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Upon publication in 1895, Gabriele Reuter's From a Good Family (Aus guter Familie) became something of a cultural event, making its author one of Germany's most talked-about women of letters. Set in the first two decades of the Second German Reich, this story of a Prussian bureaucrat's daughter caught between conformity and rebellion struck at the core of the class that upheld the empire, revealing the hypocrisy and misery at the very heart of the bourgeois family. It recorded the conflicted and ultimately interminable adolescence of a middle-class girl who failed to fulfill the destiny prescribed for her by her gender and class, a young woman who, despite an incipient high-spiritedness and ...
Known primarily for the novel, Aus guter Familie, Gabriele Reuter has not yet been accorded the attention she deserves for her contribution to German literature in general and women's writing in particular. The precisely observed portraits of women in the novels discussed in this volume allow us to experience the complex interplay of societal norms and individual needs which shape feminine existence. Among the themes treated are misguided motherhood, the virtue of the unwed mother, the conflict between the will to be and the need to love and be loved, woman's role in the political sphere and a comparison of womanhood in two generations. One of the enduring pleasures of reading Reuter is the rich variety of female characters from the early part of the twentieth century.
Focusing on feminism in Germany, Towards Emancipation examines some of the most influential women writers of the nineteenth century, from the late-Romantic writers, such as Bettina von Arnim and Johanna Schopenhauer, to writers who were active in the 1848 Revolution, such as Malwida von Meysenbug and Johanna Kinkel. The heart of the book is devoted to the leading proponents of emancipation, Hedwig Dohm, Helene Bohlau and the prolific Louise Otto-Peters, yet it also includes mainstream writers whose attitudes towards the movement range from lukewarm (the enormously popular Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach and Gabriele Reuter) to downright hostile (Lou Andreas-Salome and Franziska zu Reventlow).
In this broad-ranging study of German fiction by women between 1770-1914, the author aims to add a new dimension to existing debates on the association of women and illness in literature. She constructs a history of women's self-starvation, eating behaviour and wasting diseases.
Nietzsche's friend, the philosopher Paul Rée, once said that Nietzsche was more important for his letters than for his books, and even more important for his conversations than for his letters. In Conversations with Nietzsche, Sander Gilman and David Parent present a fascinating selection of eighty-seven memoirs, anecdotes, and informal recollections by friends and acquaintances of Nietzsche. Translated from the definitive German collection, Begegnungen mit Nietzsche, these biographical pieces--some of which have never before appeared in English--cover the entire span of Nietzsche's life: his boyhood friendships, his arrival at the University of Bonn, his appointment to professor at Basel a...
The novels of Imperial Berlin, a rich repository of social discourse about the simultaneous experiences of nationhood and modernity in Imperial Germany, reveal distinct historical and cultural obstacles impeding authors' attempts to envision a humane, modern German identity.
The first German women’s movement embraced the belief in a demographic surplus of unwed women, known as the Frauenüberschuß, as a central leitmotif in the campaign for reform. Proponents of the female surplus held that the advances of industry and urbanization had upset traditional marriage patterns and left too many bourgeois women without a husband. This book explores the ways in which the realms of literature, sexology, demography, socialism, and female activism addressed the perceived plight of unwed women. Case studies of reformers, including Lily Braun, Ruth Bré, Elisabeth Gnauck-Kühne, Helene Lange, Alice Salomon, Helene Stöcker, and Clara Zetkin, demonstrate the expansive influence of the discourse surrounding a female surfeit. By combining the approaches of cultural, social, and gender history, The Surplus Woman provides the first sustained analysis of the ways in which imperial Germans conceptualized anxiety about female marital status as both a product and a reflection of changing times.
Thomas Mann is among the greatest of German prose writers, and was the first German novelist to reach a wide English-speaking readership since Goethe. Novels such as Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, and Doktor Faustus attest to his mastery of subtle, distanced irony, while novellas such as Death in Venice reveal him at the height of his mastery of language. In addition to fresh insights about these best-known works of Mann, this volume treats less-often-discussed works such as Joseph and His Brothers, Lotte in Weimar, and Felix Krull, as well as his political writings and essays. Mann himself was a paradox: his role as family-father was both refuge and façade; his love of Germany was match...
The ideal book for anyone interested in Nietzsche's life and work.
The origins of the incest taboo have puzzled many of the most influential minds of the West, from Plutarch to St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, David Hume, Lewis Henry Morgan, Sigmund Freud, Emile Durkheim, Edward Westermarck, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. This book puts the discussion of incest on a new foundation. It is the first attempt to thoroughly examine the rich literature, from philosophical, theological, and legal treatises to psychological and biological-genetic studies, to a wide variety of popular cultural media over a long period of time. The book offers a detailed examination of discursive and figurative representations of incest during five selected periods, from ...