Preface.

The dedication of this year's Women in German Yearbook to the memory of Susanne Zantop is meant not only to honor a dear friend, cherished collaborator, and splendid scholar, but also to acknowledge her actual involvement in many of the articles that appear between the covers of this volume. In corresponding with the authors as well as with the ever-helpful anonymous readers of manuscripts that were reviewed in preparation for this volume, I came to a deeper appreciation of how Susanne's spirit and dedication had touched the lives of so many colleagues at all stages along the continuum from graduate student to emerita. Susanne was firm in her conviction that first-rate scholarship--the kind she demanded of herself--could and should be both accessible and erudite. She sought structure and theoretical reflection in scholarly writing and had little patience with the kind of jargon that sometimes covers murky thinking. But she was also unfailingly gentle in helping others to achieve the goals she set for herself and our Yearbook.

It was my privilege to collaborate with Susanne in a particularly intense way that was professionally and personally satisfying, a way that enabled us to bring about something better than we could have achieved in isolation. E-mails and faxes regarding Yearbook matters flew back and forth between Hanover and Rochester, often several times a day, but our exchanges almost invariably included observations on other aspects of our lives, major and minor: progress--or lack thereof--in our own research projects as well as our garden plots, travel plans, even the good and bad extremes of weather that impinged on daily life in our respective locations. The cruelty with which she and her husband Half were snatched from our midst, from the college they had served so unstintingly, and from their circle of family and friends seems all the more senseless in view of the steadfastness with which both of them committed their personal and intellectual energies to improving the world in which we now must live without them. What remains is an example worth following.

The essay that opens the present volume is among the very last that Susanne Zantop finished in her lifetime. As editor of this Yearbook, she would, of course, never have considered positioning her own work so prominently. That we are able to present it as a tribute to her intellectual influence in the profession we owe to the kind permission of her daughters, Veronika and Mariana Zantop, and to the dedication of her Dartmouth colleagues Gerd Gemunden and Irene Kacandes, who took the initiative of preparing it for publication here. Susanne's bold expose of colonialist residues in Veit Harlan's filmic cover-up of the reality of Nazi Germany offers a taste of what her larger project on "Postcolonial Amnesia" might have been. The article links nicely to Ingeborg Majer O'Sickey's exploration of Fassbinder's Marriage of Maria Braun as a critique of Germany's postwar failure to come to terms with the persistence of racialist and sexist elements in the construction of national identity.

Much of the remainder of the volume, in which an international assemblage of scholars offer reevaluations and rediscoveries of women's texts from four centuries, would seem to challenge the fairly widespread notion that feminist Germanists are too little concerned with pre-twentieth-century literature or with the aesthetics of a genre such as poetry. These articles suggest that, as international theoretical developments increasingly inform German Studies at large and feminist German Studies in particular, new perspectives are breaking important ground in the study of older periods. Silke R. Falkner and Karin Baumgartner strike a thematic note for all of the following essays in their examination of the strategies that aristocratic women of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries employed to circumvent constraints placed on their creativity by the norms of class and gender. In describing Catherina Regina von Greiffenberg's strategy for negotiating the religious and cultural constraints of her time in order to publish her poetry, Falkner invokes Susanne Zantop's comments on the "complicated maneuvers [and] ... strategies of adaptation and defiance women had to develop in order to gain admittance to a realm dominated by male printers, publishers, critics, and peers." In the case of Liselotte von der Pfalz, Baumgartner employs Foucauldian terms. In the thousands of letters written by this German noblewoman, two lines of strategy for resisting the power of the French court of Louis XIV can be identified: on the one hand, Liselotte's assertion of her own superior ...