8 - The Pedagogy of Pulp: Liberated Sexuality and Its Consequences through the Eyes of Vicki Baum’s stud. chem. Helene Willfüer

Summary

IN HER MEMOIRS, the Weimar German author Vicki Baum refers to herself as “eine erstklassige Schriftstellerin zweiter Güte” (a first-rate secondrate author). Baum masterfully combines the style of the Zeitroman—which includes documentary-style reporting of cultural, economic, and political themes—with the emotionally melodramatic nature of popular novels—including “tropes of female victimization, highly expressive language, and sudden shifts of fate that confront characters with impossible decisions between love and work, life and death”—in order to create what Lynne Frame refers to as “a scenario into which a woman could project a bit of herself and reflect on the alternatives to and within her real-life situations.” Through her immensely popular serialized novels that appeared in the Berliner Illustrirte [sic] Zeitung (Berlin Illustrated Newspaper) before being republished by the Berlin-based Ullstein Publishing House in book form, Baum introduces many of her primarily lower-middle-class women readers to a number of widely discussed and often controversial contemporary issues.

In the August 15, 1929 issue of Frau und Gegenwart vereinigt mit Neue Frauenkleidung und Frauenkultur (Woman and Contemporary Society United with New Women’s Clothing and Women’s Culture), the editors printed the following introduction to a review of Vicki Baum’s novel stud. chem. Helene Willfüer:

Unseren Leserinnen wird es willkommen sein, daß hier einmal eine kluge und literar-historisch fein gebildete Frau den aufsehenerregenden Roman einer umfassenden ästhetischen, künstlerischen Kritik unterzieht.

[Our readers will welcome the fact that here a clever and well-educated literary woman will provide a comprehensive aesthetic, artistic critique of this sensational (here meant in a negative connotation—A.R.K.) novel.]

Dr. Hilde Walter begins her review by justifying her reason for specifically critiquing the literary aspects of Baum’s novel:

Vicki Baums stud. chem. Helene Willfüer [entfacht] Debatten, Proteste, Entgegnungen der Verfasserin—kurz einen Aufruhr. Doch immer steht das Was, nicht das Wie im Vordergrunde, die ‘Probleme’ werden diskutiert, nicht die Art, wie sie behandelt werden.

[Vicki Baum’s stud. chem. Helene Willfüer is arousing debates, protests, responses to the author—in short, quite a commotion. But everything focuses on the “what” and not the “how,” the “problems” are being discussed, not the manner in which they are being addressed.