Preface

PREFACE With this volume, we have reached what feels like a milestone of sorts: ten years of the Women in German Yearbook, our first decade. A decade sounds more substantial somehow than a period of years such as eight or nine that has no special name; there is a sense of having "arrived." Of course, longevity alone would be a dubious achievement without quality—and the articles in this volume are, we believe, among the best our journal has offered: original, thought-provoking, and useful. Contributors from Germany, Great Britain, and the USA offer provocative new readings of literary works from the nineteenth century to the present and bring a range of theoretical perspectives to bear on issues of gender and sexual identity in literature, film, publishing house practices, and even parliamentary debates in German-speaking countries. As always, the articles resonate in unexpected and exciting ways with each other. Redefinitions of the public and private spheres are the focus of several articles and inform the analysis in several others. The instability of constructions of gender and sexual identity is a theme or subtheme of nearly every contribution. Feminist perspectives on the Holocaust yield new and sometimes painful insights into the complexity of gendered experience. The volume opens with three articles that offer innovative approaches to theorizing the public and private spheres, building on recent work in cultural studies, history, political theory, feminist philosophy, and even the theory of letters. The first article, by Richard McCormick, focuses on the instability of the boundaries between those spheres in Weimar Germany as reflected in (and in part produced by) the new forms of mass culture that emerged during that period. Taking G.W. Pabst's 1926 film Geheimnisse einer Seele as emblematic of a "New Objectivist" sensibility, he shows how the cinema provided a "public" place to project "private" anxieties about gender identity, and argues that the politics of gender in Weimar culture can illuminate the relationship of national, class, and gender identities to public dialogue in Germany today. Turning to the issue of Öffentlichkeit under state socialism, Elizabeth Mittman proposes that we regard writers as actually embodying whatever public sphere existed in the former GDR up to 1989. She analyzes Christa Wolfs and Helga Königsdorf's 1989-90 extra-literary publications in light of the authors' need to negotiate new positions for themselves in the drastically altered post-Wende public sphere. Familiar definitions of the two spheres are also challenged by Ruth-Ellen B. Joeres in her examination of early nineteenth-century women writers' letters. Focusing especially on the Rahel Varnhagen/Pauline Wiesel and Bettine von Arnim/Karoline von Günderrode correspondences, she reads the ? Women in German Yearbook 10 homosocial content in their letters as suggesting the willful creation of a social sphere distinct from those usually identified as public or private, one responsive to the expression of their desires and the construction of their identities. Two feminist revisions of Heinrich von Kleist's prose follow. Marjorie Gelus continues the challenge to traditional Kleist scholarship she began in WIG Yearbook 8 by analyzing the obsessive focus on sex and gender in three of Kleist's stories as the author's response to his own rejection of Enlightenment values. Rather than constructing ideological correctives to the loss of these values as did so many of his contemporaries, Kleist, she argues, focused on the threats to order, for him embodied in women and their sexuality. Kleist's famous "Marionettentheater" essay is the focus of Gail Hart's contribution. Contrasting Kleist's use of the word Anmut with that of Schiller, she shows how Kleist's de-humanization and de-feminization of that virtue reinforce the exclusivity of a male homosocial universe. A nineteenth-century woman writer's view of female sexuality is the subject of Brigid Haines's contribution. Working with turn-of-the-century as well as contemporary theories of domination and submission, she argues that Lou Andreas-Salome's Eine Ausschweifung (1898) stands out both in its time and among Salome's works for its treatment of the relationship between female erotic desire and masochism. Two contributors offer fresh perspectives on literature from the former GDR. Silke von der...