Ich werde ein Berliner

Introduction: An often repeated opinion you’ll hear from German people is that it is extremely hard for a man to understand “the women”. When you’re with a group of German men, you can score some easy empathy points by saying: “Women - can’t be with them, can’t be without them!” Your German friends will respond by nodding contemplatively and think of you as a weathered veteran of complicated (meaning: interesting) relationships.

Elite German women are very aware of their quirky, mysterious image, and each of them strives to become the most arcane being of their current Altbau neighborhood. As a male Auslander, it is highly recommended that you play along and never let it show that you are able to figure out the allegedly quirky and mysterious ways of the elite German woman in less than 5 seconds. You don’t want to come across as the Hans Landa of inter-sexual cognition. In Germany, only a woman is trusted to be able to really figure out other women, so what’s more fitting than have one write about women’s haircuts? Nothing, that’s what. Ladies and gentlemen, here’s Dolores Overgaard.

Women’s haircuts
by Dolores Overgaard

In this article, we will learn about the politics of women’s haircuts, and how to impress your German friends with your nonconformist haircut. It will cover the basics of the female bohemian haircut and hopefully avoid future embarrassments. There is no point in dressing yourself in ironic 80s retro clothes if they are crowned by the wrong sort of hair. Your outfit might say urban intellectual, but your hair is screaming ordinary, or even worse, mainstream. All those hours sifting through second hand shops and Flohmärkte will be wasted. And your romantic prospects, particularly if they involve freelance graphic designers, will be severely diminished. This brief guide will throw you hair first into the zeitgeist, and will ensure that Germans bond with you at the next guerrilla art installation about urban alienation. Remember, hair is an essential part of your carefree yet committed cosmopolitan persona. To retain the requisite spontaneity, you should always remain vigilant and under no circumstances let your guard down, lest you risk social death. Thankfully, not being part of the café intelligentsia no longer leads to actual death, but to understand the origins of the revolutionary haircut, we must take a brief detour back to the end of the 18th century.

During the last years of the French Revolution, many young members of the bourgeoisie, eager to show off their newfangled revolutionary credentials, ditched their powdered wigs and adopted cropped hair. These short tresses were meant to evoke the hair displayed by guillotine victims, who had theirs cut by the public executioner to make for a cleaner decapitation. Now, you might wonder about the symbolic ramifications of sporting the hairstyle of a guillotine-bound aristocrat. I mean, you couldn’t get more unpopular without turning up to Robespierre’s housewarming dressed as Marie Antoinette. Was it a covert display of sympathy for the Ancien Régime? Support for the new government’s bloody measures? A clean cut - literally - from the past? Well, there’s no need to over-think things. The overriding concern of any young member of the bourgeoisie is too look really hard at all times. Regardless, of course, of the often contradictory implications their sartorial choices might hold. Wearing a hat shaped like the Bastille (yes, really) does not mean that you were there on the 14th of July, torch and pitchfork in hand, storming the beejezuz out of any government building in sight. No more than a Che t-shirt is a sign that its wearer has joined the guerrillas in the depths of the Bolivian jungle and plans on beating the living lights out of the Man. That’s frankly too much effort and involves far too little time spent in cafés pondering Issues and consuming Olympian quantities of fair-trade coffee.

Like any good bourgeois, the German elite know the importance of displaying one’s revolutionary credentials through something as seemingly mundane as hair. Hair is a shortcut if, like 99% percent of the population, you have never read Das Kapital. There are many ways to establish one’s anti-establishment credentials, as long as they are alternative of course. Everybody is into the alternative scene.

