Die Frau Research Articles

DESCRIPTION OF GERMAN LANGUAGE DICTIONARIES

The functioning of language is associated with the disappearance of certain words, with the emergence of new ones, with the change in the meaning or stylistic status of words. Each of the ways of developing the vocabulary of the German language has its own characteristics. The paper draws attention to these features. The paper describes verbal neoplasms not registered in dictionaries until the middle of the 20th century, selected from the texts of the German newspapers “Süddeutsche Zeitung”, “Frankfurter Allgemeine”, “Der Spiegel”, “Joe”, “Alles für die Frau”, “GEO” and others. The study considers the linguistic material of some dictionaries published in the second half of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries, including dictionaries of colloquial youth vocabulary. So, the main idea of this article is to highlight the peculiarities of word formation in German linguistics through the history.

DESCRIPTION OF GERMAN LANGUAGE DICTIONARIES

The paper defines the ways and peculiarities of word formation in modern German language. The paper deals with one of theways of enriching the verb vocabulary in the modern German language, in particular wordbuilding. In the result of the analysis of the language material, the most productive models and means of the word-building of the verbs are emphasized including word-building models borrowed from other languages. The vocabulary of the language, being a system, is in constant motion. The functioning of language is associated with the disappearance of certain words, with the emergence of new ones, with the change in the meaning or stylistic status of words. Each of the ways of developing the vocabulary of the German language has its own characteristics. The paper draws attention to these features. The paper describes verbal neoplasms not registered in dictionaries until the middle of the 20th century, selected from the texts of the German newspapers “Süddeutsche Zeitung”, “Frankfurter Allgemeine”, “Der Spiegel”, “Joe”, “Alles für die Frau”, “GEO” and others. The study considers the linguistic material of some dictionaries published in the second half of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries, including dictionaries of colloquial youth vocabulary. So, the main idea of this article is to highlight the peculiarities of word formation in German linguistics through the history.

Die Frau ohne Schatten by Richard Strauss and the Structural Conditions of Orchestration in German Fin-de-siècle Opera

Die Frau ohne Schatten by Richard Strauss and the Structural Conditions of Orchestration in German Fin-de-siècle Opera

The Quest for Equal Rights: The Women’s Movement in Germany and its Care-based Argumentation

Abstract Building upon the Three-Level Model of the Public Sphere, we (a) analyse how women’s associations in Germany, both during the Wilhelmine era and in the days of the early Federal Republic of Germany, interlinked women’s care work with demands for equality, and (b) examine the public responses to women’s associations’ use of care as the basis for their argumentation. To accomplish these goals, we discuss the results of a standardised content analysis of three feminist magazines from these two eras (Centralblatt, Welt der Frau, and Informationen für die Frau) and supplement the results with a historical-hermeneutic analysis of selected articles, an approach that provides contextualised and detailed insights. Furthermore, we analyse the corresponding discourse in mass media and politics by focusing on major legislative changes and presenting the results of our hermeneutic analysis of selected articles from two periodicals with a strong focus on socio-political issues (Die Hilfe and Der Spiegel).

Beyond Tomorrow: German Science Fiction and Utopian Thought in the 20th and 21st Centuries by Ingo Cornils

Reviewed by: Beyond Tomorrow: German Science Fiction and Utopian Thought in the 20th and 21st Centuries by Ingo Cornils Anne Fuchs Beyond Tomorrow: German Science Fiction and Utopian Thought in the 20th and 21st Centuries. By Ingo Cornils. Rochester: Camden House. 2020. 322 pp. £80; $99 (ebk £19.99; $24.99). ISBN 978–1–64014–035–6 (ebk 978–1–78744–797–4). Speculative fiction has been the dark continent of German Studies until very recently. While Germanistik has largely ignored popular genres such as fantasy or Science Fiction (SF) because of their perceived poor aesthetic ‘value’, Anglophone German Studies has been in the grip of the discourse on Vergangenheitsbewältigung and the prevailing memory paradigm. As a result of this foreshortening of the field, the burgeoning domain of speculative fiction has remained largely unexplored. Against this backdrop the publication of Ingo Cornils’s study is to be welcomed: it marks a shift from the Anglophone preoccupation with the outdated discourse on Vergangenheitsbewältigung towards what Cornils aptly calls Zukunftsbewältigung. The scope of Cornils’s study is astonishing: it deals with 70 novels and 25 films, from Kurd Laßwitz’s Auf zwei Planeten (1897)—the earliest example of German SF—to best-selling author Franz Schätzing’s Die Tyrannei der Schmetterlinge (2018) and Theresa Hannig’s Die Unvollkommenen (2019). The book also covers a wide range of SF films and TV formats, from Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou’s classics Metropolis and Die Frau im Mond to the 1960s prime-time TV series Raumpatrouille, which, as Cornils convincingly shows, set new standards in set design as its disc-shaped spaceship Orion was inspired by the Bauhaus. While the representation of slick technology in the series signalled the technological modernization of West Germany, the unisex uniforms gestured towards female emancipation. Cornils’s study is at its best when it engages with the popular SF tradition: another prominent example in this vein is Stefan Ruzowitzki and Michael Krummenbacher’s TV series Acht Tage (broadcast in 2019), which imagines an extinction scenario in an entertaining format. The rediscovery of the digitally restored version of Fassbinder’s Welt am Draht (1973) is another highlight: the film explores the political repercussions of the erosion of the difference between simulation and reality long before the invention of the Internet. By analysing both high-brow and popular formats Cornils rightly highlights the malleability of a genre which spans the entire spectrum from the most critical and gloomy dystopias to entertaining and fast-paced plots about the race against the clock. Occasionally Cornils stretches the genre boundaries too elastically—by, for example, including Schnabel’s island utopia Die Insel Felsenburg or Uwe Timm’s novel Ikarien, which tracks the history of eugenics. Cornils’s book does not pursue a literary-historical exploration of the development of the genre. Rather than systematically exploring the genre’s intrinsic responsiveness to the rapid advance of modernization in Germany after 1871 right up to the end of the Weimar Republic and after the Second World War in the context of Germany’s division, Cornils groups his material into fourteen short chapters that explore themes such as first contact stories, catastrophism, virtual realities, surveillance, space stories, AI, and eternal life, to name but a few. This is understandable, given the richness of futurist scenarios and preoccupations. However, [End Page 142] this prevailing thematic focus flattens the history of the genre. Given the subtitle, the broad-brush discussion of German utopian thought in Part i comes across as too male-centric and rather eclectic: neither literary critic Jost Hermand nor the late FAZ editor Joachim Fest nor the sociologist Harald Welzer is an obvious contributor to the great tradition of utopian thinking from Hegel to Benjamin and Hannah Arendt to Ernst Bloch. Even though Cornils’s book does not do full justice to the socio-philosophical contexts of utopianism or to the contemporary debates on posthumanism and the Anthropocene as central drivers of SF, it does offer a rich survey of the German SF tradition. Its coverage will make it an indispensable reference point and source book for further analyses of an unduly neglected genre. Anne Fuchs University...

