Literature in the Weimar Republic: Novel “Men’s Fashion Department”: The girl from the department store

On May 16, 1933, a few days after the book burning on Berlin’s Opera Square, a collective review appeared in the “Börsen-Courier” in which Wolfgang Koeppen discussed various new publications ranging between trivial and high literature. Among them was the novel “Men’s Fashion Department” by the 24-year-old author Maria Gleit, published by the Viennese Amonesta publishing house, which creates a moral image of the middle class of the Weimar Republic in the form of scenes from the everyday life of the 22-year-old department store employee Lotte Stein. Koeppen calls it an example of “a new (…) type of entertainment novel,” the “professional and white-collar novel.” Referring to Siegfried Kracauer’s essay “The Employees,” published three years earlier, he attests to the author’s diagnostic skills in portraying the social character of the department store saleswoman. However, he complains that the “confection” that is the subject of the novel affects the form: Gleit’s book lacks “intensity” and is nothing more than a literary camouflage “reportage”.

In his afterword to the new edition of the novel, which was published 90 years after its first publication by The Forgotten Book, the historian Vojin Saša Vukadinović corrects Koeppen’s judgment with regard to the prose style of the New Objectivity, which emphasizes the surface, the light and the shallow discovered as qualities. In terms of perception psychology, the turn to lightness, whose “place of longing” alongside the cinema is the department store and especially the fashion department, corresponds to distraction and absent-mindedness, which is manifested in the fleeting thoughts, halting and erring conversations of the characters. It was less the unemotional aspect of the New Objectivity that made the National Socialists suspicious of it than the revaluation of the consumer sphere and urban entertainment culture, which was considered “corrosive” and “decadent.”

In 1935 the “Men’s Fashion Department” was placed on the “List of Harmful and Undesirable Literature” and confiscated in 1936. In the same year, Maria Gleit emigrated to Switzerland with her husband Walther Victor, who had to leave Germany because of his Jewish origins, and a little later to America via France and Spain. In 1947 Victor went back to Germany, where he became an important cultural official in the GDR. In 1949 he and Gleit divorced. Because of her second husband, whom she met in the USA, Gleit converted to Judaism and in 1950 they both moved to Switzerland. She almost stopped her writing work and in 1981, having become hopeless professionally, privately and politically, she took her own life in Ticino.

Since Vito Victor, her son from her first marriage, destroyed all documents related to his mother’s literary work after her death at her request, it is not possible to find out whether Gleit later took up the topic of professional and sexual emancipation has. In any case, “Men’s Fashion Department”, although it has a self-confident female protagonist, is not a feminist novel. Rather, the book is interesting because it does not stylize its protagonist as a flawless identification figure, but rather shows her, as well as the men who surround her, in both sympathetic and unpleasant facets. Over the course of the plot, Lotte only gradually learns through experiences at work and sharpening self-reflection: initially conformist and flirtatious, she takes advantage of the role given to her by the boss of the Berlin department store Schack, dressing up male customers in a “girl” costume inspired by American culture to charm her in order to test her own erotic market value and to make her lover and colleague Walter Böhmelmann jealous.

Böhmelmann is a petit bourgeois with simple ideas about partnership, loyalty and order, who answers almost all of Lotte’s requests with the sentence “As you want” with uncertain affection. Because of the male success that the “girl” uniform gives her, she feels bored with him and looks for other “sacrificial animals.” However, she soon realizes that she is more of a kind of casual prostitute for the men who flirt with her. Lotte experiences a real change when her colleague Annemarie is impregnated by Doctor Saffian, Schack’s human resources manager. She helps her friend, experiences her own affair with an entrepreneur’s son as both enriching and a lesson in the fact that those with whom you get along best are rarely the ones who offer you the most, rises and becomes department manager of a Prague department store, which enables her to find a place at her side for Böhmelmann, whom she loves but who is too passive to make anything of himself.

The fact that “Men’s Fashion Department” is not a developmental novel, but, as the subtitle puts it more sociographically precisely, just the “novel of a department store girl” is not only due to the flightiness of its main character, about whom you still don’t know what is happening after the by no means definitive happy ending from it, but also because the joy in the temporary constitutes the law of movement of the female development story that Gleit tells. The bluntness and frivolity that characterize Lotte as well as Gleit’s narrative style were among the first things that were liquidated by the National Socialists in the Weimar Republic’s civilizational assets. The fact that the novel shows emancipation not as an identity project, but as an interplay of female and male desire, spontaneous friendliness and self-knowledge, gives the book a serious lightness that has been present since the authors of the 1920s, including Irmgard Keun, Mascha Kaléko, Marieluise Fleißer and Vicki Baum also belonged to Maria Gleit, hardly a “women’s book” has reached the mark.

Maria Gleit: Men’s Fashion Department. Novel of a department store girl. Edited and with an afterword by Vojin Saša Vukadinović. With a closing word from Vito Victor. DVB-Verlag, 384 pages, hardcover, €28.

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