Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1353/fgs.2023.a899994
J. Rafael Balling
Abstract: This article places Sasha Marianna Salzmann's novel Außer sich (2017; Beside Myself , 2019) in dialogue with Else Lasker-Schüler's experimental prose work Der Malik: Eine Kaisergeschichte (1919; The Malik: An emperor's story) to highlight the shared investments of these two Jewish and gender-variant writers. While situated a century apart, both respond in their work and lives to societal discrimination in similar ways: they make themselves visible as an Other and use the knowledge of their vulnerability as a starting point to build communities that defy antisemitism and gendered oppression. In this context, Lasker-Schüler's rejection of ethnic, religious, gendered, and sexual boundaries and her envisioning of new forms of kinship appear as a precursor of Salzmann's call for inclusive queer-feminist alliances. Reading these works alongside each other invites us to understand the vision of political-personal associations based on the experiences of antisemitism and gendered oppression as an abiding concern of German-Jewish literature.
{"title":"Intimate Associations: Reading Community in Sasha Marianna Salzmann's Außer sich (2017) and Else Lasker-Schüler's Der Malik (1919)","authors":"J. Rafael Balling","doi":"10.1353/fgs.2023.a899994","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/fgs.2023.a899994","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This article places Sasha Marianna Salzmann's novel Außer sich (2017; Beside Myself , 2019) in dialogue with Else Lasker-Schüler's experimental prose work Der Malik: Eine Kaisergeschichte (1919; The Malik: An emperor's story) to highlight the shared investments of these two Jewish and gender-variant writers. While situated a century apart, both respond in their work and lives to societal discrimination in similar ways: they make themselves visible as an Other and use the knowledge of their vulnerability as a starting point to build communities that defy antisemitism and gendered oppression. In this context, Lasker-Schüler's rejection of ethnic, religious, gendered, and sexual boundaries and her envisioning of new forms of kinship appear as a precursor of Salzmann's call for inclusive queer-feminist alliances. Reading these works alongside each other invites us to understand the vision of political-personal associations based on the experiences of antisemitism and gendered oppression as an abiding concern of German-Jewish literature.","PeriodicalId":53717,"journal":{"name":"Feminist German Studies","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532166","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1353/fgs.2023.a899990
Sonia Gollance, Kerry Wallach
IntroductionWhen Feminism and Antisemitism Collide Sonia Gollance (bio) and Kerry Wallach (bio) Antisemitism and misogyny often go hand in hand.1 Conservative defenders of the status quo who target Jews frequently oppose feminism as well. Jewish women cannot escape from the negative stereotypes also aimed at their male counterparts, and they contend with additional gendered stereotypes. Negotiation of these issues becomes even more complex when one considers how both Jewishness and gender identity are often perceived or assigned by the beholder, perhaps particularly in the context of antisemitism and misogyny. Karl Lueger, the influential mayor of Vienna from 1897 to 1910 who "legitimized antisemitism in Austrian politics," famously declared, "I decide who is a Jew" (Geehr 436), underscoring the extent to which prejudices and opportunities can shift depending on political context and the whims of those in positions of power. Contemporary scholarship, literature, and popular culture address the intersection of these two forms of prejudice by interrogating the perniciousness of antisemitism and the pervasive nuances of misogyny. Many Jewish women and feminist leaders in German-speaking lands have sought to combat both, sometimes encountering opposition from right-wing groups or from other German feminists who harbored a more covert form of antisemitism. Bertha Pappenheim, founder of the Jüdischer Frauenbund (League of Jewish Women), noted in 1934, "It is exceedingly demanding to be a German, a woman, and a Jew today. However, because these three duties are also three sources of spiritual strength, they do not cancel each other out. On the contrary, they strengthen and enrich one another" (Loentz 87–88). Although Pappenheim (discussed in Elizabeth Loentz's article in this issue) wrote these words at a particularly fraught [End Page 1] moment for considering the interplay of feminism and antisemitism—indeed, at a time when hybrid German-Jewish-female identity was under direct attack—she was not alone in considering such concerns. This special issue