ALTHOUGH THE NAMES of female fashion journalists and illustrators appear very often in the pages of the Weimar popular press, little is known of their lives and careers during the 1920s and after 1933. Biographical information is scattered and hard to find. Contemporary reference sources rarely list them, since these women were not always considered writers of serious literature or creators of high art. The personnel archives of the publishers for whom they worked were, for the most part, destroyed during the Second World War. The accounts presented below piece together fragmentary facts obtained from newspaper articles, obituaries, archival notes, and interviews. There is no entry on Helen Grund, because a chapter in this book is dedicated to her. There are no entries on Gerda Bunzel, Erica Mohr, Martha Sparkuhl, Julie Haase Werkenthin, and Katharina von Rathaus, since no biographical data could be found on them.

OLA ALSEN (b. 1880 in Bonn, d. 1956 in Munich; real name Henriette Alsberg), daughter of the Jewish merchant Lehmann Alsberg, was one of the best known and most prolific fashion journalists in the 1920s. The 1930 Reichshandbuch der deutschen Gesellschaft identifies her as an author of “elegant prose” (elegante Prosa). She was fashion editor of Elegante Welt, but she also wrote regularly for Sport im Bild, Die Dame, Film-Kurier, and, from 1921 to 1924, Der Moden-Spiegel, a weekly supplement to Mosse's Berliner Tageblatt und Handelszeitung. Alsen was a best-selling author of books of advice on cosmetics, makeup, fashion, manners, and beauty. Her novel Das Paradies der Frau: Berliner Roman (1919) sheds light on the workings of the Berlin garment industry after the First World War and the role of women as designers and entrepreneurs. Her 1930 documentation Die Tochter Lots studies the lives and problems of women in prison. Other novels include Hier wohnt das Glück (1910), Garten der Leidenschaft (1920), Charlotte Bell (1924), Durch Klippen (1924), and Ein Mädchen von heute (1925). Alsen also wrote the screenplays for several films: Treibende Kraft (1921, dir. Zoltan Nagy), Des Lebens und der Liebe Willen (1921, dir. Lorenz Bätz), Monna Wanna (1922, dir. Richard Eichberg), and Luxusweibchen (1925, dir. Erich Schönfelder).