Images of the Prostitute in Weimar Germany. Reference Type Thesis Year of Publication. This dissertation focuses on images of the sexual woman, especially the prostitute, as painted in Germany during the Weimar Republic, , by such artists as Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, George Grosz and others. Frequently, the women in these pictures are threatened, injured, maimed or even killed. While it is to be expected that artists active during that time would reflect the new sexual openness that followed the morally oppressive years of Imperial Germany, an openness regarding sex and prostitution evident in the literature as well as films, it is curious that the paintings dealing with prostitution seem to be fraught with much hostility toward the women themselves.
French turn-of-the-century images of similar subject matter took into consideration larger aspects of prostitution such as the lives of the women, their work and their leisure, and, of course, their relationships with men. In the twentieth century, however, and increasingly during the years of the Weimar Republic, attention shifted away from the situation of prostitution and focused on individual prostitutes instead.
Although heralded as the champion of the underprivileged and elevated by the artists as a symbol of new sexual freedom, the prostitute in these pictures is not only a sex object--one would expect that--but she is the target for the expression of violent male emotions. Studying the paintings of sexual murders, for example, one comes to the conviction that the artists are not the neutral observers of crime as they may wish to appear.
Their pictures reveal a great deal of hostility toward as well as fear of the sexual woman. Art history has until now paid very little attention to these images.
They have usually been explained away in terms of the artists' anger and frustration in connection with World War I. This study shows that the reasons for these hostile depictions of women go far beyond such simplistic explanations; they must be sought, to a large degree, in the artists' attitudes toward sex and toward women who determined their own sexual destinies.