of Feminist German Studies investigates past and present-day tensions between feminist objectives and antisemitic sentiments. Our point of inquiry encompasses theoretical approaches to forms of antisemitism that specifically target women; historical, literary, and cultural responses to antisemitism, including how it interacts with misogyny; and issues related to scholarship in this field today. Although the term antisemitism (Antisemitismus) is a late-nineteenth-century invention that was shaped by ideas of race at the time, negative or othering attitudes toward Jews from earlier periods have carried into the present and have been crucial to how minority/minoritized groups and minority women have been portrayed in German culture. The broader impact of antisemitic characterizations on women's lives and cultural production is also of interest in this issue, as in the case of women and nonbinary writers who h
{"title":"Introduction: When Feminism and Antisemitism Collide","authors":"Sonia Gollance, Kerry Wallach","doi":"10.1353/fgs.2023.a899990","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/fgs.2023.a899990","url":null,"abstract":"IntroductionWhen Feminism and Antisemitism Collide Sonia Gollance (bio) and Kerry Wallach (bio) Antisemitism and misogyny often go hand in hand.1 Conservative defenders of the status quo who target Jews frequently oppose feminism as well. Jewish women cannot escape from the negative stereotypes also aimed at their male counterparts, and they contend with additional gendered stereotypes. Negotiation of these issues becomes even more complex when one considers how both Jewishness and gender identity are often perceived or assigned by the beholder, perhaps particularly in the context of antisemitism and misogyny. Karl Lueger, the influential mayor of Vienna from 1897 to 1910 who \"legitimized antisemitism in Austrian politics,\" famously declared, \"I decide who is a Jew\" (Geehr 436), underscoring the extent to which prejudices and opportunities can shift depending on political context and the whims of those in positions of power. Contemporary scholarship, literature, and popular culture address the intersection of these two forms of prejudice by interrogating the perniciousness of antisemitism and the pervasive nuances of misogyny. Many Jewish women and feminist leaders in German-speaking lands have sought to combat both, sometimes encountering opposition from right-wing groups or from other German feminists who harbored a more covert form of antisemitism. Bertha Pappenheim, founder of the Jüdischer Frauenbund (League of Jewish Women), noted in 1934, \"It is exceedingly demanding to be a German, a woman, and a Jew today. However, because these three duties are also three sources of spiritual strength, they do not cancel each other out. On the contrary, they strengthen and enrich one another\" (Loentz 87–88). Although Pappenheim (discussed in Elizabeth Loentz's article in this issue) wrote these words at a particularly fraught [End Page 1] moment for considering the interplay of feminism and antisemitism—indeed, at a time when hybrid German-Jewish-female identity was under direct attack—she was not alone in considering such concerns. This special issue of Feminist German Studies investigates past and present-day tensions between feminist objectives and antisemitic sentiments. Our point of inquiry encompasses theoretical approaches to forms of antisemitism that specifically target women; historical, literary, and cultural responses to antisemitism, including how it interacts with misogyny; and issues related to scholarship in this field today. Although the term antisemitism (Antisemitismus) is a late-nineteenth-century invention that was shaped by ideas of race at the time, negative or othering attitudes toward Jews from earlier periods have carried into the present and have been crucial to how minority/minoritized groups and minority women have been portrayed in German culture. The broader impact of antisemitic characterizations on women's lives and cultural production is also of interest in this issue, as in the case of women and nonbinary writers who h","PeriodicalId":53717,"journal":{"name":"Feminist German Studies","volume":"119 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532429","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1353/fgs.2023.a899991
Elizabeth Loentz
