Clare Bielby, Anna Richards - Women and Death 3 - Women's Representations of Death in German Culture Since 1500 (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) (2010)

Women and Death 3
Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture

Women and Death 3
Women’s Representations of
Death in German Culture
since 1500
Edited by
Clare Bielby
and
Anna Richards
Rochester, New York

Copyright © 2010 by the Editors and Contributors
All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation,
no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system,
published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted,
recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means,
without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
First published 2010

by Camden House
Camden House is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Inc.

668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA
www.camden-house.com
and of Boydell & Brewer Limited
PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK
www.boydellandbrewer.com
ISBN-13: 978–1–57113–069–3
ISBN-10: 1–57113–069–1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Women and death 3 : women’s representations of death in German culture

since 1500 / edited by Clare Bielby and Anna Richards.
p. cm. — (Studies in German literature, linguistics, and culture)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-57113-439-4 (hardcover: alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 1-57113-439-5 (hardcover: alk. paper)
1. German literature—History and criticism. 2. German literature—
Women authors—History and criticism. 3. Women and literature—
Germany 4. Women in literature. 5. Women and death. 6. Death in
literature. I. Bielby, Clare, 1981– II. Richards, Anna, 1962– III. Title:
Women and death three. IV. Series.
PT151.W7W59 2010
830.9'3522—dc22
2010000983
A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
This publication is printed on acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States of America.
Contents
List of Illustrations vii

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
Clare Bielby and Anna Richards
1: Practicing Piety: Representations of Women’s Dying in
German Funeral Sermons of the Early Modern Period 12
Jill Bepler
2: “Ich sterbe”: The Construction of the Dying Self in the
Advance Preparations for Death of Lutheran Women in
Early Modern Germany 31
Judith P. Aikin
3: The “New Mythology”: Myth and Death in Karoline
von Günderrode’s Literary Work 51
Barbara Becker-Cantarino
4: The Murderess on Stage: Christine Westphalen’s
Charlotte Corday (1804) 71
Stephanie Hilger
5: “Ob im Tode mein Ich geboren wird?”: The Representation of
the Widow in Hedwig Dohm’s “Werde, die du bist” (1894) 88
Abigail Dunn
6: The Figure of Judith in Works by German Women Writers
between 1895 and 1921 101
Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly
7: Lola Doesn’t: Cinema, Jouissance, and the Avoidance
of Murder and Death 116
Simon Richter
8: Death, Being, and the Place of Comedy in
Representations of Death 134
Stephanie Bird
vi CONTENTS
9: “Liebe ist ein Kunstwerk”: The Appeal to Gaspara Stampa

in Ingeborg Bachmann’s Todesarten 152
Áine McMurtry
10: TV Nation: The Representation of Death in Warfare in
Works by Peter Handke and Elfriede Jelinek 174
Elisabeth Krimmer
Works Cited 193
Notes on the Contributors 213
Index 217
Illustrations
1.1 Detail from the epitaph for Markgräfin Sophia 16

von Brandenburg-Ansbach in the Lorenzkirche,
Nuremberg.
1.2 Detail from engraving in Johann Saubert, 22
Currus Simeonis, Nuremberg, 1645.
2.1 Death’s-Head, frontispiece engraving from 40
Christoph Sommer, Epilogi Pie Demortuorum,
Oder: Exemplarische Sterbe-Schule, 1676.
Acknowledgments
T HIS VOLUME IS THE THIRD of a series of three to emerge from the

three-year research project Representations of Women and Death in
German Literature, Art, and Media after 1500. We would like to thank
Professor Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly of the University of Oxford and Pro-
fessor Sarah Colvin of the University of Edinburgh, who led the project,
for their inspiration and for their practical assistance in compiling this vol-
ume. We would also like to thank the other members of the project’s steer-
ing committee for their helpful advice and support, the core group of
scholars who attended the project’s four colloquia for their stimulating
discussions, and, in particular, the ten contributors for their flexibility and
their commitment to the volume. Madeleine Brook was the project’s
professional and able editorial assistant. We are grateful to Jim Walker of
Camden House for his constructive involvement with the volume from the
earliest stages. The School of Languages, Linguistics and Culture at
Birkbeck College, University of London, and the Department of Modern
Languages at the University of Hull kindly contributed to the publication
subvention for the volume. Our greatest debt is to the British Arts and
Humanities Research Council for funding the research project.
Introduction
Clare Bielby and Anna Richards
T HE FREQUENT ASSOCIATION OF WOMEN with death in Western culture

has received a great deal of critical attention. But the cultural repre-
sentations under scrutiny have typically been representations produced by
men, and critics have primarily been interested in the masculinist, some-
times misogynistic, assumptions that motivate them.1 It has been argued,
for example, that the alignment of women with death can be attributed to
the “unknowable” quality of each for the male sex. Elisabeth Bronfen
explains that representing the death of a woman, or death as a woman,
allows male writers and artists at once to express the threatening and fas-
cinating quality of this mystery and to contain it.2 Helen Fronius and Anna
Linton suggest that the link between women and death, so frequent in
male-authored works, may be the “shadow-side of their connection with
birth.”3
German culture offers many examples of women who die and women
who kill: these include women represented in the motif of death and the
maiden in early modern German art, the numerous reworkings of biblical
stories about figures such as Judith and Salome, the ethereal heroines of
German Romanticism, Amazon warriors such as those portrayed in
Heinrich von Kleist’s drama Penthesilea (1808), nineteenth-century
Heldenmädchen (heroic maidens), and femmes fatales such as Frank
Wedekind’s Lulu, to name but some.4 Volumes 1 and 2 of the Women and
Death series, the product of a three-year research project funded by the
British Arts and Humanities Research Council, investigate German tradi-
tions such as these with a particular focus on how women are represented
as victims and killers (volume 1) and on the woman warrior (volume 2), in
art, literature, and media produced for the main part by men. As well as
demonstrating how fertile the topic of women and death has proved to be
for the (male) cultural imagination — its power to trouble and to fascinate
— both volumes reveal the historical, changing nature of the topic’s por-
trayal.
But what of the relationship of women artists to death? This is the
issue that the current, third volume in the Women and Death series seeks
to address. The threat of death is universal; for women, too, then, the
portrayal of death must fulfill an important function if, following Bronfen,
2 CLARE BIELBY AND ANNA RICHARDS
it is through representing death that we work through and contain our

fears of it. But biological death may take on a different, perhaps less abso-
lute, significance for those whose sense of self or whose status is compro-
mised in patriarchal society already.5 Death might also have a different
meaning for women on account of their role as life-givers. And since
“woman” as a concept must appear less mysterious to women themselves,
it might be expected that women writers are less motivated by fear and
fascination in their representations of dying women and women who kill.
If, as Fronius and Linton argue, “[masculinist] representations of women
and death focus on young, available, or otherwise sexually alluring
women,”6 are women writers more likely to portray the deaths of old or
“unspectacular” women, rejecting the aesthetic admiration for the female
corpse famously expressed by Edgar Allan Poe7 or the sexualized portrayal
of female killers often to be found in works by men? Do women writers
more frequently present the experience of women who die “from the
inside,” rather than from the position of observer, and do they invest
women who kill with more agency? Can we expect that, unlike many liter-
ary works by men, in which female death is the channel through which
tensions and conflicts are resolved and which thereby provides a narratively
“satisfying” conclusion,8 works by women protest against any understand-
ing of early female death as “appropriate”? Or can no such differences be
detected: are women themselves bound up so inescapably in the patriarchal
tradition that they reproduce its paradigms?
The ten essays in this volume, written by an international group of
scholars in German literary and film studies, range chronologically from
the early modern period to the early twenty-first century. From their dis-
cussion of song-texts, funeral sermons, poetry, letters, drama, fiction, and,
in one case, the acting of a role onscreen, it emerges that there are no
universal answers to such questions; that there is no consistent counter-
tradition to be uncovered. As Michel Foucault argues, it is only ever pos-
sible to write from inside power, critiquing it from within: “Where there is
power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is
never in a position of exteriority in relation to power.”9 As one would
expect, then, the works of the women writers examined in this volume
“hover[. . .],” to use the words of Elisabeth Bronfen, “between cultural
complicity and critique,”10 but they do so in different ways and to different
extents.
No simple equation can be drawn between women’s lives and their
literary works: that equation has itself often been mobilized by those wish-
ing to denigrate women’s creativity. Where “resistance” is in evidence,
however, it appears often to be inspired by women’s lived experience of the
cultural association between women and death. Abigail Dunn suggests, for
example, that Hedwig Dohm’s own experience of widowhood may have
allowed her — to a limited extent — to question masculinist prescriptions
INTRODUCTION 3
about the appropriate behavior and status of widows in her story “Werde,
die du bist” (1894). Áine McMurtry argues that for Ingeborg Bachmann
the “deathly” experience of seeing herself appropriated in the work of her
former partner Max Frisch inspired her later thematic concern with
death.
A potential source of resistance, women’s lives are also, of course, the
site where dominant cultural representations are inscribed and come into
force: women are the recipients, before they are the producers, of dis-
courses. As Victor Burgin argues, “we become who we are only through
our encounter [. . .] with the multitude of representations of what we may
become.”11 This is illustrated by Barbara Becker-Cantarino’s essay on the
Romantic poet Karoline von Günderrode. Becker-Cantarino argues that
Günderrode internalized the Romantics’ idealized images of love-death
and that this may have contributed to her suicide. Hence the urgency of
the feminist project — and of this project — to interrogate patriarchal
images of women, and to draw attention to alternatives. Silence is not an
option.
Despite their historical and individual differences, it is possible to
observe certain communalities in many of the works discussed here. In
their effort to wrestle with the images and stereotypes that language con-
veys, many writers challenge conventional or prescribed forms, modes, and
phrases. Historically, such a challenge has been particularly audacious for
women writers, who have been under pressure to restrict themselves to
appropriately “feminine” kinds of writing: to romantic or domestic fiction,
for example, rather than drama; to love poetry, rather than elegy. Stephanie
Hilger explains that for the German author Christine Westphalen (1758–
1840) to compose a historical drama — a choice of genre that facilitates
her representation of Charlotte Corday, the assassin of Jean-Paul Marat, as
a powerful, active figure — was to go against the “rules” laid down for
women’s writing by Goethe and Schiller, amongst others. Hilger parallels
Corday’s wielding of the sword with Westphalen’s wielding of the pen in
encroaching on the sacred male terrain of Weimar Classicism. Günderrode
again provides a negative example: while Westphalen boldly appropriates
and reworks this male genre, Günderrode allows her lover Creuzer to steer
her away from historical drama toward a “feminine,” mythic, and “orien-
talizing” poetic mode.
Early modern women have to be content to make themselves heard
through often prescriptive genres, such as funeral books, and women writ-
ers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are frowned upon for ven-
turing into “male” literary terrain, but by the twentieth century
experimentation with form has become much more possible for women
writers. The Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann (1926–73) has any genre
or mode at her disposal. Bachmann responded to her former partner Max
Frisch’s novel Mein Name sei Gantenbein (Gantenbein: A Novel, 1964),
aspects of the female protagonist of which Bachmann identified with her-

self, with her own, radically experimental, novel, Malina (1971). According
to McMurtry, this novel has long been considered an “aesthetic trumping”
of Frisch’s work. For Bachmann, an avant-garde aesthetic opened up a new
way of talking about women and death. Stephanie Bird also discusses
Bachmann and focuses on the humorous aspects of her prose, specifically
when its subject is death. Bird argues that Bachmann’s use of comedy is a
suitable response to representations of death and gender in much twenti-
eth-century thought. Through humor, she suggests, Bachmann is ulti-
mately able to affirm life. Elisabeth Krimmer contends that the Austrian
writer Elfriede Jelinek uses parody and mimicry to disrupt stereotypes and
clichés of women and death. It is through recycling and reworking tradi-
tional associations that Jelinek finds a distinctive voice to express the rela-
tionship between women and death.
The ten essays in the current volume are organized chronologically,

which enables certain historical shifts in the portrayal of women and death
to be observed. Our volume begins with two chapters that illustrate occa-
sions on and ways in which women’s voices made themselves heard in
early modern Lutheran texts. During the early modern period, the para-
digmatic “good death” was an ideal for both sexes. Women and men from
the German-speaking territories strove for a Christian “good death” by
reflecting, in times of health as well as sickness, on their mortality and
reading devotional works, thereby preparing spiritually for their demise.
In the first chapter, Jill Bepler discusses printed funeral books. Widely
distributed and read in early modern Germany, funeral books included
speeches, hymns, poems, and illustrations, as well as a transcript of the
funeral sermon, which typically offered an account of the life and the
death of the deceased and was intended to serve as an example to others.
Discussing the devotional practices of several individual women, practices
that included not only reading devotional texts but also compiling their
own prayer manuals, Bepler argues that although women did not author
funeral sermons or speeches themselves, they exercised agency over their
posthumous representation in various ways. For example, they could
compose prayers to be read at their funeral, choose the biblical verses to
be recited or the hymns to be sung, or design their own coffins. Often
preachers would quote the words of the deceased woman directly in their
sermons, in order to illustrate her piety. Moreover, it seems that in death
women were accorded the same spiritual status as, or even greater spiritual
status than, men. Preachers laud their strength of faith and their patience
in suffering and compare them with biblical figures or even with Amazon
warriors.
Spiritual preparation for death is also the theme of Judith Aikin’s
chapter, but Aikin focuses on one woman in particular: Aemilia Juliana,
INTRODUCTION 5
Countess of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt (1637–1706). Aemilia Juliana com-

posed letters and songs in which she represented herself as continually
dying. The most famous of her death-themed songs, “Wer weiß, wie nahe
mir mein Ende” (Who knows how near my end may be), is not gender-
specific, and it has been used in the context of the deaths of many men as
well as women for more than 300 years. Several of Aemilia Juliana’s songs
address specifically female experiences, however, such as death in child-
birth, and Aikin provides evidence of their long female reception. As well
as analyzing particular texts by Aemilia Juliana, the essay provides insights
into the complex relationship between her life and works. Although
inspired by her own illnesses and composed at a time when “early” death
was common, Aemilia Juliana’s songs do not stand in any mimetic rela-
tionship with “reality.” Her construction of a dying persona — she even
signed her letters “ich sterbe” — was a rhetorical device employed in the
midst of an active, practical life as ruler’s consort, author, businesswoman,
wife, and mother.
By the late eighteenth century the gendering of death had become
more pronounced than in the early modern period, in keeping with the
new emphasis in medicine, anthropology, and philosophy on the polarized
nature of sexual difference. These disciplines ascribed to the female sex
qualities such as passivity, emotionality, physical fragility, and a lack of
sexual desire. Sickliness and ethereality were understood as “natural”
feminine characteristics and were poeticized in literature by women writers
as well as by men. In Romantic works the “love-death” motif became
popular and, as Becker-Cantarino argues, it was most often women who
were represented as its victims. Becker-Cantarino illustrates how
Günderrode, influenced by her lover, the classical scholar and philologist
Friedrich Creuzer (1771–1852), who advised her against writing about
what he called “bright” occidental history, adopted many aspects of the
Romantics’ “new mythology” in her poetic and dramatic works, in par-
ticular its recourse to classical and oriental ideas and the concept of the
love-death. In her poem “Die Malabarischen Witwen” (The Malabarian
Widows, 1806), she celebrates the Indian custom of Sati, the widow’s self-
sacrifice on her husband’s funeral pyre, as a true expression of love.
Becker-Cantarino’s essay chillingly illustrates the potential power of
misogynistic representations over the lives of women. An examination of
the surviving correspondence between Creuzer and Günderrode suggests
that, although Creuzer himself employed the terminology of the love-
death in his relationship with Günderrode, its rhetoric had little influence
on his life: he had a long and successful career as an academic. Günderrode,
meanwhile, seems to have adopted these ideas as a model for life as well as
for her creative work, and they may, Becker-Cantarino argues, have con-
tributed to her suicide in 1806 when her relationship with Creuzer
ended.
The alternative for women writers of the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries was to write against those literary and extra-literary
discourses that associated women with sickness and emotionality. Hilger
suggests that the Hamburg author Christine Westphalen does just this
with her historical drama, published in 1804, about Charlotte Corday,
who assassinated the Jacobin leader Marat in post-revolutionary Paris. At
this period it was common for female killers to be portrayed as lacking
agency, for their deed to be attributed to madness, passion, the desire for
revenge, or obedience to the orders of others. In the case of Corday,
Hilger writes, both denigrators and supporters resorted to such stereotypes
in order either to depoliticize, or to excuse, her action. Westphalen rejects
these motives: her protagonist is a reasoning, sane, sensitive woman who
acts independently, for political reasons, reasons that Westphalen has her
voice in scenes portraying her trial. For Hilger a parallel can be drawn
between Westphalen and her heroine: by publishing a historical tragedy, a
“high” genre considered at the time to be inappropriate for women writ-
ers, Westphalen is also venturing — albeit with less dangerous conse-
quences — outside the traditionally female realm and into the public,
masculine sphere.
In the course of nineteenth-century literary history many of the
stereotypes surrounding women and death were repeated, reworked, and
became entrenched in literary works. It is the century of the self-sacrifi-
cial heroine and the femme fragile, of the sexualized female killer and the
femme fatale. It is also the century that witnessed the birth of the wom-
en’s movement and the rapid expansion of women’s professional writing.
Many women writers used their creative work to protest against the tra-
ditional, restrictive association of women and death, as the next two
contributions to the volume illustrate, both of which address works by
women written around 1900. Dunn focuses on a short story published
by Hedwig Dohm in 1894 that is rich in its literal and figurative explora-
tion of the theme of death. “Werde, die du bist” tells of Agnes Schmidt,
an “ordinary” woman in her fifties who after the death of her husband
experiences the social death that was often the fate of the widow in the
nineteenth century. Agnes’s widowhood is also, however, the catalyst for
a kind of emancipation, for an attempt to discover her “self”: she travels,
reads, reflects, and falls in love with a younger man. Dunn places her
discussion of Dohm’s short story in the context of dominant views on
widowhood in the nineteenth century and depictions of the widow in
nineteenth-century literature. She shows that while Dohm’s story can be
read as a protest against the loss of social status and visibility of the older
woman in the nineteenth century, and in particular of the widow, and
against the sexual double standard that permits love relationships
between older men and younger women, but not vice versa, the story
also has its conventional aspects. Like so many transgressive nineteenth-
INTRODUCTION 7
century widows, Agnes Schmidt dies a self-sacrificial death at the end of

the story.
Picking up and developing ideas explored in Hilger’s chapter, Helen
Watanabe-O’Kelly considers women writers’ representations of another
killer: the biblical figure of Judith. Watanabe-O’Kelly sets the scene by pro-
viding an overview of male-authored representations of Judith, such as those
by Heinrich Heine, Friedrich Hebbel, and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. She
demonstrates how this female killer becomes increasingly eroticized and
sexualized by male artists and writers during the course of the nineteenth
century. In this period, as previously, she argues, Judith functioned as a can-
vas onto which male fears, anxieties, and desires were projected. Watanabe-
O’Kelly goes on to explore how the story of Judith is told by four female
writers: Maria Janitschek, Anna Sartory, Katharina Gondlach, and Rosemarie
Menschick, writing between 1895 and 1921. Although all four write decid-
edly against the sexualization of Judith and are intent upon restoring a sense
of Judith’s heroism, they rely heavily upon patriarchal clichés of woman-
hood and femininity. Unlike in Westphalen’s Charlotte Corday, Judith’s
action is depoliticized; she is stripped of her agency and shown to be acting
as a puppet of her dead husband, of God, or of both, or her action is shown
to be motivated by revenge for Holofernes’ would-be rape of her. Instead of
disrupting cultural ideals of femininity, the writers invoke stereotypically
feminine qualities — woman’s “natural” submissiveness and maternal
instincts — in order to legitimize her as a woman. While to some extent they
rework traditional ideas on women and death, they therefore remain bound
up in misogynistic patriarchal discourses, much more so than does
Westphalen in the earlier Charlotte Corday.
The next chapter takes us to the twentieth century and considers the
medium of film. Here the woman artist is an actress, or rather a series of
actresses who play a particular role. Unlike nineteenth-century representa-
tions of Judith, in which the possession of sexual desire in woman is
equated with the capacity to murder, Simon Richter posits the German
cinematic tradition of Lola as one in which female sexuality and desire can
be represented on their own terms without the desiring woman meeting
the usual fate of death or murder. Lola, he argues, is an anomaly, neither
femme fragile nor femme fatale, and yet still a desiring woman. Starting
with Josef von Sternberg’s Der blaue Engel (1930), Richter traces the cin-
ematic tradition of Lola, exploring German and international films and
taking us right up to the twenty-first century. Richter demonstrates how,
while death always hovers in the background, each film — with the excep-
tion of those portraying transgendered Lolas — is careful to distance Lola
from death and to show her uncompromising sexuality. Concluding with
Tinto Brass’s Monello of 1998, Richter argues that Lola is able to escape
death and murder because her unleashed and unpunished sexual freedom
is a fantasy that the actress and the director share. In this way the medium
of cinema is a crucial component in what Richter terms Lola’s “immunity

from the cycle of murder and death.”
The following two essays take Ingeborg Bachmann as their subject.
Bachmann was a socially engaged poet and writer whose later work, from
the early 1960s until her death in 1973, focused increasingly on feminist
concerns. Her unfinished Todesarten (Manners of Death) cycle, which
features the acclaimed novel Malina and the posthumously published Das
Buch Franza (1995), examines questions of female identity and death.
Bird’s chapter starts by exploring twentieth-century philosophical and
psychoanalytical discourses on death and the centrality of death to notions
of being, subjectivity, and ethics. Bird critiques these traditions from a
feminist perspective, reexamining, for example, how abstract, universaliz-
ing notions of being and identity take man as their subject; woman is
merely the means through which man achieves his transcendence. Bird
considers how psychoanalysis understands loss or death to be at the very
core of representation, for it is through fantasy and representation that the
subject attempts to rediscover his jouissance. Whereas Luce Irigaray insists
that symbolic sublimation is unavailable to women, Joan Copjec’s insist-
ence that sublimation is a quality of the drive, not of the symbolic, allows
for a productive understanding of representation. With very different
philosophical underpinnings and by positing both life and death as merely
part of the continuum of becoming, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari,
too, point to representation as creative. Bird concludes that representation
need not be about loss and death. Representation can actually be a produc-
tive process, and it is this that is integral to our enjoyment of representa-
tions, not least those of death. It is with this in mind that Bird looks at the
role of comedy with regard to death in Ingeborg Bachmann’s Todesarten
prose, with a particular focus on Das Buch Franza. She asks to what extent
comic and melodramatic modes of narrative can be understood as a rejec-
tion of a “masculine” tragic mode, in which a noble death confers nobility
on life. The incongruous combination of comedy and death thus provides
a way for woman to assert her subjectivity and to make a valuable interven-
tion into the paradigm of women and death.
As well as considering Bachmann’s celebrated novel Malina, Áine
McMurtry examines the less well-known poetic drafts found in the recently
published collection Ich weiß keine bessere Welt (I Know of No Better
World, 2000). She reads the drafts, written shortly after Bachmann’s sepa-
ration from the Swiss writer Max Frisch in 1962, as Bachmann’s response
to the “deathly experience” of seeing herself appropriated in the figure of
the main protagonist of Frisch’s Mein Name sei Gantenbein. Tracing
Bachmann’s engagement with a sonnet by the Italian Renaissance poet
Gaspara Stampa, McMurtry demonstrates the trajectory of Bachmann’s
critique of the cultural association between women and death, as evident
in the “deathly” objectification of women in the (male-authored) work of
INTRODUCTION 9
art. She argues that Bachmann is able to protest against and move beyond
such murderous cultural alignments by developing a radical aesthetic of
love, finally achieved in her experimental novel Malina.
The final essay in the volume takes us to the late twentieth and early
twenty-first centuries and explores intersections between death, gender,
and the media. Its author, Elizabeth Krimmer, alludes to a paradigm shift
in conceptions of war, death, and gender brought about by the pervasive-
ness of the media in contemporary society, where they become complicit
in the logic of war. Krimmer examines a selection of newspaper articles on
the war in Yugoslavia, written by Peter Handke, and a play and three short
monologues on the war in Iraq by the Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek. The
juxtaposition of a female and male author demonstrates the insights we
gain from reading the female perspective. An awareness of gender bias
pervades Jelinek’s texts, whereas Handke’s negotiation of gender is more
the byproduct of his central focus on war and the media. Krimmer argues
that both Handke and Jelinek critique traditional associations between
femininity and victimhood and destabilize the dichotomies between the
private and the political, male and female. Although Handke reproduces,
in part, cultural clichés of women and death, referring to women reporters
as “Kriegsbräute” (war brides) for example, he is also intent upon giving
women a voice and agency in his quest to get beyond the so-called big
men and big stories of history, to unveil something more real and authen-
tic. Whilst Handke’s interventions into discourses of women, war, and
violence are an indirect result of his critique of the media, Jelinek, argues
Krimmer, is more radical in her approach to war and gender, parodying
and mimicking stereotypical conceptions of femininity and the traditional
associations between women and victimhood, in order to explode these
from within. Jelinek represents women as simultaneously victims and per-
petrators of war, and she seeks to counter the invisibility of women in
Western discourses on war by thrusting them to the forefront. As Krimmer
argues, although Jelinek’s texts are pervaded by cultural pessimism, her
aesthetic mode allows for a more positive reading.
The different contributions to our volume illustrate that it is impos-
sible to generalize about the representation of death by women writers
from the last five hundred years. Perhaps no subject is as central to any
given historical culture, or as intensely personal, as the annihilation of our
own existence or that of those close to us. What emerges, however, despite
their historical and individual specificities, is the paradoxical vitality of the
portrayals of death discussed here. According to some modern theorists,
writing is itself “deathly,” as Bird illustrates in her chapter: relying on and
expressing the absence of the referent, it is always inflected with loss. In
the words of Bronfen and Goodwin: “Any representational discourse
implies the muteness, absence, nonbeing — in short the death — of the
object it seeks to designate.”12 But many of the works by women discussed
here also suggest something else. Beyond the simple point that to write
oneself, rather than to be written about (and thereby fixed in stereotypes
conceived of by others) is to be alive, the women discussed here seem to
“avoid” death even while writing about it. Of course, when we write about
death we are always writing about something else:13 representations of
death have no knowable referent and death can therefore only ever be
written “around.” But, perhaps surprisingly, there is a particularly figura-
tive or indirect quality to many of these works. Early modern women
construct a dying persona during times of health as well as sickness in order
to underline their spiritual fitness for living; Westphalen represents a his-
torical female killer who ends on the scaffold, without depicting her deed
or her death; Hedwig Dohm’s protagonist protests against the experience
of social death and strives for emancipation; Bachmann uses humor to
write about death and thereby affirms life, and in her novel Malina devel-
ops a radical aesthetic of love that works against the cultural alignment of
women and death; Lola doesn’t die and doesn’t kill. Many of the women
artists examined here use death to represent, even to celebrate, life.
Notes
1
Notable exceptions to this include Claire Raymond, The Posthumous Voice in
Women’s Writing from Mary Shelley to Sylvia Plath (Burlington, VT: Ashgate,
2006) and the concluding section to Elisabeth Bronfen’s seminal Over Her Dead
Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester UP/Routledge,
1992), titled “Aporias of Resistance: From Muse to Creatrix — Snow White
Unbound,” 393–435, in which she discusses works by English-language writers,
including Sylvia Plath, Angela Carter, and Margaret Atwood.
2
Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body.
3
Helen Fronius and Anna Linton, “Introduction,” in Women and Death:
Representations of Female Victims and Perpetrators in German Culture, 1500–2000,
ed. Fronius and Linton (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2008), 1–8; here 1.
4
Sarah Colvin and Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly make a convincing case for the par-
ticularly German tradition of the woman warrior. They argue that “the warrior
woman [in her guise as Amazon, Heldenmädchen, the Biblical Judith][. . .] is both
a more continuous and a more central figure in German culture from the Middle
Ages to the present than in other Western cultures.” Sarah Colvin and Helen
Watanabe-O’Kelly, “Introduction,” in Women and Death 2: Warlike Women in the
German Literary and Cultural Imagination since 1500, ed. Colvin and Watanabe-
O’Kelly (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009), 3.
5
Claire Raymond argues, for example, that woman is “always already dead, or
erased as a speaker in patriarchal culture” (The Posthumous Voice, 4).
6
Fronius and Linton, “Introduction,” 6.
INTRODUCTION 11
7
Edgar Allan Poe writes in “The Philosophy of Composition” [1846] that “the
death [. . .] of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the
world.” Edgar Allan Poe, The Selected Poetry and Prose of Edgar Allan Poe, ed.
T. O. Mabbott (New York: Modern Library, 1951), 369.
8
Laura Martin argues that in works such as Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck (1879) the
murdered female character fulfils a “scapegoating” function. See “‘Gutes Mensch/
schlechtes Opfer’: The Role of Marie in Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck,” German Life
and Letters 50:4 (1997): 429–44. See Anna Richards, The Wasting Heroine in
German Fiction by Women 1770–1914 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004), on the narra-
tively “cathartic” function of the wasting death of the heroine in the nineteenth-
century German novel.
9
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality 1: The Will to Knowledge, trans. Robert
Hurley (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1990), 95.
10
Bronfen claims that “although the narratives to be analyzed [in the concluding
section to Over Her Dead Body] revise the canon and represent the topos and trope
of feminine death differently, they remain uncannily between a disavowal and an
affirmation of the dominant image repertoire; hovering between cultural complic-
ity and critique”; Bronfen, Over her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic
(Manchester and New York: Manchester UP/Routledge, 1992), 395.
11
Victor Burgin, The End of Art Theory (London: Macmillan, 1986), 41.
12
Elisabeth Bronfen and Sarah Webster Goodwin, “Introduction,” in Death and
Representation, ed. Bronfen and Webster Goodwin (Baltimore and London: John
Hopkins UP, 1993), 3–25; here 7.
13
Webster Goodwin and Bronfen, “Introduction,” 20.
1: Practicing Piety: Representations of
Women’s Dying in German Funeral
Sermons of the Early Modern Period
Jill Bepler
Introduction
T HIS ESSAY FOCUSES ON A highly popular and specifically German mass

phenomenon from the early modern period that helped establish
stereotypes for the representation of ordinary women confronting death:
the “Leichenpredigt” or funeral book. In the following, I want to examine
what models of women dying these texts provided and how women them-
selves embraced these stereotypes and engaged in their construction,
thereby gaining a degree of agency in the way in which they were repre-
sented to posterity. Their reading and writing played a role in forming
those representations. The need to bear witness, which dominated
accounts of confrontations with sickness, pain, and death, allowed wom-
en’s voices to be recorded. The heroic nature of the struggle for salvation
depicted in these texts leads to the use of military imagery: exemplary
women are described as soldiers of Christ and even as Christian
Amazons.
The German Funeral Book

Throughout Europe, publications concerned with meditations on death as
a devotional practice reached a peak in the seventeenth century.1 It was,
however, in the German-speaking Protestant territories that the funeral
book became one of the most popular and widespread genres of devo-
tional reading materials on death.2 Funeral books contained representa-
tions of men’s and women’s lives and deaths that shaped individual and
collective expectations and perceptions of proper Christian behavior, both
in long-term preparation for death and in facing the actual process of
dying. In an age when biography was not yet an established genre in the
vernacular, these religious texts, with their sometimes expansive accounts
of the life of the deceased, provided representations of Christian lives as a
GERMAN FUNERAL SERMONS OF THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD 13
continual battle for salvation, in which women could figure as prominently

as their male counterparts.3 Accounts of illness and death were central to
these narratives, carefully crafted by the preachers who wrote them, in
order, wherever possible, to present the deceased as a model of holy living
and holy dying that would exhort listeners or readers to examine their own
consciences and prepare for their own deaths. Funeral sermons were, of
course, only printed for those sections of society who could afford to pay
for them, or when the preachers or printers who published them at their
own expense could hope for some form of recompense from the deceased’s
family.
The funeral book was a vehicle for the representation of death that
operated on various levels and employed several different media. Its core
was a written re-enactment of the oral performance of one or several
sermons given before a specific and limited audience of mourners,
adapted for a larger reading audience who may never have known the
deceased. It could also include academic or lay speeches (“Abdankungen”),
given in connection with the funeral but outside the church, modeled
on texts of classical antiquity. In contrast to the sermons, they were
elaborate rhetorical exercises in allegory and metaphor, as was the poetry
written for the occasion and often published in the funeral book.4
Illustrations, which were mostly reserved for members of the aristocracy,
included allegorical title-pages, portraits of the deceased, both in life and
in death, visual records of the funeral and the mourners, or depictions
of a coffin or an epitaph. The element of acoustic representation is
present in accounts of the hymns sung in the sickroom or at the death-
bed, or in front of the house and through the streets during the funeral
procession.
The greatest potential for presenting the exemplary life and, above all,
the exemplary death of the deceased was of course in the funeral biogra-
phies, printed usually either as part of the sermon or as an appendix to it.
As normative texts these biographies concentrate on extolling Christian
virtues and move toward the logical conclusion that a life well-lived has an
exemplary death that matches it. In recounting the lives of women they
often knew well, preachers could include extraneous material about their
skills as estate managers or businesswomen or their intellectual prowess,
which could subvert the stereotypes of the submissive Christian female at
the core of the genre.5 As Rudolf Schlögl has pointed out, the narrative
structures that preachers had to follow in their biographies necessarily
produced processes of reflection that strengthened the sense of the
deceased’s individuality. The act of composition involved a selection of
elements from a range of sources in order to produce a consistent and
coherent biography.6 Contemporaries were very much aware of the role
these texts played as textual representations. In 1603 a preacher at a
woman’s funeral in Stendal stressed the far-reaching circulation that such
14 JILL BEPLER
memorializing texts could enjoy and asserted the superiority of the written
over the painted portrait:
Denn durch ein Gemelde oder Contrafactur alleine des Menschen Bilde/
wie er gestalt gewesen/ entworffen/ und etlicher massen für Augen ges-
tellet wird: Wie er aber gesinnet gewesen/ unnd wie er sein Leben zuge-
bracht hat/ kan kein Mahler abbilden/ Mit Worten aber alleine kan mans
etlicher massen beschreiben. Zu dem bleibet eines Menschen Contrafactur
nur an einem Ort/ irgend etwa an einer Wand behangen/ was aber
öffentlich durch den Druck ausgehet/ bleibet nicht alleine an einem
Ort/ sondern wird hin und wider verschicket/ kömmet in vieler Hände/
und wird von vielen gelesen.7
[For in paintings or portraits of the dead, only the picture of a person,

his outward appearance, is sketched and visualized to some degree. But
what his opinions were and how he lived his life no painter can depict.
This can only be more or less adequately described in words. And fur-
thermore, a person’s portrait remains in one place, perhaps hung on one
wall, but whatever is made public in print doesn’t stay in one place but
is sent here and there, passes through many hands, and is read by many
people.]
Preparing for Death — Exemplary Women

In his study of death ritual in early modern England, The Art of Death
(1991), Nigel Llewellyn points to a major difference between modern
concepts of death and the premodern understanding of dying as a process
and a rite of passage not restricted to the immediate moments preceding
death itself. Llewellyn calls this “liminality,” a period of indeterminate
duration in the course of which a whole series of preparations for death
takes place and in which the social construction of the dying individual and
his or her memory begins, a process in which the deceased could play a
very active role.8 Funeral sermons often stress that the mark of a true
Christian is early and prescient preparation for death, which may even have
surprised or alienated those closest to the deceased. This preparation
included the sewing of shrouds and other burial artifacts, the commission-
ing of coffins and epitaphs, and above all the preparation of texts. The
sermon for Marie Salome Lucius (1631–62), wife of a Dresden court
preacher, records that she commissioned the biblical verses that she had
selected for her funeral sermon to be painted on a board and hung oppo-
site her bed so that she could read them as she died.9
As sources are more readily available for those at the top of the social
scale, it is easier for us to identify women from the high aristocracy who
played an active role in constructing their own social identity. This is par-
ticularly true of widows, whom we see acting independently of the male
constraints placed on daughters and wives.10 An exceptional figure in this

respect for Nuremberg was the widowed Markgräfin Sophia of Brandenburg-
Ansbach (1563–1639), whose effigy in the Lorenzkirche still presents an
impressive model of piety today (see fig. 1.1).11 Archival material and sev-
eral publications provide extraordinarily detailed documentation of both
the Markgräfin’s death and her funeral in 1639. The latter was a major
public event in the city of Nuremberg, where she had lived since 1632,
when the events of the Thirty Years’ War had forced her to give up her
widow’s seat in Ansbach. One aspect of her arrival in the city must have
attracted some attention, for one of her main concerns was that an ornate
pewter coffin embellished with her own verses, which she had commis-
sioned some years earlier, should be brought safely from Ansbach. Sophia
reluctantly made preparations for her burial in the Lorenzkirche, as her
plans for being buried next to her husband in the dynastic burial chapel at
Heilsbronn were thwarted after the church there was plundered by sol-
diers. In the memorial sermon that he gave for Sophia in Ansbach on the
day of her burial in Nuremberg, Johann Meelführer recalls several conver-
sations with the Markgräfin years earlier on the subject of her death, when
he was abbot of Heilsbronn. She had talked to him about her wishes for
her funeral and burial, discussing exactly where she wished to be buried
and details of the funeral sermon. She had also extracted a promise from
him that he would preach it.12
Preparing for Death — Women Reading and Writing

All funeral biographies follow a standard pattern: details of birth and hon-
est parentage (or aristocratic pedigree), baptism, Christian education, mar-
riage, children, professional and domestic life and personal crosses, illness,
death. Part of a woman’s early Christian upbringing that is usually explic-
itly mentioned is learning to read and write in order to be able to read and
memorize the Catechism, the Psalter, the Bible, and other devotional
works.13 This continual process of reading, writing, and memorizing all
manner of religious texts was to stand her in good stead in times of need
and is typically described by Polycarp Leyser in Leipzig in 1625 in a ser-
mon for two young sisters. The preacher records that they had read not
just the Bible again and again but also the German works of many theolo-
gians, especially Nikolaus Selneccer’s Psalms, which they had committed
to memory.
Both sisters had personal manuscript prayer books in which they noted
these texts. Both regularly asked that their manuals should be read to them
during their final illnesses. Leyser stresses that they had long since written
out the Bible text for their funeral sermons and he mentions how this act
of compilatory writing could provide a creative impetus:
Fig. 1.1. Detail from the epitaph for Markgräfin Sophia von Brandenburg-
Ansbach in the Lorenzkirche, Nuremberg. Reproduced from Günther Schuhmann,
Markgraf Georg Friedrichs d. Ä. zweite Gemahlin Sophia (†1639) und ihre
Beziehungen zu Nürnberg, in Mitteilungen des Vereins für Geschichte der
Stadt Nürnberg 65 (1978): 257.
In massem dann Jungfraw Maria etzliche Bogen unterschiedene Geistliche

Lieder/ darinnen sie die Eitelkeit dieser Welt angeführet/ und sich nach
einem seligen Sterbstündlein hertzliglichen gesehnet/ wie auch ihren
erkohrenen LeichenText Gesangweise selbsten verfasset.14
[For the maiden Maria had herself written several sheets of different spir-
itual songs in which she referred to the vanity of the world and heartily
longed for the blessed hour of her death as well as writing verses based
on the Bible text she had chosen for her funeral.]15
Examples of the practice of women compiling prayer manuals abound in

funeral books, and provide tantalizing glimpses of a lost wealth of early
modern women’s texts. Such manuscripts were, however, never intended
for publication or a wider audience, and the relatively small number that
have survived are only starting to be taken seriously in studies of wom-
en’s writing.16 In aristocratic circles there is evidence that personal devo-
tional manuscripts were read by a limited audience and that they were
sometimes passed down through generations of the female members of
a family.17 The practice of compilatory, ruminative reading consisted of
the intensive and often repeated study of and meditation on the same
texts combined with note-taking, either of biblical verses or of short
personal meditations or prayers, to be committed to paper and memory
and prayed or sung by rote in moments of duress.18 The physical appear-
ance of early modern books themselves bears witness to how this reading
took place.19 Both typography and marginalia played an important role
in steering readers through their devotional texts, especially by high-
lighting passages of special significance which could be excerpted. Bible
verses or citations from works by other authors are referenced in the
margins. In the texts themselves font sizes are varied to denote impor-
tant passages, such as quotations from the Bible and reported speech, or
they are highlighted in bold type. In funeral sermons the reader is con-
stantly being encouraged to pause in reading the text in order to consult
the Bible.
Like those of many of her burgher counterparts, Sophia of Ansbach’s
personal piety and especially her command of biblical texts are seen as
preparations for her final illness, the ultimate test of faith. All preachers
concur in their admiration of her ability to quote Bible verses from mem-
ory, “deren dann Ihr F.D. einen solchen Vorrath in ihrem Hertzen
gehabt/ daß man keinen können anfangen/ dene Sie nit hätte wissen
hinauß zusagen” (of which her Grace had such a supply in her heart that
no one could start to recite one that she didn’t know how to complete),20
and of her capacity both to find and give consolation by using her own
personal compilations of texts. One compilatory technique used by the
Markgräfin shows how she actually developed the skill of combining bibli-
cal quotations that so impressed her clergymen:
18 JILL BEPLER
Unnd ist sonderlich mercklich/ daß I.F.D. auff alle Anligen deß
Menschen einen sondern Trost geben können/ wie ich vor diesem einen
Dialogismum gesehen/ so sie mit eygner Hand geschrieben/ darinne die
Klag eines armen Sünders/ unnd die tröstliche Antwort darauff sehr
artlich gegen einander gesetzt wird. Als nur ein Exempel oder zwey
anzuziehen: Wann der armer Sünder sagt/ Psal. 6 Ach Herr straff mich
nicht in deinem Zorn/ etc. So antwortet David Ps. 103. Barmhertzig
und gnädig ist der Herr/ gedültig unnd von grosser Güte. Wenn das
geängste Gewissen fragt Ps. 139. Herr wo soll ich hingehen für deinem
Angesicht? So antwortet Christus Matth. 11. Kompt her zu mir alle die
ihr Mühseelig und beladen seyd [. . .].21
[And it is particularly remarkable that her Grace could give special com-
fort in all human concerns. I once saw a dialogue that she had written in
her own hand in which the lament of a poor sinner and the consoling
answer to it were very nicely combined with one another. When the poor
sinner says (Psalm 6) O Lord rebuke me not in thine anger, etc., David
answers with Psalm 103 The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to
anger, and plenteous in mercy. When the frightened conscience asks
(Psalm 139) Whither shall I flee from your presence? Christ answers with
Matthew 11 Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden . . .]
In the funeral books and ars moriendi literature, patience, submission, and
endurance are shown as the key virtues of the dying. These are tested not
just by extremes of pain but also by spiritual tribulation, from which the
dying person is seen to emerge victorious. In a particularly long passage
the Markgräfin’s chaplain recalls her crisis of faith (“Anfechtung”), which
occurred suddenly, just before her death, when she felt that the devil was
undermining her good thoughts and thus subverting her good death.22 As
an antidote, the chaplain bombards her with consolatory Bible quotations.
The interchange ends when the Markgräfin supplies him with her own
quotations, and her power to lead in exemplary faith and select her own
text for consolation is reasserted:
Deß tröste ich mich auch/ ja ich weiß und bin gewiß/ daß mich weder
Leben [margin: Röm. 8] noch Todt scheiden kan von der Liebe Gottes/
die da ist in Christo Jesu unserm Herrn.23
[This is what comforts me — yes I know and I am persuaded that neither

life [margin: Romans 8] nor death can separate us from the love of God,
which resides in Jesus Christ our Lord.]
The term “Anfechtung” is not easily translated into English (it denotes a
mixture of affliction, temptation, suffering, and tribulation),24 but it con-
notes the necessity to combat (“fechten”) tribulation through prayer and
a well-rehearsed repertoire of biblical readings. In this permanent recourse
to the performance of prayer and religious texts we see the result of a ritu-
alization and sacralization of all aspects of everyday life, which took place
long before Pietism, as Patrice Veit and Cornelia Moore have stressed.25 In
describing how devotional practices led to the “incorporation” of texts,
Veit speaks of a deep internalization, in which biblical verses or parts of
songs provided a formula for creative self-expression.26
Rudolf Schenda highlights another aspect in describing the role of
devotional practices as a form of pain management throughout the early
modern period, when techniques of devotion were presented in literary
forms and performed in communal acts of reading and singing believed to
counteract all forms of pain. In this framework, pain and suffering are
imbued with positive qualities, and devotional handbooks encourage what
Schenda calls therapeutic visions of torture to help the patient to divert
attention from his or her own pain. The ultimate diversion is of course the
meditation on the Passion of Christ, in which all mere human suffering is
put into perspective.27
Women’s Voices — the Drama of Death

To varying degrees women’s voices could be present in the texts that made
up a funeral book. At the most simple level, the deceased could be directly
and extensively quoted in the funeral sermon and thus become her own
witness to her faith and constancy and a teacher of others. These texts
obviously aim at achieving a sense of dramatic immediacy with an emo-
tional appeal to both listeners and readers. Between 1626 and 1628 several
female members of the Besler family in Nuremberg died. Basilius Besler
(1561–1629) was an apothecary and botanist, author of the famous
Hortus Eystettensis (1613), and a prominent citizen of the town. In the
thirty-three years of his marriage to his wife Susanna five of their children
died. Between 1626 and 1628 it was the couple’s son-in-law, the preacher
Johann Jakob Beurer, who was called upon to hold the necessary sermons.
The first to die, in December 1626, was the Beslers’ unmarried daughter
Katharina, an example of the prescient Christian, who, with no outward
signs of ill health, perturbed her family by inexplicably beginning to pre-
pare for death and declaring her intention of becoming a Bride of Christ.28
Beurer’s funeral biography uses reported dialogue to heighten the drama
of this account and underscore the exemplary nature of Katharina’s cour-
age in the face of death. In these dialogues the girl assumes the role of a
religious teacher:
Zuvor aber/ und ehe sie kranck worden/ auß sonderbarer antung [sic]/
und eingebung Gottes deß H. Geistes/ etliche wochen lang/ mit eitel
tröstlichen Sterbensgedancken/ sterbeLiedern und sterbgebetlein/ ihre
zeit zugebracht/ und als sie deßwegen von ihrer Schwester anges-
20 JILL BEPLER
prochen/ warumb sie doch nur allein vom sterben täglich und ohn
underlaß lese/ singe/ und bete/ hat sie geantwort/ das sey ihr gröster
Trost/ und höchste begierde/ sie schicke sich hiermit zu einem seligen
stündlein/ sie achte sich diser Welt nit mehr/ begehr auch nicht von
grund ihres Hertzens keines irdischen Bräutigams/ sondern allein ihres
Himmlischen Bräutigams Jesu Christi/ dem wolle sie zugleich an Leib
und Seel ein reine Jungfraw zubringen.29
[For several weeks before she fell sick, specially warned and inspired by
God the Holy Spirit, she spent her time only with consoling thoughts of
death, songs, and prayers for the dying. When her sister asked her why
she read, sang, and prayed about death every day without interruption,
she answered that this was her greatest comfort and her ultimate desire,
she was preparing for the blessed hour of her death, she cared nothing for
this world any more, from the bottom of her heart she no longer wished
for an earthly bridegroom, but only for her heavenly bridegroom Jesus
Christ, to whom she wished to bring herself as a maiden, pure in body
and soul.]
Beurer reports further conversations in which Katharina, who had sud-

denly and inexplicably begun to suffer severe lung hemorrhages, counsels
and consoles her mother. Her bravery and strength of faith is shown by the
fact that she is not afraid to die unattended. She encourages her mother to
leave her bedside and sleep, even though she may be about to die. In
another reported speech, admonishing her father not to mourn, but to
rejoice that he has possibly been spared seeing her in an unhappy marriage,
she reverses the role in which he as head of the household (“Hausvater”)
is responsible for her religious edification. The exceptional circumstances
justify the child’s instruction of her father: “nun aber hab er sich mit ihr/
mit seinem Kind zu trösten/ daß sie zu ihrem allerliebsten/ getrewesten
und holdseligsten Herren Bräutigam käme [. . .] (he should comfort him-
self with her his daughter because she was going to her most beloved,
faithful, and lovely bridegroom).30
The next Besler daughter, Anna Maria, died in December of the fol-
lowing year, obviously of the same wasting sickness, however this time as
a young matron after only one year of marriage. Beurer again makes exten-
sive use of reported speech to provide a dramatic reenactment of her
exemplary death. Anna Maria’s final illness was attended by visions strongly
linked to her devotional reading, and Beurer shows her and those attend-
ing her in the process of internalizing those readings. In the first vision the
dying woman says she sees the whole of Christ’s Passion played out at the
foot of her bed, claiming she is surrounded by little white lambs that have
taken upon themselves her sins and the sins of the world.31 The marginal
reference guides the reader to John 1:29–37, reinforcing the message that,
like John the Baptist, Anna Maria is a witness to faith. Her visions of
Christ’s Passion are followed by visions of two beautiful angels at her bed-
side and she becomes anxious whenever she loses sight of one of them.
This vision of angels is taken up by those around her, who console her and
explain that one of the angels has only disappeared to seek reinforcements
and speed her departure:
Es würde mehr Engelein mit sich bringen/ sie auff Simeonis wagen
setzen und fort führen. Drauff sies auch wider gesehen [. . .]. Dabey sie
auch ihre damaln gegenwertige Mutter gefragt: Ob dann der Simeons
Wagen noch nit kommen oder fertig were/ damit sie fort kommen
möchte? Welche geantwortet/ es wäre schon angespant/ und die H.
Engelein bey den Rädern/ solchen fortzuschieben.32
[It would bring back more angels to put her on Simeon’s chariot and
bear her away. Then she saw it again [. . .] and she asked her mother who
was with her at the time whether Simeon’s chariot had not yet arrived or
if it was not ready yet so that she could be on her way? Her mother
answered that the carriage was already tethered and the holy angels were
standing by the wheels, ready to push it away.]
The Besler family are referring to a text that, as we are told in a marginal
note, Anna Maria had read in her sickness and which others had read to
her. The scene with the angels and the chariot is taken from the emblem-
atic engraving in Johann Saubert’s Currus Simeonis, which had just been
published in Nuremberg that year, 1627 (see fig. 1.2). The work was a
handbook especially written for lay use with the sick and dying. It con-
sisted of a sermon of about fifty pages that Saubert had preached on the
Gospel of Luke 2:25–32, the encounter of Simeon with Christ in the
Temple of Jerusalem. The engraving illustrating the text is numbered
with the fifteen points made in the sermon and the numbers are also
marked in the margins of the sermon, so that the reader can continually
refer back to the illustration while meditating on the text. The angels
pushing the wheels of the chariot referred to by Anna Maria’s mother are
clearly to be seen. The sermon was accompanied by 550 pages of what
Saubert called a spiritual apparatus with which both the healthy and the
sick could prepare themselves for death. An index provides easy access to
the correct reading, prayer, or hymn for every occasion. Texts to read to
the dying are especially marked by a pointing hand so that they can be
quickly located. The Currus Simeonis was an immensely popular work
that was reprinted four times in the next decades and obviously left its
mark on its readers, such as the Besler family, where we see its practical
employment.
The deathbed scene reported for Anna Maria Besler is a carefully con-
structed melodramatic tableau full of reported speech. It includes her
reporting hearing heavenly music, dialogues between her and her mother,
visions of her dead sister Katharina reaching down to pull her up to
heaven, and finally an ecstatic vision of the heavens opening:
22 JILL BEPLER
Fig 1.2. Detail from an engraving in Johann Saubert, Currus Simeonis,

Nuremberg 1645. With permission of the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel.
und da es eben schier zum End mit ihr kommen und das Gesicht verge-
hen wollen/ hebt sie ihre beede Hände betend gehen Himmel/ reicht
und reckt sie nach ihrem Erlöser/ hebt an mit heller Stimm zu ruffen/
O Freud O Frewd [sic] und über Freud; Ich sehe den Himmel offen/ O
ewige Himmels Frewd/ und als sie hierüber die Händ wider zu ihr zog/
und auf das Hertz truckte/ fragte sie die Mutter abermal/ Wen sie dann
also hertzlich zu ihr truckte/ ihren Himmels König. Ja/ ja sagt sie freyl-
ich/ mit demselben will ich uber die Mauren springen.33
[and when the end had finally come and her sight was deserting her, she
raised both hands in prayer toward heaven, reaching and stretching out
to her savior, and she began to cry out with a clear voice O joy o joy and
more than joy; I see the heavens open, o the eternal joy of heaven. And
she pulled her hands back and pressed them to her heart and her mother
asked her again whom she was pressing so affectionately, and whether it
was her Heavenly King. Yes, yes, she said, of course, with him I will leap
over a wall.]
The marginal note to this passage refers the reader to Psalm 18:30, giving the
words of the dying girl to her mother a heroic and martial twist somewhat
lost in the King James version (v. 29): “Denn mit dir kan ich Kriegsvolck
zerschmeissen/ Vnd mit meinem Gott vber die mauren springen” (For by
thee I have run through a troop; and by my God have I leaped over a wall).
Alongside the reported deathbed speeches, another topos of the funeral
sermon used to increase its emotional potential is the imagined speech given
by the deceased to the mourners from the coffin. Authors of poems or songs
could introduce the deceased as an imagined speaker in their texts, often in

dialogue with their grieving relatives — parents, children, or husbands.34
Sigmund von Birken’s Todes-Gedanken (Death Thoughts, 1670) contains a
pastoral tribute to the wife of a Hamburg councillor, Joachim Pipenburg, in
which the deceased enters into an imagined dialogue with her bereaved
husband, giving an extended description of her life after death:
Wie gieng es mir so wol/ als ich von dir gegangen/

als ich zog aus dem Leib/ darinn ich lag gefangen.
Es schwebten bald üm mich viel tausend Engelein;
ich mänget’ unter sie mich selber mitten ein/
und flog mit ihnen fort.35
[How well I felt when I left you and departed from the body in
which I lay imprisoned. Soon, thousands of angels were swarming
around me and I mingled in among them and flew away with
them.]
However, these addresses were not always just the ventriloquized voices of
the male clergy or authors of poetry. As we have seen, they could also
convey the authentic voice of the deceased by using witnessed reported
speech or by using texts written by the women themselves. Among the
Altenburg women poets whose works have been edited by Anna Carrdus
we find the example of fifteen-year-old Sophia Christiana Geyer (1676–
89), whose own devotional songs were sung both before and after her
funeral sermon. Although a healthy child, in a constant process of reading,
writing, and memorizing, Sophia had prepared carefully for death. She
selected the verses to be inscribed on her coffin and, long before her sick-
ness, the text for her funeral sermon.36 The performance of her own poetry
as arias at her funeral allows her to address both the mourners and the
readers of the funeral book directly:
Ich bin gantz bereit zu sterben/

und aus dieser Welt zu gehn/
Denn ich werde nicht verderben;
schön geschmücket werd ich stehn37
[I am fully prepared to die and leave this world, for I will not
perish; I will stand beautifully clad]
Whether women’s voices were being quoted directly or interpreted by

the preachers of their sermons, funeral sermons provided a model in
which women were seen as instructors in faith, perseverance, and ulti-
mate fulfillment.
24 JILL BEPLER
Biblical Heroines and Amazons

If we ask which representations of women dying in funeral sermons were
the most pervasive and durable, then it is not surprising that from the very
earliest examples of the genre the most prominent were biblical heroines.
There were figures of identification for all stages of a woman’s life. In 1561
the preacher Johann Mathesius offered his own daughters the models of
Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, Anna, and Elisabeth in his funeral sermon for their
mother, which he recommended they read regularly as part of their devo-
tional exercises.38 A whole genre of prayer books especially written for
women contributed to their identification with figures from the Bible. The
most famous of these originated in Nuremberg: Hieronymus Oertel’s
Geistlicher Frawen-Zimmer Spiegel (Spiritual Mirror for Women), a work
first published in 1610, which went through twelve different editions in
the seventeenth century.39
The heroic is an attribute often used in connection with the way in
which the deceased confronts sickness and final illness. In the funeral ser-
mon held in 1670 in Dresden for nineteen-year-old Johanna Margaretha
von Seidewitz, who died after being delivered of a dead child, Bernhard
Schmidt depicts the young woman’s death as that of a heroic Amazon:
Ja den grausamen Feind/ den Todt/ ist Sie als eine unverzagte geistliche
Amazonin mit einem unüberwindlichen Helden-Muth entgegen gegan-
gen. Welchen tapfferen Helden-Muth Sie auch in einen herlichen/
schönen Leichen-Text/ den Sie selbst von mir bey ihrer Beerdigung zu
erklären begehret hat/ an den Tag gegeben.40
[Yes, she confronted the cruel enemy, death, as an unshrinking spiritual

Amazon with invincible heroic courage. She demonstrated this heroic
courage in the splendid and beautiful biblical verse that she asked me to
expound on at her funeral.]
Schmidt gives his readers an extended argument for acknowledging wom-

en’s physical bravery, usually, as he says, the prerogative of males: “fast ein
Eigenthum unsers Geschlechtes” (almost a property of our sex).41
Although Schmidt commences with the biblical heroines, his examples are
also taken from contemporary sources42 and include a surprisingly positive
attitude to cross-dressers and women warriors:
Gleichwohl finden wir manche Heldin in den schwächern Geschlechte:

