"Berlin, du deutsche deutsche Frau": Berlin as a woman in twentieth-century German poetry

This article examines the feminization of Berlin in twentieth-century German poetry, exploring how gendered personifications of the city negotiate historical change and emotional attachment. While Berlin's literary representations have received extensive critical attention, their gendered dimensions remain under-explored. Through close readings of Gertrud Kolmar's Wappen von Berlin (1927/28), Hildegard Knef's 'Berlin, dein Gesicht hat Sommersprossen' (1966), and Wolf Biermann's Berlin du deutsche deutsche Frau (1962) and Mein Kiez (1998), the analysis demonstrates that feminization serves as a recurring but historically adaptable strategy through which writers articulate the city's conflicting identities as maternal, domestic, eroticized, or violated. Spanning the Weimar period, postwar reconstruction, and Cold War division, these texts reveal how Berlin's poetic imagination binds urban history to gendered embodiment and translates political upheaval and social transformation into affective experience.