Jewish Women and Intersectional FeminismThe Case of Bertha Pappenheim Elizabeth Loentz (bio) This essay addresses the thorny question of whether Jewish women fit into the framework of intersectionality and what we gain when we read the work of early-twentieth-century German-Jewish feminists through the lens of a theoretical model developed by Black feminists in the United States in the late twentieth century. The essay situates the social activist and writer Bertha Pappenheim in a long tradition of international intersectional feminist thought: she recognized over a century ago that Jewish women had different concerns and a different experience of patriarchy than Christian women, as well as a different experience of antisemitism than Jewish men—not to mention that Christian feminists were not immune to antisemitism. Recognizing the marginalization of Jewish women within both the male-dominated Jewish community and the German feminist movement, Pappenheim founded a German-Jewish feminist movement that was distinct from yet integrated into the German feminist movement, and which sought to unite diverse German-Jewish women. The Jewish Women Empowerment Summit, held in Frankfurt, Germany, in September 2021, opened with the panel "Can Jewish Perspectives Be Considered in Intersectional Spaces?" (El).1 In their introduction to this special issue, Sonia Gollance and Kerry Wallach answer this question in the affirmative, arguing that it is not only possible but imperative—particularly within the context of German studies—for feminist scholars who research and write about different forms of oppression to find a way to include antisemitism and Jewish perspectives. Yet Jewish feminists working in Germany today, such as Ina Holev and Miriam Yosef, founders of the educational initiative Jüdisch & Intersektional (Jewish & Intersectional), report that they have felt excluded from intersectional feminist groups and that antisemitism is often tolerated or even reproduced in these settings ("Über Uns"). [End Page 24] In the following pages I consider what we gain when we read the experiences and work of early-twentieth-century German-Jewish feminists through the lens of a theoretical model developed by Black feminists in the United States in the late twentieth century. I focus especially on the work of the social activist and writer Bertha Pappenheim (1859–1936), the founder and leader of the Jüdischer Frauenbund (JFB; League of Jewish Women). Audre Lorde emphasized in her work with the nascent Afro-German women's movement in the 1980s and 1990s the vital importance of researching their history in order to better understand and articulate their place as women and feminists of color and Germans. I propose that an exploration of how an earlier generation of German-Jewish feminists grappled with the categories of gender, Jewishness, and Germanness (among others) and their intersections would, on the one hand, be generative to understand the broader intellectual tradi
{"title":"Jewish Women and Intersectional Feminism: The Case of Bertha Pappenheim","authors":"Elizabeth Loentz","doi":"10.1353/fgs.2023.a899991","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/fgs.2023.a899991","url":null,"abstract":"Jewish Women and Intersectional FeminismThe Case of Bertha Pappenheim Elizabeth Loentz (bio) This essay addresses the thorny question of whether Jewish women fit into the framework of intersectionality and what we gain when we read the work of early-twentieth-century German-Jewish feminists through the lens of a theoretical model developed by Black feminists in the United States in the late twentieth century. The essay situates the social activist and writer Bertha Pappenheim in a long tradition of international intersectional feminist thought: she recognized over a century ago that Jewish women had different concerns and a different experience of patriarchy than Christian women, as well as a different experience of antisemitism than Jewish men—not to mention that Christian feminists were not immune to antisemitism. Recognizing the marginalization of Jewish women within both the male-dominated Jewish community and the German feminist movement, Pappenheim founded a German-Jewish feminist movement that was distinct from yet integrated into the German feminist movement, and which sought to unite diverse German-Jewish women. The Jewish Women Empowerment Summit, held in Frankfurt, Germany, in September 2021, opened with the panel \"Can Jewish Perspectives Be Considered in Intersectional Spaces?\" (El).1 In their introduction to this special issue, Sonia Gollance and Kerry Wallach answer this question in the affirmative, arguing that it is not only possible but imperative—particularly within the context of German studies—for feminist scholars who research and write about different forms of oppression to find a way to include antisemitism and Jewish perspectives. Yet Jewish feminists working in Germany today, such as Ina Holev and Miriam Yosef, founders of the educational initiative Jüdisch & Intersektional (Jewish & Intersectional), report that they have felt excluded from intersectional feminist groups and that antisemitism is often tolerated or even reproduced in these settings (\"Über Uns\"). [End Page 24] In the following