Introduction
“Motherhood is beautiful.”Footnote 1 Alluding to the Black Panther slogan “Black is Beautiful,” a number of West German feminists associated with the Green Party published the Müttermanifest (Mother's Manifesto) in 1987, calling for a new kind of self-confidence among mothers in the New Women's Movement and recognition of their identities as “primarily mothers.”Footnote 2 Contrasting their demands, which included the establishment of mothers’ centers as spaces where women and children could meet, to what they perceived as the “aquarium of career women” and the “ghetto of non-mothers,”Footnote 3 the signatories of the Müttermanifest departed from the Greens’ previous women's politics, which had fought for better public childcare and equal opportunities for men and women in paid jobs outside the home. The juxtaposition of “career women” with mothers that runs through the manifesto and the ensuing public debate that it caused beyond the inner confines of the women's movement stand emblematically for a growing split along the lines of motherhood that marked the West German feminist movement from the mid-1970s onward.
Considering the West German New Women's Movement's initial aims, the prominence these maternalist ideas assumed within one of the movement's most important spaces for political agenda-setting, the Green Party, seems curious. Thunderously initiated in September 1968 with Sigrid Dammrüger's infamous tomato toss that followed Helke Sander's speech on the need to incorporate the challenges women and especially mothers were facing into the political work of the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (Socialist German Student Association, SDS), the movement began in close association with the “New Left” and aimed at liberating women from the constraints accompanying motherhood in “the tyranny of the private sphere.”Footnote 4 Attempting to overcome the isolating confines of the nuclear family, protagonists of the Aktionsrat zur Befreiung der Frau (Action Council for the Liberation of Woman) and the early Weiberräte (women's councils) demanded both that women be granted full autonomy in making reproductive decisions, as well as a solidary distribution of childcare duties among all: “We will force our male and female comrades without children to accept the general responsibility for the children, both in theory and in practice.”Footnote 5
As indicated by these demands, the concept and practice of motherhood always played a central role in the New Women's Movement. The realities surrounding the difficult lives of mothers, who had to manage (as they in many ways continue to) childcare, housework, a job and/or studies, and political engagement without much help, led many left-wing women to turn away from the male-dominated SDS, where feminist demands were continuously sidelined as a “secondary contradiction.” Indeed, in the context of the Kinderladenbewegung (movement for alternatively organized, self-administered childcare), initiated by the Action Council in 1967 and taken over by the SDS-affiliated Zentralrat der Kinderläden (Central Council for Kinderläden) in the summer of 1968, Sander demanded a “politics of motherliness” that called into question the role of women as primary and often sole caregivers for children.Footnote 6
Although motherhood and its difficulties thus functioned as an important politicizing factor for many West German women in the late 1960s, the approach that supporters of the early movement took differed decisively from the maternalist perspective promoted in the 1987 Müttermanifest. Sander, the Action Council, and (after the split of the Action Council in 1970) the West Berlin–based Brot und Rosen (Bread and Roses) group, in cooperation as well as conflict with the New Left, sought alternative and anti-authoritarian forms of childcare, insisting that fathers get more involved and demanding that kindergartens were transferred from the churches to public authorities, thus calling for structural change.Footnote 7 The Müttermanifest retreated from these demands in defining parenthood again primarily as women's issue, giving up on the involvement of men and public institutions in childcare.Footnote 8 Concern for changing the conditions under which motherhood was practiced thus turned into an elevation of motherhood as such—an (old) new form of maternalism.
The contrast this reconceptualization constitutes when compared to the movement's beginnings is best illustrated by the nationwide mobilizing power the §218 campaign enjoyed in the early 1970s. Headed by the anti-abortion law movement's figurehead Alice Schwarzer and garnering support from an overwhelming number of women throughout the country, the fight for liberalized abortion laws marked the movement's transition from its socialist beginnings to an increasingly mainstream endeavor. Schwarzer, who saw herself in the tradition of de Beauvoirian equality feminism, viewed motherhood mainly as a trap against which women should guard themselves. As the feminist scholar Andrea Trumann points out, in the early 1970s the New Women's Movement was very much impressed by the French pioneer of feminist thought Simone de Beauvoir's critique of pregnancy and motherhood as the crucial sources of female oppression that needed to be overcome.Footnote 9 Indeed, in a 1976 interview with the German weekly Der Spiegel, de Beauvoir stated that “motherhood today is true slavery.”Footnote 10
Considering these two sharply contrasting positions—“motherhood is beautiful” on the one hand, and motherhood as “slavery” on the other—the question arises how and why, over a mere ten to fifteen years, the conceptions of motherhood prevalent in the West German New Women's Movement changed so dramatically from critical analysis, even outright rejection, to affirmative identification. Tracing this change, I will argue that there were two moments in which the concept of motherhood was heatedly discussed and transformed, moments that significantly contributed to the movement's split over the question of motherhood and eventually weakened its power to effect political change. First, from the mid-1970s onward and within the broader cultural currents of “New Inwardness” (Neue Innerlichkeit) and “New Sensuality” (Neue Sinnlichkeit) that permeated the New Left, motherhood became sensualized, eroticized, and even sexualized. Second, following the growing cooperation and overlap between the ecology movement and the women's movement underway since the early 1980s, these trends were intensified and at the same time drawn into new directions after the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe. For while the focus on female bodiliness was consolidated, the growing ecofeminist strand successfully reimagined motherhood as tightly bound to nature and life itself, and to a grounded form of bodiliness (Leiblichkeit) that enjoyed a special connection to “Mother Earth” and the cosmos.
Despite the growing prominence the subjects of motherhood and pregnancy are currently enjoying in feminist debates,Footnote 11 the changing approaches to these questions that characterized the West German New Women's Movement have received scarce scholarly attention. Seminal studies of the women's movement in Germany, like those of Ute Frevert, Rosemarie Nave-Herz, Ute Gerhard, and Brigitte Young,Footnote 12 discuss the significance of motherhood within the New Women's Movement alongside the debate between equality feminists and advocates of difference feminism, generally considering it important regarding the movement's development but not granting the emergence of new, inspiring conceptualizations of motherhood and pregnancy as deserving particular attention. Recent works by Kristina Schulz and Myra Marx FerreeFootnote 13 take a much-needed comparative approach. Especially Schulz's book constitutes an important contribution because it offers a dense account of the German context and carves out its specificities by comparing it to the French movement. Discussing the emergent “New Motherliness” (Neue Mütterlichkeit) current as one element resulting from and strengthening the cultural feminist faction, her book, however, ends in 1976, thus leaving out the burgeoning maternalism of the late 1970s and 1980s.Footnote 14
A systematic historical examination of conceptualizations and practices of motherhood within the New Women's Movement is thus lacking. This is corroborated by feminist sociologist Ilse Lenz, who argues that the West German New Women's Movement “in the diversity of all its voices, its trajectories and its consequences (has) barely (been) examined”Footnote 15 and that “sub-movements like the migrants, mothers, or lesbian movement”Footnote 16 in particular have received little attention. Addressing this blind spot, this article traces how the discussion about motherhood within the movement developed, and which moments were important in shaping it and how changing attitudes toward the environment influenced it. Although women's politics within the Green Party will be considered in this analysis, the focus of this paper is not on the Greens but on the women's movement. Why and how did a specific ideologization of motherhood gain traction at this particular moment in time and among self-understood progressive feminists? And why in Germany?