Recipe for Compromise? The Negotiation of East German Foodways

This article argues that the dynamics of negotiation processes between the GDR population and the regime’s institutions can be identified in East German cookbooks. These negotiations were the result of a persistent orientation towards West German consumer standards, strongly influenced by the territorial and cultural proximity of the two German states. These processes have been examined more closely by using the example of cookbooks edited by the state-owned publisher Verlag für die Frau. Its audience and publisher, in addition to the censorship authorities and the Institute for Nutrition, were identified as negotiating agents. The present study is based on a quantitative analysis of cookbooks, interviews with former staff members and documents from both the publishing house and the censorship authorities.

Reconstructing Arthur Schnitzler's Library: Literary and Biographical Sources for 'Die Frau des Weisen'

After the National Socialists seized power in Austria in 1938 Arthur Schnitzler's library was confiscated and incorporated into the holdings of the Austrian National Library. Once the war was over, what could still be restituted was returned. This article outlines how a reconstruction of the library could be achieved today. In the second part, the copy of Buch der Freundschaft [Book of Friendship, 1884] by Paul Heyse (1830–1914) that was in Schnitzler's possession is used as a means to explore intertextual connections between the novella 'Gute Kameraden' [Good Friends] from that volume, Schnitzler's story 'Die Frau des Weisen' [The Wife of the Wise Man, 1897] and Schnitzler's account in his autobiography of the love story between Olga Waissnix and himself.

Hofmannsthal: Jahrbuch zur europäischen Moderne 25 ed. by Maximilian Bergengruen et al.

Reviewed by: Hofmannsthal: Jahrbuch zur europäischen Moderne 25 ed. by Maximilian Bergengruen et al. Raymond L. Burt Maximilian Bergengruen, Alexander Honold, Gerhard Neumann, Ursula Renner, Günter Schnitzler, and Gotthart Wunberg, eds., Hofmannsthal: Jahrbuch zur europäischen Moderne 25. Freiburg: Rombach Verlag, 2017. 306 pp. Since 1968 the Hugo von Hofmannsthal Gesellschaft has had an active publication record to support the promotion of Hofmannsthal studies, beginning with the Hofmannsthal-Blätter, which focused on unpublished sources on the poet’s life and work and adding in 1971 a companion series, Hofmannsthal-Forschungen, that presented findings of scholars delivered at conferences or addressing specified topics. In 1993, these two publications were merged under the title of Hofmannsthal: Jahrbuch zur europäischen Moderne; the resultant periodical expanded its scope to place the poet’s life and work within the wider context of European Modernism. For its twenty-fifth year, the editors have selected seven contributions that add perspective to the life and works of Frank Wedekind, Rainer Maria Rilke, Marcel Proust, Karl Kraus and Arthur Schnitzler (as well as, of course, Hofmannsthal). Such collections may often be mined by scholars in search of a particular author or topic, whereas others may read the book in its entirety for insight into contemporary research with its variety of approaches and interpretive methodologies. In this volume, some of the articles proceed logically and methodically, and others surprise the reader with the creative twists and turns they take through their unexpected connections. The opening article by Klaus Bohnenkamp falls among the former and constitutes almost half of the pages dedicated to articles. His “‘Wir haben diesen Dichter geliebt . . .’: Hugo von Hofmannsthal und Eduard Korrodi: Briefe und Dokumente” delivers a meticulously researched investigation of the interaction of the Austrian poet with Korrodi, a Swiss journalist and the longtime editor of the [End Page 123] Neue Zürcher Zeitung. Bohnenkamp tracks every reference to Hoffmannsthal in Korrodi’s writings from 1917 to Hofmannsthal’s death in 1929. He follows Korrodi’s comments on publications from the Hofmannthal’s papers, with special attention to the novel fragment Andreas. Also included are Korrodi’s critique of Hofmannsthal’s works published in anthologies and performances of Hofmannsthal’s plays on in the German-language stage up to 1952. The essay is followed by the printing of the existent correspondence between Hofmannsthal and Korrodi and ends with Korrodi’s Nachruf of Hofmannsthal from 1929. Another example is “Selbstsucht und Selbstsuche: Schnitzlers Psychopoetik des Narzissmus,” in which Michael Navratil postulates that a general, dominant tendency can be drawn out of Schnitzler’s works revealing the defining role of narcissism in the psychological profile of his protagonists. To illustrate his thesis, Navratil ends the essay with an interpretation of Schnitzler’s “Die Frau des Richters.” In order to show the influence of Ecclesiastes on Hofmannsthal’s writings, Heinz Rölleke uses parallel textual comparisons in his “Hofmannsthal und das alttestamentarische Buch ‘Kohelet’” to great effect. Beginning with the indirect influence on the opening lines of Jedermann, he proceeds to a detailed analysis of Hofmannthal’s “Ballade des äußeren Lebens” in which he shows the unfiltered inspiration it draws from this most enigmatic book of wisdom in the biblical canon. Inspiration of a different sort of book on literature is taken up by Daniel Hilpert in his contribution, “‘Mein Fleisch heißt Lulu’: Eugenik und Sexualpathologie in Frank Wedekinds ‘Die Büchse der Pandora. Eine Monstretragödie.’” The book in question is Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis (1886). Hilpert places Wedekind’s literary production within the cultural context of the late nineteenth century, in which deviance in sexuality, race, and art were seen by many as a sign of a cultural collapse. The scientific discussion about eugenics inspired Wedekind to bring the themes of sexual pathology and eugenics into literature. Wedekind is dealing not only with the character of Lulu but with the construction of the entire plot by using Krafft-Ebing’s descriptions of sexual pathology as the narrative framework. On the artistic end of the spectrum, Johannes Ungelenk’s contribution, “Rainer Maria Rilkes ‘Die Flamingos’: Ein Kling(-ge-)ding,” starts with the traditional genre analysis of this sonnet as...

