»Not only did I make myself popular with the book, but I didn’t think first of all about the professional world when writing it.«(Katharina Wesselmann, Greek and Latin studies, Christian-Albrechts-University Kiel)
The impulse to look at the old texts from the perspective of women’s rights first came from the USA. As early as 2004, the literary scholar Madeleine Kahn reported on an Ovid reading course at a college in California: the group of participants suddenly raised the accusation that the Metamorphoses were a »rape manual«. At the end of the discussion, however, there was also the realization that the one-dimensional misogynistic interpretation did not do justice to the complexity of the text.
In September 2019, Wesselmann himself helped design a teaching unit on the subject of sexual violence in the metamorphoses at the traditional Kiel school of learning, in which opinions differed in particular on the evaluation of the Daphne episode. About half the class felt the story was “good,” with a “compromise” ending: Daphne lost her human form, but Apollo didn’t get his way either.
The enthusiasm for antiquity in German intellectual history, a “tyranny of Greece over Germany”
Wesselmann has published essays on “Sex and Power in Antiquity” since 2019 and most recently a book whose title “The Severed Tongue” refers to the Philomela Tereus episode. The fact that the topic reached German classical studies relatively late can also be explained by a specific educational tradition in this country. It all started in the 18th century with Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who was born in Stendal and was director of the Antiquities Administration of the Papal States in Rome. In the art of ancient Greece in particular, he saw embodied “a noble simplicity and a quiet grandeur.” In doing so, he shaped the perception of many generations to come.
In the 19th century, the linguist, diplomat and Prussian university reformer Wilhelm von Humboldt propagated the study of Greek antiquity as the key to any knowledge of the world and oneself. In 1935, the British Germanist Eliza Marian Butler diagnosed nothing less than a »Greek tyranny over Germany«. In her book of the same name, she described the tradition of enthusiasm for antiquity in German intellectual history since Winckelmann.
Antiquity as the epitome of the good, true, and beautiful: According to Wesselmann, this idealized image “also damaged” the perception of the ancient languages. The old texts contain “the horror of the world in all its diversity.” Under the neoclassical foil they seemed rather bland and sterile. “The wrong product is being sold there,” says the didactic specialist, who admits that in her choice of studies she was also “taken by the narrative that antiquity was the ideal, wonderful world.” In this respect, turning to more conflict-oriented reading is also a kind of demythologization of one’s own course of education.
For this, Wesselmann had to be reproached by the Berlin classical philologist Melanie Möller for cleaning up “with didactic intentions in ancient literature”. The colleague criticizes the undertone, which she feels is moralizing, and finds that the »dividing line between art and life« is not sufficiently taken into account in literary works. “I not only made myself popular with the book, but when I wrote it I didn’t think first of the professional world,” says Wesselmann: “I had my students in mind.” She is concerned with proving that “innovative approaches (…) not only do not devalue the ancient texts, but make them particularly interesting in today’s world”. This is the conclusion of their publication about the Ovid reading with Kiel high school students.