This volume of new essays represents a collective, academic, and activist effort to interpret German literature and culture in the context of the international #Me Too movement, illustrating and interrogating the ways that ‘rape cultures’ persist.
Responding to the worldwide impact of the #Me Too movement, this volume investigates not only the ubiquity of sexual abuse and sexual violence but also the transhistorical and transnational failure to hold perpetrators accountable. From a range of disciplines, the collected essays engage current cultural and political discourses about systemic sexism, feminist theory and practice, and gender-based discrimination from an academic and activist perspective. The focus on national cultures of German-speaking Europe from the mid-eighteenth century to the present captures the persistence of normalized and institutionalized sexism, reframed through the lens of a contemporary political and social movement.
German #Me Too argues that sexual violence is not a universal human constant. Rather, it is nurtured and sustained by the social, political, cultural, legal, and economic fabric of specific societies. The authors sustain and vary their exploration of #Me Too-related issues through considerations of rape, prostitution, sexual murder, the politics of consent, and victim-blaming as enacted in literary works by canonical and marginalized authors, the visual arts, the graphic novel, film, television, and theater. The analysis of rape myths – of discourses and practices in German history and culture that subtend and indemnify sexual violence – is a central subject of this edited volume. Throughout,
German #Me Too challenges narratives of sex-based discrimination while emphasizing the strategies of resistance and the importance of telling one’s own story.
Table of Content
Introduction – Elisabeth Krimmer and Patricia Anne Simpson
Part I. Histories
1: Eighteenth-Century #Me Too: Rape Culture and Victim Blaming in Heinrich Leopold Wagner’s
Die Kindermörderin (1776) – Lisa Wille
2: #Me Too: Prostitution and the Syntax of Sexuality around 1800 – Patricia Anne Simpson
Part II.
Dialogues across Time
3: ‘Immaculate Conception, ‘ the ‘Romance of Rape, ‘ and #Me Too: Kleistian Echoes in Kerstin Hensel and Julia Franck – Melissa Ann Sheedy
4: Female Sacrifice, Sexual Assault, and Dehumanization: Bourgeois Tragedy, Horror, and the Making of
Jud Süß – Deborah Janson
5: ‘Na, wenn du mich erst fragst?’: Reconsidering Affirmative Consent with Schnitzler, Schnitt, Habermas, and Rancière – Sonja Boos
Part III.
Sexual Violence, Warfare, and Genocide
6: War of the Vulva: The Women of Otto Dix’s Lustmord Series – Jessica Davis
7: Death to the Patriarchal Theater! Charlotte Salomon’s Graphic Testimony – Maureen Burdock
8: #Me Too and Wartime Rape: Looking Back and Moving Forward – Katherine Stone
Part IV.
The Institutions of #Me Too
9: Boarding-School Novels around 1900: The Relation of Male Fear of Women to Male-Male Seduction and Sexual Abuse in Hesse, Musil, and Walser – Niklas Straetker
10: Breaking the Silence about Sexualized Violence in Lilly Axtser’s and Beate Teresa Hanika’s Young Adult Fiction (YAF) – Anna Sator
11: ‘Eine gigantische Vergewaltigung’: Rape as Subject in Roger Fritz’s
Mädchen mit Gewalt (1970) – Lisa Haegele
12: Elfriede Jelinek and Ingeborg Bachmann: Transformations of the Capitalist Patriarchy and Narrating Sexual Violence in the Twentieth Century –
Aylin Bademsoy
13: Staging Consent and Threatened Masculinity: The Debate on #Me Too in Contemporary German Theater – Daniele Vecchiato
Part V.
#Me Too Across Cultural and National Borders
14: Patriarchy, Male Violence, and Disadvantaged Women: Representations of Muslims in the Crime Television Series
Tatort – Sascha Gerhards
15: Fatih Akin’s Head On: Challenging Mythologies of German Social Work in
Gegen die Wand (2004) – Florian Gassner
16: Is a Prostitute Rapeable? Teresa Ruiz Rosas’s Novel
Nada que declarar in Dialogue with #Me Too – Kathrin Breuer
Notes on the Contributors
Index
About the author
Kathrin Breuer is an Associate Professor of Practice of German at Brandeis University where she also serves as the Director of the German Language Program.
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