Anna Richards & Clare Bielby 
Women and Death 3 
Women’s Representations of Death in German Culture since 1500

Studies representations of women and death by women to see whether and how they differ from patriarchal versions.


In Western culture, women are often linked with death, perhaps because they are traditionally constructed as an unknowable ‘other.’ The first two
Women and Death volumes investigate ideas about death and the feminine as represented in German culture since 1500, focusing, respectively, on the representation of women as victims and killers and the idea of the woman warrior, and confirming that women who kill or die violent or untimely deaths exercisefascination even as they pose a threat. The traditions of representation traced in the first two volumes, however, are largely patriarchal. What happens when it is
women who produce the representations? Do they debunk or reject the dominant discourses of sexual fascination around women and death? Do they replace them with more sober or ‘realistic’ representations, with new forms, modes, and language? Or do women writers and artists, inescapably bound up in patriarchal tradition, reproduce its paradigms? This third volume in the series investigates these questions in ten essays written by an international group of expert scholars. It will be of interest to scholars and students of German literature and culture, gender studies, and film studies. Contributors: Judith Aikin, Barbara Becker-Cantarino, Jill Bepler, Stephanie Bird, Abigail Dunn, Stephanie Hilger, Elisabeth Krimmer, Aine Mc Murtry, Simon Richter, Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly. Clare Bielby is Lecturer in German at the University of Hull. Anna Richards is Lecturer in German at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Table of Content

Practicing Piety: Representations of Women’s Dying in German Funeral Sermons of the Early Modern Period – Jill Bepler

‘Ich Sterbe’: The Construction of the Dying Self in the Advance Preparations for Death of Lutheran Women in Early Modern Germany – Judith P. Aikin

The ‘New Mythology’: Myth and Death in Karoline von Günderrode’s Literary Work – Barbara Becker-Cantarino

The Murderess on Stage: Christine Westphalen’s
Charlotte Corday (1804) – Stephanie Hilger

‘Ob im Tode mein Ich geboren wird?’ The Representation of the Widow in Hedwig Dohm’s ‘Werde, die du bist!’ (1894) – Abigail Dunn

The Figure of Judith in Works by German Women Writers between 1895 and 1921 – Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly

Lola Doesn’t: Cinema,
Jouissance, and the Avoidance of Murder and Death – Simon Richter

Death, Being, and the Place of Comedy in Representations of Death – Stephanie Bird

‘Liebe ist ein Kunstwerk’: The Appeal to Gaspara Stampa in Ingeborg Bachmann’s
Todesarten – Aine Mc Murtry

TV Nation: The Representation of Death in Warfare in Works by Peter Handke and Elfriede Jelinek – Elisabeth Krimmer

About the author

ELISABETH KRIMMER is Professor of German at the University of California, Davis.