Spring 2001 Book Reviews

Editor: Magda Mueller
E-Mail: mmueller@csuchico.edu
Deptartment of Foreign Languages
California State University, Chico
Chico, CA 95929-0825
Phone: 916-893-0361

Submissions policy: Books reviewed should be relevant to feminist criticism in the field of German and Comparative Studies. Reviews of books by single authors should not exceed 600 words. Reviews of books by multiple authors should not exceed 900 words. Unsolicited reviews will be published on a space-available basis.

Ute Scheub. Verr¸ckt nach Leben: Berliner Szenen in den zwanziger Jahren. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2000. 192 Seiten, schwarz/weiþ Illustrationen, DM 18.90.

Erstaunlich ist es, wie Ute Scheub so viele und so vielf”ltige Geschichten in einem Band von nur 192 Seiten unterbringen kann. Verr¸ckt nach Leben enth”lt neun ”uþerst inhaltsreiche, gleichseitig aber leserfreundliche, sch–n mit Fotos versehene Kapitel.

Im ersten einf¸hrenden Kapitel (ìDas gesprengte Korsett: Berlin in den zwanziger Jahrenî) verwendet Scheub das Korsett als Sinnbild f¸r das deutsche Kaiserreich, das sowohl symbolisch wie auch real in den zwanziger Jahren gesprengt wurde. Die Spannungsfelder der Tradition gegen Modernit”t, des Gehorsams gegen Auflehnung, der M¸tterlichkeit gegen neue Berufst”tigkeit und der Sittsamkeit gegen sexuelle Rebellion sind die Themenbereiche um die Scheub wirkungsvoll die folgenden sieben Kapitel aufbaut. Die genannten Themen werden kulturhistorisch zugleich kontextualisiert und erkl”rt.

Die ìPionierinnenî (13), die Scheub vorab kurz einf¸hrt und dann in den einzelnen Abschnitten eingehend behandelt, sind: Gabriele Tergit, Vicki Baum, Dinah Nelken, Helen Hessel, Hannah H–ch, Rosa Valetti, Trude Hesterberg, Valeska Gert, Charlotte Wolff, Claire Waldoff, Marlenne Dietrich und Anita Berber.

ìSchneller schreiben, schneller lebenî (Kapitel 2) behandelt die schriftstellerischen T”tigkeiten von Nelken, Tergit, Baum und Hessel im Kontext des erfolgreichen Verlags- und Zeitungswesens in Berlin der damaligen Zeit. Scheub inszeniert jedes der zentralen Kapitel, indem sie fiktive Treffen, Gedanken oder Gespr”che der behandelten Frauen schafft. Die Inszenierung l”þt die Frauen unmittelbar aufeinander wirken, zieht uns als LeserInnen quasi in ihren Kreis hinein.

Die ausgesprochenen Berliner ìWeiber-Kabarettsî (57) der Dinah Nelken, Valeska Gert, Rosa Valetti und Trude Hesterberg werden in Kapitel 3 (ìDas Leben ist ein Kabarettî) beschrieben und diskutiert. Wie Nelken, Gert, Valetti und Hesterberg, war die Mehrzahl der Frauen in Verr¸ckt nach Leben geb¸rtige Berlinerinnen beziehungsweise etliche Jahre in Berlin t”tig. Jedes dieser Kabaretts hat seine Spezialit”t: es gab politisch-literarische Programme (Valetti) und politische Satire (Hesterberg). In Nelkens Kabarett Die Unm–glichen wurden Texte auf der B¸hne geschrieben und Gerts Kohlkopp lief g”nzlich ohne Geld.

Die Wechselbeschreibung von Anita Berber und Marlene Dietrich im Abschnitt 4 (ìBerlin, du tanzt den Todî) zeichnet dieses Kapitel als das spannendste des Buches aus. Scheub beginnt mit den vielen Gemeinsamkeiten der zwei Frauen, z.B. die Ÿhnlichkeiten in der Erziehung und im Verhalten als erwachsene Frauen. Sicher ist es, daþ die zwei sich kannten, aber wie nah sie sich kannten ist nicht klar. Die Autorin stellt sich ein Nebeneinandersitzen der zwei in den Berliner Homobars vor. Auf Berbers Ruhm als ìSinnbild des Exzessesî und Dietrichs Markenzeichen als ìVenus der Neuen Sachlichkeitî baut Scheub ihre Diskussion der zwei Frauen auf. Letztendlich tanzte sich Berber durch ersch–pfende internationale Auftritte und Drogenkonsum f–rmlich in den Tod. Dietrich, andersgeartet, sang und schauspielte sich nach Kalifornien, wo sie noch eine lange und illustre Karriere machte.

