Anette Horn, University of the Witwatersrand
When considering women in German Studies, one could place it under the rubric of telling women’s stories. This can take the form of Ingeborg Bachmann’s trilogy Todesarten about the devastating effects of patriarchy and sexism on women’s psyches. This has been done in the German curriculum at the University of Cape Town and the University of the Witwatersrand.
Christa Wolf was influenced by Bachmann’s proto-feminist novels and thus Reflecting on Christa T. as well as Kassandra and Medea, which focus on women’s oppression through patriarchy, were studied.
Sharon Dodua Otoo adds racism to patriarchy and sexism. Different centuries are interleaved in her novel Adas Raum to show the dis/continuity of women’s oppression, which goes back to slavery.
One could also add class, but all these aspects of oppression are included in the concept of intersectionality. It also includes gender and sexual orientation and could be called postcolonial, because it interrogates the impact colonialism had on men and women.
This also implies that not all women are victims of patriarchy in the same way, but that they can also exert power over women of colour or of a different race, as contentious as this term is to identify women of different skin colours.
A move from feminism to gender and intersectionality can be observed in what is loosely known as women’s literature.
There is also a move away from the German canon in German Studies curricula to Afro-Germans like May Ayim and Afro-Europeans, as well as Turkish writers in Germany, who also experience sexism and racism as well as class oppression, which was demanded during the student protests of 2015 and 2016 at South African universities.
Women don’t count as discriminated anymore when appointing academics, at least not white women, but black women do, i.e. race is used as a marker to show up white privilege, yet there still is inequality as far as salaries are concerned. White men still earn more than women.
There is a call for more diversity in appointing women at senior levels as well as curriculum transformation which was part of the student protests in 2015 and 2016.
A transnational and comparative approach to German literature can bring German fiction into dialogue with African literature, thus showing up, how colonialism not only affected the oppressed but also the oppressors.
I would like to investigate to what extent the metaphor of madness functions as a critique of patriarchy and colonialism in the fictionalised autobiographies of the Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann and the South African-Botswanan writer Bessie Head. I would like to propose a sceptical reading that is subjective, but also follows the development of thought and language used to articulate madness.
Bachmann uses the image of the burnt hand which writes on the nature of fire and Head that of disintegrative knowledge for writing on the experience of madness. In Bachmann´s case, it probably was a reaction to the failure of her marriage to Max Frisch, one of the foremost Swiss novelists in the sixties to eighties of the last century, which led to severe depression and her accusation, that he wrote about their marriage in his novel “Mein Name sei Gantenbein”, which she saw as a betrayal of her trust in him and being used as material for literature. Head, on the other hand, writes about her exile from South Africa in Botswana with her young son and the racism she experienced not only in South Africa as the illegitimate daughter of an upper-class white woman and a black stable-hand, besides her separation from her husband after she caught him with another woman, but also owing to her status as a coloured woman in an African society in Botswana. While the real suffering of both women writers at the hands of psychiatric institutions which sought to make them “function” in a normal way again, should not be underestimated, it is after their experience of depression and madness that they started to write on it in a literary way. Writing should not be seen as a therapy therefore, but as a way of understanding and coming to terms with an experience, for which there is no cure in the end. I would like to show the literary devices which they use to defamiliarise this experience and make sense of it, or rather to analyse in a literary fashion the twin systems of patriarchy and colonialism that leads, in the case of Head, to an overcoming of her experience of madness and in Bachmann´s case, a vanishing of the protagonist, the autobiographical “I”, in the wall of her room, which ends in the laconic statement: “It was murder.” In contrast, Head uses a third person narrator and a fictitious character, Elizabeth, to represent her own autobiographical experience, although Bessie is short for Elizabeth, of course. Thus in both cases it is not merely a reflection on the experience of madness, but an interruption of the way the colonial and patriarchal discourses make us see women that make both novels so powerful and indeed “crazy” in their language and metaphors. It is indeed a question of power not only in the political sense but also the discursive sense that Head and Bachmann show up through their surreal images.
