Joel Morton
Lisa Simpson,
Antifascist
Superhero:
Masculinity, Violence, and Eastern German 'Antifa' Street Ephemera, May Day, Berlin, 2004
Accompanying
this text is a specially created website of 30 images of
antifascist street ephemera, available at: http://www.stlawu.edu/gallery/vancouver8-04.html.
Please read essay in tandem with viewing the images.
|
Introduction[i]
Such was my plan. Yet
in the early weeks of my stay in Berlin, as I traveled
around the
eastern, formerly socialist half of the city renewing contacts and
collecting
artifacts off the streets, I was struck not only by the prevalence of
explicitly antifascist posters and stickers, but by their frequent use,
and
seeming celebration, of U.S. pop cultural cartoon, comic, and action
movie
icons and images. One pale red
sticker depicted a fierce-looking Lisa Simpson, Bart's smart kid sister
in the
popular American cartoon TV show The
Simpsons, as antifascist superhero. In
it (Fig. 1), Lisa swings from a rope clutched in one
hand
while
gripping a grafitti-spewing spray can in the other hand.[iii] In
another street sticker (Fig. 4), the
same image of Lisa is used, but this time on a white background and
without the
rope, so that she appears to be holding up her right fist in a
traditional
antifascist power salute. Other
antifascist designs appropriating figures from U.S. popular culture
comics,
action films, and TV cartoons depicted Calvin (Fig. 5) of the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, with his
arms folded across his chest, his face and body locked in an expression
of
stubborn resistance; a green and menacing Incredible Hulk (Fig. 6)
charging out
of the darkness, his massive hand extended directly at the viewer, and
(in Fig.
7) his snarling face in extreme close-up; Spiderman (Fig. 8) looming in
the
shadows and ready for action; a battle scene from the original Stars Wars film (Fig. 9); and even Bugs
Bunny's old adversary, the ornery Yosemite Sam (Fig. 10), staring down
the
viewer with his six-guns drawn. These eye-catching designs represented a form of
Americanization of the east I had not seen before in my travels
throughout the
Neue Laender of unified Germany. Although
transnational and especially American corporate
media
advertising is now pervasive in the newly capitalist east, the
celebratory
appropriation of U.S. pop culture icons and images by elements of the
eastern
German radical left is indeed a curious development.
Wouldn't use of these popular comic, cartoon, and action
figures from U.S. culture effectively undercut the radical leftist
critique of
transnational capitalism and American cultural imperialism? Had Americanization of eastern Germany
asserted itself so thoroughly that even the radical left had by now
been left
with no choice but to make strategic use of it? What
does the use of U.S. pop culture suggest about possible
changes in antifascist self-representation, especially as it concerns
young
eastern Germans coming of age since unification in 1990?[iv] Intrigued by such questions, I made it part my
fieldwork
routine to collect as many examples of antifascist, or "Antifa,"
street ephemera as possible. This
was the easy part, for they were everywhere: Antifa posters, flyers,
stickers,
and announcements were stuck to subway, streetcar, and bus station
walls,
attached to lampposts, street signs, and rubbish bins, and sometimes
slapped up
across commercial posters and billboards. (Figures 11-14 show
photographs of
typical examples of Antifa ephemera displayed in the streets of east
Berlin.[v]) In the
period from late January through
April 2004, many of these materials announced demonstrations to occur
on the
weekend of May 1st, International Workers' Day. May
Day remains a major holiday not only in former Warsaw
Pact nations but in many nations throughout the world, the primary
exception
being the United States itself, making the Antifa appropriation of U.S.
comic/pop culture icons all the more ironic. In
addition, despite frequent warnings from east Berliner
friends and acquaintances about the history of violent May Day
confrontations
between the radical left, the radical right, and the Berlin riot
police, I
resolved to attend May Day demos as participant-observer.[vi] Nonetheless, the more pressing fieldwork problem
was that
of actually locating Antifa activists, or, even better for my purposes,
those
who had in fact designed and created the street ephemera announcing the
May Day
demonstrations. Their paper trail
was everywhere across the city, yet they proved to be most elusive. Website searches made clear that every
district of east Berlin had its own "Jungen Antifa-Gruppe," or
antifascist youth group, so there was no lack of potential contacts. Yet the websites always discluded names
of activists and uniformly lacked group office address information, and
my
e-letters of inquiry sent to several groups yielded no responses
whatsoever. This lack of response from Antifa groups made
sense only
after I finally met and befriended "Ralf Fischer," a 25 year old
eastern German Antifa activist and poster designer.
After weeks of futile searching, I had the luck one day of
learning
from a bookshop clerk acquaintance that the shop served as a kind of
unofficial
postal address for east Berlin Antifa groups. I
left a handwritten note explaining my intentions and
asking to be contacted. "Fischer"
phoned later that day, and we met for the first time the next afternoon
at the
Café Morgenrot (the Red Morning Café) in the inner-city
east Berlin district of
Prenzlauer Berg. At the close of
our first meeting, during which we agreed to meet frequently in the
weeks
leading up to May Day, I explained that in writing up my research I
would need
a pseudonym by which to refer to him, and he said simply, "You already
have it." Excuse me? I
didn't understand, so he continued:
"My false name is Ralf Fischer. We never
give out our real names. We cannot. If Nazis find us
out, they come after us. So there
is no choice about it. For you, I
am Ralf Fischer."
