Preface

PREFACE We complete our editing of Women in German Yearbook 9 with a sigh of relief and satisfaction. The present collection, like last year's again spans German literary history from the middle ages to the present. And again, perusal of the finished volume reveals even more recurring themes and overlapping concerns than we had anticipated during the process of article selection. Among the issues addressed by more than one author are the construction of gender differences in literature, popular culture, and public policy; theories of the construction of a national identity; racism and antisemitism in German literature and society; and the persistence of gender bias in literary criticism. Several contributions highlight the interdisciplinary nature and activist roots of feminist scholarship and teaching. And in different ways, the articles illustrate the interrelatedness of literature, scholarship, and politics. The volume begins with historian Ann Taylor Allen's comparison of the Women's Studies movements in West Germany and the USA. Her analysis of the different patterns of institutionalization in the two countries will interest everyone who has grappled with the need for both feminist autonomy and institutional support for Women's Studies teaching and research. Allen's historical perspective also invites reconsideration of strategies for achieving the Utopian goal of transforming knowledge with which the Women's Studies movements began. The next four articles offer fresh approaches to texts from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Susan Signe Morrison reexamines the Early New High German prose novels of Elisabeth von Nassau-Saarbr ücken and Eleonore von Österreich, arguing that their adaptations of French sources were inspired by the desire to represent women rulers as models for emulation. Morrison's analysis expands our understanding of the role that noblewomen in the late middle ages played in the development of German-language literature as well as of women's role in the political arena. Gender-specific models of communication in Harsdörffer's Frauenzimmer Gesprächspiele are examined by Christi GriesshaberWeninger . Drawing on recent research by sociolinguists such as Fishman, Tannen, and Trömel-Plötz, she finds evidence for a centuries-old tradition ? Women in German Yearbook 9 of gendered speech. Gertrud Bauer Pickar offers a close reading of Die Judenbuche that is informed by a subtle understanding of DrosteH ülshoff's sympathy for the lot of married women in Westphalian villages. Pickar argues that Droste's depiction of the battered wife Margreth is more positive than critics echoing the misogyny of the novelle's narrator have acknowledged. Kirsten Belgum discusses strategies used in the popular nineteenth-century magazine Die Gartenlaube to construct a cohesive national identity predicated on the ideal of a bourgeois family in which women bridged the space between home and nation. She argues that the domestication of women, both as they appeared in the magazine and as readers, was a crucial element in the concept of the nation as an "imagined community." German unification and the subsequent opening of archives previously inaccessible to Western researchers paved the way for the new perspectives in GDR Studies provided in the next two articles. Turning to hitherto neglected women dramatists of the 1950s and early 60s, Katrin Sieg examines the tensions in their works between officially proclaimed gender equality and the authors' recognition of the "double burden" increasingly imposed upon women. Complementing Sieg's article is Katharina von Ankum's survey of abortion legislation in the GDR from the early years to legalization in 1972. Threading her way through a maze of documents, von Ankum analyzes the GDR's ultimately unsuccessful efforts to recruit women for both production and reproduction through an aggressively pronatalist policy. These articles will be useful for anyone seeking to understand the conflicting messages about motherhood, pregnancy, and abortion in many works by GDR authors. The next two articles offer post-unification perspectives on the study of GDR literature. Examining the writings of Elke Erb and Gabriele Stötzer Kachold, both associated with the Prenzlauer Berg circle, Friederike Eigler argues that the formal and linguistic experiments of these two writers are an integral part of issues such as gender and power relations. Her article challenges the work of those scholars who have read GDR literature with more...