Women and War in the German Cultural Imagination

Conquering Women: Women and War in the German Cultural Imagination Edited by Hillary Collier Sy-Quia and Susanne Baackmann Description: This volume, focused on how women participate in, suffer from, and are subtly implicated in warfare raises the still larger questions of how and when women enter history, memory, and representation. The individual essays, dealing with 19th and mostly 20th century German literature, social history, art history, and cinema embody all the complexities and ambiguities of the title “Conquering Women.” Women as the mothers of current and future generations of soldiers; women as combatants and as rape victims; women organizing against war; and violence against women as both a weapon of war and as the justification for violent revenge are all represented in this collection of original essays by rising new scholars of feminist theory and German cultural studies. RESEARCH SERIES / NUMBER 104 Conquering Women: Women and War in the German Cultural Imagination X Hilary Collier Sy-Quia and Susanne Baackmann, Editors UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Conquering women : women and war in the German cultural imagination / Hilary Collier Sy-Quia and Susanne Baackmann, editors. p. cm — (Research series ; no. 104) Papers from the 5th Annual Interdisciplinary German Studies Con- ference held at the University of California, Berkeley, March 1997. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-87725-004-9 1. German literature—History and criticism—Congresses. 2. Women in literature—Congresses. 3. War in literature—Congresses. 4. Violence in literature—Congresses. 5. Art, Modern—20th century—Germany— Congresses. 6. Women in art—Congresses. 7. Women—Germany— Social conditions—Congresses. I. Sy-Quia, Hilary Collier. II. Baack- mann, Susanne, 1958– . III. Research series (University of California, Berkeley. International and Area Studies) ; no. 104. PT151.W7 C66 2000 830.9’352042—dc21 99-089769 ©2000 by The Regents of the University of California Printed in the United States of America CONTENTS Foreword Atina Grossmann ix Acknowledgments xvv Introduction Hilary Collier Sy-Quia 1 The Body as Battleground: Images of the German Abortion Debate Andrea Wuerth and Janice Monger 12 Constructing Borders: Image and Identity in Die Frau von Heute, 1945–49 Jennifer V. Evans 40 Sores That Still Bleed: Germany, the Great War, and Violence against Women in the Modernist Literary Imagination Ellen Rees 62 The Discourse of Trauma—The Trauma of Discourse: Conquering Memory in Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina Kristin Kopp 75 The Battle with Memory: Grete Weil’s My Sister Antigone Susanne Baackmann 91 vii viii Contents “Truth Lies with the Victor”: Scars on the Skin and Silenced Memories—Christa Wolf’s Medea Hilary Collier Sy-Quia 111 The Amazon Body: Wartime Sexuality and Female Subjectivity in Kleist’s Penthesilea Renée M. Schell 126 Imperfect Myths: Gender and the Construction of Nation in Heinrich von Kleist’s Die Herrmannsschlacht Jennifer M. Kapczynski 143 Bettina and Louise: Gender Constructions in Bettina Brentano-von Arnim’s Clemens Brentanos Frühlingskranz Elisabeth Krimmer 156 Divergent Interpretations of Women’s Agency and Luther’s Political Agenda David O. Neville 177 Notes on Contributors 199 FOREWORD Atina Grossmann Cooper Union The March 1997 conference on “Conquering Women” which generated this volume was organized and conceptualized by graduate students in German studies. Neither the date nor the interdisciplinary but national perspective were accidental. We gathered in Berkeley for our sessions on women, war, and violence in what seemed to be the direct shadow of the war in former Yugoslavia and the reports of mass rape committed in that conflict. And despite the inclusion in the original panels of papers addressing the contemporary United States and Eastern Europe, it was the German con- text—and the limited case of World War II and the Holocaust which it necessarily raises—that drove our discussions about women, war, and violence and the representations and memories they produce. My own keynote address on the meanings of motherhood for Ger- mans and Jews in the aftermath of total war and genocide from 1945 to 1949 fit somewhat uneasily among the predominantly cultural and literary studies presented but certainly reflected and engaged the general questions about identity and body, nation and memory, atrocity and trauma, which framed all of our conversation weekend. I know that my own work benefited enormously from our ex- changes, among disciplines and among scholarly generations (from honored emerita to beginning graduate student), and I am delighted that this documentation is now available to a larger audience.1 Indeed, the conference—mischievously held in a campus build- ing, the venerable Men’s Faculty Club, which itself carried a lot of gendered history—marked a certain point in the development of the still young field of feminist German studies.2 Its cultural studies focus encompassed social