Scandals and Metamorphoses
Barbara Burns talks to Elizabeth Boa, whose book Re-Viewing the Canon: Feminist Readings of German Literature from the Age of Goethe to the Present was recently published in Legenda’s Selected Essays series.
BB. Elizabeth, thank you for agreeing to do this interview. Your work has influenced, inspired and challenged countless researchers in German Studies through the years. In the Introduction to your volume, you make a self-deprecating reference to the ‘scatter-gun range’ of your work, whereas in fact this virtuoso collection of essays offers an incisive and cogently structured feminist reassessment of works right through from the eighteenth-century classical (predominantly male) canon to recent women writers who engage with issues of social change, migration, gender identity and climate change. How did it all start?
EB. After graduating from Glasgow in 1961, I spent four years in Germany reading long difficult novels, followed by final-year teaching in Nottingham on ‘The Modern German Novel’. Back then, students of German still read long difficult novels mostly by men: Hermann Broch, Alfred Döblin, Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka, Heinrich and Thomas Mann. Looking back, my essays do seem a bit sparse till the 1990s. But while writing the introduction to Re-Viewing the Canon, I realised that I’d forgotten about Critical Strategies: German Fiction in the Twentieth Century. This was a volume that Hamish Reid and I published in 1972. I wrote eight of the sixteen essays, though I’m not sure now who wrote what.
BB. How would you describe your own approach to research, and how have broader attitudes to research changed during your career?
EB. I was delighted but also anxious when the invitation from Legenda arrived: what was/is/is still my key research field? Does close textual reading even count as research? Admittedly I’ve re-read Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg (1085 pages) at least four times, filling up Pukka Pads with page-by-page notes, though at the other extreme, I can recite Kafka’s Kleine Fabel (7 lines) off by heart. So reading, re-reading and making copious notes is how I approach teaching and essay writing.
When I first arrived in Nottingham, a kindly professor advised me not to bother about publication for a while, just concentrate on teaching, he said. This was twenty years before the first RAE, the Research Assessment Exercise in 1986 that upped the pressure to publish-or-perish. I was on the first assessment committee for German and Dutch Studies, so spent a summer in the garden reading RAE submissions.
BB. Presumably your pioneering feminist take on canonical masterpieces didn’t always meet with approval from your peers. What are your recollections of your early days of working from a feminist standpoint?
EB. From the start I was (nearly) always reading and so writing ‘as a woman’, sometimes more, sometimes less consciously, though I was shocked recently by an early essay where I kept referring to ‘the reader and his responses’. My political second-wave feminism focusses on the interplay between class difference and the imbalance of social power between men and women – Sheila Rowbotham put the case powerfully in Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World (1973).
I dimly recall arguments in the pub with lefties who saw feminism as a bourgeois distraction. After 1970s social activism, feminist cultural theory and literary criticism got going in the 1980s, including lesbian then queer theory too, but also tensions between different groups and programmes. I was joint supervisor for a Critical Theory thesis on Black feminist writing at a time when Black with a capital letter signalled commitment to racial justice across the board. But the external examiner queried the blanket inclusion of South Asian authors under the Black umbrella and required the candidate, herself of South Asian/South African heritage, to revise her terminology.
BB. Did feminism impact significantly on your teaching too?
EB. The Nottingham Critical Theory M.A. definitely had an impact on my undergraduate teaching. In the early 1980s, we started up a women’s reading group. Sara Mills and Elaine Millard, occasional visitors at our meetings, went on to publish Feminists Reading/ Feminists Reading (1989) which developed the notion of ‘reading as a woman’. A group of us also designed an undergraduate module: ‘Feminism in the Humanities’ with staff from English and Modern Languages and a male colleague in Theology. Around that time, we read Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, where the protagonist starts crawling like an insect round the room, and I eventually published ‘Creepy Crawlies: Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper and Kafka’s The Metamorphosis’ in the journal Paragraph, that specialises in critical theory.
