[NYTr] Germany: A Radical Feminist Revolutionary Comes in from the Cold

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Womens eNews - Aug 13, 2007
http://www.womensenews.org


Germany's Once-Violent Feminist Adopts Quiet Life

By Harriet Torry
WeNews correspondent

BERLIN (WOMENSENEWS)--Adrienne Gerhaeuser left Germany 20 years ago as
a dangerous terrorist.

Today she is an emblem of how little a country led by right-of-center
Angela Merkel, the nation's first female chancellor, has to fear from
feminist militants. Some women's rights activists are quick to distance
themselves from Gerhaeuser and Rote Zora, the violent anti-patriarchy
group to which she belonged.

Despite plotting to commit acts of terrorism and being a member of a
group that carried out an estimated 45 bombings and arson attacks
between 1974 and 1995, Gerhaeuser received a suspended sentence in
April.

After nearly two decades on the lam, she turned herself in and pleaded
guilty. The court reasoned that she would be unlikely to re-offend, and
the 20-year gap between her crimes and her trial, as well as the fact
that her actions weren't for personal gain, allowed Gerhaeuser to
escape a jail term.

The feminists from her era who were not as radical are quick to
minimize her influence. Speaking of Rote Zore, Sybille Plogstedt, a
journalist who founded the feminist magazine Courage in 1976, says
Gerhaeuser's group accomplished little.

"I never supported them and spoke out against the use of violence in
the mid-1980s, but it was made clear to me that being anti-violence
wasn't the collective view at the time. There was a lot of sympathy for
militancy amongst intellectuals then."

"They were very much on the fringe of the women's movement, both in
terms of quantity and quality," says Ulrike Helwerth, from the German
Women's Lobby and co-author of "Of Mommies and Women's Libbers:
Feminists in East and West Germany," published in 1995. "They weren't
the core center by any means."

 From Militancy to Photography

Gerhaeuser currently lives on government assistance, but that may not
last too long. At her trial she said she intends to become a
photographer, specializing in portraying women.

Gerhaeuser's political story began in 1974 when Germany was still
divided into East and West. A group of women got together on the
western, democratic side of the wall and formed an anti-patriarchal
group named after the red-haired, Robin Hood-like heroine of the 1941
children's book "Red Zora."

Their mission was to liberate women from exploitation as sex objects
and baby-making machines and to fight the "day-to-day war against women
with fire and flames."

They plotted bomb attacks on targets such as sex shops and
bio-technology research centers. The group said doctors who performed
genetic engineering and forced sterilizations were equal to "exponents
of rape in white coats," and attacked a pharmaceutical company that
produced a drug linked to birth anomalies.

They were women with jobs and children who paid taxes and plotted
terrorist acts in their spare time.

At her trial in April, Gerhaeuser admitted to being in the Rote Zora
between 1986 and 1987, buying alarm clocks used as detonators and
helping build explosive devices.

In 1987, after she was filmed buying a clock which later turned up on a
bomb, Gerhaeuser fled the country.

No Longer Wanted 'Illegal Life'

In 2006 she decided "she didn't want to live an illegal life any more"
and put it behind her since "the political connections which existed
then do not exist anymore," as her lawyer told the Berlin court.

"It became possible for her to come back without having to go to
prison, so she did it," said Ulla Penselin, who was jailed for eight
months in the late 1980s on suspicion of being in the Rote Zora at a
time when the government was desperate to crack down on the group.
"She'd been in touch with the public prosecution office and it was
clear that she wouldn't have been given a jail sentence."

Some say Gerhaeuser's ability to slip quietly back into German life
reflects the somnolence of feminism in a country where women earn on
average 26 percent less than men and make up less than a third of
parliament.

"The women's movement is pretty worn out at the moment," says
Plogstedt. "It hasn't quite caught on with the younger generation." Her
magazine, Courage, shut down in 1989.

Not all activism disappeared along with the Rote Zora. The German
Women's Lobby, the nation's main council of 50 different women's
organizations, aims to put the German constitution's gender equality
article into practice and focuses on the workings of government. But
the lobby's demands, like most political women's groups, are for female
economic independence: equal pay, social security and tax law reform,
rather than overthrowing the patriarchy.

There is also demand for gender equality in medical research, medical
practice and high-level medical decision-making, particularly regarding
reproductive rights. So at least one of the Rote Zora's
targets--biotechnology and genetic engineering institutions--is still a
bull's eye for mainstream women's groups.

The main voice of political feminism in Germany, the women's
twice-monthly magazine Emma (short for "emancipation") is still going
strong after 30 years with a readership of 120,000. The magazine, run
without advertising, has organized campaigns for improved child care
and against female genital mutilation and pornography. The Rote Zora's
only known interview was with Emma, given anonymously by two members in
1984. It was used as evidence of the Rote Zora's political motivation
in Gerhaeuser's recent trial.

Lamenting Decline of Feminism

Some German feminists lament that their cause has become unfashionable,
especially in its extreme form.

In the 1970s, by contrast, young people were enraptured by militancy of
all kinds and revolutionary ideas spread throughout Europe.

It was a time when violence became voguish, when "the guerrillas of
South American nationalism were considered heroes and some feminists
equated sexual equality with being militant," says Helwerth.

But as left-wing groups such as the Red Army Faction and the
Revolutionary Cells became deadlier and deadlier, police clamped down,
and around 1987 the Rote Zora's members fled the country or went
underground.

The Rote Zora claimed it never intended to hurt anyone, just to destroy
"symbols of the patriarchy," and had more success in achieving
political aims than many other, far more lethal, groups at the time.

In 1987, the group bombed the department store Adler because its
corporation--one of Germany's largest clothing producers--fired women
at its South Korean factory for striking. The bombing injured no one
and the women were rehired and paid more money.

"I couldn't quantify exactly how much success the group had, but the
topics that the Rote Zora and other women's groups were campaigning for
on a legal and illegal level became big causes," says Ulla Penselin,
who writes for the radical feminist-lesbian journal Ihrsinn.

Today, however, no one seems more ready to minimize Gerhaeuser's mark
on history than Gerhaeuser herself.

"I feel sorry, but I don't want to give interviews," she said in a
recent e-mail with Women's eNews.

In the anonymous 1984 interview with Emma, a Rote Zora member described
a future utopia where "every sex trader, violent husband, sexist
newspaper editor and pornographer lives in fear of female vigilantes
and public humiliation."

Most traces of the group or its influence are gone. But around Berlin,
you still catch occasional glimpses of printed T-shirts or sprayed
graffiti of a woman with a gun: "Watch out rapists," the slogan reads,
"we're going to get you."

[Harriet Torry is a freelance journalist based in Berlin.]

For more information:

Deutscher Frauenrat (German Women's Lobby): -
http://www.frauenrat.de/module/home/start.aspx

Emma (in German): - http://www.emma.de/

Ihrsinn (in German): -
http://www.ihrsinn.auszeiten-frauenarchiv.de/englisch/self.html

Copyright 2007 Women's eNews.