Adrienne Thomas, Gertrud Isolani, and Gabriele Tergit: German Jewish women writers and the experience of exile

Abstract

This dissertation examines the post-1933 novels of Adrienne Thomas, Gertrud Isolani, and Gabriele Tergit, three German-Jewish women authors who were forced into exile just as their writing careers were beginning. My analysis demonstrates the mutual dependence of biography and literary production in their subsequent experience of exile. Using the socio-historical work of Monika Richarz as well as Gabriele Kreis's theories about women in exile, I show that the authors' writings reflect not only the physical and emotional rigors of refugee life, but also constitute a more specific attempt on the part of the writers to construct their own gender and ethnic identities, as women and as Jews. This dissertation supplements existing scholarship by detailing the exile experiences of women from the assimilated German-Jewish bourgeoisie.Chapter one examines the novels of Adrienne Thomas. Her position as both a woman and a French-speaking Jew informs her critical stance vis-a-vis German chauvinism in the 1930 antiwar novel Die katrin wird Soldat. The author's exile novel, Reisen Sie ab, Mademoiselle!, is significant in that Thomas increasingly distances herself from her Jewish identity, instead demonstrating a marked sympathy for the antifascist struggle of the workers.Chapter two focuses on Gertrud Isolani's fictional depiction of Gurs, Stadt ohne Manner. She celebrates the superior abilities of women to adapt to concentration camp life, but at the same time the romantic genre of the novel offers a fanciful retreat from the women's suffering: her idealized fictional protrayals stand in stark contrast to the harsh conditions Isolani experienced in both France and Switzerland. Isolani's budding attraction to Zionism was reflected in later stories on the mission of the Jews in a post-Holocaust world.Chapter three examines the development of the Weimar-era journalist, Gabriele Tergit. The 1931 novel Kasebier erobert den Kurfurstendamm demonstrates her interest in the problems of emancipated women. In her exile novel Effingers she adds an explicit historical dimension to her analysis of womens' issues, locating the specific experience of Jewish women within the cultural context of a Germany on the way to fascism.Thesis (Ph.D.)--The University of Wisconsin - Madison, 1995.School code: 0262