, healthy, and athletic, but not to have an affinity toward luxury and consumption. Even though there was no Russian equivalent to the American “girl” as an iconic figure anticipating the future in the present, among left-leaning authors there was a general tendency to celebrate the newly developed gender relations in Soviet Russia. For them the Soviet Union was the country of the future and, accordingly, also the home of the “new woman.” For example, Helene Stöcker, the founder of the Bund für Mutterschutz und Sexualreform, declared that the Soviet Union was the only country seriously trying to solve the sex-problem and thus furthest ahead in the journey toward a sexual “new land” (Neuland).Footnote ⁹²

In this context great emphasis was laid on sexual liberation and the development of new relations between men and women. This is particularly evident in the study on the new ethics and the working class by the Russian communist Alexandra Kollontai. Starting with a literary analysis of several influential novels, she discerned a new type of autonomous female characters in these books and asked if these “new women” were only the products of the literary imagination of some novelists or if they really existed. Her conclusion was simple and clear: “Look around, see clearly, think it over, and you will be convinced: the new woman is here—she exists.”Footnote ⁹³ According to Kollontai, “new women” existed in all classes and segments of society, being economically autonomous and developing a self-conscious attitude toward sexuality.Footnote ⁹⁴ Especially in the working classes, among the women in the factories, however, Kollontai discerned the seeds of a future liberated relationship between the sexes that could and would overcome the present “sexual crisis.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Thus, the workers were already living future and better forms of sexual relationships in the present, anticipating them for the society as a whole.

While the morals of the working class worried many middle-class social reformers, conservatives were openly afraid of the sexual turbulences a socialist revolution might bring about. During and after the German Revolution, bourgeois and catholic authors had accused the communists of aiming not only at the abolishment of private property but also at the “communalization” of women. Repeatedly, they painted dark pictures of the alleged moral decay after the Russian and the Hungarian revolutions.Footnote ⁹⁶ Against these allegations some writers on the left extensively quoted noncommunist and supposedly unbiased observers who could confirm that Soviet Russia did not exhibit any signs of moral decay. While neither promiscuity nor prostitution existed, the men and women would be truly liberated and encounter each other as equals.Footnote ⁹⁷ Although in Marxist theory the complete liberation of gender relations was possible only after the revolution, authors often left space for its anticipation even outside Communist Russia. In 1922 Otto Rühle, who had left the Social Democratic Party in 1918 to participate in more radically leftist political activities, published a pamphlet on the “Socialization of Women” in his own small publishing house Am anderen Ufer. Rejecting conservative horror scenarios and criticizing bourgeois double standards that led to sexual oppression, prostitution, and venereal disease, Rühle purported that only after a proletarian revolution would a truly liberated sexuality be possible.Footnote ⁹⁸ He depicted an ideal state of free love and relationships in larger communes that seemed impossible under the conditions of a capitalist economy. Yet, Rühle dedicated his book to his twenty-year-younger girlfriend Alice Gerstel, with whom he claimed to have already anticipated the “socialism of love”: “Socialism of Love: Today only a word, a hope, a development goal. But we (dearest human!) experienced all the wonders of its bliss in advance.”Footnote ⁹⁹

Ten years later, his then-wife Alice, who had earned a Ph.D. and published several studies developing a Marxist perspective on individual psychology, wrote her own analysis of the women's problem of the present. Based on 155 questionnaires that she had distributed among women in the Volkshochschule, she developed a typology of women's characters, distinguishing between a female, a male, and a beyond-sexual (übergeschlechtlich) character.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ While the majority consisted of “female women,” embodying all classical gender stereotypes who belonged, above all, to the petite bourgeoisie, the fewer “male women,” such as the intellectuals, came from all different strata of society. The “beyond-sexual women,” however, occupied only the smallest room in society. Living in its corners, they “already pushed over the threshold of the present” into the future.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The “new woman” for Rühle-Gerstel was economically and privately independent, and experienced freedom as a matter of course while leading a meaningful and sexually fulfilled life: “She can, is, and achieves as much as and the same as a pragmatic, courageous, man who is optimistic about the future.”Footnote ¹⁰² Despite the broad contemporary literature on the “new woman,” Rühle-Gerstel judged that only very few women, perhaps only a few thousand or even hundred, already realized this ideal in the present. She called those who did, however, “forerunners of tomorrow” or “pioneers of the future,” because more and more women would follow them and realize the liberated utopia.Footnote ¹⁰³

