Investigates the field of German life writing, from Rahel Levin Varnhagen around 1800 to Carmen Sylva a century later, from Döblin, Becher, women's WWII diaries, German-Jewish memoirs, and East German women's interview literatureto the autofiction of Lena Gorelik.

Katja Herges, Elisabeth Krimmer

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Katja Herges and Elisabeth Krimmer
Part I. Women's Life Writing,
Female Subjectivity and Agency
1: "A Portrait of the Moment": Rahel Levin Varnhagen's Letters at the Boundary of Life Writing
Laura Deiulio
2: A Force of Nature: Narrative Strategies of Autobiography in the Work of Poet-Queen Carmen Sylva
Beth Ann Muellner
3: Writing the Cultural Memory of East Germany through Women's Interviewliteratur
Julie Shoults
Part II. Modern Life Writing and Aesthetics
4: A Life of Its Own: Alfred Döblin on Autobiography and the Novel
Matthias Müller
5: A Man of the Century in His Poems: Johannes R. Becher and the Creation of the Twentieth-Century Life Narrative
Kristin Eichhorn
Part III. Trauma and Vergangenheitsbewältigung
6: Writing Two Selves: A Woman's Struggle to Cope with War
Erika Quinn
7: "Confrontation with My Complicity": Paratextual Self-Encounters in Diaries of the Second World War
Kathryn Sederberg
8: Voices from an "Extinct Species": Narrative Responses to Trauma in German-Jewish Memoirs
Jennifer Hansen-Glucklich
Part 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 Frau
Katra Byram
10: Lena Gorelik's Autofictional Letter Lieber Mischa: A Guide to Being Jewish in Contemporary Germany
Lydia H. Heiss
11: Shapeshifters: Metamorphosing Transgenerational Trauma through Comics
Maureen Burdock
12: Homeland, Nation, and Gender in the Life Writing of German and Jewish Émigrés
Aylin Bademsoy
Bibliography
Notes on the Contributors
Index