Preface

PREFACE We have a bumper crop of good articles this year, pushing the one-pound mailing limit beyond which we dare not go (costs are alleged to double). The volume opens with a cluster of articles that have a common affinity for perspectives of transnational feminism. The germ for this section was a particularly compelling panel at the 2004 Women in German conference (thanks to organizers Jennifer Hosek and Elizabeth Mittman!), but happenstance brought us several more related manuscripts. Two of these are interviews with writers who negotiate competing currents of cultures and languages in their work and their lives: Bettina Brandt's interview of Yoko Tawada—who writes in both Japanese and German, and who takes issue "with the presumption of a stable, nation-based, language-rooted identity" (Brandt 6)—and Helga Kraft's interview of Sabine Scholl—an expatriate Austrian who has lived and worked in Portugal, Japan, the United States, and Germany , and whose works "articulate her discoveries in transnational interconnectedness" (Kraft 86). Emily Jeremiah also focuses on a border -troubling contemporary writer, the Finnish-based German poet Dorothea Grünzweig, whose poems "enact and celebrate nomadism" (Jeremiah 241). Deborah Janson explores Afro-German identity formation through an examination of Ika Hügel-Marshall's autobiography Daheim unterwegs: Ein deutsches Leben. The other two pieces in this group foreground theory. Beverly Weber's concern is the too-often narrowly cultural focus of scholarship on textual figures of immigrant and minority women in Germany, one that obscures their economic and political participation in public life. Maria Stehle's seemingly whimsical choice of subject—her experiences in Berlin telecafés—is the occasion for critical reflection on concepts of nation that borrows from "feminist political geography and the artistic concept of Psychogeography " (Stehle 39). Among the five remaining articles, only one addresses pre-20th century material: Cindy Brewer's study of the role of Raphael's painting Transfiguration (1520) in Friederike Helene Unger's Bekenntnisse einer schönen Seele von ihr selbst geschrieben (1806). This volume of the Yearbook may lack chronological variety, but it does offer an unusual number of forays into interdisciplinarity. In addition to ? Women in German Yearbook 21 Stehle's work with concepts of geography and Brewer's thoughtful analysis of Raphael's painting, there are the following efforts: • David Prickett explores the topography of Weimar Berlin —particularly as it is represented in fiction—as constitutive of male homosexual identity, and draws on medical, legal, and political discourses as well. • Susan Funkenstein studies not only the painting of Otto Dix, but also his dancing and his style of dress (she cites liberally from contemporary fashion magazines) as exemplary constructions of masculinity in Weimar Germany. • Gundolf Grami's entertaining look at Sound of Music tourism in Salzburg (grist for the cabaret at last year's Women in German conference) reads the tours as a "performative space for the construction and narration of Austrian national identity " (Grami 192). • Music makes a rare appearance in the Yearbook in Elizabeth Bridges's account of the rise and fall of Berlin's Love Parade, with particular attention to the electronic music that it featured . It has been a treat to pull together a volume with offerings as diverse as these, and to enjoy expertise in areas far from our own oft-plowed fields. This is the third volume that I have worked on, and I have decided not to stay on for a second term. I have loved the work, and I am grateful to the two coeditors with whom I shared it: first Ruth-Ellen Joeres, and now Helga Kraft. As of this writing, the search for my successor is underway, and the candidates are impressive. Thank you for having me, and bon voyage to the next team! Marjorie Gelus September 2005 ...