Offenheit und Geschlossenheit als Funktionen des unzuverlässigen Erzählens. Mit Interpretationsbeispielen anhand von Texten von Ernst Weiß, Paul Zech und Stefan Zweig

Abstract The paper surveys two different functions that may be ascribed to unreliable narratives. Derived from the notion of technique (Russian »priëm«, German »Verfahren«), function is a key concept of literary theory, which relates textual properties to effects. One of the functions, in recent time related to unreliable narration, is deception. In order to appreciate the literary effect of deception, the reader must finally understand that s/he has been deceived for a certain time. In other words, in order to recognize that s/he has been deceived, the reader must find out what is the case in the narrated world, i. e. fiction, and distinguish it from what was told without being the case. Another effect will be introduced. It is related to narratives in which it is impossible to find out what is true in the fiction. In those cases, readers will be perplex or helpless. In the next step, these effects – that of deception and that of helplessness – being effects of reception shall be substituted by their hermeneutic counterparts. If one is deceived by an unreliable narration, one finally finds out what is the case in the fiction (with regard to the reason for the deception); if one is left helpless by an unreliable narration, one cannot find out what is the case in the fiction (with regard to the unexplained fact that is the reason for the helplessness). The first one of these hermeneutic counterparts of the reception functions will be called the closed function of unreliability, since a gap of explanation can be closed by an interpretation; the second one will be called the open function of unreliability, since a gap of explanation is left open and cannot be closed. The remaining parts of the paper deal with literary examples which show different cases fulfilling those functions. The first two examples are taken from stories by Stefan Zweig. In »The Fowler Snared« (»Sommernovellette«, 1911), the closed function is fulfilled because the trustworthy extradiegetic narrator finally corrects the unreliable intradiegetic narrator. The next example of Zweig, »The Woman and the Landscape« (»Die Frau und die Landschaft«, 1922), lacks an explicit correction, since the narrator deceives not only the reader but also himself. A thorough interpretation, however, shows that it is more plausible to assume that the narrator’s account referring to certain facts is not true than to assume that it is correct. In this case, the gap can be closed, too, although there are more assumptions required than in the first case as the second text gives no explicit trustworthy evidence. The evidence must be inferred by hermeneutic conclusions. In contrast to the closed function, the open function of unreliability is much more complicated to ascribe. The first case, the (very) short novel The Castle of the Brothers Zanowsky (Das Schloß der Brüder Zanowsky, 1933) by Paul Zech presents several contradicting versions of a fact of the fiction (narrated world). The narrator renders them without preferring one of them. He is even unable to account for, let alone to recognize the fact that these versions are contradicting each other. So, it seems impossible to determine which one of these versions is true in the fiction. The version the narrator believes to be true may be true or not. On the one hand, the narrator can be considered to be plainly unreliable; on the other hand, his unreliability is not the point of the story. It is its point that what the narrator tells us is inevitably vague; it is not its point that he lies or is not able to find out what is true in his world. – The last example stems from the novel The Poor Squanderer (Der arme Verschwender, 1936) by Ernst Weiß. In this case, the narrator’s discourse is full of single contradictions and omissions. Some of the gaps can be closed, some of them not. However, there is no explanation which accounts for the narrator’s misreporting and underreporting tout court. The overall setting of the narrator’s putative unreliability is left open due to the lack of self-awareness the narrator reveals in his discourse. – The paper closes with a short outlook on the literary/poetical difference between the closed and the open function of unreliable narration. Texts that close the gaps caused by the unreliability of their narrators display other literary properties than texts that leave the gaps, caused by the unreliability of their narrators, open. Additionally, the difference between texts whose open gaps are caused by unreliable narration and texts with similar gaps, which are not unreliably narrated, is hard to explain.

