The Times of Their Lives: Queer and Female Modernism, 1910-1934

Abstract

Time, sexuality, and subjectivity have been central to traditional understandings of modernism. In particular, women and queers are frequently positioned in these scholarly accounts as objects and symbols of these concepts rather than as agential subjects who also exert force on them with their own intentions, experiences, and perspectives. Addressing this scholarly limitation, this dissertation examines early twentieth-century German-language modernist literature of queer and female authors to explore the relationships between sexuality, time, and subjectivity during an era of unprecedented freedom and opportunities for these groups. It investigates how these three factors interact with each other and the role of the individual therewithin. Informed by queer and feminist theories, Frankfurt School philosophy, and literary theory, I undertake close readings of literary fiction as well as essays, letters, and diaries by Robert Musil, Annemarie Schwarzenbach, Klaus Mann, Siegfried Kracauer, and Marieluise Fleißer to examine how individuals negotiate, shape, and are shaped by the dynamics between temporality and sexuality in fashioning themselves as subjects. The dissertation contributes to a new turn in queering German Studies as well as bringing the much-neglected German-language context to the Anglo-French-dominated fields of queer and feminist studies.

Chapter 1 provides a theoretical and methodological introduction to the dissertation, defining the major terms of the study, while also situating the interventions it makes within German Studies, women’s studies, and queer studies. Chapter 2 reads Robert Musil’s Die Vollendung der Liebe as a text commandeered by the exuberant sexuality of its female protagonist. I show how the text narrativizes shifts in modern notions of temporality, subjectivity, and sexuality, revealing them as interconnected processes, while also illustrating their limitations, particularly as a male author writing about and through a female character. Chapter 3 draws on the figure of the Augenblick to interpret Annemarie Schwarzenbach’s Eine Frau zu sehen as an account of lesbian utopia, a first-person narrative of a woman’s anticipation of a liberatory subjectivity through erotic fulfillment. I focus on how the protagonist’s desire comes to commander the writing of narrative and of self in a way that critiques contemporary queer theoretical debates around visibility, hope, and anti-futurity. Chapter 4 undertakes a comparative reading of Klaus Mann’s Der fromme Tanz and Siegfried Kracauer’s Georg, two Weimar-era novels that diverge in their use of queer pasts and queer presents, respectively, as sites to envision transgenerational forms of subjectivity and community. By foregrounding friendship as the relationship through which queer subjectivity can be birthed, it intervenes in the overwhelming emphasis on sex and romance in queer studies of time. Chapter 5 concludes with Marieluise Fleißer’s Mehlreisende Frieda Geier, explicating how shifting non-simultaneities of temporal discourses and systems interact with volatile notions of gender to influence individuals, their subjectivities, and their social worlds in ways both liberating and threatening.

The dissertation makes the case for the specificity of literature as a medium and its role as a partner with its readers in making meaning and making worlds and in which we can see most clearly the pleasures, potentials, and pitfalls of queer and female lives and cultures—and better comprehend and thus bend these entwined phenomena that continue to exert power over the lives of the sexually marginalized.