Even other female authors writing about the “new woman” who did not share Rühle-Gerstel's Marxist philosophical outlook still concurred with her diagnosis that few women had already reached a future stage of historical development. For Elsa Hermann, women had encountered new forms of activity during the war and thus could not confine themselves to being a Dame anymore. Yet, few women already managed to lead an autonomous life in the present. One had to look for them where “true life was vibrating”: in the arts, sciences, practical work, and even in high-society circles. According to Hermann, the basic task of the present was to work for Germany's recovery for which (new) women assumed a central role. “The female sex has set up the pioneers of this work. They are represented by the NEW WOMAN.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Similar—and generally friendly—appreciations of new women as individual anticipations of the future in the present can be found in a collection of essays concerning the “woman of tomorrow” edited by the writer Friedrich Huebner. Huebner had asked a group of German writers and poets to express their hopes and wishes concerning the woman of the future. Because the writers—like women—lived in an “anticipatory mode,” he thought they would be able to describe their future appearance.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Yet, in their essays many of the authors referred to the women of the present and refrained from utopian predictions. This was not an attempt to beg the question, but rather an acknowledgment that some women already anticipated future life-forms in the present. As Georg von der Vring put it, “Today's woman is in some cases already the woman of tomorrow.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ According to von der Vring, it did not matter which position one took with respect to the “modern woman”; because she was the product of the “natural course of things,” her occurrence could not be influenced. New women were the final stage of the women's movement, which had produced a revolution and now entered the evolutionary stage. In many occupations, as “teachers, secretaries, record-setters, artists, and impostors,” women proved to be independent of men: “And it really works. She brings proof. […] Whether she marries or not, she is equally independent.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Even though Stefan Zweig thought that the woman of tomorrow would be very different because the classical types of the Dame, the housewife, and the Fräulein would disappear, he still saw a close connection to the present. According to his diagnosis, since 1900 there had been a “grandiose revolution of the woman,” transforming the relations between the sexes within one generation. In the future, Zweig predicted, this revolution would appear to be even more important than World War I.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In this picture women in the present had not completely freed themselves from the past, but already anticipated the future even if they did not yet completely fulfill the type of the new European woman. The change would continue by force of nature, however.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Accordingly, Emil Lucka explained the present was characterized by the “simultaneity of the dissimultaneous,” to borrow a phrase from Ernst Bloch. Especially with respect to the relations of the sexes, elements of different times coexisted: old forms of marriage stood next to forms that were appropriate for the present as well as to “utopian models” of gender relations.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Because of her necessary interaction with other people, Robert Musil argued, the “new woman” was a complex being having implications for the whole society. She consisted at least of a “new man, a new child, and a new society.”Footnote ¹¹¹ According to Musil and many other writers, the feminist movement was not responsible for the emergence of the “new woman,” but rather, the war and a change in popular culture, above all fashion, had freed women and increased their self-confidence.Footnote ¹¹²

In general, authors on the political right were far less sympathetic to the “new woman” and adhered to traditional values. If they described women as beings of the future, it was mainly due to the fact that they gave birth to, raised, and educated future generations and not because they anticipated a future and different order of society. As a being of the future on the political right, the “new woman” stood in sharp conflict to other anticipations that have been elaborated above. The “new human” (neue Mensch) that right-wing politicians and intellectuals discerned in the present and expected for the future was no gender-neutral concept, but rather exhibited distinctively male characteristics. In general, they propagated an extreme cult of masculinity as a recipe for Germany's future “re-emergence,” identifying masculinity, creativity, and Germanness.Footnote ¹¹³ Yet, because of the interconnectedness of gender roles and images, the cult of masculinity had various implications for women. After the passage of the new electoral law, the German National People's Party looked not only for “manly men” as voters and bearers of future German culture in the present, but they also called for “manly women.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ The extreme masculinization of conservative recipes for renewal became particularly obvious in the sermons of the protestant pastor of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Memorial Church in Berlin: “Experts arise every day for what plagues all peoples; yet, what the world lacks most are men, men, men!” He asked God to send “men” to the German people who were “weatherproof and genuinely rooted, […] manly and strong” and added that women with the same characteristics were also in need.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Despite this apparent assimilation of gender characters in times of national crisis and despair, publicists of the political right tended, in general, to confine women to their traditional female roles and tasks.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Only an orientation of women toward their alleged “nature,” to the home and the family, was supposed to contribute to Germany's reemergence, to the realization of the new man and a new time.Footnote ¹¹⁷ In the end, many authors of the right claimed that the “new man” demanded of the woman, above all, to be a mother.Footnote ¹¹⁸ While there was space for women in distinctly female occupations, “new women,” economically independent, unmarried, and unwilling to have children, posed a serious threat toward this right-wing vision of national renewal. Rather than anticipating Germany's future, they were attacked as embodiments of its possible future decline and destruction.

This criticism of the new woman that was due to the existence of concurring anticipations of the future was particularly evident in the writings and the propaganda of the National Socialists. For them as well as for other revolutionaries from the right, the “new woman” who was neither willing to let somebody else lead her nor—in their view—able to become a leader herself constituted a severe provocation since the discursive space was already taken by other beings of the future. Thus, the National Socialists fiercely attacked the “new woman.” They were particularly worried about her masculinization (Vermännerung) and androgyny which allegedly neglected the “natural differences between men and women that had been there from the beginning of time.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ Her manliness was not construed as an asset on the path toward a new Germany, but rather as a danger causing national decline. A short article in Rosenberg's monthly “scientific” journal of National Socialism on the Manhattan-Girl summarized and ridiculed optical and mental features of a masculinized “new woman” who dominated her “boy,” the effeminate American man.Footnote ¹²⁰ They were described as figures of a “new race” or “type” of mankind that was “bred” in the United States. As the author discerned American girls and boys already in Europe, the concrete danger arose that Europe would continue to imitate the American development.Footnote ¹²¹ For the National Socialists, it was clear that this dystopia of reversed gender roles could only lead to racial decline and had to be avoided.

