Chaplin Smiles on the Wall: Berlin Dada and Wish-Images of Popular Culture

[George Grosz]'s illustrations pictured the counts and schoolteachers who populated [Hans Reimann]'s parodies, as well as his concept of Courths-Mahler's readers. His frontispiece drawing reinforces the title opposite by its focus on a woman alone in a simple bedroom. Indications of a washbasin and a toilet bucket allude to the intimate tasks of a body whose heaviness and worn features speak of middle age. With drinking glass in hand and bath slippers on her feet, she stands naked in banal routine. She is mirrored by a drawing (fig. 9), also of a naked middle-aged woman, found at the end of the book and whose caption says "Goodbye!", concluding a letter from Courths-Mahler to Reimann. Her erect posture, hose, and kempt hair may indicate a higher economic level, or even CourthsMahler's presence, but she is linked to her lower-class sister by the erasure of her sexuality. The figures' contours come to a stop at the zones of breasts and hips, the line's abrupt end indicating the lifting of pen from paper as Grosz refused to render the sexual features that he so frequently exposed in other drawings. Perhaps the idea came from Reimann, who remarked on the absence of frank sexuality in CourthsMahler's idealized romances by writing: "Her `characters' are knick-knack figurines without lower abdomens." 84 However, Reimann's statement and Grosz's drawings are more than a literary critique. By the erasure of primary sexual characteristics, they simultaneously reduce women's creativity to the bearing of children and anxiously deny even that role, scorning it as a `lack' and `mere' reproduction like the "gilded plaster cast produced in Berlin." In contrast to these images of women, The Adventurer not only asserts Grosz's cynical independence from society, but links creativity to violence and originality to a male autogeny centered in the aroused sexual member. 85 3. Dada's interests in popular culture are addressed in the following: Hanne Bergius, "`Lederstrumpf' zwischen Provinz und Metropole," Rudolf Schlichter 1890-1955 (Berlin: Staatliche Kunsthalle, 1984) 33a-46a; Hanne Bergius, "Berlin: A City Drawn. From the Linear Network to the Contour," German Realist Drawing of the 1920s, ed. Peter Nisbet (Cambridge: Busch-Reisinger Museum, 1986) 15-30; [Beth Irwin Lewis], "`Lustmord': Inside the Windows of the Metropolis," Berlin: Culture and Metropolis, ed. Charles W. Haxthausen & Heidrun Suhr (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1990) 111-40; Beeke Sell Tower, "Asphaltcowboys