Irmtraud Morgner

Irmtraud Morgner's choice of baroque narrative modes, already indicated in the title of her highly entertaining book about the extraordinary character of a female troubadour, was a successful move for the author in many respects. On one hand it gave her the distance she needed to tackle the ideologically loaded issue of the seemingly eternal battle of the sexes in a free and unrestrained manner; on the other she was able truly to give full expression to her artistic temperament, her predilection for imaginative, creative combinatorial analysis, involving her characters in profound allegorical games without any great psychological depth. Beatriz de Dia is a troubadour from ancient Provence, who uses a Sleeping Beauty trick to end her first life in 1200, in order to begin a new life some eight centuries later. She is such an ideally suited character for the main role in Morgner's literary projects that she is resurrected once again in a later book - as the siren in the 'witches novel' Amanda, the second volume of a trilogy whose final volume never appeared because the author became ill with cancer and died. top All women struggling for the right to determine their own personal development find their great spiritual forebear in Beatriz: in her time she turned her back on the "ocean of masculine egotism", hoping to awake from the sleep bridging the ages at a stage beyond the power structures of matriarchy and patriarchy. But because her castle Almaciz in Provence stands in the path of a new motorway she is woken early, just at the time of the uprisings in May 1968. She soon realises the world still falls far short of her emancipatory ideal - even that 'promised land' the GDR, where she finds her minstrel Laura. She takes the place of Beatriz at the round table after Beatriz herself has a fatal accident when cleaning the windows.