Although the emphasis of this thesis is on the literary representation of female subjectivity in contemporary women's writing in West Germany, the first chapter looks back on the history of women's emancipation in Germany from the early 19th century until today. Selected examples of women's writing will show how women - in their writing and often their lives - attempted to break out of the restrictions which existing male images of women and society as a whole had set up for them. Included in this chapter are the beginnings of women's movements and the struggle for political and social rights. A comparison between those early beginnings and today allows the identification of differences and similarities. The pursuit of the question of how women break out of existing images or how they subvert them in their writing is not only of interest in Chapter I, but is followed up in the whole thesis. This has to lead to another question, namely that of female subjectivity. As women in a patriarchal society are enclosed by a set of images in whose production they did not actively partake, and as the exclusion of women from history perpetuated itself in the absence of women from the history of ideas and from language as the representative of the symbolic order (Lacan), the original question has to be modified to include the assumption that exclusion and absence cannot be overcome by the rational decision to be present. The emphasis in HButungen by Verena Stefan (Chapter II) is therefore on the possibilities of a feminist subject to express subjectivity, focussing also on the relationship between ideology and subjectivity. In Chapter III, which analyses the autobiography by Inga Buhmann Ich habe mir elite Geechlchte geechrleben, the focus is on the conflict between subjectivity and truth, as a self-imposed rule to "confess". Chapter IV is divided into two parts and includes an analysis of the po6tstructuralist theories of subjectivity of Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva, with emphasis on the role and function of language. The focus of the analysis of Rahschnitt by Ursula Krechel and Altweibereommer? by Pola Veseken (Chapter V) is on the subversion of language and the deconstruction of the unified, coherent subject as the producer of meaning, and the portrayal of female subjectivity as the réintroduction of the imaginary into the symbolic. Through these analyses the question of female subjectivity and the related one as to how women break out of existing images or subvert them in their writing are constantly addressed. The thesis is written in German.

This thesis investigates representations of “Muslim” women and girls in German popular culture 1990-2015. The thesis offers a symptomatic reading of three under-researched genres in the field: life writing, young adult literature and film. The figure of the “Muslim” woman or girl performs a crucial role in far-reaching socio-political debates in Germany. Indeed, such figures challenge the boundaries of “gender equality” and “secularism” and contest notions of “tolerance” and “integration”. The (in)visibility of “Muslim” women’s bodies and their apparent position in “Islam” function as ostensible indicators of their oppression and of “Islam’s” inherent incompatibility with “western” values. This study analyses the discursive function of such figures in German popular culture via three key research questions: what representational practices surround the figure of the “Muslim” woman or girl in German life writing, young adult literature and film? How do such representations function to produce “non-Muslim” subject positions? What is the function of this figure within narratives of feminism and assertions of “gender equality”? This study understands itself as an intervention into contemporary racist discourses in Germany and operates within a transdisciplinary framework of intersectional feminism, cultural and German studies. Ultimately, this thesis aims to make visible and interrogate the underlying hierarchies and agendas that drive representations of “Muslim” women and girls within the discourses studied.

This thesis sets out to examine perceptual structures in works of "Neuer Realismus". In 1965 a group of authors became known both under this name and also under that of "Kölner Schule". Their works were published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne. The publisher's reader in charge of these authors was Dieter Wellershoff who published working notes in the house magazine of Kiepenheuer & Witsch under the title "Neuer Realismus". The fictional work of this group of writers corresponded largely to these notes. In the article Wellershoff made a special plea for phenomenological modes of perception and writing. The critics soon regarded "Neuer Realismus" as a successor to the French Nouveau Roman. It is one of the main aims of this thesis to show what "Neuer Realismus" and the Nouveau Roman have in common and what differentiates them. We should like to examine what similarities each work of the "Neuer Realismus" shows with the Nouveau Roman, how far it follows Vellershoff 's working notes and in what way it remains a work in its own right. We have therefore attempted a predominantly immanent interpretation. The criteria of this thesis are phenomenological modes of perception, particularly with regard to Robbe-Grillet1s "Ecole du regard", the examination of the polarities of subjectivity and objectivity, and the role of the author, and/or the first person narrator, who reflects him and his medium. Because of these criteria there suggested itself the following selection of authors and works, which could be dealt with in an exemplary and meaningful manner within the framework of the thesis: Nicolaus Bom, Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, Giinter Steffens, Dieter Wellershoff. The thesis deals first with the term "Neuer Realismus" and its contemporary literary context. At the same time it juxtaposes "Neuer Realismus" and Nouveau Roman, considering common aspects as well as divergent ones, and referring in particular to the theoretical writing of Wellershoff and Robbe-Grillet. Then follows a discussion of the individual works vhich are, with the exception of Wellershoffs "Die Schattengrenze", first novels or collections of short stories.

