Seduced by Poetry, Sickened by Mass Spectacle: Julia Franck’s Gendered Portrait of Weimar Berlin in Die Mittagsfrau (2007)

Abstract:This article takes Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the novel as dialogic text as its methodological foundation for close readings of key intertexts in Julia Franck’s Die Mittagsfrau. The two most prominent intertexts are a poem by Else Lasker-Schüler and the premiere of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Dreigroschenoper. These intertexts exemplify the tension between the dialogic (Lasker-Schüler’s poem and the protagonists’ conversation about it) and the monologic (the audience’s ecstatic response to Brecht/Weill’s opera). Through close analysis of the language, sexual politics, and historical context of each of these scenes, I propose that Franck’s novel privileges Lasker-Schüler’s vision of erotic love and shared suffering as a trope for the democratization of gender roles in Weimar Berlin. At the same time, Die Mittagsfrau points to the potential of violence unleashed by the spectacle of politicized popular entertainment and hence exposes the limits to women’s emancipation during the Weimar era.