Editor: Magda Mueller
E–Mail:mmueller@csuchico.edu
Department 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.
Carmine Chiellino, Ed. Interkulturelle Literatur in Deutschland:
Ein Handbuch. Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler, 2000. 536 pp. 77 Illustrations.
78 DM.
With Interkulturelle Literatur in Deutschland editor Carmine Chiellino and the twenty-seven contributors to the volume provide the most extensive record yet available of the post-war literary and cultural productions of minorities in Germany. The handbook offers concise essays on the historical, economic and social background of migration to Germany since the mid-1950s, but its main focus is on presenting a wide range of authors, as well as separate accounts of various cultural forms such as film, theater, fine art, and media. Organized according to the ethnic, national or regional backgrounds of the writers, the sections on literature give brief overviews and identify central tendencies of these literatures, followed by portraits of the most important writers. Finally, the volume offers useful lists of addresses, institutions, organizations and a large bibliography.
With the sheer breadth of its coverage, Interkulturelle Literatur has the potential to change the landscape of scholarship on German minority literature substantially by shifting the focus from a few better-known writers to the recognition of a vital literary and cultural scene which exhibits an astonishing variety and diversity of Kulturschaffende. To that end, the literary and non-literary sections complement each other nicely and indicate a larger cultural context of artistic production that deserves to be taken into account.
Yet, the handbook-and particularly its editor-attempts more than just to catalog the range of minority writers and artists. Through the very criteria of its organization, the volume seeks to (re)define the parameters of scholarship on minority authors. Opposed to a Germanocentric notion of minority literature, it proposes "intercultural literature" as a field of study which includes but is not limited to minority literature written in German. The heading "intercultural literature" in Chiellino's presentation foregrounds the fact of the cultural encounter between authors and artists of non-German background with Germany and German culture (which themselves, as he points out, have been changed by that encounter since the mid-1950s). Chiellino asks scholars to take into account the variety of languages in which the encounter with Germany is articulated as well as the variety of circumstances of encounter (such as exile, migration, expatriation) which shape the relationship to Germany in different ways and, according to him, are reflected in the works themselves. He sketches a multi-axial model which is worth considering, although it raises more questions than it resolves.
The volume defines writings by authors from a common ethnic, national or regional origin as separate literatures (or sub-categories of intercultural literature). Thus, it speaks of the literatures of the Greek minority, of the German minority of Romania, of Brazilian authors in Germany, or authors with African background. Some of these divisions are more arbitrary than others. The section on authors from Asia, for instance, is an entirely artificial construct, rather than a coherent field, as contributor Ulrike Reeg makes clear. This organization does make visible the non-German linguistic and literary traditions and histories of the respective authors. It also offers a point of departure for thinking about whether national background is indeed the most salient category through which to understand these authors rather than such categories as genre, theme, and style.
Despite the volume's admirable range, there is a curious absence of Jewish writers, an absence which, at the least, would have merited discussion. Surely authors such as Jeannette Lander or Maxim Biller have something to say about Interkulturalität. The unexplained decision not to incorporate them seems glaring particularly since Jewish authors such as Canetti, Celan, and Kafka are listed as evidence of an "interkulturelle Kontinuität innerhalb der deutschsprachigen Literatur" (51). Relegating Jewish writers to a prehistory of "intercultural literature" skews the understanding of contemporary German culture just as much as does the absence of other minority literatures from dominant cultural accounts.
This methodological blind-spot indicates the need for continued reflection on the terms and concepts in use, a task which the various theoretical and disciplinary issues raised in Chiellino's and Köstlin's contributions take on but do not fully resolve. In this context it should also be noted that the volume does not operate with one single approach. Chiellino, for instance, draws on intercultural hermeneutics, while other contributors (such as Terkessidis or Göktürk) seem more guided by a cultural studies approach. Thus the term "Interkulturalität" in the title is in some ways a pragmatic one, not one which indicates a consistent theoretical outlook and understanding of minority literature and culture. The handbook does not have a particularly feminist outlook, but female authors are well represented overall and the issue of minority women's writing emerges briefly at different moments throughout the volume. Although one would have liked an overarching methodological reflection, the variety of approaches at work actually reflects the current condition of scholarship more realistically.
