Goethe’s Gretchen was considered the feminine image of German existence. This girl and maiden, whose social order and language has been obliterated from use in the meantime, was the innocence of purity, and the devil was the tempter in league with the impulses of a man on his way to knowledge. The Mother’s Cross under Hitler was related to this, as a new sign of recognition awarded for the service of giving birth to several children.
With this lever began the assault on the old image. One who positioned oneself here won the hated image for the others. People laughed at the provincial, which was mutilated by mannerism, destroyed by the pornography that one called freedom, attacked, the woman in the theater, in the images of the times, stripped, the unmanly celebrated in man, and woman ridiculed in the ostentation of homosexuality, so also in the racially understood lesbian scene, the new self-perception as confident women that the solitary life after the war and work had developed, organized as a mockery, from bourgeois obesity to neurotic intellectualism, the women having no chance, just like the landscape and culture, “the idiocy of country life.” Whoever strips off, performs; whoever is cynical, acts thoughtlessly, rotten and enterprising in business; whoever goes along with it, curries favor; and whoever is unable to do so, makes it hard for himself. It would be worth studies, studies not wished for and not even thought of. Gone, tabooed — through rage, lies and betrayal, the actual corruption of the mind. Thus, woman became in the end the victim of men in one of these lost worlds. But sometimes still there, like an echo, between the evocative words or pictures, playful, hidden, elegant or even elegiac, everything still there, highly moved, like a song from the mountains, the call during haymaking, from hillside to hillside, echo of the old cries of joy, to be alive, old sounds in the stillness of the harvest.
Woman as the height of the representation of bodily beauty and as the spirit of the will of earlier art — in this age, and to its powerful people with the intentions of dividing and dispossessing and re-educating: the solo, like an autography of loneliness on the skin of a person on the empty stage of an overcrowded world.