The Observer Observed: Narrating Surveillance in Gertrud Kolmar's Susanna

Abstract:This article is an exploratory reading of Gertrud Kolmar's novella Susanna, which the poet wrote under extreme circumstances between 1939 and 1940 in a Judenhaus in Berlin. Kolmar's novella offers unique and invaluable insight into acts of surveillance at the end of the Weimar Republic. The novella demonstrates how German-Jewish women experienced the damaging effects of small-town gossip, neighborhood spying, and daily instances of social ostracism. On the narrative level, Nazi oppression does not come into play, although racist and antisemitic ideologies are shown to have entered the surrounding Jewish world. Embedded within the story of Susanna is a critical commentary on prejudice within the Jewish community directed against more traditional Jews. My analysis of the first-person narrator and her ward illuminates how both female characters use the act of storytelling as an important strategy of negotiation, which is otherwise impossible.