Women, Emancipation and the German Novel 1871–1910: Protest Fiction in its Cultural Context by Charlotte Woodford (review)

German women’s writing during the Vormärz and the middle of the nineteenth century, which has been much studied in recent years, seems to have remained somewhat isolated from the literary system, struggling for a hearing and for persuasiveness in the patriarchal culture. Except for Fanny Lewald, a family-magazine author like E. Marlitt, or a successful writer for the stage like Charlotte Birch-Pfeiffer, few seem to have achieved professional careers comparable to those of male authors. This began to change significantly towards the end of the nineteenth century. While society continued to be under patriarchal governance, the number of women authors increased and they became more visible. The protest against the conditions under which women were obliged to live became widely thematic in their books. Charlotte Woodford of Cambridge University devotes eight compact chapters to eleven such writers. Some are well-known: Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, Bertha von Suttner, and Lou Andreas-Salomé; some will be recognizable by those familiar with German literature around the turn of the century: Gabriele Reuter, Helene Böhlau, Hedwig Dohm, and Clara Viebig; three were new, at least to me: Vera (pseudonym for Betty Kurth, 1878– 1948), Ilse Frapan (pseudonym for Elise Therese Levien, 1848–1908), and Else Jerusalem (1877–1942). Perhaps a special case is Minna Kautsky, better known as a political writer but also a successful author of socialist fiction.

For each of the novels treated, Woodford carefully defines the position of the author in regard to women’s issues and the nature of the protest against established social convention in regard to political participation, women’s education, women’s work, and a reform of sexual relations. Throughout she accepts that these books differ in these respects, and also often in emotional tone, from male writing. She highlights Julius Rodenberg’s Deutsche Rundschau and S. Fischer’s publishing house as hospitable to such writers.

Ebner-Eschenbach’s Das Gemeindekind (1887) belongs to her pattern of works sympathetic to the poor, rejecting gender roles, and critical of the Catholic Church’s reinforcement of economic inequality. Because the novel suggests the alterability of circumstances, the socialists were interested in it as reading for the working class. Woodford combines the Nobel Peace Prize winner Bertha von Suttner’s Die Waffen nieder! (1889) and Minna Kautsky’s Stefan von Grillenhof (1881) under the heading of political literature and pacifism. Woodford takes their stark depictions of the horrors of war and physical suffering as innovations in the realist mode, although Wilhelm Raabe and Friedrich Spielhagen had written of such things somewhat earlier. Suttner modifies her realism with a sentimental discourse, while Kautsky, the “red Marlitt” (44), concentrates on the sufferings of working-class mothers of the soldiers, who are cannon fodder for capitalism; at the end a collective garden is formed. Gabriele Reuter’s Aus guter Familie (1895) deals with the plight of the “surplus woman,” the middle-class spinster who has not succeeded in getting married and has no role and no activity or stimulation. The novel gives much attention to fashion and material culture, but the protagonist is forced to witness the miseries of the urban poor and the descent of a woman into prostitution. She is powerless to do anything about these injustices and is, in fact, complicit in them.

It may surprise some to find Helene Böhlau here, as she acquired a reputation as an author of cheery stories about Goethe’s Weimar, but with Der Rangierbahnhof (1896) and Halbtier! (1899) she was in her Naturalist phase. Both novels are concerned with the problem of the compatibility of motherhood with the pursuit of a career and the exploitation of mothers by men. A scene in Halbtier! of the pains of childbirth was so vivid that the editor Rodenberg tried to have it toned down. A poor woman, who has died in childbirth, is shown being dissected under the male...