Vertigo - The Rise and Fall of Weimar Germany. Chapter 4 Destinies Behind Typewriter
发布时间 2025-02-23 12:34:06 来源
Chapter 4. Destinies Behind Typewriters. The Supporting Class of the New Age. Office, Home, Work, Love. How did she ever combine them all? Imgardcoin. Gilgi, one of us. At 8 o'clock in the morning, strange beings populate the streets. Anyone wanting to make a phone call in 1920 picked the receiver up from the cradle and dialed. Two or three turns was enough and the electricity produced made a signal flap on the switchboard in the nearest telephone office. Each line had an indicator flap next to it. The switchboard operator could tell by the drop of the flap that someone on the line wanted to speak.
第4章 打字机背后的命运。新时代的支撑阶层。办公室、家庭、工作、爱情。她是如何将这一切结合的？伊玛加德科因。我们中的一个，基尔吉。早上8点时，街道上充满了各种奇怪的人。1920年想打电话的人只需拿起听筒，从底座上摘下，然后拨号。转动两三圈就足够了，产生的电能会让最近的电话局交换机上的信号牌翻动。每条线路旁都有一个指示牌，交换机接线员通过指示牌的翻动可以知道有人想要通话。
She, it was always a woman, put the cable of the heavy headset that hung around her neck into the corresponding socket and said, Hello, how may I help you? Or, office here, what can I do for you? The caller gave her the number that they wanted to speak to whereupon the operator connected the two lines with a cable and plugged it in. The girl from the office could bring two people together like this up to a hundred times an hour. She was a tirelessly active synapse, a living connection cable. Many dozens of telephone operators, often even hundreds, sat side by side at huge rows of switchboards, talking and plugging. They formed the human nodules of the telephone network, changing its connections by the second, asking the number, plugging, asking the number, plugging.
她，总是个女人，把挂在脖子上的沉重耳机的电缆插入相应的插孔中，说道：“你好，我能为你做些什么？” 或者“这里是办公室，我能为你做些什么？” 打电话的人告诉她他们想要接通的号码，接着接线员便用电缆将两条线连接并插入插孔。办公室的这个女孩可以这样每小时多达一百次地把两个人连通起来。她像一根不知疲倦的活跃的神经元，一根活生生的连接电缆。许多甚至上百位电话接线员并肩坐在巨大的接线板排上，不断地交谈和插线。她们形成电话网络中的人际节点，瞬间改变连接，询问号码，插入电缆，再次询问号码，再插入电缆。
That went on for eight hours a day. The pressure intensified when several flaps fell at once. Then the callers would have to wait for a few seconds, cursing under their breath and asking to speak to a manager. Even when new operators were employed, the rush in the telephone offices increased because the number of connections was growing unevenly. The women were supervised by men who sat at broad desks in the middle of the vast halls, ensuring that the operators kept their nerve. Automatic self-dial phone calls became more commonplace throughout the 1920s.
每天这样持续八个小时。当多条线路同时出现故障时，压力会加剧。这时，来电者只能等上几秒钟，心里暗骂，并要求与经理通话。即使雇用了新的接线员，电话局的工作量仍在增加，因为连接的数量在不均匀地增长。这些女接线员由坐在宽大办公桌前的男性监督，他们会确保接线员保持冷静。在整个1920年代，自动拨号电话逐渐普及。
Now, at first only on some local networks, one could dial the desired number directly. This way, the electricity passed automatically through the nodal points of the network. When this technique became more widespread, many telephone operators were dismissed, but soon found new jobs in the booming offices that were springing up because the more phone calls people made, the more work they made elsewhere. The more often than the faster people communicated, the more administrative processes were set in motion. The more had to be noted, recorded, invoiced, checked and filed.
起初，只是在一些本地网络中，人们可以直接拨打所需的电话号码。这样一来，电流就会自动通过网络的节点。当这种技术变得更加普及时，许多电话接线员被解雇了，但他们很快在新兴的办公机构中找到了新的工作机会。因为随着人们打电话的增多，其他地方的工作量也随之增加。人们沟通越频繁，速度越快，行政流程就越多。需要记录、归档、开票、核对和存档的工作也相应增加。
The emblem of the times was no longer a smoking factory, but the apparently emission-free palace of administration, a beehive containing honeycombs of offices and typing pools. By day, office workers disappeared into these massive or inspiring valhallers. These buildings told everyone where power was to be found, at the desk. They included genuine works of art, such as the Heelahouse in Hamburg, built between 1922 and 1924. A wonderful building of burned bricks running together into points and peaks, like a gigantic ship's prow, the apotheosis in stone of foreign trade bringing back its visual ingredients from somewhere remote and unimaginably exotic.
时代的象征已不再是冒烟的工厂，而是看似无排放的行政大楼，这些大楼就像蜂巢，里面布满了办公室和打字池。白天，办公室员工进入这些宏伟或令人仰慕的大厦中。这些建筑告诉人们权力所在的位置——办公桌。它们中不乏真正的艺术作品，如汉堡的希勒大楼，这栋建筑建于1922年至1924年。它是由烧制的砖块组合而成的奇妙建筑，形成尖角，宛如一艘巨大船只的船首，是对外贸的一种石雕顶礼，似乎从遥远的、难以想象的异域带来了视觉元素。
The first high-rise building in Berlin was constructed in 1922, an office building with an expressionist-inspired twist. The 65-metre Bozigtwam had a jagged penthouse floor that radiated the light of office administration far into the distance, like a giant gothic lantern, bureaucracy as a source of redemption. But the claim to universal validity embodied by the administrative office of Ige Fábm in Frankfurt put everything else in the shade. The enormous 250-metre-long building looked as if it was merely the entrance to something much bigger lurking behind it. The Ige Fábm building may legitimately be called Kafkaesque.
柏林的第一座高层建筑建于1922年，是一座具有表现主义风格的办公楼。65米高的博齐格塔姆大厦拥有一个锯齿状的顶层，好似一盏巨大的哥特式灯笼，把办公行政的光线投射得很远，使得官僚体制成为了一种救赎的来源。然而，法兰克福的伊吉法布姆行政办公室所体现的普遍效力，使其他一切相形见绌。这座巨大的250米长建筑看起来就像是通向某个更大事物的入口。可以说，伊吉法布姆大厦充满了卡夫卡式的风格。
In the imagination, it could have easily continued into an endless sequence of administrative corridors in which losing one's way seemed inevitable, and any petition would be lost forever. The Kafkaesque, as we know, is a heightened manifestation of bureaucracy, and Kafka's work, as singular as it might be, is unimaginable without that experience of administration. Franz Kafka, until 1922, chief legal secretary for the Workman's Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia in Prague, had learned to value and fear life from the perspective of risk evaluation, as a bookkeeper of anxiety, against which his writing was inadequate insurance.
在想象中，这样的情形很容易延续成无尽的办公走廊，让人迷失方向，任何请求都会永远消失。众所周知，卡夫卡式风格是官僚体制的极致体现，而如果没有行政管理这种体验，卡夫卡的作品是难以想象的。直到1922年，弗朗茨·卡夫卡在布拉格的波希米亚王国工人意外事故保险机构担任首席法律秘书，他学会了从风险评估的角度重视和畏惧生活，就像焦虑的记账员一样，而他的写作对这种焦虑而言是无效的保障。
In the existentially excessive demands made upon him, he was an entirely modern character, whose posthumous fame was able to grow out of an experience shared by millions. Martin Kesser, author of what is probably the most significant office novel of the 1920s, called this collective experience the bent or seated way of life, the way of life of the modern clerical worker. Between 1914 and 1933, the number of office workers would double from 2 million to over 4 million. The rise in the number of female clerical workers was disproportionately large, and 65% of the 1.2 million women employed in 1925 were under 25 years old. In absolute terms, there might not have been very many of them compared with the number of manual workers, but they were a new phenomenon on the streets, and to the surprise of many contemporaries shaped the face not only of the cities but also of the future.