Interkulturelle Literatur in Deutschland will be indispensable as a resource and research handbook. The amount of information gathered and the range of fields it covers make it valuable both for those who are new to the field as well as those who have been working in it for some time. While I did not always agree with the evaluations of the contributors (such as the dismissal of Zafer Senocak's insightful essayistic work), the individual entries on authors generally present their work and biographies succinctly and effectively. The bibliography of literary authors, although extensive, is somewhat uneven. It offers an up-to-date listing of secondary literature in some cases, while others are quite deficient (the growing scholarship on Özdamar, for instance, is absent from the bibliography on her work, which primarily lists German newspaper articles and reviews instead). A number of the chapters could also be assigned individually in advanced undergraduate and graduate courses as concise overviews (such as Hisashi Yano's "Migrationsgeschichte"). Despite its occasional unevenness this volume, with its plethora of information and resources, should be instrumental in expanding the range of the scholarship on minority literature and culture in Germany.
Yasemin Yildiz
Cornell University
Christiane Schönfeld, Ed. Commodities of Desire: The Prostitute in Modern German Literature. Rochester: Camden House, 2000. 270 pp.
The ten essays and introduction of Commodities of Desire offer a comprehensive and much-needed look at a fascinating and multi-faceted figure, the prostitute. Edited by Christiane Schönfeld, this volume documents the German literary and filmic representation of the prostitute from the 1880s through the 1930s, explicating cultural texts by such well-known authors as Bertolt Brecht, Arthur Schnitzler, and Frank Wedekind, as well as those by lesser-known authors such as Margarete Böhme, Curt Corrinth, and Otto Erich Hartleben. The approach used in the essays is predominantly new historicist, combining analyses of socio-historical and cultural texts, an approach exemplified by Schönfeld in her thorough introduction (1-30). Not only does Schönfeld give the reader a brief history of the Germanic literary representation of the harlot from the Middle Ages to the 1920s, but she also surveys the historical, sociological, political, and scientific (or pseudo-scientific) discourses surrounding the figure in the 19th and 20th centuries. By closely examining the heightened cultural currency of the prostitute toward the end of the 19th century-in the midst of rapid industrialization and urbanization as well as intensified social unrest-, Schönfeld posits the prostitute as an ambivalent, yet highly subversive figure. She writes, "She is the perfect image for writers who seek to question existing hierarchies, moral codes, or social norms" (24).
Because this study does not mention male prostitution, the prostitute as presented in Commodities of Desire is inexorably linked to the representation of women in the German context from the turn of the century through the Weimar era. According to several of the writers in this volume, the prostitute, an erotic woman, serves as a negative foil to the prudish bourgeois wife and mother. In his essay on "Prostitution, Free Love, and Marriage in German Drama in the 1890s" (31-45), Karl Leydecker examines this contrast in late nineteenth century plays by Otto Erich Hartleben, Felix Hollaender and Hans Land, Ludwig Fulda, and Hermann Sudermann, reading them for a "third type of relationship" (32), an alternative to prostitution and bourgeois marriage. This "third type" is a free love relationship in which both partners are financially self-sufficient. While Leydecker does find evidence of free love relationships in turn-of-the-century dramas, he also finds that such dramas were often met with public outrage and even censorship, and he concludes that Wilhelmine Germany was not yet ready for a sexually liberated, economically independent female population. It was women's "economic vulnerability" (38) that made such alternative relationships difficult, if not impossible, both on stage and in German society. Christiane Schönfeld, in her essay entitled "Streetwalking the Metropolis: Prostitutes in Expressionism" (111-130), also reads the prostitute as decidedly anti-bourgeois, much like the expressionist movement itself. A condensed version of her book-length study Dialektik und Utopie: Die Prostituierte im deutschen Expressionismus (1996), Schönfeld's essay argues that while some expressionists praise the prostitute, turning her into somewhat of a muse, others criticize her as a signifier of the modern metropolis. Those who praise her (i.e. Curt Corrinth, Alfred Lemm, Ernst Stadler) transform her into a saint, collapsing the classic split between Madonna and whore (123). Those who criticize her expose her as the ultimate urbanite, emblematic of the alienating effects of life in the big city, as one reads in Schönfeld's adept close reading of Oskar Kanehl's poem "Nachtcafé" (119-120). Whether they use her in a positive or negative way, the expressionists capitalize on the prostitute's ability to "provoke and shock the bourgeoisie" (126).
