Recent scholarship has broadened definitions of war and shifted from the narrow focus on
battles and power struggles to include narratives of the homefront and private sphere. To
expand scholarship on textual representations of war means to shed light on the multiple
theaters of war and on the many voices who contributed to were affected by and or critiqued
German war efforts. Engaged women writers and artists commented on their nations' imperial and
colonial ambitions and the events of the tumultuous beginning of the twentieth century. In an
interdisciplinary investigation this volume explores select female-authored German-language
texts focusing on German colonial wars and World War I and the discourses that promoted or
critiqued their premises. They examine how colonial conflicts contributed to a persistent
atmosphere of Kriegsbegeisterung (war enthusiasm) that eventually culminated in the outbreak of
World War I or a Kriegskritik (criticism of war) that resisted it. The span from German
colonialism to World War I brings these explosive periods into relief and challenges readers to
think about the intersection of nationalism violence and gender and about the historical
continuities and disruptions that shape such events.
