Author: Lisa Wille, Institut für Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft, Technische Universität Darmstadt

Lecture: Wille, Lisa. »Heinrich Leopold Wagner's Die Kindermörderin (1776) in the Context of #MeToo: Between Rape Culture and Victim Blaming.« Forty-Third Conference of the German Studies Association. San Diego 2019. - Bibliographic Entry: Info

Summary: »The #Me Too Movement has given rise to a virulent international debate about sexualized violence, repressive power structures, and rape cultures. The 2017 launch of this hashtag, which revived a phrase coined a decade earlier, dates back to a tweet by the American actress Alyssa Milano on the social media platform Twitter. Milano's tweet, which invited her followers to share their experiences of sexual harassment or violence, received an overwhelming response and kickstarted a movement. The fallout included publicized allegations leveled against the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, who, despite his initial denial, eventually stood trial.
At first, #MeToo-related allegations were limited to figures in the public sphere, especially in film, sports, and politics, but soon they expanded into all social realms and across national borders. Millions of women around the world shared their experiences of sexualized violence in everyday life through #MeToo. The immense scale of these cumulative stories has shown the extent to which sexism remains omnipresent and normalized in society. Further, sexism not only exists in violent form, such as sexual assault and rape, but also encompasses structural discrimination and gender-based oppression. The German-language dictionary Duden, which is representative of common usage, defines "sexism" as the "Vorstellung, nach der ein Geschlecht dem anderen von Natur aus uberlegen sei, und die [daher fur gerechtfertigt gehaltene] Diskriminierung, Unterdruckung, Zurucksetzung, Benachteiligung von Menschen, besonders der Frauen, aufgrund ihres Geschlechts" (the notion that one sex is innately superior to the other; and the [therefore considered justifiable] discrimination, oppression, neglect, and disadvantaging of people, especially women, because of their sex). The idea of female inferiority, deeply rooted in cultural history, is not new but merely a reactualized version of a stereoytpe that reaches back across the ages.
While the #MeToo movement is a twenty-first-century phenomenon, a look at eighteenth-century German drama reveals an acute awareness of the tragedies surrounding gendered violence. Heinrich Leopold Wagner's (1747-79) bourgeois tragedy Die Kindermörderin (1776; The Child Murderess), one of the most important dramas of the Sturm und Drang movement, mercilessly stages sexual violence, unwanted pregnancy, familial and social constraints, and the precarious position of women and their reasons for commiting infanticide.« (Source: Cambridge Core)

Wikipedia: History of Eurpe: History of Germany / 18th-century history of Germany | Literature: German literature / Heinrich Leopold Wagner | Literature: Rape in fiction / The Child Murderess | Sex and the law: Rape / Rape culture, Rape in Germany