My
several meetings with Fischer were useful not only in understanding the
Antifa
appropriation of U.S. popular culture--many of the designs, including
those
using the image of Lisa Simpson, were his--but also in placing this
appropriation within the context changing forms of eastern masculinity
amid the
continuing social, political, and economic transformation in eastern
Germany
since 1989. Feminist scholars of
post-socialist transformation studies have made a convincing case for
the
inclusion of gender analysis in post-1989 transformation studies, and
yet
studies of the "reinvention of gender" in eastern Germany have until
now focused primarily on women.[vii] Here I
would like to turn the attention
to men, or, more precisely, to the "reinvention" of eastern German
masculinity since the fall of the Wall. I
focus on the example of Antifa activist and poster
designer
Ralf
Fischer, who is at once representative of young eastern German men who
came of
age in the 1990s after the fall of the Wall, and unusual in having
emerged from
that decade having fully committed himself to radical left activism. As we shall see, that commitment is, at
least in part, a gender project framed by violent confrontation with
both
neo-nazis and the Berlin riot police, informed by Germany's genocidal
history
and by the post-GDR influx of American cultural forms, and expressed in
street
art in which gender, the comic, and the violent are fused for decidedly
political ends. Fischer's is a
multiply-inflected, marginalized, and highly politicized youth
masculinity
specific to the post-unification era. In
practice it is simultaneously both a reaction against
dramatic
social, economic, and political change and an ironic embrace of the
arrival of
new cultural forms, especially those of American popular culture. It takes shape only within eastern
Germany's ongoing reinvention of gender, with the contested realignment
of
power being vividly on display in collective masculine confrontations
in Berlin
on May Day, 2004. Based on ethnographic fieldwork that includes
street
ephemera collection and photo-documentation, regular meetings and a
life
history interview with Ralf Fischer, and multi-sited
participant-observation in
the months leading up to and including May Day, the following gender
analysis
is in three parts. The first
section traces Ralf Fischer's life history, focusing especially on the
period
from his late boyhood to early manhood, which spans the 15 years from
the collapse
of the GDR in 1989 to the present. The
second section focuses on Antifa political street art,
briefly
tracing its history in order to contextualize an ensuing discussion of
several
examples collected from the streets of east Berlin prior to May Day,
2004. The third and concluding section
narrates my experience as participant-observer during the recent May
Day
weekend, when the link between violence and newly configured German
masculinities is most apparent.
Fischer's desire for anonymity derives from both
a personal
history and a larger historical context in which male violence or the
threat of
it looms large. While violence or
the threat of it may be said to play an important role in the
construction of
masculinities everywhere, Fischer's individual experience of both
personal and
institutional violence helps us understand some of the larger social
tensions,
anxieties, and contradictions which inform the collective masculinity
of the eastern
German radical left. These
particulars in turn help yield a degree of insight into the antifascist
German
appropriation of U.S. popular culture, including the comic. The appearance on the streets of Berlin
of images of Lisa Simpson as antifascist superhero is not simply a
matter of
deepening Americanization of east German culture, but a combination of
the
local and transnational contexts informing the lives of those caught up
in the
post-socialist transformation. Fischer was ten years old in 1989. He recalls riding atop his stepfather's
shoulders during mass demonstrations against the state in East Berlin. His grandfather, a long-time communist
who had witnessed Hitler's rise to power and embraced postwar creation
of the
GDR in 1949, had resigned his membership in the ruling Socialist Unity
Party
(SED) in 1982. Perhaps for
this reason, Fischer's mother had a troubled relationship with the
state
throughout the 1980s. She was
expelled from her job as a schoolteacher, had subsequently taken
whatever jobs
were available, eventually working in a library. Fischer
has never met his biological father, his mother
having ended her first marriage by the time he was born in 1979. Like many in the GDR who took part in
mass demonstrations against the state in the fall of 1989, Fischer's
parents
desired not an end to the GDR or unification with West Germany, but a
reformed,
non-totalitarian East German state in which the socialist ideals touted
by the
regime would in fact become reality and citizens would not be prisoners
in
their own country. In the power vacuum that occurred in the early
1990s
immediately after unification, during which the firebombing of
immigrant
apartment buildings in Hoyerswerda and Rostock were only the most
glaring
examples of a resurgent, militant fascism in eastern Germany, Fischer
was
schoolboy in Berlin. "In the
years after the GDR had fallen," he says, "there was anarchy on the
streets. This was my youth
time." He says that at that
time gangs of fascist youths and nationalist sympathizers had to be
contended
with in every school, youth club, and neighborhood in eastern districts
of
Berlin, and the only way to do so was to fight. Even
going home was dangerous for Fischer. He
recalls having to fight his way into
the door of his parents' flat as neo-Nazi youths would wait for him in
the
hallway. Thus, after a secure and
safe childhood in the officially antifascist GDR, Fischer's
self-conscious
political and gendered identity began to take shape in post-1989 east
Berlin as
a result of frequent, direct, and violent confrontation with neo-Nazis. In Fischer's example we can be reminded
that masculinity is always an effect of social relations, including
especially
crisis moments (such as the threat or experience of violence) in the
life
course. Furthermore, particular
performances of masculinity arise in response to specific historical
circumstances, in this case quite directly in response to the
re-emergence in
the post-socialist east German context of hyper-masculine right wing
extremism. Yet it was not only neo-Nazis that Fischer had
to contend
with. In the early 1990s, Fischer
began to began to hang out at newly established squatter houses in
various
parts of east Berlin, where many formerly state-owned buildings and
housing blocks
had been swiftly privatized and often left abandoned after the Wende. As Fischer puts it, "You had a big
time in this period if you were young. The
older people had many problems, but the young people
had
nothing to
lose. It was all new."
For Fischer, the squats were a place of
refuge, protection, and fun. In
them he made his first connections to the so-called "Schwarzer Block"
(Black Bloc) and "Autonome," or self-organized anarchist and
communist youth groups, a militant wing of the larger antifascist,
anti-racist,
and anti-statist youth movement dating from the early 1980s in West
Germany
which spread to the east after 1989.[viii] In the
squats, confrontations with the
newly unified Berlin's police force were frequent and often violent,
with
squatters resisting eviction and identifying the police as the armed
representatives of the newly capitalist state. State
institutions such as the police are also integral in
the shaping of masculinity, sometimes, as in this case, violently
imposing a
new West German political, social, and gender order in the chaotic and
turbulent east Berlin.[ix] Radical
left east youth German
masculinity arises not out of the blue, but out of a context in which
those who
eventually became activists faced not only the institutional violence
of a
newly hegemonic state but also the personal, non-institutional, street
violence
in confrontation with neo-Nazis, whose emergence may be seen as the
extreme
expression in the east of "a strong nationalist revival … that
ideologically rationalized the 1990 reunification of Germany."[x] Although
active in the antifascist movement since 1995, in the late 1990s
Fischer had
not yet fully disassociated himself from or lost hope in conventional
party
politics. This is to say that his
had not yet fully adopted an eastern German version of what Connell
(1995:
109-112) describes as counter-hegemonic "protest masculinity."[xi] At 17 he
joined the post-Wende
successor to the GDR's Socialist Unity Party (SED), the Party for
Democratic
Socialism (PDS), which sought to create a youth wing within the party
and
thereby identify and groom future leaders. Fischer
remained a PDS member for five years. He
finally quit the PDS in 2000 after
having become disenchanted with the party's ineffectiveness as well as
its retention
of hard-line apparachiks of the former SED, whom he and other radical
young
easterners wanted nothing to with. Today,
Fischer dismisses the PDS as the "right wing of the
left" and as "part of the problem." Over the course of several meetings with Fischer
in cafes,
bars, and his fourth floor walk-up flat in an east Berlin Platinbau, I
not only
began to understand the depth of his commitment antifascist activism,
but also
gained some sense of his particular position within the range of
sometimes competing
and disparate Antifa groups. Walking with
him in the graffiti-strewn streets, he would
point
out and
remark upon designs by one of many leftist street art "crews" (thus
using a term drawn directly from U.S. hip hop culture, especially as it
is
presented globally via MTV). He
would often recognize, and sometimes warmly greet,
other
young men on
the streets. Others he would steer
us away from, even though they, too, were Antifa activists. In follow-up conversations on these
close encounters, Fischer distinguished between "Dogmatisch" and
"Undogmatisch" Antifa positions, rejecting the former as the
ill-disciplined, ideologically narrow, unnecessarily violent, and
sometimes
nationalist positions on the radical left spectrum.
