Women in German Yearbook, Volume 10 - Women in German Yearbook

The tenth volume ofWomen in German Yearbookoffers new perspectives on issues of gender and sexual identity. Richard McCormick analyzes, through a reading of G. W. Pabst’s film Geheimnisse einer Seele, social anxieties about gender identity in Weimar popular culture. Elizabeth Mittman discusses Christa Wolf and Helga Knigsdorf as different “embodiments” of the drastically altered eastern German public sphere in 1989–90. Ruth-Ellen B. Joeres suggests that the homosocial content of letters by early nineteenth-century German women writers created a social sphere distinct from those usually identified as public or private.

Marjorie Gelus analyzes the obsessive focus on sex and gender in three of Kleist’s stories. Gail Hart argues that Kleist’s defeminization of “Anmut” in his “Marionettentheater” essay reinforces the exclusivity of a male homosocial universe. The relationship of masochism to female erotic desire is the subject of Brigid Haines’s examination of Lou Andreas-Salom’s Eine Ausschweifung. Silke von der Emde investigates Irmtraud Morgner’s use of postmodern strategies to promote feminist goals. Susan Anderson rereads Monika Maron’s Die berluferin, analyzing the self-emancipatory effects of fantasy.

A cluster of articles providing feminist perspectives on the Holocaust is introduced by Ruth Klger’s “Dankrede zum Grimmelshausen-Preis.” Karen Remmler discusses the relationship between memory and the portrayal of female bodies in two recent Holocaust narratives. Suzanne Shipley examines the significance of exile in the autobiographies of two women who fled Austria for New York. Sigrid Lange introduces Marie-Therese Kerschbaumer’s Der weibliche Name des Widerstands, a challenge to Austria’s attempts to minimize its role in Nazi persecutions. Miriam Frank provides an overview of lesbian literature and publishing practices in Germany, and Luise Pusch reports on a recent attempt at language censorship in the German parliament. The volume closes with the editors’ look at Women in German after twenty years.