German Masculine Fashion Culture during National Socialism and the Postwar Era: Constructing and Reconstructing the Ideal Man through Illustration

Abstract

Under the National-Socialist regime, German visual culture prescribed rigid gender roles of militaristic masculinity to parallel the nation’s rearmament and complement its ideals of domesticated femininity. After twelve years of witnessing and, for most, participating in the political, personal, and racialized dimensions of such Nazi gender expectations, defeated Germans rebuilding after the so-called “Zero Hour” of 1945 faced the significant challenge of redefining and renewing masculinity for the postwar era. The images in fashion magazines are material evidence of the active shaping of new national masculine norms of the 1950s and ’60s. These images exemplify the complicated racial, political, gendered, and cultural dimensions of German masculinity while also playing a direct role in ascribing new expectations of ideal male dress and behaviour. And, among the content created for these publications, fashion illustrations, due to their imaginative hand-drawn qualities and sustained mass-media cultural prevalence, powerfully visualize how artists experimented with possibilities for male appearance. During the postwar Wirtschaftswunder (“Economic Miracle”), the underexamined West German menswear industry sought to cultivate international diplomatic networks and incorporate new ideals of cosmopolitanism to redefine mid-century modern German identity. This dissertation thus analyses the work of West German fashion illustrators, in conjunction with the work of fashion designers, photographers, and journalists, to investigate the enduring and insidious influence of fascist ideologies over visual representations of postwar masculinity. By exploring the historical, aesthetic, and geographic contexts within the West German fashion media’s normative representation of the ideal German man, this dissertation demonstrates how the popular culture of mass-produced men’s fashion illustration manifested often unspoken and powerful debates about postwar manhood.