A self-described "cosmopolitan communist," Fischer
is an activist and publicist for the so-called "Anti-Deutsch," or
radically anti-German , pro-Israeli, pro-American position, a minority
view
among the range of mostly anti-American radical left subject positions
in
Germany. He had rejected the
traditional pro-Palestinian view of the German left (and of the GDR) by
adopting a historical narrative of the postwar German state as
incurably
anti-semitic and potentially (again) genocidal. This
is a position that defends the U.S. as the primary ally
to Israel, views the September 11th attacks as essentially
anti-semitic, accepts the U.S. war in Iraq as necessary to eliminate
the
"fascist dictator" Saddam Hussein, and believes that "communism
can come only after full bourgeois freedom (simply: liberalism) has
been spread
worldwide."[xii] As the
primary vehicle for the global
spread of bourgeois freedom, the presumed precursor to international
communism,
the U.S. becomes in this view a historically necessary, albeit
temporary, ally. Hence, we can begin to
grasp the
celebratory appropriation of American popular culture in Fischer's
Antifa
designs as something more than simply a one-dimensional Americanization
of
post-1989 eastern Germany in which U.S. cultural forms simply overtake
and
displace the local. Instead,
Fischer makes self-consciously political use specific aspects of U.S.
culture
in order to foment popular resistance to what he experiences as
deepening
German nationalism in the wake of unification.
In addition to his PDS involvement in the late
1990s
Fischer also completed three years of training as a printer where he
learned
layout and design, and while temporarily employed in a box factory
began
creating placards and posters for local antifascist groups with money
they
would sometimes get from the PDS. As of
today, he has been producing political street art
for
several
years, and he is well-positioned to comment on changing Antifa designs,
virtually all of which, including those which draw on comics, thematize
violence as a central issue. He
describes three distinct, though sometimes overlapping Antifa design
styles.[xiii] First, the style he refers to as "classic" or
"straight" design has its historical roots in the World War I and
1920s street sloganeering of German Communist Party (KPD), whose
inter-war
ranks were all but wholly eliminated through street fighting, murder,
concentration camp imprisonment, going underground, or escape from
Germany once
Hitler took power in 1933. The
classic KPD design was text heavy and used colors then associated with
the KPD,
red and black. One may find many
current examples of this color scheme in Antifa ephemera
(e.g., Figures 15 and 16).[xiv] However,
according to Fischer, the
scheme is problematic today because of the collective memory of the
Third
Reich's appropriation of red and black (standing for blood and soil) as
the
primary colors symbolizing the Nazi regime. Thus,
to disassociate themselves from any popular connection
to Nazism, contemporary Antifa designers often turn to softer colors
such as
lighter red, green, or orange. For
example, one design (Fig. 17) for May Day, 2004, combines the classic
emphasis
on textual message ("Naziaufmarsch Verhindern! Stop
& Smash Nazi Marching!") laid over a light
green background that includes a black star and a white flame. "Smash" is a term frequently
seen in Antifa ephemera. It is
both a verbal reiteration the central tenet of Antifa identity (to
"smash" Nazism) and, because the word is routinely rendered in
English, another indication of the depth of Americanization in eastern
Germany
fifteen years after the fall of the Wall. A second major design style of current Antifa
street
ephemera is what Fischer calls the "historical." In
it, the designer uses recognizable
historical images, usually from photographs, which are meant to
resonate in the
German political imaginary. Uli
Linke (1999: 1), one of the few scholars to have treated Antifa street
ephemera
seriously, argues that: the German political imaginary is infused with a
racialized
violence that has persisted in a more or less unbroken trajectory from
the
Third Reich until today. In
postwar West Germany, Nazism and the murder of Jews are contested and
highly
charged domains of cultural reproduction. The
horror of the past inspires an intense fascination
that
generates
both desire and repulsion: in a diversity of domains (everyday life,
mass
media, politics, and leftist protest), the past furnishes narrative
material
for the contemporary construction of identity and difference. This claim, even though it does not speak
specifically of
east German masculinity, is certainly applicable to Antifa historical
designs,
which function partly by activating gendered historical narratives of
particular
kinds. One example (Fig. 19)
features a widely known Soviet photo which, like the famous U.S. photo
of
American soldiers raising the flag at Iwo Jima, is a propaganda photo
of a
military event re-staged for the camera. In
the Soviet photo, a Red Army soldier raises the
Soviet hammer and sickle flag over the Reichstag in early May, 1945,
with
decimated buildings clearly in view in the background.