Two of the most noteworthy essays in the book study the transposition of the prostitute from written to cinematic media. Margaret McCarthy provides the reader with an astute comparison of Margarete Böhme's 1905 novel Tagebuch einer Verlorenen and G.W. Pabst's 1929 film version, contrasting the two works in terms of the amount of mobility they afford the prostitute protagonist, Thymian Gotteball (77-97). Analyzing the book as a prostitute's diary that is both actually authored by Böhme and fictionally authorized by a bourgeois woman (Böhme's alter ego, Grete), McCarthy argues that Thymian's narrative remains contained, or trapped within a tempered bourgeois narrative that robs the protagonist of her mobility and her subversiveness (82-84). The film, on the other hand, is read by McCarthy as presenting its viewers with a "self in flux" (87), emphasizing "the ease with which new identities can be acquired for both the women in the film and those potentially transformed female spectators" (92). With critical nods given to Siegfried Kracauer and Patrice Petro (Joyless Streets), McCarthy skillfully challenges past readings of the film that have read the camera's gaze as oppressively patriarchal, offering female viewers only masochistic identification with the protagonist. Even a reader who is not well versed in feminist film criticism will enjoy this clearly written and cleverly argued essay. While McCarthy relies on film theory and close reading for her filmic analysis, Barbara Hales examines two Weimar street films through a socio-historical lens in her essay "Blonde Satan: Weimar Constructions of the Criminal Femme Fatale" (131-152). Hales supports her readings of Karl Grune's 1923 film Die Strasse and Joe May's Asphalt (1929) by tracing the written construction of female criminality in the scientific studies, cultural criticism, and mainstream journalism of the Weimar Republic. Influenced by turn-of-the-century writings by Paul Möbius, Otto Weininger, and Cesare Lombroso, Weimar studies by Erich Wulffen and Hans Schneickert suggest an innate female inclination toward criminal activity. According to Hales, these studies enjoyed immense popularity among the Weimar middle class, who identified the criminal woman not necessarily with the prostitute but with the liberated New Woman of the 1920s, whom they viewed as the ultimate threat to the bourgeois family (146). In fact, this reader found it striking that Hales did not draw more attention to the fact that the femme fatales she describes in her essay are not always prostitutes. This begs the question of whether or not, with the appearance of the New Woman, the prostitute somehow loses her subversive edge. The only scholar to address this question in the book is Alan Lareau, whose well-constructed and thoroughly documented study of the cabaret acts, prostitute songs, and Apache dances of the 1920s argues that even Bertolt Brecht capitalized on the prostitute's popularity in order to appeal to, rather than criticize, bourgeois audiences (180).
Those who read Commodities of Desire with the expectation of finding a simple, neat definition of the prostitute as literary icon will be disappointed, but such a definition is not Schönfeld's intention, for as she states, "[the] power of the prostitute in German literature is often due to her instability and ambivalence" (24). Some readers may find that several essays in this volume read much like an inventory list of prostitutes in German literature-mentioning too many works in too small a space and thereby offering only cursory readings of texts. Most readers should, however, be glad that the contributors to this book have discovered so many interesting texts still rife for more in-depth interpretation and should use this as an impetus for further investigation. Commodities of Desire truly is a useful study for scholars interested in erotic literature, the representation of women in 19th and 20th century western literature and film, issues of class and gender, and the literature of the metropolis.
Jill Suzanne Smith
Indiana University, Bloomington
Andrea Slane. A Not So Foreign Affair: Fascism, Sexuality, and the Cultural Rhetoric of American Democracy. Durham: Duke UP, 2001. $19.95 (Paperback).
Film scholar Andrea Slane's study of the way fascism has served to incite ongoing and contentious definitions of democracy in America is brilliantly theorized, rigorously historicized, and persuasively argued. Her book makes an important contribution to several critical endeavors that characterize recent scholarship: it adds to the cultural history of gender and sexuality from World War II through the Cold War whose focus on women complements such projects as Andrew Hewitt's male-centered Political Inversions; its analysis of Nazis in the American political imagination offers a shift of perspective from Germanist studies of images of America in German culture; and it makes a significant contribution to the project of historicizing psychoanalysis, by examining the ascendancy of this discourse as part of the war effort and tracing out the cultural effects of understanding fascism (and later, totalitarianism as well as the racially prejudiced personality) in psychoanalytic rather than social or historical terms. Aside from offering intellectually and politically exciting insights into the ways in which fascism and democracy, America and Nazi Germany continue to be intertwined on a deep fantasmatic level, instructors should consider using it in courses on gender/sexuality, German-American relations, and fascism/antifascism; because Slane crafts her arguments carefully and provides excellent historical and theoretical introductions in each chapter, her study might be read by advanced undergraduates as well as experienced scholars.
