Facing Fascism and Confronting the Past. German Women Writers from Weimar to the Present

Abstract

Friedrickson, Elke P, and Martha Kaarsberg Wallach, eds. Facing Fascism and Confronting the Past: German Women Writers from Weimar to the Present. Albany, NY SUNY Press, 2000. 320 pp. $24.95 hardcover. The seventeen essays in this anthology are edited papers that were presented at a conference at the University of Maryland at College Park in 1993. The essays are such fascinating investigations that the reader wishes the collection of these papers had been published without such a delay. They focus on works by Jewish and non-Jewish women authors exploring the interconnectedness of gender, patriarchy, the Holocaust, and consequences of fascism for postwar Germany. The contributions, ranging from 925 pages, are all from established scholars in German studies from the United States, Germany, and Denmark. Facing Fascism covers the span between the 1920s and the 1990s and offers a wide spectrum of perspectives and interpretive methods. Some articles discuss a single literary piece, while others examine a range of one or several authors' works. Three essays have previously been published, some of them in an earlier German version (Horsley, Kraft, Liebs). Almost all articles offer an English translation of the texts under discussion as well as the German original, facilitating an introduction for English-language readers to the latest research in this field. Facing Fascism is divided into seven parts. Part One covers autobiographical accounts by Holocaust survivor Ruth Kluger for the first time in English with some passages taken from her book wetter leben (1992). Part Two comprises articles on Else Lasker-Schuler's poetry with a special emphasis on the construct of the New Woman in Weimar Germany (Brinker-Gabler), an investigation of several novels by Irmgard Keun (Horsley), and an overview of texts by women who initially supported Nazi ideology (Elaine Martin). Part Three offers individual women's voices against fascism: an in-depth investigation of Anna SeghersExcursion of the Dead Girls as a short story written to reeducate German youths after the war (Gutzmann), an analysis of Gertrud Kolmar's letters to her sister Hilde as an example of epistolary autobiography and a form of resistance (Shaft), a look into Elisabeth Langgasser's and Cordelia Edvardson's works in terms of mother-daughter relationships in the face of fascism (Kraft) as well as an inquiry into several of Nelly Sachs' poems (Dinesen). The first essay of Part Four examines (contrary to what the book's subtitle suggests) texts by Anglo-American women who use exile figures as victims or heroes in their fiction (Stern). This is followed by an exploration of class issues and an analysis of Nazi rhetoric in the works of several German and Austrian women writers (Lorenz). …