“Die zarte Haut einer schönen Frau”: Fashioning Femininities in Weimar Germany's Lesbian Periodicals

Summary

Introduction

IN THE YEARS FOLLOWING the end of the First World War, Berlin developed a reputation as a site of unfettered sexual liberalism. Spurred on by an increasingly hedonistic climate and the waning of punitive Wilhelmine moral codes and conventions, the cosmopolitan cityscape was lined with private clubs for local “deviants” and European sex tourists, and the modern German metropolis fundamentally shaped the postwar erotic imaginary. It was the well-established homosexual scene in the southern district of Schoneberg, however, that firmly cemented the city's position in central Europe as the “Hauptstadt des Vergnugens” (Capital of Pleasure). In conjunction with Berlin's ever-expanding gay nightlife, the relaxing of censorship laws after the foundation of the Weimar Republic also enabled publishers to cater to the needs and desires of a queer readership in print. Although many of these early magazines were intended predominantly for male readers, Die Freundin (The Girlfriend) and Frauenliebe (Women's Love) were the most recognized and widely distributed journals for women who desired women in the interwar era. Acknowledged by historian Florence Tamagne as the “definitive reference point for lesbians of the 1920s,” these publications addressed exclusively the concerns and interests of non-heterosexual women and were available to purchase from newspaper kiosks throughout Berlin and across Germany and Europe via subscription. The emergence of regular periodicals for queer citizens enabled alternative grassroots discourses to reach a broader audience and provided a platform for positive and self-affirming models of same-sex desire. Yet, although the emancipatory aims of these publications arguably engendered a culture of open debate and political activism among their readers, the conflicting agendas of the organizations to which the magazines were affiliated sparked enduring ruptures within queer social and political circuits.

Focusing on the representation of feminine women in Weimar lesbian print media, a subject that has garnered little attention in previous studies of queer interwar publications, this chapter will explore the conflicting cultural and sexological theories to which Die Freundinand Frauenliebe subscribed and the approaches of their writers and readers to the subject of queer femininity. Combining textual analysis with historical survey, I will suggest that the assimilationist tactics employed by the Bund fur Menschenrecht (League for Human Rights, BfM) appears to create what Lisa Duggan has termed a culture of “homonormativity” in the publication Die Freundin.