Introducing:
Poet and Performer
Emmy Hennings
Emmy Hennings (1885–1948) was a German artist, a poet and a writer, a singer and a dancer at the vanguard of creative happenings. She played a formative role in the Dada movement and was the only woman founding member of the Cabaret Voltaire – widely considered its star performer. Her itinerant artist’s life was plagued by hardship and poverty, drugs and prostitution, illness and prison. Between 1914 and 1915, Hennings was repeatedly arrested and imprisoned for alleged theft from a client and for passport forgery. This left her traumatised. On her release from prison, she moved to Zürich with her future husband, the Dada poet and fellow Cabaret Voltaire founder Hugo Ball. In 1919, she published her first semi-autobiographical novel Gefängnis. It has never before been translated into English. This latest translation makes the story of Hennings’ incarceration and its profound effect on her available to English-language readers for the very first time.
Prison
by Emmy Hennings
translated by Gabriele Popp
Prison tells the story of a woman cabaret artist who is suddenly arrested. In the two months she is locked up Emmy H. battles her own mental health as well as the Kafkaesque justice system, and she questions man’s persistent urge to punish poverty (and its attendant petty crime and prostitution) with the imprisonment of women. The companionship of women and their enforced proximity is both curse and salvation. Emmy initially struggles to connect with those sharing her ordeal, but is ultimately saved by her empathy. The author balances a deeply subjective description of her visceral response to imprisonment and its disorienting loss of privacy with often tragicomic tales of her fellow inmates. What unites and ultimately bonds these women is the desperate need to retain one’s humanity in the face of arbitrary justice.
Introducing:
Author and Silhouette Artist
Adele Schopenhauer
AdeleSchopenhauer (1797–1849) was a German author and silhouette artist. She was the sister of the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. After the early death of their father, their mother Johanna moved with Adele to Weimar, where she hosted a literary salon, frequented by the leading writers and artists of their time, most notably Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Adele never married, but had intense life-long friendships with women, such as Goethe’s daughter-in-law Ottilie, and a romantic relationship with Sibylle Mertens with whom she lived, on and off, until her early death at the age of 52.
Fairy Tales of the House, Forest and Field
by Adele Schopenhauer
translated by Gabriele Popp
with illustrations by Adele Schopenhauer
This collection of three fairy tales, originally published in 1844 under the title Haus-, Wald- und Feldmärchen is now available in English for the first time. Fairy tales by women were widely read from the seventeenth century onwards, indeed they often provided the sources for the literary canon, such as the Brothers Grimm. Today the original tales are being rediscovered and seen as part of a long lineage leading up to feminist writers such as Angela Carter and Margaret Atwood.
Introducing:
Award Winning Author
Elisabeth Langgässer
Elisabeth Langgässer (1899-1950) was one of the most significant writers in Germany after the Second World War. Her premature death at the height of her fame was considered a great loss to German literature, and she was posthumously awarded the Georg-Büchner-Prize, the country's most prestigious literary award (only the second-ever woman to win this award). In a post-war world dominated by men and a society reluctant to engage with the past, her work faded from memory and was largely forgotten by the late 1950s.
The Torso.
A Collection of Short Stories
by Elisabeth Langgässer
selected & translated by Gabriele Popp
illustrated by Mark Robinson
The collection, Der Torso, was originally published in 1947. The subject matter ranges from the persecution of Jews to the effects of air raids on the civilian population. The stories are almost exclusively narrated from a female perspective and ask questions about individual guilt and responsibility. Like Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin, published in the same year and translated into English for the first time in 2009, this book is a rediscovered masterpiece; its publication could not be more timely.
(Also available in a limited printed edition.)
Introducing:
Leading feminist thinker
Hedwig Dohm
Hedwig Dohm (1831-1919) was one of the most radical and committed feminists Germany ever produced – fearlessly and passionately challenging the establishment of the day. A leading figure in the women’s movement, she published numerous books and articles on the ‘woman question’, as well as fiction and drama, from the 1870s up to her death.
Books by Hedwig Dohm
The Antifeminists.
A Book of Vindication:
Women, Men and Misogyny
in the Age of Nietzscheby Hedwig Dohm
translated by Gabriele Popp
The pieces in this collection were written in response to those male and female antifeminists who saw women merely as a “conduit for real human beings: as the womb that bears the man.” Dohm skilfully and satirically dismantles the arguments put forward by writers ranging from Lou Andreas-Salomé and Laura Marholm to doctors and other professionals who wanted to bar women from advanced education. And there is a whole chapter dedicated to her hallowed contemporary Friedrich Nietzsche, whose work she subjects to the most devastating ridicule for his attitude towards women.
Summer Love.
Children, Aunts and Other Peopleby Hedwig Dohm
translated by Gabriele Popp
Hedwig Dohm’s novella was originally published in 1909 as part of the collection Sommerlieben. Its protagonist Marie Luise Anger is an independent woman enjoying a summer vacation on the German island of Usedom in the early years of the 20th century. On the surface this is an amusing story about love – both old and new – set in the world of seaside resorts and spa towns on the Baltic coast. But Dohm has a keen eye for the ridiculousness of both men and women. In the dry ironic tone of a German ‘Jane Austen with the gloves off’ she explores questions about the visibility and identity of women of all ages and their capacity to rebel against the constraints placed upon them by a restrictive society.