RECORDINGS IN REVIEW

1 9 2 Y R E C O R D I N G S I N R E V I E W D E W E Y F A U L K N E R On 7 May 2017 New York’s Metropolitan Opera o≈cially celebrated with a gala evening the fiftieth anniversary of performances in the ‘‘New Met,’’ a term employed in its initial years to distinguish the current building at Lincoln Center from the 1883 ‘‘Old Met,’’ the ‘‘yellow brick brewery’’ at Broadway and 39th Street in Manhattan. That first, 1966–67 season is also o≈cially celebrated by a box of CDs titled The Inaugural Season: Extraordinary Met Performances from 1966–67 (Met Opera B01LYTT7LP, 22 CDs). This o≈cially produced set contains recordings of nine radio broadcasts and the soundtrack from the televised opening night, Samuel Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra, as well as an additional CD of excerpts from seven other broadcasts. Each opera but one has its own two-CD cardboard container with a booklet and illustrations; Richard Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten is on three CDs. Also included is a booklet containing more photos and a brief, graceful essay by Barbara Haws, the Met’s current historian. The Met has issued such boxes before, as with their 2013 pair of Verdi at the Met (Sony, B00DWOUY3Y, 20 CDs) and Wagner at the Met (Sony, B00AL6SM0S, 25 CDs), and they have fixed here those sets’ problem of too-snug openings for their CDs. But this is the first Met set devoted to one season only. 1 9 3 R It may be claimed that the 1966–67 season was exceptional as well as historic. There were nine new productions, two of which were of American operas commissioned for the opening season. Old favorites were moved to the new house, many with star performers new and old: Leontyne Price, Birgit Nilsson, Renata Tebaldi, Joan Sutherland, Martina Arroyo, Renata Scotto, and Mirella Freni, to name only some sopranos, appeared. The ‘‘Three Tenors’’ had not yet burst onto the Met scene, so one had to make do with Franco Corelli, Richard Tucker, Nicolai Gedda, Jess Thomas, Jon Vickers, James King, and James MacCracken, again naming only some of the singers. And there were great mezzos, baritones, and basses. Conductors were more variable, but Karl Böhm, Thomas Schippers , Zubin Mehta, and Colin Davis all made strong impressions. General Manager Rudolf Bing had reason to be proud. The house itself, which is only glimpsed here in photographs, was not quite what we had wanted or expected. The dimensions at the front and on the sides had to be reduced, so the grand staircase was shortened and not very grand, and the huge Marc Chagall murals at either side of the second level were (and are) just behind the glass at the front and hard to see up close. Inside, the auditorium and stage were as planned, but the decor was both overdone and underdone at once. Each tier of seats was faced by white protruding outcrops that looked like ill-designed automobile grills from the fifties, with gold sashes or ropes draped across the tops and gold corrugations on the bottoms – for the acoustics, we were told. The walls were all covered in outwardly bowed wood from a single African rosewood tree that looked exactly like formica – again for the acoustics. The proscenium surround was nondescript (we missed the old house’s proscenium for the first time), ridged in various unappealing ways, crowned with an awful sculpture unconnected with anything musical, and all brightly gilded – so brightly that it had to be painted darker in succeeding seasons because spotlights and other house lighting created a blinding glare on it. The highlight of the hall was the set of tasteful (Austrian) starburst lighting fixtures, twenty-one of which rose to the scalloped ceiling (gilded, of course) when an opera began. In typical New York fashion, enough was not enough, and clusters of small lights, looking like cheap costume brooches, were added to the 1 9 4 F A U L K N E R Y corrugated bottoms of all the tiers. Everywhere you looked there was glitter...

Eine eigene Geschichte schreiben Frauenbewegungszeitschriften als vergessene Orte einer frühen Frauengeschichte

This article analyses three magazines of the women’s movement in Germany between 1890 and 1914. Clara Zetkin founded Die Gleichheit (the equality) for the female labor organization. Helene Lange edited Die Frau (the women) for the bourgeois-conservative wing of the women’s movement and Die Frauenbewegung (the women’s movement) was published by Minna Cauer for the left-wing civil women’s movement. The article shows that in two magazines (Die Gleichheit and Die Frau) an early form of ›her‹story was written in order to create and strengthen a corporate feeling as a basis for the women’s movement and furthermore give the movement its own identity.

Review: Rounding Wagner's Mountain: Richard Strauss and Modern German Opera, by Bryan Gilliam

Book Review| August 01 2016 Review: Rounding Wagner's Mountain: Richard Strauss and Modern German Opera, by Bryan Gilliam Rounding Wagner's Mountain: Richard Strauss and Modern German Opera, by Bryan Gilliam. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. xv, 340 pp. Wayne Heisler, Jr. Wayne Heisler, Jr. WAYNE HEISLER JR. is Professor of Historical and Cultural Studies in Music at the College of New Jersey. He is the author of The Ballet Collaborations of Richard Strauss (University of Rochester Press, 2009), and both guest-edited and contributed to the 2015 Strauss issue of Opera Quarterly, for which he is Reviews Editor. His essay on ballets to Strauss's Vier letzte Lieder is forthcoming in The Total Work of Art: Foundations, Articulations, Inspirations (Berghahn). His current book project concerns choreographies of song. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the American Musicological Society (2016) 69 (2): 565–571. https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2016.69.2.565 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Wayne Heisler; Review: Rounding Wagner's Mountain: Richard Strauss and Modern German Opera, by Bryan Gilliam. Journal of the American Musicological Society 1 August 2016; 69 (2): 565–571. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2016.69.2.565 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of the American Musicological Society Search If calculated according to the current operatic canon, Richard Strauss's years of compositional productivity in this genre encompass a decade and a half, from Salome—his most staged opera—to the World War I–era Die Frau ohne Schatten. Bryan Gilliam casts his net much wider. Building on his body of work as a preeminent Strauss scholar, Gilliam's book is the first musicological study to cover this composer's entire operatic oeuvre from Guntram (1894) to Capriccio (1942). Gilliam's focus is on Strauss's five decades of opera composition, and his main objectives are to explore the genesis of Strauss's operas in the contexts of his collaborations, his musical, aesthetic, and philosophical preoccupations, and the changing sociocultural and political climates, as well as to illuminate structural (formal and harmonic) attributes of Strauss's operatic scores. Strauss is worthy of such consideration: add to his scores his early years as a student of opera and... You do not currently have access to this content.

