Eight Girls Taking Pictures

by Whitney Otto

  Her department manager, Miss Schmidt, thought as long as they were selling the outrageously stylish glasses, perhaps they could add an evening dress? Maybe some high-heeled shoes with open toes, in silver metallic leather? What about sequins on pajama trousers? Oh, and even though it’s early March, isn’t there still time for someone to purchase a fur for the unpredictable weather of a German spring?

  What Charlotte and her manager didn’t discuss was the recent easing of the violently hard times that had come on the heels of the Great War, impoverishing so many Germans. Had Charlotte mentioned it, Miss Schmidt would have said, “But you aren’t talking about our customers, Miss Blum.”

  It was true, there were still well-heeled shoppers who strolled the elegant Leipzigerstrasse; the manager’s unspoken sentiment was a swipe at the young men and women crowding the streets. Especially the women, with their corsetless figures moving freely in their light garments: the short skirts, the loose blouses. Charlotte knew that her manager, a middle-aged woman who had known her place all her life, bore no affection for the New Woman, who was now—or so Charlotte felt—only a reminder of how devastating it can be to be born at the wrong time.

  Miss Schmidt checked her wristwatch, a gorgeous object that Mr. Wertheim himself had brought back from Geneva as a gift to her. It was still common to see women wearing small lapel watches on their blouses, or men relying on pocketwatches, so wearing a wristwatch immediately made the manager look modern. How Charlotte envied her that watch! For all Miss Schmidt’s complaints about the “girls of today,” the manager was aware that the watch gave her a certain contemporary cachet; it made her less easy to peg as the traditionalist that she really was, and Charlotte knew this sort of misrepresentation pleased her. It wasn’t so she could pass herself off as something she wasn’t; it was so she could, in some small way, be a part of the sexual revolution that was already leaving her behind.

  There were so many ways for a woman to be frustrated, thought Charlotte. Even when you bestow a new life on young women, by definition you leave the older ones out. The truth was, this new Berlin didn’t belong to all young women; it easily excluded the ones who were working-class or poor. Factory workers who considered themselves New Women still cleaned and cooked on their days off. Wives still had children to look after, along with the husbands. And then there were the secretaries, who could never hope to have positions equal to their bosses’. Women who had less opportunity to be New Women than those spirited, athletically built middle- and upper-class girls in summer dresses. Girls who smoked, openly took lovers, chose bohemian society, and pretty much did as they pleased because they, like the manager, were affected by the accident of birth. In their case, into money. Charlotte knew this because she was one of those girls who came from comfortable circumstances and privilege, though it didn’t prevent her from observing the world around her.

  Even her window-dressing job came as a consequence of studying typography, having spent two summers drawing advertisements for a design firm. Her education came because her parents could afford it, and because they, particularly her father, were progressive, never thinking to offer something to her brother that they would not offer to her.

  It didn’t occur to Charlotte that this was unusual parental behavior in those pre–Great War years, and when it did finally occur to her to ask about it, her father had laughed and said, “I never really thought about it, but I will say I made more of an effort after our Denmark holiday.”

  When Charlotte was nine years old, her parents had traveled with her and her brother to Denmark. In Copenhagen, placed all by itself on a rock in the harbor, sat a statue of Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid. It wasn’t very big, the size of a real girl actually, and Charlotte was entranced by this fishgirl, her lower body half legs, half fins, and the tragedy of her inability to win the love of her prince.

  Nothing in the city enthralled her as much as the statue, who sat so close to the shore Charlotte felt she could march right out and touch her.

  On the second day, her family indulged her request to visit the statue again; on the third day, her mother and brother refused to go. “Charlo, how can you keep coming back to this little tourist statue?” asked her father.

  She didn’t want to say because she was so beautiful, with her slim figure, her pretty, downturned face, her hair loosely gathered at the base of her neck. The mermaid seemed like a girl she could have gone to school with. So delicate, the sort of girl the other girls might have crushes on. Charlotte wouldn’t have thought to say this to her father, because she wouldn’t have articulated it in this way, but her feelings could be summed up as, What’s the difference between my loving to look at this bronze girl, a creature of fantasy, and my friends who like the girls in the cinema?

