Contested Selves (Web PDF) von Katja Herges

Investigates the field of German life writing, from Rahel Levin Varnhagen around 1800 to Carmen Sylva a century later, from Döblin, Becher, women's WWII diaries, German-Jewish memoirs, and East German women's interview literatureto the autofiction of Lena Gorelik.

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Katja Herges and Elisabeth Krimmer

Part I. Women's Life Writing
Female Subjectivity and Agency
1: "A Portrait of the Moment": Rahel Levin Varnhagen's Letters at the Boundary of Life Writing
Laura Deiulio
2: A Force of Nature: Narrative Strategies of Autobiography in the Work of Poet-Queen Carmen Sylva
Beth Ann Muellner
3: Writing the Cultural Memory of East Germany through Women'sInterviewliteratur
Julie Shoults

Part II. Modern Life Writing and Aesthetics
4: A Life of Its Own: Alfred Döblin on Autobiography and the Novel
Matthias Müller
5: A Man of the Century in His Poems: Johannes R. Becher and the Creation of the Twentieth-Century Life Narrative
Kristin Eichhorn

Part III. Trauma andVergangenheitsbewältigung
6: Writing Two Selves: A Woman's Struggle to Cope with War
Erika Quinn
7: "Confrontation with My Complicity": Paratextual Self-Encounters in Diaries of the Second World War
Kathryn Sederberg
8: Voices from an "Extinct Species": Narrative Responses to Trauma in German-Jewish Memoirs
Jennifer Hansen-Glucklich

Part IV. Transnational and Transgenerational
Life Writing in Contemporary Germany9: The Case of the Disappearing Son: Gender, Genre, and German Postwar Cultural Memory in Niklas Frank'sMeine deutsche Mutter and F. C. Delius'sBildnis der Mutter als junge Frau
Katra Byram
10: Lena Gorelik's Autofictional LetterLieber Mischa: A Guide to Being Jewish in Contemporary Germany
Lydia H. Heiss
11: Shapeshifters: Metamorphosing Transgenerational Trauma through Comics
Maureen Burdock
12: Homeland, Nation, and Gender in the Life Writing of German and Jewish Émigrés
Aylin Bademsoy

Bibliography
Notes on the Contributors
Index