Berlin Coquette: Prostitution and the New German Woman, 1890–1933. By Jill Suzanne Smith (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2013) 221 pp. $69.95 cloth $27.95 paper

Smith’s book is an exciting contribution to the growing scholarship about the history of prostitution in modern Germany. With the intent of moving beyond the standard dichotomy of victim/villain, Smith uses myriad sources to sketch a vibrant picture of women in Berlin’s sex trade from the Kaiserreich to the end of the Weimar Republic. In doing so, she argues that cultural texts (popular novels, plays, social-hygiene films, police records, and sociopolitical essays) should be read not only as reflections of their historical time periods but as important shapers of contemporary debate and discourse.For instance, Chapter 1 uses two Otto Erich Hartleben plays, Georg Simmel’s The Philosophy of Money (Berlin, 1900) and August Bebel’s influential Die Frau under der Sozialismus (Berlin, 1879) to examine fin-de-siècle debates about bourgeois marriage, “free love,” and prostitution. Smith concludes that although the authors use the sex trade to criticize the institution of bourgeois marriage, none of them is “truly able to imagine a world in which women can be both sexually and economically autonomous” (62).Similarly, in Chapter 2, Smith examines the writings of the prominent German feminists Anna Pappritz, Helene Stöcker, and Hanna Bieber-Böhm to inform her reading of Margarete Böhme’s bestselling novel of 1905, Diary of a Lost Girl. Thus does Smith confirm what several other scholars have contended, that Germany was home to a vibrant and multifaceted reform culture in the early years of the twentieth century. For instance, although many feminist reformers placed the blame for sex-trade conditions at the feet of male johns and pimps, opinions about the culpability of female sex-trade workers were constantly shifting.In Chapter 3, Smith focuses on such cultural artifacts as cinematic works, cabaret performances, and a visitor’s guide to “naughty” Berlin to illustrate the links between gendered public spaces, male anxiety, and female emancipation in the Weimar metropolis. In Chapter 4, Smith uses fictional works to gauge the effects of the controversial 1927 Law to Combat Venereal Diseases. As in earlier chapters, she uncovers a multiplicity of experience, which confirms one of her overarching arguments, that texts examining female prostitution should not be read “simply as indicator[s] of women’s oppression”; in fact, a reading of diverse cultural texts “reveals the fragility of gender relations and new modes of sexual expression in the Weimar era without resorting to defeatist conclusions” (184).Berlin Coquette is an innovative interdisciplinary work that succeeds in illustrating the complicated nature of the urban German prostitution trade in the years before and after World War I. Smith defends the book’s narrow geographical focus by qualifying Berlin as “one of the quintessential modern cities of twentieth-century Europe” (3). Although this label is tough to dispute, a sole focus on the German capital ignores rich sources in cities such as Munich, Hamburg, and Dusseldorf, let alone the smaller cities and towns that sought to deal with “prostitution problems” in their own ways. That said, Smith’s work will be read with interest by scholars and students of German history and literature, gender and sexuality, and culture and media studies.

‘DAMIT DIE SEELE DIESER FRAU NICHT ÜBERSEHEN WERDE BEIM SAMMELN DES LEBENS’: RE‐ENACTMENT AND THE SEARCH FOR KNOWLEDGE IN VIOLA ROGGENKAMP'S DIE FRAU IM TURM (2009)

ABSTRACTTelling history is, famously, a process of ‘re‐enacting’ past experience through ‘re‐thinking’ it – and in ‘re‐thinking’ that past experience, the historian also understands something about himself (Collingwood). These ideas are at the root of a great deal of modern pedagogical thought with reference to teaching history. The character of Masia Bleiberg in Viola Roggenkamp's novel, Die Frau im Turm (2009), however, takes a more subjective and emotionally driven approach to employing re‐enactment as a way to find out about herself. As the thirty‐something daughter of a Jewish Holocaust survivor now living in the GDR and a West German mother, she tries to establish her identity through exploring a number of ‘re‐enactment’ strategies, many of which prove unsatisfactory. Masia's search for knowledge proves to be highly gendered: while female characters produce knowledge and the record of it, it is the male characters who act as the gatekeepers to the (self‐)knowledge Masia seeks.

Overcoming Inner Division: post-suffrage strategies in the organised German women's movement

German women were working within a context strikingly different from either the USA or the UK following the granting of suffrage in 1918. Focusing on the largest of the bourgeois women's organisations, the Federation of Women's Associations (Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine, BDF), this article situates the post-suffrage strategies and priorities of the German women's movement within their particular national context. The BDF have been accused of failing to fully utilise the vote as a tool for change, but a study of their journal, Die Frau, shows that it was the weight of external factors that reduced the BDF's impact, rather than any failure of courage or commitment by the women. An overview of German press coverage of female suffrage before, during and after the war sets out the mental landscape within which the women were operating and gives for the first time a much-needed indication of public response to the issue.

