“Feminism Between the Wars”: New issue of the Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte
News from 11/17/2020
The 2020 winter issue of the ZIG is dedicated to the "interlude of emancipation"; it also carries a report on initial discoveries in the Riefenstahl estate.
The Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte [literally: magazine for the history of ideas] is published quarterly by C.H.Beck. The 2020 winter issue, which has just come out, looks back a hundred years to an interlude of emancipation, under the title “Feminism Between the Wars”.
The period after World War I saw the first heyday of feminism, one of the great social movements of the past two hundred years. It was the time of women's fight for basic rights, participation, and access to education and the professions. The debate about power and gender dispositions – about femininity, masculinity and their intermediate stages – broke out spectacularly after 1918. Suddenly, women looked different: it seemed as though intermediate beings from the moon, tomboys, and muscle women had landed on the Earth. They went to work. They laughed at timidity and sought whatever was new. Being “feminist” changed from being an attitude to being a way of life.
The ZIG traces this feminist interlude after the first women's movement and before the second one, with articles on “New Women in Weimar”, Hannah Arendt's network of friends, and the connections between Germany's defeat in World War I and women's liberation.
Its co-publisher, the SPK, has contributed a report on the first finds that have come to light during the examination of Leni Riefenstahl's estate. Moritz Wullen, Ludger Derenthal, and Matthias Struch discuss a letter from a fan, a photograph, and the "African handbag" to illustrate how the contents of the estate are continually revealing new facets of one of Germany's most controversial figures of the twentieth century, and thereby seem to jump back and forth between fabricated reality and historical reality.