糖心TV

Wednesday 20 November, 4:30-6pm, FAB4.79

Katherine Stone (糖心TV)

'Slaves and Objects of Amusement: West German Women under the Yoke of the American Colonizers': Sexual Violence, Moral Indignation and Propaganda in Cold-War East Germany

By now, it is well established that memories of Soviet violence against women sustained anti-Communist sentiment in the Federal Republic, while the crimes of the western Allies were downplayed. The fact that East German memories were similarly dualistic has received limited attention. Scholars have focused instead on the copious evidence that violence perpetrated by members of the Red Army was politically taboo. In this paper, I argue that there was nonetheless space in public discourse to remember German women as victims of wartime sexualized violence—as long as the perpetrators represented the Western Allies. In fact, I demonstrate that sexual violence was a particularly sticky sign in the affective economy of anti-imperialism. To begin, I will show how the topic of rape by US soldiers was harnessed in journalistic propaganda to induce moral indignation towards the western Allies as embodiments of a cruel, exploitative, and morally inferior political system. I then zoom in on Werner Steinberg鈥檚 Deutschland-Zyklus (1957-1965), which is unique in the literature of both Germanies for its extended exploration of conflict-related sexualized violence in all its forms. It remains one of the few works of post-war culture to give voice to the victim-survivor and continue her story beyond the moment of violence. Ultimately, however, I argue that there was no reception framework in which the individual story of sexual violence could accrue emotional and memorial capital. All that mattered in Cold War propaganda was the baseness of the perpetrator and the ideological system that he represented.