Androgyny, Spectatorship, and the Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch

Author(s): Maud Lavin

Source: New German Critique , Autumn, 1990, No. 51, Special Issue on Weimar Mass
Culture (Autumn, 1990), pp. 62-86
Published by: Duke University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/488172

REFERENCES
Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/488172?seq=1&cid=pdf-
reference#references_tab_contents
You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

Duke University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
New German Critique

This content downloaded from

188.189.188.238 on Tue, 07 May 2024 12:34:33 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Androgyny, Spectatorship, and the Weimar
Photomontages of Hannah HIch

Maud Lavin

In 1930, the same year that Marlene Dietrich's Blue Angel was released,
Hannah Hach made the photomontage Marlene. With its challenging ar-
ray of sexual signs and its deliberate allusion to Dietrich, an actress wel
known for her ambiguous sexual identity, the photomontage provokes
wealth of questions about gender identity and sexuality, strategies of rep-
resentation, and the reading of imagery by a Weimar audience. In the
montage, two men gaze upward at a pair of gigantic, stockinged, and
high-heeled legs mounted upside-down on a pedestal. A bright red
mouth is positioned in the upper right corner, facing the viewer. The
mouth, not situated in the line of the male gaze, is instead offered direct
ly as an object of desire to the male or female viewer of the montage. The
name "Marlene," with its connotations of androgyny, is handwritten
across the sky in large letters, as if by a fan. Viewed in its historical con-
text, H6ch's image takes its place amidst an enormous proliferation of
images of androgyny during the Weimar years, produced by both avant-
garde artists and mass-culture institutions.
Today many critical or theoretical treatments of androgyny promote
the androgynous ideal as a liberation from constricting gender roles, or
describe it merely as a pre-Oedipal fantasy. But if we examine this strain
of imagery in the historical context of Weimar culture, we see that repre
sentations of androgyny, and of ambiguous sexual identity, can function
in two fundamentally opposed fashions.' For both the producer and the

1. A pioneering analysis of representations of androgyny is Carolyn Heilbrun, To-

ward a Recognition of Androgyny (New York: Knopf, 1964). For an incisive yet ahistorica

63

This content downloaded from

188.189.188.238 on Tue, 07 May 2024 12:34:33 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 ii- ...........

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . ::iii.i;ii~i:-:::i::: :::::

ai~iiii~ii ::_:::-::-::-::: .. ........::-

ao:-iia-~i :::??:: :1:::ir::: : : :i::

41., F?:-: ;:~ i:::::::::

:::::::::::"?:::i-::
:j : I:: ? ::::::::
??: :-:::::::-::? ::_:il::::::i:
::: :;ii : NEI: :

'::: MN.

i~~ii:::: :'i-:::::':::ji:::: ::;: ::-

M117::::~' ;:::::::::::-

........ . . . . . . . . ....

Hannah Hach, Ma
Dakis Joannou, A

62

This content downloaded from

188.189.188.238 on Tue, 07 May 2024 12:34:33 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 64 The Photomontages of Hannah H6ch

viewer, images of androgyny may open a utopian moment of shifting

and anti-hierarchical gender identities. On the other hand, such repre-
sentations may also feed reactionary ideologies of individualism and
class prejudice. Only a return to social context and an examination of
specific strategies of representation will enable us to determine the sig-
nificance of particular images of androgyny. In what follows I investi-
gate a range of images, not only from H6ch's work but also from fash-
ion photography, newspaper features, and film, in order to assess
strategies for producing and reading images of women in Weimar Ger-
many and to explore more generally the construction of female identi-
ty in and through visual media.
Representations of androgynous women appeared in newspapers and
art exhibitions of the Weimar years simultaneous with the emergence of
the concept of the New Woman, the two phenomena marking a rethink-
ing of gender identity in the context of modernity and rationalization.
The New Woman of Weimar Germany was a sign of modernity and lib-
eration, and in fact conditions for women in Germany had changed dra-
matically in the first two decades of the century. The Weimar New Wom-
an differed from her Wilhelmine counterpart in that she now held the
vote and probably had fewer children; in addition, she was more likely to
be working for a wage, to have had an illegal abortion, to be married, to
work in a pink collar position or in a newly rationalized industry, and to
live in a city.2 Sexual and social mores affecting women had also
changed, leading, at least in theory, to an increased autonomy for wom-
en and a new freedom to seek social, political, and sexual self-definition.
Despite these new possibilities of freedom and self-determination,
however, the socioeconomic status of most individual women did not
improve significantly in these years. Behind the New Woman myths of
flexibility and opportunity, women's economic opportunities, legal
rights, and political participation continued to be circumscribed.3 Al-
though more women entered the work force, they were employed in
the lowest-paid and least-unionized jobs.4 Most wage-earning women

analysis of androgyny as pre-Oedipal fantasy, see Francette Pacteau, "The Impossible

Referent: representations of the androgyne," Formations of Fantasy, Victor Burgin, James
Donald, and Cora Kaplan, eds. (London and New York: Methuen, 1986) 62-84.
2. Renate Bridenthal, Atina Grossman, and Marion Kaplan, eds., When Biology Became
Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany (New York: Monthly Review, 1984) passim.
3. Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz, "Beyond Kinder, Kiiche, Kirche" in When Bi-
ology Became Destiny.
4. Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland- Women, Family, and Nazi Politics (New York:
St. Martin's, 1987) 47.

This content downloaded from

188.189.188.238 on Tue, 07 May 2024 12:34:33 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Maud Lavin 65

merely added the duties of employment to their chores as

ers, working outside the home as well as doing all the
Clearly the creation of this "double burden" cannot be la
gressive. The task of the cultural historian should be rather
gate celebrational myths of the New Woman and to exam
fects of the relations and contradictions between those my
everyday realities of women in Weimar.
In focusing on ideology, the imaginary relationship of th
the real, I am interested in the beliefs and attitudes of Wei
toward the New Woman myths presented in mass cultu
image of the contemporary, androgynous woman is of sign
the location of desires and anxieties associated with women's direct ex-
perience of modernity and the allegorical representation of women as
signs for modernity. In analyzing Hannah H6ch's work here, I am
concentrating on the representation of gender identity in her photo-
montages and on the possible reception of H6ch's images by female
viewers. This kind of analysis requires a reconstruction of the historical
spectator operating within specific institutions of reception. The hypo-
thetical Weimar female viewer would be urban, bourgeois or petit-
bourgeois, familiar to some degree with the contemporary debate on
bisexuality, exposed to mass-media representations of the New Wom-
an and androgyny, and perhaps a visitor to such popular exhibitions
as Film und Foto. In this generalized context of reception, Htch's work
can be analyzed and appreciated for its contributions to the non-hier-
archical and non-static representation of gender.
Hannah Htch first became known as a member of the Berlin Dada
group in the years 1918-22, and especially through her participation in
such major exhibitions as the "Dada-Messe" in 1920. Since Hdch was af-
filiated with the group through her lover Raoul Hausmann, however,
she tended to occupy a subordinate position within this largely male
avant-garde. In her work, Hoch made images of an empowered New
Woman central to her photomontages. She was the only Berlin Dadaist
to do so despite the group's leftist politics and in particular Hausmann's
theoretical interest in twenties feminism.5 Many of Htch's overtly politi-
cal photomontages from the Dada period caricatured the pretended so-
cialism of the new republic and linked female liberation with leftist

5. Hausmann also used New Woman imagery occasionally in his Dada photo-
montages, but these images were not consistently central to his work, as they were to
Hbch's montages.

