Dr Georgina Paul

Dr Georgina Paul,

St. Hilda’s College

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Women writers in German in the post-1945 period

Week 4

The Women’s Movement of the 1970s:

Themes, concerns, the role of literature, and the rise of feminist theory

1.  Germany in the late 1960s: Große Koalition 1966-69: CDU/CSU formed a coalition government with the SPD; 468 of 518 members of the Bundestag were in the government; Bundeskanzler Kurt Georg Kiesinger (CDU) was a former Nazi; Student organisations, trade unions, peace activists came together to form the so-called Außerparlamentarische Opposition (APO).

2.  1968: unrest in Paris, Berlin, San Francisco, Chicago, Mexico City and Prague; young people in organised left-wing groups oppose the US intervention in Vietnam and campaign against capitalism, imperialism, consumerism. Cf. Mark Kurlansky, 1968: The Year That Rocked the World, London: Jonathan Cape, 2004

3.  ‘The achievements of organized modernity were to transform the disembedding and uncertainties of the late nineteenth century into a new coherence of practices and orientations. Nation, class and state were the main conceptual ingredients to this achievement, which provided the substance for the building of collective identities and the setting of boundaries. […] Organized modernity was characterized by the integration of all individuals inside certain boundaries into comprehensively organized practices. […] This configuration achieved a certain coherence, or closure, at about 1960, in terms of the various institutions, their specific embodiments of collective agency, their interlinkages, and their respective reaches. It appeared as a naturally “interlocking order”.’ (Peter Wagner, A sociology of modernity. Liberty and discipline, London and New York: Routledge, 1994, pp.118-119; on the significance of ‘1968’, see p.141)

4.  The birth of West German feminism: Aktionsrat zur Befreiung der Frau founded January 1968 in West Berlin by five women activists in the Sozialisticher Deutscher Studentenbund, the leftist student organisation at the centre of the West Berlin student movement.
Conference early 1968 at which the Aktionsrat issued a statement demanding the ‘abolition of the bourgeois separation of private and social life’.
September 1968 in Frankfurt, a speech by Helke Sander, representative of the Aktionsrat at 23rd conference of SDS, ended with another woman delegate spattering the SDS officials on the platform with tomatoes (‘Frankfurter Tomatenwurf’).
Frankfurter Weiberrat founded November 1968 – issued a manifesto statement with the slogan: ‘Befreit die sozialistischen Eminenzen von ihren bürgerlichen Schwänzen’ (the translator of Ute Frevert, Women in German History, wittily translates as ‘Free the socialist lords from their bourgeois pork swords’ – Frevert, p.288)

5.  ‘All the rights and liberties we gained in universities, the countless political actions and especially the much heralded new era of sexual freedom, simply piled a larger load onto our shoulders: now men had even less time or inclination to stay at home and help us with the children and the housework. We typed their speeches, we tried to follow what they said at meetings, we made ourselves look nice as we had always done, we swallowed the Pill every day or put up with abortions. Our exploitation in the home, the satisfaction of their sexual desires – all this was supposed to be just our private problem. We should stop doing things the way we have been. They did the real political work, and they pitied us or made fun of us because we “weren’t that far advanced yet”. Well, now we no longer want to be “as far advanced” as they are. We don’t want to imitate them, we have different objectives.’ (Dokumentation der 1. Berliner Frauenkonferenz der traditionellen Frauenverbände und der autonomen Frauengruppen 16.-18.9.1977, Berlin 1978, cited from Ute Frevert, Women in German History. From Bourgeois Emancipation to Sexual Liberation, trans. Stuart McKinnon-Evans et al., Oxford, New York: Berg, 1989)

6.  Early feminist cultural activity
Political aims supported by cultural activity and initiatives. The radical women’s magazines Courage 1976-1984 (circulation of 60,000 in 1978); Emma, first publ. Jan 1977, edited by Alice Schwarzer (circulation of 120,000 by end 70s).

Feminist publishing houses: 1975 Frauenoffensive in Munich, Orlanda in Berlin 1980s –these among the most prominent (infl. of their programmes on the mainstream publishing houses such as Fischer and Suhrkamp). The network of Frauenbuchläden.

First feminist literature feeds into these networks. Famous early works:

·  Erika Runge, Frauen. Versuche zur Emanzipation, Frankfurt am Main; Suhrkamp, 1970 – protocols of interviews with women; Marxist orientation.

