Philomela's Legacy: Rape, the Second World War, and the Ethics of Reading

Abstract

This article addresses the ethical quandaries of the wartime rape of German women by Russian soldiers during the last months of the war. In particular, I discuss the multiple challenges involved in reading such rapes: the danger of identifying the victimization of these women with the victimization of the German nation; the danger of trivializing or downplaying the suffering of the rape victim; the challenge of writing about rape without recycling Nazi narratives. Rape is, as Sabine Sielke maintains, “a dense transfer point for relations of power.” My readings show that, when wartime rape is made to serve an ideological agenda, as it inevitably is, the experience of the victim, her trauma and pain, threaten to disappear amidst the noise of justifications, metaphors, and political deployments. Drawing on the mythical model of Philomela, I argue that there is a legacy of violence in both silence and in writing, but there is also an ethics of reading that allows one to pay tribute to the victims’ suffering even as one negotiates and recontextualizes their stories.