bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Body in the Discourses of Colonial Savage and European Woman during the Enlightenment
Authors: Lode Imke
Published: October 2010

Today, issues of race, ethnicity, and racism require a new kind of attention by feminist scholarship in German Studies. The discourse of the body is proposed as a feminist model integrating these concerns. This article first examines Sigrid Weigel's essay "Die nahe Fremde" and her hypothesis that a substitution process between the Enlightenment discourses of European woman and colonial savage took place. The discourse of the body is then used to challenge this hypothesis and to argue for the need and possibility of integrating both issues, race and sexuality, on a discursive as well as on a material level. (IL)
Aspects of Censorship in the Work of Karoline von Günderrode
Authors: von Hoff Dagmar
Published: October 2010

This article examines aspects of "gendered censorship" in the work of Karoline von Günderrode (1780-1806), especially in her dramas. To understand the phenomenon, it is necessary to view censorship from both the outside and within. Eighteenth-century drama and theater were taboo fields for women. Consequently, Gunderrode reacted with a three-fold form of self-censorship: in her form of self-expression, in her determination to write under two pseudonyms (Tian and Ion), and in her decision to leave a number of the dramas unfinished. (DvH)
On Autobiographical Filmmaking
Authors: Brückner Jutta
Published: October 2010

Jutta Brückner's autobiographical essay traces her own development from early attempts to write the text of her "female subjectivity" in the language of prose to her discovery of how much more suited the medium of film was for establishing an immediate relationship to her material. Arguing that autobiography is a desire, not an accomplishment, she locates the beginning of that desire in the mother, whose images have to be reconstructed in order to free the self. The dialectic of history and biography, loss of language and loss of body, is played out in the struggle between mother and daughter in the films of the body-less author. Losses that cannot be recovered via the written word can be shown in the images of film. In trying to locate the place that women can actually occupy in the cultural scripting of history and identity, Brückner traces two lines of autobiographic approach: a semiotic one in which the daughter separates from the body of the mother and a symbolic one that concentrates on the language and culture defining the autobiographical line of the father. (PH)
Woman as Will and Representation: Nietzsche's Contribution to Postmodern Feminism
Authors: Call Lewis
Published: October 2010

Friedrich Nietzsche is frequently dismissed as a misogynist. However, Nietzsche's texts contain many possibilities for postmodern feminism, since these texts strongly exemplify the two themes that characterize much of the post-modern feminist position: woman as multiple and woman as representation. Nietzsche redefines "truth" as a "mobile army of metaphors"; if he is right about the status of truth, then his attempt to construct a new representation or metaphor of woman can be viewed as the beginning of a radical new feminism. His texts simultaneously decry the failures of modernist feminism and illustrate the possibility of a feminist politics that is truly beyond the modern. (LC)
Lesbian Life and Literature: A Survey of Recent German-Language Publications
Authors: Frank Miriam
Published: October 2010

The article discusses similarities and differences of Lesbian/Gay politics and culture in German-speaking countries and in the USA and surveys recent non-fiction German-language publications, documenting widespread cultural borrowing and a keen interest in historical research. A new genre, the "merged anthology," juxtaposes the pioneering work of non-German writers/activists in translation with original German contributions on related themes. Recent scholarly works provide a historical survey of Lesbian literature and document the existence of Lesbian subcultures in the GDR, in Switzerland in the 1930s and 1940s, and in Germany during the Third Reich. Analysis of the specifically German situation demonstrates the intrinsic connection between homophobia, racism, and institutionalized violence by the State. (JC)
Consolidating, Consuming, and Annulling Identity in Jutta Brückner's Hungerjahre
Authors: McCarthy Margaret
Published: October 2010

Situated within German feminist practices of the 1970s, Jutta Brückner's Hungerjahre attempts not only to represent the director's youth during the years of the Economic Miracle, but also to find expressive forms to articulate experiences that evade language. While the voice-over searches for such a language, it is hindered, I argue, by its very embeddedness in the structures that produce such stunted subjectivities as Ursula's, the protagonist of the film. More compelling is the voice that Ursula herself constructs through the repressive mechanisms of socialization that shape her subjectivity. By examining how she speaks through the contradictions that characterize her socialization-the double bind of consumption and denial-I emphasize her ability to speak through such contradictions, to create her own language and unique voice through the very oppressive terms that otherwise deform her identity. Although her "language" is ultimately self-defeating and self-destructive, it still manifests the strands of a unique self emerging within the fabric of social, cultural, and historical conditions woven into her subjectivity. (MM)
Irmtraud Morgner's Postmodern Feminism: A Question of Politics
Authors: von der Emde Silke
Published: October 2010

Taking the contradictory reception of Irmtraud Morgner's novel Life and Adventures of Troubadoura Beatriz, As Chronicled by Her Minstrel Laura as a starting point, this essay examines Morgner's novel in the context of feminist debates on the political nature of postmodernist texts. Unlike other feminists in the early seventies, Morgner uses postmodernist strategies in order to promote feminist goals. Morgner discusses questions of representation and the status of the subject, topics that have become key issues in postmodernist texts. In reading Morgner's novel from today's perspective, we can gain important insights into the current debate about the differences between, and the intersections of, postmodernist and feminist theories. (SvdE)
Sociological Perspectives on Gender in Germany
Authors: Ferree Myra Marx
Published: October 2010

