Mary Hennessy

Vanishing Mediators: Work, Gender, and Technology in Weimar Germany

“Vanishing Mediators” tells the stories of women whose labor and lives were shaped by new communication and mass media technologies, and who were, in turn, at the heart of major technological, aesthetic, and socio-cultural changes in Weimar Germany (1918-1933). I focus on three technologies—telephone, film, typewriter—that propelled women into the workforce in unprecedented numbers and were marked, from their nineteenth-century beginnings, by gendered patterns of labor. Challenging masculinist approaches to the history of technology and complicating dominant understandings of women as consumers and spectators, the project reveals women’s multiple, often hidden roles in the production of modern media.

The materials I examine—which range from modernist literary texts to popular novels and entertainment films—depict breakdowns in communication, often involving a woman who fails to fulfill her expected role. Reading these texts with and against the grain of early twentieth-century instructional manuals, critical theory, and German media theory, I argue that such instances of failure, disruption, and malfunction offer a compelling counternarrative to discourses of rationalization that promoted efficiency and productivity while frequently equating women workers with machines. At the same time, the book demonstrates that women were central actors in the creation of Weimar modernity, even though their very human labors have been largely effaced. 

Mary Hennessy is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research examines women’s multiple, often hidden, roles in the production of media to retheorize relationships between gender, labor, and technology in modern Germany. She has published on German film and media from the 20^th and 21^st century, with recent articles appearing in German Studies Review and New German Critique. Her current book project, “Vanishing Mediators,” focuses on women typists, telephone operators, and film editors in the Weimar Republic. Mary’s research has been supported by the Fulbright Program, the American Friends of Marbach, and the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies. Mary earned a PhD in German Studies from the University of Michigan and an MA in European Studies from Indiana University Bloomington. Before joining the faculty at UW–Madison, she taught at the University of California, Berkeley, and was Max Kade Postdoctoral Fellow at the Free University of Berlin. She is co-editor for Screen Cultures: German Film and the Visual at Camden House.