“A Couple that Makes Love”: The Eroticization of Motherhood in the mid-1970s
For many left-leaning West Germans, the mid-1970s were a period of widespread disillusionment and frustration. Following the revolutionary euphoria that had characterized the immediate aftermath of 1968, many New Leftists and feminists had to face the disappointing realities of splinter groups and the absence of fundamental political change. Growing tensions within the New Left culminated in the formation of the Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Faction, RAF) and the violent upheavals of the “German Autumn” in 1977, which came to dominate the public discourse and led to the introduction of profoundly repressive laws by the state. In this context, numerous left-leaning individuals turned away from large-scale political activities to the “warming inwardness of the [alternative] milieu.”Footnote 17 The emerging focus on authenticity, which has come to be known under the terms of “New Inwardness” and “New Sensuality,” became manifest in a growing concentration on subjectivity and identity. These changes that transformed the Left did not leave the women's movement untouched. Indeed, as Sven Reichardt argues, large parts of the feminist movement fell into line with the alternative scene in the mid-1970s, which was related to the disappointments the women's movement itself was confronted with.Footnote 18
The campaign against §218, which had gained popular support across the country, lost momentum in 1975 when the Federal Constitutional Court overturned a 1974 law passed by the social-liberal government that would have liberalized abortion laws in West Germany.Footnote 19 Their hopes shattered, many mid-1970s women's rights activists turned away from macro-level actions and toward the “project movement,” a form of feminist activism focused on small-scale, local projects “by women for women,” such as women's book shops, self-experience groups, and shelter houses for women experiencing domestic violence.Footnote 20 Growing interest in explorations of feminine subjectivity and the female body led to a reconceptualization of feminism as inwardly turned and focused on the self rather than a decidedly political movement in the narrower sense of the term. In 1976, Alice Schwarzer first observed this shift in feminist self-understandings as “a mystification of the eternally feminine.”Footnote 21 Cautioning against rising trends of ontologizing a feminine essence, Schwarzer's warning was issued at the very time that discussions on motherhood within the movement began to take a new turn.
One of the earliest incidents, in which conflicting notions of motherhood took center stage, was the first Frauenjahrbuch (Women's Yearbook) published in 1975 by a group of Frankfurt-based feminists. Under the rubric “Mütter” (mothers), two anonymous women offered diametrically opposed experiential reports about pregnancy, giving birth, and mothering. The first woman proclaimed that “pregnancy is deadlier than death”Footnote 22 and likened the event of giving birth to a torturous procedure: “I was seized by naked consternation: broken on the wheel—quadrisected—torn into pieces!”Footnote 23 Recalling her feelings from that time, she noted: “It was horrible, even more horrible than I had feared.”Footnote 24
Although this article still largely resonated with the broad premises of de Beauvoir's conceptualization of motherhood and pregnancy, the second report in the Frauenjahrbuch 1 reflected what would become a more dominant understanding of motherhood in the years to follow. In sharp contrast to the first report, the other female author accused the New Women's Movement of neglecting the specific needs and concerns of mothers and of dismissing motherhood as a sign of failed emancipation. Instead of viewing motherhood as something that would hinder her liberation, she saw it as a clearly positive and natural identity: “I wonder what kind of self-help this is supposed to be when the knowledge about our body does not even comprise the fact that the suckling of a child can be a very important pleasure.”Footnote 25 Making her divergent (at the time) opinion explicit, the woman from Berlin continued: “First of all, I am in opposition to some feminists in that my identity as a woman is linked above all to those biological functions that I evaluate as positive.” She elaborated:
But our bodies are us. We are them [the bodies], and we want to have pleasure and pride in them. For our sexuality this means: Not only clitoris, also vagina, uterus, breasts. And with them all bodily and emotional experiences that pertain to the carrying of a child.… And we not only “have” children, but we breastfeed, stroke and love them and we have a bodily intimacy, which the man cannot have.… We are our bodies; the sex drive is really linked to procreation…. These desires are, I believe, at bottom real.Footnote 26
This author's conception of motherhood introduces a number of themes that would gain increasing prominence throughout the next years. First, she emphasized the bodiliness of both motherhood and femininity. She was her body; she identified herself completely with her own corporeality and attributed her reproductive choices to this body rather than to social expectations. Second, her text revealed an essentialization of femininity as a biological trait rooted in the ability and desire to bear children, which, importantly, was here conceptualized as “real” and thus set as the norm. Third, she described motherhood as a sensual, intimate undertaking; she felt pleasure when breastfeeding and enjoyed a special intimacy with her child that excluded any male participation, thereby also indicating an erotic dimension. These three intricately interwoven themes—the emphasis on and elevation of the bodily dimension of motherhood and femininity, the absolutizing of alleged feminine qualities, and the sensualization of motherhood—assumed growing significance in negotiations of motherhood in the New Women's Movement.