Sociological research looks particularly at social structures, that is, persistent patterns of human behavior arising from and impacting on collectivities. Thinking of gender as a social structure rather than an individual trait shifts the analytic focus to include multiple levels of interaction (macro, meso, micro) and the varied processes in which gender is actively produced and contested. This perspective leads me to an analysis of public and private patriarchies as contrasting ways in which the state may organize gender at the macro level. Using the FRG and GDR as examples of public and private patriarchy, I suggest that current conflicts in feminism in unified Germany may partly reflect realistic responses to different past experiences with gender as a social structure. (MMF)
Renderings of Alice in Wonderland in Postwar German Literature
Authors: Melin Charlotte
Published: October 2010

This article examines reworkings of Alice in Wonderland in works by postwar authors writing in German. While writers of both genders use Lewis Carroll's fictional character to question the expressive capacities of language, Rose Ausländer, Sarah Kirsch, Elisabeth Plessen, and Angelika Mechtel optimistically interpret her protean character as essential to poetic creativity and psychological autonomy. H.C. Artmann and Jürg Federspiel, by contrast, associate Alice with a postmodern loss of coherence in identity and narrative form. (CM)
On Commonality, Nationalism, and Violence: Hannah Arendt, Rosa Luxemburg, and Frantz Fanon
Authors: Cocks Joan
Published: October 2010

In this essay I briefly discuss the reasons why feminist theory, which twenty years ago had repudiated Hannah Arendt, now embraces her. I then present my own embrace of Arendt as an illustration. I examine how Arendt, in the company of Frantz Fanon and Rosa Luxemburg, illuminates nationalism as an especially explosive form of "identity politics." I argue that all three thinkers press feminists to consider the dangers of political solidarities based on "being," not "thinking and doing." In addition, Fanon and Arendt press feminists to reconsider the significance and value of violence in politics. (JC)
"Society Is the Biggest Murder Scene of All": On the Private and Public Spheres in Ingeborg Bachmann's Prose
Authors: Mahrdt Helgard
Published: October 2010

In her prose Ingeborg Bachmann took up the Frankfurt School's cultural criticism and extended it by adding the dimension of gender. Violence and oppression are thus shown to be structural moments of the public and the private spheres. Against a sketch of the background and cognitive implications of my use of the concepts private and public, I describe Bachmann's critique of the politics of a public sphere that requires the splitting off of feelings. After demonstrating that feelings, sensuality, and trust have no "place" in the private sphere either, and that this sphere can be deadly for "woman," I explore how Bachmann goes beyond the Frankfurt School's critique by portraying the return of "woman" to the public sphere and asking how she can survive there. (HM)
Gender-Bending in the Biedermeier
Authors: Kontje Todd
Published: October 2010

This essay complicates the notion that the German Wars of Liberation brought about renewed conservatism regarding the gender stereotypes that restricted women to their "natural" calling in the domestic realm. An examination of homosocial bonding in Theodor Körner's patriotic poetry leads to an analysis of Caroline de la Motte Fouqué's novels about the French Revolution, and Henriette Frölich's Virginia, oder die Kolonie von Kentucky . Although the two women writers differ sharply in their political viewpoints, both use their fiction to explore the limits of permissible behavior for women and to intervene into the public sphere. (TK)
Interview with Elisabeth Alexander: The Mother Courage of German Postwar Literature
Authors: Lubich Frederick A.
Published: October 2010

The interview with the German author Elisabeth Alexander discusses her controversial role among the generation of women authors in post-war German literature. The author talks about her own personal and intellectual development, the cultural differences between Germany and America, her relationship to Germany's fascist past, her strong but ambivalent involvement with Germany's student movement, feminism, and the Catholic church. A substantial part of the interview focuses on her own work, discussing its recurring themes of sexuality, pornography, gender trouble, men as such, and the role of women, especially mothers, in modern society. (FAL)
Epistemological Asymmetries and Erotic Stagings: Father-Daughter Incest in Heinrich von Kleist's The Marquise of O ...
Authors: Krüger-Fürhoff Irmela Marei
Published: October 2010

Focusing on the scene of reconciliation between the heroine and her father, the article traces the epistemological, erotic, and aesthetic impact of father-daughter intimacy in Kleist's Die Marquise von O .... While the protagonists rely on bourgeois notions of sexuality, daughterhood, and family bonds that allow them to ignore the libidinal dynamics at home, the reader is asked to reflect on the difficulties of distinguishing between emotions and eroticism within an intimate early nineteenth-century family. This epistemological asymmetry is paralleled by aesthetic ambiguities. By presenting father-daughter desire in the scene of reconciliation as a quotation from contemporary theater and tableaux vivants , the novel not only parodies dramatic traditions, but also reveals the erotic impact of successful theatricality. (IMKF)
Remembering Eastern Europe: Libuše Moníková
Authors: Jankowsky Karen Hermine
Published: October 2010

