Frauen Des Ostens

Frauen des Ostens

Biography Between Structure and Agency

While bookstore shelves around the world have never ceased to display best-selling “life-and-letters” biographies in prominent positions, the genre became less popular among academic historians during the Cold War decades. Their main concern then was with political and socioeconomic structures, institutions, and organizations, or—more recently—with the daily lives of ordinary people and small communities. The contributors to this volume—all well known senior historians—offer self-critical reflections on problems they encountered when writing biographies themselves. Some of them also deal with topics specific to Central Europe, such as the challenges of writing about the lives of both victims and perpetrators. Although the volume concentrates on European historiography, its strong methodological and conceptual focus will be of great interest to non-European historians wrestling with the old “structure-versus-agency” question in their own work. Contributors: Volker R. Berghahn, Hartmut Berghoff, Hilary Earl, Jan Eckel, Willem Frijhoff, Ian Kershaw, Simone Lässig, Karl Heinrich Pohl, John C. G. Röhl, Angelika Schaser, Joachim Radkau, Cornelia Rauh-Kühne, Mark Roseman, Christoph Strupp and Michael Wildt.

Daughters of Eve

This volume is the first anthology of contemporary East German women's writing in English translation. It will introduce scholars and general readers to writers whose voices are essential to an understanding of the situation of women in today's changing Europe. Included are short stories, essays, autobiographical sketches, and excerpts from novels, written between 1974 and 1986 by women of the postwar generation. Their work reflects everyday life in the GDR before the fall of the Berlin Wall with vitality, sympathy, humor, and warmth. This literature has been of great significance within the GDR as a public forum for social-critical discussion, and in the West for its depiction—as the volume title suggests—of universal issues confronting women in modern society: women and work, women and family, women’s self-determination in relation to other people and social institutions. The twenty-five authors represented are Renate Apitz, Irene Böhme, Daniela Dahn, Gabriele Eckart, Christiane Grosz, Monika Helmecke, Helga Königsdorf, Angela Krauss, Katja Lange-Müller, Beate Morgenstern, Irmtraud Morgner, Christa Müller, Doris Paschiller, Helga Schubert, Helga Schütz, Maria Seidemann, Angela Stachowa, Gerti Tetzner, Maxie Wander, Petra Werner, Maja Wiens, Christa Wolf, Christina Wolter, Charlotte Worgitzky, and Rosemarie Zeplin. Notes and biographical introductions are provided for each story.