How to Be a German Woman: Mixed Messages at the Columbian Exposition

Wilhelmine von Hillern’s female Bildungsroman, A Physician for the Soul, sounds a theme that reverberates throughout the collection of approximately 300 books representing Imperial Germany at the Exposition. An account of an unloved girl whose intellectual ambitions are cynically encouraged and then thwarted, Hillern’s novel concludes in ambiguity and ambivalence as the heroine appears to recede into domesticity and motherhood. Available to divergent readings, it embodies the Janus face of the entire German collection and especially of the novels, advice literature, essay collections, and biographical anthologies that tell their readers how to be female, middle class, and German. This chapter examines samples from these generic subsets with an eye to their promise of Bildung, namely, the development of one’s talents toward their realization in careers and service to the community and nation. While they default repeatedly to life trajectories circumscribed within the home, these books do offer an array of perspectives, the most forward-looking of them strategically intertwining women’s domestic lives with historical processes outside the home. In the aggregate, the ambivalence and contradictions of these works reflect larger tensions at the Exposition stemming from the intersections of ideas of progress and future rights with competitive nationally based display that in effect celebrated the status quo.