Publisher's Synopsis
The articles in Women in German Yearbook 9 attest to the vitality of feminist scholarship in Germanistik. The volume begins with Ann Taylor Allen's comparison of women's studies movements in West Germany and in the United States. The next four articles offer fresh approaches to texts from the fifteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Susan Morrison reexamines the prose novels of Elisabeth von Nassau Saarbrücken and Eleonore von Österreich, comparing them to their French sources. Against the background of recent findings in sociolinguistics, Christl Griesshaber-Weninger analyzes gender-specific models of communication in Harsdörffer's Frauenzimmer Gesprächspiele. Gertrude Pickar argues that Droste-Hülshoff's depiction of the battered wife, Margreth, in Die Judenbuche was more sympathetic than critics have acknowledged. Kirsten Belgum discusses the strategies used in the popular nineteenth-century magazine Die Gartenlaube to construct a cohesive national identity.
The remaining articles deal with recent literature. Newly accessible archives in East Germany yielded material for two articles on the form GDR: Katrin Sieg examines hitherto neglected women dramatists of the fifties and early sixties and Katherina von Ankum analyzes abortion legislation up to legalization in 1972. Friederike Eigler investigates the formal and linguistic experiments of two women writers associated with the Prenzlauer Berg circle. Karin Eysel discusses Christa Wolf's Kassandra in the context of recent work on nationalism. Petra Waschescio analyzes Gisela von Wysocki's drama, Abendlandleben, as a radical critique of patriarchal Western thought. Women in German member Ruth Klüger's 1992 autobiography, weiter leben, is discussed by Dagmar Lorenz as a feminist challenge to commonly held notions of Holocaust literature.
Sara Lennox introduces the focus section on anti-racism feminism. Ika Hügel's "Wir Kämpfen seit es uns gibt" provides a personal account of her experiences as an Afro-German growing up among white Germans. Dagmar Schultz analyzes the white Women's Movement in Germany, emphasizing the need for committed anti-racist work at all levels of German society. The volume concludes with the editors' demysification of New Historicism.
