IN INGEBORG DREWITZ'S Gestern war heute, Gabriele, the main character, tells a male friend that women greet the world with their arms wide open. She contrasts this explicitly with the way men approach life: “Vielleicht kann sich ein Mann nicht vorstellen, daß die Frau immer mit sorgend ausgebreiteten Armen lebt” (297: Perhaps a man cannot imagine that a woman always lives with her arms open to care). The primary difference Gabriele sees between women and men seems to lie in the word “sorgend.” That is to say, men may set out to greet the world with open arms, but women's open arms are there to embrace those in need of care, whereas men's arms are open to new opportunities for self-realization.

In a gesture common to all of the female characters treated in this study, Gabriele's statement emphasizes her role as caring for others and deemphasizes the importance of fulfilling her own wishes. All of the women characters have varying levels of difficulty using the pronoun “I” to refer to a self separate from others, distinct from the demands and desires of other individuals. From Christa Wolf's now-famous phrase in Nachdenken über Christa T: “Die Schwierigkeiten, ‘ich’ zu sagen” (173: The difficulties of saying “I.”) to Drewitz's repeated explorations of the ramifications that an insistence on saying “I” can have, their readers find again and again an acknowledgement of how individual lives are caught up in a web of relationships.