Besprechungen / Reviews 277 bates of the last century. Jürgen Habermas’s paradigm of the ‹public sphere› became popular with literary critics of the generation of ’68 and beyond and enjoyed a short revival in the US with the belated appearance of the English version The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989). In this theoretical framework critics used Habermas’s idea of the public sphere as a distinction between public and private issues thus separating issues that normally affected women around 1800 (aspects of family, reproduction, and nurture). And they continued to assign the label ‹domestic› to women’s fiction, thereby relegating it to the private realm and out of the discussion in the public sphere. This mostly transported, re-inscribed, and reinforced the notions and valuation of separate gender spheres from the 1800s. Replacing the outmoded ‹public sphere› in the twenty-first century with the more open concept of the ‹social imaginary› (as discussed in the wake of Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 2004) has been a step in the direction that Baumgartner’s focus on Public Voices has taken when she concludes that «a new theory of reading such domestic fiction takes these texts as literary and cultural documents involved in complex negotiations regarding the shape their communities needed» (239). Yet vexing questions remain: Why was there such a forceful, dominant tradition to exclude women from the political and the public, and why has this lasted for so long even beyond the rhetoric of the ’68ers? The Ohio State University Barbara Becker-Cantarino M ICHAEL M AREINER (E D .): «Von einer edlen Amme». Eine mittelhochdeutsche Minneallegorie. Wörterbuch und Reimwörterbuch. Mittelhochdeutsche Minnereden und Minneallegorien der Wiener Handschrift 2796 und der Heidelberger Handschrift Pal. germ. 348. Vol. 8. Bern & New York: Peter Lang, 2007. 378 pp. € 64,20. For the past four decades, Michael Mareiner has devoted his energy to preparing for publication the Middle High German Minnereden and Minneallegorien of manuscripts principally in Prague (R VI Fc 26), Vienna (2796), and Heidelberg (Pal. germ. 348). Individual works are presented first in the form of edition and translation, followed by a separate dictionary and rhyme dictionary. The present volume, a dictionary and rhyme dictionary to the allegory «Von einer edlen Amme,» supplements the work’s edition and translation, published in 1993 and based on the Heidelberg manuscript. A brief preface offers minimal context for the present volume’s provenance. Terms are glossed and arranged, with few and so noted exceptions, according to normalized Lexer/ BMZ spelling convention. Entries are followed by the respective Lexer/ BMZ lemmatization and definition, line references, and citations (including variants). The dictionary is supplemented by a rhyme dictionary and index of orphans. A brief bibliography and subsequent listing of Mareiner’s publications concludes the work. A work of this type stands largely on its accuracy and, to a lesser degree, on such aesthetic elements as aid in its ‹user friendliness,› e.g., layout, font type and attributes, formatting, etc. 278 Besprechungen / Reviews With respect to accuracy, Mareiner has on the whole done a thorough job of editing. The entry blœse (42) should read bœse. In view of the manuscript orthography, Mareiner’s decision to use normalized Lexer/ BMZ spelling is justified. On several occasions, however, Mareiner opts for subordinate, context-sensitive meaning(s) in glossing terms, which may mislead an unfamiliar user to infer primary, rather than subsidiary, meaning(s). For example, bilde is glossed only as «Vorbild.» Likewise, name is glossed only as «Stand; Person.» An explanatory reference such as «Hier: […]» would have been helpful to deal with such cases. Layout and font attribute choices generally aid in user friendliness. Several inconsistencies do, however, compromise the impression of a carefully edited text. Foremost among these is Mareiner’s decision to opt for more than a dictionary per se, since most of the entries also include an index and concordance, often for the same entry, albeit not consistently. Fully four pages, for example, are in this way taken up by an index and lemmatized concordance for tuon. Similarly, daz merits more than six pages. Certain ubiquitous and largely self-explanatory glosses, e.g., articles and pronouns, could have been omitted without detriment to the volume’s essential purpose and value. Multiple, nested parenthetical notations further detract from rapid, efficient reference. In some cases, Mareiner cannot escape the impression of arbitrariness in the assignment of meaning(s). The entry for zuht, for example, references six meanings and proceeds in a three-page concordance of all instances in the text to assign one meaning parenthetically to each citation. The context is in most cases simply not specific enough to allow