Responding to the worldwide impact of the #MeToo movement, this volume investigates not only the ubiquity of sexual abuse and sexual violence but also the transhistorical and transnational failure to hold perpetrators accountable. From a range of disciplines, the collected essays engage current cultural and political discourses about systemic sexism, feminist theory and practice, and gender-based discrimination from an academic and activist perspective. The focus on national cultures of German-speaking Europe from the mid-eighteenth century to the present captures the persistence of normalized and institutionalized sexism, reframed through the lens of a contemporary political and social movement.
German #MeToo argues that sexual violence is not a universal human constant. Rather, it is nurtured and sustained by the social, political, cultural, legal, and economic fabric of specific societies. The authors sustain and vary their exploration of #MeToo-related issues through considerations of rape, prostitution, sexual murder, the politics of consent, and victim-blaming as enacted in literary works by canonical and marginalized authors, the visual arts, the graphic novel, film, television, and theater. The analysis of rape myths - of discourses and practices in German history and culture that subtend and indemnify sexual violence - is a central subject of this edited volume. Throughout, German #MeToo challenges narratives of sex-based discrimination while emphasizing the strategies of resistance and the importance of telling one's own story.

Edited by Elisabeth Krimmer and Patricia Anne Simpson

Introduction - Elisabeth Krimmer and Patricia Anne Simpson
Part I. Histories
1: Eighteenth-Century #MeToo: Rape Culture and Victim Blaming in Heinrich Leopold Wagner's Die Kindermörderin (1776) - Lisa Wille
2: #MeToo: Prostitution and the Syntax of Sexuality around 1800 - Patricia Anne Simpson
Part II. Dialogues across Time
3: "Immaculate Conception," the "Romance of Rape," and #MeToo: Kleistian Echoes in Kerstin Hensel and Julia Franck - Melissa Ann Sheedy
4: Female Sacrifice, Sexual Assault, and Dehumanization: Bourgeois Tragedy, Horror, and the Making of Jud Süß - Deborah Janson
5: "Na, wenn du mich erst fragst?": Reconsidering Affirmative Consent with Schnitzler, Schnitt, Habermas, and Rancière - Sonja Boos
Part III. Sexual Violence, Warfare, and Genocide
6: War of the Vulva: The Women of Otto Dix's Lustmord Series - Jessica Davis
7: Death to the Patriarchal Theater! Charlotte Salomon's Graphic Testimony - Maureen Burdock
8: #MeToo and Wartime Rape: Looking Back and Moving Forward - Katherine Stone
Part IV. The Institutions of #MeToo
9: Boarding-School Novels around 1900: The Relation of Male Fear of Women to Male-Male Seduction and Sexual Abuse in Hesse, Musil, and Walser - Niklas Straetker
10: Breaking the Silence about Sexualized Violence in Lilly Axtser's and Beate Teresa Hanika's Young Adult Fiction (YAF) - Anna Sator
11: "Eine gigantische Vergewaltigung": Rape as Subject in Roger Fritz's Mädchen mit Gewalt (1970) - Lisa Haegele
12: Elfriede Jelinek and Ingeborg Bachmann: Transformations of the Capitalist Patriarchy and Narrating Sexual Violence in the Twentieth Century - Aylin Bademsoy
13: Staging Consent and Threatened Masculinity: The Debate on #MeToo in Contemporary German Theater - Daniele Vecchiato
Part V. #MeToo Across Cultural and National Borders
14: Patriarchy, Male Violence, and Disadvantaged Women: Representations of Muslims in the Crime Television Series Tatort - Sascha Gerhards
15: Fatih Akin's Head On: Challenging Mythologies of German Social Work in Gegen die Wand (2004) - Florian Gassner
16: Is a Prostitute Rapeable? Teresa Ruiz Rosas's Novel Nada que declarar in Dialogue with #MeToo - Kathrin Breuer

Notes on the Contributors
Index