Lesbian Camp and the Queer Archive: Angela Steidele’s Rosenstengel: Ein Manuskript aus dem Umfeld Ludwigs II. (2015)

Abstract

Abstract Angela Steidele’s 2015 epistolary novel Rosenstengel: Ein Manuskript aus dem Umfeld Ludwigs II presents a queer archive via partially fictional letters from and about Ludwig II and the cross-dressing lesbian Catharina Margaretha Linck, who lived more than 100 years before the Bavarian king. Steidele’s novel highlights the marriage of materiality and fantasy within the queer archive, engaging a mode of Camp aesthetics that always points to the gap between the material/real and fantasy. What is more, it is lesbian Camp, an undertheorized concept, that shapes and structures Steidele’s novel, even those portions concerned with the homosexually-inclined King Ludwig. The unrepresentability of lesbian desire surfaces in the novel as textual gaps that connote both a joke and loss, underscoring the affective complexity of the queer archive.