  “The story of this little mermaid?” her father said. “That’s not your story. You will never fall in love with a prince you’ve rescued who isn’t even smart enough to know that it was you who saved him. You will never sell your voice for legs that feel like a thousand knives every time you walk.”

  “I know,” said Charlotte.

  “It’s a terrible story, you know.”

  Charlotte nodded.

  Father and daughter gazed at the little statue. “Mr. Andersen,” said her father, “never had a daughter.”

  Charlotte couldn’t tell her father that the story of the Little Mermaid frightened and fascinated her.

  “Come on, kid,” he said. “Your mother and Trilby are meeting us at the Tivoli Gardens.”

  Reluctant to leave the bronze fishgirl, Charlotte followed her father to the amusement park.

  “Miss Schmidt,” said Charlotte, “would it be all right if I stepped out for a moment?”

  Her manager looked at her watch and said, “Ten minutes.” That Charlotte was being timed was a given, for productivity, and for Charlotte to be reminded of the beautiful watch that belonged to Miss Schmidt.

  • • •

  Being outside allowed Charlotte to get some fresh air, which she immediately polluted by lighting up a cigarette. She was raised to believe that women shouldn’t smoke, and, if they did, smoking on the street was déclassé. Even Charlotte thought it lowbrow. So when she did it, it was because she was courting an image that no more represented her true self than Miss Schmidt’s modern wristwatch represented her; it wasn’t rebellion as much as it was a kind of game of pretend.

  She stood across the street from the windows she was working on, her coat pulled tight against the wisps of snow as she held the cigarette she barely inhaled. Sunglasses. How to get passersby to look at the sunglasses? These same pedestrians bustled around her as she remained stationary.

  Charlotte stubbed out her cigarette beneath one well-shod foot. The windows were shaping up, but something was missing, something that would catch the feminine eye. There was talk about making Charlotte a permanent window dresser, which meant more pay and job security in the union. It wasn’t a completely unattractive prospect, since she believed the job carried a possibility for theatrics.

  Until now Charlotte had not moved very far from the prim Wertheimer aesthetic—smartly dressed salesgirls, tasteful music, perfectly modulated lighting that fit the architecturally graceful arches at the entrance and the soaring atrium—but all at once she saw another direction for the windows. In her excitement, she hurried back across the street, arriving at her post with two minutes to spare and never noticing another young woman who had been watching Charlotte as Charlotte had been watching the storefront windows.

  Charlotte Blum worked quickly. Three scenes: In the first window, a wife and mother cooks dinner in the kitchen. In the second window, a secretary sits at her typewriter, Dictaphone nearby as she transcribes a recording. In the third, a woman works in a factory.

  “Do you find this job amusing? Do you think this is just for fun?”

  Miss Schmidt was standing just outside one of Charlotte’s tableaux, refusing to enter while still able to see the passersby who stopped to sta
re at the mannequins. “Am I amusing?” said Miss Schmidt, insensible to the crowd that was attracted to the windows but stayed on for the obvious reprimand Charlotte was receiving.

  An arm of the mannequin in the kitchen caught Miss Schmidt’s critical eye: On its rigid, skinny wrist was a beautiful watch. She stepped in and yanked the arm out of its pose to get a closer look, then shoved it into an opposite, awkward pose in disgust. “Is this what you think of . . . of . . . of all of us?” as she made a sweeping gesture with her own watch-adorned arm. “Our customers? They aren’t secretaries. They are to be treated with respect, not like some burlesque.”

  “It wasn’t meant as ridicule—” Charlotte began.

  “Stop!”

  It seemed Miss Schmidt had more to say, then thought better of it as she turned and left Charlotte in the kitchen scene, unsure of what was expected of her.