In the National Socialist ideology, there was no space for an autonomous “new woman” anticipating the future, because this discursive role had already been taken by the Führer, the S.A., and the National Socialist movement as a whole. Discussing new strategies of addressing women in order to win elections in 1932, Florentine Hamm declared in the Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte that there was no possibility of avoiding national decay and realizing Germany's reemergence outside the National Socialist movement. She reiterated the classical tale that the movement had been created by a “few men” who had formulated the hope for a “völkisch” resurgence (Wiedererhebung) against the worldview of decline. According to National Socialist ideology, national renewal was not only a promise for the future, but the movement also already realized it in the present, causing the “spiritual rebirth of millions […] giving a new face to Germany.” In Hamm's words: “But the young Germany grows in the secret sunshine of a new myth amid the rubble, with the chaotic noise of a declining world as a cradle song, and apocalyptic prophecies as mantras.”Footnote ¹²² In this conception, there was no space for autonomous emancipation or for “new women,” but liberation was only possible within the movement that anticipated Germany's future.

Reappraising the “New Woman” in the 1920s

Some historians have argued that in Germany in the 1920s the “new woman” ceased to be a utopian vision that was located somewhere in the future but became reality.Footnote ¹²³ More and more women conceived of themselves as autonomous and independent beings trying to realize their own aspirations in life.Footnote ¹²⁴ Yet as the above considerations have shown, on a discursive level the “new woman” came in various guises and was subject to intense debates. Despite the heterogeneous ways in which “new women” were depicted and the differing attitudes with which they were appreciated—from fear and hate to hope and sympathy, they all shared a common feature. Conceptually the “new woman” always appeared as an anticipation of the future in the present. Because of this specific temporal structure of the concept, the “new woman” was highly contested.

In general, after World War I, political debates in Germany were highly futurized. Authors from all parts of the political spectrum were not content with the present but hoped for betterment and a fundamentally “new time.” Intellectuals and politicians overwhelmingly conceptualized the present as an epochal change of times, a Zeiten- or Weltenwende, and in this constellation they privileged short-term visions of break and renewal over long-term visions of continuous development. Particularly attractive, however, was the rhetorical figure of anticipating the future in the present. Localizations of the future in the present—be it of a communist society in Soviet Russia, of modern ways of production and consumption in the United States, or of a new community realized at a meeting of a youth-group or a party assembly—functioned as claims that certain visions of the future could be realized. Purporting not to talk about utopias, desirable aims or goals, but about concrete realities, this rhetorical strategy exhibited a high degree of certainty and conviction. Especially in a time when various and incompatible claims of knowing the future increased the insecurity about its development, this strategy to convey secure knowledge was very attractive. Accordingly, all claims at anticipating the future in the present were highly contested: while some authors introduced anticipations of the future—often as self-fulfilling prophecies in order to promote their goals, others attacked them as dystopian scenarios that had to be prevented.

Since the “new woman” itself was an anticipation of the future, she constituted a provocation for many alternative models. She concurred with other candidates, such as the Führer, the nationalist youth, the proletariat, and the eugenically designed man, and was thus subject to an intense political struggle. Therefore, it would be misleading to dismiss the “new woman” of the 1920s as a pure lifestyle phenomenon arguing that advertisements and the arts in the 1920s replaced the older emancipative vision of the “new woman” with a “formally determined iconographic system.”Footnote ¹²⁵ Rather the well-known accessories of the “new woman” offered many women the opportunity to “design” themselves as “new women,” that is, as people belonging to a future stage of historical development to which everybody should aspire. Regardless of their own intentions, this was at least the message in the eyes of many political observers who struggled for competing visions of the future. At a time when culture, gender relations, and ways of life were highly contested, women dressed as “new women” appeared as beings belonging to a different, future social organization and as such, they were highly political.

The occurrences of “new women” in Weimar Germany as well as the debates surrounding them are characteristic of the German political culture after World War I. The war and the subsequent revolution resulted in a further separation of Erfahrungsraum and Erwartungshorizont, opening the space of expectation to abundant possibilities of social and political improvement. While almost everything seemed to be imaginable for the future, however, the intense need arose to secure knowledge, that is, to anticipate the future and to determine its bearers who already existed in the present. The “new woman” was one of these anticipations trying to bridge the transition from the present into the future and, therefore, a distinctively “modern” figure. It would be mistaken, however, to contrast her as the “modern” woman against “traditional” visions of femininity. Rather, she epitomized one of a set of different and competing schemes of gender relations that were all “modern” in the sense that they tried to anticipate and secure the transition from the present into a better future. This temporal structure connected the “new woman” to other beings of the future and made her a paradigm case for Weimar political culture in general.