German Women's Poetry Circa 1900: A Forgotten Anthology

The anthology Frauenlyrik unserer Zeit (1907), edited by the artist‐writer Julia Virginia Scheuermann, appeared at a pivotal moment in literary history when the economic conditions for poetry, aesthetic tastes, and women's roles in society were in dramatic flux. In this article, I examine those dynamic conditions and the influence such anthologies once attained as quintessential social and cultural projects. I propose that the intermediality of this unique collection marks it as a transitional project that bridged the private and public spheres and illustrated the expansion of women's writing. I argue that the author's rights movement, advanced by the Kartell lyrischer Autoren , influenced the stylistic and ideological heterogeneity of the collection. By boldly defining the emergence of women's writing in the early twentieth century in terms of universal human history ( Menschheitsgeschichte ), Scheuermann proposes a narrative rationale for the lyric genre that endures in later modernist projects.