在对他所提出的过高要求中，他是一位现代人物，他的身后名声源于数百万人的共同经历。马丁·凯瑟是1920年代最重要的办公室小说作者，他将这一集体经历称为"弯腰或坐姿的生活方式"，即现代文员的生活方式。在1914年至1933年期间，办公室职员的人数从200万翻倍至超过400万。其中，女性职员的增加尤为显著，在1925年就业的120万女性中，65%年龄在25岁以下。与体力劳动者相比，文员的数量虽然不算非常多，但是她们在街头出现作为一种新现象，出乎许多同时代人的意料，不仅塑造了城市的面貌，也影响了未来。
All of a sudden, office workers seem to have become the crowd, and had burdened from a manageable quantity to a barely imaginable dimension, a class full of mysteries. Hundreds of thousands of office workers populate the streets of Berlin every day, and yet less is known about their lives than that of the primitive tribespeople whose customs the office workers admire in films. With this oft-quoted sentence, the commentator Zekefried Karkauer introduced his sociological study, the Ungerstären, the Salaried Masses, which bore the subtitle from the newest Germany, and with which he wanted to shed light on the darkness of this unknown species. Karkauer was by no means alone in his curiosity. In the Weimar Republic, clerical workers, particularly the female kind, became the object of growing interest. Secretaries and shorthand typists were the sirens of the New Age, the object of sociological research, and the protagonists of an overflowing, frivolous imagination. Film titles such as The Department Store Princess, 1926, The Little Short Hand Typist, 1925, and so on, speak for themselves.
突然之间，办公室职员似乎成为了人群中的一部分，他们的数量从可控的程度激增到几乎难以想象，宛如一个充满神秘的群体。每天有成千上万的办公室职员出现在柏林的街头，但与他们在电影中仰慕的原始部落居民相比，人们对他们的生活了解甚少。评论家泽克弗里德·卡考尔用这句经常被引用的话开篇，介绍他的社会学研究《薪水阶层》，副标题为《最新德国》，他希望借此揭开这个未知群体的神秘面纱。卡考尔对这个话题的好奇并不孤单。在魏玛共和国时期，办公室职员，特别是女性职员，成为越来越多研究的对象。秘书和速记员被视为新时代的迷人角色，是社会学研究的对象，也是丰富多彩的想象力的主角。电影如《百货公司公主》（1926年）和《小速记员》（1925年）等，便是这类关注的体现。
Not so I go out and you stay here, 1931, based on the homonymous novel of a model by Wilhelm Schpier, which put the confident retail employee Garbi at its center. In the James Klein Review, laughing Berlin in 1925, the office was put on stage. The set consisted of an enormous typewriter in which the dancers positioned themselves as keys, wearing black letters on their heads. In their basic position, they formed the German QWERTZ arrangement before their legs started swinging, and they began shedding their clothes. The idea of women pursuing professions was not a new one. They had already been Emilia Vinckelmann, Germany's first architect, Marie Monke, the first judge, Lisa Meitner, the first physics professor, and in 1929, Ellie Blah, the first taxi driver. But they were still exceptions, even if they were typical of a now unstoppable development.
《这不是我出去，你留在这里》，1931年根据威廉·施皮尔的同名小说改编，小说的主角是一名自信的零售员工加比。在1925年的《詹姆斯·克莱因评论》中，舞台设在嬉闹的柏林办公室。舞台布景是一台巨大的打字机，舞者们将自己放在打字机的按键位置，头上戴着黑色字母。在他们的初始姿势中，他们组成了德国的QWERTZ布局，然后开始摆动双腿，并逐渐脱去衣服。女性追求职业的想法并不新鲜，德国已经有了第一位建筑师埃米莉亚·文克尔曼、第一位法官玛丽·蒙克、第一位物理学教授丽莎·梅特纳，以及1929年的第一位女出租车司机艾莉·布拉。不过，她们仍然是少数，尽管她们代表了一种势不可挡的发展趋势。
Short-hand typists and office assistants were a different matter, however. They were a mass phenomenon. Their headiness, their lust for life, their visible confidence, their tendency to appear in groups seemed to bring fresh air to the public space. Women were no longer only men's companions, and they didn't dart home by the quickest route at night after work. They hung around, they populated the cafes, inspected the shop windows, never had so many women had so much money of their own, made their own decisions, moved out, resigned, made their own plans. It was their taste that now helped to decide the success and failure of films and magazines. Their gaze now appraised men, just as men had for so long appraised women, and their intelligence helped to determine the efficiency of an office.
速记打字员和办公室助理则情况不同。她们是一种大众现象。她们的大胆、对生活的热情、明显的自信，以及喜欢成群结队出现的倾向，似乎为公共空间注入了新鲜空气。女性不再只是男性的陪伴者，她们下班后不再急匆匆地走最捷径回家。她们闲逛、光顾咖啡馆、浏览商店橱窗，有史以来从未有过这么多女性拥有自己的钱、做自己的决策、搬出去住、辞职、制定自己的计划。她们的品味如今已能影响电影和杂志的成败。她们的目光也开始评估男性，就像男性长久以来评估女性一样，她们的智慧也提升了办公室的效率。
And as customers, their purchasing power was considerable. The business world had never been so dependent on women, but women were dependent on it as well. They decided which records would be bought, which cinema tickets clipped. They became a crucial target group for the booming entertainment industry. Hyperactive, busy at work by day, ready to dance in the evening, the modern urban woman was redefined and reappraised. Hardworking, beautiful legs, and the necessary mixture of reliability and frivolity, blurring and contour, kindness and coolness. This was how German Vogue summed up the woman of today. Countless magazine articles, some films, and numerous novels were devoted to the secretary.
作为消费者，她们的购买力相当可观。商业世界从未如此依赖女性，但女性也同样依赖于商业。她们决定购买哪些唱片，剪掉哪些电影票。她们成了蓬勃发展的娱乐行业的重要目标群体。白天在工作中忙碌，晚上准备好去跳舞，这种现代都市女性被重新定义和评价。勤劳，修长的双腿，以及必要的可靠性和轻快、模糊和轮廓、善良和冷静的混合。这就是德国《Vogue》对当今女性的总结。无数的杂志文章、一些电影和众多小说都围绕着秘书而展开。
Gilgi, one of us, 1931, by Iomgad Koin, the girl at the Orga Prevart, 1930, by Rudolf Breonna, destinies behind typewriters, 1930, by Christina Anita Brook, and Herbrajes Fiasco, 1932, by Martin Kessel, all revolved around secretaries. The fact that their positions were not mere trophies of emancipation, but that they were ancillary, badly paid, subordinate jobs did nothing to diminish the interest. It was precisely that ambivalence, that oscillation between dependence and autonomy, that sparked the curiosity of the media and stirred the collective imagination. Glossy magazines, such as Das Leibem and Wu sent their reporters and photographers into offices to explore the new social terrain that had formed in the smart office block palaces.
《吉尔吉，我们中的一员》 (1931年，Iomgad Koin)、《Orga Prevart的女孩》 (1930年，Rudolf Breonna)、《打字机后的命运》 (1930年，Christina Anita Brook) 和《Herbrajes Fiasco》 (1932年，Martin Kessel) 等作品都围绕着秘书展开。尽管这些职位并不是解放的象征，而是辅助性质、薪酬低、地位低下的工作，但这并未减少人们的兴趣。正是这种对依赖与自主之间摇摆不定的状态，引发了媒体的好奇心并激发了集体想象力。诸如《Das Leibem》和《Wu》的时尚杂志派遣记者和摄影师进入办公室，以探寻这些新型写字楼内形成的社会新景象。
In the summer of 1929, the trendy magazine Das Leibem published in Leipzig, published a long read, zoology of the shorthand typist, in words and pictures. This presented a whole series of female types found more or less in this form in every office, the good girl, the beginner, the factotum, the intellectual, the enamored one, the slut, the greedy one, the oath, and finally, the lady who for various reasons gets away with everything. But she, the magazine reminded its readers, appeared almost only in films. Koutorholski also explored the world of office workers, and for Oohoo, he set out his thoughts about what a good secretary had to be.
在1929年的夏天，莱比锡出版的时尚杂志《Das Leibem》刊登了一篇长篇文章——《速记女打字员的动物学》，用文字和图片展示了一系列女性类型，这些类型或多或少能在每个办公室中看到。包括好女孩、初学者、杂务工、知识分子、恋爱中的人、放荡的人、贪婪的人、发誓者，最后是因各种原因无所不能的女士。不过，杂志提醒读者，这样的女士几乎只在电影中出现。库托霍尔斯基也曾探索过办公人员的世界，并在《Oohoo》中阐述了他对一个优秀秘书的看法。
She was the one who made the boss what he represented in the world by taking care of him and steering him so gently through files and corridors that he believed he was the one in charge. Take note, he wrote, under his pseudonym Peter Punta, a good secretary is invisible, inaudible, and only perceptible when she isn't there. The mutual dependencies in the system of governance in the office world were what turned the new employees into curious figures of social being, a class that was both difficult to define and politically unreliable. Regardless of how exploited office workers might have been, they at least felt that they were superior to proletarians since they had some role, however minimal, indirectorial, or at least, administrative functions.
