Introduction

HEDWIG DOHM’s SHORT STORY, “Werde, die du bist” (Become Who You Are), published in 1894, is a moving account of widowhood and old age. For a nineteenth-century bourgeois German woman, Dohm lived a seemingly ordinary life for many years. She married at the age of twenty-four, bore four daughters, and was a housewife to her husband, the editor and publisher Ernst Dohm. On 5 February 1883 Ernst died of a heart attack and Hedwig Dohm’s thirty-six-year widowhood began. As Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres argues, during her widowhood, Dohm’s difference from other bourgeois German women of the period emerged. Not only did she produce a considerable body of fiction, often depicting the unhappy fate of women, but she also wrote witty and lively political essays and was an outspoken advocate of the feminist cause in the nineteenth century. Although she did not actively participate in the women’s movement, she was very much involved with its aims and ideals. The contrast between Dohm’s radical, positive political writings and the often hopeless depiction of women in her fiction has perplexed modern scholars. Sandra L. Singer argues, however, that Dohm’s essays and fiction in fact complement each other, and she accounts for this as follows: “Whereas the essays attempt to tear down barriers to necessary change for women, the fiction illustrates the devastating costs in women’s lives of the slow and torturous path to change.”

“Werde, die du bist” is certainly a poignant example of the damaging consequences that await a woman who endeavors to break free from her limited surroundings and emancipate herself. A widow’s struggle to find a voice and an identity is the principal theme of the story. The protagonist, Agnes Schmidt, an “old” woman in her fifties, has lived according to dominant social norms but feels an overwhelming sense of alienation. Although both Dohm and Agnes Schmidt are highly critical of the limitations placed on women, the story shows it is impossible to resist them entirely, transcend gender, sex, and age, and create an identity beyond that of nurturer, mother, and wife.

The story is told from two different perspectives. Agnes’s life is portrayed in the third person in two brief framework passages from the viewpoint of the doctors in the psychiatric hospital in which she spends her final days.