Literarisierungen der Lebenswelt deutsch-jüdischer Autorinnen in Berlin (1900–1918)
[Jewish Women and Modernity: Models of Femininity and Jewishness in the Works of Female German-Jewish Writers in Berlin (1900–1918)] _________________
Professor Elizabeth Boa writes on Godela Weiss-Sussex's publication:Fascinating Insight into Forgotten German-Jewish Women Authors
By 1900, Berlin could lay claim to becoming the metropolis of the new century, the very exemplar of urban modernity. The sheer speed of the physical and social transformation of the capital city of unified Germany was spectacular. Godela Weiss-Sussex's study explores the intersection of two key discourses of secular modernity, women's emancipation and Jewish emancipation. Berlin was the cultural arena where conflict between modernisation and reaction was played out most sharply, and was the scene too of lived tensions between progressive hopes and regret for lost beliefs.
Complementing the study of women's writing, of German-Jewish literature, and of how 'the Jewess' is imagined in German literature, Weiss-Sussex recuperates the lost voices of German-Jewish women authors themselves.The result is a fascinating excavation of contrasting responses to the hopes and threats of now forgotten German-Jewish women authors, including Else Croner, Auguste Hauschner, Grete Meisel-Hess, and L. Audnal (pseudonym of Elisabeth Landau). Weiss-Sussex vividly draws out the tension in their writing between Jewish women as citizens of modernising Germany and the Jewish woman as bearer of traditional culture: Croner's ambiguously distanced essay on the 'Modern Jewess' skirts antisemitic topoi; Hauschner's characters negotiate a way between traditional arranged marriage and the neurasthenia of hectic city life; Grete Meisel-Hess optimistically positions Jewish femininity in the context of feminism and a new scientific ethic; Elisabeth Landau, writing in 1918 with far-sighted pessimism, chooses emigration over the ideal of German-Jewish symbiosis, which she now perceives as hopeless. Weiss-Sussex brings illuminating analysis of a highly complex discursive field to bear on her subtle close reading of the texts in this important feminist contribution to the study of the position of women in German-Jewish culture.
