Introduction: Women, Violence, Representation, and West Germany

Summary

AS THE PROLIFERATION OF DISCOURSES on women and violence in West Germany of the 1960s and 1970s testifies, there is something deeply fascinating and deeply troubling about the combination of femininity, youth, beauty, and violence, both during that period and more generally. If woman's cultural role is to give life, the woman who is violent and potentially murderous is, at best, difficult to comprehend and, at worst (and in the words of Gilda Zwerman), “the ultimate pariah of the modern world … possessing an identity that exists outside the limits of political and moral discourse.” The will to discuss violence in women is certainly in evidence in West German newspapers and magazines in these two decades. In the context of several high-profile murder cases and, from 1970 onward, the participation of women in left-wing terrorism, the print media played a key role in “setting the agenda” for making the topic a subject of discussion. As I demonstrate in this study, though, print-media discourse is ambivalent. The discourses mobilized by the individual publications attest to a will to explain, to conceptualize, and hence to defuse any fear that the violent woman provokes (what can be explained can be assimilated, known, and mastered — partially at least), even as that threat is magnified in order to sell more newspapers.