Nicole Seifert, „Einige Herren sagten etwas dazu“: Die Autorinnen der Gruppe 47

Heinrich Böll, Ilse Aichinger, Günter Eich at a meeting of Gruppe 47, 1952

This book is a real goldmine for those who, like me, have often found themselves confronted with the misogynistic behavior of some of their male colleagues. It describes techniques that, to this day, are used to devalue and/or totally obscure the work of women in male-dominated contexts. The setting here is Gruppe 47 – a literary formation in postwar West Germany composed mainly of male members, including Günter Grass, Walter Jens, Martin Walser, and Günter Eich, and which regularly met at various locations for readings and critical discussions. Certain women authors were also individually invited to these meetings by the group’s self-appointed leader, Hans Werner Richter – not least as a way of attracting more attention to the group. Against this backdrop, Nicole Seifert’s study on the women of Gruppe 47 must be credited for the fact that its focus is not exclusively on the women who were made into “poster girls” for the group, such as Ingeborg Bachmann or Ilse Aichinger; it also honors lesser-known authors like Gisela Elsner, Gabriele Wohmann, Barbara König, Helga M. Novak, and Elisabeth Plessen, who read in the group as well, but whose work has since largely slipped into obscurity. The most popular method the men employed for drawing attention away from the work of their female colleagues was to focus on the women’s appearance. Seifert has compiled the sexist comments made regarding the women readers’ looks, which speak of a violent resistance to their work; it was precisely because these men felt threatened by women authors that they felt these women had to be put back in their “proper” place, as sexual objects. Another method used to dampen the spirits of the women was to offer exaggeratedly withering criticisms of their texts, which often resulted in them leaving feeling totally dejected and unable to work. Seifert also describes how the texts of numerous women authors violated the group’s self-imposed taboos: they didn’t block out the past and, by implication, the Shoah, as Richter demanded, and the language they used was not a sober one but rather one that took inspiration from the prewar avant-gardes and allowed itself to be guided by the unconscious. According to Seifert, the fact that these women refused to deny history and to make the fresh start Richter demanded of them also contributed to their work being discredited. One problem with her otherwise enlightening study is that it consistently praises the works of all the women involved. Their texts, whether prose or poetry, are merely cited in short quotations, without ever being subjected to any substantial literary analysis – as if the significance of these texts were self-evident, their value beyond any doubt. The book convincingly demonstrates that sexist structures within the group played a major role in the process of marginalizing these women. But I think there’s a need to read the texts of these women authors more closely, and possibly even to admit that some of their works were less successful than those that Seifert rightly celebrates as pioneering examples of autofiction.

Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2024, 352 pages.

“Monet and the Impressionist Cityscape”

Claude Monet, “Saint Germain l’Auxerrois,” 1867

Looking at Claude Monet’s cityscapes in the “Monet and the Impressionist Cityscape” exhibition at the Alte Nationalgalerie recently, I was struck by the sociological perspective embedded in them. In paintings like Quai du Louvre and Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois (both 1867), the emphasis is on urban and architectural structures that shape and determine the lives of the people who inhabit them. By contrast, the figures themselves appear as miniature representatives of the city’s middle-class citizens, lacking any individual features but certainly bearing the specific signifiers of bourgeois elegance – the men wear top hats and suits, while the women carry parasols and wear lavish bonnets that Monet sometimes accentuates with colorful specks of turquoise or beige, emphasizing the materiality of the paint. Numerous texts in the informative catalogue mention the “raised viewpoint” Monet chose for these paintings. He had written to the director of the Louvre Museum, Émilien de Nieuwerkerke, asking him for access to the museum’s balcony in order to paint his views of Paris from this perspective. The art historian Frouke Van Dijke interprets this positioning as a sign of Monet’s determination to “turn his back” on the Old Masters in order to depict “modern life on the street.” His sociological interest in this life can be seen in the care with which he documented the then new phenomenon of public advertising in his paintings – the designs used on the advertising columns also allowed him to use primary colors. He had a keen intuition for the increasing pace of capitalism, which he captured in images of public pissoirs, the Bouquinistes along the Seine, rattling carriages, and strolling flâneurs. The tightly packed rows of limestone buildings along the banks of the Seine do not merely serve as a backdrop in Quai du Louvre; on the contrary, their density and central position give these structures the appearance of protagonists themselves. The “City of Stone” that Hausmann’s massive restructuring of Paris produced saw these buildings positively pile up in front of its residents, defining their living environment. Monet’s emphasis on the power of new urban structures is particularly clear in Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois – a painting whose leading character is the eponymous church. The people filling the square in front of the church look tiny and insignificant in comparison to the building (and to the trees in the foreground). Monet demonstrates how life in Paris was reorganized by Baron Haussmann’s “Grands Travaux” – the new boulevards were frequented by the bourgeoisie, whereas the working class disappeared from the cityscape. The exhibition also includes two paintings of building sites (by Félix Buhot and Barthold Jongkind) that demonstrate the extent of the redesign, which tore huge wounds in the city and created new structures that determined the lives of the individuals living there from that point on.

