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Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity-A Cultural Biography by Irene Gammel. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002, 534 pp., $39.95 hardcover.
Gender and Sexuality in Weimar Modernity: Film, Literature, and "New Objectivity" by Richard W. McCormick. New York: Palgrave, 2001, 240 pp., $21.95 paper.
The extent to which gender marks modernity in both material and cultural form is the object of two new studies. Irene Gammel's biography of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, deemed "the mother of Dada" by her contemporaries, provides the first comprehensive scholarly look at a neglected and enigmatic figure. Richard McCormick's analysis of gender in Weimar culture, particularly the movement known as "New Objectivity," moves through familiar historical territory by analyzing some of its best-known texts and films. If scintillating, scandalous tales of a dime-store Baroness walking the streets of New York, Paris, and Berlin in a tomato-soup can bra would seem to compel more than yet another reading of the film The Blue Angel, then McCormick's study is ultimately more original and satisfying than Gammel's.
There is no denying, however, the achievement in Gammel's richly detailed account and analysis of a woman otherwise familiar only to scholars of international modernism. If largely unknown today, Freytag-Loringhoven's "body art"-or utilitarian objects like a taillight worn as a skirt bustle, teaspoons as earrings, and postage stamps as rouge-was photographed by Man Ray and Berenice Abbott, painted by Theresa Bernstein, and captured in lithography by George Biddle. Her poetry appeared in the Little Review and her artwork has lately been exhibited in major museums. The Baroness also knew and often collaborated with some of the major figures of dada and modernism, including Marcel Duchamp, Djuna Barnes, William Carlos Williams, and Hart Crane. Despite such contacts, however, she subsisted on the wages of an artist's model and lived the last decade of her life in abject poverty.
From her bourgeois origins in the Baltic town of Swinemunde (now part...