Libuše Moníková presents in The Façade (1987) a range of cultures between Bohemia and Siberia, a Renaissance castle whose symbols are constantly redefined, and a range of gender roles enacted in relation to narratives of the nation-state in Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. As the process of German unification casts women's concerns as secondary to the "genderless" goal of building a new German state, Moníková's depiction of intersections of gender and nation grows in importance. References to nation from Homi Bhabha and Benedict Andersen and to gender constructions from Judith Butler and Marjorie Garber inform the investigation theoretically. (KJ)
Not "until Earth Is Paradise": Louise Otto's Refracted Feminine Ideal
Authors: Morris-Keitel Helen G.
Published: October 2010

Typically, analyses of Louise Otto's novel Schloß und Fabrik (1846) have focused on the issues surrounding the factory and the unique way Otto involves her female characters in exposing and combatting a new form of poverty. In contrast, this reading of the novel emphasizes the role the question of class or social status plays in delineating and constraining Otto's feminine ideal. Structural elements of the text, such as representative figures and redundancies, are reexamined in light of the "cultural work" the novel was intended to do. (HGM-K)
Remarks on Current Trends and Directions in German Women's History
Authors: Grossmann Atina
Published: October 2010

For the benefit of literary scholars curious about recent developments in German women's history, this contribution offers a critical survey of trends in the United States and Germany. Moving beyond its earlier focus on the history of women and feminism, the field now tends to analyze broader topics, i.e., nationalism, as they are inflected by issues of gender. Feminist explorations of the potential of postmodern analysis for the interrogation of historical reality have, however, made few inroads into traditional, mainstream historiography. There have been insightful contributions in, for example, debates about women's status as victims and perpetrators or the situation of women since unification, but xenophobia and antisemitism persist in some German feminist work. (PH)
"Between Worlds": Reading Jeannette Lander's Jahrhundert der Herren as a Postcolonial Novel
Authors: Shafi Monika
Published: October 2010

This article examines Jeannette Lander's novel Jahrhundert der Herren in the context of postcolonial and travel literature. It offers a close reading of the text and traces the conflicting discourses the main protagonist, a young German woman, confronts in settling down in Sri Lanka. It argues that the protagonist is on the one hand able to critique the (neo)colonial masters' discourse, alluded to in the title of the novel, but that she also remains deeply implicated in it through her identification with the concepts of bourgeois subjectivity and progress, which ultimately hinder her from developing a dialogic, reciprocal relationship with Sri Lankan culture. (MS)
Neglected "Women's" Texts and Contexts: Vicki Baum's Jewish Ghetto Stories
Authors: Brenner David A.
Published: October 2010

Better known for her novels and Weimar-era celebrity, Vicki Baum was also of Jewish ancestry and authored two ghetto novellas ( Ghettogeschichten ) that appeared in 1910-11 in Ost und West , the first Jewish magazine. "Rafael Gutmann" depicts the attempt of an effeminate teenage ghetto singer, a traditional Ostjude , to break into the world of German opera represented by Beethoven and Wagner. Baum's own career parallels this narrative of social and cultural legitimization, yet the story's ambivalent attitudes toward Jews and Judentum are mediated through a discursive framework resembling that of Otto Weininger. At the same time, certain connotations are disputed by surrounding (inter)texts of Ost und West , a process challenging a simplistic "ideology of mass culture." (DAB)
Re-Thinking and Re-Writing Heimat : Turkish Women Writers in Germany
Authors: Henderson Heike
Published: October 2010

Since German unification, questions of Heimat and belonging have been discussed with renewed urgency. The definition of who is allowed to claim Germany as their home, and what its characteristics are supposed to be, has been at the center of many political, cultural, and literary debates. Examining literary texts by four Turkish women in Germany, I analyze how these writers challenge narrow and exclusive concepts of Heimat. They investigate home on the national as well as the family level, thereby pointing to the racist and sexist implications of traditional definitions. Ultimately arguing for a redefinition of Heimat that allows for cultural differences, their texts open up new possibilities of belonging. (HH)
Avant-gardist, Mediator, and...Mentor? Elke Erb
Authors: Dahlke Birgit
Published: October 2010

This examination of Elke's Erb's texts and the interview that follows it seek an answer to the question of why most GDR women writers vehemently rejected the label "feminist author," even when they explicitly deal with gender issues in their texts. As poet and theoretician, but also as mediator between different generations and literatures, Elke Erb continues to receive much attention, particularly from young authors. Her way of dealing with gender questions, on the one hand, and with a politically understood feminism, on the other, exemplifies her own ambivalence about the issue of gender-specific writing. At the same time, she displaces some of the familiar feminist questions, rejects them, breaks them down, and appropriates them for herself in original ways. (BD)
Elise Bürger (1769-1833) and the Gothic Imagination
Authors: Wurst Karin A.
Published: October 2010