history, art history, cinema studies, and literary criticism and moved back and forth between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; participants analyzed monuments and me- morials, popular journals and films, as carefully as they did novels ix x Atina Grossman and plays. Above all, the conference took seriously the notion of women’s agency and the disturbing complexity embodied by the term “conquering women.” As all the articles in this collection sug- gest, when it comes to war and violence, women can be both victims and perpetrators, albeit in particular gendered ways. In either case, they are agents in history and in their own lives, even if, to once again invoke Karl Marx’s famous phrase from The Eighteenth Bru- maire, not under conditions of their own choosing. Moreover, they are the producers and consumers, as well as the objects, of the myr- iad cultural products that portray war and violence. Always, how- ever, the authors remind us, women’s experience and representation are structured by their particular vulnerability to sexual violence—rape is a frequent topic in this book—and their material and symbolic importance to nations as reproducers, of people and the body politic.3 As in many collections of new work and work in progress drawn from exciting conferences, the articles in this volume, both individually and as a whole, raise more questions than they can possibly answer. The questions raised are both daunting and at the center of current feminist historical and cultural scholarship. As readers, we are left with the nagging sense that just as the title “Con- quering Women” is deliberately double-edged, so too are the notions presented here of the female body as political site. We claim that the personal is political, that women’s bodies have political and ideo- logical power, at our peril. States that make war, regimes that commit genocide or ethnic cleansing, do so, at least in part, in the name of those political bodies. Women have been granted entry to citizen- ship, or even claimed it for themselves, at least in part, on the basis of their ability to reproduce the next generation of soldiers. The identification of women as victims of war and violence makes visible what has too often been silenced; it also offers new and powerful means to encourage further violence and revenge. In March 1997, we were acutely aware of these contradictions: we debated uncomfortable issues, contemporary as well as historical and literary. Does the gratifying fact that the media are finally ready to take seriously reports of rape as war crimes also open the way to misuse and manipulation of such reports in the name of further warfare and ethnic violence? What happens when the horror of war comes to be represented or defined by rape, when in fact rape is, of Foreword xi course, only one of the horrors that accompany war? Do individual women and their fates disappear when the fact of rape becomes an instrument of political mobilization or propaganda? Given women’s painful struggle to name and make visible sexual violence, can there even be such a thing as overreporting? How does one best alert public opinion to horrors perpetrated on women, men, and children in official and unofficial wars and establish sexual violence in the canon of war crimes and crimes against humanity?4 How do we represent and analyze the female body as a privileged site of political contestation, and indeed of testimony about the traumatic effects of violence and war, without reinscribing cultural conventions about women’s entrapment by and in their bodies? In one form or another, these articles all grapple with the slippage between the individual body and the national body, in personal and public histories and in the cultural imagination.5 Andrea Wuerth and Janice Monger consider how individual women’s bodies, especially pregnant bodies, appear as “battle- grounds” in contemporary West and East German feminist art and how that depiction, as well as the political circumstances creating the “battleground,” have changed over time. Weimar representations of women in need (Frauen in Not) designed to draw sym- pathy and mobilize political action have transmogrified, in their telling, into more “in your face” artworks intended to subvert and interrogate the inevitable link between female identity and repro- duction. Jennifer Evans’s analysis of a post–World War II women’s magazine in occupied Germany reminds us how much careful read- ings of journalism, including advertisements, cartoons, and photo- graphs, can tell us about the containment of women’s stories about wars in the larger narrative of German guilt and German victimiza- tion. Women were simultaneously utterly central and marginal to Soviet occupation and communist policy as it endeavored to both repress and negotiate the legacy of Red Army rapes of German women. Die Frau von Heute is, as Evans suggests, as revealing in its silences and circumlocutions as it is in the shifting content of what was actually printed.

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