With the launch of the book
Tout le monde parle de la pluie et du beau temps. Pas nous, the Éditions du Remue-Ménage invites you to meet Ulrike Meinhof. The focus is not Ulrike Meinhof, the icon of the radical left and well-known co-founder of the terrorist Baader-Meinhof group, but the respected intellectual, the sharp-eyed analyst, the perceptive journalist whose articles and films on women’s issues, on the apathy of a society run by career politicians with dubious backgrounds, on the role of the media, and many other topics are as current today as they were in the 1960s.
This is the first French-language account and analysis of Meinhof’s life and work as a journalist, and the first presentation of a selection of articles she wrote over the course of the 1960s. It casts a critical light on West Germany society during these years and its struggle, in the shadow of National Socialism and the Holocaust, to institute democratic forms of life.
Le Monde diplomatique commented on the publication of the English book in 2008, that is now being launched in French: “Au fil des textes, celle qui n’a pas encore embrassé l’action directe armée propose des analyses fines qui renvoient aux questionnements fondamentaux de celles et ceux qui ne se satisfont pas de la société capitaliste. Quelle est l’efficacité politique du dévoilement critique des ressorts de la domination ? Comment articuler les revendications pour l’égalité des droits et l’éradication des inégalités constitutives de l’ordre social ? Quelle place accorder à l’illégalité et à la violence physique dans l’action politique?”
With:
- Isabelle Totikaev, translator, and graduate of the Universities of Montreal and Ottawa.
- Luise von Flotow, translator and professor at the University of Ottawa.
- Karin Bauer, professor at McGill University and author/editor of the English book “Everybody talks about the weather. We don’t” (Seven Stories, 2008).
- Rachel Bédard, publisher of Editions Remue-ménage, Montreal.
- Till van Rahden, professor at the Université de Montréal and a historian who focuses on democratic forms of life.
Excerpts from the Meinhof columns:
On women
From “False consciousness”:
“[I]n a car plant, the women who polish the doors earn less than the men who polish the roofs. The employers’ justification: roof-polishing requires different pressure than door polishing.”
From “Women in the SDS”:
“They [women] made it clear that it is not a personal failure for a woman not to be able to combine raising children with work outside the home; it is a societal failure, since society makes these two domains irreconcilable. [...] And when men didn’t want to engage with this, they threw tomatoes at them. [...] The reactions of the men…showed that entire trainloads of tomatoes will have to be thrown at appropriate targets for the message to really sink in.”
On politics and the spectres of National Socialism
From “A Man with good Manners”:
“He’s a warrior, a Teuton, a full-blood Aryan, progenitor of many children with two different wives whom he was more or less faithful to. [...] The supporters of National Socialism, and not its opponents, are the ones unveiling the truth about the regime.”
From “Hitler within you”:
“The response to concentration camps is not just to close them down, but to guarantee total political freedom for political opponents. [...] Anti-fascist sandbox games cannot make up for the (lack of) resistance against National Socialism – not for the younger generation or their older generation.”
On the cruelty and criminality of war
From “Dresden”:
“If we needed proof that the people is always abused by the governments that enter into war and are degraded into being both the pretext and the victims of applied barbarity, then Dresden is that proof.”
From “Napalm and Pudding”:
“It is thus not a criminal act to drop napalm on women, children, and old people; protesting against this act is a crime. [...] It is considered rude to pelt politicians with pudding and cream cheese but quite acceptable to host politicians who are having villages eradicated and cities bombed.”
On the media
From “File number XY” (on a popular TV program in which “crimes” are solved with the help of the public) :
“The program’s suggestive message may well be striking a chord with the many people who feel the need to get out of their subaltern roles at work and their consumer roles at home, who want to escape the permanent condition of powerlessness, the feeling of not being the subjects of their own lives, but the objects of outside interests. The feeling of having no influence, of knowing that the people “up there” do what they want anyway, the feeling of isolation in their own living rooms ...”
On Protest and Resistance
From “From Protest to Resistance”:
“’Protest is when I say I don’t like this. Resistance is when I put on end to what I don’t like. Protest is when I say I refuse to go along with this any more. Resistance is when I make sure everybody else stops going along too.’”
RSVP:
bibliothek-montreal@goethe.de
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