Männer in Weibes- und Weiber in Mannes-Kleidern. Debora/ Jael/
Judith haben ihres gleichen noch biß auf den heutigen Tag.43
[Nevertheless, we find a number of heroines among the weaker sex: men

in women’s and women in men’s clothes. To the present day we find the
likes of Deborah, Jael, and Judith.]
Citing his sources, the preacher recommends that his readers consult the
section on “mulieres fortes” (strong women) in Theodor Zwinger’s
Theatrum vitae humanae (Theater of Human Life, 1604) for examples of
female courage that would take him two hours to recite.44 He regales them
with tales of a young woman of twenty who killed twenty-six Spaniards in
the battle for Genoa, of the women of Ulati who in 1571 shamed their
menfolk by defending the island of Cozula from attack by the Viceroy of
Algeria, and of the Duchess of Nevers who commanded a cavalry regiment
in 1617, of the women of Montaulbon who fought alongside their hus-
bands against the troops of the French King in 1621. Schmidt concludes
his list of contemporary Amazons with a noble Irish woman who defended
Castleknock against the English in 1642, citing her story from the widely
read French journal Mercure François (French Mercury).45 Although she
had fewer than fifty men at her disposal, it was claimed that she managed
to kill 500 besiegers before charging out from the gate to confront them:
Hernach als es an munition mangeln wollte/ ließ sie ihre Kleinodien und
alle köstliche mobilien zusammen in den Schloß-Hof tragen/ zündete
dieselben an/ sprach ihren übrigen Soldaten einen Muht zu/ eröffnete
das Thor/ fiel mit grosser furi heraus unter die Engelländer/ erlegte ihrer
wiederumb eine grosse Anzahl/ und hoffte also ritterlich mitten unter
ihren Feinden zu sterben. [. . .] Welche und dergleichen von heroischen
Weibern begangene männliche Thaten manchen gepantzerten Haasen in
die Estandart sollte mahlen lassen.46
[Afterward, when munitions ran short, she had her valuables and costly
furniture brought into the castle courtyard and set fire to them. She
encouraged her other soldiers to take heart, opened the gates and
stormed out among the English with great ferocity, once more killing a
great number of them, hoping to die a chivalrous death in the midst of
her enemies. [. . .] Some cowards in armor would do well to have these
and other manly deeds by heroic women painted on their standards.]
This is definitely not the usual stuff of funeral sermons, and as is to be

expected, Schmidt qualifies these examples by stressing their truth but also
their rarity. As far as exemplary strength of faith is concerned, however, he
sees that of women as superior to that of many of their male counter-
parts:
Was aber unser Christenthumb betrifft/ welches in lauter Kampff und
Streit bestehet/ da finden wir unter den Evæ Töchtern so viel/ ja ich will
wohl mit guten Grunde sagen mehr/ Heldinnen als Helden unter den
Söhnen Adams. [. . .] Gottes Rüstkammer (Ephes. 6:10 seq.) stehet auch
ihnen offen. Daraus entlehnen sie den Harnisch Gottes: Den Gurt der
Warheit: Den Krebs der Gerechtigkeit: Den Schild des Glaubens: Den
Helm des Heyls: Das Schwerd des Geistes. Darinnen sie Gott gefallen/
dem Teuffel aber und der Welt erschrecklich sind.47
26 JILL BEPLER
[As far as our Christianity is concerned, however, which consists of noth-

ing but battle and conflict, we find more heroines among Eve’s daugh-
ters than there are heroes to be found among the sons of Adam. [. . .]
God’s armory (Ephesians 6:10 ff.) is open to them too. From it they
take the armor of God: the belt of truth, the breastplate of righteous-
ness, the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, the sword of the Spirit.
In these they are pleasing to God, but they are terrifying to Satan and
the world.]
With his description of the battle-clad Christian woman Schmidt has

returned Johanna Margaretha to the sphere of the biblical heroines such
as Judith, Deborah, and Jael.
Conclusion
Funeral sermons attested to a model Christian death that was not spe-
cifically gendered, and for about 150 years the genre provided a unique
vehicle in which ordinary women’s lives and deaths were read and reread
as part of devotional practice. The stereotypes they provided were always
in tension with individual narratives that show women shaping the way
in which they were seen by their families, households, and neighbors, and
also how they wanted to be remembered by posterity. The preachers who
wrote these popular texts presented women as active and equal in a bat-
tle for Christian salvation. The act of reading may have determined the
way they prepared themselves for death, but writing and an intense and
creative interaction with devotional texts gave them an opportunity to
find their own words to reformulate and internalize their devotions,
while the voices that are transported in their funeral sermons were a les-
son to others.
Notes
1
Stephanie Wodianka, “Individuelle Erinnerung und kulturelles Gedächtnis: Zur
Funktion der meditatio mortis in der Literatur,” in Zum Sterben schön: Alter,
Totentanz und Sterbekunst von 1500 bis heute, ed. Andrea von Hülsen-Esch and
Hiltrud Westermann-Angerhausen (Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 2006), 1:289–
300; here 290.
2
It is estimated that 250,000 such funeral books have survived in archives and
libraries in Germany and the former German-speaking territories. See Rudolf Lenz,
De mortuis nil nisi bene: Leichenpredigten als multidisziplinäre Quelle (Sigmaringen,
Germany: Jan Thorbecke, 1990), 21.
3
For a comprehensive study of the topic and an extensive bibliography, see
Cornelia Niekus Moore, Patterned Lives: The Lutheran Funeral Biography in Early
Modern Germany (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2006). I would very much like to

thank Cornelia Niekus Moore for reading and commenting on this paper, which is
so dependent on her research.
4
See Maria Fürstenwald, Andreas Gryphius: Dissertationes funebres; Studien zur
Didaktik der Leichabdankungen (Bonn: Bouvier, 1967); Anna Carrdus,
“Consolatory Dialogue in Devotional Writings by Men and Women of Early
Modern Protestant Germany,” Modern Language Review 93 (1998): 411–27;
Anna Linton, Poetry and Parental Bereavement in Early Modern Lutheran Germany
(Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008).
5
Jill Bepler, “Women in German Funeral Sermons: Models of Virtue or Slice of
Life,” German Life and Letters 44 (1991): 392–403.
6
Rudolf Schlögl, “Öffentliche Gottesverehrung und privater Glaube in der
Frühen Neuzeit: Beobachtungen zur Bedeutung von Kirchenzucht und
Frömmigkeit für die Abgrenzung privater sozialer Räume,” in Das Öffentliche und
Private in der Vormoderne, ed. Gert Melville and Peter von Moos (Cologne:
Böhlau, 1998), 164–209; here 196.
7
Sabellus Chemnitius, “Widmung,” in Leich Predigt In dem Begräbnis der . . .
Catharina von Tresßkowen, des . . . Andreas von Luderitzen, . . . Witwen. Welche den
16. Februar . . . entschlaffen, und . . . den 1. Martii . . . zu Stendall . . . bestattet
worden (Magdeburg: Andreas Duncker, 1603), Aiii r.
8
Nigel Llewellyn, The Art of Death: Visual Culture in the English Death Ritual, c.
1500–c. 1800 (London: Reaktion Books, 1991), 18.
9
Jakob Weller, Herrliche Seelen-Ruhe und Freude . . . (Dresden: Bergen, 1662),
J3 r.
10
See Britta Juliane Kruse, Witwen: Kulturgeschichte eines Standes in Spätmittelalter
und Früher Neuzeit (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007).
11
See Günther Schuhmann, “Markgraf Georg Friedrichs d. Ä. zweite Gemahlin
Sophia (†1639) und ihre Beziehungen zu Nürnberg,” Mitteilungen des Vereins für
Geschichte der Stadt Nürnberg 65 (1978): 253–67, for an excellent account of
Sophia’s time in Nürnberg, her funeral, and the erection of her epitaph in the
Lorenzkirche, although he is mistaken in asserting that her pewter coffin was made
after her death (260).
12
Johann Meelführer, Leich-Predigt Bey dem angestellten Trawrbegängnuß und
Ehrngedächtnuß . . . In Volckreicher Versamblung Fürstlicher und anderer Personen
. . . zu Onoltzbach . . . (Nuremberg: Jeremias Dümler, [1639]), Aii v.
13
On the education of girls and their reading, see Cornelia Niekus Moore, The
Maiden’s Mirror: Reading Material for German Girls in the Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Centuries (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1987). On the role of reading in
devotional practice, see Cornelia Niekus Moore, “The Quest for Consolation and
Amusement: Reading Habits of German Women in the Seventeenth Century,”
Chloe, Beihefte zum Daphnis 19 (1994): 247–68; on the special role of reading in
illness and death, see Cornelia Niekus Moore, “Praeparatio ad mortem: Das Buch
bei Vorbereitung und Begleitung des Sterbens im protestantischen Deutschland
des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts,” Pietismus und Neuzeit 19 (1993): 9–18.
28 JILL BEPLER
14
Polycarp Leyser, Leichpredigt/ Bey Christlichem Begrebniß zweyer Schwester:
Denen . . . Frawen Sabinen, Des . . . Herrn Sigismundi Möstels/ beyder Rechten
Candidati ehlichen Haußfrawen: Vnd Jungfrawen Marien, Beyden des . . . Herrn
Johann Roithaupts auff Zehmen/ deß Raths vnd Bawmeistern zu Leipzig ehleiblichen
Töchtern/; Welche . . . den 23. Februar. Anno 1625. . . . eingeschlaffen/ vnd den 26.
Febr. . . . bestattet worden . . . (Leipzig: Liger, [ca. 1625]), Eii r.
15
All translations are the author’s unless otherwise noted.
16
Stephanie Wodianka, Betrachtungen des Todes: Formen und Funktionen der “med-
itatio mortis” in der europäischen Literatur des 17. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen:
Niemeyer, 2004), 67–73, highlights the role of these manuals in meditation practices
and in the stimulation of women’s writing. For a general overview, see Anna Carrdus,
“Women’s Writing in the Context of their Lives,” in The Camden House History of
German Literature, vol. 4: Early Modern German Literature, 1350–1700, ed. Max
Reinhart (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2007), 869–903, which includes a dis-
cussion of domestic and religious encouragement of writing (886–96).
17
Jill Bepler, “‘zu meinem und aller dehrer die sichs gebrauchen wollen, nutz,
trost undt frommen’: Lektüre, Schrift und Gebet im Leben der fürstlichen Witwen
in der Frühen Neuzeit,” in Witwenschaft in der Frühen Neuzeit: Fürstliche und
adlige Witwen zwischen Fremd- und Selbstbestimmung, ed. Martina Schattkowsky
(Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2003), 302–19; here 315.
18
See Cornelia Niekus Moore, “Erbauungsliteratur als Gebrauchsliteratur für
Frauen im 17. Jahrhundert: Leichenpredigten als Quelle weiblicher
Lesegewohnheiten,” in Le livre religieux et ses pratiques: Études sur l’histoire du livre
religieux en Allemagne et en France à l’époque moderne, ed. Hans Bödeker, Gerald
Chaix, and Patrice Veit (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991), 291–315;
also Wodianka, Betrachtungen des Todes, 66.
19
On the importance of physical aspects of the early modern book for the act of
reading, see Bradin Cormack and Carla Mazzio, Book Use, Book Theory (Chicago:
U of Chicago Library, 2005).
20
Cornelius Marci, Aller Hertz-Christen Thun und Lohn . . . 28 May/ dieses 1639
Jahrs/ in der Pfarrkirchen bey S. Lorentzen/ zu Nürnberg . . . (Nuremberg: Jeremias
Dümler, 1639), Giv r.
21
Caspar Herbst, Eine Christliche Predigt . . . Gehalten: Den 26. May/ in Ihrer
Fürstl. Durchl. Haußkirchlein . . . (Nuremberg: Jeremias Dümler, [1639]), Fi v. All
English translations of biblical passages quoted in this essay are from the King
James Bible; all citations in this essay are from the Luther Bible of 1545.
22
On consolation of the dying, see Alexander Bitzel, Anfechtung und Trost bei
Sigismund Scherertz: Ein lutherischer Theologe im Dreißigjährigen Krieg (Göttingen:
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002), 146–48.
23
Herbst, Eine Christliche Predigt, Fi v.
24
See David P. Scaer, “The Concept of Anfechtung in Luther’s Thought,”
Concordia Theological Quarterly 47 (1983): 15–30.
25
Patrice Veit, “Die Hausandacht im deutschen Luthertum: Anweisungen und
Praktiken,” in Gebetsliteratur der Frühen Neuzeit als Hausfrömmigkeit: Funktionen
und Formen in Deutschland und den Niederlanden, ed. Ferdinand van Ingen and
Cornelia Niekus Moore (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2001), 193–206; here 204;
Moore, “Erbauungsliteratur als Gebrauchsliteratur,” 298.
26
Veit, “Hausandacht,” 205.
27
Rudolf Schenda, “Leidensbewältigung durch christliche Andacht: Geistliche und
soziale Therapie-Techniken in der Devotionalliteratur des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts,”
in Bödeker, Chaix, and Veit, Le livre religieux et ses pratiques: Études sur l’histoire du
livre religieux en Allemagne et en France à l’époque moderne, 388–402. Women giving
birth were surrounded exclusively by other women, whose incessant singing and
reciting of hymns during their labor is often recorded in their funeral sermons. See
Patrice Veit, “‘Ich bin sehr schwach, doch drückst du nach . . .’: Evangelisches
Kirchenlied und seelsorgerische Begleitung von Schwangeren im 17. und 18.
Jahrhundert,” in Geschichte des Ungeborenen: Zur Erfahrungs- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte
der Schwangerschaft, 17.-20. Jahrhundert, ed. Barbara Duden, Jürgen Schlumbohm,
and Veit (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002), 49–74.
28
See Anna Linton, “Der Tod als Brautführer: Bridal Imagery in Funeral
Writings,” Daphnis 29 (2000): 281–306.
29
Johann Jakob Beurer, Geistliches Kül: und Labtrüncklein . . . (Oettingen:
Schultes, 1627), Cii v.
30
Beurer, Geistliches Kül: und Labtrüncklein, Ciii r.
31
Johann Jakob Beurer, Psalmi LXII. Silentium Animae: Das ist Gedultige/ und
in grosser Traurigkeit/ schuldige Befridigung/ eines Christlichen Gemüts und
Hertzens [. . .] (Oettingen: Schultes, 1628), 20.
32
Beurer, Psalmi LXII. Silentium Animae, 21.
33
Beurer, Psalmi LXII. Silentium Animae, 21–22.
34
See Anna Carrdus, “Consolatory Dialogue.”
35
Sigmund von Birken, Todes-Gedanken und Todten-Andenken: Vorstellend eine
Tägliche Sterb-bereitschaft und Zweyer Christl. Matronen Seelige SterbReise (Bayreuth:
Johann Gebhard, 1670), appendix, 115. On the composition of the volume see
Hermann Stauffer, Sigmund von Birken (1626–1681): Morphologie seines Werks
(Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2007), 2:732–43. On the form of the “Trauerschäferspiel,”
see Maria Fürstenwald, “Letztes Ehren-Gedächtnüß und Himmel-klingendes
Schäferspiel: Der literarische Freundschafts- und Totenkult im Spiegel des barocken
Trauerschäferspiels,” Daphnis 2 (1973): 32–53.
36
Anna Carrdus, ed. Das “weiblich Werck” in der Residenzstadt Altenburg (1672–
1720): Gedichte und Briefe von Margaretha Susanna von Kuntsch und Frauen aus
ihrem Umkreis (Hildesheim: Olms, 2004), 322.
37
Carrdus, “Das weiblich Werck,” 273.
38
See Bepler, “Women in German Funeral Sermons,” 397.
39
See Ferdinand van Ingen, “Frauentugend und Tugendexempel: Zum
Frauenzimmer-Spiegel des Hieronymus Ortelius und Philipp von Zesens biblische
Frauenporträts,” Chloe, Beihefte zum Daphnis 3 (1984): 345–83.
40
Bernhard Schmidt, Einer Gottliebenden Seelen unüberwindlicher Helden-Muth/
Zu wolverdienten/ Christlichen Andencken Der weiland Wohl-Edlen/ Hoch- Ehr und
30 JILL BEPLER
Tugend-begabten Frauen Johannen Margarethen von Seidewitz/ Frauen auff

Rammenau/ gebohrner Oehlschlägelin . . . (Dresden: Melchior Bergens Witwe,
[1670]), A4 r.
41
Schmidt, Einer Gottliebenden Seelen unüberwindlicher Helden-Muth, B1 r.
42
On the use of newspapers and contemporary materials in sermons, see Joachim
Hahn, Zeitgeschehen im Spiegel der lutherischen Predigt nach dem Dreißigjährigen
Krieg: Das Beispiel des kursächsischen Oberhofpredigers Martin Geier (1641–1680)
(Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2005), 66–68.
43
Schmidt, Einer Gottliebenden Seelen unüberwindlicher Helden-Muth, B1 r.
44
Schmidt, Einer Gottliebenden Seelen unüberwindlicher Helden-Muth, Bi v: “Man
besehe Zwingerum Volum. VIII. libr. IV. pag. 2073.2074.2075.2076.2077.2078
.2079. sub. Tit. Mulieres fortes.” The reference here is to Theodor Zwinger,
Theatrum vitae humanae, vol. 8: De fortitudinis, et contrariorum vitiorum, auda-
ciae scilicet et timiditatis, speciebus . . . (Basel: Henricpetri, 1604).
45
Schmidt, Einer Gottliebenden Seelen unüberwindlicher Helden-Muth; “ex. 24.
Tom. Mercur. Franc. f. 802.” This volume of the Mercure François from the rare-
book collection of the École des Ponts ParisTech has been digitized in a project of
the Groupe de Recherches Interdisciplinaires sur l’Histoire du Littéraire and is
available at: http://mercurefrancois.ehess.fr/picture.php?/23907/category/121
(accessed 14 August 2009).
46
Schmidt, Einer Gottliebenden Seelen unüberwindlicher Helden-Muth, B2 v.
47
Schmidt, Einer Gottliebenden Seelen unüberwindlicher Helden-Muth, B2 v.
2: “Ich sterbe”: The Construction of the
Dying Self in the Advance Preparations
for Death of Lutheran Women in Early
Modern Germany
Judith P. Aikin
T HE RHETORICAL QUESTION “Wer weiß, wie nahe mir mein Ende?”

(Who knows how near my end may be?) functions as the first line of
a seventeenth-century song preparing for death that is still included in
today’s Lutheran hymnal. The text’s author was Aemilia Juliana, Countess
of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, consort of the ruler of a small Thuringian
principality.1 Since its first inclusion in a hymnal in 1687, innumerable
women (and men) have incorporated this song into their sickbed and
deathbed activities, and Johann Sebastian Bach loved this hymn so much
that he made it the textual basis for several chorales.2 The sentiments
expressed in the text provide evidence for the existence of a paradigm for
the perfect way to die that underlies representations of death created in
Germany in the early modern period and beyond. Since the song text was
authored by a woman, it offers insight into female ideas and practices sur-
rounding death and dying. And because the author also wrote a variety of
other songs on the subject of death, some for specifically female experi-
ences, a close examination of several of her texts can illuminate how a
gendered representation of death developed during the foundational
period of German Lutheran thought. On the other hand, a survey of the
reception of her most famous song demonstrates that the representation
of the good death as it was expressed by a woman found entry into the
devotional practices of men as well.
Being ready for the unknowable hour of death is the primary theme in
“Wer weiß, wie nahe mir mein Ende” and in many of Aemilia Juliana’s
other songs, for the greatest danger to the soul, it was generally felt in early
modern Lutheran Germany, was a sudden and unexpected death for which
one was not spiritually prepared.3 She didn’t just reflect on the theme in
an objective fashion but instead endeavored to give expression to the
anxieties she and her contemporaries felt, employing highly charged emo-
tional language and a first-person perspective. Aemilia Juliana faced death
in advance by constructing a female persona who was in the midst of
32 JUDITH P. AIKIN
dying, an aesthetic self-fashioning that found its way into her songs for
childbirth gone awry, serious illness, and deathbed use, as one might
expect. But the dying persona also speaks in dozens of songs for the hale
and hearty to employ in their daily or weekly contemplations of mortality.
In creating these song texts, she was establishing the basis for her own
advance preparations for death. However, by making her songs available to
others through manuscript copies as well as published hymnals and devo-
tional handbooks, she was also furnishing other users with a constructed
dying self. And by the 1670s she was authoring songs explicitly designed
for the use of others, some of whom were women of her acquaintance but
most of whom she did not know by name — her subjects and the unknown
buyers of her books in other Lutheran territories.
Aemilia Juliana’s intense preoccupation with death was a natural out-
growth of her own early experiences and thus emerges already in her cor-
respondence from the period when she was a healthy young woman who
enjoyed an active practical life as a ruler’s consort, author, businesswoman,
wife, and mother. Of her 427 surviving letters, all of which are addressed
to a sister-in-law and dated between 1664 and 1671, around 25 percent
employ a formulaic ending, with her signature preceded by the phrase “ich
sterbe” (I die), often in the context of conveying news about a sudden
death. In one letter she writes, “Griesheinen zu Mörseburg soll [. . .] auch
an einen stükflus gestorben seyn, Gott tröste die herüber betrübten, und
behüte einen iedeweden doch das seine väterl., deßen schutz E.L. ich
überlaße und sterbe, Ae.J.” (It is reported that Griesheinen died in
Merseburg of an asthma attack, may God console those who mourn his
demise and preserve everyone from such a death through his fatherly love,
into whose protection I entrust you and die, Ae[milia] J[uliana].) In
another instance she employs this closure after describing the admirable
advance preparations and deathbed demeanor of a woman acquaintance
who has just died. The letter reports that the woman had prepared well in
advance, writing down while still in full possession of her faculties what she
wanted done at her funeral and how she was to be dressed, and choosing
the Bible text “I know that my Savior lives” as the basis for her funeral
sermon. Aemilia Juliana ends the anecdote and her letter with the sen-
tence, “Nach Lichtmesse soll das begräbnis seyn, Gott tröste alle betrübte,
in dessen schutz E.L. und uns sämmpt. ich übergebe, und sterbe, Ae.J.”
(The funeral is to take place after Candlemass, may all the grief-afflicted be
consoled by God, into whose strong protection I place you and all of us,
and die, Ae.J.). Perhaps it is her own emotional reaction to the deaths she
recounts that has elicited her choice of words. However, this formulaic
closure, which appears in ever varying permutations, more often follows
some prosaic comment, as in “Weil der Trompeter fort will, so sage ich
kürzlich adieu und sterbe, Ae.J.” (Because the messenger wants to depart,
I must bid you a short adieu and die, Ae.J.).4 No matter whether she
ADVANCE PREPARATIONS FOR DEATH OF LUTHERAN WOMEN 33
employs this phrase casually or in the context of news about someone’s

death, she posits herself as perpetually dying. The phrase “ich sterbe,” with
its vague present-tense verb so evocative in German, expresses this pro-
tracted process: I die, I am dying, I am going to die, I will die. Her closure
to such letters constitutes a self-fashioning device whereby she constructs
herself as conscious she is dying, so that even if she dies suddenly, death
can never take her unexpectedly. Because she sees herself as perpetually in
her death throes, she is always spiritually prepared for her demise.
The texts of five of Aemilia Juliana’s devotional songs to be used for
preparation for death will provide the basis for my examination. The first
is a text she created for her own use and never shared with others. In it she
lists all the causes of sudden death she can think of. These include several
catastrophes or close calls that had befallen her or her child in real life, as
a perusal of letters, songs, and prayers from her hand shows. The song
begins with a generalization about how suddenly and violently death can
materialize when least expected:
1. Es ist gar zu geschwind geschehn um eines Menschen Leben, wenn er

vermeynt ganz fest zu stehn, muß er den Geist aufgeben; in einem Huy
und Augenblick umpfänget ihn des Todes Strick, und reißt ihn plötzlich
nieder.
2. Der Tod wart’t sein in jedem Land, ob er schläft oder wachet; es kan
ihn rühren Gottes Hand, der Schlag und Fluß es machet; es kan ihn brin-
gen in die Gruft, das Feuer oder auch die Luft, das Wasser und die
Erde.
3. Er kan sich fallen gleich zu todt, verschlucken und verschlingen; ein
Grätgen und ein Krümgen Brod, kan ihn ums Leben bringen. Die Art des
Tods ist mancherley, davor kein Menschen-Kind nicht frey, es muß den
Tod stets fürchten.
4. Weil denn der Tod mir auch gewiß, Zeit, Ort und Art verborgen, so
bitt ich, Jesu! nur um dis: du wollest für mich sorgen, daß, wenn, wo, und
auf welche Weis’, ich sterben soll, durch deinen Schweiß, es seeliglich
geschehe.
[1. It can happen all too suddenly that a person’s life is snuffed out.
Whenever someone thinks he is completely safe, that’s when he must give
up the ghost. In the blink of an eye, Death has him in his snare and sud-
denly jerks him to the ground.
2. Death awaits him in every land, whether he wakes or sleeps. God’s
hand can strike him dead, apoplexy and pneumonia can do it, he can be
brought into the grave by fire or air or water or earth.
3. He can plunge to his death or mis-swallow and choke to death, a little
fishbone and a crumb of bread can cost him his life. The ways to die are
various, but no one can avoid dying; everyone must always fear death.
34 JUDITH P. AIKIN
4. Because death is also certain for me personally, although time, place,

and manner of my dying are hidden, I plead, Jesus! just for this, that you
will care for me so that, no matter when, where, and how I may die,
through your suffering it will happen blessedly.]5
The text reflects on mortality and the constant risk of sudden death as a
generalization about the human condition, then turns in the final strophe
to Aemilia Juliana’s personal situation and pleads for a blessed death. The
adverb “seeliglich” (blessedly) alludes to the phrase “ein seliges Ende” (a
blessed death), which crops up in most of her death-themed songs.
The song “Wer weiß, wie nahe mir mein Ende” was reportedly Aemilia
Juliana’s response to the news of the sudden death of a nobleman from a
neighboring territory while he was out hunting, and her manuscript bearing
the date “d. 17. Sept. 1686” still survives, along with a copy she inscribed
in the back of a book published in 1687 that she gave as a gift to an acquaint-
ance.6 The thrilling and terrifying rhythms of the initial strophe were per-
haps what attracted Johann Sebastian Bach and others to this song:
Wer weiß, wie nahe mir mein Ende,

hin geht die Zeit, her kömmt der Tod.
Ach! wie geschwinde und behende
kan kommen meine Todes-Noth!
[Who knows how near my end may be,

There goes Time, here comes Death.
Alas! how rapidly and suddenly
my death throes can come upon me!]
The text goes on to plead for God’s assistance to make sure she will con-
stantly think about her own death and thus have “her house in order”
when she dies. Each strophe ends with a refrain in which she names the
salvific blood of Jesus as the reason why God should grant her a good and
blessed death:
Mein Gott! ich bitt durch Christi Blut,

machs nur mit meinem Ende gut!
[My God! I ask through Christ’s own blood,

just make sure my end is good!]
The final strophe brings the song to an end on an optimistic note:
Ich leb indeß in dir vergnüget,

und sterb ohn alles Kümmerniß,
mir gnüget, wie es mein Gott füget,
ich glaub, und bin es gantz gewiß,

durch deine Gnad und Christi Blut,
machst du’s mit meinem Ende Gut!
[Meanwhile I live well satisfied in your care,

And will die untroubled by anxiety.
As my God wills, that suffices for me.
I do believe and am completely certain
that through your grace and Christ’s blood
you will make sure my end is good!]
The transmuted refrain, which occurs solely in this final strophe, affirms her
faith-based optimism and thus offers relief for the anxieties expressed in the
initial strophe. Following its first publication in 1687, this song has appeared
in hundreds of Lutheran hymnals, including those currently in use.7
Another of Aemilia Juliana’s death-preparation songs was, until the
early twentieth century, equally widely distributed in official Lutheran
hymnals and other compilations: “O Du Dreyeinger Gott/ den ich mir
auserlesen” (Oh you three-in-one God, whom I have chosen for myself).
This song was employed at the deathbed or during the funeral of nearly as
many early modern women as “Wer weiß, wie nahe mir mein Ende,” to
judge from the many references in funerary sermons and biographies.
Aemilia Juliana may well have sung it as she lay dying in 1706; in any case,
the first funeral service in the month-long sequence of funerary events fol-
lowing her death began with this song, probably at her own request.8 But
she had authored it more than two decades earlier, clearly designing it for
her own advance preparations for death.9 The second strophe offers an
explication of her self-fashioning as a dying person:
2. Ich lege Leib und Seel/ o Gott! in deine Hände/ ach! lehre du mich
stets gedencken an mein Ende/ auch sterben/ eh ich sterb/ und hören
alle Stund: Mensch! du must sterben auch/ es ist der alte Bund.
[2. I convey myself both body and soul, oh God! into your hands. Alas!
teach me constantly to think about my death, and to die before I die, and
to hear at every moment these words: “Human being! you too must die,
as established in the first covenant.”]
Thus the song starts with an admonition to herself to be constantly aware

of her own mortality, to experience death well before she dies. The song
continues with a depiction of the preparations that take place on the well-
ordered deathbed, the one on which the dying individual has plenty of
time to “get her house in order”: professing her faith, taking leave of her
loved ones, and conveying her soul entirely into God’s hands. The penul-
timate strophe constitutes a profession of faith up to the very moment of
death, culminating in a confident statement that will reappear in the final
36 JUDITH P. AIKIN
refrain of “Wer weiß, wie nahe mir mein Ende”: “Ich weiß/ Gott macht
es schon mit meinem Ende gut” (I know for a fact that God will make my
end good). The last strophe contains a strong shift as she imagines her final
words to God and his in response:
11. Ich sage Amen drauf/ in meines JESU Nahmen/ es sage gleichfalls
auch der Herre mein Gott/ Amen. Ich sage: Ja zu mir/ Drey-Einger
Gott! komm du. Ach sage: Sey getrost mein Kind/ ich komme nu.
[11. I say “Amen” to these words in the name of my JESUS; may the
Lord my God likewise say “Amen.” I say, “Quick, come here to my side,
three-in-one God!” Oh please say, “Be solaced, my child, I’m coming
now.”]
Thus she supplies an imaginary conversation with the benevolent, fatherly

God of her faith as the culminating event in the deathbed scene she has
vicariously experienced in advance, dying before she dies as preparation for
the actual event.
The songs that Aemilia Juliana wrote for her own use during preg-
nancy and childbirth, unlike these three songs that were applicable to the
situation of either women or men, address a frequent cause of premature
death for early modern women. When she later published these texts in her
devotional handbook for pregnant and birthing women, Geistliches Weiber-
Aqua-Vit (Spiritual Aquavit for Women, 1683), she added other songs
that were probably designed from the beginning to offer pastoral care, as
they do not reflect her own life experiences. Among them are two songs
for the use of the woman dying in childbed. “Gott mit meiner matten
Zungen” (God, with my feeble tongue) provided words for any woman
who, after giving birth to a healthy infant, was about to die as a result of
the birth — a fate all too common in early modern Europe.10
1. Gott mit meiner matten Zungen/

Daß mein Kind gesund zur Welt/
Sey dir Lob und Ehr gesungen/
Und das Kind hir zugestellt.
Nimm es durch die heilge Tauf
Auch zum Himmels-Erben auf/
Daß es gleich von Mutter-Leibe
Deine sey und deine bleibe.
2. Ich werd/ wie es scheinet/ scheiden

Von der Welt ins Himmels-Haus:
Nun hilf/ JESU/ durch dein Leiden/
Halte bey mir redlich aus.
Dein Blut/ Creutz und Todes-Schmertz
Mach zum Tod geschickt mein Hertz

Daß ich sanft und selig sterbe
Und die Lebens-Cron ererbe.
3. Vater hilf/ wenn mir am bängsten/

Reiß mich aus dem Weh und Schmertz!
Hilf mein Jesu aus den Aengsten/
Dein Blut-Schweiß erquick mein Hertz!
Ach du werther Heilger Geist
Itzo/ ietzo Beystand leist/
Daß ich sanft und selig sterbe
Und die Lebens-Cron ererbe.
[1. God, with my feeble tongue may praises

that my child came into the world healthy
be sung in your honor, and may
my child be presented here to you.
Accept the child, through Holy Baptism,
as your child and as Heaven’s heir
so that it may from the moment of birth
be your child and remain your child.
2. I will, it now appears, depart

from this world and enter Heaven’s house.
Now help, JESUS, through your suffering
and stand loyally by me in mine.
May your blood, cross, and mortal pain
get my heart well-prepared for death
so that I may die gently and blessedly
and the Crown of Life inherit.
3. Father, help me, when I’m most afraid,

snatch me away from anguish and pain!
Help me, my Jesus, escape my fears,
Let your bloody sweat refresh my heart!
And oh, you precious Holy Spirit,
now, right now, offer comfort to me,
so that I may die gently and blessedly
and the Crown of Life inherit.]
For the sake of the infant that will survive her, she asks God to insure that
the child will benefit from baptism. For her own precarious situation, she
calls on all three aspects of the Trinity for help with her preparations to die
a blessed death.
38 JUDITH P. AIKIN
Aemilia Juliana created another song, “Gott/ ich merck dein Vaters-
Wincken” (God, I see you beckon to me like a father), for a dying woman
to sing when she experiences the most catastrophic of situations during
childbirth: the position of the baby makes birth impossible, and in dying
as a result of the failed birth, the mother’s body becomes her unborn
child’s tomb.11 She consoles herself by alluding to the biblical passage in
which women who die in childbirth are assured of dying “selig” (blessed)
if they die in faith, as the first two strophes show:
GOTT/ ich merck dein Vaters-Wincken/

Ich soll fort/ nichts hilft davor!
Ich laß drum den Muth nicht sincken:
Denn der Tod/ der ist das Thor/
Dadurch ich aus allem Weh
Zu dir/ liebster GOTT/ hin geh/
Und nach ausgestandnem Leide
Stets genieß der Himmels-Freude.
Muß ich gleich allhir auf Erden/

Wie es scheint/ mit Traurigkeit
Meines Kindleins Grabstätt werden/
So tröst mich in meinem Leid/
Daß dein Hertze/ das mich trägt/
Mir das Creutz selbst aufgelegt
Und ich mit Beten und Arbeiten
Hab das Mein gethan in Freuden.
[GOD, I see you beckon to me like a father:

I must away, nothing can preserve me here!
But I won’t let my courage sink:
For death is the very portal
through which I’ll escape all woe
and come, dearest GOD, to you,
and after all the suffering I’ve endured
I’ll drink the joys of Heaven for all eternity.
Even though I must, here on earth,

as it appears, with great sadness
become my little child’s tomb,
I am consoled in the midst of my sorrow
that your heart, which carries me,
was the one that gave me this cross to bear,
and I, through prayers and childbirth’s labor,
have contributed my own efforts joyfully.]
This song, too, was for deathbed use, not for advance preparations.
Indeed, Aemilia Juliana placed both of these songs in a separate section
subtitled “Auff betrübte Fälle” (For Dire Cases) that she placed at the back
of the book, where they appear alongside songs for the mothers of still-
born, dead, or dying infants to sing.
One song she originally wrote for her own use does appear in the sec-
tion “Auff betrübte Fälle”: the song for the use of a mother whose infant
has just died.12 Although her first pregnancy had a happy culmination, and
her son lived to perpetuate the Schwarzburg dynasty, the daughter born
prematurely less than a year later was so weak that she received emergency
baptism, and she died thirty-six hours after birth. The birth had been hard,
and Aemilia Juliana was convinced that she was going to die as well. She
made it through her confinement, but her health had been permanently
damaged. She never conceived again, and she suffered from a variety of
painful ailments for the remainder of her long life.
This calamity in 1668 also marked the beginning of a series of deaths
of the people closest to her: her mother-in-law (who was also her aunt and
foster mother) died unexpectedly in 1670, and three of her four sisters-in-
law (who were also her foster sisters and closest friends) died during a
measles epidemic in 1672. Funerals and memorials were the order of the
day. In addition to commissioning and publishing funeral sermons and
biographies for all five deaths, the Rudolstadt court began to hold anni-
versary commemorations of the deaths of the three sisters-in-law. A series
of book dedications in 1674 and 1675 that repeat the deathbed accounts
from the funerary biographies culminate in a book published in 1676 by
Christoph Sommer that places these deathbed accounts alongside those of
hundreds of other exemplary deaths. Not just a commemorative, Sommer’s
book was designed to serve as the basis for advance preparations for death,
as the title shows: Epilogi pie de mortuorum, Oder Exemplarische Sterbe-
Schule (Pious Epilogues of the Dying, or, School for Dying based on
Exemplary Models).13 He dedicated it to Aemilia Juliana and her husband,
as well as to the fourth sister-in-law, Maria Susanna, who had survived the
epidemic illness.
The frontispiece of this book (see fig. 2.1) can itself serve as a device
for memento mori meditations. An enormous skull (“Todes-Kopf” or
death’s head, as it is called in German) supported by the implements of
grave-digging dominates the image, but that is not the only focus for
contemplation, just as the certainty of death is not the final message for
the followers of Luther’s teachings. Between the eye-sockets, the figure
of Christ hangs from a cross on which a biblical quotation is inscribed:
“Es ist in keinem andern Heil” (There is salvation in none other). From
the crucified Christ’s wounded palms, blood droplets stream down over
twin scenes depicted within the eye-sockets. On the right, the recipients
of the salvific blood are three corpses, still enveloped in their burial wrap-
Fig. 2.1. Death’s-Head, frontispiece engraving from Christoph Sommer, Epilogi pie
de mortuorum, Oder: Exemplarische Sterbe-Schule (1676). Courtesy of the
Historische Bibliothek in Rudolstadt.
pings, but beginning to awaken from their death-sleep. They represent

the three deceased sisters being honored on the fourth anniversary of
their deaths. They hold their hands together in prayer and raptly gaze at
the crucified Christ as they are touched by the drops of blood. The blood
also flows over an altar bearing the eucharistic chalice and paten, the
baptismal font, and an open Bible — symbols of the two scripturally
based sacraments retained by Martin Luther, together with their source
in the Word of God. In the other eye-socket, another scene shows the
blood benefiting three living figures, a man and two women who appear
to represent the three dedicatees. They stand or kneel gazing at the cru-
cified Christ with hands raised up in praise and supplication as the drop-
lets of blood stream over them as well. The message is one of optimism
about the efficacy of Christ’s sacrifice as a powerful weapon against the
permanence of death.
In the years immediately following the publication of this book with
its death’s-head frontispiece, death was still in the ascendant in Rudolstadt.
In 1677 Aemilia Juliana’s closest friend and confident, an aristocratic
woman who spent much time at court, died in childbed, and one of
Aemilia Juliana’s sisters also died that year. And then in August 1679,
while visiting another sister in Wolfenbüttel, Aemilia Juliana herself — sud-
denly and without advance warning — fell into a coma, and everyone
expected her to die. After lying unconscious for many days she awoke, like
the corpses in Sommer’s frontispiece, fully recovered — miraculously and
by the grace of God, it was assumed. She and her family and subjects cel-
ebrated her return to life after this near-death experience jointly with her
August birthday every year thereafter, a sign that they considered her
recovery as a sort of rebirth. And she seems to have regarded the experi-
ence as a call to dedicate the remainder of her life to playing a leadership
role in pastoral care, especially perhaps in relation to the arrival in Europe
of a deadly plague epidemic in 1680 that continued to threaten
Schwarzburg through the end of 1682. Aemilia Juliana began to publish
her songs and prayers — first in devotional pamphlets for use to ward off
the plague in 1681, then in the devotional handbook for the use of preg-
nant and birthing women published in 1683, then in a book containing
texts for use during three daily devotional sessions, Tägliches Morgen-
Mittags- und AbendOpffer (Daily Morning, Noon, and Evening Devotional
Offering), which appeared in 1685.14
At some point in the 1680s — perhaps in 1686, when she wrote “Wer
weiß, wie nahe mir mein Ende,” or in 1689, the tenth anniversary of her
“Scheintod” (apparent death) — Aemilia Juliana established an additional
private devotional session that she conducted every day at four o’clock in
the afternoon, a “Sterbe-Bet-Stunde” (prayer hour dedicated entirely to
preparations for death), as it was termed in the funerary biography.15 She
considered herself to be living on borrowed time, and, even more than
42 JUDITH P. AIKIN
before, she lived in constant expectation of dying. As the years flowed by

without a recurrence of coma or fatal illness, she began to seek the reasons
behind the long respite God had granted to her, and she found a possible
answer in the Bible: the story of King Hezekiah, who from his deathbed
had begged God to have mercy and allow him to live on in return for a
pledge to devote himself to saving his land and his people from their
enemies (Isaiah 38). God had granted Hezekiah fifteen more years, and
Aemilia Juliana clearly began to fixate on this number as she passed the
thirteenth anniversary of her recovery.
As 1692 drew to a close, Aemilia Juliana and her husband made a
remarkable request of their court pastor: to designate the coming church
year (Advent 1692 to Advent 1693) “das Todes-Jahr” (the Death Year),
during which he was to dedicate every sermon to preparations for death.
In the preface to his collection of the resulting sermons that he published
in 1694, Michael Hörnlein expressed the horror he had felt at this odd
request, but he also applauded his patrons for their pious intentions.16
Then, in honor of Aemilia Juliana’s birthday in August 1694, which was
also the fifteenth anniversary of her “Scheintod,” Hörnlein prepared a
special sermon that expressly addressed her expectation that she would die
that week. Titled Der Sich selbst überlebende König Jehißkia (King Hezekiah,
who outlived himself), the sermon recounted both the biblical story and
the events of fifteen years earlier in the life of his patroness. At the end, he
diffused her expectations — and the fears of others in the congregation
— by repeating the theme so prevalent in her own songs: the timing of
one’s death was unknowable. Given her great value to her family, her land,
and her people, Hörnlein stated, God would surely not have limited her
new lease on life to a mere fifteen years.17
And indeed, Aemilia Juliana continued to lead a productive life for
another decade, although periodically brought low by her genuinely seri-
ous ailments. She continued to conduct her daily “Sterbe-Bet-Stunden”
and to produce new song texts for use during preparations for death, both
in advance and on the deathbed. More than thirty such songs are dedi-
cated solely to these functions. And she continued to share her songs with
friends and relatives through handwritten copies and to release them to the
public through publication in new editions of the Rudolstadt hymnal and
in her own compilations. In 1699 she published a second edition of her
all-purpose devotional handbook Tägliches Morgen- Mittags- und
AbendOpffer, now greatly augmented by sections for songs dedicated to a
variety of topics, including advance preparations for death and the death-
bed activities of those lucky enough, as she saw it, to die fully conscious
that the dying process had begun.
There is considerable evidence that others, especially women, availed
themselves of her pastoral care, in person or through the use of books
containing her songs. The death-themed songs were among the most
popular. For example, the funerary sermon and biography of Baroness

Anna Magdalena von Schönfeld, the friend who had died in childbed in
1677, tells us not only that Aemilia Juliana spent much time at the bedside
of her closest friend, singing and praying with her, but also that Anna
Magdalena made use of some of Aemilia Juliana’s songs on her death-
bed.18 It is entirely possible that Aemilia Juliana wrote the song designed
for the use of a new mother who was dying shortly after the birth, “Gott
mit meiner matten Zungen,” as solace for her dying friend, among other
handwritten songs she must have shared with her at this time.
Two noblewomen from distant courts who had direct or indirect con-
nections with Aemilia Juliana probably possessed the books Aemilia Juliana
published containing her own songs and those of her deceased sister-in-
law, Ludaemilia Elisabeth, for when Magdalena Sibylla, Duchess of
Württemberg, and Sophia Christiana, Markgräfin of Brandenburg-
Culmbach, published devotional compilations for use at their own courts,
they included large numbers of songs by the two Rudolstadt women.
Magdalena Sibylla’s Gott geweytes Andachts-Opffer (Devotional Offering
Dedicated to God) included five death-themed songs by Aemilia Juliana,
while Sophia Christiana’s collection, Glauben-schallende und Himmel-
steigende Herzens-Music (Faith-Resounding and Heaven-Ascending Heart’s
Music), incorporated those five songs plus two additional songs by Aemilia
Juliana that were designed as advance preparations for death.19 The preface
to the surviving exemplars of Magdalena Sibylla’s Andachts-Opffer claims
that this undated edition of ca. 1705 was the seventh, a sign that it was
much sought after. Sophia Christiana’s Herzens-Music, initially published
in 1703, likewise reappeared in new editions. It was republished in 1719
and then again in 1727 by her husband’s great-niece, Christiana
Eberhardine of Brandenburg-Beyreuth, the much-tried woman who had
married August the Strong, Elector of Saxony.20 Both of these devotional
song compilations seem to be aimed at a female readership and attest to
the continuing popularity among women of Aemilia Juliana’s song texts,
including those for preparation for death, well into the eighteenth
century.
The funerary biographies of several women from Altenburg show that
Aemilia Juliana’s songs were likewise popular among non-aristocratic
women.21 Poet Margaretha Susanna von Kuntsch, who died in 1717, was
honored at her funeral by equation with Aemilia Juliana’s pseudonym “Die
Freundin des Lammes” (the Friend of the Lamb). Since this authorial
identification had accompanied the two-volume edition of 1714 contain-
ing most of Aemilia Juliana’s songs, it seems likely that Kuntsch — and the
pastor who authored her funeral sermon — possessed one or both vol-
umes. Indeed, in the funeral sermon in Kuntsch’s honor titled Die
Freundin des Lammes, Johann Tobias Rauschelbach mentions the posthu-
mous publication of Aemilia Juliana’s songs as an example of the poetic
44 JUDITH P. AIKIN
products of similarly learned women who were likewise devout followers

of Jesus. He asserts:
Das erbauliche Rudolfstädtische Gebet- und Gesang-Buch der frommen

Loide des Schwarzburgischen Hohen Hauses weiß keinen bessern
Nahmen der theuren Verfasserin desselben, als daß Sie heisset, und sich
zu nennen vor die höchste Ehre schätzet, die Freundin des Lammes.22
[The edifying Rudolstadt prayer and songbook of the devout Lady of the
Schwarzburg royal house knows no better name for its author than that
she is called, and considered it the highest honor to be so named, the
Friend of the Lamb.]
He uses this observation to justify the title and theme of his sermon. The
“Lebenslauf” (biography) of Kuntsch’s niece Dorothea Wilhelmina
Margaretha Förster for her funeral in 1721 attests to her use of at least one
of Aemilia Juliana’s death-themed songs. As Förster neared death, the
biographer reports, she asked her companions to sing with her various
devotional songs that she loved, “absonderlich den schönen Sterbe-
Gesang: Wer weiß wie nahe mir mein Ende/ durch und durch sehr
andächtig mit gesungen” (especially the beautiful song for the dying “Wer
weiß wie nahe mir mein Ende,” which she sang all the way through in a
most devout manner).23
The prose meditations on “Wer weiß, wie nahe mir mein Ende,”
authored by David Christian Walther and published in 1719, likewise
demonstrate the use of Aemilia Juliana’s most famous song in connection
with a woman’s death: as the author states, the meditations initially served
to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the death of his wife Abigail. In
his preface, Walther notes that the Zwickau hymnal had called this song
“den Kern aller Gebete” (the quintessence and source of all prayers). He
goes on to state:
Dieses Lied [ist] von so unvergleichlicher Kunst, absonderlich da sehr

wenige Worte darinnen, die nicht in H. Schrifft zu finden sind; So hab
ich mich in solches über die massen verliebet, und es bey meiner seligen
Todes-Vorbereitung zum benöthigten Grunde geleget.24
[This song is of such incomparable excellence, especially considering how

few words it contains that are not derived from Holy Scriptures, that I
have fallen totally in love with it. For this reason I have made it the basis
of my preparations for a blessed death.]
Walther reprints the entire twelve-strophe text, then provides a long prose
“Betrachtung” (contemplation) for each sentence or clause — a series of
thirty-four meditations that take up more than 440 pages. Following this
long version, he provides a shorter “Auslegung des Liedes” (exegesis of
the song), which briefly interprets each strophe. Finally, he creates a per-
formance plan, perhaps for the commemoration, in which blocks of alex-

andrine verses marked with personalizing acrostics alternate with strophes
of the song. It seems likely that he had found in this song text the basis for
his own preparations for death precisely because he had heard it in the
context of his wife’s deathbed or funeral (or both). The 1739 edition
claims to be the fifth — a sign of its enduring popularity as a devotional
book employed on deathbeds and during prayer hours dedicated to
advance preparation for death.
A chapter on “Wer weiß, wie nahe mir mein Ende” in a book pub-
lished in the middle of the nineteenth century recounts anecdotes illustrat-
ing the extraordinary reception of this song. In addition to references to
Walther’s meditations and the judgment expressed in the Zwickau hymnal,
F. A. Cunz mentions that Georg Heinrich Götze delivered twelve sermons
providing a commentary on the text of the song in Annaberg (Electoral
Saxony) in 1720. He then relates a number of anecdotes concerning the
song’s use and impact under amazing circumstances, most of them
instances when men used the song in the context of their own deaths. Not
least amazing is his account of the false authorship claim made by Georg
Michael Pfefferkorn and the attributions made to him and to several other
men in the absence of any assertion of authorship from the true author.25
Thus the history of the reception of Aemilia Juliana’s “Wer weiß, wie nahe
mir mein Ende” shows that her conception of the good death was influ-
ential for men as well as for women, and perhaps because it usually
appeared anonymously or under the name of a male pretender, it could
subvert and supplant the traditional representations of death available in
texts written by men.
By the time Johann Sebastian Bach employed the song as the textual
basis for two chorales in 1726 and 1727, “Wer weiß, wie nahe mir mein
Ende” was already the most famous of all death-themed hymns of the
Lutheran church. Through performances of the Bach chorales and through
the congregational or private use of her song based on ubiquitous publica-
tion in hymnals of the past 330 years, Aemilia Juliana’s perspective on
death and dying has continued to influence views of the end of life. In
1923 theologian Paul Althaus could still describe the significance of the
use and impact of the hymn during contemporary funerals in his book on
Lutheran “Sterbelieder” (songs about dying): “Dieses kostbare Lied steht
dem Herzen der Gemeinde bis heute besonders nahe. Der Einsatz mit den
ersten Strophen [. . .] greift, am Sarge und offenen Grabe gesungen, auch
dem Fernerstehenden an die Seele” (This precious song remains dear to
the hearts of the congregation up to this very moment. The words at the
start of the song, when sung at the coffin by the open grave, grip the souls
even of those standing farther off.”26 In spite of the title of his study, Der
Friedhof unserer Väter (The Graveyard of our Forefathers), Althaus
acknowledges Aemilia Juliana’s authorship and firmly places the words of
46 JUDITH P. AIKIN
a woman among the favorites in the canon of death-themed songs. Any

attempt to understand representations of the good death, from the early
modern period up to the present day, must take into account Aemilia
Juliana’s writings, especially her “Wer weiß, wie nahe mir mein Ende.” Her
constructed dying self lives on in her words.
Notes
1
Aemilia Juliana, Gräfin von Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, née Gräfin von Barby, was
born in 1637, married in 1665, and died at the advanced age of 69 in 1706. She
can be identified as the author of nearly 700 extant devotional songs, many of
which were published anonymously or pseudonymously during her lifetime. Prior
to 1990 she was little studied. Since 2001 I have published a number of articles on
Aemilia Juliana’s authorship, publications, and activities, which I will cite where
relevant. My book-length study, Aemilia Juliana: A Woman’s Life in Song in Early
Modern Germany, is nearly complete. Susanne Schuster has recently published a
book treating her practical theology: Aemilie Juliane von Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt
und Ahasver Fritsch: Eine Untersuchung zur Jesusfrömmigkeit im späten 17.
Jahrhundert (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2006).
2
Like other works by Johann Sebastian Bach, these cantatas are generally referred
to by their numbers in the standard Bach Werkverzeichnis (catalogue of the com-
plete works of Bach, abbreviated BWV). The first based on Aemilia Juliana’s song
is BWV 27, composed in 1726, which uses the first strophe and refrain. BWV 84,
composed in 1727, employs only the final strophe with its variant of the refrain.
3
On attitudes toward sudden death in the context of women of the highest nobil-
ity in early modern Germany, see Jill Bepler, “Die Fürstin im Spiegel der protes-
tantischen Funeralwerke der Frühen Neuzeit,” in Der Körper der Königin:
Geschlecht und Herrschaft in der höfischen Welt, ed. Regina Schulte (Frankfurt am
Main: Campus, 2002), 135–61, esp. 142–48.
4
The letters are preserved in an unbound bundle in the Thüringisches Staatsarchiv
in Rudolstadt, Geheimes Archiv A. III. 152. The three quoted here are [49],
[346], and [200]. The transcriptions and translations are my own, as are all subse-
quent translations from German.
5
This song first appeared in a posthumous edition of Aemilia Juliana’s works:
Aemilia Juliana von Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, Der Freundin des Lammes Creuz-
Schule und Todes-Betrachtungen (Rudolstadt: Löwe, 1770), 331. Because this is the
sole source for this song text, I have reproduced the typesetting scheme of this
edition, which, like many hymnals of the early modern period, prints the text
margin-to-margin instead of like a poem. This format was practical because reading
was eased by memory of the phrasings and rhythms of the well-known melody that
the song was designed to employ, or, if using a new melody, by the presence of the
musical notation printed above the text. In Aemilia Juliana’s manuscripts (and in
one book she published herself), she presents her song texts in the form of poems,
with line breaks after the end-rhymes, and when quoting from these sources I do
so as well.
6
The dated manuscript, which also provides the name of the place where the song
was written — Neuhaus, the family hunting lodge — is reportedly preserved in the
church library in Gera, a town not far from Neuhaus; Aemilia Juliana probably gave
this copy as a gift to the Gera pastor or to a member of the Reuss family that ruled
there. Her handwritten copy of the same song in the back of a book is preserved
in the Forschungsbibliothek in Gotha under the signature Cant. spir. 127. The
book presents the devotional songs of her deceased sister-in-law: Ludaemilia
Elisabeth von Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, Die Stimme der Freundin/ Das ist:
Geistliche Lieder (Rudolstadt: Schultz, 1687). The excerpts I quote here follow this
version.
7
The song first appeared in a Nordhausen hymnal: Schrifftmässiges CCC. Geistl.
Lieder haltendes Gesangbuch (Nordhausen: Hynitzsch, 1687), 495, then in a
Rudolstadt hymnal: Gesang-Büchlein (Rudolstadt: Löwe, 1688), 984. Aemilia
Juliana designed the song to be sung to a well-known hymn melody, that for “Wer
nur den lieben Gott läßt walten” (Whoever leaves it up to God). The complete
twelve-strophe version is readily accessible in Das deutsche evangelische Kirchenlied
des 17. Jahrhunderts, ed. A. F. W. Fischer and W. Tümpel (1902–16; repr.
Hildesheim: Olms, 1964), vol. 5, no. 631. The version in the modern hymnal
retains only five strophes.
8
As reported in the compilation of texts and engravings published to commemo-
rate the funeral events, Schwartzburgisches Denckmahl einer Christ-Gräflichen
Lammes-Freundin (Rudolstadt: Urban, 1707), 2. The song began the funeral
service associated with the arrival of her body in the court chapel four days after
her death, the first of twelve funeral services spread over a three-week period.
9
The song first appeared in the inaugural edition of the Rudolstadt hymnal,
Christliches Gesang-Büchlein (Rudolstadt: Fleischer, 1682), 356. The text appears
in its entirety in Fischer and Tümpel, Das deutsche evangelische Kirchenlied des 17.
Jahrhunderts, vol. 5, no. 608. I quote from the version in the Rudolstadt hymnal.
10
The song, in the only version that survives, is printed in Aemilia Juliana von
Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, Geistliches Weiber-Aqua-Vit/ Das ist/ Christliche Lieder
und Gebete/ Vor/ bey und nach Erlangung Göttlichen Ehe-Segens/ wie auch Bey
andern darbey sich begebenden Fällen zu gebrauchen/ Aus Landes-Mütterlichen
Hertzen/ Mund und Hand Ihren Landes-Kindern zu erwünschter/ kräftiger
Erbauung aus Gottes H. Wort zubereitet und mitgetheilet (Rudolstadt: Freyschmidt,
1683), 158. I have followed the source in printing this song as a poem, with line
breaks after the relatively short phrases that probably helped the mortally ill woman
to read and sing the words. The middle strophe is missing its final two lines, and I
have filled them in using the lines from the third strophe, as they fit here as well.
On this book and its contents, see my article: Aikin, “Gendered Theologies of
Childbirth in Early Modern Germany and the Devotional Handbook for Pregnant
Women Authored by Aemilie Juliane, Countess of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt
(1683),” The Journal of Women’s History 15.2 (2003): 40–67.
48 JUDITH P. AIKIN
11
This song is included in Geistliches Weiber-Aqua-Vit, 163.
12
“Gott/ dein Wille ist Geschehen” (God, your will has been done), in Geistliches
Weiber-Aqua-Vit, 223. On the topic of consolation poetry for the deaths of chil-
dren, see Anna Linton, Poetry and Parental Bereavement in Early Modern Lutheran
Germany (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008). Linton does not discuss this song and has
for the most part excluded song texts from consideration, but many of her findings
are relevant to the analysis of this song and several others on the topic by Aemilia
Juliana.
13
Christoph Sommer, Epilogi pie de mortuorum, Oder: Exemplarische Sterbe-
Schule/ in sich haltend Denckwürdige letzte Reden und Seufzer Christi und über
vierhundert seiner Gläubigen/ Altes und Neues Testaments (Rudolstadt: Fleischer,
1676). On this work and the other commemorative publications, see my article:
Aikin, “‘Wer weiß, wie nahe mir mein Ende’: Todesbereitschaft im Leben und
Dichten der Gräfin Aemilie Juliane von Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt (1637–1706),”
Blätter der Gesellschaft für Buchkultur und Geschichte 10 (2006): 34–55.
14
On these publication activities, see my article: Aikin, “Der Weg zur Mündigkeit
in einem Frauenleben aus dem 17. Jahrhundert: Genesis und Publikationsgeschichte
der geistlichen Lieder der Gräfin Aemilie Juliane von Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt,”
Wolfenbütteler Barock-Nachrichten 29 (2002): 33–59.
15
The term “Sterbe-Bet-Stunde” appears in the “Lebens-Wandel” (biography) in
Schwartzburgisches Denckmahl, 356. On page 352, the biographer refers to these
prayer sessions as “Ihre Bet-Stunden um ein seliges Ende” (her devotional hours
dedicated to praying for a blessed death).
16
Michael Hörnlein, Bewährteste Kunststücke wieder des Todes Furcht und
Bitterkeit/ In Evangelischen Sonn- und FesttagsPredigten/ dergestalt gewiesen und
gepriesen/ Daß in ieder Predigt/ Eingangs/ ein in der Bibel beschriebener Sterbender
fürgestellet/ Darnach nachdenckliche Todes-Erinnerungen/ sammt einer christlichen
Zuschickung zum Sterben/ und endlich liebliche TodesErquickungen angezeiget wer-
den (Rudolstadt: Löwe, 1694), unpaginated preface.
17
Michael Hörnlein, Der Sich selbst überlebende König Jehißkia/ An dem
Höchsterfreulichen GeburtsTage Der Hochgebornen Gräfin und Frauen/ Fr. Aemilien
Julianen/ . . . der 19. Augusti 1694 . . . in einer einfältigen Predigt . . . vorgestellt
(Rudolstadt: Löwe, 1694), 1–26, esp. 24–26.
18
Justus Söffing, Das schönste Symbolum und Hertzens-Wort aller Frucht-
bringenden Jesus-Seelen (Rudolstadt: Fleischer, 1677), 45.
19
Sophia Christiana’s compilation survives as an apparent unicum in Göttingen:
Sophia Christiana von Brandenburg-Culmbach, Glauben-schallende und Himmel-
steigende Herzens-Music (Nuremberg: Froberger, 1703). Magdalena Sibylla’s com-
pilation survives in several libraries in an early eighteenth-century edition:
Magdalena Sibylla von Württemberg, Gott geweytes Andachts-Opffer (Stuttgart:
Metzler, [ca. 1705]). The preface is dated 1690, presumably the date of the first
edition. On Sophia Christiana’s Herzens-Music, see my article: Aikin, “Songs By
and For Women in a Devotional Songbook of 1703: Women’s Voices for Women’s
Voices,” Daphnis 31 (2002): 593–642. I discuss both compilations in an essay:
Aikin, “Beteiligung von Frauen am ‘geist=reichen’ Gesang um 1700. Herzens=Music

(Nürnberg 1703), Andachts=Opffer (Stuttgart 1705) und Freylinghausens
Geist=reiches Gesang=Buch (Halle 1704) mit Zugabe (1705),” in “Singt dem Herrn
nah und fern”: 300 Jahre Freylinghausensches Gesangbuch, ed. Wolfgang Miersemann
and Gudrun Busch, Hallesche Forschungen 20 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2008),
123–42.
20
On Christiana Eberhardine, see Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly, “Religion and the
Consort: Two Electresses of Saxony and Queens of Poland (1697–1757),” in
Queenship in Europe, 1660–1815: The Role of the Consort, ed. Clarissa Campbell Orr
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004), 252–75. I am grateful to Helen Watanabe-
O’Kelly for making her findings available to me prior to publication.
21
I am very grateful to Anna Carrdus for bringing these materials to my attention
as she was working on her research project on Altenburg women poets. I have
relied on her transcriptions of relevant passages from the funeral sermons and
funerary biographies, which she gave me at that time. Her book on these women
has since appeared: Das “weiblich Werk” in der Residenzstadt Altenburg (1672–
1720): Gedichte und Briefe von Margaretha Susanna von Kuntsch und Frauen aus
ihrem Umkreis (Hildesheim: Olms, 2004). Carrdus does not include these particu-
lar passages in the book.
22
Johann Tobias Rauschelbach, Die Freundin des Lammes (Altenburg, 1717), 9.
Kuntsch and/or Rauschelbach probably possessed Aemilia Juliana’s Der Freundin
des Lammes Täglicher Umgang mit Gott (Rudolstadt: Urban, 1714). They may also
have had access to the massive volume of funerary texts published in Aemilia
Juliana’s honor in 1707, Schwartzburgisches Denckmahl einer Christ-Gräflichen
Lammes-Freundin.
23
Johann Michael Thomä, Süße Grabes-Gedancken (Altenburg, 1721), 49–50.
24
David Christian Walther, Allerbewährteste Mittel wider die Einbildung eines
schnellen und unverhofften Todtes, Oder Gründlicher Unterricht, Wie ein jeder
Mensch zu aller Zeit seinen Gott solle recht erhörlich um ein seliges Ende bitten, und
täglich könne bereitet und gelassen leben, In XXXIV. Betrachtungen über das unver-
gleichliche, geistreiche, schöne Lied: Wer weiß, wie nahe mir mein Ende? (Dresden and
Leipzig: Hübner, 1739), unpaginated preface. I have been unable to locate an
earlier edition, but the dated preface shows that it was first published in 1719.
Walther’s wife had died in 1714.
25
F. A. Cunz, Geschichte des deutschen Kirchenliedes vom 16. Jahrhundert bis auf
unsere Zeit (1855; repr. Wiesbaden: Sändig, 1969), 660–69. I have been unable to
locate Götze’s sermons. The authorship dispute over this very popular song ensued
despite the presence of Aemilia Juliana’s initials accompanying the first publication
in the Nordhausen hymnal in 1687, because the song was otherwise always pub-
lished anonymously or under Pfefferkorn’s name until after her death, when the
funerary biography asserted her claim based on her own private testimony. The
1714 edition of her songs likewise included an essay proving her authorship. An
early eighteenth-century hymnologist published an account of the claims and
counterclaims and concluded that Aemilia Juliana was the author: Johann Gottfried
50 JUDITH P. AIKIN
Gregorius, Gottgefälliger Glantz der Wahrheit, zu Ehren der . . . Frauen Aemil.

Julianen Gräffin zu Schwartzburg . . . mit unverwerfflichen Beweiß-Gründen/ daß
Sie allein die wahre Verfasserin des trostreichen Sterbe-Liedes: Wer weiß wie nahe mir
mein Ende rc. sey und bleibe (Frankfurt am Main: Jung, 1719). Nevertheless, the
contentious debate continued until 1938, when another hymnologist disproved
yet another attribution to a male author. See Johannes Kulp, “Wer ist der Dichter
des Liedes ‘Wer weiß, wie nahe mir mein Ende’?” Monatsschrift für Gottesdienst
und kirchliche Kunst 43 (1938): 284–90.
26
Paul Althaus, Der Friedhof unserer Väter: Ein Gang durch die Sterbe- und
Ewigkeitslieder der evangelischen Kirche (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1923), 56.
3: The “New Mythology”: Myth and
Death in Karoline von Günderrode’s
Literary Work
Barbara Becker-Cantarino
M YTH AND DEATH ARE AT THE CENTER of the poetic works of Karoline
von Günderrode (1780–1806). In her last collection, entitled Melete
von Jon (Melete by Jon, 1806) — dedicated to the “Muse des sinnigen
Daseyns — die auf hohe Lieder sinnt” (the muse of sensuous being, who
ponders high songs)1 — the lead poem deals with the death of Adonis. In
the funeral elegy “Adonis Todtenfeyer” (Memorial for Adonis) we read:
Wehe! Dass der Gott auf Erden

Sterblich musst geboren werden!
Alles wandelt und vergehet
Morgen sinkt, was heute stehet;
Was jetzt schön und herrlich steiget
Bald sich hin zum Staube neiget;
Dauer ist nicht zu erwerben,
Wandeln ist unsterblich Sterben.2
[Woe that God had to be born as a mortal on earth! Everything

changes and perishes, what stands today falls tomorrow; what now
rises beautifully and majestically will soon turn to dust; permanence
cannot be acquired, living is immortal dying.]
These elegiac lines have a religious quality, reminiscent of baroque lyrics in

their evocation of inescapable death, of all living beings turning into dust,
of no permanence: “Dauer ist nicht zu erwerben”; yet the conceit
“Wandeln ist unsterblich sterben” turns death in oxymoronic fashion into
the immortal. In this and many other poems and in her plays, Günderrode
uses mythological imagery to represent death. The poet here is mourning
Adonis, one of the most complex cult figures in Greek mythology. In
Greek religious belief he was an annually renewed, ever-youthful “god of
vegetation,” a life-death-rebirth deity whose cult was perpetuated by
women: the cult of the dying Adonis was fully developed in the circle of
52 BARBARA BECKER-CANTARINO
young girls around Sappho on the island of Lesbos around 600 BCE, as a
fragment by Sappho reveals. As told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Adonis was
the lover of Aphrodite, who had to share him with Persephone, the
Goddess of the Underworld; when he went hunting in spite of Aphrodite’s
warning, he was killed by a wild boar. As a sign of her mourning Aphrodite
then made red flowers spring from his wound. The Adonis story (his birth,
love, and death) was a frequently used subject in ancient art and it has
often been employed in European literature, art, music, and opera since
the Renaissance.
“Adonis Todtenfeyer” is a reflection of Günderrode’s intellectual and
erotic entanglement with the classical scholar Friedrich Creuzer (1771–
1852). Creuzer had written the two preceding sonnets in the Melete col-
lection and Adonis may have stood as a mythic and ideal other for him.
The poem is also emblematic of Günderrode’s fascination with myth and
of her representation of death and love, of the lovers’ (re)union in death.3
It is my thesis that Günderrode’s intensive study of the “new mythology”
explored and advocated by the early Romantics and elaborated by Creuzer
led her to an aesthetic position in which she identified with mythology’s
love-death paradigm in her poetic works as well as in her own life.
Günderrode’s fascination with myth, I submit, originated in and intensi-
fied during her readings of Johann Gottfried Herder, the early Romantics,
and especially Novalis and Schelling. It was heightened through her
acquaintance with Friedrich Creuzer and then shifted toward a fascination,
if not obsession, with death and sacrificial love. I maintain that the persist-
ent gap between mythical ideals and prosaic reality gave rise to Günderrode’s
preoccupation with death as a way of imagining the eventual re-union and
re-integration of herself and the other into some future, albeit mythic,
age.
Günderrode’s occupation with myth as a poetic medium was inspired
and heightened by Creuzer’s philological studies in comparative ancient
and oriental mythology, which were later to result in his scholarly opus
magnum, Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker (Symbolism And
Mythology of the Ancients, 1810–12).4 Their intensive interest in and
study and use of mythology was the intellectual bond between Günderrode
and Creuzer. Their affair was short-lived: it began with a meeting during
her trip to Heidelberg in August 1804 and was cut short by his withdrawal
and her subsequent suicide two years later in July of 1806. As I argue here,
it was Günderrode’s interest in the early Romantics and subsequent close
bonds with the Romantic scholar Creuzer that informed her poetic use of
myth and intensified her shift to mythic representations of women and
death, of sacrificial love and death, and of renewal through death. These
ideas were also, of course, part of Romantic thought, the project of a “new
mythology,” a pervasive discourse of and preoccupation with myth that
began with the era of early Romanticism in the 1790s and lasted well into
MYTH & DEATH IN KAROLINE VON GÜNDERRODE’S LITERARY WORK 53
the nineteenth century, when it was explored by Wagner and Nietzsche.

