Sich MitSprache erschreiben. Selbstzeugnisse als politische Praxis schreibender Frauen, Deutschland 1840–1919 by Katharina von Hammerstein, and: The Political Woman in Print: German Women’s Writing 1845–1919 by Birgit Mikus (review)

At the core of both these monographs is the question of how individuals can participate in political discourse in an era in which they are legally and socio-culturally precluded from doing so due to the dominant construct of their identity. As the titles indicate, the politically marginalized group that is the focus of von Hammerstein’s and Mikus’s studies is German women who produced works of non-fiction, fiction, and/or art between 1840 and 1919 (Louise Aston, Malwida von Meysenbug, Mathilde Franziska Anneke, Fanny Lewald, Louise Otto-Peters, Hedwig Dohm, Frieda von Bülow, and Käthe Kollwitz). Both authors analyze strategies employed by the female authors and artists to lay claim to political agency in an era that deemed public, political participation on the part of women “unwomanly.” The major differences between the respective analyses derive from their divergent theoretical frameworks.

Von Hammerstein develops her own interdisciplinary approach by synthesizing genre theory, speech act theory, and gender theory with detailed knowledge of the socio-historical context(s) in which the self-referential texts she analyzes were produced. Her understanding of self-referential writing—autobiographies, autobiographical texts, testimonials, and Ego-documents—is clearly anchored in previous research in this area. She is particularly influenced by the work of the early modern historian Gabriele Jancke and her “Konzept vom autobiographischen Schreiben als sozialer Praxis” (20). As she quotes Jancke, autobiographical texts are “Quellen für die konzeptuelle pragmatische Selbsteinbildung der Verfasserinnen und Verfasser in die gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhänge ihrer Zeit” (21) and must be seen “als eine Form des Agierens in sozialen Kontexten” (21). Von Hammerstein complements this participatory notion of self-referential writing with “John Austins Konzept vom Sprechakt als sozialer Handlung, Michail Bachtins Konzept der Dialogizität und Hannah Arendts Philosophie des Gesprächs als zentraler Moment politischen Handelns” (37). This allows her to demonstrate connections among content, form, and communicative strategies used to engage the audience(s) as a means of actively participating in the cultural and political discourses of the day. Due to the complexity of von Hammerstein’s framework and the thorough documentation of its reliance on and distinction from earlier theoretical works, Part A—where it is laid out—is very dense, and at times the reader loses sight of all the strands she is combining. However, its effectiveness at producing compelling and nuanced readings of the primary texts discussed is evident in the following chapters. The target audience is clearly graduate students and other scholars.

These chapters deal with Louise Aston, Hedwig Dohm, Frieda von Bülow, and Käthe Kollwitz. The function(s) of the self-referential female “I” is the crux of von Hammerstein’s readings of these authors. Therefore, she focuses primarily on their non-fictional texts where there is an undeniable correlation between the writer/artist and the “I.” In the case of Aston, she also includes some of her poetry. The finesse of her theoretical framework allows von Hammerstein, however, to develop targeted questions—related but not identical—specific to each author’s historical situation, style, and message, allowing her to analyze the writings of women with vastly different political goals, using different genres of self-referential writing, but all with the purpose—explicit or not—of taking part in and inviting their audience to take part in and affect the political discourse of the day.

All the texts analyzed share a quality of “Dialogizität” with an implicit audience, or in the case of Kollwitz, with herself (95, 320–21). Von Hammerstein makes a compelling argument for the centrality of writing in Kollwitz’s creative process even though her communication with a public audience is, for the most part...