39 pages • 1 hour read
The Artificial Silk Girl
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Chapter 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary: “A Lot of Winter and a Waiting Room”
Doris is walking around Bahnhof Zoo with her suitcase, wondering what she should do and realizing that she is no longer sure of what she wants. All she knows is that she doesn’t want to go back home to her parents, or back to Tilli, Lippi, or anyone she knows. She has no money left, but she does not want to sell her ermine coat. One man mistakes her for a prostitute. She dates men hoping they will buy her something to eat, but they just want to buy her drinks and talk about sex. She spends a night in the backseat of a cab. The cab driver lets her and asks for nothing in exchange.
Doris meets a man named Karl in the waiting room. He’s a poor man who sells lettuce and radishes and handmade trinkets in the Westend. Sometimes, he has a beer at Bahnhof Zoo. He asks Doris to come with him and help out. She doesn’t want to go with him. Doris mentions that Albert and Tilli have been arrested for burglary. Karl comes back and notices Doris still sitting. He buys her some food, and then asks if she will come with him. She refuses, telling him she has ambitions.
On New Year’s Eve, Doris meets a man she calls the Green Moss. He is depressed because his wife left him. Doris is so desperate for money she is ready to sell herself to him for the night for 10 Marks. She is so dirty and disheveled, however, that she wonders if she will have to accept less. She goes with him back to his place. She finds the man disgusting. Doris is exhausted and wants to get it over with. She gets undressed in the bathroom and hardly recognizes herself. She tells the Green Moss she’s tired. He tells her to sleep on the couch and goes into his room.
In the morning, he wakes her up with coffee and breakfast. He goes to work, leaves Doris expensive cigarettes, and tells her to help herself to whatever food she finds. Doris doesn’t trust him. After he leaves, she goes back to sleep and sleeps for a long time. He cleans up his place and lets her stay with him. She wonders what he wants in return. When he tells Doris that, if she feels like it, she could help clean up, Doris wonders if she’s become so ugly that he doesn’t want her.
Doris stays with the Green Moss, whose real name is Ernst. She despises him and find him revolting, but she stays and begins helping out around the apartment, cooking and cleaning up. When Doris learns that Ernst’s wife left him for a young man—the artistic type—she feels a little pity for him. As time goes by, she realizes how educated Ernst and his ex are. They listen to Tchaikovsky and read Baudelaire. Doris feels intellectually inferior. Despite this, her feelings for Ernst become more positive. Ernst asks Doris about her diary. She tells him that she’s just writing about all her experiences.
On a walk, which they take every night after dinner, Doris learns that Ernst fought in the war and carries a piece of shrapnel from a grenade in his shoulder. She asks if she can touch it, and she realizes she likes Ernst; she is adapting more and more to his bourgeois lifestyle. Doris wishes Ernst would show interest in her, romantically, but Ernst pines for his wife.
Doris struggles with the thought for a time but decides to show Ernst her diary. She lets him read it but asks him to stop when he arrives at New Year’s. While Ernst is reading, Doris feels grateful that she never slept with the Onyx or Red Moon. She’s embarrassed by her past behavior.
Ernst tells Doris that she should return the coat, get her papers, and find a job. Doris doesn’t want to do any of that. She is sick of working. She feels that her lack of skills and education greatly hinders any possibility of her finding gainful employment. Doris just wants to stay with him and take care of him and the apartment.
A letter from Ernst’s wife comes in the mail. Doris opens it and reads it. The wife’s name is Hanne. She is apologetic and hopes that Ernst can forgive her for leaving. She explains that she left because she wanted to be more than just a housewife. Doris hides the letter under the carpet.
Doris has fallen in love with Ernst. She likes life with him. She also loves her fur coat. Doris writes that if Ernst will stop loving his wife, then she will give up her coat. She writes a letter, reluctantly, and she asks her mother to give the letter to the coat’s owner. Doris gives Ernst the news as a gift and says she is ready to follow through with his earlier plan. She worries about losing him and wants him to love her. He doesn’t force her to send the letter, so she doesn’t—yet.
Things continue as they have. Doris increasingly worries about her lack of education. The fact that the popular song Die Liebe der Matrosen is her favorite song embarrasses her; Ernst says that Hanne was able to sing the way Schubert composed. Ernst finally kisses Doris, on her neck. She really wants Ernst to love her.
Things have fallen apart. Doris sits at the Friedrichstrasse Station, panicky and scared. She briefly contemplates suicide. She left Ernst after he called her Hanne; she recognizes that Ernst will never love her and will never get over his wife. Doris went to the place where Hanne danced, telling all about her time with Ernst and letting Hanne know that he wanted her back. Hanne went back to Ernst, but now Doris is alone and cold and destitute, wondering what she should do.
