Introduction

This special theme issue brings together ten articles whose principal concern resides with representations of masculinity in eighteenth- to twentieth-first-century German films and literary texts – from Theodor Johann Quistorp’s comedy Der Hypochondrist (1745) to Antje Rávic Strubel’s Unter Schnee (2001), from fin-de-siècle Austrian women writers to early postwar DEFA films. Despite the broad time span and what could be termed a “specialized diversity” among the articles, there is much that connects them. First, all focus on literary texts and films that were products of Western modernity, the post-Enlightenment era when the one-sex model, which had previously interpreted the female body as a less perfect execution of the male body, was replaced by the two-sex model that is dominant to this day. Second, these articles discuss texts that originated in German-language areas – in Swedish-Pommerania and Switzerland, in prewar Imperial Austria and in Weimar Germany, in the early GDR and in post-unification Germany. Finally, all the articles share a theoretical foundation: They consider femininity and masculinity to be not universal or natural categories of sex/ gender, but rather discursive constructs, historically and socially determined categories of identity that are negotiated, affirmed, and subverted in the artistic process.

Criticism that investigates constructions of masculinity in film and literature is a relatively new entry in the discourse of masculinity studies, eclipsed both temporally and in terms of theoretical sophistication in comparison to such disciplines as sociology, history, psychology, and cultural studies. Thus much of literary criticism on masculinity derives its theoretical framework from these neighbouring disciplines – for example, as in several of the articles offered here, from Robert W. Connell’s concept of hegemonic masculinity. Likewise, while the study of masculinity is commonly held to be a late entry ino the “game” of gender studies, the analysis of masculinity has, as Claudia Breger notes in this volume, “become a dominant paradigm in German gender studies at the beginning of the twenty-first century” (155; see also Kühne 9).

The history of masculinity is arguably (at least in the Western world) a history of masculinity in crisis: “Nichts ist so unstet wie die Männlichkeit,“ reads the first sentence of Wolfgang Schmale’s Geschichte der Männlichkeit (1450–2000) (9). Schmale highlights the changing notions of masculinity from the Rennaissance to the French Revolution and modernity, varying models and ideals of masculinity that were socially negotiated throughout the centuries. But he also argues convincingly that only with the European Enlightenment did uniform anthropological definitions of woman and man take hold. These in turn led directly to the hegemonic concepts of feminity and masculinity that are active to this day (20). As such, the much-discussed “crisis of masculinity” that is purported to have taken its beginning at the turn of the twentieth century can be identified as a crisis of masculine hegemony, a crisis that continues today and finds its regressive expressions in the mythopoetic men’s movements of the 1990s or in the homophobic policies of movements of the religious (and political) right both in Europe and North America.

Critical research into issues of masculinity and masculine identity originated in the Anglo-American realm, where it underwent several transmutations in keeping with and in reaction to developments in feminism, feminist theory, queer studies, postcolonial studies, and most recently, gender studies. A “three-phase model” has gained considerable acceptance; it stipulates the beginnings of critical studies of masculinity from the 1970s on (cf. Stephan 18–19; Walter 97–99; also the summary by Edwards 2–3). The first phase is the development of the “sex role paradigm,” which focussed on issues of sex-role learning and socialization in its argument for the socially constructed nature of masculinity. While sex-role theory undertook to show that male gender roles were constructed, it also posited as universal (and hegemonic) a white, middle-class masculinity. By focussing on the negative effects of male socialization, it implied a level of oppression for men concomitant to that experienced by women. These implications led to the demand for a new kind of “critique of men” (Hearn & Morgan 203), beginning...