The photo is complemented by a brief
text above and below the image: "Chancngo! … heisst Danke!" (Chancngo!… means Thank you!).[xv] Fischer
points out that this design is
meant to speak directly to an east Berliner audience, former GDR
citizens who
were required to learn Russian and for whom the photo was an officially
celebratory image of victory over the Nazis. Yet
of course the image is also designed to provoke outrage
among German nationalists east and west by flatly rejecting both
popular and
scholarly narratives of German "victimization" at the hands of the
victorious Allies. I would suggest
as well that the design symbolically represents and performatively
replays a
form of epic socialist masculinity defined strictly according to
willingness to
sacrifice oneself for the antifascist cause. This
heroically violent antifascist masculinity is still
publicly on view in leftover GDR memorials in east Berlin, such as the
massive
Soviet memorial in Treptow Park, yet neither the memorial nor the
Antifa design
in question acknowledges the mass rape of thousands of Berlin women
perpetrated
by Red Army soldiers during and after the battle of Berlin.[xvi]
The
third and most recent development in east German Antifa street ephemera
design
is the appropriation of transnational popular culture for radical left
political purposes. Since
unification in 1990 and the total end of the GDR's (always failing)
attempt to
shield its population from capitalist media, eastern Germans,
especially the
young, have become avid consumers of globally marketed movies,
television,
comics, music, computer games, the internet, etc. Given
not only American domination of global media markets,
but also the intense Americanization of West German popular culture
throughout
the cold war period and the ensuing massive transfer of West German
political,
economic, and cultural institutions into the east in the early 1990s,
the
Americanization of eastern Germany should come as little surprise. For
their
part, young "Anti-Deutsch" Antifa designers, such as Fischer, rather
than rejecting Americanization or using its popular cultural forms in
order to
demonize transnational capital, instead embrace those forms as a
antifascist,
anti-nationalist weapons and recruiting tools, cultural implements
sometimes
wielded with intentionally comic and gender subversive effect.[xvii]
The
Lisa Simpson May Day 2004 sticker (Fig. 1) is a case in point. Here we see both a subtle
variation and yet echo of the traditional Antifa use of red and black
as
primary (and arguably hyper-masculine) colors, furthered softened by
the white
text. The overall effect of the
design is thus less aggressively masculinist than most Antifa classic
and
historical designs, and the comic use of the Lisa Simpson image is
meant to
attract those young people who are not yet committed Antifa activists,
both men
and women, boys and girls. The
design as a whole purposefully subverts the seeming gender exclusivity
of
Antifa activism, which Fischer himself acknowledges in saying that it
is
popularly understood to be "men's work." In
significant ways, the gender inflection of the Lisa
Simpson design contrasts sharply with specifically masculine images in
Antifa
ephemera I have found in the streets during previous research trips to
Berlin. Figure 22, a poster pulled
from a wall in Pankow in 2003, is typical of Antifa self-representation
prior
to 2004. The poster is not an
announcement for a demonstration but an explicit signal to passersby of
the
local and active presence of "Junge, Aktive Antifas."
Against the poster's stark white
background, the image of three black-clad and masked figures,
unmistakably
male, engage in street action (presumably against neo-Nazis or the
police), two
throwing stones, and the third, facing the viewer, wielding a
truncheon-like
stick. The poster presents a
self-defined image of antifascism as a form of young, active, heroic,
and
anonymous masculinity.[xviii] Figures
23 and 24, designs that also
date prior to 2004, reiterate this image of the typical Antifa as
heroically
active, masked, and male.
Another
May Day 2004 demo announcement designed by Fischer, this time with an
image
taken from a commercial magazine for women, intentionally subverts the
explicit
maleness of "Junge, Aktive Antifas" by featuring a young, blond,
white woman "smashing" a swastika with her fist (Fig. 25).
Foregoing the comic effect but
retaining the gender subversion of the Lisa Simpson design, this design
is a
straightforward invitation to women to take part in "smashing"
fascism at a May Day Antifa demonstration. Yet
another Fischer design is evidence of conscious
commitment to women's rights among Antifa men. Figure
26 shows a placard for a North Berlin Antifa group
that features the exclamation, "Fight Against Sexism!" laid over a
black and white photograph of a young woman at an abortion rights
demonstration. She wear a band
across her mouth in symbolic protest against the effect of paragraph
218 of
Germany's Basic Law, curtailing what had been until unification an east
German
woman's right to free abortion.[xix]
Such
designs seek to present Antifa activism as something more than "men's
work." However, it is unclear
as yet whether the professed anti-sexism of eastern German Antifa men
such as
Fischer is much in practice. My
bookshop clerk acquaintance who was
originally responsible for helping me to locate Ralf
Fischer, is a
young West German woman, one of the many thousands of young West
Germans who
have made inner city east Berlin their home since unification. She is deeply skeptical about local
Antifa men's commitment to the inclusion and full participation of
women. When shown and asked about the
Antifa
designs featuring women, her response was outright laughter. Nonetheless, women certainly do
participate in Antifa demonstrations, and although far outnumbered by
male
activists, occasionally occupy at least temporarily prominent positions. At one of the several Antifa demos I
attended over the May Day weekend, a woman was a featured speaker, and
yet
typically women activists appeared in supporting roles, holding signs,
setting
up a display of books and pamphlets, sustaining chants, and so on. Fischer's interaction with other
activists at these events was always among men, so much so that I was
never
introduced to a female Antifa activist. Furthermore,
while Antifa literature will sometimes
include
pro-gay
sentiments among its other progressive positions, I found no evidence
of the
inclusion of gay men in Antifa ranks.[xx] In the great majority of Antifa street ephemera
designs,
the defining feature of Antifa identity remains a traditionally
masculine-coded
willingness to put one's body on the line in the fight against fascism. As playful and comic as they may
sometimes be, and whether or not they bend the gender of standard
Antifa
masculine self-representation, those designs that feature U.S. pop
culture
images and icons always centrally thematize violence.
Bart Simpson (Fig. 5) stands solidly against the Nazi
march
scheduled for May Day. The
Incredible Hulk (Fig. 6 and 7) is set to go beserk in order to clean
the
streets of skinheads. Spiderman
(Fig. 8) is ready to swing into action, and Yosemite Sam (Fig. 5) is on
his way
to Hamburg for a showdown with the neo-Nazis there.
Appropriated to Antifa ends, these American comic and
cartoon masculinities provide media savvy young Berliners with potent,
familiar, and masculine symbols of violent resistance to resurgent
German
fascism. Yet as representations of Antifa masculinity,
these images
also operate to distance viewers from traditional GDR representations
of heroic
antifascist masculinity. The
cartoon images break through and fragment what had been the
state-sponsored
myth of the epic male hero, signaling a self-conscious lack of
masculine
exemplars that is nonetheless without the despair that one might
presume to
follow. As a well-known figure of
comedy, the image of Lisa Simpson promises the pleasure of
(masculine-coded)
antifascist violence. Spiderman
and the Incredible Hulk are at once tragic and heroic figures, having
to suffer
through personal and even bodily trauma and yet transforming that
experience
into an enduring commitment against evil (i.e., in the Antifa context,
against
resurgent fascism). Even Yosemite
Sam, the bumbling, aging male target of the jokes and often violent
pranks of
Bugs Bunny, is drawn on to ridicule and taunt neo-Nazis.
