Feminist Europe, Book Review:

The tone is casual and ironic, now angry, now funny, basically cheerful. They take seriously the girls they used to be, but without nostalgia. Anyone who likes reading memoirs will get his or her money's worth here: school days, fads, crushes, American films, pop music, fashion (the detested nylon stockings, the coveted close-fitting Jeans), detaching from one's family— all from the perspective of "Do you remember?"

Do you remember the nylon stockings?

The authors proceed chronologically, but the format of letter and reply provides a dialogic momentum and intellectual breadth. They argue over who remembers "correctly," for the details of the past become blurred for everyone, but a little differently for each woman. Since the letters are written years after the events and experiences they are about, the power of memory itself unexpectedly becomes a subject for discussion.

The two women are from Wuppertal - like Eise Lasker-Schüler, Alice Schwarzer's favorite poet -, attend the same schools, are inseparable, and later, craving independence, move to Munich together where they share a room and yearn for Paris. The end of the friendship, which also Signals the end of youth for them, coincides with Alice's move to France and the Start of her journalistic career and with the beginning of Barbara's unhappy marriage and her life as a mother.

At first these texts are admittedly a bit superficial and glitzy, radiating cheeriness and high spirits. Political and social Problems are merely intermittent drops of rain in the consciousness of young people, concerned as they are with dancing and personal possessions. In that respect the two did not have it easy as children.

Both were fatherless with helpless mothers who could not be role models for them. Schwarzer, an illegitimate child, regarded her mother as an older sister; only her grandparents, with whom she lived ("my outcastish family"), and especially her beloved grandfather, were authorities. Barbara despised her mother, who regularly had screaming fits. To a great extent, the girls were left to their own devices. There were any number of prohibitions but no warnings; the society was prudish and more interested in restricting young people than in enlightening them. The pervasive theme of silence when one should have spoken up is expressed also in the grownups' reluctance to deal with the Nazi past. In Munich the two meet Jewish immigrants. They feel sympathetic to them but do not dare to ask them about their past.
Starting with the time in Munich, the letters become more serious, the memories more ambivalent. What caused the friendship to break down? Was it the men who, after all, were less important to the two young women than their relationship with each other? Their partly contradictory exchanges about this acid test, when friendships and love affairs cross paths, make very suspenseful reading.

No less gripping are their memories of attempted rape, which both report from personal experience. Barbara experienced it no less than five times. "Plus other dangerous situations." Alice is of the opinion that such attacks inevitably encompass death threats. She comments: "What do we women do with all that? And where do we get the confidence, a few days later, to go out swimming, dancing, and flirting again?" And why is it not talked about? Probably so as not to overburden one's self-esteem.

Alice Schwarzer is no naive, one-note feminist. She speaks up for women and their rights, but she can also be sharply critical of women and analyzes what she believes to be feminine foibles. Concerning an anti-female film critique by a woman Journalist, she writes: "Women can be down-right mean and cowardly. It struck me that only men have written accurately about this film." And in another context: "Funny, these scheming nasty behaviors have fol-lowed me my whole life. And of course they always came only from women. Since they are too weak to attack head-on, they do it from the rear." Conversely and yet of a kind, "the rage and revolt of an Ulrike Meinhof. . . surely [had] far deeper reasons than the great political idea. It was, I believe, also her petty, humiliating life as a woman that caused her to flip out."

Nowadays we women are better off!

These are feminist theses argued on the basis of examples from the private life of the founder of EMMA. The focus is primarily on Alice, even in Barbara's letters. But Barbara also writes vividly about a woman's life that Alice did not know, about housewives' woes that could not be brought out in the open given the pressures of society in the nineteen fifties and sixties. The unanimous conclusion of this collection of letters is: Nowadays we women are better off than we were then.

What is captivating about this book is the mixture of thoughtfulness and everyday silliness, of awakening political consciousness and the hair-curling (literally!) private life, of soul-destroying, boring office Jobs—at the time there were hardly any other options for women—and the conviction that one could make more of oneself. In the end, the back-and-forth of two women's voices expresses affirmation of life and affirmation of friendship.

By Ruth Klüger; Trans. Jeanette Clausen, Feminist Europe 2008. - Review of Schwarzer, Alice and Barbara Maia: "Liebe Alice! Liebe Barbara!" [Dear Alice! Dear Barbara!] Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2005. - Review originally ap-peared in Die Welt, 5.3.2005.