BB. Nottingham was one of the first universities in the UK to offer an M.A. on critical theory: how did that go for you?
EB. Academia in the UK divided acrimoniously between proponents and opponents of theory. The original ‘critical theory’ was Marxism, often filtered through Horkheimer and Adorno. But increasingly the un-English spirit to be resisted came from France: Structuralism, Deconstruction, or Post-Structuralism; reception theory from the Constance School also figured. For me, critical theory meant tools to be deployed strategically but unobtrusively, alongside historical and social contexts, though I did write the chapter on ‘gendered reading’ for a book of essays on new developments in German Studies.
One of my own favourite efforts, ‘Losing the Plot: Kafka, Kleist and Disappearing Grand Narratives’, began as a paper for a symposium in Cambridge on narrative theory organised by Erica Wickerson. I always try to draw sparingly, even discretely, on theory. So I was taken aback when James Hawes, (author of The Shortest History of Germany), attacked me in the Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift. Apparently, I’d succumbed to Derrida and deconstruction in an essay on Kafka’s ‘Auf der Galerie’. The journal offered me a right of reply and James Hawes kindly agreed I could include my reply in Re-Viewing the Canon while leaving out his attack. True, I had used the verb ‘deconstruct’ at least twice, but in an essay intended to exemplify ‘reading as a woman’.
Then there was an intensely irritating Critical Theory seminar. I had proposed we try reading Kafka’s ‘Das Unglück des Junggesellen’ ‘as a woman’ – the men too, as a change from unthinkingly reading as men. But this came up against a brick wall, a student who denied that words like ‘woman’ or ‘man’ had any truth value. In effect he pitted a de-politicising version of deconstruction against reading politically ‘as a woman’, or trying gendered reading at all.
A few years on, an eminent American Kafka specialist launched a contemptuous attack on my Kafka book. But a review of Kafka criticism in the New York Review of Books came to my defence. The author praised my ‘close analysis of Kafka’s formal idiosyncracies’ – I was really chuffed by that – and contrasted favourably my feminist political approach to my attacker’s ‘quietistic epiphanies’ – I was quite pleased by that too. In 2024, the centenary of Kafka’s death, my attacker and I finally met in the coffee queue at a Kafka conference in Oxford. I should be grateful to him, he said, for that mention in the New York Review of Books.
BB. I believe there’s an unusual story behind your PhD. Can you tell us about it?
EB. This is a tender point. I spent three years as a postgrad in Munich, then a year at Saarbrücken as Lektorin, all the while working on Hermann Broch’s long philosophical novels and reading other long philosophical novels by Thomas Mann, Robert Musil et al. When I arrived at Nottingham, my PhD was unfinished, one might even say not properly started. Essay writing took over, and at some point engagement with Broch turned from growing weariness, through dislike, into disgust. Thankfully, in the late 1980s, Nottingham University granted me a PhD for a book on Frank Wedekind.
BB. Wedekind was an influential critic of late-nineteenth-century bourgeois attitudes, whose work caused something of a scandal at the time. What drew you to his writing?
EB. My interest in Wedekind came from discussions with students – Frühlings Erwachen (Spring Awakening) was the sexually challenging play we read – and from my love of Munich. On research leave, I met Wedekind’s sister Kadidja in Munich and visited the site of Wedekind’s cabaret in the Türkenstrasse. In the Munich archive, Wedekind’s handwriting was hard going, but the dialogue in weird English between Lulu and Jack the Ripper in the Monstretragödie, the earliest of the Lulu plays, was in legible English script. And I found a typescript of a piece of Alpine porn: a teenage rite of spring with bosoms and buttocks bursting out of dirndls and lederhosen. Frühlings Erwachen, I heard recently, now attracts trigger warnings and is under threat of banishment from the curriculum, teenage lovemaking in a hay loft being seen as rape.
