German #MeToo

This volume of new essays represents a collective, academic, and activist effort to interpret German literature and culture in the context of the international #MeToo movement, illustrating and interrogating the ways that "rape cultures" persist.

This volume of new essays represents a collective, academic, and activist effort to interpret German literature and culture in the context of the international #MeToo movement, illustrating and interrogating the ways that "rape cultures" persist.

Responding to the worldwide impact of the #MeToo 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 #MeToo 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 #MeToo-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. ThroughoutGerman #MeToo challenges narratives of sex-based discrimination while emphasizing the strategies of resistance and the importance of telling one's own story.

Introduction - Elisabeth Krimmer and Patricia Anne Simpson

Part I. Histories
1: Eighteenth-Century #MeToo: Rape Culture and Victim Blaming in Heinrich Leopold Wagner'sDie Kindermörderin (1776) - Lisa Wille

2: #MeToo: Prostitution and the Syntax of Sexuality around 1800 - Patricia Anne Simpson

Part II. Dialogues across Time
3: "Immaculate Conception," the "Romance of Rape," and #MeToo: Kleistian Echoes in Kerstin Hensel and Julia Franck - Melissa Ann Sheedy

4: Female Sacrifice, Sexual Assault, and Dehumanization: Bourgeois Tragedy, Horror, and the Making ofJud 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: #MeToo and Wartime Rape: Looking Back and Moving Forward - Katherine Stone

Part IV. The Institutions of #MeToo
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'sMädchen mit Gewalt (1970) - Lisa Haegele

12: Elfriede Jelinek and Ingeborg Bachmann: Transformations of the Capitalist Patriarchy and Narrating Sexual Violence in the Twentieth CenturyAylin Bademsoy

13: Staging Consent and Threatened Masculinity: The Debate on #MeToo in Contemporary German Theater - Daniele Vecchiato

Part V. #MeToo Across Cultural and National Borders
14: Patriarchy, Male Violence, and Disadvantaged Women: Representations of Muslims in the Crime Television SeriesTatort - Sascha Gerhards

15: Fatih Akin's Head On: Challenging Mythologies of German Social Work inGegen die Wand (2004) - Florian Gassner

16: Is a Prostitute Rapeable? Teresa Ruiz Rosas's NovelNada que declarar in Dialogue with #MeToo - Kathrin Breuer

Notes on the Contributors

Index