Karen Duve, Kathrin Schmidt, Judith Hermann: ‘Ein literarisches Fräuleinwunder’?

In an article in 1999 examining the sudden wave of new home‐grown authors on the German literary scene, the Spiegel declared that it was the young women among them who were creating the greatest stir, not least for their uninhibited depiction of the erotic, and it promptly labelled this phenomenon ‘ein literarisches Fräuleinwunder’. The present article examines a representative work by each of three writers included under that title, Karen Duve's Regenroman , Kathrin Schmidt's Die Gunnar‐Lennefsen‐Expedition and Judith Hermann's Sommerhaus, später . What emerges is not just the absence of a supposedly unifying approach to the erotic but also the variety of writing on display, in style, content and, it is argued, in literary quality. The attempt to create some grouping largely on the basis of gender, therefore, whilst producing a memorable (if implicitly belittling) headline, is both artificial and misleading.