The book traces how selective perceptions of historical Nazism have been instrumentalized by a range of political agendas in the U.S. for objectives that derive their rhetorical power and moral heft from the (sometimes questionable) assertion that they are antifascist. The term "sexuality" in the title indicates not merely a thematic focus on sexual and gender politics, but is also central to Slane's thesis that in the course of the 20th century, the "private" relations and practices in the home and the bedroom have become the defining marker of democratic subjectivity. The association of Nazism with sexual decadence and deviance (contrary to historical evidence), and of democracy with the attainment of a properly Oedipalized heterosexuality practiced within a patriarchal family structure has served to make family life the primary locus for scrutinizing democratic "maturity", diagnosing its failure, and devising a cure.
The book's three parts are divided along the main genres and tropes that wed notions of democratic behavior to gender-specific sexual norms. Each part consists of several chapters that trace these forms from their historical inception to postwar and contemporary versions. In the first part, entitled "The Democratic Family," Slane develops the concept of "nationalist melodrama" through analyses of Veit Harlan's film Die Goldene Stadt, the 1942 Hollywood movie Hitler's Children, and three right-wing propaganda videos from the 1980s. These texts all predicate the well-being of the nation on the sexual conduct of young women, with the crucial difference that the fascist film elevates personal drama (e.g., the daughter's disloyalty) to national, i.e., political myth, while American nationalist melodrama suggests that the fortified patriarchal family serves as (apolitical) bulwark against the incursion of political doctrines into the home. Nonetheless, men's responsible and benign protection of women, and women's subservience to their father and/or husband are the lynchpin of nationalist melodrama on both sides of the democratic/fascist divide.
The second part, "The Democratic Psyche," describes the emergence of political psychology in the U.S., surveys leftist, liberal, and conservative explanations of the fascist/authoritarian personality in psychological terms, and shows how the cultural genre of nationalist psychobiography shaped a pervasive view of political dissent as a kind of personal disorder whose etiology as well as therapy had, again, everything to do with family relations. The three chapters in this section demonstrate how the conflation of political maturity and sexual development, and the association of political dissidence with sexual regression or deviance informed classical Hollywood cinema like Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious, the social problem films that responded to the Civil Rights movement, and more recent films about neonazis. These texts and the theories they popularized tend to identify overbearing moms as the reason for the sons' political waywardness. The diagnosis of the sons' consequent inability to achieve either sexual autonomy or political maturity evidence a concept of democratic subjectivity that hinges on the patriarchal resolution of the Oedipal conflict, and implies that political dissidence corresponds with actual or psychic homosexuality or other forms of regression and perversion.
The third part, "Democratic Sex," is organized around the trope of the sexy Nazi woman, rather than a dramatic or narrative genre. It complements the previous section's analysis of the sexually deviant fascist male with an examination of the sexually deviant and politically dangerous woman. The fascist femme fatale yokes older fears about feminine evil to political threat, but the desire she evokes evidences the anxious self-doubts of democratic men. Slane reads Americans' ambivalence toward this figure by reconstructing the on- and offscreen roles of Marlene Dietrich, and by tracking the iconology of the sexy Nazi woman from Lola Lola in The Blue Angel through The Night Porter and Cabaret to the Madonna video Justify My Love.
The book's Introduction lays out the main terms and trajectories of analysis. It argues that the asserted absolute opposition of democracy and fascism is more tenuous than most antifascist rhetoric allows. While antifascism remains a powerful tool for creating democratic values, Slane shows how some political factions have chosen selective and false images of Nazism in order to cast heterosexual relations and the patriarchal family as the bedrock of democracy. While progressives might expect such tendentious appropriations of Nazism for a Christian, conservative agenda, I found Slane's astute criticism of leftist analyses of fascism, namely their failure to connect the critique of authoritarianism with a critique of patriarchy, especially useful. Her sophisticated account of the ways in which gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and nation are entwined in democratic rhetoric argues out the feminist credo that "the personal is political," and criticizes how in this rhetoric the personal has come to function as substitute for the political, while pretending that the thoroughly ideological relations in the personal realm are entirely apolitical or antipolitical. I regard her feminist study of the rhetoric around the family, democratic subjectivity, and sexual normativity as a contribution to democratic self-definition that seems as topical as a decade ago (when Dan Quayle lost his family-values campaign), and may have attained more urgency through the recent curtailment of democratic rights.
