The Group 47 was established in the wake of the second world war to promote a new generation of German writers, explicitly opposed to the Nazi past. From 1947 to 1967 it held annual meetings in cities across Germany and beyond, each lasting several days, at which writers read their work followed by a discussion and a vote for the best text. There was no fixed membership: attendees were invited by its founder, Hans Werner Richter.
The Group’s meetings were attended by a roll call of the most celebrated names in postwar German literature, but aside from Ingeborg Bachmann and Ilse Aichinger, the women writers who took part have largely been forgotten. In her history of the women of the Group 47, ‘Einige Herren sagten etwas dazu: die Autorinnen der Gruppe 47’, Nicole Seifert seeks to unearth these women, and to highlight their experiences of the Group and the male-dominated German publishing industry more generally. She highlights the sexist exclusion that severely marked their reception and their legacies, arguing that writers such as Ruth Rehmann, Ingrid Bachér, Ilse Schneider-Lengyel and Barbara König (to name just the earlier authors) deserve far more recognition for their innovative and progressive work.
New Books in German spoke to Nicole about the book.
Lizzy Kinch: How did you have the idea of looking specifically into women the 47 Group? Can you describe the significance of the Group to an anglophone audience?
Nicole Seiffert: I wanted to explore the structural discrimination of female writers and in order to analyse a structure, I needed a group of authors. There aren’t many writers’ groups of significant size in German literary history that still have a certain importance, so the 47 Group was quite an obvious object of investigation.
Most of the male canonised authors of post-war Germany took part in the Group’s annual meetings: Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass, Peter Handke, to name only the Nobel prize winners. Of the women we practically only know about Ingeborg Bachmann. There were many others, in fact, but they were suppressed from literary history and forgotten. The reasons for this are far more interesting and more political than I initially thought. From today’s perspective, the women, especially the female poets, were by far the more interesting writers, in form and in content.
The title is very apt — could you explain why you chose it?
“Some gentleman said something about it” is a quote from Ingeborg Bachmann. She wrote it after her first reading in front of the 47 Group. The men were a vast majority, and it was only men who proffered criticism, which, of course, was due to the very restricted gender roles of the 1950s. If you consider the enormous impact these male judgments had on the reception of the women authors, on their lives as well as their afterlives — it seemed to me a meaningful and appropriate title for the book.
It was striking to see how many of the women authors explored the legacies of National Socialism in contrast to the male authors — in particular the Group’s founder Hans Werner Richter — who seemed to repress any mention of the horrors. Was this something that surprised you in your research? Do you think this was down to the particular experiences and personalities of the authors, or largely because of the male experience of fighting during the war?
I was very surprised by the extent of the repression. The male founders of the group were soldiers in World War 2 and saw themselves as anti-fascist in its aftermath. But they also considered themselves blameless for the horrors, and didn’t want to hear anything about the Holocaust; they wanted to think of themselves as victims.
Many of the women were a few years younger and were still at school and college during the war, so they were far better educated than their male colleagues. Their writing shows that they understood how fascism and patriarchy worked together in post-war Germany. So it seems to be structural on the one hand but of course there is always a personal aspect as well.
Each of the chapters opens with two juxtaposed quotes: one by the woman author who is the focus of the chapter, and one by a man about her. Often the contrast is so absurd, it’s bleakly funny — I laughed at Hans Werner Richter describing Ilse Aichinger as a ‘beautiful woman, so attractive to some of the attendees at my meeting that they were completely besides themselves, and in my view lost their composure a little’. Aichinger’s response: ‘I was really just interested in literature’. When did you have the idea of using the quotes?
Initially, I was only collecting the most horrendous statements made by the men about the women authors. But the more I researched, the more statements I found by the women authors on their situation in the 47 Group, and I realised how telling it is to merely contrast these perspectives — the overwhelmingly sexist male gaze, versus the often very self-confident and informed view of the women.
The book has so many examples of female authors being slighted and belittled by male critics and the male literary establishment. Is there a particular author you felt angry on behalf of?
My research gave me more reason to be sad, actually. There are so many great women authors we don’t know of anymore. Some of them were already left to be forgotten by the time they died and ended their life in poverty and without recognition. Even some of the obituaries of these women are full of malice and misogyny. Others, like Griseldis Fleming, were so harshly criticised for her great poems that she almost stopped writing and publishing. The question is: What could have been, had they received the appreciation they deserved, had they not stopped writing.
There’s a great sense of missed opportunity in the book; of how different these women’s lives would have been had they lived in a less sexist period, and of how much more work they may have produced. You also argue that much of their work was ahead of its time. Are there any authors in particular whose work you think should be more widely read today (too many to choose from I imagine!)
Lots! The early stories of Ilse Aichinger are mindblowing. Gabriele Wohmann’s stories on men and women living together in the 1960s and 1970s, the feminist novels by Christa Reinig and the hilarious socio-critical novels by Gisela Elsner. Griseldis Fleming’s poems and her memoir Donna. We’ve missed out on a lot. Most of it is still around, though; we can still catch up and bring these women back into the light.
Author photo: © Katja Scholtz
Nicole Seifert has a doctorate in literature and has completed training as a bookseller. She works as a translator and author. Her book “FrauenLiteratur. Devalued, forgotten, rediscovered” was published in 2021 and sparked a debate about female writing. Nicole Seifert is co-editor of the “rororo Entdeckungen” series, in which novels by unknown female authors of the 20th century are (re)published.
Lizzy Kinch works in history documentaries and translates fiction from German to English. She holds a Masters in Global History from the Freie Universität Berlin and a Diploma in Translation.
“Einige Herren sagten etwas dazu” Die Autorinnen der Gruppe 47 is published by Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch. For more information about the book, please see the publisher’s website.
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