By challenging the limits of the natural, predictable, and reasonable, the Gothic offered a certain amount of freedom from the referentiality of realist texts, creating an unconventional vision of reality through conventional narrative. This article explores the productive tensions between Gothic elements and realist narrative forms, which were predominantly influenced by developmental novels in the sentimental, moralistic, and didactic traditions. Bürger's use of the Gothic not only allowed for the creation of unconventional female protagonists; it reacted against the obsessive focus on the domestic sphere and its value system and expressed formal displeasure with the increasing staleness of the possibilities of realistic writing conventions at the end of the century. (KAW)
Erotic Provocations: Gabriele Stötzer-Kachold's Reclaiming of the Female Body?
Authors: Linklater Beth
Published: October 2010

The article examines constructions of the sexual in some writings by Gabriele Stötzer-Kachold, specifically through an analysis of the author's attempt to reclaim the derogatory term Votze . This aspect of Stötzer-Kachold's art is contextualized with reference to the general reception of her work as authentic autobiography, the notion of the sexual as taboo in GDR literature, and more general issues of feminism and feminist theories. Such a contextualization recognizes the importance of this author's feminist writing, while also evidencing the difficulties involved in such a project of revision and redefinition. (BL)
Recollections of a Small-Town Girl: Regional Identity, Nation, and the Flux of History in Luise Mühlbach's Erinnerungen aus der Jugend (1870)
Authors: Tatlock Lynne
Published: October 2010

Luise Mühlbach's recollections of her Mecklenburg childhood demonstrate the productive capacity of remembering, or rather, how representation of the past can serve as a defense against the present. In reinventing the province as the reserve of the eccentric and originary, as the place where desire is expansively expressed, Mühlbach posits an alternative to the power politics of imperialist Prussia, that is, a feminized and domesticated nation more inviting to women readers and to a public in other German-speaking principalities (including Austria) who lacked Prussian sympathies. In the end quirky Mecklenburg represents not the particular, but the universal, and thus stands not on the periphery, but at the center of an imagined German nation. (LT)
Jigsaw Puzzles: Female Perception and Self in Brigitte Kronauer's "A Day That Didn't End Hopelessly after All"
Authors: Ittner Jutta
Published: October 2010

This essay analyzes one of Brigitte Kronauer's early stories, which magically draw readers into a fragmented, ambiguous reality and then challenge them to question their everyday experience. Their highly sophisticated structures, their "furor of precision," and simple, yet blindingly clear language illustrate the author's redefinition of literary reality. In "Ein Tag, der zuletzt doch nicht im Sande verlief" we accompany an increasingly anxious narrator in her effort to perceive the vertiginous world and herself. When the last episode ends with her "complete satisfaction," we are nevertheless required to create a full picture out of seemingly unrelated pieces—the Odyssey of female maturation. (JI)
The Whip and the Lamp: Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the Woman Question, and the Jewish Question
Authors: Hyams Barbara
Published: October 2010

We think we know how the so-called first masochist helped to construct the finde-siècle's idols of perversity. Sacher-Masoch's international review Auf der Höhe , which claimed to raise itself above all partisan politics, reveals the extent to which he sought a more expansive drawing board for his critical imagination. Neither women nor Jews remained static idols of perversity in this imaginative forum. The inconsistencies in their representation were his own unfinished ruminations on the social emancipation of both women and Jews, on the philosophy of religion, and on sexual identity in the late nineteenth century. (BH)
The Wired Mouth: On the Positionality of Perception in Anne Duden's Opening of the Mouth and Das Judasschaf
Authors: Meusinger Annette
Published: October 2010

This study is part of a comprehensive book project on concepts of identity and body in both feminist theories and modern literature by women in Germany and the USA. Referring to the dispute between Leslie Adelson and Sigrid Weigel (1988) about racist elements in feminist aesthetics, the article examines Anne Duden's Opening of the Mouth and Das Judasschaf . Both are seen to reproduce the idea of a universality of woman and the female body and exclude issues of race, nationality, ethnicity, and class from the concept of identity. My analysis presents a traumatic structure of the protagonist in Das Judasschaf and questions her imago as a surviving memory-body and the position of "responsible sufferer." (AM)
Her (Per)version: The Confessions of Wanda von Sacher-Masoch
Authors: Gerstenberger Katharina
Published: October 2010

This article on Wanda von Sacher-Masoch's 1906 autobiography Meine Lebensbeichte is informed by turn-of-the-century studies in its focus on constructions of sexuality and gender, as well as by feminist studies of autobiography and issues of female self-representation. With her autobiography, Wanda von Sacher-Masoch created a countertext to her husband Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's masochistic texts, in particular his "Venus in Furs," by introducing female subject positions outside the heterosexual paradigm of the male master text. The misogynist reception of Wanda von Sacher-Masoch's assertion of female authorship and self-representation illustrates the contested position of the female autobiographer around 1900. (KG)
Man and Animal: The Discourse of Exclusion and Discrimination in a Literary Context
Authors: Lorenz Dagmar C.G.
Published: October 2010