This content downloaded from

188.189.188.238 on Tue, 07 May 2024 12:34:33 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
66 The Photomontages of Hannah H6ch

political revolution. For example, H6ch showed her famous photomon-

tage Cut with the Kitchen Knife (whose full title is Schnitt mit dem Kiichenmesser
Dada durch die letzte Weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands) at the
"Dada Messe"; this montage combines photographs of political leaders
with sports stars, Dada artists, and mechanized images of the city. In this
allegory, H6ch assigns women a catalytic role within an opposition pos-
ited between the revolutionary Dada world associated with Marx and the
anti-Dada world of the paunchy President Ebert.6
By late Weimar, H6ch's sexual identity had changed radically. She left
Raoul Hausmann in 1922 and in 1926 began a lesbian relationship with
the Dutch writer Til Brugman. Hoch met Brugman in Holland in the
summer of 1926 through her close friends Kurt Schwitters and his wife,
Helma Schwitters. By the fall of that year, she had moved to The Hague
to live with Brugman.7 The two lived together there until 1929, when
they moved to Berlin. The relationship lasted nine years, until 1935,
making it one of the longest and most stable bonds of Hich's life.
H6ch's photomontage, Vagabunden (1926), may allude to this new
lesbian relationship. A biographical reading offers itself immediately:
there is an implied narrative of two women traveling together, one in
sports clothes and one, heavier, in combinations of masculine and
feminine attire, costume and nudity. This could be a double-portrait
of H6ch and Brugman, holding hands, arms raised. The image also
seems to celebrate Hoch and Brugman's actual or projected travels.
Travel was central to their relationship: the two first met while H6ch
was traveling through The Netherlands in 1926, and almost imme-
diately Brugman asked Hoch to continue with her to Grenoble. As
H6ch explained to her biographer, "She persuaded me to come with
her to Grenoble. Then we stayed together for nine years."8

6. Maud Lavin, "Strategies of Pleasure and Deconstruction in the Weimar Era

Photomontages of Hannah Hbch," The Divided Heritage, Irit Rogoff ed., (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1990).
7. It is possible that Brugman may have been more lesbian- identified than H6ch.
Brugman had had previous relationships with women (Kurt Schwitters, letter of 24 Oc-
tober 1926, from Rettelsdorf b. Schinberg i. M., Hannah H6ch NachlaB, Berlinische
Galerie, Berlin, BG HHC K438/79), whereas H6ch had not, and only Brugman was
explicitly referred to as homosexual in correspondence, as for example by the homo-
phobic Theo van Doesburg. And it should be noted that after the war, Brugman was
active in the Dutch homosexual organization COC. (Myriam Everard, "Graven: De
Dood is de Humor van Heet Leven," Diva: Lesbisch Tijdschrift 6 (Nov. 1984): 24-7, 35.
8. "Oberredete sie mich mit ihr nach Grenoble mitzukommen. Wir blieben dann
neun Jahre zusammen." Heinz Ohff, Hannah H6ch (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1968) 25.

This content downloaded from

188.189.188.238 on Tue, 07 May 2024 12:34:33 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Maud Lavin 67

In Vagabunden, the stinging irony of the earlier, Dada

tages was replaced by affectionate caricature. Although H i
viously given male figures female bodies in order to mo
in her caricature of the despised President Ebert in Cut with
Knife (1919) or the central figure of a father holding a baby
(1920) - by this time her representation of composite male
ures was changing. H6ch's relationship with Brugman m
influential, and the switch from living with a man to living
an may have further sensitized her to issues of gender.
ship with Brugman seems to have intensified and expan
concerns already evident in H6ch's work, especially tho
representations of the New Woman in Weimar.
Still, it is not clear whether Hich identified herself as a l
bisexual (these distinctions were not so sharply drawn i
they are today). Amongst themselves, H ich and Brugm
seem to feel it necessary or desirable to define their relati
bian; in their letters, they discussed it as a deeply private
ship.9 Although H6ch's relationship with Brugman was e
cepted by her family and friends, neither H6ch nor Brugm
tive in homosexual organizations, and apparently, outsid
cle, H6ch had no public identity as a lesbian. (It should b
here that in 1935 H6ch began a relationship with a youn
she later married; the marriage lasted from 1938 to 1944.10)
sexual preferences, of course, are not directly reflected in h
tations. Rather, in keeping with representations of the
and certain leftist ideologies of Weimar, her androgynous
a pleasure in the movement between gender positions and a
deconstruction of rigid masculine and feminine identitie
During this same period H ich's artistic reputation became
ly established. By 1931, she had shown in several major phot
hibitions which presented photomontage as a technique in c
photography as well as in avant-garde art works. In particu
well represented in the Werkbund's Film und Foto exhibition

9. Letters from the Hoch Nachlagl, Murnau, and the H6ch Nachlal
10. Theories that this may have been merely masking H6ch's homos
the National Socialists are contradicted by Hich's journals of the time, i
scribes a passionate relationship. Hannah Hoch Nachlal, Berlinische Gal
11. This raises the large question about the relationship between fem
movements in Weimar. Here I am referring only to leftist ideologies inf
nism and/or matriarchy, such as Otto Gross's.

This content downloaded from

188.189.188.238 on Tue, 07 May 2024 12:34:33 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
68 The Photomontages of Hannah HIich

and the 1931 Berlin Fotomontage exhibition, as well as important photog-

raphy exhibitions outside Germany, in Brussels in 1932 and 1933, and
in Philadelphia in 1932. Meanwhile, photomontage no longer connoted
revolutionary politics but had become an accepted design tool linked
with consumerism and modernity. In particular, photomontage was well
adapted to the single-impact demands of poster and advertising design.
Such commercial photomontages were produced both by those who
self-consciously defined themselves as avant-garde, such as Herbert
Bayer or Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and by those who identified exclusively
with advertising, publishing, and industry, such as Vilma Frielingsdorf,
photo-editor at Ullstein's Grine Post.12 Indeed, many members of the
avant-garde wanted to work for mass-market or commercial design
firms, as they believed in the power of design to represent and inspire a
utopian vision. Thus when Bayer left the Bauhaus in 1928, it was consid-
ered positive (rather than inconsistent) that he began working to work for
the large Berlin advertising firm Dorland.
Photography and design exhibitions of the period reflected this easy
mix of fine art and mass culture, celebrating the formal qualities of the
commercial designs as well as the affinities of fine art with mass-prod-
uced design. Film und Foto, a major international exhibition which trav-
elled for two years (1929-31), presented posters, advertising, scientific
photography, abstract photography, fine art photomontages (includ-
ing 17 montages by H6ch), portraits, fashion photography, and, at
some locations, photojournalism. Photomontage was exhibited as part
of the New Vision, in which the camera - as a sort of prosthesis - was
optimistically believed to extend the powers of the body (yet another
aspect of the body-as-machine ideology known generally as Kirper-
kultur).'3 Accordingly, many of the montage artists of late Weimar relin-
quished the complexity of Dada photomontages for a simplified, high-
impact format that focused on a single, highly legible message. This
more direct approach typified montages produced as common posters
and advertising images, as well as (though less frequently) overtly polit-
ical photomontages, such as John Heartfield's photomontages for the
Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung.
H ch's compositions had also become more simplified, but she did

