Shedding and Literally Dreaming

by Verena Stefan, Johanna Seiglander Moore (Translator)

Sometimes called the feminist equivalent to Mao’s "little red book," Shedding narrates the transformation of a young woman’s consciousness against the background of the rising women’s movement of the early 1970s. Over 300,000 copies have been sold in Germany since 1975.

Shedding and Literally Dreaming , a collection of eight stories written a decade later, portrays women living together in rural settings, independent of men. The autobiographical essay “Euphoria and Cacophony” traces the extraordinary reception and backlash that greeted Shedding and Stefan’s emergence as a writer and a symbol of the German women’s movement.

In resonant prose, and with a refreshing honesty, Stefan speaks to the universality of women's lives, a concept popular in the 1970s and 1980s, and ripe for re-discussion now in the 1990s. Stefan was a pioneer in "experimental writing" before the phrase was coined, and her writing about women's lives is as immediate today as when it first exploded on the German literary scene.

Genres: Nonfiction, Queer, Feminism

178 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1994

Reviews

[Regina · Rating 4 out of 5]

While I enjoyed reading Shedding a lot, Literary Dreaming rather got my hackles up from a point in history where the tone and topics of Literary Dreaming strongly reminded me of spiritual, nature glorifying feminists who have done a u-turn away from progressive politics to anti-vaccers, TERFs and Identitarianism (but that is not the auther's fault, obviously).
If you want to get an insight into 1970s German feminism and Verena Stefan's work I highly recommend this book. It is both great and depressing, how Stefan's descriptions of the female experience in society in Shedding is still so familiar. It was intetesting to follow somebody who wants to create a life outside of these experiences of sexist oppression while the basic limitations of that new space by the grips of capitalism still shines through.

In Literally Dreaming, Stefan portraits female life in and as part of the natural process. If you are a bit surprised or confused by Literally Dreaming, hang in there and read "Cacophony" afterwards. Here she describes how she wrote it and I found it very helpful for context.

This book in its variety documents German feminism of the 1970s and after very much the way I remember it from childhood and adolescence in Germany: the harsh rejection of female emancipation from all sides, all classes, all genders, and even from fellow political activists. For some, the answer was to try to eject and isolate themselves from the patriarchal sosciety and its aggessions, and celebrate nature and femininity in rural communities instead.
It was almost alarming how still only debated issues of the climate crisis are already mentioned in both Shedding and Literally Dreaming. Makes you question the speed and ambition of both environmental and political progress...

[Sarah Swedberg · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an excellent primary source.

It's a feminist novel published in 1975. Unfortunately not much has changed, but this is a subject (women being erased in society) that I have read a lot about and so found myself skimming through a lot of the prose.

I wonder (if I had been older than 10) if it would have blown me away in 1975.

[Radhika · Rating 4 out of 5]

what an underrated gem. must read.

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stefan's work is blatantly feminist and subtly brilliant. At times, I simply figured that it was annoyingly one-sided. At other times, Stefan looks beneath gender and focuses on the humanity of the situation -- and it is at these times that she shines.



I am also very glad that they included Literally Dreaming alongside of Shedding, because it gave a nicely rounded feeling to the stories. The editors picked from the earliest of Stefan's work as well as the middle works. (And I loved the stories from Literally Dreaming. We Work Here is in my top favorite short stories, not just of Stefan's.)



Sometimes I was angry while reading, sometimes I agreed, but at all times I realized that I was reading something important, and it is clear to me that Stefan was one of the leading German feminists during the 70s. One this is for certain, I enjoyed every page of her most prominent works.

[Mj · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I was creating an independent study in German literature, every online course recommended Stefan to me, and I am very glad that they did, because this contains some of the best, most feminist work that I have ever read. This is some of the most powerful writing that I've ever read.

[Mills College Library]

Fiction S816s 1994