Although these two women writers didn´t know of each other´s novels and experiences, it is probably no coincidence that the novels were published within a very short time-span: Bachmann´s Malina in 1971 and Head´s A question of Power in 1974. Both also died prematurely: Bachmann at the age of 47 and Head at 48, the former as a result of burn wounds from a cigarette that set alight her night-gown on top of her use of barbiturates and the latter of a liver failure apparently owing to too much drinking of beer. Both forms of death point to psychic wounds, however, probably in childhood already. In Head´s case, this certainly had something to do with her adoption by foster-parents owing to the laws of Apartheid and in Bachmann´s case, sexual abuse which is alluded to in the image of the cemetery of the dead daughters. Patriarchy is a system that unites both psychic and political relations and colonialism could not only be seen in the system of Apartheid, but was also present in the relations between Europe and Africa in the sixties and seventies, something which both Bachmann and Head were very aware of. It was the time of the independence movements of the former colonies from their colonisers and also a re-emergence of feminism in Europe, although both Bachmann and Head did not explicitly identify themselves as feminists. Bachmann reflects on colonialism in her uncompleted cycle of novels Todesarten in which Egypt functions as an utopian opposite to Europe and Head was an adherent of Robert Sobukwe´s Pan-Africanism so that she identified as an African eventually and saw this as a way of overcoming the racial divisions of Apartheid.
Susan Sontag has questioned the use of illness as metaphor in her book of the same title, because it makes the ill seem interesting or endowed with special powers which denies the medical causes for their disease and thus also the possibility of a medical cure. She therefore sees an analysis of the physiological causes of illness as being of paramount importance. Her empirical impetus, however, denies the productiveness of illness as metaphor in literature, something which writers have made use of since the beginning of time. Thus the sorcerer was seen as someone with psychic powers, something which was transferred to the poet with his/her prophetic and divine powers. Bessie Head makes use of these traditions in her depiction of Elizabeth´s madness in A Question of Power, in which she becomes involved in a drama of quasi-religious proportions, while this dimension of the cultural imagination of madness seems to be occluded in Bachmann´s Malina. She does use the form of the fairy-tale of the princess of Kagran and a stranger who is meant to allude to Paul Celan to indicate an utopian love-relationship as opposed to her real relationship with the civil servant, Malina, which both contains the word “mal” for bad as well as a reference to “raspberry” in Hungarian, however, just as Head´s protagonist lays her hand in a “soft gesture of belonging” on a map of Botswana at the end of the novel in order to suggest a form of healing from her experience of alienation from her adopted land. She in fact only received Botswanan citizenship fifteen years after having arrived in Botswana.
Elizabeth in A question of power is tormented by two imaginary men, who also represent opposites, namely the spiritual Sello and the masculine Dan who purportedly has a romantic interest in her but also torments her with Medusa, the all-powerful African woman with her seventy-one nice-time girls who perform the most debauched acts in front of her in order to demean her sexually.
In contrast there is the appeal of her mother to share the stigma of insanity, which is also the insanity of the prohibition of interracial love and sex under Apartheid. Elizabeth is open to this appeal of her dead mother: “Now you know. Do you think I can bear the stigma of insanity alone? Share it with me.” (QP 17) It is only after this realisation of the shared experience of insanity that Elizabeth wants to know more about her mother from her foster-mother. It is the tragic story of adoption of a child of mixed blood under Apartheid that doesn´t fall into the categories of Apartheid and is therefore sent from pillar to post. She was born in a mental asylum and her mother committed suicide there. Her mother´s family wanted to wash their hands of her by putting her up for adoption. A sexual relationship across the colour and class line would have been too great a scandal for a family more interested in entering their pure-bred horses in the races than normal human relations. The only exception in this family was the old lady, presumably Elizabeth´s grand-mother, who wanted to see her daughter and grand-daughter. After her mother had killed herself, she gave Elizabeth all her toys and dolls.
