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Sophie Discovers Amerika : The Digital Companion
Michelle Stott James and Rob McFarland
Dear Readers:
The following collection of texts has been edited by Alec Down as a companion to our anthology of articles titled Sophie Discovers Amerika: German-Speaking Women Write the New World (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2014). Our anthology of articles takes on a fascinating corpus of literature: in their explorations of the Americas over the past 300 years, German-speaking women have written poetry, novels, screenplays, dramas, erotica, and scientific treatises about many different places in the New World, from Brazil to California, from Canada and Mexico to Argentina.
For obvious reasons, we were not able to include the original primary texts in our anthology. In this literary companion, Alec Down has collected many full-text electronic versions of that are treated in our anthology. In this way, readers can easily have access to long-out-of-print texts that are otherwise inaccessible in distant archives.
We hope you enjoy the texts, and we encourage you not only to read about them, but to research them and write about them. In this way, we can put these texts back into the broader discourses of travel literature, colonialism, gender, family and the reception of America in European literature.
We thank Alec Down for his hard work and diligence, and wish him well on his further academic career.
Rob McFarland Michelle Stott James
Contents of this work include:
1. Die Auswanderer nach Brasilien, Amalia Schoppe
2. Die Lieder der Mormonin, Sidonie Grünwald-Zerkovitz
3. Kolonistenvolk, Gabriele Reuter
4. Im Goldlande Kalifornien, Sophie Wörrishöffer
5. Aus vergangenen Tagen, Clara Berens
6. Der Amerikaner, Gabriele Reuter
7. Kultur im Werden, Alice Salomon
8. Mit Karl May durch Amerika, Klara May
9. Lebensbeschreibung der Wittwe des Obrist Florian Engel, Regula Engel
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Die deutsche Frau: An Anthology of German Women's Writing
Alec Down
With a pressing need for an anthology of women writers in the field of German literature, where women authors have been consistently excluded from the canon (Blackwell 1990), I have selected fifteen texts, which are grammatically and linguistically appropriate for third-year level German classes. I have assessed the selected texts based on their literary quality, the views and ideals depicted and the educational and cultural value that text may have for the student. I have selected a wide range of texts, including short story prose, poetry, dialogued plays, letters and essays, thus providing the reader with an assortment of different literary writing styles of the time.
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‘Die Seele sehnte sich hinaus in den Schnee’: The Meaning and Function of Outside Space in Bettine von Arnim’s Die Günderode
Catherine Grimm
Bettine von Arnim’s Die Günderode is the second of her autobiographically inspired works of epistolary fiction, based on correspondences and memories of key figures from von Arnim’s youth.i Published in 1840 the text is usually read as an idealized depiction of 19th century female friendship and companionship. Lorely French states, for example, that “recent studies have recognized Die Günderode as the most communicational of Arnim’s four epistolary books”, while Edith Waldstein observes that “such cooperation, mutual respect, reciprocal enrichment and love are characteristic of the relationship between these two women and distinguish it from all other friendships portrayed in Bettine von Arnim’s novels. The frank exchange between the two young women in Die Günderode is often contrasted with the more one-sided and hierarchical correspondence between a young von Arnim and an older Goethe in her first book Goethes Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde. For example, in her recent book Ulrike Growe writes the following about Die Günderode: “Dem ganzen Briefverkehr ist konstrastierend vor der Folie des drohenden Selbstmordes eine jugendliche Unbeschwertheit und Träumerei unterlegt, und eine Offenheit und Akzeptanz, die so im Austausch mit dem Bruder Clemens oder dem abgöttisch geliebten Goethe nicht vorhanden ist“.
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Not Another Grim(m) Tale: The Rights of Passage in Marie von Olfers’ “Little Princess”
Bernadette H. Hyner
If we accept, as Edward Said suggests, that the terms authorship and authority both emphasize a writer’s capacity to establish an alternative discourse, control, and preserve it, then Marie von Olfers is best remembered as a tale spinner who redrafts conventional gender designations in her fairy tales. Specifically, her narrative “Little Princess,” published in 1862, presents alternative interpretations of female agency and sisterhood, while it also debases traditional concepts of family. Von Olfers’ unusual reading of these topics suggests that she construes family and rites of passage in response, perhaps even in opposition, to her male predecessors’ more traditional approach to the same themes.
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Doppelganger, Dreams, and Delusions: A Freudian Reading of Marie Eugenie delle Grazie’s Der Schatten
Jared Löhrmann
Marie Eugenie delle Grazie’s drama Der Schattenpremiered in 1902 in the Hofburgtheater, Vienna’s most prestigious stage at the time. The play deals with the poet Ernst Werner and his encounter with a character called “Der Schatten”. The Shadow is Werner’s double, meaning that it looks like the poet, but it does not have all of the abilities of a human. Although the idea of a double or “Doppelgänger” is ubiquitous in the literature and art of Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, delle Grazie approaches the topic from a different angle. Many contemporary columnists, however, criticized her drama; to them it lacked depth and did not seem to add to the existing discourse (Münz 101). They interpreted the Shadow as a personification of evil or evil thoughts. Although this approach is certainly valid, the role of the Shadow is far more complex. In her play, delle Grazie alludes to several existing theories by important minds, such as Sigmund Freud, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Heinrich Heine, but employs their ideas in a unique way. As delle Grazie culminates these thoughts in the character of the shadow, the drama reflects the psychological complexity of life in Fin-de- Siècle Vienna. I will analyze the figure of the Shadow using Freud’s concepts of “Das Unheimliche” (The Uncanny), dreams and repression, and his theory on the Id, Ego and Super-Ego.