Ancient and modern mythologies were debated across several scholarly
disciplines, including biblical theology and classical, Germanic, and com-
parative philology.5 The intellectual, philosophical discussion of mythology
was also reflected in nineteenth-century literature and the fine arts, espe-
cially in illustrations and sculpture, and in general cultured discourse.
Moreover, thinking in mythological analogies became habitual.6
Mythological allusion was often used to reinforce or to condemn a certain
norm of behavior,7 for example it supported heroic masculinity and anti-
feminist ideas. Even in the twentieth century the identity discourse of
femininity and masculinity was often couched in mythic configurations and
images.
I would like to follow these intricate ties between artistic and cultural
representations of myth, death, and women’s bodies, looking at
Günderrode’s use of myth from a gender perspective. The Romantic
project of a “new mythology” was conceived within a modern Christian
society. Over the course of the nineteenth century this discourse on myth
reinforced traditional patriarchal gender roles in ever starker opposition to
social developments in the nascent women’s movement. The power and
appeal of myth in German intellectual and artistic circles can best be
understood “not as a secularization of traditional religion or as a form of
‘secular religion,’ but rather as a development within Christian (especially
German Protestant) culture, as it confronted the cultural and political
challenges of European modernity.”8 The social changes demanded by the
nineteenth-century movement for the emancipation of women should also
be mentioned here, as it faced and embraced such mythological discourse
as was found, for example, in Bachofen’s Das Mutterrecht (Mother Right,
1861) or Wagner’s operas.
Günderrode’s Mythic Poetics

Karoline von Günderrode’s early literary works dating from about 1798 to
1800 already embrace mythology — but, rather unexpectedly, in a comic
and satirical vein. Her poem in doggerel verse “Geschichte der schönen
Göttin und edlen Nympfe Kalypso” (SW 1:405–11; Story of the Beautiful
Goddess and Noble Nymph Kalypso), written in 1798, is a parody on the
idolizing, pathos-laden reception of Homer of her day. Her two-act play
Der Kanonenschlag oder das Gastmahl des Tantalus (SW 1:412–20; The
Canon-Shot Or Tantalus’s Banquet, 1800/1801) employs a cast of
ancient gods in a spoof on contemporary aristocratic society. Among her
early literary efforts is also a poem celebrating Napoleon as bringer of
freedom and rejuvenator of ancient Egypt, “Buonaparte in Egypten,”
written in 1799. Such worldly tones inspired by the French Revolution
and the parodic use of mythology in her early work before 1800 are a far
cry from Günderrode’s ensuing literary production.
Günderrode’s first published collection, Gedichte und Phantasien (SW
1:9–84; Poems and Fantasies, 1804), reveals that she was committed to
the premises of philosophical idealism and to the notion that the philo-
sophical and aesthetic tenets of idealism should become part of society.
From about 1796 to 1800 she had read widely in the writings of the Early
Romantics and other major philosophical texts dealing with a “new
mythology,” as we can discern from Günderrode’s readings recorded in
her Studienbuch (Notebook).9 In it she made excerpts from, among many
other works, the Athenäum, from Novalis and Herder, and from
Schleiermacher’s Über die Religion (On Religion, 1799) and his Monologe
(Monologues, 1800). Her readings between 1802 and 1804 included
Schelling’s System des transcendentalen Idealismus (System of Transcen-
dental Idealism, 1800) and his other early writings. She endeavored to
understand Schelling’s “divine philosophy” and the “heavenly truth of his
teachings,” she wrote to Creuzer in March of 1805.10 Günderrode
reworked and extended the ideas in her notes on natural philosophy (SW
3:358–406) and tried to incorporate them into her poetic efforts, as she
wrote to Savigny in June of 1804: “Ich studiere Schelling mit grosem Fleiß
und arbeite an einem neuen Drama” (SW 3:343; I am studying Schelling
with great diligence and am working on a new drama [Nikator]). Her
studies also included ancient geography and religions (of Greece, Rome,
and the Orient).
From around 1800 Günderrode’s poetry shows an increasingly con-
scious reflection on, and integration of, myth, philosophy, and ancient
religions. In the collection Gedichte und Phantasien and other works from
about 1802 onward, we encounter an array of mythic or mythological top-
ics. There is the Egyptian Isis and Osiris material, a cipher for the cultic
mysteries of a mythic past. There are themes from Nordic Mythology, as
in her drama Hildgund (1805), in her poems “Scandinavische
Weissagungen” (Scandinavian Prophecies, 1806) and “Edda” (unpub-
lished), and from Ossian (then still believed to have been written by a
Scottish bard). Above all, there are themes from and references to classical
mythology as in “Orphisches Lied” (Orphic Song, 1806) or “Ariadne auf
Naxos” (Ariadne on Naxos, 1804) as well as names and narrative elements
from “Oriental” rituals and religions — Persian, Islamic, and Indian. In
keeping with her age, Günderrode conceived of the “Orient” or
“Morgenland” (Luther’s German translation of the Greek anatole — land
of the rising sun, the East) as an esoteric, distant locale with ancient reli-
gious or mythic stories, a land of origins, of a golden, romantic age. She
used these exotic mythic traditions to create a “new religion” or a “new
mythology” in her poetic work. In her drama Udohla she has the wise
Indian say:
Es leben deine alten Götter noch.

Sie leben, neu die Welt sich zu erzeugen.
Vielleicht ist schon die schönre Stunde nah. (SW 1:223)
[Your old gods are still alive. They live in order to create the world
anew. Perhaps the more beautiful hour is near.]
With its wide range of themes and sources, Günderrode’s poetic use of
myth was similar to Creuzer’s interest in symbolism and the mythico-ritual
heritage of antiquity and the East. For Günderrode, as for the other
Romantics, narratives from earlier times and from foreign, distant places
were veiled stories symbolic of origins and the human condition, which
contained signs indicating how a better future could be created. She
shared the Romantics’ belief that the pagan mythical substrate grounded
in ancient Greece, in the Orient, or in the Germanic past would yield a
new mythology, a revitalized story of mankind in poetic form. This
Günderrode hoped to accomplish in her writings. In an apparently mutual
understanding with Creuzer about the redeeming quality of myth,
Günderrode was the poet, Creuzer the classical scholar and philologist
with his research into the comparative mythology of the ancients.
Creuzer, Mythology, and Death

Friedrich Creuzer trained as a historian and classical philologist and had a
particular interest in Greek art and literature, especially the “new school,”
as the Romantics became known. On the basis of his publications on the
Greek historians and his book Die historische Kunst der Griechen (The
Historical Art of the Greeks, 1803), and on the recommendation of friends
from his Marburg circle, the theologian Carl Daub and the legal scholar
Friedrich von Savigny, he was offered a professorship at the University of
Heidelberg in 1804, then a small, provincial institution. Creuzer was
enthusiastic about Schelling’s philosophy and introduced philosophy and
the study of ancient mythology into his lectures and the Heidelberg cur-
riculum. His aim was to initiate the students in higher philosophical truths,
as he proposed in an essay in the journal Studien (Studies), which he edited
together with his friend Daub from 1805 to 1811. According to Creuzer,
philology would serve as a kind of lesser mystery before the initiate reached
the greater mystery of idealist philosophy. At that stage the student would
experience the same religious intoxication and loss of individuality that had
produced Greek poetry.11 But his plans for a Romantic curriculum of
mythology and idealist tenets were soon thwarted by the appointment of
the famous philologist Johann Heinrich Voss to the Heidelberg faculty in
1805. The enlightener, poet, translator (notably of the Homeric epics), and
superb classical scholar Voss considered myth to be a language of the child-

hood of men and the product of a barbarous race. Voss (who also received
a very high salary and had no regular teaching duties) was to become
Creuzer’s arch enemy. Their differences culminated in the famous fight
over Creuzer’s magnum opus on mythology, Symbolik und Mythologie der
alten Völker (1810–12), in response to which Voss published his findings
on classical mythology in Antisymbolik (Anti-Symbolism, 1824–26).12
Creuzer’s work foregrounded the dark side of ancient Greece, the
chthonic powers of the earth, the underworld. He focused on Dionysus
and elaborated on the Bacchanalian (Dionysian) orgies and other cult
practices, tracing them back to that ambiguous concept of the “Orient.”
For his students in the first two decades of the nineteenth century,
Creuzer’s university lectures on the new mythology based on idealist phi-
losophy proved to be a powerful and seductive alternative to the neo-
humanist (bright, Apollonian) image of Greece and to a rather desolate
present during the years of the Napoleonic Wars; he became a popular
professor long before his major work on mythology appeared in 1810–12.
But his fame as a scholar was spoiled by increasing controversy over his
mythological theories, as he later nostalgically recalled in his autobiogra-
phy Aus dem Leben eines alten Professors (From the Life of an Old Professor,
1848),13 in which he failed to mention the secret, traumatic affair with
Günderrode and her literary work.
During their relationship Creuzer truly appreciated and enjoyed read-
ing Günderrode’s poetic work, considering it “ihrem Hauptelement nach,
(und darum habe ich sie so lieb) mystisch, offenbarend” (SW 3:167; in its
essence, [and that is why I love it so much] mystical, revelatory). During
their frequent exchange of letters between August 1804 and July 1806,
Günderrode sent him individual poems as expressions of her self in poetic
form for his reading pleasure and his emotional reaction rather than for a
critical response or for assistance with her versification. She conceived and
executed her poetic works independently. Creuzer often seemed surprised
by her poetry and expressed his delight. He collected the poems for Melete,
determined their sequence, and also contributed the two fateful Adonis
poems to the collection; after her suicide he suppressed its publication.
Creuzer appreciated and valorized her poetry in terms of his mythological
world, as was shown when he wrote to Günderrode in February of 1806:
Darum bist Du im Morgenlande so einheimisch: und der große
Naturgeist (der die stille Hoheit des alten Indiens am würdigsten fand
sich in ihr zu verkörpern) zeigt auch Dir nicht selten sein Angesicht. —
Auch bist Du unübertrefflich, wenn Du den geheimen Sinn des Rätsels
singst, das wir Leben nennen, jene Heimlichkeit des Daseyns und die
innerste eigenste Gewohnheit eines schönen Gemüthes. Da gibt Dir Gott
immer das rechte Wort d.h. dasjenige, was von seiner Bedeutung sich
nicht scheiden lässt, das notwendig ist, das jedes Kind versteht, wie Du
dann selbst Kind bist liegend im Schoos der großen Mutter, ein Kind
liebend wie andere, spielend auch und herzig aber doch wieder mit einem
wunderbaren Blick, der sich selbst nicht begreift und geheimnißvoll und
tief. [. . .] Siehe lieber Freund der Mythus ist mehr Deine Welt.14
[That is why you are so much at home in the Orient: and the great spirit
of nature (which found the quiet sublimity of the old India the most
worthy in which to reincarnate itself) shows his face to you not infre-
quently. — Likewise, you are unsurpassable when you sing the secret
meaning of the riddle we call life, that secret of existence and the inner-
most, most individual mode of a beautiful mind. Then God always gives
you the right word, that is to say the one that cannot be separated from
its meaning, that is necessary, that which every child understands, just as
you yourself are then a child lying in the great mother’s lap, a loving child
like the others, playing and lovable but again with a wonderful gaze that
does not comprehend itself and mysterious and deep. [. . .] Look dear
friend, myth is more your world.]
Creuzer’s somewhat awkwardly phrased assessment of Günderrode’s

poetry is a medley of Romantic notions of the poet, art, and the feminine:
he is pointing to hidden meaning, the riddle, the chosen poet, the child in
the lap of the Great Mother, the veiled and mythical. Unfortunately we do
not have Günderrode’s response to this professorial, somewhat conde-
scending advice from the teacher to his student, advice that is very much
in keeping with gender conventions of the day. Creuzer led Günderrode
ever more into the mythic, dark, “oriental” mode of poetry by feminizing
her work and the “Orient” while at the same time, in the very same letter,
steering her away from the real, contemporary world by advising her
against writing a historical drama about “bright” occidental history:
Deine Poesie ist mystisch [. . .] eben darum ist sie nicht plastisch. Folglich
ist Dir alles fremd, was seiner Natur nach hervortreibende systematische
Gestalt fordert, folglich das eigentliche systematische Drama. [. . .] ver-
meide jedes Drama das einen historischen Boden hat; am meisten das
occidentalische der ganz hellen Geschichte. Ist es überhaupt mißlich, die
Urkunden überbieten zu wollen, die von einem großen Manne deutlich
zeugen, so ist es doppelt mißlich für ein Weib. (LG, 230, 231)
[Your poesy is mystical [. . .] that is why it is not plastic. Therefore eve-

rything that requires because of its very nature a creative, systematic form
is alien to you; therefore the real systematic drama. [. . .] avoid any drama
that has a historical grounding, especially the occidental with its very
bright history. If it is unbecoming for anyone to try to surpass those
records that speak of a great man, then it is doubly unbecoming for a
woman.]
Creuzer assisted Günderrode with publishing, an important service in

her day for a woman author and aristocrat who for reasons of social repu-
tation wished to remain anonymous. He published her drama Magie und

Schicksal (Magic and Fate) in his programmatic new journal Studien in
1805. Creuzer offered the drama to his readers as “Poesie, die das Ewige
in der Idee zu symbolisieren vermag” (SW 3:152; poesy that can symbolize
the eternal in the idea). The drama is set in a symbolic “Orient” and ends
with the fateful, ominous death of its protagonist Ligares, the son of the
old Magician Alkmenes (embodying reason, a past age) and Cassandra
(Mother Nature), who kills his own brother in rivalry over the princess
Ladikä and then takes his own life. The drama is a paradigm of Romantic
Naturphilosophie (natural philosophy):15 it represents the crisis of the sub-
ject in the Enlightenment, the transition from the mythic age to the age
of reason, and the cosmic conflict between freedom and necessity — all in
a dense, somewhat contrived plot laced with hidden references to key per-
sons in Günderrode’s (love) life — Alkmenes (Clemens Brentano), Ladikä
(Savigny), Zeno (Bettina Brentano), Timandras (Kunigunda Brentano),
and Cassandra (Creuzer). Her veiled self-portrait in Ligares (“Lina” G)
appears also to be a testimony to her increasing despair, resignation, and
depression. Creuzer had pushed Günderrode toward such an enigmatic,
mystic construction and discouraged her from writing in a more realistic
vein and from using historical or contemporary scenarios.
The Creuzer-Günderrode Correspondence

The topic of death recurs repeatedly in the correspondence between
Creuzer and Günderrode, of which some 120 of Creuzer’s letters have
been published repeatedly since 1896, partly in defense of Creuzer and
also as a fascinating love story. They have dominated and colored our read-
ing of this relationship. We must remember first of all that only ten of
Günderrode’s letters to Creuzer, including some fragments and eight let-
ters which are (partial) copies made by Creuzer’s wife, have survived, eight
of which were not published until 1937. Scholars have lamented the fact
that upon Creuzer’s request and in accordance with his selection most of
Günderrode’s letters to him were destroyed. It was Günderrode’s trusted
friend Susanne von Heyden who took care of Günderrode’s literary papers
after her death and who burned all of Günderrode’s letters to Creuzer.
Heyden had received them from Creuzer in return for sending him his
correspondence (BKG, 32–33). Apparently Creuzer held back some of
Günderrode’s letters. He also had his brother go through his own corre-
spondence and destroy any passages and letters that the brother or his
friend Daub judged might possibly be incriminating in the event of a
judicial hearing.16 Creuzer considered the period from May 1805 to
January 1806 to contain his most unfortunate (“unglückliche”) letters
(BKG, 363–64), probably because they contained intimate remarks about
their relationship, perhaps more explicit references to a love-death pact.17

Such maneuvering with the letters sheds light on the sensibilities of the era
in relation to the affair and the suicide: each person sought to guard his
reputation in his social circle, and silence and silencing were the best way.
When personal letters were published in the nineteenth century, they were
almost always edited, cut, and often altered in order to put the best face
forward. Critical editorial principles did not apply, and why should the
curious have a right to know intimate details?
In the Creuzer-Günderrode correspondence death was a topic addressed
frequently and with great seriousness, always couched in pathos-laden, rhe-
torical language and with mythic allusions. In October 1804 Creuzer wrote
to Günderrode: “Wähle du auch bald, denn wie wohl der Tod süßer ist als
das Leben,18 so wäre es doch recht schändlich von mir mich vom Tode
übereilen zu lassen, ehe ich des Lebens Fülle gekostet” (LG, 20; You should
also choose soon, for though death is sweeter than life it would be despicable
of me to let myself be overtaken by death before I have tasted life). When
Creuzer asked Günderrode to accept his plan for her to move into his house
in Heidelberg, since his wife had agreed to a separation, he entreated her:
“Laß mich hoffen — oder sterben — sterben für Dich. Das ist doch ewig
meine Empfindung, daß mein Leben keine Bedeutung habe, wenn ich nicht
für Dich gelebt” (LG, 27; Let me hope — or die — die for you. That is my
eternal feeling, that my life has no meaning unless I live it for you). Love and
death, sacrifice in death — these are Creuzer’s almost formulaic, rhetorical
phrases in the early months of the affair.
The tone shifts when Creuzer admonishes Günderrode not to seek
death in order to reach her ideals (February 1805, LG, 67) and further
“nicht zu sündigen mit Vorsatz gegen das Gebot der ewigen Natur welche
Selbsterhaltung fodert” (LG, 68; not to sin intentionally against eternal
nature’s command, which demands self-preservation; March 1805).
Creuzer refers to nature and self-preservation as a natural law and he advises
against a love-suicide with a reassuring suggestion: “Nur dies sey der Sinn
unseres Bundes daß wir gerne gehen wollen wenn die Natur uns abrufen
wird, voll Zuversicht daß wir Liebe finden auch bei den Schatten” (LG, 69;
Let only this be the meaning of our bond, that we will go gladly when
nature calls us, confident that we will find love among the shadows as well;
March 1805). Creuzer’s reference is to the underworld of classical antiq-
uity, not to a Christian beyond. Günderrode (in one of her very few surviv-
ing letters) responds to this literary, mythological reference and insists:
Ich habe schon viele Tage im Orkus gelebt und nur darauf gedacht, bald
und ohne Schmerz nicht allein in Gedanken, nein ganz und gar hinun-
terzuwallen, auch Sie wollte ich dort finden. [. . .] Die Freundschaft, wie
ich sie mit Ihnen meinte, war ein Bund auf Leben und Tod. (March
1805, BKG, 206)
[I have already lived in the netherworld for many days and my only
thought was that I would soon, painlessly, sink down to it, not only in my
thoughts, no, totally and utterly, I wanted to find you there as well. [. . .]
The friendship with you I had in mind was a pact for life and death.]
Günderrode then asks whether that was too serious, too irrational for
Creuzer and surmises that he now may have other things on his mind.
In this ongoing dialogue on death and love, death is not seen as some-
thing threatening or destructive, but rather as a possible form of reunion,
as a willing sacrifice for the other, as a special promise (by Günderrode) to
their love. But her references to death remain for the most part rather
unemotional (perhaps allowing her merely to rein in and suppress her
erotic feelings); they also appear distant in the imagination of the beyond,
often a mere reference to the “world of the shadows” that is seen by her
perhaps as a natural state for a love-union, but one that appears pallid and
colorless. Günderrode’s (very occasional) voice in their correspondence (as
it has survived) is a poet’s voice seemingly in awe, not in fear, of this land
beyond death. Death is couched in the language of classical mythology or
literary passages, as when she quotes Sophocles: “O, der Sterblichen
Glückselige, welche die Weihung erst schauten, dann wandlen zum Hades,
denn ihr Anteil allein ist es, dort noch zu leben” (BKG, 206; O happy
mortals, who first witnessed the consecration, then wander to Hades, for
it is their lot alone to continue living there). In spite of the religious aura
and reference (“Weihung” is the term for the blessing of the host), classical
mythology and literature have replaced the Christian idiom and with it the
Christian awe of death, struggle for redemption, and fear of the last judg-
ment. There is no fear or (open) despair about approaching death, nor is
Günderrode yearning for it. Rather, she is accepting it as an inevitable fate,
an as yet unknown state. She expressed her expectation of an eternal
union, albeit a vague and unspecific one, with the beloved. For her their
friendship was a pact in life and in death. Since their union is thwarted in
the real world, she hints at a voluntary sacrifice, but all this in rather
muted, formulaic language, an uneasy stoic appeasement, especially after
Savigny in a letter of November 1805 to Günderrode had pointed to her
“sinnliche Schwäche” (sensuous weakness) and mentioned “Gottlosigkeit”
(impiety).19 Savigny criticized her way of loving: “Diese Empfindung
durch Phantasie höher spannen, als ihre natürliche Kraft reicht, ist sehr
unheilig” (it is very irreverent to heighten your feeling beyond its natural
power by means of the imagination) and he warned her: “Sei gegen Dich
selbst auf Deiner Hut, daß nicht falsche Götter Dich abwendig machen
vom wahren Gottesdienst” (Be wary of yourself so that false gods don’t
turn you away from service to the true God).20 These were harsh words;
the practical legal scholar Savigny (who had been called in as a mutual
friend and legal advisor for their marriage plans) saw the danger in fusing
life and literature and in believing in the “false gods” of “new mythology.”
Savigny noted how Günderrode was moving away from Christian ethical
concepts.
Creuzer’s letters at times explode with erotic desire, promises of
union, and testimonies of his love. Later — after the fateful consultation
with Savigny (and Daub) in early November of 1805 — they fade into
self-doubt and considerations of his social and familial position. Still, he
continued the rhetoric of love and death. His allusion to a sacrificial love-
death was almost playfully couched in Latin: “O sanctissima Virgo, tecum
moriar libens” (LG, 252; O holiest virgin, with you I will die gladly)
Creuzer wrote to Günderrode in April 1806 and asked the friend
(Günderrode) to tell Eusebio (Creuzer) what these words meant and
whether he might give “him” more such verbal exercises. Here Creuzer
was teaching her Latin, as a teacher rehearsing his pupil’s progress with a
very suggestive theme, exploiting the literary love-death motif under the
guise of a linguistic exercise. In the same letter, Creuzer also referred to a
literary passage employing the love-death motif with an aura of high
poetry in connection with Greek literature:
Oft erklingen in meiner Seele die Worte des Dichters, wenn ich
an Dich denke:
Ob Deiner Schönheit, Jungfrau, zu sterben
Achtet Hellas neidwertes Geschick
Und brennende rastlose Arbeit zu tragen
Zu solcher Lieb entzündest Du die Herzen
Und bringst unsterblichen Lohn. (BKG, 306)
[Often the poet’s words resound in my soul when I am thinking

of you: Hellas deems it an enviable fate to die for your beauty,
virgin, and to carry burning restless labor; you enflame hearts to
such love and you bring immortal reward.]
Creuzer borrowed from, or unconsciously took recourse to, classical lit-

erature and mythology to express his emotions, a performance on his
scholarly territory of classical antiquity that reverberated in his soul: “Ich
wünschte, Du könntest das Griechische selbst hören, das mir in der Seele
tönt. Es ist unübersetzbar” (BKG, 306; I wish you could hear the Greek
that resounds in my soul yourself. It is untranslatable). Günderrode, of
course, did not know enough Greek literature, but she was beginning to
learn Latin to please Creuzer and learned enough Greek to read his letters,
which encoded German words in Greek letters.
More importantly, she delved deeper into the mythic world of classical
and oriental themes for her poetic work, her metaphysical quest, and her
love. Günderrode’s use of mythology was a syncretistic one,21 amalgamat-
ing elements and motifs from different, albeit distant, ancient mythico-
religious traditions for her poetic expression. For her, mythology and
classical poetic literature became alive, a source of truth and comfort; they
assumed metaphysical meaning and an aura of religion. Death became in
her poetic imagination a solace, a relief from earthly worries, with the
prospect of a union of the lovers in the beyond. In her last surviving letter
to Creuzer, Günderrode sent him a handkerchief, just as Desdemona gave
one to Othello (“das für Dich von nicht geringerer Bedeutung sein soll,
welches Othello der Desdemona schenkte”), with drops of blood from her
breast; she had “die linke Brust gerade über dem Herzen aufgeritzt”
(BKG, 344; cut her left breast just above her heart). With such a ritualistic
present Günderrode, by sending a token of her own body, showed the
intensity of her feelings about love and death. Creuzer, the scholar, had
earlier given her a valuable Roman coin set in a ring, a token of his classical
learning.
The Mythic Representation of Death and

Women in Günderrode’s Works
Günderrode’s poetic works that use mythical narrative elements are replete
with the theme of death in conjunction with love. Early on — between
1802 and 1804 — she had copied the following from Novalis:
Eine Verbindung, die auch für den Tod geschlossen ist, ist eine Hochzeit,
die uns eine Genossin für die Nacht giebt. Im Tode ist die Liebe am
Süßesten; für den Liebenden ist der Tod eine Brautnacht, [ein
[Geheimniß]] süßer Mysterien. (SW 2:275)
[A union that is also entered into for death is a matrimony that gives us
a companion for the night. In death love is sweetest; for the lover death
is a wedding night, a secret of sweet mysteries.]
Her “friendship” with Creuzer was just such a “matrimony,” a “Bund auf
Leben und Tod” (BKG, 206; a pact for life and death). Death became a
transition to another form of existence, the human being a part of nature,
of the cosmos. With Schelling Günderrode saw in all things the finite rep-
resentation of the infinite: in death the limited, individual human being
was merely passing into a universal state; he did not cease to exist, as she
noted in her Studienbuch,22 poeticized in her writings, and expressed in
mythological themes.
In her short play Immortalita (1804) the immortal goddess awakens
as if from a stupor in an “offene schwarze Höhle am Eingang der
Unterwelt, im Hintergrund der Höhle sieht man den Stix and Charons
Nachen der hin und her fährt” (SW 1:41; open black cave at the entrance
to the underworld; behind the cave Stix and Charon’s boat can be seen
sailing back and forth). Living under a spell in semi-darkness, not knowing
herself, she prays to Hekate, who prophecies that “du wirst wohnen im
Licht” (you will live in the light) when “glaubige Liebe dich der Nacht
entführt” (SW 1:43; faithful love leads you out of darkness). Erodion, the
son of Aphrodite and Eros, of beauty and love, dares to approach the
underworld in search of his love Immortalita and smashes the rocks — the
protective barrier — between the land of the dead and that of the living.
Breaking the partition between darkness and light, his courageous action
redeems the goddess and gives her a soul: Immortalita finds herself in the
mirror image of love. Erodion had the courage “der Sterblichkeit zu ster-
ben, und der Unsterblichkeit zu leben, das Sichtbare dem Unsichtbaren zu
opfern” (SW 1:48; to die for mortality, and to live for immortality, to sac-
rifice the visible for the invisible). Immortalita triumphs, expressing the
wish: “sei es den Gedanken der Liebe, den Träumen der Sehnsucht, der
Begeisterung der Dichter vergönnt, aus dem Lebenslande in das
Schattenreich herabzusteigen und wieder zurück zu gehen” (SW 1:47;
may thoughts of love, dreams of yearning, the poets’ inspiration be
allowed to descend from the land of life to the realm of the shadows and
return again). Is this a return of the Golden Age, a utopia “showing the
advent and resurrection of the messiah of Nature-History”?23 The “new
mythology” seems to have replaced the “old mythology” of Christianity.
In this mythological setting the dichotomy of life and death is overcome
in the poet’s imagination.
Günderrode seemingly wanted to overcome the threshold of death in
her poetic imagination with love that provided a mystic bond to the other,
a happy blessed state, as she wrote in “Die Bande der Liebe” (The Bonds
of Love):
Liebe heißet das Band, das an den Tag mir geknüpft

Hat die erebische Nacht, Tod mit dem Leben vereint.
Ja ich kenne ein Land, wo Todte zu Lebenden reden,
Wo sie, dem Orkus entflohn, wieder sich freuen des Lichts [. . .]
Seliges Land der Träume! Wo, mit Lebendigen, Todte
Wandeln, im Dämmerschein, freuen des Daseins sich noch. (SW 1:68)
[Love is the bond that for me the oriental night has joined to the
day, death united with life. Yes, I know a land where the dead
speak to the living, where they, having escaped from Orcus, again
enjoy the light [. . .] Blessed land of dreams! Where the dead
wander with the living in the dusk, still enjoying life.]
This relatively early poem (of 1799?) is reminiscent of a Propertian elegy,

a translation of which was first published in Schiller’s Horen in 1796, and
which Günderrode copied in her Studienbuch. Günderrode’s poem cele-

brates the prospect of the lovers’ reunion in the beyond as a joyous sol-
ace.24 The later “Adonis Todtenfeyer” (1806, SW 1:322) is more somber
in its sorrowful lament about the mortality of all beings (“alle sind dem
Tod verfallen”; everyone is destined to die) and its entreaty to death (“Tod
den Raub muß wiedergeben”; death must restore what it has taken). The
mourning goddess in “Adonis Todtenfeyer” — unnamed in Günderrode’s
poem — is a symbol of pain and lament, a call to hope through sorrow
(“Laßt die Klage uns erneuern,” let us renew our lament). Flowers contain
the secret of life, “wie sie leis empor sich drängen / und des Hügels Decke
sprengen” (as they gently come up and burst through the surface of the
hill). Earth here provides the possibility of redemption (as according to the
myth Zeus hears Aphrodite’s pleas and calls Adonis back to life — but only
during the summer; he has to spend the winter in the underworld), but
this is only a story, a hope: “Also ist der Gott erstanden / Aus des dumpfen
Grabes Banden” (So the god has risen from the dull bonds of the grave).
The return of all life in the year’s seasonal cycle offers comfort. The verses
used on Günderrode’s gravestone also point to a comforting Mother
Earth: “Erde Du meine Mutter” (Earth, my mother) — though they were
not written by her but are a slight reworking of a Herder poem sent to her
in the summer of 1806 by her Latin teacher, Christian Mosche.
In her poem “Ariadne auf Naxos” Günderrode took up and then
slightly, but significantly, rewrote the story of the deserted lover Ariadne
who, in Günderrode’s version, chooses a union in death over immortality
with Jove:
Auf Naxos Felsen weint verlassen Minos Tochter.

Der Schönheit heisses Flehn erreicht der Götter Ohr.
Von seinem Thron herab senkt, Kronos Sohn, die Blitze,
Sie zur Unsterblichkeit in Wettern aufzuziehn.
Poseidon, Lieb entbrannt, eröffnet schon die Arme,

Umschlingen will er sie, mit seiner Fluten Nacht.
Soll zur Unsterblichkeit nun Minos Tochter steigen?
Soll sie, den Schattten gleich, zum dunklen Orkus gehn?
Ariadne zögert nicht, sie stürzt sich in die Fluten:

Betrogner Liebe Schmerz soll nicht unsterblich seyn!
Zum Götterloos hinauf mag sich der Gram nicht drängen,
Des Herzens Wunde hüllt sich gern in Gräbernacht. (SW 1:80)
[Minos’s deserted daughter is weeping on the rocks of Naxos. The

beauty’s ardent begging reaches the ear of the gods. From his
throne Cronos’s son sends down his bolts to elevate her to
immortality with his lightning. — Love-stricken Poseidon is

already opening his arms, wanting to engulf her with the night of
his floods. Will Minos’s daughter rise to immortality? Will she go
to dark Orcus like the shadows? — Ariadne does not hesitate, she
plunges into the floods. The pain of love betrayed will not be
immortal! Grief may not strive for the lot of the gods above. The
wounded heart likes to be shrouded in the darkness of the grave.]
Günderrode proceeded from Ovid’s version of the Ariadne story (Ars

amatoria, I:527) according to which Dionysus found the deserted Ariadne
sleeping on the beach, “married” her and took her to Olympus, making
her immortal. Her innovation in this short poem in a modified alexandrine
meter fitting the traditional mythological subject matter lies in Ariadne’s
choice of Poseidon, the ocean, and death over heaven and a new love, and
a substitution of Zeus for Dionysus. Is Ariadne’s choice of Poseidon a
return to the maternal (water) instead of a new bondage to the male, a new
love? Is it a choice between natural origins (the ocean) and the Absolute,
as Lucia Maria Licher suggests?25 The meaning of Ariadne’s “choice” is
ambiguous, yet the ending in “Gräbernacht” highlights the death motif,
an unsettling rather than comforting or redeeming end, with its stark ref-
erence to “Betrogner Liebe Schmerz” — the wounded heart in the dark-
ness of the grave — and the “love betrayed.”
The longing for a union in death is unequivocally expressed in the
story of the Indian custom of Sati, the widow’s self-sacrifice on her hus-
band’s funeral pyre, in “Die Malabarischen Witwen” (The Malabarian
Widows; SW 1:325). In her accomplished sonnet Günderrode interprets
this custom as a true expression of love and desire for union in death: “Die
Sitte hat der Liebe Sinn verstanden” (This custom has understood the
meaning of love), a ritual likened to the wedding, where death is the priest:
“Zu ihrem Priester selbst den Tod geweiht” (death itself appointed to be
its priest) and interpreted as signifying a bond in immortality:
Nicht Trennung ferner solchem Bunde droht,

Denn die vorhin entzweiten Liebesflammen
In Einer schlagen brünstig sie zusammen.
Zur süßen Liebesfeyer wird der Tod,

Vereinet die getrennten Elemente,
Zum Lebensgipfel wird das Daseins Ende.
[Such a bond cannot be threatened with separation, for the

previously divided flames of love now unite passionately in one.
Death becomes a sweet celebration of love, it unites the separate
elements, life’s end becomes its culmination.]
Death in the flames becomes a celebration of love and life. Without any
reflection on the origin and meaning of this ritual in India, Günderrode
interprets it as revealing an eternal mythic truth. She reinvigorates an ata-
vistic tradition with the Romantic concept of the lovers’ union — oblivious
to the cultural reality that Indian marriages were not love matches but
economic transactions arranged by the respective families. More impor-
tant, such a “true” mythic custom devalued women — widowers do not
sacrifice themselves on the wife’s funeral pyre but remarry and replace the
lost “love.” Such a sacrificial death was not mutual. Günderrode celebrates
here self-destruction in the guise of myth and love. A parallel, if not a
source, is Goethe’s ballad “Der Gott und die Bajadere” (The God and the
Dancing Girl, 1798), where the god elevates a lowly prostitute for her true
love and allows her to jump into the funeral pyre26 in an equally problem-
atic recreation of an atavistic mythic custom.
With this theme of the lover’s death, Günderrode edges dangerously
toward self-sacrifice and self-destruction. The theme also points to the
danger and destruction inherent in using myth without regard to its gen-
dered substrata. Günderrode thought deeply about life and death; she
experimented with the borders of life and death and in doing so used ide-
alist philosophy and mythological images instead of traditional Christian
religious notions. Her representation of death is abstract, intended to be
universal at the cost of the traditional emotions associated with death: fear
of death, mourning for the dead, and sympathy for the bereaved. But she
was no less serious, no less perceptive or original in her poetic renderings
of death because of this. Her prevailing emotion was a desire for a reunion.
She almost always considered death in the voice of a lover desiring and/or
imagining a union with the beloved. She thought of it in terms of a couple
(not a family or as a mother or parent), a couple of lovers whose union was
constantly threatened or in jeopardy.
Mythology, Death, and Gender

In the late eighteenth century Herder developed a concept of myth as a
distinctive fusion of poetry and religion, a concept that Günderrode
extended to real life. She looked to natural philosophy, notably the works
of Schelling, and to myth as embodying the eternal, and employed the
poetic form to express it and to come to terms with death and the meaning
of life. While Günderrode’s suicide appears to be foreshadowed in her cor-
respondence with Creuzer, it was also the result of severe bouts of depres-
sion and physical illness (chest pain, headaches, eye problems, and general
weakness).27 Death is a prominent theme in her poetic work, but her writ-
ings also express a strong will to live and the struggle for a meaningful life.
“Leben” and its synonyms comprise by far the largest semantic group in
her texts, far larger than “Tod, töten, tötlich” (SW 3:391–96; death, kill,
deadly).
Using mythology to represent and more importantly to explain and
cope with life, love, and death was problematic. While myth may convey
something like universal human experience or beliefs about death, dying,
and an afterlife or rebirth, the position of woman in classical and oriental
mythology (in the broad, unspecific sense in which it was revived in
Romanticism) is troubling and flawed. Gendered perceptions and patriar-
chal cultural practices informed and shaped the “new mythology,” includ-
ing Günderrode’s. Her affirmative, mystifying use of Indian Sati — the
widow’s self-sacrifice — was perhaps the most blatant example of a cultural
misfit, though this theme was an accepted and often hinted-at reference in
literary circles around 1800. In its then “modern” European variation, the
notion of a “Liebestod,” death of the lover(s) with or without the hope of
a reunion after death, was received with sympathetic ears. After all, in the
literary tradition a popular emblem representing love-death is that of a
candle or burning lamp attracting a moth or butterfly that burns in its
flame. In the nineteenth century the “Liebestod” motif was as ubiquitous
in literature and art as it was culturally celebrated. And even if not all vic-
tims are shown to be women (though most are), it is a disturbing para-
digm for gender relations. In its pathetic versions like Wagner’s text for
Tristan und Isolde this motif reflected and heightened the traditional gen-
der dichotomy and traditional concepts of gender at a time of social debate
and of change in gender roles.28
The return to classical and oriental myth also transmitted and rein-
forced existing gender roles. Günderrode began with, and envied, male
heroism and heroic death in battle in her motifs from Ossian and
Germanic myths and from there moved to the love-death paradigm. After
all, the heroes of classical mythology especially are strong males, from
Tantalus to Zeus to Dionysus. Besides being courageous in battle like the
Homeric heroes, they show aggression and sexual appetite. The women,
mostly submissive young maidens or vengeful, scheming wives like Juno,
are seduced, forgotten, or abandoned. The mysterious, darkness, and
death are represented by female figures like Demeter. The stories of
Ariadne, Dido, or Medea captured many poets’ imaginations. Gender
relations are usually seen through a heterosexual lens, and the female-male
dichotomy is seen above all as adversarial, one of intrigue, passion, and
betrayal. Classical mythology achieved iconic status in the nineteenth cen-
tury. The heavily charged discourse on mythology remained preeminently
a German phenomenon — national myths and symbols in a heroic vein
abounded.
Günderrode’s self-fashioning in mythical terms entailed existentialist
questions about the meaning of life and death, not patriotism or national-
ism, now that Christian belief was no longer a safe haven. But could the
“new mythology” give answers? Was the project of an “aesthetic self,”

today belabored repeatedly in recent articles on Günderrode,29 a meaning-
ful way of life or did it lead to death? Did the “creative-destructive
thought, to liberate the authentic I through the destruction of the inau-
thentic”30 really hold such a fascination for Romantic women? Did the
Romantic project of a new “mythology” really represent an attempt to
found a public sphere that would preserve the ineffable qualities of indi-
viduality and freedom?31 For Günderrode and Romantic women, I would
suggest, the “new mythology” supported traditional submissiveness and
steered them into expressing their individuality in a yearning for a love
union — sublimating and aestheticizing them as sex objects.
Notes
1
Friedrich Creuzer suggested the title of the collection Melete. “Hohe Lieder”
may well evoke a reference to the “Hohelied” (Song of Solomon), the quintes-
sential love poem in the Old Testament.
2
Walter Morgenthaler, Karoline von Günderrode: Sämtliche Werke und aus-
gewählte Studien (Basel and Frankfurt am Main: Stromfeld/Roter Stern, 1990–
91), 3 vols., 1:323. Unless otherwise stated, Günderrode’s works are quoted by
volume and page number from this excellent critical edition, cited as SW. All trans-
lations are my own.
3
See Barbara Becker-Cantarino, “Mythos und Symbolik bei Karoline von
Günderrode und Friedrich Creuzer,” Heidelberger Jahrbücher 51 (2007): 281–
98.
4
Friedrich Creuzer, Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker, besonders der
Griechen: In Vorträgen und Entwürfen (Leipzig and Darmstadt: Karl Wilhelm
Leske, 1810–12).
5
George S. Williamson, The Longing for Myth in Germany: Religion and Aesthetic
Culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004), 17–18.
6
See Gerhard von Graevenitz, Mythos: Zur Geschichte einer Denkgewohnheit
(Stuttgart: Metzler, 1987), xiii–xxvi. The numerous studies on the use of myth in
German literary culture have largely ignored gender issues.
7
See Joseph A. Kestner, Mythology and Misogyny: The Social Discourse of Nineteenth-
Century British Classical-Subject Painting (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1989), 5.
8
Williamson, The Longing for Myth in Germany, 5.
9
See Doris Hopp and Max Preitz, “Karoline von Günderrode in ihrer Umwelt:
III. Karoline von Günderrodes Studienbuch,” Jahrbuch des Freien Deutschen
Hochstifts (1975): 223–323; repr. in Morgenthaler, Karoline von Günderrode:
Sämtliche Werke und ausgewählte Studien; Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, 3:313–61.
10
Brigitte Weißenborn, ed., “Ich sende Dir ein zärtliches Pfand”: Die Briefe der
Karoline von Günderrode (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1992), 205–6. Further refer-
ences to this work will be given in the text using the abbreviation BKG and the
page number.
11
Studien [1805–11], ed. Friedrich Creuzer and Carl Daub (Stuttgart: Frommann-
Holzboog, 1969), 1:1–28; here 19–20.
12
After Voss’s death his extensive library was sold to the University of Oxford.
13
Friedrich Creuzer, Aus dem Leben eines alten Professors (Darmstadt: Leske,
1848).
14
Karl Preisendanz, ed., Die Liebe der Günderode: Friedrich Creuzers Briefe an
Caroline von Günderode (Munich: Piper & Co, 1912), 230, 231. Further refer-
ences to this work will be given in the text using the abbreviation LG.
15
See Lucia Maria Licher, Mein Leben in einer bleibenden Form aussprechen:
Umrisse einer Ästhetik im Werk Karoline von Günderrodes (1780 –1806) (Heidelberg:
Winter, 1996), 363–88; Barbara Becker-Cantarino, Schriftstellerinnen der
Romantik: Epoche — Werke — Wirkung (Munich: Beck, 2000), 213–17.
16
According to Creuzer’s letter to his cousin Leonhard, 20 Oct. 1806, Leonhard
Creuzer eliminated and blackened numerous passages in Creuzer’s letters (from
May 1805 to Jan. 1806) to make them illegible (Weißenborn, “Ich sende Dir ein
zärtliches Pfand,” 359–62).
17
Since plans for a joint residence and marriage were aired in the early letters, and
since Creuzer also mentioned that he had discussed his divorce and marriage plans
with Daub and Savigny, the incriminating eliminated passages must refer more
directly to plans for an elopement and the circumstances leading to Günderrode’s
death.
18
Creuzer is referring here to the Latin dictum “quidam autem aiunt mortem
dulciorem esse quam vitam.”
19
Max Preitz, “Karoline von Günderrode in ihrer Umwelt: II. Karoline von
Günderrodes Briefwechsel mit Friedrich Karl und Gunda von Savigny,” Jahrbuch
des Freien Deutschen Hochstifts (1964): 158–235; here 210.
20
Preitz, “Karoline von Günderrode in ihrer Umwelt: II,” 210.
21
Annette Simonis, “‘Das verschleierte Bild’: Mythopoetik und Geschlechterrollen
bei Karoline von Günderrode,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft
74 (2000): 274–78; here 272.
22
Hopp/ Preitz, “Karoline von Günderrode in ihrer Umwelt: III,” 293–94.
23
Licher, Mein Leben in einer bleibenden Form aussprechen, 389.
24
Hopp/ Preitz, “Karoline von Günderrode in ihrer Umwelt: III,” 247–49.
25
Licher, Mein Leben in einer bleibenden Form aussprechen, 443.
26
See Becker-Cantarino, Schriftstellerinnen der Romantik, 223–24.
27
See Nicholas Saul, “Fragmentästhetik, Freitod und Individualität in der deutschen
Romantik: Zu den Morbiditätsvorwürfen,” in Zwischen Aufklärung und Romantik:
Neue Perspektiven der Forschung; Festschrift für Roger Paulin, ed. Konrad Feilchenfeldt
et al. (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2006), 232–51, on Romantic suicide
(240–41) and Günderrode assessing it as “not genuinely Romantic” (266).
28
Rudolf Bibion, Love Beyond Death: The Anatomy of a Myth in the Arts (New
York: New York UP, 1993).
29
See Simonis, “‘Das verschleierte Bild’”; see also Christian Schärf, “Artistische
Ironie und die Fremdheit der Seele: Zur ästhetischen Disposition in der
Frühromantik bei Friedrich Schlegel und Karoline von Günderrode,” Deutsche
Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft 72 (1998): 433–62.
30
Saul, “Fragmentästhetik, Freitod und Individualität in der deutschen Romantik,”
247.
31
As argued by Manfred Frank, Der kommende Gott: Vorlesungen über die Neue
Mythologie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982).
4: The Murderess on Stage: Christine
Westphalen’s Charlotte Corday (1804)
Stephanie Hilger
J ULY 13, 1793. CHARLOTTE CORDAY. JEAN-PAUL MARAT. Invoking these

two names in conjunction with the date conjures up the most famous
representation of the assassinated Jacobin leader: Jacques Louis David’s
painting of Marat in his bathtub, dead, naked, a letter in his hand, and
blood dripping from his wound.1 This image has become part of European
cultural memory of the years following the French Revolution. The assas-
sin and the victim have both turned into mythical figures that have cap-
tured the imagination to the present day. This mythologization began not
only with visual representations, but also with the poems, novels, and plays
that appeared in several countries in the aftermath of the murder.2
In late eighteenth-century France, tragedies about the fateful encoun-
ter between the hitherto unknown peasant girl and the famous politician
were particularly popular. Early nineteenth-century French writers, how-
ever, avoided any allusions to Corday, as a result of Napoleon’s censorship
and his general hostility to the Revolution and the events in its wake.3 The
same restrictions did not apply to German authors publishing in areas not
under Napoleonic rule; they could, therefore, explore a topic forbidden to
their French neighbors. One such author was Christine Westphalen
(1758–1840), née Axen, who wrote drama, poetry, songs, letters, and a
travel diary.4 In 1804, at a time when her hometown of Hamburg was not
yet directly affected by the Napoleonic wars,5 Westphalen anonymously
published a play, Charlotte Corday: Tragödie in fünf Akten mit Chören
(Charlotte Corday: A Tragedy in Five Acts with Choruses).6 It was one of
the first historical tragedies by a German woman; up until then, as Susanne
Kord observes, women had not been active in this genre, which had been
dominated by Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Friedrich Schiller.7 Therefore
I read Charlotte Corday not only as a play about Marat’s murderess but
also as an exemplification of the politics and controversy surrounding
women’s entry into a realm dominated by men.
Goethe and Schiller, who described women writers as dilettantes,8
reacted particularly harshly to women’s reaching for what was considered
the highest genre of Weimar Classicism, historical tragedy. When he dis-
covered the authorship of the anonymously published Charlotte Corday,
72 STEPHANIE HILGER
Goethe ruthlessly dismissed the play and its author: “Die würdige
Verfasserin der Tragödie der Charlotte Corday hätte besser gethan, sich
ein warmes Unterröckchen für den Winter zu stricken, als sich mit dem
Drama zu befassen” (It would have been better if the worthy author of the
tragedy of Charlotte Corday had knit a warm underskirt for herself for the
winter instead of bothering with this drama).9 Goethe’s belittling com-
ment echoes Rousseau’s thoughts on needlework as a feminine activity in
Emile ou de l’éducation (Emile or On Education, 1762). Rousseau had
argued that “l’aiguille et l’épée ne sauraient être maniées par les mêmes
mains. Si j’étais souverain, je ne permettrais la couture et les métiers à
l’aiguille qu’aux femmes, et aux boiteux réduits à s’occuper comme elles”
(the needle and the sword cannot be handled by the same hands. If I were
sovereign, I would permit sewing and the needle trades to women only
and to the lame who are reduced to occupations like theirs).10 In his reac-
tion to Charlotte Corday, Goethe replaces the sword of war with the pen
of the literary imagination and opposes these masculine instruments to the
tools of feminine handiwork. Goethe discursively chastises Westphalen for
encroaching on the genre of historical tragedy by directing his comment,
literally and metaphorically, below the belt of the woman author, to her
underskirt. Women’s presence as writers of fiction — considered a popular
genre — had become a more or less accepted fact in the turn-of-the-cen-
tury literary marketplace. Women’s foray into the realm of historical trag-
edy, however, was experienced by the authors of Weimar Classicism as a
particularly insolent attack on their realm of literary activity.
Schiller may have felt Westphalen’s encroachment on the privileged
domain of historical tragedy particularly acutely since he had himself
planned to write a play on Marat’s assassin.11 Schiller received Charlotte
Corday through Goethe, who had been sent the play by Westphalen.
Schiller’s reaction upon receiving it was ambivalent: “Endlich eine
Charlotte Corday, die ich zwar mit Zweifel und Bangigkeit in die Hand
nehme, aber dennoch ist die Neugier groß” (Finally a Charlotte Corday;
even though I approach it with doubt and uneasiness, my curiosity is
great).12 Even though Schiller’s thoughts upon reading Charlotte Corday
are not directly reported, his ambivalent feelings upon receiving the play
raise the question as to why he himself did not write a play on Charlotte
Corday. Schiller had, after all, published historical tragedies on female fig-
ures such as Maria Stuart and Joan of Arc. Was Corday not “historic”
enough, since she had acted only in the previous decade, and not two
centuries or more ago? Did Schiller fear too direct an involvement in con-
temporary politics, at a time when the legacy of the French Revolution,
and the role of women in it, was still unclear? Or was it simply his prema-
ture death in 1805 that prevented him from bringing his plan to fruition?
Answers to these questions necessarily remain hypothetical, yet Goethe’s
and Schiller’s setting of historical tragedy in a remote past significantly
CHRISTINE WESTPHALEN’S CHARLOTTE CORDAY 73
shaped the perception of the genre. As a result of the canonization of their

plays, historical tragedy became normatively established as plays that were
set in antiquity or that staged past historical events of legendary nature and
that were at significant historic remove. Westphalen’s choice of the Corday
subject matter, therefore, forces a reconsideration of the early nineteenth-
century German tradition of historical tragedy beyond those plays tradi-
tionally subsumed under the heading of Weimar Classicism.
Westphalen’s decision to thematize Corday’s actions in a historical
tragedy is significant. By opposing contemporary conventions regarding
gender and genre, she highlights the ambivalent position of those women
who wielded the pen and the sword, rather than the needle, in the late
eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries. Both the author and her
fictionalized protagonist challenge contemporary prescriptions of feminin-
ity and the attempts to exclude active women from the public sphere of
writing and politics. Westphalen’s approach to Corday is necessarily sym-
pathetic; yet with her play she not only responds to Marat’s partisans but
also engages with Corday supporters who denied her agency by portraying
her as a victim and martyr. Westphalen combines historical source material
with fictional elements to counteract a number of sympathetic and hostile
representational practices that undermined the political dimension of
Corday’s deed. One such practice was the construction of Corday as an
unfeminine, unnatural, and ultimately mad woman, which is exemplified
in a commentary first published in the 20 July 1793 issue of the Gazette
de France nationale (French National Gazette):
Cette femme, qu’on dit fort jolie, n’était point jolie; c’était une virago,
plus charnue que fraîche, sans grâce, malpropre, comme le sont presque
tous les philosophes et beaux-esprits femelles [. . .] Charlotte Corday
avait 25 ans; c’est être, dans nos moeurs, presque vieille fille, et surtout
avec un maintien homasse et une stature garçonnière [. . .] Elle a déclaré
[. . .] qu’elle avait tout lu, depuis Tacite jusqu’au Portier des Chartreux
[. . .] De ces choses, il résulte que cette femme s’était jetée absolument
hors de son sexe; quand la nature l’y rappelait, elle n’éprouvait que
dégôut et ennui; l’amour sentimental et ses douces émotions n’approchent
plus du coeur de la femme qui a la prétention au savoir, au bel-esprit, à
l’esprit fort, à la politique des nations, qui a la manie philosophique et qui
brûle de se mettre en évidence.13
[This woman, who was said to be very pretty, was not pretty; she was a
virago, more plump than fresh, without grace, unclean, like most phi-
losophers and female wits [. . .] Charlotte Corday was 25 years old; that
makes her, according to our customs, nearly an old maid, especially since
she had a mannish bearing and a boyish figure [. . .] She declared [. . .]
that she had read everything, from Tacitus to the Portier des Chartreux
[. . .] The result of all this is that this woman had thrown herself com-
pletely outside of her sex; when nature called her back to it, she only felt
74 STEPHANIE HILGER
disgust and boredom; sentimental love and its tender emotions no longer
reach the heart of the young woman who strives for knowledge, wit, a
strong mind, the politics of nations, who is affected by philosophical
mania, and who wants most fervently to make her presence felt.]
Corday is cast as a virago. Her behavior is described as mannish and

unclean because of her interest in historical accounts, erotic literature, and
national politics. Corday has purportedly lost all feminine propriety. At the
same time, however, the text alludes to her virginity, since this was one of
Corday’s most often mentioned characteristics. Rather than casting her
abstinence as proof of her good moral character, the twenty-five-year-old
virgin is transformed into yet another female aberration, an “old maid.”
Her interest in politics and history has supposedly closed Corday’s heart
off to love. By pathologizing her behavior as “philosophical mania,” the
author of this commentary negates Corday’s capacity for reasoning and
thereby undermines her political agency.
Westphalen constructs her play in opposition to this image of Corday.
In Westphalen’s play, Corday is not a virago living on the borders of
humanity and sanity but a young woman who is part of a loving family.
The first act is set in a garden in Caen, where Corday’s parents are awaiting
her and her brother Antoine’s return from a trip to Paris (a trip invented
by Westphalen). Upon Corday’s arrival in the second scene, she is pre-
sented in the socially accepted female role of the concerned daughter.
Careful not to wake her parents, Corday acknowledges the worrying of
“die treuen Geliebten” (CC, 13; her loyal loved ones). In order to achieve
this family reunion, Westphalen needs to people her stage with dead peo-
ple. She ignores the fact that Corday’s mother had already been dead for
eleven years by the time the action of the play begins14 and that she largely
grew up in a convent, away from her father and brother.15 This change to
the historical Corday’s biography allows Westphalen to portray her pro-
tagonist as a caring and beloved daughter rather than an unnatural
woman.
Similarly, the author’s invention of a trip to Paris enables her to con-
tradict any accusations of mania by presenting Corday’s reasoning for
Marat’s murder. Westphalen thereby responds not only to hostile critics of
Corday but also to those of her supporters who invoked insanity as a poten-
tial argument for her defense and compared her to Joan of Arc. In the play,
Corday’s decision to murder Marat is based on her experience of her com-
patriots’ suffering in the French capital. Her trip to Paris, which the father
had hoped would cure his daughter of her unfeminine political desires,
constitutes the crucial moment in Corday’s decision-making process:
Noch hört mein Ohr der grausen Töne Klang

Der Waffen — das Geschrei der Mordlust Stimmen,
Der Unschuld Seufzer aus beklemmter Brust,

Den Klageruf der Mütter, Väter, Söhne,
Der bleichen Braut im welken Myrthenkranze,
Durch Marat’s Blutdurst jedes Glücks beraubt.
Weh, weh mir, daß ich diese Greuel sah!
Zu wahr ist’s, was ich nicht der Sage glaubte.
Fast unterliegt mein Herz der Folterpein!
Du wunde Brust, wann wirst du wieder heilen? —
Wo ist ein Retter? Wo? O Vaterland,
Du blutest unter schnellen scharfen Streichen,
Und wirst dich einmal so zu Tode bluten,
Wenn keine Engelhand dein Retter ist! (CC, 14–15, my italics)
[My ear still hears the dreadful sound of weapons —

The screaming of murderous voices,
The sighing of innocence from an oppressed bosom,
The lamentation of mothers, of fathers, of sons,
Of the pale bride with the withered myrtle wreath,
Robbed of her joy by Marat’s blood thirst.
Woe is me that I saw these atrocities!
The rumors that I did not believe are all too true.
My heart nearly succumbs beneath this torturous pain!
Sore bosom, when will you heal again? —
Where is a savior? Where? Oh Fatherland,
You are bleeding under quick and sharp blows,
And you will one day bleed to death
If you are not saved by an angel’s hand!]
Westphalen invents this episode and thereby diverges from the historical
Corday’s biography to establish her protagonist’s sensory experience of
suffering as the basis for her decision. She sees the pain not only of indi-
vidual bodies — mother, fathers, sons, and daughters — but also of the
body politic, the fatherland bleeding to death. She hears murderous
screams and the weapons’ dreadful sounds. Unlike Joan of Arc, Westphalen’s
virginal protagonist is not guided by celestial voices or the voice of insanity
but by the cries of her suffering compatriots. Westphalen highlights
Corday’s sore bosom and thereby invokes the image of the feeling woman.
Unlike the heart of the virago, Corday’s “blutend Herz” (CC, 41; bleed-
ing heart) is open to compassion. She is capable of exactly those tender
emotions that the reporter from the Gazette de France nationale denied
her. Yet rather than merely weeping about the state of affairs, as her
mother suggests, Corday turns to action. Her heart is not the location of
tearful feminine resignation but the incubatory place for action, motivated
by the images of feminine bravery that Corday witnessed in Paris:
76 STEPHANIE HILGER
Hättest Du gesehn,
Wie dort die blanken Dolche muthig zucken!
In vieler Frauen Hände sah ich sie,
Mit Kraft gelenkt, den Männer-Muth begeisternd.
So sah ich Eine —
(Sie nimmt schnell ein Messer vom Tische, und macht die Bewegung
eines Dolchstosses.)
Einen niederstossen. (CC, 81)
[If you had seen

How courageously the polished daggers twitched there!
I saw them in the hands of many women;
Handled with strength, they inspired men’s courage.
I saw one —
(She quickly takes a knife from the table and makes the movement
of a dagger thrusting.)
Stabbing somebody.]
Corday’s compassion transforms itself into a moral and historical impera-

tive, a “hoher Zweck” (CC, 190; high purpose); “die Seele dieser Welt”
(the soul of this world) is in “Harmonie mit [ihrem] Selbst” (CC, 40;
harmony with [her] being).
As a result of this imperative Corday claims: “kein Fremder kann es
hier statt meiner thun!” (CC, 40; No stranger/No foreigner can do this
for me here). Westphalen thereby contradicts various representational
practices that refused to depict Corday as a perpetrator of political violence
because she was a woman. One incarnation of this refusal was the rumor
that the murder was committed by a man in women’s clothes. In order to
thematize this idea, Westphalen introduces the character Adam Luchs into
her play. The historical Adam Lux was a Mainz Jacobin who became a
delegate to the Rhenish-German National Convention in Paris. Lux fol-
lowed Corday’s procession to the guillotine and wrote a defense of her,
which led to his execution in November 1793. Westphalen portrays and
fictionalizes this historical figure, thereby creating an additional layer of
interest for her German-speaking audience. She invents Luchs’s acquaint-
ance with the Corday family and also imagines a friendship between him
and Cheveau-Lagarde, a fictionalized version of Chauveau-Lagarde,
Corday’s public defender during her trial. In addition to linking Luchs to
central figures in the Corday story, Westphalen also invents Luchs’s intent
to kill Marat. Cheveau-Lagarde fears an escalation of violence and cautions
Luchs to keep some distance from French politics because “[d]er deutsche
Boden ist [s]ein Vaterland” (CC, 98; the German soil is [his] fatherland).
Westphalen’s Luchs, however, remains true to his name — “Luchs” means
“lynx” in German — and devises a sly cross-dressing plan. Cheveau-
Lagarde is unable to dissuade his friend, yet his objections lead to a post-
ponement of Luchs’s plan. As a result, the murder is committed by
somebody else, first thought to be a cross-dresser: “Ein kühner Streich,
von einer Frauenhand [. . .] Ein Mann that es in einem Weiberanzug, So
lautet die allgemeine Sage” (CC, 148; A bold trick, by a woman’s hand
[. . .] A man did it, disguised in women’s clothes. This is the general
rumor). Westphalen presents the perception that a woman could not pos-
sibly have committed this calculated and politically motivated deed, only
to debunk it; the killer was indeed a murderess: “Ein Weib? Ist’s möglich!
— und ich zögerte?” (CC, 149; A woman? Is it possible! — and I hesi-
tated?). With the revelation that a woman committed the murder, and that
this woman was French, Corday’s statement that “kein Fremder” (no for-
eigner) can do it comes full circle. It was Corday who assassinated Marat,
not some (foreign) man.
After exposing the rumor of a cross-dressing killer as false, Westphalen
addresses a related representational practice that questioned the historical
Corday’s role as an active political agent. Once Corday’s identity was
revealed, a common assumption was that Corday must have executed
somebody else’s plan. Corday was seen as the innocent and gullible agent
of a well-planned plot by a group of aristocrats or Girondins. The suspi-
cion of the aristocratic plot was fueled not least by her name, Marie-Anne
Charlotte de Corday d’Armont, and by her illustrious provenance: she was
a descendant of the family of Pierre Corneille, the seventeenth-century
French author. Corneille was a protégé of cardinal Richelieu, who was
closely associated with royal authority in his position as secretary of state.
Corday’s supposed association with the Girondins was based on the fact
that they had sought refuge in Caen, her hometown, after their conflict
with the Jacobins had forced them to leave Paris in 1793. These conspiracy
theories defused the uncomfortable fact that a woman had, by herself,
planned and executed the murder of one of the most powerful Jacobin
leaders. Westphalen addresses these hypotheses by continuing her story
after the murder scene, the point at which most pictorial representations
such as David’s stop.16 She omits a direct representation of the assassina-
tion (we only see Corday enter and then leave Marat’s room) and instead
stages Corday’s trial in the fourth act. While the absence of the actual
murder from the third act reflects early nineteenth-century conventions
governing the dramatic representation of violence, it also signifies
Westphalen’s attempt to return Corday’s voice to her. By replacing the
murder scene, which is reported indirectly by Cheveau-Lagarde’s servant,
with the trial, Westphalen transforms Corday from the silent killer in con-
temporary paintings to the vocal defender of her motives. Westphalen
portrays her as a speaking subject and acknowledges the historical Corday’s
self-conscious efforts to shape her own historical representation. By devot-
ing the fourth act to the trial and Corday’s time in her prison cell,
78 STEPHANIE HILGER
Westphalen lets her protagonist claim the murder as hers. The staging of
Corday’s words refutes the idea of her as the instrument rather than the
brain and heart behind the deed.
In her court scene Westphalen stays close to transcripts of the histori-
cal trial. She particularly emphasizes those moments when the historical
Corday denied having been the mere plaything of counterrevolutionary
political forces. The author thereby follows Corday’s own wishes regarding
her historiographical representation, which she expressed most clearly in a
letter written in prison: “J’ai prêté un long interrogatoire, je vous prie de
vous le procurer, s’il est rendu public” (I submitted to a long interroga-
tion; I ask you to procure it for yourself if it is made public).17 The itali-
cized phrases in the following courtroom scene from Westphalen’s play
indicate where the author stays particularly close to the historical Corday’s
words recorded in the trial transcripts:18
Charlotte: Ich bin es, ja, die Marat so getödtet! [. . .]