她是那个让老板在世界上具有权威的人，她通过照顾他、在文件和走廊间温柔地引导他，让他相信自己才是掌控一切的人。注意，他用笔名彼得·庞塔写道，一个好的秘书是隐形的、无声的，只有在不在场时才会被注意到。在办公室的治理体系中，相互依赖关系使新员工成为一种难以定义且政治上不稳定的特殊社会群体。无论办公室工作人员受到怎样的剥削，他们至少觉得自己比无产阶级优越，因为他们至少在某种程度上参与了决策或管理工作，不管这些工作多么微不足道或间接。
Where the manual worker saw himself as the primal element in the generation of value, without whose strong arms or cogs would be brought to a standstill, office workers were the ones who assigned his work, calculated his efficiency, arranged his wages, and finally paid him. However, monotonous office work might have been, it was elevated above the dirt of production and played apart in the sphere of operational control. For that very reason, the young women, most of whom came from proletarian backgrounds, had enjoyed an enormous boost. They were participating in the modern age, they understood its technologies and its codes, they had an understanding of fashion, even if they couldn't afford much.
在体力劳动者看来，他是价值创造的核心元素，没有他的强壮双臂或机器的齿轮，生产就会停滞。然而，办公室职员则是那些分配工作、计算效率、安排工资并最终支付薪水的人。尽管办公室工作可能单调，但它高于直接生产过程中的泥泞，并在运营控制领域扮演了角色。正因如此，大多数来自无产阶级家庭的年轻女性获得了巨大的提升。她们参与了现代社会，了解现代技术和规则，并对时尚有了认识，尽管她们可能负担不起太多。
At home, they were the ones who read out and explained official letters to their parents, they knew the manners of educated people, they picked up their turns of phrase in the office and watched how they behaved at table. They didn't wolf their soup down from a lunch bucket like their proletarian brothers, but ate with their colleagues in the big cantines or even in subscription restaurants. They lived in an exciting world which they watched as if from outside. Quick even when sitting down, the quiet dramas of the office. These new office buildings operated a little like merchant vessels. The lower rooms belonged to the tabulating and hole punching machines which marked the beginning of modern data collection and processing.
在家里，他们是那些为父母念出和解释官方信件的人，他们了解有教养的人的礼仪，他们在办公室学习措辞，观察人们在餐桌上的行为。他们不像他们的无产阶级兄弟那样从午餐桶里狼吞虎咽地吃汤，而是和同事一起在大型食堂，甚至是在包餐餐厅用餐。他们生活在一个令人兴奋的世界里，仿佛从外部观察。即使坐着，他们也很机敏，享受办公室里的宁静戏剧。这些新办公楼有些像商船运作。底层房间属于打孔机和制表机，它们标志着现代数据收集和处理的开始。
Hole punches and saucers worked on those. Little training was required for the tasks involved. The job of the hole punches was one of the least highly regarded and toughest of the modern administrative jobs. Clerks who have previously engaged in office activity find it difficult to adapt to this new work. The prestige that comes with sitting at a desk is lost and the demands in terms of discipline become all the greater. Modern organization theory believed and recommended that only employees who were not accustomed to anything better be taken on as hole punch girls.
洞孔打孔器和碟子适用于这些工作。所需的培训很少。打孔器的工作是现代行政工作中最不被重视和最困难的之一。以前从事办公室工作的职员很难适应这种新工作。坐在办公桌前的那种体面不复存在，而在纪律方面的要求则更高。现代组织理论认为并建议，只雇佣那些没有更好经验的员工作为打孔女工。
Upstairs the rather better off class of employees sat at their desks and produced the correspondence for the gentleman whose offices were arranged around the typing rooms. This was the site of sharp-tongued conversation that would become typical for the office was a place of social interaction. This was a particular kind of secretarial wit balanced between detachment and intimacy. A communicative grease that was urgently required to keep the wheels of the competitiveness, dependence, attraction and tedium rolling. Martin Kessel's novel, Hebrhejazviosko, features a wild office argo with which the secretaries defy the boredom of the job and the demands of their bosses.
楼上的员工相对富裕一些，他们坐在办公桌前，为办公室周围的老板们撰写信件。在这里，常常发生尖锐的对话，这成为办公室社交互动的一种典型特征。这是一种独特的秘书幽默，介于疏离和亲密之间。它是一种交流润滑剂，对于保持竞争、依赖、吸引和单调的运转而言是必不可少的。马丁·凯瑟尔的小说《Hebrhejazviosko》中描绘了一种独特的办公室行话，秘书们用这种行话来对抗工作的无聊和老板们的要求。
Each sentence ends with an affected oo for example, in a request for a pencil not habmsi ein Blaistift but ava en blaieu a special jargon of their own invention. Kessel's male readers will have recognized this oo language not least because it coincided with the current prejudice that once respectable offices run by men had been overrun and deprofessionalized by hordes of chattering women who had changed the language of the office and administration. The prime cause was not the women however but the typewriter.
每句话都以一个特殊的"oo"结尾。比如，在请求一个铅笔时，不说 "habmsi ein Blaistift" 而说 "ava en blaieu”。这是他们自己发明的一种特殊术语。Kessel 的男性读者会认出这种"oo"语言，至少是因为人们普遍偏见认为，曾经由男性掌控的体面办公室如今已被大量喋喋不休的女性占领并去专业化，她们改变了办公室和行政的语言。然而，主要原因并不是这些女性，而是打字机的普及。
It was with that instrument that slang entered the world of bookkeeping and replaced the old specialist terms and abbreviations with which classic bookkeepers had kept things brief and precise in their handwritten documents. The typewriter granted business people the possibility of delegating paperwork and made their old professional codes obsolete. With the invasion of the office by female typists, businessmen jargon gradually disappeared. The sociologist Teor Pilka observed. But the perceived loss of class was usually attributed not to the women themselves but to the boss who often dictated distractively.
正是借助这种工具，俚语进入了簿记的世界，并取代了老一代簿记员在手写文件中使用的那些简洁精确的专业术语和缩写。打字机让商务人士可以将文书工作委派给他人，从而使他们的旧有专业代码变得过时。随着女性打字员进入办公室，商业界的行话逐渐消失。社会学家Teor Pilka指出。但人们认为这种阶级感的流失通常不归咎于女性，而是归咎于那些常常分心口述的上司。
Pilka continued, abbreviations gradually disappeared. Unfortunately the blossoming empty phrase remained. Businessmen who were now relieved of the trouble of writing their own letters and who no longer ran the risk of leaving blots on the page fell into a series of bad habits particularly the one of starting a sentence without knowing where it was going to end. The typewriters speeded up the writing process but it did not rationalize the running of businesses. Typriters meant that much more writing was done than before.
皮尔卡继续说道，缩写逐渐消失。不幸的是，空洞的套话却依旧存在。那些不再需要自己写信，也不用担心在纸上留下墨迹的商人们，养成了一系列坏习惯，尤其是那种在不知道句子如何结束时就开始写句子的习惯。打字机加快了写作的速度，但没有使企业的运作更合理。打字机的出现意味着写作的量比以前多了很多。
Business letters became longer, more distracted and more to the point, more abundant. Then when carbon paper was invented and copies could be produced at the drop of a hat there was no stopping the flow of paper. Sensible storage became a genuine science to the joy of the office furniture industry and specialists in organization. This particular area grew just as swiftly as the mountains of paper in the company offices and the armies of secretaries required to produce and control it.
商业信函变得越来越长，内容上既分散又直接，并且数量也明显增多。后来，随着复写纸的发明，人们可以非常轻松地制作副本，从而纸张的流通势不可挡。有效的存储逐渐成为一种真正的科学，这也让办公家具行业和组织管理专家倍感欣喜。随着公司办公室中纸张堆积如山，负责制作和管理这些文件的秘书团队也迅速壮大，这一领域也随之快速发展。
In the USA in 1948 when the Westinghouse Company rationalized its storage system it moved a total of 420 railway wagons full of files out of its buildings. On the safer assumption that no one would ever want to read any of them again, not least because there wasn't a hope of finding the information you were looking for in such enormous amounts of information. In the accelerated bustle of the modern office older clerks had few chances.