Katrin Sieg
Georgetown University
Barbara Becker-Cantarino. Schriftstellerinnen der Romantik. Epoche-Werke-Wirkung. München: C.H.Beck, 2000. 320 Seiten. Euro 19,90.
Diese material- und informationsreiche Einführung bereitet große Lesefreude, egal ob LeserInnen kein oder unterschiedlichstes Vorwissen mitbringen oder ob sie ausgewiesene ExpertInnen der Periode sind. Eine mit der Materie vertraute LeserIn wird größtes Lesevergnügen erfahren, da ihr Assoziationshorizont außerordentlich stimuliert wird; während eine LeserIn, die mit der Thematik wenig oder kaum vertraut ist, die Fülle der Informationen und Querverweise sehr zu schätzen lernen wird, da die Vernetzung unterschiedlichster historischer, kultureller und soziologischer Fakten, Informationen und Interpretationen ein dichtes Gewebe tiefsten Verständnisses zu vermitteln weiß.
Schriftstellerinnen der Romantik ist in der erfolgreichen Reihe "Arbeitsbücher zur Literaturgeschichte" erschienen. Es ist in sechs unterschiedlich lange Kapitel eingeteilt, die den historischen und literarhistorischen Hintergrund vermitteln, sowie unterschiedliche Schriftstellerinnen im einzelnen vorführen.
Das erste Kapitel "Rahmenbedingungen für Schriftstellerinnen im späten 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert: Problematik der 'Mündigkeit', 'Bestimmung des Weibes' und die 'Produkte der weiblichen Muse'" informiert in drei Unterteilungen ("A. 'Der lange Weg zur Mündigkeit'. Frauen und Literatur im späten 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert", "B. 'Bestimmung des weiblichen Geschlechts'. Die historische Theoriedebatte über 'Geschlechtsunterschied' und die romantische Liebe" und "C. 'Geschlechtszensur' und subversive Strategien: Zur Autorschaft der Frauen") über historische Begrenzungen und wesentliche Forschungsresultate, die zum umfassenden Verständnis der Produktionsbedingungen der Frauen in der Romantik unerläßlich sind. Eine kommentierte Teilbibliographie "Zur gesellschaftlichen Stellung, Sozialisation, Lesen", zu "Geschlechtsunterschied" und zur "Autorschaft der Frauen" verschafft die nötigen Hinweise zu einem weiterführenden (auch selbständigen) Studium.
"Roman und Patriarchat: Ort der Familie, Liebe und der Traum vom Ausbruch" werden im zweiten Kapitel traktiert. Unter "A" wird der "Roman von Frauen im literarhistorischen Kontext (Patriarchat)" analysiert. Eine prägnant kommentierte Bibliographie zur Forschungsliteratur und eine Analyse der bisherigen Forschungsergebnisse bietet einen notwendigen Hintergrund, auf dem die Schriftstellerinnen Therese Huber und C. Dorothea Veit (Schlegel) vorgestellt werden. Für beide finden sich ebenfalls kommentierte Bibliographien, die zu intensiven weiteren literaturgeschichtlichen Forschungen in äußerst gebraucherfreundlicher Form einlädt.
Das dritte Kapitel behandelt "Briefkultur und Geselligkeit", das vierte beschäftigt sich mit "Karoline von Günderrode: Dichtung -- Mythologie -- Geschlecht". Das fünfte Kapitel setzt sich mit "Bettina von Arnim" auseinander. Auch alle diese enthalten kommentierte Bibliographien zur jeweiligen Forschungsliteratur, die zu weiteren Studien geradezu animieren.
Das letzte Kapitel "Wirkung" setzt sich intensiv mit der "Rezeption der Schriftstellerinnen der Romantik" auseinander und widmet sich der individuellen Romantikrezeption so unterschiedlicher Autorinnen wie Hannah Arendt, Ingeborg Drewitz und Christa Wolf. Eine "Zeittafel" im Stile einer Kulturchronik und eine knapp kommentierte Gesamtbibliographie bilden den Schluß dieser umfassenden Einführung.
Selbstverständlich gehört dieses gelungene Buch in jeder Bibliothek und vor allem auch in jeder Handbibliothek einer jeden GermanistIn.
Magda Mueller
California State University, Chico