Praesident: Wer flösste gegen ihn den Hass Dir ein?
Charlotte: Ich hatte an dem meinem [sic] schon genug, Und
brauchte keines fremden, mir zur Hülfe.
Praesident: Wer hat Dir den Gedanken eingehaucht, Ihn zu ermor-
den?
Charlotte: Seine Greuelthaten.
Praesident: Was nennst Du seine Greuelthaten? — Rede!
Charlotte: Frankreichs Zerrüttung, seiner Hände Werk [. . .]
Praesident mit Spott: Hast Du denn alle Marats umgebracht?
Charlotte, mit Enthusiasmus: O könnt’ ich sie mit einem Dolchstoß
tödten! Doch mordet sie vielleicht der Schrecken itzt. Denn
Feigheit ist die Präge der Tyrannen! [. . .]
Praesident, auflauernd: Der Plan der That ist nicht Dein
eig’nes Werk. Du liehst die Hand dem Wollen vieler
Andern. Entdecke Sie, die Dich so arg bethörten!
Charlotte: Am Gängelband des fremden Wollens, glaubst Du, Sei
ich, geleitet, — gleich dem Kind — mechanisch? (Mit
Hoheit) [. . .] Ich dachte — handelte — ich fragte nicht!
Mein ist die That, mein ihre spätsten Früchte. (Präsident
sieht sie mit mistrauender Verwunderung forschend an.)
Dein scharfer Blick späht hier umsonst! — An mir, An mir
allein, musst Du die Kühnheit rächen. (CC, 167–72)
[Charlotte: It is I, yes, I who killed Marat in this manner! [. . .]

President: Who instilled this hatred in you?
Charlotte: Mine was already sufficient. I did not need anybody else’s
to help me.
President: Who breathed the idea into you to murder him?
Charlotte: His atrocious deeds.

President: What do you call his atrocious deeds? — Speak!
Charlotte: France’s disorder, the work of his hands [. . .]
President, scoffing: Do you think that you killed all the Marats?
Charlotte, with enthusiasm: O, if only I could kill them with a single
thrust of the dagger. But perhaps now fear will kill them.
Because cowardice is the stamp of tyrants! [. . .]
President, lying in wait: This plan is not your own work. You lent
your hand to the will of many others. Reveal those who
fooled you so gravely!
Charlotte: Do you believe that I was led on the leash of strangers’
will — like a child — mechanically? (With grandeur)
[. . .] I thought — acted — I did not ask anybody! The
deed is mine, mine are its most recent fruits. (The presi-
dent observes her with astonishment and distrust.) Your
sharp eye looks here in vain for somebody else! — It is my
boldness, mine alone that you must punish.]
Westphalen’s Corday withstands the judge’s attempts to coax her into stat-
ing that she acted on somebody else’s orders. The author remains close to
the historical Corday’s repeated denial of having been a naive and gullible
executor of a political faction’s plan. Westphalen uncovers the judge’s
infantilization of Corday by revealing the root of his discomfort: his unease
at punishing a woman for a political crime. In the play, the protagonist’s
speech about her political motivation forecloses the option of viewing her
as the duped associate of powerful political groups or as a woman acting
on private motives.
That Corday was guided by private motives such as love and revenge
was yet another hypothesis that depoliticized her act and established a
“feminine” cause — excessive and uncontrolled emotions — for the mur-
der. This interpretation was less discomforting to the judicial and political
status quo than a woman’s political motivation. In other literary adapta-
tions of the case, the murder was presented as a crime of passion avenging
the death of a lover slaughtered by Marat,19 or the killing of a royalist
husband.20 Westphalen addresses such interpretations by once again trans-
posing them onto the fictionalized character of Adam Luchs. Luchs’s
desire to murder Marat is fueled by the death of his beloved, Eugenie, in
the post-Revolutionary chaos, which constitutes another storyline invented
by Westphalen. His hatred of the Jacobin leader is based on personal feel-
ings. In order to atone for his indecision about killing Marat, in the fourth
act Luchs offers Corday the possibility to escape by suggesting she cross-
dress and travel on his passport to Dover. Corday, however, rejects this
suggestion firmly. Love and cowardly indecision — constructed as femi-
nine characteristics — are transposed onto a male character. Through this
80 STEPHANIE HILGER
reversal Westphalen emphasizes Corday’s strength of will and her

resolve.
Corday’s courage is also underlined the last time she appears in the
play. When the guards remove her from her prison cell for the procession
to the Paris public square, Corday accepts her impending execution with
fortitude:
Sie tritt mit gewöhnlichem Gange zwischen die Wache. Der

Gefangenenwärter will Charlotten ein blutfarbenes Gewand umhängen,
der Officier nimmt es ihm ab, und überreicht es Charlotten mit Anstand,
und dem Ausdruck des stillen Schmerzes. Charlotte steht einen Augenblick
erschüttert, fasst sich gleich, schlägt es hochherzig um, und sagt: “Ganz
recht, geschmückt ward immer ja das Opfer.” Sie wird hinausgeführt. Die
Scene verwandelt sich in einen freien Platz in Paris. (CC, 198)
[She steps between the guards in her usual gait. The prison guard wants
to drape a blood-red garment around Charlotte’s shoulders; the officer
takes it from him and presents it to Charlotte with propriety and an
expression of silent suffering. Charlotte is shaken for a moment, com-
poses herself, then wraps it around herself courageously and says: “That’s
right, the sacrificial offering is always adorned.” She is led out. The scene
changes to an open square in Paris.]
Corday’s courage is informed by the awareness of her political legacy. She

presents her body as the sacrificial offering to a body politic in upheaval
and chaos. The meaning of Corday’s death exceeds that of the annihilation
of her physical existence. In the fifth and last act Westphalen inserts a letter
that, although addressed to her parents, becomes Corday’s political testa-
ment. Her private letter becomes a public document when her defender,
Cheveau-Lagarde, reads it aloud after Corday’s execution. In this letter,
based on two letters written by the historical Corday,21 the protagonist
presents herself as political figure rather than a woman acting on private
motives:
Wenn Ihr dies leset, bin ich nicht mehr hier.

Mit Cato wandl’ ich schon in bessern Fluren,
Mit Sokrates, mit Brutus, — Arria.
Wenn ich ohn’ euren Willen, liebe Eltern,
Geschaltet über meiner Tage Ziel,
So denkt, daß ich die Tugend, Unschuld rächte,
Viel Unglück, vielen Thränen vorgebeugt [. . .]
O liebe, theure Eltern,
Ich fleh’ Euch an, vergesst Charlotten bald!
Und könnt ihr’s nicht, so freu’t Euch ihres Schicksals [. . .]
Ihr seid in nichts gefährdet, glaubt es mir!
Auch fändet Ihr Vertheidiger in Caen.
Erinnert Euch zum Abschied jenes Spruch’s

Des würdigen und trefflichen Corneille:
Das Laster nur beschimpft, kein Blutgerüst! (CC, 229–30)
[When you read this, I will no longer be here.

I will be walking in better fields with Cato,
Socrates and Brutus — Arria.
If I decided on the fate of my days
Without considering your will, dear parents,
Consider that I avenged virtue and innocence and
Thereby prevented much misery, many tears [. . .]
Oh dear, beloved parents,
I beg you, forget Charlotte quickly!
And if you cannot, rejoice in her fate [. . .]
You are not in any danger, believe me!
You would also find defenders in Caen.
In parting, remember this saying by
The worthy and admirable Corneille:
Only vice brings shame, not the scaffold!]
Corday associates herself with Brutus, who participated in the assassination

of his archenemy Caesar. She thereby establishes an implicit parallel
between Marat and Caesar, the politician whose conquests caused civil war
and whose dictatorship marked the end of the Roman republic. Corday
echoes the discourse of the dutiful daughter, yet she subordinates this
private role to her public mission. Her parents’ weeping is sacrificed to the
body politic’s “many tears,” which Corday believes to have prevented by
killing Marat.
In the same way that Westphalen worked the trial transcripts into her
play, she also adapted Corday’s letters and thereby represented the his-
torical figure’s awareness of her legacy. In order to insert her protagonist
into a lineage of political figures, Westphalen expands on the historical
Corday’s reference to “Brutus et quelques anciens” (Brutus and some
ancients)22 in her letter by adding Cato and Socrates. The parallels with
Cato, who committed suicide after Caesar’s victory over Scipio at Thapsus,
and with Socrates, who drank the poisonous potion without hesitation,
serve to emphasize Corday’s willingness to empty the bitter cup to its last
drop. The author also adds a reference to Arria, the Roman heroine whose
husband, Caecina Paetus, was ordered to kill himself by the emperor. Her
husband did not want to follow the order until Arria took his dagger and
stabbed herself, proclaiming that it did not hurt. Westphalen thus estab-
lishes continuities between her protagonist’s courage and that of the
Roman heroine. She complements images of male bravery with representa-
tions of female agency from antiquity, which not only highlights women’s
82 STEPHANIE HILGER
political impact throughout the ages but also supersedes an interpretive

practice that compared the historical Corday with the biblical Judith. This
view of Corday as the “new Judith” was strengthened by the claim made
by those who had searched Corday’s room in Caen that they had found an
open Bible with the description of Judith’s beheading of Holofernes
underlined.23 Replacing the image of Judith with that of Arria was impor-
tant, because Judith was thought to have committed the murder for per-
sonal rather than political reasons.24 By invoking Plutarch rather than the
Bible, Westphalen establishes a historical example of female courage and
once more contradicts the conjecture that Corday’s deed was driven by
supposedly feminine motives such as love, revenge, naiveté, and madness.
In the play, Cheveau-Lagarde reads Corday’s letter to her parents
aloud. She lives on in the words of her political testament, in which she
emphasizes her reasons for killing Marat. By highlighting her protagonist’s
agency, Westphalen thematizes an issue of which the historical Corday
herself was aware: “Nous sommes si bons républicains à Paris que l’on ne
conçoit pas comment une femme inutile, dont la plus longue vie ne serait
bonne à rien, peut se sacrifier de sang-froid pour sauver tout son pays” (We
Parisians are such good republicans that we cannot imagine how a useless
woman whose life would be good for nothing could sacrifice herself cold-
bloodedly to save her entire country).25 With these words the historical
Corday points to her contemporaries’ inability to imagine women as part
of the political process, especially if they are not victims but perpetrators
of political violence. Rather than portraying Corday as a virago, a Joan-of-
Arc figure, a duped female associate, or a lovesick and vengeful woman,
Westphalen represents Corday as a reasoning and sensitive being who bases
her decision to murder Marat, the self-described “ami du peuple” (friend
of the people), on her first-hand experience of the post-Revolutionary
body politic’s suffering. Westphalen emphasizes Corday’s political motiva-
tion and highlights a paradox of the post-Revolutionary period. This era’s
egalitarian principles theoretically established a space for politically active
women, yet in practice struggled with this reality. The executions of Marie-
Antoinette, Olympe de Gouges, and Marie-Jeanne Roland in 1793 dem-
onstrate that even some of those women who did not commit murders but
only spoke and wrote publicly ultimately suffered the same fate as Corday.
Westphalen and the historical Corday both highlighted this paradox in
their writings and thereby provided an alternative representation of the late
eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century politically and intellectually
active woman.
Charlotte Corday thematizes the unresolved struggle between the
egalitarian ideals of the French Revolution and post-Revolutionary realities
from the vantage point of an early nineteenth-century German woman
author who ventured into historical tragedy, a de facto male domain. On
the one hand, unlike her contemporaries already living under Napoleonic
rule and experiencing the curtailing of authors’ and women’s rights as a

result of the implementation of the Code Napoléon, Westphalen was still
able to reflect directly on the meaning of Corday’s act, because Napoleon
would not march into Hamburg until two years later. Yet, on the other, she
herself was bound by many of the same limiting discursive prescriptions
regarding gender and politics that she exposes through her protagonist’s
story. The early nineteenth-century woman author and the late eighteenth-
century female political agent were ambivalent figures. Contemporary
discourse undermined the legacy of these women with the charge of dilet-
tantism, naiveté, and impropriety. A woman wielding the pen or the sword
was an uncomfortable image for those who wanted women to continue
knitting warm underskirts rather than reaching for the peak of their era’s
metaphorical mountain. At the level of national politics, Corday ques-
tioned the power of the Jacobin political group, also called the montagne
(mountain), in post-Revolutionary France. In the context of the politics of
writing and publishing, Westphalen stepped out from what Katherine
Goodman and Edith Waldstein have called the shadow of Mount Olympus,
Goethe and Schiller’s definition of literary value, which became canonized
as Weimar Classicism.26 Both women ventured into domains that were
defined as traditionally male: political assassinations and historical drama.
By doing so, Corday and Westphalen forced their contemporaries and later
generations to rethink restrictive definitions of femininity and to insert
women as agents into the writing of political and literary history.
Notes
1
Jacques Louis David, La mort de Marat, oil on canvas, Brussels: Musées Royaux
des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, 1793.
2
Among others, see Arnd Beise, Charlotte Corday: Karriere einer Attentäterin
(Marburg: Hitzeroth, 1992), and Inge Stephan, “Gewalt, Eros und Tod:
Metamorphosen der Charlotte Corday-Figur vom 18. Jahrhundert bis in die
Gegenwart,” in Die Marseillaise der Weiber: Frauen, die Französische Revolution
und ihre Rezeption, ed. Inge Stephan and Sigrid Weigel (Berlin: Argument, 1989),
128–53, for adaptations in the German context. For a discussion of French literary
and visual representations see Yves Chastagnaret, “La légende de Marat et de
Charlotte Corday dans le théâtre du XIXe siècle,” in La mort de Marat, ed. Jean-
Claude Bonnet (Paris: Flammarion, 1986), 289–308; Sylvie Dangeville, ed.,
Comment en finir avec la Révolution? L’apothéose de Charlotte Corday et d’Elisabeth
de France dans le théâtre de Thermidor (Saint Étienne, France: Publications de
l’Université de Saint-Étienne, 1998); Elizabeth R. Kindleberger, “Charlotte
Corday in Text and Image: A Case Study in the French Revolution and Women’s
History,” French Historical Studies 18.4 (Fall 1994): 969–99; and Charles Vatel,
Charlotte de Corday et les Girondins, 3 vols. (Paris: Plon, 1864–72). For adaptations
84 STEPHANIE HILGER
in the English context, see Adriana Craciun, “The New Cordays: Helen Craik and
British Representations of Charlotte Corday, 1793–1800,” in Rebellious Hearts:
British Women Writers and the French Revolution, ed. Adriana Craciun and Kari E.
Lokke (Albany: State U of New York P, 2001), 193–232. See Paul Lewis, “Attaining
Masculinity: Charles Brockden Brown and Women Warriors of the 1790s,” Early
American Literature 40.1 (2005): 37–55 for adaptations in the American context.
3
See Vatel, Charlotte de Corday et les Girondins and Chastagnaret, “La légende de
Marat” on the topic of Napoleonic censorship.
4
For further biographical information on Westphalen see Walter Koch, “Heinrich
Christoph Albrecht und Christine Westphalen: Eine neuentdeckte Quelle über den
norddeutschen Jakobiner,” Jahrbuch des Instituts für deutsche Geschichte 11 (1982):
381–85; Susanne Kord, Ein Blick hinter die Kulissen: Deutschsprachige
Dramatikerinnen im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1992); Hans
Schröder et al., Lexikon der Hamburgischen Schriftsteller bis zur Gegenwart
(Hamburg: Perthes-Besser & Mauke, 1879); and Inge Stephan, “‘Die erhabne
Männin Corday’: Christine Westphalens Drama Charlotte Corday (1804) und der
Corday-Kult am Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts,” in Sie, und nicht Wir: Die Französische
Revolution und ihre Wirkung auf Norddeutschland und das Reich, ed. Arno Herzig,
Inge Stephan, and Hans G. Winter, 2 vols. (Hamburg: Dölling & Galitz, 1989),
1:177–205. For more information on the effects of the French Revolution on
German literature, see Inge Stephan, Literarischer Jakobinismus in Deutschland
(1789–1806) (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1976).
5
Napoleon occupied Hamburg in 1806. This occupation lasted — except for a
short interruption in 1813 — until May 1814. For accounts of Hamburg during
the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, see Walter Grab, Demokratische
Strömungen in Hamburg und Schleswig-Holstein zur Zeit der ersten französischen
Republik (Hamburg: H. Christians, 1966) and Bernhard Mehnke, “Anpassung
und Widerstand: Hamburg in der Franzosenzeit von 1806 bis 1814,” in Herzig,
Stephan, and Winter, Sie, und nicht Wir 1:333–49.
6
Christine Westphalen, Charlotte Corday: Tragödie in fünf Akten mit Chören
(Hamburg: B. G. Hoffmann, 1804), hereafter cited parenthetically as CC. All
translations of foreign-language materials are mine.
7
Kord, Ein Blick hinter die Kulissen, 122.
8
A detailed analysis of Goethe and Schiller’s writing on female authorship and
dilettantism can be found in Helen Fronius, Women and Literature in the Goethe
Era, 1770–1820: Determined Dilettantes (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007).
9
Johann Wolfgang Goethe, “An Eichstätt, 3. Oktober 1804,” in Goethes Werke,
ed. Hermann Böhlau, 5 parts, 143 vols. (Weimar: Böhlau, 1887–1919), part 4,
17:204.
10
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile ou de l’éducation (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion,
1966), 259.
11
Schiller had mentioned his plan to write a tragedy on Charlotte Corday in a
letter to Goethe and in a note in his diary. See Vatel, Charlotte de Corday et les
Girondins, ccxxxv–ccxxxvi and Beise, Charlotte Corday, 95–96.
12
Quoted in Beise, Charlotte Corday, 96.
13
Quoted in Jacques Guilhaumou, La mort de Marat (Brussels: Editions
Complexe, 1989), 74–75.
14
See Kord, Ein Blick hinter die Kulissen, 125.
15
See Stephan, “Die erhabne Männin Corday,” 195.
16
For discussions of visual representations of the murder scene, see Kindleberger,
“Charlotte Corday in Text and Image”; Michael Marrinan, “Images and Ideas of
Charlotte Corday: Texts and Contexts of an Assassination,” Arts Magazine 54
(1980): 158–76; Nina Rattner Gelbart, “The Blonding of Charlotte Corday,”
Eighteenth-Century Studies 38.1 (2004): 201–21; and Chantal Thomas, “Portraits
de Charlotte Corday,” in La mort de Marat, ed. Jean-Claude Bonnet (Paris:
Flammarion, 1986), 271–86.
17
In Gérard Walter, ed., “Le procès de Charlotte Corday,” in Actes du tribunal
révolutionnaire (Paris: Mercure de France, 1968), 23. In addition to her reference
to the trial transcripts and her letters, Corday also wrote a political statement,
“Adresse aux Français,” which was found on her person after her arrest. In her
prison cell, she also asked for a painter to produce her portrait, which was begun
during her trial. She even posed shortly before her execution to allow the painter,
Jean-Jacques Hauer, to make the last corrections.
18
The following is the corresponding excerpt from the transcript of the historical
trial (in Walter, “Le procès de Charlotte Corday,” in Actes du tribunal révolution-
naire, 17–21, my italics):
L’accusée interrompt la déposition: Oui, c’est moi qui l’ai tué!

Le président: Qui vous a engagé à commettre cet assassinat?
L’accusée: Ses crimes.
Le président: Qu’entendez-vous par ses crimes?
L’accusée: Les malheurs dont il a été la cause depuis la Révolution.
Le président: Quels sont ceux qui vous ont engagé à commettre cet assassinat?
L’accusée: Personne, c’est moi seule qui en ai conçu l’idée [. . .]
Le président: Barbaroux [a Girondin deputy], lors de votre départ, était-il
instruit du sujet de votre voyage? [. . .]
Le président: Qui vous a dit que l’anarchie régnait à Paris? [. . .]
Le président: Etiez-vous en liaison d’amitié avec les députés retirés à Caen?
[. . .]
Le président: Quelles sont les personnes qui vous ont conseillé de commettre
cet assassinat? [. . .]
Le président: Croyez-vous avoir tué tous les Marat?
L’accusée: Celui-ci mort, les autres auront peur, peut-être.
[The accused interrupts the deposition: Yes, it is I who killed him!

The president: Who enlisted you to commit this assassination?
The accused: His crimes.
The president: What do you mean by his crimes?
86 STEPHANIE HILGER
The accused: The calamities that he has caused since the Revolution.
The president: Who encouraged you to commit this assassination?
The accused: Nobody, I myself had the idea [. . .]
The president: Did Barbaroux [a Girondin deputy] know the reason for your
trip when you left? [. . .]
The president: Who told you that there was anarchy in Paris? [. . .]
The president: Did you have friendly ties with the deputies who had fled to
Caen? [. . .]
The president: Who advised you to commit this assassination? [. . .]
The president: Do you think that you killed all the Marats?
The accused: This one is dead, perhaps the others will be afraid.]
19
Two texts that present Marat’s murder as an apolitical crime of passion are Louis
Du Broca’s Interesting Anecdotes of the Heroic Conduct of Women Previous to and
During the French Revolution (Baltimore: Fryer & Clark, 1804) and Percy Bysshe
Shelley’s “Fragment Supposed to be an Epithalamion of Francis Ravaillac and
Charlotte Corday,” in Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Newell Ford
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), 558–59. For a discussion of these texts, see
Craciun, “The New Cordays.”
20
The anonymous French play Charlotte ou la Judith Moderne (1797) presents
Corday as a royalist widow committing a crime of passion. The play is reproduced
in Dangeville, Comment en finir avec la Révolution? 29–59.
21
The first half of the letter in the play is based on the historical Corday’s letter to
Barbaroux, the Girondin deputy who had fled to Caen. In it, the historical Corday
establishes a continuity between Brutus’s deed and her own: “Une imagination
vive, un coeur sensible promettait une vie bien orageuse, je prie ceux qui me
regretteraient de le considérer, et ils se réjouiront de me voir jouir du repos dans
les Champs-Elysées avec Brutus et quelques anciens” (in Walter, “Le procès de
Charlotte Corday,” 23; A vivid imagination, a sensitive heart promised a stormy
life; I am asking those who might lament my death to consider this and they will
rejoice seeing me enjoy my peace on the Champs-Elysées with Brutus and some
ancients). The second part of the letter in the play echoes the historical Corday’s
letter to her father: “‘Pardonnez-moi, mon cher papa, d’avoir disposé de mon
existence sans votre permission. J’ai vengé bien d’innocentes victimes, j’ai prévenu
bien d’autres désastres [. . .] J’espère que vous ne seriez point tourmenté. En tout
cas, je crois que vous auriez des défenseurs à Caen [. . .] Adieu, mon cher papa, je
vous prie de m’oublier, ou plutôt de vous réjouir de mon sort [. . .] N’oubliez pas
ce vers de Corneille: “Le crime fait la honte, et non pas l’échafaud”’” (in Walter,
“Le procès de Charlotte Corday,” 25–26; Forgive me, dear father, for disposing of
my existence without your permission. I have avenged many innocent victims, I
have prevented many other disasters [. . .] I hope that you will not be tormented.
In any case, I believe that you will have defenders in Caen [. . .] Farewell, my dear
father, I ask you to forget me or rather to rejoice in my fate [. . .] Do not forget
this line by Corneille: Crime causes shame, not the scaffold).
22
In Walter, “Le procès de Charlotte Corday,” 23.
23
See Gelbart, “The Blonding of Charlotte Corday,” 204.
24
For a discussion of the way Judith’s motives were represented, see the chapter
by Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly in this volume.
25
In Walter, “Le procès de Charlotte Corday,” 22–23.
26
Katherine R. Goodman and Edith Waldstein, eds., In the Shadow of Olympus:
German Women Writers around 1800 (Albany: State U of New York P, 1992).
5: “Ob im Tode mein Ich geboren wird?”:
The Representation of the Widow in
Hedwig Dohm’s “Werde, die du bist”
(1894)
Abigail Dunn
Introduction
H EDWIG DOHM’S SHORT STORY, “Werde, die du bist” (Become Who

You Are), published in 1894, is a moving account of widowhood and
old age.1 For a nineteenth-century bourgeois German woman, Dohm
lived a seemingly ordinary life for many years. She married at the age of
twenty-four, bore four daughters, and was a housewife to her husband, the
editor and publisher Ernst Dohm. On 5 February 1883 Ernst died of a
heart attack and Hedwig Dohm’s thirty-six-year widowhood began. As
Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres argues, during her widowhood, Dohm’s dif-
ference from other bourgeois German women of the period emerged.2
Not only did she produce a considerable body of fiction, often depicting
the unhappy fate of women, but she also wrote witty and lively political
essays and was an outspoken advocate of the feminist cause in the nine-
teenth century. Although she did not actively participate in the women’s
movement, she was very much involved with its aims and ideals.3 The
contrast between Dohm’s radical, positive political writings and the often
hopeless depiction of women in her fiction has perplexed modern schol-
ars.4 Sandra L. Singer argues, however, that Dohm’s essays and fiction in
fact complement each other, and she accounts for this as follows: “Whereas
the essays attempt to tear down barriers to necessary change for women,
the fiction illustrates the devastating costs in women’s lives of the slow and
torturous path to change.”5
“Werde, die du bist” is certainly a poignant example of the damaging
consequences that await a woman who endeavors to break free from her
limited surroundings and emancipate herself. A widow’s struggle to find a
voice and an identity is the principal theme of the story. The protagonist,
Agnes Schmidt, an “old” woman in her fifties, has lived according to
dominant social norms but feels an overwhelming sense of alienation.
THE WIDOW IN HEDWIG DOHM’S “WERDE, DIE DU BIST” 89
Although both Dohm and Agnes Schmidt are highly critical of the limita-
tions placed on women, the story shows it is impossible to resist them
entirely, transcend gender, sex, and age, and create an identity beyond that
of nurturer, mother, and wife.
The story is told from two different perspectives. Agnes’s life is por-
trayed in the third person in two brief framework passages from the view-
point of the doctors in the psychiatric hospital in which she spends her final
days. The majority of the work, however, consists of the diary that Agnes
begins to write as a widow. Her life and background during her marriage
and before the onset of her “madness” are told in the first person. The
doctors in the hospital fail to see her as an individual and do not under-
stand that her madness is linked to society’s treatment of her. They do not
refer to Agnes by her actual name; rather, as Lilo Weber points out, she is
called “Gattin” (wife), “Irre” (madwoman), “Greisin” (old woman), or
“Kranke” (sick woman).6 Like the doctors at the psychiatric hospital,
Agnes’s own family fails to see her as an individual. Her name, Agnes
Schmidt, also suggests her ordinariness. In her diary, however, it is revealed
that she becomes “insane” after an attempt to break free from convention-
ality. Following her husband’s death, Agnes asserts herself; she travels
extensively, reads voraciously, and visits art galleries. In Capri she falls in
love with a young doctor called Johannes. However, Agnes overhears him
ridiculing her, calling her “Großmutter Psyche” (Wddb, 273; grandmother
Psyche), and this moment, the moment Agnes realizes that she is being
referred to in legends and myths, precipitates her madness. Three years
later, back in Germany Johannes visits the psychiatric ward to which Agnes
has been admitted. Agnes recognizes him from her trip to Capri, remem-
bers the myrtle wreath he gave her, and declares passionately that he is her
betrothed.
Johannes diagnoses Agnes with “erotischer Wahnsinn” (Wddb, 271,
erotic madness) following this outburst. Agnes, however, believes that her
love for him is of a spiritual nature. It is her soul and spirituality as opposed
to her sexuality that she attempts to develop in “Werde, die du bist” Yet
ultimately Agnes fails to escape from conventional male ideas of femininity.
In this essay I will show that when Agnes does try to construct a new
identity, she finds herself often imitating images and tropes of women, cre-
ated by men, which have been dominant from antiquity to the late nine-
teenth century. On several occasions Agnes tries to react against these, but
by so doing, she learns that she is also destroying her own image of herself,
as Weber points out. Weber argues that she is left with the feeling that she
has only two options available to her — suicide or madness.7
That Agnes, the widow, is in part defined by death is nothing new in
depictions of widowhood in nineteenth-century German fiction. In nine-
teenth-century Germany a wife’s identity was so bound up within her
husband’s that when he died, she underwent a figurative death herself.
90 ABIGAIL DUNN
Dohm’s protagonist has, moreover, lost her youth. This essay will first
examine how widowhood is understood and portrayed in fictional and
non-fictional texts in nineteenth-century Germany, and the relationship
between widowhood and death, and will then analyze the representation
of the aged, widowed Agnes Schmidt. Does Dohm, herself a widow, sub-
vert or imitate the dominant discourses pertaining to widows, death, and
female old age in this period?
Widowhood in Nineteenth-Century Germany

As mentioned above, a widow was generally perceived as lacking an identity
in nineteenth-century Germany. If, as was widely believed, a woman’s main
role in life was to be a mother, wife, and housewife, then as a widow she was
superfluous, especially if she was childless or if her children had grown up.
Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel (1741–96), statesman and writer, set out his
views on widowhood in Über die Ehe (On Marriage), first published in 1774
and expanded several times up to 1793. It is interesting that the views on
widowhood he expresses between the years 1774 and 1793 do not change,
whereas his views on female education and women’s rights become much
more liberal in the later versions. In the 1793 version of the essay, from
which all quotations in this essay will be taken, Hippel highlights how wid-
ows are seen as even more removed from having real and authentic selves
than women in general because they do not have a man or a role as wife:
Was ist eine Witwe mehr als eine halb verwischte Schilderei, ein umge-
wandtes Kleid, ein aufgewärmtes Essen, eine Perrücke statt eigenes Haar,
eine Tulpe, die den Schlüssel verloren hat und sich nicht mehr zuschließen
läßt?
[What is a widow but a half-erased painting, a dress that has been turned
round, a warmed-up dish, a wig instead of one’s own hair, a tulip that has
lost its stamen and can no longer close up?]8
This statement suggests incompleteness, inauthenticity, and substitution.

According to Hippel, a widow is nothing more than unwanted leftovers
from a previous marriage, another man’s used goods. Widows who remain
alive undergo a figurative death, which includes the death of sexuality and
social standing. All they have left to do in widowhood is to mourn their
husband and continue to define themselves in relation to him. As Hippel
asks: “Hat es nicht einen Mann verloren? und ist dieser Verlust nicht einer
ewigen Trauer werth?” (ÜE, 450; Hasn’t she lost a man? And isn’t this loss
worthy of eternal mourning?). The impersonal “es,” which refers to “das
Weib,” lends credibility to the image of the widow as a non-being without
her husband.
According to Hippel, a widow should remain forever true to her hus-

band’s memory and not remarry: “Einer Wittwe ist nichts anständiger, als
daß sie es bis ans Ende ihres Lebens bleibe” (ÜE, 450; Nothing is more
fitting for a widow than that she remain widowed until the end of her life).
Hippel argues that a widow should remain in spiritual connection with her
late husband and that for this she will be rewarded by society (ÜE, 450–
51). Not to do this would be to practice “Ehebruch am Toten” (ÜE, 446;
adultery against the dead man). According to him, this absolute horror of
widows who remarry goes back as far as antiquity: “Die ganze Welt hatte
Abscheu vor Weibern, die sich zum zweitenmal verheirateten” (ÜE, 454;
the whole world felt disgust at women who married for a second time). As
far as widowers were concerned, on the other hand, Hippel encourages
them not only to remarry but, if possible, to marry a relative of their
deceased wife or someone who looks like her (ÜE, 449). It is not only
recommended that widowers remarry; it is seen as necessary, especially if
there are children to take care of (ÜE, 442).
Ursula Machtemes has extensively researched the lives and feelings of
bourgeois widows in nineteenth-century Germany. In her study she exam-
ines widows’ letters and diary entries, showing how they structured their
lives following the deaths of their husbands. It appears that they them-
selves often experienced the loss of a husband in the way Hippel had dic-
tated they should; that, for a woman, a husband’s death was perceived and
felt to be a “grundsätzliche Daseinskrise” (a fundamental crisis of exist-
ence).9 Female remarriage, writes Machtemes, was viewed negatively
throughout the nineteenth century.10
Widows, however, are not only defined by death; they are also defined
by sexual experience. Irmgard Taylor writes in her study of the representa-
tion of the widow in German literature that a widow possesses “the sexual
experience of a married woman,” but does not have a man to control that
sexuality.11 It was suspected that once deprived of their husbands, widows
would become sexually voracious. In literary depictions of widows male
authors are often intrigued by the widows’ connection with sex and por-
tray them as a potentially dangerous group of people who need to be
controlled. Moreover, widows may have more independence in widow-
hood than their married contemporaries, again making them threatening
figures. Machtemes points out that in the nineteenth century widowhood
was in fact a more liberating state legally than was marriage.12 It was
potentially empowering, as it offered women the opportunity to pursue
their own goals and interests. In her novel Die Wittwen (The Widows,
1842), widow and writer Henriette Hanke (1785–1862) alludes to the
potential freedom of widowhood through one of her widowed protago-
nists. When a husband of her acquaintance dies, this character says: “Da ist
wieder ein Quäler zur Ruhe gebracht und ein freies Herz erlöset” (Another
torturer is brought to rest and a free heart is delivered).13
92 ABIGAIL DUNN
The problem — for society — is that widows are potentially powerful,

independent, and fulfilled beings living life on their own terms. This
inspires fear; surely a widow should accept her sexual and social death.
Thus it seems that, in fiction at least, widows need to be shown their
proper place. In German fiction of the nineteenth century, widows are
often portrayed as women who transgress sexually and therefore end up
dead at the end of the story. If widows do not die sexually and socially,
then the alternative — in fiction at least — is actual death. Male writers, in
particular, depict widows as women who need to be chaste if they want to
stay alive.
The Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler depicts the widow as sexually
frustrated in his short story “Frau Berta Garlan” (1901). Berta is in her
early thirties and left alone with a young child when her much older hus-
band, whom she does not love, dies. Berta’s sexuality reasserts itself and
she gets in touch with a man she nearly married, Emil Lindbach, who is
now a famous violinist. She goes to Vienna to see him and goes to bed
with him, only to be told that if she wants to have infrequent but regular
sex with him all she has to do is turn up in Vienna every four to six weeks.
Schnitzler provides Berta with a parallel figure in his story, a woman
named Anna Rupius, who is married to a paralyzed man in a wheelchair.
Throughout the story she too has been going to Vienna to live out her
libido with a lover. She becomes pregnant, however, and kills herself. A few
lines before the end of the story Berta comes to an insight:
Und sie ahnte das ungeheure Unrecht in der Welt, daß die Sehnsucht
nach Wonne ebenso in die Frau gelegt ward als in den Mann; und daß es
bei Frauen Sünde wird und Sünde fordert, wenn die Sehnsucht nach
Wonne nicht zugleich die Sehnsucht nach dem Kinde ist.
[And she sensed the terrible injustice in the world, that the desire for
pleasure has been planted in woman as well as in man; and that it is sinful
in woman and demands atonement if the desire for pleasure is not also
the desire for a child.]14
Bruce Thompson argues that Schnitzler “does not surrender to a mor-

alistic judgment of [Berta’s] sexual adventure.”15 Instead Schnitzler
unveils the injustice of the sexual double standard according to which
women, unlike men, suffer from the strict, inhumane, and unnatural moral
code that prevailed in turn-of-the-century Vienna: women have to pay a
price for their pleasure.
Not all authors are as forgiving as Schnitzler. In the minds of many
men, the widow cannot be allowed to take a second mate, to commit
“Ehebruch am Toten.” This attitude is encapsulated in the story of the
Widow of Ephesus, which is told in chapters 111 and 112 of Petronius’s
Satyricon (first century CE).16 Briefly told, the story is of a widow so grief-
stricken at the death of her husband that she refuses to leave his tomb. The
governor of the province gives orders that some robbers be crucified. A
young soldier is deputed to guard their corpses. The soldier and the widow
become lovers and they consummate their love in the tomb, next to the
coffin of the dead husband. While the soldier is thus occupied, one of the
corpses he is guarding is stolen. The discovery of this theft would expose
both his dereliction of duty and his relationship with the widow. It is the
widow who finds the solution, saying that they can take the corpse of her
dead husband and hang it on the cross in place of the missing corpse.
Petronius comments ironically that the widow is as clever as she is chaste.
She is not found out and so can live happily with her new partner.
This story begins a march down European literature. The earliest
German version is found in a collection of verses entitled Dyocletianus
Leben written by Hans von Bühel and published in 1412.17 One nine-
teenth-century German author who adapts it is Eduard Grisebach (1845–
1906). Grisebach writes about a husband who pretends to be dead in
order to catch his “widow” out. The protagonist of his story Die treulose
Witwe (The Faithless Widow, 1873) is a Chinese academic and philosopher
called Tschwang-sãng, who sees a widow at her husband’s grave and is
horrified to witness her fanning the grave.18 She tells him that the quicker
the earth on the grave dries, the sooner she can remarry. Tien-sche, his
wife, is appalled to hear this and boasts about her own virtue. Shortly after
this conversation, Tschwang-sãng becomes ill and “dies.” After a short
period of mourning, Tien-sche becomes attracted to a student of her
deceased husband, a prince called Wang-sien. Tien-sche pursues the stu-
dent and eventually tells his servant that she wants to marry him. On the
day of their wedding, Wang-sien collapses and Tien-sche is informed that
the only way of saving him is to take the brain of a man who has not been
dead for more than forty-nine days, and cook it in wine. The widow imme-
diately suggests taking her husband’s brain, for he has only been dead for
twenty days. She takes an axe to his coffin and is about to strike it when
Tschwang-sãng sits up and questions her motives and behavior. Tien-sche
hangs herself. Tschwang-sãng dismembers her body and throws it into the
coffin. The portrayal of a widow whose lust is so unbridled that she is
prepared to damage the corpse of her husband in order to remarry is an
extreme illustration of the idea that any widow who wants a life after her
husband’s death is the embodiment of evil.
The widow’s relationship to male children is also often construed as
problematic in German literature around 1900. At times this relationship
is simply portrayed as excessive and stifling, as is the case in Gabriele
Reuter’s “Frau Clementine Holm” (1902). In other works it is much more
transgressive. Arthur Schnitzler’s “Frau Beate und ihr Sohn” (Beate and
her son), published in 1913, describes Beate’s reawakening sexuality,
which has been repressed since her husband died.19 She begins an affair
94 ABIGAIL DUNN
with her son’s seventeen-year-old-friend Hugo, and there is more than a

hint of incest in this relationship, in which the son’s friend represents a
son-substitute. At the same time her son’s sexuality awakens and he is
drawn to the femme fatale Fortunata, who is the same age as his mother.
The story tells of what happens when a widow, trammeled by convention,
whose rules she has internalized, is no longer able to repress her libido. At
the end mother and son, both conscious of their wrong-doing, set off
together in a boat and allow themselves to be swept away to their deaths,
the implication being that they cannot survive in a society whose laws they
have transgressed.
Unlike most of the fictional widows just discussed, Dohm’s life did not
end as she entered widowhood. Instead her most productive phase began,
as regards her writing and her involvement in the women’s movement, and
it lasted for a further thirty-six years.
The Representation of the Widow in

“Werde, die du bist”
Dohm’s short story is a clear protest against the “living-dead” status of the
widow in the nineteenth century. Dohm has a young child express in an
unambiguous way the dominant view of widowhood, and the protagonist
Agnes acknowledge that he is right: “‘Dir gehorche ich nicht, du bist ja
nur eine Witwe!’ Weises Kind. Eine Witwe, das heißt: Dein Mann ist tot.
Du bist mit ihm begraben” (Wddb, 286; “I won’t obey you, you’re just a
widow!” Wise child. A widow, that means: your husband is dead. You’ve
been buried with him).20 “Buried” with her husband, Agnes twice experi-
ences the sensation that she is trapped in a coffin (Wddb, 300, 328). Dohm
leaves the reader in no doubt as to the double death that society dictates
should occur when a husband dies.
The form of the short story allows Dohm to express Agnes’s growing
realization of her “life-in-death” status, and her attempts to break free
from it, directly. Excepting the first brief framework passage and the final
pages of the story, “Werde, die du bist” is recounted in the first person in
the form of Agnes’s diary. In other words, Dohm gives her protagonist a
voice and a clear means of self-expression: the story is told from the inside.
That Agnes’s commentary on her life between the ages of fifty-four and
fifty-eight takes up sixty-four pages of the story, whereas the portrayal of
her marriage accounts for five pages and her childhood and adolescence
only four, is indicative of the importance Dohm ascribes, contrary to liter-
ary convention, to her female protagonist’s widowhood and old age.
Agnes’s diary relates how her life as a daughter paved the way for her
future as a wife and widow. She received little education and married only
because it was expected of her, without really understanding what married
life meant. As a wife Agnes adopted the typical and passive role of house-
wife, but was pleased when her and her husband’s sex life ceased after the
birth of their two children. Her daughters married well and she hoped that
she and her husband would now be able to travel, but he became paralyzed
and she nursed him for eight years until his death. At this point Agnes’s
conventional role as a wife and mother, in which she has been trapped, but
which has also given her an identity, begins to dissolve. She feels her sense
of self becoming shadowy:
Bin ich wirklich Agnes Schmidt? ganz sicher Agnes Schmidt? Ich war es
ganz bestimmt, bis mein Mann starb. Und nun, allmählich ist mir, als
schwände Agnes Schmidt immer mehr aus meinem Gesichtskreis, in weite
Fernen hinaus, ein Schatten, der vor mir her ist, und der Schatten wird
immer fahler, dünner, und an seine Stelle — (Wddb, 276)
[Am I really Agnes Schmidt? Quite certainly Agnes Schmidt? I definitely

was until my husband died. And now, suddenly [sic], I feel like Agnes
Schmidt is fading more and more out of my sight, into the far distance,
like a shadow that is before me, and that shadow is becoming ever paler,
ever thinner, and in its place — (BW, 9)]
Her widowhood is marked increasingly by the feeling that she does

not belong anywhere. When she visits her daughters, for example, she
soon realizes that she has grown apart from them. Agnes’s grandson
mocks her for not making the perfect birthday cake. His teasing reminds
Agnes that she, the old widow, has no place in her family: “‘Wir brauchen
keine Schwiegermama.’” Und alle lachten, die Erwachsenen auch, [. . .]
und doch — doch — ich heiße hier nur immer die Schwiegermutter, und
ich bin doch als Mutter da” (Wddb, 286; “We Don’t Need Any Mama-
in-Law.” And everyone laughed, the grown-ups too [. . .] and yet — yet
— Here I am always only called the mother-in-law, and actually, I am
here as mother: BW, 19). Agnes is further mocked by one of her sons-
in-law for her appetite and made the butt of endless jokes. He does not
want to introduce her to guests, so she tries to make herself inconspicu-
ous. As we see in Dohm’s brief discussion of Agnes’s childhood, Agnes
has learnt to keep quiet and hidden away from society. This is a behavio-
ral trait that society dictates she must display to an even greater extent in
widowhood.
The dissolution of her former identity, and her realization of her
“invisible” status, is also an opportunity for Agnes, however: widowhood
is rebirth as well as death. She begins to reflect upon her former life, or
lack of life, and to question her passive, self-sacrificing role. As she writes
in her diary: “Ich will vorwärts — aufwärts! Die kleine Hausfrauenseele
loswerden” (Wddb, 301; I want to go forward — upwards! Be rid of the
small housewife soul: BW, 35). She realizes that a “Seelenmord” (Wddb,
307; murder of the soul: BW, 42) has been committed against her; that in
96 ABIGAIL DUNN
her life up until now she has been a body and not a soul: “Ich war ja gar
kein ich! Agnes Schmidt! ein Name! eine Hand, ein Fuß, ein Leib! keine
Seele, kein Hirn” (Wddb, 299; But I wasn’t even an “I.” Agnes Schmidt!
A name! A foot, a body! No soul, no brain: BW, 33).
Agnes’s self-assertion therefore involves attempting to remove herself
from the domestic sphere and to develop intellectually, spiritually, and
creatively. She begins to read as much as she can and to visit art galleries.
She inherits ten thousand marks and, rather than giving it to one of her
sons-in-law, decides to keep it in order to travel to Florence and Capri.
Her spiritual and intellectual emancipation involves a denial of the body.
Agnes identifies with Goethe’s Mignon from his novel Wilhelm Meisters
Lehrjahre (1795/96), a childlike, androgynous figure. As Singer argues,
Agnes is aware of the incongruity between the image of Mignon and that
of an old woman, but she identifies with her on a spiritual level.21 Both
Agnes and Mignon yearn for something that they have never experienced,
yet that they feel is an integral part of their being. In Mignon’s case, this
is Italy, whereas for Agnes — who travels to Italy —, it is freedom from
the confines of gender. Later in the story, when Agnes has been admitted
to the psychiatric hospital, her denial of the body in favor of the spirit
involves a refusal of food. On Sundays, after going to chapel, Agnes fasts
for the whole day. As Anna Richards argues, Dohm “charts the growth of
her soul in proportion to the wasting of her body.”22 Although the medi-
cal profession diagnoses Agnes’s behavior as a kind of madness, to her it
seems more like sanity than her previous repressed life. She tells the doc-
tors in the sanitarium: “Hier in Ihrer Anstalt war ich weniger irre als
während meines ganzen früheren Lebens” (Wddb, 274; Here in your
sanitarium I was less insane than during my whole previous life: BW, 7).
Singer argues that Agnes begins to fear madness and death less as she
becomes aware that her former existence was already a kind of madness
and death.23
But Agnes’s emancipation can only ever be partial, her new sense of
self only ever “shadowy” and characterized by a lack. She — and, to some
extent her author — are constrained by the male conventions and images
from which Agnes wants to escape. Her rejection of the body is very much
in keeping with the ethereal nineteenth-century feminine ideal, which
denied female sexuality. This is illustrated by Agnes’s feelings for Johannes,
the young doctor whom she first meets in Capri. There is a clear challenge
to convention here: for Dohm’s nineteenth-century readership, an “old”
woman falling in love with a younger man was inappropriate and transgres-
sive. One of Agnes’s doctors gives voice to society’s prejudice when Agnes
expresses her enthusiasm on seeing Johannes again. Taking her by the arm,
he tells her: “Besinnen Sie sich, Frau Schmidt, vergessen Sie nicht, daß Sie
eine alte Dame sind” (Wddb, 271; Come to your senses, Frau Schmidt, do
not forget that you are an old lady: BW, 4).
Dohm has Agnes draw attention to the sexual double standard which
is in evidence here, referring to Goethe and his “acceptable” relationship
with a much younger woman:
Der siebzigjährige Goethe liebte ein junges Mädchen, um ihrer Jugend

und ihres Reizes willen; und Mit- und Nachwelt bewunderte darin
Goethesche Gemütskraft. Empfindet aber eine alte Frau tief und stark für
einen Mann, um seiner Seelenschönheit willen, so ist sie — erotisch
wahnsinnig. (Wddb, 326)
[The seventy-year-old Goethe loved a young girl because of her youth and
her charm; and contemporaries and posterity admired in that Goethe’s
mental strength. But if an old woman feels deeply and strongly for a man
because of his soul-beauty then she is — erotically insane. (BW, 61)]
Despite this criticism of the sexual double standard, however, Dohm her-
self shies away from portraying the sexuality of a woman in her fifties.
Instead she has Agnes insist — as in the above quotation — that her love
for Johannes is of a spiritual nature, that she loves his “Seelenschönheit.”
Agnes describes her feeling for him as “eine intime, begeisterte
Genossenschaft, geboren aus der herztiefen Sehnsucht nach Mehrsein,
nach einem Mehrerkennen, Mehrfinden, Weiterschauen” (Wddb, 325; an
intimate inspired camaraderie, born out of the deep-hearted yearning for
being more, for recognizing more, for finding more, for looking further:
BW, 60).
On other occasions, too, Dohm portrays a heroine who is unable to
escape from patriarchal stereotypes. By comparing herself to Goethe’s
Mignon, for example, she is identifying with a literary creation of male
origin. “Werde, die du bist” has an abundance of stereotypical female fig-
ures and images created by the male imagination, and Dohm suggests that
her heroine can only be defined with the representations that already exist.
Even if she succeeds in overturning a conventional image, another is wait-
ing to be employed, either by others or by herself. When she overhears
herself being called “Großmutter Psyche” (Wddb, 273), for example, she
feels so horrified that she is stunned into silence. She is turned into a
statue, unable to speak for herself. But Johannes finds a descriptive com-
parison ready to hand. He explains: “Sie erinnerte mich in jenem
Augenblick mit den geöffneten Lippen und den großen, starren und
entsetzten Augen an eine Medusa” (Wddb, 273; She reminded me at that
moment of Medusa with her open lips and large, rigid and terrified eyes:
BW, 6). Later in the story Dohm seems at first to reject a suggested paral-
lel between her protagonist and an Ophelia-like figure. Agnes has a vision
of a drowned woman with whom she feels an affinity, a vision that makes
it clear to Agnes that for a long time she too has been suffering from
“Selbstmordgedanken” (Wddb, 309; suicidal thoughts: BW, 43). Just after
98 ABIGAIL DUNN
Agnes has this vision, she remarks “Das Meer zieht mich hinab” (Wddb,
309; the sea is pulling me down: BW, 43), yet she does not come to her
death in water. Unlike Ophelia, she does not — explicitly at least — com-
mit suicide.
But Dohm’s ending is, for all that, a conventional one, in the context
of the nineteenth-century literary depictions of the widow examined
above. Lying on her death-bed, Agnes expresses the hope that in the next
life she will achieve the liberation of her “true” self for which she has
strived: “Ob im Tode mein ich geboren wird? — ob ich im Jenseits werde,
die ich bin?” (Wddb, 329; Will my “I” be born in death? — Will I in the
Beyond become who I am? BW, 65). These are Agnes’s words; but her
death is narrated in the third-person from a male perspective, underlining,
again, her inability to escape being “represented” by patriarchal society.
Agnes’s corpse is presented via a conventional male gaze as a beautiful
work of art, “ein Marmorbild von reiner Schönheit” (Wddb, 330; a beau-
tiful marble statue: BW, 66).24 This beauty depends on the elision of the
physical characteristics of her age and sex: the doctors describe her body as
“Ohne Alter, ohne Geschlecht” (Wddb, 329; without age, without sex:
BW, 65). In her martyr-like death, Agnes is presented as a female Christ,
and she claims that she is dying for other women. Critics disagree about
the significance of the comparison with Christ. Richards argues that pre-
senting a female protagonist as Christ is unusual at this period and “imbues
Agnes with dignity and her death with significance,”25 but Weber high-
lights the lack of innovation in the image, pointing out that women have
long been represented as sacrificing themselves for others.26 There is cer-
tainly something clichéd and formulaic about the description of Agnes
with a myrtle wreath in her hair and blood running down her forehead:
Ihr Antlitz war schmal wie ein Schatten. Sie trug noch den welken
Myrtenkranz. Die spitzen Stengel hatten sich in ihr Haar verwickelt. Man
hatte versucht, den Kranz zu entfernen, und sie dabei geritzt. Ein
Tropfen Blutes rann ihr über die Stirn. (Wddb, 329)
[Her face was small like a shadow. She still wore the myrtle wreath. The
sharp stems had become entwined in her hair. They had tried to remove
the wreath and cut her in the process. A drop of blood ran over her fore-
head. (BW, 65)
The word “Schatten” (shadow) in the above quotation is suggestive of the

way in which Agnes remains more or less invisible until the moment of her
death, despite her attempts to assert herself. Dohm’s short story is a radical
critique of the status of the (aged) widow in late nineteenth-century soci-
ety and a powerful assertion of her right to “become who she is.” Perhaps
motivated by realism, or perhaps by the desire to conform to the expecta-
tions of publishers and readers, however, Dohm is unable to present a
protagonist who achieves true spiritual, intellectual, or sexual liberation

during her lifetime. Only in that most conventional of ways, with a sacrifi-
cial death involving the transcendence of the aged female body, can Dohm
conclude her story and offer her protagonist emancipation. Dohm’s own
long widowhood was the most productive and active period in her life, but
her fictional heroine is not so lucky. Could it be that, in some ways, literary
convention was even more “deathly” than the limits placed on women in
real life?
Notes
1
Hedwig Dohm, “Werde, die du bist,” in Werde, die du bist! Zwischen Anpassung
und Selbstbestimmung: Texte deutscher Schriftstellerinnen des 19. Jahrhunderts, ed.
Gisela Henckmann (Munich: Goldmann, 1993), 329. The story will henceforward
be referred to in the main text as Wddb. Dohm lived from 1831 to 1919.
2
Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres, Respectability and Deviance: Nineteenth-Century
German Women Writers and the Ambiguity of Representation (Chicago and
London: Chicago UP, 1998), 127.
3
Boetcher Joeres, Respectability and Deviance, 127.
4
See for example Sandra L. Singer, Free Soul, Free Woman? A Study of Selected
Fictional Works by Hedwig Dohm, Isolde Kurz, and Helene Böhlau (New York:
Lang, 1995), 23.
5
Singer, Free Soul, Free Woman, 24.
6
Lilo Weber, Fliegen und Zittern: Hysterie in Texten von Theodor Fontane, Hedwig
Dohm, Gabriele Reuter und Minna Kautsky (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 1996), 152.
7
Weber, Fliegen und Zittern, 170.
8
Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel, Über die Ehe: Vierte viel vermehrte Auflage (1793;
repr., Berlin: Morgen, 1987), 457–58. Further references to this work will be given
in the text using the abbreviation ÜE and the page number. All translations are my
own unless otherwise noted.
9
Ursula Machtemes, Leben zwischen Trauer und Pathos: Bildungsbürgerliche
Witwen im 19. Jahrhundert (Osnabrück: Rasch, 2001), 91.
10
Machtemes, Leben zwischen Trauer und Pathos, 53.
11
Irmgard Taylor, Das Bild der Witwe in der deutschen Literatur (Darmstadt:
Gesellschaft Hessischer Literaturfreunde, 1980), 38. See also Olwen H. Hufton,
The Prospect before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe (New York: Random
House, 1996), 222.
12
Machtemes, Leben zwischen Trauer und Pathos, 9.
13
Henriette Hanke, Die Wittwen [1842], I, 15, in Bibliothek der Deutschen
Literatur: Mikrofiche-Gesamtausgabe, ed. Axel Frey (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1995),
FNr: 502–36.
14
Arthur Schnitzler, “Frau Berta Garlan,” in Gesammelte Werke: Die erzählenden
Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1961) 1:513.
100 ABIGAIL DUNN
15
Bruce Thompson, Schnitzler’s Vienna: Image of a Society (London and New
York: Routledge, 1990), 73.
16
Petronius, Satyricon, in A Companion to Petronius, ed. Edward Courtney
(Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001), 168–70.
17
Hans von Bühel, Dyocletianus Leben, ed. Adalbert Keller (1412; repr., Leipzig:
Quendlinburg, 1841).
18
Eduard Grisebach, Die treulose Witwe: Eine chinesische Novelle und ihre
Wanderung durch die Weltliteratur (Vienna: Rosner, 1873).
19
Arthur Schnitzler, Frau Beate und ihr Sohn (Berlin: Fischer, 1922).
20
Translation is from Elizabeth G. Ametsbichler, Become Who You Are: With an
Additional Essay “The Old Woman” (Albany: State U of New York P, 2006), 67.
All subsequent translations will be taken from this text and indicated by the abbre-
viation BW and the page number.
21
Singer, Free Soul, Free Woman? 33.
22
Anna Richards, The Wasting Heroine in German Fiction by Women 1770–1914
(Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004), 187.
23
Singer, Free Soul, Free Woman? 33.
24
See Weber, Fliegen und Zittern, 175.
25
Richards, The Wasting Heroine, 188.
26
Weber, Fliegen und Zittern, 84.
6: The Figure of Judith in Works by
German Women Writers between 1895
and 1921
Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly
The Biblical Judith
T HE JUDITH STORY FAMILIAR TO US TODAY is from the apocryphal Book

of Judith in the Septuagint or Greek Old Testament, which is based
on an earlier tale probably from the third century BCE.1 The key elements
of the story are that Judith is a beautiful and chaste widow who saves the
besieged city of Bethulia from conquest by the Assyrians under
Nebuchadnezar’s rule by going to the enemy camp, accompanied by her
maid Abra, and killing their general Holofernes in his sleep. When she
brings Holofernes’ head back to Bethulia, her fellow citizens are embold-
ened to sally forth and defeat the leaderless Assyrians. Judith lives out the
rest of her life as a chaste widow. The story calls gender roles and notions
of masculinity, femininity, and violence into question, and it is this unset-
tling potential that has ensured the story’s continuing fascination for writ-
ers and artists, particularly German ones, up to the present day.2
The potential to unsettle begins with Judith herself. On the one hand,
she is a heroic figure, braver than the men of Bethulia, and she triumphs
because she uses a man’s weapon against a man and does so successfully.
She is the liberator of her people, but at the same time she kills a defense-
less and sleeping man. As a widow, she is a sexually experienced woman
but has neither a male guardian nor children to tame her sexuality and
limit her actions. The Septuagint represents her as strong-minded and
eloquent and as using her eloquence to chide the timorous Bethulians for
their cowardice and lack of trust in God. She also uses this eloquence to
gain access to Holofernes, lying to him by explaining that she has come to
betray her people. The Septuagint, too, emphasizes that Judith is beautiful
and that she uses her beauty to ensnare Holofernes, dressing in her best
clothes and jewels when she sets out for the enemy camp: she “made her-
self very beautiful, to entice the eyes of all men who might see her”
(10:4).3 It is because he desires her that Holofernes has dinner with her
alone in his tent, and it is this that gives her the opportunity to kill him, as
102 HELEN WATANABE-O’KELLY
Judith herself is well aware: “It was my face that tricked him to his destruc-
tion,” she says later (13:16). Judith therefore is a temptress and so resem-
bles Eve and Delila. In manipulating Holofernes and gaining a man’s head
as her reward, she resembles Salome. Beautiful, sexually experienced, cun-
ning, physically strong, resolute, courageous, and eloquent, Judith arouses
unease about women’s beauty, sexuality, and power over men and about
what happens when a woman transgresses against norms of submissive and
modest feminine behavior. Judith triumphs over Holofernes by using first
her weapons and then his, liberating Bethulia by employing both female
qualities of seduction and deceit and male qualities of reason, eloquence,
physical courage, and strength.
If these aspects of the figure are problematic, there are two others that
are even more so. The first is the question of whether Judith had sex with
Holofernes before killing him. Though Judith stresses on her return to
Bethulia that she was not “defiled,” the very fact that she says this introduces
the possibility of sex to our minds. The Bible stresses that Judith killed
Holofernes when he was lying on his bed and that she took the canopy of
this bed with her as a trophy when she cut off his head. In the Lutheran
translation of the Book of Judith into German, “canopy” is translated as
“Decke,” which can mean ceiling but also blanket. Unless a reader knew the
Greek original, he or she would assume that Judith was taking a blanket
from Holofernes’ bed with her, thus stressing the bed and the bedroom as
the locale of the killing. I have argued elsewhere that this lies behind the
eroticization of the figure of Judith by such early sixteenth-century German
artists as Hans Baldung Grien, Barthel Beham, Hans Sebald Beham, and
Lucas Cranach the Younger.4 In marked contrast to contemporary depic-
tions of Judith in Italian art,5 German artists often show her naked, in tender
communion with the head of her victim, and even in one instance riding on
Holofernes’ corpse with her sword pointing down toward his genitals. The
second and more troubling aspect is the fact that Judith kills a man and does
not expiate this crime with her own death, as is the usual fate of women who
kill. She kills in cold blood and remains at large.
Judith in German Literature

The figure of Judith has functioned down the centuries as a screen onto
which male fantasies, desires, and fears, aroused by the problematic aspects
mentioned above, have been projected. In order to make such a problem-
atic figure heroic, she has been allegorized in a number of ways, as a per-
sonification of courage, resolution, trust in God, chastity, and humility.6
She stands for God’s providence and his care for his Chosen People, and
she demonstrates that God can use even a weak woman as his instrument.
In this regard she is sometimes compared to David, who triumphed over
THE FIGURE OF JUDITH IN WORKS BY GERMAN WOMEN WRITERS 103
Goliath. She can also be presented as a prefiguration of the Virgin Mary,

who vanquished the devil; she stands for the Jewish people, and indeed her
very name means Jewess. She has also been politicized, for instance by
Donatello in his famous sculpture of Judith and Holofernes in Florence
dating to 14607 and by the German Reformation dramatist Sixt Birck, who
tailored his two Judith plays to fit the local political situations of the city
of Basel (the German version, 1534)8 and the city of Augsburg (the Latin
version, 1537).9 In 1536 another German dramatist, Joachim Greff,
depicted the Assyrians as the Turks, Judith as Protestantism, and
Holofernes as Catholicism.10 As the substantial scholarly literature makes
plain, each century uses Judith for its own ends.11
From the nineteenth century on, however, the sexual and erotic
potential of the story becomes the main, sometimes the only, focus for
male writers.12 Heinrich Heine, for instance, was fascinated by Horace
Vernet’s painting of Judith and Holofernes, exhibited at the Paris Salon of
1831. Vernet sets the scene in Holofernes’ bedroom. He is lying asleep,
half naked, on the tousled bed. Judith, whose right shoulder and left arm
are bare, looks as if she has dressed hastily. She is about to raise a huge
scimitar against the sleeping man. Heine, writing in Cotta’s Morgenblatt
on 29 October of that year, is quite clear that coitus has taken place, that
Judith has just got up from the bed, and that, though a widow, she is a
virgin who has been deflowered. According to Heine, Judith stands: “an
der eben überschrittenen Grenze der Jungfräulichkeit, ganz gottrein und
doch weltbefleckt, wie eine entweihte Hostie. . . . Süße Wildheit, düstere
Holdseligkeit und sentimentaler Grimm rieselt [sic] durch die edlen Züge
der tödlichen Schönen” (at the borderline of virginity which she has just
crossed, completely divinely pure and yet soiled by the world, like a dese-
crated host . . . Sweet wildness, dark grace, and sentimental anger flow
across the noble features of the deadly beauty).13 Vernet’s picture, accord-
ing to Heine, shows us Judith just after her seduction of Holofernes and
his defloration of her and before she kills him in his post-coital slumber.
Heine’s last sentence provides a gloss on these events: “Welch ein benei-
denswertes Ende! Wenn ich einst sterben soll, ihr Götter, laßt mich sterben
wie Holofernes!” (What an enviable end! When I come to die, ye Gods,
let me die like Holofernes!).14 The interpretation of Judith as a virgin goes
back to the pre-biblical version of the story.
Friedrich Hebbel’s play Judith, first performed at the Hoftheater in
Berlin on 6 July 1840, takes further the idea of Judith as a virgin who kills
the man who deflowered her. Hebbel makes four important changes to the
biblical version, for, as he writes in his diary on 3 January 1840: “Die
Judith der Bibel kann ich nicht brauchen. Dort ist die Judith eine Witwe,
die den Holofernes durch List und Schlauheit ins Netz lockt . . . das ist
gemein” (The Judith of the Bible is no use to me. There she is a widow
who lures Holofernes into the net by means of subterfuge and cunning . . .
that is base).15 He makes his reasons even clearer in his essay Mein Wort
über das Drama! (My Thoughts on the Drama): “Die Judith der Bibel ist
eben nichts, als eine Charlotte Corday, ein fanatisch-listiges Ungeheuer”
(The Judith of the Bible is nothing more than a Charlotte Corday, a
fanatical and cunning monster).16 In order to turn her into the tragic
heroine he wants, Hebbel like Heine makes Judith a virgin, explaining that
on her wedding night Judith’s husband Manasse was petrified by a terrible
sight and rendered impotent. Manasse died six months later, the taboo still
unbroken.
The second change that Hebbel introduces is a consideration of the
nature of masculinity and femininity exemplified by the invented figure of
the Israelite Ephraim. He is in love with Judith but does not have the
manly courage to go out and challenge Holofernes until she has already
done so. Ephraim then turns up at the Assyrian camp and in her presence
makes a feeble swipe with his sword at Holofernes but is laughed at and led
away. The ineffectual Ephraim functions as a foil both for the courageous
Judith and for Holofernes, portrayed throughout the play as a real man.
The third new element is that Judith is represented as needing, indeed
wanting, such a real man. As she says in act 2, “Ein Weib ist ein Nichts;
nur durch den Mann kann sie etwas werden” (A woman is nothing; she
can only become something through a man). As Hebbel himself puts it in
his diary of 28 March 1840 when talking about Judith: “Das Weib liebt in
dem Mann etwas Höheres, das sie zu sich herabziehen will” (woman loves
in man something higher, which she wants to pull down to her level).17 In
the entry for 22 April of the same year he writes that Judith
kommt zum Holofernes, sie lernt den “ersten und letzten Mann der
Erde” kennen, sie fühlt, ohne sich dessen klar bewußt zu werden, daß er
der einzige ist, den sie lieben könnte, sie schaudert, indem er sich in
seiner ganzen Größe vor ihr aufrichtet, sie will seine Achtung ertrotzen
und gibt ihr ganzes Geheimnis preis, sie erlangt nichts dadurch, als daß
er, der vorher schon mit ihr spielte, sie nun wirklich erniedrigt, daß er sie
hohnend in jedem ihrer Motive mißdeutet, daß er sie endlich zu seiner
Beute macht und ruhig einschläft.18
[Judith comes to Holofernes, she makes the acquaintance of the “first

and last man on this earth” without becoming really conscious of the fact
that he is the only man she can love. She shrinks when he rises up before
her in all his greatness; she wants to win his respect by her defiance and
surrenders all her mystery. She achieves nothing by this except that he,
who played with her previously, now really humiliates her, that he mock-
ingly misunderstands all her motives, that he finally makes her his prey
and falls calmly asleep.]
In Hebbel’s play Judith describes her own deflowering in great detail to

her maid in act 5, all the more appalling to her since, as Hebbel makes
clear, she half desired it. She then kills Holofernes, not to save her people
but because of what he did to her personally: “nichts trieb mich, als der
Gedanke an mich selbst” (nothing drove me but the thought of myself).19
As Freud says in his discussion of Hebbel’s Judith in his 1918 essay “Das
Tabu der Virginität”: “Judith [ist] das Weib, das den Mann kastriert, von
dem sie defloriert wurde” (Judith is the woman who castrates the man
who deflowered her).20
The final new element in Hebbel’s rendering of the story is that Judith
fears at the end that she is pregnant and she extracts a promise from the
Elders that they will kill her should that be true. It is this fear of the future
on Judith’s part, Hebbel tells us in Mein Wort über das Drama!, which
raises her to the level of tragic heroine. Judith has to be made to pay for
her murderous act and may indeed die. The killer may not live to tell the
tale after all.
Where Hebbel had to find a reason — her deflowering — to justify
Judith’s violent act, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch is fascinated by the
capacity of women to inflict pain.21 His famous novella Venus im Pelz
(Venus in Furs, 1970) begins with an epigraph from the Book of Judith.
In the novella, the protagonist Severin von Kusiemski dreams of being
humiliated, enslaved, and tortured by the beautiful widow Wanda von
Dunajew, of being Samson to her Delila, but also Holofernes to her
Judith. Writing about the moment of his highest sexual pleasure, which is
simultaneously the moment of his greatest degradation, when he has been
beaten to a pulp by his rival while his Judith/Delila looks on and laughs,
he comments: “Ich sah jetzt auf einmal mit entsetzlicher Klarheit, wohin
die blinde Leidenschaft, die Wollust, seit Holofernes und Agamememnon
den Mann geführt hat, in den Sack, in das Netz des verräterischen Weibes,
in Elend, Sklaverei und Tod” (I suddenly saw with terrible clarity where
blind passion, desire, has led man since Holofernes and Agamemmnon,
into the trap, into the net of treacherous woman, into misery, slavery, and
death).22 In his story Judith von Bialopol, 1675 (Judith of Bialopol, 1675,
1874) Sacher-Masoch takes a different tack.23 Judith of Bialopol is a brave
and beautiful Jewess who fights the Turks in person on the battlements of
the besieged city of Bialopol and then sets off to seduce the Turkish pasha
who commands the siege army. She is a self-possessed woman, an autono-
mous subject who takes her own decisions and refuses to assume a passive,
submissive role. At one point she says: “Ich bin nicht das Weib, das sich
verkriecht, während die Männer ihre Brust dem Feinde darbieten. Ich teile
mit Euch Kampf und Sieg, oder Niederlage und Tod” (I am not the
woman to creep away and hide when the men are offering their breasts to
the enemy. I will share combat and victory or defeat and death with you).24
This Judith is manlier than her husband, whom she humiliates in front of
the pasha in the same way that Hebbel’s Judith humiliated Ephraim in
front of Holofernes. Sacher-Masoch’s Judith then easily dominates the
Turk by inflaming his passions while coldly denying him consummation.