Doris feels she only has a few options. She could find Karl and see if he still wants her to go with him. She could go to Tauentzien Strasse and become a star, or she could “just as well turn into a Hulla—and if I became a star, I might actually be a worse person than a Hulla, who was good. Perhaps glamour isn’t all that important after all” (144).
Chapter 3 Analysis
At the end of Chapter 2 and the beginning of Chapter 3, Doris is homeless, penniless, and desperate. For the first time, she sees herself as something low, ugly, and unattractive, facing a fate that would place her in a worse socioeconomic position than ever before. Doris is so against the idea of becoming a poor man’s wife that she entertains the idea of engaging in blatant prostitution, something that she has always judged negatively. She views it as the debased version of what she had been doing with men: being a mistress.
The thin line between mistress and prostitute remains in the background of the novel until Doris decides to sell herself for 10 Marks. She and women like Hulla, Doris discovers, are only separated by desperation. Her dreams of stardom and luxury fade as she spends time with Ernst, who shatters Doris’s previously held notions about men and love. At first, Doris despises Ernst because she despises herself and wants to blame someone for her situation. After his kindness toward her, Doris learns to love him, and she wants to replace Hanne as Ernst’s wife.
Hanne and Doris provide contrasting visions of what a woman could be in the 1930s. Hanne has an education and worked as an artist, earning her own income before she married Ernst; unlike Doris, she possesses the requisite talent to be a star. By marrying Ernst, Hanne chose financial security and stability, letting go of her own pursuit of stardom. Later, she wanted independence from Ernst. In her letter to him, Hanne states that “I had just been standing on my own two feet for too long already, had lived with a profession I loved too long” (125). The obligations of being a housewife made her so unhappy that she ran away with another man to find her independence again. The novel may intend to communicate a sense of doom for women like Hanne, who are unable to achieve independence from their husbands. It may also be portraying Hanne and Ernst’s reunification as a victory for love; the story contains plenty of supporting material for both perspectives.
Doris, unlike Hanne, prefers the thought of being a housewife to looking for work. She detests the constant pressure of possibly being dismissed: “You have to hate anyone who can dismiss you, even if they’re good to you, because you work for them and not with them” (121). Her views of work lean socialist: She blames a lack of job security and protection for employees as her reason for avoiding work, and she yearns for a job market where people work because it’s what they want to do, and they never have to worry about not having work. Her real hindrance in the workplace, however, is her lack of education, as shown in Chapter 1, when her employer dismissed her because of her constant errors as a stenographer.
The lack of confidence that she can make it on her own contributes to Doris’s growing attachment to Ernst. For the first time, Doris finds herself willing to trade stardom for the stability of a bourgeois life. After witnessing utter destitution firsthand—a reflection of Germany’s economic situation during the Weimar period—she appreciates the positive aspects of having a stable home, recalling what her mother said in Chapter 1 about needing to belong somewhere after a while. She begins to clean and cook, habituating to life as a housewife, even though she and Ernst are not married. After dinner, they take a nightly Verdauungsspaziergang—a “digestive walk”—much as a bourgeois husband and wife might do.
Unfortunately, Ernst doesn’t love her, even though she tries to overcome her lack of education by reading Baudelaire and Stefan George. She is constantly reminded of how well read and how musically talented Hanne, who loved Tchaikovsky and Schubert, is; Doris feels ashamed to love the folksy show tune, Die Liebe der Matrosen. Doris offers Ernst much to be desired in a wife, despite not being an intellectual: She is beautiful and young, and she cooks and cleans. Yet Ernst pines for Hanne, although he attempts to find a way to be with Doris because he slowly loses hope of ever seeing Hanne again. In the end, Doris does the right thing: She goes to Hanne and lets her know that Ernst still loves her.
Weimar society held few viable solutions for the major socioeconomic issues facing women. Women were still bound to men, and marriage remained the simplest and most secure way for a woman to live a comfortable life. As Doris quickly learns, finding a worthy husband is no easy task; a shortage of eligible husbands and a lack of work caused a rise in prostitution during the Weimar era. Sometimes, prostitution was the only option for women who lacked both education and opportunity.
The novel ends with an open-ended scenario, with Doris facing three choices. She can go with Karl and become the wife of a poor man, which would at least give her somewhere to belong. She could go ahead and become a prostitute, which she often views as being preferable to other choices; for example, she would rather prostitute herself than become like her older friend Therese: “Compared to that, a whore’s life is more interesting. At least she’s got her own business” (120). Finally, she can continue trying to acquire a glamorous life, although this third choice seems to be one Doris is least likely to make. The novel’s final words are, “Perhaps glamour isn’t all that important after all” (144).
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