







































 
 

56 
 

The Ideal Woman 
Sexology, Sex Reform, and Engineering Marriage in Weimar Germany  
 
 

Cassie Lee Epes 
Eastern Connecticut State University 

 
 

Abstract 
The end of the first World War marked a period of profound change for the German nation, 
giving birth to Germany’s first democracy, the Weimar Republic. The Weimar Republic 
ushered in one of the most creative and uninhibited periods of the twentieth century. This 
period witnessed advancements in the field of sexology and unprecedented change for 
German women as they flooded the workforce and gained full suffrage. As an increasing 
number of single women became financially independent and disillusioned with the 
prewar construction of the family unit, German men found themselves rendered impotent. 
Already humiliated by the loss of the war, men desperately clung to the prewar, Wilhelmine 
ideal of the quintessential real man by turning their attention to the sexual behavior of 
women and fostering a culture of systematically engineered marriages through sex reform. 
This article draws upon the works of several prominent sexologists of the late nineteenth 
and early twentieth centuries, most notably Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Theodoor 
Hendrik van de Velde, as well as a variety of articles published in German magazines during 
the 1920s. By comparing these works, spanning from the end of the Wilhelmine era to the 
1930s, it becomes clear that the Great War fundamentally altered the way that women 
conceptualized female identity, sex, and the family. 

 
 
Article 

 
It was the women themselves, due to an easily understood hunger for air and life, 
who shattered the bell jar in which they were vegetating. They have become 
comrades in work in play, in pleasure and struggle, and among comrades everything 
is equal.1  

 
This short anecdote from the article, entitled “The Defenseless: A Conversation between 
Men,” published in the progressive German magazine Uhu in 1928, narrates a conversation 
had between a father and son on a bustling streetcar in Berlin. The older man asks his son 
why he had neglected to get up and offer his seat to a woman who was forced to stand, 
noting that his son’s aversion to chivalry made him feel unsettled. His son explains that the 
woman of his father’s time was not the same woman who stood on the streetcar with them. 
The woman of his own time would not want or expect him to offer her his seat. If he did, 

                                                           
1 Alfred Polgar, “The Defenseless: A Conversation between Men (1928),” in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, 
eds. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 204. 



 
 

57 
 

she would most likely refuse it, or possibly even be offended by the well-intentioned 
gesture. The modern woman of his time did not concede to weakness or accept that the 
structure of her body made her any less capable than a man. She had emancipated herself 
from the constrictions of marriage and motherhood and embraced the newfound strength 
that was given to her by the war and the Weimar Constitution. As the son states, “Gender, 
father, has become a secondary human characteristic.”2  
 
Between 1914 and 1918, nearly thirteen million German men were dispatched to the 
warfront to defend the Fatherland. By the time the armistice was signed in 1918, over two 
million soldiers had been lost.3 Those who survived were unaware that the homes and 
families to which they were returning bore no resemblance to those they left behind. Men 
returning from the war did not have the luxury of reclaiming their former existence. They 
limped their way back onto German soil as ghosts, unsure of how to navigate what now felt 
like foreign land. It quickly became clear to the soldiers that women had endured a war of 
their own. Food scarcity had called for strict rationing, and fuel shortages left women 
scouring rail yards for fallen coal when they were not working or standing in obscenely 
long food queues.4 The long, arduous work days and overwhelming shortages were 
especially burdensome for women with families, who were forced to shoulder the financial 
responsibilities associated with housing and feeding several children.  
 
German women are often still lumped together in historical works as a collective and 
enthusiastic fighting force, despite the fact that many women were eager for the war to 
end. As Detlev J.K. Peukert points out, the most common portrait of the New Woman was a 
male-generated fantasy and did not reflect the way that most women conceptualized 
themselves during the war. “The ‘vamp’: the glamour girl, a bit too independent to be true, 
armed with bobbed hair and made-up face, fashionable clothes and cigarette, working by 
day behind the sales counter in some dreamland of consumerism, frittering away the night 
dancing the Charleston.”5 In reality, most women working in industry more closely 
identified with the gender-specific notion of the woman as a substitute member of the 
workforce.6 Nevertheless, while married women and mothers anxiously awaited the return 
of their spouses, many city-dwelling single women became increasingly independent and 
uninhibited. For these women, the war was not a burden but an opportunity.  
 
The “New Woman,” as she became known, took root in the throes of the First World War 
and blossomed just as the haggard, defeated soldiers began to make their way home. The 
Germans had lost the war, and their failure ran alongside a surge of unprecedented female 
empowerment that dramatically reshaped the structure of Imperial German institutions 
and blanketed the male population with discontentment. As grueling as life on the war 
front was, there was also a sense of liberation pulsating beneath the boots of women 
working in metal and munitions factories. For many young, single women who were 
                                                           
2 Ibid.  
3 Eric D. Weitz, Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 8. 
4 Ibid., 10. 
5 Detlev J.K. Peukert, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), 
98. 
6 Ibid. 



 
 

58 
 

mobilized to support the war effort at home, Germany’s circumstances allowed them a 
taste of independence without stepping outside of the boundaries of their customary social 
positions. The demand for industrial workers in cities pulled young women away from the 
watchful eyes of their more conservative communities and allowed them to experience the 
fulfillment that came along with earning their own money.7 As Mel Gordon notes in his 
study of Weimar culture, “No longer wide-eyed innocents, these newly enfranchised 
women had witnessed an implosion of moral values.”8 After the war, these women quickly 
formed the bedrock of the Weimar Republic, and today the emancipation of the New 
Woman is tied inextricably to the birth of Germany’s first constitution in 1919. By granting 
women full suffrage and declaring men and women equal before the law, a cause that 
feminists had been rallying for since before the Wilhelmine period, the Republic 
definitively declared that men no longer held authority over women. Still struggling to 
come to terms with their extraordinary defeat in the war and shamed by the provisions of 
the Treaty of Versailles, Article 109 of the Weimar Constitution was yet another twist of the 
knife for men.9  
 