12. Ami Hfirlimann and Maud Lavin, interview with Vilma Frielingsdorf, Berlin,
12 October 1986.
13. For example, see Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Malerie Photographie Film, Bauhaus-
biAcher 8 (Munich: Albert Langen, 1925).

This content downloaded from

188.189.188.238 on Tue, 07 May 2024 12:34:33 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Maud Lavin 69

not give up the contradiction and ambiguity of her earli

the contrary, ambiguity became integral to the ways in whic
began to treat matters of gender and sexuality. Ambiguity
tion between gender positions, however, do not function un
all viewers; at least in theory, different viewers encounter v
markedly different ways. Drawing on the work of such fem
theorists as Laura Mulvey and Miriam Hansen, I would locate
viewer's pleasures and anxieties in her ability to identify wit
culine and feminine positions.'4 While being socialized as
women in male society also have had to identify with the m
the primary location of action and power. Self-conscious
between the two offers multiple pleasures: 1) occupying
positions or the fantasy of such a possibility; 2) perceivi
unfixed or unstable, which is a pleasure certainly to those o
tom of the gender hierarchy; and 3) destabilizing the hierar
However, it should be clear that it is not oscillation per se t
privileged, but rather forms of reception in which personal
of oscillation are connected to the desire to dissolve hierarchies of both
gender and class.
By 1925, when Horch painted Roma, a composition that imitates her
photomontages, gender ambiguity was central to her work. In the
painting, the actress Asta Nielsen, dressed in swimwear, crouches co-
quettishly next to Mussolini. At the same time, by vigorously pointing
to the right, she seems to be ordering him out of Rome. A theater and
film actress particularly popular with women, Nielsen was known for
her portrayal of masculine roles such as Hamlet.'5 In Hoch's painting,
she is shown, from the shoulders up, in her Hamlet persona. In fact, the
image is based on a publicity photograph of the film published in Berliner
Illustrirte Zeitung in 1920.16 Mussolini, in this painting, is also presented
androgynously, as his head is attached to a woman's body. Thus, not
only ambiguity but contradiction in the echoed pair of women's bodies
is used to signify flirtation, athleticism, mockery, and command.
H6ch's Liebe im Busch (Love in the Bush), from the same year, depicts

14. Laura Mulvey, "On Duel in the Sun: Afterthoughts on 'Visual Pleasure and Nar-
rative Cinema,"' Framework 15-17 (1981): 12-15. Miriam Hansen, "Pleasure, Ambiva-
lence, Identification: Valentino and Female Spectatorship," Cinema Journal (Summer
1986): 6-32.
15. Miriam Hansen, "Silent Cinema: Whose Public Sphere?" New German Critique
29 (Spring/Summer 1983): 147-84.
16. "Asta Nielsen als Hamlet," Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung 12 Sep. 1920: 423.

This content downloaded from

188.189.188.238 on Tue, 07 May 2024 12:34:33 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
70 The Photomontages of Hannah Hich

two figures, composites of masculine and feminine, black and white, in

a natural setting. The two figures embrace among oversized stalks of
grass; the black figure embraces the white who is a montage of jutting
arms, trousered legs, and a trunkless head; the white head is a wom-
an's with her hair in a short, modern cut and with her eyes and mouth
open in excitement. The montage also connotes primitivism, the jun-
gle (Busch), and the myth of African culture for the German avant-
garde, further explored by H6ch in her slightly later Ethnographic
Museum series.'7 Liebe im Busch was exhibited in the 1931 Berlin
Fotomontage exhibition where it would have contrasted sharply with th
rational Sachlichkeit of Piet Zwart and Paul Schuitema's advertisin
photomontages, which represented mass-produced electrical part
juxtaposed with brand-name logos.18
H6ch's works produced later in Weimar focus more on the pleas-
ures and confusions of oscillation. Perhaps H6ch's most ambiguou
and sophisticated image of androgyny is Dompteuse (Tamer, c. 1930
Here even the remarkable framing device is a contradictory montag
of a traditional frame (barely visible behind the figure), surrounded b
studs and covered by the torn edges of the central montage - sign
fiers both of containment and bursting through, connoting a con
trolled violence. The central figure has a manikin's head, which is fem
inine and muscular, and arms and a flat-chested torso, which are mas-
culine. The figure is wearing a sleeveless, ornamented top that coul
be part of a circus costume and a skirt. The manikin's head is take
from a black-and-white photograph, the arms, torso, and skirt from
color photographs, and the sea lion's head from a black-and-whit
photograph tinted beige. The viewer is always aware of looking at pho-
to-fragments, and so the constructed nature of the figure is evident,
thus preventing a reading of the figure as "natural." The pieces ar
skillfully fitted together and carefully proportioned to avoid any dis-
crepancy of scale between parts. The impossibility of reading a single
gender is even more pronounced than in earlier works such as Roma.
The manikin figure of Tamer is seated, arms crossed, and seems to
look down at the sea lion; along with the title, Tamer, the pose suggest

17. The Ethnographic Museum series and contemporary attitudes towards eth
nography are discussed in my dissertation, "Hannah H6ch, Photomontage, and th
Representation of the New Woman in Germany 1918-33," The Graduate School an
University Center of the City University of New York, 1989.
18. Gewerbemuseum, Fotomontage (Berlin: Staatliche Museen Staatliche Kunstbib-
liothek, 25 Apr.-31 May 1931).

This content downloaded from

188.189.188.238 on Tue, 07 May 2024 12:34:33 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 :LJ:ow.:

.........

W?::

-M

. . . . ..........
0 ...........
........... x::::::.::
.......... ~ l- ;-~: :i:

.. ....... .?SS888~~8 ~ i~l ::::

:ii-v-ii
gt??
.iziy

::1NO

.. ... .....

. ... ... . ..... ..... ...

. . . . ..... .

so:::

. ... . . . . ..

Hannah H6ch, Dompteuse (c. 1930) photomontage, 35.5X26.

