Art, artifice, and eroticized infantilization: Imagining Japanese femininities in the Weimar Republic in Fritz Lang's Harakiri (1919) and Kapitän Mertens's “Kio, die lasterhafte Kirschblüte” (1924)

Abstract

This article focuses on the ways in which a Japan‐specific Orientalism regarding Japanese femininities establishes itself in Weimar Germany's popular culture. In this period of German democratization in which we observe Weimar women's social, sexual, and political liberation, I propose that popular culture texts such as Fritz Lang's film Harakiri (1919) and Kapitän Mertens's magazine publication “Kio, die lasterhafte Kirschblüte” (1924) created an alternative fantasy engaging with contemporary anxieties and dreams. I read the depiction of Japanese femininities as a mediation of predominantly heterosexual male fears about the liberation movement of modern Weimar women as circulated in mass media. In developing this reading, I observe a simultaneity of three different imagined Japanese femininities: aestheticized artificialization/reification, eroticization, and infantilization. I argue that the narrative construction of such ultimately subservient exotic, doll‐like figures is diametrically opposed to the widely studied New Woman of Weimar and thus warrants further inquiry.