Frühlings Erwachen mixes Jugendstil echoes of 18th-century Rococo with surreal grotesquerie, subtle psychology, and mockery of ignorant, cruel or hypocritical adults. Radio 4 has just been broadcasting episodes on Sunday afternoons of a new free translation of Spring Awakening so rescuing literature from trigger warnings. Nobody has proposed banning Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring that climaxes with a maiden dancing herself to death or Goethe’s ‘Heidenröslein’, come to think of it, which if you read the pronouns properly depicts a rape in idyllic mode.
BB. You’ve also written about poetry. Did you have the opportunity to meet any of the women poets whose work you studied?
EB. Well, I have written about the narrative verse tales: Wieland’s Musarion and Goethe’s Hermann und Dorothea. For years I ran a first-year lecture course on Goethe’s lyric poetry – always a huge pleasure, at least for me. I also wrote a couple of essays each on Rilke and on Brecht, and touched on Ingeborg Bachmann in an essay on figures of the muse. Bachmann was in effect already canonised as a poet in 1954 thanks to a front-page photo and lead article in Der Spiegel. Since her death in 1973, Bachmann’s Malina has become a feminist classic.
In my time, three poets visited Nottingham: Anne Duden, Barbara Köhler, and Ulrike Almut Sandig. Heike Bartel and I co-edited a volume of essays on Duden’s stories and poetry. I met up with Barbara Köhler in London and Manchester, as well as Nottingham where she stayed with me. An Ossie, educated as a physicist and mathematician, Barbara discovered after the Wende that she’d been spied on by an IM, a stasi spy. Niemands Frau, her feminist reworking of the Odyssey, is not a ‘masterpiece’ – I avoid that term – but is intellectually and aesthetically brilliant. Barbara died all too young a few years ago and is mourned by many of us in German Studies.
Ulrike Almut Sandig, poet and performance artist, has visited Nottingham more than once, for splendid joint readings along with Karin Leeder of wonderful original poems and translations. The first time I met Almut we talked about a father figure in one of her stories who asks his daughter, the narrator, why she doesn’t write a novel instead of all those short stories. I asked that too and a couple of years on she presented me with a signed copy of her newly published novel Monster wie wir. Heike Bartel and I recently wrote a joint essay on Sandig for a book on short stories.
BB. The late 80s and early 90s was a key period when interest in women’s writing increased. How did you come to engage more with women authors?
EB. My ‘re-viewing’ of the canon began as critical readings of male authors from my point of view as a woman today, but also trying to reconstruct the female readership and sexual culture of the past. ‘Re-viewing’ also means querying inclusions and exclusions. My turning more to women’s writing was prompted by a flurry of developments towards the end of the 1980s: our Nottingham M.A., ‘Recent Trends in German Literature since 1968’, started up in 1987; in 1988 the first meeting of WIGS – Women in German Studies – was organised by Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly; in 1989 the Berlin Wall opened.
The fall of the Berlin wall was a massive historical shift. In 1990, a group of staff and students from Nottingham visited Leipzig and Dresden to observe the East German election on March 18th. I still remember opposing reactions the next day: the young woman guide on our tour bus looked utterly miserable and wept at one point. But the elderly attendant in the ladies’ loo in Auerbachs Keller told me she’d voted for Helmut Kohl. ‘Did I do the right thing?’ she asked. ‘Yes, of course!’ I replied, though I wasn’t sure at all. In 1994, librarian friend Janet Wharton and I co-edited Women and the Wende, the papers from the first three-day WIGS conference at Nottingham, attended by Sabine Bergmann-Pohl, the last President of the Volkskammer, by the author Helga Königsdorf, and by a feminist sociologist and two women photographers, all funded by the Goethe Institute in Manchester.
BB. Besides WIGS meetings, you seem to have enjoyed collaborating on a lot of joint projects with colleagues.
