Small Stories: The Novels of Martina Hefter

WhenSpiegelcritic Volker Hage (1999) created the termliterarisches Fräuleinwunder(literary girl wonder), he did not propose a return of feminism or a renewed critical attention to gender. Rather, he suggested that young women writers, whose presumed artistic naïveté and uncomplicated attitude toward sex and eroticism Hage underscored in his essay, had succeeded in making German literature attractive again for readers in Germany and beyond. Hage’s was an intervention in the debates about the status of contemporary German literature, much of which revolved around the repeatedly expressed demand for a “new readability” and an insistence on literature’s obligation to