This shift was already evident a year later with the publication of the Frauenjahrbuch 2, in which the bodiliness and eroticization of experiences relating to motherhood came to the fore, notably without being paired with a contrasting account. In this volume, all four contributions pertaining to motherhood and children were decidedly affirmative, marking a shift away from a former ambivalence and openness to a variety of perspectives on this topic. For example, Kathrin Mosler, an actively involved feminist, perceived her pregnancy predominantly as a visceral experience: “When I became pregnant, I did not think of the child as a human. I became pregnant because I wanted to come into a different bodily condition. My body grew, worked, was beautiful. The enduringly heightened bodily temperature, the erotic sensibility were like a summer without season.”Footnote 27 Similarly, Eva-Maria Stark, whom Andrea Trumann describes as a “prominent pioneer”Footnote 28 of difference feminism in West Germany, proclaimed in the Frauenjahrbuch that “the wish for a child can rise from deep inside the belly.” Mothers' “affection and willingness to sacrifice,” Stark argued, “while admittedly socially enormously amplified,” was nonetheless a “unique and incomparable relationship deeply anchored in the physical-psychic . . . system of mother and child.”Footnote 29 Like Mosler, Stark thus essentialized the bodily dimension of reproductive wishes and naturalized women's alleged willingness to make sacrifices for their children, thereby absolutizing a socially produced division of labor that continues to confine women to unpaid reproductive work inside the domestic sphere. Stark's main focus in this text as well as in her 1976 monograph was, however, the event of giving birth and the subsequent experience of breastfeeding, both of which she celebrated and sexualized, following the Australian author Jean Ritter, as an “orgastic experience.”Footnote 30
This glorification of pregnancy and motherhood came with new demands and accompanying reprimands when women failed to live up to them. Stark, for example, declared that women who decided not to breastfeed often used the “pretext” of technical difficulties while in fact it was only a matter of attitude,Footnote 31 thus blaming them for something they either did not feel comfortable with or their breasts simply would not render. Women, who used this pretext, Stark continued to argue, would deprive their children of “something that actually every infant is entitled to: an intensive breastfeeding relationship to their mother,”Footnote 32 which was “both a part of female sexuality as well as the first intensive sexual experience of the newborn.”Footnote 33 This increasing emphasis on breastfeeding as a decidedly sexual relationship between mother and child and an above all natural experience also appeared in one of the New Women's Movement's leading magazines, the Berlin-based Courage. Only one year after the second Frauenjahrbuch was published, Courage ran an issue, in which breastfeeding was treated as a “weapon”Footnote 34 (Kampfmittel). Women reported about a “feeling of fertility”Footnote 35 when breastfeeding and about their enjoying the suckling as a pleasurable stimulus. One author, much like Stark, proclaimed: “Every woman can breastfeed, she only has to want to.”Footnote 36
These statements illustrate just how far parts of the West German New Women's Movement had moved away from de Beauvoirian notions of motherhood as the most dangerous “trap” in a woman's life. From these new perspectives, women were again supposed to welcome motherhood, pregnancy, breastfeeding, and the concomitant pains and sacrifices as their “natural” determination, which was supposedly deeply ingrained in their bodies. What changed in comparison to conceptualizations of motherhood prevalent in the 1950s, however, was the seemingly left-leaning alternative rhetoric of authenticity, pleasure, and emancipation, with which these notions were elevated to positive offers of identity that were in harmony with ostensibly progressive ideas about sex and the erotic.
This shift was, however, not only a temporal but also a geographical one: although the first Frauenjahrbuch was published in Frankfurt by the New Left publisher Roter Stern, the second Frauenjahrbuch was published by the feminist Verlag Frauenoffensive, which specialized in cultural feminist publications, with its most prominent publication being Verena Stefan's feminist counterculture hit Häutungen (Sheddings). Meanwhile, the scene around the Frankfurt Weiberrat retained a more ambivalent stance on motherhood, as is illustrated by the 1979 self-help book Mutterfrust, Mutterlust (Mother's Problem, Mother's Pleasure) which, very similar to the first Frauenjahrbuch, contained a diversity of experiential reports on childbirth, breastfeeding, and mothering.Footnote 37 Although Mutterfrust, Mutterlust is in no way as prescriptive as the second Frauenjahrbuch, Stark's book, or the Courage articles, it nevertheless points to a growing preoccupation with pregnancy and motherhood, and at times also an eroticization and sexualization of this experience, beyond the Munich and Berlin milieus.Footnote 38
Especially this latter theme, the eroticization and sensualization of motherhood and pregnancy, appealed to a widespread number of feminists, as is illustrated by Barbara Sichtermann, one of the intellectual protagonists of the New Left and 1970s feminism. Sichtermann's work, in taking up and condensing these themes in the early 1980s, can be read as a culmination and synthesis of the transformations under way. Describing breastfeeding as “a sexual potency,”Footnote 39 Sichtermann maintained that motherhood and breastfeeding once had a decidedly sexual and erotic quality to them that now needed to be reclaimed by women of the movement:
Meanwhile, the women's movement has changed this situation—not so much through searching for words for sensual experiences in reproduction as through births. There has been and there is a feminist “Yes to the child” or: a practical critique of Simone de Beauvoir.… True to the New Women's Movement's temperament, which is never sparked by theory, but has always been actionist in the best sense, they heighten their experience, they spread their knowledge through the experiment. Feminist-children (Feministinnenkinder) are carried, birthed and breastfed. The “others” of a new, still hesitantly accepted and expressed sexual experience are unborn and newborn children. Men appear here too—but as fathers, as part of a ménage á trois. The couple, which is the new center of attention, is called woman and child. (Also, less frequently, man and child.) A couple that seeks pleasure. A couple that makes love.Footnote 40
In this quote, several shifts already apparent in previous accounts are made even more explicit. First, drawing on the writings of the French obstetrician-gynecologist Frédérick Leboyer,Footnote 41 Sichtermann described the relationship between mother and baby in distinctly sexual terms, with the two of them forming “a couple that makes love.” Second, Sichtermann launched an explicit attack at equality feminists like de Beauvoir, thus criticizing those strands of the movement that continued to see motherhood in terms of repression rather than liberation. Third, Sichtermann's quote illustrates the widespread and growing aversion to social theory and a preference for actionism (in the sense of a focus on practice) that gained currency within the New Women's Movement and the New Left more broadly in connection with the turn inward and the growing stress on emotion and experience. Sichtermann here seemed to yearn for something concrete, something in accordance with her feelings and her bodily desires rather than with abstract insights. She further highlighted this longing for an unmediated and immediate bodily experience:
The sensibility with which Leboyer guessed what a newborn, with its mouth opening to suckle, its scared searching body, its wildly thumping heart desires: a love act, deeply impressed me at the time I read the book.… With the love act, Leboyer gave a name to a hidden yet throbbing wish … It was the idea of the “love act with the child” that met the expectations that my body had long expressed. I did not want edification but something “serious,” something that could not be easily grasped, subdued by consciousness, by rationality, something riskier, something that was closer to a rush than to mere joy.Footnote 42
She accordingly emphasized the corporality of her wishes concerning a love relationship with her child—they resided within her body and merely needed to be uncovered; they were not the product of a thought process but again rooted in a “natural,” real desire that aimed at a transcendental experience. Going beyond Leboyer's theories, Sichtermann additionally framed the “breastfeeding-hours” as “a sexual act that produces (the continuation of) life and gives pleasure as we all know it (or wish to know it) from coitus….”Footnote 43 Importantly, this sensualization and sexualization of motherhood and breastfeeding, which could be dubbed a reversed oedipal wish, must, according to Sichtermann, be understood as “a horizon of female emancipation.”Footnote 44
Thus, for Mosler, Stark, and Sichtermann, the affirmation of motherhood as a positive, natural, and eroticized identity figured as a distinctively female path to emancipation. Motherhood and the female body became sites of a particularly feminine, maternal form of power, based on the idea of an exclusively female world that is independent of male participation.Footnote 45 For them, this seemingly depoliticized approach to motherhood comprised an activist dimension: motherhood as activism per se.