During the war years, German leaders watched apprehensively as they were forced to rely 
on female laborers to sustain the war effort. When the war came to an end, they were eager 
to push women back into their traditional roles as wives and mothers, but the utter 
devastation and loss of life caused by the First World War simply would not allow for that 
to happen. Germany was no longer a nation bonded by men; for the first time in history, the 
German economy was undeniably reliant on women. The introduction of a large female 
population into the workforce and sudden shift in gender-based labor division eventually 
triggered a resurgence of the scientific field of sexology and sex reform. As an increasing 
number of single women became financially independent and disillusioned with the 
prewar construction of the family unit, German men found themselves rendered impotent. 
Already humiliated by the loss of the war, men desperately clung to the prewar, Wilhelmine 
ideal of the quintessential “real man” by turning their attention to the sexual behavior of 
women and fostering a culture of systematically engineered marriages through sex 
reform.10  
 
The Great War and its aftermath destroyed any lingering legitimacy that the German 
government may have had, and the lack of both order and authority created a collective 
sense of juvenile defiance, leaving young people asking, “What are you going to do about 
it?” Revolutionary soldiers abandoned their epaulettes and prowled city streets with shirts 
unbuttoned.11 Women cut their hair and traded their long, conservative dresses for short 
skirts and silk stockings, unapologetically brandishing their slender, feminine figures. 
Describing the new attitude and clothing of women of this period, Gordon notes: “The light 

                                                           
7 Ibid., 11. 
8 Mel Gordon, Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin (Port Townsend, WA: Feral House 
Publishing, 2006), 14. 
9 Article 109 of the Weimar Constitution stated that all Germans are equal before the law and that men and 
women have the same fundamental civil rights and duties. 
10 Norman Domeier, “The Homosexual Scare and the Masculinization of German Politics before World War I,” 
Central European History 47, no. 4 (December 2014): 737-759.  
11 Gordon, Voluptuous Panic, 53. 



 
 

59 
 

clothing she wears moves like a wave over the line of her bright, free body. On this sunny 
day she takes in the wind the air and every male glance.”12 The Wilhelmine bubble had 
popped. Centuries of sexual repression had been unleashed, and there was a palpable sense 
of eroticism in the air. As a result, the postwar Weimar era is commonly associated with a 
surge of unparalleled sexual expression. Thirty years earlier, however, Germany had been a 
different world. Dominated by nobility, elites, and the military, Imperial Germany was 
comparatively rigid and dull. In this era, “proper” woman were seen as devoid of all sexual 
desires and shamed if they gave any indication such desire existed. 

 
Diagnosing Sexuality 
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the up-and-coming field of sexology was piloted 
by the antiquated sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing, one of the first and most influential 
figures in the field of human sexuality. Krafft-Ebing pioneered the study of sexual 
perversity in men, women, and children through a series of primitive case studies. These 
case studies, some of the first examples of the medicalization of sexual behavior, were 
revolutionary in that they characterized behaviors that had previously been labeled 
criminal, immoral, or unnatural as identifiable, diagnosable, and often treatable diseases.13 
Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, most of the discourse surrounding the 
relationship between science and sex was dominated by medical doctors, but by the turn of 
the century, the study of sexual behavior had been largely overtaken by psychiatrists who 
believed that “abnormal” sexual desires were a sickness of the mind rather than the body.14 
Conceived within the constrictions of the exceptionally prudish Victorian era, late-
nineteenth-century sexology pushed the limits of what was considered “moral” sexual 
behavior by acknowledging that female sexual impulsivity was a natural part of the 
biological process. Krafft-Ebing and his fellow sexologists subsequently utilized that 
information to deduce that the sole purpose of any female sexual desire was to encourage 
reproduction, not to experience physical pleasure.  
 
Krafft-Ebing’s prior “diagnoses” were skewed to curb the changing nature of marriage and 
intimacy at the end of the nineteenth century, but by the 1920s his ideas were unable to 
withstand the Germans’ desire for uninhibited, enjoyable sex. Nevertheless, the goal of 
Weimar era sexologists, most notably Theodoor Hendrik van de Velde, remained the same: 
fortify marriage and birth rates and ensure the continuation of a male-dominated society. 
Krafft-Ebing and Van de Velde, both leading sex reformers of their times, had a similar 
objective but applied variable strategies to reach this objective. Krafft-Ebing, motivated by 
a desire to keep sex under lock and key, used his position as an established and respected 
doctor to present female sexual expression as a disease that required aggressive treatment 
and rehabilitation. In his study of Krafft-Ebing, Harry Oosterhuis has drawn attention to the 
problematical legacy of the reformer: “Because he wrote about sex when polite society was 
silent about it, and because he wrote about it as if it were a disease or medical problem, 
Krafft-Ebing has been mistaken as a progressive force in the struggle against sexual 

                                                           
12 Weitz, Weimar Germany, 309. 
13 Harry Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of Nature: Krafft-Ebing, Psychiatry, and the Making of Sexual Identity 
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 2. 
14 Ibid., 43.  



 
 

60 
 

prejudice and prudery.”15 But by 1926, when Van de Velde published his famed work, The 
Ideal Marriage, Krafft-Ebing’s blueprint for sexual repression was outdated and inapt. 
Recognizing that Krafft-Ebing’s approach was no longer effective, Van de Velde devised a 
new plan, incentivizing sex to encourage women to marry and bear children. Sex, Van de 
Velde discovered, was a valuable tool that if used properly, had the potential to repair a 
broken Germany.  
 
The war and the Weimar Republic were not solely to blame for Germany’s convoluted 
attitudes toward marriage in the early twentieth century. Rules regarding dating, intimacy, 
marriage, and sex had begun to change long before the war. This shift coincided with the 
growth of modern city life at the turn of the century; between 1850 and 1900, Berlin 
blossomed into a vibrant metropolis.16 City life dramatically altered the ways in which 
people became acquainted with one another, and as a result, the concept of casual dating—
or what Tim Carrington refers to as Verhӓltnis—became commonplace.17 If the women of 
the Wilhelmine era began to create a crack in the foundation of traditional family life, the 
women of the Weimar era definitively shattered Wilhelmine attitudes toward sex and 
motherhood. The cruel legacy of The Great War had mutated into a culture of 
experimentation, indulgence, and unconventional relationships. Those who survived the 
war were awakened to the transitory nature of life. New opportunity was ubiquitous. 
Sexual autonomy became obtainable. Much like the reactionary sexology that was 
produced in the late nineteenth century, twentieth-century sex reform was designed to 
retrench female sexual expression. As Detlev J.K. Peukert has observed, “The ideas and 
methods of the new sexual enlightenment were themselves still very much the offspring of 
the nineteenth century, particularly of its faith in science.”18 The gradual emergence of the 
surplus woman beginning in the nineteenth century became synonymous with sexual 
deviancy and disease, but after the war, the recently emasculated male populace became 
even more eager to find a cure. Science, some believed, was a viable recourse.  
 
