Anticipating the Future in the Present: “New Women” and Other Beings of the Future in Weimar Germany

Abstract

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, and newer studies emphasize the liberating tendencies, especially for younger women in Weimar Germany. 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.

“Junge Mädchen” and “Daughters of the Sky”: Transatlantic Changes in the Construction of Femininity after 1930

“…20 However, the "Girl" was not only a shorthand for the broader complex of German ideas and images of "America," it also embodied an interpretation of current German society and a construction of a possible German future, in both political and sociocultural terms. 21 As in many other European countries, the question of what it meant to be female was highly politicized in Germany after 1918. The experience of the breakdown of the old political and social order, the establishment of a democratic republic, and the introduction of female suffrage made women seem like the most prominent representatives of the momentous social, cultural, and political transformations the country had gone through.…”