| Using the tools of postcolonial and feminist theories, this dissertation compares both periods of national unification in Germany (1870/71 and 1989/90) and their effects on the cultural construction of nationness in literary works by four German authors: Gabriele Reuter (1859--1941), Heinrich Mann (1871--1950), Gunter Grass (1927-- ), and Monika Maron (1941-- ). Specifically, the study analyses and compares how national identity is produced in relation to marginalized "Others," and how potentially subversive attempts to re-define the nation are informed by the intersecting categories of gender, class, ethnicity, and religion. In her novel Aus guter Familie. Leidensgeschichte eines Madchens (1895), Reuter problematizes the construction of "otherness" through her female protagonist, Agathe Heidling, who is unable to fit into the role of a bourgeois woman. Unfolding Agathe's failing attempts to belong, Reuter questions not only the restrictive concept of "female" identity in the Wilhelminian era but also that of a German nation which cannot tolerate differences. Reuter's contemporary, Heinrich Mann, does not empathize with the situation of the "Other" but instead blames what he views as its predominance for the downfall of the Wilhelminian nation. His novel Im Schlaraffenland. Ein Roman unter feinen Leuten (1900) not only portrays "women," "Jews" and the "Orient" as indicators of "ex-centricity" and perversion, but also as the very source of national decadence and downfall. Gunter Grass' novel Ein weites Feld (1995) strikes similar melancholic notes of loss and destruction. While both, Mann and Grass, uphold the Enlightenment ideal of a civil (male) society, Grass perceives the "Other" not as a threat to the German nation, but as its salvation. This redeeming quality, however, is restricted to "foreign" influences and denied where "internal Others," i.e. women, are concerned. In contrast, Maron's novels Stille Zeile Sechs (1991) and Animal Triste (1996) attempt to subvert the binary notion of "same" versus "other" by depicting a woman's failing effort to view Germany's unification as a radical point of departure into a future beyond hierarchical dichotomies. |