In an earlier effort to curtail the looming threat of female sexual expression that had begun 
to emerge before the war, many pioneers of the study of sexual behavior set out to 
determine the root cause of the degeneration of the traditional family unit. German 
neurologist P. J. Mӧbius, who published Concerning the Physiological Feeblemindedness of 
the Female in 1907, focused his attention primarily on what he considered to be biological 
causation. Mӧbius asserted that the size of the female brain was far less developed than the 
male brain, causing women to be incapable of analytical thinking and thus driven entirely 
by instinct.19 In this treatise, Mӧbius asserted: “Instinct makes woman animalistic, 
dependent, naïve and cheerful … Like animals have behaved from times immemorial, so too 
would mankind remain in its primal condition, if there were only women. All progress 

                                                           
15 Ibid., 8.  
16 Tim Carrington, Love at Last Sight: Dating, Intimacy, and Risk in Turn-of-the-Century Berlin (New York: 
Oxford University Press, 2019), 65.  
17 Ibid., 17. 
18 Peukert, The Weimar Republic, 101. 
19 Barbara Hales, “Woman as a Sexual Criminal: Weimar Constructions of the Criminal Femme Fatale,” Women 
in Germany Yearbook 12 (1996): 102. 



 
 

61 
 

originates from man.”20 According to Mӧbius, the woman’s instinctual nature and lack of 
both intellect and restraint endangered the structure of German society and, as a result, 
threatened the very fabric of their nation. Prior to the war, there was a collective, clear 
vision of what the construction of the family should look like and what it should provide. 
That vision was driven by “specialists” of human sexual behavior like Mӧbius and Krafft-
Ebing and, broken by the war, was resurrected in the twenties by prominent sexologists 
like Van de Velde and Magnus Hirschfeld to combat the postwar crisis of the family.  
 
While Mӧbius’s theories were rooted in physiological science, most prominent sex 
reformers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, like Krafft-Ebing, had 
backgrounds in psychology and natural sciences. Krafft-Ebing published the first edition of 
his major work, Psychopathia Sexualis: A Clinical-Forensic Study, in 1886, addressing for the 
first time taboo subjects, like masturbation, fetishism, masochism, and incest. Psychopathia 
Sexualis was assembled from a series of case studies in which Krafft-Ebing categorized a 
myriad of sexual perversions ranging from “abnormally” increased sexual desire and 
erectile dysfunction to violent and sometimes deadly sadism.21 Keeping with the widely 
accepted nineteenth-century belief that men had a more intense sexual appetite than 
women, Krafft-Ebing viewed a heightened female libido as a disease, deducing that “a 
predominating sexual desire in her arouses a suspicion of pathological significance. When 
this finds expression in desire for adornment, coquetry, or male society, which passing 
beyond the limits set by good breeding and manners, becomes quite noticeable.”22 Krafft-
Ebing’s case studies effectively validated the widespread belief that women were more 
susceptible to psychological anomalies and insanity, especially when sex was involved.  
 
In two case studies documenting “hyperesthesia,” which by his definition meant 
“abnormally increased sexual desire,” Krafft-Ebing likened an inflated sex drive to insanity, 
explaining that one of his female patients was sent to an asylum because “she was unable to 
control herself, so she would shut herself in a room until the storm had passed. At last she 
gave herself up to the men of her choice, but neither coitus nor masturbation brought 
relief.”23 In another evaluation, he reported that a mother of five was driven to attempt 
suicide as a result of her sexual impulses, and was also sent to an asylum. Even once she 
had been “rehabilitated,” she refused to leave the institution because she did not trust her 
ability to control herself in the outside world.24 Krafft-Ebing never explicitly clarified what 
constituted abnormally increased sexual desire, but based on his assertion that the female 
sex drive was “naturally small,” it can be assumed that in some cases, any sexual desire at 
all could be deemed increased and abnormal. Krafft-Ebing’s crude case studies were the 
embodiment of the Wilhelmine era. To him, women were merely vessels. Their existence 
was necessary for the continuation of the German race—and nothing more.  
 

                                                           
20 Quoted in Ibid.  
21 Richard Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, with Especial Reference to Contrary Sexual Interest, trans. 
Charles Gilbert Chaddock (Philadelphia: F.A. Davis Publishers, 1893), 57. 
22 Ibid., 48. 
23 Ibid., 51. 
24 Ibid., 52.  



 
 

62 
 

Examining the way that educated men conceptualized female sexuality at the end of the 
Wilhelmine era is essential to understanding the complex social environment in which 
Weimar era sexology was conceived. Krafft-Ebing’s belief that sexual females should be 
condemned to institutions and denied the opportunity to marry and have children 
indicated a desire to contain what he thought might be hereditary. In the majority of his 
case studies, he provided a brief family history of the patient and overwhelmingly 
established some form of mental illness on the mother’s side, as seen for example in his 
description of the case of “D.”: “Case 3. D., aged 33, had a mother who suffered with insanity 
of the persecution. The woman’s mother became insane in the perpetual state. Three of her 
mother’s children died in babyhood, and those that lived longer had an abnormal 
character.”25 The idea that “D.” was sexually abnormal because there was a family history 
of what he very loosely defined as “insanity” is rooted in the theory of eugenics formulated 
by Francis Galton in 1883. Eugenics deduced that abnormalities caused by environmental 
factors could be passed down over time.26 Viewed in this context, Krafft-Ebing’s push to 
quarantine sexually explicit women was his attempt to dictate the direction of evolution. 
However, by the 1920s and 1930s, progressive sexologists like Van de Velde became less 
interested in eugenics and more focused on replenishing the German population after the 
war, meaning that women should be free to enjoy their marital sex lives, provided that the 
result was an increase of births.  
 
