This critical anthology presents original scholarship and materials about the prominent dramatist and concentration camp memoir writer Elsa Porges-Bernstein (1866-1949). The individual scholarly contributions provide new insights into the issue of multiple identity and allegiance in the first half of the twentieth century. Bernstein was a Germanophile and, according to Nazi ideology, a Jew; she also assumed the traditional roles of mother and housewife; finally, she was a feminist and a socialite related to the Wagner family. The complexity and conflictedness of Elsa Porges-Bernstein appeals to contemporary audiences, as evidenced by the 2002 revival of her play Maria Arndt, in Chicago.

The Editors: Helga W. Kraft is Professor of Germanic Studies in the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She was Director of the Center for Women’s Studies and Gender Research at the University of Florida. Her research interest lies in the area of Germanic studies of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries with special focus on drama and gender studies. Dagmar C. G. Lorenz, Professor of Germanic Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, focuses her research on Austrian and nineteenth- and twentieth-century German and German-Jewish literary and cultural issues and Holocaust studies, with an emphasis on history and social thought and minority discourses.