Życie i pisanie (dla) wspólnoty. Käthe Schirmacher i Stefania Laudyn-Chrzanowska między feminizmem a nacjonalizmem

Abstract

Two controversial women, a German and a Pole, are presented in this comparative study. Käthe Schirmacher and Stefania Laudyn-Chrzanowska were radical women’s rights advocates who became passionate nationalists. The article is an attempt at interpreting their lives and writings as a kind of self-narration and at the same time a narration of community (identity). As Carolyn Heilbrun puts it, a woman can write her life by telling it in an autobiography, she can write it as a fictional narrative or write it “in advance by living it”. Therefore, the paper focuses on both texts and (real) lives. Moreover, individual identity continuously intersects with group identity in the biographies and narrations displayed here. For Schirmacher and Laudyn narrating the self often means narrating community: either narrating the imagined women’s community or narrating the nation. Hence both authors challenge the model of an autonomous individual narrating a single life. A further point of departure is the relationship between identity and interaction with other languages or national groups. It is not entirely coincidental that Schirmacher and Laudyn developed strongly nationalistic and anti-Semitic attitudes after having lived abroad for a long period of time. The first few years were marked by a deep belief in supra-national women’s organizations and women’s solidarity. Then a kind of “political solstice” took place (Schirmacher). Obviously, the radical change of views was due to a number of factors but the everyday confrontation with “the other” intensified the awareness of cultural boundaries and resulted in the sacralization of their own respective nations. The paper offers thus a double portrait of both activists as feminists and nationalists, and also, more or less deliberately, chronists of two different, though intertwined, ‘imagined communities’.