She is a domina who makes both her men suffer before killing one of
them.
In Die Jüdische Witwe (The Jewish Widow) of 1911 Georg Kaiser uses
the Judith story to focus on and ridicule female desire.25 In a play full of
black humor he presents a distant and barbaric world in which female
children are the chattels of their family. His Judith is a twelve-year-old girl,
dragged by her relatives into the temple to marry an aged, senile, and
impotent Manasse. In the second act, though married, she is still a virgin
and unhappy because of this. Her bald husband with his scraggy beard
takes his pleasure by looking on and salivating when she is in the bath. At
the same time he is on the watch for any sign that in desperation she will
take a lover. Judith suffocates him with a pillow offstage — in an almost
offhand way. She is therefore a murderess before ever she encounters
Holofernes but is also the virginal widow posited by Heine and Hebbel
and desperate to be deflowered. She makes various vain efforts to achieve
this, but finally puts on trousers and sets off for the Assyrian camp in search
of a man. Once there she actually desires Nebuchadnezar (whom Kaiser
inserts into the scene), but kills Holofernes, again almost offhandedly,
before she can lose her virginity. After she has brought his head back to
Bethulia, the Elders find, after a physical examination, that God has appar-
ently restored her virginity and declare it a miracle. She must now live
apart and honored for the rest of her life. But first she is again physically
dragged, protesting, into the temple, to be coupled this time with Jojakim,
the High Priest, who deflowers her in the Holy of Holies. If Hebbel’s
Judith was at the mercy of her hormonal reaction to the brutal Holofernes,
Kaiser’s Judith is a powerless and stupid child, in the grip first of her fam-
ily and then of her sexuality, and is therefore not an autonomous being at
all. For these nineteenth- and early twentieth-century male writers, then,
Judith is either an object of erotic fascination, a violent monster, or a pup-
pet whose heroic deed is no longer heroic. For Hebbel it is a crime of
passion and revenge, carried out on her own behalf rather than for her
people; for Kaiser it is almost an accident.
Women Writers and Judith

When women take Judith as their subject, the dominant discourse sketched
out above is of necessity their starting point. If we examine four works by
women writers between 1895 and 1921 — a novella by Maria Janitschek
(1895), a biblical drama by Anna Sartory (1907), a novel by Katharina
Gondlach (1918), and a play for an all-female cast by Rosemarie Menschick
(1921) — we see that all of them reject the eroticized version of the story,
above all the idea that Judith desired, still less had sex with, Holofernes
and that they all in various ways restore the notion of Judith as heroic.26
Janitschek is the only writer to tackle the topic of sex head-on, while the
other three repudiate any sexual connection between Judith and Holofernes.
Menschick even denies any desire on Holofernes’ part for such contact.
Sartory makes Judith into a saint, remarkable for her capacity to suffer,
Gondlach shows her as the instrument not just of the Lord but of her dead
husband — a motif to be found in Sartory’s play too. Menschick is inter-
ested in the topic of guilt, of how a good woman can kill and how, having
killed, she can live on after the deed. The link between killing and war is
made by the two of the authors — Gondlach and Menschick — writing at
the end of or just after the First World War.
In the earliest of the four works, the novella “Königin Judith” (Queen
Judith, 1895), Maria Janitschek focuses on Holofernes’ attempted seduc-
tion, leaving out completely the aspect of Judith as liberator of an embat-
tled people. Janitschek is interested in Holofernes the would-be rapist and
his death at Judith’s hands. Her Holofernes is a rich, brutal, debauched,
late nineteenth-century aristocrat called Kronios whose castle lies in the
forests south of Mostar in Bosnia. One day he catches sight of Judith, the
beautiful Jewess, a member of a despised and impoverished minority. He
has her kidnapped and brought to his fortress, where he intends to rape
her, but her sense of self protects her from his sexual games. She refuses to
wear the exotic clothes laid out for her or to drink the wine and eat the
exotic food he offers her. Her dignity is her armor. When he asks why she
refuses to wear the silk garments offered to her, for instance, she says
coldly that she has never yet worn other people’s clothes. She is articulate
because she was the pupil of a famous Syrian rabbi and she is contemptu-
ous of Kronios’s fantasies and his erotic accessories, which she sees as props
for a man lacking in real substance. The jewels he shows her tire her eyes,
she says, and the overheated rooms remind her of the dwelling of an old
man. She does not need all this luxury because she alone is enough. If she
were staging an erotic encounter, she says, she would dispense with the
props: “aber in der Mitte würde ich stehen, ich, ich ich, und der Sieg würde
vor mich hinknien und meine Füße küssen . . .” (35575; but I would stand
in the centre, I, I, I, and victory would kneel before me and kiss my feet).
Kronios demands to sleep with her. She undresses completely, even letting
her hair down, praying aloud for strength and protection as she does so.
Janitschek describes the naked Judith as clothed in a cold majesty — draw-
ing on the traditional iconography of nakedness as connoting chastity and
truth — and in her presence Kronios is impotent. She does not fear him
and so he has no hold over her, for he can only conceive of sex as the tri-
umph of the strong over the weak. He suddenly achieves a deep insight,
his “day of Damascus.” As she leaves, he gives her a pistol as protection on
her way home and learns then that she was impervious to his wooing
because, having married the man she loves a week before, she was no quiv-
ering virgin. As he accompanies her through the forest, the so-called Devil
of Mostar asks, referring to her husband: “Und er wird Dir . . . diese Nacht
. . . glauben . . .” (35582; And he will believe you . . . about this night)?
At this point Judith realizes that her husband will not believe in her chas-
tity and that she is dishonored even though she has done nothing wrong.
She shoots “jene[n] Teufel, der sie um ihr Glück gebracht hat, um ihre
verschwiegene, weiße, meertiefe Liebe, weil sie seinen Augen behagte!!”
(35583; that devil who robbed her of her happiness, of her silent, white,
love, deep as the ocean, because she pleased his eye!!). At the moment of
his death, the Devil of Mostar feels love for the first time in his life.
“Königin Judith” (Queen Judith) are his last words. He has learned that a
woman can be a person and not just a sex object but learns it too late. This
Judith kills not because one man is brutal but because all men are weak
and are incapable of believing in a woman’s virtue and strength of purpose.
Janitschek undermines the notion at the heart of Hebbel’s play that a
woman, morally and physically weak by definition, only has to see a violent
and highly sexed man to desire him, for her Judith finds Kronios ridicu-
lous. Janitschek’s Judith, however, like Hebbel’s, kills not for a heroic
motive but out of revenge.
In 1907 Anna Sartory presents the Judith story as a large-scale biblical
drama with twenty-four named characters, mostly speaking blank verse.
She takes quite a different tack from Janitschek. Instead of the latter’s
almost aggressively fearless and independent Judith, her Judith evinces
more traditional feminine virtues. She does not appear until the beginning
of the second act, standing to one side of the stage with bent head. The
Council of the Elders is coming to an end and she has just proposed some-
thing to them. What this is emerges only gradually. She calls on God to
direct her arm and the Bethulians to pray for her. Her eloquence is not
demonstrated, as in the Septuagint, by showing her castigating the faint-
hearted Bethulians; Sartory shows her instead comforting Tirza, Ozias’s
daughter. Judith tells Tirza that women are born weak but become great
through suffering, in which they show “Löwenkraft und -mut” (43; a
lion’s strength and courage). Woman is made for suffering, according to
this Judith. The last scene in the act shows Judith putting on her jewellery,
feeling as she does so the hand of her dead husband, Manasse, enfolding
her own — a typical motif whereby the woman warrior does not act as an
independent agent but is guided by father, husband, or brother.27 Before
she leaves for Holofernes’ camp, Judith prays for two things: that she shall
not be defiled but return pure to Bethulia and that she shall either be vic-
torious or die a hero’s death (“Heldentod”).
Act 3 takes us to Holofernes’ camp, where Judith is already installed
as Holofernes’ darling. He has organized a dinner at which she is the prin-
cipal guest, and here Sartory introduces the figure of Ruth, the crazed wife
of Ozias, dying of thirst, accompanied by her two small children. This
addition enables Sartory to show Judith as a mother figure, giving them

water in defiance of Holofernes, and subsequently comforting the children
and sending them back to Bethulia. Holofernes cannot understand why
Judith should care about the Jewish people, and she explains what it means
when the bond between ruler and ruled is one of love, not fear. Holofernes
drinks several cups of wine very quickly and becomes tipsy, entering his
tent to sleep it off. Judith enters the tent and kills Holofernes offstage —
all the audience hears is “ein dumpfer Hall” (75; a dull thud). In act 4
Judith arrives at the walls of Bethulia, saying that God has guided the arm
of a weak woman and she suddenly faints with exhaustion. When the
Bethulians find her, Judith repeats again and again that it was God who
did the deed, it was God’s strength, it was God who guided her arm.
Judith restores the two children to the sorrowing Ruth and is praised by
Ozias as an angel and a mother. Judith makes it very clear that nothing of
an untoward sexual nature happened to her in Holofernes’ camp: she is
still pure, which fits with the angelic character ascribed to her by Ozias.
So Sartory’s Judith kills Holofernes and saves Bethulia but is remark-
able, not for her leadership of the Bethulians, her cunning, and her seduc-
tiveness, but for her submissiveness to God’s will, her purity, her love of
her people, and her motherly qualities. It is to show the latter that the
figures of Tirza and of Ruth are introduced. Judith’s contact with
Holofernes is characterized by the majestic eloquence with which she
shows him the humane and civilized virtues of the Jews in contrast to his
own savagery. He is shown as fascinated by and attracted to her, but she
never acts the seductress with him, though it is clear that she puts on her
best jewels and clothes to meet him. In a cryptic note at the end of the play
the author says that Judith’s character, as presented in the Bible, would not
be suitable for the modern stage, which likes to cover even sacred charac-
ters with too much “glänzende[m] Erdenstaub” (97; shining earthly
dust). We can only speculate that what is meant by this is the interpretation
of the Judith story as one of sex and desire.
Katharina Gondlach’s 311-page novel, published in 1918, seeks to
make Judith’s deed comprehensible by showing us her married life, her
relationship to her husband Manasses, his trust in her, and the prophetic
vision of her future greatness that the High Priest supposedly has while
Manasses is still alive. Though Gondlach’s version is otherwise very close
to the Septuagint, she introduces a new element into the story, namely, the
idea that Manasses not only authorizes Judith’s deed but actually directs
her actions from beyond the grave. Judith has a dream in which her dead
husband appears to her and commands her: “Töte den Löwen!” (97; kill
the lion), a command she does not understand at this point. When Judith
is invited to Holofernes’ tent to dinner and she knows that he is expecting
to make love to her after having been made to wait for three days, she prays
fervently and then sees Manasses at her side:
Manasses trug in seiner Rechten ein krummes Schwert, mit Smaragd und
Rubinen die goldene Scheide geschmückt. - - Und er trat vor sie hin, zog
die furchtbare Waffe heraus. - - “Nimm und tote den Löwen,” gebot
er, - “töte den Löwen - den Holofernes. Nimm das Schwert, der Herr
befiehlt es. Und sei stark! Sei gesegnet und stark im Namen des Herrn.”
- - - (247–48)
[In his right hand Manasses bore a curved sword, whose scabbard was
decorated with emeralds and rubies. - - And he stepped before her and
drew the frightful weapon. - - “Take this and kill the lion,” he com-
manded, - “kill the lion - Holofernes. Take the sword, the Lord com-
mands it. And be strong! Be blessed and strong in the name of the Lord.”
- - -]
At the moment when she is about to chop off the head of the drunken
and by now unconscious Holofernes, Judith’s husband again directs her
actions: “Das Schwert - es schien zu rufen, - nein - nicht das Schwert, - der
Herr - war es, - nein - auch er nicht. - Manasses, - - ja, Manasses. - - Er
gebot” (269; The sword - it seemed to call her, - no - not the sword, - it
was - the Lord, - no, not Him either. - Manasses, - - yes, Manasses. - - - He
gave the orders). This Judith is not a resolute warrior but a submissive wife
carrying out her husband’s wishes. That the work was published in the last
year of the First World War may account for the resigned disgust with
which Judith regards her deed, even though it was ordained both by God
and by her dead husband. Murder is the word she uses, though the state
of war justifies the act:
Nun sah sie mit kalter Überlegung auf ihr Werk. Krieg bedeutet Mord.
Die Hauptaufgabe im Krieg ist des Führers habhaft zu werden und den
Geist, der den Feldzug leitet, aufzuheben. Ob nun die Fürsten kämpften
oder die Soldaten mit dem Schwert, oder ob durch eines Weibes
Schönheit der Feldherr durch Leidenschaft geschwächt der Hand dieses
Weibes zum Opfer fällt,- es ist gleich, - - Krieg - Kriegslist,- Es mußte
sein, und es geschah . . . “Dem Herrn sei Dank!” (271–72)
[Now she looked with cold calculation at her deed. War means murder.
The principal task in war is to capture the leader and to remove the spirit
which leads the campaign. Whether princes or soldiers fight with the
sword or whether the general, weakened by passion for a woman’s
beauty, falls victim to that woman, is all the same - - war, - the strategems
of war, - it had to be, and it came to pass . . . “Thanks be to God!”]
This Judith is credited with the eloquence she shows in the Septuagint,
chiding the Bethulians for their lack of trust in God, telling them what to
do when she has brought Holofernes’ head back to the city, and praising
God in her great song at the victory dinner. But the actual killing, even
though it is premeditated and linked to her very deliberate seduction and
hoodwinking of Holofernes, is again and again shown to be the work of

Manasses.
Rosemarie Menschick’s prose play of 1921 for a cast of seventeen
female characters centers on the ethical question of what it means to kill,
more specifically what it means for a woman to kill. All the action in
Menschick’s play takes place in Bethulia, and we are never shown the
Assyrian camp or Holofernes at all. This enables her to focus on what
makes a murderer, what constitutes guilt, whether any motive can excuse a
violent deed, how a killer lives on after the deed, and whether killing always
demands expiation of some sort on the part of the killer. The first act intro-
duces two contrasting female figures — Dalila and Judith. Dalila is jealous
of the people’s love for the compassionate Judith and above all of the love
of Benjamin, the man Dalila loves, for Judith. Menschick’s Judith has the
eloquence of an Old Testament prophet. In this act, suddenly filled with
the Lord, she addresses the despairing women of Bethulia in the words of
the Bible, foretelling the help that will come on the third day and the part
she will play in saving the city. Dalila, eaten up with jealousy and anger, falls
in with her maid Saphira’s suggestion to hurt Judith by injuring the person
she loves most in the world, her mother Salome. In the second act Judith
explains to her mother how she heard the voice of the Lord and how she
will go to Holofernes, beautifully dressed as in the days of her marriage, to
plead for the Bethulians. Her mother fears she will fall into the clutches of
the debauched Assyrian, but Judith believes that there is good in everyone
and that she will be safe. Though terrified at what she is about to do and
fearing that she is deceiving herself about Holofernes, she ultimately
accedes to God’s plan and surrenders her will to His. A cherub comes to
her as God’s mouthpiece, telling her that he does not want her to abase
herself before the heathen but that she should kill him. He hands her a
sword and Judith sees a vision of God and knows herself to be strong.
Judith’s last scene in act 2 is her farewell from her beloved mother.
In the third act Saphira, Dalila’s maid, persuades Salome’s maid
Rachel that Judith has set off to seduce Holofernes out of lust and that
Rachel should poison her mistress before she discovers her daughter’s
shameful conduct. Just as Judith returns victorious, Salome dies. Judith
has, of course, not been dishonored, for Holofernes fell into a drunken
sleep before he could so much as touch her. The last scene in this act opens
with Judith in a state of exaltation holding the bloodied sword in her hand
and praising God for making her his instrument. When she lays down the
sword, her exaltation leaves her and she realizes that she has murdered:
Wer bin ich, daß ich leidenschaftslos ihn schlug? Er sah mich nicht mit
wildem, gierigem Blicke an, bewundernd und mit Ehrfurcht ist er mir begeg-
net. Ich sah den reinen Funken leuchten ihm im Auge, ich hatt’ geglaubt an
ihn, er hat mich nicht enttäuscht — und dennoch tötete ich ihn. (33)
[What kind of a person am I that I killed him in cold blood? He did not
look at me with a wild greedy gaze; he approached me with admiration
and respect. I saw the pure spark in his eyes, I believed in him, he did not
disappoint me — and yet I killed him]
Menschick makes Judith’s dilemma here far more interesting than a

mere crime of revenge. She, a good woman, was led by God to kill a man
in cold blood. She feels overpowering guilt (“Die Furien sind hinter mir,”
34; the furies are after me) and asks how she can expiate her deed. She goes
to her mother for comfort, only to find her dead. Now she knows that this
is the sacrifice demanded of her to expiate her murder. The fourth act
shows us the other murderer, Dalila, also wracked with remorse. As in
Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell, where the murder carried out by the figure of
Parricida for an evil motive acts as a foil to the deed carried out by the
eponymous hero, here Dalila’s act in destroying Judith’s mother out of
jealousy is the evil act that contrasts with Judith’s killing of Holofernes,
which we are to see as good. Since her deed, Judith has become a kind of
saint and healer, “ein lichter Engel der Barmherzigkeit” (38; a bright angel
of mercy). When Dalila finally gets up the courage to confess her deed to
Judith, it turns out that Judith already knows what she has done and has
forgiven her, accepting her own mother’s death as punishment for her own
“crime.” In a denial of free will and moral choice, she tells Dalila: “Gottes
Wege sind nicht unsere Wege. Auch du warst nur sein Werkzeug” (46;
God’s ways are not our ways. You too were his instrument). Dalila’s mur-
der, it appears, was not her doing but God’s! Dalila wants to die as her
penance but Judith tells her that the Lord wants her to live. In a phrase
that must have resonated with an audience three years after the First World
War, Judith says: “schwere Wunden hat der Krieg geschlagen und vieler
Hände und warmer Herzen bedarf es, sie zu heilen” (46; the war has
caused many serious wounds, and many hands and warm hearts are needed
to heal them). Saphira, the maid who did the actual poisoning, appears,
having been brought by a vision of the woman she killed to drink the same
poison she gave to Salome. She dies, and Judith tells Dalila that her task
now is to live on in love and take the secret of what she did to her grave.
It was God’s will that the only other person to know of Dalila’s deed is
now dead, so it is God’s will that Dalila live. Dalila accepts and the curtain
falls. This therefore is not a play about masculinity and femininity or about
the link between sex and violence, but about what it means to kill and live
on after the deed. Menschick restores Judith’s eloquence and dignity and,
it seems at first, her courage and heroism. But in equating her slaying of
Holofernes, the enemy of the Bethulians, with Dalila’s underhand killing
of Salome by having her poisoned at third hand, Menschick undermines
the ethical message of the play. The virtuous Judith is God’s puppet, but
so, it seems, is the base Dalila: a deeply questionable notion. The only
choice women are allowed to make in this play is to accept God’s plan for
them, and to suffer in submission to His will.
Conclusion
The four works by women writers discussed above take issue with the con-
temporary understanding of the Judith story in two ways: they reject the
notion of Judith and Holofernes as lovers and of Judith longing to be
deflowered by the Assyrian enemy and they are concerned to restore Judith
as a positive, indeed heroic, figure. However, these women writers are just
as troubled as male ones by the idea of Judith as a killer, as a warrior who
efficiently slays a defenseless man with his own weapon and lives on to a
ripe old age. Our four authors, therefore, evolve a series of strategies to
cope with this problem. Janitschek represents Judith as shooting a mod-
ern-day Holofernes for having destroyed her own personal happiness, a far
less gory and physically demanding method than cutting off his head.
Gondlach shows her as carrying out the killing at the behest of her dead
husband. Sartory portrays her as in reality having the character of a moth-
erly saint, whose most egregious quality is the capacity to suffer. Menschick
depicts her as expiating her guilt by suffering the loss of her mother, mur-
dered in her turn. Even in the early twentieth century, it seems women, like
men, cannot regard the figure of Judith with anything other than unease.
Notes
1
See Henrike Lähnemann, Hystoria Judith: Deutsche Judithdichtungen vom 12. bis
zum 16. Jahrhundert (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2006), 17–23.
2
See Edna Purdie, The Story of Judith in German and English Literature (Paris:
Librairie Ancienne Honoré Champion, 1927); Otto Baltzer, Judith in der deut-
schen Literatur (Berlin and Leipzig: Walter de Gruyter, 1930); Martin Sommerfeld,
Judith-Dramen des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Juncker & Dünnhaupt,
1933); Adelheid Straten, Das Judith-Thema in Deutschland im 16. Jahrhundert:
Studien zur Ikonographie — Materialien und Beiträge (Munich: Minerva, 1983);
Mary Jacobus, “Judith, Holofernes and the Phallic Woman,” in Jacobus, Reading
Woman (London: Methuen, 1986), 110–36; Margarita Stocker, Judith: Sexual
Warrior; Women and Power in Western Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1998);
Gabrijela Mecky-Zaragoza, “Da befiel sie Furcht und Angst . . .” Judith im Drama
des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Iudicium, 2005); and Marion Kobelt-Groch, Judith
macht Geschichte: Zur Rezeption einer mythischen Gestalt vom 16. bis 19. Jahrhundert
(Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2005).
3
The Holy Bible: Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition (London: Catholic
Truth Society, 1957).
4
For a fuller explanation of this see Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly, “The Eroticization
of Judith in Early Modern German Art,” in Gender Matters: Re-reading Violence,
Death and Gender in Early Modern Literature and Culture, ed. Mara Wade
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, forthcoming). See Gabrijela Mecky-Zaragoza, “Virgo und
Virago: Zwei frühneuzeitliche Judith-Figuren im Vergleich,” Daphnis 31 (2002):
107–26.
5
Bettina Uppenkamp, Judith und Holofernes in der italienischen Malerei des
Barock (Berlin: Reimer, 2004).
6
Daniela Hammer-Tugendhat, “Judith und ihre Schwestern: Konstanz und
Veränderung von Weiblichkeitsbildern,” in Lustgarten und Dämonenpein: Konzepte
von Weiblichkeit im Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, ed. Annette Kuhn and Bea
Lundt (Dortmund: Edition Ebersbach, 1997), 343–85; here 347.
7
Horst Bredekamp, “Donatellos Judith und Michelangelos Sieger als Marksteine
subversiver Bildkunst,” in Der Liebesangriff: “Il dolche assalto”; Von Nymphen,
Satyrn und Wäldern, ed. Maria Gazzetti (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1993),
99–115.
8
Sixtus Birck, Iudith Ain Nutzliche History/ durch ain herrliche Tragœdi/ in spilß-
weiß für die augen gestelt/ Dienlichen/ Wie man in Kriegßleüfften/ besonders so man
von der ehr Gots wegen angefochten wirt/ umb hilff zů Gott dem Herren flehend
rüffen soll (Augsburg: n.p., 1539).
9
Sixtus Birck, Iudith Drama comicotragicum: Exemplum Reipublice recte institu-
tae; Unde discitur, quomodo arma contra Turcam sint capienda (Augsburg:
Ulhardus, 1539). See the excellent discussion of this by Henrike Lähnemann in her
monograph Hystoria Judith.
10
Joachim Greff, Tragödia des Buchs Judith inn Deudsche Reim verfasset
(Wittemberg: Rhau, 1536). Scenes from this are reprinted in Lähnemann, Hystoria
Judith, 453–67.
11
Mara Wade, “The Reception of Opitz’s Judith during the Baroque,” Daphnis
16 (1987): 147–65.
12
Literary and artistic treatments of the Judith theme are dealt with in much
greater detail than is possible here in Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly, Beauty or Beast? The
Woman Warrior in the German Imagination from the Renaissance to the Present
(Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010).
13
Heinrich Heine, “Horace Vernet,” in “Ich bin Judith”: Zur Rezeption eines
mythischen Stoffes, ed. Marion Kobelt-Groch (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag,
2003), 203. All translations are by the author.
14
Heine, “Horace Vernet,” 203.
15
Friedrich Hebbel, Tagebücher, in Kobelt-Groch,“Ich bin Judith,” 245.
16
Friedrich Hebbel, Mein Wort über das Drama! Eine Erwiderung an Professor
Heiberg in Kopenhagen (Hamburg: Hoffmann & Campe, 1843), in Deutsche
Literatur, vol. 1 of Digitale Bibliothek (Berlin: Directmedia Publishing, 2005),
74250–302; here 74266.
17
Hebbel, Tagebücher, 247.
18
Hebbel, Tagebücher, 245.
19
Friedrich Hebbel, Judith: Eine Tragödie in fünf Akten, in Deutsche Literatur,
vol. 1 of Digitale Bibliothek, 72820–937; here 72925.
20
Sigmund Freud, “Das Tabu der Virginität” (1918), in Kobelt-Groch,“Ich bin
Judith,” 256.
21
See the extensive discussion of Sacher-Masoch in Kobelt-Groch, Judith macht
Geschichte, 125–96. In his article “Patria und Peitsche: Weiblichkeitsentwürfe in
der deutschen Wanda-Figur des 19. Jahrhunderts,” Convivium: Germanistisches
Jahrbuch Polen (2007): 57–89, Andreas Degen argues that Sacher-Masoch depicts
not an inherently violent domina, as is usually argued, but a woman who is made
to act out a male masochist fantasy that she ultimately rejects.
22
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus im Pelz, www.zeno.org/Literatur/M/
Sacher-Masoch,+Leopold+von/Erzählungen/Venus+im+Pelz,33 (accessed 9 Jan.
2009).
23
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Judith von Bialopol, 1675 (1874), in Kobelt-
Groch, “Ich bin Judith,” 107–20.
24
Quoted in Kobelt-Groch, Judith macht Geschichte, 110.
25
Georg Kaiser, Die jüdische Witwe: Bühnenspiel in fünf Akten, in Werke, vol. 1,
ed. Walther Huder (Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, and Vienna: Propyläen, 1971).
26
Maria Janitschek, “Königin Judith,” in Lilienzauber: Novellen (1895), vol. 45 of
Deutsche Literatur von Frauen, Digitale Bibliothek (Berlin: Directmedia Publishing,
2001), 35561–81; Anna Sartory, Judith, die Heldin von Bethulia: Drama in vier
Akten (Einsiedeln, Waldshut, and Cologne: Verlagsanstalt Benziger, 1907);
Katharina Gondlach, Judith: Eine Erzählung aus vorchristlicher Zeit (Mainz:
Kirchheim, 1918); and Rosemarie Menschick, Judith: Biblisches Schauspiel in 4
Aufzügen mit nur weiblichen Rollen (Munich: Buchhandlung Leohaus, 1921). All
subsequent page references to these works are in parentheses in the text.
27
See Sarah Colvin’s discussion of this phenomenon in relation to Ulrike Meinhof
in the essay: “Witch, Amazon, or Joan of Arc? Ulrike Meinhof’s Defenders, or
How to Legitimize a Violent Woman,” in Women and Death 2: Warlike Women in
the German Literary and Cultural Imagination since 1500, ed. Sarah Colvin and
Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009), 250–72.
7: Lola Doesn’t: Cinema, Jouissance, and
the Avoidance of Murder and Death
Simon Richter
L OLA IS A CINEMATIC ANOMALY. What makes a given Lola “Lola” is her

cinegenic name. By this I mean a name that engenders a profusion of
films, each featuring a character who bears the name and shares key char-
acteristics. Lola is unique in this regard. There is no other name as prolific
in film history. In an ongoing series of some twenty films so far, beginning
with Joseph von Sternberg’s Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel, 1930),1
Lola has come to designate an individual, usually a singer and dancer,
whose persistent and self-confident sexuality understood as pleasure — her
pleasure — provokes a variety of male and female responses. Lola is a per-
sona. I use this term to emphasize the fact that Lola names no single
person. Lola is not a given name and certainly not a Christian name. It is,
on the contrary, an assumed name, a stage name, a name of choice, not
chance, and an important choice at that. Even if Lola has historical ante-
cedents — two nineteenth-century Lolas with European careers as Spanish
dancers, the notorious Lola Montez2 and the less well known Lola de
Valence3 — she is, from the beginning, a persona: a leggy pose, a cocked
head with a top hat and an attitude, a song and a dance, a wig and a
wink.
One of the things that makes Lola an anomaly is the fact that she has
been deliberately dissociated from death. Lolas don’t die and Lolas don’t
kill. In other words, for all her disruption of patriarchal and masculinist
orders, Lola is neither a femme fatale nor a femme fragile. This is reflected
in my title, “Lola Doesn’t,” with its allusion to Theresa de Lauretis’s Alice
Doesn’t.4 Given not only that Lola operates largely within the conventions
of cinema with its limited array of female representations,5 but also that
Lola arises as a cinegenic name in an era marked by spectacular and abun-
dant violence against women, this is remarkable. Maria Tatar’s study
Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany makes a strong case for the
inescapability of male aggression toward the female body during the
period of Lola’s origin.6 According to Tatar, a constellation of circum-
stances that included anxieties about the “New Woman” and the devastat-
ing experience of the First World War prompted a crisis of masculinity
registered in literature, art, and film, as well as a preoccupation with sexual
CINEMA, JOUISSANCE, AND THE AVOIDANCE OF MURDER AND DEATH 117
murder reported in gruesome detail in newspapers and journals. The

Weimar era was preceded by Wilhelmine Germany and Victorian England,
and for both of these Elisabeth Bronfen’s Over Her Dead Body shows a
necessary linkage between women and death,7 while Bram Dijkstra’s Idols
of Perversity catalogues the many negative female types common during
the period.8 Tatar speculates that “Lustmord seems [. . .] a response to the
‘bloodlust’ of male representations of sexually predatory women, the turn-
of-the-century femmes fatales.”9 How was it possible for Marlene Dietrich’s
Lola Lola in Der blaue Engel to suspend herself from the usual run of
murder and death? To escape with impunity? After all, her theatrical and
cinematic sister, Lulu, comes to a very different end. As Tatar writes:
Once Lulu deviates from the script that dictates self-effacing compliance
with the rigid cultural codes and social conventions governing femininity,
she falls prey to a variety of strategies for mortification and containment,
the most radical of which is set forth by Jack the Ripper, but all of which
point to her death.10
Let me try to persuade you that this question about Lola Lola’s immu-
nity from the cycle of murder and death is not idle, that in fact the stakes
are high. At the very least, as will become apparent, I am proposing a
revisionist reading of Der blaue Engel. More importantly, my argument
challenges the determinism of much psychoanalytically informed feminist
film criticism. Since Laura Mulvey’s canonical essay “Visual Pleasure and
Narrative Cinema,”11 Dietrich and Sternberg have been regarded as
ciphers for a long-standing tendency in mainstream cinema. The major
contention of Mulvey’s essay is that the male gaze determines the possi-
bilities of the representation of woman in film according to a psychoana-
lytic economy, with ultimate reference to castration. Essentially two modes
of looking are possible: sadistic voyeurism, which she associates with Alfred
Hitchcock, and fetishistic scopophilia, which she links to Sternberg.12
Sternberg, writes Mulvey,
produces the ultimate fetish, taking it to the point where the powerful
look of the male protagonist [. . .] is broken in favor of the image in direct
erotic rapport with the spectator. The beauty of the woman as object and
the screen space coalesce; she is no longer the bearer of guilt but a perfect
product, whose body, stylized and fragmented by close-ups, is the con-
tent of the film and the direct recipient of the spectator’s look. (VP, 43)
The erotic impact of Dietrich, she writes, “is sanctified by death” (VP, 44).
For Judith Mayne, there is not the slightest ambiguity: in her triumph,
Dietrich’s Lola Lola “has become a perfectly containable image of a tart,
a man-eater, a seductress and destroyer of men. . . . What The Blue Angel
demonstrates [. . .] is the creation of an image of woman to the measure
of male fantasy.”13
118 SIMON RICHTER
I actually have no quarrel with Mulvey, although others, notably

Gaylan Studlar and Miriam Hansen, have engaged in productive and con-
structive criticism.14 Because of the canonical status of Mulvey’s essay we
lose sight of the fact that she did not intend to erect a rigid binary struc-
ture for the interpretation of film but rather to engage in an explicitly
political assault on a mainstream cinema grounded in the “unconscious of
patriarchal society” (VP, 34) in the hope of accomplishing something else.
There should be no mistaking her polemical posture: “It is said that ana-
lyzing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this article.
The satisfaction and reinforcement of the ego that represent the high point
of film history hitherto must be attacked” (VP, 36). For her, analysis (that
is to say the analysis of cinematic pleasure, but also psychoanalysis itself) is
a means to accomplishing a specific destructive task. She desires nothing
less than “the total negation of the ease and plenitude of the narrative fic-
tion film” (VP, 36). All of this is in the service of “transcending outworn
or oppressive forms, and daring to break with normal pleasurable expecta-
tions in order to conceive a new language of desire” (VP, 36). On my
reading, Lola is the name of a sustained and global attempt, largely outside
the conventions or at least the strictures of Hollywood, to create a version
of the “new language of desire.”
Since the Dietrich/Sternberg collaboration is so crucial for Mulvey’s
attack on classic Hollywood cinema, it is not trivial that Mulvey, in contrast
to many who follow in her train, is careful not to reference Der blaue
Engel.15 The first Sternberg/Dietrich film of relevance to Mulvey is
Morocco (1931),16 Dietrich’s first American film, which was also strategi-
cally released in the United States before Der blaue Engel. As Gaylan
Studlar has shown, Morocco was specifically produced as a vehicle for intro-
ducing Marlene to an American audience as a Greta Garbo type, precisely
because the persona of Lola was not suitable.17 When Mulvey talks about
Dietrich as the “ultimate fetish” that is “sanctified by death” she explicitly
refers to Sternberg/Dietrich’s American films, from Morocco and Dishonored
(1931) to The Devil Is a Woman (1935), and implicitly excludes Der blaue
Engel. In other words, I am not reading Der blaue Engel as an origin of
Dietrich’s American career;18 I am reading it, however, as the beginning of
the trajectory of the name Lola and its decidedly non-American career.
Steven Bach has astutely noted that
Lola Lola was the last role Marlene Dietrich would ever play in her life
that was not created for her, or tailored to her measure. There was chal-
lenge and aspiration to Lola Lola that would never be there again, the
stretch she had to make as an actress to fit a role.19
I contend that Lola (not Dietrich, or only insofar as she, among others,
plays Lola) marks a cinematic possibility for the representation of female
desire and female sexual pleasure that, first, is collaboratively constructed
between an actress and the camera as an extension of the director; second,

is not limited to the concept of the fetish; and third, resolutely extracts
itself from the logic of death and murder that typically seals the desiring
woman’s fate.
Obviously it will be crucial to my argument to show that Dietrich’s
Lola is not a femme fatale, and that she does not become one (although
the femme fatale will be a key aspect of Dietrich’s American persona).
More importantly, I will have to refute Judith Mayne’s contention that
Lola Lola is a “containable image” made “to the measure of male fantasy.”
The cards seem stacked against me. Given a culture and a cinematic record
of rampant misogyny, was it possible for some directors, actors, and audi-
ences to sustain a fantasy that did not succumb to the pressures of the time
and the imperatives of gender? The evidence that accrues to the name Lola
throughout its cinematic career suggests that it was. It is important to
recognize that the fantasy of Lola is not an instance of escapism, denial, or
wish fulfillment. The very fact that Lola films are compelled to deal with
the specter of murder and death indicates just how high the stakes are. In
the final analysis, the question I am asking is whether we are willing to
admit and theorize the possibility that cinema has included the elaboration
of a fantasy that acknowledges woman’s legitimate claim to sexual pleasure
without punitive response. Properly recognized, Lola is nothing less than
the patron saint of woman’s jouissance.
Der blaue Engel

It is easy to see how critics might become confused about Lola Lola’s role
in Professor Rath’s death. Their fortunes appear to crisscross in the course
of the film: he descends from a position of respectability to ignominy and
death, while she survives with easy grace and is accorded a triumphantly
staged reprise of her signature song, intercut with Rath’s tragic return to
his classroom. Insofar as they are married and Sternberg has Lola visibly
flirting with a new man as Rath is submitted to the scorn of the hometown
audience, it seems self-evident that she is at the root of his downfall. I
would argue, however, that the film takes great pains to attenuate the link
between Lola Lola and the death of Professor Rath. If Professor Rath
slides into a ludicrous and tragic demise, it is certainly not due to any
malevolence on Lola’s part. She is straightforward, good-natured, and self-
possessed in all her dealings with Rath. Dietrich’s vaunted coldness is
entirely absent in her interactions with Emil Janning’s character. In fact,
she scintillates with unusual human warmth and spontaneous humor. This
is Dietrich actually playing Lola, not Dietrich playing Dietrich. She marries
Rath with no malicious intention other than a vain hope of improving her
station. When that does not pan out, she gamely supports the man who
120 SIMON RICHTER
stupidly sacrificed his respectable career.20 Sternberg makes sure we under-

stand this. Whenever Rath is to be found at the Blue Angel, silent clowns
shadow and confront him, though he seems oblivious to their presence.
They are mirror images of his own buffoonery. It is the cabaret troupe’s
manager, Kiepert, with an animus all his own, who presides over the
almost ritual humiliation of the professor.21 Rath’s tragicomic demise is
paradigmatic for the inadequate male response to Lola’s sexuality, a
response for which she is not responsible:
Männer umschwirr’n mich

Wie Motten um das Licht,
Und wenn sie verbrennen,
Ja dafür kann ich nichts
[Men flutter around me

Like moths around a light,
And if they burn up
I am certainly not to blame].22
I take Lola literally.

All Lola films turn on the question of how to respond to the sexuality
figured by Lola’s persona and name. As Dietrich’s Lola sings her signature
song, framed as a dialogue between her eyes and those of an admirer —
Doch wenn sich meine Augen

Bei einem vis-à-vis
Ganz tief in seine saugen
Was sprechen dann sie?
[But when my eyes

In a face-to-face
Peer deeply into his
What is it they say?] —
she presents her body not merely as a seductive and beguiling promise but
as an assertive claim to her own pleasure, regardless of consequence. She
is famously seated on a barrel and with carefully calibrated movements
exposes her inner thighs. Peter Baxter, in an essay entitled “On the Naked
Thighs of Miss Dietrich,” was probably the first to ask the question, “What
determined the choice of this pose, and what determined that it, more
than anything else in the film, would be ‘remembered,’ that is, would reap-
pear in one form or another in ensuing discourse?” (20). In answer he
offered a psychoanalytic reading with particular reliance on Freud’s con-
cept of the fetish. The repressed fantasies of Professor Rath are awakened
by the sight of Lola Lola’s legs and he fixes — as does all culture insofar
as it too has been absorbed by this image — on what Freud calls “the last
moment in which the woman could still be regarded as phallic” (21). “It
should be obvious by now,” writes Baxter,
that this pose arrests the instant of fetishization, the instant before the
child’s glimpse of the female genital organ. Lola’s leg tantalizes by almost
revealing that anatomic feature. In other words, we are at the instant
where it is still possible to believe in the maternal phallus (21).
What is really there, as he goes on to say, is “nothing, a blank, a gap, the

kind of material lacuna which Freud himself came to understand as the
formal signification of castration” (25).
For all the interpretive ingenuity of this now almost thirty-year-old
essay, the problem with Baxter’s approach is obvious. Do we really want to
buy into this characterization of female sexuality? Baxter may account for
Rath’s desire, but that is only half the story, and half the film. He is cer-
tainly right to follow Sternberg’s camera to that location on Dietrich’s
body, but wrong to discount or fail to acknowledge Lola’s desire and
Lola’s pleasure. The fact that Rath, or other viewers for that matter, per-
ceive her legs as a fetish does not mean that her legs are a fetish to Lola
herself or other viewers, female or male. There is nothing that prevents the
naked thighs as an obvious metonymy for the locus of female pleasure
from representing her assertive and legitimate claim to pleasure. Is there a
man in the house — “einen Mann, einen richtigen Mann” (a man, a real
man), to quote the song she sings as she first trains a spotlight on the
bumbling Professor Rath — who can accept that pleasure in its own right
and on its own terms — this is the urgent (and, I would say, ethical) ques-
tion that Der blaue Engel and all successive Lola films pose. The question
is not inherently fatal. The fact that it is posed and re-posed in a succession
of films indicates not only its urgency but also its appeal. Directors have
wanted to entertain the fantasy of a demanding and flourishing female
sexual desire taken on its own terms without imposing punishment.
Putting the question does not entail death directly, and this in itself is
important — Lola doesn’t die and Lola doesn’t kill — but death does
haunt the question as a possible outcome in the event of a failed or inad-
equate response.
Lolita
Instructive for understanding the mechanism of male response and its
connection to murder and death is Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita
(1955), adapted for film by Stanley Kubrick (1962)23 and Adrian Lyne
(1997).24 In all three Lolitas we observe a determined effort to strip Lola
122 SIMON RICHTER
of her mature powers, to infantilize her and to render her accessible to

phallic sexual approach. If the mature Lola persona was desirable but
intimidating, perhaps a miniature Lola, a Lolita, might be more pliable.
Of course, Lolita originates as a novel, but we must bear in mind the
permutations of her name — “She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning. She
was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dot-
ted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita”25 — and recall that
Nabokov’s Humbert pointedly states that Lolita’s mother had “features
of a type that may be defined as a weak solution of Marlene Dietrich.”26
The most revealing evidence of a telling connection between Lolita and
Lola, however, is the doubling of the name: not hers, but that of the first-
person narrator. Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert is a failed male response
to Lola Lola. We also should not forget that Nabokov eventually embraced
the idea of adapting his novel for film and wrote a screenplay at Kubrick’s
behest.27
Humbert’s fantasy turned strategy is to arrange matters such that he
can have unhindered access to his girl-child’s body without her knowing
it. In an infamous scene that plays out over several pages and perversely
replays Dietrich’s seated exposure of her inner thighs in order to reveal his
desire, Nabokov’s Humbert surreptitiously masturbates in a chair while
strenuously distracting Lolita as she sits on his lap. Readers may be
repulsed, but Humbert is, as he says,
Proud of myself. I had stolen the honey of a spasm without impairing the
morals of a minor. Absolutely no harm done. The conjurer had poured
milk, molasses, foaming champagne into a young lady’s new white purse;
and lo, the purse was intact. Thus had I delicately constructed my igno-
ble, ardent, sinful dream; and still Lolita was safe — and I was safe. What
I had madly possessed was not she, but my own creation, another fanciful
Lolita — perhaps, more real than Lolita; overlapping, encasing her; float-
ing between me and her, and having no will, no consciousness — indeed,
no life of her own.28
The persona of Humbert’s creation, his Lolita, is the precise opposite of

the Lola persona insofar as a woman (or man, for that matter) might
choose to become her. This diminutive Lola is made to the measure of his
desire, as Judith Mayne would have it, and not her own.
Humbert’s ultimate plan is to administer sedatives to both Lolita and
her mother in order to shirk his marital duties with the latter while gaining
unrestricted access to the former.29 With Charlotte’s death, it all seems
easier. He whisks Lolita off to a hotel, offers her a purple pill, and plans to
ravage her. But even in this condition, Lolita proves more resilient and
insistently herself than Humbert had reckoned:
I should have understood that Lolita had already proved to be something
quite different [. . .], and that the nymphean evil breathing through every
pore of the fey child that I had prepared for my secret delectation, would
make the secrecy impossible, and the delectation lethal.30
The imputation of evil to Lolita arises solely from Humbert’s realization

that she will not prove pliable to his desires. And indeed the tables are
turned, when the twelve-year-old Lolita, bereft of mother and now under
his guardianship, seduces him, for her purposes and her pleasure, outra-
geous as that may seem. From this point on, Lolita, however disadvan-
taged by the asymmetry of power between a male guardian and a female
minor, controls Humbert’s desire and is the guardian of her own pleasure
figured by her secret assignations with Clare Quilty, Humbert’s shadowy
doppelgänger, whose amoral cheeriness seems to derive from the culture
of Weimar Berlin.31 Humbert is the dupe of his own desire and over-
whelmed, not by any malice on Lolita’s part (all vicious designs are his
own), but by her remarkable resilience and vitality. When, years later, he
learns of Quilty’s identity, Humbert sets out to murder him in evident
self-punishment (on the assumption that Quilty is a fictional projection of
Humbert’s libidinous self). Both Kubrick and Lyne stage the murder with
extravagant and vaudevillian excess, matching and repeating as it were the
cabaret humiliation of Professor Rath at the hands of Kiepert that results
in the former’s histrionic death. And once again, this is a matter between
two men (or two aspects of masculinity), only tenuously and not causally
connected to the desire of Lola or Lolita.
Lola, Lately
It would be possible to run down the entire list of Lola films to show how
murderous lust does not affect Lola in one way or the other — she is nei-
ther the cause nor the victim —, even though each film is principally con-
cerned with the dilemma of adequately responding to the sexuality
signified by Lola’s persona and name. In Lola Montès (1955)32 Max
Ophuls sets up a jarring contrast between the glorious sensuality of the
memories of Lola shown in extended flashback and the indignities she suf-
fers in a circus setting borrowed from Frank Wedekind’s Erdgeist (Earth
Spirit, 1895).33 Ophuls is not sanguine about the costs incurred by a
woman who acts on her pleasure, but he does not call the legitimacy of her
desire into question, and what he analyzes, to paraphrase Mulvey, is not
her pleasure but the circus audience’s salacious disapprobation (and, by
extension, that of the audience of his film).34 Jacques Demy’s Lola
(1962)35 is made in homage to Ophuls and engages in a melancholy explo-
ration of the disjuncture between the fatalistic compulsions of first love
and the freedom afforded by assuming the Lola persona. Rainer Werner
Fassbinder sets his Lola (1981)36 in the midst of small-town political cor-
124 SIMON RICHTER
ruption during the German economic miracle and literally legitimizes

Lola’s desire. Her marriage to the director of the town-planning commis-
sion confers respectability on her, and the title of the local brothel
bestowed on her by her wealthy developer-lover offers her financial inde-
pendence. Taken together, they afford her license to continue her affair on
her own terms. Fassbinder certainly meant Lola as a part of his critique of
the Federal Republic, but there is no escaping the circumstance that his
Lola and her lover are played with irrepressible vitality and, in contrast to
Maria Braun and her husband, spared the catastrophic death that claims
the lives of the latter two.37
In only two instances does Lola die:38 in Lothar Lambert’s In Haßliebe
Lola (In Hate-Love Lola, 1995) and Kutlag Ataman’s Lola und Bilidikid
(Lola and Billy the Kid, 1999).39 But in both cases we are dealing with a
transgendered Lola — a transvestite performer who has assumed the name
and persona and the attendant gender complications, exacerbated by issues
of ethnicity, and these lead to her death. Lothar Lambert, a Berlin hybrid
of early John Waters and his pet actor, the plump transgendered Divine,
plays his own Lola, a washed-up nightclub singer, who falls in love with a
Moroccan medical student and commits suicide. Lola und Bilidikid focuses
on the complications that arise from homosexuality within Turkish-
German culture. The vivacious transgendered Lola is murdered by her
brother, though suspicion rests on three young neo-Nazis. They become
the targets of the wrath of her lover, Bili, whose insistent masculinity is
tragically paired with his queer desire — he has been trying to pressure
Lola into undergoing a sex-change operation and returning to rural
Turkey as his wife. That Lola spectacularly dies in these transgendered Lola
plots underscores the fact that in all other Lola films Lola doesn’t.
Instead of continuing in this summary fashion, I want to spend the
remainder of this essay focusing on three recent Lolas that grapple most
intensely, explicitly, and appositely with the haunting specter of death:
Tom Tykwer’s Lola rennt (Run Lola Run, 1998);40 Zu Zhou (Curse of
Lola, 2005),41 by a young Chinese woman director, Hong Li; and Félix et
Lola (Felix and Lola, 2001)42 by the well-known arthouse director Patrice
Leconte. As they are some of the most recent Lolas, their stories cast light
on the status of the question regarding Lola’s claim to sexual pleasure
around the year 2000. Remarkably, each of these films deals explicitly with
the threat of murder and death.
On the face of it, Tykwer’s and Franka Potente’s Lola may not seem to
fit the Lola paradigm — Lola is not a dancer, is not a singer, and does not
work in a nightclub. However, if we take into account her flamboyant red
hair and the fact that she sings the songs that accompany her athletic run-
ning through the streets of Berlin, it becomes apparent that Tykwer’s Lola
is the persona of Lola and Berlin is her stage. As an embodied persona,
some seventy years after Sternberg and Dietrich created the original Lola
Lola, Potente’s Lola is bent on repairing the broken masculinity that has
inadvertently resulted from Lola’s sexual stance. Dietrich’s classic pose is
set in motion, the finely calibrated movements of her thighs transformed
into the tirelessly pumping legs of Franka Potente. Let us further note that
Sternberg figured Rath’s punctiliousness and his unusual departure from
the same with the image of an exorbitant and imposing clock. Clocks
abound in Lola rennt, from the terrifying clock in the opening sequence to
the clock at the supermarket and the clock in the casino, as well as its visual
counterpart, the roulette wheel. The point is that Lola’s unusual lateness is
a contributing factor to her boyfriend Mani’s desperate situation, and she
has precisely twenty minutes to save him from murder and death. In other
words, Lola rennt is framed in such a way as to address remediatively the
dilemma that has accompanied the assertion of Lola’s sexuality all along.
Lola is not Mani’s fetish — he is too intently focused on the clock face and
his impending death. Lola’s song and dance are not confined to a stage but
rather engulf the film in the form of her purposeful running and the accom-
panying music. The stakes are high, the situation is dire, and Lola fails twice
before getting it right. In the first instance she is shot; in the second he is
run over by an ambulance. In the film’s enabling conceit, through sheer
force of will, she sets things in motion a second and a third time, trumping
death. Only the third time round does she get things right, even to the
point of redeeming and saving her dying father, who is in the ambulance
that previously killed Mani. Serious doubts from feminist quarters remain
concerning the self-serving male fantasy of a redemption of masculinity
through Lola that, once achieved, again consigns her to oblivion. What
counts? The last words of the duet sung by Franka Potente and male voice
with its truncated last line sung by the male, “Ich brauch dich doch auch
nicht mehr” (But I don’t need you anymore either), or the surplus money
contained in the bag she clutches, the last image of the film?43
Hong Li’s Zu Zhou is the complementary opposite of Lola rennt. As
Hong Li is both the first woman director of a Lola film and the first Asian
and non-Western director, her intervention is particularly noteworthy. She
is also the first to conceive of the Lola material in the form of a psycho-
logical thriller, a cross between Sternberg and Roman Polanski. The film
concerns a dance group preparing an avant-garde performance simply
called “Lola.” This is already a marked shift from the world of nightclub
and brothel to the milieu of high culture. Several young women dancers
compete for the coveted title role in a company managed and directed by
a woman. Technical direction and stage lighting are provided by an older
man, Zhen Yu, who has had relationships in the past with the manager and
the dancer selected to play Lola, and is now in a relation with yet another,
the young Tian. His privileged observer position above the audience
among the banks of lights, as well as his solicitous attention to his young
aspiring protégée, mark him as both a Professor Rath and a Humbert. The
126 SIMON RICHTER
mystery begins when the past girlfriend who is cast as Lola is poisoned in
her dressing room on opening night; in the competition to fill the newly
available role, Tian emerges the winner, but both she and Zhen Yu come
under suspicion, and also suspect each other.
It is evident that the choice of the name Lola is not arbitrary. Allusions
to key films in the Lola corpus abound: to Der blaue Engel, Max Ophuls’s
Lola Montès, the Lolas of Jacques Demy and Fassbinder, but most pro-
foundly to Lola rennt. If Fassbinder notably employed garish lighting to
mark the identities of Lola (red) and von Bohm (blue), the Professor Rath
figure in his 1981 film, then Tykwer’s Lola rennt is given over to Lola’s
“redness” (from her hair and the telephone to the postcoital space that
signifies Lola’s and Mani’s relationship, bathed in red light), and the
strenuous efforts on Lola’s part to overcome the dilemma. In Hong Li’s
film, the color red appears throughout: in the wig of the dancer playing
Lola, the blood of several victims, and the lighting at the conclusion of
Tian’s performance of the part of Lola. Of equal importance, however, is
the persistent blue lighting associated with Zhen Yu’s home. When we take
into account that Zhen Yu dies when he suicidally plummets from an
imposing clock tower, after the camera has circled first Tian and then him-
self in Ophulsian fashion, and that his dying body takes the position of the
expiring Mani from the second run-through of Lola rennt, it becomes
evident that Hong Li has been most concerned with exploring the position
of Professor Rath.44 Indeed, her representation of Lola has been dimin-
ished from persona to role with no evident connection to the person play-
ing it. This is reinforced by the fact that the actresses playing the dancers
vying for the role of Lola retain their actual names. From the fragments of
performance the viewer witnesses, one gathers that the “Lola” performed
by the dance company is a narrative of sexualized encounters resulting in
the murder of the male partner with a gruesome knife — almost a reversal
of the fate of Lulu at the hands of Jack the Ripper (in Wedekind’s play and
Pabst’s adaptation). If Lola murders her lover in a dance performance
within a film directed by a woman director, does that make Lola a femme
fatale or is it a ritualized act of revenge that subsequently spills over into
the lives of Tian and Zhen Yu, laying claim to the latter’s life while sparing
the former from any blame? If anyone kills Zhen Yu, it is the director
Hong Li and certainly not Tian’s Lola. As Zhen Yu dies, he dissolves into
the whiteness of the screen, while Tian takes her place as a mediating relay
between the audience and a blue image of apocalyptic destruction — a
tornado wreaking havoc on an urban skyline. Masculinity’s inability to
respond adequately to Lola is modulated into a nihilistic melancholy not
unlike the musical and cinematic strains of aesthetic bliss realized in Lyne’s
adaptation of Lolita.45
Patrice Leconte’s Félix et Lola seems to begin with a scene of murder.
A young man who will later be identified as Félix sits in a nightclub called
the Blue Sunset, awash in red light, listening to an older male singer — not
the Blue Angel caberet, not Dietrich, but allusive enough. There is a
revolver in his hand; he aims it at the singer and fires. Cut and flashback
to the bumper-car floor of a traveling carnival, where an unlikely waiflike
Lola seated in one of the bumper cars listlessly submits to being jolted by
the playful aggression of surrounding drivers. After pointed scenes involv-
ing carnival rides as visual metaphors for erotic interaction in Ophuls’s Lola
Montès46 and especially Demy’s Lola,47 Leconte’s conceit is perfect. Félix,
it turns out, is the director of the carnival and manages the bumper-car
ride. Lola’s remarkable passivity and vulnerability capture his attention and
so their relationship begins.48
Lola cultivates an air of mystery about her, intimating that danger
threatens, and apparently testing Félix’s loyalty. The older man whom we
saw as a nightclub singer seems to be observing them, even stalking her,
and the film is fraught with impending violence. When Félix is beaten by
three anonymous assailants, Lola tends to his wounds and a love scene
ensues. In post-coital conversation not unlike in the intermittent scenes in
Lola rennt, Lola asks Félix if he could kill himself for love. On Félix’s birth-
day, she surprises him by riding unhelmeted on a motorcycle piloted by a
stunt driver who centrifugally ascends the walls of a circular space, visually
recalling the close-up of the revolving roulette wheel of Lola rennt.
Leconte’s Lola is also prepared to seize her chance, to make her gamble.
To his concerned comment “You could have died,” Lola responds, “I
would have. For you.” Against the backdrop of birthday festivities involv-
ing the crew of the carnival and in allusion to the wedding scene of Der
blaue Engel, Lola reports in exhilarated but hushed tones that the older
man, a former lover, continues to stalk her and that she is being refused
access to her child Camille. As long as he exists, Lola and Félix will not be
happy. She asks Félix to murder him.
Félix does not kill the nightclub singer. As Félix listens to him singing
in apparent anticipation of the deed visualized at the beginning of the film,
Lola appears at his table and summons him from the nightclub. Félix is
angry and shows her that he had no intention of killing the singer. He had
removed the bullets from the gun. The dimensions of the charade are
revealed to him in Lola’s confession at a dark table back at the carnival.
There is no Camille. Throughout her life, Lola has fabricated melodra-
matic circumstances in order to lend her vapid middle-class origins some
substance. Flirting with death seemed a way to make her life real. Even her
name is not Lola. True to his name, Félix offers this Lola, who is no Lola,
happiness. In a final, redemptive exchange they determine to “make
Camille.”
Concluding as I have with these three films, it may seem that the pos-
sibilities of Lola’s persona have run their course, that the trajectory of Lola
has come to its logical end, that the dilemma and promise posed by female
128 SIMON RICHTER
sexual pleasure and figured by Lola have nonetheless fallen into familiar
patterns, an anomaly no longer. None of the recent Lolas we have sur-
veyed lays claim to the exuberant sexuality of her predecessors. But, of
course, this is not the case. These are but three of a recent barrage of Lola
films, and more are almost certainly in the offing. The desperate tragi-
comic clownishness of the male response fatally embodied in Professor
Rath, Humbert Humbert, and Zhen Yu is only one possibility. The tenu-
ousness of Hong Li and Leconte’s Lola, the “looseness” of fit between the
biography of the woman and the name she has come to bear, should be
understood as both the persisting difficulty of asserting Lola’s position
and the continued desire to do so, even if under increasingly fraught, but
different, circumstances. At the beginning of the twenty-first century,
Lola’s stance is still difficult to sustain. In all three instances the contem-
porary Lola involves an elaborate negotiation with murder and death. We
may not be edified by the course of the negotiations or the nature of the
alternately reparative and vengeful fantasies the films indulge. Yet two
inescapable facts remain: first, Lola continues to be the name under which
the possibility of representing the legitimate claim of female sexual desire
is explored, and, second, for all Lola’s proximity to murder and death,
Lola doesn’t die and Lola doesn’t kill. Lola is still not a femme fatale and
not a femme fragile.
Lest it seem that the original vitality and resilience of the cinematic
fantasy known as Lola has virtually succumbed to recent cultural pressures
such as repairing wounded male egos or been compromised by internal-
ized feelings of guilt, allow me to point to one more film in which Lola
certainly does not die and does not kill. In this film we find a different and
collaborative response that resides with the camera in its interplay with the
actress, not for the benefit of scopophilic fetishism, but for the representa-
tion of the legitimate claim of female sexual pleasure. In the same year that
Lola rennt appeared, Tinto Brass, the Italian director of intelligent erotic
films, completed Monella (Frivolous Lola, 1998).49 His Lola, set in rural
northern Italy in the 1950s, strikes me as the most insightful response to
date to Der blaue Engel and the question of Lola’s pleasure. Lola is an
impulsive young woman, the daughter of Zaira, a woman who lives with
Señor André, who may or may not be Lola’s father. Lola is engaged to
Tomasso, the son of the village baker, and she is eager to lose her virginity
to him — she views it as an obstacle to the pursuit of pleasure. André in
the meantime meets regularly with a photographer friend to savor a stud-
ied connoisseurship of female beauty with particular emphasis on the pos-
terior. Part of the brilliance of Brass’s film is the fact that he explores the
family romance, what Freud would call the Oedipal situation, with the
cards stacked in favor of the female members of the triangle and without
trading on any concept of castration. Lola’s mother withholds the identity
of Lola’s father in order to keep André’s vibrant desire in check at least
with respect to her daughter (on the correct assumption that he would be
reluctant to commit incest), while Lola for her part is intrigued by the
cultivated aesthetic camaraderie of André and his friend. By film’s end her
goal of marriage is achieved. But marriage is not a bond that shackles her
— on the contrary, marriage and the loss of virginity are the condition for
the pursuit of an epicurean life.
The first shots of Lola show her on a bicycle. The bicycle is an occa-
sion for exhibitionist behavior — Dietrich’s inner thighs or, rather, Anna
Ammarati’s buttocks — on wheels — the mobility of Franka Potente
crossed with the calculated exposure of Dietrich. The camera almost
immediately reveals an impertinence to match Lola’s. The close-up of
Anna’s buttocks matches Sternberg’s close-up of Dietrich’s legs. While
the narrative of her quest to be deflowered is amusing and subjects her
uncooperative fiancé to a degree of humiliation that places him in the line
of clownish dupes starting with Professor Rath, the truly interesting
strand of the film involves Lola’s incursions into the space of André’s
sexual connoisseurship. When Lola settles down on her bed to masturbate
— a scene that I would identify as the counterpart of the signature song-
and-dance numbers of numerous Lolas — Brass’s camera draws unspeak-
ably close to the place where her pleasure resides. We are, to speak plainly,
at the nexus of Lola’s thighs. However, intercut images, snippets of reality
already encountered, increasingly coalesce into the masturbatory fantasy
that allegorically represents Lola’s desire. Her fantasy is the primal scene:
André taking her mother from behind, observed from two corners by
herself and André’s companion, while André holds a camera. Brass brings
Sternberg’s camera, the signifier of the director’s adequate response to
Lola’s pleasure, into the frame. Lola’s masturbatory fantasy is capacious
enough to assume both, indeed all, positions, and leads in due course to
orgasm.
Lola’s desire for André — or something André stands for and seems
to promise and withhold at the same time — leads her to make a bet with
him. Should she ever succeed in seducing Tomasso and marrying him, she
will offer herself sexually to him, that is, to André: the loss of her virginity
will vouchsafe this freedom. She does succeed and a wedding takes place,
the Italian counterpart to the wedding scene in Fassbinder’s Lola, as well
as the wedding scene in Der blaue Engel with all its allusions to cuckoldry.
Withdrawing to her room on a pretext, she is soon joined by André,
whose wedding gift to her is membership in his “Joie de vivre” club, sig-
nified by a bracelet. For her part Lola seems determined to see that she
pays her bet, an offer André respectfully declines. Understanding the cir-
cumstances of their newly founded relationship, she offers him a souvenir
of her wedding and lifts her dress for his response, exposing her legs and
the locus of her pleasure. The words he utters say it all: Lola Lola. It is a
simple repetition, not unmotivated. But it forges an immediate connec-
130 SIMON RICHTER
tion to Sternberg and Dietrich’s Lola and rewrites the possibility of a

