 Frauen der Romantik examines the lives of five German women, tracking the untold story of the women’s perspective of a literary movement that claimed to be all about love but cast women as ultimately uncreative but fortunate beneficiaries of male fantasy. A perceptive critique of Romanticism’s necrophiliac tendencies, whose renewal Susman witnessed under the banner of the rise of reactionary forces in Weimar Germany, the study also examined the undercurrents of religious difference under whose sign the prominent Jewish Romantics Dorothea von Schlegel (Moses Mendelssohn’s oldest daughter) and Rahel Varnhagen sought to find their own way, albeit in an often palpably restricted fashion. Similarly, Deutung einer grossen Liebe seeks to present a great albeit often conflicted dialogue between Goethe and the woman who became his guiding star, a relationship that was profoundly affected by the way the feminine gender role determined the lives of the even most creative and independent minds.