As a woman, you’ve a few options available to you, as long as they don’t involve hairbrushes, hairdryers, hairspray or other hair paraphernalia. Give up your accessory habit right now. Obvious high maintenance is the ultimate faux pas, and pray none of your Teutonic acquaintances ever catch you with a pair of straighteners or, even worse, a comb. You should always display that tussled ‘just out of bed’ look, regardless of when/if you actually got out of bed. This air of carelessness should be carefully maintained, as it casts you as a free living spirit that is not bogged down by society’s norms and constraints. Also it saves you a lot of money on shampoo that you could spend on nonconformist stuff like Club-Mate and squatter chic furniture. There are of course different ways of showing this commitment to the bohemian ethos:

1. The postmodern haircut: You’ve probably come across confused dark-haired girls that seem even more confused than usual, and to the uninformed observer, look like they have had a rather unfortunate encounter with a similarly confused, and possibly drunk hairdresser. Why is their hair longer at the front than the back? Why has it been shaved on the left side but left shoulder-length on the right? What’s with all this asymmetry? And more importantly of course, did she actually pay for this? Not so fast, Auslander! What you might think is the result of being dragged through a hedge backwards by Edward Scissorhands is actually a postmodern deconstruction of the very concept of a haircut, a statement so radical that it shakes the very foundations of human grooming. It’s Existentialism in a haircut. Also it’s €10 a snip. This might be 10 too many for what is essentially an accident, and you might be tempted to do it yourself. Just make sure that you use the Existentialist scissors (like Occam’s razor, but without the logic bit), or failing that, some seriously ironic clippers.
2. The Patti Smith: If you don’t want to embrace the postmodern millennium by looking like a member of an 80s New Wave band, you can always go for a well tested classic - the Patti Smith. Again, you might wonder why looking like an aging hippy would be deemed edgy in the year 2010. You might even have the temerity to suggest that this do is pretty mainstream, given that it has been the default look of every woman with an acoustic guitar for the last 40 years. Including your mom. It is however the original confused dark-haired girl cut, and is therefore forever imprinted in German minds as the counterculture hair. This is regardless of the fact that most of its earlier adopters are now part of that complacent Audi-driving bourgeoisie so reviled by their children, who will express this generational clash by sporting exactly the same hairstyle.
3. The pixie: Of course, if you want to take this approach to the extreme, you should cut off all your long unbrushed locks, so you’re left with short unbrushed locks. This will make you look androgynous, which is the pinnacle of postmodernism and has been for at least 200 years. Since, as we’ve mentioned previously, the French revolution. Cropped hair has never lost its alternative aura and its followers always ooze boyish charm and gamine elegance. These fearless women, blurring gender boundaries by sporting a man’s haircut! I mean, you would have thought that after 200 years, those boundaries would be practically smeared.
4. The paint brush: Maybe you’re in one of those annoying intermediate stages between a pixie and Patty. Should this be the case, you’re strongly encouraged to adopt the paint brush, also known as the postmodern ponytail. This is because it undermines the very purpose of a ponytail. Being a stub poking out at the back of your head, it has neither the traditional length of a ponytail, nor does fulfill its primary function, i.e. keeping hair out of your face, as your hair is not long enough at that point. Its main function, it seems, is to act like some sort of bohemian antenna that sends out beatnik waves to its surroundings, and alerts other iconoclasts in the vicinity of your alternative credentials.
5. The Amélie : Another way to draw attention to your status as a disaffected urbanite is by wearing your fringe/bangs two inches above your eyebrows, at least, in the hope that this will make you look like that quirky bohemian Amélie, and not like that pointy-eared dude in Star Trek. Everybody knows that a short fringe is awfully avant-garde, and not at all reactionary, like the one sported by war-mongering crusading Medieval monks. But what about the short spiky fringes often seen on the wrong kind of German, normally complementing a mullet? Those Germans whose hair hasn’t evolved since the fall of the Wall, and who actually listen to Looking for Freedom in a non-ironic fashion? Auslander, haven’t you learnt anything yet? Their hair has obviously not been touched by Existential scissors, just by normal ones. Only Existential scissors can bless your hair with enough irony to make it kitsch and not just a really bad haircut.

Burn your hairbrush, liberate yourself from the tyranny of grooming and embrace your carefully crafted uncoiffed look. Though it might be wise to keep a comb for that seriously messy look - emulating the look of a tortured artist driven to tear their hair out over the banality of polite society. This look requires much enthusiastic backcombing, but don’t tell anyone.