relationship between male desire and the desire associated with the name
Lola. That relationship is grounded in mutual respect for the pleasures of
sexuality.
Let me sum up. I have argued that Lola is a cinematic anomaly. Lola
is typically a singer and dancer. Her name is inscribed in a pose — arms
akimbo, legs wide — and its variations: the nostalgic coyness of Demy’s
Lola, the bicycle of Brass’s Lola, the running legs of Franka Potente. She
is the patron saint of feminine jouissance: sexual pleasure unconstrained
by phallic determination. This is why her legs are her most significant
body part — not her breast or any other part. As the variety of male-
positioned responses indicates, two main outcomes are possible. One is
patterned on the tragicomic downfall of Professor Rath and involves
murder and death, although not at the hands of Lola. The other avoids
murder and death and is linked to the camera in its attention to the ful-
crum of pleasure, not in order to take possession of it — this is unthink-
able — but in order to collaboratively participate in its production. All
that is required is the right attitude on the part of both partners: a cheer-
ful, non-moralizing regard for jouissance. Lola is a persona, a position, a
promise, and a performance. If we know about Lola, it is because of
cinema. Certainly, there are novels, songs, and paintings that have Lola
as their subject. But only the camera, that is to say the director, in col-
laboration with the actress, can project the performance of the promise
of pleasure that is signified by Lola’s name.
Notes
1
Der blaue Engel, dir. Joseph von Sternberg (Germany: Universum Films,
1930).
2
Starting from ordinary lower-middle-class origins, Eliza Gilbert, as she was bap-
tized, took the name Lola and used her sexuality and prevaricating charm to rise
to world renown as a “Spanish” dancer, the lover of composers (Liszt), writers
(Dumas), and kings (Ludwig of Bavaria). For a detailed account, see Bruce
Seymour, Lola Montez: A Life (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1996).
3
Lola de Valence was the primary dancer of the Camprubi dance company, whose
members danced with the Royal Theater of Madrid on a European tour in the
1860s. Eduard Manet saw her in Paris in 1862 and she posed for him at his studio.
His striking portrait captured the fancy of Baudelaire, who wrote a quatrain that
found its way into Les fleurs du mal (1857).
4
As de Lauretis explains in her preface, “Alice doesn’t” signifies “the unqualified
opposition of feminism to existing social relations, its refusal of given definitions
and cultural values,” as well as the affirmation of “the political and personal ties of
shared experience that join women in the movement and are the condition of
feminist work, theory and practice.” Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism,
Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984), vii.
5
It should be pointed out that the majority of Lola films are international and not
Hollywood-produced. In other words, the possibilities for representation and the
parameters of fantasy are less circumscribed. Hollywood has never succeeded in
producing a Lola film on her terms, although not for lack of trying. I should men-
tion that the PCA (the Production Code Administration which imposed a con-
servative Catholic worldview on Hollywood cinema from 1934 to 1968) required
that any intimation of sex outside marriage be punished within the film’s narrative.
Impunity was not an option.
6
Maria Tatar, Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Cinema (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton UP, 1995). See also Beth Irwin Lewis, “Lustmord: Inside the Windows
of the Metropolis,” in Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar
Culture, ed. Katharina von Ankum (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: U of
California P, 1997), 202–32.
7
Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic
(Manchester and New York: Manchester UP/Routledge, 1992).
8
Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle
Culture (New York and London: Oxford UP, 1986).
9
Tatar, Lustmord: Sexual Murder, 10.
10
Tatar, Lustmord: Sexual Murder, 11; my italics.
11
Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16.3 (1975):
6–18. This essay has often been anthologized. My citations come from Feminism
and Film, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2000), 34–47.
Further reference to this work will be given in the text using the abbreviation VP
and the page number.
12
It may be indicative that Hitchcock becomes an honorary citizen of Weimar
Germany in Maria Tatar’s argument about violence against women while Sternberg
deserves no mention. See Tatar, Lustmord: Sexual Murder, 7 and 35–40.
13
Judith Mayne, “Marlene Dietrich, The Blue Angel, and Female Performance,”
in Seduction and Theory: Readings of Gender, Representation, and Rhetoric, ed.
Dianne Hunter (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1989), 28–46; here 37.
14
Gaylan Studlar develops the masochistic aspect of the gaze, which is elided by
Mulvey. See “Masochism and the Perverse Pleasures of the Cinema,” in Kaplan,
Feminism and Film, 203–25. Miriam Hansen explores the notion of female spec-
tatorship in relation to male icons such as Valentino. See “Pleasure, Ambivalence,
Identification: Valentino and Female Spectatorship,” in Kaplan, Feminism and
Film, 226–52.
15
To give just one example of the inaccuracy of citation to which Mulvey has been
subjected, Richard W. McCormick writes: “Mulvey may have been right to call
Sternberg’s version of Lola Lola the ‘ultimate fetish’ in patriarchal cinema”;
McCormick, Gender and Sexuality in Weimar Modernity (New York: Palgrave,
2001), 125. But, of course, Mulvey said no such thing.
16
Morocco, dir. Joseph von Sternberg. (USA: Paramount, 1931).
132 SIMON RICHTER
17
Gaylan Studlar, “Marlene Dietrich and the Erotics of Code-Bound Hollywood,”
in Dietrich Icon, ed. Gerd Gemünden and Mary R. Desjardins (Durham and
London: Duke UP, 2007), 211–38.
18
That is what Elizabeth Bronfen does in “Seductive Departures of Marlene
Dietrich: Exile and Stardom in The Blue Angel,” in Gemünden and Desjardins,
Dietrich Icon, 119–40.
19
Steven Bach, Marlene Dietrich: Life and Legend (New York: Da Capo P, 2000),
120.
20
The bizarre 1959 English-language remake of Der blaue Engel, directed by
Edward Dmytryk and starring May Brit, confirms this. Dmytryk spells out what is
implied when he has his Lola Lola deliberately perform the scene of her unfaithful-
ness in order to bring Professor Rath to his senses. By the same token, Dmytryk
refrains from killing his Professor Rath. The Blue Angel, dir. Edward Dmytryk
(USA: 20th Century Fox, 1959).
21
Peter Baxter identifies him as the “Freudian father.” Baxter, “On the Naked
Thighs of Miss Dietrich,” Wide Angle 2.2 (1978): 18–25. Subsequent references
to this essay will be indicated parenthetically.
22
All translations are by the author.
23
Lolita, dir. Stanley Kubrick. (UK: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1962).
24
Lolita, dir. Adrian Lyne. (USA: Guild, 1997).
25
Vladimir Nabokov, The Annotated Lolita, ed. Alfred Appel, Jr. (New York:
Vintage, 1991), 9.
26
Nabokov, The Annotated Lolita, 37.
27
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita: A Screenplay (New York: Vintage, 1997).
28
Nabokov, Lolita, 62.
29
Nabokov, Lolita, 94.
30
Nabokov, Lolita, 124–25.
31
While other characters seem constrained by American prudishness or old-world
guilt, the guilt-free hijinks of Clare Quilty hark back to the sexually liberal culture
of the Weimar era, captured in Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories (1946), for
example.
32
Lola Montès, dir. Max Ophuls (France and West Germany: Gamma Film, 1955).
33
Wedekind’s Lulu plays (Erdgeist and Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora’s Box,
1904)) were adapted by G. W. Pabst as Die Büchse der Pandora (Germany: Nero
Film, 1929). Pabst dispensed with the circus framework.
34
Kaja Silverman writes insightfully about the difference between the circus and
the flashbacks in The Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford UP, 1983), 226–30.
35
Lola, dir. Jacques Demy (Italy and France: Rome Paris Films, 1962).
36
Lola, dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder (West Germany: Rialto Film, 1981).
37
Die Ehe der Maria Braun (The Marriage of Maria Braun), dir. Rainer Werner
Fassbinder (West Germany: Albatros Filmproduktion, 1979).
38
I am excepting Lolita, who is reported to have died in childbirth at the end of
the novel and both film adaptations, but not as a direct consequence of her rela-
tionship with Humbert Humbert.
39
In Haßliebe Lola, dir. Lothar Lambert (Germany, 1995). Lola und Bilidikid, dir.
Kutlag Ataman (Germany: Boje Buck Produktion, 1999). The scholarship on these
films is sparse. For Lambert see Jeffrey Peck, “The Films of Lothar Lambert,” in
Gender and German Cinema: Feminist Interventions, vol. 1: Gender and
Representation in New German Cinema, ed. Sandra Frieden et al. (Providence, RI,
and Oxford: Berg, 1993), 225–40. For Ataman, see Christopher Clark,
“Transculturation, Transe Sexuality, and Turkish Germany: Kutlag Ataman’s Lola
und Bilidikid,” German Life and Letters 59.4 (2006): 555–72.
40
Lola rennt, dir. Tom Tykwer (Germany: X-Filme Creative Pool, 1998).
41
Zu Zhou, dir. Hong Li (Hong Kong: Media Asia Films, 2005).
42
Félix et Lola, dir. Patrice Leconte (France: Ciné B, 2001).
43
These questions are raised most urgently by Ingeborg Majer O’Sickey,
“Whatever Lola Wants, Lola Gets (Or Does She?): Time and Desire in Tom
Tykwer’s Run Lola Run,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 19.2 (2002):
123–31.
44
Interestingly, the apparent suaveness of Zhen Yu is compromised by his heavily
accented Cantonese, almost recalling the play of accents in Der blaue Engel, espe-
cially the English version shot parallel to the German. On Sternberg’s English-
language version of Der blaue Engel, see Patrice Petro, “The Blue Angel in
Multiple-Language Versions: The Inner Thighs of Miss Dietrich,” in Gemünden
and Desjardins, Dietrich Icon, 141–61.
45
“Aesthetic bliss” is a term that Nabokov coins in “On a Book Entitled Lolita,”
in The Annotated Lolita, 314. Adrian Lyne transfers Nabokov’s aesthetic bliss to
Humbert Humbert and associates it with a melting version of Mahleresque chords
that echoes Luchino Visconti’s use of the same in Death in Venice (1971).
46
I am thinking of the recurring shots of the carousel in Max Ophuls’s La Ronde
(France: Films Sacha Gordine, 1950).
47
In Demy’s Lola, first love happens during and is represented by a variety of
circus rides.
48
Lisa Downing offers a fine reading of Félix et Lola in Patrice Leconte (Manchester
and New York: Manchester UP, 2004), 113–16. She notes how “the refusal to film
Gainsbourg’s body [the person who plays Lola] as an object for pleasurable con-
templation and cinematic fetishism is paralleled at the diegetic level by Félix’s
refusal to engage in the film noir game of decoding the woman-enigma” (114).
49
Monella, dir. Tinto Brass (Italy: C.R.C., 1998).
8: Death, Being, and the Place of Comedy
in Representations of Death
Stephanie Bird
I N SECULAR THOUGHT, RELIGIOUS UNDERSTANDINGS of death as a transi-

tion to a new life, as a stage within a morally meaningful process, func-
tion as cultural narratives that, as well as offering a foundation for a
particular ethical system, also provide a comfort of sorts: death is not final,
and the meaning of life is not defined by the bare, finite life of the body. It
is fascinating to observe, then, how many modern philosophers are unwill-
ing to understand death as simply the biological demise of an individual
organism, part of the ethically indifferent natural process of reproduction
and evolution. Thus, for example, Simon Critchley argues that “if (and this
is a vast qualification) death is not just going to have the character of a brute
fact, then one’s mortality is something in which one has to find a mean-
ing.”1 And even with his positive engagement with biology Gilles Deleuze
“is keen to avoid [. . .] a purely geneticist account of evolution as well as a
DNA mythology.”2 Critchley’s phrase “if death is not just going to have”
is a contemporary expression of a more general reluctance amongst many
post-Nietzschean philosophers to accept the meaning of life provided by
evolution and genetics, which, ethically, offers no meaning to life at all,
even though they acknowledge the loss of transcendental guarantees of
meaning. So death does not remain a “brute fact,” “just” death. Rather
death has, in different ways, been fundamental to much twentieth-century
thought, including the work of Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas,
Maurice Blanchot, and in psychoanalysis, where its complex and central
structuring relation to existence is asserted and explored. For these thinkers
our anxious relation to the horror of finitude takes on particular signifi-
cance for understanding being, subjectivity, and ethics. Yet the loss of tran-
scendental certainty, along with the perceived inadequacy of the scientific
account of death for thinking about meaning and ethics need not result in
death having ascribed to it a fundamental and traumatic role when consid-
ering life. Deleuze, for example, is also interested in exploring the ethical
potential of life beyond a strict biological definition, but in his work it is the
primary emphasis on life that then leads to a reconceptualization of death.
The way in which death has been theorized in relation to life has inter-
esting implications for thinking about gender and the representation of
DEATH, BEING, AND THE PLACE OF COMEDY 135
death. This is a vast field, and far from attempting a basic systematic
account of the relationship between death, representation, and gender, I
shall analyze aspects of the relationship that I consider particularly stimu-
lating. I look at responses to Heidegger’s view of death as solitary, and the
implications for gender of an emphasis on human interrelatedness and
community. I examine the tension between philosophical abstraction and
lived experience, as well as the important question of the pleasure of rep-
resentation. Leading on from this I conclude by raising the question of
comedy’s role in representing death with reference to the humorous ele-
ments of Ingeborg Bachmann’s Das Buch Franza (1995).3
The Dread of Death

A fascinating legacy of Heidegger’s work is the concern with his idea that
death is “Da-sein’s ownmost potentiality-of-being.”4 In his discussion of
the nature of Da-sein, Heidegger emphasizes community and relatedness
as vital for structuring Da-sein, for one is always already born into an envi-
ronment. However, it is Da-sein’s existence as “being towards death”
(BaT, 233) that enables us to live authentically. It is through anxiety that
Da-sein breaks through the inauthentic existence of conforming to others’
expectations, for in anxiety Da-sein is confronted with the reality of death,
with nothingness, and is aware of its finitude. Only through this realiza-
tion, achieved through anxiety, and not by observing at second hand the
deaths of others, will Da-sein recognize the possibility for authentic exist-
ence, recognize the unique possibilities that it is free to choose. Da-sein’s
confrontation with death through anxiety cannot be substituted by the
experience of the death of another: “As the end of Da-sein, death is the
ownmost nonrelational, certain, and, as such, indefinite, and not to be
bypassed possibility of Da-sein” (BaT, 239). Thus, although Heidegger con-
ceives of Da-sein as constituted both through being with others and as
“being towards death,” Brent Adkins argues that Heidegger ultimately
privileges the latter in determining Da-sein;5 his privileging arises from his
grounding of spatiality in temporality: “The constitution of Da-sein and its
modes of being are ontologically possible only on the basis of temporality”
(BaT, 335). So “even though Heidegger considers being with others as
essential to Dasein’s being, insofar as it is spatial, it must be seen as
grounded in temporality. The internal self-relation of death must ground
spatial relations, such as being with others.”6
Adkins continues by arguing that Heidegger’s emphasis on Da-sein’s
own grounding in temporality also results in his unwillingness to explore the
relationship between community and death (70). Heidegger’s conceptuali-
zation of Da-sein’s productive, constituting relation exclusively to its own
death, for which the relation to the deaths of others can be no substitute, is
136 STEPHANIE BIRD
considered by many to be a crucial shortcoming of his work. Like Adkins,

many critics insist that our response to and understanding of death can never
be separated from its social dimension. Simone de Beauvoir points out that
the knowledge of mortality cannot be solely subjective but depends on
“adopting the outsider’s view of me,”7 and Robert C. Solomon too resists
what he terms the “morbid solipsism” of much philosophical discourse on
death, insisting on the importance of “social experience. I want to live
because of other people. I want to live because I love, because I am steeped
in my projects — social projects.”8 He argues that it is not necessarily the
case that we are most horrified by our own death, but that many people, for
example, regard the death of their own child as more tragic. Linnell Secomb
specifically links the social experience of death with femininity. She argues
that women have traditionally lived much more closely with death than
men, since they have been allotted the roles of carers and grievers. She uses
this point to characterize community as feminine, and the focus on the uni-
versal individual subject as masculine, ascribing Heidegger’s abstractions to
“a limited masculine understanding of death.”9
Secomb’s attention to gender and women’s experiences of death
points to important feminist concerns about universal abstractions that
deny the specificity of experience. I shall return to the crucial question of
the experience of death later in the chapter but wish first to show that a
consideration of death in relation to otherness does not in itself involve a
reappraisal of gender. Such a move is offered in the work of Levinas, who
fundamentally refutes Heidegger’s ontology, the assertion of the primacy
of the self’s ethical relation to the other and with it the denial of death as
a force that constitutes the self’s possibilities. Levinas agrees with
Heidegger that death is ungraspable, for it cannot be experienced and as
such remains always utterly alien. It can therefore not be assumed as in any
way “mine”:
My death comes from an instant upon which I can in no way exercise my

power. I do not run up against an obstacle which at least I touch in that
collision, which, in surmounting or in enduring it, I integrate into my
life, suspending its alterity. Death is a menace that approaches me as a
mystery.10
Far from being an “event of freedom,” from constituting the “supreme

lucidity and [. . .] supreme virility” of Heidegger’s being-towards-death,11
for Levinas death is the cause of suffering: the subject “finds itself
enchained, overwhelmed, and in some way passive” (TO, 71). The abso-
lute alterity of death means that the relation to death is beyond the sub-
ject’s possibilities. It is a relation that cannot be reduced to self-presence;
the subject’s solitude is shattered by death (TO, 74). This is the crucial
point that marks the subject as ethical, as constituted in relation to alterity:
“The facticity of dying structures the self as Being-for-the-other, as substi-
tution, which also means that death is not revealed in a relation to my

death but rather in the alterity of death or the death of the other.”12
Although Levinas’s emphasis on absolute otherness has been of great
interest to feminist critics, his work remains problematic. His use of the
term “virile” to describe being-towards-death triggers the hope that his
critique of ontology and his insistence on the subject as being-for-the-
other in his encounter with death will involve a positive reevaluation of the
feminine. But Levinas instead replaces what he sees as Heidegger’s virile,
solipsistic masculinity with a different, and this time suffering and rela-
tional, masculinity.13 Thus the “love of the father for the son accomplishes
the sole relation possible with the very unicity of another; and in this sense
every love must approach paternal love” (TI, 279). Luce Irigaray points
out how the woman again assumes a secondary role and becomes the
means to the man’s end of transcendence: “The beloved woman is rele-
gated to an inwardness that is not one because it is abyssal, animal, infan-
tile, prenuptial, while the lover is left a solitary call to his God.”14
Blanchot engages closely with Levinas’s ideas, and his work is, per-
haps, of particular interest for literary critics, for he specifically addresses
the question of literary representation and its relationship to death. Like
Levinas, Blanchot conceives of death as ungraspable, an unknowable event
for which any representation can only be a misrepresentation. Our rela-
tionship to death must be one of dread: “A death that is free, useful, and
conscious, that is agreeable to the living, in which the dying person
remains true to himself, is a death which has not met with death.”15 In
Blanchot’s work death and literature are intimately related. Both are con-
stituted by a double aspect of what is possible and impossible in the
approach to alterity. For him, death is “double”: “There is one death
which circulates in the language of possibility, of liberty, which has for its
furthest horizon the freedom to die and the power to take mortal risks;
and there is its double, which is ungraspable.”16 Yet the possibility of death
as an act of will, most clearly and extremely demonstrated by suicide, is
deceptive, for death cannot be the object of intentionality: “To die means
losing the will to die and losing the will itself as the motor that drives the
deception of suicide. [. . .]; in believing myself able to die, I lose my ability
to be able.”17 So in the very act of suicide the second aspect of death, its
impossibility, is exposed: death cannot be grasped, for it remains absolutely
other. According to Blanchot this ambiguous duality is also a fundamental
facet of art and representation. He conveys this ambiguity through the
figures of Orpheus, the writer, driven by his desire to bring beauty,
Eurydice, out of nothingness into the light as a work of art. On the one
hand Orpheus can only bring Eurydice into the light by not gazing upon
her, by representing her and not seeing her, but on the other he is driven
by his desire to see her as herself, in the darkness, as fully other, to look at
her: “Orpheus does not want to make the invisible visible, but rather (and
138 STEPHANIE BIRD
impossibly) to see the invisible as invisible.”18 Bringing Eurydice into the

world is that aspect of writing inseparable from the possibility of death, the
freedom of the subject to choose. The writer seeks to represent alterity in
aesthetic form, in meaningful language, yet the process of aesthetic trans-
formation depends on the negation of the reality it seeks to represent. The
very articulation of subjectivity is dependent on death: “When I speak:
death speaks in me. My speech is a warning that at this very moment death
is loose in the world.”19 The “impossible” aspect of literature, like the
impossibility of death, is the attempt to gaze at Eurydice, to recover the
very immediacy of the thing prior to its negation in language, and yet to
do so in the very language that destroys it.
In Blanchot’s thought, death and art define the limit of what it is to
be human. Yet for him this limit is also clearly identified as feminine, and
the likening of the production of art to the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice
undoubtedly re-inscribes gender stereotypes. Here the woman is cast once
again in the role of muse to the creative male artist, as object of the male
gaze; she is aligned with alterity, with the unknown, and, ultimately, with
death. It is precisely this alignment of woman with death in the process of
the male subject’s complex negotiation with alterity that is central to much
feminist engagement with the theme of death. In her impressive and fruit-
ful study of the relationship between death, femininity, and the aesthetic,
Elisabeth Bronfen argues that representations of the dead feminine body
can be understood as symptoms of culture, as the threat that culture wishes
to repress but is forced to articulate through a substitution. The alterity of
femininity and death pose a threat to culture, and in “representations of
the dead feminine body, culture can repress and articulate its unconscious
knowledge of death which it fails to foreclose even as it cannot express it
directly.”20 In her analysis the fact that representations are in fact only ever
misrepresentations is ascribable to their status as symptom, for they
“repress what they purport to reveal and they articulate what they hope to
conceal” (DB, xi). Although the term symptom conjures up notions of
trauma, an integral part of representations of death is also our enjoyment
of them. The pleasure we take in these fictions, be it of an image or of a
text, is the pleasure of self-deception: in fantasy we die with another, but
in fact we remain alive and feel confirmed in our immortality (DB, x).
The Hole in Being: The Death Drive

Bronfen’s emphasis on representation as a symptom and indeed as a symp-
tom that we enjoy as part of our evasion of death links her analysis directly
to the psychoanalytical concept of the death drive. In psychoanalysis death
remains unknowable, a structuring void, but is not external to the subject.
In Lacanian thought, subjectivity is structured around a loss of being, and
the ego is no more than a fictional misrecognition of ourselves as whole, a

necessary fiction, however, that guards against the knowledge of the void
at our core. Death is therefore present from the start: the subject must
sacrifice her original plenitude, her jouissance, in order to become subject,
a traumatic loss that gives rise to the partial drives. The aim of the partial
drives is a return to this lost mythical plenitude, a return to the previous
state as Freud saw it, and it is through the objects of the partial drives, the
objets a, that we attempt to pursue the illusion of wholeness and regain
access to jouissance. One of the ways in which we do this is through fan-
tasy, which the subject orchestrates around the objet a in order to produce
the illusion of wholeness. As Ellie Ragland vividly describes it, our bodies
are “fragments, image-inarily sewn together around a lump of nothing-
ness” and we cling to whatever allows us to ignore our fragmentation,
including the comforts offered by representations and words.21 In this
reading, then, all representation has loss or death as its core.
If Bronfen’s analysis shows the image of the beautiful dead woman to
be particularly valuable in recuperating the illusion of masculine plenitude,
Irigaray holds that the death drive necessarily deprives woman of any such
illusion. She argues that the death drives are differently organized in the
symbolic for men and women: “The ‘active’ enactment of [the death
drives] is forbidden for/in female sexuality. And this ban does not and
cannot produce any results, any system of metaphor, any sublimation,
simply because a dominant specular economy does not tally with female
sexuality.”22 This dominant organization is achieved through castration,
whereby women transform the death drive into masochism, men into
“normal” masculinity: “the death drives can be worked out only by
man.”23 There are significant implications for representation: “Death is a
‘hole’ in being [. . .]. But if women can stand for that hole in representa-
tion, then there is an illusion of mastery, for men at any rate. The unthink-
able has been represented.”24 For Irigaray, Antigone exemplifies the
position of woman generally: she is the daughter who is condemned to a
slow death in the service of patriarchal law. Two genealogies, male and
female, are collapsed into the one genealogy of the husband, and woman
is thus deprived of access to symbolic mediation, including mediation of
her death drive.25
The fact that Antigone has no symbolic form to mediate her own
death is, however, for Joan Copjec, the whole point. In what is effectively
a fundamental refutation of Irigaray’s idea that the death drive can either
be affected by the order of the symbolic or be differently sublimated
within it, Copjec offers a radical reading of the death drive. She points us
to the importance in Freud’s and Lacan’s thought of the notion of Vor-
stellungrepräsentanz for understanding the drive. Vorstellungrepräsentanz
is a type of representation that stands in for das Ding, the lost plenitude or
primordial mother: “[It] is not any ordinary representation [. . .], but a
140 STEPHANIE BIRD
peculiar kind of representation that permits us to grasp hold of some non-

being, some jouissance, or satisfaction.”26 The relationship of
Vorstellungrepräsentanz to das Ding is not, in Kantian terms, that of the
phenomenal to the noumenal, for as object of the drive the
Vorstellungrepräsentanz “lets us conceive satisfaction not as always already
lost, but as attainable by the subject” (IW, 37). The relation of the drive
to an external object is vital for distinguishing between idealization and
sublimation. In idealization the ordinary object represents something
beyond, the essence of which remains forever unattainable. It sustains the
Kantian relation of phenomenal object to noumenal beyond and so “has
the effect of erecting a barrier to jouissance, which is now conceived as
inaccessible” (IW, 38). In sublimation, however, the ordinary object is
satisfying, not because it represents a beyond, but because it is “elevated
to the dignity of the Thing” by the very action of the drive itself.27 It is the
drive, seeking solely its own satisfaction, the attainment of jouissance, that
effects this transformation, because “it so wills what occurs that the object it
finds is indistinguishable from the one it chooses” (IW, 39).
Copjec gives two examples of sublimation. The first is the work of
Jasper Johns, in which he depicts objects like clothes hangers or flags that
do not seem to represent anything other than themselves. Rather, what can
be discerned in the apparent absence of artistic subjectivity is actually
Johns’s passion for the object: “The affect of jouissance, satisfaction in the
object, is not passive; it arouses itself through the active gift of love” (IW,
40). Love is precisely her second example of sublimation’s transformation
of the object. The experience of jouissance is made available through love
for another, and the special qualities of the beloved, not objectively special,
are found to be so through the sublimation of love. It is love that trans-
forms the beloved into something “slightly different from or more than,
herself” (IW, 43), a process that is starkly illustrated by Antigone’s love for
Polynices, whose uniqueness is a product of her love. It is the jouissance
accessed through her love that guarantees her autonomy: “She gives her-
self her own law and does not seek validation from any other authority”
(IW, 42). Herein lies the death drive’s threat to the symbolic and to value
systems: the drive’s aim of satisfaction is not secured with reference to the
symbolic, nor indeed with reference to what either the ego or others want.
Sublimation here is not about containing the death drive, channeling it
into symbolic forms. On the contrary, sublimation changes the object,
regardless of the object’s symbolic significance or the subject’s standing.
This view of the drive, with an emphasis on its productive, indeed,
ethical dimension (from a psychoanalytic point of view), is also significant
for representation, for it suggests that representation is not only about
representations of absence. Although we are constituted as subjects
through lack and can never regain the illusory original plenitude, through
the death drive’s attainment of jouissance the subject experiences itself as a
“passionate inference.”28 Through the death drive, satisfaction is available

in the present, and in this sense love, and other moments of object subli-
mation, although they certainly do function to screen the void in being, at
the same time provide real enjoyment, “a corporeal experience of the self”
(IW, 79). In this reading representation itself becomes highly complex.
Representation is structured around the loss of original plenitude; repre-
sentation is part of the order of necessary fictions, which allow us to mis-
represent ourselves as whole. But there is another vital dimension of
representation that also provides real satisfaction, a dimension that pre-
vents representation from being simply the death of that which it repre-
sents, or a feeble copy of a real original. Just as in love the drive adds a
“more than itself” to the object, so too does representation change its
object. It is for this reason that Bronfen’s explanation of the pleasure we
derive from representations of death as rooted in the experience of death
by proxy, fueling our self-deception, may be true of idealization but is not
the whole truth of sublimation.
Universal Death, a History of Death, or No Death?

Copjec’s emphasis on the impersonal drive as that which guarantees sub-
jectivity might, in the eyes of some critics, serve as an excellent example of
the problem with much psychoanalytic discourse: its focus on universal
laws blinds it to the political problems of gender and to the historically
contingent nature of the very terms it uses. Arguably, Copjec’s study does
not address the political structures through which women are oppressed
and the ways in which women are specifically constructed in discourses of
death in order to underpin those oppressive structures. Her focus on sex-
ual difference explicitly leaves aside the experience of woman in the sym-
bolic. In contrast, writers like Irigaray and Bronfen seem to be more
concerned with the politics of gender difference and the reality of women’s
social and historical experiences, including those of death. Their critiques
specifically address the question of women’s experience as part of their
feminist politics. Yet one of the problems with invoking experience is that
experience is highly variable and therefore provides a slippery basis for
generalization. We see this in Secomb’s willingness to generalize about
“dwelling-with-death” on the basis of a particular “feminine experience”
of caring that she describes. So if men start doing the caring, does this
mean they are feminine, or that “dwelling-with-death” becomes mascu-
line? The most effective way around this problem is not to attempt to
generalize on the basis of experience but to accept that experience is cul-
turally and historically specific, and that, as a result, the experience of death
will be highly variable. Put another way, there is “a history of death.”29
Furthermore, if death is inseparable from the subject’s social experience,
142 STEPHANIE BIRD
then how the subject is constituted socially will profoundly affect how
death is perceived: death as a biological fact cannot exist independently of
the discourses through which it is understood and constructed. The nature
of death is therefore complicated, its conceptualization as absolutely other
thrown into question, if a person is not deemed to be socially alive in the
first place. Elisabeth Bronfen and Sarah Webster Goodwin point to
Orlando Patterson’s study of slavery and his concept of “social death.”30
If for the Cherokees slaves were comparable to bears and not deemed
human, and if for the Nias of Indonesia slaves did not even have a place in
the universe, then the nature of both life and death become questionable:
“The slave, in his social death, lives on the margin between [. . .] life and
death.”31
For Heidegger, the focus on changing cultural conceptualizations of
death, as well as the concern with the communal experience of death, does
not alter the fundamental confrontation with it. After all, he fully concedes
the experience of loss caused by the death of another, yet “in suffering the
loss, the loss of being as such which the dying person ‘suffers’ does not
become accessible” (BaT, 222). Equally, though, the “style of questioning
of which Heidegger, Freud, and Levinas are remarkable witnesses,” as
Derrida puts it, cannot defend itself from the historicist charge that it is
itself a product of Western culture (A, 79). But Derrida does not privilege
the historicist over the universalizing approach, arguing rather that the two
are mutually contaminating: on the one hand anthropological, cultural,
and historical accounts rely on “the powerful and universal delimination
that the existential analysis of death in Being and Time is” (A, 80), and on
the other a work such as Heidegger’s can be read “as a small, late docu-
ment, among many others within the huge archive where the memory of
death in Christian Europe is being accumulated. Each of these two dis-
courses on death is much more comprehensive than the other” (A, 81).
The work of Deleuze and Guattari is necessarily a further example of
this aporia, for although they argue that the death drive is a product of
capitalism, a function of the lack created by capitalist relations of produc-
tion, their analysis nevertheless depends on retaining a certain splitting in
their conceptualization of death, with the result that an extra-cultural
dimension is retained. For them, “the body without organs is the model
of death.”32 The body without organs is the state of zero intensity of
affects and energy, “the limit of any ratio of motion and rest among a
body’s parts,” as Adkins argues,33 in relation to which the organism per-
ceives an increase or decrease in its productive power. When a body dies it
returns to this zero intensity, and at this point the self dies, the ego that
perceives itself as singular. But the body without organs is not the same as
the organism: it is the “‘body’ of the energies and becomings of the Earth”
and will continue to “become” in a new relation.34 The “event” of dying
is therefore not finite, not limited to the consciousness of the self that
thinks itself as finite, but part of the continuum of “becoming.” The expe-
rience of death is the experience of this process of becoming, the move-
ment between different degrees of intensity: it “is the most common of
occurrences in the unconscious, precisely because it occurs in life and for
life, in every passage or becoming, in every intensity as passage or becom-
ing.” Intensive emotions “control the unconscious experience of death,
insofar as death is what is felt in every feeling, what never ceases and never
finishes happening in every becoming” (A-O, 330).
Here life is conceived as a continuous state of becoming, and the
human as a temporary holding form for changing forces. Consciousness
deceives itself in thinking that it defines the boundaries of life, for it is only
a transitional manifestation of life’s durational flow, which encompasses
both organic and inorganic forms. Death, as conventionally understood,
becomes irrelevant, since the process of becoming is continuous. Thus we
arrive back at the aporia: a universalizing conceptualization of life and
death is asserted, while at the same time describing society as a “socius of
inscription” (A-O, 142), and the social machine as that which “fashions a
memory” (A-O, 141), a memory of which their own work is a product.
What is the critical response to this aporia? Generally critics ignore it and
either focus on the problem that human perception and experience have
been marginalized or explore the positive implications of the universal for
us as human beings. So critics of Deleuze and Guattari, and of Deleuze
more generally, have pointed to the neglect of the human experience as
individual and finite:
As a theory of “pure” becoming, one might argue that the thinking of

the event does not acknowledge the peculiar violence it inflicts upon
individuals [. . .]. Real alcoholics and addicts, as well as genuine schizo-
phrenics (for whom Deleuze had little time, considering their contamina-
tion to be of an insidious kind), become portrayed as mere vehicles
through which the philosopher is able to devise a conception of germinal
life.35
Ansell Pearson is clear, however, that part of Deleuze’s disavowal of the

human is precisely a concern to challenge the limits of what is thought to
be human: in other words, his is an ethics of the possible.
This positive view of Deleuze’s aims is also taken by Rosi Braidotti,
who sees Deleuze’s conceptualization of death as that which “frees us into
life.”36 Death is not something that lies inexorably before us, since we have
already experienced and continue to experience it as an event in becoming.
As a source of terror, then, it lies behind us, and its ongoing proximity
empowers us to make of life a project of self-styling. For Braidotti, this is
not an aesthetic project, although aesthetics offer a model of how to
“engender [. . .] counter-habits, or alternative memories that do not repeat
and confirm the dominant modes of representation” by producing effects
144 STEPHANIE BIRD
that “destabilize us, heighten our awareness and stimulate our perception”
(TON, 249). The radical and transformative potential of self-styling is,
crucially for Deleuze, not structured around lack. Thus aesthetic represen-
tation is not reducible to the category of necessary fiction that masks a
void, a presence structured around absence or itself a form of the death of
what it seeks to represent. The potential of art is that it re-describes, not
reproduces, the world with which we are familiar. Most important, how-
ever, is that art is concerned with affect, which, far from being simply the
individual’s emotional response to what she sees or hears, is integral to the
process of becoming, the body’s movement between different degrees of
intensity. Art, therefore, opens up modes of being and becoming that are
not based on the familiarity of the self and current norms. In Foucault, for
example, Deleuze discusses the diagram as a form that does not attempt
“to reproduce a persisting world,” but that unmakes “preceding realities
and significations” by constructing “unexpected conjunctions or improb-
able continuums.”37
A diagram may not in itself be the most enticing re-description of the
world: it certainly indicates little concern with the self’s experience of her-
self as finite, and also returns us to the insoluble problem of the relation-
ship of abstraction to a historically contingent understanding of death.
What is enticing, however, as in Copjec’s reading of the death drive, but
with very different presuppositions, is the emphasis on the productive
dimension of aesthetic representation: whether understood as sublimation
or as performing desire, aesthetic representation changes the object, and
does not only, although it may do this as well, point to the impossibility of
saying, the void, etcetera. It is this productive side of representation that
is an integral part of our enjoyment of representations of death in fiction
and art in general, in addition to the undeniable pleasure of apparent
immortality that Bronfen points to. In other words, art, including attempts
to represent death, necessarily affirms life through its re-description of the
world, its production of real effects and of real affects in the present that
are not reducible solely to a relationship with death.
Some Thoughts on Comedy

The effects and affects generated by aesthetic representations of death are
commonly those associated with death in the real world. In the light of
what has been argued about the productive dimension of representation,
I wish in the final section of the chapter to consider briefly the place of
comedy in representing death.
Comedy has, understandably, been commonly held to be incompatible
with the tragic experience of others’ deaths or the awareness of one’s own
finitude. This incompatibility has also been extended to aesthetic represen-
tation, where comedy is seen to be a by-product of more serious matters.

This is typified in Hélène Cixous’s attitude:
I go to the theatre because I need to understand or at least to contem-
plate the act of death, or at least admit it, meditate on it. And also because
I need to cry. And to laugh: but laughter is merely the sigh of relief that
bursts forth at the scythe’s passing: it missed us by a hair!38
Crying needs no excuse; laughter, however, is dismissed with a “but” and

a “merely.” Such a dismissal is typical of the generally lowlier status of
comedy. On the one hand, comedy’s association with the failings of the
body, be this the reduction of the body to a mechanistic state or the ugly
distortions of uncontrollable laughter, or with aggression, compare poorly
with tragedy’s emphasis on truth, and the usually male heroic gesture of
reconciling individual will with necessity. On the other hand, comedy is
taken very seriously when it can be divorced from the physical, or when it
becomes tragic, when in writers such as Samuel Beckett and Franz Kafka
it is held to produce the “laughter of despair” in the face of nihilism. The
devaluing of the body, the concomitant aspiration of a reason unimpeded
by degrading passions, and the social use of laughter in the form of ridicule
to maintain norms mean that recent attempts to reevaluate comedy and
laughter are of particular interest for feminist criticism. Thus Critchley is
right to praise laughter as something that “returns us to the limited condi-
tion of our finitude, the shabby and degenerating state of our [. . .] bodily
strata.”39 He is wrong, however, to reduce finitude only to shabbiness and
degeneration. For as the Ich asserts in Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina, “Ich
konnte vor lauter Glück stundenlang lachen” (I could laugh for hours out
of sheer happiness).40 Here she reminds us of other dimensions of laughter
and of finitude: that its pleasures and joys are real and immediate, and
indeed, that laughter, in and of itself, is part of that immediate experience
of joy.
Comic effects and laughter are not what usually spring to mind when
we think of Bachmann’s late work with its focus on death and suffering.
Although Bachmann’s skill as a satirist has often been noted, the presence
of comic effects in her work has generally been neglected. Hans Höller’s
excellent study of comedy in Malina is a welcome exception to this, and
he effectively demonstrates the centrality of comedy in the novel. He
argues, however, that Bachmann’s is a “Komik der Verzweiflung” (comedy
of despair).41 Her comedy is undoubtedly a comedy of despair, but it is not
only that, nor is it merely a sigh of relief that the scythe has got someone
else. The “unexpected conjunction” of comedy and death is also an affir-
mation of narrative’s productive effects, its production of pleasure in the
present, even while it exposes modes of death. Put in a different way: the
fact that the Ich in Malina does not have much cause to laugh in her
present, and that Franza, the central character of Das Buch Franza, is gen-
146 STEPHANIE BIRD
erally humorless, and that Bachmann addresses themes of suffering and

death does not mean that their stories need be humorless. It is worth
remembering that Malina, later to become a Todesarten storyteller himself,
asks the Ich only to tell him stories “wenn sie komisch genug sind” (M,
282; if they’re amusing enough: 177).
Das Buch Franza, a story of a woman’s social and physical death, dem-
onstrates fiction’s versatility in representing death: it considers the experi-
ence of a woman in relation to social expectations while concurrently
exploring questions of representation itself.42 It explores the question of
point of view, the overlapping of first- and third-person perspectives on
death, of individual despair and social indifference, and of the self-decep-
tion of a yearned-for heroic death, and the banal reality of the woman’s
physical death. But it also makes good use of comic devices and contains
considerable humor. Certainly this humor is not generated by Franza’s
perspective on events: the immediacy of her suffering, combined with her
ongoing search for moral absolutes, militates against comic distance. It is
the incorporation of Martin’s point of view, Franza’s brother, as well as
that of a third-person narrator, that introduces a comic dimension, for it is
through the interplay of different narrative perspectives that comic incon-
gruity is generated. It is interesting that in one of the early drafts to the
Franza text Bachmann experimented very briefly with the figure of Martin
as a first-person narrator. She chose instead to mediate his perspective, as
well as much of Franza’s, through the voice of a third-person narrator. As
a result, not only is a degree of distance established by seeing Franza from
Martin’s point of view as well as her own, but the reader is guaranteed an
external perspective on both characters. The narrator’s presence is felt
predominantly, though not exclusively, through the use of erlebte Rede,
ensuring that an external gaze is maintained even at profoundly subjective
moments. The reader is therefore not only compelled to move between
perspectives but is required to hold different perspectives together at the
same time. This establishes a dynamic that allows for a comic response,
even though the protagonists are excluded from this perspective on their
actions: Franza is uncompromising in her despair, needing Martin and the
extreme isolation of the desert, to the point of interfering with his carefully
laid travel plans; Martin, who never quite comprehends the degree of his
sister’s mental desolation, does the best he can but is frequently placed in
unexpected and unwanted situations.
The comic dimension of Martin’s predicament is there from the out-
set, for Martin, who “hasste es, wenn etwas passierte” (F, 34; hated it
when anything happened), has events thrust upon him that he would never
have thought possible, starting with a three-side-long telegram full of
“stop und stop und stop” (F, 11; stop and stop and stop). Martin’s
methodical approach to life is fundamentally challenged, and his academic
reasoning becomes comically exaggerated, as he desperately casts around
for solutions to the Franza problem. Very funny for the reader is the epi-
sode with the motorcyclist who rescues Franza from the river the night
before their departure for Egypt. Not only does he finish Martin’s
Steinhäger gin, but Martin has to give him his nearly-new winter suit so
that he can finally ride off after midnight, a slightly wobbling “Wildwestreiter”
(F, 52; cowboy). Martin’s fury at what is for him inexplicable suicidal
behavior continues as they approach the border. Martin is very worried
about Franza’s false passport, but she gives a consummate performance of
unruffled confidence, and even “schaute bald schamlos freundlich die
Kontrolleure an” (F, 54; started looking at the officials with unashamed
friendliness). The comedy is further heightened by the clash of Martin’s
furious fantasy of flinging her off the train with her repeated decorous
requests for him to do something for her: “macht es dir etwas aus, mein
Lieber, und bitte” (F, 54; would you mind, my dear, and please).
The interplay of perspectives allows the reader to appreciate the situa-
tion comedy of these episodes, comedy that is reinforced by the witty or
ironic turns of phrase incorporated into the narrative. Martin’s ghastly
realization that Franza may have married Jordan as a father figure when he
sees that Jordan has two warts on his face is reduced to the phrase “Warzen
als Heiratsgrund” (F, 22; She married for warts). Elfi Nemec’s origins are
condensed into “ein Kind vom Gürtel, aber nicht von der Gürtellinie an
ihrer besten Stelle” (F, 27; a ring-road child, but from the wrong side),
and the crucial and intertwined themes of Franza’s idealization of the
desert, the suffering perpetrated by white men, and the limitation of rea-
son are condensed into one pithy sentence: Martin is preparing the first-
aid kit and
es stellte sich heraus, daß sie auch davon nichts verstand, weil von Magen
und Darm und von Gelbfieber bis Malaria in ihrer Welt nichts vorgekom-
men war, nur die Psyche der Weißen, die offenbar bedrohter war, als er
es sich vorstellen konnte. (F, 50)
[it transpired that she didn’t understand much about that either, because
in her world stomach and bowels didn’t figure, nor did yellow fever or
malaria; just the psyche of the whites, which was obviously more threat-
ened than he could imagine.]
Much of the general ironic tone of the first section, of which these are
particularly distilled examples, is closely identifiable with Martin’s general
outlook, but it cannot be solely ascribed to him. The use of erlebte Rede
means that the speaking voice cannot be attributed specifically to Martin
rather than to the narrator, but remains ambiguously both. This ambiguity
also reflects the clear overlap between what are at one level Martin’s obser-
vations of the difference between social appearances and the reality of
poor-quality housing in Vienna, his awareness of the difference between
148 STEPHANIE BIRD
the television film’s representation of Egypt and his memory of it, and the
narrator’s broader thematic interest in the gulf between appearance and
what is really going on, and how to represent this gulf: “Der Rest war aus
den Wiener Zeitungen nicht zu ersehen” (F, 139; The rest was not evident
from the Viennese newspapers).
The narrator’s active participation in the text’s comic aspects means
that the humor cannot be dismissed simply as Martin’s incomprehending
perspective on events. Indeed, the narrator’s enjoyment of comedy is con-
firmed at the end of the story, when a drunk Martin leaves the Altenwyls
after an evening watching a film about Egypt. On this occasion Martin
comes closest to comprehending Franza’s devastation, her critique of the
white man, and her uncompromising expectation of love, to the point
where her phrases enter his head: “Die Liebe aber ist unwiderstehlich” (F,
139; Love, however, cannot be withstood). This is a potentially pathos-
laden occasion, but although Martin feels a terrible “Finsternis” (F, 139;
darkness), comic devices ensure that the pathos, without being denied, is
heavily mediated. We are again presented with situation comedy: Martin
ignores the rules of polite society in which manners and appearance are all,
and where “Finsternis” is not only an emotional state but an opportunity
for Antoinette to hide her glasses and Atti to suppress his yawn. But more
importantly in terms of the narrator’s affirmation of comedy, the narrator
enjoys a pun. Barely able to stand, Martin is forced to take a taxi home,
and “unwiderstehlich” (unable to withstand) takes on a whole new mean-
ing: “Er zahlte nicht ganz dreißig Schilling für die Unwiderstehlichkeit
und kam nachhause” (F, 139; He paid nearly thirty Schillings for failing to
withstand and went home).
The comedy in the novel never tips into ridicule. Malina is careful to
qualify his demand for funny stories by saying “Sag, was sich ohne
Indiskretion sagen läßt” (M, 282; Say what you can without committing
any indiscretion: 177). So in stark contrast to the “höhnisches Gelächter”
(F, 70; scornful laughter) with which Jordan belittles Franza, the comic
devices in Franza do not serve the purpose of humiliation. The comic
devices do not function to humiliate first of all because they are not
ascribed a position of textual superiority. The emotional reality of Franza’s
suffering is powerfully presented alongside the comedy; indeed, if any-
thing, the comic elements are swamped by her point of view. Furthermore,
the shifting between and holding together of incongruous perspectives
also mean that a position of sovereign superiority often associated with
comedy is unsustainable. Most important, however, is the fact that
Martin’s and the narrator’s perspectives are fundamentally and consistently
sympathetic to Franza. These factors provide a framework within which
the incorporation of comedy as an important part of representing suffering
and death conforms to Bachmann’s narrative ethics. Comedy, like fictional
representation more generally, always incorporates an affirmation of life in
the very pleasure it provides. This is why Bachmann’s books can never be
only “books about the end.”43
Notes
1
Simon Critchley, Very Little . . . Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature
(London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 25.
2
Keith Ansell Pearson, Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze
3
Ingeborg Bachmann, Das Buch Franza (Munich: Piper, 1995).
4
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State U of
New York P, 1996), 232. Subsequent references are cited in the text using the
abbreviation BaT and the page number.
5
Brent Adkins, Death and Desire in Hegel, Heidegger and Deleuze (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh UP, 2007).
6
Adkins, Death and Desire, 69.
7
Simone de Beauvoir, Old Age, trans. P. O’Brian (London: André Deutsch/
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1972), 441.
8
Robert C. Solomon, “Death Fetishism, Morbid Solipsism,” in Death and
Philosophy, ed. Jeff Malpas and Robert C. Solomon (London and New York:
Routledge, 1998), 152–76; here 175–76.
9
Linnell Secomb, “Philosophical Deaths and Feminine Finitude,” Mortality 4.2
(1999): 111–25; here 123.
10
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh,
PA: Duquesne UP, 1969), 234–35. Subsequent references to this work are cited in
the text using the abbreviation TI and the page number.
11
Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh,
PA: Duquesne UP, 1987), 70. Subsequent references to this work are cited in the
text using the abbreviation TO and the page number.
12
Critchley, Very Little, 75.
13
For an excellent discussion of Levinas’s increasing emphasis on suffering see
Peter Dews, The Idea of Evil (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), chap. 5.
14
Luce Irigaray, “The Fecundity of the Caress: A Reading of Levinas, Totality and
Infinity, ‘Phenomenology of Eros,’” in Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel
Levinas, ed. Tina Chanter (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP, 2001),
119–44; here 132.
15
Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: U of
Nebraska P, 1982), 101.
16
Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 104.
17
18
19
Maurice Blanchot, The Gaze of Orpheus, trans. Lydia Davis (New York: Station
Hill, 1981), 43.
150 STEPHANIE BIRD
20
Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic
(Manchester and New York: Manchester UP/Routledge, 1992), xi. Subsequent
references are cited in the text using the abbreviation DB and the page number.
21
Ellie Ragland, “Lacan, the Death Drive, and the Dream of the Burning Child,”
in Death and Representation, ed. Sarah Webster Goodwin and Elisabeth Bronfen
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993), 80–102; here 94.
22
Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell UP, 1985), 102.
23
Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, 53.
24
Margaret Whitford, Luce Irigaray, Philosophy in the Feminine (New York and
London: Routledge, 1991), 115.
25
Luce Irigaray, “The Necessity for Sexuate Rights,” in The Irigaray Reader, ed.
Margaret Whitford (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 199–200.
26
Joan Copjec, Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (Cambridge,
MA, and London: MIT Press, 2002), 36. Subsequent references are cited in the
text using the abbreviation IW and the page number.
27
Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1956–1960, trans. Dennis Porter
28
Leo Bersani, quoted in Copjec, Imagine There’s No Woman, 66.
29
Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP,
1993), 43. Subsequent references are cited in the text using the abbreviation A and
the page number.
30
Bronfen and Webster Goodwin, Death and Representation, 8.
31
Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge,
MA, and London: Harvard UP, 1982), 51.
32
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (London: Athlone P, 1984),
329. Subsequent references are cited in the text using the abbreviation A-O and
the page number.
33
Adkins, Death and Desire, 184.
34
Ansell Pearson, Germinal Life, 153.
35
Ansell Pearson, Germinal Life, 133.
36
Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (Cambridge: Polity, 2006),
211. Subsequent references are cited in the text using the abbreviation TON and
the page number.
37
Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Seán Hand (London: Athlone P, 1988), 35.
38
Hélène Cixous, The Hélène Cixous Reader, ed. Susan Sellers (London and New
York: Routledge, 1994), 154.
39
Simon Critchley, Ethics, Politics, Subjectivity (London and New York: Verso,
1999), 235.
40
Ingeborg Bachmann, Malina (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971), 322.
Subsequent references are cited in the text using the abbreviation M and the page
number. The English is taken from the translation by Philip Boehm (New York and
London: Holmes & Meier, 1990), here 203.
41
Hans Höller, “‘Das Komische, mehr als das Tragische, hat seine Noten, seine
nationalen’: Ingeborg Bachmanns Malina,” in Komik in der österreichischen
Literatur, ed. Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler, Johann Sonnleitner, and Klaus Zeyringer
(Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 1996), 263–74; here 270.
42
Bachmann, Das Buch Franza, endnote 3. Subsequent references are cited in the
text using the abbreviation F and the page number. All translations are my own.
43
Cixous, Reader, 199.
9: “Liebe ist ein Kunstwerk”: The Appeal
to Gaspara Stampa in Ingeborg
Bachmann’s Todesarten
Áine McMurtry
[. . .] ein Konvolut aus Gestammel und Geheul, aus Hilfe- und
Racherufen, Wahn- und Todesfantasien, kurz: der ungereinigte
Lebensschlamm.
— Peter Hamm, Die Zeit, October 2000
[a bundle of stammers and howls, of calls for help and revenge,

fantasies of death and delirium, in short, impure biographical muck.]
P ETER HAMM’S RESPONSE SET THE TONE for many reviews of Ich weiß
keine bessere Welt (I Know of No Better World).1 Published as a collec-
tion in 2000, these poetic drafts were written by Ingeborg Bachmann
during a period of personal crisis that followed the breakdown of her rela-
tionship with Max Frisch in 1962 and his publication of the semi-autobi-
ographical Mein Name sei Gantenbein (Gantenbein: A Novel) in 1964.2
Bachmann identified aspects of her own person in the female protagonist
of this novel and felt its appropriation of her intimate experience as a kind
of murder. References to death recur throughout Bachmann’s drafts, in
which a female speaker evokes the destructiveness of pain, loss, and
betrayal. As Hans Höller highlights in his published response to Hamm,
such widespread condemnation of the drafts stems from a refusal to
acknowledge the significance of their preoccupation with immediate suf-
fering.3 Höller underlines Bachmann’s late concern with an alternative
authorship that sublimates personal crisis through artistic creation. An
examination of the poetic drafts reveals many correspondences with
Bachmann’s contemporaneous Todesarten (Manners of Death) prose
work, the novel cycle that she had begun in the early 1960s, the composi-
tion of which took up the last decade of her life. Bachmann intended this
cycle to lay bare those intimate abuses and deathly drives repressed and
censored in postwar society:
Die Todesarten wollen die Fortsetzung sein, in einer Gesellschaft, die sich
die Hände in Unschuld wäscht und nur keine Möglichkeit hat, Blut
THE APPEAL TO GASPARA STAMPA IN BACHMANN’S TODESARTEN 153
fließen zu lassen, zu foltern, zu vergasen. Aber die Menschen, die sind

nicht so, nicht plötzlich zu Lämmern und Entrüsteten geworden. Unsere
Literatur möchte kühn sein, auf Kosten der Vergangenheit, aber ich habe
herausgefunden, daß sie unbewußt einer Täuschung unterliegt. Daß sie,
ohne es zu wissen, verheimlicht, welche Dramen sich abspielen, welche
Arten von Mord.4
[Manners of Death are intended as a continuation, in a society that pro-

tests its own innocence and merely lacks the opportunity to shed blood,
to torture, or to gas. But people, they’re not like that, they haven’t sud-
denly become scandalized and turned into lambs. Our literature claims to
be bold at the expense of the past but I have discovered that — uncon-
sciously — it is subject to a delusion. That without being aware, it covers
up those dramas which are taking place, those forms of murder.]
By focusing on the role of literature in the widespread failure to address

the covert abuses in contemporary culture, Bachmann alludes to her aes-
thetic project to portray the murderous dramas of the present. My read-
ings identify the poetic drafts of the 1960s as an early experimental stage
of writing that fed into the socially critical Todesarten project. My concern
is to examine Bachmann’s shifting portrayal of the appropriation of female
experience in art as a kind of death. Focusing on her ongoing engagement
with a single sonnet by the Italian Renaissance poet Gaspara Stampa
(c.1523–54), I demonstrate an increasingly political concern with gender
in Bachmann’s oeuvre.
Scholars tend not to differentiate when discussing the allusions to
Stampa and her writings that appear throughout Bachmann’s work and
often understand them as a straightforward identification with a female
capacity for ecstatic love.5 I focus, however, on the ambivalent character
of Bachmann’s identification with the female lyric tradition of lovers’
protest represented by the older poet. I demonstrate Bachmann’s increas-
ingly critical engagement with the key citation, “vivere ardendo e non
sentire il male” (to live ardently and not to feel the pain), which is char-
acteristic of the reflexive impulse in her late writing. I examine the trans-
position of references to Stampa from an early love poem to the poetic
drafts of crisis and then to the 1971 novel Malina and reveal Bachmann’s
gendered project to construct an aesthetic that rebels against the objec-
tifying work of art. On the one hand, Bachmann aims to expose the
vulnerability of the one who loves and, on the other, she associates love
with communicative possibility and alternative forms of being.
Gaspara Stampa
Hast du der Gaspara Stampa
denn genügend gedacht, daß irgend ein Mädchen,
154 ÁINE MCMURTRY
dem der Geliebte entging, am gesteigerten Beispiel

dieser Liebenden fühlt: daß ich würde wie sie?
Sollen nicht endlich uns diese ältesten Schmerzen
fruchtbarer werden?6
[Have you sufficiently thought about Gaspara Stampa;

remembered that somewhere a woman whose lover had left her
might, reaching beyond herself, pray: Let me be as she was?
Is it not time for these oldest of heartaches, now
at last, to bear fruit for us.]
These lines, taken from the first of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duineser Elegien
(Duino Elegies, 1922), form probably the most famous reference to
Gaspara Stampa in European literature. Stampa is singled out as a figure
whose artistic refashioning of feelings of hurt provides a model for the
male poet’s own endeavors. As the author of 311 love poems, among the
most acclaimed in Italian literature, Stampa has long appealed to the artis-
tic imagination. Romantic artists fêted the passion and early death of the
broken-hearted “poetess.”7 Predominantly employing the sonnet form,
the poems give a forthright account of carnal passion, as well as betrayal
and abandonment, unprecedented for their era. Recently feminist critics
have come to question the primary ideological, as opposed to literary,
character of the poet’s reception. Their identification of aspects of gen-
dered critique in her work provides a framework for tracing similar strate-
gies in Bachmann’s writing. Patricia Phillippy convincingly demonstrates
how, by identifying with female figures who testify to mistreatment by their
lovers, Stampa accuses and critiques the male-dominated social order.8
Particularly illuminating when considering the critical backlash against
Bachmann’s draft poems is Fiora Bassanese’s attack on an understanding
of Stampa’s sonnets as the journal-style outpourings of a troubled soul.
Bassanese criticizes such interpretations for celebrating a lack of agency on
the part of the female poet. Her reading of Stampa emphasizes the radical
aesthetic and political dimensions of the lyric engagement with private
experience. My article reads the voicing of intimate injury in Bachmann’s
late lyric writing in similar terms and highlights how she rejects aestheticiz-
ing modes for their bogus romanticization of the mortal female subject.
The Stampa sonnet cited throughout Bachmann’s oeuvre begins
“Amor m’ha fatto tal ch’io vivo in foco” (Love has made me live in cease-
less fire). The lyric speaker provocatively compares herself to a salamander
— a Petrarchan symbol of unfulfilled love — to describe a new love affair.
Throughout her oeuvre, Bachmann associates Gaspara Stampa with fire.
Her 1956 love poem “Erklär mir, Liebe” (Tell Me, Love) uses the sala-
mander motif to advocate a passionate, physical mode of existence.9 By
1971 Bachmann had become concerned with the “burning” character of
Stampa’s aesthetics. She alludes to the fervor and implicit destructiveness

in the Renaissance verse and to her own integration of the phrase “vivere
ardendo e non sentire il male” (to live passionately and not to feel the
pain) in Malina. Here Bachmann rejects the idea that ecstatic love — a
phenomenon that defines the novel’s female writer protagonist — is con-
ceivable within the social order:
Liebe ist ein Kunstwerk, und ich glaube nicht, daß es sehr viele Menschen
können. Ob es mir gelungen ist, das Genie der Liebe zu zeigen, weiß ich
nicht. Ich weiß nur, daß die wenigen großen Beispiele so außerordentlich
sind, daß man sagen muß, es gibt zweifellos Menschen, die dort, wo die
anderen ein kleines gelegentliches Talent haben, etwas geschenkt bekom-
men haben; das erwirbt man sich nicht, deswegen ist es etwas
Verbrennendes. Es gibt nur sehr wenig Beispiele dieser Art, zu denen ich
die Briefe der portugiesischen Nonne zähle und die Gedichte der Gaspara
Stampa, die an einen Graf Sowieso gerichtet sind, der sie offenbar sehr
rasch verlassen hat. Ihr ist, glaub’ ich, rasch — wie das im 16. Jahrhundert
häufig war — eine Lungenschwindsucht zu Hilfe gekommen, sich aus
dieser für sie nicht mehr erträglichen Welt davonzumachen. Diese
Gedichte sind einfach unglaublich schön, ich habe in meinem Buch
daraus einen Satz zitiert: “Vivere ardendo e non sentire il male” — dieses
Glühendleben und das Böse nicht fühlen.10
[Love is a work of art and I don’t believe that many people have the
capacity for it. Whether I’ve managed to show love’s genius, I don’t
know. I only know that the few great examples are so extraordinary that
it must be said there are doubtless people who, where others only possess
an occasional talent, have been blessed with a real gift. You can’t acquire
that, that’s because it’s something that burns. There are only a few exam-
ples of this kind, among which I count The Letters of a Portuguese Nun
and the poems of Gaspara Stampa, which are addressed to a Count
So-and-So, who obviously abandoned her very quickly. Rescue came
quickly, I think, in the form of consumption — as was so common in the
sixteenth century — which helped her escape the unbearable world.
These poems are simply incredibly beautiful; in my novel I quoted one
sentence from them: “Vivere ardendo e non sentire il male” — this living
ardently and not feeling any pain.]
Here Bachmann relates the Stampa phrase not only to states of passionate
physicality, as conveyed by the fire metaphors common in her own early lyr-
ics, but, more significantly, to an aesthetic mode that engages with a condi-
tion of destructive extremity aligned with the female love experience.
As Barbara Agnese has highlighted, Bachmann’s comparison of
Stampa’s poems to love letters long-attributed to a Portuguese nun —
Mariana Alcoforado — recalls Rilke’s Die Aufzeichungen des Malte Laurids
Brigge (The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, 1910) where both
Stampa and Alcoforado are associated with a gendered aesthetic of pro-
156 ÁINE MCMURTRY
test.11 In Malte, Rilke attributes the empowering quality of the female

lover’s lament to the voiced character of its critique:
die gewaltigen Liebenden [. . .] die, während sie ihn riefen, den Mann
überstanden; die über ihn hinauswuchsen, wenn er nicht wiederkam, wie
Gaspara Stampa oder wie die Portugiesin, die nicht abließen, bis ihre
Qual umschlug in eine herbe, eisige Herrlichkeit, die nicht mehr zu
halten war.12
[those mighty lovers [. . .] who, in the act of calling him, went beyond
the man; who surpassed him when he did not return, like Gaspara Stampa
or the Portuguese Nun, who did not relent until their agony transformed
into a dry, icy splendor that could no longer be contained.]
This state of icy cold contrasts with the sustained fire imagery in
Bachmann’s engagement with Stampa’s writing. Whilst the fin-de-siècle
poet emphasizes the transcendent quality of the verse, the affective con-
nection with the surrounding world determines a writer’s task in the post-
1945 context. In a 1959 speech, Bachmann reiterates the appeal, made
during Rilke’s contemplation of Stampa in the first Duino elegy, that the
oldest kinds of pain should yield artistic fruit. She reworks the modernist
plea for artistic transcendence into an assertion of the need to lay bare the
destructive effects of suffering:
So kann es auch nicht die Aufgabe des Schriftstellers sein, den Schmerz
zu leugnen, seine Spuren zu verwischen, über ihn hinwegzutäuschen. Er
muß ihn, im Gegenteil, wahrhaben und noch einmal, damit wir sehen
können, wahrmachen. [. . .] Wir sagen sehr einfach und richtig, wenn wir
in diesen Zustand kommen, den hellen, wehen, in dem der Schmerz
fruchtbar wird: Mir sind die Augen aufgegangen.13
[So it cannot be the author’s task to deny pain either, to remove its traces,
to hide it away. He must, on the contrary, acknowledge it and once again,
so that we can see, give it form. [. . .] We say very simply and truly, when
we enter this state — bright and sore — in which pain is made productive:
my eyes have been opened.]
This insistence on the relation between the subjective perception of hurt

and acts of recognition reveals a conception of literature as a medium of
reflection. In her poetic drafts of the 1960s Bachmann attempted a formal
solution for this project. These texts manifest a concern with the burning
quality of Stampa’s verse and its voiced protest at the deathly affliction of
the amorous subject. Increasingly in Bachmann’s writing, the motif of
burning assumes a crucial historical aspect and, by Malina, fire and flame
images relate to the gas chamber and recent atrocity. The novel famously
takes up the Flaubertian refrain — “Avec ma main brûlée, j’écris sur la
nature du feu” (With my burned hand, I write about the nature of fire)
— which, as Joachim Eberhardt has emphasized, is adapted from an 1852

letter that describes the imperative for the author to establish distance
from experience in order to write about it. As Eberhardt suggests, for the
woman writer in the post-1945 context it is not an attitude of detachment
but rather the destructive experience of burning that provides a fitting
metaphor for authorial activity.14 Bachmann’s ongoing interest in Stampa’s
verse thus relates to her wider project to find literary form for subjective
crisis. I will show that Bachmann’s ambivalent identification with her
female predecessor in two draft poems of the 1960s represents an explicit
attempt to gender this project.
The Poetic Drafts of the 1960s

