Author: Katherine Stone, School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Warwick - Academia.edu

Lecture: Stone, Katherine. »Allegories of Trauma and Repression: Representations of Wartime Rape in Contemporary German Fiction.« Fortieth Annual Conference of the German Studies Association. San Diego 2016. - Bibliographic Entry: Info

Summary: »A Fundamental assumption of memory studies is the idea that collective remembrance is a highly mediated version of "history-in-motion," which !remak[es] the residue of past decades into material with contemporary resonance." The recent graffitiing of Seward Johnson's sculpture Unconditional Surrender offers a pertinent example of this process of recasting. Modeled on the iconic photograph by German-Jewish emigre Alfred Eisenstaedt, the statue depicts US Navy sailor George Mendonsa passionately embracing a pliant nurse on September 2, 1945. This image was initially celebrated as a visual encapsulation of the joy of VJ Day; in 2005, however, an Austrian-Jewish refugee named Greta Zimmer Friedman identified herself as the photographed woman and revealed that the kiss had not been consensual. This disclosure cast the title of Johnson's work in a new light, exposing the extent to which women's sexual passivity and the fine line between consent and coercion are naturalized-if not romanticized and eroticized in Western cultures. It took #MeToo to disturb the narrative. When Mendonsa's death in February 2019 was widely reported in obituaries, a protestor sprayed the Sarasota statue with the words "#MeToo." This graffito embodied the work's altered status as feminist cipher for "the normalization of assault." Conversely, the fact that local authorities categorized the #MeToo tag as vandalism and removed it suggests the difficult entanglement of sexual politics and history with national identity.
Several scholars have considered the memorial dynamics at the heart of #MeToo. For instance, Laura Moisi analyzes the "temporal engagement" integral to the public sharing of stories, which she calls a form of "navigating the past with the tools (words, concepts, ideas) of the present." 5 This chapter contributes to such discussions by specifically examining how #MeToo has the potential to shift our understanding of history. First, I elucidate the relevance of the past to debates and scholarship under the sign of #MeToo and discuss the extent to which historicization has been used to downplay the systemic dimensions of rape culture in the present. Part 2 of this chapter explains the implications of such historical thinking for how Germany remembers its history of sexual violence, especially in the context of World War II.« (Source: Cambridge Core)

Wikipedia: History of Europe: History of Germany / Nazi Germany / Sex and the law: Wartime sexual violence / Wartime sexual violence in World War II | War: World War II / War crimes of the Wehrmacht