Sexual Violence, Typologies of the Feminine, and Otto Weininger Revisited:
The Lustmord Pictures of George Grosz
Lauren Murtagh
Master’s Thesis
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts in Art History
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Columbia University
2013
ABSTRACT
Sexual Violence, Typologies of the Feminine, and Otto Weininger Revisited: the Lustmord Pictures of George Grosz
This thesis will examine the cultural construction and significance of the sexual murderer by exploring the theme of lustmord in the work of George Grosz. Enjoying a curious ubiquity during the early Weimar years, lustmord as artistic subject is frequently rationalized as modernist aesthetic strategy, political allegory, or Freudian pathology. Rather than compiling an encyclopedic survey of lustmord’s various iterations, I will focus principally on Grosz’s engagement with Otto Weininger’s magnum opus Geschlecht und Charakter, whose influence is frequently treated as something of an afterthought. While the Neue Sachlichkeit verists, Grosz among them, are conventionally considered the most acerbic critics of the excesses of the Weimar era, they often operated squarely within certain of the ideological frameworks that define it. I will therefore seek to determine to what degree Grosz reinforces (or departs from) prevailing ideologies regarding gender relations, sexuality, and lustmord itself.
In many past studies of this theme, the First World War and its aftermath are taken to somehow legitimize the hostility inherent in the subject. According to such arguments, the artist merely substitutes domestic and gendered battlefields for military ones. However, many of Grosz’s lustmord pictures, as well as the sinister alliance of female sexuality with disorder and death in Grosz’s oeuvre coincide with or precede the war. While I will not ignore or refute the works’ potential political subtext, I will more closely examine the intellectual, philosophical, and pseudo-scientific groundwork that was laid well before the Great War. I will situate the subject within Grosz’s preoccupation with the sensational, his general misanthropy, the groundwork laid by Weininger, and public discourse on prostitution and the neue frau. I will assert that the war did not initiate explorations of lustmord from the shell-shocked artist, but merely altered the nature of the artist’s engagement with an already established subject.
I will first discuss Oskar Kokoschka’s play (and later opera) Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen and accompanying drawings as ur-lustmord. Kokoschka was one of the first artists to engage with Weininger’s philosophy; his play puts forth a cosmic, metaphysical lustmord in which Woman ceases to exist the moment Man denies his own sexuality, thus disavowing her essence. I will then discuss Grosz’s treatment of the subject through the prism of Weininger’s characterology and conception of Woman as an exclusively sexual non-entity. I will trace the trajectory of the lustmord theme through Grosz’s oeuvre, including how it evolved from an independent subject in the prewar period to an oft-hidden leitmotif in innumerable wartime and postwar works. I will assert that Grosz’s engagement with the subject is unique among his contemporaries in that he treated the theme in a greater array of styles and across a far longer span of time than any other artist. I will also address the clandestine self-portraits that situate Grosz vis-à-vis the sinister, turbulent milieu that plays host to the lustmord subject.
I will ultimately assert that Grosz constructs the sexual murderer as a victim of Woman and the power of her sexuality; he emphatically and almost invariably depicts men with a total lack of agency. I will also address the question of self-directed lustmord (the ultimate consequence of Woman’s sexual tyranny) in Grosz’s work. The sexual murderer is thus cast as an unwilling victim of compulsions which must be mastered; one way to do so is to eliminate the threat altogether via the lustmord. Perhaps more importantly, the grotesque corporeality of Grosz’s female nudes elicits repulsion rather than erotic interest, thus annihilating desire along with the works’ feminine subjects (effecting a mord of lust along with a lustmord).
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………...….…..ii
Dedication………………………………………………………………………………………...iii
List of Figures………………………………………………………………………………...…..iv
Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………..1
Chapter One…………………………………………………………………………………….....8
Chapter Two…………………………………………………………………………………...…27
Chapter Three……………………………………………………………………………….…....64
Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………….…89
Appendix (Images)……………………………………………………………………….………92
Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………....112
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank the faculty of the Department of Art History at Columbia University for their invariably captivating, enriching, and illuminating courses. Chief among them is my thesis advisor, Dr. Noam M. Elcott, to whom I am grateful for his advice, encouragement, and patience. Most of all, I owe my parents a tremendous debt of gratitude for their unwavering support of my educational endeavors.
Dedicated to my parents, Richard T. and Nancy J. Murtagh
LIST OF FIGURES
Fig. 1.1 Oskar Kokoschka, Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen (poster), 1909. Lithograph. Fondation Oskar Kokoschka, Villeneuve, Switzerland.
Fig. 1.2 Oskar Kokoschka, Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen (Der Sturm cover), 1910. Ink drawing. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Fig. 2.1 George Grosz, Die Affäre Mielzynski (The Mielzynski Affair), 1912-13. Pen and ink drawing. Richard L. Feigen & Co., New York.
