The 1950s have passed into the history books as the period of the Federal Republic of Germany's so-called "economic miracle"; yet attention to women's roles in economic reconstruction has until now been negligible. In this book, Erica Carter explores how the development of a "social market economy" after 1949 gave a new centrality to consumers as key players in the economic life of the nation, and, in that process, gave women a new public significance. Public attention focused in particular on the nation's housewives, who were to train the populace for entry into a new world of consumer prosperity. Carter investigates this focus from two perspectives: in part 1, she tackles the political economy of postwar West German consumption, and in part 2, she looks at representations of the consuming woman across a range of popular cultural forms. Since visual imagery is discussed at length, the book is lavishly illustrated with advertisements, fashion photographs, film stills, and documentary photography from the period. How German Is She? also makes a distinctive contribution to questions of national identity. While many historians agree that nationalism was a spent force after 1945, Carter argues that concepts of nationhood survived in the rhetorics of public policy and in popular culture of the period. In this context, national and efficient consumption became a housewife's duty, not just to husband and family, but to the postwar "nation." The book will be of primary interest to scholars and students in German studies, women's studies, and cultural studies. Erica Carter is Research Fellow in German Studies, University of Warwick.

Peter Bayer was seventy-three. He’d taught at the school just up the road for most of his life and, when the wall came down, saw no reason to move. Nobody could say life had been easy, and when it was built, he’d lost contact with many friends, but he’d learnt to enjoy life as best he could and had had the good fortune of a happy marriage to Elsa. It’s 2006. Peter Bayer and his wife, Elsa, live on the East side of Berlin, as they’ve always done, even when that wasn’t an attractive proposition. What limits Peter’s freedom nowadays isn’t a concrete wall but often feels like one. Elsa has dementia and barely recognises him, so his life is not only hard work, but it’s lonely. What makes it lonelier is that his wife’s illness has given her a distorted view of the past and one that would horrify the woman he married. When Helen, a recently widowed English woman, rents the flat Peter owns nearby, he experiences the kinds of conversations that used to be normal for him, which makes his current reality all the more painful. Helen’s come to Berlin to find out more about her husband’s past in the city and learns things from their German friends that she was unaware of when he was alive. During her struggle to come to terms with her present life, Helen sees that the terrible demands on Peter’s life are almost impossible to endure. Other stories in the book show the toll of war, as fear is passed from one generation to another and we see how the power of secrecy never disappears. They also reveal how gratitude can take various forms and how intergenerational friendships really are all they’re cracked up to be. The Writing on the Wall and Other Stories is a collection of tales, spanning the 1980s to the present day, that will appeal to fans of Anne Tyler, Alan Bennett and Alice Munro, whom Penny Edwards takes inspiration from.

This is the first book (in either English or French) to offer readers an overview of women's experience of the Second World War and its immediate aftermath in France. It examines objectively the part that women played in both collaboration and resistance, synthesising much recent scholarship on the subject in French and English, and drawing on the author's own extensive research (including oral testimony) in Toulouse, Paris, and West Brittany. The findings are complex, and the immensely varied testimony challenges easy generalisation. This will be relevant for courses on French studies, French and European history and Women's studies.

A valuable survey and reference resource It is hard to imagine a more needed and more useful literary reference work than this one, which gives students and readers quick access to the lives and work of a wide range of notable female writers from England and the Continent, from Aphra Behn to Emily Bronte, from Simone de Beauvoir to Isak Dinesen, from Bridget of Sweden to Hannah Arendt. Writers in more than 30 languages are included: French, Czech, Greek, Italian, Swedish, Spanish, German, Russian, Portuguese, Serbian, Catalan, Arabic, Hebrew, Dutch, Bulgarian, Croatian, Slovak, and more. Covers 1,500 years and all major genres Going back 15 centuries, the Encyclopedia covers the authors of novels, short stories, poetry, plays, criticism, social commentary, feminist manifestos, romances, mysteries, memoirs, children's literature, biography, and other genres. In signed entries, some of which are mini-essays, experts in the field examine writers' lives and achievements, comment on individual works, place artistic efforts in historical context, provide insights and analyses, and present more information than can be easily found elsewhere without undertaking more exhaustive research. Each entry is followed by a bibliography of primary works. Indexed by language, nationality, genre, and century. Spotlights the interesting lives of notable writers In these pages students and readers will meet hundreds of interesting women writers who made lasting contributions to the intellectual and popular culture of their countries while often leading fascinating lives, among them: * AGATHA CHRISTIE , who wrote her first book in response to her sister's demand for a detective story that was harder to solve than the popular fiction of her day, and whose work has been translated in more languages than Shakespeare's. * HILDEGARD VON BINGEN , the 12th-century German mystic, who wrote profusely as a prophet, a poet, a dramatist, a physician, and a political moralist, often communicated with popes and princes, and exerted a tremendous influence on the Western Europe of her time * MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY, whose 1818 masterpiece Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus became a literary sensation around the world * ILSE BLUMENTHAL-WEISS, one of the few concentration camp survivors to memorialize the victims of the Holocaust in German verse * LINA WERTMULLER, who in addition to her work in films, has written plays for the stage and a novel, and who once was a member of a short-lived puppet theater that staged the works of Kafka. Special features: Ideal for quick reference and student research * Multicultural-covers over 30 languages and 15 centuries * Includes many contemporary writers * Provides essential biographic data on each writer * Each entry is followed by a chronological listing of the writer's published book-length works * Offers critical evaluations of major works * Indexes help find writers by country...research by time period...survey genres...focus on languages