1948年，美国西屋公司在对其存储系统进行合理化调整时，搬出了公司建筑物，总共装满了420个火车车厢的文件。出于一种更稳妥的考虑，人们认为不会再有人希望再阅读这些文件，尤其是因为在如此庞大的信息量中几乎没有找到所需信息的希望。在现代办公环境中加速发展的忙碌中，年长的职员几乎没有机会。
Companies prefer to take on young members of staff, ideally young women who didn't plan to stay on for too long and who could be expected to leave of their own accord by the age of 40. Older wide-collar workers were whittled down because they were more senior and hence more expensive. They were also thought to be less quick to adapt to new working methods than younger colleagues. At the age of 40 many people who cheerfully imagine that they have their whole lives ahead of them are already economically dead.
公司更倾向于招聘年轻员工，理想情况下是那些不打算长期留任的年轻女性，她们到40岁时可能会主动离职。年长的白领员工因为资历更高，因此成本更高，也逐渐被淘汰。他们还被认为在适应新工作方法方面不如年轻同事灵活。在40岁的时候，许多人可能乐观地以为自己的生活还有很长一段路，但在经济上却已被边缘化。
Zekewid Karkawa wrote, The cult of youth, kindled by inflation, attacked the older staff. Anyone who did not go willingly was bullied out by psychological terror. It was said, the fact that they are treated even more recklessly than might be in the interest of the companies is ultimately due to the general abandonment of old age in the present day. Not only the workforce, the entire population has turned its back on the older generation and is glorifying youth as such to a staggering degree.
泽克维德·卡尔卡瓦写道，因通货膨胀而激发的“青年崇拜”对年长员工发起了攻击。任何不主动离开的员工都受到心理恐吓的驱逐。据说，他们被如此草率地对待甚至超出了公司利益所需，这归根结底是因为当今社会普遍抛弃了年长一代。不仅仅是员工群体，整个社会都对年长一代置之不理，并且以令人惊讶的程度美化年轻。
It is the fetish of the illustrated magazines and their readers, older people, woo it and rejuvenation tonics are sought to preserve it. Secretaries who didn't manage to leap into marriage in time risked finding themselves without a husband and without work in the middle of their lives. Many clung desperately to their job even though no effort was spared to frighten them off. The independence they thought they had won with their job proved to be a temporary freedom.
这是一种被图文杂志及其读者所迷恋的东西，年长的人追求它，并寻找保养的灵药来保持青春。那些没有及时结婚的女秘书可能会面临在中年时既没有丈夫又没有工作的风险。许多人即便受到多方威胁，也拼命坚持自己的工作。他们以为通过工作获得的独立其实只是暂时的自由。
For ageing secretaries, working life often became a torment if they hadn't managed to win a particularly trusted position or one that they were able to defend. On a daily basis, they lost the competition with the swift fingers of the young shorthand typists and their superiors could be brutally dismissive of them. Find yourself a husband, a desperate 41 year old advises a younger colleague in the novel Destiny's Behind typewriters.
对于年长的秘书来说，如果她们没有赢得一个特别受信任或可以稳定下来的职位，工作生活往往变成一种折磨。在日常工作中，她们在与年轻速记员灵巧手指的竞争中败下阵来，上司们对她们的态度可能十分冷酷。小说《命运在打字机后》中的一位41岁绝望的女士建议一位年轻的同事：找个丈夫吧。
If a monster came today with six legs and eight arms and five mouths and wanted to have me, I wouldn't think twice, I'd take it. Mary frolenbruckner, Mary, marry at all costs. Often things weren't much better for older men. Even the most efficient bookkeeper who was used to working with a pen and ink had no chance against a girl fresh out of middle school with three or four months training on the accounting machine behind them.
如果今天有个怪兽来了，长着六条腿、八只手臂和五张嘴，并且想要带走我，我会毫不犹豫地接受。玛丽·弗罗鲁布克纳，玛丽，无论如何都要结婚。对年长的男人来说，情况通常也好不到哪里去。即便是最熟练的簿记员，习惯用笔和墨水工作，但在面对一个刚从初中毕业，并接受过三四个月会计机培训的女孩时，也毫无胜算。
The old-star bookkeeper was a dying species. An old young man, slightly stoop-shouldered with a salo complexion, usually dyspeptic looking with black sleeves and a green eyeshade. Regardless of the kind of business, regardless of their ages, they all looked alike. He always looked tired and he was never quite happy because his face betrayed the strain of working toward that climax of his month's labours. He was usually a neat penman, but his real pride was in his ability to add a column of figures rapidly and accurately. In spite of this accomplishment, however, he seldom, if ever, left his ledger for a more promising position. His mind was atrophied by that destroying hopeless influence of drudgery and routine work. He was little more than a figuring machine with an endless number of figure combinations learned by heart.
那种老派的簿记员正在逐渐消失。他是一个有点驼背、皮肤偏黄的老年轻人，看起来经常消化不良，习惯穿着黑色袖套和绿色眼罩。无论从事什么行业，无论年龄多大，他们看起来都差不多。他总是显得很疲惫，也从未真正快乐，因为他的面容往往暴露出为了每个月工作的顶点而承受的压力。他通常书写工整，但真正令他自豪的是快速准确地列出数字之和的能力。然而，尽管有这样的本事，他很少，甚至几乎从未能因更有前途的职位而离开自己的账本。他的心智因单调的琐事和例行工作而萎缩。他几乎成了一个计算机器，掌握了无穷无尽的数字组合。
When the bookkeeper's mechanical colleague became cheap enough over the course of the early 20th century, it meant it was time to go. The production of calculators boomed and even the Mauser Arms Factory got involved in the business. But the young women who were needed to feed the machines with their raw material of figures were not going to be outdone in terms of skill and speed by some old office workhorse. So the bookkeeper became a caricature. His fingers were like fountain pens, his ears, the hooks for them, his suit sits on him like blotting paper, the novel Divigadestilshan Hans, said of office person Hans Liederra. These old decommissioned number crunches haunted the films of the Republic in the form of comical figures such as Commissioner Hauser, Wagesklar Kremke or Senior Kashir Pichla.
在20世纪初，随着簿记员的机械同事变得越来越便宜，这意味着到了告别的时刻。计算器的生产迅速发展，甚至毛瑟武器工厂也参与了这门生意。然而，需要年轻女性来操作这些机器，用她们快速输入的数据来填满机器，她们的技能和速度并不输给那些旧式的办公室能手。因此，簿记员变成了一个讽刺性的形象。正如小说《Divigadestilshan Hans》中描述办公人员汉斯·利德拉那样，他的手指像钢笔，他的耳朵像挂钢笔的挂钩，他的西装像吸水纸一样贴在身上。这些旧式的计算能手以幽默的人物形象出现在共和国的电影中，如专员豪瑟、工薪族克朗克或高级出纳佩西拉。
By contrast, their colleagues at the keyboards and shorthand pads, literally hundreds of thousands of them, became a cheerful, lively reserve army. Some of them are said to have used the phrase accumulated return account as a pet name, or at least that was what was claimed in an article clearly catering to male fantasies in the magazine Das Leibn. The Orger that provided the title for the 1930 novel The Girl at the Orger Prevert by the Communist author Rudolf Brauner was a typewriter, the stiffest one available in the typing pool. It was always foisted on newcomers, specifically inexperienced ones who had a huge amount of trouble with this monster. The machine with its 45 keys stares coldly and wickedly with complete disinterest at the strong hands of this little girl. Those hands needed to be strong.
