How can peace be made without weapons? This question is highly topical and yet an ongoing topic. Is it specifically a women’s issue? Of course not. And somehow yes. Women are not only passively and massively affected by the consequences of armed conflicts, they have also actively and loudly raised their voices for peace throughout history – and are doing so again.
The “Female Peace Palace” festival, organized by the Munich Kammerspiele and the Monacensia literature archive from March 31 to April 23, is dedicated to “the courage, demands and struggles of women in war and resistance”. At a recent press conference on the program, the director of the Kammerspiel, Barbara Mundel, said the aim was to draw a link from historical voices to the present day. It was about “working on the present”. Monacensia director Anke Buettner also confirms that the aim is to “mobilize people to think seriously. This should be done with plays, talks in a large gathering and many smaller actions. An overview.
The predecessors
Women who want peace: the International Women’s Peace Congress in The Hague in 1915.
(Photo: AddF – Archive of the German Women’s Movement, Kassel)
The festival finds inspiration in history: the “First Women’s Peace Congress” held in The Hague in 1915. Just imagine: in the middle of the First World War, more than a thousand women from 16 nations set out to discuss politics and international law and to make demands. Pacifism and feminism came together in an undertaking that was not only logistically demanding: the rights of women were anything but a matter of course at that time, the corresponding associations were hostile; in Germany, for example, women were not allowed to vote for the first time until three years later.
The women’s rights activists who organized the congress were all the more motivated, in addition to the German women’s rights activists Anita Augspurg and Lida Gustava Heymann, in particular the Dutch pacifist Aletta Jacobs. The Congress made proposals that were revolutionary at the time, for example calling for the establishment of a permanent international court (which actually does exist in The Hague today). The delegates denounced mass rape as a weapon of war. They appealed to the states to use all means of diplomacy. And they founded an “International Committee for Lasting Peace”, which is still active today under the name “Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom”.
You can find out more about this on Thursday, April 20, 5 p.m. in the Monacensia: Then Laura Schibbe from the archive of the German women’s movement in Kassel and Annika Wilmers from the Leibniz Institute for Educational Research in Frankfurt will explain the importance of the former congress and its consequences illuminate today.
calls for the present
Federal Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock at the beginning of March in Berlin at the presentation of the guidelines for feminist foreign policy.
(Photo: Wolfgang Kumm/dpa)
The questions of yore are more relevant than ever at a time when war is raging in Europe, when German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock not only calls for a feminist foreign policy, but also wants to implement it – and a politician like Sahra Wagenknecht and a feminist like Alice Schwarzer campaign for peace with controversial actions. A symposium or “assembly” in the Monacensia on Friday, April 24th and Saturday, April 25th, will therefore discuss important questions between war and peace. First, on Friday evening, three experts will speak about feminist demands from 1915 to the present day. Golineh Atai, head of the ZDF studio in Cairo, the political scientist Françoise Vergès and Kristina Lunz: the co-founder of the Center for Feminist Foreign Policy co-wrote the guidelines for Baerbock’s new foreign policy.
On Saturday, the whole day is devoted to the global threat and opportunities for women to resist in war. The journalist and human rights activist Düzen Tekkal, the lawyer Elisabeth Baier and the author and BR moderator Shahrzad Osterer can be seen at a panel discussion at 11.30 a.m. At 2 p.m., the Belarusian poet Volha Hapeyeva, who lives in exile in Germany, the Kiev playwright Natalia Vorozhbyt and the playwright Anna Akkash from Damascus will read. There will be a “Queer Talk Show” at 4pm with Zain Salam Assaad and Ozi Ozar. And like Thursday and Friday, Saturday also ends with suitable theater performances at the Kammerspiele – and with a party.
The theater premieres
There will be four premieres at the “Female Peace Palace” festival in the Kammerspiele, two smaller, more agile performances and two larger premieres in the Schauspielhaus and in the Therese-Giehse-Halle. This alone shows the importance of the festival in the Kammerspiele and the effort involved in realizing it.
The research-based production “Anti War Women”, commissioned by Jessica Glause, will start on March 31st and will premiere at the Schauspielhaus. For “Anti War Women” the director and her team dug deep into the history of the Women’s Peace Congress in The Hague in 1915. The minutes of the meetings are the basis on which the evening operates. Individual protagonists such as the lawyer and activist Anita Augspurg, her partner and women’s rights activist Lida Gustava Heymann or Hope Bridges Adams Lehmann, the first gynecologist in Munich, are characters in the play, as is the writer Franziska zu Reventlow. This evening has its own narrative thread, which takes up the incredible story of how Reventlow helped her son to escape from further military action.
