Word: germanism
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...long as I can remember, i have had hemorrhoids." That revelation is the first line of the novel Feuchtgebiete (Wetlands), which has dominated German bestseller lists since its publication in March, and become the first German novel ever to lead Amazon's world rankings. Some say Feuchtgebiete's astounding popularity has been fueled by prurient fascination. But others place the book and its author, Charlotte Roche, whose first novel this is, at the center of an earthy neofeminist revival out to challenge Germany's comfortable preference for ideological abstraction...
Roche's book is no isolated phenomenon. Feminism, which many German women have long considered the domain of unglamorous, joyless man haters with bad haircuts, suddenly seems sexy again - in the most basic sense of the word. A series of books with titles such as We Alphagirls; Why Feminism Makes Life Better, and Neue Deutsche Mädchen (New German Girls) has cropped up this year. Despite stylistic differences, the books have one thing in common: their authors espouse a feminism that is less interested in a general critique of male-dominated society than in helping women deal directly with...
Behind the explicit language, personal tone and sometimes infantile humor of these "new German girls" lies a set of concerns that is more visceral - if also more self-absorbed - than a previous generation's fight for equality and respect. "This generation of women dares to declare that there are other things in life than either career or children," says Christel Eckhart, a sociologist and professor of gender studies at Kassel University. This is not entirely new. Since the late 1990s, Berlin's vibrant musical underground has featured women who undermine gender clichés through in-your-face sexual behavior...
...real antagonism, however, lies elsewhere. Traditional feminists such as Alice Schwarzer, a pioneer of the German women's movement in the 1970s, have condemned the latest feminists for being interested only in "their personal affairs: that is, career and men." Yet many young women say that Schwarzer does not speak for them anymore. "We need a new feminism," says Elizabeth Raether, one of the authors of Neue Deutsche Mädchen. "The old feminism is influenced by the language, the rhetoric and the thinking of the '68 ers. It's a problem to get rid of them. They think because...
...move would be very political and symbolic," says François Heisbourg, a military expert and special adviser to the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) in Paris. Heisbourg, who helped draft Sarkozy's military plan, predicted France would actually rejoin by the time of a Franco-German summit in March next year...