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Abstract
The study focuses on the apocryphal figure of Judith, the man-killer. Dramatic texts about Judith are of great interest for cultural scholars for three reasons: first, they belong to the genre of dramatic representations of fear and anxiety, which provide an opportunity to experience these amorphous emotions in a playful way. Second, they represent the female Jew, and in so doing exemplify how the voyeuristic appropriation of fear and anxiety is related to the construction of gender and race. Third, these Judith dramas function as containers for fantasies of both desire and fear. In other words, Judith dramas elucidate how gender models contain the repressed Other in a culturally acceptable form in order to domesticate it. German dramas of Judith in the early 19th century represent prototypical examples of different strategies of containment. The study analyzes scenarios of fear and anxiety in three previously unexamined German Judith dramas from a gender-sensitive perspective: Heinrich Keller's Judith (1809), the anonymous Judith und Holofernes (1818), and Friedrich Hebbel's Judith (1841). Part I consists of (1) the theorization of the problem of fear, anxiety, and gender, and (2) the investigation of the psycho-historical context in the early 19th century. Part II consists of (1) the analysis of biographical material such as Keller's unpublished writings, drawings, and sculptures, the anonymous author's preface, and Hebbel's diaries and letters, and (2) the analysis of the figure of Judith. The study identifies three stages of schematization through which fear and anxiety are contained in the dramas: idealization, demonization, and psychologization. The reading reveals a strong correlation between context and text: the more an author's reflections are marked by anxieties, the more pronounced is his distance from the Bible's Virago gender model in his drama. In each of these cases, however, the depiction of a female warrior acts as a spectacle of power: Judith is allowed to flash her sword only if she can eventually be confined to the bourgeois fantasies of femininity.