The thesis offers a sapphic Gothic reading of the chosen corpus of texts, broadening Paulina Palmer’s notion of lesbian Gothic and Terry Castle’s perception of the lesbian as an apparitional figure. It then outlines the sapphic uncanny aesthetic established in Schwarzenbach’s novella and the third volume of Der Skorpion, engaging primarily with Freud’s theory of the Uncanny. My analysis considers the reimagining of vampiric figures in the first volume of Weirauch’s trilogy and Döblin’s fictionalised account of the scandalous 1923 Ella Klein and Margarete Nebbe case. It also illustrates how the appropriation and modification of Gothic tropes, such as vampirism, haunting and doubling, reflect the ambivalence and hostility toward homosexuality internalised by the sapphic subject during the interwar period. This thesis examines the use of established Gothic motifs in Alfred Döblin’s Die beiden Freundinnen und ihr Giftmord (1924), Anna Elisabet Weirauch’s Der Skorpion (1919-31) and Annemarie Schwarzenbach’s Eine Frau zu sehen (2008). Existing scholarship on interwar German lesbian narratives has largely overlooked the role of Gothicism in their portrayal of sapphic sexuality.
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