Sloth / Im Gasthaus
A portrayal of the “neue Frau” of the Weimar Era, Lotte Laserstein’s Im Gasthaus (In the Restaurant) is a triumphant painting for a female artist of the time. The person in the painting, a new woman of the time, is seen sitting alone in a café looking rather bored. She is by herself, without a man to accompany her, and behind her sits a second solitary woman reading. There is an indifference to the expression of the woman in the foreground. She is almost snotty, as she rests her elbows on the table (a flagrant disregard of traditional manners). She is represented here as bored and blasé.
In this sense, she is a typical new Woman, or neue Frau of the 1920s. In the Weimar era, many new women were financially independent for the first time. Although not all of these women were sex workers or visited cabarets, images of prostitution and night life often dominated the public image of the independent woman. (Grossman 1986, 62-63). According to the stereotype of the neue Frau, she looked to find more and different kinds of excitement in her life rather than fall in to the monotonous traps of wifely duties and family life (Grossman 1986, 68). And yet, this search for stimulation could lead to Sto blasé attitudes. There was a certain freedom afforded to these new women, and the luxury of freedom was often accompanied by boredom, relating to a reluctance to participate in an oppressive society. While these women are trying to card out a new path in Berlin, the struggle of how to achieve that was slow and difficult, which could manifest in frustration, and in turn, boredom, as represented in this bored woman in a café.
Bibliography:
Grossman, Anita. “Girlkultur or Thoroughly Rationalized Female: A New Woman in Weimar Germany?” in Women in Culture and Politics: A Century of Change. Ed. Blanche Wiesen Cook, Judith Friedlander, Alice Kessler-Harris, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986.