Im Kapitel ìKinder oder keine: Die neuen Freiheiten und ihre Grenzenî begegnen wir den Paragraphen 218 im Umfeld der Sexualwissenschaft im Institut vom Magnus Hirschfeld. Seine Mitarbeiterin Helene Stocker wird eingehend behandelt in ihrer Rolle als Begr¸nderin des Bundes f¸r Mutterschutz und Sexualreform, der Gesellschaft f¸r Sexualreform, und des Reichsverbands f¸r Geburtenregelung und Sexualhygiene. Auch wird die literarische Darstellung der Schwangerschaft und Abtreibung in Werken von Baum und Irmgard Keun besprochen. Zus”tzlich werden die Beziehungen mancher der behandelten Frauen zu ihren eigenen Kindern erl”utert. Scheubs Fazit zur ëNeuen Frau:í sie soll ìsexuell aktive Geliebte, charmante, gebildete Gesellschafterin, selbstlose Kameradin, z”rtliche Mutter, patente Mitverdienerinî (105) sein. Die Erwartungshorizonte kommen denen der heutigen Frauen verbl¸ffend nah.

ìAmour fou: Helen Hessel und das Leben in Dreieckenî (Kapitel 6) behandelt die Liebesbeziehungen zwischen Hessel, ihrem Ehemann Franz Hessel und dem Schriftsteller Henri-Pierre RochÈs. Weitaus spannender liest sich aber ìLiebe deine N”chste: Lesben und GarÁonnes: Charlotte Wolff und Helen Hessel, Marlene Dietrich und Claire Waldoff.î Wolff war eine der ersten Frauen, die offen als Lesbe lebte, ferner widmete sie sich der lesbischen und bisexuellen Liebe in empirischen Studien, sie war n”mlich Ÿrztin. Scheub kehrt in diesem Kapitel zu den Werken Hirschfelds zur¸ck und enth¸llt dabei Berlin als Eldorado der Homosexuellen der Zeit. Ðber die gewaltige Unterdr¸ckung Hannah H–chs durch Raoul Hausmann liest man in ìF¸r Frauen, wie wir es sind, gibt es aber heute noch keine M”nner. H–ch rettete sich aus der Bindung zu Hausmann und lebte gl¸cklich neun Jahre lang mit der holl”ndischen Schriftstellerin Til Brugman zusammen.

Im letzten Kapitel inszeniert Scheub ein Treffen in Berlin 1999 mit Gabriele Tergit. Durch dieses fiktive Gespr”ch reflektiert sie zum Teil ¸ber das Vorausgegangene und gr”bt tiefer in Tergits Biographie hinein. Das Tergit 1982 in London starb, was Scheub selbst zugibt, schien mir dieser Abschnitt, vielleicht wegen der zeitlichen N”he, etwas gezwungen. Schlieþlich erm–glicht Scheubs gekonntes Spinnen der Geschichten um diese verr¸ckten Frauen jedoch eine neues literarisches Fortleben, eine Entfaltung, die alles in allem gerade durch ihre Verbindung von Literatur und Geschichte ergreifend wirkt.

Ellen Manning Nagy. Women in Germanics 1850-1950. New York, Peter Lang: 1997. 186pp.

Germanists have talked for some time of writing the history of German studies in the United States, but until now no more than a few articles, a prolegomena, and several calls to action have appeared. A volume under the general editorship of Peter Uwe Hohendahl is currently in the works, but not yet in print. In the meantime, Ellen Manning Nagy aims at providing the ìfirst comprehensive analysis of the roles and contributions of women in the profession of Germanics in the United States between 1850 and 1950î (1). Hers is a difficult task, built upon precious little previous research, and therein lie this bookís strengths and weaknesses. Without forebears, illuminating more than a corner of female Germanistsí hidden history seems an impossible undertaking. More important, the history Nagy seeks to uncover is, to no small degree, the story of absence: until very recently male Germanists -- seldom an enlightened category -- successfully excluded, marginalized, and forgot most of their female counterparts. The traces women Germanists left behind, their scholarship and their pedagogies, remained imprinted on grateful students more often than on paper in the archives. Small wonder then that a ìcomprehensive historyî exceeds Nagyís grasp.

