Whoever appeared in the street scene as a pedestrian became a representation of society. In the s, one met veterans, workers, military personnel, prostitutes, the unemployed, and the masses in the street. This essay seeks to shed light on the changes in representations of the street scene that took place when working girls were added to it. Although the urban street around was a chaotic space, working girls appeared as an icon that affirms modernity without necessarily breaking with the past.
This may have changed our perception of the public sphere. I wish to thank R. Obst for the translation. These young single women with their Hollywood faces, their elastic and wiry bodies, short hair and skirts, their thin legs covered by silk stockings crowded the public sphere of the cities 1. Both, the apparent and the obscure, can be seen by looking at the street. Thus this look is oscillating between observing and decoding the visible.
The Weimar society of the late s seemed to define itself by views of the street — in the literal and metaphorical sense. The street is both its projection screen and surface of reflection. Time and again this society externalizes views of its inner workings: it generates typologies, is obsessed by form, and shifts its center to the exterior metropolis, which becomes a challenge to the senses 4.
A discourse about the street, its objects and actors emerges. Therefore, reality, in its emphatic sense, becomes visible, even if just conveyed and represented by the media 6. The actual matter of concern was the presence of prostitutes in public. But there is something wrong with this snapshot. It combines key players of society who do not belong together in a picture, who even exclude each other.
It introduces differences that do not function properly in the synchronicity of the moment: for wherever the mass enters the stage one cannot find white collar workers, neither male nor female. By contrast, the unemployed, like demonstrators and workers, are merely manifestations of the mass. Veterans, Freicorps fighters, unemployed, whores, ladies and gentlemen, however, can effortlessly be arranged side by side in an image 8. She disappears as soon as she enters the stage. This is true for the white collar workers in general.
