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Women Writers of the Journal Jugend from 1919-1940

Kathleen Condray
Edwin Mellen Press

In the newly published "Women Writers of the Journal Jugend from 1919-1940," assistant professor Kathleen Condray, ex-amines the themes found in women’s narratives during the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich and the images female writers created for their fellow women.

Jugend helped pioneer the development of the short story. Its editors vowed to publish any work they deemed "short and good." The journal stood in absolute contrast to a contemporary periodical, Die Gartenlaube, which relegated women writers and women’s issues to a separate section and condescendingly addressed them as "our dear female readers."

The Jugend editors who predicted that Adolf Hitler would be a brutal dictator ended up in concentration camps. Over the years, writers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Rainer Maria Rilke, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Herman Hesse and Thomas Mann were published in Jugend, which evolved into a particularly rich source of women’s writing as well, featuring authors such as Richarda Huch and Else Lasker-Schüler.

Professor Brian Keith-Smith, compiler of "An Encyclopedia of German Women Writ-ers," notes in his review that Condray has conducted the only in-depth investigation of the literature of Jugend, in the process compiling the first comprehensive index of women writers during the period.