Germanistik: In search of the female writer… Part I: Through the endless corridors of the (Bonn) Universität

Universität Bonn. All images belong to author.

In this column, Maddie Hazelden reflects on her experience of studying Germanistik while on her year abroad and the lack of female representation she found there. The series will explore reasons behind the dearth of women in the German canon by delving back into literary history and bringing attention to those female writers whose names have been reduced to footnotes.

There is a particularly elusive figure in German literature, that of the female writer.

This year I have been studying under the Germanistik and Komparatistik department at Bonn Universität. Having read a variety of texts by both men and women from many different time periods over the last two years at Cambridge, I was interested to see how the subject would be taught at a German university. To my surprise, I found that the texts covered in lectures and seminars were almost exclusively written by men. Sitting in a lecture on the construction of the German literary canon, I stared in disbelief at the one and only slide dedicated to the ‘anti-Kanon’. The lecturer acknowledged the exclusion of women but without any elaboration beyond this fact - it was suggested that those interested could do some further reading in their ‘own time’. 

The Germany of today is generally regarded as a progressive country, and its universities as symbolic of this. That preconception of mine was confirmed as I walked into my lecture one morning only for it to be promptly hijacked by climate protesters - these students would continue to occupy the lecture hall for the entire week. However, this forward-thinking mindset appeared to stop short of the Germanistik syllabus, which only seemed more outdated when compared to the general outlook of the students and, to some extent, the university itself. While browsing through the classes on offer, I eventually came across one seminar, simply entitled ‘Frauenliteratur’. Rather than integrated thematically into the rest of the curriculum, literature by women appeared to be curtained off, neatly contained in one reading group per week. It did not even seem to merit its own lecture series.

Indeed, the only seminar I took in which texts by women were covered was from a comparative studies module on German and English Gothic literature. The texts were not only divided by their language, but notably by the gender of their authors. Furthermore, it was only the English texts which featured female writers, notably Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. In what was fast becoming a pattern for me as I navigated my first semester at Bonn, the German texts chosen for the seminar were all written by men. Not only did this seem at odds with my studies at Cambridge, but it also seemed to be an issue with the Germanistik department specifically. Following a conversation with a German friend, who revealed that she could not recall reading a single text written by a woman while studying for her Abitur (the German A-Level equivalent), my interest was more than piqued, and I began my search for the German female writer in earnest.

Taking the advice of my lecturer, I decided to pursue the topic by myself and picked up a copy of Nicole Seifert’s pointedly entitled FrauenLiteratur. The compound noun, of which the German language is so fond, identifies writing by women as a subset of literature, never quite on a par with the ‘Literatur’ of their male counterparts. I hoped this non-fiction choice would point me towards some writers whose works I had not yet heard of, while also providing some answers to the apparent dearth of women in the German canon. Seifert takes on the concept of Frauenliteratur itself, how works by women came to be parcelled off and consistently undervalued by critics throughout literary history. The project was sparked by the author’s recognition of her own lack of exposure to writing by women throughout her school and university career, which she correctly identifies as the result of a vicious cycle wherein literature by women has been diminished by critics, shut out from the canon, and subsequently falls out of print, and in the worst cases, is lost entirely. 

It is estimated that a total of 3,500 women published works in German throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. However, by the early 20th century only a handful of these names were still known. Even now, writers such as Hedwig Dohm and Helene Böhlau are relatively unheard of outside academic circles, to name just a few. Their gradual erasure was not a lack of either critical or commercial success; indeed, many women took advantage of the boom in the publishing industry following the first use of the rotary printing press in Germany in 1865. Rather, the popularity of writing by women could often be turned against them with the label of ‘Trivialliteratur’, the assumption that what appealed to mass consumption was unlikely to contain much literary value, especially if it concerned itself with the lives of women. It was the derision of their subject matter and popular appeal that shut out many works of literature by women from the higher echelons of the German canon. 

All is not lost, however. Since the 1970s, following the call by Gisela Brinker-Gabler for an ‘umfassende Neubewertung der Frauenliteratur’ (comprehensive re-evaluation of literature by women), important work has been done to reassess marginalised writing by women and help recover the names of authors who, although recognised by their contemporaries, have since been forgotten by literary history. Despite these efforts, it appears that appreciation for literature by women and a thorough recognition of their exclusion from the canon is yet to trickle through to all schools and universities in Germany. Therefore, I will continue in my conscious effort to read more literature by female writers and delve further back into literary history. I hope you will join me along the way, as I rediscover lost voices and re-examine those who survived against the odds.