The limits of representation? : the expression and repression of desire in 20th-century German lesbian narratives

This study investigates the expression and repression of desire in four 20th-century German-language lesbian prose texts. I examine in chronological order three novels and one novella: Der Skorpion (1919) by Anna Elisabet Weirauch; Lyrische Novelle (1933) by the Swiss author Annemarie Schwarzenbach; Der Schlachter empfiehlt noch immer Herz (1976) by Margot Schroeder; and, finally, Bilder von ihr (1996) by Karen-Susan Fessel. While not concentrating on any single literary work, the excursus on texts from the period between the Third Reich and the Second Feminist Movement in Germany provides a brief analysis of the (lack of) lesbian literary developments during this time.Drawing on diverse lesbian-feminist and queer strains of criticism, this study provides a close examination of the narrative elements, strategies, and styles used to inscribe lesbian desire into the literary works selected for analysis. The investigation explores how these texts utilize narrative conceptualizations of lesbian desire, critiques of heterophallocentric language and representation, and strategies to create lesbian narrative spaces that challenge the heterosexual presumptions and trajectories which traditionally underlie conventional Western romance narratives. The constructions of "lesbian" identity presented in the texts are fundamentally connected to the creation and operation of these narrative spaces. Thus, in order to contextualize my interpretations and literary analyses, I situate the texts in the respective socio-historical and political contexts in which they were written and received.The unresolved problems, prevailing tensions, and their individual differences notwithstanding, the narratives examined here collectively contribute to a lesbian counterdiscourse to the 20th-century German literary establishment. By exploring the strategies invoked in these texts to represent a desiring textual lesbian subjectivity, this study hopes to make visible a tradition of Germanlanguage lesbian literature---a fragmented and often marginalized literature---over the last century and to offer German literary studies insights from the periphery of the dominant heterosexual culture. However, this investigation simultaneously and paradoxically also contests the very positioning of German lesbian literature and criticism at the margins by proposing their strategic integration into the German literary canon