Even a discussion of assembling evidence of womenís activities in the field of German studies raises a host of other difficulties: German only gradually found acceptance in the nationís still developing post-secondary institutions, where women were not yet universally accepted as students, much less as professors. As a result, women Germanists tended to earn fewer, and less advanced degrees from less prestigious universities. Moreover, even though they worked at second tier schools, most notably at womenís colleges, the few exceptional women found themselves locked into the lower ranks of the profession, instructors rather than full professors. And these women were assumed to be more interested either in teaching than scholarship, i.e., in preparing (mostly female) students to teach in secondary schools, where modern languages were reserved for women, while men taught Greek, Latin, and the sciences. Not surprisingly then, the one, potentially clear record of female Germanistsí achievements, their publications, turns up meager. More important, relying on books and journal articles necessarily misses much of what women (and most male) Germanists actually accomplished.

Yet, lacking other data, Nagy finds herself forced examine (male) criteria of excellence, using journal articles as a measure of scholarly production. She devoted considerable energy to a survey of articles in the leading scholarly journals of the period (PMLA, Monatshefte, German Quarterly, Modern Language Journal, and The Journal of English and Germanic Philology) only to find that women published less than men. For example, in the two decades 1920-1939 women produced 7-9% of the articles on German subjects, while they comprised 17% of the faculty members in German. And this was a high point, achieved almost exclusively by female faculty at womenís colleges, which leaves Nagy with precious little data to explain. She does, however, situate the absence of evidence admirably: Roughly 40% of men never published anything either!

Despite these problems, Nagy manages to produce two dozen pages of useful statistics (101-126). Among the most depressing are the relentlessly male lists of presidents of the AATG (116) and the small number of Ph.D.s granted to women 1861-1949 (120). The numbers may not lie, but their sad reality undermines Nagyís goal of writing a comprehensive history. Instead, she is forced to document the lives of four prominent women Germanists: Marian Whitney and Lilian Stroebe, who both taught at Vassar, Melitta Gerhard of Wittenberg University in Ohio, and Helen Adolf of Penn State. And the book includes a long interview with Adolf (76-85), although Nagy admits that it was difficult to get a straight answer from her. These four women put names and faces into the holes in Nagyís tables; they serve as illustrations, if not representatives, of what women accomplished in Germanics during the fieldís first century. For this reason, their biographies merit recounting, however much they undermine Nagyís larger agenda.

Whitney and Stroebe seem to this reviewer the most interesting of the four. They pioneered the use of German in the classroom -- advocating, perhaps, inventing the direct method of language instruction (as opposed to grammar/translation) before W.W. I; they included cultural and social history in literature courses; and Stroebe founded the foreign language summer school at Middlebury in 1912. Nagy not only rescues their history, but she also asks, at least implicitly, why it was necessary to rediscover their pioneering insights. Gerhard and Adolf were no less productive, but their accomplishments were more conventional and, for Nagy, more difficult to research and to judge. As she says of Gerhard: ìThe information about her career can only be gleaned from directories of scholars which only provide information on the schools where she taught, degrees earned, and research and teaching interestsî (74). In other words, she too, like so many of her less accomplished sisters, ultimately escapes Nagyís grasp. One senses her enormous frustration, her inability to wrest a comprehensive history from missing data and from women who toiled without besting adversity or who never even got a job, much less did as much as the men who kept them from positions they deserved. As a result, Nagyís book is ultimately the history of an absence, of what might have been; her inability to discover what is, unfortunately, not there probably explains Nagyís tentative writing. The sentence just quoted is all too typical, but the difficulty is as much substance as style, a lack for which Germanics rather than Nagy is to blame.

Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres. Respectability and Deviance. Nineteenth-Century German Women Writers and the Ambiguity of Representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

With Respectability and Deviance Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres has written a highly useful historical study, though she herself repeatedly insists in this text on the literary critic and historianís ability only to offer approximations of the past. While she emphasizes that she has not written a comprehensive history of womenís writing in the nineteenth-century, the selected women writers she treats may be understood as exemplary of womenís experience as writers in the historical moment in which ever increasing numbers of women emerged in the public sphere of print culture, yet remained largely outsiders vis-ý-vis high culture. Or as Joeres herself characterizes her project, she has undertaken ìthe pleasurable rediscovery and exploration of women who liked to write and think, who were indeed the first sizable group of women in their country to have the chance not only to imagine themselves as professional writers but to partake in an ever larger degree in the public world of writing and publishingî (xiv).

