Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Vicarious Consumption: Wartime Fashion in Film and the Press, 1939–44
- Chapter 2 “Fashions for Fräuleins”: The Rebirth of the Fashion Industry and Media in Berlin after 1945
- Vignette 1 Charlotte Glückstein: Historical Ruptures and Continuities in Postwar Fashion
- Chapter 3 Fashion amidst the Ruins: Revisiting Two Early Rubble Films,… und über uns der Himmel (1947) and Die Mörder sind unter uns (1946)
- Vignette 2 Hildegard Knef: Star Appeal from Fashion to Film
- Chapter 4 Farewell to the Rubble and Welcome to the New Look: Straßenbekanntschaft (1948) and Martina (1949)
- Chapter 5 Consuming Fashion on the Screens of the Early 1950s: Modell Bianka (1951), Frauenschicksale (1952), and Ingrid: Die Geschichte eines Fotomodells (1955)
- Epilogue
- Appendix 1 Principal Costume and Fashion Designers: Biographical Notes
- Appendix 2 Films and Newsreels Discussed
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 2 - “Fashions for Fräuleins”: The Rebirth of the Fashion Industry and Media in Berlin after 1945
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2018
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Vicarious Consumption: Wartime Fashion in Film and the Press, 1939–44
- Chapter 2 “Fashions for Fräuleins”: The Rebirth of the Fashion Industry and Media in Berlin after 1945
- Vignette 1 Charlotte Glückstein: Historical Ruptures and Continuities in Postwar Fashion
- Chapter 3 Fashion amidst the Ruins: Revisiting Two Early Rubble Films,… und über uns der Himmel (1947) and Die Mörder sind unter uns (1946)
- Vignette 2 Hildegard Knef: Star Appeal from Fashion to Film
- Chapter 4 Farewell to the Rubble and Welcome to the New Look: Straßenbekanntschaft (1948) and Martina (1949)
- Chapter 5 Consuming Fashion on the Screens of the Early 1950s: Modell Bianka (1951), Frauenschicksale (1952), and Ingrid: Die Geschichte eines Fotomodells (1955)
- Epilogue
- Appendix 1 Principal Costume and Fashion Designers: Biographical Notes
- Appendix 2 Films and Newsreels Discussed
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This is what one can see on the streets of Berlin—women who look distinctly chic and fashionable. This is the overall impression, while the clothes themselves are not extravagant. The Berlin woman demonstrates again her sense of fashion, her sense of “what's in the air.” She does not reach for the stars, but rather for what is feasible. She looks for and finds the right dress for her type as well as for today's Berlin!
—“The Fashion Barometer: Rising,” Heute, June 15, 1947IN THE CHAOTIC AFTERMATH of Germany's unconditional capitulation in May 1945, the tasks of reconstruction and a new beginning in Berlin were daunting. Alongside the ideological and political objectives of democratization, denazification, and demilitarization was the common goal of restoring some sense of normality, which found expression in sometimes paradoxical reinstatements of routines and rituals of everyday civilian life. Many outside observers in the collapsed city of Berlin were astonished by the look of its inhabitants and their general attitude toward appearances. By the end of 1945, a headline in the British newspaper Daily Mail announced “Life Returns to the New Germany” and published a report on the first “after-the-defeat fashions,” richly illustrated by the Berlin-based artist Alice Bronsch and labeled “Fashions for Fräuleins.” Traveling through the decimated German capital in September of 1945, Isaac Deutscher reported in The Economist on the paradoxical presence of elegance against the background of destruction and despair:
The people give a … fallacious impression. The misleading factor is their clothes. In the less damaged suburbs within the British and American districts, and in the centre of the Russian district, suits, hats, dresses and baby clothes seem to have survived the air raids and the battle in surprising quantities. Among ruins, one expects to see beggars; instead … the Berliners appear rather better dressed than shoppers in the Edgware Road.
That same autumn, the Swiss writer Max Frisch was visiting the city and gauging its contradictory ambience by observing Berliners in the subway and on the streets. In his journal he noted with some astonishment the attempts of women to at put on a more cheerful look:
Almost everyone is carrying a bundle, a backpack or a box. Next to faces dark as clay and ash, there are others, perfectly healthy faces, but similarly sealed, impenetrable, and masklike.
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- Information
- Film and Fashion amidst the Ruins of BerlinFrom Nazism to the Cold War, pp. 47 - 66Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2018