Kalkowska. Biogeografia

This book is the first biography and the first monographical map of works and reception of Eleonore Kalkowska, Polish-German modernist poet and playwright, an important, yet forgotten, border-crossing agent of transnational modernism network. In previous studies, Kalkowska functioned mainly as an author of few plays, written between 1929–1932, which connected her only with political Zeittheater of the Weimar Republic. This book argues that it was one of the reasons for Kalkowska’s marginalization in – both Polish and German – literary history. Another factor of this marginalization was Kalkowska’s ambiguous, multipositional national affiliation, which interfered with her works and their reception differently in different locations, and ultimately led to her erasure from ‘nationalized’ literary canons. Therefore, the central axis of this thesis is, on the one hand, to present Kalkowska’s case beyond the category of Zeittheater. And on the other, is to describe the mechanism of interferences between national categories, which was imposed on Kalkowska (who was describing herself as an “embodiment piece of Pan-Europa’s body”), and the reception of her works (eventually: a marginalization from nationalized literary histories). The main methodological inspirations of this book are taken from literary studies, which were developed as a part of ‘spatial turn.’ The author uses concepts from ‘geopoetics’, studies of transnational modernism and exile studies, last but not least – locational feminism. An essential concept for this thesis is also the idea of the ‘World Republic of Letters’ by Pascale Casanova, who described e.g., the mechanisms governing the transnational literary field and the requirements posed to writers from languages of ‘lower’ positions in the hierarchy of ‘world’ literary prestige. The book is divided into three parts, framed by the chronological and biographical boundaries. The first (Migrations) tackles the years between 1883–1918 and the stage of Kalkowska’s nomadic explorations (both artistical and geographical). The second shows Kalkowska’s years in modernist, Weimar Berlin (1918–1933) – it analyses her artistic networks and constellations, describes her way onto the stage and the high point of her literary career, which was abruptly interrupted by Hitler’s rise to power. The third part (Exodus) tackles the years of exile, which Kalkowska spent in Paris and London, among thousands of other exiles, who were eventually named as a formation of ‘exile modernism’.