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Lustmord(Sex Murder) in Weimar German Art

이윤희 1

1이화여자대학교

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ABSTRACT

Weimar Republic era in Germany(1919-1933) is the times between the end of World War I and the Nazi's period. At that time there were various tendencies such as Dada and Neue Sachlichkeit and several unique subjects had emerged as an object of concern. Lustmord(Sex murder), one of those unique theme is the subject of this research. Artists such as Otto Dix, George Grosz, Rudolf Schlichter, Heinrich Maria Darvringhausen started to focus their attention to Lustmord theme in the First World War, and showed diverse variations of them in Weimar era. The Theme of Lustmord has not formed the important category in French and English art, but the significant one in Weimar German art. The theme of Lustmord was associated with the environment of the metropolitan city, especially Berlin, the capital of Weimar Republic, which was the result of the World War I. A lot of newspapers which is published in Berlin reported Lustmord cases that were associated with the increase of prostitutes and the urban poor. The works of the Lustmord theme were motivated by that kind of report of journals. But dealing with Lustmord, the artists had expressed their own views on the social structure behind that cases. To the more detailed analysis, I divided the elements of the works to place and figures. The places in which Lustmord is happened are public spaces of metropolis or indoor spaces. The aspects of metropolis emphasizes the harmful consequences of the anonymity and apathy among urban people, because the target of Lustmord is the people of low status who have no one to take care. Also the women who seem to be killed indoor space are seen like the stuff that be used and discarded. These aspects is stressed by the killers who are mostly showed as the bourgeois. The works that treat the theme of Lustmord didn’t attract art critic’s attention at that time, and furthermore had to go through suffering on account of Nazi’s cultural policy. Accordingly, many of those works were lost and destructed in Nazi era. In 1990s,femminist analysis on the Lustmord image in Weimar era asserted that conflicts of the sexes and mysogynism of the artists caused the works. But the artists modified the elements of Lustmord strongly and contained the critical view on that peroid.

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