Heiner Müller has often been interpreted as a political writer. This thesis seeks to argue that the profoundly political import of Müller's work can best be understood if one understands Müller as writing about and for a community. This community is heterogeneous, finite, non-totalitarian and transgressive. It is constituted by alterity, thus making its complete realisation impossible. As such, this community can only with the greatest of difficulty be understood in Marxist-Leninist terms, that is, in that ideology under which Müller spent most of his writing life. Müller's later plays, which are far more well-known and more often produced, have often been described as fitting uneasily into the conventional aesthetics of the GDR. This thesis argues that traces of such a non-totalitarian community are to be found in his early work. On the other hand, they bear only limited testimony to the heterogeneous community. The conditions under which he had to write accorded him only restricted means in allowing such a community to come to expression. In addition, Müller himself pulls back from carrying this heterogeneous impulse through to its radical conclusion. It is only when he develops his drama - a development which takes the form of engagement with the dramatic tradition - that he begins to do justice to the notion of community which is present only in nascent form in his early texts. Furthermore, as time goes on, the manner in which Müller wrote and produced texts for the theatre can itself be seen as an expression of this non-totalisable, complex and manifold community. As such, the reasons for the change in Müller's writing can be found in his early work. It is this which the thesis sets out to examine. The expression of community in the manner of Müller's writing might best be explained through the notion of signature. By emphasising the finitude in the relationship between himself and his texts, Müller further radicalises his work. This is primarily achieved through the use of allegory which in turn proves to be a form of writing which engenders remembrance - itself an important constitutive moment in the community. Müller's work, in seeking to express community through its radically finite nature raises a number of questions about the relationship between author, text and the role of literary criticism. The thesis thus attempts to examine these questions and take up the challenge to literary criticism which they represent.

This thesis investigates representations of the Holocaust and the Second World War across a range of German- and Austrian-Jewish writers who belong to the second or third generation born after the Holocaust. These writers relate to the events from the position of the “nonwitness” (Weissman 2004), and in the face of major shifts in Holocaust memory since the millennium: the disappearance of the survivor and eyewitness generation entails a transition from first-hand memories of the war period to an increasingly ritualised cultural memory of the events. This transformation intersects with larger changes in Holocaust memory in the last 15 years, such as the re- and hypermediation of Holocaust memory and the emergence of a globalised Erinnerungskultur. The Holocaust has therefore emerged as a highly discursivised “floating signifier” (Huyssen 2003), which travels transgenerationally, transmedially and transnationally. Engaging with these shifts, I argue that Marianne Hirsch’s concept of “postmemory” (Hirsch 1997) and recent trauma theory remain embedded in a biologising framework of analysis that views cultural transmission in terms of contagious inheritance. Drawing on cultural and literary theories and transnational memory studies, I develop a new approach that focuses on the Holocaust as a form of “travelling trauma” (Tomsky 2011), tracing its remediation and recycling across geographical, cultural, medial, and representational boundaries. My readings of texts by Benjamin Stein, Maxim Biller, Vladimir Vertlib, and Eva Menasse explore how these authors (re-)negotiate the various travels of Holocaust memory in the age of remediation. By initiating a dialogue between the realms of theory and contemporary fiction, this thesis engages with a broad body of recent German- and Austrian-Jewish Holocaust fiction, while at the same time critically investigating key paradigms in the field of memory and trauma studies.