It was especially this claim to a liberating impetus that drew criticism from various other feminist and New Left voices. Most outspokenly, the New Left activist and resolute advocate of the sexual revolution Ulrike Heider launched a very polemical yet extremely sophisticated critique on what she termed a new trend of “erotic irrationalism,”Footnote 46 a tendency Heider spotted pervading both the New Left and the women's movement. Longing for physical and psychological transcendence, the proponents of “New Sensuality,” according to Heider, employed a depoliticized concept of pleasure and sexuality that drew on a “cult of the primal (Kult des Urpsrünglichen),”Footnote 47 romanticized motherhood as naturally good and showed a strong aversion to the Enlightenment ideal of reason. In trying to make sense of the return of nature that she observed in feminist and New Left circles, Heider drew on the Frankfurt School thinker Theodor W. Adorno: “Like so many times before, the force [Gewalt] of the ruling elites again appears in the iridescent guise of human nature, the nature of which Adorno said is ‘merely the scar tissue of mutilation’ in the ‘bourgeois context of delusion.’”Footnote 48 Accordingly, rather than recognizing—as Adorno had in the 1940s—how supposedly “natural” conditions were actually socially created in the bourgeois-capitalist system and its relations of production (which, among other things, rely on a sexed division of labor), West German feminists and New Left activists, according to Heider, regressed toward a re-ontologization these socially produced categories (and in so doing) were actually upholding of a patriarchal, capitalist society.
In an essay in Heider's edited volume, Hannelore Rath extended Heider's critique. She explicitly characterized the currents of “New Femininity” and “New Motherliness” as drawing on natural mysticism and myths of both magic and motherhood. She saw this natural mysticism in biologizing ideas about femininity and noted the importance of the reception of French theories inspired by Lacanian psychoanalysis and Derridean philosophy of language.Footnote 49 (French theorists like Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and Luce Irigaray—forming the core of the all-female writers' group écriture feminine—were, as Schulz has stressed, received in the West German movement and reinforced the ascendant framework of “cultural feminism.”)Footnote 50 Other commentators critical of these trends looked beyond theory to find explanations for the transformation they were witnessing.
In the edited volume Bauchlandungen. Abtreibung—Sexualität—Kinderwunsch (Belly Landings: Abortion—Sexuality—A Wish for a Child), Angelika Wetterer, while angry at women like Sichtermann and Stark (“I am tired of being told again and again what is supposed to be pleasurable for me”Footnote 51), interpreted the recourse to nature present in the “New Motherliness” writings as a way of legitimizing the wish for a child. In articulating their desire to become a mother in terms of a female “nature,” so Wetterer's reasoning went, many women tried to frame this wish as something other than an individual decision for which they could be blamed by those women in the movement who continued to adhere to the opinion that women should beware of having children if they wanted to emancipate themselves.Footnote 52 In a different publication, Ursula Pasero and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, both sociologists and active 1970s feminists, saw the turn to motherhood and its exaltation as an attractive identity as being motivated by deep-seated social reasons. They hypothesized that late-capitalist forms of socialization motivated many women to turn to the nuclear family, which was imagined as the only space free from the all-pervasive logic of efficiency and rationality.Footnote 53
In sum, in the mid-1970s and early 1980s, the West German New Women's Movement was increasingly occupied with debates about womanhood and motherhood. The latter not only assumed unprecedented importance within feminist discussions but was imbued with new qualities. Motherhood, pregnancy, and breastfeeding were glorified as sensual and erotic, sometimes even sexual experiences, which answered a woman's supposedly visceral desires and provided many women, disillusioned with the New Left and the women's movement, an alternate and appealing identity. This heightened engagement with concepts and practices of motherhood and pregnancy and the unmistakably bodily conceptualization of both also played out in another, intricately related field, which further elucidates the specificities of perceptions of motherhood and sexuality in the West German feminist context: new reproductive technologies (NRT).
The “Greening” of the New Women's Movement: Ecofeminism and Reproductive Technologies
Connections between the West German ecology and peace movement and the New Women's Movement started forming as early as 1979, when women began organizing themselves in groups such as the Women's Congress against Nukes and Militarism and Women for Peace, marking the beginning of the “‘greening’ of the women's movement”Footnote 54 and giving renewed impetus to the growing maternalist notions that had emerged within the movement. The peace and ecology movement of the early 1980s played a crucial role in politicizing women who had formerly not been engaged in any of the new social movements. As Belinda Davis argues, “the peace movement united feminist numbers in a way that even opposition to the criminalization of the anti-abortion law §218 had not been able to achieve,”Footnote 55 with many of these women subsequently turning to the New Women's Movement. Just how intertwined the fight for women's rights had become with the efforts of the ecology and peace movement is illustrated by a widely received 1980 speech by Helke Sander, entitled “Love and Medium-Range Missiles,” in which she connected the feminist struggle to a call for resistance against the Pershing-II-double-resolution.Footnote 56
Katharina Karcher notes that 1980s feminists, despite their marked disagreements in other contexts, “were united in their opposition to nuclear arms.”Footnote 57 But Sander's speech revealed the growing rifts between different strands within the West German New Women's Movement. Although an increasing number of feminists were sympathetic toward the ecology and peace movement, those aligned with Alice Schwarzer's Emma (the West German voice for equality feminism) in contrast to the West Berlin-based, more left-wing Courage, were suspicious of the implications of the notion that women were peaceful, and men aggressive.Footnote 58 Such stereotypical ideas were widespread in the women's peace movement.Footnote 59
The growing overlap between the women's movement and the ecology movement led to two separate but interlinked developments. First, feminists in West Germany became very much involved with the Green Party following its foundation in 1980, approaching it as a potential “mouthpiece” for their own political agenda. Despite the traditional skepticism that the autonomous women's movement held toward party politics, women like Regina Michalik, who had been active in the women's movement before joining the Green Party and who soon became a Green functionary, regarded the new party as a tool for the feminist movement to pursue its aims institutionally. Proposing the notion of a “proxy politics” (Stellvertreterinnenpolitik), Michalik regarded the women's movement as the “secret basis” of the Green Party's women's politics and encouraged 1980s feminists to “use” (ge-brauchen) and “functionalize” the party for their political agenda.Footnote 60
