Erika Wisselinck

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Erika Wisselinck (born October 6, 1926 in Görlitz ; † January 4, 2001 in Madeira ) was a German feminist journalist , author and translator . Through her own books and her translations, especially the works of the American radical feminist Mary Daly , which were previously considered untranslatable , she is one of the most important representatives of feminism in the late 20th century.

Life

Wisselinck was born in Görlitz in 1926 as the daughter of the trained teacher and librarian Eva (née Roth), who never exercised these professions, and of the professional officer and later general of the Wehrmacht Ernst . The family is described as middle-class in the Prussian-Protestant tradition. In the first few years of her life, the family moved more often due to the father's job. Wisselinck himself described the relationship with her mother as difficult throughout her life and complained about her lack of human warmth. She described her father as open and loving, both towards her and towards her eight years younger brother. According to her, the latter was preferred by the mother.

During the Nazi era , Wisselinck was forced to join the Association of German Girls . In 1942 she had to work for half a year in the vicinity of Kraków to harvest and in 1944 she was drafted into the Reich Labor Service in Falkenberg / Elster . She wrote herself later that she hated the military drill and that she found the time harassed. She complained that her thirst for knowledge could not be quenched, partly due to the book burnings and ideological restrictions . Her statement about the spiritual wasteland under which she suffered under National Socialism has been handed down literally . In April 1945 she completed her school career with the Abitur at a school in Dresden . After the Second World War , Wisselinck taught children and worked as a secretary for the British occupying forces . She improved her already good English skills in the first post-war years by attending an interpreting school in Hamburg .

Wisselinck dreamed of becoming a journalist. She believed she was getting closer to this goal by marrying Bernd Meinhard Meinardus, who ran an editorial office in Düsseldorf. Wisselinck quit her job as a secretary and gained her first editorial experience in her husband's office during the brief period of their early failed marriage. After the divorce, she returned to Hamburg, where she initially worked as a managerial secretary for Scandinavian Airlines . Despite her good income, she did not give up her dream of being a journalist; she quit her job and studied at the University of Hamburg the subjects economics , philosophy and literature . Even during her studies she wrote for the Hamburger Sonntagsblatt . From 1958 she wrote briefly for the Süddeutsche Zeitung and then from 1960 to work for Bavarian Broadcasting .

During his time at the radio, Wisselinck worked hard on issues such as clarifying the crimes of the National Socialist dictatorship or the Contergan scandal . At the beginning of the 1960s she was also concerned with feminist issues, although at the time these did not yet correspond to the prevailing zeitgeist. From 1962 she worked part-time in the course management of the Evangelical Academy in Tutzing , in addition to journalistic work at radio . According to her own statement, she was able to pursue the main preoccupation with her women's issue there without resistance, because this new topic was still pure theory at the time. With the 1968 movement , this perception changed, which was also evident in the increased attention paid to their programs. Male colleagues and superiors then let them feel their rejection through spite and referred to them as male-murdering emanciers . Within the women's movement , Wisselinck attempted to raise awareness through radio broadcasts in order to prevent the separation of groups of men and women who seek solutions independently of one another and without the participation of the opposite sex. In the 1970s, she saw the women's movement as a demarcation from the left-wing movement , in which she sees a farewell for herself that particularly pains her as the story of a disappointed and broken love .

In 1973, before the magazines EMMA and Courage appeared for the first time, she founded the feminist monthly newspaper Korrespondenz die frau . A special feature of the newspaper was that the content could be used by others free of charge , whereby Wisselinck wanted to achieve that the feminist topic was widely spread. The magazine, which also saw itself as a free press service, was published by Evangelical Women's Work in Germany and the joint venture of Evangelical Journalism. In 1980, Wisselinck left the editorial team of the magazine due to differences in content. At the same time she was dismissed by the director of studies at the Evangelical Academy.

