Heike Bartel, Elizabeth Boa, eds. Pushing at Boundaries: Approaches to Contemporary German Women Writers from Karen Duve to Jenny Erpenbeck. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006. 187 pp. $49.00 (paper), ISBN 978-90-420-2051-1.

Reviewed by Mariana Ivanova (Department of Germanic Studies, University of Texas at Austin)
Published on H-German (May, 2007)

Young German Women Writers: Girl/Pop Culture Pushing at the Boundaries

"Crossing the border" of comfort-zone literary and feminist research and confronting long held academic suspicions of pop literature comprise the ultimate goals of this volume edited by Heike Bartel and Elizabeth Boa. Inspired by a 2004 symposium on German writer Karen Duve, the volume is an original compilation of contributions primarily from the perspectives of German, Women's, and Cultural Studies. While many of the essays engage with recent and lesser known texts by a young generation of German women writers, the volume struggles to push beyond obsolete theoretical approaches. Indeed, the boundary trope, running like a red herring through the volume, opens new possibilities for the discussion and reconsideration of how the young German authors assert or critique in a new way various perceptions of women.

Since Simone de Beauvoir's seminal The Second Sex (1949) and the theories of second wave feminism, terms such as "challenging," "blurring," or "pushing" boundaries have become buzz words for several generations of feminist criticism, serving to undermine the predominant patriarchal and bourgeois dichotomies. The worn-out boundary trope suggested in the title admittedly becomes indicative of the various approaches found throughout this collected volume. All of the essays included make an original attempt to engage with texts by women authors less known to British and American feminist and cultural studies circles. The book is interesting because of its focus on texts by a young generation of German female authors who chose to challenge, via pop literature, the conventions of story-telling, myth, fairytale or previous generations' serious literature, inventing new ways of writing femininity.

The architecture of the volume is reflected in the authors' claim that the "crossing of generic boundaries" with its subversive potential is a "key feature" in both the so-called new wave women writers' literary texts and in their interpretations (p. 7). Bartel and Boa's intention is to move from strategies of transgressing linguistic boundaries in the literary narrative and its translation to discussions of a broader context of works by women writers such as Anne Duden, Jenny Erpenbeck, Julia Franck, Julia Schoch, Malin Schwerdtfeger, and Judith Hermann. The volume thus opens with an excerpt from Duve's most recent novel Die entführte Prinzessin followed by an essay by Duve's translator, Anthea Bell.[1] The approaches in the subsequent contributions, written both in German and English, vary from quite traditional text and motif analysis, close reading and review of the books' reception to intriguing and quite compelling comparative discussions of the traits of pop literature, eco-feminism, body politics, and urban modernity in the texts. Several essays focus especially on the genre mixes of fairy tale, romance, short story, and myth, or ultimately place Duve's and the other writers' work in the context of post-Wende/post-Wall pop and Berlin literature. The editors' decision to provide a wide range of different approaches to the young German writers works well, while the essays are held together by common themes such as the "relationship between mind and body, nature and culture" (p. 41), the "merging of 'high' and 'low' culture" (p. 89), "disgust and body motifs" (p. 119), the "disappearance of the metropolis" in female writing (p. 168), and the "contamination of nature through modern industrial life" (p. 7).

The volume thus resonates with central phenomena in contemporary literary production and criticism both in and outside of Germany. For instance, several of the essays mention discussions around the "Fräuleinwunder" label (lady miracle), a controversial debate released by Volker Hage's article in the major German weekly Der Spiegel of 1999. In a nutshell, this debate reconsidered the labeling of the young generation of German women writers after 1989 with a historically ambivalently charged term. Originally used in American media of the 1950s, "Fräuleinwunder" referred to the first Miss Germany after WWII, Susanne Erichsen.[2] This term draws problematically on the popular term "Wirtschaftswunder," thus suggesting the equation of women with freshly produced commodities. In America, these debates were reflected in a German Life and Letters article by Peter Graves.[3] Not surprisingly, he is also the contributor of the first essay in Bartel and Boa's volume. In addition to Graves's opposition to this term, Petra Bagley also counters it in her contribution by ironically coining the term "Grossmütterliteratur" (p. 151). She thus evokes the no less problematic notion of postwar "Vaterliteratur" and the postwar re-evaluation of the fathers' generation by younger German authors. In another essay, Franziska Meyer argues in her own right for the term "Generation Berlin" to refer to the young German authors (p.168), thus avoiding altogether the contentious gender label. The most interesting response to these attempts to classify the young writers, nevertheless, comes in Bartel's essay. True to her and Boa's project with this volume, she argues that Duve's writing blurs the boundaries between "low" and "high" culture, between girl culture and pop/media culture, and the "Bildungsroman" defined so rigidly by canon-oriented literary studies. Thus, Bartel clearly unravels the root of the various classification debates--namely, desperate attempts to accommodate academic reluctance to include women, pop, and girl culture texts into the canon of German, Women's, or Culture Studies.[4]