Second, certain strands of the New Women's Movement sought to engage with ecofeminist positions theoretically. Promoting a dehierarchization of the relationship between human and nonhuman nature, pioneering US-American ecofeminists such as Carolyn Merchant and Mary Daly saw a connection between earth and women. The exploitation of both, they held, was rooted in a “patriarchal appropriation of fertility.”Footnote 61 Tying men to the essentially destructive technological world, women were once again conceptualized as enjoying a special spiritual connection to nature in the ecofeminist worldview, an image that socialist and liberal feminists had desperately tried to combat. In this context, ecofeminists developed a radical critique of science in general as a male-dominated institution serving a patriarchically structured society and of genetic and reproductive technologies in particular as the epitome of male control over nature and the female body.Footnote 62 In West Germany, the “Bielefeld Approach,” a variant of ecofeminism developed by Maria Mies, Claudia von Wehrlhof, and Angelika Bennholdt-Thomsen, garnered support throughout the country in the mid-1980s.Footnote 63
The implications that the growing importance of the ecofeminist strand carried for conceptualizations of motherhood within the New Women's Movement is equally reflected in the realm of anti-reproductive technology agitation. After the first baby conceived through in-vitro fertilization technique (IVF) was born in the United Kingdom in 1978 and the first German “test-tube baby” came into the world in 1982, West German feminists were increasingly preoccupied with discussions surrounding genetic and reproductive technologies.Footnote 64 From the mid-1980s onward, women active in the ecofeminist spectrum as well as in the Green Party started organizing and participating in nationwide and international conferences in protest against NRT. In 1985 the first such conference, organized by Maria Mies in Bonn under the headline “Women against Genetic and Reproductive Engineering,” drew two thousand participants.Footnote 65 Framing reproductive technologies as a “declaration of war against women and nature,” the demands drawn up in the congress's resolution included a call for women to resist the “dismemberment and expropriation of their bodies in the service of profit.”Footnote 66 The resolution further demanded an end to human genetic counseling centers and a halt to training male gynecologists. Positively receiving the anti-reproductive technologies work of American ecofeminist Carolyn Merchant, especially her The Death of Nature, the leading West German feminist journal Beiträge für feministische Theorie und Praxis agreed with Merchant's claim that NRT downgraded women to the status of machines and violently subjugated nature, which—also according to Merchant—had formerly been recognized as a “female organism.”Footnote 67 Motherhood, in this context, was thus tied ex-negativo to notions of nature, non-artificiality, and spirituality.
In the context of anti-reproductive technology activism, West German feminists built alliances with activists from all over the world, as exemplified by the Feminist International Network on the New Reproductive Technologies (FINNRET, from 1985 FINRRAGE), founded in 1984 in the Netherlands. Within the framework of this loosely organized international network, West German ecofeminists participated in and co-organized international conferences aimed at resisting the further development and implementation of NRT. Despite this international engagement, the specificity of the German discourse on these issues becomes apparent when looking at a report authored by Maria Mies and Claudia Roth (still today a leading politician in the German Green Party) on a conference held by FINNRET in Sweden in 1985. Lamenting the lack of criticism of technology and the comfort with an “ideology of calculability (Planbarkeit)” exhibited by her French counterparts, Mies was shocked by how French feminists cooperated with the state in “the economy of fertility.”Footnote 68 Rather than protesting the use of NRT, French feminists, Mies noted, were actively involved in the scientific projects sponsored by the state as well as in societal discourses surrounding “artificial motherhood.”Footnote 69
To be sure, (feminist) critiques of NRT were not limited to the German context. Leena Schmitter, for example, shows how certain Swiss feminists criticized the development of prenatal diagnostics “as a modern form of Social Darwinism and the first step toward a neo-eugenics,”Footnote 70 and, in 1993, the Canadian disability and women's rights activist Maria Barile warned of the threat NRT would invariably pose to the disabled community.Footnote 71
However, NRT assumed a special meaning in the German context, where it was and is still fiercely contested. The degree of controversy is illustrated by the comparably strict Embryo Protection Act (EPA), passed by the German Parliament in 1990, which banned surrogacy and egg donations,Footnote 72 as well as by the ubiquitous framing of NRT with reference to Germany's Nazi past. For example, the signatories of the resolution, “Women against genetic engineering and reproductive technology,” which emerged from the Bonn conference, referred to reproductive technologies as a “declaration of war against women and nature” and described NRT as “weapons of destruction” engineered by “desk perpetrators” (“Schreibtisch—Täter”). They further warned against the resulting “fascist selection and eradication politics” (“Auslese- und Ausmerze-Politik”) and refused to participate in a “negative eugenics” that would entail the “classification of children as ‘inferior’ and superior’” (“Einteilung von Kindern in ‘minderwertige’ und ‘hochwertige’”).Footnote 73 Even more glaringly, Maria Mies framed NRT as a “new eugenics on a global scale compared to which Hitler's racial politics were child's play.”Footnote 74 Drawing on Dagmar Herzog's and Johanna Schoen's analysis of German hostility toward NRT as connected to an “unwillingness to engage in a careful analysis and debate about the differences between Nazi eugenics, euthanasia, and contemporary reproductive choices,”Footnote 75 such statements can be interpreted as a refusal of meaningful public discourse about National Socialist crimes against the disabled.
In the context of ecofeminism, which was closely tied to, yet not fully congruent with mobilization against NRT, motherhood symbolized a sense of immediacy, spontaneity, and naturalness, which was linked to the female body as a site of “realness” or “non-artificiality.” This particular strand of thought gained prominence in the mid-1980s, yet at the time still constituted a mere sideshow within the New Women's Movement, whose preoccupations at that time remained motherhood and pregnancy's links to the realms of pleasure and sensuality. This would, however, change in 1986 when the Chernobyl catastrophe hit large parts of central and eastern Europe, functioning as a catalyst for the ecofeminist trends already underway. Concomitantly, prevailing conceptualizations of motherhood within the movement changed, too.
“The Chernobylian Mother Animal”: Maternalism and Mother Earth
In 1987, the feminist philosopher and activist Annegret Stopczyk noted that “80% of the Chernobyl initiatives are women's and mother's initiatives.”Footnote 76 Although we cannot know how exact this number is, Stopczyk's statement nevertheless points to a strong involvement among mothers and women in the protest movement that sprang up across the Federal Republic shortly after the Chernobyl catastrophe on April 26, 1986. That catastrophe resulted in nuclear fallout across large parts of eastern and central Europe. These initiatives, led by the so called “Chernobyl mothers,” found expression in regular demonstrations against nuclear technology, self-help groups where mothers could exchange advice on (breast)feeding their small children after the nuclear fallout, and, as I argue, a reconceptualization of motherhood itself as the embodiment of a pure and holy form of nature, femininity, and Leiblichkeit that figured as the antidote to a supposedly male technological world.