While the Weimar era is often viewed as an era of radical sex reform, not all professionals 
who involved themselves with sexology advocated for female sexual emancipation as Van 
de Velde did. In 1923, state prosecutor and legal reformer Erich Wulffen published Woman 
as a Sexual Criminal, which argued that “female crime is rooted in sex.” Wulffen contended 
that a woman’s biological premise, caused by the processes of pregnancy, menstruation, 
and menopause, made her more susceptible to criminal behavior.27 Like Krafft-Ebing, 
Wulffen believed that the male sex drive was naturally stronger than the biological female 
impulse, and the bedrock of his argument was reminiscent of Wilhelmine era attitudes 
toward women, sex, and the family. According to Wulffen, sexual submissiveness was the 
only way to prevent women from developing an “excess of sexuality.”28 Without the sexual 
passivity provided to a woman by her husband, she would undoubtedly collapse under the 
pressure of her congenital vanity and lust and turn to a life of crime. Echoing Mӧbius’s early 
twentieth-century assertion that women were driven entirely by instinct, Wulffen believed 
that dominant women were unable to grasp the concepts of authority and justice, 
rendering them unable to control their compulsion to commit criminal offenses.  
 
In Woman as a Sexual Criminal, Wulffen explicitly stated what more progressive sexologists 
later wrote more obliquely. The sexually emancipated, single woman posed a direct threat 
to the welfare of society as a whole. “As long as a woman has a connection to childbearing, 
she is in bondage to sex.”29 Without marriage, her unrestrained sexual instinct would cause 
                                                           
25 Ibid., 42. 
26 Laurie Marhoefer, “Degeneration, Sexual Freedom, and the Politics of the Weimar Republic, 1918-1933,” 
German Studies Review 34, no. 3 (2011): 530.  
27 Hales, Weimar Constructions of Criminal Femme Fatale, 104. 
28 Ibid. 
29 Ibid.  



 
 

63 
 

her to become recalcitrant and depraved. Wulffen viewed female sexuality and vanity as a 
weapon, inspiring women to commit crimes like prostitution, murder, and shoplifting.30 
Her narcissism triggered extreme jealousy and hatred toward both sexes, resulting in a 
myriad of volatile relationships and unsettled vendettas. According to Wulffen, not only did 
the sexual woman feel drawn to engage in criminal behavior herself, she also had the 
ability to manipulate others into doing so as well. One of Wulffen’s fellow criminologists, 
Hans Schneickert, shared his concern regarding the manipulative powers of women. 
Schneikert went so far as to condemn women for the vast majority of crimes that were 
committed by males, theorizing that woman devised devious schemes and enlisted men to 
provide the strength to carry them out.31 Criminologists and sexologists like Wulffen and 
Schneickert were the embodiment of postwar anxieties regarding sex and male 
incompetency. The idea that women were to blame for virtually everything, including the 
actions of men, reinforced the sentiment that Germany had lost the war because the nation 
had become weak and effeminate. It was not men who lost the war; it was women, and it 
was women who continued to tarnish Germany’s former prestige.  

 
The Ideal Woman 
The conviction that women were responsible for Germany’s exceptional defeat in the Great 
War exacerbated the already widespread fear that the New Women had become the 
majority. In reality, the New Woman was and continues to be an enigma. By some accounts, 
like that of Elsa Herrmann, the New Woman was a worker: “For the sake of her economic 
independence, the necessary precondition for the development of a self-reliant personality, 
she seeks to support herself through gainful employment.”32 To others, like Else Kienle, she 
was an outspoken feminist and advocate for women’s rights: “There is a law that stands 
above all paragraphs, and that is the law of human dignity and women’s dignity.”33 To the 
mass media, she was a young, attractive socialite: “They were more lightly and 
provocatively clad or altogether naked, and they could be seen live onstage and at the 
beach, walking down the street, or in magazines or at the cinema.”34 She could have been 
one of those things, or all of those things, and as a result it can be difficult to gauge how 
many women were actually “new.” According to Anton Kaes, women were often perplexed 
themselves about what behavior was expected of them throughout the changing times.35 
Rüdiger Graf suggests that the New Woman was more of an expectation for the future than 
an actual entity, an anticipated force that needed to be contained.36  
 

                                                           
30 Ibid., 105.  
31 Ibid., 106.  
32 Elsa Herrmann, “This is the New Woman (1929),” in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, eds. Anton Kaes, 
Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 206.  
33 Else Kienle, “The Kienle Case (1931),” in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, eds. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and 
Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 216.  
34 Weitz, Weimar Germany, 312.  
35 Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg, “The Rise of the New Woman,” in The Weimar Republic 
Sourcebook, eds. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 
1995), 196.  
36 Rüdiger Graf, “Anticipating the Future in the Present: ‘New Women’ and Other Beings of the Future in 
Weimar Germany,” Central European History 42, no. 4 (December 2009): 647.  



 
 

64 
 

Popular memory of the birth of the New Woman often gives the impression that in August 
of 1919 every single woman in Germany took a pair of scissors to her hair and all of the 
dresses of her closet. However, during the early years of the Weimar Republic, the idealized 
image of the New Woman that was popularized by the media was largely assumed by 
middle- and upper-class women who had the means to afford high-end clothing and city 
entertainment. But for the one-third of women who worked long hours in low-wage factory 
and office jobs, the glamour and excitement of modern nightlife was an unattainable 
fantasy.37 To conservative onlookers, the New Woman of Berlin represented everything 
that was wrong with Germany. The Kaiser was gone, and to some, it appeared as though he 
had taken every ounce of Victorian morality with him, leaving Berlin to rot as “a new Hell 
on earth.”38 For the first few years, financial demographic disparities had helped to keep 
the New Woman contained, but eventually the influence of city life began to seep into the 
countryside. The New Woman, growing in numbers and in capability, now threatened the 
future of the German race by ignoring her responsibility to replenish the population.39 The 
“problem” had begun to spin out of control, and for conservative Christian sexologists like 
Van de Velde, the solution was an “ideal” marriage.  
 