  When Charlotte had examined the display windows from outside the store as she smoked her cigarette, the idea of women daydreaming came to her in full. The sunglasses, of course, they represented a life of sunshine, vacations, paradise, and moonlight. If she were to make tableaux depicting an expensive lakeside resort, or a midsummer’s picnic in the heart of New York City, then where is the dream? Where is the unexpected? Where is the connection to the dreariness of life and the flight of fancy?

  It was the juxtaposition of the two things that would draw the eye and stimulate the fantasy, then the desire to make it real, then the sale of the thing being sold, in this case, the sunglasses.

  In the wake of Miss Schmidt’s departure (and presumed march up to the floor supervisor), Charlotte remained motionless near the stove. The mannequin mother, intent on cooking dinner, wore a silk dress, a shimmer of pale blue ice that seemed the weight of a butterfly’s wing. Delicate ropes of diamonds wound around her throat and wrists, with individual stones scattered in her upswept hair. A pair of black-framed sunglasses shielded her eyes from the harsh light of the display windows as she went about her task, her pose indicating that nothing was amiss in her hausfrau attire. Her children sat in the corner, constructing a tower from a metal Erector set. The message, Charlotte tried to explain to Miss Schmidt, was that her family may see her one way, but this glamorous costume was how she saw herself.

  The secretary in the next window wore red-framed sunglasses with green lenses as she transcribed a business letter on her typewriter, a full-length mink coat casually flung over the back of her chair.

  The final window was of a factory girl clad in ruby velvet overalls studded with rubies. Ruby and diamond cuffs sparkled on each wrist as she tightened a cog with a gold-painted wrench while peering through her sunglasses, sky blue lenses set in round tortoiseshell frames. Her high-heeled shoes were an intricate web of red satin and velvet ribbons.

  If Charlotte was sure of nothing else, she knew that even women who didn’t work in offices or factories or fix their own supper would recognize the lives in the window. They would recognize them and, in a passing fit of fantasy, imagine they were in their place, sentimentally perhaps, but that wouldn’t stop them from responding to the daydreams of working girls. Desire, thought Charlotte, only unexpected desire can have any effect.

  She wandered over to the secretary’s window and dropped into the leather office sofa. It was hard to imagine that she’d be keeping her job, or that she’d want to keep her job if all it meant was dressing and undressing mannequins without doing anything more interesting than pretending they were guests at a party. Charlotte struggled to see the reasoning behind selling goods if you weren’t selling the ideas behind the goods.

  While she tried to muster up the energy to find Miss Schmidt and learn her fate, which she was fairly sure would be to dismantle everything, she noticed a young woman taking in the window displays. Some of the passing crowd still stopped to look, but not with the undivided interest of the young woman.

  Charlotte watched her pause before the first scene, studying it, leaning a little to one side. The girl looked to be about Charlotte’s age and was, not unlike Charlotte, dressed in a gamine outfit of a crisp white men’s shirt tucked into pleated trousers topped with a wide, simple belt with a rhinestone dress clip attached just next to the buckle. Her navy blue wool overcoat was tailored, though unbuttoned; Charlotte noted the way it tucked in at the waist before flaring out again and stopping midcalf. Charlotte had spent enough time around luxury to recognize the very fine coat as easily the most expensive item the girl wore. But the trousers, the rhinestone pin, and the lack of a hat (in winter, no less), revealing her unfussed, bobbed hair, pulled Charlotte’s attention. The young woman was, in short, adorable.

  As this thought occurred to Charlotte, the girl wandered over to the secretary scene, breaking her concentration long enough to see Charlotte. At first, she seemed slightly startled to see a live girl keeping company with the imitation girl. Then she relaxed, smiling a smile so unexpectedly charming that Charlotte could not breathe.

  It was decided that while the elder Blums were in England for an extended period, Charlotte and her brother, Trilby, would stay in their parents’ modernist house of glass located on the edge of Berlin. The hard, reflecting surfaces stood in contrast to the garden of roses that surrounded the home. Climbing roses, wild roses, trees of roses. The large garden and glass house, designed by Charlotte’s architect-father, Bruno, were bordered by a tall stone wall that hid both house and garden from the street.

