SOURCE: Schlant, Ernestine. Review of Die Pantherfrau: Fünf unfrisierte Erzählungen aus dem Kassetten-Recorder, by Sarah Kirsch. World Literature Today 51, no. 1 (winter 1977): 86.

In the following review, Schlant asserts that Kirsch focuses on the personal struggles of women in Die Pantherfrau, as opposed to the ideological conflicts facing East Germany as a whole.

During the past decade Sarah Kirsch (b. 1935) has established herself as a promising lyrical poet on the East German literary scene. In her poetry and also in her first collection of short narrative pieces, Die ungeheuren bergehohen Wellen auf See (1973), a subjective and impressionistic mood prevails which has been traced to Bobrowski's formative influence.

Die Pantherfrau is Kirsch's second collection of prose writings, published in West Germany in 1975, two years after the East German edition. As the subtitle indicates, the slender volume consists of “five narrations from a tape recorder.” They portray the lives of...