Elisabeth Landau's novel Der Holzweg (1918): A German-Jewish Gendered Discussion of Heimat

Elisabeth Landau's novel Der Holzweg discusses her German-Jewish protagonists’ attitudes to their estranged homeland in the climate of anti-Semitism in the last months of the First World War. With reference to contemporary theoretical writing, two main notions of Heimat, held by the novel's main characters, Karl and Elise, can be identified. Landau pits Karl's heroic but desperate clinging to his German homeland against the female protagonist Elise's clear-sighted argument for turning away from a nation that excludes its Jewish citizens and for building a new life elsewhere. Building on the concepts of motherhood and motherliness, and investing her heroine with a life-giving femininity and ‘nomadic’ subjectivity, Landau describes the ‘female’ perspective as the one showing the way into the future. An analysis of contemporary reviews of the novel shows how critics, who were not willing to concede the struggle for the acceptance of German Jews as equal citizens, ensured through misogynistic attacks that the novel and the criticism of the Heimat concept it carries were denied the readership it deserved.