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1Katherine Mansfield and Germany: Influences, Interactions, Afterlives, edited by two leading Mansfield specialists, offers a captivating and meticulously researched account of Mansfield’s previously understudied relations with Germany. While her French connections have attracted much critical attention, her German connections have been strikingly overlooked. Mansfield is now an iconic figure of anglophone ‘high modernism’, primarily associated with her stays in London and Paris as the sites of cosmopolitan avant-gardes, as well as with her colonial migration from New Zealand to England. This, along with the fact that New Zealand, England and France are the key settings of her most emblematic collection The Garden Party and Other Stories, has somewhat obliterated the role played by the German language, literature and music, and by Germany as a geographical location, both in the shaping of Katherine Mansfield the modernist writer, and in her biography.

2In the introduction, the editors underscore the originality of the volume, presenting it as the very ‘first attempt to examine . . . Mansfield’s encounter with Germany’ and her subsequent ‘fascination with all things German’ (1). They trace this fascination back to her early education between the ages of 15 and 17, in Wellington, and later at Queen’s College London (1903–1906) where she was strongly influenced by her charismatic German teacher Walter Rippman. The editors then turn to Mansfield’s experience as a young adult, focusing on her seven-month stay in the provincial spa town of Wörishofen, Bavaria, in 1909. Finally, they note that she continued to explore German culture in London in 1910, under the influence of the editor of The New Age, who introduced her to Nietzsche. These steps in her early career, the editors argue, were highly formative, and in fact instrumental in shaping Mansfield’s ‘cosmopolitan colonial’, or ‘antipodean’, modernism. The volume looks to mitigate the tendency to overemphasise Mansfield’s French connection, which stems from the frequency of Mansfield’s visits to Paris and the South of France, and her own celebration of France as a ‘creative space’. This contrasts with her difficult personal circumstances of 1909 which cast a shadow on her single, short stay in Germany: while pregnant and abandoned by her lover Garnet Trowell, she was exiled by her mother to Wörishofen where she experienced a stillbirth.

3The aim of the edited collection is both to rehabilitate the importance of Mansfield’s early ‘German encounters’, and to unravel previously unsuspected features of her writing that spring directly from them. It brings to light a more obscure period of Mansfield’s life, often treated as peripheral, as well as a lesser-known body of fiction written during her time in Germany, and later gathered under the title In a German Pension—after Pension Müller where Mansfield stayed. This volume seeks to demonstrate that her satirical portrayal of Bavarians in these sketches, which were often misread and classified as anti-German, had less to do with Anglo-German pre-war tensions than with the colonial writer’s shrewd observations, and estrangement: an outsider’s point of view on Europeans in general, taking both English and German stereotypes as the targets of her parody and satire. While seeking to break new ground and bridge critical gaps, the book also builds on previous scholarship which, in the past fifteen years or so, has initiated explorations of Heinrich Heine’s literary influences on Mansfield’s work, for instance, but also of her taste for German Romantic music (see, among others, the work of Da Sousa Correa, Davison, Griffiths, Kascakova or Sobotta, who also feature among the contributors to this volume). Such recent critical endeavours have both uncovered the need for, and paved the way towards, a more thorough study of Mansfield’s German influences that are the scope of this collective volume.

4Katherine Mansfield and Germany gathers thirteen chapters authored by a range of contributors from eight different countries. Their essays explore the various facets of Mansfield’s engagement with Germany, with her seven-month stay in Wörishofen in 1909, and the satiric sketches she wrote there, as central points of interest. The thirteen chapters fall into four parts, organised both chronologically and thematically. The three chapters that form part I, entitled ‘Wellington to Wörishofen: Locations and Intersections’, focus on Mansfield’s early endeavours to study the German language, literature and music as a schoolgirl, and their formative role in the shaping of her writing in the long run. In chapter 1, whose title quotes from a 1902 letter in which Mansfield confessed her ‘long[ing] for German’, Natalie Perman brings evidence that Mansfield’s ‘early German encounters’, which then turned into a ‘lifelong passion’, were instrumental in shaping Mansfield’s mature modernist style. Perman traces them back to her youthful infatuation in London with her German teacher, Walter Rippmann, who introduced her to Oscar Wilde and Heinrich Heine. Building on Claire Davison’s scholarship, Perman works out the influences of Heine’s post-Romantic taste for irony on Mansfield’s own distinctive wit, alongside the impact of Nietzsche’s aphorisms and hyperbole on her engagement with modernist fragmentation and her later use of epiphany. In chapter 2, John Horrocks adopts a strongly cultural perspective for his comparative study of ‘Katherine Mansfield’s spa experiences’ in both Rotorua, New Zealand, in 1907, and Wörishofen, Germany, in 1909. This chapter compellingly highlights Mansfield’s humorous accounts of cure guests’ ‘nerv[ous]’ conditions in Wörishofen, as well as her critical attitudes towards colonial treatments of Maori populations in Rotorua, especially their exploitation as exotic figures for the entertainment of privileged cure guests. Chapter 3 by Martin Griffiths concludes this section by enlightening the reader on Mansfield’s poorly documented journeys between Wörishofen and London in 1908–1909. This chapter looks more particularly at her musical experiences in London and their impact on her explorations of musicality in her narratives. The chapter also gives a survey of the various literary figures or musicians she associated with in both England and Germany, and who would later feature in her fiction.