for such restrictive assignments. The decision to include a lemmatized index and concordance with the dictionary expands the work considerably in volume, albeit not necessarily in scope, yet the usefulness of the concordance seems compromised in the absence of widespread familiarity with, or access to, the full text itself. Recourse to the full text itself would, of course, make the concordance largely redundant. The present volume’s stand-alone value is hence a matter of legitimate concern. On the whole, the added concordance, arbitrary indexing, and space-consuming inclusion of common lemma gives a somewhat inconsistent and ‹padded› impression. This does not, however, detract from its essential usefulness with respect to the manuscript’s orthography and documentation of the critical vocabulary of Middle High German Minnereden. The work would have benefitted from some fundamental editorial considerations to focus its scope, remedy inconsistencies, and to review the glosses with respect to primary and subsidiary meanings. Stripped of its excess indexes and concordance, the work may have been considerably shorter, yet no less useful as an entry in Mareiner’s valuable series of editions, translations, and lexica of the manuscripts’ Minnereden and Minneallegorien. Lastly, the present volume, appearing some fourteen years after the original edition and translation of «Von einer edlen Amme,» should have included at least a brief introduction to the work itself, to situate it in the larger context of the manuscript tradition and literary genre. Likewise, the rhyming dictionary deserves a more solicitous introduction than Mareiner’s intertextual reference to a previous work from Besprechungen / Reviews 279 2003: «Über den Sinn und Zweck eines Reimwörterbuches ist alles Nötige bereits früher gesagt worden» (305). University of Wisconsin-Parkside Siegfried Christoph H ILLARY H OPE H ERZOG , T ODD H ERZOG and B ENJAMIN L APP (E DS .): Rebirth of a Culture: Jewish Identity and Jewish Writing in Germany and Austria Today. New York: Berghahn Books, 2008. vi + 193 pp. $ 75. As both Todd Herzog and Dagmar C.G. Lorenz observe, the reception of contemporary Germanand Austrian-Jewish writers has so far been limited to two small and distinct audiences: American and German Germanists. Part of the aim of Rebirth of a Culture is to resolve this problem by introducing these authors to a larger English-speaking audience from both a scholarly and a personal perspective. Rebirth of a Culture is the result of a seminar developed and led by Lorenz who also provides an introduction to the volume that does as marvelous a job of highlighting the critical relevance of such a work as it does of sketching the topography of Germanand Austrian-Jewish writing since 1945. The particular strength of this book as a whole lies in its transatlantic scope, probing «cross-fertilization as well as conflicts, intellectual debates that reach beyond the boundaries of German-speaking countries» (1). The collection demonstrates that «Germanand Austrian-Jewish writing at the turn of the millennium is local and global, aware of the interconnectedness of Jewish concerns and world history» (5). These expanding spheres of relevance make it possible for the authors to introduce new and provocative viewpoints on Jewish identity in Europe and North America, which most of the essays in Rebirth of a Culture in fact do. There is so much of value in this book that it is difficult to do it justice in a short review; it offers both an accessible overview as well as in-depth discussion, and my only quibbles with the book arise from a desire to learn more. Rebirth of a Culture is divided into four sections: the first three consisting of scholarly essays, the fourth of a selection of short, original texts by Barbara Honigmann, Esther Dischereit, Jeanette Lander, and Doron Rabinovici. The essays by Cathy S. Gelbin, Petra Fachinger, Richard Bodek, and Hillary Hope Herzog make it clear that the existing historical and geographical categorizations in Germanophone Jewish literary studies need to be reevaluated and new directions to be explored. Particularly vocal in this direction are Gelbin’s article on the trope of the Golem, in which she argues that «it is precisely because of the shared history of the Golem tradition that this trope lends itself to the negotiation of European-Jewish identity on the cusp of a new millennium and political era» (31), and Bodek’s comparison of Stefan Heym’s novels with his obituaries. Bodek’s essay demonstrates that the media attention on Heym’s political affiliation undermined the positions he pursued in his writing and reminds us that the biography and reception of any author are bound to specific moments in history. The impact of the Nazi genocide on the very idea of history prompts Robert Menasse’s layered engagement of historical discourse, as Margy Gerber discusses in her article on Menasse’s Die Vertreibung aus der Hölle.