Preface

As Volume 23 goes to press, we're happy to report that the Women in German Yearbook continues to adapt to the electronic age. In recent years we transitioned to paperless editing, and as of 2008 the Yearbook's visibility will increase dramatically when it becomes part of Project Muse. Available online and in their entirety, our essays will be in the company of many other excellent journals of the humanities, arts and social sciences. Please alert your libraries and encourage them to subscribe.

While the current volume also reflects advances in scholarship on gender, film and media studies, and Germanic studies, it begins with the voice of Esther Dischereit, last year's invited speaker at the Women in German Annual Conference at Sunbird, Utah. Lest we start feeling too smug about our progress on the electronic front, Dischereit keeps us grounded in the animism of everyday objects, like a piece of bread in a toaster, in a highly industrialized world. She also reflects on the complexities of writing from a Jewish identity, whether willingly or of necessity.

Our film studies section features other kinds of thorny identities, born of the need to work through larger historical events and cultural anxieties. Cathy Gelbin's "Double Visions: Queer Femininity and Holocaust Film from Ostatni Etap to Aimée & Jaguar" offers a comprehensive overview of lesbian sexuality in Holocaust films, initially employed to underscore Nazi perversion and later to rewrite women's historical role as either victim or resister. Barbara Hales argues in her essay on the femme fatale in film noir that exiled German film directors in Hollywood used the female criminal and double to assuage the existential distress they experienced in the early days of the Weimar Republic. Christina Gerhardt's analysis of Hito Steyerl's film Die leere Mitte (1998) tracks several centuries of shifting historical boundaries around Potsdamer Platz and their implications for Germany's more liminal identities.

Other kinds of concrete historical circumstances impacting women's lives and psyches emerge in a range of essays spanning the 18^th to the 20^th centuries. Laurie Johnson's "The Romantic and Modern Practice of Animal Magnetism: Friedrich Schlegel's Protocols of the Magnetic Treatment of Countess Lesniowska" addresses Schlegel's investment in the psychiatric practice of "animal magnetism," its enactment on one woman's body, and its larger implications for philosophy and religion. Ritchie Robertson's essay on 19^th-century Austrian writer Caroline Pichler argues that her conflicted notions of women's gender identity vis-à-vis both family and nation provide an important backdrop to her novel The Swedes in Prague.

Twentieth-century women's expanded economic, intellectual, and political possibilities brought their own assorted consequences, evident in several essays that take journalism, political activism, and novels as their starting point. Julia Karolle-Berg's essay "Creating a Maidservant Community through Newspapers: The Berliner Dienstboten-Zeitung, 1898–1900" traces a newspaper editor's efforts to foster professional consciousness and community among female domestic employees not otherwise professionally organized. German-Jewish pacifist writer Clementine Krämer, the subject of an essay by Elizabeth Loentz, used both journalistic and literary outlets to promote her own brand of anti-war activism in the early twentieth century, while simultaneously negotiating her identity as a German/Jewish/feminist/pacifist. In a more personal realm, New Women struggled with the psychic downside of expanded choices, like the independent but melancholic heroines of novels by Franziska zu Reventlow and Gabriele Reuter that Lisabeth Hock an-alyzes, who nonetheless use their temperament to expand the creative possibilities associated with (single) motherhood. In a more conceptual rendition of emancipated lives, Lou Andreas-Salomé's novel Fenitschka, the subject of Laura Deiulio's essay, traces one academic woman's movement through the "forward" and "backward" spaces of Paris and St. Petersburg respectively, with the latter, paradoxically, offering a neue Frau more possibilities.

Finally, Dagmar Lorenz's essay "Transatlantic Perspectives on Men, Women, and Other Primates: The Ape Motif in Kafka, Canetti, and Cooper's and Jackson's King Kong Films" expands our gendered frame to include "interspecies" concerns and the status of relations between humans and...