German Women's Poetry Circa 1900: A Forgotten Anthology

Abstract

The anthology Frauenlyrik unserer Zeit (1907), edited by the artist‐writer Julia Virginia Scheuermann, appeared at a pivotal moment in literary history when the economic conditions for poetry, aesthetic tastes, and women's roles in society were in dramatic flux. In this article, I examine those dynamic conditions and the influence such anthologies once attained as quintessential social and cultural projects. I propose that the intermediality of this unique collection marks it as a transitional project that bridged the private and public spheres and illustrated the expansion of women's writing. I argue that the author's rights movement, advanced by the Kartell lyrischer Autoren, influenced the stylistic and ideological heterogeneity of the collection. By boldly defining the emergence of women's writing in the early twentieth century in terms of universal human history (Menschheitsgeschichte), Scheuermann proposes a narrative rationale for the lyric genre that endures in later modernist projects.