Conquering Women: Women and War in the German Cultural Imagination Edited by Hillary Collier Sy-Quia and Susanne Baackmann 2000, ISBN: 0-87725-004-9 SUGGESTED CITATION: Hillary Collier Sy-Quia and Susanne Baackmann, ed. Conquering Women: Women and War in the German Cultural Imagination. University of California International and Area Studies Digital Collection, Research Series #104, 2000. http://repositories.cdlib.org/uciaspubs/research/104 This work has been peer reviewed.

This volume, focused on how women participate in, suffer from, and are subtly implicated in warfare raises the still larger questions of how and when women enter history, memory, and representation. The individual essays, dealing with 19th and mostly 20th century German literature, social history, art history, and cinema embody all the complexities and ambiguities of the title "Conquering Women." Women as the mothers of current and future generations of soldiers; women as combatants and as rape victims; women organizing against war; and violence against women as both a weapon of war and as the justification for violent revenge are all represented in this collection of original essays by rising new scholars of feminist theory and German cultural studies.

Contents

Front Matter, including Foreword and Acknowledgments, Hilary Collier Sy-Quia and Susanne Baackmann (p. i-xv)

Introduction, Hilary Collier Sy-Quia (p. 1-11)

The Body as Battleground: Images of the German Abortion Debate, Andrea Wuerth and Janice Monger (p. 12-39)

Constructing Borders: Image and Identity in Die Frau von Heute, 1945–49, Jennifer V. Evans (p. 40-61)

Sores That Still Bleed: Germany, the Great War, and Violence against Women in the Modernist Literary Imagination, Ellen Rees (p. 62-74)

The Discourse of Trauma—The Trauma of Discourse: Conquering Memory in Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina, Kristin Kopp (p. 75-90)

The Battle with Memory: Grete Weil’s My Sister Antigone, Susanne Baackmann (p. 91-110)

“Truth Lies with the Victor”: Scars on the Skin and Silenced Memories — Christa Wolf’s Medea, Hilary Collier Sy-Quia (p. 111-125)

The Amazon Body: Wartime Sexuality and Female Subjectivity in Kleist’s Penthesilea, Renée M. Schell (p. 126-142)

Imperfect Myths: Gender and the Construction of Nation in Heinrich von Kleist’s Die Herrmannsschlacht, Jennifer M. Kapczynski (p. 143-155)

Bettina and Louise: Gender Constructions in Bettina Brentano-von Arnim’s Clemens Brentanos Frühlingskranz, Elisabeth Krimmer (p. 156-176)

Divergent Interpretations of Women’s Agency and Luther’s Political Agenda, David O. Neville (p. 177-198)

Notes on Contributors, Hilary Collier Sy-Quia and Susanne Baackmann (p. 199-201)