Representations of Male Inadequacy in the Geschlechtertausch Stories of the German Democratic Republic

Summary

In 1971, the German Democratic Republic's head of state, Erich Honecker, made a speech to the eighth Parteitag of the ruling SED claiming,

[e]s ist in der Tat eine der größten Errungenschaften des Sozialismus, die Gleichberechtigung der Frau in unserem Staat sowohl gesetzlich als auch im Leben weitgehend verwirklicht zu haben. Kein kapitalistisches Land der Welt kann gleiches von sich behaupten.

On the same occasion he pronounced an end to state control of the arts along rigid ideological lines, and to the insistence on the model character of protagonists that had characterized the policy up to that point; in short, for authors working within a socialist framework there were to be no taboo areas in literature. In response to this greater freedom, the early 1970s produced a number of key texts, mainly by women authors, that address the problem of authenticity and fulfillment for women within a society claiming to have overcome class and gender oppression. Texts such as Gerti Tetzner's Karen W., Brigitte Reimann's Franziska Linkerhand, Irmtraud Morgner's Leben und Abenteuer der Trobadora Beatriz and arguably also Maxie Wander's Guten Morgen, du Schöne, published in 1977, as well as the gender-swap anthology, Blitz aus heiterm Himmel, under consideration here, use this brief window of possibility (which lasted until the expulsion of the critical songwriter, Wolf Biermann, in 1976) to raise questions about personal happiness and fulfillment, and to critique the state-ordained model which imposed on working women a male model of production relations while also expecting them to retain their nurturing, womanly qualities.

As is made clear by Honecker's speech, any contradictions had to be shown as capable of resolution within Socialist society, with any discriminatory attitudes or practices presented as outmoded remnants of false consciousness. A major source of the GDR's sense of moral superiority to the consumer-orientated, materialistic West, in the face of a vocal and embittered Western women's movement, was its self-image as a place where women were valued as workers, were economically independent of and free from sexual exploitation by men, and where the compatibility of work and motherhood was seen as a social problem with a state solution. As well as policies aimed at removing the legal, social and educational barriers to women's entry to the labor force, the GDR legalized abortion up to 12 weeks from conception in 1972.