Abstract

Luise Mühlbach's recollections of her Mecklenburg childhood demonstrate the productive capacity of remembering, or rather, how representation of the past can serve as a defense against the present. In reinventing the province as the reserve of the eccentric and originary, as the place where desire is expansively expressed, Mühlbach posits an alternative to the power politics of imperialist Prussia, that is, a feminized and domesticated nation more inviting to women readers and to a public in other German-speaking principalities (including Austria) who lacked Prussian sympathies. In the end quirky Mecklenburg represents not the particular, but the universal, and thus stands not on the periphery, but at the center of an imagined German nation. (LT)

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