Zuirich, Zuirich.

71

This content downloaded from

188.189.188.238 on Tue, 07 May 2024 12:34:33 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
72 The Photomontages of Hannah H6ch

domination. The contrast of scale between the large tamer and the
smaller sea lion creates a sense of anxiety, yet the tamer is also strangely
beautiful and the gaze somewhat meditative, while the sea lion looks
outward, engaging the viewer in a sly, uncanny gaze. The contradiction
between the two faces - the manikin's blank and porcelainlike, the sea
lion's darkened as with make-up - forbids a unified, narrative reading
and promotes double-meanings. While there is a contrast between the
artificial manikin and the natural animal, a similarity is established for-
mally between the shapes of the two sets of eyes, which echo one anoth-
er. The androgyny of the manikin figure seems to be part of a secret; the
figure is inaccessible and self-enclosed with its self-reflective gaze and
folded arms. The viewer is involved trying to unlock the mystery of the
manikin figure's gender and its relationship to the sea lion.
Also complex is H ch's slightly later Die starken Mdnner (1931; the ti-
tle could be read literally to mean "the strong men" or "male weight-
lifters"). In this work, a composite face of an older man and younger
woman is superimposed over the silhouette of a man flexing his mus-
cles. The head is surrounded by jagged forms, thus circling it as a pre-
cious object, doubly framed, yet precariously balanced. Although usu-
ally Hoch distorts scale and proportion within a face, say, making one
eye too large, here there is a close fit in the joining of the masculine
and feminine faces. Both eyes engage the viewer directly in this central
image. However, even though the scale of both halves match, the pho-
tographic facial fragments differ in skin tone and signs of aging so that
the parts never quite merge into a whole. For the viewer the tendency
is first to engage one half, then the other, through the different gazes.
Thus subject/object confusion can occur in terms of gender, posing
the question of whether one is viewing a representation of self or the
Other. The constant shifting is aided by the off-balance location of the
head. At the same time, in the middle ground are the jagged, phallic
forms connoting masculinity; two of these forms encroach on the out-
line of the male face. In the background is a silhouette of a man flexing
his arm muscles, painted in with warm red and brown watercolors,
with the buttocks carefully delineated. The focus on these two sites -
arm and buttocks - presents signs of the man as the object of his own
gaze and of others' desire. While he is turned inward looking at his
bicep (and thus completing a closed circuit of a narcissistic gaze), his
body is turned so the buttocks face outward, emphasizing the crevice
which resembles a feminine sign of availability. Jagged forms continue

This content downloaded from

188.189.188.238 on Tue, 07 May 2024 12:34:33 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 -Timi

As":?::

RON:-
INS:?

COLORi~

ow h-A;::-?- ::::::

oi l .: _::: :-::?:;:: :::::= ;~:

.........

Hannah Hoch, Die starken Mdnner (1931) pho

Institut ffir Auslandsbeziehungen, Stuttgart.

73

This content downloaded from

188.189.188.238 on Tue, 07 May 2024 12:34:33 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
74 The Photomontages of Hannah H6ch

in a diagonal line beneath the buttocks creating a juxtaposition of sharp-

ly phallic shapes with the dark crevice. The man's body below the waist is
feminized and above is overtly masculine.
Despite the fact that feminine elements here are inserted into a
frame of primarily masculine attributes, what is exceptional about
Hach's montage is that the head can never be resolved into a unity; it
is always two genders. Weimar images in which androgyny has been
commodified as fashion appear, finally, as women who have taken on
the attributes of men. In contrast, HOch's image, The Strong Men, in pre-
serving ambiguity, also preserves the radical potential of photomon-
tage at a time when commercial design had emptied that potential
through its emphasis on pure form and clean design.
Clearly there are a range of identifications and objects of desire offered
here. Through their juxtaposition and denial of closure, Hdch's repre-
sentation of androgyny encourages the mechanisms of the fetishizing
gaze to shift between a masculine and feminine object. The Strong Men is
not only a representation of androgyny but a deliberate positioning of
the viewer in oscillation between positions of masculinity and femininity
or an insisting on a bisexual relationship to the object of desire, or a
shifting between a disavowal and a recognition of that bisexuality - all
of which can be described as conditions of female spectatorship, thus, in
this case, putting both men and women in the feminine position.
H6ch's images differ sharply from most other Weimar representations
of androgyny, bisexuality, and lesbianism. The broad array of represen-
tations of gender and sexual roles in Weimar is complex and demands a
more thorough analysis than is possible here. However, of particular rel-
evance to H6ch's montages - if only by their strong contrast - are cer-
tain images used in advertisements in which androgyny can be read as a
sign for intensified individualism embodied in a single consumer. These
body-as-machine or Kiirperkultur images claim a fantastic plenitude for
the body: masculine and feminine, nature and machine, youth and im-
mortality. Accordingly, the body-culture images were used to advertise
products in the new mass-media market which also claimed to provide
such plenitude. It comes as no surprise, for example, that immediately
after release of the enormously popular Kiirperkultur film Wege zur Kraft
und Schirnheit in 1925, stills from the film were used in advertisements in
the fashionable Ullstein bi-monthly Die Dame magazine and elsewhere.'9

19. For example, stills from Wege zur Kraft und Sch6nheit were published in Die Dame

This content downloaded from

188.189.188.238 on Tue, 07 May 2024 12:34:33 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Maud Lavin 75

Print-media images in Weimar almost always showed wom

proved" through masculinization. What was presented as
was actually a subsumption of femininity under masculine sig
yet not all images in the mass-market print media promo
plenitude. The popular illustrated newspapers often carri
about not being able to distinguish between men and wome
ample, on May 20, 1928, the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, the hig
lation newsweekly in Weimar, ran a contest called Buib oder Md
or Girl?), offering readers a variety of rewards totalling appr
2000 Marks if they could correctly identify the gender of youn
in six different photographs. The photos were run a second
answers given on June 18. Thus, both in ads and in contests, s
of resolution was offered - either through buying a product o
ing the correct gender. While one cannot underestimate the p
provided by such images in exploring gender confusions an
tions, one must question how these materially based pleasu
being redirected.
Despite their limitations, these androgynous images could ha
vided an important sense of identification for Weimar women
in new gender roles. This is most clear for the lesbian subcult
regard to images read not only as androgynous but also as lesb
or bisexual. But as Michel Foucault warns in the first volume of his
History of Sexuality, speaking about alternative sexualities is not necessa-
rily liberating; it can in fact feed the myth of sexual liberation as being
integral to political revolution.20 According to Foucault, the inverse of
this myth actually takes place: by obeying the injunction to speak about
sexuality, to represent and explore it constantly, the speaker participates
in the promotion of sexuality; this, in turn, contributes to the self-im-
age of the bourgeoisie as all-powerful, life-enhancing, body-intensified,
expanding, and eternal. Foucault's warning is particularly apt for images
of androgyny circulating within the discourse of Kiirperkultur in early
20th-century Germany.
In the case of Weimar's lesbian subculture, however, Foucault's logical
neatness fails. Despite the prevalent images of lesbian culture in twenties
Berlin, for the most part lesbian life in early 20th-century Germany was

23 (Erstes Augustheft 1925): 46 to advertise two health pamphlets, "Licht heilt, Licht
schiitzt von Krankheit," and "Sonne als Heilmittel."
20. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. I, trans. Robert Hurley (New York:
Vinatge, 1980).

