"Eine blassblaue Frauenschrift": la specularità del doppio come paradigma dell’identità

Abstract

This paper aims to rediscover a masterpiece of the Exilliteratur, which for too long was the object of intermittent research, mostly in German-speaking countries, while in Italy it still remains almost unstudied. In Eine blassblaue Frauenschrift (1941), Franz Werfel ironically portrays a double identity crisis: at an individual level, this arises from a confrontation with female otherness, and at the national one, it develops from the Austrian situation prior to German annexation. In doing so, he uses mirroring Leitmotifs at different levels of a text with a very complex structure.