German Mother, the Mother of Germany: Visions of Patriotism, Modernity, and Motherhood in Ina Seidel’s Das Wunschkind (1930)

Abstract

Abstract:In the decade following WW I, conservative German women writers celebrated picturesque landscapes and tapped into mysticism, religion, and national history. While interested in women’s contributions to society and literature, they pointedly avoided the social and cultural realties of the Weimar Republic. In contrast to liberal urban writers who commented on changing sexual relationships, working women, and controversial issues such as abortion, Seidel contemptuously disdained contemporary trends, instead advocating a spirit of cultural conservatism and restoration of traditional values. Her well-received Heimatsroman echoed contemporary tensions between seductive femininity and nurturing womanhood, between racism and patriotism, and between the ideas of women as professionals, spiritual mothers, and guardians of history and nationality. Although placed in the early nineteenth century, its sensitive portrayal of female experiences during the German Wars of Liberation alluded to the Weimar Republic’s debate about the notorious New Woman and echoed the visions of emancipation promoted by the German bourgeois women’s movement.