This content downloaded from

188.189.188.238 on Tue, 07 May 2024 12:34:33 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
76 The Photomontages of Hannah H6ch

marked by invisibility and silence. (Even later, under National Social-

ism, though lesbians could be denounced, committed to concentra-
tion camps, and killed, lesbianism still was not officially a crime.)21 For
lesbians during early Weimar, the creation of androgyny as afashion cut
two ways, both as a sign of acceptance and of cooptation/dismissal.
This duality confronts the reader in many Weimar photographs. In
Uhu (also published by Ullstein) for instance, images of androgynous
women were often accompanied by ultra-"feminine" signs (such as a
childish hands-to-mouth gesture of a model) to counter a lesbian
"masculine" identification.22 Thus representations of bisexuality and
homosexuality in Weimar cannot simply be seen as a form of repres-
sive tolerance in Foucault's sense. For lesbians, such images, however
problematic, could enforce the basic and crucial functions of identity
and a belief in the right to exist at all.23
Both the usefulness of Foucault's watning and the limitations of his ar-
gument are made clear by an example of mass-culture representation of
homosexuality during Weimar, the lesbian film Miidchen in Uniform,
which premiered in Berlin in December 1931. Foucault's warning allows
us to see how easily this filmic representation of lesbianism was incorpo-
rated, legitimized, and sanitized by its critical reception (representing yet
another sexual difference collected by the all-encompassing power of the
bourgeoisie). At the same time, the limitations of Foucault's thesis are ev-
ident when we recognize the tremendous importance of this film for the
identity of the lesbian subculture and, as well, the overt, political
radicality of the film's thematic interlacing of anti-militarism and alterna-
tive sexualities. At the very least, the film expresses the desire to link leftist
political revolution and alternative sexualities. Nevertheless, the way in

21. Ilse Kokula, "Lesbisch leben von Weimar bis zur Nachkriegszeit," Eldorado:
Homosexuelle Frauen und Mdnner in Berlin 1850-1950 (Berlin: Fr6lich und Kaufmann,
1984) 160-1.
22. For example, "Vom Chorgirl zum Bfihnenstar: Dolly Haas," Aufn. Elli
Marcus, Uhu Sept. 1930: 80.
23. With even this brief speculation on the meaning of androgynous images in the
lesbian subculture of Weimar, we can see that Foucault elides certain questions of gen-
der identity and subjectivity by over-simplifying previous discourses on sex as con-
cerned with "liberation": he subsumes the the term "identity" under the term "libera-
tion." As a feminist, I find this overriding of current work on identity and the gen-
dered subject to be grossly inadequate. Any critique of Foucault must also consider
theories of representation which explore the reception of cultural production and the
work of this reception in the positioning of the gendered subject, including, for exam-
ple, much of contemporary film theory. I would like to thank Kathy O'Dell for a
collaborative reading of Foucault's text.

This content downloaded from

188.189.188.238 on Tue, 07 May 2024 12:34:33 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Maud Lavin 77

which lesbianism is represented in Mddchen in Uniform ser

its reception. It is the absence of ambiguity and oscillat
rows the address of subjectivity in the film. In this it pro
contrast to Hbch's aesthetic strategies.
Miidchen in Uniform was the product of a lesbian directo
Sagan, and a lesbian writer, Christa Winsloe. It was pro
tively by the Deutsche Film Gemeinschaft. The film is set
boarding school for the daughters of military officers.
Manuela (Hertha Thiele) has lost her mother and develo
Friulein von Bernburg. Though such crushes are not
within the school and are generally tolerated, this crush g
normally accepted limits into a more serious lesbian lov
plicitly only once - through a kiss. Manuela's love is rec
von Bernburg who tries to deny her feelings. The narrativ
crisis, a thwarted suicide attempt by Manuela and a def
principal by the other schoolgirls and von Bernburg.
Since Mddchen in Uniform has been discussed at length els
would like to focus here on the significance of its narrative
cal response it received. Immediately upon its release, the fi
ly celebrated, particularly as an anti-militaristic, anti-Pruss
authoritarian statement. But outside homosexual journals, c
ry critics never mentioned the explicit lesbianism, instead re
central relationship as merely adolescent.25 Moreover, sinc
nous images are specifically avoided in the film,26 the issu
and speaking about homosexuality (and, conversely, the
this speech) is a tension at many levels of Madchen in Uniform,

24. Karola Gramann, Heide Schliipmann, and Amadou Seitz,

Heute: Ein Gesprach mit Hertha Thiele," Frauen und Film 28 (June
"Hertha Thiele im Gesprach mit Karola Gramann und Heide Schlup
Thiele (Berlin: Stiftung Deutsche Kinematek, 1983) 6-23. Rosi Kries
Liebe im Film bis 1950," Eldorado 187-96. B. Ruby Rich, "From Repres
to Erotic Liberation: Miidchen in Uniform," Re-vision: Essays in Feminist Film
Anne Doane, Patricia Mellencamp, and Linda Williams, eds. (Frederic
sity Publications of America, 1984) 100-30.
25. For excerpts of contemporary criticism, see Hertha Thiele
Kriesche in Eldorado 187-96. Also see Roland Schacht, "Ein Film setzt
Dame 59 (March 1932) 6-8, 52.
26. In an earlier theatre version (performed in Berlin and also
Leontine Sagan), Hertha Thiele had played Manuela opposite Margar
for the film version the artistic supervisor, Carl Froelich, ruled out M
culine and chose instead the more conventionally feminine Dorothe
von Bernburg. Cf. Thiele in Gramann, et al., "Gestern und Heute" 3