pages I consider what we gain when we read the experiences and work of early-twentieth-century German-Jewish feminists through the lens of a theoretical model developed by Black feminists in the United States in the late twentieth century. I focus especially on the work of the social activist and writer Bertha Pappenheim (1859–1936), the founder and leader of the Jüdischer Frauenbund (JFB; League of Jewish Women). Audre Lorde emphasized in her work with the nascent Afro-German women's movement in the 1980s and 1990s the vital importance of researching their history in order to better understand and articulate their place as women and feminists of color and Germans. I propose that an exploration of how an earlier generation of German-Jewish feminists grappled with the categories of gender, Jewishness, and Germanness (among others) and their intersections would, on the one hand, be generative to understand the broader intellectual tradi","PeriodicalId":53717,"journal":{"name":"Feminist German Studies","volume":"66 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532412","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1353/fgs.2023.a899993
Meghan Paradis
Abstract: Annette Eick (1909–2010) is best known as a Jewish lesbian writer and poet who managed a miraculous escape from Nazi Germany in November 1938. However, her fiction and poetry published in the late Weimar Republic have been hitherto neglected. This article examines two of her serialized novellas, Die Arbeitsgemeinschaft (The study circle; 1929) and Petra (1930), which were published in the lesbian periodical Die Frauenliebe when Eick was in her late adolescence. Both works center adolescent girls whose inability to confide in the adults around them about their desires for other women produces paralyzing shame and loneliness. This article situates these works within the context of interwar-era antisemitism and Jewish communal efforts to mitigate antisemitism through gendered performance of bourgeois respectability. It argues that through these works Eick mounts a dual critique of antisemitism in the lesbian press and of German-Jewish commitments to respectability and the silences and shame the requisite self-repression imposed.
{"title":"Shame, Desire, and Queer Jewish Girlhood in Annette Eick's Semiautobiographical Fiction, 1929–1930","authors":"Meghan Paradis","doi":"10.1353/fgs.2023.a899993","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/fgs.2023.a899993","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Annette Eick (1909–2010) is best known as a Jewish lesbian writer and poet who managed a miraculous escape from Nazi Germany in November 1938. However, her fiction and poetry published in the late Weimar Republic have been hitherto neglected. This article examines two of her serialized novellas, Die Arbeitsgemeinschaft (The study circle; 1929) and Petra (1930), which were published in the lesbian periodical Die Frauenliebe when Eick was in her late adolescence. Both works center adolescent girls whose inability to confide in the adults around them about their desires for other women produces paralyzing shame and loneliness. This article situates these works within the context of interwar-era antisemitism and Jewish communal efforts to mitigate antisemitism through gendered performance of bourgeois respectability. It argues that through these works Eick mounts a dual critique of antisemitism in the lesbian press and of German-Jewish commitments to respectability and the silences and shame the requisite self-repression imposed.","PeriodicalId":53717,"journal":{"name":"Feminist German Studies","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532410","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1353/fgs.2023.a899995
Lea H. Greenberg
Abstract: This article considers how the demands of forgetting collide with the imperative for a coherent familial narrative in Adriana Altaras's memoir Titos Brille (2011; Tito's eyeglasses). Altaras's work engages with her family's post–World War II trauma between Croatia and Germany and points toward the parallel demands of national memory politics. The memoir grapples with the pressures of maintaining a story's continuity while reaching the limits of this project, as processes of recollection and omission are in constant tension. This article contextualizes Altaras's work within contemporary German memory politics and then considers Altaras's memoir in conversation with Astrid Erll's concept of traveling memory , Marianne Hirsch's work on postmemory, and the dybbuk figure of Jewish folklore. A feminist recognition of Altaras's distinctive role at the center of memory work, attentive to inequities based on gender and religious and national affiliation, deepens an understanding of the personal and political stakes of this mediation process.
