Barbara Köhler

Meaning Nobody's Wife, Niemands Frau tells the story of the Odyssey in the perspective of its female characters.

"[2] In 2009, Köhler won the Poetry Prize of the German Industry Culture Group, among several other awards, for Niemands Frau.

She worked as an English and French translator and had been recognized for her versions of Gertrude Stein and Samuel Beckett.

Before becoming a poet, she also worked in an elderly home, and was a lighting assistant for the city theater in Karl Marx Stadt, now known as Chemnitz.

This is shown in work such as Niemands Frau, the premise of the retelling being that "er", meaning "he" in German, is changed to "sie", meaning "they" or "she" in German, switching from the single voice of Odysseus to the various female voices and showing their point of views.

With East Germany's collapse in 1989 and German reunification in 1990, writers looked back on classic literature and philosophers to explain civilization and to understand the changes that were occurring around them.

However, Barbara Köhler's interest in Homer may be accredited to her own understanding as a poet and skepticism of the classics.

"[6] Correction to the above: The rewriting of mythological stories from the woman's perspective is something Köhler would have been familiar with from her past in East Germany - Christa Wolf's 1983/84 novel Kassandra, for example, was a hugely successful book that retold the story of the Trojan war from the woman's perspective.