Woman and Typewriter: Gender, Technology, and Work in Late Weimar Film.

Among the new technologies of the industrial age, the typewriter both provided women with access to the labor force and became identified as a gender-specific machine used almost exclusively by women. This essay examines the iconography of the female office worker at the typewriter in two Weimar entertainment films, Arm wie eine Kirchenmaus (Poor as a Church Mouse, 1930) and Die Privatsekretarin (The Private Secretary, 1931), in order to assess how this woman is negotiated as a spectacle and role model for female spectators. Technology, the ethos of work, and consumer culture are the central terms of this negotiation. Although these films highlight the professional success of women at work, they also reinforce traditional gender expectations, such as sex segregation and the return of young females to the domestic sphere of marriage and family life. By contextualizing these films within the Depression years, this paper argues that their conventional conclusions should also be understood as expressing male anxieties over the ongoing economic crisis and competition from working women. (AF)

"The typewriter has conquered all the offices," a 1921 trade journal article declared, noting that the modernization of work through new technologies had led to a shift in the nature of the work force and increased the number of women, especially in the clerical and service sectors ("Die weibliche Angestellte" 7).(1) Among the new technologies, it was particularly the typewriter, which had been invented at the end of the nineteenth century and mass-produced in Germany shortly thereafter, that provided women with access to the office, and therefore entry to a professional site that had hitherto been a predominantly male domain. The story of the typewriter is thus the tale of a discursive technology that changed not only the ways of writing and of text production, but also the gender identity of writing. As Friedrich Kittler remarks in his analysis of media technologies, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter: "Prior to the invention of the typewriter, all poets, secretaries, and typesetters were of the same sex" (184). After its introduction to the workplace, the typewriter replaced both the manual writing tool of the pen and the clerical men who worked with it. This "Zwischending," a thing between a tool and a machine,(2) as Martin Heidegger described the typewriter, developed into a gender-specific machine used almost exclusively by women. By being associated with manual skills such as sewing and playing the piano, the act of typing and, by extension, the job as typist or, eventually, secretary became typecast as "woman's work." A historical novelty, the typewriter entered the office--the word typewriter signifying both the typing machine and the female typist, the one who writes by typing.

The typist, or, more precisely, the secretary,(3) who derives her existence from the rise of technological innovation and the modernization of the workplace, turned into a popular media image in the cultural imagination of the late Weimar years. Emerging from the tradition of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity, an aesthetic movement that had begun to proclaim objective realism in the arts in the mid 1920s), late Weimar popular film was deeply engaged with the phenomena of modern urban life, such as work, consumerism, and leisure. As they mediated between the working woman's experience and the public sphere, many films centered on the white-collar woman at the typewriter: for example, Arm wie eine Kirchenmaus (Poor as a Church Mouse, 1931), Die Privatsekretarin (The Private Secretary, 1931), Das ha[Beta]liche Madchen (The Ugly Girl, 1933), Madchen mit Prokura (The Girl with Power of Attorney, 1933), Es lebe die Freiheit (Long Live Freedom, 1932), and Liebe mu[Beta] verstanden sein (Love Has to Be Understood, 1933). These so-called Burofilme (office films) presented the typing woman as a spectacle and a role model for a female audience, an audience that, in turn, consisted mostly of typists, shop assistants, and telephone operators. Despite their extraordinary popularity at the time, the intervening years have not been kind to these entertainment films, which today receive scant attention and are scarcely acknowledged.

As indicators of cultural shift, these films deserve closer scrutiny. By taking Richard Oswald's Arm wie eine Kirchenmaus and Wilhelm Thiele's Die Privatsekretarin(4) (both Greenbaum productions) as case studies, I will examine the iconography of the New Woman in the modernized office and the ways in which she is imagined and negotiated as a spectacle in terms of gender, technology, work, and consumption. I will elucidate what kinds of images of the modern working woman these films convey and how these images contribute to a visual definition of a particular role model for female spectators. Given the fact that these office films are from the Depression years, a time often referred to as the crisis of modernization, I will also consider how the social realities of economic crisis and unemployment are negotiated and redefined through gender and the image of the working woman. As I will argue, this New Woman at work is to be read as a medium for articulating fantasies, desires, and anxieties about the growing presence of women in the labor force as well as the crisis of modernization at the end of the Weimar period.

Critical literature on Weimar cinema generally focuses on avant-garde film and mostly ignores the entertainment cinema of the period, including the numerous office films. To the extent that they are discussed at all, popular films tend to be viewed entirely as cultural products of white-collar culture. This bias is itself reflected in the generic term customary for these pictures--Angestelltenfilme (white-collar films). Along with other contemporary critics, Siegfried Kracauer interpreted the entertainment films as a "cult of distraction" that seeks to provide diversion and visual pleasure for a white-collar audience consisting mostly of female spectators who are enjoying their after-work hours (Die Angestellten 97). Following Emilie Altenloh's Soziologie des Kino (Sociology of the Cinema, 1914), a study of early silent-film reception, Kracauer recognizes cinema as site of consumption and women as its principal consumers. Not surprisingly, his reading of popular film and its audience displays a condescending attitude toward female spectators and their cinematic desires.(5) The essay "Die kleinen Ladenmadchen gehen ins Kino" ("The Little Shopgirls Go to the Movies"), in which Kracauer refers to the female audience exclusively as "shopgirls," "typists," or "cleaning girls" (Ladenmadchen, Tippmamsells, or Scheuermadchen) may stand for many in its dismissive view of women as the audience of "mass culture" films (Das Ornament der Masse 279-94).

More recent cultural studies-oriented criticism has challenged this universalized concept of "mass culture" precisely on the grounds of its exclusive class orientation and gender bias. These new studies suggest a differentiated reading of culture in terms of processes of gendered consumption, modernization, commodification, spectatorship, marketing of desires, and image-making. Such processes, they argue, are equally crucial for the study of popular film.(6) By decoding "mass" culture along gender lines as consumer culture, a new school of criticism is able to view women as subjects and active participants in a modern consumer and cinematic culture, while resisting Kracauer's jaundiced view of the "little shopgirls'" desires and cinematic habits.

Current research on consumption has also given sustained attention to gender in production and technology and to its distinctive role in the construction of the imaginary. By viewing women as agents of modernization and technology, these feminist critiques challenge a common assumption of technology as either a male monopoly or as gender-neutral. The gendered body along with the factory and the household--one may also add the office--is considered as site of technological activity as well as of projection.(7)