Truth to Tell: German Women's Autobiographies and Turn-of-the-Century Culture, and: Das Familiengedächtnis: Erinnerung im deutschjüdischen Bürgertum 1890 bis 1932 (review)

The Jewish Quarterly Review, XClII, Nos. 3-4 (January-April, 2003) 643-647 Katharina Gerstenberger. Truth to Tell: German Women's Autobiographies and Turn-of-the-Century Culture. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2000. Pp. 208. Miriam Gebhardt. Das Familiengedächtnis: Erinnerung im deutschj üdischen Bürgertum 1890 bis 1932. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1999. Pp. 229. Around the year 1900, German and Austrian society witnessed a wave of autobiographical writing which was also called "the Memoir Boom." Hundreds of memoirs were published and became very popular reading material. This phenomenon, which can be seen as an expression of the democratization of German cultural and literary life, went beyond all borders of religion, class, and gender and played a part in the formation of modern mass society. In the atmosphere of the expectations, challenges, and anxieties that modernization posed, this flood of memoirs affected the reading habits of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, members of the upper middle and working classes, and women and men. The autobiographies played an important role in the formation of modern German national consciousness and in exposing major sections of the reading public to problems of history and society. Among the various book publishers that began to produce series of memoirs was the Jüdischer Verlag. The first book of a series of Jewish memoirs was a modern German translation of The Reminiscences ofGlückel ofHammeln from the 17th century. Gliickel has since become an icon of Jewish feminist activism and of loyalty to the Jewish tradition alike, and nowadays Gliickel has a central place at the Jewish museum in Berlin. Following Gliickel's model, as well as the example of turn-of-the-century German bourgeoisie, many Jewish women wrote their own memoirs. AU of them coped in different ways with the question of forming their identity in the face of the competing forces of tradition and modernity, Judaism and Germanness , as well as around contemporary gender roles and images. The phenomenon of feminine autobiographical writing in turn-of-thecentury Germany is illuminated in an interesting and unique way in Katharina Gerstenberger's Truth to Tell: German Women's Autobiographies and Turn-of-the-Century Culture. The book is not focused on the Jewish aspects of this literature nor is Gerstenberger's aim simply to contribute to the understanding of German and Austrian society of this period, but rather to illumine the wider topics of feminine autobiographical writing and the challenges and crises of modernity. However, the book can still help us to learn about the social background of "the Memoir Boon," the various forms 644THE JEWISH QUARTERLY REVIEW of memory and identity found in these autobiographies, and to understand women's autobiographical writing in context. Gerstenberger's book deals with four autobiographies which were written in turn-of-the-century Europe, two in Germany and two in Austria, but the sources of her research and the topics of her discussion range far beyond these individual case studies. Her major interest in this work is not the written autobiographies but the social roots of their narratives and their reception . Gerstenberger draws extensively on periodicals and on the first modern research into autobiography which appeared, not by chance, at the time of "the Memoir Boom." Gerstenberger shows that not only the writers but also the readers and the scholars of that time had to cope with the challenges and the anxieties that modernity aroused and tried to propose different solutions for them through the medium of the autobiographical genre. Current feminist critics see the work of Georg Misch, who is considered to be the pioneer of the modern study of autobiography, as a defense of German male high culture against the flood of modern autobiographies.1 Misch's ideal autobiographer was, according to Gerstenberger, "male, endowed with unique individuality and a claim to historical representativeness" (p. 10). The autobiographies of women, and of course those of Jewish women, were therefore pushed to the margins and were considered inferior. Gerstenberger's book aims to illuminate exactly those memoirs that were considered less important and inferior by Misch and those following him. Drawing on the intellectual legacy of the intervening century, she focuses on gender problems...