Book Description
The First World War altered the view of masculinity held by many in Germany and shredded what many regarded as unchangeable fixtures of German life. For German men, much of the interwar period meant dealing with the losses from the war, reconfiguring what it meant to be a man. This reconfiguration of gender took place in a context of change in Germany. Many women entered the workforce to replace the lost men. The economic downturn and reliance on funding from the United States motivated many within Germany to examine gender roles and to reassemble masculinity to meet changing circumstances. This project explores this reassembly of gender and masculinity through the lens of film. As a starting point, I examine the historiography of gender crisis within interwar German film. For several decades now, many film historians have analyzed gender in these films and concur about their portrayal of a crisis of masculinity, specifically that men saw themselves as failures. My re-reading of these films suggests that while it is true that many films from this period convey a crisis of gender, a number of filmmakers pushed through crisis to reconfigure and reassemble a coherent vision of masculinity.
