Shame, Desire, and Queer Jewish Girlhood in Annette Eick's Semiautobiographical Fiction, 1929–1930

Abstract

Abstract: Annette Eick (1909–2010) is best known as a Jewish lesbian writer and poet who managed a miraculous escape from Nazi Germany in November 1938. However, her fiction and poetry published in the late Weimar Republic have been hitherto neglected. This article examines two of her serialized novellas, Die Arbeitsgemeinschaft (The study circle; 1929) and Petra (1930), which were published in the lesbian periodical Die Frauenliebe when Eick was in her late adolescence. Both works center adolescent girls whose inability to confide in the adults around them about their desires for other women produces paralyzing shame and loneliness. This article situates these works within the context of interwar-era antisemitism and Jewish communal efforts to mitigate antisemitism through gendered performance of bourgeois respectability. It argues that through these works Eick mounts a dual critique of antisemitism in the lesbian press and of German-Jewish commitments to respectability and the silences and shame the requisite self-repression imposed.