Gina Kaus - edition and text-analysis

Gina Kaus (1893-1985), one of the most successful German-speaking authors in the inter-war period, has been neglected by scholars for a long time since her texts were categorised as popular literature. This forestalled an integration into the literary canon. But this categorisation overshadows the literary and aesthetic quality work of an author who tells profound psychic proceedings with fascinating narratologic techniques and thereby abolishes the much discussed division between artistic and popular literature. Besides, it is essential to discover Gina Kaus as a perspicacious observer and critic of actual themes in the 1920s and 1930s, such as the question of gender, the image of the "Neue Frau", and social and socio-political grievances. The material scattered in different archives and institutions will be collected in the course of this project. Kaus` articles, feuilletons, novels, short-stories and novellas published in numerous journals and magazines are to be gathered. These hitherto only dispersed published texts shall be edited as CD-ROM. In addition to this text- collection all texts will be thoroughly analysed and the results will be published in a long overdue monographic work about Gina Kaus. The aim of this project is to reveal the importance and relevance of Gina Kaus for the literary and cultural history of the first third of the 20th century. As Kaus is interested especially in anthropologic themes as love, corporeality and sexuality, gender roles, human contacts und conflicts, etc., her texts, as part of the entire culture, participate in the construction, the tradition and the variability of cultural formations of meaning. The texts shall not be read as sources or documents for everyday-historical phenomena but as forms of cultural self-perception and self- reference, as a possibility to observe culture. The aim of this project is twofold. On the one hand it wants to supply a scholarly base to research about Gina Kaus and to recognize her as one of the most important German-speaking authors of the inter-war period. This will be done through a complete bibliography of all her writings, something that has never been done before. Thus, our knowledge about the author will be completed and previously unknown aspects will be discovered. In her prose texts and her essays Kaus critically describes, comments upon and analyses the social life of the 20s and 30s. Her literary talent clearly goes beyond commercial writing on an assembly line. On the other hand the success of her novels in the contemporary reception shall be looked into. The relationship between Kaus` narrative texts and her journalistic works has to be looked into. By focusing on the texts Kaus wrote in the 1920s and 1930s, an aspect of her artistic work will be revealed that has been ignored by previous scholarship.

Gina Kaus (1893-1985) is known today rather as the (girl)friend of eminent men than as one of the most successful German-speaking authors of the 1920s and 1930s. She has been neglected by scholars for a long time since her texts were categorised as popular literature, which prevented an integration into the literary canon. Nearly unknown are large parts of her work, which includes, besides her novels, also dramas as well as numerous short-stories, feuilletons, reviews and articles dealing with pedagogic and psychological themes. During this research-project many of Kaus texts were rediscovered in archives and various journals and magazines of the inter-war period; a selection was published in book-form. In addition, Kaus narrative and journalistic works were catalogued and analysed in a monography that connected them to the literary, historical, and cultural contexts of the Weimarer Republik in Germany and the First Austrian Republic. The success of Kaus novels is not to be seen as an indicator for their literary quality but rather as a contemporary phenomenon. Her own ideas about reception-aesthetics correspond to the programme of the Neue Sachlichkeit. Similarly, her choice of topics reflects the socio-historical and mental-historical discourse of the inter-war period in Austria and Germany. In her texts, Kaus deals with the decline of monetary and moral values, the changed conception of gender roles, the liberal discourse of marriage and sachliche love affairs. She was also interested in pedagogic and psychological problems, based on Alfred Adlers Individual Psychology, which was booming in Vienna in the 1920s. Kaus managed to symbiotically connect various phenomena of the inter-war period. She combined individual psychological theorems and postulates of the Neue Sachlichkeit: her articles and short-stories concerning aspects of childlike development, educational problems or neurotic phenomena were also published outside pedagogic and psychological journals in international newspapers and glamorous magazines where they could be read by a large amateur public. Kaus understood Sachlichkeit beyond a poetological objective as an attitude towards life based on moral and ethic principles, motivating her strong commitment to social and politico-cultural matters. She connected her criticism of capitalism, financial and economic policy, speculative dealings and corruption, social injustice and contemporary socio-political grievances (like the housing shortage or usury) with an interest in Individual Psychology, which she regarded as a social movement. In accordance with her sachliche attitude towards life, she postulated a critical commitment in literature that should lead to practical results.