Representing Berlin

Book excerpt: Berlin, city of Bertolt Brecht, Marlene Dietrich, cabaret and German Expressionism, a city identified with a female sexuality - at first alluring but then dangerous. In this fascinating study, Dorothy Rowe turns our attention to Berlin as a sexual landscape. She investigates the processes by which women and femininity played a prominent role in depictions of the city at the end of the nineteenth and into the early twentieth centuries. She explores how in the aftermath of the horrors of World War I, increasing anxieties about the liberation of women and the supposed increase of female prostitution contributed to the demonization of the city not as a focus of desire and pleasure but rather as one of alienation and anxiety.