Female Experiences of Rape and Hunger in Postwar German Literature, 1945-1960
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Carolina Digital Repository FEMALE EXPERIENCES OF RAPE AND HUNGER IN POSTWAR GERMAN LITERATURE, 1945-1960 Anja Wieden A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures. Chapel Hill 2011 Approved by: Dr. Richard Langston (Advisor) Dr. Jane Burns Dr. Eric Downing Dr. Jonathan Hess Dr. Peter McIsaac ©2011 Anja Wieden ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT ANJA WIEDEN: Female Experiences of Rape and Hunger in Postwar German Literature, 1945-1960 (Under the direction of Dr. Richard Langston) Female Experiences of Rape and Hunger in Postwar German Literature, 1945- 1960, traces the fundamental rubble experiences of rape and hunger as they course over time and through the genres of autobiography and fiction. This dissertation illuminates how literary forms unite, dissociate or displace female experiences in such a way that either female power is enacted or masculinist political reconstruction is facilitated. In the immediate postwar years, autobiographies became a popular genre for women to express their experiences of rape and hunger during and directly after the war. Anonyma’s Eine Frau in Berlin, written from April to June 1945, is of central interest to my analysis. The writer’s imagination of a postwar world is filtered through her starving and sexually abused body, resulting in what Anonyma describes as “Schreiben aus dem Bauch heraus.” Using humor to narrate her rape experience, the writer displays agency and control of her situation. Conversely, my dissertation also explores the recoding, appropriation and silencing of female experiences, prominently played out in fictional texts written and published alongside women’s autobiographies. These divergent representations resulted, in part, from what I first identify as the literary subordination of bodily experience to the primacy of political ideology around 1945. In the case of Anna Seghers’ “Die Saboteure” (1947), I illuminate the way anti-fascist prose preserves a link between female agency iii and the experience of hunger, but at the expense of silencing rape as an incisive wartime experience altogether. In the case of Gert Ledig’s Die Vergeltung (1956), I examine, how literary existentialism not only relativized women’s experiences of rape but also excluded the times and spaces of hunger. The dissertation then uncovers how narratives such as Das Brot der frühen Jahre (1955) and Der Tod in Rom (1954) appropriate the coupling of hunger and rape common among female autobiographies, but make them part of a man’s quest to come to terms with the past. Wartime experiences of women are almost entirely excluded in this literature. To further demonstrate this exclusion, I turn to Wolfgang Koeppen and Heinrich Böll, two writers of West Germany’s literary salon, Group 47, and examine how texts by these representatives of the Federal Republic of Germany’s leading literary institution claim corporeal economies of food and sex as exclusively (post-) fascist male experiences, transforming the conditions for female agency into post-fascist signs of the fascist man. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation developed out of a 2006 research paper on the representation of food and meals in Günter Grass’ Die Blechtrommel. Possessing a general interest in food in postwar German literature, I expanded my area of research to include rape, hunger and the role of women in select texts written after Germany’s occupation. I would not have been able to conduct this research without my doctoral advisor, Dr. Richard Langston. Due to his valuable suggestions and advice, I framed the project around a fifteen year time period, which not only let me look at evolutions in the literary processing of rape and hunger over time, but also the historical changes in postwar German literature, including the vanishing of female experiences in a multitude of texts—an effacement that has rarely been acknowledged. In addition to the guidance of Dr. Langston, I have benefitted from the comments of extraordinary readers: I thank my committee members, Dr. Jane Burns, Dr. Eric Downing, Dr. Jonathan Hess, and Dr. Peter McIsaac, for sharpening the direction of my dissertation and encouraging me to rethink its terminology. Parts of the dissertation have been presented at graduate student conferences at Rutgers University, the University of Kentucky, and at the Carolina-Duke Faculty-Graduate Student Works in Progress Series. I would like to thank the audiences at the aforementioned conferences, as well as faculty and graduate students alike, who aided me in my research. A special thanks goes to two of my colleagues at SUNY New Paltz: Dr. Mary Christensen, Department Chair of Foreign Languages, and Dr. Jeff Miller, Director of the Honors Program. Both assisted v me greatly in developing syllabi for two upper level literature and culture classes entitled “Cigarettes and Nylons – Postwar Realities in Occupied Germany,” based on my dissertation. Gaining teaching experience in my own field of research and benefitting from the inspiring comments and feedback of students has convinced me that the perspectives of both a scholar and a teacher of literature are equally important for a successful project. vi Table of Contents Introduction ..........................................................................................................................1 I. Female Experiences of Rape and Hunger in Postwar German Literature after 1945 .....................................................................................................1 II.The Investment with the Body – A Reassessment of Adelson’s Thesis..6 III. The Problematic Issue of Narrating Rape in a Postwar German Context and Beyond ..................................................................................................8 IV. Hunger/ Food and Female Characters .................................................16 V. Structure of the Dissertation .................................................................20 Part I: Eine Frau in Berlin .................................................................................................22 Chapter 1: The Deconstruction of Female Victimization ......................................23 I. Other Autobiographies and Eine Frau in Berlin ....................................23 II. Existing Scholarship and My Reading ..................................................31 III. Hunger and Food ..................................................................................41 IV. Anonyma’s Narration of Rape Experiences ........................................53 V. Narrating Rape in a Humorous Way .....................................................66 VI. Female Bonding and the Obliteration of Men .....................................69 VII. Humor as a Reaction to Imagined Abuse ...........................................73 VIII. Collective Experience of Rape and Women’s “Funny” Stories .......77 IX. Conclusion ...........................................................................................87 Part II: Transitions .............................................................................................................89 vii Chapter 2: Between Politics and a Higher Violence: the Cleaving of Anna Seghers’ “Die Saboteure” and Gert Ledig’s Die Vergeltung ................................90 I. Ideology versus Normalization ...............................................................90 II. Hunger and Resistance: the Politics of Food in Seghers’ “Die Saboteure” ................................................................................................103 III. Rape…Just a Larger Part of Violence ...............................................113 IV. Conclusion .........................................................................................123 Part III: The Rise of the Diskurswache ............................................................................125 Chapter 3: The Rise of the Diskurwache ................................................126 I. Heinrich Böll and Wolfgang Koeppen as Group 47 Writers ...............126 II. In the Name of Love – Rape Economies in Heinrich Böll’s Das Brot der frühen Jahre ......................................................................132 III. “Wenn Sie wollen…werde ich Sie ernähren” ...................................138 IV. Food, Sex and Violence: Killing the Leib ........................................148 Chapter 4: Erasing Women in Wolfgang Koeppen’s Der Tod in Rom ....155 I. The Abolition of Sensuous Pleasures ...................................................155 II. Food and Hunger .................................................................................161 III. The Fascist Quest: Fressen and Huren ...............................................170 IV. Music, Art and Sexual Desire ............................................................183 Final Conclusion ......................................................................................199 Bibliography ....................................................................................................................203 viii Introduction I. Female Experiences of Rape and Hunger in Postwar German Literature after 1945 The approach of the sixtieth anniversary marking the end of World War II is accompanied by vastly changing perceptions