When Alice Schwarzer invited 30 journalists to found EMMA in 1976 , Wisselinck was one of them. Until 1978 she wrote as a freelancer for EMMA. In 1978 the employment relationship changed and she wrote under two different pseudonyms on a fee basis. After three months, she resigned due to the labor law grievances in the editorial team and Schwarzer's authoritarian management style. In the dispute, she called Schwarzer a “macho in rock”.

In the following years, Wisselinck withdrew from the media and dealt only with feminist theory. In Porto Santo she began to write her own books and translated works by American authors such as Mary Daly , Robin Morgan , Janice Raymond and others. The translation of Mary Daly's monumental patriarchal criticism “Gyn / Ecology”, a major work on feminist philosophy, which also points the way for Wisselinck's own thinking, is of particular importance. In the following, she advocated the theory of difference feminism , emphasizing that, in her opinion, the differences were not biologically determined, but were based on a different background of experience. She explained her understanding

“Our wish has always been: a fairer world. It wasn't narrow-minded just about women. It is about a fairer distribution among the people, it is about a different way of dealing with nature, first and foremost, ... it is about a change in the whole attitude to the foundations of human life on this planet. The approach of the women's movement is that broad. "

This view also explains her support for the peace movement and the environmental movement from the 1980s onwards. In the following years she continued to work on translations of feminist literature and wrote her own books, including her only novel "Anna in the Golden Gate", which tells the story of Mary's mother . After translating Mary Dale's book “Reine Lust”, she goes on a reading tour with the author. In 1988 she was one of the co-founders of the Women's Studies in Munich , an association that sees itself as a think tank for those interested in feminism.

Private life

After their short marriage, Wisselink had some passionate, but often disappointing, relationships. Later, female friendships were in the foreground for her and she described herself as a woman-identified woman and a non-practicing lesbian .

In 1979 she bought a house on the island of Porto Santo , where she mainly lived and worked in the following years. In June 1993 she completely moved there. Apart from regular visits to her mother in need of care in Germany, she has spent the last few years relatively withdrawn. After a fall, she did not recover from the consequences. After a few misdiagnoses and treatments, she was diagnosed with skeletal disease. She died on January 4, 2001 in Funchal . She was buried in Porto Santo.

Your legacy is administered by Erika Wisselinck Nachlass gGmbH . In cooperation with the Gerda-Weiler -Stiftung, this published a biography, for the creation of which the author Gabriele Meixner had more than 30,000 files, including diaries, photos and letters, as well as recordings and copies of her entire professional work, available from the estate .

Local political activity

In 1972, Wisselinck ran as an SPD candidate for the office of district administrator in the Munich district . With a result of 42.2%, it was not elected. For the next twelve years she was politically active on a voluntary basis as a district councilor . In the district council she mainly campaigned for women's political issues such as women's health, women's language in offices or rhetoric courses for women. After she realized that she was getting stuck with party politics, she stopped doing this. Her contacts with the autonomous women's movement were also responsible for this .

subjects

Autonomous women's movement

From the mid-1980s, Wisselink no longer saw the autonomous women's movement , which had formed from the ranks of the 68 movement , as part of the continuity of the women's movement . In contradiction to Alice Schwarzer , she sees the beginning of this movement in 1968 with the beginning of the 1968 movement, while Schwarzer only sees the beginning of 1973 with the I have aborted campaign . While in the early 1970s Wisselinck still saw common origins and continuity, she later realized that, due to the different topics and the diversity of family backgrounds, there was little in common between these different generations of women's rights activists.

Witch hunt

In 1986 Wisselincks published the book Witches. Why we learn so little of their history and what is wrong with it. Analysis of a displacement . According to historian Jaana Eichhorn, there has been a change in historical studies since the monograph was published : The witch theme has since been dealt with in historical overview works. Various authors linked the persecution of the Jews in the Middle Ages and the early modern period with the witch craze. Eichhorn criticizes the fact that Wisselinck, who recognizes the similarities between the National Socialist persecution of Jews and the persecution of witches in the “structures of the persecutor's mentality ”, writes of “ women's holocaust ” and compares the witch hammer with Hitler's Mein Kampf . However, she avoids naming the number of victims, "since a woman who is burned as a witch [...] is one too many" (Wisselinck, 1986). Elsewhere, however, she writes of "murders of millions". It is also noted that she expects the number of victims to be far too high.