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A Voice for Sophie's Daughters
Lisa Ann Jackson Thomson
In European libraries, students and professors discover works by largely forgotten German women. Then they give the works an audience the authors never imagined. The story and background of Sophie: A Digital library of Works by German-Speaking Women.
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Gender - Art - Science: Elsa Bernstein's Critique of Naturalist Aesthetics
Astrid Weigert
Elsa Bernstein (1866-1949) was a successful playwright at the turn of the last century whose works Wir Drei (The Three of Us, 1892), Dammerung (Twilight, 1893) and Maria Arndt (1908) are generally categorized as Naturalist dramas. Of those dramas, Dammerung was the most successful and received critical praise after its performance at the Freie Bühne Berlin, where, under the directorship of Otto Brahms German audiences were introduced to dramas by Ibsen, Hauptmann , and Holz Schlg to name a few of the best-known Naturalist dramatists. My approach to Bernstein's dramas and, for the purpose of this paper, in particular to Dämmerung, from an aesthetic-poetological perspective. This means that I read the drama in the context of the dominant Naturalist aesthetic and programmatic discourse as as put forth by a number of male authors in a number of literary journals of the period (such as Die Gesellschaft, Durch! or Freie Biihne). Against the background of this aesthetic discourse, Dammerung acquires a new dimension: it becomes an avenue for Elsa Bernstein to partake in the Naturalist aesthetic discourse via the genre of the drama.
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The Education of Women: Ideas and Vignettes
Heather Pitts
Looking at German girls and women in the eighteenth and even the nineteenth century, we see that most of them received very little formal education. Reading and writing and a basic, broad education were typical. In the higher social classes, girls learned conversational French, social dancing, and enough piano and voice to accompany or sing at parties. Young women were trained to become wives and mothers. For the lower-to middle-class women this meant learning household management and the raising of children, although lower-class women did it all themselves, whereas middle-class women delegated some of the work to servants and oversaw the general going-on in the household. Upper-class women left the house and children to the servants; they were mainly to learn how to entertain. Of course, there were always people with progressive ideas about women's education and about what it means to be educated and why it is important. These people (gradually) changed public opinion about what is acceptable learning for women and made possible my education, this course on women's literature, and this paper. I would like to investigate three reasons why women deserve a good education, drawing examples from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary works by German women.
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Malwina as a Female Heroine
Sharon Stamps
This story, Die Brunnengäste, was actually an intriguing, entertaining read. I read in anticipation along with the characters who waited to discover the reason for Malwina and Adelbert's secret marriage. Although the resolution of the story didn't match the action-packed movie "thrillers" of today, it satisfied me and was believable. Since I enjoyed the story, there are several things that I can think to write about. As I began the story, Malwina seemed a little like Jutta in Jenseits der Mauer, in the descriptions by others. As it progressed, I found less correlation between the two. I would like to write about the character of Malwina as the female heroine.
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Rahel Levin Varnahagen: Harnessing the Ability to Become
Mareena Smith
Rahel Levin Varnhagen: Influence of a Jewess on German Romanticism. Life is not always a box of chocolates, especially if one is part of a marginalized race, religion or gender. Since all three apply to Rahel Levin Varnhagen, one can easily imply that she did not live an easy life. She was raised as a Jewess in a time when Jews were welcome in society but not yet fully integrated into it. As a woman she was limited to a particular lifestyle as well, and yet she took advantage of her surroundings to make a place for herself in the formation of German Romanticism. Due to her self-education emphasizing enlightenment thinking, her non-partiality and the salons she hosted, Rahel Varnhagen proved to be an essential element of the German romantic movement in Berlin.
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Im Nonnengarten : An Anthology of German Women's Writing 1850-1907
Michelle Stott James
The female-authored stories collected in this anthology originated during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a time that witnessed some of the most significant changes ever experienced in European society: the rise of industrialism and the decline of the agrarian state; the decline of the aristocracy; a growing awareness of the plight of the underclasses; the new ideas of thinkers such as Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche and Freud, whose theories revolutionized the way humans understood themselves and their relationship to their environment; the beginnings of the Women's Movement and the accompanying gains in mobility, political rights, and educational and professional opportunities for women; the advent of the steam engine, electricity, the telephone, and other such far-reaching improvements in technology.
Written primarily between 1850 and 1907, these narratives are the fruit of this period of tension and change; thus, they reflect and react to the thought, conventions, and attitudes of the time, in many cases powerfully depicting the birth struggles of a new way of being.
The anthology's stories are arranged by birth years of the respective authors, beginning with Malvida von Meysenbug (born in 1816) and ending with Sophie Hoechstetter (born in 1873).
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A List of Women in German and Austrian Silent Cinema (Reference, 1969)
Gerhard Lamprecht
Compiled by Sarah Reed from Garhard Lamprecht’s Deutsche Stummfilme. Berlin: Deutsche Kinemathek. 1969. Includes list of film title, year, and woman.
