Mutterrecht to Mauerfall: Cassandra and Penthesilea in 1980s east German art
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Two important mythological figures emerged in East German art in the 1980s: Cassandra, the Trojan prophetess, and Penthesilea, the Amazon warrior queen. Christa Wolf’s 1983 novel, Cassandra, exerted a profound influence on the pacifist movement and enhanced women’s gender consciousness during this period. The 1986 Dresden production of Heinrich von Kleist’s Penthesilea (1808) was another significant influence, extensively impacting the countercultural scene. This thesis will establish connections between literary productions and visual artworks focused on the figures of Cassandra and Penthesilea in the context of the Cold War. It offers iconological and feminist analyses of the illustrations, paintings, lithographs, and sculptures of East German artists Heidrun Hegewald, Angela Hampel, Nuria Quevedo, Annemirl Bauer, Regine Richter, Christine Schlegel, and Gabriele Koerbl, among others. Tracing a longer iconographic history of Penthesilea and Cassandra in Ancient Greek, Neoclassical, and modern art, it addresses how GDR artists of the 1980s subverted conventional modes of depicting women in art. Relying on symbolism, figure duplication, and visual ambiguity, they created densely layered artworks which underscore women’s differences, subjectivity, and autonomy, condemn war and sexual violence, and encourage a persistent search for alternative modes of identity and community construction in the midst of the polarizing system of the Cold War period. GDR artists’ works reinterpreting ancient myths also engage with the concept of das Mutterrecht, a primitive form of matriarchy which informed foundational socialist ideology on women. This ideology bears interesting connections with the myths in which Cassandra and Penthesilea originate. In addition to advancing the understanding of gender representation in the GDR art of the 1980s, this thesis aims to amend the exclusion of female artists, particularly figurative painters, from English scholarship on the art of the GDR.
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Introduction -- Cassandra -- Penthesilea -- Conclusion
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M.A. (Master of Arts)