Recasting Autobiography, Women's Counterfictions in Contemporary German Literature and Film

In one of the first books to address the New German Cinema from a feminist perspective, Barbara Kosta looks closely at two autobiographical films, Helma Sanders-Brahms's Germany, Pale Mother and Jutta Brckner's Years of Hunger; and at two books, Ruth Rehmann's Man in the Pulpit: Questions for a Father, and Christa Wolf's Patterns of Childhood. In different ways, Kosta shows, these works of the 1970s and 1980s have recast traditional autobiography, offering fresh characters in new roles, exploring innovative forms of expression, and confronting long-repressed themes such as the devaluation of the female voice and the horror of Germany's fascist past.