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.

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 cultural history uses the glaring spatial divides within Germany in the 1970s, the Berlin Wall and the German-German border, to analyze discourses of crisis that manifest themselves around issues of space, divisions, walls, and borders. The perspective of a "transnational feminist psychogeographer" borrows from German and cultural studies, transnational feminist theory, and postcolonial critiques to allow for a reading of cultural contradictions without reducing them to either/or positions. Discussing changes in Cold War politics that characterize the 1970s in terms of a shift to postmodernity, post-Fordism, or a new stage in capitalist globalization, chapter one develops a theoretical framework for examining how 'globalized' borders appear as both permeable and permanent, fostering contradictory discourses of security and confinement. Rather than suggesting that the specific fears produced around global issues like the oil crisis and the Vietnam War vanished by the end of the 1970s, chapter two argues that the production of fear is part of a permanent, racialized, gendered, as well as specifically Western, state of emergency. Chapter three and four reread discourses of national crisis around immigration and terrorism. The mechanisms and strategies of Othering implied in these texts promote a contradictory sense of global alliances and national identity while simultaneously fostering the militarization of the borders of the nation state. Chapters five and six examine the politics of discourses of gender crises in texts and films of the New Subjectivity and in feminist texts in the 1970s. The perspective of a "transnational psychogeographer" allows me to contextualize feminisms and the crisis of the male subject within changing interpretations of gender, nation, and the West. The conclusion contends that we should rethink our understating of the 1970s as a decade between the social change of the 1960s and the conservative backlash of the 1980s to accommodate contradictory political discourses defining a divided Germany in a global context by means of creating a 'permanent state of emergency.'

This dissertation investigates the influence of GDR writer Gabriele (Kachold) Stötzer's visual and performance art on the texts published in her 1992 volume of experimental prose, grenzen los fremd gehen. Born in 1954, Stötzer is loosely associated with the experimental writers of the Prenzlauer Berg “Szene.” In the 1980s in Erfurt, she established the Künstlerinnengruppe, a performance group that focused on self-expression in the private spaces of apartments and self-made studios—painting, posing for photographs, creating amateur films, weaving, making pottery, and sewing clothes. I maintain that this coalition of women fashioned an indirect defiance to the GDR State by operating in arenas the Stasi did not conceive as political. As well, I argue that the techniques of bricolage—the spontaneous use of materials at hand—she devised to express that defiance that are employed in the group's visual art performances, are also central to Stötzer's textual production. Stötzer tosses together sentences built upon consonant and vowel sounds that play on meanings; she rejects the steps of revising and editing; and she uses “materials at hand”—especially the body. She uses those techniques to represent her wrenching experience of incarceration at the age of twenty-four and her ongoing discontent with the GDR. Stötzer eschews any optimistic view of the intact individual within socialism and reveals instead in her writing an exasperated figure that lacks crucial freedoms. In Chapter One I outline the prescribed tenets of socialist realism and their implementation in GDR practice and how Stötzer's texts resist them. In Chapters Two and Three I trace Stötzer's biography and her artistic production—especially with the Künstlerinnengruppe, showing how her art has always been informed by elements of bricolage. In Chapter Four I provide analyses of eight texts from grenzen los fremd gehen, particularly emphasizing their relationship to her visual and performance art. I conclude my dissertation by arguing that Stötzer's creative potential was catalyzed in very particular ways by the circumstances that reigned in the waning days of the GDR, so that her more recent post-Wende texts no longer display the experimental qualities that brought her acclaim before 1989.

Among the linguistic innovations attributed to mystics is the use of sensual, sensory words to express spiritual and abstract ideas (Waterman 101) which Otto Zirker calls a "Tendenz zur Vergeistigung des Sinnlichen" (15). When histories of the German language discuss Mechthild von Magdeburg (ca. 1212-ca. 1282), they focus primarily on the passionate passages in her text, Das fliessende Licht der Gottheit. While Mechthild's descriptions of the mystical union between God and the soul are indeed full of sensual images, her use of sensory vocabulary is not limited to this context. The goal of this dissertation is to come to a fuller understanding of Mechthild's use of sensory vocabulary by means of an investigation constructed from the vocabulary itself, not from a theoretical framework down. Mechthild says that there are five senses, but does not specify what they are. The underlying assumption is that she was acquainted with the traditional five senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. In addition, she describes an allegorical bride with five kingdoms: eyes, speech, thoughts, hearing and touch. This investigation, therefore, includes the additional "senses" of speaking and thinking. An analysis of Mechthild's sensory vocabulary indicates that Mechthild privileges the senses of sight, hearing, and touch over smell and taste and these have the largest amount of vocabulary allotted to them. These senses are also the most prominent in the interaction between the soul and God. God reveals "visions" to the eyes of the soul and Mechthild records the visual details of what she has seen. God and the soul are among the many voices in Das fliessende Licht. They listen and speak with each other in prayers and dialogues. Mechthild also acquires a voice as she speaks through her text. God and the soul also enter into an intimate tactile relationship with each other in the unio mystica, the union between God and soul for which the mystic longs.

