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Ilse Langner's Amazonen and the Reception of J. J. Bachofen's Das Mutterrecht
Author(s) -
Davies Peter
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
german life and letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.1
H-Index - 12
eISSN - 1468-0483
pISSN - 0016-8777
DOI - 10.1111/1468-0483.00254
Subject(s) - mythology , victory , weimar republic , nazism , censorship , politics , modernity , sociology , art , history , art history , political science , law , literature
Abstract Ilse Langner's play Amazonen : Komödie was due to receive its première in April 1933, but became one of the early victims of Nazi theatrical censorship, attracting condemnation for its satirical feminist polemic and its radical reworking of the myth of the Greek victory over the Amazons. This paper explores Langner's play as a response to a highly‐charged debate over the legacy of Johann Jakob Bachofen's theory of ancient matriarchy, in which theorists and writers from all political camps fought over the uses of myth in the modern world. Langner's approach to Bachofen's theory and to this debate demonstrates that the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’, which are often applied to the debate on myth in the Weimar Republic, do not necessarily do justice to the complexity of pre‐1933 thinking on the place of myth in modernity.