EB. Yes. Working along with colleagues kept generating essays and a book too: Rachel Palfreyman and I co-authored Heimat – A German Dream, a survey of German Heimat discourse – Rachel was the expert on Heimat films before and after the Second World War as well as Edgar Reiz’s great Heimat series for television. A lot of the novels and stories I looked at were by women, notably Klara Viebig and Marie-Luise Fleißer. I also see fascinating affinities with Heimat discourse in Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Das Leben ist eine Karwansere where native Turkish keeps shining through transliterated Turkish metaphors dotted through the German text.
WIGS helped to stimulate reading drafts of one another’s work. I read a draft of Godela Weiss-Sussex’s study of German-Jewish women’s writing in the early 20th century; Godela suggested German-Jewish Gabriele Tergit to me as topic for a symposium. Tergit emigrated from Berlin in 1933, travelling via Palestine to London. Irmgard Keun is another Weimar novelist re-discovered more belatedly than the male returnees post-1945 but very popular now. Projects increasingly arrived through conferences or symposia, or just by email invitation. Ten years after Women and the Wende, in 2004 I contributed to a conference in Dublin organised by Anne Fuchs on German Memory Contests: The Quest for Identity in Literature, Film and Discourse since 1990. Anne and I first met in 1999 at a Kafka conference in Prague and a whole sequence of Anne’s conferences at Warwick and Dublin have kept me busy since then. Over the years, Carolin Duttlinger too, now at Oxford, organised a number of symposia, culminating in the Kafka conference in 2024 where I met my enemy in the coffee queue.
BB. What would you pick out as a couple of essays you most enjoyed writing?
EB. I hugely enjoyed a visit, along with David Lodge and two other British Germanists, to the annual conference of German Anglists in 1984 in Passau. This was organised by Manfred Pfister who had sat in as a guest student in my first ever Nottingham seminar on the novel. Rather than an English/German topic, I offered a Scottish/Bavarian paper: ‘Some Versions of Pastoral: McGrath’s The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black Black Oil and Kroetz’s Stallerhof’. Research included trips to the theatre in Munich and to Lewis and Harris in the Outer Hebrides where I consulted a Gaelic speaker about the Gaelic songs.
Manfred Pfister told me he’d especially enjoyed the Nottingham classes on Der Zauberberg. I especially enjoyed writing two quite hefty essays on Der Zauberberg. ‘The Trial of Curiosity in Der Zauberberg’ arose from a symposium on curiosity organized by Carolin Duttlinger, but I’ll go for ‘The Aesthetics of Disgust in Der Zauberberg’. This was inspired by supervisions with Katie Jones, whose PhD explored the aesthetics of disgust in contemporary French and German women’s writing. Inspired by Katie, I followed up with ‘Lust or Disgust in Karen Duve’s Regenroman’.
BB. You’re clearly an avid reader with consummate reading skills. Is there anything you’re reading now that you’d recommend or might eventually write about?
EB. I recently gave papers two years running, in Nottingham, then in Dublin, on Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Ein von Schatten begrenzter Raum, that came out in 2021. I’d like to work up an essay comparing grotesque aesthetics in Özdamar’s novel with its chorus of speaking birds, the woman who steps out of the mirror, and the face from a different time reflected in a puddle, with Elif Shafak’s The Island of Missing Trees, with its fig-tree narrator. Özdamar and Shafak are both of Turkish inheritance, and both novels deal with migration and Turkish-Greek tensions in the Mediterranean region.
I am currently reading – very slowly – Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos. The book, whose title is an ancient Greek word meaning ‘moment of crisis’, tells of a love affair in East Berlin during the last years of the GDR between a man in his fifties, a writer, and a girl in her teens. The 9th of November 1989 was a crisis, a truly sudden end and a beginning too, of course. Reading Kairos now feels strange just as the era of liberal democracy it ambiguously heralds may have just come to a sudden end on 1st March 2025. My worries as a Germanist have been growing too: are the Arts and Humanities – especially Modern Languages – coming to an end? And is there still such a phenomenon as ‘the canon’? I am fortunate to have worked at a time when re-viewing the canon was such a pleasure.
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