Pop and girl literature that challenges various traditions of the past, while re-writing the mythological in a new and fresh way, plays a significant role in the remaining essays. They draw particularly on topics such as literature and the body, physical performance, disgust, bulimia, and identity politics as predominant in Duve's and other young German writers' texts. A better framework for the elaboration on these issues could have been provided perhaps by such feminist seminal works as Helene Cixous's The Laugh of the Medusa (1975), Susan Bordo's Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (1989), and Judith Butler's Gender Trouble (1990). Instead of crossing the borders of early feminist theories, however, the articles in the volume remain largely confined to textual boundaries and parallels, and to the performance of close text analysis. One should mention here the only exception--Lucy Macnab's essay, "Becoming Bodies," which relies heavily on Butler's work. Elisa Müller-Adams's essay establishes successfully references to Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann's work in terms of the use of mythological figures, yet it fails to connect Julia Schoch's and Karen Duve's work to that of more contemporary women authors. An attempt to place young German women writers within a larger context of European pop literature is also made by referencing Nick Hornby's bestselling novels (p. 90). This attempt could have profited more from an analysis of the conspicuous parallels between the young German authors discussed and contemporary British women authors such as Iris Murdoch, Margaret Drabble, and A. S. Byatt, whose fiction similarly draws on fairy tale and mythological motifs. Another larger issue that remains unconsidered, which is perhaps justified within the constraints of the symposium on Duve, are East European women re-writing German mythological texts from a new perspective in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Such examples are Libuze Monikova's Die Fassade (1987), Emine Sevgi Özdamar's Mutterzunge (1990) or even Herta Müller's Herztier (1994).[5] These texts resonate, although in a different way, with similar dimensions of boundaries, both geographical, social, urban, and linguistic, which have been crossed by these and other women. The project of crossing borders is thus restricted, it seems, to German-born women writers.

Nevertheless, this volume achieves the goals set by its editors and by the contributors themselves. The value of the volume lies primarily in the various insights for English-speaking scholars and students of German provided in areas rarely touched upon, such as pop and girl literature. As discussed earlier, many essays provide a fresh take on young German writers, emphasizing their rebellious potential, but also the originality of their new language and style. Moreover, this volume, rich in footnotes and references to media reviews of the texts discussed, as well as to German literary criticism, is a good reference source. One further aspect reinforces the reference quality of this volume: the presence of various parallels established among the young German women writers' works, but also to canon authors such as E. T. A. Hoffmann, J. W. Goethe, or Bertolt Brecht. Indeed, the latter reflect the attempts to re-integrate the literature of younger female authors within the boundaries of the canon, rather than pushing at its boundaries. Finally, the feminist components of all the essays, even if confined to certain limits, successfully challenge our thinking about literature and most prominently women's literature. This volume convincingly argues for a new niche for literary reception and criticism of girl literature and pop literature, which cannot be lightly dismissed. Digging deeper into the contributions proves that young women authors provide an unlimited reservoir of playful challenges and innovative story-telling. In this sense, the project of "crossing borders" still provokes questions and reconsiderations of the forms and ways of female expression.

Notes

[1]. Karen Duve, Die entführte Prinzessin. Von Drachen, Liebe und andere Ungeheuern (Frankfurt: Eichborn, 2005).

[2]. Hage's use of the term "Fräuleinwunder" was probably provoked by Susanne Erichsen's return to public attention when she celebrated her ninetieth birthday in 1999. Erichsen's autobiography, which explicitly linked her life to the label, was published in 2003, one year after her death. See Susanne Erichsen, Ein Herz und eine Krone. Die Lebenserinnerungen des deutschen Fräuleinwunders (Berlin: Econ Verlag, 2003).

[3]. Peter Graves, "Karen Duve, Kathrin Schmidt, Judith Hermann: 'Ein literarisches Frauenwunder?,'" German life and Letters 55 (2002): 196-207.

[4]. See, among others, Wiebke Eden, Keine Angst vor großen Gefühlen. Die neuen Schriftstellerinnen (Berlin: edition ebersbach, 2001); Heidelinde Müller, Das "literarische Fräuleinwunder". Inspektion eines Phänomens der deutschen Gegenwartsliteratur in Einzelfallstudien (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2004); Ilse Nagelschmidt, Lea Müller-Dannhausen, Sandy Feldbacher, and Lea Müller, eds., Zwischen Inszenierung und Botschaft (Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2006); and Christiane Caemmerer, Walter Delabar, and Helga Meise, eds., Fräuleinwunder literarisch. Literatur von Frauen zu Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2005).

[5]. Yoko Tawada, Rumjana Zaharieva, Aysel Özakin, Carmen Francesca Banciu, and many others could be mentioned and further explored in respect to parallels and affinities to younger German women writers.

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Citation: Mariana Ivanova. Review of Bartel, Heike; Boa, Elizabeth, eds., Pushing at Boundaries: Approaches to Contemporary German Women Writers from Karen Duve to Jenny Erpenbeck. H-German, H-Net Reviews. May, 2007.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=13218

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