The Jewess Pallas Athena
Subtitle: this too a theory of modernity
By: Barbara Hahn ; translated by James McFarland.
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2005
Place of publication: Princeton, N.J
Language: eng
Number of pages: 233
Subjects: German literature -- History and criticism; Jewish women in literature; Jewish women -- Germany; Athena (Greek deity) in literature
Description: ""The Jewess Pallas Athena"--A line from a poem by Paul Celan. It is a provocative phrase, cutting across cultures and traditions. But it poses questions: How to reconstruct a culture that has been destroyed? How to conceive of history after the catastrophes of the twentieth century?"

"This book begins in the mid-eighteenth century with the first Jewish women to raise their voices in German. It ends two hundred years later, with another group of Jewish women looking back at a country from which they had been expelled and to which they would never want to return. Among the many prominent female intellectuals and literary figures Barbara Hahn discusses are Hannah Arendt, Gertrud Kantorowicz, Rosa Luxemburg, Else Lasker-Schuler, Margarete Susman, and Rahel Levin Varnhagen. In examining their writing, she reflects upon the question of how German culture was constructed - with its inherent patterns of exclusion."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.