Introduction: Alle Menschen werden Schwestern 3 Introduction: Alle Menschen werden Schwestern: Sisters and Sorority in the German Cultural Tradition Gail Hart University of California, Irvine Schiller’s declaration of humanity’s universal brotherhood has been challenged and nuanced repeatedly in numerous fora, 1 and the organizers of the German Studies Association’s Family and Kinship panels chose to use the altered version as a heading for their 2015 program� The GSA ’s Family and Kinship Network promotes scholarly work on modes of kinship, both figurative and literal. As an interdisciplinary group, we follow the evolution of families 2 and the re-evaluation of family matters in literary and historical, legal and religious contexts, as well as the rhetorical adaptation of kinship metaphors and tropes to extra-familial situations. The essays presented here represent the Network’s 2015 focus on lateral relations within the family, namely sibling interactions with an emphasis on sisters and the varieties of sisterhood and sister relations� These include natural / biological, spiritual, and legal sisterhood, in addition to sisters by choice and sisters by fate� Incest and religious sisterhood were also topics of interest� Overall, the contributions to the panels responded in multiple ways to the call, addressing the literary status of sisters / siblings and stepsisters, the veiling of sisters in the convent, the borrowed and gendered notoriety of historical sisters of famous men, as well as specific and general sister-brother and sister-sister relationships� Sisters are historically very different from brothers within and outside the family and these differences are codified in Germanic law and literature. 3 Childbearing, property relations, succession, education, and primacy or precedence within the group are all factors in the existence and perception of sisters and their interactions with brothers, parents, in-laws, and offspring. In this issue, we have collected five articles that take these considerations in various directions, from documents of family history to a literary competition to the function of a popular genre and the contemporary modifications of traditional tales. Writing in a recent issue of the fashion magazine Vanity Fair , which also took up the theme of sisters and sisterhood, Graydon Carter remarks that sisters are “occasionally adversarial, completely different, and yet utterly familiar” (May 4 Gail Hart 2016, 50)� Though our program diverged considerably from that of the magazine with its photographs of rich and glamorous sisters in beautiful clothes, Carter’s emphasis on familiarity and difference is a useful epigraph for this grouping of scholarly essays� All the sisters and siblings addressed in these pages are quite - if not utterly - familiar to scholars of German Studies, but our contributors have provided new and different readings of these familiar family relations and, in many cases, staked out uncharted territory in the cultural assessment of sisterhood� The first two essays are rooted in the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries and based on intra-familial letters and the characterizations of sisters that emerge from these documents� Both look at family dynamics and the tensions and differences between and among sisters and siblings and both bring hitherto unpublished letters to light� Barbara Becker-Cantarino writes of Bettine Brentano-von Arnim (1785-1859) as a literary correspondent or Briefdichterin and as a practical correspondent who chronicled the events and emotions of a large and prosperous bourgeois family in Frankfurt. Bettine’s letters, especially the unpublished ones that up to now have held no obvious historical or literary historical value for editors, flesh out the everyday life, the Alltag , of the family group. Peter Anton Brentano or Pietro Antonio Brentano (1736-1797) had twenty children with three wives, thirteen of whom reached adulthood� Some were boys and some were girls and Becker-Cantarino shows the complex daily negotiations among the siblings as each assumed “ihre jeweilige Stellung im Familienverband je nach Alter und Geschlecht�” Further complicating the age and gender variables within the family was the matter of education� Boys received professional training and higher education, while the girls had private lessons designed to make them good wives for educated and prosperous husbands� Bettine resisted this program, exceeding family prescriptions for gendered intellectual life and her missives document the tensions that proceeded from her search for independence and empathy. Her affinities with her brother, noted author Clemens Brentano, are a point of interest and Becker-Cantarino assesses their “erotisch komplizierte Beziehung�” A literary older brother with all the advantages of seniority and male precedence may have had little trouble dominating - or at least fascinating - his literary-leaning younger sister� Yet Bettine matured and transcended Clemens’s influence and became an accomplished literary personality whose personal letters give us a privileged perspective on the growth