The purpose of this thesis is to evaluate and reconceive the scholarly understanding of one of Óðinn’s aspects – Óðinn as a patron to a mortal hero figure. This theme runs through a number of Old Icelandic and continental Scandinavian texts, but it is most widely represented in the fornaldarsaga genre. To formalise the discussion as well as the choice of material, the concept of the Odinic hero complex was introduced, which encompasses narrative structures, imagery and other material associated in the sagas with a protagonist helped and betrayed by Óðinn. This Odinic hero narrative has been looked at on the example of three fornaldarsǫgur, Vǫlsunga saga, Hrólfs saga kraka and Gautreks saga, as well as learned Latin texts connected to saga literature. The analysis also relied on the evidence of saga narratives that do not explicitly demonstrate the complete Odinic hero complex, but contains significant thematic parallelism to the main sources; these secondary sources included Hálfs saga ok hálfsrekka, Ǫrvar-Odds saga and Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks. The findings support the notion that a number of historians of religion have proposed, that there is a clear structural connection between the Odinic hero paradigm, initiation sequences and the themes of berserkir and shapeshifting. On the other hand, the dissertation shows that this thematic unity is in many cases a younger phenomenon than usually proposed, which leads to the necessity to re-evaluate a number of fornaldarsǫgur as sources on Old Scandinavian mythology and read them from a different perspective.

Critical reception of Karoline von Gunderrode has largely ignored her work and focused on her tragic life and death. Even earlier feminist scholarship overlooked her writing because of its presumed adherence to masculine literary traditions. As part of a shift towards more discursive analyses, this dissertation traces the contradictory representations of gender in Gunderrode's body of work. I maintain that gender is the central conflict for Gunderrode primarily because her appropriation of romantic idealism contradicts her desire for self-fulfillment. As a woman writer, she adopted a masculine persona at a time when romanticism privileged the feminine. Rather than an identity as muse or in self-negating love, Gunderrode developed her masculine self through intellectual engagement with philosophy and history. She also had ambitions of becoming a poet. What she considered feminine, however, is not absent in her writing: love, the sexualized body, and nature figure significantly as subject matter and metaphor. The contemporary discourse on nature and the extensive feminist criticism of that form the theoretical framework of my analysis. Gunderrode did not explicitly question the natural complementarity of the sexes, but through close readings of a wide range of her texts I establish some of the ways that she transgressed conventional expectations of women's and men's natures. Because love exists in a complicated relationship with women's creativity and historical agency, Gunderrode utilized various strategies--such as the maternal, homoeroticism, incest, and triangular relationships--to counter the romantic ideal. Love is never portrayed within a bourgeois context of marriage and family. Women's economic and emotional reliance on men is thematized. I also discuss how Gunderrode appropriated an orientalist discourse in her gender critique. Given the complexity of Gunderrode's work, I concentrate on three themes: the conflict between creativity and female sexuality; the conflict between heroism and love for women in history; and the construction of a poetic self. Through my reading of Gunderrode's encounter with an ideal of subjectivity and its negation of women, I suggest new categories with which to explore how gender codes formed the basis for late-eighteenth-century German notions of the individual.

Despite increased scholarly attention, the framework within which the oeuvre of eighteenth-century German poet Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz (1751-1792) is being received is still very narrow. Lenz who in German literary history remained in the shadow of his famous contemporary Johann Wolfgang Goethe for much of the last two hundred years is now seen as an artist in his own right. Lenz has at the same time become a much mythologized figure for his mental illness. The relative inaccessability of Lenz' later works, as well as artistic adaptions of his biography and work contribute to a fascinating yet distorted image of Lenz. I argue that our perception of his illness plays a significant role for the critical assessment of his work as scholars continue to focus only on the short period between between 1772-1778. It is widely believed that a mental breakdown in 1778 abruptly ended his career, and consequently the reception breaks off after this point. Biographical research, however, suggests that Lenz remained active as a writer and intellectual during his later years while also struggling with episodes of his illness. In this interdisciplinary study, I examine how literary and medical research dealt with Lenz' mental illness and contributed to the prevailing myth of his sudden descent into "madness." I show how posthumous diagnoses of schizophrenia in Lenz' case are generally based on incomplete biographical data for the later part of his life. By incorporating recent research on psychoses, I suggest instead that Lenz may have suffered from manic-depressive illness which would explain the documented episodes of his later life and at the same time allow for continued creative work. I also trace the myth surrounding Lenz' illness back to the eighteenth century by locating his case within contemporary discourses of insanity. My analysis finally considers how Lenz' life and search for artistic identity were informed by the experiences of manic-depressive illness throughout his life, and traces poetic representations of illness in his dramas and prose.

