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Women's Studies: An inter-disciplinary journalPublication details, including instructions forauthors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gwst20

Stephanie Bird. WomenWriters and National Identity:Bachmann, Duden, ÖzdamarSRINIVAS S. VENKATA aa University of Southern California ,Published online: 17 Mar 2010.

To cite this article: SRINIVAS S. VENKATA (2010) Stephanie Bird. Women Writersand National Identity: Bachmann, Duden, Özdamar , Women's Studies: An inter-disciplinary journal, 39:3, 273-275, DOI: 10.1080/00497871003595737

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00497871003595737

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Women’s Studies, 39:273–275, 2010Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 0049-7878 print / 1547-7045 onlineDOI: 10.1080/00497871003595737

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GWST0049-78781547-7045Women’s Studies, Vol. 39, No. 3, Jan 2010: pp. 0–0 BOOK REVIEW

Stephanie Bird. Women Writers and National Identity: Bachmann, Duden, Özdamar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Book ReviewSrinivas S. Venkata BY SRINIVAS S. VENKATA

University of Southern California

In Women Writers and National Identity: Bachmann, Duden, Özdamar,Stephanie Bird examines the theme of national identity and howit relates to individual subjectivity and female identity in the worksof three major German-language writers: Ingeborg Bachmann,Anne Duden, and Emine Sevgi Özdamar. This well-written volumeexplores these three very different authors by making a connectionbetween individual and national identity formation using multiplemethodologies, including but not limited to feminist theory, theo-ries of nationalism, and gender theory and notions of performativity.

Bird introduces her book by discussing Austrian novelistIngeborg Bachmann and the extant Todesarten fragments, DasBuch Franza, Requiem für Fanny Goldmann, the posthumously namedGoldmann/Rottwitz-Roman, and Bachmann’s 1970 novel, Malina.In Das Buch Franza, Bachmann portrays the failure of Franza’smarriage with a psychiatrist who does research on the long-termeffects of experiments on Holocaust victims. After finding outthat he had been using Franza as the object of his research, sheflees with her brother to Egypt, where she suffers an accident atthe pyramids and dies. Throughout the novel, Bird argues thatFranza’s idealism and absolutism is inherently destructive. Franza’sdependence on idealism and her seeking of a moral absoluteleads her to idealize the national identity of the Habsburg Empireand the oriental present. Bird continues to pursue this theme inRequiem für Fanny Goldmann and the Goldmann/Rottwitz-Roman,but defines feminine identity in both those works as questioningAustrian national identity. Bird also analyzes the themes of ideali-zation, self-deception, and victimhood as part of Austrian nationalidentity in Malina, but here Bird argues that the narrator of thatnovel “dreams of borderless expanses of land” which she reads

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274 Srinivas S. Venkata

both as an empire without borders and a female subjectivity with-out constraints (87).

The second part of Bird’s Women Writers and National Identity,on German writer Anne Duden, centers around Duden’s short sto-ries in the volumes Übergang and Wimpertier and the novel DasJudasschaf. In Übergang, Bird contends that Duden links memorywith the body and bodily pain. Focusing on the short story“Übergang” in particular, Bird argues that the awareness of pastatrocities—like the Holocaust—is essential to the narrator’s iden-tity, at once defining it individually with her memories locatedwithin the body and also socially, in relation to her comments onethnicity and national identity. Using theories of feminine psycho-analysis and performativity like those espoused by Judith Butler,Julia Kristeva, and Jacques Lacan, Bird suggests the narrator ineach of Duden’s short stories partakes in “an indulgence in, if not adependence on, the role of anguished victim” (122). In Duden’sDas Judasschaf, Bird continues her argument of female desire andits relationship to suffering and victimization. Bird contends thatDas Judasschaf specifically provides a fictional account of the rela-tionship between the Final Solution and German national identity.In one passage of her book, Bird encapsulates the theme of victim-ization as it relates to Duden’s novel: “Thus facing the past, whilenecessary to overcome the trauma that continues to be transmittedthrough the generations, can also serve to consolidate the central-ity of violence to identity. In its complex critique, which under-mines any naïve understanding of what coming to terms with thepast involves, [Das Judasschaf] offers a timely invitation to considerthe ongoing and growing fascination with the Holocaust” (154).

Part III of Women Writers and National Identity is devoted tothe stories and novels of Emine Sevgi Özdamar. As opposed toBachmann and Duden, Özdamar was born in Kurdistan andcame to Germany as a guest worker in a factory; her perspectiveon German identity is unique and multi-cultural. Bell begins withthe stories “Mutterzunge” and “Großvaterzunge,” where she arguesthat Özdamar’s exploration of identity is linked to language. Thetwo stories delineate the narrator’s search for individual and cul-tural identity after she has lost her mother tongue, Turkish, andthe language spoken by her grandfather, Arabic, and adoptedher work language, German, as her own spoken and written lan-guage. In the two stories, the narrator tries to regain her lost

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Book Review 275

sense of tradition by learning Turkish and Arabic, but she is caughtin a bind between her knowledge of German and the impact onidentity presented by the other two languages. In doing so, Birdclaims: “If Özdamar’s stories point towards German identitybeing as ethnic as any other identity, she is implicitly denying thepossibility of defining national identity in any way other than ashistorically, politically, and culturally contingent. This is why sheappears not to ‘take sides.’ Not because she is adhering to notionsof fair play where each nationality has something to offer, butbecause she is questioning the very notion that identity is immu-table, defined and constrained by national borders. There are no‘sides’ to take, but there are specific explorations to be made”(164). Bird also examines Özdamar’s story “Karriere einer Putzfrau,”in which the narrator, a cleaning lady in Germany, discusses herrole in her former country of Turkey as Ophelia in Shakespeare’sHamlet. Bird contends that the twin roles she plays as cleaninglady and Ophelia allows Özdamar to subvert both of these rolesand undermine the dominant discourses that perpetuate thoseroles.

Bird concludes Women Writers and National Identity with a briefdiscussion about cultural studies, remarking that a danger existsin regarding literature as evidence for determining a cultural orhistorical context. She remarks, “It is the stylistic . . . and narrativepolyvalence of prose texts which enables them to thematize andrepresent the ambivalence and contradictions that structure iden-tity, and it is precisely this polyvalence that makes the close studyof literary texts significant for evaluating theoretical discourse”(218–219). Through her close readings of these German fictionalnarratives, Bird elegantly depicts the associations between femaleidentity and national identity.

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