and development of a large, and for the most part, loving family� Jordan Lavers’s contribution, “Liebe, böse, Line! ” examines the role of epistolary practices, literal and material, in the maintenance of sorority among the five Günderrode sisters. Karoline, Louise, Charlotte, Wilhelmine, and Amalie von Günderrode were, with the exception of Wilhelmine, single women who wrote Introduction: Alle Menschen werden Schwestern 5 individual and communal letters to their sisters during times of separation� Karoline, the “Line” of Lavers’s title, was, of course, also one of Bettine’s correspondents and the subject of her fictionalized Die Günderrode (1840). Based on extensive archival research and unpublished letters, Lavers’s work focuses on the material circumstances of letter writing, from the paper itself to the various collaborations and combinations of writers and those taking dictation, of those adding a postscript to another’s letter and those speaking for the whole group - usually Karoline� The relative ranking of sisters within the group, culturally based on age precedence and marital status, is also a factor in the epistolary practices of sorority� The material analysis and its application to the complex sister relationships constitute an unusual topic and little work has been published thus far using these analytical tools� Single women of the eighteenth century, who stayed at home, visited relatives, or entered convent-like arrangements and the letters they wrote to one another regarding mundane and familial issues have simply not stimulated widespread scholarly interest; it is to Lavers’s credit that he demonstrates the value of these documents as artifacts of kinship� Eleanor ter Horst’s essay on E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Das Gelübde brings in the dimension of religious sisterhood, as well as a startling reflection on a pair of “sister” texts of the early nineteenth century that have been separated by critical reception, namely Kleist’s Die Marquise von O and Hoffmann’s similarly themed novella. Whereas Kleist’s tale, first published in 1808, preceded Hoffmann’s (1817) by nine years and critics have openly preferred the former - ter Horst cites Hartmut Steinecke who pronounced the latter “eine schlechte Weiterführung des Kleistschen Motivs” her essay argues that it was Hoffmann’s project to displace the originary text and establish the primacy of his own� Though this maneuver recalls Harold Bloom’s oedipal patterns of authorship, ter Horst maintains that it is not a matter of overcoming the father but rather a struggle of siblings as Hoffmann “challenges the notion of temporal succession, of the distinction between original and copy.” She identifies all manner of kinship tensions between the two tales, each of which involves a woman who experiences an unexplained pregnancy and seeks seclusion, resisting marriage vows and, in the case of Hoffmann’s heroine, taking religious vows. Hermengilda, the daughter of Polish nobility, seeks to conceal her pregnancy and her visage in the home of a German Bürgermeister , where she wears both a mask and a veil� The riddle of paternity is never definitively solved in either tale, even as appearances suggest otherwise� Ter Horst elucidates a series of parallels between the novellas along with their acknowledged affinities and contributes significantly to our understanding of the much-commented-upon Marquise as well as bringing an original and invigorating reading of Das Gelübde. 6 Gail Hart In “The Ballad and its Families,” Adrian Daub focuses on the ballad genre and the ways in which it explores and perpetuates “the mysteries of sisterhood�” The mission of the ballad is transmission and sisterhood is a mode of knowledge that may or may not be successfully passed on from one poetic generation to the next or from writer to reader� Daub interrogates the form in some of its nineteenth-century representations, beginning with an intricate reading of Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” (1862). Rossetti’s sister figures, Laura and Lizzie, live alone and agitate in the absence of a mother as an “originary pair, but the balladic itinerary moves them toward a lesson in motherhood, in how to be a mother. Here, sisterhood becomes “a story to be told to one’s children,” an element of another, different, reproductive identity. Where “Goblin Market” yields tamely to didactic transmission, the ballads of Friedrich Hebbel and Annette von Droste-Hülshoff appear to be critical of balladic genealogy, problematizing “the narrative, the melodramatic, the dynastic dimensions of family�” Daub concentrates on Droste’s “Die Schwestern” (1844) that, like “Goblin Market,” conveys the story of two sisters in the absence of parents and children� Yet here, Daub finds significant differences in the piece’s perspectivism and its questioning of sisterhood or the male gaze’s potential construction of sisterhood. If sisterhood does indeed resist balladic transmission, the poem nonetheless raises very important questions about what sisterhood is, how and by whom it is perceived� Once again, sisters and sisterhood are, to