DEFA's floating islands

The DEFA Sci-Fi Collection. First Run Features. NTSC region 1. 16:9. us $44.95. Contains Silent Star (Der schweigende Stern/Milczaza Gwiazda; Kurt Maetzig East Germany/Poland 1960), Eolomea (Hermann Zschoche East Germany/ USSR/Bulgaria 1972) and In the Dust of the Stars (Im Staub der Sterne; Gottfried Kolditz East Germany/Romania 1976).Despite the vaunted respect for sf - or rather its official socialist form, the 'utopian adventure' - in the USSR and its satellite states, few sf films were made in the Eastern bloc. The Russians produced about a dozen, the Czechs perhaps another half-dozen, the Poles perhaps three. The German Democratic Republic's state-run DEFA studios made four. First Run Features has released three of these - Silent Star (1960), Eolomea (1972) and In the Dust of the Stars (1976) - in a DVD package, produced from the prints housed in the University of Massachusetts' DEFA collection. Some of these films have attained legendary status. For some viewers, Silent Star and Eolomea represent the most concerted effort by the Eastern bloc to present alternative socialist sf to international audiences. For others, who grew up in the region under Soviet domination, they were powerful childhood experiences and spurs for 'ostalgie'. For most, they are the most accessible examples of sf film under Communism.The three films in the collection are a very mixed bag. It is not clear why the fourth DEFA sf film, Signals: A Space Adventure (Signale - Ein Weltraumabenteuer/ Sygnally MMXX; Kolditz East Germany/Poland 1970), was not included. I have not seen it, and it is not highly regarded by those who have, but historians attest to its importance as the first step in 'DEFA 70', the effort by the studio to produce and distribute 70mm film on a regular basis (see Vonau). Even if Signale had been included, I doubt we would be able to trace a distinctive DEFA style of sf. Unlike romances, musicals and even westerns (of the Karl May type), DEFA did not produce enough examples of the genre to establish a style. Sf proved to be prohibitively expensive to make for the always cash-and-creditstrapped bloc states. And the clear value of utopian adventure as a vehicle for Marxist-Leninist ideology actually hindered its production, as the various bureau-heads and Ministers of Culture, and indeed even Party First Secretaries, insisted on having their say about the films' messages. Nonetheless, DEFA's sf films do share an aesthetic-political purpose: to negotiate between western commercial sf adventure and the Soviet model of socialist romanticism.At first glance, it is surprising that a studio as endowed with experienced filmmakers as DEFA would have produced so little sf. Officially chartered in 1946, the Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft was the reconstituted heir of the great Babelsberg Ufa studios that played such a dominant role in European filmmaking before World War II, and which had produced Fritz Lang's Metropolis (Germany 1927) and Die Frau im Mond (Germany 1929) and the fascist sf films of Harry Piel (on the history of DEFA, see Bergahn; on Harry Piel and Nazi sf film, see Strzelczyk). East German cinema represented a confluence point where the powerful traditions of Soviet and National Socialist propaganda cinema met with its cross-border counterpart-antagonist, the postwar entertainment cinema of US-backed Western Europe. Under other circumstances, this might have led to the emergence of a powerful, reflective sf cinema. In fact, it contributed to its stifling. Burdened by being the main frontline state of the Warsaw Pact, and to Soviet eyes having the most suspect population, East German culture was kept on the shortest leash in the bloc.Not all of the Soviet bloc cultures were equally interested in the genre. Sf in Russia constituted a true literary tradition, both dangerous and uplifting, the stuff of cultural adventure. Extending from pre-Revolutionary times, through a period of high experimentalism, criticism and utopian vision in the 1920s, it was stifled brutally under Stalin, when it became the occasion for the persecution of scientists in the 1930s, and settled into a form of imperial propaganda until the breakout period of Thaw after Stalin's death. …