The dissertation examines three stage-plays--Was geschah, nachdem Nora ihren Mann verlassen hatte (1977), Clara S. (1981), and Krankheit oder Moderne Frauen (1984)--by the Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek (b. 1946, Murzzuschlag). My dissertation views these works as a trilogy, which articulates the playwright's earliest attempt to create a new language of theater so that she could present her own critical views on Austro-German cultural history, particularly her belief that the historical subjugation of women (within private and public spheres) is closely aligned to the formation of a distinctly gendered subjectivity. I examine how Jelinek develops an increasingly complex notion of the intertextually referenced male- and female-subject in each successive play. Chapter One considers Jelinek's criticism of the growing nationalist sentiment in post-war Germany and Austria. She views residual fascism and misogyny in both these nation states as being inextricably linked to a historical process of hegemonic control by religious institutions, and powerful corporate and political interests. Chapter One considers the extent to which Jelinek's use of language and innovative theater techniques rest on avantgarde artistic trends generated by the postwar Vienna Group. This chapter lays the framework of Jelinek's political theater as she describes this in essays, interviews, and discussion sessions with Graz Group and Munchener Literaturarbeitskreis members. Chapter Two is devoted to an analysis of the Nora play. Jelinek's emerging aesthetic of political theater is evaluated through her construction of gendered dramatic subjects, in particular the female-subject Nora Helmer. Chapter Three examines Clara S., which parodies the marriage of Robert and Clara Schumann while alluding through visuals to resurgent fascism in contemporary Austria and Germany. Chapter Four examines Krankheit oder Moderne Frauen. Multiple narratives (fictional, documentary, mythical) are tightly woven together in Jelinek's depiction of Emily Bronte and Carmilla as lesbian vampires locked in a deadly struggle with the opposite sex. I conclude, in Chapter Five, by evaluating the trilogy plays as a cohesive body of work which sheds light on the early development of the playwright's political aesthetic in theater representation.

The sister-figure that appears in the works of the turn-of-the-century Austrian poet, Georg Trakl (1887-1914) has been the source of speculation and analysis in numerous secondary works, beginning already less than ten years after Trakl's suicide in a military hospital in Cracow. Although current research is generally in agreement that Trakl had an incestuous bond with his younger sister, Margarethe Langen-Trakl (1891-1917), the relationship between Trakl's poetic creation of the sister-figure and his own sister Grete continues to be a contentious issue within the secondary literature. In my study of the development of Trakl's sister-figure, I show that this figure appears at times of crisis or emotional turmoil with Grete. Through creation of the sister-figure, Trakl found a means of expressing the conflicting emotions of attraction and repulsion and guilt that arose out of his relationship to Grete. In the poems and particularly in the unedited dramas, the sister-figure is represented as fragmented, both physically and psychically. The image of the sister as both victim and aggressor, both male and female eventually gives way to a mythical representation of the sister. After Trakl's death, many of his friends and acquaintances had contact with Grete Langen-Trakl. In their depictions of her, they measure her explicitly against her brother and find her lacking in positive qualities, polarizing Georg and Grete into extremes of good and evil. Implicitly, their negative portrayals of Grete are based on Trakl's implication of the sister-figure in an incest scene. Contemporary depictions of her behavior and relationship to her brother frequently employ words expressing disgust and abhorrence or make references to her fate of tragic suffering. As a result of these early attempts to obscure the incest, most secondary works establish a stance of either accepting or rejecting the importance of the incest and the sister-figure in Trakl's oeuvre. I argue that many of these secondary works adopt the tone of the contemporary depictions of Grete Langen-Trakl, which they then apply to their analysis of Trakl's sister-figure. In particular, biographical sketches of Trakl and his sister borrow heavily from the contemporary descriptions of Grete Langen-Trakl and Trakl's representation of a sister-figure.