Awards

Works (selection)

  • Women think differently. To the feminist discussion. As an introduction and to think further. Göttert, Rüsselsheim 1984/1992 , ISBN 3-922229-26-3 ; 4th edition, Feministischer Buchverlag Wiesbaden 1996, ( DNB 949005096 ).
  • Witches. Why we learn so little of their history and what is wrong with it. Women's offensive, Munich 1986, ISBN 3-88104-158-3 .
  • Now it's our turn. Women and politics. Essays from 30 years. Women's offensive, Munich 1988, ISBN 3-88104-181-8 .
  • Anna in the Golden Gate. Counter-legend about the mother of Mary. Kreuz, Stuttgart 1990/1993 , ISBN 3-7831-1051-3 , NA: Göttert, Rüsselsheim 2008, ISBN 978-3-939623-03-8 .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ biography on www.fembio.org (accessed June 8, 2014)
  2. ↑ biography at www.fembio.org (accessed June 9, 2014)
  3. ^ Mathilde, Heft 106 (May-June 2010) (accessed on June 8, 2014)
  4. ↑ www.christel-goettert-verlag.de (accessed on June 8, 2014)
  5. ^ Julia Paulus, Eva-Maria Silies, Kerstin Wolff: Contemporary history as gender history: New perspectives on the Federal Republic , Campus Verlag, 2012, p. 261 online at googlebooks
  6. ↑ Protestant women's work in Germany in connection with the community work of the Evang. Journalism , published: 1973 - 1984, so that publication was discontinued.
  7. ↑ Kristin Flach-Köhler in Evangelical Women in Hesse and Nassau. Women Education Spirituality September 2010 (accessed June 8, 2014)
  8. ↑ www.frauenstudien-muenchen.de (accessed on June 8, 2014)
  9. ↑ biography on www.fembio.org (accessed June 8, 2014)
  10. ↑ Juliane Brumberg in Geschichte quer , issue 15, 2010 (accessed on June 8, 2014)
  11. ↑ a b Dagmar Buchta on Die Standard (accessed June 8, 2014)
  12. ↑ www.gerda-weiler-stiftung.de (accessed on June 9, 2014)
  13. ↑ Kristin Flach-Köhler in Schlangenbrut , November 2010 online (accessed June 9, 2014)
  14. ^ Julia Paulus, Eva-Maria Silies, Kerstin Wolff: Contemporary history as gender history: New perspectives on the Federal Republic , Campus Verlag, 2012, p. 265 online at googlebooks
  15. ↑ Julia Paulus, Eva-Maria Silies, Kerstin Wolff: Contemporary history as gender history: New perspectives on the Federal Republic , Campus Verlag, 2012, p. 271 ff. Online at googlebooks
  16. ↑ Jaana Eichhorn: History between tradition and innovation: Discourses, institutions and power structures in West German research in the early modern period , V&R unipress GmbH, 2006, pp. 303-304 online at googlebooks
  17. ↑ Birgit Neger: Modern Witches and Wicca: Notes on a magical world of today , Böhlau Verlag Vienna, 2009, p. 51 online at googlebooks
  18. ↑ dnb link to the award brochure in the catalog of the German National Library (accessed June 8, 2014)
personal data
SURNAME Wisselinck, Erika
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Meinhardus, Erika
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German feminist journalist, author and translator
DATE OF BIRTH October 6, 1926
PLACE OF BIRTH Goerlitz
DATE OF DEATH January 4, 2001
Place of death Madeira