The concepts "man" and "animal," basic to the Western discourse of exclusion and discrimination, are examined in the context of literary works by authors who, like Gertrud Kolmar, Elias Canetti, Ilse Aichinger, and younger writers such as Rahel Hutmacher, experienced racial and/or gender-related discrimination. Drawing on recent feminist theory, this article shows that opposition to anthropomorphic attitudes in these authors' works implies a fundamental critique of the dominant paradigm of Western culture, which establishes man's superiority both in terms of species and of gender. Pertinent literary texts are explored from the point of view of contemporary feminist and animal-rights criticism, and parallels between these traditionally separate discourses are brought to light. The article also uncovers opposing cultural norms: Jewish and Christian, feminist and patriarchal, Nazi and humanist, anthropocentric and non-speciest. (DCGL)
Charlotte von Hezel and Das Wochenblatt fürs schöne Geschlecht : An Eighteenth-Century Challenge to Gender and Genre
Authors: Archangeli Melanie
Published: October 2010

When Charlotte von Hezel edited Das Wochenblatt für's schöne Geschlecht (The Weekly Paper for the Fair Sex) in 1779, she was the first woman in the German territories to publish a magazine for women using her own name. Her magazine introduced two journalistic innovations for the time: a health column written for women and weekly literary reviews written by Hezel. In this essay, Das Wochenblatt is compared with a better-known periodical for women, Pomona , edited by Sophie von La Roche. By identifying the ways in which Das Wochenblatt resembles or differs from Pomona , we gain insights into why Pomona received more attention than Das Wochenblatt in the eighteenth century. (MA)
Ilse Langner's Klytämnestra : A Feminist Response to the Rhetoric of War
Authors: Marshall Catherine C.
Published: October 2010

Ilse Langner's Klytämnestra marks a change in revisions of Clytemnestra, wife of Agamemnon. While authors have traditionally demonized the figure as a murderer or discounted her as a mother in mourning, feminist authors have reclaimed Clytemnestra in order to clear her name. Langner belongs to this tradition, but at the same time breaks free of it. Instead of justifying Clytemnestra's murder of Agamemnon, Langner focuses on the queen's deeds during her reign in Mycene, where she has created an alternative society that denies the primacy of patriarchy and war. This article examines Langner's feminist revision of Clytemnestra. (CCM)
Invisible Bibliographies: Three Seventeenth-Century German Women Writers
Authors: Wade Mara R.
Published: October 2010

Many seventeenth-century German women writers have yet to be reclaimed by literary scholarship. Some women published anonymously, and some have not been recognized as the author of a given work. In many cases, texts are often unattributed, or even misattributed, often to a man. This unfortunate situation demonstrates that primary bibliographic research is an essential component of feminist scholarship of the Early Modern Period. Three Saxon sisters, Sophie Eleonore Landgravine of Hessen, Marie Elisabeth Duchess of Schleswig Holstein, and Magdalena Sibylle of Saxony, provide the focus of this micro-history, which both uncovers and recovers their published works. (MRW)
Contested Memories: Heimat and Vaterland in Ilse Langner's Frau Emma kämpft im Hinterland
Authors: Emonds Friederike
Published: October 2010

Ilse Langner's play Frau Emma kämpft im Hinterland offers a revisionist perspective on World War I from the point of view of women at the home front. Langner portrays women's struggles with issues of identity and, ultimately, with their new roles in a changed society. By challenging traditional concepts of Heimat and Vaterland, Langner reveals that these terms participate in a national war ideology that not only excludes women, but is, in part, directed against them. With the projection of a postwar utopia of social and economic equality, she argues for a redefinition of Heimat and Vaterland to include both men and women. (MC)
Der Malik : Else Lasker-Schüler's Anti-War Novel
Authors: Rumold Inca
Published: October 2010

Elsa Lasker-Schüler's Der Malik: Eine Kaisergeschichte (1919) is a pacifist roman à clef , which I view as the poet's response to World War I. It represents the artistic battleground where she attempts to solve, through embracing art as the supreme value, the complexity of her own situation amidst the mounting tensions between Jews and non-Jews, pro-war and anti-war writers and artists, and to reassess her identity as a woman writer among the male Expressionists. (IR)
Authority and Resistance: Women in Lou Andreas-Salomé's Das Haus
Authors: Cormican Muriel
Published: October 2010

In Das Haus (The House), Lou Andreas-Salomé's depiction of her female protagonists' constant vacillation between submission and self-assertion confronts her reader with the conflict feminism represented for women in early twentieth-century Germany. On the one hand, women were socialized to be wives and mothers. On the other hand, the women's movement in turn-of-the-century Germany had begun to articulate the necessity for recognizing women as independent individuals who would not be solely defined in terms of men, children, and the home. The transition from one social order to another was neither easy nor immediate, and Salomé's novel keenly reflects the psychological and social discord it prompted for many women. (MC)
Acting Out: Bettine as Performer of Feminine Genius
Authors: Roetzel Lisa C.
Published: October 2010

Genius, which is traditionally coded as masculine, is rewritten by Bettina von Arnim in her epistolary novel Die Günderode . In the dialogue between the character Bettine and her friend and mentor Karoline, the author outlines a concept of feminine genius that oscillates between creativity and aesthetic control. Bettine, who "acts out" in ways that challenge social mores, becomes the source of creative actions. These are then tempered by Karoline's careful attention to artistic and cultural history. The result is a subversive form of feminine genius that challenges conventional concepts of art and artistic practice. (LCR)
Among Friends?: Early German Evidence of Friendship among Women
Authors: Jeep John M.
Published: October 2010