{"title":"Between Remembering and Forgetting in Adriana Altaras's Titos Brille (2011)","authors":"Lea H. Greenberg","doi":"10.1353/fgs.2023.a899995","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/fgs.2023.a899995","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This article considers how the demands of forgetting collide with the imperative for a coherent familial narrative in Adriana Altaras's memoir Titos Brille (2011; Tito's eyeglasses). Altaras's work engages with her family's post–World War II trauma between Croatia and Germany and points toward the parallel demands of national memory politics. The memoir grapples with the pressures of maintaining a story's continuity while reaching the limits of this project, as processes of recollection and omission are in constant tension. This article contextualizes Altaras's work within contemporary German memory politics and then considers Altaras's memoir in conversation with Astrid Erll's concept of traveling memory , Marianne Hirsch's work on postmemory, and the dybbuk figure of Jewish folklore. A feminist recognition of Altaras's distinctive role at the center of memory work, attentive to inequities based on gender and religious and national affiliation, deepens an understanding of the personal and political stakes of this mediation process.","PeriodicalId":53717,"journal":{"name":"Feminist German Studies","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532444","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1353/fgs.2023.a899997
{"title":"Acknowledgments","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/fgs.2023.a899997","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/fgs.2023.a899997","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":53717,"journal":{"name":"Feminist German Studies","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532711","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1353/fgs.2023.a899996
Rebekah Slodounik
Abstract: Mirna Funk's novel Winternähe (2015) and Deborah Feldman's autobiography Überbitten (2017) depict iterations of antisemitism in contemporary German society, focusing on the seemingly latent antisemitism, exacerbated by their gender, that Lola, the protagonist in Winternähe , and Feldman experience frequently. Intruder figures make legible their disregard for Lola's and Feldman's position as Jewish women in Germany. Funk's Winternähe and Feldman's Überbitten call out the contradictions that Lola and Feldman identify in German society as two independent and fully autonomous Jewish women who are repeatedly told they do not belong in Germany. Funk and Feldman write against such rejections of female German-Jewish identities and toward a recuperation and reclaiming of what it means—for them, not for others—to inhabit Jewishness, Germanness, and femaleness simultaneously, on their own terms.
{"title":"German, Jewish, and Female: Encounters with Antisemitism in Mirna Funk's Winternähe (2015) and Deborah Feldman's Überbitten (2017)","authors":"Rebekah Slodounik","doi":"10.1353/fgs.2023.a899996","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/fgs.2023.a899996","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Mirna Funk's novel Winternähe (2015) and Deborah Feldman's autobiography Überbitten (2017) depict iterations of antisemitism in contemporary German society, focusing on the seemingly latent antisemitism, exacerbated by their gender, that Lola, the protagonist in Winternähe , and Feldman experience frequently. Intruder figures make legible their disregard for Lola's and Feldman's position as Jewish women in Germany. Funk's Winternähe and Feldman's Überbitten call out the contradictions that Lola and Feldman identify in German society as two independent and fully autonomous Jewish women who are repeatedly told they do not belong in Germany. Funk and Feldman write against such rejections of female German-Jewish identities and toward a recuperation and reclaiming of what it means—for them, not for others—to inhabit Jewishness, Germanness, and femaleness simultaneously, on their own terms.","PeriodicalId":53717,"journal":{"name":"Feminist German Studies","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532414","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1353/fgs.2023.a899992
Lisa Silverman
Abstract: Unlike Hugo Bettauer's 1922 novel, on which it is based, Hans Karl Breslauer's 1924 film Die Stadt ohne Juden features Jewish women. They appear as department store customers, mothers, wives, girlfriends, and synagogue congregants, yet they never engage in dialogue and, with but one exception, are always depicted together with men. Despite its inclusion of Jewish women, the film does little to disturb stereotypical representations of them, severely limiting its ability to challenge the powerful social structures that govern their representation. This article explores how additional scenes that appear in the restored 2018 version of this film address contemporary anxieties about Jewish women's and men's appearance, behavior, and ability to pass as non-Jews. That a film intended to oppose hatred of Jews ultimately cannot confront audiences with the absurdity of antisemitism reveals the limits of interwar films in transmitting critical messages.