The sonnet-line — “vivere ardendo e non sentire il male” — provides an
ambiguous signature for Bachmann’s handwritten draft entitled “Das
Strafgesetzbuch Gaspara Stampa” (The Penal Code of Gaspara Stampa)
(kbW, 120), where no further reference to the Italian poet or to her writing
appears in the text. Its speaker gives a stammered account of feelings of
mortality after the collapse of a relationship. As suggested by the ironic
title, the injustice that no official means is to be found for acknowledging
the speaker’s mistreatment motivates her expressive attempt and indicates
a lyric concern with the social ramifications, or lack thereof, of intimate
abuse. The poem begins with a moment of identification with insects
pinned on display and describes the transformation of reality into matter
for observation:
Der Käfer, aufgespießt, der Schmetterling

Ins Album gepreßt, das Blatt zwischen
Buchseiten gelegt —
ermordet die Wirklichkeit, auf feinste Weise

nur Menschen gestattet, auch das ist
erlaubt, ein Gift zu geben, ich
ich lese im Strafgesetzbuch und
finde keinen Paragraphen, der es
verbietet.
Verloren, verramscht, eine Liebe

ins Versatzamt getragen, nicht mehr
ausgelöst, Opfer abgeschoben, Küsse ausgespuckt
Kranke auf die Straße geworfen, ange-
schrien, mangelndes Verständnis meinerseits,
vorrausgesetzt und bedauert. (kbW, 120 and 1–15)
158 ÁINE MCMURTRY
[The beetle pinned down, the butterfly

pressed in an album, the leaf laid between
pages of a book —
murders reality, in the most subtle ways,

only humans are allowed to do that, though it is also
permitted to poison someone, I
I read the penal code and
find no paragraph that
forbids it.
Lost, flogged, a love

taken to the pawn shop, never again
allowed out, the victims hauled off, kisses spat out,
invalids dumped on the street, screamed
at, me struggling to understand,
taken for granted and pitied.]
Acts of betrayal — evoked in terms of being rejected, abused, and sold

— have provoked the crisis here. In contrast to the southern landscapes
and mythical scenes that characterize Bachmann’s early love poetry, a new
concern with the depiction of painful physicality marks this text of aban-
donment. The stammered first person pronoun and halting rhythms con-
vey growing confusion. As her agitation builds, the repeated “ver-” prefix
and harshly alliterative “k,” “g,” and “t” sounds make the distress felt
aurally. The isolated speaker searches for external reference points and
questions the consolation offered by religion in a violent world. This
attempt to understand provokes ambiguous recourse to the masculine
third-person which, by the poem’s final section, carries religious overtones
in positing identification with an abused Christ-like figure. This self-align-
ment with the male figurehead is not elucidated: confused questions tail
off in the final lines of the open-ended draft. The sense of having been
murdered is thus directly related to the inability to express, and this help-
lessness is seen in the speaker’s struggle to find a fitting reference point for
her own crisis.
In the context of amorous betrayal, however, the implicit comparison
with the ultimate betrayal of selfless love in the Western tradition is illumi-
nated by Bachmann’s contemporary prose draft, “Die gestohlenen Jahre”
(The Stolen Years). Here echoes of the circumstances surrounding the
publication of Frisch’s Gantenbein novel can be discerned. The actress nar-
rator, Fanny, also describes herself as a Christ-like lamb and uses images of
crucifixion to evoke her fatal sacrifice by a former lover. The draft contains
the seeds of the Fanny Goldmann plot, a central Todesarten text about a
famous actress, which is principally a critique of the commodification of
private experience on the literary market. With “Die gestohlenen Jahre”

Bachmann responded to her recent experience of betrayal. Through inter-
nal monologue the actress-narrator reflects on her lover’s transformation
of personal details into an inalterable work of fiction:
Sie käute jedes einzelne Wort, manche Sätze dann schnell, um sich nicht
daran zu verschlucken, dann wieder Wort für Wort. Er schrieb, und sie las,
und so würde es nun immer bleiben, sie war über vierzig, und sie las nur
noch in einem Buch. Das Buch handelte von ihr, so sagte sie sich, er hatte
sie zwei Jahre gekannt und dann nicht mehr, und es handelte aber von
ihr. [. . .] es waren lauter Dinge, die sie ihm erzählt hatte, wann erzählt,
nachts, wenn sie neben ihm lag, am Nachmittag, wenn sie durch einen
Wald gingen, wie sie radfuhren, wenn sie Kaffee tranken, was war ihr bloß
eingefallen, sie hatte ihm in zwei Jahren das wirklich alles erzählt. Oh ja,
das hatte sie getan. Sie sagte sich: schuldig [. . .]. Er war zehn Jahre jünger
als sie gewesen und war es eigentlich noch immer, dort drüben, einige
Bezirke weiter, war er noch immer zehn Jahre jünger, ihr Schlächter, den
sie Schwein nannte, obwohl sie das Tier war, das er geschlachtet hatte, ein
Lamm, Lamm Gottes [. . .] Er hatte aber einen vollen Namen, der
Bibelschreiber, der Passionsschilderer, hieß Anton Marek und hatte jetzt
Erfolg mit der Schlachtung, mit dem Ölberg und dem Essigschwamm,
den sie sich auf die Stirn gepreßt hatte. (TP, 1:117–18)
[She chewed every single word, then gulped down a fair number of sen-
tences so that she didn’t choke and, then, word for word, again. He wrote
and she read, and now it would always be so, she was over forty and all
she could do was read one book. The book was about her, so she told
herself, he had known her for two years and then no more, but it was
about her. [. . .] nothing but things that she’d told him, told him at night,
when she was lying beside him, in the afternoon, when they were walking
through a wood, as they were cycling, when they were drinking coffee,
what had she been thinking, in two years she really had told him all of
that. Oh yes, she had indeed. She said to herself — guilty. [. . .] He had
been ten years younger than her and, come to think of it, still was, over
there, a few districts on, he was still ten years younger, her butcher, whom
she called a pig, although she was the creature he’d slaughtered, a lamb,
lamb of God [. . .] Still, he had a full name, that Bible-writer, that scrib-
bler of the Passion, he was called Anton Marek and was practiced in the
art of slaughter, familiar, too, with the Mount of Olives and the sponge
soaked in vinegar that she had pressed against her own forehead.]
The narrator’s intractable position here stems from the recognition of her
lover’s abuse and her own complicity. The narrator refers to being ren-
dered witness to a male-narrated account of her life. Her sense of helpless-
ness is thus paralleled with a condition of silence and an inability to write.
Elsewhere in the prose draft the narrator expresses outrage at this bogus
depiction of her person in the fixed fictional narrative. With echoes of
those culinary metaphors central to Bachmann’s late poem “Keine
160 ÁINE MCMURTRY
Delikatessen” (No Delicacies), images of consumption, physical violence,

and butchery suggest the aesthetic culling of personal experience.15 This
contemplation of authorship becomes explicitly gendered as the female
narrator witnesses her own appropriation. In the ironic suggestion that the
speaker has been made fodder for the exemplary tale by the male scribe,
the masculine character of the literary act is given explicit commentary as
that which takes leave of lived experience, aligned with woman, and over-
comes it in the creation of the inalterable text. The text thus posits a con-
nection between literature that transcends lived experience and the sale, in
the literary market, of a product made at someone else’s cost. The conven-
tional third-person narrative does little more, however, than describe the
abuse and so contrasts with the lyric writing, where formal experimenta-
tion suggests a present-tense crisis.
Bachmann’s contemplation of the romantic relationship lends a binary
aspect to “Das Strafgesetzbuch,” whose female speaker defines herself in
opposition to a male counterpart. Unlike in “Die gestohlenen Jahre,” in
the lyric account of the partners’ respective roles Bachmann does not
attempt psychological character portraits. Instead, the partners are cast at
symbolic poles of the cultural spectrum, according to which woman is
aligned with body and man with mind. The female speaker contrasts her
painful physicality, consistently aligned with dying, with her male counter-
part’s rational indifference:
Daß keine meiner Schmerzen ihn bewegt,

kein Schweiß ihn feuchtet, nicht der Todeschweiß
nicht gelbes Fieber, nicht der Scharlachbrand
ihn brennt, ihn brennen macht,
und keine Litanei, und Rufe, Briefe,
Schreie wie nie
gewesen sind, was soll noch mehr sein,
Mehr kann nicht mehr sein.
Daß keiner dieser Tode, und kein zer-

fetztes Fleisch, zufassen noch ein
Hirn, das nicht begreifen kann, daß
nicht und niemals, nie es ihn bewegt,
wie kann das sein,
Es kann nun nichts mehr sein. (kbW, 120–21, 23–36)
[That none of my pain touches him,

no sweat dampens him, not death sweats,
not yellow fever, not scarlet fever
burns him, makes him burn,

no litany, or calls, letters,
screams as never
before, how much more can be?
More can no longer be.
That none of these deaths, and no rip-

-ped flesh, can be fathomed by a
mind that cannot understand, that
not once and never has it touched him,
how can that be,
There can be nothing more now.]
Through her description of physical collapse Bachmann attempts to

express the disempowerment provoked by suffering. The female poet uses
the fact of her sex to convey how culture treats woman as the embodiment
of objectified nature. The graphic portrayal of the female body defies social
norms and aesthetic conventions, a rebellion enacted formally in the
extreme turning away from conventional schemes of rhyme and metre.
The free verse and open-ended character of the draft reflect an impro-
vised poetic in which suffering is not overcome but rather laid bare in the
disrupted writing. Repetition of sounds (“sch”; “ei”) and words (“nicht”;
“Tod”; “brennen”; “mehr”; “nie”) is employed heavily. There is a palpable
tension between the establishment of rhythmical patterns and their deter-
mined undermining, as the attempt to stretch the lyric form inevitably
collapses. By defining the speaker’s physical distress through negation,
Bachmann suggests the helplessness occasioned by intense pain. Two
stand-alone lines use end-stops and negated comparisons to express deso-
lation, yet their attempt to express impossible extremity leaves silence the
sole option for the speaker. By structuring the love relationship around a
symbolic gender binary that objectifies the female body and thereby fatally
silences the female voice, the draft depicts how absolutist oppositions
undermine the crisis-stricken subject. The relentless lyric drive to radicalize
the speaker’s crisis leads inevitably from a declaration of corporeal suffering
to a reiteration of feelings of impending mortality. Ultimately, this associa-
tion of woman and death means that the draft breaks off as the isolated
female subject, bereft of an addressee, falls from distressed physicality into
silence. Although the ambiguous signature phrase evokes a tradition of
lyric protest, the contradiction between the aspiration in the Italian verse
that pain should not be felt and the modern account of human suffering
reveals the distance of the aesthetic ideal from the crisis. This dislocation
is signaled with a signature motif. On the one hand, the aesthetic motto
162 ÁINE MCMURTRY
promises ultimate vindication for the speaker seeking external orientation

for her distress. On the other, the raw lyric writing issues an implicit formal
challenge to the older poet that manifests the radical discrepancy between
the motto and the reality of the pain felt.
Bachmann employs the Italian signature motif in a similar way in
another poetic draft. Here the alienation within the failing love relation-
ship gives way to a reflection about the sister artist. The typewritten draft
bears the title “Alla piu umile, alle piu umana, alla piu sofferente” (kbW,
116–17) and is voiced by an isolated first-person speaker who, in muted
tones, refers to undefined injustice. It is likely that the incongruous “alle”
in the poem’s title should read “alla” i.e. “Alla piu umile, alla piu umana,
alla piu sofferente” (To the most humble, caring, and long-suffering
woman). This conveys the communicative impulse in the draft, as well as
its reflection on the exemplary writings of the female predecessor. The edi-
tors present the poem as an amalgam of two manuscripts. A consideration
of typographical evidence, however, suggests that the title should only be
applied to the first seventeen lines, which are arranged in a loose but self-
contained lyric structure on a single page.16 These lines treat the relation-
ship with a dead sister figure, who is presented as a conflation of the
speaker’s nurse and Gaspara Stampa:
Alla piu umile, alle piu umana, alla piu sofferente
Vivere ardendo e non sentire il male
Gaspara Stampa
Meine Schwester soll mir weiterhelfen.

meine Schwester ist nicht weit von hier.
Nur viel Zeiten ferner und so nah bei mir.
Nur viel länger tot ist als ich.
Zu ihr sprech ich seit fast tausend Tagen,

und sie sagt mir, daß ein Ende wird
laß mich schlafen, nie erwachen.
Und sie lebt für mich, sie weiß zu leben,

leidets für mich, wird verhöhnt, geschmäht,
verstoßen und verdammt, sie leidet es.
Ich vertrete nur den Schlaf, den langen.
Die Gnade Morphium, aber nicht die Gnade eines Briefs

die Gnade schmerzt [— —], aber nicht die Hand,
die Gnade Delirium, aber nicht die Rückkehr

um das Böse gutzumachen, bedarf es bloß eines Worts,
um das Böse nicht mehr zu fühlen, bedarf es des Tods.
Meine Schwester hat mich auch verlassen. (kbW, 116 and 1–10)
[My nurse is supposed to help me on,

my nurse is not far from here.
Just much further back in time, yet so close to me.
Just dead much longer than me.
I’ve spoken to her for a thousand days,

and she tells me that an end will come
let me sleep, never awaken.
And she lives for me, she knows how to live,

She suffers for me, is mocked, abused,
rejected and damned, she suffers it.
I stand only for sleep, the long one.
The grace of morphine but not the grace of a letter,

the grace hurts [— —], but not the hand,
the grace of delirium, but not the going back
to make the wrong right, it just takes a word,
to make the wrong not be felt, only death will do.
My nurse, too, has abandoned me.]
The end-stopped lines with their rhymes and internal echoes (“weit” —
“Zeit” — “leidets”; “hier” — “mir” — “ihr”) create a calm tone that
conveys the consolation provided by the sister who, by assuming the
speaker’s pain, is presented as an aesthetic incarnation of the Christ-like
figure of other drafts. Bachmann reworks the symbolic masculine victim-
savior into a sister-poet who does not stand for ultimate religious tran-
scendence but permits immediate human identification. In what appears a
lonely hospital setting, the poetic draft thus begins with a spatial and tem-
poral situating of this eternal nurse-sister who, belonging to both past and
present, forms an imaginative reference point for the speaker.
Through the opening portrayal of the sister’s quasi-physical presence,
Bachmann conveys something of the reassurance of the poetic encounter.
Manifest in those mutual acts of approach signaled in the first two sections
of the poem, a form of exchange is suggested that might comment on the
immediate experience of reading lyric poetry. The speaker’s illness, like
164 ÁINE MCMURTRY
that of others of Bachmann’s female protagonists, stems from an inability

to cope with life. While the speaker voices a repeated desire for silence and
oblivion, the work of her predecessor lives on to accuse the origin of suf-
fering. By articulating the injury done to a woman by a man, the text
permits identification and indicates a gendered pattern that crosses centu-
ries. A progressive distancing from the sister figure takes place in the poem,
as the speaker slips from human interaction. Dulling morphine gives way
to delirium and, ultimately, to the speaker’s desertion by the sister, which
marks her death and the final elimination of sensation.
In their different ways the two poetic drafts protest against an experi-
ence of deathly abuse inflicted by an intimate counterpart. Gone is the
celebration of the eternal love song found throughout Bachmann’s earlier
love lyrics. Instead, the present context of interpersonal conflict motivates
the female speaker’s expressive attempt. The engagement with Gaspara
Stampa sets the articulation of personal suffering in implicit relation to the
poetic tradition, which is seen in the sustained yet ambiguous employment
of the Renaissance quotation as an opening signature. The renowned writ-
ings of the female predecessor provide a model for working the experience
of suffering into a gendered accusation of abuse. Yet the idealist motto
advocating passionate surrender is questioned in the modern German
poems, where it becomes associated with an aesthetic tradition that pro-
motes leaving behind lived experience in the quest for transcendent form.
Bachmann’s experimental attempt to find urgent linguistic form harnesses
the present drama of the female lover’s crisis in condemnation of her
abuser. The impassioned physicality endorsed in Bachmann’s earlier verse
assumes a destructive character now aligned with female experience. By
inscribing the damage done onto the disrupted verse, the drafts engage
with the lived moment and, in so doing, generate an aesthetic concerned
not with the transcendent or eternal but with the present crisis of female
suffering. By including references to extreme corporeal conditions, the
drafts seek representation for objectification. Nonetheless, in trying to
expose the symbolic gender binary that relegates woman to unreflexive
excitation, the drafts demonstrate how, within the context of the failing
partnership, the attempted radical aesthetic merely reinforces gender stere-
otypes. While identification with the sister-artist enables partial self-defini-
tion and more reflective critique, the text loses the urgency of other drafts
and fails to capture the destructiveness of crisis.
Not until Malina, the experimental novel that Bachmann published to
critical acclaim in 1971, did she find a formal solution for giving gendered
depiction to the deathly phenomenon of intimate abuse. The novel’s
abstract mode allowed Bachmann to portray the crisis of the modern sub-
ject, and it manifests how states of individual emergency relate to cultural
norms determining expression and authorship. Intended as the “overture”
to the planned Todesarten prose cycle, the novel has been interpreted as
giving gendered representation to what Hannah Arendt, in The Human

Condition (1958), describes as the originary murder central to the work of
art.17 Here Arendt emphasizes the “reification and materialization” inher-
ent in the work of art, which is said to exist as a “thought thing” or “the
‘dead letter’ in which the ‘living spirit’ must survive.”18 In an otherwise
present-tense narrative that charts the gradual elimination of an anony-
mous female voice, Malina famously closes with the words — “Es war
Mord” (TP 3.1:695; It was murder). The novel is understood to enable
the representation of present-tense excitation, aligned with the feminine,
prior to its aesthetic reification in the retrospective, male-narrated text.19
The burning project “to reconcile the demand for endurance with the
inevitability of destruction” forms the subject of a recent essay by Catríona
Leahy that highlights the historical, as well as the aesthetic, dimensions of
the novel’s fire imagery.20
The brief concluding section of this essay sketches how Bachmann’s
narrative gives a gendered portrayal of a deathly state of excitation in the
post-1945 context. The oblique prose reworking of the Stampa motif
contributes to a vital countermovement in the novel, one that gestures
toward alternative forms of expression and being. I consider the prose
rendering of the Renaissance verse indicative of the abstract method of the
novel as a whole, which draws lines from other sources, as well as frag-
ments of musical notation, into a dense narrative that avoids the direct
articulation of suffering and implicitly critiques norms determining culture
and expression.
Malina
This reading of Malina begins with a reference to a 1977 work by Roland
Barthes, an acquaintance of Bachmann’s from a period of collaboration on
the international Gulliver journal in the early 1960s.21 A Lover’s Discourse:
Fragments is a prose text that records, in alphabetical order, around eighty
“figures” or “outbursts of language” from the mind of the amorous sub-
ject. Barthes introduces his text by proposing that the extreme solitude of
the modern lover’s discourse renders it an affirmative site, since it exists
severed from social mechanisms of authority. The text presents the lover as
a reader of signs, desperately searching for indications of requited passion
but consistently experiencing love as loss and anxiety. Sigrid Weigel has
alluded to structural parallels between the portrayal of love experience in
A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments and in Bachmann’s writings, particularly
her early love lyrics, as well as a 1958 radio play and Malina.22 I will dem-
onstrate that Barthes’s account of the necessary adoption of the dramatic
method for staging the amorous speech act provides new insight into the
formal achievement of Bachmann’s novel. He writes:
166 ÁINE MCMURTRY
The description of the lover’s discourse has been replaced by its simulation,
and to that discourse has been restored its fundamental person, the I, in
order to stage an utterance, not an analysis. What is proposed, then, is a
portrait — but not a psychological portrait; instead, a structural one which
offers the reader a discursive site: the site of someone speaking within him-
self, amorously, confronting the other (the loved object), who does not
speak. [. . .] Endlessly I sustain the discourse of the beloved’s absence;
actually a preposterous situation; the other is absent as referent, present as
allocutory. This singular distortion generates a kind of insupportable
present [. . .] a pure portion of anxiety. Absence persists — I must endure
it. Hence I will manipulate it: transform the distortion of time into oscilla-
tion, produce rhythm, make an entrance onto the stage of language [. . .].
This staging of language postpones the other’s death [. . .]. To manipulate
absence is to extend this interval, to delay as long as possible the moment
when the other might topple sharply from absence into death.23
Barthes’s concern with the amorous staging of language illuminates the

similarly reflexive function of the revolutionary dramatic structure adopted
in Malina. Beginning with a list of dramatis personae and declaring its
unity of time and place, “Zeit Heute / Ort Wien” (TP 3.1:276; Time
Today / Place Vienna), the three-part novel voices a present-tense account
of “pathologisch[er] Erregung” (TP 3.1:278; pathological excitation) as
experienced by an anonymous female writer known only as Ich. The prose
works with dramatic impact that is immediately evident in the striking pro-
logue, as Ich speaks in pulsing sentences that draw on lyric rhythms to
convey the burning excitation of a mind disturbed by a trauma that cannot
be named. The prose takes over the agitated shifts, compulsive repetitions,
and broken syntax of the draft poems of crisis; yet not so much in the
description of corporeal suffering as in the immediate rendering of the
disrupted female voice does the prose forge a quasi-physical mode in which
to enact the drama of the crisis-stricken subject and thereby compel the
reader’s reflexive engagement.
Part 1 of the novel outlines Ich’s obsessive love relationship with the
indifferent Ivan and largely describes writing, smoking, and waiting. Here
Ich’s traumatized femininity is suggested through her fervent hope of
being healed by love. Her devotion to her absent lover is depicted in terms
of religious supplication as she kneels by the telephone, her head on the
floorboards in the Muslim prayer position, awaiting his call. As the affair
fails, Ich retreats from the external world, and her internal relationship
with Malina, her masculine alter ego, becomes dominant. Malina provides
a rational counter to the excitation experienced in the love relationship.
Particularly in the psychoanalytic dialogues between Ich and Malina in
parts 2 and 3, Bachmann found an abstract form in which to lay bare the
culturally symbolic functioning of gender in issues of authorship. No
longer does the female artist contemplate her aesthetic misappropriation
by the murderous male scribe. Instead, in these exchanges, Malina is pre-

sented as a masculine organizer and Instanz that constructs meaning from
the traumatic condition connoted as feminine. Two subject positions are
devised, one connoted masculine and the other feminine, as opposed to
character portraits in any realistic sense. At the end of the novel, Ich disap-
pears into a crack in the wall, leaving Malina alone in their apartment, and
the narrative shifts from the present tense into the preterit of the closing
declaration of murder. By reworking the interpersonal conflict of the sexes
central to the drafts of romantic crisis into a gendered exchange within the
divided self, Bachmann reveals the cultural construction of diametrically
opposed gender positions and the relation of these to conventions of
authorship.
Comprising thirty-five nightmares that describe scenes of past trauma,
the central dream chapter finds displaced expression for the causes of the
disturbance manifest throughout the novel. Beginning with a dream vision
of the cemetery of murdered daughters, the prose depicts an incestuous
relationship with a brutal father figure. The narrative gives oblique repre-
sentation to those covert deathly drives related to the fascist crimes of the
recent past, through a series of decipherable signs.24 The Stampa motif
occurs in one of the eight psychoanalytic dialogues interspersed between
the dream scenes. The line of Italian verse is attributed to a dream memory
of a reading by a sister, Eleonore, who recurs as a fellow victim of the
father-aggressor throughout Ich’s dreams. As she does in the draft poems,
Bachmann presents a conflated figure but the lyric merging of Gaspara
Stampa with the real-life nurse gives way to an ambiguous apparition:
Malina: Warum kommt deine Schwester vor, wer ist deine

Schwester?
Ich: Eleonore? Ich weiß nicht, ich habe keine Schwester, die
Eleonore heißt. Aber wir haben doch alle eine Schwester,
nicht wahr? Verzeih. Wie konnte ich nur! [. . .]
Malina: Du sollst nicht so von deiner Schwester sprechen, es strengt
dich nur an, sie zu verbergen. Und Eleonore?
Ich: Ich hätte es ernst nehmen müssen, aber ich war noch so jung
damals.
Malina: Eleonore?
Ich: Sie ist viel älter als meine Schwester, sie muß in einer anderen
Zeit gelebt haben, in einem andern Jahrhundert sogar,
Bilder kenne ich von ihr, aber ich erinnere mich nicht, erin-
nere mich nicht . . . Gelesen hat sie auch, einmal hat mir
geträumt, sie liest mir vor, mit einer Geisterstimme. Vivere
ardendo e non sentire il male. Wo steht das?
Malina: Was ist aus ihr geworden?
Ich: Sie ist in der Fremde gestorben. (TP 3.1:542)
168 ÁINE MCMURTRY
[Malina: What’s your sister doing here, who is your sister?

Me: Eleonore? I don’t know, I don’t have a sister called Eleonore.
But we all have some sister, don’t we? Excuse me. How
could I!
[. . .]
Malina: You shouldn’t speak that way about your sister, it’s only
costing you a lot of strain to keep her concealed. And
Eleonore?
Me: I should have taken it seriously, but then I was still so
young.
Malina: Eleonore?
Me: She’s a lot older than my sister, she must have lived in
another time, even another century, I’ve seen her picture,
but I don’t remember, I don’t remember . . . She read as
well, once I dreamed she was reading to me, in a voice from
beyond the grave. Vivere ardendo e non sentire il male.
Where’s that from?
Malina: What happened to her?
Me: She died in a foreign land.]25
As is true for Ich, the sister’s vulnerability is consistently related to her

capacity for love and, consistently, she is presented as complicit with the
brutal patriarch. The allusion to Stampa during Ich’s exchange with
Malina gives clues to the sister’s identity. By suggesting that the sister lived
in another century, the text aligns her with Stampa, yet the name Eleonore,
the claim she died in a foreign country, and, particularly, the connotations
of the verse bring to mind the renowned Italian actress Eleonora Duse
(1858–1924), who died while on tour in the United States.
Monika Albrecht has highlighted this allusion to Duse and to the lat-
ter’s tempestuous relationship with the Decadent writer Gabriele
D’Annunzio. D’Annunzio famously took up the same Stampa line —
“vivere ardendo e non sentire il male” — in his semi-autobiographical
novel The Flame of 1900.26 This work is crucially concerned with its orator
protagonist’s quest for a new dramatic form that unites the lyrical, sexual,
and political and so fuses life and art. Evident in the central love affair
between the protagonist, Stelio Effrena, and an ageing actress, Foscarina,
the narrative turns around the sublime interrelation of the amorous and
the aesthetic. Scandalized readers recognized the stuff of D’Annunzio’s
ongoing relationship with Duse, four years his senior. The actress’s private
correspondence testifies to her sense of being packaged and sold off in this
novel, which uses a comparison with cattle-trading that recalls the termi-
nology of “Die gestohlenen Jahre.”27 The references to Stampa appear
toward the end of The Flame, when Effrena reminds Foscarina of the lyric
exhortation to live fervently, praising the expressive possibility engendered
by “mortal passion.” Soon after, Foscarina recalls these words in recogniz-

ing the deathly drives inherent to the love relationship. The title image of
the flame, ceaselessly consuming and rekindling, suggests the destructive
character of the artist’s self-interested passion for his expendable female
muse.
If, as interpretations have long held, Malina forms an aesthetic trump-
ing of Mein Name sei Gantenbein and Bachmann’s experience of seeing
aspects of herself appropriated in Lila, its actress protagonist,28 this implied
identification with the famously exploited actress Eleonora Duse provides
an oblique means of provoking reflection on culture’s deathly commodifi-
cation of woman. As a revolutionary renunciation of the decadent drama
envisaged by the male orator of The Flame, Bachmann’s dramatic portrait
of the divided subject in the post-1945 context instead accords worth to
the fragmentary truth of disrupted human speech. Edith Bauer gives a full
account of D’Annunzio’s novel in exploring a broader pattern of identifi-
cation with actresses and dramatic heroines in Malina. Bauer draws out
the covert references in the prose, identifying an indirect mode of articula-
tion in its intertextual allusions to fatal heroines. She gives two turn-of-
the-century Scandinavian plays particular attention, August Strindberg’s
Easter (1901) and Henrik Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken (1899), whose
female protagonists declare themselves to be dead following experiences of
betrayal by beloved male figures. Eleonore, the mentally ill sister at the
centre of Strindberg’s drama, crucially steals in an act of displaced identi-
fication with her father, whose embezzlement leaves his household facing
ruin. Bauer interprets Ich and Duse through Strindberg’s protagonist,
who is also implied in the dream sister Eleonore, reading all three in
Freudian terms as victims of the symbolic father figure.29 Similarly in her
treatment of Ibsen’s play, Bauer explores the deathly influence of a gen-
dered power relationship, this time in an aesthetic context. The Norwegian
play recounts the sculptor Rubek’s asexual passion for Irene, his female
muse, and employs images of petrification to convey the symbolic murder
of woman in the objectifying quest for a transcendent work of art. In
Malina, Ibsen’s drama is referred to by name in the third of those dreams
describing the cemetery of murdered daughters. Highlighting the statu-
esque quality of the waxen corpses, Bauer convincingly interprets how the
scene denotes the abusive objectification of real women in art.30 Bauer’s
thorough account of the covert source material in Malina illuminates the
novel’s reflective critique. Nonetheless, her search for intertextual refer-
ences in Bachmann’s narrative leads to a reductive project to systematically
uncover the repressed traumatic memories. The suggestion that the dream
narrative allows Bachmann to portray biographically significant events
from her life31 reflects Bauer’s wider failure to acknowledge the aesthetic
achievement of Malina. Not only do the nightmare scenes represent the
trauma of objectification, but the novel’s abstract method also goes far
170 ÁINE MCMURTRY
beyond the expression of biographical experience to devise a mode of cri-

tique that challenges the cultural hierarchy under which such forms of
domination are fostered.
When the published novel is compared with Bachmann’s poetic drafts
of the 1960s, the radicality of the abstract prose becomes clear. There is an
ambivalent identification with the Italian poet and her verse in the drafts.
Stampa is appealed to as a sister-artist whose writings serve as a model for
the suffering poet’s own endeavors. Yet her predecessor’s celebration of
passionate abandon is implicitly critiqued by the modern poet as complicit
with an aesthetic tradition that promotes leaving behind lived experience
in the quest for transcendent form. In Malina the line of Italian verse no
longer appears as a signature. Instead, woven into the metonymic dream
narrative, it forms part of a reflexive contemplation of a mysterious sister
who is displaced in different dream scenes as a conflated figure of the
unconscious. As a relational mode that operates through displacement,
metonymy offers an expressive alternative to hierarchical reasoned modes,
yet simultaneously provokes the reader’s critical engagement. The meto-
nymic prose draws Ich and Eleonore into association with Gaspara Stampa
and Eleonora Duse, as well as with a range of dramatic heroines, to suggest
the longstanding abuse of the love experience culturally aligned with
woman and its misappropriation within cultural tradition. By merging the
artistic female victims in the imagined sister Eleonore, however, the prose
simultaneously gestures toward an alternative mode of interaction that,
following Barthes in A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, can be understood in
aesthetic terms:
Sexual pleasure is not metonymic: once taken, it is cut off: it was the
Feast, always terminated and instituted only by a temporary, supervised
lifting of the prohibition. Tenderness, on the contrary, is nothing but an
infinite, insatiable metonymy [. . .]. Where you are tender, you speak your
plural.32
The prose rendering of the amorous voice in Malina effects a damning

critique of those structures according to which the male author attains
transcendence at the cost of the female beloved’s vitality. The writing’s
commitment to the present — impossible, as the end of the novel displays
— refuses that which comes after and, through metonymy, continuously
defers final meaning to retain its “presentness.” In the intertextual appeal
woven into this fragmentary prose, the self-reflexive engagement with past
artists permits an aesthetic community that not only lends wider validity to
the solitary speech act but also suggests a utopian state of multiplicity in
which diverse sources are cast into a creative dialogue through the produc-
tive play of difference.
Through its radical formal innovation, Bachmann’s prose develops a
viable mode for the expression of suffering where, arguably, the majority
of her late draft poems do not. For Bachmann, a woman writer in the
German postwar period, the appeal to her literary predecessor — and the
lyric tradition of lover’s protest she represents — provides an aesthetic
context for the gendered expression of intimate abuse. In the resonant
lyric voicing of female accusation Bachmann identified a medium for an
alternative authorship that rebelled against the binary modes and objectify-
ing tendencies of patriarchal culture. With her experimental novel she
devised a dramatic structure to lay bare culture’s systematic eradication of
this voice. By retaining the urgency of the draft poems, yet abstracting
from the former personal mode of utterance, the prose enables the shift to
a reflexive mode concerned with the murderous appropriation of the
feminine within art and culture. In the open appeal to the reader woven
into the fabric of this metonymic narrative, an alternative mode is attained
from which, beyond the deathly silencing of the female voice, the echoing
poetic prose resounds.
Notes
1
Ingeborg Bachmann, Ich weiß keine bessere Welt, ed. Isolde Moser, Heinz
Bachmann, and Christian Moser (Munich: Piper, 2000), hereafter cited as kbW.
2
Max Frisch, Mein Name sei Gantenbein (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1975).
3
Hans Höller, “Ingeborg Bachmann,” Die Zeit 46, 9 Nov. 2000, 70.
4
Ingeborg Bachmann, “Todesarten”-Projekt: Kritische Ausgabe, ed. Monika
Albrecht and Dirk Göttsche, 4 vols. (Munich: Piper, 1995), 2:77, hereafter cited
as TP. Unless otherwise stated, translations are by the author.
5
See Ellen Summerfield, Ingeborg Bachmann: Die Auflösung der Figur in ihrem
Roman “Malina” (Bonn: Bouvier, 1976), 40; Joachim Eberhardt, “Es gibt für
mich keine Zitate”: Intertextualität im dichterischen Werk Ingeborg Bachmanns
(Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2002), 346; Barbara Agnese, “‘Qual nova salamandra al
mondo”: Zu einigen Motiven aus der italienischen Literatur in Ingeborg
Bachmanns Werk,” in Cultura tedesca 25 (2004): 29–46; here 35–36.
6
Rainer Maria Rilke, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Ernst Zinn, 7 vols. (Frankfurt am Main:
Insel, 1966), 1:686–87. English translation in Rilke, Duino Elegies, trans. Stephen
Cohn (Manchester: Carcanet, 1989), 23.
7
Fiora A. Bassanese, Gaspara Stampa (Boston: Twayne, 1982), 26.
8
Patricia Berrahou Phillippy, Love’s Remedies: Recantation and Renaissance Lyric
Poetry (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 1995), 93.
9
Ingeborg Bachmann, Werke, ed. Christine Koschel, Inge von Weidenbaum, and
Clemens Münster, 4 vols. (Munich: Piper, 1978), 1:110.
10
Ingeborg Bachmann, Wir müssen wahre Sätze finden: Gespräche und Interviews,
ed. Christine Koschel and Inge von Weidenbaum (Munich: Piper, 1983), 109–10
[Interview with Ilse Heim, 5 May 1971].
172 ÁINE MCMURTRY
11
Barbara Agnese, Der Engel der Literatur: Zum philosophischen Vermächtnis
Ingeborg Bachmanns (Vienna: Passagen, 1996), 121.
12
Rilke, Sämtliche Werke 6: 833.
13
Ingeborg Bachmann, Kritische Schriften, ed. Monika Albrecht and Dirk
Göttsche (Munich: Piper, 2005), 246.
14
Eberhardt, “Es gibt für mich keine Zitate,” 333.
15
“Keine Delikatessen” — Bachmann’s famous farewell to lyric poetry — appeared
along with three other poems, “Enigma,” “Prag Jänner 64,” and “Böhmen liegt
am Meer,” in the fifteenth issue of the Kursbuch journal in November 1968. The
poem expresses despair at linguistic forms that fail to engage with human need and
suffering and begins by using culinary images to highlight the discrepancy between
ornamental lyric features and a basic state of human need. Ingeborg Bachmann,
“Vier Gedichte,” Kursbuch 15 (1968): 91–95.
16
The three additional lines found at the bottom of the same manuscript are to be
understood as a separate fragment. The lines are set apart from the main body of
the text and their description of feelings of intense hatred proves incongruous in
the context of the otherwise dominant tone of lyric despair. The material relating
to Puccini’s Tosca found in the twelve closing lines of the Ich weiß keine bessere Welt
version is similarly to be identified as a lyric draft in its own right.
17
See Georgina Paul, Perspectives on Gender in Post-1945 German Literature
(Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009) chap.3.
18
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998),
169.
19
See, for example, Sara Lennox, Cemetery of the Murdered Daughters:
Feminism, History, and Ingeborg Bachmann (Amherst: U of Massachussetts P,
2006), 91.
20
Catríona Leahy, “Bachmann’s Burning Question: Or: reading ‘rauchende
Worte,’” in Re-acting to Ingeborg Bachmann: New Essays and Performances, ed.
Bernadette Cronin and Catríona Leahy (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann,
2007), 112.
21
Bachmann, Kritische Schriften, 606.
22
Sigrid Weigel, Ingeborg Bachmann (Vienna: Zsolnay, 1999), 149, 222, 548.
23
Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard
(London: Vintage, 2002), 3, 15.
24
See Sigrid Weigel, “Zur Genese, Topographie und Komposition von Malina,”
in Werke von Ingeborg Bachmann, ed. Mathias Mayer (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2002),
220–46; here 221.
25
Ingeborg Bachmann, Malina, trans. Philip Boehm (New York and London:
Holmes & Meier, 1990), 139–40.
26
Monika Albrecht, “Die andere Seite”: Untersuchungen zur Bedeutung von Werk
und Person Max Frischs in Ingeborg Bachmanns “Todesarten” (Würzburg:
Königshausen & Neumann, 1989), 352.
27
See Maria Gazzetti, Gabriele d’Annunzio (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1989), 63–64.
28
See Albrecht, “Die andere Seite,” 129–58.
29
Edith Bauer, Drei Mordgeschichten: Intertextuelle Referenzen in Ingeborg
Bachmanns “Malina” (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1998), 176–77.
30
Bauer, Drei Mordgeschichten, 85.
31
Bauer, Drei Mordgeschichten, 76.
32
Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, 224.
10: TV Nation: The Representation of
Death in Warfare in Works by Peter
Handke and Elfriede Jelinek
Elisabeth Krimmer
I N HER STUDY This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil
War, Drew Gilpin Faust investigates social and political changes in the
reality and representation of death during the Civil War era. Although
Faust does not dispute the universal nature of death, she is acutely aware
that, in spite of its universality, “death has its discontinuities.”1 Technological
innovations and changing social formations have a profound impact on
our experience and perception of death. While Faust discusses the cultural
repercussions of the staggering death toll of the Civil War, this essay
focuses on the socio-political conditions that determine the perception of
death in the postmodern era. For the majority of the population in the
Western world, the experience of death in warfare is profoundly shaped by
our dominant media: television and the Internet. In our global visual cul-
ture, the immediacy and perpetual accessibility of images on television and
on the Internet radically transform our perception of violence and death as
death is normalized, de-realized, and commercialized. On television, death
is both perpetually present and always absent, and it is this oxymoronic
structure that produces what Ann Kaplan has referred to as “empty
empathy.”2
In the following, I will analyze the intersection of death, gender, and
the media in Peter Handke’s essays on the war in the former Yugoslavia,
published between 1991 and 2000, and Elfriede Jelinek’s Bambiland and
Babel (2004), her texts on the war in Iraq.3 I chose Handke and Jelinek
because the juxtaposition of these male and female authors shows clearly
what we gain by reading women writers. As we shall see, an acute aware-
ness of gender bias informs every stratum of Jelinek’s texts. She addresses
gender directly and explicitly. Handke also redefines traditional notions of
gender, but this redefinition is a side effect, an unintentional byproduct of
his analysis of how the media change our perception of war. Handke’s texts
do not seek to draw our attention to gender, and his subtle revision of
gender concepts may well go unnoticed. Jelinek’s texts, in contrast, make
it impossible for readers to ignore gender issues. As I will show, both
DEATH IN WARFARE IN WORKS BY HANDKE AND JELINEK 175
authors are acutely aware of the marketability of death, and both portray
the media not as observers but as immediate participants in warfare.4 In
other words, both authors conceive of television as a procurer of “weap-
onized images”5 and of the consumers of these images as complicit in
warfare. As my reading of Jelinek’s and Handke’s texts shows, the medi-
ated nature of televised warfare not only transforms our experience of
death but also forces us to rethink notions of victimization and agency, as
well as our concepts of gender.
In the wars in Yugoslavia and Iraq gender played an important role in
convincing the Western public of the necessity of an armed response and
in the actual conduct of war. In the Yugoslavian context, the rape of
Bosnian women provided a moral justification for Western intervention. In
Iraq the shortage of military personnel led to an increased participation of
female soldiers in combat. The rescue of Private First Class Jessica Lynch
from Iraqi captivity, a relatively easy operation aided by Iraqi medical per-
sonnel, was turned into a sensational television story of national deliver-
ance. The infamous participation of Privates First Class Lynndie England
and Sabrina Harman in the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib actu-
alized stereotypes of female depravity and lethal sexuality. Clearly, the
combination of gender and war makes for an explosive mix open to exploi-
tation in different discursive arenas. Philosopher Kelly Oliver, for example,
points out that media emphasis on the dichotomy of female victim and
she-monster has made it possible to “simultaneously blame feminism for
the abusive women at Abu Ghraib and use it to justify invading Afghanistan
to liberate women.”6
The texts that I will discuss in this essay allow new insights into these
gender stereotypes. Handke, albeit not primarily concerned with gender
discourses, seeks to create a counter-discourse designed to replace the
media’s distortion of reality and in so doing also redefines common
notions of gender. Because Handke conceives of the media as immediate
participants in warfare, women, who are active producers and consumers
of the media, are no longer perceived to be at a distance from war.
Moreover, Handke’s attempt to redefine our notions of what constitutes
history and of the dichotomy of the sublime and the quotidian also has
far-reaching implications for our understanding of gender.
While Handke’s critical intervention does not focus on gender but
nonetheless impacts our perception of the relation between gender, war,
and history, Jelinek attacks traditional gender roles head-on. By joyfully
embracing and recycling gender stereotypes, her texts explode them from
within. By inhabiting established discourses of femininity, by quoting and
mimicking, Jelinek’s works stage a calculated interruption of traditional
concepts of gender, a process that Jelinek has described as “zur Kenntlichkeit
entstellen” (to distort into recognition).7 Like Handke, Jelinek questions
the traditional association of femininity and victimization and portrays
176 ELISABETH KRIMMER
women as complicit in warfare. However, unlike Handke, Jelinek also

draws attention to the invisibility of women in Western discourse.
Handke
Starting in 1991, Peter Handke published a number of texts dealing with
the state of affairs in the former Yugoslavia. Some of these texts, including
Die Fahrt im Einbaum, oder, Das Stück zum Film vom Krieg (The Canoe
Ride or the Play about the Film about the War, 1999), Rund um das Große
Tribunal (Around the Grand Tribunal, 2003), and Noch einmal für
Jugoslawien (Once Again for Yugoslavia, 2005), received little critical
attention.8 Handke’s first four essays, however, instigated a highly contro-
versial public debate in which the author was accused of producing “Blut
und Boden” (blood and soil) literature and of denying genocide.9
Unlike the following three, Handke’s first essay, Abschied des Träumers
vom Neunten Land (The Dreamer’s Farewell to the Ninth Country),10 first
published in the Süddeutsche Zeitung on 28–29 July 1991 (feuilleton sec-
tion, 1), is not primarily based on experiences formed during a trip but
presents a political and philosophical argument against Slovenian inde-
pendence in favor of the Yugoslav union. His second essay Eine winterliche
Reise zu den Flüssen Donau, Save, Morawa und Drina oder Gerechtigkeit
für Serbien (A Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia),11 first published
in the Süddeutsche Zeitung on 5–6 and 13–14 January 1996 (feuilleton
section, 1–3 and 1–4 respectively), records impressions from Handke’s
journey to Serbia in November 1995. This first visit to war-torn Yugoslavia
was followed by many others, at least three per year, during which he was
at times alone and at times with companions, some of whom were illustri-
ous, such as Katja Flint and Claus Peymann, and some who were personal
friends of the author.12 Handke’s translator, Zarko Radakovic, and his
friend Zlatko Bocokic, who, along with his second wife Sophie Semin, had
accompanied Handke on his first trip, also came along for the second one.
The experiences of this second journey in June and July of 1996 are
recorded in Sommerlicher Nachtrag zu einer winterlichen Reise (A
Summery Addendum to a Winter’s Journey, 1996).13 Finally, the fourth
essay, Unter Tränen fragend: Nachträgliche Aufzeichnungen von zwei
Jugoslawien-Durchquerungen im Krieg, März und April 1999 (Asking
through the Tears: Belated Chronicle from Two Crossings through
Yugoslavia during the War, March and April 1999, 2000) draws on two
trips to the sites of Nato bombings in 1999, the year in which Handke
returned the prestigious Büchner prize and left the Catholic Church in
protest against NATO bombings.14
Handke’s essays unleashed a firestorm of criticism. Most of his detrac-
tors focused on the political content of his texts but failed to deal with
Handke’s insightful critique of the media.15 Although the provocative

nature of Handke’s writing, exacerbated by the author’s acerbic comments
in public debates, makes the focus of the responses understandable,
Handke’s incisive understanding of contemporary media deserves our
attention.16 His essays are motivated by a fervent desire to correct what he
calls “Bilderstarre,” frozen images and rigid mental frameworks created by
a pervasive stream of information in the media that remains untouched by
actual personal experience:
Denn was weiß man, wo eine Beteiligung beinah immer nur eine (Fern-)
Sehbeteiligung ist? Was weiß man, wo man vor lauter Vernetzung und
Online nur Wissensbesitz hat, ohne jenes tatsächliche Wissen, welches
allein durch Lernen, Schauen und Lernen, entstehen kann? Was weiß der,
der statt einer Sache einzig deren Bild zu Gesicht bekommt, oder, wie in
den Fernsehnachrichten, ein Kürzel von einem Bild, oder, wie in der
Netzwelt, ein Kürzel von einem Kürzel. (wR, 30)
[For what do we know where participation is almost always only televi-

sion participation? What do we know where in the face of lots of networks
and online we are only in possession of knowledge, without that real
knowledge that comes only from learning, looking and learning? What
does he know who instead of the object only sees its image, or, as in
television news, an outline of an image, or, as online, an outline of an
outline.]
The desire to go behind the mirror, to see for oneself and thus be in a
position to reject the information handed out in newspapers and maga-
zines and on television shows — “der geile, marktbestimmte Fakten- und
Scheinfakten-Verkauf” (the randy market-determined sale of facts and
pseudo-facts, wR, 121) — informs Handke’s writing:
Es drängte mich hinter den Spiegel; es drängte mich zur Reise in das mit
jedem Artikel, jedem Kommentar, jeder Analyse unbekanntere und erfor-
schungs- oder auch bloss anblickswürdigere Land Serbien. (wR, 12)
[I felt compelled to go behind the mirror; I felt compelled to travel to

Serbia, this land that, with every article, every commentary, every analy-
sis, had become more unknown and worthy of exploration or even simply
of being seen.]
Handke has frequently been attacked for his bias toward the Serbs, because
he never traveled to the hotspots of war and violence in Bosnia and Croatia
and because his essays do not include discussions of the violence perpe-
trated by the Serbs. Even critics who are sympathetic to Handke’s aesthetic
enterprise object to the fact that he failed to condemn both “Serbian
nationalism and European political hypocrisy.”17 To Handke himself, how-
ever, his Serbophilia is but an attempt to correct an anti-Serb bias in the
media.18 Handke, an avid consumer of newspapers and television, is con-
vinced that the Western media are guilty of biased reporting and wrongful
intervention, and wonders: “Welche Kriegsseite war, was die Getöteten
und die Gemarterten betraf, fürs Berichten und Photographieren die
Butterseite” (wR, 40; Which of the warring parties was, in terms of those
killed and martyred, the sunny side for reports and photographs)? He
claims that, while some victims are accorded prominence, others are
reduced to the status of “Neben-Tote” (collateral dead) or “Seiten-Opfer”
(Tr, 47; sidelined victims).
In order to uncover bias, Handke analyzes the style and language of
major European newspapers and, to a lesser extent, refers to and corrects
factual errors. In Tränen, for example, he points out that all major news-
papers featured the murder of two Kosovo Albanians by Serbs above the
centerfold, whereas the retraction of the story — it was found that both
supposed victims were still alive — was offered in a marginal position sev-
eral days later. In Handke’s view, the bias in reporting results from the
media’s inability to situate current events in their historical context, and
from their enslavement to the “gedächtnislosen Moloch Aktualität” (SN,
84; amnesic behemoth timeliness). In contrast, Handke makes a case for
reading the war with respect to its “Vorgeschichte” (SN, 83; prehistory)
and attempts to represent the perspectives of average Serbian people.
Throughout, Handke relates his conversations with locals. He gives equal
weight to male and female voices, old and young, and includes a variety of
professional people, ranging from a librarian to a physician, from a waitress
to a bishop. Moreover, in his third and fourth essays Handke engages in a
dialogue with the male and female readers of his previous essays. His
Sommerlicher Nachtrag, in particular, contains several passages in which he
replicates the responses of Serbian readers to his Reise.
In his effort to set the record straight, Handke is particularly attuned
to problems relating to the representation of death. In spite of his hyper-
critical attitude toward the media, Handke concedes that at times the
inherent nature of language, that is, the unbridgeable gap between word
and world, between sign and signified, accounts for the failure to convey
the grave reality of death. When Handke visits a destroyed car factory, for
example, he points out that neither photographs nor films of the site could
possibly do justice to the immensity of the damage because the nature of
such destruction does not lend itself to photographic appropriation (Tr,
117). But he is also acutely aware of the manifold opportunities for the
manipulation and misrepresentation of death in warfare and realizes that
the conditions of contemporary publishing and telecommunication are
conducive to lies and distortions. According to Handke, where death is
presented as a news item, it is necessarily attended by a failure to mourn:
Ihr Medien entwirklicht oder, eher, verformt und verderbt jedes

Mitgefühl, indem ihr zuerst mitbombt und dann die Stories eurer (in
jedem Sinn “eurer”) Gebombten verschachtert, in ähnlicher Weise, wie

eure Staaten, deren perfekt funktionierende Spiessgesellen ihr seid.
(Tr, 72)
[You media de-realize or, rather, deform and spoil every form of compas-
sion by first participating in the bombing and then bartering away the
stories of your (“your” in every sense of the word) bombing victims, in a
manner similar to your states whose perfectly functioning accomplices
you are.]
Handke calls such reporting “Kriegspornographie” (Tr, 156; war pornog-

raphy), thus establishing the link between sexuality, the media, and war
that has become the focus of analysis by a number of feminist critics such
as Kelly Oliver and the film theorist Linda Williams.19 Moreover, as the
quotation shows, Handke explicitly defines the media not as observers but
as direct and immediate participants in warfare. In a variation on the com-
mon comparison of cameras and guns,20 Handke consistently likens news-
paper columns and television shows to weapons. Numerous metaphors
designate commentaries as projectiles (“Tendenzkartätschen aus der
FAZ,” wR, 15; biased case shot in the FAZ) and editors as military person-
nel (“Redaktionscorps,” wR, 26; corps of editorial staff).21 Handke speaks
of “Zuschlagwörter” (Tr, 22; hit words), “Bombersprache” (Tr, 29;
bomber language), “Wortbeschuss,” and “Hackbeil-Artikeln” (wR, 126;
word shelling, cleaver articles).
Unsurprisingly, this reconceptualization of warfare also affects the
realm of gender. Where articles are weapons and reporters warriors, the
traditional separation between front and home front no longer holds.
Because women are active participants in the contemporary media culture,
they are also complicit in the logic of war. Thus throughout the text female
reporters are portrayed as engaged in the war effort. Women journalists are
variously designated as a “Frontfrau” (wR, 28; front woman), waging war
on a distant land from the comfort of her newsroom desk, a “Kriegsbraut”
(Tr, 42; war bride), or a “Westkriegsblitzmädel” (Tr, 43; Western war anti-
aircraft girl). Moreover, like the producers of media texts, the male and
female consumers of these images and news reports are also implicated in
the practice of war. It is their hunger for images that keeps the war machine
running. The media sell the war, and the consumers buy it.
In order to combat the barrage of media images, Handke relies on a
discourse of uncertainty. He is explicit, vociferous, and opinionated when
he attacks the rigidity of preconceived notions on television and in news-
paper reporting, but his own impressions from his travels are characterized
by reticence, subtle allusions, and doubt. Handke is extremely careful not
to replace the dominant stories with his own definitive version of events.
Instead, he foregrounds uncertainty; a technique that is facilitated by the
form of the essay itself.22 In Handke’s essays, no attempt to see for oneself,
to explore a situation in loco leads to clarity. Rather it produces contradic-

tory and uncertain information. The more Handke tries to get to the bot-
tom of the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and the closer he is to the
war, the more he feels unsure of his own understanding. At the border to
Bosnia, for example, Handke cannot tell if he is faced with violent militia-
men, harmless foresters, or militiamen disguised as foresters. He wonders
if the border patrol’s face expresses a “Schießblick” (wR, 100; shooting
look) or a deep sadness and fails to determine whether the houses on the
other side of the border were destroyed in the war or are incomplete
because they are in the process of being built.
Handke’s preference for indirectness also applies to the representation
of death. In conscious distance from the garish gruesomeness of television
and newspaper reporting, Handke does not depict death directly. Rather
than focus on the most blatant cases of destruction and slaughter, he con-
veys the general devastation through allusions and circumlocution. In all
of Handke’s essays, the victims of war are a matter of hearsay, present only
as distant echoes and memories. During his first visit to Bajina Basta — a
town in Western Serbia that had been exposed to shelling by Bosnian
Muslims — Handke repeats the report of a local woman, who is herself
referring to anonymous sources: “Immer wieder sollen scharenweise
Kadaver die Drina abwärts getrieben haben, doch sie kannte niemanden,
der das mit eigenen Augen gesehen hatte” (wR, 94; Again and again,
cadavers are supposed to have drifted down the Drina in droves, but she
did not know anybody who had seen this with his own eyes). Even when
Handke does have access to eyewitness reports, he refuses to replicate
them. Thus, although his texts are filled with the opinions of locals, he
shies away from repeating the “grausigsten Einzelheiten” (SN, 33; most
horrid details). Instead, he provides detailed descriptions of the minutiae
of damage to houses and of the destruction of communal life, which is
now restricted to graveyard gatherings. That this is not an unthinking
preference but a conscious choice becomes evident in Handke’s account of
his visit to Srebrenica, where Serbian forces massacred approximately eight
thousand Bosnian Muslims. Here Handke refers explicitly to the Islamic
prohibition of images and the concomitant preference for arabesque
forms. True to this principle, Handke again does not provide a detailed
description of death and victimization. Rather, he chooses to convey a
picture of his own feelings of helplessness and pain in the face of general
devastation: his hand deliberately thrust into a bush of nettles. Clearly,
Handke’s insistence on indirectness and arabesques is a deeply ambivalent
technique. It represents a conscious rejection of the commercial, sensa-
tionalist exploitation of death in the media and in so doing seeks to restore
dignity to the subject of death. However, it is also true that his emphasis
on media critique and on the war as a Western imperial act imposed on the
people of Yugoslavia, along with his search for narratives of communality
and peace, demands the exclusion of the local victims of physical violence.
As Peter Strasser points out, Handke’s works cannot provide information
about certain aspects of the world, because they cannot be assimilated to
the idealism of his texts.23 Handke’s muted recording of the horror of war
seeks to portray suffering without doing harm to the victim’s dignity, but
it also silences the victims of war and removes them from direct view.
In spite of their condescending components and at times vitriolic
attacks on the Western media, Handke’s essays constitute deliberate
attempts to break out of the dominant history of war. Handke seeks to
direct our gaze away from the big men and big battles of history toward
what he repeatedly refers to as “dritte Dinge” (wR, 51; third things) or
“Nebendraußen” (besides outside), an expression that Handke borrows
from Hermann Lenz’s eponymous poem.24 Both terms refer to the fabric
of everyday life on which a peaceful community could be built. In
Handke’s writing, the realm of the everyday is not only the last arena of
authenticity, but it is also in great proximity to the sublime and even the
sacred.25 Unsurprisingly, this shift away from war and big history toward
the essential minutiae and trivia that make up our lives, that is, toward the
realm that has traditionally been identified as female, also has implications
for the representation of gender. Because Handke consciously blurs the
borders between the sublime and the quotidian, between the sacred and
the everyday, his focus on “common life” does not simply reverse but
rather destabilizes the dichotomies of private and political and of male and
female.
In his effort to convey his conversations with locals, to render a picture
of everyday life in Serbia, Handke reproduces the stories of many women.
Throughout Reise and Nachtrag, women appear as important witnesses, as
keepers of memory, as mourners, survivors, citizens, and even as fighters.
Engaged as eyewitnesses, women offer their version of the ethnic strug-
gles. Handke portrays the Serbian women he encounters as powerful
agents and frequently refers to their warrior days as partisans in the Second
World War. Thus, an older woman, mother-in-law to one of his two com-
panions, is described as female chief (“Häuptlingin”) and partisan fighter
(SN, 22; “Partisanin”), and an old woman in Banja Luka is also introduced
as a guerilla fighter. Handke not only relates her story but also provides a
detailed description of the scars that bear witness to her participation in the
Second World War (Tr, 99).
Unlike Jelinek, whose ventriloquism, as we shall see, is highly stylized
and never presumes to represent the voice of an Other, Handke’s attempt
to render the Serbian perspective at times turns into a colonization of the
voice of the Other. Throughout his essays he makes frequent and highly
problematic judgments about the authenticity of the voices of those con-
structed as subalterns.26 He wonders, for example, whether “das slowe-
nische Volk sich das Staat-Spielen nicht bloss einreden lassen [hat] — welch
kindliches Volk, welch kindischer Staat” (whether the Slovenian people

had been talked into playing state — what a childish people, what a child-
ish state).27 Clearly, Handke’s patronizing tone threatens to discredit his
enterprise of “Ideologiekritik.” The attempt to unveil a realm of
“Wirklichkeit” underneath the barrage of media images and the dominant
influence of Western culture is tainted by the author’s own peculiar colo-
nial fantasies of a world apart from Western consumerism. Moreover,
although the world of the “Nebendraußen” troubles traditional gender
categories, the author who seeks to initiate others to this heightened real-
ity is defined as male.28 And yet, in spite of its shortcomings, Handke’s
insightful analysis of the interrelation of war and the media, his valoriza-
tion of the everyday, and the concomitant reconceptualizations of gender
deserve our attention and respect.
Jelinek
While Jelinek’s early dramas feature conventional dialogue and traditional
plots, her later texts abandon psychological and narrative consistency in
favor of free-flowing narrative voices or, as Corina Caduff puts it, charac-
ters who are mere vehicles of language.29 Like Das Werk and In den
Alpen,30 Jelinek’s texts on the Iraq war, the play Bambiland and the three
monologues Babel, which were added for the première in Zurich, make no
attempt to represent psychologically consistent characters. Instead they
offer a melée of narrative voices intermingling citations from the most
prized proponents of Western literature and philosophy with motifs and
jingles from popular television shows, advertisements, and, most recently,
websites. Instead of insisting on originality, Bambiland highlights and
satirizes its citationality. Jelinek prefaces her text with an ironic acknowl-
edgement section, in which she thanks her sources:
Meinen Dank an Aischylos und die Perser, übersetzt von Oskar Werner.
Von mir aus können Sie auch noch eine Prise Nietzsche nehmen. Der
Rest ist aber auch nicht von mir. Er ist von schlechten Eltern. Er ist von
den Medien.
[My thanks to Aeschylus and the Persians, translated by Oskar Werner.