Indeed, the Antifa use of such images
from U.S. popular culture is in itself an affront to both neo-Nazi and
less
extreme versions of German nationalist masculinities, so that the
Antifa images
form one part of a communicative system between radical left and
radical right
in which symbolic (and bodily) male violence plays a central part. For instance, late one April evening
two days prior to May Day, 2004, alone at a tram stop in the east
Berlin
Weissensee district, I saw two young, clean-cut men approach a wall
plastered
with posters across the street from where I stood.
Pausing for a moment to look at the posters, they glanced
quickly up and down the street, and then quickly stripped from the wall
an
Antifa poster, tore it to shreds, tossed the pieces on the sidewalk,
and then
hurried away. Apart from their
suggestive actions, I have no way of knowing whether they were part of
what
Ralf Fischer estimated to be the 3,000-5,000 right wing youth who
gather in
Berlin for their own demonstrations on May Day weekend, many of them
coming to
the city from small towns and villages in eastern Germany.
In terms of gender, although women, whether antifascist, fascist, or even police, may certainly be found at May Day demonstrations, what manifests itself in these almost ritual confrontations is the competition among potentially violent, counter-hegemonic, alternative masculinities for temporary control of the streets. In this ongoing scenario, replayed annually in post-unification Berlin, the police both symbolically and in practice (and numbering in the thousands) represent the enforcing arm of the hegemonic masculine state, itself the most potentially violent, and thus most controlling, of all. The two primary alternative, collective masculinities, radical left antifascist (Autonome Antifa) and radical right fascist (neo-Nazi) -- which again may and do include women and girls in their ranks -- represent distinct and youthful collective masculine subject positions, predominantly working class, white, heterosexual, and marginally employed, if employed at all. The difficult material preconditions of both left and right radical eastern German masculinities derive from the largely failed economic promises of German unification. Today's generation of eastern German male youth lacks the GDR-era reality of secure employment and thus a central lynchpin to a stable conception of manhood. Furthermore, a common refrain among young men on the radical left is that "My nation no longer exists." They feel little or no connection to or allegiance with the unified Federal Republic, which they identify as responsible for encouraging nationalist revival in the east. Nor do they yearn for a return to a repressive socialist state apparatus that many of their parents had helped bring to an end in 1989. What they do seem to retain from the GDR-era is, however, is an abiding commitment to antifascism that is nonetheless stripped of its official GDR trappings. It is this selective historical memory upon which their enactment of manhood as antifascist action seems to depend. Opposing narratives of Germany's violent and genocidal history underwrite the post-socialist confrontation between radical left and radical right collective masculinities. The sharpest gender demarcation to be made between them is, on the one hand, the rights's embrace of Nazi hyper-masculinity and either the celebration or outright denial of the mass murder/holocaust of Jews, as well as Romas/Gypsies, homosexuals, and communists, versus, on the other hand, the left's memory of necessarily violent antifascist masculinity, in its most heroic and idealized GDR-era version always willing to sacrifice itself for the common good in direct confrontation with what it identifies as Nazi or fascist. Whereas radical leftist men appear to take up the antifascist ideal stripped of any direct identification with what was the state, rightwing extremists appear emboldened by unification and a renewed sense of nationalist potential for once again cleansing Germany of its "others." Poised against and in relative control of both these two directly oppositional performances of radical masculinity is the recently unified German state, itself a male-gendered institution, with the police representing German hegemonic masculinity at its most institutionalized and powerful. Perhaps ironically, then, at around 11 p.m. on the night of May 1st, I had a long conversation with a riot police woman. We met on the Schillingbruecke, a bridge across the Spree River separating Kreuzberg (formerly part of West Berlin) from Friedrichshain (formerly part of East Berlin). Heike, as I will call her, a 24 year old eastern German who had left the GDR with her mother in the early 1980s, was taking a break with her Cologne-based unit, one of many police units sent to Berlin from various cities in Germany every year for May Day. One of three women (all eastern Germans who had moved west) in a unit of perhaps two dozen men, Heike described her unit's riot control assignments at three different sites over the previous 24 hours: Mauer Park in Prenzlauer Berg, Karl Marx Allee connecting the districts of Lichtenberg and Friedrichshain, and Mariannen Platz in Kreuzberg. On the previous evening I had attended with Ralf Fischer an Antifa demonstration and parade of over 1,000 primarily young adults that wound its way under heavy police escort from Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof in Mitte (city center Berlin) to Mauer (or Wall) Park, formerly the site of the Wall where it had separated Prenzlauer Berg in the east from Wedding in the west. (Figures 29 and 30 are photographs of the start of the demonstration.) The demonstration brought together numerous Antifa organizations which, Fischer explained, generally set aside their ideological differences on May Day in order to display a united front to the public, in part to attract more young people to get involved. Fischer emphasizes that Antifa groups do not have "members" but "activists," and that one becomes an activist by taking part in such demonstrations, as he had done by simply joining in a demonstration for the first time in 1995. Although this demonstration included more men than women, women made up a significant portion of the crowd, playing various roles, including in one case a young woman reading a prepared text over a loud speaker set up on the back of a truck, and many other women escorting vehicles as they slowly edged along, carrying signs and placards, handing out literature, or taking part in group chants. The demo proceeded for two hours without incident from the city center to Mauer Park, where, as darkness fell, thousands of left-leaning young people gathered to listen to a concert by reggae and punk bands (again organized by local Antifa groups). To enter the park from any direction, one had to pass through a police checkpoint, and scores of police vans ringed the area, including those from police woman Heike's unit. Late that night, after three cars were