This content downloaded from

188.189.188.238 on Tue, 07 May 2024 12:34:33 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
78 The Photomontages of Hannah Hoch

production and its critical reception. Ironically, although the film pi-
vots around the crime of publicly naming lesbian passion, lesbianism
is never explicitly verbalized. Rather expressions such as "the great
spirit of love that has a thousand forms" or "Manuela's suffering" are
used, an elision which Hertha Thiele explained in a much later inter-
view (1981) was designed to make the film acceptable to a broader au-
dience.27 This pressure to name which both bursts out and is repressed
in the film cannot be dismissed (as Foucault might) as merely a confes-
sion compliant with the bourgeoisie's need to claim sexual investiga-
tion and therefore sex itself for its deployment of power. As Ruby Rich
has pointed out, the homosexuality in this case is clearly connected to
a revolutionary activism and exemplifies an alternative to the princi-
pal's definition of the girls: "You are all soldiers's daughters, and God
willing, you will all be soldiers's mothers."28 The audience's under-
standing of the narrative development is entirely dependent on a read-
ing of Manuela's love as lesbian - why else is she sent to the infirmary
after proclaiming it?
But was the proclamation pronounced enough? Unfortunately,
Mddchen in Uniform fit easily into contemporary understandings of les-
bianism as a thing of schoolgirl crushes, an immature phase on the
route to adult (hetero)sexuality. Critics were quick to describe the film
in these terms, dwelling on von Bernburg's maternalism or the idealistic
nature of Manuela's crush. Ullstein's Uhu, in an advance-publicity fea-
ture, promoted the movie by focussing on the nonprofessional actresses
who made up the majority of the boarding school population, stressing
that they were all from good bourgeois families and most had ambitions
for non-stage careers.29 Most tellingly, the film was not banned by the
Nazis, despite its anti-militarism. Rosi Kriesche's explanation is two-
fold: both that lesbianism was not recognized and that the heroine
Fraulein von Bernburg inculcates her students with the virtues of work
and duty, qualities the Party also demanded of its youth, as in the Bund
Deutscher Mddchen.30

My purpose is not to argue that naming alone - or a more explicit

naming - would have been a sufficient strategy for a revolutionary
propagation of alternative sexualities and politics. Instead, I find that

27. Thiele in Gramann et al., "Gestern und Heute" 41.

28. Qtd. in Rich 103.
29. "Von der h6heren T6chterschule zum Film," Uhu 12 (Sep. 1931) 34-42.
30. Kriesche 196.

This content downloaded from

188.189.188.238 on Tue, 07 May 2024 12:34:33 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Maud Lavin 79

the stereotypical representation of alternative sexuality in M

Uniform involves limitations worth examining. In essence
question is this: on the one hand, if Kirperkultur images too
the power of bourgeois consumerism, and if, on the oth
Mddchen in Uniform, while it did connect the naming of
sexualities with political revolution, still lent itself too easily
whitewashing, what strategies of representation were or w
been more effective in linking issues of gender/sexualit
hierarchical societal change?
H och was not involved in simply representing or propag
mosexuality; rather, her montages recombined masculine
nine gender attributes. In this way, her representation of an
introduced a radical and non-hierarchal sexual ambiguity.
ages of thoroughly masculinized women, as in some forms of
photography, these montages suggested fluctuating gend
the exhibition contexts of late Weimar, this sexual ambigu
have had a specific political meaning for her audience, dem
least temporarily an unsettling oscillation in the gender iden
engaged viewer. Since these images expressly deny resolution
portant to consider the effect of such fluidity on the Weima
For instance, a lack of representational resolution could have
lar meaning for Weimar women whose economic and sex
were in a state of flux. Such representations could have the p
contradict - at least in fantasy - efforts to circumscribe
Woman's roles, attempts to assure that "new" places were stil
anchored at the bottom of the social hierarchy.
Categories demarcating gender roles and sexual identit
blurred in Weimar Germany, particularly in the representati
bians, bisexual women, and modern (or New) women
thought on sexuality generally posited an inherent bisex
foundation on which inclinations toward heterosexual, ho
and bisexual practices were established. Though the various
psychologists conceived of this fundamental bisexuality i
differing ways, the postulate of inherent bisexuality had wid
ance among sexologists and psychologists, and among non-
as well (as evidenced by the lack of antagonistic response to t
thetic treatment of lesbianism in Mddchen in Uniform). Indee
formulating his remarks on the psyche's fundamental b
strove to dispel belief in the idea of a "third sex," the widely

This content downloaded from

188.189.188.238 on Tue, 07 May 2024 12:34:33 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
80 The Photomontages of Hannah Hich

that homosexuals comprise a biological category separate from both

men and women. Freud hoped to lead his readers toward his own, more
sociological concept of the formation of sexual identity. In contrast,
sexologists Otto Weininger and Magnus Hirschfeld were outspoken pro-
ponents of the "third sex" concept, even arguing that in the case of les-
bians, female homosexuals were biologically more masculine than other
women - and that this difference was congenital.31 This argument,
commonly accepted at the time, is most familiar today through the Brit-
ish author Radclyffe Hall's novel The Well of Loneliness (1928).32
From today's point-of-view, the concept of a third sex seems bi-
zarre, but in homosexual writings of the first decades of the century, it
was important in forging an identity and self-acceptance within the ho-
mosexual community.33 Activist homosexual groups such as Hirsch-
feld's Scientific Humanitarian Committee also used the idea of the
third sex as a tool in the fight for legal reform, arguing that since this
so-called perversion was a result of nature, not criminality, it should
not be punishable by law.34 Understandably, Hirschfeld's work was
greeted with ambivalence by many Weimar homosexuals; while they
supported his legal activism for homosexual rights, they resented his
definition of homosexuality as a deviation.
H6ch did not write about her positions on homosexuality, except
indirectly in one letter to her sister Grete in which she expressed her
deep love for Brugman.35 However, to some degree, H 5ch's attitudes
towards the prevalent theories of bisexuality and homosexuality can be
inferred from Brugman's early short stories and grotesques which
Hoch read and edited between 1926 and 1935.36 Brugman's position i

31. Otto Weininger, Sex and Character, trans. and 6th ed. of Geschlecht und Charakter
(London: Heinemann, 1906). Magnus Hirschfeld, Die Homosexualitdt des Mannes und de
Weibes (Berlin: Louis Marcus, 1914).
32. Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness (1928; London: Virago, 1984).
33. Cf. the writings in the anthology Lesbian-Feminism in Turn-of-the-Century Germany,
Lillian Faderman and Brigitte Eriksson, eds. (Naiad, 1980).
34. Manfred Baumgardt, "Das Institut fiir Sexualwissenschaft und die Homosexu-
ellen-Bewegung in der Weimarer Republik," Eldorado 17-27.
35. Letter from Hdch, den Haag, to Grete K6nig, 14 Oct. 1926; Hoch NachlaB,
Murnau.

