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9 - The Kränzchen Library and the Creation of Teenage Identity
- Edited by Bruce Campbell, Alison Guenther-Pal, Vibeke Rützou Petersen
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- Book:
- Detectives, Dystopias, and Poplit
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 28 February 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 September 2014, pp 207-226
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Summary
Mit vierzehn Jahr’ und sieben Wochen ist der Backfisch ausgekrochen
AT THE AGE OF FOURTEEN YEARS AND SEVEN WEEKS, German girls were said to become Backfisch. The term comes from the fishing industry, referring to fish too large to be returned to the water but so small as to be suitable only for baking (German backen), and in reference to women is more or less synonymous with “teenager.” During this period of her life a young bourgeois woman navigated the difficult transition to adulthood, shedding childish behaviors such as selfishness and stubbornness in favor of the sense of duty, domesticity, and orderliness necessary to be a successful wife and mother. In the late nineteenth century German Backfisch had their own literature to narrate the transformation of a young tomboy into a responsible, marriageable young woman. The most well-known example is likely Emmy von Rhoden’s Der Trotzkopf (1885). The novel traces the fortunes of wild, unruly tomboy Ilse, who is sent by her father and stepmother to a boarding school and comes home tamed, transformed into a mild, marriageable young woman. According to Dagmar Grenz, the story of Der Trotzkopf, and I would argue, the story of Backfisch literature in general, is that of an “ungeheuren Erfolgs” (monstrous success). The novel has sold millions of copies, ran to hundreds of editions, has been adapted for film and television, and remains in print today. Jennifer Redmann classes these novels as a type of “extended Bildungsroman,” which “offers readers struggling through the ‘awkward years’ between the ages of twelve and sixteen a model for the successful transition to maturity.” Though derided by critics then and now for their kitschiness and sentimentality, Backfisch books were a highly successful and influential form of genre fiction that shaped the reading habits of generations of German girls.
In this essay I will examine twentieth-century girls’ novels from the Stuttgart-based youth publisher Union to see how they show the emergence of the modern teenage girl. Originally published in the magazine Das Kränzchen, these novels showcase two divergent understandings of young people: youth as a problem to be managed and brought under parental and adult authority, and youth as an emerging demographic in its own right, with enough autonomy and spending money to make it the target of marketing efforts.
14 - Land of Fantasy, Land of Fiction: Klara May's Mit Karl May durch Amerika (1931)
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- By Maureen O. Gallagher, University of Massachusetts
- Edited by Rob McFarland, Associate Professor of German at Brigham Young University, Michelle Stott James, Associate Professor of German at Brigham Young University
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- Book:
- Sophie Discovers Amerika
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 05 August 2014
- Print publication:
- 15 June 2014, pp 171-182
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Summary
Images of Karl May's America are no doubt familiar to most readers of German literature. Who doesn't recall the stories of “der Greenhorn” in the American West, shooting, surveying, hunting buffalo, and taming wild mustangs? Who can forget the noble savage Winnetou and his lifelong companion Old Shatterhand? Even those who have not read Winnetou likely know Karl May, former crook and swindler and arguably the most widely read German author of all time. Although he wrote prolifically about the United States, May only visited North America once; his westernmost destinations were Buffalo, New York, and Niagara Falls, and even this 1908 trip occurred long after his classic tales of the American West were published. Karl May's America thus has very little to do with the “real” America, serving instead as a blank canvas onto which German dreams of settlement, conquest, and masculine freedom are projected.
But what about Klara May's America? Klara May, Karl May's widow, saw and experienced more of the United States and the American West than her husband ever did, documenting it in a little-known 1931 work called Mit Karl May durch Amerika (With Karl May through America). This work, part memoir, part travelogue, recounts Klara May's 1930 trip through the United States, when she traveled from the East Coast to the West and back again. A review of the work on the online discussion board of the Karl May Foundation sums up the work thus: “Insgesamt: wenig Karl May, viel Klara May, und das ist nun leider wirklich fatal” (All in all: little Karl May, lots of Klara May, and that is truly fatal).