This dissertation examines Elfriede Jelinek's investigation of Austria's and Western Europe's "obscene fantasies" through her "perversion" of generic forms in three of her best-known texts (Die Liebhaberinnen, Lust, and Die Klavierspielerin). It also investigates how these texts, at first glance less overtly political than Jelinek's later work, can be seen as laying the groundwork for her later, more political, analysis of Austrian fascism and racism. The dissertation is composed of three chapters; each investigates a central psychoanalytic concept (alienation, jouissance, perversion and sublimation) and reads a Jelinek text in relation to the genre that it is perverting, exposing the "obscene fantasies" that lie at its heart. Chapter One examines how Jelinek depicts alienation (in the Marxist, socialist feminist, and Lacanian senses) in her 1975 novel Die Liebhaberinnen, and explores how Jelinek's depiction of alienation functions to make Die Liebhaberinnen an anti-romance. Chapter Two addresses whether Jelinek's novel Lust (1989) is a pornographic or anti-pornographic text. I investigate the complex relationship between aesthetics and pornography, arguing that many other Jelinek scholars collapse the distinction between mass-cultural forms of pornography and the high-cultural pornography of Bataille and Sade, and thus fail to understand how her text is simultaneously pornographic and anti-pornographic. Chapter Three focuses on Jelinek's novel Die Klavierspielerin (1983), examining the development of its protagonist as a (perverse) sexual subject, and her ultimate failure to achieve a stable sexual position and how Jelinek's text perverts the genre of the Künstlerroman. It also discusses Erika's training as a pianist as a possible causal factor of her perversions and lack of sexual identity, concluding that her inability to sublimate demonstrates the similarities (and differences) between the artist and the pervert, illustrating how Jelinek's novel deviates from the traditional Künstlerroman. The dissertation argues that the disruption of genres is one of Jelinek's most significant literary contributions, her works functioning to create a "negative aesthetics" as opposed to a positive reworking of generic forms. Jelinek rejects an identificatory mode of writing and refuses to create "positive" subjects, preferring instead to produce art that is a "critique of praxis as the rule of brutal self-preservation at the heart of the status quo" (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 12).

This dissertation gives a first critical introduction to the dramatic works of the contemporary Austrian writer Marlene Streeruwitz. The dissertation's first chapter provides biographical information about the author, situates her in the Austrian post-war cultual context, and examines the specific dramatic and literary techniques that she employs for her postmodern materialist feminist plays. Of particular interest in this introductory chapter are Streeruwitz's method of postmodern citation and her staccato language because they follow an underlying principle of simultaneous affirmation and negation which is characteristic of Streeruwitz's entire works: The flow of action is at the same time disrupted and alienated as it is commented on. Most of Streeruwitz's well-crafted plays are predicated on a unique dramaturgy of violence and humor. The second and third chapter of the dissertation therefore provide a close reading analysis and interpretation of violence and humor in the dramatist's first five plays that form the "English cycle" (New York, New York, Waikiki Beach, Sloane Square, Ocean Drive, and Elysian Park). In both the violence and the humor chapter, the critical analysis of each of the five plays is preceded by extensive socio- and drama-historical background information on the phenomena of violence and humor to determine how Marlene Streeruwitz's dramaturgy is influenced by or independent of literary traditions and sociological debates. The final chapter concludes that the intersection of violence and humor (in combination with the unique stylistic devices employed by the dramatist) serves the author's intent to subvert traditional bourgeois theater standards as well as Western capitalist society's acceptance of violence as natural and necessary. Streeruwitz's plays are an assault on the audience: They send the viewer on an emotional-roller-coaster ride transversing the highs and lows of laughter and shock, enjoyment and discomfort, in order to isolate the individual spectator from the security of the theater-going mass. In this deliberately-orchestrated isolation, Streeruwitz does not only see a chance to fight against the violent potential of mass mentality, but also the possibility of genuine interaction with her art.