Only thirty years after Krafft-Ebing released the first volume of Psychopathia Sexualis, Van 
de Velde, a prominent Dutch physician and gynecologist, published a book that shocked the 
world by openly accepting and celebrating female sexuality. In 1926, Van de Velde went on 
a lecture tour of Germany. Massive crowds and reporters gathered in Berlin to listen to him 
speak, his words perfectly complementing changing attitudes toward sexuality in the 
Weimar Republic. Harkening back to the “real man” complex of the Wilhelmine era, Van de 
Velde introduced the idea that “real men” should be able to satisfy their wives’ sexual 
desires. Het volkomen huwelijk, or, The Ideal Marriage, published in 1926, was a detailed 
guide written to free-thinking married couples from an epidemic of what he deemed 
“sexual misery.” Van de Velde, a husband and father himself, was able to draw upon his 
own experiences with sexuality and combine them with his extensive knowledge of the 
female anatomy. In doing so, he was able to effectively blend his personal reassurances 
with physiological explanations for sexual impulses, creating a comfortable, safe 
environment for couples to explore and break the cycle of sexuelle Not (sexual misery). 
Moving away from the sexually repressive convictions of Mӧbius and Krafft-Ebing, Van de 
Velde encouraged women to find joy and pleasure in their sexual relationships. Van de 
Velde revealed his inspiration for The Ideal Marriage in his personal introductory 
statement, declaring that “[t]here is a need of this knowledge; there is too much suffering 
endured which might well be avoided, too much joy untasted which could enhance life’s 
worth.”40 Van de Velde felt that it was not only his personal duty but also his responsibility 
as a medical professional to abolish unspoken sexual frustration in marriages, most 
importantly by telling women that they had a right to sexual fulfillment. The book became 

                                                           
37 Weitz, Weimar Germany, 307.  
38 Gordon, Voluptuous Panic, 8.  
39 Weitz, Weimar Germany, 328.  
40 Theodoor Hendrik van de Velde, The Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique, trans. Stella Browne 
(Kingsport: Kingsport Press, 1926), 24. 



 
 

65 
 

immensely popular throughout Europe and the United States, where it was reprinted forty-
four times between 1941 and 1966.41  
 
Van de Velde likened a woman’s sexual frustration to physical abuse, criticizing men for 
their rushed and sometimes “brutal” lovemaking. In the first chapter of The Ideal Marriage, 
he shared a lengthy quotation by a fellow doctor and mother of two, Gina Lombroso. 
Lombroso stated that, “The loneliness of mind and heart to which a man can condemn his 
wife, is much more painful and injurious than tyranny and violent brutality.”42 She went on 
to promote the idea of comradeship within a marriage, encouraging husbands to involve 
their wives in both their work and personal lives. Any form of exclusion was a sign of 
inequality, and any inequality within a marriage translated to unequal and unsatisfying 
sexual relationships. This, Van de Velde believed, was both the sickness and the cure; but 
while he claimed that his intention was to heal the people suffering from sexual misery on a 
personal level, his ultimate objective was to rescue the institution of marriage as a whole. 
Van de Velde’s innovation was hinged upon his recognition that the beliefs of sexologists 
like Krafft-Ebing were outdated and unsustainable. Women, especially those who lived in 
cities where casual dating and sex had been more common before the war, had become far 
less likely to believe that their sexual desires were worthy of a diagnosis. Van de Velde’s 
modern theories regarding sexual emancipation were designed not only to revive maternal 
instincts but also to reinvigorate the masculine propensity that had been shattered by the 
war. He believed that fostering pleasurable sex within a marriage would bring happiness 
and productivity to the German people, and in turn create a more prosperous and robust 
German society.  
 
Volkstod 
Van de Velde’s plan for a resurgent Germany went far beyond what most women saw when 
they flipped to Part III of The Ideal Marriage, where Van de Velde explained in vivid detail 
the act of intercourse. These women, eager to explore their bodies and enhance their sex 
lives, flocked to his lectures in large numbers, embracing Van de Velde as their trusted 
advocate. He preyed upon their dissatisfaction and loneliness, accusing their husbands of 
mistreatment and validating their vexation. Van de Velde, however, had his own aims. After 
all, healthy marriages produce healthy children, and marriage and birth rates had been in 
steady decline since the beginning of the First World War. Although it was predominantly 
women who blamed for the deterioration of the traditional family unit, there were a 
considerable number of women who did not marry simply because there were not enough 
men. Within the twenty-five to fifty-year-old age group, most notably men from ages thirty 
to thirty-five, the number of surviving men fell well below the level of 1910, a year that had 
experienced a significant population growth. Concurrently, there was a surplus of women 
born between 1865 and 1900. According to the 1925 Census, there were 1,067 females for 
every 1,000 males, resulting in observable demographic disparities.43 As a result, many 
women that were of appropriate marriageable age had no choice but to remain single and 
therefore childless. Meanwhile, the average family size had been reduced to an average of 

                                                           
41 Weitz, Weimar Germany, 297.  
42 Van de Velde, The Ideal Marriage, 4. 
43 Weitz, Weimar Germany, 305.  



 
 

66 
 

only one child per family, and by 1933, more than one-third of married couples remained 
childless, causing the German birthrate to plummet far below the rest of their European 
neighbors.44 Many Germans, particularly conservative men, believed that the traditional 
family, the heart of conservative ideology, was in a state of crisis at the hands of female 
sexuality. The crippling humiliation brought on by the loss of the war and the Treaty of 
Versailles, coupled with the Germans’ inability to cultivate a new, powerful generation, 
reinforced the idea that Germany’s collapse had little to do with imperialism and much to 
do with a combination of femininity and sexuality.  
 
In The Ideal Marriage, Van de Velde claimed that the most effective means of defense 
against marital woes, aside from sex, was strong mutual interest.45 And what mutual 
interest, he asked, could be more unifying than children? As he wrote in The Ideal Marriage, 
“Children are the strongest mental link in normal married life, and those who ignore this 
ancient truth will often have occasion to repent.”46 The movement for health and hygiene 
during the Weimar era, a movement in which Van de Velde was a fundamental presence, 
advocated for healthy and normal marital sexual relationships, but it also ran alongside the 
principle of Bevӧlkerungspolitik, or population policy. Proponents of Bevӧlkerungspolitik 
harbored deep anxieties regarding dwindling birth rates, fearing that further decline would 
ultimately lead to Volkstod, or the extinction of the German race.47 The stark decline in 
births during the postwar years was alarming for professionals like Van de Velde who felt 
compelled to uphold the welfare of the broader community by telling people how to behave 
in their marriages. What was marketed to women as a guide to freedom from sexual 
emancipation was, at its core, part of a much larger surreptitious plan to bolster the birth 
rate and ease natalist panic. By not upholding their duty to replenish the population after 
the war, women exposed male impotency on all fronts.  
 
