Jill Suzanne Smith. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, Toward the end of her excellent new book, Berlin Coquette: Prostitution and the New German Woman, , Jill Suzanne Smith sketches a scene that is at once quintessentially Berlin and the basic premise of her investigation into cultural and intellectual discourses about femininity, sexuality, and early twentieth-century gender politics.
Due to a ticketing blunder, the premier has been oversold by some one hundred tickets, and the crowds outside, who wrangle and jockey for a seat inside, themselves become something of a spectacle—a sight that Willy Haas, a film critic, cannot help but include in his review of the film.
Smith, who herself bundles all of this together into her narrative about coquettes, does a masterful job highlighting the varied and ever-shifting, ever-elusive definitions of prostitution in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this goal, Smith succeeds rather brilliantly. Smith undoubtedly makes a great many extremely insightful observations along the way e. This somewhat narrow focus leads her to perhaps overstate the importance of her subject—prostitution—in turn-of-the-century Berlin, when it was, in fact, only one of several fleeting relationships that were not only booming but also increasingly under attack.
Chapters 3 and 4 showcase her quite enviable ability to dissect the often-tangled meanings of the characters of Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Tucholsky, Siegfried Kracauer, Vicki Baum, and Irmgard von Keun. Indeed, she demonstrates a wide variety of quite interesting ways in which these authors did not always mean to portray prostitution as a dead end, as scholars have heretofore believed.
But what Smith misses here is the fact that the turn-of-the-century street was already recognized as the domain of women—upstanding women, even—whose respectability remained intact even if it was questioned when they walked to and from work.
