Lady Killer and Lust-Murderers

During the years following the First World War, and until the consolidation of the Nazi party, paintings and drawings of nude murdered and butchered women proliferated in the German art galleries and avant-garde publications of the Weimar Republic. Lustmord, a term derived from criminology and psychology, was the label assigned to such works, and the representation of the lust-murder of women by men became curiously ubiquitous in Weimar culture. Although previous scholarship has tended to treat Lustmord art homogonously, in this thesis I argue that these works must be considered individually to grasp the varying meaning of Lustmord to Weimar artists and audiences. My study surveys the transformation of Lustmord from a crime to an artistic genre, then looks specifically at two paintings: Der Kleine Frauenmörder by George Grosz (1893-1959) and Der Lustmörder (Selbstporträt) by Otto Dix (1891-1969). I argue that despite the shared subject matter, and compositional and temporal parallels of Der Kleine Frauenmörder and Der Lustmörder (Selbstporträt), the two paintings have meaning beyond that generically attributed to Lustmord art. The separate meanings that can be culled from these works speak specifically to the circumstances and intentions of the artists who created them, and offer insight to the multivalence of Lustmord in Weimar society.