If Van de Velde’s solution to a happy marriage was as simple as good sex, he certainly faced 
a quandary when it came to encouraging reproduction. Contraception greatly eased the 
anxieties of women who avoided sex in fear of unwanted pregnancies, but it also allowed 
couples to limit the number of children that they had, ultimately resulting in less births. For 
women who were against the use of contraceptives or did not have access to them, 
unintended pregnancies were of great concern. Many women were forced to work in 
factories in addition to their extensive housewifely duties. In the article, “My Workday, My 
Weekend,” first published in Berlin in 1930, a wife and pregnant mother described her 
typical work week in a textile mill. The demands of the factory coupled with the 
responsibility of caring for a family barely allowed for women to sleep, leaving them both 
exhausted and desperate. “Six days of vacation once a year, but that’s no relaxation, just the 
opposite. … That’s how the life of a woman working in a factory goes all year round.”48 For 
working women, multiple unplanned pregnancies were an enormous burden, and as a 
result, many women were forced to seek illegal abortions.  
                                                           
44 Peukert, The Weimar Republic, 86.  
45 Van de Velde, The Ideal Marriage, 5. 
46 Ibid. 
47 Peukert, The Weimar Republic, 102. 
48 Textile Workers, “My Workday, My Weekend (1930),” in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, eds. Anton Kaes, 
Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 208. 



 
 

67 
 

 
Else Kienle, a German doctor and writer, was briefly imprisoned in 1931 on charges of 
professional abortion that was uncompliant with article 218 of the Weimar Constitution, 
criminalized abortion without legitimate medical necessity.49 In an article published in Die 
Weltbϋhne in 1931, Kienle challenged the stereotype of the typical woman who sought an 
abortion, shattering the notion that only debauched, city-dwelling women would reject an 
unintended pregnancy. In doing so, she revealed the true reason why many women chose 
to terminate their pregnancies; they were tired, poor, and indisposed. Kienle explained that 
80 percent of all women who sought a doctor to terminate their pregnancies were mothers 
who had already birthed several children and were deeply ashamed of their decision to end 
their pregnancies. Kienle sympathized with the “modern woman” who had become modern 
because she had entered the workforce, but was still buried beneath her maternal 
responsibilities, rendering her unable to truly assume the identity of the New Woman. 
After having experienced the effects of war on the homefront firsthand, all women in 
Weimar Germany were “new,” but not all of them were liberated. Going against the male-
dominated natalist sentiment, Kienle made the bold assertion that an additional child had 
no right to enter a family that was already struggling to feed itself: “Hunger and love have 
been and remain the primal drives of human beings, and love is quite likely the only 
diversion a family of workers can afford in 1931.”50  
 
Toward the end of The Ideal Marriage, Van de Velde did acknowledge the reservations that 
many couples felt toward pregnancy and advised them how to overcome this hinderance. 
“Fear of pregnancy often impairs sexual processes and reactions on the psychic side to such 
a degree that bodily reactions are sympathetically affected and even inhibited or 
checked.”51 Ironically, as a cure for this psychological block, Van de Velde prescribed more 
sex, claiming that it had “very happy” biological and anatomical effects that might help to 
outweigh the burden of anxiety concerning unwanted pregnancy. Yet Van de Velde either 
failed to recognize or ignored how encumbered women became by the demands of large 
families. Contrary to his professions in The Ideal Marriage, sex was not a cure-all for many 
woman, but especially not for the working poor. Van de Velde actively framed his work as 
being “for the women,” but he fundamentally failed to identify a root cause of celibacy that 
could easily be found in the hollowed eyes and slumped posture of any working mother: 
she was unbearably and irrevocably exhausted. In a botched effort to resurrect Germany’s 
diminishing birthrates by criminalizing abortion and encouraging married couples to have 
more unprotected sex, an estimated 4,000 to 12,000 women died as a consequence of back-
alley abortions, and an additional 50,000 experienced various other health complications, 
many of which caused permanent infertility.52  

 
Communion 

                                                           
49 Legal abortions were permitted if the pregnancy endangered the life of the mother or if the fetus was 
deformed or incompatible with life.  
50 “The Kienle Case,” 213. 
51 Van de Velde, The Ideal Marriage, 265.  
52 Weitz, Weimar Germany, 305. 



 
 

68 
 

Working women rose before the sun and settled into bed long after it had gone down. 
While Van de Velde’s stages of the ideal sexual communion—Prelude, Sexual Union, and the 
Epilogue or “After-Glow”—are designed to satisfy the sexual needs of women, if executed 
as Van de Velde intended, sex became quite a lengthy process. Once again, Van de Velde’s 
flawless methodology has forgotten one crucial determining factor: When do women have 
the time for such a prolonged sexual experience? As expressed by the female textile laborer 
mentioned above: “I am always so tired. When I get home, I first have to sit down and rest 
for fifteen minutes. Often I just sit there and howl like a child for no reason. … But I always 
have to pull myself together again.”53 For the many women who found themselves in 
similar positions, sex was a luxury that they simply did not have the time or energy for. The 
New Woman was not only the vivacious, uninhibited woman who dressed provocatively 
and danced in cabarets in Berlin. Often, she was a mother and a member of the workforce 
as well. This new way of life was an incredibly difficult adjustment for women, but men 
struggled to cope with changing gender dynamics as well. Soldiers were promised 
prosperity and endured the brutality of war for years, only to stand by as their wives were 
forced to go to work every morning to keep their families alive. They had not only lost the 
war, they lost the core of their male identity: the ability to provide for their wives and 
children.  
 