Interestingly, many of the “Chernobyl mothers” had not been part of the women's movement before the 1986 catastrophe, let alone its ecofeminist strand. As the Munich-based initiative Mütter gegen Atomkraft (Mothers Against Nuclear Energy) reported in June 1986: “Mothers who have never been active in politics contact us.”Footnote 77 The nuclear disaster's particular impact on mothers as an apparent politicizing factor was related to the gender-specific influence the catastrophe exerted: the everyday life of many mothers was significantly complicated as they, the primary caregivers of their children, not only had to shower their children every time they went outside but also come up with food options that contrasted with their usually preferred selections. Instead of fresh vegetables and milk, they now had to rely on canned food, a necessity that many perceived as especially distressing in the context of a trend toward organic local and healthy foods.Footnote 78 Indeed, the consequences of Chernobyl proved an outright shock to those for whom nature had gone from a source of utmost consolation and hope to one of hostility and danger, a transformation upsetting the very foundations of their beliefs, lifestyle, and oftentimes even identities.Footnote 79
In addition to formerly politically inactive women, Chernobyl also changed the political lives of women who had been actively involved in the women's movement's “social feminist” strand. For Annegret Stopczyk, for example, Chernobyl proved a revelatory event of life-changing quality. Writing in the anthology Mütter an die Macht (Mothers Rise to Power), a publication that came out of the Green Party-sponsored congress “Mütter werden laut” (“Mothers raise their voices”), Stopczyk told the story of her withdrawal from the “male world,” explaining why she left the university:
Before Chernobyl, I did not use the word “mother,” at most “woman with child.” Mother—this reminded me of “primitive biology”.… I used to be this “autonomous individual,” who, from Plato over Kant to Sartre, had no other goal than self-liberation and autonomy. With this, I realized, without being aware of it, the masculine ideal…. All my enthusiasm for reason (Vernunftbegeisterung) collapsed like a house of cards. All of a sudden, I understood the death-side of the future.… Now I understood what patriarchy is, indeed on my own body relentlessly and hard. For the first time I said out loudly: “We mothers!,” and there was more to it than just “woman with child.” This was my center, there was my strength, that was where I became unrestrainedly tender for all born living beings.Footnote 80
Stopczyk's personal development is emblematic of tendencies that began to gain traction in the West German New Women's Movement: the labeling of reason and science as “masculine” and destructive, the affirmation of “mother” as a positive identity, and an emphasis on the body as itself an organ of knowledge (Erkenntnis). Stopczyk's article continued with a consideration of the dangers of reproductive technology and, tellingly, thanked one of the pioneering West German ecofeminists, Claudia von Wehrlhof, for her inspiring article in one of the “Chernobyl mothers’” seminal publications, the anthology Tschernobyl hat unser Leben verändert: vom Ausstieg der Frauen (Chernobyl Has Changed Our Life: On the Dropping Out of Women).
Sparking a contentious and polemical debate in major left-wing and feminist magazines such as taz, Pflasterstrand, and Tarantel, Wehrlhof's article “We Will Not Sacrifice the Lives of Our Children to Progress” comprises many of the major themes that came to the fore after Chernobyl. Most prominently, like Stopczyk, Wehrlhof claimed to have gained a new understanding of herself as a mother and as an individual through bodily experience and emotion: “On that day, a week after Chernobyl, when I first saw a piece of hell, my body started to react. First there was an inner quiver and shiver. Then a flutter and shudder. Fear sprang into my face and shook me like a wild animal while my teeth were chattering due to the cold.”Footnote 81 And she went further, describing how she wanted to protect her son from the (male) state: “I know that they want to get him, in school, in the military. But I am not yet ready for it. I have not yet bristled, not yet bared my teeth, not yet sharpened my claws and not yet prepared to leap. We are still like a mother animal (Muttertier) and its young, who tussle in the sun protected by the herd. It's just unfair. I, the mother, am already disabled, am shoved aside, cannot even try to perform my task of defending my young against danger….”Footnote 82
Making the explicit comparison to the animal world and labeling herself a Muttertier, Wehrlhof's relationship to her son acquired an instinctual connotation. She, the mother, instinctively knew how to act; she understood the situation through her body, which seems to have reacted to the new situation automatically, without her being able or wanting to control it. Wehrlhof thus imbued her body with knowledge. That Wehrlhof thought of this instinctual form of parenting as an exclusively female quality becomes clear in the following quote: “And that is where the pain and the grief about the damage to nature, of the children as well as the environment, changes into a feeling of rage such as I have never experienced it before. It is this big, simple, primeval, incontrovertible, unmistakable mother-rage (Mutterwut). It is a rage that is not peaceful, not quiet and not powerless.… It is female rage because it is directed against the male assault on life—and that was historically always male.”Footnote 83 The rage that Wehrlhof described was explicitly female and set against a male world, which was identified with the “assault on life” through men's alleged connection to technology and progress. Importantly, by rooting this specifically female quality deeply in her body, Wehrlhof essentialized her mothering style as a quasi-biological constant that was part of an exclusively female world. In addition, her “big, simple, primeval, incontrovertible” rage illustrates a broader trend, which Ulrike Heider criticized as a “cult of the primal”Footnote 84 and a desire for immediacy and unmediatedness (Unmittelbarkeit).
A further theme illustrated by Wehrlhof that acquired new salience after Chernobyl is the supposed special connection between mothers, on the one hand, and nature and life itself, on the other, which was again assumed to be produced through the female or maternal body. Just as Wehrlhof emphasized the power of life and love,Footnote 85 Annegret Stopczyk claimed that “mothers have a more immediate connection to life” and further that “women, especially mothers, currently feel in a bodily (leiblich) fashion how life screams for help.”Footnote 86 Similarly, in a talk given at the Frauenmuseum (women's museum) in Wiesbaden, the ecofeminist sociologist and energetic proponent of the “mother's movement” Maria Mies, drawing on Carolyn Merchant, proclaimed that “earlier, the universe, the earth was viewed as a living organism, in fact as a female organism. The earth was a woman and one had to treat Mother Earth with respect.”Footnote 87 Accordingly, the concept of motherhood as described by these feminists became closely tied to mothers’ supposedly more immediate and natural connection to “life” and to the earth.