overturned and burned in what Fischer later described as an anti-police, rather than an Antifa, action, Heike's and many other police units had intervened and dispersed the crowd gathered in the Park, making dozens of arrests, almost exclusively of young men. Fischer himself had skipped the Mauer Park partying to go home to sleep to prepare himself for the next day. Around midday on the next day, Saturday, May 1st, Heike's unit was one of many assigned to control and protect a neo-Nazi march that began around 11 a.m. in the east Berlin suburb of Lichtenberg. The intention of the organizers was to march from Lichetenberg and into the district of Friedrichshain, a leftist stronghold. Local Antifa mobilization -- carried out at least partly as a result of U.S. popular culture-informed, anti-Nazi march announcements, including Fischer's, on view in the streets for months prior to May Day -- crystallized in Friedrichshain and successfully prevented the Nazis from marching along Karl Marx Allee into Friedrichshain. Fischer was among the frontline Antifa activists, who set up and set fire to street barricades to block the Nazis' path, and hurled rocks and bottles at them to discourage and in fact halt their police-escorted advance. Fischer later described the afternoon's work as "a good action." He was also surprised and pleased that this time the police had done little break up the Antifa ranks, made up almost exclusively of men. Unusual in Fischer's experience, the police used its overwhelming numbers and water cannon to turn the Nazis back in the direction from which they had come, thus averting what might have been a much more significant street battle between right and left had they attempted to escort the Nazi march directly through the Antifa ranks. Later on the afternoon and evening of May 1, Heike's unit was also part of a very large police force assigned to surround and monitor a several block area around Mariannen Platz in Kruezberg, where a city-sponsored "Mai Fest" had been organized in hopes of quelling the annual rioting that had occurred in Kreuzberg every May Day since 1987. These hopes went unfulfilled. After a full day of music at six different stages attended by thousands of people, a day which also included two "Revolutionary May 1st" demos by anarchist and leftist organizations, trouble broke out that evening one block from where I was standing. A young woman had staged a one-person demonstration, draping herself in a peace flag as she sat down in front of a line of helmeted, heavily padded, and truncheon-wielding riot police who had moved into the area as darkness fell. She was hit by a rock or bottle thrown by someone in the crowd, setting off a melee. From my position I was unable to see the initial incident, but I was able to observe the police formations up close. Within moments police units had moved in, flooding into the area from every direction in single file lines, with individual units of perhaps twenty used initially to secure each stretch of street from corner to corner. Thereafter, reinforcements flowed through and past the secured corners and on toward the center of the trouble. Beyond the lines of police I could see water cannons moving in that direction as well, while those of us hemmed in on our stretch on street could do nothing but wait for the police to allow us to move. I was carrying with me a small, hand held tape recorder into which I would speak intermittently in order to record my impressions of the scene. At one point, a group of four excited, drunken young men, trapped along this stretch of street just as I was, saw me speaking into the device. One of them grabbed my arm and started shouting into the recorder. Immediately his three friends joined him, the four of them shouting in unison the German word for "cobblestone," which rioters traditionally pull up from the streets for hurling at police. The police line, easily within hearing distance, maintained its discipline and remained in place. Had the young men begun pulling up stones from the streets, the police would no doubt have reacted very quickly. I spoke with another young man on the scene, an English speaker, perhaps like me a kind of May Day tourist, asking him what the drunken group had been yelling, since I had not initially understood their chant. Explaining the word to me, he said, "They're upset because the police cut off the streets so quickly. All they wanted was a good riot." Those young men seeking "a good riot" form, I suggest, a fourth masculine collective much in evidence at May Day confrontations, those for whom street violence, particularly forms of it meant to provoke the police, is less a self-consciously political act than a ritualized, and often drunken, test of manhood. The late night clashes with police at both Mauer Park in Prenzlauer Berg and Mariannen Platz in Kreuzberg may be differentiated from the more strictly antifascist collective action at mid-day in Friedrichshain, where the political point was to directly confront and challenge the Nazi march. Indeed, it is entirely possible, even likely, that the Mauer Park and Mariannen Platz disturbances included right wing youth, whereas at the Friedrichshain confrontation the police themselves, embodying the institutional power of the hegemonic state, formed a heavily armed and bodily barrier between the opposing radical masculinities, left and right. Having helped resist and force back the neo-Nazi march into Friedrichshain, Fischer himself was uninterested in and did not attend the Kreuzberg "Mai Fest," because it had promised only a futile confrontation with police and unintentional alliance with right wingers in the crowd. Instead, by the evening of May Day, Fischer was already at work with friends preparing street posters for the next weekend's Antifa commemoration of the May 8th, 1945, Red Army victory in the battle of Berlin and final capitulation of the Nazi regime. Since German unification in 1990, this newly configured radical left masculinity emerges in response to nationalist revival in the east. Ironically informed by and making self-conscious use of American popular culture now pervading the east, it takes shape amid shifting regional power relations within a dramatically changed global context. It draws on yet re-casts the heroic antifascist masculine ideal promoted by the GDR, and at times in its own self-promotion subverts and even laughs at the masculinist image it nonetheless largely maintains in practice, undercutting its professed anti-sexism. Framed in a local, often personal context of male-on-male violence, and publicly displayed in collective masculine-coded confrontations such as those of May Day, it remains a significantly marginalized, would-be avant-garde against resurgent German fascism. With the most recent state-level election results showing significant gains for far-right parties in the eastern region,[xxi] it remains to be seen whether and how a now unified German nation can contain its own history of hyper-masculine violence.