5Part II, ‘In a German Pension: A “modernist” response to Germany’, consists of four chapters that seek to rehabilitate Mansfield’s early short fiction based on her stay in Wörishofen. Far from the merely youthful endeavours they were often discarded as, her ‘German Pension’ stories already contained the seeds of the mature modernist style Mansfield would reach in the mid 1910s. Chapters 4 and 5 establish a fruitful dialogue that centres on the question of gender and sexuality in Mansfield’s ‘German Pension’ sketches, and address her ambivalent engagement with feminism. Instead of the traditional focus on Mansfield’s relationships with men, female personae are given pride of place: the ‘fallen woman’ whose homoerotic desires may mirror Mansfield’s own; the ‘modern soul’ (Rozinov); the ‘New Woman’ and the ‘Advanced Lady’ (Wilson). These figures are sometimes treated satirically, as they appear to be caught in a tension between progressive aspirations and internalised patriarchal values (Wilson). In chapter 6, Michael Hollington looks at Mansfield’s use of Sekendenstil, a German literary term designating a ‘second-by-second’ narrative that creates a sense of both immediacy and scientific analysis. A feature of German Naturalism, Sekundenstil appears, this chapter convincingly argues, as one of the devices that enabled Mansfield to conduct her early modernist experimentation on the temporality of storytelling: at once a prefiguration of the stream of consciousness, an echo to German expressionism, and a mark of Mansfield’s satirical take on Germans as ‘machine-like people’ (120). In the closing chapter of this section, Yingjie M. Chen aptly explores the geographic and metaphorical concept of ‘antipodean modernism’ as an alternative, non-Eurocentric reading of modernism, through a comparative study of Mansfield’s German Pension stories and Australian writer Christina Stead’s Salzburg Tales (1934). Their shared antipodean, colonial, migrant and gendered identities allow for an experimental transformation of the ‘Germanic space’ in both their works.

6The four essays that compose part III stress the impact of German literature on Mansfield’s modernist style and its complex debt to Romanticism, with a close-up on Heinrich Heine’s poetry and the Brothers Grimm’s fairy tales, along with German Romantic music, as Mansfield sought transmedial modes of experimentation. Claire Davison’s chapter 8 opens this section with a fascinating study of Heinrich Heine’s post-Romantic poetry as an ‘intertextual echo’ (153) in Mansfield’s formation as an apprentice writer. Mansfield’s later mastery of the short story and expression of condensed emotion, Davison argues, owes quite a lot to her passionate reading of Heine and study of German as a teenager. Reading Heine’s poems closely alongside Mansfield’s poetic prose allows Davison to showcase the resonances in theme, tone and form between the two writers, as well as the impact of Mansfield’s imperfect understanding of the German language on the development of her enduring talent for translingualism and linguistic estrangement. Chapter 9 perceptively underscores the paradoxes at work in Mansfield’s relationship to Germany, which allows her interest in Wagner and German Romanticism to coexist with her scathing satire of German people. Delia da Sousa Correa explores the nuances of such contradictions through a comparative reading of Mansfield’s ambivalently satirical German Pension sketches and of her cousin Elizabeth von Arnim’s sarcastic depiction of gendered relations in Germany at the same period, set against their political, cultural and biographical contexts. Chapters 10 and 11 both examine the importance of Germanic fairy-tales in Mansfield’s storytelling: drawing on a wide range of examples, Tracy Miao investigates how the Brothers Grimm—and Hans Christian Andersen—function as part of a fascinating ‘collaging and morphing’ within Mansfield’s modernist narrative or aesthetic choices, leading her to propose sometimes subversive rewritings of Märchen. Janka Kascakova, in turn, closely examines fairy-tale motifs, themselves grounded in biblical tradition, in Mansfield’s short story ‘A Cup of Tea’ from the German Pension sketches. By focusing on specific fairy-tales by Grimm or Perrault, she convincingly examines Mansfield’s re-versioning of gendered motifs such as the ‘fairy godmother’, stepsisters, the evil stepmother, or beauty and ugliness.

7Finally, Part IV delves into the captivating history of Mansfield’s reception: its two chapters conclude the volume by shedding light not only on Mansfield as a now prominent figure of transnational modernism whose writing spread across borders, but also on the broader context of twentieth-century European history. While Jenny McDonnell addresses the ongoing debates around the reception of Mansfield’s German Pension stories against the backdrop of an increasing Anglo-German military rivalry in the 1910s, thus challenging initial Germanophobic readings, Monika Sobotta turns to Mansfield’s posthumous reception in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, as well as in East Germany from the 1960s onwards, with particular attention to questions of gender and class, as well as to the ideological aspects of translation and censorship.

8Janet M. Wilson and Tracy Miao have successfully bridged a long-standing critical gap by establishing the significance of Katherine Mansfield’s previously overlooked German connections—an intervention that will no doubt be of considerable interest to scholars concerned with the transnational dimensions of modernism. This collection also sheds light on Mansfield’s early career and formation as a writer—an aspect that, partly because of her untimely death in 1923 at age 34, deserves attention, and allows for a better understanding of the shaping of her identity as a modernist. More broadly, the volume addresses the formation of early modernism itself, foregrounding Germany, traditionally viewed as a cultural periphery of modernism, rather than France or England—a welcome contribution to the current conversation about revising the established coordinates of modernism.