相比之下，他们的同事们坐在键盘和速记本前，成千上万的人组成了一支欢快、生机勃勃的后备军队。据说，他们中的一些人把“累积返还账户”这个词当作昵称，至少这是《Das Leibn》杂志上一篇明显迎合男性幻想的文章中所声称的。1930年，由共产主义作家鲁道夫·布劳纳创作的小说《在奥格尔普雷弗特工作的女孩》的标题中的“奥格尔”指的是一种打字机，这种机器是打字池中最难用的，经常被推给新手，尤其是那些缺乏经验并对这种“怪兽”感到无从下手的人。这台有45个键的机器冷漠又狡黠地盯着这个小女孩的强壮双手。这双手需要很有力气。
Among the typewriters, there are nimble little girls who run like weasels, busy, loyal aunts, never sullen, always helpful and old grandmothers who are pushed onwards with a groan. To anyone familiar only with clicking computer keyboards designed to prevent minimum resistance, it would be hard to imagine how much strength was needed in those days to lift the type levers and strike them evenly enough against ribbon and paper to end up with a clean page of typing. And how much effort it required of the little fingers of both left and right hand to lift the keeler weight of the carriage to switch to upper case. Getting 70 error free words a minute required a nimbleness equal to that of the greatest pianists with the difference that here it wasn't a matter of art but of speed.
在打字机中，有些灵巧的小姑娘像黄鼠狼一样飞快地敲打，还有忙碌、忠诚的阿姨们，她们永远不会生气，总是乐于助人；以及那些年迈的祖母们，在发出呻吟声中被推动向前。对于那些只熟悉电脑键盘的人来说，很难想象在过去需要多大的力量才能抬起字杆，并且足够均匀地敲击它们，以便在纸带和纸上留下干净的打印页面。而且，小手指要用多大的力气才能抬起较重的滑车来切换到大写模式。在一分钟内不出错地打出70个字，需要与最伟大的钢琴家相媲美的灵活性，不同之处在于，这里追求的不是艺术，而是速度。
The author Martin Kesser had the finest sense for the special music of the office, for the busy sound of normality. He spoke of the cricket whisper of typewriters. You could hear the rustling and tickling, the ticking and creeping, the familiar sound of office activity and the fact that people were also present intensified the impression of busyness. It often sounded like the gnawing of mice. I want to stay pretty for as long as I can. It is a truism to observe that the office world had its erotic side and the truism is borne out by statistics. In the course of the 1920s up to 25% of young women office workers in retail married their boss. A startling figure that shows how constricted living conditions were in comparison with the present day, how small the radius from which partners could be chosen.
作者马丁·凯瑟非常敏锐地捕捉到了办公室中特殊的音乐，那种繁忙却平常的声音。他形容那是打字机的“蟋蟀低语”。在办公室里，你能听到窸窣声和细碎声，滴答声和潜行声，这种熟悉的办公活动声因为人们的存在而更加显得繁忙。有时这些声音像是老鼠在啃咬。我想尽可能长久地保持美丽。众所周知，办公室世界也有其吸引人的一面，这不仅是普遍的观点，数据也支持这一点。在20世纪20年代，零售业中最多有25%的年轻女性办公室职员嫁给了她们的老板。这个惊人的数字显示出与现在相比当时生活条件的限制，以及人们选择伴侣的圈子是多么狭小。
Officers were places where matchmaking took place but to an even greater extent they were places of harassment and unwanted advances. It was almost impossible for a female employee to rise through a company except by marrying her superior. Office life was enlivened by attraction and dreams of rising up the company ladder but also poisoned by cynical exploitation, calculation and tragedy. Herm Argenholz? A particularly sticky man. With these words the secretary Gilgi in Gilgi, one of us, the first novel by Imgad Koin, from 1931, describes her boss. He is sticky she says, but not dangerous. I can deal with him easily. I don't think men are nearly as bad as people always say. The important thing is to have the knack of dodging them.
在办公室，撮合约会是常见的事情，但更常见的是骚扰和不受欢迎的追求。对于女性员工来说，除了与上司结婚，几乎没有其他途径能够在公司中晋升。办公室生活既因吸引力和晋升梦想而充满活力，又因愤世嫉俗的剥削、算计和悲剧而受到毒害。在1931年Imgad Koin的首部小说《我们中的吉尔吉》中，秘书Gilgi这样描述她的老板Herm Argenholz：“他是个特别黏人的人。”她说他黏人但不危险，她可以轻松应对她觉得，男人并不像人们常说的那样糟糕。重要的是要有躲避他们的技巧。
But that didn't always work. Things usually became more difficult when the women didn't want to dodge these men but instead fell for their assurances of serious intent. Rude of Brontner's novel, the girl at the Orga Privet, concerns a shorthand typist who is expecting the child of one of her bosses. She is forced to have an abortion dismissed from her job and dies from the consequences of the operation. Kosta Anita Brooks' novel, Destiny's Behind Typewriters describes the odyssey of a secretary who has to keep taking on new office jobs. She endures an ordeal of sadistic harassment, sexual attacks and unpleasantness of all kinds. Trembling 40 times over, at what comes next, what kind of misery, what variant of torment, because I can't count the few good employers that I've had.
但这种做法并不总是奏效。通常，当女性不想回避这些男性，而是信以为真地接受他们的承诺时，事情往往变得更加困难。Brontner 的小说《The Girl at the Orga Privet》讲述了一位速记员的故事，她怀上了某位上司的孩子。她被迫堕胎，因此失去工作，最终死于手术并发症。Kosta Anita Brooks 的小说《Destiny's Behind Typewriters》描述了一位秘书的经历，她不得不不断更换办公工作。她经受了虐待性骚扰、性侵犯以及各种不愉快的经历。每次都战战兢兢，担心接下来会发生什么样的悲剧，什么新的折磨，因为我遇到过的好雇主实在是屈指可数。
The gloomy representation of the world of work in Destiny's Behind Typewriters did not go uncontradicted however. In the book by Imgad Koin, who herself worked as a shorthand typist for four years before trying her luck as an actress in 1927 and who started writing shortly afterwards, Anita Brooks' novel is explicitly mentioned in front of the main character Gilgi and dismissed as a trivial Jeremiahad. This kind of tragedy of insult could not halt her desire for advancement. She said, I take pleasure in getting ahead by my own efforts. I have no talents. I can't paint pictures or write books. I'm completely average and can't bring myself to despair over the fact. But I want to make as much of myself as I can. I will go on working and learning new things and stay healthy and pretty for as long as I can.
在《命运的打字机后面》一书中，虽然对于工作世界的忧郁描述并未毫无争议地存在下去，但在Imgad Koin的书中，对这种描述提出了反驳。Imgad Koin本人曾做过四年的速记员，然后于1927年尝试成为一名演员，之后不久开始写作。在她的书中，Anita Brooks的小说在主角Gilgi面前被提到并被看作是平庸的悲观之作。这种侮辱性的悲剧并未阻止她追求进步的渴望。她说：“我喜欢通过自己的努力取得进步。我没有天赋，既不会画画，也不会写书。我完全普通，却不会因此而绝望。但我想尽可能充分地发挥自己的潜力。我会继续工作，学习新东西，尽可能保持健康和漂亮。”
This is the sound of Neuya Zachlichkeit, coupled with a pursuit of advancement and the paradox of an almost dramatic modesty. Gilgi wants to be free and independent. Her idea of freedom includes unconditional realism because she doesn't want her ambitions to be dimmed by unrealistic expectations. My claims are never higher than the possibilities of achieving them, and that makes me free. Even though life brings her plans to nothing in the end, the author does not repudiate her heroine's modern determination for self advancement. Any more than she denounces her thirst for life or the little tricks with which she helps her career along, such as little upward from below glances by influencing her boss. She guides him by making herself small.
这是新客观主义的声音，加上对进步的追求和几乎戏剧性的谦逊。吉尔吉想要自由和独立。她对自由的看法包括无条件的现实主义，因为她不希望自己的抱负被不切实际的期望所阻碍。我的要求从不高于实现它们的可能性，这让我感到自由。虽然最终生活让她的计划化为泡影，但作者并没有否定她现代化的自我提升决心。也没有谴责她对生活的渴望或那些帮助她事业的小技巧，比如通过从下往上的小眼神影响她的老板。她通过让自己显得渺小来引导他。
Gilgi, the average girl, one of us, imagines an existence that brings her upwards step by step as long as she is skillful and ambitious enough. I have to achieve everything step by step. Now I'm learning my languages. I'm saving money. I may even end up with my own business. Her plan for life is thwarted. How could it be otherwise? By love, which takes her out of the office to coddle a struggling author. The office world produced its own promises, which painted reality and rose-tinted colours, particularly in the dynamic years of economic growth. The days of the work-life balance were plainly still a long way off, but employees needed to feel good about themselves were still very much in vogue.