Early medieval German texts contain only a few references to women's friendship. The Sankt Trudperter Hohes Lied , an anonymous paraphrase and commentary on the "Song of Songs" written for religious women, supplies a welcome exception to the widespread silence on the topic. A close reading of passages that specifically mention friendship among women in an eleventh-century convent community sheds some light on the spiritual and communal lives of these women. Comparisons with other medieval writings underscore the unique nature of the text and its significance for the early history of women's friendship. (JMJ)
Re-dressing History: Mother Nature, Mother Isabeau, the Virgin Mary, and Schiller's Jungfrau
Authors: Hart Gail K.
Published: October 2010

This essay begins with Schiller's intriguing assertion of Anmut as a detachable, movable quality in "Über Anmut und Würde" and applies it to a discussion of gender attributes and gender attributions in Die Jungfrau von Orleans . Schiller's awareness of the contingency and transportability of the attributes that signal gender generates a counter-model to the medieval "sex-gender" assumptions that triggered the execution of the historical Joan of Arc, but this is at best a vexed and inconclusive "countering." (GKH)
"She Would Rather Depart the Earth in Fire": Reading Diotima's Death in Friedrich Hölderlin's Hyperion Or the Hermit in Greece
Authors: Shin Yuna
Published: October 2010

This article examines the death of Diotima in Friedrich Hölderlin's Hyperion Oder der Eremit in Griechenland . It proposes that her death is a male fantasy rather than a textual "necessity," as previous critics have hitherto argued. At the same time, it shows through careful textual analysis that a woman's suicide, when carefully chosen and staged, can be read as a means of resisting male fantasy.
Elusive Images of Women, Home, and History: Deconstructing the Use of Film and Photography in Edgar Reitz's Heimat
Authors: Klimek Julia F.
Published: October 2010

Edgar Reitz's film Heimat (1984), which chronicles three generations of a family in rural Schabbach, elicited a number of critical responses. Reminiscent of historical documentation, it was accused of recuperating an innocent past at the expense of truthful narration. This article analyzes Reitz's use of photo and film within Heimat to demonstrate how the film deconstructs the viewer's confidence in the ability of photographic and filmic documentation to deliver proof of historic events. Reitz genders his characters' interaction by casting men as photographers/narrators, and women as spectators, leaving it to the female characters to draw attention to the constructedness and unreliability of images.
Three Media—One Story? Marie-Thérèse Kerschbaumer's "Gypsy" Narrative
Authors: Kecht Maria-Regina
Published: October 2010

There are very few narratives about "Gypsies" that would not qualify as "stories of textual persecution" (Claudia Breger). The Austrian writer Marie-Thérèse Kerschbaumer, however, has demonstrated discursive resistance to the prejudice against "Gypsies" in an iterative process of representing the experience of this ethnic minority. Through a comparative analysis of Kerschbaumer's three different approaches to the topic—the central chapter "Die Zigeunerin" ("The Gypsy") from Der weibliche Name des Widerstands ( Woman's Face of Resistance ), the radio play of the same title, and the television film—this essay explores the connections between the author's aesthetic creed, her ideological concerns, her thematic choices, and the medium-specific voice addressing the intended audience. (MRK)
One Summer in the Week of Itke K.
Authors: Lander Jeannette
Published: October 2010

One Summer in the Week of Itke K. (Insel Verlag, 1971) is the first of Jeannette Lander's German-language novels. The year is 1942; the central character is fourteen-year-old Itke Kovsky, whose Polish-Jewish immigrant parents run a grocery store in a black section of Atlanta, Georgia. Translated here are the novel's opening chapter, which introduces Itke and her environment, and the penultimate chapter, which depicts Itke's estrangement from her family and culminates in a riot precipitated by the violent deaths of several members of the black community. Drawing on traditions of the American minstrel show and Yiddish theater to frame the chapters, Lander also uses poetic language, word-coinages, and a complex narrative strategy to emphasize the constructedness of the several worlds ("circles") that Itke inhabits. Itke's fascination with her black neighbors, especially the Kovskys' former housemaid Jimmie Lee, is often described by means of stereotypic images of African-Americans prevalent at the time. Another influence from outside the inner circle is Itke's Jewish cousin Sonny, visiting in Atlanta while on leave from the US Army. For a detailed and insightful analysis of this novel, see Leslie A. Adelson, Making Bodies, Making History: Feminism and German Identity (Nebraska, 1993), chapter 4, "Jews and Other 'Others': On Representations and Enactments." (JC)
Doctor Faustus Impotent?: Fantasizing the Male Body in the Historia von D. Johann Fausten
Authors: Mathes Bettina
Published: October 2010

The notion of masculine sexual potency relies on the fiction of the penis as phallus. It is, however, the penis that perpetually challenges the phallus as privileged signifier of masculinity. This article discusses how the Historia von D. Johann Fausten —one of the most popular fictions of masculine potency in early modern Germany—represents a cultural fantasy about the penis as phallus. It shows that the transformation of the male body into the masculine body requires the transformation of the penis into the phallus as well as the construction of non-phallic 'others'—both male and female.
Women's Film Culture in the Sixties: Stars and Anti-Stars from Papas Kino to the German New Wave
Authors: Caprio Temby
Published: October 2010

