““God, How Idyllic””: The German Countryside and the Abject of Enlightenment in Doris Gercke's <em>Weinschrööter, du mußßt häängen</em> (1988)

Abstract

German leftist intellectual history as well as current trends in cultural studies tend to privilege urban experience and phenomena while constructing the rural as the city’s threatening other. In this essay we examine this broad intellectual tradition using Doris Gercke’s detective novel Weinschroter, du must hangen and its hardboiled, feminist protagonist, Bella Block, as a case study. Specifically, we expose the ways in which the countryside is experienced by Gercke’s urban detective as a pre-modern, even anti-modern “horror”; the historical dimensions and psychoanalytic mechanisms that operate in this “othering”; and the implications for literary genre, feminist theory, and the legacy of political enlightenment.