Preface

PREFACE This volume of the Women in German Yearbook is on the cusp of the Yearbook's twentieth year. In most ways, it marks a fairly familiar path in its presentation of current work in feminist German Studies: it begins with what we might call a "creative piece," although we certainly view all contributions to the Yearbook as creative; it then presents something not entirely typical but certainly not foreign to Yearbook readers, namely, a thematic cluster of articles; it continues with a series of what Yearbook editors tend to call the "historical section," that is, a chronologically arranged set of pieces that can be clearly tied to certain historical eras; and it concludes with an extremely helpful piece of a more documentary nature, although its quantitative sections are supplemented by qualitative material. As always, we intend to examine current scholarly directions in our particular subfield of feminist German Studies and to present you with an interesting cross-section of what we find is going on. There is a certain comfort in the familiarity of what we are offering you, although there is a certain discomfort too, especially when we realize what is missing. In this volume, for instance, we were surprised and unsettled to realize that the pieces that we had accepted for inclusion in the historical section all focus on the twentieth century. As the annual conferences of Women in German have shown especially in recent years, there is interesting, subtle, and important work being done in gender studies on the literature and culture of pre-twentieth-century German-speaking countries. We are hopeful that the Yearbook will receive more of the results of such research for review in the coming months. We welcome work that is wide-ranging in its interdisciplinary concerns, its desire to conceptualize broadly and comparatively, and its ability to think imaginatively about gender and other analytical categories of interest to feminist inquiry. And we particularly hope that the upcoming volume marking the twentieth year of the Yearbook will attract even more in the way of innovative and interesting scholarship. We urge our readers to contribute. We welcome your work and look forward to reading it. We begin this volume with "The Measure of Our Words, or Taking How We Talk to Each Other Seriously," an elegant and eloquent ? Women in German Yearbook 19 essay by Angelika Bammer that discusses the politics of language as it can be exemplified by Women in German. Her examination focuses specifically on the debates surrounding the use of German at a critical time in the development of the organization, the difficulties, the amazing emotional baggage connected to such debates, and the ways in which we were transformed in the process. An earlier version of her essay was presented at the opening session of the 2002 annual Women in German meeting, and we view it as a convincing example of the ways in which the essay form, that mix of the personal and the objective , can so perfectly articulate feminist thinking. What follows is a cluster of pieces that were initially presented at a conference in April 2001 at the University of Minnesota on women and the Holocaust. When conference co-organizers Leslie Morris and her political science colleague Lisa Disch, both faculty members at Minnesota , offered revised and expanded versions of these four papers to us—and when we and the external reviewers had a look at them—we were impressed with the wide range of issues presented, but especially with the ways all four papers, and the introduction to them, gave such firm evidence of how scholarship on the Holocaust is benefiting enormously from the increased presence of feminist work. The introduction to these pieces, by Morris and Disch, sets the series of papers up with a contextualizing look at the conference itself, at the questions that were posed at the outset, and at the ways in which the conference met expectations and created even more challenges and questions. Providing a provocative opening for the cluster of pieces is Karyn Ball's "Unspeakable Differences, Obscene Pleasures: The Holocaust as an Object of Desire," which presents theoretical and thematic focuses that are echoed in the other pieces—issues...