German Women Writers of the Twentieth Century is an anthology of German women writers of the twentieth century and includes English translations of their German-language short stories. These short stories provide an insight into their creators' literary achievement and give some impression of the great variety and scope of their work. Comprised of 16 chapters, this volume begins with a short story by Ricarda Huch (1864-1947) entitled "Love," followed by another story entitled "The Wife of Pilate," by Gertrud von Le Fort (1876-1971). The remaining chapters present short stories by Elisabeth Langgässer (1899-1950), Anna Seghers (1900- ), Marie Luise Kaschnitz (1901-1974), Luise Rinser (1911- ), Ilse Aichinger (1921- ), Barbara König (1925- ), Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973), Christa Reinig (1926- ), Christa Wolf (1929- ), Gabriele Wohmann (1932- ), Helga Novak (1935- ), Gisela Elsner (1937- ), Elisabeth Meylan (1937- ), and Angelika Mechtel (1943- ). This monograph will be of interest to students, scholars, and authors who wish to know more about German literature in general and the work of German women writers in particular.

The first major study in English of nineteenth-century German women writers, this book examines their social and cultural milieu along with the layers of interpretation and representation that inform their writing. Studying a period of German literary history that has been largely ignored by modern readers, Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres demonstrates that these writings offer intriguing opportunities to examine such critical topics as canon formation; the relationship between gender, class, and popular culture; and women, professionalism, and technology. The writers she explores range from Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, who managed to work her way into the German canon, to the popular serial novelist E. Marlitt, from liberal writers such as Louise Otto and Fanny Lewald, to the virtually unknown novelist and journalist Claire von Glümer. Through this investigation, Boetcher Joeres finds ambiguities, compromises, and subversions in these texts that offer an extensive and informative look at the exciting and transformative epoch that so much shaped our own.

Essays in this volume rethink conventional ways of conceptualizing female authorship and re-examine the formal, aesthetic, and thematic terms in which German women's literature has been conceived.

They are nine women with much in common--all German speaking, all poets, all personal witnesses to the horror and devastation that was World War II. Yet, in this deeply moving collection, each provides a singularly personal glimpse into the effects of war on language, place, poetry, and womanhood. After Every War is a book of translations of women poets living in Europe in the decades before and after World War II: Rose Ausländer, Elisabeth Langgässer, Nelly Sachs, Gertrud Kolmar, Else Lasker-Schüler, Ingeborg Bachmann, Marie Luise Kaschnitz, Dagmar Nick, and Hilde Domin. Several of the writers are Jewish and, therefore, also witnesses and participants in one of the darkest occasions of human cruelty, the Holocaust. Their poems, as well as those of the other writers, provide a unique biography of the time--but with a difference. These poets see public events through the lens of deep private losses. They chart the small occasions, the bittersweet family ties, the fruit dish on a table, the lost soul arriving at a railway station; in other words, the sheer ordinariness through which cataclysm is experienced, and by which life is cruelly shattered. They reclaim these moments and draw the reader into them. The poems are translated and introduced, with biographical notes on the authors, by renowned Irish poet Eavan Boland. Her interest in the topic is not abstract. As an Irish woman, she has observed the heartbreaking effects of violence on her own country. Her experience has drawn her closer to these nine poets, enabling her to render into English the beautiful, ruminative quality of their work and to present their poems for what they are: documentaries of resilience--of language, of music, and of the human spirit--in the hardest of times.

This book presents the life stories of three women of the German-speaking realm whose lives inspired the author directly: mathematician Maria Weber Steinberg (1919-2013); journalist Irmgard Rexroth-Kern (1907-1983); and Viennese art historian Fr. Dr. Anna von Spitzmüller (1903-2001). The lives of these three women serve as emotional mirrors to the cultural transformations and tumultuous history of the 20th century. Their stories tell of the hardships, struggles, and victories of intellectual European women in this era. Each woman was related to men who played a prominent role in European cultural life, men who received some recognition in history books. As intellectual professionals, these women, in contrast, received very few public accolades for their important achievements. Placing them in the cultural context of the times in Germany and Austria, the book highlights the traumatic choices imposed on ordinary people by political and social circumstances over which they had no control. Along with the women’s individual stories, the chapters focus on overarching themes, including educated women’s roles in European society, narratives of perseverance in confronting Nazism, and specific historical background describing the incidents affecting their life trajectories.

'A New History of German Literature' offers some 200 essays on events in German literary history.

Duggan, and Adrion Dula hope both to foreground women writers' important contributions to the genre and to challenge common assumptions about what a fairy tale is for scholars, students, and general readers.