Appadurai, Arjun, ed. (2001), Globalization. Durham: Duke University Press. Berndahl, Daphne (1999). Where the World Ended: Re-Unification and Identity in the German Borderland. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Connell, Robert (1995). Masculinities. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Doelling, Irene (2001). "Ten years After: Gender Relations in a Changed World -- New Challenges for Women's and Gender Studies." In Jaenhert et al (Eds.) Gender in Transition in Eastern and Central Europe. Berlin: Trafo Verlag, 57-65. Doelling, Irene (1991) "Between Hope and Hopelessness: Women in the GDR after the 'Turning Point.'" In Feminist Review, no. 39, 3-15. Doelling, Irene, Daphne Hahn, and Sylka Scholz (2000). "Birth Strike in the New Fedral States: Is Sterilization and Act of Resistance?" In The Politics of Gender after Socialism. Susan Gal and Gail Kligman, eds. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 118-147. Einhorn, Barbara (1993). Cinderella Goes to Market: Citizenship, Gender and Women's Movements in East Central Europe. London and New York: Verso. Fischer, Ericka (1995), Aimee and Jaguar. Edna McCown, trans. New York: HarperCollins. Funk, Nanette, and Magda Mueller (1993). Gender Politics and Post-Communism: Reflections from Eastern Euorpe and the Former Soviet Union. New York and London: Routledge. Gal, Susan, and Gail Kligman (2000). The Politics of Gender after Socialism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gal, Susan, and Gail Kligman, eds. (2000). Reproducing Gender: Politics, Publics, and Everyday Life after Socialism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Garcia Canclini, Nestor (2001). Consumers and Citizens: Globalization and Multicultural Conflicts. George Yudice, trans. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Glaeser, Andreas (2000) "Why Germany Remains Divided." In: Todd Herzog and Sander L. Gilman (Eds.) A New Germany in Europe. New York/London: Routledge, 173-192. Graf, William, William Hansen, and Brigette Schulz (1993), "From The People to One People: The Social Bases of the East German 'Revolution' and Its Preemption by the West German State." In H.G. De Soto and D.G. Anderson, eds., The Curtain Rises: Rethinking Culture, Ideology, and the State in East Europe. New Jersey: Humanities Press, 207-230. Grauwacke, A.G. (2003). aus den ersten 23 Jahren: Autonome in Bewegung. Berlin, Hamburg, Goettingen: Assoziation A. HKS 13 (2002?--date unlisted). vorwaerts bis zum nieder mit: 30 Jahre Plakate unkontrolliert Bewegung. Berlin: Assoziation A. HKS 13 (1999). hoch die kampf dem: 20 Jahre Plakate autonomer Bewegung. Hamburg, Berlin, Goettingen: Libertaere Assoziation und Buchlaeden Schwarze Risse--Rote Strasse. Jaenhert, Gabriele, et al, eds. (2001). Gender in Transition in Eastern and Central Europe. Berlin: Trafo Verlag. Kolinsky, Eva, and Hildegard Maria Nickel (2003), Reinventing Gender: Women in Eastern Germany Since Unification. London and Portland, Oregon: Cass. Landler, Mark (2004), "Rightists Make Strong Strides in Eastern German State Elections," New York Times online at http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/20/international/europe/20german.html?ex=1096683578&ei=1&en=d4d32376561737a6, accessed September 20, 2004. Linke, Uli (1999), German Bodies: Race and Representation after Hitler. London and New York: Routledge. Maleck-Lewy, Eva, and Myra Marx Ferree (2000). "Talking about Women and Wombs: The Discourse of Abortion and Reproductive Rights in the G.D.R. during and after the Wende." In Susan Gal and Gail Kligman, eds., The Politics of Gender after Socialism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 92-117. Middlebrook, Martin (1988), The Berlin Raids: RAF Bomber Command, Winter 1943-44. London: Cassell & Co. Nolan, Mary (1999). "Americanization or Westernization?" Paper presented at the "American Impact on Western Europe: Americanization and Westernization in Transatlantic Perspective" conference at the German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C., March 25-27, 1999. Available online at www.ghi-dc.org/conpotweb/westernpapers/nolan.pdf, accessed August 30, 2004. Radke, Volker (2003), "Anti-German for Beginners." Volker Radke Homepage. 8 August 2004. http://volkerradke.looplab.org/sonderweg-en.html. Rueschemeyer, Marilyn, ed. (1994). Women in the Politics of Postcommunist Eastern Europe. Armonk, NY and London: M.E. Sharpe. Sandford, John, eds., (1999), Encyclopedia of Contemporary German Culture. London and New York: Routledge. Tomlinson, John (1991). Cultural Imperialism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. Ullrich, Peter. Personal correspondence, July 9, 2004. Weiss, Karin, and Katrin Isermann (2003) "Young Women in Right-Wing Groups and Organisations in East Germany." In Eva Kolinsky and Hildegard Maria Nickel, eds., Reinventing Gender: Women in Eastern Germany Since Unification. London and Portland, Oregon: Cass. 250-275. Young, Brigitte (1999). Triumph
of the Fatherland: German Unification and the Marginalization of Women. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press [i] Accompanying this text is a specially created website of 30 images of antifascist street ephemera, available at: http://www.stlawu.edu/gallery/vancouver8-04.html. Once at the site, readers may click on a selected image to enlarge it. Please read essay in tandem with viewing the images. [ii] My online exhibition of post-socialist European street ephemera at is available at http://gallery.stlawu.edu. It currently displays nearly 300 posters, advertisements, flyers, announcements, stickers, and miscellaneous street art collected from cities and towns in eastern Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic. The exhibition includes a link to my photo documentation of east Berlin street scenes, street art, graffiti, advertising, and political demonstrations. The Richard F. Brush Gallery, directed by Cathy Tedford (ctedford@stlawu.edu), houses my collection of over a thousand street artifacts and photographs from which the online exhibition is continually updated. The collection also includes over 60 original cultural and political posters of the German Democratic Republic, many of which we intend to include as part of the online exhibition in the coming months. [iii] Figures 2 and 3 show photographs of graffiti-covered walls in Prenzlauer Berg. Figure 2, a scene along Prenzlau Allee in Prenzlauer Berg, is an vivid example of leftist graffiti protesting "U.S. aggression," and Figure 3, also in Prenzlauer Berg, is a typical example of hurriedly scrawled antifascist graffiti. Researchers are welcome to visit St. Lawrence University to study the collection. In addition, we would be pleased to mount an exhibition of any segment of the collection at public or private universities and galleries. [iv] "Americanization" is of course a hotly contested term, having garnered a huge literature overlapping with the broader question of "cultural imperialism." Thomlinson (1991) offers an excellent introduction to the thesis of cultural imperialism, and many have critiqued this thesis by proposing their own theories of appropriation, bricolage, hybridity, etc., e.g., Appaduria (2001) and Garcia Canclini (2001). Concerning Germany in particular (though not eastern Germany, specifically), a useful review essay is provided by Nolan (1999). [v] Figure 11 shows a Lisa Simpson Antifa sticker, this time with Lisa's image on a green background, stuck to a rubbish bin. In Figure 12, the green "Smash Nazis" Antifa poster is one of several posters glued to an electrical grid box between tram lines. Figure 13 shows two Antifa posters stuck across another poster on a dumpster in Alexander Platz. Figure 14 depicts an encased advertisement