Preface

PREFACE With this volume, the Women in German Yearbook enters its second decade, marked, we hope, more by continuity with its tradition of excellent and innovative feminist scholarship in all areas of German literature and culture than by dramatic change for the sake of change. But change there has been, too. New, for example, is a recent decision by the Editorial Board that seeks to broaden the extent to which work published in the Yearbook is read and discussed by scholars in other disciplines, such as feminist studies, film studies, other literatures, and history. To this end, a policy of publishing all articles in English has been established, the result of which can be evaluated in the present volume. Implementation, as many of our contributors can attest, has not been easy, particularly in the case of our wish to increase contributions by feminist Germanists in the Federal Republic and other countries abroad. While encouraging readers to tell us their responses to the new policy, we will continue to receive and review submissions in English or German and pursue the question of translation only after a manuscript has been accepted for publication. With thirteen contributions from three continents, authors from all ranks of the profession, topics ranging from the eighteenth century to recent years, and attention to philosophy, film, drama, popular literature, and theory, Volume 11 reflects the diversity of interests and talents on which the Yearbook has thrived. While our contributors hardly speak as one, the collection of their voices offers considerably more than cacophony: Articles that are significant in themselves, enter, when clustered together in ways unforseen by their authors, into engrossing dialogue with one another. The volume opens with a contribution from filmmaker Jutta Brückner, one of our special guests at the Nineteenth Annual Women in German Conference in October 1994, at St. Augustine, Florida. Her essay traces her attempts at expressing her own female subjectivity and documents her discovery that autobiography is inextricably grounded in the biography—and the body—of the mother. "The body," she asserts, "had to be reconstructed before language could be won back." Bruckner's analysis of the development that led to her stunning 1980 film, Years of Hunger (Hungerjahre), is followed by Maggie McCarthy's commentary on that film. Mc Carthy develops a detailed analysis of how experiences that evade language in the struggle for subjectivity are given expression through the images of the film. While McCarthy's ability to read Bruckner's film is grounded in the psychoanalytic theories of thinkers such as Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva, Janice Mouton moves beyond Freudian models and draws upon D.W. Winnicott's insights on "play" and the "relational space" between the sisters in two of Margarethe von ? Women in German Yearbook 1 1 Trotta's best-known films. Employing yet another critical lens, Jennifer K. Ward examines von Trotta's first film within the historical context of feminist thought in the 1970s and the gendered moral code that Carol Gilligan explicated in her early work. The attention to early critical reception in Ward's analysis also serves as the point of departure for Renate Möhrmann's spirited critique of filmic representations of motherhood. Moving from Germany, Pale Mother {Deutschland, bleiche Mutter) to larger questions of the depiction of motherhood in the international history of film, Möhrmann locates the subversive potential of German women's film in its resistance to the narrative pattern that E. Ann Kaplan has categorized as the classic maternal melodrama: the sacrifice of the mother so that the child, who is almost inevitably male, can be integrated into the world of the fathers. Möhrmann concludes her arguments about the paradigm shift in German feminist film—and our film cluster, as well—with a provocative reference to the work of Brückner. Refocusing our attention on an earlier period, two articles assess the role of gender in censorship. Barbara Becker-Cantarino's essay on "gender censorship" examines the impact of Fichte's philosophy in establishing male tutelage over the intellectual and literary activities of women. Reference to women Romantic writers, such as Caroline Schlegel, Dorothea Schlegel, Thérèse Huber, and Sophie Mereau, demonstrates the extent...