echo Carter, utterly familiar but radically different. The final article in this issue brings us into the twenty-first century with an analysis of a practice that began long ago but has now blossomed on the internet, namely fan fiction or the revision and rewriting of familiar texts and tales to reflect the new author-usurper’s social circumstances or world view. Jaime Roots’s “Märchen mal anders” follows familiarity and difference in the genre of the fairy tale as it has evolved in online German fan fiction. Roots focuses on “Questions of foreignness and belonging” and the ways in which the Grimm Brothers’ Kinder und Hausmärchen (1812-57) dealt with them as opposed to current internet adaptations. She is specifically interested in questions of who belongs in the family or, even more specifically, the position of “step” relatives. Becker-Cantarino notes that Bettine Brentano-von Arnim, despite her ruminations on the bond between full-blood siblings, did not make the referential distinction in her letters between step-siblings and those who were her mother’s children and Becker-Cantarino sees this as a matter of inclusiveness in the Brentano family, a refusal to distinguish “full” from “partial” relatives� In a similar vein, Gustafson bases her Goethe’s Families of the Heart on the thesis that Goethe envisioned love and not blood as the foundation of the family in his novels and plays that bring together many loving groups of unrelated in- Introduction: Alle Menschen werden Schwestern 7 dividuals� Roots opposes the traditional status of blood vs� step-siblings in folk tales to more recent tellings of these tales and identifies a trend toward broader inclusiveness. She begins her investigations of familiarity and difference with several of the Grimm tales that illustrate the relatively lofty assessment of blood sibling relations and the degraded status of step-siblings� Of course the most famous of these is “Aschenputtel”, the Cinderella story of a father’s true daughter left in the care of a stepmother and stepsisters who mistreat and isolate her as an element alien to the family - though they themselves become abjected and foreign to Aschenputtl’s new family after her marriage to the prince. Roots finds an adherence to German particularity and nascent nationalism in the crucial distinction between the foreign and the familiar in Aschenputtel’s family. This she attributes to the Zeitgeist of a time when the Napoleonic wars had just concluded and German identity was being formed or reclaimed� Roughly two centuries later, with the nation well-established, the vigilance about German-ness has diminished and both the state and the family have expanded to acknowledge inclusionary factors other than blood. In the overwhelmingly female (sisterly? ) community of online fan fiction writers, Roots identifies a tendency to reassess not only Cinderella but the importance of blood relations in general in a world where the definition of family, of who belongs and who is excluded, has changed considerably. Her investigation of fan fiction leads to important conclusions about family members, brothers, stepsisters, and sisters in the current age and also a lesson in the effects of internet technology on literature. It furthermore suggests that both Goethe and Bettine, once each other’s correspondents, were on to something. Now, as Germany’s openness to outsiders is being tested as never before, it is to be hoped that the values evident in Roots’s examples of fan fiction will prevail. Our five contributors have advanced our thinking about sisterhood, its contexts, and its meanings; however, this remains a topic that merits and requires further attention and further development. We hope that the following essays will inspire and enable future work on the bonds of sisterhood� 4 Notes 1 See especially, Luise Pusch, Alle Menschen werden Schwestern: Feministische Sprachkritik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990); Claudia Robot’s rock anthem of the same title; and Irene Fleiss’s accounts of the matriarchy, Als alle Menschen Schwestern waren (Perfect Paperback, 2006). 2 Susan Gustafson’s recent Goethe’s Families of the Heart is a good example. Gustafson examines the non-blood relations in Goethe’s work that are equivalent to kinship, including those in Wilhelm Meister and Wahlver- 8 Gail Hart wandtschaften � Though “fractured families” have long been a theme in the Goethe scholarship, Gustafson uncovers networks of kinship based on love rather than blood and opens up many new channels for the consideration of love relations in literature� 3 Michaela Hohkamp’s “Do Sisters Have Brothers? ” is a very recent account of the differences in terms of property rights and inheritance. The historical distinctions between the two sibling designations are highly material� 4 I would like to thank all the participants in the 2015 GSA panels sponsored by the Family and Kinship Network, as well as the directors of the Network, present and past, and the editors of Colloquia Germanica � I also thank my four sisters, Carol, Nancy, Peggy, and Dee Dee, for my experiential knowledge of the topic