In her production “Anti War Women”, director Jessica Glause brings the strong women of the international congress onto the stage.
(Photo: Julian Baumann)
In essence, the premiere shows how fearless, undeterred and courageous the women acted in the middle of the war. That they managed to convene an international congress dealing with women’s rights and peace. And it shows how far-sightedly demands were made here, the implementation of which later – but only partially – was done by men. Of course, this happened without naming the author’s source.
The second big premiere does not look back, but directly to the present: the Ukrainian author Natalia Vorozhbyt wrote the play “Green Corridors” on behalf of the Kammerspiele, the theater magician Jan-Christoph Gockel staged it, the premiere is on April 14 in the Therese-Giehse -Hall. The topic is the war in Ukraine and the flight to the West.
Vorozhbyt had already written “Bad Roads” (“Destructed Roads”) in 2017, an in-depth play about the war in her country that is currently also popular in Germany. At that time she traveled to the Donbass for research and wrote six different scenes with black humor.
In “Green Corridors” – the title alludes to the escape corridors set up for the civilian population – she sticks to an episodic structure, but retains four protagonists in the scenes, Ukrainian women who are fleeing from different parts of the country. They meet at the border crossing, along with various other figures. They are all damaged by the war and their traumata, and yet in this exceptional everyday life they are fighting to somehow continue. Vorozhbyt, who still lives in Kiev, wrote the text under the impression of her own escape.
These two major productions complement the Kammerspiele with two performances: First, the half-hour intervention “In My Hands I Carry” by Miriam Ibrahim on April 14 in the foyer of the Schauspielhaus is about the African-American women’s and civil rights activist Mary Church Terrell. Barely a week later, on April 20, Emre Koyuncuoglu set up a performance in the Werkraum around the controversial Turkish freedom fighter Halide Edip Adivar.
Another theater program
Strong women – other productions of the Kammerspiele, which are now meaningfully integrated into the festival, also revolve around this core. This is particularly evident in “Bavarian Suffragettes” (April 23). Jessica Glause also conceived the evening, which premiered in June 2021, and then directed it herself. It is about the early, bourgeois women’s movement between 1886 and 1899, the central figures of the evening are the three women’s rights activists Anita Augspurg, Sophia Goudstikker and Ika Freudenberg.
“The Leap from the Ivory Tower” deals with the texts of the writer Gisela Elsner.
(Photo: Emma Szabo)
Felicitas Brucker’s adaptation of the novel “The Freedom of a Woman” based on Édouard Louis will also be shown as part of the festival (March 28 and April 11). In it, the French literary shooting star talks about his mother, who freed herself from socially precarious circumstances to become independent. The writer Gisela Elsner also waged a fight against the male-dominated society and against the narrow-mindedness of Germany’s economic miracle. Pınar Karabulut packed her work, which has largely been forgotten today, into one of her shrill, colorful evenings entitled “The Leap from the Ivory Tower” (April 19). And last but not least, the Kammerspiele are also showing their young production “Licht”: These are irretrievable evenings in which Yazidi women tell their story exactly once on the big stage.
podcast and more
Too much to see? Then maybe just listen. The author Fabienne Imlinger is responsible for an ambitious podcast as part of the festival, some episodes are already online. Discussions with many experts deal with topics such as intersectional feminism (i.e. the imperative to fight other forms of discrimination in addition to sexism). Or the interesting question of why female resistance is seldom the subject of historiography.
Young protesters can also be inspired, for example by Munich activists who rattled through the city in decorated horse-drawn carriages in 1912 to draw attention to a women’s suffrage congress. In a “Peace Palace Camp” from April 11 to 15, young people between the ages of 14 and 23 can develop their own ideas – and parade through the city themselves in a final spectacle.
Still not enough suggestions? Then maybe at the end turn it off completely with “The Mysterious Traveler from Kosmos7”. For this “futuristic video work” Angela Aux and Su Steinmassl were inspired by letters and novels by the writer Annette Kolb. From this they develop the vision of a “feminist exoplanet” in the year 2222. As serious as the situation is that the “Female Peace Palace” orbits as a whole: it can also be cheerful.
Female Peace Palace, Festival, March 31 to April 23, Munich Kammerspiele and Monacensia, program information: muenchner-kammerspiele.de