For all I care you can also take a pinch of Nietzsche. The rest is not by
me either. It is by bad parents. It is from the media.]
The prominent place accorded to the media in this introductory note, along
with the title — the Bambi is Germany’s most coveted media award — testi-
fies to the importance of media critique in Jelinek’s writing, a critique that
is not directed at specific contents but rather analyzes the ways in which the
televised mediation of reality transforms our experience of the world.
Although it is a text about war, Bambiland does not follow the con-
ventional form of war reportage but is conceived as a media diary or blog,
a running commentary on the day’s news. The text acquires its critical
dimension not through explicit judgments and incisive comments but
rather by imitating the modus operandi of the media it seeks to critique.
The incessant banal banter of Jelinek’s narrative voices, the relentless jux-
taposition of the trivial and the sublime, the commercial and the sacred,
represent an ironic attack on the genre of infotainment that characterizes
the televised portrayal of war.
Jelinek presents television not as a means of conveying information
but as an instrument of manipulation. Interestingly, this distortion is not
to be imagined as a falsification of authentic data after the fact but consists
rather in the transformational effect of television on any reality it seeks to
represent:
Man will immer wohlwollend verstanden werden, sonst würde man ja gar
nichts sagen in die vielen Kameras und Mikros . . . Man selbst sagt immer
nur, was man über sich gedacht haben will, nicht was man denkt.
(B, 16–17)
[One always wants to be understood sympathetically or else one would

not say anything to the many cameras and mikes . . . One always says only
what one wants others to think about oneself, not what one thinks.]
Although television simulates directness and authenticity, it produces a

deep alienation from experience: “Die Presse! Ganz zugrunde geht der
Barbaren Heer und die Kamera erfasst es. Wir fassen es nicht, doch die
Kamera erfasste es” (B, 42; The press! The barbarians’ army perishes com-
pletely and the camera captures it. We do not grasp it, but the camera did).
Television not only radically alters the nature of experience, but it also
produces its very own form of reality: “Neinnein, Sie vergessen, dass es
eine ganz andere Natur ist, die zu dieser Kamera gesprochen hat als die,
die direkt zum Auge persönlich spricht” (B, 139; Nono, you forget that it
is an entirely different nature that spoke to this camera from the one that
speaks to the eye personally and directly). The cultural critic Neal Gabler
refers to this as postreality or simply as Life: The Movie31 while Jean
Baudrillard has theorized this condition as the hyperreal, a concept of real-
ity without origin or referents that substitutes signs of the real for the real
itself.32
While the transformative effect of television is visible in every arena of
life, it is most acutely felt in the relation between the West and its “Others.”
Because of the easy availability of images, television produces the illusion
of familiarity with other cultures. This illusory accessibility of the Other
does not diminish misunderstanding but rather widens the rift between the
West and its Others: “Die Straßen der Fremden, nur das Kameraauge, das
unbestechliche, sieht sie” (B, 47; Only the eye of the camera, the incor-
ruptible one, sees the streets of foreigners). The text illustrates the prob-
lematic méconnaissance of the Other that results from such faux familiarity
by presenting a barrage of mutually contradictory stereotypes, in which
Arabs are presented as simultaneously devoid of feelings and as incapable
of controlling their excessive feelings, simultaneously weak-minded and
dangerously cunning. But again, what Jelinek is interested in is not prima-
rily the distortion of facts through careless or mendacious reporting but
the fundamental transformation of the quality of experience through
television:
Hier, das Bild, es erscheint und leuchtet hell . . . Sein und Schein.
Schauen Sie! Das alles ergibt kein Sein an sich, das ergibt überhaupt kein
Sein mehr, was aber gleich ist dem Sein . . . Sein und Schein, die beide
eins sind, auch das habe ich bewirkt, indem ich das Fernsehen erfunden
habe. (B, 82)
[Here, the image, it appears and shines brightly . . . Being and appear-
ance. Look! All that does not equal being per se, it equals no being at all
anymore, which, however, is equal to being . . . Being and appearance,
which are both one, I did that as well by inventing television.]
Television has displaced reality as we used to know it and has usurped life
to the point where television now is the essence of life.
Like Handke, Jelinek conceives of television as a weapon of perception
and, as such, it is an instrument of war. Bambiland designates television as
an appendix and accomplice of war, “ein praktisches Zusatzgerät zu all
diesen Bomben” (B, 82; a practical auxiliary apparatus for all these bombs)
and likens it to the tracer bullet whose trail of light allows us to follow the
path of war:
Unseren Fernseher, den behalten wir, unsren Altar, der darf nicht spurlos
fort, der ist doch die Spur! Der ist unsre Leuchtspurmunition, damit wir
im Dunkeln sehen, wie er einschlägt der Blitz im Strom des feindlichen
Heers. (B, 17)
[Our television, that we’ll keep, our altar, that cannot be gone without a
trace, it is the trace! It is our tracer bullet so that we see in the dark how
it hits, lightning, in the stream of the foreign army.]
As the use of the term “altar” indicates, Jelinek also suggests that Western
culture has endowed television with a quasi-sacral significance. Television
is a substitute religion, the altar at which we worship, and it is the inter-
mediary that interposes itself in every human interaction: “wir Verführer
von niemand, wir Verführer des Bildes allein” (B, 19; we seducers of
nobody, we seducers of the image alone). Because television performs
functions previously attributed only to religion, the dominance of televi-
sion also has drastic implications for our perception of and relation to
death.
In order to show how television distorts our perception of pain and
death, turning them into “death lite,” Jelinek relies largely on parody and
pastiche. In Bambiland’s characteristic montage of the sacred and the
trivial, of the sublime and the colloquial registers, death loses its dignity
and gravity. The text intermingles reports of uranium bombs with refer-
ences to Snickers bars and proclaims that the Western army delivers death
just as the Easter bunny brings eggs. “Wegwerfsoldaten” (disposable sol-
diers) become the logical equivalent of “Wegwerfbilder” (B, 154; dispos-
able images). In Jelinek’s TV nation, death cannot be rendered as a
sorrowful personal event of deep significance but becomes a matter of
casual regret. Again and again Jelinek invokes the dirge of Greek tragedy
only to disrupt it with an abrupt switch to the jargon of television advertis-
ing: “der Männer Blüte fallend fortgerafft. So viele Männer einfach
verschwendet! Ich hätte den einen oder andren sicher noch brauchen
können” (B, 42; the flower of manhood swept away dying. So many men
simply wasted! I could surely have used one or the other). Petty complaints,
incomprehension, and apathy have taken the place of concern, sorrow, and
mourning:
Wäre es Ihnen bitte möglich, mir dieses Bild jetzt genauer zu erklären?
[. . .] Ich sehe, dass diese sieben Frauen samt Kindern, ich weiß nicht wie
viele von welcher Sorte, jetzt in dem Kleinbus erschossen worden sind.
Manche sprechen von zehn. Aber ich kann mir keinen Reim darauf
machen. (B, 68)
[Would it please be possible for you to now explain this image to me in

greater detail? [. . .] I see that these seven women with children, I don’t
know how many of which kind, have now been shot in the minivan. Some
say ten. But I don’t know what to make of it]
Pain and death are by their very nature incommunicable, but the distance
to the pain of the Other is drastically increased if it is conveyed through
television and the Internet: “Ich fühle direkt, ich fühle alle Arten von
Grausamkeit direkt am eigenen Leib, ohne sie je spüren zu müssen. Ja, das
geht wirklich bis ins körperliche hinein, echt, aber zum Glück doch nicht
echt” (B, 142; I feel directly, I feel all kinds of cruelty directly on my own
body without having to ever experience them. Yes, this really extends to
the corporeal, really, but fortunately not actually).33 In Jelinek’s text, tele-
vision and the Internet are not media that encourage empathy but rather
serve to obfuscate our inability to perceive the pain of the Other. Because
death and pain are mediated through commercialized images, our existen-
tial distance from the pain of the Other loses its innocence. Witnessing is
no longer a potentially productive act but a form of complicity. Typically,
Jelinek does not describe this dynamic but seeks to hammer it in through
puns and metaphors and by directly addressing the reader.34 Thus in
Peter’s monologue in Babel, Jelinek employs Gulf War terminology to
describe the excessive interest in the Internet video of a beheading, which
leads to the crash of the server: “wie dieser liebe Server jetzt unter Ihrem
Wüstensturm zusammengekracht ist” (B, 142; just like this dear server has
now crashed under your desert storm). Without recourse to explication,
Bambiland’s style and tropes leave no doubt that, in a TV nation, every-
body is implicated in the dynamic of war.35 Irrespective of their distance
from the battlefield, television viewers are complicit in the warfare they
watch on screen.
Jelinek’s focus on images locates the logic of our culture in a televi-
sion imperative: televideo, ergo sum. Television endows its subjects with
a heightened form of reality so that “alles alles vom Fernsehen beseelt
wurde” (B, 91; everything everything was animated by television). In our
global visual culture, images on television or on the Internet not only
define who we are, but they also eclipse and displace the people or sub-
jects they purport to portray: “Es wird im Fernsehen zu einer
Persönlichkeit ausgerufen, das bloße Foto, aber die dazugehörige völlig
bloße Person ist weg” (B, 159; On television a personality is declared, the
mere photo, but the corresponding completely bare person is gone). The
fact that images are now the carriers of essence has drastic repercussions
for our perception of life and death itself. Because of their perpetual pres-
ence in visual culture, the dead can never disappear completely. Tellingly,
Babel’s narrative voices all speak to us from beyond the grave. Because
their images circulate freely, their deaths have become unreal. Conversely,
the power over life and death is no longer a primary form of power but
has become a means to an end. In Bambiland, the meaning of the photos
of tortured prisoners in Abu Ghraib is located not only in a master-slave
dynamic but also in a perverted desire to participate in our contemporary
image culture.
Jelinek’s narrative voices from beyond the grave deconstruct the life-
death dichotomy and the categories of victim and perpetrator. In
Bambiland and Babel, victim and perpetrator are not mutually exclusive
categories, and victimization is by no means synonymous with innocence.
The narrative voice of the third monologue in Babel, for example, is that
of one of the US contractors whose flayed and mutilated body was exhib-
ited on a bridge in Fallujah. Clearly, the violence inflicted on his body
could not be more gruesome. And yet his suffering does not erase the
unlawfulness of his own actions in the war. Tellingly, the contractor is lik-
ened to the mythic figure of Marsyas, who challenged the God Apollo in
a contest of music and was flayed alive for his daring. Marsyas’s story is
often cited as an instance of hubris and just punishment, but it is also a
story in which crimes and martyrdom are made to coexist.
The reconceptualization of victimization and agency also affects the

representation of gender. Jelinek, as Friederike Eigler explains, demytholo-
gizes the cultural identity of woman and victim.36 Just as Bambiland per-
forms its media critique through mimicry, it deconstructs traditional
gender stereotypes through imitation and parody.37 Thus Bambiland con-
fronts its readers with a barrage of traditional gender stereotypes. Casualty
lists of fatalities are followed by parodic citations of the classical tradition
of mourning women — “Derweil schreit, überall wo man es trifft, aua das
Weibervolk, aber die schrein ja immer, egal was passiert, denn was andres
können sie nicht” (B, 36; Meanwhile womenfolk cry ouch wherever we
meet them, but they cry all the time, no matter what happens, for they
can’t do anything else) — and the absent soldier husband is complemented
by the housebound wife who longs for his return: “Manches Bett macht
der Wunsch nach dem Gatten tränenfeucht” (B, 41; The desire for the
husband dampens many a bed with tears). And yet, in spite of its regurgi-
tation of gender stereotypes, Bambiland situates women not on the
periphery but at the center of war. Women are not disengaged bystanders
but targets and agents of war. Jelinek is acutely aware that it is the law of
the father that counts — “Die Mutter hat nie recht, immer nur der Vater”
(B, 99; The mother is never right, always only the father) — while female
experience is often ignored and subsumed under the all-encompassing
category of the human, which itself is identified with the male: “die
Besitzer des Geschlechts, wurscht welchen, es gibt eh nur eins” (B, 91; the
proprietors of gender, no matter which, there is only one anyway). Her
text seeks to counteract this dynamic by drawing attention to women as
victims and as perpetrators of violence. Jelinek counters the traditional
rhetoric of war that frames the defense of women and children as the
object of the male fight through interjections whose casualness mirrors the
actual irrelevance of female wartime suffering: “Sie haben vollkommen
richtig gehandelt, als Sie die sieben Frauen und Kinder im Kleinbus
erschossen haben” (B, 49; You absolutely did the right thing when you
shot the seven women and children in the minivan). But she also engages
in a lengthy reflection on the interrelation of violence, femininity, and
motherhood.
In Babel, Margit, who is variously identified with Iokaste, with Mary,
mother of God, and with the mother of a suicide bomber, speaks to us
from the dead.38 Through Margit, Jelinek showcases a female perspective,
thus reversing cultural processes that render women’s experience invisible.
However, the text does not substitute a celebration of female experience
for female invisibility but depicts Margit as complicit in the murders com-
mitted by her son: “Wenn mein Sohn einmal jemanden umbringt, das wäre
dann der absolute Superkick” (B, 104; If my son kills somebody at some
point, that would then be the absolute super kick). Jelinek destabilizes the
dichotomies of private and public, domestic and political, and of male and
female by introducing metaphors that mix nutrition, sexuality, and moral-

ity, killing and cooking, cannibalism, incest, and sacrifice. In Margit’s
monologue, “das Gericht” refers to both a meal and a court of law, while
“(Back)rohr” designates oven, penis, and womb. Jelinek rehashes the cli-
ché of the all-engulfing, castrating mother, who is engaged in a symbiotic
relationship with her son and who bears the ultimate responsibility for her
son’s crimes, but she also depicts Margit’s powerlessness and the abuse she
suffers. Similarly, in discussing Lynndie England’s case, the female soldier
who was involved in the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, Peter’s mon-
ologue conflates agency and victimization. Lynndie appears as both a clue-
less dupe and a female monster, whose cheerful participation in acts of
torture and abuse is documented by countless photographs. The text
mixes voices that aggrandize Lynndie and turn her into a latter-day Athena
and voices that belittle her and blame everything on her boyfriend Charles
Graner. In doing so, it invites us to question both. Jelinek deconstructs the
notion of passive femininity by poking fun at it: “Frauen gehören jetzt
nicht hierher, und zwar deshalb nicht, weil sie diesmal ausnahmsweise
einmal den aktiven Part übernehmen dürfen und somit automatisch gar
keine Frauen mehr sind” (B, 176; Women do not belong here now, and
that is because just this once they are allowed to take the active part and
thus are automatically no longer women at all). Through language and
style, Jelinek demonstrates that women are both victims of violence, ren-
dered invisible in Western culture, and complicit in the logic of war.
Conclusion
Handke’s and Jelinek’s texts are strikingly similar in their analyses of the
role of our dominant media in shaping and transforming our experience of
death and warfare. But they differ in other important ways. Jelinek’s text
is a highly self-conscious intervention in gender discourses, while Handke’s
reconceptualization of gender is the by-product of his analysis of the rela-
tion between war and the media and of his focus on the “Nebendraußen,”
the fabric of our everyday lives. Furthermore, Jelinek’s “anarchic destruc-
tiveness takes place without any attempt at an imaginary reconstitution of
society,” as Elizabeth Wright points out,39 while Handke seeks to show the
way out of a history of violence and war. However, even though Handke’s
writing is inspired by a utopian project, his texts remain self-consciously
aware of the precarious, even futile, nature of such an endeavor. Jelinek’s
texts, on the other hand, evince intellectual pessimism, but their aesthetics
is designed to effect the kind of changes that the texts declare to be impos-
sible. Combining perceptive critique with subtle metaphorical links, asso-
ciative chains, and mantra-like incantations, Jelinek’s texts address our
conscious and unconscious mind alike. Both Handke and Jelinek conceive
of language as a key to our mind and world and both produce texts that
are vitriolic in their critique of the media and passionate in their desire to
effect political change.
Notes
1
Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil
War (New York: Knopf, 2008), xi.
2
Ann Kaplan, Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and
Literature (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2005), 94.
3
Elfriede Jelinek, Bambiland, Babel: Zwei Theatertexte. (Reinbek bei Hamburg:
Rowohlt, 2004). Subsequent references to these works are cited in the text using
the abbreviation B and the page number.
4
Although this trend has reached new extremes, it is by no means a recent phe-
nomenon. See, for example, the apocryphal missive by publisher Randolph Hearst
to the artist Frederic Remington: “You furnish the picture and I will furnish the
war,” cited in Neal Gabler, Life: The Movie; How Entertainment Conquered Reality
(New York: Random House, 1998), 68. For an analysis of the interaction of media
and the military see Walter Jertz and Carsten Bockstette, “Militärpolitische
Perzeptionen und die Zukunftsperspektiven des strategischen Informations-
managements: Die Entwicklung der Krisenkommunikation von der Kosovo
Operation Allied Force 1999 zur Operation Iraqi Freedom,” in Der Krieg in den
Medien, ed. Christian Büttner, Joachim von Gottberg, and Verena Metze-Mangold
(Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2004), 51–72. See also Heinz-Peter Preusser, ed.,
Krieg in den Medien (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005).
5
Nicholas Mirzoeff, Watching Babylon: The War in Iraq and Global Visual Culture
(New York: Routledge, 2005), 80.
6
Kelly Oliver, Women as Weapons of War: Iraq, Sex and the Media (New York:
Columbia UP, 2007), 39.
7
Elfriede Jelinek, Jutta Heinrich, and Adolf-Ernst Meyer, Sturm und Drang:
Schreiben als Geschlechterkampf (Hamburg: Klein, 1995), 49. Unless otherwise
stated, all translations are by the author.
8
Peter Handke, Rund um das Große Tribunal (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
2003); “Noch einmal für Jugoslawien.” Literaturen: Das Journal für Bücher und
Themen July and August (2005): 82–103; and Die Fahrt im Einbaum, oder, Das
Stück zum Film vom Krieg (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999).
9
Some contributions to this debate are published in Tilman Zülch, ed., Die Angst
des Dichters vor der Wirklichkeit: 16 Antworten auf Peter Handkes Winterreise nach
Serbien (Göttingen: Steidl, 1996).
10
Peter Handke, Abschied des Träumers vom Neunten Land: Eine Wirklichkeit, die
vergangen ist; Erinnerung an Slowenien (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991).
11
Peter Handke, Eine winterliche Reise zu den Flüssen Donau, Save, Morawa und
Drina oder Gerechtigkeit für Serbien (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996), 50.
Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text using the abbreviation wR
and the page number.
12
Georg Pichler, Die Beschreibung des Glücks: Peter Handke, eine Biographie
(Vienna: Ueberreuter, 2002), 176.
13
Peter Handke, Sommerlicher Nachtrag zu einer winterlichen Reise (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 1996). Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text
using the abbreviation SN and the page number.
14
Peter Handke, Unter Tränen fragend: Nachträgliche Aufzeichnungen von zwei
Jugoslawien-Durchquerungen im Krieg, März und April 1999 (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 2000). Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text using
the abbreviation Tr and the page number.
15
For an analysis of Handke’s media criticism see Hubert Lengauer, “Pitting
Narration against Image: Peter Handke’s Literary Protest against the Staging of
Reality by the Media,” in Whose Story? — Continuities in Contemporary German-
language Literature, ed. Arthur Williams, Stuart Parkes, and Julian Preece (Berne:
Peter Lang, 1998), 353–70.
16
Handke’s criticism of the media and his aversion to mediated reality are com-
plemented by a deep concern with the search for “Wirklichkeit” (reality), which he
defines as unmediated experience of the world and immediate sensual presence
through walking, tasting, observing, listening. In Handke’s works the representa-
tion of such “Wirklichkeit” is endowed with a quasi-religious significance. The
writer turns into a poet-priest, who seeks redemption through art. This redemp-
tion, however, is either always already elusive or remains perpetually deferred.
17
Matthias Konzett, The Rhetoric of National Dissent in Thomas Bernhard, Peter
Handke, and Elfriede Jelinek (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2000), 94.
18
See Scott Abbott, “Modeling a Dialectic: Peter Handke’s A Journey to the Rivers
or Justice for Serbia,” in After Postmodernism: Austrian Literature and Film in
Transition, ed. Willy Riemer (Riverside, CA: Ariadne, 2000), 340–52; here 342.
19
See Linda Williams, Screening Sex (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2008), 155–80. See
also Günther Höfler, “Medien/Krieg in deutschsprachigen Stücken des 21.
Jahrhunderts am Beispiel von Elfriede Jelineks Bambiland/Babel und Werner
Fritschs Hydra Krieg,” in Information Warfare: Die Rolle der Medien (Literatur,
Kunst, Photographie, Film, Fernsehen, Theater, Presse, Korrespondenz) bei der
Kriegsdarstellung und -deutung, ed. Claudia Glunz, Artur Pelka, and Thomas F.
Schneider (Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2006), 501–12; here 505.
20
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
2004), 66.
21
In Reise, Handke laments that journalists conceive of themselves as judges and
calls them “Kriegshunde” (123).
22
See Scott Abbott, “Handke’s Yugoslavia Work,” in The Works of Peter Handke:
International Perspectives, ed. David N. Coury and Frank Pilipp (Riverside, CA:
Ariadne P, 2005), 359–86; here 368–70.
23
See Peter Strasser, “Sich mit dem Salbei freuen: Das Subjekt der Dichtung bei
Peter Handke,” in Die Dichter und das Denken: Wechselspiele zwischen Literatur
und Philosophie, ed. Klaus Kastberger and Konrad Paul Liessmann (Vienna:
Zsolnay, 2004), 117–38; here 126.
24
For the full text of the poem see http://www.hermann-lenz-preis.de/index_01.
html (accessed 8 Aug. 2009).
25
On the everyday and the sublime in Handke see Carsten Zelle, “Parteinahme
für die Dinge: Peter Handkes Poetik einer literarischen Phänomenologie (am
Beispiel seiner Journale, 1975–1982),” Euphorion 91.1 (2003): 99–117; here 99.
26
He comments, for example, that the breaking apart of the Yugoslav union was
not a personal experience for individual Slovenians (Handke, Abschied des
Träumers, 34).
27
Handke, Abschied des Träumers, 43.
28
Mireille Tabah, “Genderdifferenz als kulturelle Performanz bei P. Handke,” in
Jahrbuch für Internationale Germanistik: Geschlechterdifferenzen als Kulturkonflikte,
vol. 10, ed. Jean-Marie Valentin (Berne: Peter Lang, 2005), 71–76; here 74.
29
Corina Caduff, “Elfriede Jelinek,” in Deutsche Dramatiker des 20. Jahrhunderts,
ed. Alo Allkemper and Norbert Otto Eke (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2000), 764–78;
here 766.
30
Elfriede Jelinek, In den Alpen: Drei Dramen (Berlin: Berlin Verlag, 2002).
31
Gabler, Life: The Movie, 10.
32
Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, ed. and trans. Mark Poster (Stanford, CA:
Stanford UP, 2001), 170.
33
The alienation from death because of the distortion created by the media finds
its real-life equivalent on the battlefield, where Western technology holds the death
of the Other at a distance. Jelinek illustrates the transfer of agency from humans to
intelligent weapon systems through mock admiration of technological prowess and
through anthropomorphization, claiming, for example, that the tomahawk knows
what it is doing (see B, 28).
34
See Brechtje Beuker, who points out that Jelinek constructs an “embedded
reader,” who is drawn into the war: Brechtje Beuker, “Theaterschlachten: Jelineks
dramaturgisches Konzept und die Thematik der Gewalt am Beispiel von
Bambiland,” Modern Austrian Literature 39 (2006): 57–71; here 63.
35
Blödorn makes a similar point when he speaks of the visual complicity of the
television audience. See Andreas Blödorn, “Medialisierung des Krieges: Mit Susan
Sontag in Elfriede Jelinek’s Bambiland,” in Gegenwartsliteratur, ed. Paul Michael
Lützeler and Stephan K. Schindler (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2006), 142–63; here
156.
36
Friederike Eigler, “Gewissenlose Erkenntnis: Frauen-Bilder und Kulturkritik bei
Elfriede Jelinek und Friedrich Nietzsche,” Seminar 30.1 (1994): 44–58; here 45.
37
See Marlies Janz, who claims that in citing and appropriating traditional gender
stereotypes Jelinek deprives them of meaning. See Marlies Janz “Falsche Spiegel:
Über die Umkehrung als Verfahren bei Elfriede Jelinek,” in Gegen den schönen
Schein: Texte zu Elfriede Jelinek, ed. Christa Gürtler (Frankfurt am Main: Neue
Kritik, 1990), 81–97; here 82. In Jelinek’s text gender is not a simple category but
complicated by class and race relations. Bambiland emphasizes differences between
rich and poor, suggesting that it is the poor who pay the price of war: “Die Reichen
schicken ihre Kinder nicht hierher, das steht fest” (59–60; The rich don’t send
their children here, that much is certain).
38
For a detailed analysis of Margit’s monologue see Bärbel Lücke, “Der Krieg im
Irak als literarisches Ereignis: Vom Freudschen Vatermord über das Mutterrecht
zum islamistischen Märtyrer; Elfriede Jelineks Bambiland und zwei Monologe;
Eine dekonstruktivistisch-psychoanalytische Analyse,” Weimarer Beiträge 50
(2004): 362–81; here 374–78.
39
Elizabeth Wright, “An Aesthetics of Disgust: Elfriede Jelinek’s Die
Klavierspielerin,” Paragraph 14.2 (1991): 184–96; here 193.
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Contributors
JUDITH AIKIN, who received her PhD from the University of California at
Berkeley in 1974, is Professor of German at the University of Iowa. She
has authored four books and over forty articles and chapters on German
drama, opera, and devotional song of the seventeenth century. Currently
she is completing a book on a woman author responsible for hundreds of
devotional song texts and a number of devotional handbooks, Aemilia
Juliana, Countess of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt (1637–1706).
BARBARA BECKER-CANTARINO is Research Professor in German at The

Ohio State University. Her research interests include early modern litera-
ture and culture, the Enlightenment, Classicism and Romanticism, women
writers, and gender studies. Recent book publications are The Eighteenth
Century: The Enlightenment and Sensibility, volume 5 of The Camden
House History of German Literature (2004) (ed.); Ingeborg Drewitz im
literarischen und politischen Feld der 50er bis 80er Jahre, Publikationen zur
Zeitschrift für Germanistik 10 (2004), with Inge Stephan; Pietism and
Women’s Autobiography: The Life of Lady Johanna Eleonora Petersen,
Written by Herself (1689/1717) (2005); and Meine Liebe zu Büchern:
Sophie von La Roche als professionelle Schriftstellerin (2008).
JILL BEPLER, who received her PhD in German Literature from Bristol
University, is head of the Fellowship Programme of the Herzog August
Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel. She has published on travel literature, collect-
ing and libraries, court culture, and funeral works in the early modern
period. She has a special interest in the cultural role of dynastic women in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
CLARE BIELBY is Lecturer in German at the University of Hull, having

studied at the universities of Cambridge, Sussex, and Edinburgh. Her
research interests lie in German cultural and gender studies, especially in
the post-war period. She has a particular interest in the politics of the body
and in gendered and sexual identities. She has published articles and book
chapters on German terrorism, gender, and representation.
STEPHANIE BIRD is Senior Lecturer in German at University College,

London. She is the author of Recasting Historical Women: Female Identity
in German Biographical Fiction (1998) and Women Writers and National
214 NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS
Identity: Bachmann, Duden, Özdamar (2003). She has published on the

theme of masochism in Musil, the relationship of gender, shame, and eth-
ics in Musil, Raabe, and Keller, and on eyes and narrative strategies in
Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz. She is currently working on comedy and
melodrama.
ABIGAIL DUNN obtained her BA in French and German from the University
of Exeter in 2003 and a Masters with distinction from the University of
Sheffield in 2005, with a thesis examining Hesse’s affinities with
Kierkegaard and Sartre. She completed her D.Phil. on the depiction of the
widow in nineteenth-century German literature at the University of
Oxford.
STEPHANIE M. HILGER is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature

and German at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her
research focuses on class and gender in eighteenth-century British, French,
and German literature. Her articles on these topics have appeared in sev-
eral journals, including Colloquia Germanica, Eighteenth-Century Studies,
Neophilologus, and Seminar. Her book, Women Write Back: Strategies of
Response and the Dynamics of European Literary Culture, 1790–1805
(2009), explores women authors’ engagement with well-known texts by
male contemporaries. Her current project, “The Warrior and the Traveler:
Women in the French Revolution,” examines the depiction of socially and
politically active women in German literature during the thirty-year period
following the French Revolution.
ELISABETH KRIMMER is Associate Professor of German at the University of

California, Davis. She is the author of In the Company of Men: Cross-
Dressed Women around 1800 (2004) and co-author of Hollywood Divas,
Indie Queens and TV Heroines: Contemporary Screen Images of Women
(2005). Her articles have appeared in journals such as PMLA, The German
Quarterly, Women in German Yearbook, German Life and Letters, Seminar,
and Eighteenth-Century Fiction. She recently completed a book on the
representation of war in German literature.
ÁINE MCMURTRY is Teaching Fellow in German at the University of St

Andrews. She studied at St. Hilda’s College and The Queen’s College,
Oxford, where she completed a doctoral thesis on Ingeborg Bachmann’s late
verse and prose. She held the Hanseatic Scholarship at Hamburg University
for two years and the Laming Junior Fellowship at Queen’s, which enabled
her to work in the Department of Manuscripts at the Austrian National
Library. Her article “Reading Tristan in Ingeborg Bachmann’s Ich weiß keine
bessere Welt and Malina” appeared in German Life and Letters (2007).
NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS 215
ANNA RICHARDS is Lecturer in German at Birkbeck College, University of

London. She has published articles and chapters on German women’s writ-
ing from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries and on mourning in late
eighteenth-century German culture. Her book, The Wasting Heroine in
German Fiction by Women 1770–1914, was published by Oxford University
Press in 2004. She is currently co-editing a volume on the future of feminist
criticism in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German studies.
SIMON RICHTER is Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the

University of Pennsylvania. He specializes in gender studies and the history
and theory of the body, especially in relation to the eighteenth century. He
has many articles to his credit and is the author of Missing the Breast:
Gender, Fantasy and the Body in the German Enlightenment (2006) and
Laocoon’s Body and the Aesthetics of Pain (2006) and editor of The
Literature of Weimar Classicism, volume 7 in the Camden House History
of German Literature (2005).
HELEN WATANABE-O’KELLY is Professor of German at the University of

Oxford and Fellow and Tutor of Exeter College, Oxford. With Sarah
Colvin she was Director of the AHRC Major Research Project
“Representations of Women and Death in German Literature, Art, and
Media from 1500 to the Present” between 2005 and 2008. Watanabe-
O’Kelly has numerous publications in the field of German literature of the
sixteenth, seventeenth, and nineteenth centuries, court culture of the early
modern period, literary translation, and women’s studies. Recent books
include The Cambridge History of German Literature (1997) (ed.);
Spectaculum Europaeum: Theatre and Spectacle in Europe, Histoire du spec-
tacle en Europe (1580–1750), edited with Pierre Béhar (1999); Festivals
and Ceremonies: A Bibliography of Works Relating to Court, Civic and
Religious Festivals in Europe, 1500–1800, with Ann Simon (2000); Court
Culture in Dresden from Renaissance to Baroque (2002); and Beauty or
Beast? The Woman Warrior in the German Imagination from the Renaissance
to the Present (2010). She is an editor of German Life and Letters and of
Daphnis: Zeitschrift für mittlere deutsche Literatur.
Index
Adkins, Brent, 135–36, 142 aporia, 142, 143

Adonis, 51–52, 56, 64 Arendt, Hannah, 165
Aemilia Juliana, Countess of Ariadne (mythical figure), 54, 64–65,
Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, 4–5, 67
31–50; correspondence, 32–33 Arria (Roman heroine), 80, 81, 82
Aemilia Juliana, Countess of Ataman, Kutlag, works by: Lola und
Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, works by: Bilidikid, 124
Der Freundin des Lammes Creuz- Athena (mythical figure), 188
Schule und Todes-Betrachtungen, August the Strong, Elector of Saxony,
33–34, 46 n. 5; Der Freundin des 43
Lammes täglicher Umgang mit Gott,
49 n. 22; Geistliches Weiber-Aqua- Bach, Johann Sebastian, 31, 34, 45,
Vit, 36–39, 47 n. 10; “Gott/ ich 46 n. 2
merck dein Vaters-Wincken,” 38–39; Bach, Steven, 118
“Gott mit meiner matten Zungen,” Bachmann, Ingeborg, 3, 4, 8–9, 10,
36–37, 43; “O Du Dreyeinger 145–46, 149, 152–53, 154–65,
Gott/ den ich mir auserlesen,” 170–71
35–36; Tägliches Morgen-Mittags- Bachmann, Ingeborg, works by: “Alla
und AbendOpffer, 41, 42; “Wer piu umile, alla piu umana, alla piu
weiß, wie nah mir mein Ende,” 5, sofferente,” 162–64, 172 n. 16; Das
31, 34–35, 36, 41, 44–46 Buch Franza, 8, 135, 145–149;
afterlife, 23, 52, 59, 60, 62–64, 67, 98. “Erklär mir, Liebe,” 154; “Die
See also heaven gestohlenen Jahre,” 158–60, 168;
agency, female, 2, 4, 6, 7, 9, 12, 73, Ich weiß keine bessere Welt, 8, 152;
74, 81, 82, 154, 175, 181, 187, 188 “Keine Delikatessen,” 159–60,
aging, female, 88, 90, 94–99 172 n. 15; Malina, 3–4, 8, 9, 10,
Agnese, Barbara, 155 145–46, 148, 153, 155, 156, 164–
Albrecht, Monika, 168 71; “Das Strafgesetzbuch Gaspara
Alcoforado, Mariana, 155–56 Stampa,” 157–58, 160–62, 164;
Althaus, Paul, works by: Der Friedhof Todesarten, 8, 146, 152–53, 158–59,
unserer Väter, 45–46 164
Amazons, 1, 4, 12, 24–25 Bachofen, Johann Jakob, works by:
Ammarati, Anna, 129 Das Mutterrecht, 53
angels, 20–21, 23 Baldung Grien, Hans, 102
Anna (biblical figure), 24 baptism, 37
Anna Magdalena, Baroness of Barbaroux, Charles, 86 n. 21
Schönfeld, 43 Barthes, Roland, 165
Antigone (mythical figure), 139, 140 Barthes, Roland, works by: A Lover’s
Aphrodite (mythical figure), 52, 63, 64 Discourse: Fragments, 165–66, 170
Apollo (mythical figure), 186 Bassanese, Fiora, 154
218 INDEX
Baudrillard, Jean, 183 childbirth, 29 n. 27, 32, 36–37, 39. See

Bauer, Edith, 169 also death, in childbirth
Baxter, Peter, 120–21 Christiana Eberhardine of
Beckett, Samuel, 145 Brandenburg-Beyreuth, 43
Beham, Barthel, 102 Cixous, Hélène, 145
Beham, Hans Sebald, 102 clergymen, 13–14, 15, 17–18, 19, 23,
Besler family, 19, 21; Anna Maria 24–26, 42, 47 n. 6
Besler, 20–22; Basilius Besler, 19; coffins, 13, 14, 15, 23, 27 n. 11, 45,
Johann Jakob Beurer, 19; Katharina 93, 94
Besler, 19–20, 21; Susanna Besler, Colvin, Sarah, 10 n. 4
19, 21 comedy, 4, 8, 134, 135, 144–49
Bible, 15, 17, 18, 24, 32, 41, 42, 101– consolation, 17–18, 20, 21, 28 n. 21,
2, 109, 111 43, 48 n. 12
biblical verses, 4, 14, 17, 18, 19, 20, Copjec, Joan, 8, 139–40, 141, 144
21, 22, 23, 25, 32, 38, 39, 42 Corday, Charlotte (historical figure), 3,
Birck, Sixt, 103 71, 72, 73, 75, 77–79, 80, 81, 82,
Birken, Sigmund von, works by: 83, 84 n. 11, 85 n. 17, 85–86 n. 18,
Todes-Gedanken, 23 86 n. 21, 104. See also Westphalen,
Blanchot, Maurice, 134, 137–38 Christine, works by: Charlotte
Bocokic, Zlatko, 176 Corday
Boetcher Joeres, Ruth-Ellen, 88 Corneille, Pierre, 77, 81
Book of Judith, 101, 102 Cranach, Lucas (the Younger), 102
Braidotti, Rosi, 143–44 Creuzer, Friedrich, 3, 5, 52, 54,
Brass, Tinto, works by: Monello, 7–8, 55–70; correspondence, 5, 56–57,
128–30 58–62, 66, 69 n. 16, 69 n. 17
Brentano, Bettina, 58 Creuzer, Friedrich, works by: Aus dem
Brentano, Clemens, 58 Leben eines alten Professors, 56; Die
Brentano, Kunigunda, 58 historische Kunst der Griechen, 55;
Bronfen, Elisabeth, 1, 2, 9, 117, Studien, 55, 58; Symbolik und
138–39, 141, 142, 144 Mythologie der alten Völker, 52, 56
Brutus, 80, 81, 86 n. 21 Creuzer, Leonhard, 69 n. 16
Bühel, Hans von, works by: Critchley, Simon, 134, 145
Dyocletianus Leben, 93 cross-dressing, 24, 76–77, 79
Burgin, Victor, 3 Cunz, F. A., 45
Caduff, Corina, 182 D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 168

Caesar, 81 D’Annunzio, Gabriele, works by: The
Carrdus, Anna, 23 Flame, 168–69
castration, 105, 117, 121, 128, 139, Daub, Carl, 55, 58, 61, 69 n. 17
188 David (biblical figure), 102
Catechism, 15 David, Jacques Louis, 71, 77
Cato, 80, 81 de Beauvoir, Simone, 136
Charlotte ou la Judith Moderne (anon), de Broca, Louis, Interesting Anecdotes
86 n. 20 of the Heroic Conduct of Women
chastity, female, 101, 102, 107 Previous to and During the French
Chauveau-Lagarde (historical figure), Revolution, 86 n. 19
76. See also Westphalen, Christine, de Lauretis, Theresa, 116, 130–31 n. 4
works by: Charlotte Corday de Valence, Lola, 116, 130 n. 3
INDEX 219
death: being-towards-death, 135, 136, Elisabeth (biblical figure), 24

137; in childbirth, 5, 24, 36–38, 41, England, Lynndie, 175, 188
43; death drive, 138–41, 142, 144; epitaph, 13, 14, 16, 27 n. 11
by execution, 76, 80, 82, 85 n. 17; ethereality, female, 96
good death, 4, 13, 18, 19–22, 24, Eurydice, 13738
31, 35, 37, 38, 39, 45, 46; as Eve (biblical figure), 102
humorous, 4, 10, 146; of infants,
24, 38, 39; love-death, 3, 5, 52, Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, works by:
59–62, 66, 67; and the maiden Lola, 123–24, 126, 129; Maria
motif, 1; as other, 1, 136–38, 142; Braun, 124
preparations for, 14–15, 17, 19, 21, fasting, 96
23, 26, 31–50; as self-sacrifice, 5, 6, femininity, 5, 7, 9, 53, 57, 72, 73–75,
7, 52, 59, 60, 65–66, 67, 80, 98–99; 79, 82, 83, 89, 101, 102, 104, 108,
social death, 10, 90–92, 94, 142; 112, 136, 137, 138, 141, 165, 166,
sudden death, 31, 32, 33–34; by 167, 175, 187, 188
suicide, 3, 5, 52, 56, 59, 66, femme fatale, 1, 6, 7, 94, 116, 117,
69 n. 27, 81, 89, 92, 93, 94, 97–98, 119, 126, 128
137; in warfare, 174, 178–79. See femme fragile, 6, 7, 116, 128
also killers; warriors fetish, 118, 119, 120–21, 125
Deborah (biblical figure), 24, 26 fetishistic scopophilia, 117, 128
Deleuze, Gilles, 8, 134, 142–44 Flint, Katja, 176
Delila (biblical figure), 102, 105 Förster, Dorothea Wilhelmina
Demeter (mythical figure), 67 Margaretha, 44
Demy, Jacques, works by: Lola, 123, Foucault, Michel, 2
126, 127, 130 French Revolution, 53, 71, 72
Derrida, Jacques, 142 Freud, Sigmund, 120–21, 128, 139,
Desdemona (Shakespearean figure), 62 142, 169
devil, 18, 25 Freud, Sigmund, works by: “Das Tabu
Dido (mythical figure), 67 der Virginität,” 105
Dietrich, Marlene, 117, 118, 119, 120, Frisch, Max, 3, 8, 152
121, 122, 124, 125, 127, 129, 130 Frisch, Max, works by: Mein Name sie
Dijkstra, Bram, 117 Gantenbein, 3–4, 8, 152, 158, 169
Dionysus (mythical figure), 56, 65, 67 Fronius, Helen, 1, 2
Dohm, Ernst, 88 funeral biography, 12–14, 15, 19, 35,
Dohm, Hedwig, biography, 2, 88, 94, 39, 41, 43, 44, 48 n. 15, 49 n. 25
99 funeral book. See Leichenpredigt
Dohm, Hedwig, works by: “Werde, die funeral sermon. See Leichenpredigt
du bist,” 3, 6–7, 10, 88–90, 94–100 funerals, 13, 15, 17, 27 n. 11, 32, 35,
Donnatello, 103 39, 44, 45, 47 n. 8
Duchess of Nevers, 25
Duse, Eleonora, 168, 169, 170 Gabler, Neal, 183
Garbo, Greta, 118
Eberhardt, Joachim, 157 Gazette de France nationale, 73–74, 75
education, women’s, 15, 27 n. 13, 72, Geyer, Sophia Christiana, 23
73–74, 90, 94 Gilpin Faust, Drew, 174
effigy, 15 Girondins, 77, 86 n. 21
Eigler, Friederike, 187 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 3,
elegy, 51 71–73, 83, 84 n. 8, 84 n. 11, 96, 97
220 INDEX
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, works 179, 180, 181; Die Fahrt im
by: “Gott und die Bajadere,” 66; Einbaum, 176; Noch einmal für
Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, 96, 97 Jugoslawien, 176; Rund um das
Goliath (biblical figure), 103 Große Tribunal, 176; Sommerlicher
Gondlach, Katharina, 7, 106–7, 109– Nachtrag zu einer winterlichen Reise,
11, 113 176, 178, 180, 181; Unter Tränen
Goodman, Katherine, 83 fragend, 176, 178–79, 181
Goodwin, Sarah Webster, 9, 142 Hanke, Henriette, works by: Die
Götze, Georg Heinrich, 45 Wittwen, 91
Gouges, Olympe de, 82 Hansen, Miriam, 118, 131 n. 14
Graner, Charles, 188 Hauer, Jean-Jacques, 85 n. 17
Greff, Joachim, 103 heaven, 21–22, 37
Gregorius, Johann Gottfried, works by: Hebbel, Friedrich, 7, 103
Gottgefälliger Glantz der Wahrheit, Hebbel, Friedrich, works by: Judith,
49–50 n. 25 103–5, 106, 108; Mein Wort über
Grisebach, Eduard, works by: “Die das Drama, 104, 105
treulose Witwe,” 93 Heidegger, Martin, 134
Guattari, Félix, 8, 142–43 Heidegger, Martin, works by: Being
Gulliver (a journal), 165 and Time, 135–36, 137, 142;
Günderrode, Karoline von, 3, 5, Da-sein, 135–36
51–70; correspondence, 5, 56, Heine, Heinrich, 7, 103, 104, 106
58–62, 66 Heldenmädchen, 1
Günderrode, Karoline von, works by: Herder, Johann Gottfried, 52, 54, 64,
“Adonis Todtenfeyer,” 51–52, 64; 66
“Ariadne auf Naxos,” 54, 64–65; heroism, in women, 7, 101, 102, 107,
“Die Bande der Liebe,” 63; 108, 112, 113, 146. See also
“Buonaparte in Egypten,” 53; Heldenmädchen
“Edda,” 54; Gedichte und Heyden, Susanne von, 58
Phantasien, 54; “Geschichte der Hippel, Theodor Gottlieb von, works
schönen Göttin und edlen Nympfe by: Über die Ehe, 90–91
Kalypso,” 53; Hildgund, 54; historical drama, 3, 6, 57, 83. See also
Immortalia, 62–63; Der historical tragedy
Kanonenschlag oder das Gastmahl des historical tragedy, 6, 71–73, 82
Tantalus, 53; Magie und Schicksal, Hitchcock, Alfred, 117, 131 n. 12
58; “Die Malabarischen Witwen,” 5, Höller, Hans, 145, 152
65; Melete von Jon, 51–52, 68 n. 1, Holofernes (biblical figure), 7, 82,
56; Nikator, 54; “Orphisches Lied,” 101–13
54; “Scandinavische Weissagungen,” Homer, 53, 55, 67
54; Studienbuch, 54, 62, 64; Udohla, Hörnlein, Michael, works by: Der
54–55 Sich selbst überlebende König Jehißkia,
42
Hamm, Peter, 152
Handke, Peter, 9, 174–82, 184, 188– Ibsen, Henrik, works by: When We
89 Dead Awaken, 169
Handke, Peter, works by: Abschied des idealisation, 140
Träumers vom Neunten Land, 176, illness, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 13, 15, 17,
182, 191 n. 26; Eine winterliche 19–21, 24, 32, 33–34, 39, 41, 42,
Reise zu den Flüssen, 176, 177–78, 66
INDEX 221
immortality, 51, 62–63, 64–65. See also Kuntsch, Margaretha Susanna von,
afterlife 43–44, 49 n. 22
Iokaste (mythical figure), 187
incest, 94 Lacan, Jacques, 138–39; objet a, 139
Irigaray, Luce, 8, 137, 139, 141 Lambert, Lothar, works by: In
Isis and Osiris (mythical figures), 54 Haßliebe Lola, 124
Leahy, Catríona, 165
Jack the Ripper, 126 Leconte, Patrice, works by: Félix et
Jacobins, 6, 71, 76, 77, 79, 83. See also Lola, 124, 126–27, 128
Marat, Jean-Paul Leichenpredigt, 2, 3, 4, 12–30, 32, 39,
Jael (biblical figure), 24, 26 43
Janitschek, Maria, works by: “Königin Lenz, Hermann, 181
Judith,” 7, 106–8, 113 Leyser, Polycarp, 15
Jannings, Emil, 119 Levinas, Emmanuel, 134, 136–37,
Jelinek, Elfriede, 4, 182, 191 n. 37 142
Jelinek, Elfriede, works by: Babel, 9, Li, Hong, 125
174–76, 181, 182, 186, 187–189; Li, Hong, works by: Zu Zhou, 124,
Bambiland, 9, 174–76, 181, 182– 125–26, 128
85, 186, 187, 188–89; In den Alpen, Licher, Lucia Maria, 65
182; Das Werk, 182 Linton, Anna, 1, 2, 48 n. 12
Jesus Christ, 19, 20, 21, 34, 39–41, Llewellyn, Nigel, 14
98, 158, 163 Lola, 7–8, 10, 116–30; in Der blaue
Joan of Arc, 72, 73, 74, 82 Engel, 119–21; in Félix et Lola, 126–
John the Baptist, 20 27; in Lola rennt, 124–25; in Lolita,
Johns, Jasper, 140 121–23; in Monella, 128–30; as
jouissance, 8, 116, 119, 130, 139, transgendered, 7, 124; in Zu Zhou,
140–41 125–25
Judith, 1, 7, 101–13; as biblical figure, Lucius, Marie Salome, 14
24, 26, 82, 101–2; eroticization of, Ludaemilia Elisabeth von
7, 102, 103–6; in German literature, Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, 43, 47 n. 6
102–13; in works by women writers, Lustmord, 117
106–13 Luther, Martin, 39, 41, 54
Juno (mythical figure), 67 Lyne, Adrian, works by: Lolita, 121–
22, 123, 126
Kafka, Franz, 145 Lynch, Jessica, 175
Kaiser, Georg, works by: Die Jüdische Lux, Adam (historical figure), 76. See
Witwe, 106 also Westphalen, Christine, works by:
Kant, Immanuel, 140 Charlotte Corday
Kaplan, Ann, 174
killers, women, 1, 2, 6, 7, 10, 71–87, Machtemes, Ursula, 91
106, 107, 109, 111–13. See also madness in women, 6, 73–75, 82, 89,
warriors 96
King Hezekiah, 42 Magdalena Sibylla, Duchess of
Kleist, Heinrich von, works by: Württemberg, works by: Gott
Penthesilea, 1 geweytes Andachts-Opffer, 43,
Kord, Susanne, 71 48 n. 19
Kubrick, Stanley, 121, 122, 123 Manasse(s) (biblical figure), 104, 106,
Kulp, Johannes, 50 n. 25 108, 109, 110, 111
222 INDEX
Marat, Jean-Paul (historical figure), 3, Oertel, Hieronymus, Geistlicher

6, 71, 72, 73, 86 n. 19. See also Frawen-Zimmer Spiegel, 24
Westphalen, Christine, works by: Oliver, Kelly, 175, 179
Charlotte Corday Ophelia (Shakespearean figure), 97–98
Maria Stuart, 72 Ophuls, Max, works by: Lola Montès,
Marie-Antoinette, 82 123, 126, 127
marriage, 20, 69 n. 17, 88, 89, 90, 91, Orpheus (mythical figure), 137, 138
93, 94–95, 106, 107, 109, 111, Ossian, 54, 67
119, 124, 129, 147 Othello (Shakespearean figure), 62
Marsyas (mythical figure), 186 Ovid, 52, 65
Mary (the Virgin Mary) 103, 187
masculinity, 53, 101, 104, 112, 116, Pabst, G. W., 126
124, 125, 126, 137, 139, 141, 167 parody, 4, 9, 185, 187
Mathesius, Johann, 24 Patterson, Orlando, 142
Mayne, Judith, 117, 119, 122 Pearson, Ansell, 143
Medea (mythical figure), 67 Persephone (mythical figure), 52
Medusa (mythical figure), 97 Petronius, works by: Satyricon, 92–93
Meelführer, Johann, 15 Peymann, Claus, 176
Menschick, Rosemarie, 7, 106–7, 111– Pfefferkorn, Georg Michael, 45,
13 49 n. 25
Mercure François, 25 Phillippy, Patricia, 154
Montez, Lola, 116, 130 n. 2 philosophical idealism, 54, 55, 66
Moore, Cornelia, 19 physical pain, 12, 18, 19, 37, 39,
Morgenblatt (Cotta’s) (journal), 103 74–75
Mosche, Christian, 64 Pietism, 19
Mother Earth/Mother Nature, 58, 64 Pipenburg, Joachim, 23
motherhood, 7, 39, 43, 89, 90, 93–95, Plutarch, 82
108, 109, 113, 187. See also Poe, Edgar Allan, 1, 11 n. 7
childbirth; pregnancy Polanski, Roman, 125
mourning, 13, 20, 22–23, 32, 51, 52, Polynices (mythical figure), 140
64, 66, 90–91, 92–93, 187 portraits of the dead, 13, 14, 85 n. 17
Mulvey, Laura, 117, 118, 123, Poseidon (mythical figure), 65
131 n. 14, 131 n. 15 Potente, Franka, 124–25, 129, 130
prayer, 17, 18, 21, 22, 33, 41, 43,
Nabokov, Vladimir, works by: Lolita, 48 n. 15
121–23 prayer book/prayer manual, 4, 16–17,
Napoleon, 71, 82–83, 84 n. 5 24
Napoleonic Wars, 56, 71 preachers. See clergymen
natural philosophy, 58, 66 pregnancy, 36, 39, 41, 92, 105. See also
Nebuchadnezar (biblical figure), 101, childbirth
106 Psalter, 15
new mythology (Romantic), 5, 51–70 psychoanalysis, 8, 117, 118, 120–21,
New Woman, 116 134, 138–41, 166, 167; das Ding,
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 53 139–40; Vorstellungsrepräsentanz,
Novalis, 52, 54, 62 139–40. See also castration; fetish;
Freud; Oedipal complex; sublimation
Oedipal complex, 128. See also
psychoanalysis quotidian, 175, 181
INDEX 223
Rachel (biblical figure), 24 Schleiermacher, Friedrich Daniel Ernst,

Radakovic, Zarko, 176 works by: System des transcendentalen
Ragland, Ellie, 139 Idealismus, 54
Rauschelbach, Johann Tobias, works Schlögl, Rudolf, 13
by: Die Freundin des Lammes, Schmidt, Bernhard, 24–26
43–44, 49 n. 22 Schnitzler, Arthur, works by: “Frau
Rebecca (biblical figure), 24 Beate und ihr Sohn,” 93–94; “Frau
Reuter, Gabriele, works by: “Frau Berta Garlan,” 92
Clementine Holm,” 93 Schwartzburgisches Denckmahl einer
Richards, Anna, 96, 98 Christ-Gräflichen Lammes-Freundin,
Richelieu, cardinal, 77 49 n. 22
Rilke, Rainer Maria, works by: Die Secomb, Linnell, 136, 141
Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Seidewitz, Johanna Margaretha von,
Brigge, 155–56; Duineser Elegien, 24, 26
153–54, 156 Selneccer, Nikolaus, 15
Roland, Marie-Jeanne, 82 Semin, Sophie, 176
Romanticism, 1, 3, 5, 52–53, 54, 55, Septuagint, 101–2, 108, 110
57, 58, 66, 67, 68, 69 n. 27 sexuality, female, 7, 89, 90, 91–94, 96,
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, works by: 97, 99, 101–2, 106, 116, 118–19,
Emile ou de l’éducation, 72 120, 121, 123, 124, 125, 127–30, 139
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, works by:
Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von, 7 “Fragment Supposed to be an
Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von, works Epithalamion of Francis Ravaillac
by: Judith von Bialopol, 105–6; Venus and Charlotte Corday,” 86 n. 19
im Pelz, 105 shrouds, 14
sadistic voyeurism, 117 Simeon (biblical figure), 21
Salome (biblical figure), 1, 102, 111, Singer, Sandra L., 88, 96
112 Socrates, 80, 81
Samson (biblical figure), 105 Solomon, Robert C., 136
Sappho, 52 Sommer, Christoph, works by: Epilogi
Sarah (biblical figure), 24 pie de mortuorum, Oder
Sartory, Anna, 7, 106–7, 108–9, 113 Exemplarische Sterbe-Schule, 39–41
Satan. See devil Song of Solomon, 6 n. 1
Sati, 5, 65, 67 Sophia, Markgräfin of Brandenburg-
Saubert, Johann, works by: Currus Ansbach, 15, 16, 17–18, 27 n. 11
Simeonis, 21–22 Sophia Christiana, Markgräfin of
Savigny, Friedrich von, 54, 58, 60–61, Brandenburg-Culmbach, works by:
69 n. 17 Glauben-schallende und Himmel-
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, steigende Herzens-Music, 43, 48 n. 19
52, 54, 55, 62, 66 Sophocles, 60
Schenda, Rudolf, 19 Stampa, Gaspara, 8, 152, 153–57,
Schiller, Friedrich von, 3, 63, 71–73, 160–64, 165, 167–69, 170
83, 84 n. 8, 84 n. 11 Sternberg, Josef von, 118
Schiller, Friedrich von, works by: Sternberg, Josef von, works by: Der
Wilhelm Tell, 112 blaue Engel, 7, 116, 117, 118, 119–
Schlegel, August Wilhelm and Karl 21, 124–25, 126, 127, 128, 129,
Wilhelm Friedrich, works by: 130; The Devil is a Woman, 118;
Athenäum, 54 Dishonored, 118; Morocco, 118
224 INDEX
Strasser, Peter, 181 Walther, David Christian, 44–45,

Strindberg, August, works by: Easter, 49 n. 24
169 war, 9, 107; First World War, 107,
Studlar, Gaylan, 118, 131 n. 14 110, 112, 116; in Iraq, 174, 175,
sublimation, 8, 139, 140–41, 144, 152 182–88; and the media, 9, 174–89;
sublime, 175, 181, 183, 185 Second World War, 181; in
Süddeutsche Zeitung (newspaper), 176 Yugoslavia, 9, 174–82. See also
suicide. See death, by suicide death, in warfare
warriors, women, 1, 24–25, 110, 113,
Tantalus (mythical figure), 67 179, 181
Tatar, Maria, 116–17 Watanabe-O’Kelly, Helen, 10 n. 4
Taylor, Irmgard, 91 Waters, John, 124
Thirty Years’ War, 15 Weber, Lilo, 89, 98
Thompson, Bruce, 92 Wedekind, Frank, 1, 126
Tykwer, Tom, works by: Lola rennt, Wedekind, Frank, works by: Erdgeist,
124–25, 126, 127, 128 123; Lulu, 1, 117, 126
Weigel, Sigrid, 165
Veit, Patrice, 19 Weimar Classicism, 3, 71–73, 83
Vernet, Horace, 103 Westphalen, Christine, works by:
victimhood, female, 1, 5, 9, 73, 123, Charlotte Corday, 3, 6, 7, 10, 71–87
175, 186–87, 188 Widow of Ephesus, 92–93
virginity, in women, 74, 103, 104, widows, 2–3, 5, 6–7, 14–15, 65–66,
106, 108, 128, 129 67, 86 n. 20, 88–100, 101, 103,
Voss, Johann Heinrich, 55–56, 105, 106
69 n. 12 Williams, Linda, 179
Voss, Johann Heinrich, works by: women’s movement, 6, 88, 94
Antisymbolik, 56 Wright, Elizabeth, 188
Wagner, Richard, 53 Zeit, die (newspaper) 152

Wagner, Richard, works by: Tristan Zeus (mythical figure), 64, 65, 67
und Isolde, 67 Zwinger, Theodor, works by:
Waldstein, Edith, 83 Theatrum vitae humanae, 25

Clare Bielby, Anna Richards - Women and Death 3 - Women's Representations of Death in German Culture Since 1500 (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) (2010)

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Women and Death 3

Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture

Rochester, New York

First published 2010

Camden House is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Women and death 3 : women’s representations of death in German culture

List of Illustrations vii

9: “Liebe ist ein Kunstwerk”: The Appeal to Gaspara Stampa

1.1 Detail from the epitaph for Markgräfin Sophia 16

T HIS VOLUME IS THE THIRD of a series of three to emerge from the

Clare Bielby and Anna Richards

T HE FREQUENT ASSOCIATION OF WOMEN with death in Western culture

it is through representing death that we work through and contain our

aspects of the female protagonist of which Bachmann identified with her-

The ten essays in the current volume are organized chronologically,

Countess of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt (1637–1706). Aemilia Juliana com-

century widows, Agnes Schmidt dies a self-sacrificial death at the end of

of cinema is a crucial component in what Richter terms Lola’s “immunity

T HIS ESSAY FOCUSES ON A highly popular and specifically German mass

The German Funeral Book

continual battle for salvation, in which women could figure as prominently

[For in paintings or portraits of the dead, only the picture of a person,

Preparing for Death — Exemplary Women

constraints placed on daughters and wives.10 An exceptional figure in this

Preparing for Death — Women Reading and Writing

In massem dann Jungfraw Maria etzliche Bogen unterschiedene Geistliche

Examples of the practice of women compiling prayer manuals abound in

[This is what comforts me — yes I know and I am persuaded that neither

Women’s Voices — the Drama of Death

Beurer reports further conversations in which Katharina, who had sud-

Fig 1.2. Detail from an engraving in Johann Saubert, Currus Simeonis,

could introduce the deceased as an imagined speaker in their texts, often in

Wie gieng es mir so wol/ als ich von dir gegangen/

Ich bin gantz bereit zu sterben/

Whether women’s voices were being quoted directly or interpreted by

Biblical Heroines and Amazons

[Yes, she confronted the cruel enemy, death, as an unshrinking spiritual

Schmidt gives his readers an extended argument for acknowledging wom-

Gleichwohl finden wir manche Heldin in den schwächern Geschlechte:

[Nevertheless, we find a number of heroines among the weaker sex: men

This is definitely not the usual stuff of funeral sermons, and as is to be

[As far as our Christianity is concerned, however, which consists of noth-

With his description of the battle-clad Christian woman Schmidt has

Modern Germany (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2006). I would very much like to

Tugend-begabten Frauen Johannen Margarethen von Seidewitz/ Frauen auff

T HE RHETORICAL QUESTION “Wer weiß, wie nahe mir mein Ende?”

employs this phrase casually or in the context of news about someone’s

1. Es ist gar zu geschwind geschehn um eines Menschen Leben, wenn er

4. Because death is also certain for me personally, although time, place,

Wer weiß, wie nahe mir mein Ende,

[Who knows how near my end may be,

Mein Gott! ich bitt durch Christi Blut,

[My God! I ask through Christ’s own blood,

The final strophe brings the song to an end on an optimistic note:

Ich leb indeß in dir vergnüget,

ich glaub, und bin es gantz gewiß,

[Meanwhile I live well satisfied in your care,

Thus the song starts with an admonition to herself to be constantly aware

Thus she supplies an imaginary conversation with the benevolent, fatherly

1. Gott mit meiner matten Zungen/

2. Ich werd/ wie es scheinet/ scheiden

Mach zum Tod geschickt mein Hertz