Joeres organizes her seven chapters around pivotal problems in understanding and evaluating womenís writing in this period, including womenís place with respect to the literary canon, womenís writing and popular culture, womenís writing and industrialization, women and radicalism, and she treats such diverse writers as Annette von Droste-H¸lshoff, Louise Otto, and Eugenie Marlitt. Insistent upon the historical limitations of the vision of the largely middle-class women writers she examines, Joeres nevertheless insightfully teases out the incipient progressivism, even occasionally, as she claims, the radicalism of their texts. While individual readers might miss among Joeresís selected authors such writers as Ida von Hahn-Hahn, Malwida von Meysenbug, Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (Joeres treats no authors outside the boundaries of Imperial Germany), or the phenomenally successful playwright Charlotte Birch-Pfeiffer, Joeresís investigations clearly rest on deep knowledge of the period; the alert reader will likely find impetus for her own investigations rather than lament omissions. Occasionally, however, Joeresís generalizations about literary culture, such as the notion of poetry as a womanís genre in the nineteenth century, demand further consideration.

Not all readers will appreciate Joeresís self presentation in this work, that is, her deliberate intertwining of her intellectual and professional biography with presentation of the results of scholarly inquiry. Yet for those interested in the emergence of feminist inquiry within German Studies in America, Joeresís recollection of her struggles with her own biases and limitations as well as those of her discipline, her concern to justify each step of her inquiry, her repeated characterization of the present tome as part of a process, though it be her lifeís work, is at once enlightening, moving, and inspiring. Haunting this study is the authorís disappointment that the recovery of womenís writing in the nineteenth century also uncovers compromise and complicity with ideologies and social structures damaging to the human spirit, and particularly to women. Joeres reminds us repeatedly that even as they seek agency, women do not occupy a place outside of ideology. Even if one does not share the need for uncompromised heroines, Joeresís almost painful intellectual journey, from the initial exhilaration of making forgotten women visible to her realization of their limitations to her rethinking the historically possible, proves eminently enabling to feminist scholarship by modeling an engaged and ever-more historically sophisticated and theoretically subtle critical inquiry into womenís cultural production.

Cathy S. Gelbin, Kader Konuk, Peggy Piesche, eds. Aufbr¸che: Kulturelle Produktionen von Migrantinnen, Schwarzen und j¸dischen Frauen in Deutschland. Koenigstein/Taunus: Ulrike Helmer Verlag, 1999. 273 pages. DM 39,90.

The essays in this volume are proceedings from and document a conference that took place in Cologne in 1997. It was sponsored by the Greensí Heinrich-B–ll-Foundation as part of their efforts to mark the Year against Racism in Europe. Analyzing and theorizing the cultural productions of ethnic minorities in Germany, the volume continues in the tradition inaugurated by Orlanda, especially their anthology Entfernte Verbindungen (1993), which similarly brought feminist scholars and activists from a range of disciplines and communities together. In contrast to that earlier collection, several of the pieces in AufBr¸che are more theoretically demanding and academic in style, and the anthology comprises two essays by artists in addition to the academic and activist pieces. I will use it to teach intercultural relations and tensions in Germany at the undergraduate as well as graduate levels.

The book does two things that make it extremely useful, as well as fun to read: it translates many of the paradigms that have emerged in Anglo-American postcolonial, ethnic, queer, and cultural studies in the last twenty years to a German context, and it embeds intellectual production in the context of community relations and antiracist politics. Most of the authors in this volume received graduate training outside of Germany, and several of them studied in the U.S. That background is clearly detectible in the choice of theoretical texts with which they engage that are central to the feminist/cultural studies canon here. Their contributions examine, among other things, the applicability and efficacy of Homi Bhabhaís notion of hybridity, Judith Butlerís concept of gender performativity, and Teresa de Lauretisís theorization of positionality to the art and literature of migrants, Afro-Germans, and Jews. The range of critical discourses that inform the young academicsí readings is impressive, as is their selection of cultural texts, which extend from the expressionist dramas of Else Lasker-Sch¸ler to contemporary novels by Jeannette Landers, Emine Sevgi ÷zdamar, and Yoko Tawada, and poetry by Afro-German writers. Cathy S. Gelbinís essay offers something like a political autobiography, and Ekpenyong Ani directly comments on the conference itself. Two essays at the end of the book, one of which includes photographs, are authored by fiction writer Esther Dischereit and performance artist Tanya Ury respectively. They address similar questions as those addressed by the scholar-critics: how to deal with ethnic stereotypes? How to negotiate a political commitment to feminist coalition-building with the experience of oneís ethnic difference? In addition, several photographs from the series ìJewish Women in Berlinî are sprinkled throughout the book.