This essay uses the trope of stardom to imagine and map women's film culture in West Germany in the sixties. From mainstream film culture and the women's press to the new "image of woman" of the Young German film-makers, we find a rich and often contradictory "women's cinema" before the second German women's movement and the feminist feature films of the late seventies. The star persona of Liselotte Pulver and Ula Stöckl's Neun Leben hat die Katze (The Cat Has Nine Lives) offer uniquely protofeminist meditations on images of women and stardom and suggest complex experiences of female spectatorship in the sixties. (TC)
Transgression and Identity in Kleist's Penthesilea and Wolf's Cassandra
Authors: Wilson Jean
Published: October 2010

Feminist readers have increasingly been drawn to the work of Heinrich von Kleist, and in particular to his play Penthesilea . Authors such as Hélène Cixous and Christa Wolf have not shied away from this notoriously "unperformable" drama, but have engaged with precisely that feature of the work most responsible for its reputation as impossible to stage: the transgressive "acting out" of the protagonist. My intertextual reading focuses on Wolf's staging of Penthesilea in her re-visionary project Cassandra . Wolf's narrative borrows to significant effect not only the figure of the Amazon queen, but also a provocative dramaturgy, whose development I trace back to Kleist's re-vision of Homer.
Historicizing Canonicity: Tradition and the Invisible Talent of Mechthild von Magdeburg
Authors: Poor Sara S.
Published: October 2010

In this essay, I trace the relationship between gender and the formation of literary traditions in the complex transmission of Mechthild von Magdeburg's Das fließende Licht der Gottheit ( The Flowing Light of the Godhead ), written in the late thirteenth century. Examining the medieval, early modern, nineteenth- and twentieth-century reception, I show that this text figures in a variety of differently constructed traditions over time, but that its presence cannot be reduced to a question of inclusion or exclusion. Instead, this evidence points to the need for a reassessment of what tradition and canonicity mean as well as for new strategies to overcome the historical problems associated with the category of "women writers." (SSP)
"I, the seeress, was owned by the palace." The Dynamics of Feminine Collusion in Christa Wolf's Cassandra
Authors: Szalay Eva Ludwiga
Published: October 2010

Hailed as a symbol of resistance and heroine, and in other instances decried for her lack of power, Christa Wolf's Cassandra remains a controversial figure. In choosing death over other alternatives, her action at once haunts and troubles contemporary interpretation. Drawing on Jessica Benjamin's psychoanalytic account of ideal love and feminine complicity in domination, this article examines central conflicts determining Cassandra's final gesture by tracing the dynamics at work in her apparent inability to survive destruction. This reading seeks to facilitate a critical understanding of Cassandra's profound identification with paternal authority and repudiation of the (m)other, as part of her collusion with patriarchal structures of domination. (ELS)
Point of No Return: Conflicting Desires in Jeannette Lander's Novel Eine unterbrochene Reise
Authors: Shafi Monika
Published: October 2010

Jeannette Lander's 1996 novel Eine unterbrochene Reise (An Interrupted Journey) depicts a solitary woman figure, a British tourist vacationing on a Greek island, who decides to stay, but eventually withdraws from a foreign locale she both abhors and yearns for. The reasons for this ambivalence, as well as for the alienation produced by it, are to be found in an array of conflicting desires and discourses. I argue that the protagonist enacts the romantic subject's search for an authentic existence, but that she is unable to recognize the conventions and contradictions of this paradigm. The novel illustrates the attraction that powerful tropes—such as the artistic quest, the lures of travel and the exotic, as well as the ambiguities of exile—continue to hold for today's subject.
Woman and Typewriter: Gender, Technology, and Work in Late Weimar Film
Authors: Führich Angelika
Published: October 2010

Among the new technologies of the industrial age, the typewriter both provided women with access to the labor force and became identified as a gender-specific machine used almost exclusively by women. This essay examines the iconography of the female office worker at the typewriter in two Weimar entertainment films, Arm wie eine Kirchenmaus (Poor as a Church Mouse, 1930) and Die Privatsekretärin (The Private Secretary, 1931), in order to assess how this woman is negotiated as a spectacle and role model for female spectators. Technology, the ethos of work, and consumer culture are the central terms of this negotiation. Although these films highlight the professional success of women at work, they also reinforce traditional gender expectations, such as sex segregation and the return of young females to the domestic sphere of marriage and family life. By contextualizing these films within the Depression years, this paper argues that their conventional conclusions should also be understood as expressing male anxieties over the ongoing economic crisis and competition from working women. (AF)
Illuminating Intersections: Ten Years of Feminist Criticism on Contemporary Austrian Women Writers
Authors: Vansant Jacqueline
Published: October 2010

This review focuses on ten years of feminist reception of selected works written by Austrian women writers from the 1970s through the 1990s, with the exception of Elfriede Jelinek. Taken as a whole, the seondary literature can be categorized roughly under the following rubrics: mother-daughter relations; Austria's National-Socialist past; language and gender; the female other meets the "foreign" other; and intertextual allusions. I have singled out those contributions that provide a foundation for further research and/or suggest new directions.
Fear of the Feminine: (Homo)Sexuality and Economics in Brecht's Jungle of Cities
Authors: Fraunhofer Hedwig
Published: October 2010