·  Britta Noeske, Gabriele Röhrer and the Westberliner Werkstatt im Werkkreis Literatur der Arbeitswelt (eds), Liebe Kollegin. Texte zur Emanzipation der Frau in der Bundesrepublik, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1973

·  Verena Stefan, Häutungen. Autobiographische Aufzeichnungen Gedichte Träume Analysen, München: Frauenoffensive, 1975 (see last page of handout)

The rise of feminist theory

7.  ‘For the “woman,” outside masculine appropriation, there can be no truth. As feminine, she keeps an ambiguous distance, leaves open a seductive plurality of meanings, and so can play irreverently with the text, taking pleasure in overturning whatever order misogynist, truth-asserting, phallic society tries to establish.’ Andrea Nye, ‘The Hidden Host: Irigaray and Diotima at Plato’s Symposium’, in Nancy Fraser and Sandra Lee Bartky (eds), Revaluing French Feminism. Critical Essays on Difference, Agency, and Culture, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992, p.82 (here summarising Derrida in Eperons: Les styles de Nietzsche (Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles) (1978))

8.  ‘If there is a self proper to woman, paradoxically it is her capacity to depropriate herself without self-interest: endless body, without “end,” without principal “parts”; if she is a whole, it is a whole made up of parts that are wholes, not simple, partial objects but varied entirety, moving and boundless change, a cosmos where eros never stops traveling, vast astral space. She doesn’t revolve around a sun that is more star than the stars.
That doesn’t mean that she is undifferentiated magma; it means that she doesn’t create a monarchy of her body or her desire. Let masculine sexuality gravitate around the penis, engendering this centralized body (political anatomy) under the party dictatorship. Woman does not perform on herself this regionalization that profits the couple head-sex, that only inscribes itself within frontiers. Her libido is cosmic, just as her unconscious is worldwide: her writing also can go on and on, without ever inscribing or distinguishing contours […].’ (Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing, intro. Sandra M. Gilbert, Manchester: Manchester University Press (Theory and History of Literature, Volume 24), 1986, pp.87-88)

9.  Irigaray’s approach to the assault on the male-generated philosophical tradition is, on the one hand, ‘to interrogate the conditions under which systematicity itself is possible: what the coherence of the discursive utterance conceals of the conditions under which it is produced’, which she conceives above all in terms of a retrieval of the material conditions and contiguity of a discourse which lays claim to the status of universal truth; and, on the other, a linguistically-oriented psychoanalytical investigation of the ‘procedures of repression’ operating within each philosophy, ‘the structuration of language that shores up its representations, separating the true from the false, the meaningful from the meaningless, and so forth’. (Luce Irigaray, ‘The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminine’, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1985, pp.74-75. ‘The Power of Discourse’ is an interview first published in the journal Dialectiques in 1975, following the publication of her first major work, the Speculum de l’autre femme (Speculum of the Other Woman), in 1974)

10.  This ‘style,’ or ‘writing,’ of women tends to put the torch to fetish words, proper terms, well-constructed forms. This ‘style’ does not privilege sight; instead, it takes each figure back to its source, which is among other things tactile. It comes back in touch with itself in that origin without ever constituting in it, constituting itself in it, as some sort of unity. Simultaneity is its ‘proper’ aspect – a proper(ty) that is never fixed in the possible identity-to-self of some form or other. It is always fluid, without neglecting the characteristics of fluids that are difficult to idealize: those rubbings between two infinitely near neighbors that create a dynamics. Its ‘style’ resists and explodes every firmly established form, figure, idea or concept. Which does not mean that it lacks style, as we might be led to believe by a discursivity that cannot conceive of it. But its ‘style’ cannot be upheld as a thesis, cannot be the object of a position. (Ibid., p.79)

Bibliography

History

Rob Burns (ed.), German Cultural Studies: An Introduction, Oxford: OUP, 1995: chapter section on ‘The Cultural Projections of Feminism’, pp.292-300

Rob Burns and Wilfried van der Will, Protest and Democracy in West Germany: Extra-Parliamentary Opposition and the Democratic Agenda, London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988: chapter on the Women’s Movement

Ute Frevert, Women in German History. From Bourgeois Emancipation to Sexual Liberation, trans. Stuart McKinnon-Evans et al., Oxford, New York: Berg, 1989: chapter on ‘The Politicisation of Private Life: From The Women’s Committees to the New Women’s Movement’

Early feminism

Erika Runge, Frauen. Versuche zur Emanzipation, Frankfurt am Main; Suhrkamp, 1970

Britta Noeske, Gabriele Röhrer and the Westberliner Werkstatt im Werkkreis Literatur der Arbeitswelt (eds), Liebe Kollegin. Texte zur Emanzipation der Frau in der Bundesrepublik, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1973

