3 - Patriarchal Authority and Fascism Past and Present: Elisabeth Plessen's Mitteilung an den Adel (1976)

Summary

MITTEILUNG AN DEN ADEL by Elisabeth Plessen clearly spoke to the emotional needs of a generation, selling over one hundred thousand copies within four years of its publication. The semiautobiographical novel is an early example of the West German literary mode that critics dubbed Väterliteratur (father literature), a label that captures the androcentrism of contemporary antifascist discourse. Fathers are central to this strand of autobiographical or autofictional literature, written by members of the first postwar generation who attempt to understand how their fathers could have come to support National Socialism, how the war shaped them, and how these experiences combined were transferred to the next generation through an impersonal and disciplinarian upbringing. As in Ingeborg Bachmann's Malina and Christa Wolf's Kindheitsmuster, the family is depicted as the locus of authoritarian mentalities.

It is unsurprising that authors of Väterliteratur drew connections between the punitive family milieu and the Nazi past, given their political backgrounds: many were sympathetic to the 1968 protest movement. In fact, Plessen was a member of the Sozialistische Deutsche Studentenbund (SDS, Socialist German Student Union), the dominant branch of the Außerparlamentarische Opposition (APO, Extraparliamentary Opposition), when she was a student in West Berlin. The specific tenor of the student protests in Germany owed to the students’ anger about perceived continuities between the Third Reich and the Federal Republic. In Germany, the issues that united global reform movements (capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, and war) appeared to signal a restoration of the defining elements of National Socialism. The Third Reich was frequently brandished as a symbolic weapon in the confrontation between the conservative establishment and the student reformers. As the protests grew increasingly explosive, and segued into the terrorism of the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF, Red Army Faction), critics drew parallels between the tactics of the students and the violent methods used by the National Socialists. In the eyes of the students, by contrast, the older generation was the Nazi generation. It needed to answer for its moral and political failings during the Third Reich.

The student movement directed its political energies toward overcoming authoritarian character structures and hierarchies across the social spectrum, from state institutions and the media to the bourgeois family. A conception of authoritarianism that bridged the private and the political was popularized, in particular, by Rudi Dutschke, the ringleader of the antiauthoritarian strand of the SDS.