Elisabeth Krimmer & Patricia Anne Simpson 
German #MeToo [EPUB ebook] 
Rape Cultures and Resistance, 1770-2020

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 des matières

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

A propos de l’auteur

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.