The extent to which these transformations are demonstrative of a larger trend and not merely confined to the intellectual realm is illustrated by various leaflets from mothers’ organizations. For example, one leaflet promoted a women's weekend seminar entitled “Of Our Treatment of Nature: The Event of Birth and the Atomic Threat.” During the seminar, the flyer proclaimed, women would learn about the historical changes that mark the “bodily experience” of giving birth and discuss it in conjunction with the events of Chernobyl.Footnote 88 Similarly, in another leaflet, the Consulting Center for Natural Birth and Parenting in Munich called for children, parents, and pregnant women to attend a demonstration against atomic energy.Footnote 89
As these sources indicate, the Chernobyl catastrophe was a catalyst for a reconfiguration of the debate about conceptualizations of motherhood within the West German New Women's Movement. Although the corporeality of motherhood remained of overarching importance, the notions of eroticization and sensualization that had marked the specific bodiliness of motherhood in the late 1970s gave way to a new form of bodiliness characterized by an emphasis on instinct and nature and marked by a much more pessimistic, at times even apocalyptic, outlook. Wehrlhof's pain and grief “about damaged nature,” her need to protect her son from the “male assault on life,” as well as Stopczyk's dramatic formulation that “life screams for help” illustrate the sense of an immediate threat that now permeated notions of motherhood. Concomitantly, maternalism became marked by a more decisive turn against the “male” world and everything associated with it, such as the state, the institution of science, reason, and technology.
Despite its widespread popularity within the movement, however, the new, “natural” conceptualization of motherhood was also harshly attacked by those feminists who continued to adhere to the initial political goals of the post-1968 (women's) movement. Central platforms for these critical reactions were the New Left magazines Pflasterstrand (Frankfurt) and Konkret (Hamburg), while other publications like taz and Wochenzeitung published both positive and negative reactions.
One of the most fervent critics was Gitta Mohrdieck, an important figure in the Frankfurt-based feminist scene, whose polemic “Das Tschernobyle Muttertier” (“The Chernobylian Mother Animal”) was published in Pflasterstrand in reply to von Wehrlhof's article. After ridiculing Wehrlhof's self-designation as a “mother animal” and her concomitant emphasis on instinctual knowledge, Mohrdieck concluded: “And although I am willing to regard mother [von Wehrlhof] as a pathological case,… she is unfortunately not a singular case. And that's why it is important to be alert. Woman and nature are for a long time now no longer a special topic of declared antifeminists…. And that these engaged mothers no longer critique the division of labor between the sexes … is a big step backward.”Footnote 90 Eliciting widespread outrage among the “Chernobyl mothers,” Mohrdieck's article sparked furious replies from, among others, ecofeminist Maria MiesFootnote 91 and von Wehrlhof herself,Footnote 92 in turn prompting polemical replies from Mohrdieck and journalist Esther Schapira.Footnote 93
The aggressive and polemical tone as well as the marked division between the two camps in this debate indicate the increasingly palpable split that ran through the movement. Diverging conceptualizations of motherhood and its heightened salience after Chernobyl came to function as a prism through which much broader political differences were articulated. These differences not only pertained to the image of women and their alleged relationship with nature but extended to the general political-strategical questions the New Left was trying to come to terms with. For the West German New Women's Movement, however, the question of motherhood continued to constitute one of the most contested issues in the movement. This process culminated in the conference “Leben mit Kindern—Mütter werden laut” (“Living with Children—Mothers Raise Their Voices”) and the concomitant publication of the Müttermanifest.
“In Our Identity Mainly Mothers”: The Müttermanifest
In November 1986, approximately five hundred women attended the conference “Living with Children—Mothers Raise Their Voices.” The conference took place in Bonn and was organized by a number of women associated with the Green Party, most prominently the local politician Dorothee Paß-Weingartz and the leading German advocate of difference feminism Gisela Erler. As explained before, the congress resulted in the publication of the Müttermanifest in 1987, a pamphlet that turned many previous feminist demands on their head. In addition to the proclamation that “motherhood is beautiful,” the defamation of nonmothers, and the assertion that the signatories at this point in their lives identified as “mainly mothers,”Footnote 94 the manifesto demanded more financial support for private childcare work and contended that mother politics were above the traditional left-right schema of politics, thereby explicitly taking distance from the new women's movement's origins within the New Left. Similar to the “Chernobyl mothers,” the Müttermanifest drew a special connection between mothers (in contrast to “mere” women) and nature: “Our expertise is missing everywhere in a world so removed from mothers, children, and nature.”Footnote 95
The publication of the Müttermanifest, as a culmination of the increased salience of discussions about motherhood within the New Women's Movement, constitutes a crucial breaking point for feminist politics in the Green Party, and therefore, by extension, for wide parts of the late-1980s movement. As the political scientist Eva Kolinsky asserted in 1989, “many of the women who initiated the movement in the seventies or who identified with its causes in the 1980s, now belong to the Green sphere of voters and party activists.”Footnote 96 This is confirmed by the fact that in 1987, 47 percent of all Green Party voters also supported the women's movement and almost 70 percent of Emma readers elected the Greens, despite Alice Schwarzer's criticism of the new party as not radical enough in terms of feminism.Footnote 97 Although it is important not to conflate the New Women's Movement with the Green Party, these numbers indicate that, on an institutional level, the Greens represented the political interests of a majority of the women engaged in the New Women's Movement, especially in light of the fact that Emma readers belonged to that part of the movement that was actually less inclined toward the ecology movement than former Courage readers.