{"title":"Stadt mit Jüdinnen: Antisemitism and Misogyny in Hans Karl Breslauer's Recently Restored Film Die Stadt ohne Juden (1924)","authors":"Lisa Silverman","doi":"10.1353/fgs.2023.a899992","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/fgs.2023.a899992","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Unlike Hugo Bettauer's 1922 novel, on which it is based, Hans Karl Breslauer's 1924 film Die Stadt ohne Juden features Jewish women. They appear as department store customers, mothers, wives, girlfriends, and synagogue congregants, yet they never engage in dialogue and, with but one exception, are always depicted together with men. Despite its inclusion of Jewish women, the film does little to disturb stereotypical representations of them, severely limiting its ability to challenge the powerful social structures that govern their representation. This article explores how additional scenes that appear in the restored 2018 version of this film address contemporary anxieties about Jewish women's and men's appearance, behavior, and ability to pass as non-Jews. That a film intended to oppose hatred of Jews ultimately cannot confront audiences with the absurdity of antisemitism reveals the limits of interwar films in transmitting critical messages.","PeriodicalId":53717,"journal":{"name":"Feminist German Studies","volume":"130 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532707","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This article reads a protofeminist critique of the nineteenth-century gender binary in Charlotte von Stein's lesser-known play, Die zwey Emilien (1803). This dramatic, inventive adaptation of Sophia Lee's melodramatic English novel, The Two Emilys (1795), features two seemingly opposite women, who simultaneously are virtually the same, to demonstrate the lack of space for the woman as individual in Stein's contemporary society. These women are coded as opposites with sometimes humorous, satirical, and outrageous language: one Emilie is the "innocent angel" committing "innocent deceit," the other a "wicked creature" and "cunning snake" practicing "nefarious deceit." Ultimately, I argue that Stein calls into question the deceptive social construct of woman that forever attempts to keep her in her place. This play contributes to the ongoing conversation among female authors who resisted the oppressive demands of feminine virtues.
摘要:本文解读了夏洛蒂·冯·施泰因(Charlotte von Stein)不太知名的戏剧《爱的一天》(Die zwey Emilien, 1803)中对19世纪二元性别的原始女性主义批判。这部戏剧性的、创造性的改编自索菲娅·李(Sophia Lee)的情节剧英国小说《两个艾米丽》(The Two Emilys, 1795)，以两个看似对立的女性为主角，同时又几乎相同，以表明在斯坦的当代社会中，女性作为个体缺乏空间。这些女人有时用幽默、讽刺和令人发指的语言被编码为对立面:一个是“无辜的天使”，犯下了“无辜的欺骗”，另一个是“邪恶的生物”和“狡猾的蛇”，实施了“邪恶的欺骗”。最后，我认为斯坦因对女性的欺骗性社会结构提出了质疑，这种社会结构永远试图让女性保持自己的地位。这部剧促成了女性作家之间正在进行的对话，她们抵制女性美德的压迫性要求。
{"title":"Deception and Displacement in Charlotte von Stein's Die zwey Emilien (1803)","authors":"R. Steele","doi":"10.1353/fgs.2022.0013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/fgs.2022.0013","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article reads a protofeminist critique of the nineteenth-century gender binary in Charlotte von Stein's lesser-known play, Die zwey Emilien (1803). This dramatic, inventive adaptation of Sophia Lee's melodramatic English novel, The Two Emilys (1795), features two seemingly opposite women, who simultaneously are virtually the same, to demonstrate the lack of space for the woman as individual in Stein's contemporary society. These women are coded as opposites with sometimes humorous, satirical, and outrageous language: one Emilie is the \"innocent angel\" committing \"innocent deceit,\" the other a \"wicked creature\" and \"cunning snake\" practicing \"nefarious deceit.\" Ultimately, I argue that Stein calls into question the deceptive social construct of woman that forever attempts to keep her in her place. This play contributes to the ongoing conversation among female authors who resisted the oppressive demands of feminine virtues.","PeriodicalId":53717,"journal":{"name":"Feminist German Studies","volume":"82 1","pages":"1 - 25"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77028321","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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