Elizabeth, who walks past the mental asylum that is called the Red House because of its red roof sees her mother´s insanity in terms of her defiance against the racial laws of South Africa. Elizabeth seems to have inherited her spirit as well: “She seemed to have that element of the sudden, the startling, the explosive detail in her destiny and, for a long time, an abounding sense of humour to go with it.” (QP 18) She continues that for years she was living on the edges of South Africa´s life.
Both novels have two chapters dedicated to two men: In the case of Head, Sello and Dan, and in the case of Bachmann, Ivan and The Third Man, who could be Malina. It is followed by a chapter titled “On last things”. The parts where Malina enters are written in the form of a dialogue although it sounds more like an interrogation of the I by him than a real dialogue. This real dialogue only comes about with the stranger in the fairy-tale The Princess of Kagran. Elizabeth in Bessie Head´s novel engages in a metaphysical dialogue with Sello, but he is powerless against Dan and Medusa. If one regards A Question of Power as a psychological drama, one could also see Dan and the nice-time girls as projections of Elizabeth´s repressed sexuality and as a rape-fantasy. She wants to be like the nice-time girls, in order to experience herself as a woman in a patriarchal society. Bachmann herself lets her female character say that she would like to be raped which is an affront to any feminist. It seems to show the complicity of women in patriarchy and confirm Freud´s idea that women´s form of sexuality is masochism and narcissism. Sello remains Elizabeth´s soul mate, whereas Dan is a purely sexual being. Sello is seen as universal man, while Dan represents the sexualised African man. He gyrates in front of Elizabeth with his sexual organ, but also the nice-time girls flaunt their sexuality in front of Elizabeth. Head seems to corroborate stereotypes of African men and women here as oversexed beings.
Head made libellous statements about the future president, Sir Seretse Khama, at the post-office of Serowe, the refugee-camp, in Botswana, when she first arrived there. There was a court-case, where she wasn´t convicted of defamation but sent to the mental-asylum outside Serowe. Here she received medication which eventually allowed her to lead a “normal” life again in the village, where she engaged in market-farming. Yet her substance-abuse indicates that she still suffered from the symptoms of her illness which according to some, was bipolar affective disorder, but could also be seen as a consequence of her state-less status as a refugee and exile. Bipolar affective disorder is a genetic disease, so she could have inherited it from her mother which made the appeal she sensed from her mother to share the stigma of insanity all the more haunting.
Although it seems that Bachmann was also institutionalised during her stay in Berlin in 1964 and 1965 on a Ford-scholarship, the diagnostics of her illness weren´t that clear. She did however mention that her condition wouldn´t allow her a normal life again and go out like other people. The tragic aspect of her love-relationship with the German-Rumanian poet, Paul Celan, is that he lost his mother in Auschwitz. Her problematic relationship with her home-country, Austria, is therefore also an investigation into its complicity in national-socialism, which they sought to deny after the second World-War. Yet Bachmann seeks to show its roots in private relations, such as between fathers and daughters and men and women which are determined by the system of patriarchy.
Both novels were attacked by critics as being too personal, banal or incoherent in a time when the political was in the foreground, be it the Anti-Apartheid novel in the case of Head or the political literature of the 68ers in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. They attempted a coming to terms with the national socialist and colonial past, but didn´t do so as radically and fundamentally as both Head and Bachmann.
References:
Bachmann, Ingeborg, “Todesarten”-Projekt. Kritische Ausgabe. Unter Leitung von Robert Pichl herausgegeben von Monika Albrecht und Dirk Göttsche. Piper, München-Zürich 1995
Däufel, Christian, Ingeborg Bachmanns „Ein Ort für Zufälle“. Ein interpretierender Kommentar. De Gruyter, Berlin/Boston 2013
Head, Bessie, A question of power. Heineman, London 1974
Otoo, Sharon Dodua, Adas Raum, S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2021