Luftzug hinter Samtportieren. Versuch über E. Marlitt

Reviewed by: Luftzug hinter Samtportieren. Versuch über E. Marlitt Helga Druxes Luftzug hinter Samtportieren. Versuch über E. Marlitt. Von Erika Dingeldey. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2007. 209 Seiten. €34,80. The popular author Eugenie Marlitt (1825–1887) published ten novels and three stories in her lifetime, many of which were serialized in the middlebrow family periodical Die Gartenlaube. Erika Dingeldey investigates Marlitt's feminist agenda and return to Enlightenment ideals, and contrasts her politics with the nationalistic patriotism after 1871 in the population at large. She also draws attention to the conflict between her views and those of the "not openly oppositional"—in fact, quite imperialistic and nationalist—agenda of the magazine which promoted her to a large readership. In recent years, Germanists have paid more serious attention to Marlitt, no longer dismissing her under the label of romance novelist. Elke Liebs (2004) shows that Marlitt's views on marriage and critique of bourgeois values put her in the company of Austen and Dickens. Dingeldey proves that the main impetus behind Marlitt's novels is to trace female development and a proto-modern view of marriage as a contractual partnership between individuated protagonists. Her novels hold up unhappy marriages to critical inspection, while not rebelling against the institution as such. She criticizes class prejudice, bourgeois self-absorption, bigotry, anti-semitism, and received notions [End Page 154] about the traditional role of women—in short, prejudice of all kinds. However, she is not as outspoken as her contemporary Fanny Lewald (1811–1889), whose novels and memoir offer a more radical feminist critique. Dingeldey rightly focuses on the novel Im Schillingshof as her central example of the overcoming of entrenched class barriers and ossified aristocratic values. She also provides an in-depth discussion of other novels, such as Goldelse, Reichsgräfin Gisela, Die zweite Frau, Das Heideprinzeßchen, Im Hause des Kommerzienrates, and Die Frau mit den Karfunkelsteinen. Unfortunately, her discussion relies heavily on plot summary. This reader would have liked more comparison with other popular women's authors of the day, whose agenda was often more nationalistic and conventional. Ultimately, Dingeldey asserts, Marlitt blames a loss of liberal political ideals on the bourgeoisie themselves, not on external enemies (90). Even then, Marlitt's critique is muted by generalities and emotionalism; she does not name the oppressor, except to refer to those who foment class hatred against the bourgeoisie to further their own rise to power: "Die Abneigung, dem Bürgertum Vorschub zu leisten, oder vielmehr das Streben, es nicht stark werden zu lassen, liegen ihnen traditionsgemäß im Blute. Dagegen fühle ich Grimm, unbezwingbaren Grimm, gegen die feilen Fahnenflüchtigen aus unseren Reihen, die liebedienerisch und um des persönlichen Vorteils willen das eigene Fleisch und Blut bekämpfen [ . . . ]" (Die Frau mit den Karfunkelsteinen, 1885). A return to family values, to the congruence of the bourgeois family with the social group, is intrinsic to such rhetoric. This stance is, however, at odds with Marlitt's ongoing critique of fictional bourgeois families as split by generational conflict, pecuniary greed, secrets, and disavowals. She feels compelled to introduce fresh blood, in the guise of exotic ethnic female others, into these dysfunctional families. In Schillingshof, Mercedes Valmaseda, a Mexican-American who lives in South Carolina, rescues her German step-brother's children and falls in love with his brother, a painter stuck in a loveless marriage to a Catholic fanatic. In Die Zweite Frau, the German protagonist Juliane von Trachtenberg reactivates the memory of the 'socially dead' invalid Indian wife by circulating an erotic portrait she painted of her. Marlitt creates an identification between "the Lotos flower" and "Liane" that infuses her own relationship to Baron von Mainau with new attraction. Freedom of artistic expression is a theme dear to Marlitt's heart, and serves to symbolize the Enlightenment values of freedom and humanitarianism. We rarely find mention of working-class subjects in the novels, but when we do, for example in Reichsgräfin Gisela, they live in a "Musterkolonie" and are educating themselves through reading books: "Und weshalb sollten sie nicht über diese Lebensstellung, die da mit anderen Worten Not, Elend und Entbehrung heißt, hinaus können [ . . . ] Haben sie nicht einen Kopf wie wir...

Mißverstandene Gleichheit: Die Frau in der frühen Kirche zwischen Charisma und Amt (review)

Reviewed by: Mißverstandene Gleichheit: Die Frau in der frühen Kirche zwischen Charisma und Amt Jonathan J. Armstrong Andrea Biernath Mißverstandene Gleichheit: Die Frau in der frühen Kirche zwischen Charisma und Amt Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2005 Pp. 179. €30. This pleasingly arranged and compellingly argued monograph represents a revision of the author's dissertation submitted at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. Biernath's project is not to catalogue the historical data pertaining to the role of women in earliest Christianity but to decipher the theological formula that animated the violently fluctuating attitudes in the church towards women in ministry. According to the author the paradigm shift in eschatology at the conclusion of the first century—from the anticipation of the immanent return of Christ to the erection of an ecclesiastical hierarchy—accounts for the depreciation of the spiritual authority of women at the beginning of the second century. "The eschatology of the early church was not at all static but evolved considerably in the first three centuries, and the position of the woman in the Christian community was decisively altered in direct correlation to this factor" (20). Women played significant roles in the ministries of Jesus and Paul, Biernath affirms, but after the advent of the eschatology of the deuteropauline epistles, women were relegated to a subordinate position. In the first section of the study, the author examines the eschatology of Jesus, Paul, and the post-apostolic community. If Jesus had intended to establish the equality of women in the present world order, Biernath reasons, then one would anticipate that he would have delivered concrete declarations about the newly defined role of women, but all such statements are absent from the gospel record. Biernath contends that Jesus did not insist on the equality of women in the here and now because he was convinced that the present world order was already obsolete. But at the same time Jesus anticipated that women would [End Page 421] achieve absolute equality in the coming "asexual, abstinent, and angelic" way of life promised in the Kingdom of God (28). In alignment with the apocalyptic eschatology of Jesus, Paul presents the Christian woman as "already" liberated (Gal 3.28) but "not yet" fully experiencing her emancipation (e.g., 1 Cor 11.3). In pronounced opposition to a great deal of feminist exegesis, the author insists that the historical Paul faithfully communicated the tradition of Jesus (120). It is rather in the deuteropauline epistles that Biernath discovers the abandonment of the hope of the Parousia and acquiescence to the patriarchy of the secular environment. The author can only conclude that the prescriptions found in the Pastoral Epistles represent an unchristian corruption alien to the spirit of Jesus and Paul (139). In the second section of the study, Biernath explores the emergence of the ecclesiastical offices in the early church. In the Pauline communities, the prophetic ministry of women was acknowledged and encouraged, and women retained positions of authority in the Johannine churches longer than anywhere else in the early Christian world. It is undeniable that women were among the most prominent of Jesus's disciples and Paul's coworkers. But the era of itinerant charismatic leadership soon passed—as attested by the Didache—and the real power of the ecclesiastical offices soared in the wake of the "de-eschatologizing" (Ent-Eschatologisierung) of the faith. Biernath claims that "at the moment when Christians embraced a hierarchical interpretation of spiritual authority and incorporated the patriarchal structure of the surrounding culture into the church, the fate of the woman was sealed" (57). The argument of the study is buttressed considerably in the third section, in which Biernath surveys the evolution of Christian attitudes towards marriage and celibacy. In a detailed examination of Matthew 19.11–12 and 1 Corinthians 7, she determines that the views of Jesus and Paul were dramatically colored by their expectation of the end of the age. In stark contrast to the stereotypical dissertation, this monograph is a joy to read. The author's central thesis is fascinating and indeed holds great promise. Nevertheless, a number of critical problems are deeply embedded in Biernath's analysis. For example, although the argument requires...