吉尔吉，这个普通女孩，如同我们中的一员，幻想着一种能让她凭借技巧和野心一步步向上提升的生活。我必须一步一步地实现一切。现在，我在学习语言，并攒钱，我甚至可能最后拥有自己的事业。然而，她的人生计划被打乱了。怎么会不呢？是因为爱情，它让她离开办公室去照顾一位挣扎中的作家。办公室的世界有自己的承诺，把现实描绘得如玫瑰色般美好，尤其是在经济高速增长的那些年。那时候的工作与生活平衡显然还遥不可及，但员工们仍然需要在生活中找到自我价值，这种需求依然十分流行。
In August 1929, Ulchdine's Oohoo published a picture story about an office outing. The head of a Berlin company had a special idea for the annual excursion. He chartered a Luftansad-Yunkas plane to fly to the nearby state of Mecklenborg. His 11 strong team from the apprentice to the senior bookkeeper landed in a green meadow. They got out with their picnic baskets and laid out the white blankets for lunch right beside the plane, with the photographer from Ulhoo always present. They had even brought a gramophone along. There was food and drink, there was flirting and teasing, the company mood was splendid.
1929年8月，乌尔赫丁的《乌胡》发表了一则关于办公室郊游的图文故事。柏林一家公司负责人对年度郊游有一个特别的想法。他租用了一架卢夫特安萨-容克斯飞机，飞往附近的梅克伦堡州。他的11人团队，从学徒到高级簿记员，都登上了飞机，着陆在一片绿草如茵的草地上。他们带着野餐篮子走下飞机，在野餐毯子上摆好了午餐，摄影师随行拍照。甚至还带上了一台留声机。午餐间有吃有喝，大家互相调侃、打趣，公司的气氛非常愉快。
The story ended with a rousing cheer for the boss, but not without a reference to the power relationship which could have gone in a very different direction. As it was said, and there is a genuine sounding cheer at the end of the speech by the little secretary when she asks him on the part of everyone never to let them go flying, i.e. be fired, otherwise, then in an aeroplane. With a boss like that, who would want to go flying in any other way? The rapportage was plainly faked, or at least the story was adapted to the punchline. It's entirely possible that the magazine contributed to the chartering of the plane, but readers will have seen the report as entirely plausible, because in fact many companies did a great deal to keep their staff in good spirits.
故事以热烈的欢呼声为老板结束，但其中也提到了可能完全不同的权力关系。在小秘书代表所有人请求老板绝不解雇他们，否则只有坐飞机离开时，发自内心的欢呼响起。有这样的老板，谁还会想以其他方式“离开”呢？这篇报道显然是经过加工的，或者至少是为了结尾笑点而改写的。很有可能杂志社也参与了飞机的包租，但读者会觉得这个报道非常可信，因为实际上很多公司确实做了很多事情来保持员工的良好士气。
Worker satisfaction was identified as an important resource by business management. Exhaustive staff regulation included measures to intensify a sense of belonging and events that engrossed the mind, such as joint parties and vacations in holiday homes belonging to the company. Many businesses set up company sports clubs, football, light athletics, boxing, handball, rowing, gymnastics, hockey, swimming, tennis, cycling, jujitsu, nothing has been forgotten. Anyone who worked in small shops with three or four colleagues or in modest offices in the provinces could only dream of such a work atmosphere. Most office employees worked in small-scale cramped conditions, but the urban department stores and large-scale offices were at the focus of sociology, the press and culture.
工人满意度被企业管理视为重要的资源。详尽的员工管理措施包括增强归属感的策略和令人投入的活动，如公司举办的聚会和在公司度假屋的度假。许多企业还成立了公司体育俱乐部，提供足球、轻竞技、拳击、手球、划船、体操、曲棍球、游泳、网球、骑自行车、柔术等一应俱全的运动项目。在小型商店与三两同事共事或在省级小型办公室中工作的员工也只能梦想这样的工作氛围。大多数办公室员工在小而局促的环境中工作，但城市的百货公司和大型办公室通常是社会学、媒体和文化关注的焦点。
It was here that the future was getting underway, and here that the contradictions clashed most clearly. While most of the young office workers lived in the modest rented rooms or at home in miserable circumstances, every morning they crossed the threshold into a more tasteful life, particularly when their workplace was in one of the spectacular palatial office blocks or one of the glittering department store temples. Everything about this life was concerned as much with appearance as it was with reality. Office workers had to be well-dressed, if not actually elegant, then at least in the latest fashion. No one who saw these women at work would ever have dreamed of the miserable conditions in the poorer districts to which they streamed at the end of the working day.
在这里，未来正在展开，而矛盾在此处最为明显地碰撞。虽然大多数年轻的办公室职员住在简陋的出租房或家中，生活艰难，但每个早晨，他们都跨入一个更有品味的生活，尤其是当他们的工作场所在那些宏伟的办公楼或闪烁的百货公司时。这里的一切与其说是现实，不如说更关注的是外表。办公室职员需要穿着得体，如果说不上优雅，至少要符合最新的时尚。看着她们在工作的人，绝不会想到下班后她们奔波回到的，是那些贫困地区的恶劣条件。
Cramped courtyards, damp walls, shabby furniture and dim light, the antithesis of the bright modern office environment that filled the popular imagination during the latter half of the 1920s, in which everything seemed to be on the up. In the morning they would apply their rouge and adjust the locks of their bobbed hair into kiss curls in the style of the American silent film star Louise Brooks, and put on expensive looking dresses in which they could have stylishly gone dancing. When these young women prepared for their job they had already half emerged from their woe-begone existence, which they escaped entirely as soon as they had pulled the apartment closed behind them to hurry to the office. A warped situation that the drama of this secretarial class staged again every morning.
拥挤的庭院、潮湿的墙壁、破旧的家具和昏暗的灯光，这些都与20世纪20年代后期大众想象中一片欣欣向荣的明亮现代办公环境截然相反。早晨的时候，她们会涂上胭脂，并把剪短的头发卷成美国无声电影明星路易丝·布鲁克斯风格的吻鬓，然后穿上看起来昂贵的裙子，这种打扮仿佛让她们可以去优雅地跳舞。 当这些年轻女性为工作做准备时，她们已经逐渐摆脱了悲惨的生活，一旦关上公寓门赶往办公室，她们便完全逃离了这种困境。这样的扭曲情况是这一秘书阶层每天早晨不断上演的戏剧。
Much the same was true of the young male office workers or salespeople. The clerk would look in the mirror and see someone that wasn't quite him, but rather the person he promised to be. Visually he represented a status that he hadn't yet reached and perhaps never would. The desire for advancement was inherent in his job. However small his real chances might have been. He worked on the threshold of something better, on the interface with a higher social class that he studiously tried to imitate. The more successful he was at that, the more secure his job seemed. This will to happiness, particular to the status of the clerical worker, encouraged his loyalty to his superiors and towards the world of work as a whole.
年轻的男性办公室工作人员或销售人员的情况也是差不多。店员照镜子时，看到的不是完全真实的自己，而是他承诺要成为的那个人。在外表上，他似乎已经达到了一个尚未实现，甚至可能永远无法实现的社会地位。升迁的愿望是他工作的一部分，即使实际机会很小。他在一个更好未来的门槛上努力工作，试图模仿一个更高的社会阶层。他越是成功地做到这一点，他的工作似乎就越安全。为了追求幸福，这种与职员身份特别相关的愿望，促使他对上司和整个职场保持忠诚。
Politically speaking then the clerk was diametrically opposed to the revolutionary. Dismissal was not a reason to revolt, but a tragedy to live through. The warped economy of happiness associated with the office life meant even more to women than it did to their male colleagues, because they embodied the novelty of the age to a much greater degree. With their pointedly fashionable appearance, their bobs, their short swinging dresses, their bold lipstick and their quick witteredness honed in countless plots and wisecracks, they were the spitting image of the feminine type which they knew from the glossy magazines, and which in real life was more at home in the upper class.
