Contested Selves

KATJA HERGES is a physician and holds a PhD in German from the University of California, Davis. ELISABETH KRIMMER is Professor of German at the University of California, Davis. LAURA DEIULIO is Associate Professor of German at Christopher Newport University, VA. KATRA A. BYRAM is Associate Professor of German at Ohio State University. MAUREEN BURDOCK is a graphic storyteller, writer, and illustrator with dual master's degrees from the California School of the Arts and a PhD in Cultural Studies from the University of California, Davis. Aylin Bademsoy is a PhD candidate in the German Department at UC Davis.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroductionKatja Herges and Elisabeth KrimmerPart I. Women's Life Writing, Female Subjectivity and Agency1: "A Portrait of the Moment": Rahel Levin Varnhagen's Letters at the Boundary of Life WritingLaura Deiulio2: A Force of Nature: Narrative Strategies of Autobiography in the Work of Poet-Queen Carmen SylvaBeth Ann Muellner3: Writing the Cultural Memory of East Germany through Women's InterviewliteraturJulie ShoultsPart II. Modern Life Writing and Aesthetics4: A Life of Its Own: Alfred Döblin on Autobiography and the NovelMatthias Müller5: A Man of the Century in His Poems: Johannes R. Becher and the Creation of the Twentieth-Century Life NarrativeKristin EichhornPart III. Trauma and Vergangenheitsbewältigung6: Writing Two Selves: A Woman's Struggle to Cope with WarErika Quinn7: "Confrontation with My Complicity": Paratextual Self-Encounters in Diaries of the Second World WarKathryn Sederberg8: Voices from an "Extinct Species": Narrative Responses to Trauma in German-Jewish MemoirsJennifer Hansen-GlucklichPart IV. Transnational and Transgenerational Life Writing in Contemporary Germany9: The Case of the Disappearing Son: Gender, Genre, and German Postwar Cultural Memory in Niklas Frank's Meine deutsche Mutter and F. C. Delius's Bildnis der Mutter als junge FrauKatra Byram10: Lena Gorelik's Autofictional Letter Lieber Mischa: A Guide to Being Jewish in Contemporary GermanyLydia H. Heiss11: Shapeshifters: Metamorphosing Transgenerational Trauma through ComicsMaureen Burdock12: Homeland, Nation, and Gender in the Life Writing of German and Jewish ÉmigrésAylin BademsoyBibliographyNotes on the ContributorsIndex

The contributions to Contested Selves demonstrate most impressively that there is a strong nexus between life writing and politics. Neither politics nor life writing nor the nexus between the two will vanish any time soon; it is to be hoped that books such as Contested Selves will continue to shed light on them.