Popular novels by women during the Weimar Republic have been accused of creating a discursive climate among women that glorified motherhood and encouraged political apathy. In this dissertation, I demonstrate that, on the contrary, these novels contained important social criticism and provided advice and role models for women. I also show that critics of these novels have misunderstood the discourse of "organized motherhood," long used within the women's movement to encourage women's entry into the public sphere in the name of civic activism. After situating the texts historically and culturally, my analysis of four texts: Stud. chem. Helene Willfuer by Vicki Baum, Die mit den 1000 Kindern, by Clara Viebig, Die Madels aus der Fadengasse, by Lisbeth Burger, and Thea von Harbou's Metropolis--works all influenced by the philosophies of the bourgeois women's movement--demonstrates a concept of women's role common to authors of the Weimar Republic's older generation. Here, women have the inherent potential to redeem and reform a society damaged by war and modern civilization through their entry into the public sphere and civic activism. Works of Weimar's younger generation of authors--Gilgi-eine von uns and Das kunstseidene Madchen, by Irmgard Keun, Die Mehlreisende Frieda Geier, by Marieluise Fleisser, Kasebier erobert den Kurfurstendamm, by Gabriele Tergit, and Schicksale hinter Schreibmaschinen, by Christa Anita Bruck--were written mainly in a neusachliche style by authors who did not experience the pre-war fight for women's rights but instead came of age during the harsh economic and social realities of the Weimar Republic. These works, devoid of bourgois utopias, instead contain strategies for individual survival and bitter criticism against modern conditions for women. Then as now, the personal was political for women. A novelistic description of the hardships suffered due to an unwanted pregnancy was as surely a protest against existing legislation and social conditions for women as a political speech--and one more likely to be accessed and understood by other women. Rather than contributing to political apathy, these novels criticized political and social realities, intervening into discourses about modern women and their role within society.

The following examination of Cordelia Edvardson's Burned Child Seeks the Fire: A Memoir, Ruth Klüger's Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered, and Elizabeth Trahan's Walking with Ghosts: A Jewish Childhood in Wartime Vienna explores how three German-speaking, Jewish women remember their childhoods by creating a new lens through which the Holocaust can be viewed. The authors compel their readers to accompany them on their journeys into the past and to witness particular events by using language to zoom in and focus on childhood experiences—like a camera bringing an image closer through a telephoto lens. Their narratives remain translucent in that the reader is always aware of the authors' contemporary, critical perspective. Edvardson's, Klüger's, and Trahan's writings are similar in how they transmit memory; they break from the traditional, nineteenth-century form of autobiography by constantly interrupting the chronological framework of their narratives to oscillate between past and present as memories occur to them. This process of interweaving memory into narrative challenges readers to re-view in a new way the making of testimony about events with which they (the readers) may already be familiar. By using James Young's Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation as a theoretical foundation, I approach these narratives as a viewer with the intention of documenting the transmission of memory rather than merely examining the events that the authors recalled. These texts offer us access to an extraordinary perspective in Holocaust literature—an uninhibited view of daily life through the eyes of three young girls who came of age during the National Socialist era and who were persecuted for being Jewish.

This dissertation, the first book-length investigation of the works of Julia Franck, investigates representations of the mother-daughter relationship in Franck’s five major texts: Der neue Koch (1997), Liebediener (1999), Bauchlandung: Geschichten zum Anfassen (2000), Lagerfeuer (2003), and Die Mittagsfrau (2007). Specifically, it examines the roles of “daughter” and “mother” as social constructs, which are open to resignification and reinvestigation. In the introduction, I outline the trajectory of Franck’s career, focusing particularly on her relationship with feminist scholarship and her persona as a representative of feminism in the German media. In chapter 1, I begin with Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity and look for examples of performative identity in Franck’s works of fiction. I further destabilize identity in chapter 2 by demonstrating how identity is contingent on space, drawing on Marc Augé’s theory of “places” and “non-places.” In chapter 3, I demonstrate how psychoanalysis, as the primary theoretical lens through which the mother-daughter relationship has been viewed, conflicts with destabilized gender binaries, as laid out in chapter 1. Consequently, I argue, the psychoanalytic models of attachment and identity are not relevant to an investigation of the mothers and daughters in Franck’s works. I explain my theory of “maternal drag” in chapter 4. I argue that the mother figures in Franck’s novels exhibit a performative maternal identity, specifically one that so conflicts with expectations of the maternal that it calls into question those very expectations. Finally, in the conclusion, I consider the wider implications of my theory, particularly in light of the media discussions in Germany surrounding feminism, motherhood, and the decline in birth-rate.