for West cigarettes underneath the Schoenhauser Allee S-Bahn; look closely to see the Antifa sticker stuck to the chin of the woman in the advertisement. [vi] After a boyhood during which I eagerly consumed U.S. 1960s and 70s television shows such as Combat, Twelve O'Clock High, and The Rat Patrol, I had endeavored for years to pack away my own culturally-instilled stereotype of all Germans as evil, violent Nazis--Darth Vader is a prominent example from late 1970s and 80s U.S. pop culture--but such fears began to creep back into me as I pondered the odds of running into a pack of neo-nazi thugs in some back alley. As yet I did not understand that on May Day the greatest threat of physical violence came less from neo-nazis than from the Berlin riot police with their truncheons and water cannon, or from drunken, bottle-throwing, apolitical young men--not Antifa activists, as it happens-- but those for whom "a good riot" had become a Berlin May Day tradition. [vii] The phrase "reinvention of gender" is from the excellent anthology by Kolinsky and Nickel (2003), Reinventing Gender: Women in Eastern Germany Since Unification. Their introductory chapter offers an excellent overview of the subject, including insightful comparison and contrast of the East and West German gender regimes, and how that historical combination informs to the present "reinvention of gender" in eastern Germany. On gender and postsocialist Europe, see especially two works by Gal and Kligman (2000 and 2000a) a comparative-historical essay, as well Jaenhert et al (2001), Rueschemeyer (1994), Einhorn (1993), Funk and Mueller (1993). For eastern Germany in particular, in addition to Kolinsky and Nickel and some essays in the anthologies listed, see Doelling (2001, 1991), Berndahl (1999), Young (1999), among may others. [viii] Although lacking direct reference to eastern German groups, a useful definition of "Autonome" may be found in Sandford (1999: 30): "Emerging in the early 1980s, as politically motivated leftist groups without any apparent central organization, the Autonome have been involved in agitprop, riots and violent clashes with neo-nazis…. Total membership estimates range between 2,700 and 6,500 (1992), recruited mostly from the eighteen to twenty-eight age group, with over 1,000 members in Berlin alone. Since their reorganization in 1990-1 they have also been known as Autonome Antifa, focusing primarily on anti-fascist activities. Due to their masked militant wing Schwarzer Block (Black Bloc), the Autonome are widely regarded as left-wing extremists and have been investigated as a terrorist and criminal organization." [ix] An insightful essay by Andreas Glaser (2000) on continuing divisions between eastern and western Germans is based partly on his ethnographic research on post-unification West German dictated re-organization of the Berlin police. [x] The quotation is from Graf, Hansen, and Schulz (1993: 207), who argue that the "people's revolution" of 1989 is best understood as a preemption by the West German state of what had been popular democratic movement into a nationalist revival. [xi] Drawing on Alfred Adler's notion of "masculine protest" arising from a male subject's childhood experience of powerlessness, Connell uses the term "protest masculinity" to describe the exaggeratedly masculine collective practice of alienated, working class Australian young men who grew up in a social milieu of poverty and violence. To the extent that the term applies to Antifa men in the contemporary eastern German context, it must be heavily qualified so that distinctions between extreme left and extreme right eastern German youth masculinities may be understood. My essay is an initial step in that process. [xii] The quotation is from personal correspondence with German scholar Peter Ullrich of the University of Leipzig, whom I thank for helping me to begin to put the "anti-Deutsch" position in perspective. For a fascinating insider's perspective in defense of the "anti-Deutsch" position, see Radke (2003), "Anti-German for Beginners." [xiii] Three "Autonome" texts are useful in familiarizing oneself with radical left German poster design since the 1970s: see HKS 13 (1999) hoch die kampf dem: 20 Jahre Plakate autonomer Bewegung and its sequel HKS 13 (2002?--date unlisted) vorwaerts bis zum nieder mit: 30 Jahre Plakate unkontrolliert Bewegung, as well as A.G. Grauwacke (2003) Aus den ersten 23 Jahren: Autonome in Bewegung. [xiv] Figure 16 is good example of "anti-Deutsch" ephemera. It urges viewers to take part in Antifascist Action Week events in late January and early February, 2004. Its primary textual message, "Fight Back, No Historical Backspin!" is set against three side-by-side images, one of an anti-capitalist march, one of symbols of German militarism, and one of a protest march featuring a hand-held sign reading "Don't Buy Israeli Products". Though a quick glance at the poster may lead one to think this is a pro-Palestinian, anti-American poster, the lower text urges readers to interpret the three images in particular ways: "Gegen Antisemitismus, Geschictrevisionismus, und AntiAmerikanismus" (Against Anti-semitism, Historical Revisionism, and Anti-Americanism"). [xv] For additional examples of Fischer's "historical" Antifa designs, see Fig. 20, which offers an "anti-Deutsch" commemoration of the May 8, 1945, German surrender to the Allies, and Fig. 21, which depicts an Allied bomber in action over wartime Germany, and includes the text, "Bomber Harris, Do it again!" Sir Arthur Harris was the head of British Bomber command in World War II. These designs work to flatly contradict the growing popularity of German media, literary, and historical discourse focusing on civilian suffering during World War II. (For an account of the 1943-44 raids on Berlin planned by Arthur Harris, see Middlebrook, 1988.) [xvi] Few scholars, German or otherwise, have taken up this extremely difficult subject. For a historical account of the battle of Berlin that includes discussion of mass rape, see Beevor (2000). For historical fiction based on a female survivor's life history, see Fischer (1995) Aimee and Jaguar. It is notable that the film version of this novel discludes treatment of the Soviet mass rape of Berlin women. [xvii] Obviously, the influx of transnational popular culture forms into eastern Germany includes more than those of the U.S. Fischer notes, for example, that in the years immediately following unification, Japanese "anime" forms were popular among Antifa designers. Multinational corporate ventures into eastern Germany deeply complicate any easy presumption "Americanization" still further. Indeed, scholars of Americanization, globalization, and westernization of will find in eastern Germany an incredibly rich and largely untapped site for research. That said, such research, including my own, participates in and is complicit with the ongoing "colonization" of the post-socialist world. In another essay (as yet unpublished), "Stealing Method: Post-Socialist Street Ephemera and the American(ization) of East Berlin," I offer a critically self-conscious reflection on the relation between ethnographic method and western colonization of the post-socialist world. [xviii] Whereas the upper text announces in German that "Wir Sind Viele -- Wir Sind Krass" ("We Are Many -- We Are Crass"), the poster's one nod to Americanization is the lower text, rendered in English, "Youth Against Fascism and Government NordBerlin." [xix] For works treating the curtailment of
abortion rights for east Germany women in the post-unification era,
see, among
many others, Melack-Lewy and Ferree (2000) and Doelling et al (2000)
by Dr. Joel
Morton Gender Studies
Program St. Lawrence
University Canton, NY, USA
13617 |