Women Travel Abroad 1925–1932: Maria Leitner, Erika Mann, Marieluise Fleisser, and Elly Beinhorn

The book offers an investigation into travel narratives and the gendered dynamics of journalism and travel in the German-speaking countries during the Weimar Republic (1919-1933). The individual contributions of women writers and journalists and their cumulative output reshaped the genre of travel writing by focusing on women’s lives in different parts of the globe. They also altered journalism in terms of readership, ethics, gendered voice, and publishing. Four fascinating travel texts written by women are introduced and analized. Gender, class, ethnicity, race, work, professionalism, journalism, and cultural places are major themes. What powers moved these women around the globe? Where did these women journalists and writers go? By what means? What have they seen and described in their travel reports? How their texts reflect circulating now and then theories? How were their travels related to the rising nationalism in Germany of the Weimar period? How do they speak to us today? The author Svoboda Dimitrova-Moeck raises these and many other questions in this book.