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  • From Fin-de-Siècle to Theresienstadt: The Works and Life of the Writer Elsa Porges-Bernstein
  • Cathy Gelbin
From Fin-de-Siècle to Theresienstadt: The Works and Life of the Writer Elsa Porges-Bernstein. Edited by Helga W. Kraft and Dagmar C.G. Lorenz. New York: Peter Lang, 2007. x + 260 pages. $73.95.

Over the last three decades one of the main ventures of feminist scholarship has been to lift once-influential women writers from oblivion. Many of these forgotten authors, among them Masha Kaleko, Gertrud Kolmar, Elisabeth Langgässer, and Elsa Porges-Bernstein, had been silenced and persecuted by the Nazis on racial grounds, and their popularity remained diminished after the war. Not least thanks to Helga W. Kraft and Dagmar C.G. Lorenz, the co-editors of this rich and comprehensive volume, the forgotten legacies of these women writers have seen renewed interest over the past years. Kraft and Lorenz's collaboration on the Austrian-born writer Elsa Porges-Bernstein (1866–1949) reinscribes another name into the ranks of important female authors.

Porges-Bernstein's writings over roughly four decades traverse the historic and aesthetic divides of the first half of the twentieth century. In thirteen articles written from multiple disciplinary perspectives the contributors to this volume examine the author's work from the turn of the century to the Holocaust, from naturalist theater and modernist drama to Theresienstadt memoir. Bernstein, however, was also keenly aware of the disenfranchised role of women in her day, and this insight both shaped her dramatic investigation of gender roles and led her to publish her early work under a male pseudonym. Yet despite being nearly forgotten in Germany, Bernstein's drama Maria Arndt recently saw a new production in Chicago. Its 2002 staging, Kraft and [End Page 627] Lorenz argue, highlights Bernstein's enduring relevance as a writer and dramatist, particularly in light of the current interest in formations of gender and Jewish identity in the United States and beyond. An interview with Curt Columbus, the Artistic Associate of the Chicago Steppenwolf Theater where Maria Arndt was recently shown, prefaces the volume's overall focus on Bernstein's topicality, her aesthetic importance and social appeal, the function of gender in her works, and the historical framework of her life and writings.

These questions are explored in depth in the detailed case studies presented in the volume's contribution. Helga Kraft's article looks at why Maria Arndt generated the current interest manifest in the Chicago production, while Elke Liebs examines the relationship between Bernstein's work and the canon of German and world literature, including Bernstein's invocation of the fairy-tale genre. Elizabeth Ametsbichler treats the dramatist's construction of gender in relation to the discourse of the early Women's Movement, finding that Bernstein cannot be regarded a feminist in the contemporary understanding, even while her concern with women's subservient role exposes the power structures of patriarchal society. Astrid Weigert engages with the question of naturalist theatre, arguing that Bernstein's dramas, which are frequently classed within naturalism, reject its impetus to harmonize art and science with their respective female and male codings. This assessment is largely shared by Friederike Emonds, who detects a female modernist aesthetics in the author's dramatic works. Gertrud Roesch and Susanne Kord look at female character constellations in Bernstein's plays, while in the final section of the volume Deborah Viëtor-Engländer explores biographical questions, such as how the writer's predicament as a Jewish woman led her to adopt the male German pseudonym Ernst Rosmer in order to reach her audience and how, finally, she was forced to face Nazi persecution and deportation. In a closer look at Bernstein's camp memoir Das Leben als Drama. Erinnerungen an Theresienstadt, Dagmar C.G. Lorenz poses writing as a survival technique that confirmed the middle-class origins of Bernstein and German-speaking Jews like her, a cultural conservatism preventing members of this group from more radical tactics of resistance. In the concluding piece of the volume, Rita Bake and Birgit Kiupel recount their rediscovery of Bernstein's camp memoir.

Bernstein, the study shows, made significant inroads...

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