从政治上讲，这位职员与革命者是截然相反的。被解雇并不是反叛的理由，而是一种必须经历的悲剧。在办公室生活中扭曲的幸福经济对女性而言比男性同事意义更大，因为她们在更大程度上体现了时代的新颖。通过她们时尚的外表、短发、短而飘逸的连衣裙、大胆的唇色及在无数对话和机智回应中磨练出来的敏捷才思，她们简直就是光鲜杂志中所描绘的女性形象的活生生写照，而在现实中，这种形象更常见于上流社会。
That was where the new woman, the darling of the culture industry of the Weimar Republic, was able to flourish. These were women who could afford their ostentatious independence and often didn't need to earn anything to do so. These were women who rode expensive motorcycles and drove expensive cars like Erekamann or Mariette Reza von Hummashtain, who travelled the world at their own expense. Like Clere Norostinus, who played tennis, learned to fly or at least study chemistry, who idolized their own sex and who calmly and publicly defended the terms of their own sexual identity.
这正是这类新女性能够蓬勃发展的地方，她们是魏玛共和国文化产业的宠儿。这些女性有能力展示自己张扬的独立性，常常无需为此挣钱。她们驾驶昂贵的摩托车和汽车，比如Erekamann或Mariette Reza von Hummashtain，能够自费环游世界。像Clere Norostinus这样的人，打网球、学习飞行或至少是化学，她们崇拜自己的性别，并且冷静而公开地捍卫自己的性别认同。
Many young office girls closely resembled this ideal of libertarian bohemia that was propagated in the media, but they were not remotely close to being part of it. It only appeared as if the cultural avant-garde were sitting at typewriters as if women like the young author Rod Lanceaufjock, the photographer Annamarie Schwadzenbach or the artist Rene Zintenys, had become a mass phenomenon, as if the roaring twenties had been so turbulent, volatile and lascivious that the excitement had spilled into the machine rooms of bureaucracy, leaving the typewriters coated with gold dust from a night of frenzy dancing that had to be blown away each morning. That was the fantasy of the decade, and that was how many of the young typists imagined it as well. Fashion and eroticism painted over the lack of satisfaction intrinsic to the job, wrote the historian Ute Freivat summing up the fact that the often-treatery work at the keyboards was warmed by a fire that fed on the illusions inherent in the world of the office.
许多年轻的办公室女孩在外表上与媒体宣传的自由波西米亚理想非常相似，但实际上她们与这个理想相距甚远。看起来好像文化先锋派正坐在打字机前，仿佛像年轻作家罗德·兰斯欧福克、摄影师安娜玛丽·施瓦岑巴赫或艺术家雷内·辛特尼斯这样的女性，已经成为一种大众现象，仿佛动荡、变化无常且放荡的二十年代的激动之情蔓延到了官僚机构的机房，让打字机上每天早上都得吹去舞会后狂欢之夜留下的金色尘埃。这是那个年代的幻想，许多年轻打字员也是这样想象的。时尚与情色掩盖了工作本身缺乏满足感的事实，历史学家乌特·弗雷瓦特写道，总结了键盘工作常常被這種幻想的火焰所温暖，人们在办公室世界中追求的幻影成为了其工作的动力。
Intellectuals in the office cameos from the upper class. With their ultra-modern bearing, many female office workers yearned for a lifestyle that far exceeded their traditional attitudes to life. They weren't nearly as permissive as they seemed to be. One need only here, Zekefrid Karkar wrote in 1930, Torda, a sales girl in Moabit, moving away from her made-up colleagues who are, we might add in passing equally ill-disposed towards the workers whom they serve. How judgmentally she speaks of the flighty girls who dine at Kempinsky in the evening, in the company of gentlemen, inherited concepts of morality, religious ideas, suspicion, and traditional wisdom from meager lodgings. That is all part of it, in untimely opposition to the prevailing practices of life. One should not forget these undercurrents.
办公室里的知识分子仿佛来自上层阶级。在她们极其现代化的举止下，许多女职员渴望一种远远超出她们传统生活观念的生活方式。她们看起来并不如表现得那般开放。正如泽克弗里德·卡尔卡在1930年写道的：“托尔达是莫阿比特的一名售货员，她远离那些化妆的同事们，而顺便提一句，那些同事对她们服务的工人们同样态度不好。”她对那些晚上在肯平斯基饭店，与绅士们共进晚餐的轻浮女孩充满了批判，她继承的道德观念、宗教观念、怀疑态度和传统智慧来自简陋的住所。这些都与当时流行的生活方式形成了不合时宜的对立。我们不应忽视这些潜流。
Where they are present, they lead to difficult conflicts between individuals and the environment. Many young secretaries who had come from small towns to Berlin, Munich, or Cologne oscillated between the moral ideas they had brought with them and their experience of the astonishingly loose morals of the city. Some suppressed their concerns, while others fought internal struggles with their consciences. Karkar, here every inch the alert reporter, spent a lot of time among office workers, kept his ears open and was even given access to the correspondence of a young couple thinking about the future. He quoted the female partner, Kita, who in a comical mixture of business German and intimacy, inquired of her beloved youthful colleague, what he thought about the following question.
在这种情况下，会导致个人与环境之间的激烈冲突。许多从小城镇来到柏林、慕尼黑或科隆的年轻秘书们，在他们带来的道德观念与城市中令人惊讶的自由道德之间摇摆不定。有些人抑制住了他们的担忧，而另一些人则与自己的良心进行内部斗争。卡尔卡，这位随时警觉的记者，花了很多时间与办公室职员们相处，倾听他们的声音，并且甚至有机会查看一对年轻情侣关于未来的通信。他引用了女方基塔的信件，基塔用一种搞笑的商务德语和亲密语气的混合方式询问她心爱的年轻同事，他对以下问题有何看法。
What, in fact, is our position on sexual intercourse? Should young people engage in such intercourse prior to marriage? I answer in the affirmative, on the condition that the persons in question are sufficiently mature and mentally in accord. What is striking is that Karkar describes the predominating permissiveness as a thoughtlessness that has been forced on people. The sexual permissiveness that predominates today is a concern for many young people in the lower secretarial circles. They would like to express their own feelings, they resist the system that tries to define their existence, and are overpowered, Ubermand, by the system. Ubermand, the term is a telling one. Karkar saw the inexperienced young women he met, who had often escaped rural or working class backgrounds as victims of a libitinism from which men in particular tended to profit.
事实上，我们对性交持有什么立场？年轻人是否应该在婚前发生性行为？我回答是肯定的，前提是相关人员足够成熟并在心理上达成一致。令人震惊的是，卡卡尔将普遍存在的性自由描述为一种被迫加诸于人的漫不经心。今天占主导地位的性自由对很多位于较低秘书职位的年轻人来说是一个问题。他们希望表达自己的感受，反对试图定义他们存在的体系，但却被系统压倒了。Ubermand，这个术语很有意思。卡卡尔观察到，他遇到的一些年轻女性常常来自农村或工人阶级背景，逃离这些背景后成为放纵主义的受害者，而这种放纵主义特别有利于男性。
The typewriter girls presented themselves as emancipated urban flappers, with short hair and skirts and smart backchat, but they didn't have the inner independence and intellectualism to defy the coldness of the modern world. The drama of social immaturity also plays a part in Iyemgarde coin's novels in which women present to the world a kind of freedom for which they lack both the self-confidence and the material conditions. So for example, the artificial silk girl Doris, newly arrived in Berlin, wants to become a glamour, a living light of the kind that haunted the world's fashion, nightlife and the imagination. Since it was an imitation lacking the real social conditions that made such life possible, that glamour only created additional conflicts.
打字机女孩们将自己展现为解放的都市摩登女郎，留着短发，穿着短裙，言谈风趣。然而，她们内心并不具备独立性和智识来挑战现代世界的冷漠。社会不成熟的戏剧性在伊姆加德·科因的小说中也占有一席之地，这些小说中的女性向世人展示了一种她们并不真正拥有自信和物质条件的自由。例如，刚到柏林的人造丝女孩多丽丝，想要成为一个耀眼的明星，一个曾经迷住世界时尚、夜生活和想象力的亮丽人物。由于缺乏实现这种生活所需的真实社会条件，这种魅力只会带来更多的冲突。
At times of economic and personal setbacks, the eagerness with which modern lifestyles from Berlin's trend-setting scene were imitated by girls in shops and offices could easily flip into the feeling of being patronised by remote elites. From 1930 onwards, androgynous play with gender roles and ostentatious permissiveness were perceived more and more as decadent, false and destructive. These ambivalences could be studied precisely in the microcosm of the office. The workforce was by no means homogeneous. It included those who had risen from the working class, alongside fallen daughters from the educated middle class who had been deprived by inflation of their financial safety net. Office literature was full of intellectual secretaries who turned the heads of their co-workers with their ideas as well as their boldness. But they could equally easily be dismissed as snooty and ignored accordingly.
