A Fragmented Self Expressed in Animals: Maria Beig's Neomedieval Bestiary Hermine. Ein Tierleben

Maria Beig, born in 1920, took up writing fiction at the age of sixty and published her first novel at the age of sixty‐two. Beig's books describe the harsh lives that country women, especially farm women, had to endure until very recently. While critics were almost unanimous in praising Beig's first two books for their authenticity and stark realism, the reception of her third book, Hermine. Ein Tierleben (1984), was more ambivalent. Critics did not know how to evaluate this text. This article shows that Hermine. Ein Tierleben is composed according to aesthetic principles that lie strangely outside of our contemporary world. Writing in her own sixty‐fourth year, Beig uses the medieval form of the bestiary to represent in sixty‐four animals a woman's (almost) impossible search for self, individuality, and identity on a Catholic farm before 1950. The animals allegorically stand for Hermine's inner defeats. They die, become crippled, are slaughtered, are shot, or are eaten by other animals. I argue that in Hermine. Ein Tierleben , allegory both has and has not yet moved from the world around us to the world inside us (Benjamin). In Hermine we have a figure who attempts to find some fragments of a self by literally contrasting herself to animals.