Topics in 20th-Century Literature: Susman, Tergit, Schwarzenbach – Three Modernist Woman Authors

In recent years, there has been a resurgence of interest in three forgotten modernist, feminist, German-language writers: the German-Jewish philosopher and poet-critic Margarete Susman, friends with Simmel, Bloch and Celan; the incisive court reporter and novelist Gabriele Tergit, also German-Jewish; and the antifascist Swiss travel-writer and novelist Annemarie Schwarzenbach, a queer icon. What binds these three women together is that all three of them were among the most alert chroniclers of their time, tracking its many upheavals: the social and political revolutions of Weimar Germany, the rise of the Nazis to power, the Shoah.