Satirizing the Private as Political: 1968 and Postmillennial Family Narratives

Abstract

Since the millennium public discourse on the family has repeatedly referenced the social-political legacy of 1968 and feminism. Using this reference as a point of entry, this article provides a genealogical sketch of family-political narratives in the 1960s and the postmillennial period. It turns specifically to the satirical literature representing the private sphere, interrogating how Gisela Elsner’s Der Nachwuchs (The Offspring, 1968), Renate Rasp’s Ein ungeratener Sohn (A Family Failure, 1967), and Sophie Dannenberg’s Das bleiche Herz der Revolution (The Pale Heart of the Revolution, 2004) illuminate the relationship between ideology and critical resistance in public debates. An examination of the continuing correlation between the family, the politicization of the child, gender, and nation exposes the on-going importance of the political private sphere throughout the postwar period. (CSP)