From Dandies to Naturburschen: The Gendering of Men’s Fashions in Weimar Germany

Summary

Scholars have often focused on the “New Woman” of Weimar Germany in her short skirts, sharp suits and Bubikopf haircut, attire considered fitting for the independent, politically emancipated and socially mobile representative of modern womanhood who emerged from the First World War. A trend toward increasingly polarized ideals of masculinity and femininity in the final years of the Republic, against a backdrop of growing cultural and political conservatism, has also been identified.

Yet men's fashions in 1920s Germany are deserving of closer attention. The decade witnessed new trends in styles for men which included a wave of feminine, “dandesque” models of masculinity in the middle of the decade. These only gave way to bulkier, more conventionally masculine looks in the late Weimar period. As with women's fashion developments, contemporary media commentators were keen to read larger social meanings into men's styles, and often used fashion columns to reflect on the state of German manhood following the traumatic war defeat. This article uses 1920s men's fashion reports as the basis for an exploration of the so-called “Verweiblichung des Mannes” in the Weimar Republic. It charts the broad progression from the effeminate “dandy” of the mid-1920s to the backlash epitomized by the late Weimar “caveman,” while also raising questions that complicate that trajectory. Did “feminine” styles for men really disappear completely by the 1930s? What role might fears of homosexual “inversion” or “perversion” have played in that development? And to what extent were developments in men's and women's fashions viewed as not only interdependent, but indicative of broader changes in relations between men and women in Germany?

There is no doubt that in Weimar Germany it was women's rather than men's bodies and visual styles that were the main object of cultural anxieties. Historians generally agree that the “New Woman” was not only a reflection of (some) women's changing reality, but also a media construction aimed at serving wider cultural needs. Mary Louise Roberts has argued in the context of 1920s France that women's appearances provided a familiar and comprehensible forum through which the population could think about broader historical and demographic developments, and thereby restore a sense of control and stability. In Weimar Germany, those developments included female suffrage and equality under the Constitution of 1919; the entrance of women into universities and professions; an increasingly urbanized and white-collar workforce; and recurrent economic and political crises.