The significance of the Müttermanifest for West German feminism within and beyond the Green Party is confirmed by the shift in women's politics that followed the publication and the subsequent split of the Green women. At a federal delegates’ conference of the Green Party in May 1987, the “mother politicians” founded a sub–working group “mothers” within the working group “women” (Bundesarbeitsgemeinschaft Frauen) after having been denied their own working group, thereby also institutionally splitting the Green women into two opposing camps.Footnote 98 Attempts at reconciliation proved fruitless, and the political line of the mother group would soon weaken the power of the working group “women,” which had hitherto been the recognized party organization for women's politics, advocating a decidedly equality-oriented feminist line.Footnote 99 Following these developments, both Claudia Pinl and Gaby Brüssow recognized a shift in the Green Party's principal orientation concerning women and motherhood: from women's politics with a focus on the structural oppression of women to a “gender politics” (Geschlechterpolitik) that unreflectingly ushered in renewed acceptance of the housewife model (in which the woman stays at home to care for the children while the man takes up waged labor) and introduced new ambiguity around abortion, departing from the movement's initially clear pro-choice position.Footnote 100
Despite the undeniable importance that party infighting between “Realos” (that is, political realists) and “Fundis” (that is, those adhering to the radical, decidedly left-wing values of the party) had for the rift between the Green women, the latter's fate stands emblematically for the ever-growing splits within the New Women's Movement, as confirmed by the former influential Green Party politician Verena Krieger. Reflecting on the Greens' changing position toward abortion, Krieger claimed: “The Greens … don't stand alone with their new/old morals. As so often, they prove to be the mirror image of what happens in the ‘movement,’ [that is, the post–New Left “scene”] maybe even assume a pioneering role in it.”Footnote 101 Precisely because, as a party, the Greens needed to formulate a coherent program that members of different submovements and strands could agree on, the party's very existence forced contradictions and conflicts glaringly into view and put pressure on radical positions.Footnote 102
The events surrounding the publication of the Müttermanifest caused wide-reaching personal and political fallings-out within the women's movement more broadly. A particularly striking example for this is the disagreement between Paß-Weingartz and Emma editor-in-chief Alice Schwarzer. After Katja Leyrer, a political scientist and feminist activist, covered the congress for Emma and wrote a scathing review,Footnote 103 Paß-Weingartz was “extremely angry” and called on Schwarzer to allow her to publish a counterstatement, which Schwarzer agreed to. However, Schwarzer edited Paß-Weingartz's article heavily, crossing out more than half of her text, which, in turn, led another Emma editor, Cornelia Filter, to empathize with Paß-Weingartz and express her regret over Schwarzer's actions.Footnote 104 The struggle about concepts and practices of motherhood that cumulated in the Müttermanifest was thus not a fringe issue but, at the time, formed the very heart of the crisis within the women's movement.Footnote 105
The ensuing struggles among the Green women and the split of working groups meant that one of the movement's most important institutional spaces for political agenda-setting, the Green Party, adopted a newly ambiguous stance toward various initial aims of the movement, such as the demand for public childcare, a clear and unambiguous pro-choice stance, and the rejection of the housewife model. All of which, in turn, profoundly weakened the feminist movement's political power.
Conclusion: New Maternalism between Universality and Uniqueness
“Despite its apparent endorsement of normative gender relations, maternity,” according to Joan W. Scott, “has sometimes served to consolidate feminist identification.”Footnote 106 Examining French feminist history, Scott points to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century feminists such as Olympe de Gouges and Jeanne Deroin, who called on the idea of maternity to unite women around feminist issues. The invocation of motherhood in the context of women's movements is thus not confined to the West German New Women's Movement—nor is it, in itself, necessarily connected to essentializing ideas about femininity. Moreover, some trends in the West German discussion were echoed in other countries, as the transnational popularity of French feminist thinkers like Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray showed. Likewise, as the establishment of FINNRET illustrates, skepticism toward reproductive technology united feminists from a variety of national backgrounds.
This, however, does not mean that there are no national specificities in how conceptualizations of motherhood were taken up and spread through the women's movement and negotiated in the context of national histories. The salience that changing concepts of motherhood assumed for the West German movement in the 1970s and 1980s can, with regard to the eventual political split about these contrasting conceptions and the prominent place the issue occupied in public feminist debates, be considered unique.Footnote 107 Indeed, the prominent and contentious role maternalism played in the West German context was—the language in this debate shows—also linked to the country's recent history of National Socialism.
Precisely in the mid-1980s, West Germans, according to historians Geoff Eley and Anson Rabinbach, were deeply engaged in renewed attempts at coming to terms with the legacy of Nazism.Footnote 108 The debates about motherhood in the women's movement were not exempt from this general attempt to grapple with the past. In fact, from the early 1980s onward, with the onset of reproductive technologies and throughout the post-Chernobyl reconceptions of motherhood, feminist discourses were saturated with references to National Socialism.
Although Nazism began to be implicitly invoked in the context of activism against reproductive and genetic technology in 1985, its usage as a reference point only increased in the wake of the Chernobyl catastrophe. Almost every contribution in the essay collection Tschernobyl hat unser Leben verändert compared the situation of mothers after Chernobyl to the immediate postwar years, thereby relating the nuclear catastrophe to the Third Reich. In addition to numerous invocations of “desk perpetrators,”Footnote 109 the figure of the “rubble woman” was a popular notion through which the “Chernobyl mothers” made sense of their situation. For example, the women's initiative from Gelsenkirchen diagnosed the resurfacing of “our rubble women mentality,”Footnote 110 and the feminist magazine Tarantel proclaimed that “we will not again be the rubble women of your male catastrophes.”Footnote 111 Implicitly portraying National Socialism and the Holocaust as a “male catastrophe,” the editors of Tarantel used the Chernobyl context to make an argument about women's role in National Socialism. Then as in the 1980s, women suffered from a disaster engineered by men; they were not perpetrators but victims. Similar, self-styled forms of victimhood and claiming distance from perpetration were widely exhibited in the aftermath of Chernobyl. Anke Martiny, publishing in Tschernobyl hat unser Leben verändert, emphasized the “female virtue of disobedience”Footnote 112 and the Hamburger Frauenzeitung headlined “Chernobyl: gas chambers without walls” and asked: “Do you want total progress?”Footnote 113 thereby alluding to Joseph Goebbel's infamous Sportpalast speech. Explicitly likening the situation after Chernobyl to the murder of the European Jews, with the Germans now imagined as the victims, the Hamburger Frauenzeitung's apologetic strategy appealed to many.
A particularly striking example of the specific ways in which conceptualizations of motherhood were intricately intertwined with attempts at coming to terms with the German past is von Wehrlhof's article that was so widely discussed for its “mother animal” metaphor. In a breathtaking argumentative turn, she concluded that Chernobyl and reproductive technologies alike constituted a continuation of National Socialism:
When also the healthy have to reckon with perpetual medical serial examinations and human experiments.—When women are no longer uncontrolledly allowed to become and remain pregnant, when “unfit” mothers or “bad” housewives are ordered to have abortions, sterilization or genetic manipulations and/or their children are being taken away and when “fit” women, on the other hand, will be more or less forcibly artificially inseminated und made into true baby machines for the precious uncontaminated semen from the time before Day X … I also realize that much of this hellish vision exists and has existed anyways, for example in German fascism, also without an MCA [Maximum Credible Accident, i.e., Chernobyl]. The MCA has not just changed everything, but also simply continued, amplified, and finally pushed through much.Footnote 114
Equating the possible use of reproductive and genetic technologies after Chernobyl to the abhorrent practices of eugenics in the name of the “Aryan” race during National Socialism, von Wehrlhof here effectively downplayed the racist ideology and practice of maternalism and eugenics characteristic of the Third Reich. As her argumentation shows, the debates about motherhood were also and importantly a vehicle through which women negotiated the legacy of the Nazi past without grappling with it directly. In essence, they were coming to terms without the past.Footnote 115 To put it another way: conceptualizations of motherhood that assumed a sharp division between a destructive, technocratic male world and a life-giving, sensual female world functioned also as apologetic strategies that exculpated German women from their responsibility for the Holocaust and other mass atrocities during the Third Reich.
