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The idea of German decadence cannot be contained by a single term. Its temporal, linguistic, and geographical reach requires further definition and suggests a plurality of decadent forms. This re-definition also includes a revisionary view of the perception of German decadence as understood by predominantly male writers and artists. This article addresses these issues by focusing on the work of two female writers, Franziska zu Reventlow (1871–1918) and Ruth Landshoff-Yorck (1904–1966), whose cultural activities span the two most significant eras of German decadence, the Wilhelmine Empire (1890–1918) and the Weimar Republic (1918–1933). Both participated in the bohemian lifestyles of their respective eras, but they also produced a body of writing in a range of literary genres that brought fresh gender perspectives to a culture of decadence otherwise dominated by male authors. Together, the two women help to clarify the paradoxically vitalist nature of German decadence.

Modernist drama between 1914 and 1945 underwent a process of rejuvenation through the remarkable revival of the medieval mystery play in women's writing on war. The adaptation of the allegorical mode of medieval drama allowed female authors to comment on political conflict, national identity, and the shifting of gender roles from a combined perspective of the inherently personal and the global. This article investigates how Vernon Lee, Mina Loy, and Else Lasker-Schüler, three authors working across the turn of the century and across various nations, remodeled the form into personal manifestos of cosmopolitan authorship. Lee's Satan the Waster (1914/20), Loy's The Sacred Prostitute (1914), and Lasker-Schüler's IchundIch (I and I, 1940/41) expose the dual status of the poet as performer and critic of their own time. The allegorical capacity of these plays allows them to ironize and criticize the idea of rigid boundaries, be these historical, national, or gendered. As these authors demonstrate, the destabilizing of boundaries common to decadent, performative writing was developed and adapted in modernist avant-garde writing.