The Literary Double Life of Clementine Krämer: German-Jewish Activist and Bavarian “Heimat” and Dialect Writer
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 February 2023
Summary
This essay examines the literary double life of the German-Jewish feminist, social welfare worker, pacifist, and writer Clementine Krämer (1873–1942). While much of her writing is typical of the middlebrow literature written by Jewish women writers for the Jewish press, Krämer simultaneously forged a separate career as a writer of Heimatliteratur, local-color works that featured Bavarian and Munich dialect, characters, customs, landmarks, and topography, but were devoid of Jewish figures. Employing the vocabulary of “passing,” in particular the concept of “authorial passing,” this essay examines the function of dialect and local color in Krämer’s writing. Krämer’s authorial passing was subversive, but in a limited way, for it stopped short of communicating to her non-Jewish audience the message that was implicit to the act of authorial passing and explicit in her Jewish texts: acculturated German Jews could share Christian Germans’ affinity for the language, culture, and landscape of their Heimat without relinquishing Jewish religion or fraternal or communal bonds.
DESPITE THE EFFORTS OF HER NEPHEW, sociologist Werner J. Cahnmann, who preserved her literary estate and published a short biography in 1964, Clementine Krämer (1873–1942) is now virtually unknown. During her lifetime, however, she was well known in Jewish, feminist, and pacifist circles as co-founder of the Israelitische Jugendhilfe (Israelite Youth Aid) in Munich, a member of the national executive board of the Jüdischer Frauenbund (League of Jewish Women) and founder and chairperson of its Munich branch, co-founder and chairperson of the Munich branch of the Deutscher Verband für Frauenstimmrecht (German Union for Female Suffrage), and the Frauenbund liason to the Jüdischer Friedensbund (Jewish Peace League). A prolific and versatile writer, Krämer published two serial novels, a children’s picture book, numerous essays and poems, and over one hundred stories and sketches. Her writings appeared in anthologies, in major Jewish and general German-language magazines, and in local and regional newspapers. Her pacifist novella Die Rauferei (The Fight) was published by Gustav Kiepenheuer, one of the most prestigious publishing houses of the Weimar era. Scores of other texts remain unpublished.
Krämer led a literary double life. Much of her writing is typical of the middlebrow programmatic or didactic literature written by Jewish women writers for the German Jewish press, addressing issues such as antisemitism, Zionism, assimilation, conversion, or women’s rights and roles.
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- Nexus 1Essays in German Jewish Studies, pp. 109 - 136Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2011