Geschlechterrollen und begehrte Koerper in Romanen Franz Kafkas, Thomas Manns und Vicki Baums

An analysis of the nature of nineteenth-century romance and of structures of desire, the gaze, and gender identity in Franz Kafka's Der Yerschollene , Thomas Mann's Der Zauberberg, and Vicki Baum's stud. chem. Helene Willfüer shows that these three authors undermine the traditional bourgeois gender matrix and model of romance. Below a realist surface, they create each an additional narrative level where they work towards the disintegration of gender roles and question the romantic model of love and desire. At the same time that they work towards the demise of the romantic matrix, they develop new discourses of corporeality focusing on sensual, erotic, nude, androgynous, deformed, and sick bodies.;Vicki Baum's novel embraces conflicting themes and narratives—traditional romance, stories of sexual emancipation, blurred gender boundaries, and moral dilemmas arising from new sexual freedom. Baum shows the physical dimension of romance and experiments with an active female role within the corporeal and sexual economy. In Der Zauberberg, Thomas Mann creates visualizations and fantasies of the body that transcend gender differences and allow him to present unconventional forms of desire. He subverts the traditional romance model, as well as conventional notions of masculinity and femininity and homo- and heterosexuality. Kafka's Der Verschollene puts the body at the center of a discourse of power, violence, gender roles, and desire. He reveals gender as performative and as a tool only arbitrarily chosen to organize power relations. The deconstruction of gender boundaries makes alternative organizing principles necessary, and since the wish for power is always expressed as sexual desire, bodies and corporeality play a central role in these alternatives.;The analysis of these changing paradigms of stories of love and desire demonstrates that the shifting configurations of body, gender, and sex in early twentieth-century novels are part of modernity's project of questioning the certainties that had supported traditional modes of social organization. The results of this analysis contribute to the ongoing gender discussion and are of general historical interest as part of a history of sensibility.