在经济和个人挫折时期，商店和办公室的女孩们模仿柏林潮流引领者的现代生活方式的热情，往往会让她们感到被遥远的精英阶层居高临下地对待。从1930年起，对性别角色的中性化游戏和张扬的宽容态度越来越被视为堕落、虚假和具有破坏性。这些矛盾特别可以在办公室这个小社会中精确观察到。工作人员并不是同质的，其中既有从工人阶级崛起的人，也有由于通货膨胀失去经济保障的中产阶级家庭中堕落的女儿。办公室文学中充满了聪明的秘书，她们通过自己的思想和大胆赢得同事们的关注，但同时也很容易被视为自负，并因此遭到忽视。
In the novel Hebrachas fiasco, this role is played by the privy counsellor's daughter, Mookie Shuppes, who is forced to work in an office after the death of her husband. Many women and men too, although it was easier for them to advance, were obliged to work full time below their skill level, even if they were above their superiors in terms of education and intellect. Others only made brief cameo appearances to finance temporary phases of experimental independence. They swept like comets through the secretarial world as admired role models, who gnawed away still further at the value systems of the simpler girls. Dohrhabenya-min, the wife of the philosopher Valta, worked as a secretary for a time. Presumably, she unsettled her colleagues just as much as her husband unsettled the traditional practice of philosophy.
在小说《赫布拉查斯的败局》中，这个角色由御用顾问的女儿穆基·舒佩斯扮演。她在丈夫去世后被迫在办公室工作。尽管男性更容易晋升，许多女性和男性都不得不从事低于自己技能水平的全职工作，即便他们的教育和智力高于他们的上司。还有一些人只是短暂地出现，为了资助他们尝试独立的阶段。她们像彗星一样迅速掠过秘书的世界，成为大家钦佩的榜样，同时也动摇了那些更简单女孩的价值观。哲学家瓦尔塔的妻子多尔哈本雅-敏曾担任过一段时间的秘书。据推测，她给同事带来的不安和她丈夫对传统哲学实践的挑战不相上下。
The Berlin secretary Albertina Gimpur became the icon of secretarial Bohemia. If not the 1920s as a whole, she is known worldwide by the name of Zonya. In 1928, the artist Christian Chard painted her in the Romante-Shikafie and called the painting simply Zonya. In her little black dress, invented only three years before by Coco Chanel, and hence ultramodern at the time, Zonya is sitting alone at a table in the legendary literary meeting place. She is smoking camels and using a long cigarette holder to keep her fingers from turning yellow. On the table behind her is a bottle of sparkling wine in a cooling bucket. Also sitting behind her are two men. The painter has moved them so far to the edge that only a shoulder of each is visible. The ear of one is however known to everyone in Berlin. It belongs to the famous poet Maxam Anissa, who was in the cafe every day.
柏林的秘书阿尔贝蒂娜·金普尔成为了波西米亚风秘书的偶像。如果不说整个20年代，她也以“佐尼娅”这个名字闻名于世。1928年，艺术家克里斯蒂安·查德在罗曼特-什卡菲画廊画下了她，并简单地将画作命名为《佐尼娅》。在画中，她穿着的小黑裙是可可·香奈儿仅仅三年前设计的，因此在当时显得极为现代。佐尼娅独自坐在一个传奇的文学聚会地点的桌旁，抽着骆驼牌香烟，并使用长长的烟嘴以防手指被熏黄。在她身后的桌子上，有一瓶放在冰桶里的起泡酒。在她后面还坐着两位男士，不过画家将他们移到了画的边缘，以至于只露出了各自的一只肩膀。然而，其中一人的耳朵在柏林众人皆知，因为它属于每天都会出现在咖啡馆里的著名诗人马克萨姆·安妮莎。
But the poet is a side issue, a marginal figure in the literal sense, since Zonya sweeps everything else aside. The world-famous painting hangs in the national gallery in Berlin. Zonya is a silent majesty, not a frivolously chattering giggy, misunderstood perhaps, but still unmistakably an authority. Her seriousness and her loneliness don't quite fit with the sparkling wine. There's something gloomy about her, a darkness that emanates not from her black dress, but from her gaze, before which the viewer shrinks. This woman has already seen a lot, but at the moment nothing and no one has anything to offer her. The day has been stressful and the night may be too, but this moment belongs only to her.
但诗人只是一个次要角色，从字面意义上讲，是一个边缘人物，因为佐尼娅将一切其他都抛在一边。这幅举世闻名的画作挂在柏林国家画廊中。佐尼娅展现出无声的威严，与浮躁轻佻无关，虽然可能被误解，但她仍然是无可否认的权威。她的严肃和孤独与香槟酒的氛围并不相符。她身上有种阴沉，不是来自她的黑裙子，而是她的眼神，让观者不禁退缩。这个女人已经见识过很多，但此刻，没有任何东西或任何人能吸引她。白天已经很劳累，夜晚也可能如此，但这个时刻仅属于她自己。
The fact that Zonya, in spite of her enormous individuality, represents a type is confirmed by the comparison with a secretary at Vestoy-Chaurendfong, photographed by August Zander, the great physiognomist of the Weimar Republic in 1931. It's one of 60 portraits that form the face of our time, one of his famous volumes of photographs. We don't know the name of this secretary, either real or fake. She too sits smoking. She too penetrates the viewer with that gloomily indifferent gaze that is ready for anything, that thinks everything is possible. Presumably her boss' communications crossed her desk day after day for her to pour them into letters.
尽管Zonya具有强烈的个性，比较她与Vestoy-Chaurendfong公司一位秘书的照片，仍然能够确认她代表了一种类型。这张照片是由魏玛共和国著名的人像摄影师奥古斯特·桑德在1931年拍摄的。这张照片属于他的60幅肖像之一，构成了他著名的摄影集《我们的时代的面孔》。我们不知道这位秘书的真实姓名或虚构名字。她也坐着抽烟，同样用那种阴郁而冷漠的眼神注视着观者，充满了一种随时准备面对任何事情、认为一切皆有可能的态度。她的上司的信件每天都会经过她的桌子，由她将这些内容写成信件。
Every day she was witness to his power and its instrument. Her hair severely parted, androgynous in line with the times, and at the same time very modern, she looks into the camera which captures her forever. Before going back into the Antaroom, one of 250 employees making radio broadcasts in Cologne. Unlike manual workers, secretaries did not have easily identifiable identities. They stood with one foot in the world of the bourgeoisie, if not in the corridors of power, with the other still or back in the reality of the proletariat. They spent the least on food, much less than the proletariat, but the most on leisure, sport, cinema, cabaret and radio, much more than the bourgeoisie.
每天，她都目睹他的权力及其工具。她的头发严格中分，这种风格符合当时的中性潮流，同时也非常现代。她注视着摄像机，永远被定格于此。在回到科隆广播电台250名员工之一的工作间之前。与体力工人不同，秘书们没有明显的身份特征。他们一只脚踏入了资产阶级的世界，甚至位于权力的走廊中，另一只脚则仍然或已经返回了无产阶级的现实中。她们在食物上的花费最少，比无产阶级还少，但在休闲、运动、电影、歌舞表演和广播上的花费却最多，比资产阶级还多。
They were the most effective target group of the new entertainment culture, threatened with social decline and oscillating between appearance and reality somewhat incapable of solidarity because of the internal structures of competition.
他们是新娱乐文化中最有效的目标群体，面临着社会地位下降的威胁，在外表与现实之间摇摆不定，由于内部竞争的结构，他们在某种程度上缺乏团结能力。
The rough wind of economic crisis blew particularly cruelly through their ranks. They embodied the dynamic of the Weimar Republic most convincingly, and were at the same time most strongly exposed to it.
经济危机的狂风在他们的队伍中刮得特别猛烈。他们最能体现魏玛共和国的活力，但同时也最容易受到其影响。
Unlike workers, they would have trouble finding a scapegoat if things start to go downhill.
与普通员工不同的是，如果事情开始走下坡路，他们将很难找到替罪羊。