Fig. 2.2 George Grosz, Lustmord, 1913-14. Pen and ink drawing. Private collection.
Fig. 2.3 George Grosz, Untitled, 1915. Ink drawing. George Grosz Estate, Princeton, New Jersey.
Fig. 2.4 George Grosz, Lustmord in der Ackerstrasse, 1916-17. Pen and India ink drawing. Leopold Museum, Vienna.
Fig. 2.5 George Grosz, John, der Frauenmörder (John, the Lady Killer), 1918. Oil on canvas. Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg.
Fig. 2.6 George Grosz, Der Kleine Frauenmörder (The Little Lady Killer), 1918. Oil on canvas. Private collection.
Fig. 3.1 George Grosz, Akt (Nude), 1916. Ink and brush drawing. Private collection.
Fig. 3.2 George Grosz, An Eva, meine Freundin (To Eva, my Girlfriend), 1918. Lithograph. Private collection.
Fig. 3.3 George Grosz, Untitled, 1919. Pen and watercolor. Stiftung Henri Nannen, Kunsthalle-Emden, Emden, Germany.
Fig. 3.4 George Grosz, Selbstporträt (für Charlie Chaplin) (Self-Portrait (for Charlie Chaplin)), 1919. Lithograph. Kupferstichkabinett, Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel.
Fig. 3.5 George Grosz, Self-Portrait as Jack the Ripper (Photograph of Grosz with Eva Peter in studio), c. 1920. Photograph. George Grosz Archiv, Akademie der Künste, Berlin.
Fig. 3.6 George Grosz, Aufruhr (Uproar), 1918. Ink and brush drawing. Galerie Nierendorf, Berlin.
Fig. 3.7 George Grosz, Selbstmörder (Suicide), 1918. Pen, ink, and watercolor. Galerie Nierendorf, Berlin.
Fig. 3.8 George Grosz, Die Tragödie des Masturbanten Mehring (The Tragedy of Masturbator Mehring), 1917. Ink drawing. Private collection.
Fig. 3.9 Otto Dix, Der Lustmörder (Selbstporträt) (The Sex Murderer (Self-Portrait)), 1920. Oil on canvas. Lost.
Fig. 3.10 Otto Dix, Lustmord, 1922. Oil on canvas. Lost.
Fig. 3.11 Otto Dix, Lustmord (from the portfolio Tod und Auferstehung (Death and Resurrection)), 1922. Etching. Otto Dix Stiftung, Vaduz, Liechtenstein.
Fig. 3.12 Rudolf Schlichter, Lustmord, 1924. Pencil and watercolor. Private collection.
v
INTRODUCTION
Otto Weininger’s Geschlecht und Charakter appeared in Vienna in 1903. His sensational suicide on the heels of its publication catapulted him to posthumous fame; multiple editions and translations of the work followed at breakneck pace.[1] The existing intellectual soil would prove fertile ground indeed for the discussion and spread of Weininger’s musings. A small constellation of scholarship cropped up around him, pulling everybody from Arnold Schoenberg to August Strindberg into its orbit. Weininger’s rhapsody on the nullity of the female sex was often greeted with unqualified admiration and exalted as a work of precocious genius. This almost unequivocally enthusiastic reception among intellectuals hints at a pervasive fear of a menacing effeminacy and attendant cultural decline.[2] Against the backdrop of the ostensibly celebratory sexuality and sensual vitality of the Expressionist visual landscape, the concept of Woman as source of corporeal corruption and threat to male subjectivity loomed. This more sinister facet of Expressionism featured a persecuted male hero compelled to thwart and rise above the singularly sexual purpose of Woman.
By no means had Weininger’s Meisterwerk lost its status as cultural lightning rod by the time George Grosz would have encountered it. Indeed, interest continued to snowball around it throughout the 1920’s (with a 25th edition published in 1923), [3] and the intellectual culture of Grosz’s formative years was positively saturated with Weininger. The incendiary ideology put forward in this once-fashionable touchstone for masculine intellectual culture was echoed directly or indirectly in the arts and cultural criticism of the time ad infinitum. Weininger’s remedy for gender struggles entails the abolition of sexuality, and therefore of Woman, for Woman and sexuality are equivalent terms. Weininger’s virulent misogyny is by no means unique; it is rather distilled from existent intellectual material and heightened with grandiose language. With his fustian verbiage and purported science of soulless womanhood Weininger effectively knocks Woman off of whatever pedestal had ever been hers. He conceives of and forcefully articulates the theoretical anti-heroine that Oskar Kokoschka and others would so frequently narrativize. In Weininger’s philosophical calculus, the female gender is akin to a moral black hole into which Man falls with each sexual union. The solution to all pressing problems humanity (mankind) faces is bound up with this “Woman problem,” as Weininger grandly asserts with the air of one divulging a prized gem of classified information.
