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• 1 2018-05-22T14:20:51+00:00 Pride/"Berlin is Becoming a Whore" 5 plain 2018-05-22T14:30:37+00:00 Thomas Wehrling’s essay, “Berlin is Becoming a Whore,” seeks to establish pride in a certain type of womanhood in Weimar Berlin and levy shame on those who do not fit this mold. He separates women into two categories: mother and whore, both distinct from the actual occupations of mothering or whoring. For Wehrling, a “mother” is conscious and reverent of the procreative nature of sex and wishes for a stable relationship in which children are the sole sexual goal. A “whore,” on the other hand, freely engages in sexual activity for the physical pleasure of it. Wehrling states that a whore by occupation may be a mother by disposition; similarly, a mother by occupation may be a whore by nature if she has entered motherhood unwillingly.
  
  In an ideal Berlin, Wehrling argues, a woman would not “[lose] her memory for the experiences of her lower body”—his way of saying that she would not divide the act of sex from its natural purpose of procreation (Kaes et al. 1994, 721-723). Wehrling’s argument that the prevalence of prostitution and sexual promiscuity undermines the purity of Berlin as a whole demonstrates a sense of pride in a traditional, or past, Berlin. His argument against “loose women” is also intimately tied up in the shame of class degradation. Wehrling notes that he is not just interested in the “proletarian merchants of love” but also in, “the young girls from so-called good families who are turning into whores” (Kaes et al. 1994, 721-723). He thus notes his belief that promiscuity among bourgeois women is the result of “the most wanton sexual chaos,” which denigrates society, and claims that “there has never been less reverence for the madonna and child” (Kaes et al. 1994, 721-723). In other words, Wehrling asserts that the turn away from motherhood is linked directly to the loss of identity and loss of pride of the German woman; she no longer has a “female destiny” (Kaes et al. 1994, 721-723).
  
  Bibliography:
  
  Wherling, Thomas. “Berlin is Becoming a Whore.” In The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, edited by Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg, 721-723. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.