Vol. 19 · No. 4 · Issue 61 · Winter 2001 · pp. 127-137 (11)

Hilary Collier Sy-Quia

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Abstract

Elke P. Frederiksen and Martha Kaarsberg Wallack eds., Facing Fascism and Confronting the Past. German Women Writers from Weimar to the Present (Albany, 2000).

Lorna Martens, The Promised Land? Feminist Writing in the German Democratic Republic (Albany, 2001).

Towards the end of her novel Patterns of Childhood Christa Wolf inserts this literary aside, setting it in parenthesis, so as to address the reader directly:

(Interview question: Do you believe in the effectiveness of literature?-Certainly, but probably not in the same way you do. I believe that the apparatus which is responsible for receiving and digesting truth is shaped by literature [...]-How did we become the way we are? One of the answers would be a list of book titles.)

The two books reviewed here both address the mirroring in literature of the circumstances individual women writers found themselves in and in turn ask the question, How far does literature shape our perceptions of those circumstances, indeed, shape us? One of the volumes examines women writers engaging with the Nazi experience; the other explores women's lifetimes spent in the German Democratic Republic and asks if the socialist Germany lived up to the promises made to its female citizens.