”Warum noch länger die demütige Magd, die ihrem Herrn die Füße wäscht?“

Mathilde Franziska Anneke (1817-1884) was one of few women who have shaped German immigrant life in America during the second half of the 19th century. The Forty-Eighter, writer, and educator founded the first German-language Frauenzeitung in the U.S., and her network of correspondents included Susan B. Anthony. The article sheds light on Mathilde Anneke as a “new woman” who broke with traditional norms of gender and sexuality. She divorced her first and abusive husband at the age of 20, raising her daughter alone before marrying Fritz Anneke with whom she had more children. This paper focuses on Mathilde's feminist essay Das Weib im Conflict mit den socialen Verhältnissen (1847). This text is a testament to her ideals and values, most of all her life-long fight for women’s rights. In this manifest, Mathilde envisions the “new woman” who would break out of the cage of male supremacy and demand equal rights. While Mathilde Anneke did not live to see the suffragist movement succeed, she made significant contributions to the early feminist movement, and she did so through her writing.

Trapped in the Land of Liberty: Monika Maron’s Animal Triste (1996)

Monika Maron’s Animal Triste (1996) was widely understood as a response to German unification. This reading of Maron’s critically acclaimed novel places the text in the context of the literary discourse of the so-called New World. The United States have long enticed the German literary imagination and have served as a screen for projections of (utopian) promises of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The narrator’s exploration of her freedom, symbolized in a trip to New York City, are juxtaposed with feelings of imprisonment, expressed through seemingly endless remembering. Maron’s novel connects with the tradition of German writing about love, another powerful trope of freedom and captivity, and resonates with other women’s writing about the U.S. after 1989.

Women Performing the American “Other"

Coming Soon

Vienna’s Feuilletons from 42nd Street: Culture and Civilization in Ann Tizia Leitich’s Amerika, du hast es besser (1926)

While so many of her fellow European writers, like Zweig, either naïvely celebrated the mechanical wonders of Henry Ford’s factories or made paranoid forecasts of American jazz music squelching out Europe’s symphonies and concertos, the author of those lines, Ann Tizia Leitich (1891-1976), contended that America is much more than an ideological projection space for Europe’s hopes and fears. As the American correspondent for Vienna’s influential Neue Freie Presse newspaper, Leitich chronicles the complexity and power of the United States from a specific, personal and intimate perspective. In this article, I will argue that Leitich counters the popular interwar perception of Europe as a beautiful, doomed culture that is under attack by a soulless but powerful American civilization. Focusing on her appropriation of Oswald Spengler’s dichotomy between civilization and culture, I will explore Leitich’s concept of a cultural syncretism that combines artistic beauty and economic power in a mutually beneficial relationship.

Aus dem schwäbischen Pfarrhaus nach Amerika: Reiseschilderungen (1860): Louise Weil’s America as Experience and Fiction

In her autobiographical travelogue, Aus dem schwäbischen Pfarrhaus nach Amerika: Reiseschilderungen(“From the Swabian Parsonage to America: Travel Descriptions,” 1860), Louise Weil recounts her experiences of living, teaching, and traveling in the United States for nearly five years, beginning in 1854. Responding to the flood of German immigration to America in 1852-54, Weil’s declared aim is to rectify idyllic images of America put forth to would-be immigrants by presenting a realistic assessment of American life and institutions.Far from idealizing the United States, Weil condemns slavery and capitalist greed, two phenomena that exemplify America’s failure to live up to its founding ideals of equality and freedom.

Confrontations in the New World: Grete Weil's Happy, sagte der Onkel (1968)

In her essay “Travel Writing and Gender,” the British scholar Susan Bassnett makes two points that are relevant in analyzing Grete Weil’s travel tales, Happy, sagte der Onkel (Happy, Said My Uncle). Bassnett remarks that “increasingly in the twentieth century, male and female travelers have written self-reflexive texts that defy easy categorization as autobiography, memoir, or travel account.” This observation certainly holds true for Grete Weil’s slim volume, and so does Bassnett’s gender-specific assertion that there is a “strand of women’s travel writing that has grown in importance in the twentieth century: the journey that leads to greater self-awareness and takes the reader simultaneously on that journey.