Blurring the Line and Walking the Street: The Elision of Visual Distinctions Between Prostitutes and New Women in Otto Dix’s Three Prostitutes on the Street (Drei Dirnen auf der Straße)

During the chaotic years of Germany’s Weimar Republic (1918–1933), women made some important gains, including employment opportunities and the right to vote. However, the government attempted to reestablish the patriarchal order by restoring established gender roles in both the domestic and professional spheres. While many Weimar women rejected such attempts to curtail their newfound freedoms, some conservative social critics railed against the sexually and economically liberated Neue Frau (New Woman). During the interwar period, women’s increased visibility in the public spaces that had previously been associated with commodified sexuality and their embrace of both makeup and more revealing fashions blurred the lines between prostitutes and emancipated New Women. Otto Dix, an artist associated with the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), used the bodies of women who seemed to pose economic, social and sexual threats to traditional German masculinity, to engage perceptions of Germany’s moral decline, specifically the elision of visual and behavioral distinctions between prostitutes and New Women, and the perceived emasculation of German men. In works such as Drei Dirnen auf der Straße (Three Prostitutes on the Street) of 1925, Dix visually engages the perceived ambiguity between New Women and prostitutes because the identities of the women are not immediately apparent. When interpreted in light of interwar texts that addressed the indistinct boundaries between “respectable” and “fallen” women, such as Margot Klages-Stange’s article “Prostitution” (1925) and Willi Pröger’s Stätten der Berliner Prostitution (Sites of Berlin Prostitution) (1923), this painting demonstrates Dix’s interest in the threat to the traditional patriarchal order posed by the sexually and economically liberated New Woman and the fear of urban and moral degeneration caused by the so-called “depravity” of prostitutes and emancipated women.