Waltraud Maierhofer, Hexen – Huren – Heldenweiber. Bilder des Weiblichen in Erzähltexten über den Dreißigjährigen Krieg. 2005

Abstract

As the title indicates, this book examines prose works, mostly fiction, about the Thirty Years' War. It begins with the century of the war and with Grimmelshausen's Courasche (1670), but then proceeds to Benedikte Naubert's Geschichte der Gräfin Thekla von Thurn (1788), for it is the period from the end of the eighteenth century up to the present that is the main focus. After Naubert the author marches down through a series of works by Schiller, Caroline Pichler, Wilhelmine Lorenz, Droste-Hülshoff, Wilhelm Meinhold, Gustav Freytag, Heinrich Laube, C. F. Meyer, Ricarda Huch and Alfred Döblin. The progress becomes somewhat of a forced march when we get to the last chapter, since here Grass, Umminger, popular love stories and adventure novels, novels about witches, detective stories and children's literature of the last fifty years are all dealt with in forty pages.