Do you like the bobble head? ”Asked the social psychologist Erich Fromm workers and employees at the end of the Weimar Republic. With his empirical survey he wanted to find out something about cultural and aesthetic standards, but also about changing gender roles. As a result of his study for the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, Fromm stated that the bobble head was widespread and largely accepted by the population. This hairstyle, it was said, expressed female emancipation aspirations. It contributes to blurring the “conventional distinction between man and woman”, as well as generational differences and challenging traditional conventions.
Viewed in this way, a visit to the hairdresser could go far beyond questions of taste.
To this day, the “boy's head”, as it was initially called, is considered an icon of the Roaring Twenties and the signet of the “New Woman”, who confidently claimed a changed way of life.
However, Helga Lüdtke doesn't think too much of simple success stories and stories of progress.
In her book, she emphasizes how diverse the motifs for the bob haircut could be.
What in one case was a striking sign of self-determination and gender-specific seriousness, in the other arose merely from a fashionable trend or the playful desire for masquerade.
Hairdressers were skeptical
In general, it is one of Lüdtke's concerns to make a wide spectrum of voices and images, including ambivalences, recognizable. By understanding history as a collage, she wants to avoid stereotypes and generalizations and to reflect the diversity of the female obstinacy as well as the male gaze. She is far from exaggerating the “new woman” as part of a Weimar culture that is outshone by gold sheen.
The hairdressers were initially skeptical about the trend that started in Paris and soon made the “Coupe à la Garçonne” popular in Berlin.
In the central organ of the association, the “Deutsche Allgemeine Friseur-Zeitung”, it was read that the bob hairstyle was a “hairstyle for lousy Russian women, but not for a lady” and in general a “misfortune for our profession”.
That was a mistake, however, if the short hairstyle business should really flourish.
"Expression of the whole way of life here"
There were hardly any limits to the variety of shapes: it ranged from straight and short as a distinctive "men's cut" to the wavy hairstyle of an "Ondulation à la Marcel" to the single "pecking bell" over the cheek, the famous "gentleman's waver". Using a variety of sources - whether fashion magazines, film posters or sheet music covers, autobiographies or private diaries, satirical verses or song texts - Helga Lüdtke shows how much attention a hairstyle could attract and how different interpretations were linked to the cipher "Bubikopf".