My analysis of Jungle of Cities aims to go beyond the many well-known investigations of women figures in Brecht's work by not restricting the analysis of the feminine to women characters alone, but by examining as well the feminization of capitalism and desire in the play. Brecht conflates the critique of the economic structures of capitalism with the representation of the patriarchal subject's fear of feminized sexuality. This analysis of the critical enactment of the threat posed by the feminine joins the discussion about Brecht's imputed quasi-fascist and misogynist tendencies following the publication of John Fuegi's controversial Brecht biography. I argue that Brecht's early work is neither fascist nor misogynist.
An Authentic Experience of History: Tourism in Ulrike Ottinger's Exil Shanghai
Authors: Harjes Kirsten , Nusser Tanja
Published: October 2010

A sign of commodification and mass culture, tourism is usually treated as a disturbance and contamination of the otherwise "authentic" atmosphere of historical artifacts. Drawing on Siegfried Kracauer's and Susan Sontag's theories of photography, this paper argues that transgressions of the genre of historical documentary in Exil Shanghai (1997) cast tourism as an authenticating factor in the perception of historical sites. The film thus suggests a notion of historical authenticity grounded in a perception of the passing of time, rather than the authority of witness accounts or archival material. This notion of historical authenticity relies on a feminist epistemology that debunks the traditional binary opposition between subject and object by suggesting that the experience of the other is essentially a reflexive experience of the self.
Quo Vadis?: Women at East Germany's Universities Ten Years After
Authors: Nagelschmidt Ilse
Published: October 2010

In my contribution, I revisit the tumultuous events of Fall 1989 and their subsequent impact on universities in the former GDR. In particular, I am concerned with the problematic concept of Abwicklung , as the "integration" of the East German university system into the Western system was termed, and with its implementation: the stifling of academic grass-roots reform initiatives in the East, the dismissal of women who had been stuck in the middle ranks of academe, and the sluggish pace of curricular reform.
Local Funding and Global Movement: Minority Women's Filmmaking and the German Film Landscape of the Late 1990s
Authors: Mennel Barbara
Published: October 2010

The German cinema landscape of the 1990s was characterized by two major trends: one featured international mainstream successes with post-feminist representations of strong female heroines, and the other consisted of a new independent minority cinema, identified by the German feuilleton primarily as male. For minority cinema directed by women, these trends create expectations and pressures, which are often expressed through the identity politics of funding decisions. Two films from the period, Seyhan Derin's I Am My Mother's Daughter (1996) and Fatima El-Tayeb and Angelina Maccarone's film Everything Will Be Fine (1997), subvert the implicit and explicit expectations of their funding by reworking traditional genres and employing narratives of movement that reconfigure notions of identity.
Capturing Hawai'i's Rare Beauty: Scientific Desire and Precolonial Ambivalence in E.T.A. Hoffmann's "Haimatochare"
Authors: Weinstein Valerie
Published: October 2010

E.T.A. Hoffmann's 1819 epistolary short story "Haimatochare" depicts the desires of two natural scientists on a mission to Hawai'i that leads to their tragic downfall. In this tale, the colonial encounter becomes the site onto which preexisting, contagious, and eventually fatal passions are transferred. The story thus produces an intense ambivalence, a complex and fascinating mix of fear and desire, toward European colonialism. My reading both begins to untangle the mesh of lust, horror, parody, and epistemological pursuits in this vexing text and suggests that more study of the ambivalence of German precolonial narratives can enrich our understanding of German discourses of nation, empire, race, and sex.
The Reception of the Bluestockings by Eighteenth-Century German Women Writers
Authors: Brown Hilary
Published: October 2010

Enlightenment Germany had no contemporary equivalent to the English Bluestocking circle: a network of well-regarded, scholarly women who sought to further women's interests through their social and literary activities. The impact of the Bluestockings and their writings on German women writers is assessed here for the first time, with specific reference to Sophie von La Roche (1730-1807) and Julie Clodius (1750-1805). La Roche and Clodius translated Bluestocking texts for the particular benefit of their countrywomen. They were careful to present their translations in a manner that would make them acceptable to their day while, crucially, not sacrificing all of the feminist ideals that the English texts express. (HB)
Arthur Schnitzler's Fräulein Else and the End of the Bourgeois Tragedy
Authors: Matthias Bettina
Published: October 2010

Schnitzler's novella Fräulein Else can be read as the last representative and "death-sentence" of the bourgeois tragedy. A comparison with Lessing's Emilia Galotti informs my reading of the later story and shows how new socio-economical realities have a major impact on the way the beautiful female body is treated in late bourgeois society. By ultimately taking possession of her body, the daughter wins her lonely fight against an objectifying male society that mandates a new literary form, the interior monologue. Additionally, striking similarities between Schnitzler's and Lessing's texts suggest that Fräulein Else is a conscious commentary on Emilia Galotti .