Heinrich von Kleist: Geschlecht, Erkenntnis, Wirklichkeit by Erika Berroth

884 Reviews mere assassin, a compliant pawn in a plot masterminded by Octavio Piccolomini. To correct this misconception, Krobb reassesses Buttler's importance within the drama, traces the story of the historical Butler, one of several Irish 'Wild Geese' who fought for Catholic monarchs abroad in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and considers the significance of a figure such as But(t)ler in the political and social flux of Schiller's time. Finally he draws attention to the resemblance of Buttler-not only in name, but more significantly in social standing and function-to Otto Bitter, alias the Jew Gawriel Siiss, who fights inMansfeld's army in Salomon Kohn's story Gawriel (I853). Buttler, inKrobb's analysis, is an example par excellence of one of Schiller's central themes. He has risen from the ranks to lead his own regiment, thus uniting the soldiers of the Lager, towhom the army offers similar prospects, with Wallenstein, himself a social climber. Buttler, unlike Octavio, who has inherited his standing, embodies the meritocracy on which Wallenstein's army, and his challenge to the existing order, is based. Significantly, the historical Butler was considerably richer than the play suggests; his invented, detailed biography as a footloose homo novus in Schiller thus directly addressed the upheavals in late eighteenth-century politics and society. Krobb occasionally departs from his tight focus on But(t)ler to dwell on other themes, but the diverse perspectives from which he considers his subject are convincingly and interestingly intertwined in a thought-provoking and valuable study, both of But(t)ler and of Wallenstein as awhole. THE QUEEN'S COLLEGE, OXFORD STEFFAN DAVIES Heinrich von Kleist: Geschlecht- Erkenntnis- Wirklichkeit. By ERIKA BERROTH. (Studies on Themes and Motifs in Literature, 58) New York and Bern: Peter Lang. 2003. I54 pp. $53.95. ISBN o-8204-4958-x. Erika Berroth's study aims at the point of intersection between an area on which Kleist scholarship has long been focused-the problem of Erkenntnis-and one in which interest has arisen relatively more recently, but remains unbroken-Kleist's representation and construction of gender. The author's starting-point, with refer ence to late eighteenth-century changes in paradigms of gender difference and to Lorraine Code's interpretation of Kant in the light of Kleist's Kantkrise, is that both gender difference and apparently objective knowledge are essentially recognized by Kleist as 'Konstrukt[e]', the latter explicitly, the former by clear, although implicit, contrast with Kleist's positions on gender in his early letters. The 'Gleichzeitigkeit von Realitaten' (p. iI) experienced by Kleist's characters, which generates tragic en ergy through the characters' lack of awareness of the 'subjective Beschrinktheit ihrer Realitatsversion' (ibid.), is further linked by Berroth to the intrusion, after Julia Kris teva, of the semiotic into the symbolic. Die Marquise von 0... serves as the principal testing ground of Berroth's hypotheses and the centrepiece of the study. The analysis of Die Marquise ismarked by a series of interesting word associa tions and interpretations, notably on the notorious Gedankenstrich: 'Ein Strich durch die Gedanken, ein Strich durch die Ordnung, etwas, das die Frau unter den Strich fallen lal3tund auf den Strich schickt, gleichzeitig aber der Verband, der dieWunde deckt, die im RiB durch die Gedanken aufklafft' (p. 36). The Gedankenstrich appears, observes Berroth, wherever the 'master discourse' is interrupted (p. 67). Berroth re lates the ambiguity and simultaneity of the Gedankenstrich to the experience of the woman whose rape it represents and censors, positing that the Marquise embodies 'den Zustand gleichzeitigen Wissens und Nicht-Wissens' (p. 62) and so experiences the fragility of the symbolic order, its vulnerability to the semiotic, am eigenen Leib. MLR, 101.3, 2006 885 The author's analysis of theMarquise's 'Momente des Wiedererkennens, die nicht in den binaren Bezugsrahmen integriert werden konnen' (p. 51) is related aptly to pregnancy as 'the radical ordeal of the splitting of the subject', as Berroth quotes from Kristeva (p. 34), but we miss a precise definition of how much, and inwhat way, Berroth supposes theMarquise to have 'known'. This omission potentially opens the door for the type of aspersions on theMarquise's desire for the Graf which...

The phonographic mise-en-scène

For Adorno, the graphic reproduction of operatic performance means that the primary scene of audition has shifted as well: from the theatre – and the telic determinations towards which the natural history of the theatre tends – to the living room, where people gather to listen to what they no longer concern themselves to perform. The phonograph allows the vagaries and vulgarities of the visuality of (operatic) performance to be held off or back by an auditory experience whose condition of possibility and whose end is the illusory recovery of something literary – and thus essentially visual. What remains is to begin an attempt to see and hear what might be gained by moving through the opposition of the denigration of the recording in the discourse of performance and the denigration of performance in the discourse of ‘classical’ musicology. This attempt is made by way of the 1993 recording of Arnold Schoenberg's monodrama Erwartung, starring Jessye Norman as the opera's single character, Die Frau, with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra under the baton of James Levine. It is an attempt that has required reading with and against Adorno – which is to say, listening to and for the sound that works in and against him.