Despite his lack of attention to the realities of the 35 percent of women who were a part of 
the German labor force, many of whom had children, Van de Velde continuously 
emphasized the importance of sexual satisfaction for both partners, arguing that women 
have become “sexually frigid” as a result of their suspended gratification.54 Van de Velde 
attempted to combat this frigidity by framing the female orgasm as the ultimate objective 
of “sexual communion.”55 Again, sex always serves a purpose, and Van de Velde’s 
gynecological training had taught him that the female orgasm did as well. In his 
exceptionally detailed chapter on sexual positions, he stated, “It may be said that every 
position in coitus which tends to promote the intensest possible orgasm in both partners 
simultaneously, or almost simultaneously, increases the possibility of conception.”56 As a 
result, he discouraged the practice of coitus interruptus as a means of preventing 
pregnancy, arguing that it leaves the man feeling satisfied but not the woman, implying that 
simultaneous orgasm was the only way for both partners to reach sexual satisfaction. For 
women, Van de Velde’s methods had nothing to do with satisfaction and everything to do 
with pregnancy. With this, Van de Velde also harkened back to the Wilhelmine era ideal of 
the “real man” by indicating that the inability of men to please their wives was a sign of 
inadequacy. In this sense, the female orgasm was an opportunity for redemption.  
 
 Van de Velde’s perpetuation of the importance of the simultaneous orgasm is rooted in the 
centuries-old belief that the female orgasm increased the likelihood of successful 
conception. This theory can be dated back as far back as the Hippocratic Corpus, which 
states, “Pleasure and warmth reach their height at the same time as the seed falls into the 

                                                           
53 “My Workday, My Weekend,” 209. 
54 Van de Velde, The Ideal Marriage, 7. 
55 Ibid., 194. 
56 Ibid., 211.  



 
 

69 
 

womb.”57 To Van de Velde, any pleasure that a woman experienced as a result was merely a 
byproduct. Ideally, her husband’s attention to her sexual needs would encourage her to 
remain committed to both him and their mutual desire to produce a robust family. While 
Van de Velde dedicated twenty-five pages of The Ideal Marriage to “The Anatomy and 
Physiology of the Male Sexual Organs,” pages fifty-one through 114 revolved entirely 
around the sexual physiology of the adult woman, more specifically the processes of 
menstruation and ovulation. Out of the eight colored diagrams in the reference section of 
the book, only two were reserved for the male organs, while the other six, including two 
fold-out pages that chart menstruation and ovulation cycles, focused on the female 
anatomy. The Ideal Marriage was supposed to free women from sexualle Not, but if that 
were true, this information would serve no purpose.  
 
The sexual instruction that Van de Velde provides in The Ideal Marriage conforms to the 
standard gender ideology of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He 
instructed the man to take the initiative and the woman to respond accordingly. He 
established the process by which the man should dominate the act of sexual intercourse by 
nature and indicated that the woman should organically follow suit, stating: 
 

What both man and woman, driven by obscure primitive urges, wish to feel in the 
sexual act, is the essential force of maleness, which expresses itself in a sort of 
violent and absolute possession of the woman. And so both of them can and do exult 
in a certain degree of male aggression and dominance—whether actual or 
apparent—which proclaims this essential force.58 

 
With this assertion, Van de Velde implied that any instance in which a woman denied her 
customary submissive role was somehow an abnormal sexual act that defies the laws of 
traditional “mating.”59 He challenged the earlier theories of sexologists like Krafft-Ebing by 
concluding that the woman is an entirely sexual being, while the man is merely an 
accessory to her biological impulse to reproduce. Motherhood, the intended destiny of all 
women, could not exist without an innate dependence on the male sex. The essence of 
female dependence had been dismantled during the war years. Despite the absence of 
thirteen million men, women had survived. This reality could not be avoided, which is why 
Van de Velde worked to calculatedly engineer marital sexual relationships to ensure that 
women would promptly lose sight of their wartime independence and gracefully 
reintegrate into family life.  

 
The Hell-Gate 
Considering Van de Velde’s preoccupation with reproduction, it comes as no surprise that 
he denounced any sexual act that had no possibility of resulting in a child. Unlike some of 
his fellow colleagues, most notably the prominent German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, 
Van de Velde discouraged homosexual relationships in favor of what he called “normal” 
heterosexual relationships. In Part III of The Ideal Marriage, he explained to the reader that 

                                                           
57 Ann Ellis Hanson, Hippocrates: Diseases of Women I (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 582. 
58 Van de Velde, The Ideal Marriage, 159.  
59 Ibid., 145.  



 
 

70 
 

there may be rare cases in which he could not avoid referencing certain deviant sexual 
practices—but promised that he would emphatically state that they were abnormal to 
avoid any confusion: “But this will only occur very seldom, for as postulated above, it is our 
intention to keep the Hell-gate of the Realm of Sexual Perversions firmly closed.”60 
Concerned by the onslaught of unapologetic lesbian tendencies percolating in cities like 
Berlin, Van de Velde reassured men that there were ways to conquer such 
“abnormalities.”61 He promised that with enough instruction, a husband should be able to 
teach his wife to develop appropriate sexual desires. Perhaps even more important than 
the inability of same-sex couples to conceive children was the utter emasculation attached 
to lesbianism. Van de Velde was far more invested in preserving the male ego and 
containing female sexuality than he was with enhancing women’s sex lives. While popular 
memory venerates Van de Velde as a revolutionary sex reformer, his true crowning 
achievement was his ability to successfully disguise misogyny as feminism.  
 
Despite his success, Van de Velde was not the first nor the most memorable medical 
professional to encourage radical sex reform in the twenties. Magnus Hirschfeld published 
his first work, Sappho and Socrates, under a pseudonym in 1895, but began publishing in 
his own name as early as 1900.62 Hirschfeld had been an outspoken advocate for sexual 
minorities and a pioneer of gender studies since the Imperial period, but his work was not 
as widely circulated or as well received as The Ideal Marriage. Hirschfeld’s emphasis on 
gender, or lack thereof, was unnerving for many, as it stood in direct opposition to the 
ideals that sexologists like Van de Velde were frantically working to reestablish. Hirschfeld, 
an openly gay man, was genuinely interested in sexuality and sex reform and did not have 
an agenda like Van de Velde; He was not concerned with preserving the family unit or 
healing damaged masculinity. He unabashedly fueled debates surrounding sex and gender 
following the war, while Van de Velde merely gave antiquated Wilhelmine ideals a 
makeover. Van de Velde’s work was exceptionally provocative for an audience that had just 
barely been exposed to the concept of sex reform, but it was just conservative enough to be 
considered tolerable.  
 