Weininger’s frequently convoluted and dubious logic tends to unravel upon even the most cursory inspection by 21st century eyes; however it is my intention to highlight those facets of his characterology of Woman that will be relevant to Grosz’s treatment of the feminine and of the lustmord subject. Weininger’s Weltanschauung regarding Woman’s nature and significance (or lack thereof) proved compelling for writers and visual artists alike; these were anxieties that intellectuals evidently shared with the traditionalists they so derided. While it may seem that Grosz does little to contradict this vision, I will argue that his treatment of Weiningerian typology and dogmatism is oblique and somewhat diluted in comparison with the more direct translation offered by Kokoschka. I will not make the claim that Grosz’s lustmord pictures are tantamount to Weininger made visible, but will seek to examine where Grosz reflects, qualifies, complicates, and departs from the former’s ideas. I will also endeavor to resituate Grosz’s engagement with the lustmord subject away from the later surge of interest heralded by Otto Dix, Rudolf Schlichter, and others, and closer to one more informed by Expressionism than by New Objectivist verism.
Weininger takes great pains to establish the nature of Woman as purely and exclusively sexual; she is a non-logical, non-moral (as opposed to immoral) being, possessing no geist, self, or intellect. She is non-existence. The feminine and masculine principles are in constant conflict, with the former always threatening to rise to dominance, and against which the latter must exercise vigilance. Within the feminine principle, Weininger establishes a characterology of two absolute types: the prostitute and the mother. While characterology (for men) was something of a specialty for Grosz, he may be said to treat only one denuded, unadorned female type, particularly in his earlier work, while Weininger’s mother type is all but absent from his oeuvre. I will argue that Grosz’s representation of Woman as sexuality incarnate, as devoid of reason, and as a danger to Man is informed by the Weiningerian ethos.
It is difficult to determine the precise nature of Grosz’s relationship with Weininger’s seemingly inescapable legacy, which is typically treated as a peripheral influence at best. The sociological valences with which scholarship has invested the lustmord works tend to obfuscate these possible philosophical underpinnings. However, I will endeavor to follow the trajectory of Weininger’s ideas and the subject of lustmord through Grosz’s oeuvre, starting in 1912-13 with works that differ markedly from later iterations in their emphasis on the nude corpse. In Grosz’s innumerable crime scenes, sinister characters gaze bemusedly at the product of their mindless violence as they stride away, or remain, entirely unconcerned, in interiors laden with the mundane trappings of domesticity and scattered murder weapons alike. Yet Weininger’s worldview reaches its apex not with the lustmord subject or in works depicting a valiant masculine hero’s triumph over debasing female sexuality, but with the subject of male suicide, which Grosz frames as self-directed lustmord and as Man’s only means of liberation from Woman’s sexual oppression.
Lustmord was a criminological and psychological term prior to its arrival on the artistic scene. A distinction must therefore be made between lustmord as it is understood in art, and in criminology. Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s exhaustive sexological volume Psychopathia Sexualis popularized the term in the late 1880’s, when the sex murderer emerged as a distinct criminal type. Krafft-Ebing offers this account: “…it is very likely the murderous act and subsequent mutilation of the corpse were equivalents for the sexual act.” [4] He goes on to absolve the perpetrators of blame entirely: “All consciousness is lost…culpability is scarcely reasonable in such a mental state where the natural urge is intensified to a pathological level.” [5] Erich Wulffen’s 1910 compendium Der Sexualverbrecher built on Krafft-Ebing’s work and contains a chapter on lustmord, which features a parade of lurid crime scene photographs of raped, murdered, and mutilated women. Like his predecessor, Wulffen does not progress very far past organic, constitutional causes for the murderous behavior, and focuses instead on the necrophilia and dismemberments that follow the murder, rather than on what motivates it. Grosz does not portray these grisly postmortem machinations; his perpetrators dispatch their victims without further ado.
Most scholarship on lustmord as artistic subject has tended to treat it somewhat uniformly, gathering all geographically, chronologically, and stylistically disparate works under the same umbrella. Previous book-length studies strive to be broad and all-encompassing surveys, drawing upon all major artistic figures that took up the theme in turn, and upon all possible influences and cultural manifestations. These studies typically focus on lustmord’s chief representatives in the fine arts (Grosz and Dix), progressing through its cinematic (Fritz Lang’s M and Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s Pandora’s Box) and literary (Alfred Döblin’s novel Berlin Alexanderplatz) iterations, and touching upon everyone from Jack the Ripper to Norman Bates (Maria Tatar, Beth Irwin Lewis, Martin Büsser, Susanne Komfort-Hein, and Susanne Scholz are among the scholars who have taken this approach). However, the films and novels in question, as well as the oft-cited Fritz Haarmann and Peter Kürten serial murder cases, belong to the decade following the one in which Grosz took up the lustmord theme. This broadened scope elides the cultural and philosophical specificity of lustmord art production; I endeavor to narrow the field of inquiry considerably in focusing on Grosz’s work.