Feminist Europe, Book Review: Coup de

Napoleon is credited - probably erroneously - with a frank defmition of history: It is "a lie agreed upon by historians." Long before this ideology was invented, historians had understood it thus, and, ever since, not only have events come thick and fast, but also justifications. Only a few are privileged to take a long look, with presence of mind, into the ideology production site (Department of Tranquilizers and Sedatives) and return unanaesthetized with a list of instructions in hand. Alice Schwarzer has achieved this.

Schwarzer has examined, from the perspective of a feminist Journalist, the Kelly/ Bastian deaths, which took place on l October 1992 and remained undiscovered until the 19 of that month. After persecution theories of all stripes had been constructed and discussed for several days, clarity about the actual, intimate course of events was quick to come. "In the judgment of the prosecuting attorney, it is established that the fatal shots were fired by Gert Bastian. He killed Petra Kelly, who was lying in bed, with a point-blank shot to the temple from his Derringer pistol. He then took bis own life with a shot to the crown of his head." These are the events. But they are reported as a "double suicide." The public prosecutor also testified that "the absence of a farewell letter is no reason to doubt the suicide of the two former members of the German Parliament."

His Interpretation is widely shared. The Greens as well as the general public quickly reached consensus on this imaginative reconstruction, almost without Opposition. Statements are circulated in which Bastian laments the disintegration of the relationship. Friends confirm the "total exhaustion" of their Green political colleague and her dependence on Bastian's care, her Statement that she "can no longer live" without him.

Schwarzer sums up the falsification of a murder as double suicide: It is not only the public prosecutor for whom "Kelly's often repeated Statement 'I can no longer live without Gert' becomes identical with 'Pleasekillme'."

Since Schwarzer's book is not only larded with references to the dialectical relationship of the political and the personal (now fallen into oblivion) but also concludes with a confession, the reviewer must of course make public her own self-criticism: Only through Schwarzer's offensive action did this reviewer become aware that she had unwittingly endorsed the prevailing opinion, that she too had spontaneously spoken of "double suicide," and she too found herseif more susceptible to the tragic-romantic version a la Kleist (Heinrich von Kleist, 1777-1811, German dramatist ber 1992 and remained undiscovered until and poetwho killed himself a woman companion in a supposed suicide pact.) man to the plain fact: man kills woman.

The fact that the woman was a pacifist and an outspoken feminist, that the man was a retired general and eloquent pacifist, that he was a father figure while she, despite her tenacious energy, was perceived as fragile and girlish, that for both of them, private life merged with the political in ways that were hardly beneficial - all these antagonisms and spectacularly obvious facts had, if anything, a surprisingly muting effect Schwarzer calls the mainstream press "strikingly differentiated." I recall moments of unaccustomed stiffness at staff meetings of the taz [Tageszeitung (Daily Newspaper) in Berlin] as well as half- or fully articulated fears of succumbing to the morbid fascination of this case: the couple's death was something like a spy in the political editor's office - the world spirit wafts across one, it is touching and one feels important. Presumably to ward off these yellow-press urges, the serious media behaved discreetly on the whole - and in their flight to the civic front lapsed into gooey romantization, which in this case was not exaggeration but a lie.

It is not Alice Schwarzer's concern to serve up a new reconstruction of the case—though she begins her book with an abridged version that demonstrates her talent as a short-crime-story-teller. She wants to find the truth not by augmentation but reduction. Michelangelo (to cite a second great man) supposedly once said that sculpture is very simple: "You take a stone and chip everything away that doesn't look like the model." That is what Schwarzer does and the result justifies her method. Page after page she dismantles the legends that have developed around the deaths of these two people. Impartially but relentlessly she cites those who were quick to contribute to the Grand Opera Libretto: the Green Party, which staged a common funeral Service for victim and perpetrator; the [news magazine] Der Spiegel with its court psychiatrist testi-mony in which the murder was interpreted as a last act of love; Pastor Zink at the graveside, for whom Kelly, "this vivacious woman," has "gone to her death"; psycho-analyst Horst Eberhard Richter, who exhorts us to show "respect for the incomprehensible"; DIE ZEIT [weekly newspaper], which rather reluctantly concedes: "Even if he is said to have shot her without an agreement of mutual suicide... who dares to condemn a Gert Bastian, who steered Petra Kelly like an invalid through her last years." Schwarzer acknowledges that all-inclusive motifs, such as piety for example, may have a euphemistic effect. But: "Let's take a moment to irnagine the drarna the other way around: After a twelve-year relationship, Petra Kelly shoots Gert Bastian in his sleep and then kills herseif. How would his family have reacted? His friends? The retired military officers and the new politicians? The public? Would murderess Kelly have been able to count on the same sympathy as murderer Bastian?"

Some telling questions have obvious answers. Schwarzer has asked those questions and therein lies the significance of her book. Her psychological description of the Kelly/Bastian relationship and its link to sociological and historical considerations is simplified rather than subtle, and the hand of an attentive editor would have done no harm. But compared to the challenge she poses with her book, these are trivialities. One who wants to correct history before it has been consecrated for eternity must be fast and effective. Schwarzer against Napoleon: one to zero for the lady.

By Elke Schmitter; Trans. Jeanette Clausen, Feminist Europe, 2008. - Review of Schwarzer, Alice: "Eine tödliche Liebe. Petra Kelly und Gert Bastian", [A Fatal Love: Petra Kelly and Gert Batian] Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1993.  - Review originally appeared in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 17.7.1993