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Literaturhaus Munich celebrates Simone de Beauvoir: Women's role forward!

2022-12-29T14:56:48.978Z


Literaturhaus Munich celebrates Simone de Beauvoir: Women's role forward! Created: 12/29/2022, 3:48 p.m By: Katja Kraft “Thinking about life with a pen” – Simone de Beauvoir wanted to be a writer when she was five. © Gallimard Collection Sylvie le Bon de Beauvoir The Literaturhaus Munich celebrates the great feminist Simone de Beauvoir with the successful exhibition "Simone de Beauvoir & The S


Literaturhaus Munich celebrates Simone de Beauvoir: Women's role forward!

Created: 12/29/2022, 3:48 p.m

By: Katja Kraft

“Thinking about life with a pen” – Simone de Beauvoir wanted to be a writer when she was five.

© Gallimard Collection Sylvie le Bon de Beauvoir

The Literaturhaus Munich celebrates the great feminist Simone de Beauvoir with the successful exhibition "Simone de Beauvoir & The Second Sex".

Our excursion tip.

No press photo with Sartre.

How beneficial.

Because as a journalist you naturally expect photos of the great Jean-Paul (1905-1980) on the homepage of the Munich Literature House if you want to find out more about the exhibition there on the great Simone de Beauvoir.

But the resourceful team of curators gallantly breaks such expectations.

And with the new show "Simone de Beauvoir & The Second Sex" consciously bows to the Frenchwoman and her main work.

For whom the relationship with Sartre was formative.

However, Beauvoir was never intellectually inferior to her “necessary love” Sartre.

Although that was what male critics in particular liked to insinuate at the time.

Maybe because they were a bit afraid of the sharp quill of this feminist great.

Simone de Beauvoir had a decisive influence on Sartre's work

At 21, de Beauvoir was the youngest person ever to pass the extraordinarily demanding entrance examination for a postgraduate teaching degree.

Diaries from the philosopher's student days, which have been published in recent years, show that at 19 she was already experimenting with ideas that would later become famous as existentialist.

This revealed the great influence Beauvoir had on Sartre's work.

For a year she published under his name because he was too busy - and nobody noticed.

A look at the show: oversized passport photos from different decades of Simone de Beauvoir's life hang in the hall of the Munich Literature House.

© kjk

So now away from him, towards her.

In oversized passport photos from different years of life, Simone de Beauvoir looks at the visitors.

The face has changed over the decades, but the provocative, demanding look remains.

Her reputation for having no patience with idiots seems to be evident in these images.

So pay attention and think carefully.

That's not difficult.

Because the curators of this joint exhibition of the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn (Eva Kraus and Katharina Chrubasik) and the Literaturhaus Munich (Tanja Graf and Anna Seethaler) managed to make Simone de Beauvoir's approximately 1000-page intellectual feast "The Second Sex" very digestible in bite-sized bites to serve.

“On ne naît pas femme, on le devient” – one is not born a woman, one becomes one, wrote Simone de Beauvoir in 1945. © kjk

On the side walls of the exhibition hall, timelines tell of Beauvoir's career and at the same time of the socio-political change in the role of women in Germany and France.

It quickly becomes clear how the two are related.

How the Beauvoir - from a conservative Catholic family - was shaped by her upbringing and society, and in turn changed society with her revolutionary writings.

She did it with words.

The show focuses on them.

In the middle of the room, surrounded by an interior that could have been in Beauvoir's beloved Parisian Café de Flore, today's thinkers deal with five Beauvoir theses worked out by author Iris Radisch in videos.

The most well-known sentence from "The Second Sex" is central: "One is not born a woman, one becomes one."

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My space

To a wine with Simone de Beauvoir.

© Gallimard Collection Sylvie le Bon de Beauvoir

How revolutionary this statement was in 1945, how Simone de Beauvoir swept every natural determination off the table with it in a few words.

And how, 70 years later, it sparked discussions about the discrepancy between biological (“sex”) and social (“gender”) sex.

In a video, journalist Stefanie Lohaus questions what Beauvoir would have said about the Self-Determination Act, which allows trans, intersex and non-binary people to have their gender entry in the civil status register changed.

We do not know it.

“In fact, Beauvoir laid the groundwork for understanding that gender attributions are not natural.” She argued fiercely that the freedom to take charge of life should not be curtailed by biology .

Today,

As the timelines mentioned make clear, western women have come a great deal closer to this goal.

This exhibition shows what can be set in motion by brains and hearts and the will to fight.

Daily from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. until April 30, 2023 in the Literaturhaus Munich.

There is a comprehensive program accompanying the show with readings, film evenings and discussions. You can find all the information you need here

Source: merkur

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