In 1935, Hirschfeld published Sex in Human Relationships, which unlike The Ideal Marriage, 
is utterly devoid of gender. Hirschfeld focused more on the concept of love than sex, 
encouraging men and women to find spouses that complemented their personalities 
without regard for traditional gender expectations: “Contrasted temperaments may often 
complement each other admirably. A very active temperament, for instance, demands to 
complement it, a partner whom passivity predominates.”63 Unlike Van de Velde, he did not 
establish which members of a relationship should assume either passivity or dominance, 
reinforcing the importance of comradeship between men and women in their relationships. 
Most importantly, he did not tell women how to behave in their relationships or accuse 
them of sexual deviancy. Unsurprisingly, Hirschfeld faced backlash for his ideas, which 
many people believed explicitly encouraged the degeneration of the family unit. Opposition 

                                                           
60 Van de Velde, The Ideal Marriage, 144.  
61 Weitz, Weimar Germany, 301.  
62 Magnus Hirschfeld, Sex in Human Relationships, trans. John Rodker (New York: AMS Press, 1935), 12. 
63 Ibid., 54.  



 
 

71 
 

to Hirschfeld’s beliefs became violent, and in 1920, he was beaten so severely that he was 
initially pronounced dead by police.64 Nothing illustrates the postwar crisis of masculinity 
like Hirschfeld’s near-death attack. It had been two years since the war, but many wounds 
remained unhealed.  
 
Despite Hirschfeld’s attempts to destigmatize sex, the notion that abnormal or devious 
behavior was inherent in unmarried women remained a common one throughout the first 
half of the twentieth century. While earlier sexologists, psychologists, and criminologists 
were more brazen in their assertions that unmarried women were prone to mental illness, 
feeblemindedness, and deviant behavior, the core of Van de Velde’s work was inspired by 
the conservative ideologies of the “sex experts” who came before him. Van de Velde 
genuinely believed that marriage was the only way to save women from their own 
sexuality, more palatably reiterating what Krafft-Ebing had concluded thirty years earlier: 
“normally developed mentally and well bred, her sexual desire is small. If this were not so 
the whole world would become a brothel and marriage and a family impossible.”65 While 
Van de Velde did challenge the consensus that women possessed very little sex drive, he 
had his own reasons for doing so. Van de Velde was concerned about the precarious 
position of the traditional family unit during the 1920s, but he also recognized that female 
sexuality had already been unleashed, and he knew that any attempt to force women back 
into their traditional molds would be met with resistance. In this sense, The Ideal Marriage 
served as an unspoken treaty between the contemporary sexologist and the New Woman. 
The sexologist would support the existence and normality of female sexuality with natural 
science and logic, and in return the woman would do what Van de Velde instructed her to 
do, get married, start a family, and preserve the patriarchy.  
 
Van de Velde’s apprehension toward the New Woman and concerns regarding the crisis of 
the family were not nearly as transparent in 1926 as they are today. As a middle-aged, 
Christian male, Van de Velde understood that he was putting his reputation at risk by 
releasing a book as provocative as The Ideal Marriage. He announced his martyrdom in the 
first sentence of his personal introductory statement writing, “This book will state many 
things that would otherwise remain unsaid. Therefore it will have many unpleasant results 
for me.”66 He went on to explain that his acquired knowledge of human nature had taught 
him that humans had a tendency to condemn anything that was considered unusual and 
unconventional, therefore he felt that it would be prudent to wait for the appropriate time, 
when he had gathered a sufficient amount of medical and personal experience, to publish a 
book about the joys of sex: “So long as a doctor has to meet the requirements of his 
practice, he cannot permit himself to transgress the bounds of custom.”67 He could have 
published under a pseudonym to avoid the inevitable backlash, he said, but as a scientist he 
felt that it was his duty to legitimize his work with his own name.  
 

                                                           
64 Ibid., 5.  
65 Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, 13. 
66 Van de Velde, The Ideal Marriage, 1. 
67 Ibid. 



 
 

72 
 

As Van de Velde had predicted, The Ideal Marriage was not readily accepted by all. Initially, 
it was predominantly the church that spoke out against sex reform. They viewed the New 
Woman and her “public display of her lightly clad body” to be a visibly ominous sign of 
spiritual crisis.68 Conservatives were utterly horrified by this public display of sex, which 
was not only displayed by the clothing that women chose to wear but also in Van de Velde’s 
lecture tour of Germany that promoted a book about pleasurable sex. When conservatives 
conceptualized the sex reform movement, all they saw was an onslaught of illegal 
abortions, an epidemic of venereal disease, and the extinction of the German race. The 
church waged war on sex reformers like Van de Velde, campaigning for the preservation of 
the “holiness” of marriage, despite the fact that religion was present in every chapter of The 
Ideal Marriage. As Eric Weitz has observed in his study of the Weimar period, half of 
Germany celebrated the sexual emancipation that had been stimulated by the Republic, and 
“the other condemned it as the very fount of immortality, the cause of all that was wrong in 
German life.”69 Whether they were trying to cultivate it, or bury it, Germans simply could 
not bring themselves to leave sex alone. 
 
When German women were propelled into the workforce during World War I, the general 
consensus was that it was a temporary solution to sustain what they were told would be a 
quick and expeditious war.70 The New Women, whether glamorous and vibrant or weary 
and maternal, existed as representatives of the excitement of the Weimar era and its legacy. 
While the concept of liberation is often considered to be the touchstone of the Weimar 
Republic, the sexologists that pioneered modern sexology in the 1920s, as demonstrated by 
Theodoor Hendrik van de Velde, were still very much intent on restoring Imperial German 
institutions and returning women to their traditional social positions as dutiful wives and 
mothers. What was marketed to women as “sexual emancipation” was, in reality, nothing 
more than a lightened form of sexual repression that was designed to safeguard the 
continuation of the German race. Men, still reeling from the horrors of World War I, were 
desperate to reclaim their virility and reassert their dominance over the very women who 
had carried the nation through the war. While sex and war are not always commonly 
associated with one another, the reactionary sex reform of the 1920s illustrates how a 
crisis of masculinity was able to bridge the gap.  

                                                           
68 Weitz, Weimar Germany, 323.  
69 Ibid, 327.  
70 Peukert, The Weimar Republic, 98.  