  The family loved this house to distraction. They loved it for the play of light through the walls of glass, loved how the walls slid away, transforming the large, undivided living space into a kind of industrial gazebo. They loved the extreme height of the ceilings, the kitchen, with its sleek cabinetry that ran almost unnoticed along one wall. The most expensive element of the house was the series of retractable skylights in all of the bedrooms, reduced in size so that more space could be given over to the public rooms and studios where Mr. and Mrs. Blum worked; he was an architect, she designed glassware, and together the family had a thriving glass-manufacturing firm, Blum GlasWerks. Trilby had a compact studio whose decor still reflected his student days at the Bauhaus, where he had taken classes on all manner of design—furniture, lighting, carpets, textiles, glass, and pottery. And Charlotte’s tiny studio of colored pencils, pastels, watercolors, inks, and papers and was atop the garage, accessed by a sky bridge.

  Inside the home, colorful carpets in geometric patterns sat on planked floors (the bedrooms) and concrete floors (the studios and living room). The furniture was leather and comfortable and avant-garde. Charlotte’s parents had included touches of velvet and aged crystals, but so perfectly that the connection between glass and velvet, concrete and crystal was seamless. The success of her parents’ company depended upon the Blums’ love of the new.

  Books lined the floor-to-ceiling shelves. There were tables of metal and mirror, lighting fixtures of aged metal and amber glass. The displayed art was spare and well-chosen—a small sculpture here, an oversize oil abstraction there—all of it personal, not simply decorative.

  It would be safe to say that no house ever represented a family as this house did the Blums: their twentieth-century ideas, their intellect, their commitment to high and popular art, their unity. Their unwavering affection for each other.

  In 1914, at the Cologne Werkbund Exhibition, Bruno Blum built what looked like a Turkish temple made of glass. The monumental dome, which swirled like a serving of whipped cream, was a multihued fantasy of diamond-shaped panes of wavy glass in paint-box colors ranging from indigo and rose at the base through deep green and grass, to lavender, to buttery yellow, pale orange, and back to an incandescent yellow that resembled pure light.

  Etched lines of modernist poetry wrapped around the exterior walls.

  Inside the temple were a pair of clear glass stairways that bordered an interior waterfall, the water mirroring the wavy glass in the dome.

  This little pavilion of color, light, and glass honored the workers at Blum GlasW
erks while announcing Bruno Blum’s dream to make a “crystal world.” Mr. Blum was not a religious man; he, along with his family, adhered to humanist values. Kindness and forgiveness were his moral compass, and a belief in the possibility for an earthly paradise found through glass.

  Glass, he reasoned, allowed people to be seen, and loved. It invited light into people’s lives, making it inevitable that transparency, and a banishing of the darkness, would naturally lead to a better world. If you called Bruno Blum a utopian, he would agree. “So I’m a little luftmensch,” he would say with a laugh. “There are worse things.”

  While Bruno Blum pursued his realization of livable glass buildings (his wonderful home being one example), his brother ran the factory, along with Trilby, who was being groomed to take over the entire operation. Blum GlasWerks made not only ordinary windows but also windows for churches and synagogues and department stores. It was the company that most of Europe looked to for municipal aquariums and flower conservatories. They made art glass for interior doors and windows. Every German who could afford it purchased a Blum greenhouse, or garden house.

  The greenhouses further fueled Bruno Blum’s ideas regarding glass structures that housed people instead of plants. His philosophy of glass led to the establishment of the Glass Chain—a series of letters among ten other architects who loved glass and steel as much as Bruno Blum. Eventually, the paper conversation became influential as close to home as the Bauhaus and as far away as the rest of Europe, and America.

  In between his glass projects, Blum built public housing, fanciful and solid. Not pure glass, but full of windows and sunlight just the same, as he made the correlation between contentment and light.