During the late nineteenth century the city of Berlin developed
such a reputation for lawlessness and sexual licentiousness that it
came to be known as the "Whore of Babylon." Out of this reputation
for debauchery grew an unusually rich discourse around
prostitution. In Berlin Coquette, Jill Suzanne Smith shows how this
discourse transcended the usual cliches about prostitutes and
actually explored complex visions of alternative moralities or
sexual countercultures including the New Morality articulated by
feminist radicals, lesbian love, and the New Woman.
Combining extensive archival research with close readings of a
broad spectrum of texts and images from the late Wilhelmine and
Weimar periods, Smith recovers a surprising array of productive
discussions about extramarital sexuality, women's financial
autonomy, and respectability. She highlights in particular the
figure of the cocotte (Kokotte), a specific type of prostitute who
capitalized on the illusion of respectable or upstanding womanhood
and therefore confounded easy categorization. By exploring the
semantic connections between the figure of the cocotte and the act
of flirtation (of being coquette), Smith s work presents flirtation
as a type of social interaction through which both prostitutes and
non-prostitutes in Imperial and Weimar Berlin could express
extramarital sexual desire and agency."
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