"Das Gehirn Unsrer Lieben Schwestern": Women Writers of the Journal "Jugend" From 1919--1940

286 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2001.Women writers' documentation of life is remarkably apolitical in eras of such tremendous political upheaval, as writers focus on a personal account of these times in topics such as courtship and marriage, sexuality, rivalries among women, consumerism, working women, male perspectives, country life, spirituality, crime, the exotic, poverty, and racism. Generally, no radical shift in topics selected by women writers occurs in the transition from the Weimar Republic to the Third Reich, in spite of the Nazi party's radical redefining of women's roles within the sphere of home and family. Although elements of the Nazi worldview do appear in women's contributions, some texts actually feature more positive female protagonists than in stories published in the Weimar Republic. Two women writers of the Nazi years, Ziska Luise Dresler Schember and Johanna Birnbaum, achieve a level of prominence unprecedented for women authors in the Weimar Republic. While Schember's poetry exhibits the sentiments of a true believer, Birnbaum gradually subverts the content of her initially pro-Nazi, 1938 novel fragment into a work with feminist aspects contrary to Nazi doctrine as it progresses, until installments abruptly stop without explanation.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD