With the “open letter” against the arming of Ukraine, she once again put herself under fire. That’s where Germany’s quarrelsome longest-serving feminist likes it best anyway.
Alice Schwarzer at the age of 34 in March 1977. The first issue of “Emma” had just appeared, and she is still the editor today.
To get an idea of Alice Schwarzer, where do you start? Especially since everyone already has one. The woman turns 80 this year, she was a public figure from a young age and has never stopped speaking since, the sheer volume of material is overwhelming. Schwarzer calls himself an “institution”. Some call her an old feminist, which Schwarzer denies.
In any case, she’s not young anymore, and young feminists can’t do much with her. Neither do you with them. She finds them ignorant, oblivious to history, harmful to feminism. It doesn’t occur to Schwarzer that concepts of feminism other than their own could be valid. The legendary TV show from 2001, where Alice Schwarzer meets the starlet Verona Feldbusch, is not just fun to watch. It is also meaningful in retrospect, in what has been said and what has not been said. The alienation from today’s feminists is already present there, but nobody suspected it at the time. More on that.
Alice Schwarzer is currently on fire again. Last weekend, your magazine Emma published an “open letter” from 28 intellectuals and artists to the German Chancellor, in which they called on him not to deliver heavy weapons to Ukraine. The letter and the whole process triggered a heated debate. As a result, Schwarzer found herself in interviews, in one of which she excitedly spoke of “Hungarian” instead of “Ukrainian”. Some wanted to assume her incipient senility. That would definitely be wrong. A certain stubbornness – definitely. However, it is not age related.
Let’s start with her herself, after all she does that too. Her autobiography has two volumes, “CV” and “Life’s Work”. She wrote the second one during the corona pandemic, so it’s still quite new. The work is particularly interesting as an audio book, because Alice Schwarzer reads it herself, and after a while the listener can tell from the tone of her voice that she is enjoying something. “Ms. Schwarzer, how can you stand it?” That is the question she is asked most frequently, Schwarzer reads out loud, for example, and her voice conveys: I can stand it fantastically! I like it so much!
One is made into a woman
Nevertheless, resistance, perseverance, that is what characterizes her from her youth. She was born out of wedlock in Wuppertal, grew up with her grandparents, her mother doesn’t care, her grandmother is difficult, only her grandfather is caring, an idol. Black learns that women are not automatically maternal. The seeds of their belief that one is not born a woman, but made into a woman, are sown here. She doesn’t do Abitur, goes to Paris, comes back, works in journalism, goes back to Paris, studies without Abitur, she is good at speaking and writing, publishes books, goes on television. She can’t be braked.
Being unwanted was an incentive. She founded the magazine “Emma” because her “Spiegel” colleagues didn’t want her. Publisher Rudolf Augstein had offered her a job as a reporter at his magazine with oysters and champagne, that was in 1973, but the editors were against “the feminist”, she would have been the first woman with such a post, it was her dream – she withdrew. And founded «Emma».
The paper was way ahead of its time. She is still the boss there today, after an attempt in 2008 to install a successor failed. She had already found them. The TV journalist Lisa Ortgies should be. She started – and after a few weeks threw down in exasperation. Queen Alice couldn’t deal with the fact that her crown princess wasn’t silent, but had her own ideas and wanted to change things, it’s rumored.
There is no known battle that Schwarzer shied away from, and no one will deny that it made a big difference, particularly in getting rid of Section 218, which criminalized abortion. She was behind the “Stern” title “We’ve had an abortion”, inspired by a similar action in France. 1974 was the decisive Bundestag debate; Chancellor Willy Brandt, also born out of wedlock, left the plenary hall during the vote.
In 1992 at a women’s rights event in Cologne.
Women and men as mutilated people
“I don’t believe in the nature of woman or man,” writes Schwarzer. “Women are by no means naturally peaceful and men are not necessarily violent. Women are not naturally motherly and men are not uncaring.” The supposedly male and female characteristics are the result of deep imprints, long traditions and rebukes that are renewed every day: “The result is the mutilation of people into women and men.”
Her ideal is “the holistic human being”, not a multitude of genders. Everyone should be able to be whatever they want to be. As a result, Schwarzer was already in favor of equal access for women to the Bundeswehr in 1978, which brought her new enemies. In 1979, Emma called for maternity leave for men as well – it was introduced in 2007. The newspaper also called for same-sex marriages early on.
With Angela Merkel in November 2000 – five years before the start of Merkel’s chancellorship. The CDU also sent Schwarzer several times to the Federal Assembly for the election of the Federal President.
Black has plenty of opponents. And of course she’s annoying. She is macho, smug, domineering, authoritarian. She is said to be better with men than with women. The aura as a moral authority has vanished since it became known that it had evaded taxes for years. Since she has been critical of political Islam, she has also been considered right-wing, and her criticism of the identitarian left brought her the same accusation. She is also considered transphobic.
In that light, it’s no wonder she clashes with today’s feminists. “Women have been abolished behind the ideological construct of identities,” complains Schwarzer, referring to the newfangled fragmentation into countless genders. Instead of standing on the shoulders of deserving feminists, they started again from scratch. That only benefits the patriarchy: “The lack of history is the biggest obstacle on the way to true emancipation.”
«Didn’t know you were like that‘have a perfect body»
Although – when is one actually emancipated? Back to the TV show mentioned at the beginning. Alice Schwarzer, then 58, met Feldbusch, then 33. In the book, Schwarzer describes her thoughts at home before the show – what do I wear? She vacillates between “factual” and “wanting to please” and opts for “factual”: a wide black dress and flat shoes. Feldbusch appears in high heels in a shimmering white pants suit. Narrow cut, three-piece. In the course of the conversation she takes off her jacket and sits there in a waistcoat, with slender bare upper arms and a magnificent décolleté. She had previously spent four hours in the mask.
Now she is being attacked by Schwarzer. She is regressive, represents the “available woman”, one cannot stand firmly in life in high heels, Feldbusch harms feminism. In turn, she easily parries the attacks and quickly has the laughter on her side, for example when the moderator announces the two as “body meets brain” and Feldbusch says to Schwarzer: “I didn’t even know that you had such a perfect body.” When Schwarzer doesn’t understand it right away because, as so often, she didn’t really listen, Feldbusch offers to “say it again slowly”. After further attacks, Feldbusch asks: “What is unemancipated about me?” , and Schwarzer replies: «The image of women that you depict! You play the bitch!’ – “I’m a female,” counters Feldbusch and stands up – “this here, that’s all I am.”
In the book, Schwarzer still writes in contempt 20 years later about Feldbusch. She was out of the question, a puppet, a robot: “She shocked and pityed me at the same time.” Feldbusch doesn’t allow himself to be belittled in front of the camera, Schwarzer should actually like it when a woman just does what she wants. That she asserts herself. “But not like that!” Schwarzer seems to be thinking. As if this weren’t the “right” feminism. Schwarzer sees a “mafia-like structure” of backers at work who only earn money with the artificial figure. She completely denies Feldbusch that she has her own personality or intellectual achievement.
But Feldbusch could also be seen as the ancestor of today’s «boss bitches». These women make it clear who has the sexual power, namely them, not the men. No wonder black people struggle with this, because their world is always male-dominated, and sex is mostly about power and submission. Pornography is always degrading and a woman can never engage in prostitution on her own. Young feminists see this rigid and limited image of femininity as outdated.
“I’m a person who fought for everything he is today,” says Alice Schwarzer in her audio book, adding with satisfaction: “And that was almost always fun.” Now her life has been filmed – the film will be presented next week. His name is, of course, «Alice Schwarzer».
