Women, Gender and Sexuality in German Literature and Culture – serie

This book introduces the works of a German Jewish female author and provides a detailed analysis of the early twentieth century as she witnessed it. Although a prolific writer and leader in the women’s movement, Clementine Krämer (1873–1942) is relatively unknown today. Krämer’s life and works offer a fascinating insight into a challenging period for this community, as she experienced at first hand moments of enormous significance for Germany’s history: the First World War, the German Revolution of 1918, the polarisation of German political life andthe growth of the far right, and the rise to power of the National Socialists in the 1930s. Rather than focusing on one period, this book examines the full range of Krämer’s writings to uncover continuities and changes over her lifetime.The book explores the following questions: how did Krämer understand herself and her role in light of her German Jewish identity? How did she challenge societal expectations for women and what limits did she perceive? How did she respond to the violence facing German Jews during this time? This important contribution to the scholarship reveals a fresh perspective on this tumultuous time in German history.

This book is a study of women’s involvement in occult practices in Weimar Germany. Women during the Weimar period experienced an unprecedented level of liberation. This included a greatly increased role in the work force as well as participation in other realms that were traditionally the province of men. They were also given the liberty to be more outwardly sexualized. Women engaging in occult practices during this period present an interesting example of the liberated woman. The occult woman reversed all traditional gender roles by the pretense of possessing powers that threatened male dominance.The book investigates the significance of the occult in the Weimar period by drawing on popular, scientific, and legal writings of women’s involvement in the occult. In addition to examining reports of women engaging in actual occult practices (expressive dance, mediumism, and witchcraft), this book also considers various fictional depictions of women as demonic or as possessing supernatural powers (ghosts, vampires, and monsters). The author contends that both actual practices, as well as fictional depictions, constructed an imaginary female identity as a dangerous and grotesque monster.

The domestic sphere, the ideological as well as physical context of female life during the nineteenth century, featured prominently in German women’s writing of the period. Women writers, such as Fanny Lewald, Ida von Hahn-Hahn and E. Marlitt, who had begun to dominate Germany’s book market, addressed domestic life and female gender roles through a variety of genres. At the same time, activists such as Helene Lange and Henriette Schrader-Breymann let their vision of female gender roles shape the kindergartens and girls’ secondary schools they founded.This book discusses issues of female gender role formation and examines the ways in which women’s writing and activism contributed to the process. As a result, a rich tapestry of female social discourse is uncovered, exhibiting women’s strong commitment to shaping their destinies within a largely misogynistic political and legal national framework.

Discovering Women’s History brings to light the work of a selection of German-speaking women journalists from the first half of the twentieth century who made significant contributions to German life and culture, yet are barely known today. The volume builds upon scholarship on women and culture by focusing on individual journalists who published both within and outside the periodicals of women’s organizations and women’s magazines, thus offering a sampling of the vastly different perspectives of German-speaking women journalists during this period. The contributors to the volume aim to raise awareness regarding the great range of viewpoints represented by women journalists as well as challenging gender-based stereotypes of women’s writing that have traditionally tended to simplify the complexities of women’s diverse experiences. The volume closes with Erika Mann’s autobiographical fragment ‘I, of all People’ published here for the first time in the original English.

Julia Franck, winner of the 2007 German Book Prize for Die Mittagsfrau (The Blind Side of the Heart), puts the experience of women – and mothers – at the core of her novels and short stories. This study, the first book exclusively about Franck, addresses the various roles that women play in her œuvre: lovers, daughters, mothers, and sisters. With an eye to the way these roles are influenced by and connected to domestic space, the author examines the desire for intimacy and connection that motivates Franck’s characters. Drawing on theories of both performance and performativity, the author argues that Franck creates these identities as mutable and changeable, in effect opening up women’s roles for resignification in an age of renewed feminist inquiry.

