Mad Mädchen: Feminism and Generational Conflict in Recent German Literature and Film by Margaret McCarthy (review)

At once broad in scope and deep in its readings of individual texts, this important book marks an essential contribution to the scholarship on literary and public developments in feminism in Germany since 1990. One of its strengths is the thorough contextualization of feminist debates within a much longer history of feminist engagement in the German cultural context and in diverse feminist theoretical frameworks. All the film and literature analyses connect back to these theoretical and historical debates. McCarthy brings different waves and generations of feminist and postfeminist engagement in conversation with one another, convincingly building her central argument that the contradictions and disjunctures between the different voices and movements are rooted in continuities and similar aims. Guided by theorist Claire Hemmings, she asserts that "alternative visions of a feminism's past, present, and future" are needed in order to make political transformation possible (11).

Chapter 1 provides an overview of German feminism during the 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s. Here McCarthy discusses the so-called "demography debate," the Alice Schwarzer / Verona Feldbusch debate, and the appearance of the volumes Neue deutsche Mädchen and Wir Alpha-Mädchen, emphasizing the centrality of the mother/daughter paradigm as a metaphor for fissures and connections between different generational voices. She provides readers with a comprehensive and critical overview of developments in postfeminism, particularly its dis/engagements with second-generation feminists during the two decades after unification. She draws comparisons to postfeminism in the US, highlighting connections and differences, and engaging discussions by Hester Baer, Alexandra Merley Hill, Maria Stehle, Carrie Smith-Prei, Christina Scharff, and other scholars of recent feminist production and activism.

In chapter 2 McCarthy discusses the deeply conflicted female protagonists in Zoe Jenny's Blütenstaubzimmer (1999), Alexa von Lange's Relax (1999), and Elke Naters's Lügen (1999), in which she identifies "profoundly neurotic behavior" by characters who "perceive feminism not as a web of intersecting voices but as a disjunctive cacophony that further agitates already fragmented selves" (13). She embeds the novels in the broader pop literature debate and delineates the im/possibility of the different characters' realizations of female selfhood/subjectivity by dissecting motherdaughter relationships, female friendship, fluid erotic desire, and the politics of watching/viewing in the novels. Highlighting their disjointed, fragmented, and sometimes immobile selves, she argues that a playful performativity aids the characters' potential for healing and solidarity, and even possible transformation of wounded relationships, both in the private and the broader public spheres.

Chapter 3 shifts attention to Charlotte Roche's influence on the feminism debate; it discusses her two novels Feuchtgebiete (2008) and Schoßgebete (2011), tracing second- and third-wave influences in both. Here she argues that even in the angry, defiant daughter's voice there resonates an identification with the mother, to the point that "difference and affiliation coexist" (105). In her engagement with the mother and the iconic Alice Schwarzer, Roche develops a dialogic relationship, creating a transgressive sexuality in which trauma and self-discovery are enacted via the female body, desire, and bodily fluids.

Chapters 4 offers discussions of female terrorists in mainstream film, Uli Edel's Baader Meinhof Komplex (2008) and Achim Bornhak's Das wilde Leben (2007). She argues that "both films implicitly show us the [feminist] movement's shaping influence on our understanding of two historically fraught female figures" (158). She reads the portrayal of Ulrike Meinhof in Edel's films as a second-wave feminist story of self-actualization, which serves to correct predominant media representations, while she highlights "third-wave performativity and sexual empowerment" in Bornhak's representation of Uschi Obermeier (159). In the end, however, she points out that both films leave us with representations that "occlude … the fragmented, incongruous selfhood that fuels the feminist project" (229).

In her analysis of Petzold's Die innere Sicherheit (2000) and Akin's Auf der anderen Seite...