Verena Stefan, Häutungen. Autobiographische Aufzeichnungen Gedichte Träume Analysen, München: Frauenoffensive, 1975

General on women’s writing of the period

Hiltrud Gnüg, Renate Möhrmann (eds.), Frauen - Literatur - Geschichte. Schreibende Frauen vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart, Stuttgart: Suhrkamp, 1989 (J. B. Metzler, 1985) - a collection of essays on women's writing through the ages, cf. esp. the essays by Lennox, Brügmann and Wiggershaus under the heading 'Feministische Aufbrüche'

Margret Brügmann, Amazonen der Literatur. Studien zur deutschsprachigen Frauenliteratur der 70er Jahre, Amsterdam, 1986

Manfred Jurgensen (ed.), Frauenliteratur. Autorinnen, Perspektiven, Konzepte, München: DTV, 1985 (Verlag Peter Lang, 1983)

Manfred Jurgensen, Deutsche Frauenautoren der Gegenwart, Bern: Francke Verlag, 1983

Ricarda Schmidt, Westdeutsche Frauenliteratur in den 70er Jahren, Frankfurt/Main: R. G. Fischer Verlag, 1982 - a very useful dissertation on the developments in 'Frauen-literatur' under the influence of the women's movement, cf. esp.Chapter V on theoretical influences (de Beauvoir, Woolf, Bovenschen, Irigaray)

Sigrid Weigel, Die Stimme der Medusa. Schreibweisen in der Gegenwartsliteratur von Frauen, Reinbek bei Hamburg: rowohlt, 1989 - a comprehensive account of the issues raised by the women's movement and analysis of a range of themes and approaches in the literature of the 1970s and 1980s

Sigrid Weigel, '"Woman Begins Relating to Herself." Contemporary German Women's Literature' in New German Critique, No.31, 1984, pp.53-94 and 'Overcoming Absence. Contemporary German Women's Literature (Part Two)' in New German Critique, No.32, 1984, pp.3-22 - two articles representing Weigel's 'Vorarbeit' to the Stimme volume

Theoretical works

Silvia Bovenschen, 'Über die Frage: Gibt es eine weibliche Ästhetik?' in Gabriele Dietze (ed.), Die Überwindung der Sprachlosigkeit. Texte aus der neuen Frauenbewegung, Darmstadt and Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1979, pp.82-115 (first publ. in the journal Ästhetik und Kommunikation 25 (1976)) - one of the standard German texts from the 1970s on feminist aesthetics; see Ricarda Schmidt for a discussion of it

Silvia Bovenschen in Die imaginierte Weiblichkeit. Exemplarische Untersuchungen zu kulturgeschichtlichen und literarischen Präsentationsformen des Weiblichen, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979

Sigrid Weigel, 'Der schielende Blick. Thesen zur Geschichte weiblicher Schreibpraxis' in Argument-Sonderband 96 (1983), Die verborgene Frau. Sechs Beiträge zu einer feministischen Literaturwissenschaft, pp.83-137 - an historical review of the position of women writers in the German literary tradition, providing a well-reasoned argument on a number of issues raised by the women's movement, particularly on the relationship of women and culture; an important essay from one of Germany's leading feminist academics

alternative 108/109 (1976), Das Lächeln der Medusa - a special double edition of the literary journal following the 'Treffen schreibender Frauen' in München in May 1976; the first appearance in German translation of essays by the French feminists who would become so influential in the development of feminist theories internationally: Irigaray, Cixous, Kristeva

Elaine Marks, Isabelle de Courtivron (eds.), New French Feminisms. An Anthology, Brighton: Harvester Press, 1981 - a much more comprehensive volume than the alternative one, but playing a similar role in that it introduced French theoretical writings to an English-speaking readership; cf. esp. Irigaray and Cixous contributions

Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory, London, New York: Routledge, 1988 (Methuen, 1985) - the standard English language introduction to feminist theories, Anglo-American as well as French; somewhat tendentiously argued, however

Elizabeth Grosz, Sexual Subversions. Three French Feminists, Sydney: Allen and Unwin Australia, 1989 - a more difficult but more detailed introduction than Moi's to Kristeva, Irigaray and the philosopher Le Doeuff; helpful in that it gives an account of the Marxist, psycho-analytical and linguistic theories in recent French thought which provide the intellectual starting point for Kristeva, Irigaray (and Cixous)

Chris Weedon, Feminist Practice and Poststructural Theory, Oxford: Blackwell, 1987 - intended as an introduction for the non-specialist, and so clearer and simpler than some both about the goals of feminism and how feminism uses poststructural theory; good concise accounts of psychoanalytic theory, theory of language etc.