Since several of the pieces describe the conference and discuss the sometimes controversial reception of particular presentations, critical writing what we do in academia, but often without direct feedback or face-to-face-contact attains a different weight. One of the most instructive moments in the book is organized around what it excludes, namely a presentation about the Afro-German poet May Ayim; two essays make reference to this exclusion and its rationale, illustrating that some spectators objected to a merely formalist analysis of an artist whose life and death cannot be easily separated from the fierceness of the defiance and suffering that mark her work. The constant call to intellectual accountability makes this book a valuable document of the stakes of theorizing, creating a palpable tension between identity politics as the paradigm that clearly governed the relationships between the women present at the conference, and the performative, postmodern, and parodic strategies that different presenters often favored. The tension between communal accountability and exclusion from academic institutions on the one hand, and theoretical sophistication as a sign of academic assimilation and hence political isolation is the subject of an essay by Encarnacion Gutierrez Rodriguez entitled ìAkrobatik in der Marginalit”t,î one of the strongest in the book. In it she considers the conditions of intellectual production by migrants and women of color in Germany, which she discusses in terms of Gramsciís notion of the organic intellectual.í Even though she warns against the tokenization of feminist intellectuals from ethnic minorities in German academia, who are socially and politically isolated, she refrains from equating theoretical discourse with the language of domination that minoritized intellectuals must stay away from in order to prove their integrity. Her piece addressed a predicament that informed practically every chapter in the book, although the majority of contributors, unfortunately but not surprisingly, seem to be affected more by exclusion from academia rather from a tokenized existence within it.

I suggest using this collection of smart, creative, politically dedicated, and theoretically sophisticated work not only for teaching, but also as a list of potential hires, collaborators, and invited visitors.

Maria Tatar. Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1995.

Maria Tatarís study of sexual murder employs a new historicist approach combining historical and cultural texts. This theoretical approach is reflected in the thematic two-part division of Tatarís: the first part, ìSexual Murder: Weimar Germany and Its Cultural Legacyî provides a rough historical framework for the entire study, while the second part ìCase Studiesî analyzes sexual murder in Otto Dixís and George Groszís various paintings, Alfred D–blinís Berlin Alexanderplatz and Fritz Langís M.

The historical background provided in part one transpires across three chapters. In the first chapter, Tatar asks what is at stake in portraying sexual murder in various media. Picking up the thread where Elisabeth Bronfenís famous study, Over Her Dead Body, left off, Tatar argues that perhaps initially the inordinate number of womenís corpses strewn across Weimar era canvasses were overlooked because the ìoverkill has . . . desensitized us to the image of female corpsesî (8). However, Tatar insists that there is an ethical imperative to discuss why there was such a rampant interest in sexual murder at this specific time in history. The second chapter seeks to understand the psychological structure underlying sexual murder. Tatar argues that both those who commit murder in real life as well as those who ìcommitî the crime in art are motivated by competition with women and their sexuality. Chapter three proceeds to analyze historical cases of sexual murders that took place in the Weimar era, and the journalistic discourse portraying these crimes.

The second part is structured around a reprimand of both the artists for their implication in and the critics for their avoidance of the crime committed on the canvas: ìthe producers of those works [Lustmord paintings] become personally implicated in what they put into words and images...î (4), so that even Grosz ìtransforms himself from the creative artist ... into a murderer...î (4). Murder in art, literature or film is something the artist can or should be taken to task for; it is not merely a ìpurely aesthetic principle.î According to Tatar, critics have predominately distracted from the question of what is at stake by analyzing other categories. For instance, one analysis of Dixís canvases of murdered women focuses on the aesthetic principles of the piece, while another restricts the reading to the biographical data the canvas includes. Critics who analyze in a formalistic manner Tatar takes to task more than those critics who focus on biographical data. ìFocusing exclusively on formal features and insisting on disfigurement as a purely aesthetic principle,î Tatar claims, ìcan distract from facing the full consequences of what is at stake in the pictures we see and in the words we readî (9).

The heavy-handedness of Tatarís reprimands of artists for their choice of subject matter, as though they were criminals, and critics for their methodological approach could lead readers to ignore it altogether. But that would be a mistake. Tatarís book not only brings the historical reality and artistic prevalence of sexual murder in the Weimar era to the fore, it also offers an insightful analysis of the history, art, literature and cinema of the period. Its focus on violence, gender and sexuality, and its methodological approach are sure to provoke further discussions.

WiG Book Reviews Online Spring 2001