36. Til Brugman, "Warenhaus der Liebe," Hoch Nachlag, Berlinische Galerie, B
BG HHC H1511/79. I want to thank Myriam Everard for pointing out that this stor
as a parody of the Institute of Sexology. The collection of unpublished short sto
Brugman is in the Hoch NachlaB in Berlin. In 1935, Hoch and Brugman published a
together, Til Brugman, Scheingehacktes (Berlin: Die Rabenpresse), which contained
by Brugman parodying Nazism and consumerism and which was illustrated by

This content downloaded from

188.189.188.238 on Tue, 07 May 2024 12:34:33 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Maud Lavin 81

clearer. Her short story, "Warenhaus der Liebe" ("Warehou

c. 1934), shares the widespread ambivalence towards Hirsch
logy. The story is a thinly veiled parody of Hirschfeld's B
for Sexology, which was in operation from 1919 to 193
people of all sexual persuasions through sex counseling
Brugman's story describes a scientific warehouse where
purchase their favorite fetish objects and achieve complet
of their desires. But the military objects to the wareho
that it curtails aggression and that, by making old-fas
course obsolete, it endangers population growth. As a resu
tary closes the warehouse. Brugman's story strongly lamp
tional Socialists, but her humor at Hirschfeld's expense is
Most probably, the short story was written after May 10
the Nazis plundered the Institute, closed it, and burnt
In Otto Weininger's work, the dangerous side of the thi
is most apparent. Theories of congenital sexuality unde
struction of Weininger's biological hierarchies. He claim
individual is constituted with a fixed ratio between m
femininity, thus allowing him or her to be typed accordin
that one is born with this ratio and that his thesis could be extended to
a belief in bisexuality. This seemingly benign idea was clearly stated in
the 1906 edition of his Sex and Character: "In my view all actual organ-
isms have both homo-sexuality and hetero-sexuality."37 Such pro-
nouncements addressed widely perceived anxieties about the ambigui-
ties of gender identity and made this turn-of-the-century book popular
during the Weimar era. Weininger's book also revealed a darker side of
its author's ideology. Weininger, a Jewish anti-Semite, was also, in the
most exact sense, a misogynist. He argued that a woman's worth de-
pended entirely on the amount of masculinity she possessed: "Manlike
women wear their hair short, affect manly dress, study, drink, smoke,
are fond of mountaineering, or devote themselves passionately to
sport. ... A woman's demand for emancipation and her qualification
for it are in direct proportion to the amount of maleness in her."38
Weininger followed this logic rigorously to the conclusion that lesbians
were superior to other women because they were more masculine. He
suggested "the possibility that homo-sexuality is a higher form than

37. Weininger 48.

38. Weininger 58, 64.

This content downloaded from

188.189.188.238 on Tue, 07 May 2024 12:34:33 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
82 The Photomontages of Hannah Hich

hetero-sexuality. For the present, it is enough to say that homo-sexual-

ity in a woman is the outcome of her masculinity and presupposes a
higher degree of development.""39 Theories such as Weininger's, then,
ascribed bisexuality to a visible, physical combination of masculine and
feminine attributes. This created a climate in which images of
androgyny could incorporate not only issues of gender roles, but ones
of sexual identity as well. In this new context, the visual stereotype of
the lesbian as androgynous woman could cut two ways: it could pro-
mote self-identification, but by the same token it could lock the lesbian
into a rigid hierarchical classification.
Though Freud's writings on bisexuality were also based on biology,
they aimed at refuting the congenital theory of bisexuality and homo-
sexuality. Instead, Freud argued that it was familial and social pres-
sures that shaped sexual preference. In his Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality (1905), Freud argued that manifestations of homosexuality
were common in puberty and that later developments towards hetero-
sexuality were in part socially determined. Freud saw its "authoritative
prohibition by society" as one of the chief factors leading to the renun-
ciation of this juvenile homosexuality.40
In his 1920 article on "The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality
in a Woman," Freud twice insisted that his subject, a young, bourgeois
woman sent to him by her parents for a "cure" for her homosexuality,
was in no way neurotic. Indeed, he objected at length to the whole idea
of curing homosexuals.41 He argued that conversion to heterosexuality is
not possible, that at most a willing patient could be introduced to her or
his inherent bisexuality. Freud did validate the desire to live a heterosex-
ual life, but primarily for pragmatic reasons (i.e., that it is more socially
acceptable). He wrote: "One must remember that normal sexuality too
depends upon a restriction in the choice of object. In general, to under-
take to convert a fully developed homosexual into a heterosexual does
not offer much more prospect of success than the reverse, except that for
good, practical reasons the latter is never attempted."42
In the early 20th-century German debates on sexuality, what is most

39. Weininger 66.

40. Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905; London: Norton,
1967) 95.
41. Sigmund Freud, "The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman,"
The Standard Edition XVIII, James Strachey, ed. (1920; London: Hogarth, 1955) 145-72.
42. Freud, "Psychogenesis."

This content downloaded from

188.189.188.238 on Tue, 07 May 2024 12:34:33 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Maud Lavin 83

significant for cultural history are Freud's speculations ab

held by his readers. The firm hold of the congenital thir
be read even in Freud's text in his perception of the bias
thetical readers in 1920.43 There, as usual, Freud address
jections to his arguments, and thus we learn what he ass
readers's prejudices: "The mystery of homosexuality is b
simple as it is commonly depicted in popular expositions
mind, bound therefore to love a man, but unhappily att
culine body; a masculine mind, irresistibly attracted by w
imprisoned in a feminine body."'" He continues later:
to their manifest heterosexuality, a very considerable m
or unconscious homosexuality can be detected in all n
these findings are taken into account, then, clearly, the s
nature in a freakish mood created a 'third sex' falls to the
concept of universal bisexuality, then, seems to have had
currency in Weimar Germany, whether in Freud's form
those of the sexologists he opposed.
According to some theorists, this innate bisexuality was
attributes of a person's physical appearance. Therefore, a
tation of androgyny during Weimar had the potential to
ality, or a version of homosexuality. This potential, howev
metrically distributed between male and female images o
Male homosexuality remained illegal throughout the Wei
pite widespread acceptance of a theory of universal bi
bianism, on the other hand, was never against the law -

43. This is particularly useful for a construction of a historical spe

discussed in Thomas Elseasser, "Film History and Visual Pleasure:
Cinema Histories, Cinema Practices, Patricia Mellencamp and Philip Ros
MD: University Publications of America, 1984) 47-84.
44. Freud, "Psychogenesis" 170.
45. Freud, "Psychogenesis" 171.
46. Steakley notes that during the twenties, there existed some thirt
riodicals that flourished (usually) free of censorship, except for the ap
protection laws intermittently in late Weimar (somewhat analogous to
phy laws), which were used to close down temporarily the magazines a
in Berlin to shut down the bars, both male and female. Most seriou
could occur as arbitrarily (James Steakley, The Homosexual Emancipation M
ny [New York: Arno, 1975]). Thus our popular image of the wild night
lesbian scenes in Berlin in the twenties should be tempered by the
precariousness of its existence. Moreover, lesbians and gay men livin
born in more conservative Wilhelmine times, when acknowledgemen
was in its fledgling stages.