Gustave Caillebotte’s remarkable painting Rue Halévy, vue d’un balcon (1877) also appears alongside Monet’s works in the exhibition. It features a similarly elevated standpoint, with the artist painting the blue-tinged view of the street and the surrounding buildings from the balcony of a Haussmannian apartment block. This imposing new architecture appears abstract, bulky, and threatening, and the artist merely suggests it. The thing that points to his position are the plants on the balcony, which partially filter the view of the buildings beyond. Caillebotte’s decision to capture this almost empty street scene in pastel cream tones was obviously inspired by Berthe Morisot, whose paintings are unfortunately missing from the exhibition. There is, however, a chance to see Camille Pissarro’s L’Avenue de l’Opéra (1898), which shows the newly built square in front of the opera house in soft light. Redeveloped by Haussmann, the building disappears into the distance, while the square in front of the building, and its bustle of activity, attracts all the attention. But in this picture, too, the figures are only loosely suggested, as a “mass” of outlines that occasionally mutate into dabs of grey paint as they hurry along the boulevard. Further mention should be made here to Henri Matisse’s later work Quai Saint-Michel (1916), which also appears in the exhibition and drives the Impressionist’s vocabulary to the point of abstraction, making the Notre-Dame cathedral appear like a large and shapeless lump in the middle of no-man’s land. It’s just a shame that Claude Monet’s excellent series of views of Gare Saint-Lazare from 1877 are not on view. These paintings are further proof of Monet’s interest in how improvements in the railways accelerated the pace of capitalism – after all, the new stations and transport routes also made it possible to transport and trade artworks more easily. Monet always filled his railway stations with the steam of the locomotives, as if reminding the viewer that capitalism had, by that stage, become too big to depict in its entirety: since we’re all embedded in this system, our view of it is inevitably a foggy one.

Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin, September 27, 2024–January 6, 2025.

Caroline Darian, Und ich werde dich nie wieder Papa nennen

Gathering in support of Gisèle Pelicot, September 2024

The most remarkable thing about this book by Caroline Darian – the daughter of Gisèle Pelicot – is the profile it presents of her abuser father. Darian describes him as an outwardly caring family man, but one whose career had hit the rocks. It might be speculated whether this blow to his professional reputation was one of the motivating factors for his violent exercise of patriarchal power; Darian describes him as a “gambler” whose business initiatives always came to nothing, and who repeatedly had to borrow money from his daughter. Against this backdrop, it’s tempting to hypothesize that he wanted to punish his comparatively well-paid wife for this humiliation, which he did by sedating and incapacitating her and allowing her to be raped by at least 80 men. The fact that he also filmed these horrific events, as Darian describes, suggests he wanted to document this “project” and mark it up as a “success” in an otherwise less than successful life. Only with hindsight does Darian realize how certain aspects of his occasionally dysfunctional behavior as a husband and father indicated the actions of a perfidious and violent abuser. For example, it’s only in retrospect that she becomes aware of the fact that her mother had become increasingly socially isolated by her father, allowing him to cement his dominance over her. Or that a friend of her mother who had been sexually harassed by Dominique Pelicot and told Gisèle about it was immediately banished from their circle on his initiative. Her father downplayed the repeated memory loss and absence seizures her mother suffered as a result of being secretly administered increasingly strong doses of sedatives, just as he did the gynecological problems she experienced as a result of the (gang) rapes he organized. He often prevented his children from speaking with their mother, claiming she needed rest and was sleeping. But Darian also mentions how hard it was for her at first to let go of her once-beloved father and condemn him. Above all, it was when photos were discovered showing Darian herself in unfamiliar underwear that her break with him was finally sealed. It took somewhat longer for her mother to stop remembering her husband’s good side, and to stop sending warm clothes to him in prison. Darian powerfully depicts how her family was divided and traumatized by such a monstrous deed. Her son had to attend therapy, while she and her siblings didn’t speak to each other for a time, since not all of them wanted to ignore the letters their father sent them. Darian also describes how writing down her trauma was the most important factor in processing it. Her book ends before the start of the now finished trial against Dominique Pelicot and his accomplices – a shame in my view, as I would have been very interested to read his daughter’s perspective on the proceedings.

Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2025, 224 pages. Published in English as I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again, London: Bonnier Books, 2025, 234 pages.

Translated by Ben Caton

Isabelle Graw is the cofounder and publisher of TEXTE ZUR KUNST and teaches art history and theory at the Hochschule für ­Bildende Künste – Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. Her most recent publications include In Another World: Notes, 2014–2017 (­Sternberg Press, 2020), Three Cases of Value Reflection: Ponge, Whitten, Banksy (Sternberg Press, 2021), and On the Benefits of Friendship (Sternberg Press, 2023); and the forthcoming Fear and Money: A Novel (Sternberg/MIT Press, 2025).

Image credit: 1. Photo Rob Kulisek; 2. picture alliance / dpa; 3. b p k - Bildagentur / Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, photo Jörg P. Anders; 4. picture alliance, photo Hans Lucas / Maylis Rolland