Martha’s Melancholia: Racial and Sexual Trauma in Gertrud Kolmar’s Die Jüdische Mutter (1931)

This essay offers an original reading of Gertrud Kolmar’s 1931 novel Die jüdische Mutter according to trauma and trauma theory. In so doing, it resolves two central puzzles at the heart of the novel: why the protagonist Martha Wolg poisons her sexually abused daughter, and what role Martha’s Jewishness plays in the work. Martha is herself a victim of sexual and racial trauma, and she reads her daughter’s experience in terms of her own suffering and the suffering of others. She comes to see herself and her daughter as enmeshed in a web of vertical (intergenerational) and horizontal (societal) traumas from which there is no possible escape. This explains why she is incapable of a healthy mourning process and instead falls victim to a pathological melancholia: Martha sees the whole world as a mirror of her child’s suffering. Her final act of suicide is a tragic consequence of her melancholic tendency to attach multiple sources of pain and suffering to her lost love object. Martha’s infanticide and suicide are a direct result of how she experiences and reads her own and other people’s trauma.

Duke Scholars

Author Kata Gellen German Studies