This content downloaded from

188.189.188.238 on Tue, 07 May 2024 12:34:33 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
84 The Photomontages of Hannah H6ch

toleration than of non-recognition. This double standard suggests that

while an image of a feminized man may have appeared to the Weimar
viewer as obviously and illegally homosexual, an image of a
masculinized woman may not have been so easily categorized. Such
images of androgynous women, then, allowed for varying significa-
tions. For female images, the masculine roles newly occupied by wom-
en in work and political spheres offered another and related set of con-
notations. A matrix of significations was possible, depending on the
image and the arena of reception, linking androgyny, modernism, the
New Woman, and a new sexuality.
With this complex in mind, I want to discuss further the representa-
tion of androgyny in a specific, late Weimar photomontage of Hannah
Hach. For the female viewer, H6ch's Marlene (1930) generates an oscilla-
tion between a male heterosexual position and a female homosexual
one. Although the fetishized legs are viewed by two men in the lower
right corner, both the mouth and the word "Marlene" - by being pres-
ented frontally, out of the narrative space - are offered directly as ob-
jects of desire to the viewer. For female homosexuals in Berlin during
late Weimar, this montage would have held specific connotations, since
any image of Marlene Dietrich would be read as either androgynous or
lesbian. As actress Hertha Thiele recalled, Dietrich functioned as a cult
figure for lesbians in Berlin: "There was at that time a trend ... to appear
like Dietrich ... and each would call herself Marlene."47

Given this special status accorded Dietrich's image, H6ch's highly

sexualized representation of her fragmented mouth, legs, and name
would seem to offer to the female viewer a fetishized image of Dietrich as
an object of lesbian desire. In fact, the viewer can choose either to engage
with the name and fragmented body parts as objects of desire, and/or to
identify with the two men as surrogates, since the men are defined as
spectators. For the female viewer, this choice represents a selection be-
tween a female homosexual gaze of desire (directly confronting the deli-
cious lips and the admired name) and a male heterosexual gaze of desire
(represented explicitly if somewhat ironically) - or both. Since both
possibilities are represented alluringly within the montage, the female
viewer is encouraged to construct herself as androgynous.
For today's viewers, this consideration of the female viewer raises

47. "Es gab damals einen Trend ... sich wie Dietrich anzuziehen .. . und jeder
nannte sich Marlene, wie sie." Hertha Thiele, in Gramann, et al., "Gestern und
Heute" 40.

This content downloaded from

188.189.188.238 on Tue, 07 May 2024 12:34:33 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Maud Lavin 85

questions concerning the differences between male and fema

torship, specifically in viewing photographs, and in particul
concerning notions of fetishism, an explicit theme of H6ch'
Freud described fetishism as a psychic mechanism operating
arising from both a disavowal of castration and a substitutio
vision, of an image for the woman's missing penis. It is sign
this double action - disavowal and substitution - occurs in one crucial
moment and is then repeated in future viewings of fetish objects.48 Refer-
ring to Freud's definition, Victor Burgin has made an analogy between
the elements of the fetishizing process (such as vision, disavowal, the fro-
zen moment, and repetition) and the same mechanisms brought to bear
in the viewing of a photograph. Here Burgin introduces the concept of
oscillation, placing the viewer in the position of shifting: between recog-
nition (of the photograph as representation) and disavowal (a belief that
the photograph is in some way real), as well as between an identification
with the photographer (camera's point-of-view) and with the object pho-
tographed.49 Unfortunately, embedded in this claim that shifting is in-
herent in the process of viewing photographs is an idealization of the
medium of photography, establishing it as a privileged site for unmask-
ing fetishistic viewing mechanisms. Certainly, not all photographs and
their viewing contexts foreground this process of oscillation. Rather,
some encourage reification, while others stimulate a consciousness of
fetishism's contradictions, though retaining its pleasures. Moreover, dis-
parate elements of reception - disavowal, pleasure, etc. - can either be
emphasized or suppressed by presenting photographs in different ven-
ues (a newspaper, a fan magazine) and in different formats (portrait pho-
tography, photomontage).
When these issues of fetishism and representation are applied to fe-
male spectatorship, two questions are frequently raised: Is the fetishism
experienced when viewing photography exclusively a condition of the
male viewer? And, conversely, is oscillation between gender positions
exclusively female? To both these questions, I would say no. While it
may be desirable to consider fetishism in relationship to the phallus and
power, I see no reason to keep the concept of fetishism contained wholly
within Freud's theory of the castration complex (and therefore maintain

48. Sigmund Freud, "Fetishism," The Standard Edition XXI, James Strachey, ed. (1927;
London: Hogarth, 1961) 169-77.
49. Victor Burgin, "Photography, Phantasy, Function," Thinking Photography (London:
Macmillan, 1982) 177-216.

This content downloaded from

188.189.188.238 on Tue, 07 May 2024 12:34:33 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
86 The Photomontages of Hannah Hoch

it as exclusively male). Lacan's discussion of fetishism in "Desire and the

Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet" emphasizes a confusion in subject/
object relations and a neurotic fixation on time and repetition.50 While
Lacan's remarks focus on the place of fetishism in male fantasy, the re-
thinking of identity provoked by the "Hamlet" essay need not be re-
stricted to the male viewer. For the purposes of cultural history, Freud's
emphasis on the castration complex may be usefully supplemented by
considerations of disavowal and subject/object confusion.
However, fetishism in the Freudian sense is more central to male
viewing (or to a neurotic male viewing) than to a female viewing. Even in
this sense, though, fetishism can be considered part of the female view-
ing process if one believes that women are required in our society to shift
constantly between masculine and feminine positions. And certainly,
while masculine and feminine may be binary oppositions in theory, in
actual men and women, there are no pure and completely differentiated
gender identities; damaging errors can arise from equating a dichoto-
mized definition of gender with actual individuals and cultures, which
are inflected by much more complex identities. Of course, oscillation be-
tween gender positions can also be experienced by men, but I assert that
while it can be experienced by men, it must be experienced by women in
any relationship to forms of societal power gendered as masculine.
The mechanisms of viewing photography and the degree to which
they evince shifting, confusion, pleasure, and self-consciousness bear di-
rectly on the reception of photomontage. The fragmented nature of
photomontage can encourage - if not an escape from fetishism - an
awareness of fetishistic operations, of the viewing mechanism itself, and
therefore the position of the viewer vis-A-vis the gender identities por-
trayed. With the representation of androgyny in photomontage as op-
posed to "straight" photography, the viewer's dialectical assimilation of
montage fragments whose connotations are binary opposites can lead to
a rethinking of gender identity.5"

50. Jacques Lacan, "Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet" [1959], Yale
French Studies 55/56 (1977): 11-52.
51. I would like to thank colleagues for ideas and comments which contributed to
the development of this essay, particularly Sabine Hake, Margaret Higonnet, Rose-Carol
Washton Long, Linda Nochlin, Irit Rogoff, Vernon Shedey, and Brian Wallis. This essay
in revised form is a part of my book, The Photomontages of Hannah Hich: Representing the New
Woman in Weimar Germany, 1918-33, forthcoming from Yale University Press]. For all
Hannah H6ch research, my deepest gratitude to the Berlinische Galerie, Berlin and the
H6ch family.

This content downloaded from

188.189.188.238 on Tue, 07 May 2024 12:34:33 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms