Marie Luise Kaschnitz is one of the few women writers to have received considerable respect from the predominantly male West German critical establishment: she was the only woman Horst Bienek apparently thought worthy of including in his 1962 series of interviews with German writers; almost all of the admiring journal and newspaper articles on her have been written by men; and the seven-volume collection of her works which began appearing in 1981 is being edited by two men. Since 1984, the tenth anniversary of her death, critics have been discussing and analyzing her work from a feminist perspective.

Marie Luise von Holzing-Berstett was born in Karlsruhe on 31 January 1901, the third daughter and the third of four children of Max Freiherr von Holzing-Berstett, a Prussian general, and his wife, the former Elsa von Seldenek. She spent her early years primarily in Berlin and Potsdam, although there were frequent visits to the family...