Women and Death: Representations of Female Victims and Perpetrators in German Culture 1500–2000 ed. by Helen Fronius, Anna Linton

Abstract

MLR, 105.2, 2010 613 (notably Alexanderplatz), enriched with a vast range of intriguing allusion and comparison. (A filmography and indexing of textswould have been useful.) Above all the topographical approach makes for brilliantly imaginative analyses of film and photography: of Kuhle Wampe; of Umbo's uncanny photomontages; of the filmic symphonies; ofTurkish Berlin and the running women in recent films. University of Nottingham Elizabeth Boa Women and Death: Representations ofFemale Victims and Perpetrators inGerman Culture 1500-2000. Ed. by Helen Fronius and Anna Linton. Rochester, NY: Camden House. 2008. 267 pp. $75; ?40. ISBN 978-1-57113-385-4. This first of three volumes from a research project includes twelve essays, lengthened by 44 pages of notes and a 3 5-page list of works cited. The intro duction describes portrayals that suggest amurky history of the life-force innate in women countered by or deliberately invoking death. Stefanie Knoll highlights voyeurism and revulsion indances of death, thewoman often representing narcissism, voluptas, or infidelity.The spectator, provoked by the composition, enjoys rather than learns. Ruth B. Bottigheimer examines the use of Bible stories and fairy tales to support social values and define gender roles. The Grimms' stories, she claims, ineffectivelyfeminized evil, in contrast to the less chauvinist Bechstein versions popular in the nineteenth century.Anna Linton's ba lanced account of virgin sacrifices undergone by Iphigenia and Jephthah's daughter emphasizes conflicts between the state and the family, civilization and barbarism. Fathers emerge as tragic vulnerable heroes, with daughters dying in typically limi nal situations. Bettina Bildhauer interpretsKriemhild in theNibelungenlied neatly as the passive and suppressed object of the interpreter's [Hagen's] attack' (p. 61). The work is a symptom of itshost culture, and amodel of the origins of violence. Essays byMary Lindemann on narratives of dismembering women inNorthern Germany 1600-1800, and byHelen Fronius on images of infanticide in eighteenth century Germany, define provocatively the development of attitudes to gruesome cases. The Enlightenment, the cultural background inHamburg, and new liter ary stylesmarked a changing interest in torture and eventual confessions as a stage towards nineteenth-century realist and detective novels. Real crime inspired popular fiction and became a hallmark for new cultural attitudes. Poems showed that infanticide often came from thewickedness Tor which theman is ultimately responsible' (p. 97), but the hidden issuewas 'theunregulated reproductive female body, so difficult to control, which develops amurderous potential when not safely contained within the bourgeois family unit' (p. 98). Literary texts portrayed weak, gullible, and betrayed women, whereas court cases apparently recorded male at tempts to explain away a problem central to sexual politics, either psychologically or pathologically and oftenwith undisguised brutality. Anna Richards argues effectively that grief among eighteenth-century women was characterized by extreme subjectivism, their emotions increasingly influenced by enlightened moral views, but not allowing debate on 'the relationship between 614 Reviews the self and the other, themind and theworld' (p. 126). JurgenBarkhoff enquires with relish into female vampires, victimhood, and vengeance inGerman literature around 1800, and their apparent development frompassive victims into aggressive, predatory monsters. Examples by Goethe and E. T. A. Hoffmann demonstrated cultural conflict or magnetization on the nightside ofmesmerism, with parasitic male empowerment at the cost of thewoman' (p. 139). In an account ofmurderous women inGerman opera, Lawrence Kramer spells out musical parallels between Mozart's Donna Anna and Strauss's Salome. His analysis of the unvoicing of Salome primarily by the orchestra includes phrases that go to the heart of thematter. Unvoicing, he suggests, engenders an act of violence, the opera catching itselfand itsheroine 'in the act' (p. 155). The femme fatale, especially in the visual arts, focuses Kathrin Hoffmann Curtius's examination of sexuality and gender hierarchies inspiring artists around 1900. She contrasts an infamous Lustmorderin with depictions of the femme fatale to show the link between active female sexuality and dangerous aggression to wards males, who emerged either as virtuous heroes or as vengeful murderers. Clare Bielby's suggestive account of representations in 1962 of Vera Bruhne ex plains fascination with the 'natural order' and a need for theMadonna figure in German society after its collapse in 1945. Links between Nazism and Marlene Dietrich, Bruhne and the camp guard Use...