‘Was ist eine Witwe mehr als … ein aufgewärmtes Essen?’ According to politician and statesman Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel (1741-1796), widows were superfluous beings and second-hand goods, but they were also perceived by theologians and moralists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a threat due to their sexual experience and supposedly ungovernable lust.This book analyses the overwhelmingly negative portrayal of the widow in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German fiction. Male writers in the works discussed repeat the theory that, once deprived of their husbands, widows become sexually voracious. Indeed, the widow is often presented as a dangerous sexual predator who is prone to violence. Female authors, however, highlight the invisibility of the widow and portray her as a figure alienated from society and her family because she has internalized the ideas propounded by Hippel. The widow is depicted throughout as a figure to be at best re-educated and at worst to be feared and guarded against.

E. Marlitt was a bestselling author of the late nineteenth century whose romance novels dominated the German literary market between 1865 and 1888. Her novels appeared in thirty languages, with as many as five different English translations circulating simultaneously in the United States alone. While her name is virtually absent from histories of German literature, recent scholarly studies of individual novels suggest the need to reassess her contributions. This study is the first in English to examine E. Marlitt’s complete fiction. It situates her prose against the backdrop of women’s discourse and nineteenth-century historical developments in the German Empire. It synthesizes findings of both American and German scholarship to show how her social constructs advanced a liberal political agenda while resisting the conventional view of «natural» gender roles. The book provides a context for recognizing Marlitt’s clever use of the conventionality and acceptability of the romance genre to reposition the image of middle-class women. Her emphasis on personal autonomy, educational opportunities and new fields of professional engagement for women advanced altered images of family, class and national identity. Ultimately, this study of a popular author illuminates domestic, middle-class issues that underwent significant transformations equal to the Empire’s public developments under Bismarck’s politics.

This book analyses the depiction and function of politically active women in novels by six female authors from the margins of the democratic revolution of 1848 and the first German women’s movement: Louise Aston, Malwida von Meysenbug, Mathilde Franziska Anneke, Fanny Lewald, Louise Otto-Peters, and Hedwig Dohm. What was their political stance in relation to democratic developments and women’s rights? How did they render their political convictions into literary form? Which literary images did they use, criticise, or invent in order to depict politically active women in their novels in a positive light? Which narrative strategies were employed to ‘smuggle’ politically and socially radical ideas into what were sometimes ostensibly conventional plots? These authors wrote before modern feminist theory was established; however, their proto-feminist observations, demands, and discursive tactics contributed much to the formation and institutionalisation of feminist thought. This book contextualises the authors’ works in their historical and social environment in order to evaluate what can be considered radical and political in the period 1845-1919.

How was it possible for a well-educated nation to support a regime that made it a crime to think for yourself? This was the key question for the Stuttgart-based author Anna Haag (1888–1982), the democratic feminist whose anti-Nazi diaries are analysed in this book. Like Victor Klemperer, she deconstructed German political propaganda day by day, giving her critique a gendered focus by challenging the ethos of masculinity that sustained the Nazi regime. This pioneering study interprets her diaries, secretly written in twenty notebooks now preserved at the Stuttgart City Archive, as a fascinating source for the study of everyday life in the Third Reich. The opening sections sketch the paradigms that shaped Haag’s creativity, analysing the impact of the First World War and the feminist and pacifist commitments that influenced her literary and journalistic writings. Extensive quotations from the diaries are provided, with English translations, to illustrate her responses to the cataclysms that followed the rise of Hitler, from the military conquests and Jewish deportations to the devastation of strategic bombing. The book concludes with a chapter that traces the links between Haag’s critique of military tyranny and her contribution to post-war reconstruction.

This first book-length biography with discussions of select writings by Luise Büchner (1821-1877) draws on her commentary of events available in letters and writings. A close reading of Büchner’s fictional writings reveals that she both entertained and educated her readers. Her pedagogical messages correspond to ideas she promoted in her work on the «woman question». This in-depth study properly situates her in the changing cultural climate and socio-political developments that led to unification of the German states in 1871. Büchner tested and revised her thoughts on the «woman question» in the course of her practical work as a co-founder of local women’s associations and as a member of two competing «national» bourgeois women’s organizations. Her «voice» and temperament, as reflected in letters and articles not consulted by previous biographers, lead to surprising discoveries about a single woman whose life had more to offer than the narrowly prescribed roles assigned to middle-class women of her day.