Have you ever dated a German man who happened to be a writer? No? Good for you. Not that I would recommend dating writers in general, who have a tendency to justify their worst behaviour as art. And honestly, why wouldn’t they? The canon is full of men who poured their raw misogyny into beautiful sentences and well-crafted compositions. In return some of these men had genius status conferred on them because, well, they wrote fiction and the misogyny was the fictional character’s, not theirs.
In German writing there is another unfortunate tradition: a hyperfixation on the inner world of the perpetrator. This focus goes beyond narrative perspective. It finds its way into essays and nonfiction writing. It finds its way into so many forms of writing that the perpetrator is sometimes transformed into the real victim of his own violence. That’s exactly what the Nobel prize winner Peter Handke did (OK, Handke is Austrian), in his revisionist account of the Bosnian genocide committed by the Serbs. And it’s what the recently deceased author Martin Walser did when he complained that not a day went by without Germans being hit with the ultimate “moral cudgel”, namely Auschwitz.
But what about the current generation of German literary boys? They’re all about changing the world and tearing down patriarchy, aren’t they? Well, in a way they are.
The term “critical masculinity” began seeping out of German academia into artistic circles in the 2010s, and since then more and more male authors have been reflecting on their self-image and role in a patriarchal society. The concept goes back to the global feminist movement of the 1960s, when male allies sought to play an active part in liberating society from patriarchal violence by questioning themselves.
But in 2023 the idea, framed as anti-sexist allyship with women and queer people, seems to have created a stage for men to take up space without feeling bad about it. Their monologues suddenly serve a higher purpose. Centring their own male vulnerability, these writers seem to believe they make the world a better place for all of us. And they have been mostly applauded for it, until a scandal blew up in Germany last month.
An anthology called Oh Boy: Masculinity Today assembled a diverse range of male writers as well as one trans and two non-binary authors. They all explore and reflect their internalised images of being a man, stories of trauma and silence, cases of their own violent behaviour. Immediately after its publication, one of the book’s two co-editors, Valentin Moritz, was accused by an anonymous woman of what the publishers later described as a sexualised assault and then writing about the incident in the book. It took a few weeks and a group of activists to transform this anonymous allegation into a furore and then a public debate, which played out in every quality newspaper in the country. The activists’ demands: stop capitalising on someone else’s trauma.
This all comes at a time when Germany is at a frustrating point for the #MeToo movement. The Harvey Weinstein scandal may have opened the floodgates globally but relatively few women have spoken out in Germany, and most of the allegations of sexual harassment and sexual abuse made public have not involved terribly famous men. That changed earlier this summer, when fans of the metal band Rammstein accused its frontman Till Lindemann of systematically drugging and sexually assaulting fans at his concerts. Berlin state prosecutors opened an investigation, but the band didn’t cancel a single one of their stadium shows. The band denied the allegations and prosecutors subsequently said that in the absence of direct testimony they were unable to substantiate the allegations, and dropped the case.
The case of the Oh Boy anthology is a bit more complicated. While the first statements by the publisher, Kanon Verlag, and Moritz’s co-editor, Donat Blum, were handled with an amateurism (“it’s fiction!”) that raised doubts about their capacity to deal with this subject on any level, more details came out: Moritz had apparently spoken to the woman affected about his draft, but she did not consent for her story to be made public. The publishing house then confirmed it had been informed about the woman’s objections but decided to print the text anyway, since there weren’t any details that could identify the victim (or risk a lawsuit, I assume).
But the legal side was never the one in question. The point the anonymous woman was making was that Moritz took advantage of her trauma by framing it as his own. His contribution to the book, which is not labelled or marked as fiction, explores the shock of being a perpetrator, despite clearly thinking he is one of the courageous ones. It’s about the shame, guilt and despair of being confronted by his victim and then not being allowed to make amends. The issue here is not whether such a piece of prose should be written, but how it is written. Moritz shifts the focus from the victim’s experience to the perpetrator’s emotional burden. It was published in a context of “critical masculinity” and falls into every trap that besets this discourse: it centres the vulnerability of a man who violated a woman’s consent, and by doing so it violates her consent again.
In a public letter most of the authors, who apparently knew nothing about the context of Moritz’s piece, announced they were withdrawing from any involvement with the book until his chapter was removed. Moritz himself apologised to the victim and everyone else. The publishing house announced it would reissue the book without that piece. But it’s debatable whether there will be enough interested readers for a new edition. Let’s hope at least the whole trend of “critical masculinity” in Germany is done for good and male allyship shifts from public navel-gazing to more urgent actions: stop being a dick might be a good start?
Fatma Aydemir is a Berlin-based author, novelist, playwright and a Guardian columnist
