From Page to Screen / Vom Buch zum Film. Группа авторов
the way science does, with a strategy of trial and error, so that we could also say that History, at least serious History, is a story that far from attempting to write and define once and for all what happened in the past, it struggles to rewrite itself, precisely because of its bad conscience, that is, because it is (unconsciously) aware that its writing generates dark areas, because telling implies being silent, because emitting is omitting. Inevitably.
And when those dark areas are illuminated then we can see how women also have a close relationship with war. The women who in modern times occupy the factories and maintain the machinery of war in substitution of the men who had to march to the front, and the women who also participate, in one way or another, in the various aspects of war, an activity that does not restrict itself to the battlefield or the fight at the decisive moment. And also, like other segments of the population, the women who are frequently collateral victims of the consequences of war, both because they have to suffer the shortage of resources in the rearguard and/or because they are often victims themselves of the violence that any war generates, not the least of that violence being the more than frequent possibility of ending up as a plunder of war, in the usual form of a sexual assault, or as a trophy within the reach of a victorious soldier.
In this section of our collection we include three essays which only by chance happen to coincide in their focus and in the chronological order of their analysis: the situation of women in the period from the end of the First World War to the end of World War II. The first of these essays, by Alberto Lena, deals with the film version of a novel written by Erich Maria Remarque (Drei Kameraden, 1938) and its film version, Three Comrades, a Hollywood production directed by Frank Borzage in 1938. Initially planned as a woman’s drama, the film veers its course to become an indictment of the political situation and the violence which could be witnessed in Germany after, and because of, the First World War. Lena describes how, in the process of adaptation, the film becomes first an exploration of the social and economic context in which Adolf Hitler rose to power, and then also a vehicle for the representation of a German woman as a heroic subject.
Manuel Almagro-Jiménez concentrates his analysis on a climactic moment in the history of Germany, only a few years after Hitler’s rise to power. The fall of Berlin in 1945 at the hands of the Red Army led to the “inevitable” rape of around one hundred thousand women in that city. An anonymous woman captured the story of a number of them, registering their painful experience in her diary without any form of embellishment. The publication of that diary in 1959 was initially met with the rejection of a German society that refused to accept the reality of those facts. The later filmic adaptation could have vindicated the denouncement of the original text, but only served to aggravate the situation, as the tragic experiences of those women were buried under the typical language of melodrama. Almagro-Jiménez analyzes the film version of the diary in detail and highlights the additions found in that version creating a clearly melodramatic tone; at the same time Almagro-Jiménez draws attention to issues that are present in the diary but do not acquire sufficient relevance in the film, perpetuating the silencing of the true nature of these women’s experiences.
The last essay in this section, by Leopoldo Domínguez, concentrates on certain events that took place in the post-war period in Germany, and more specifically after the German reunification, also known as “Wende” (change). By means of the so-called memory literature, there took place an important re-evaluation of the most recent past, concerning issues such as victimhood and aggression, especially during the period of National Socialism. Domínguez by focusing on a specific text, Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser, describes how this type of literature brings out repressed stories or traumas from the collective past for the first time. In contrasting the original novel with the film version, Domínguez discusses the difficulties involved in the adaptation of the novel and how in the film some of the most relevant issues are simply left out, as there is a preference for leading its narration towards the construction of a love story of sorts.
4 Demanding Their Own Voice, Stating Their Own Needs
In the previous section, we have discussed the violence that women can suffer because of war. Fortunately for women, and for everyone, war is not something that is always and continuously present in a society, at war with another country, for example. But this does not mean that, even in those periods in which a given society is not immersed in a conventional war, there is not a violence that has its origin in economic, cultural, religious or ideological conditions and values, and that finally ends up being reflected in the life of women, and somehow sets limits to their existence in various ways.
In an attempt to face this situation, on numerous occasions the voices of many women have been raised, in an organized way or not, to stand up to what we could call the structural violence that can be observed in the way all kinds of relationships are established, for example between men and women. But appealing only to the purely biological element would prove to be a rather reductionist analysis, since it cannot be denied also that this structural violence is a compound, as said before, of all sorts of other variables, such as race, ethnicity, social class or religious education.
And here we are not referring to the social practices in ancestral and past societies, something that the progress inspired by Western societies has supposedly overcome: we are also talking about the circumstances in the Western societies of today, in which progress suffers from an unfinished agenda. Thus, it is clear that in order to accomplish the promise of freedom implicit in the narrative of progress, women have to start by discovering a voice of their own with which to express not the needs of others but their own needs, a voice that will also make it possible for women to become aware of their own situation. This leads to a process, again here and now, of deconstruction of the given, particularly the masculine world, that is, a revelation of its already cultural character; a world that has been created, constructed, but which is not necessarily definitive and, in that sense, perfectly susceptible to change and even substitution for another model of relationships.
In the first essay of this section Margarita Estévez-Saá deals with one of the most powerful and complex representations of a woman in fiction, Molly Bloom, the female protagonist in Ulysses, by James Joyce. To the initial difficulty of taking a novel like this one to the screen it must be added the controversy concerning the approppriateness and faithfulness of Joyce’s portrayal of the psychology of a woman. Estévez-Saá reviews the opposing views in this respect, and then goes on to provide a detailed analysis of the way in which the character of Molly Bloom has been staged on two occasions, tracing the differences between the two film versions to distinct aspects like, among others, the diverse performances of the female protagonist in both films, or the contrasting target audiences intended by both filmakers or the different moments in the history of Ireland in which the filmings took place.
In her essay Monserrat Bascoy discusses Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum oder: Wie Gewalt entstehen und wohin sie führen kann, a novel by Heinrich Böll which was published in 1974. With this text the author achieved a significant amount of success which soon caught the attention of the German film industry, and, therefore, was brought to the screen shortly afterwards under the direction of Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta. In his work Böll denounces how the notion of “freedom of the press” can be abused, and the social violence that can be generated and supported by such abuse. Bascoy argues that both the original text and the film version can be considered typical of a period in German recent history when cinema and literature began to position themselves politically, an attitude for which both Böll and Schlöndorff ended up as victims of attacks by the press, even though the film has been frequently criticized for not knowing how to transmit the strength and force of the female protagonist.
Claudia Garnica’s essay is an analysis contrasting similarities and differences between Elfriede Jelinek’s novel, The Pianist, and its film version by Michael Haneke. After placing Jelinek’s novel in the context of other novels by the Austrian writer, Garnica goes on to dissect the basic frame of reference in the novel so that the reader of her essay can fully grasp the play of coincidences and dissonances between the novel and the film. Although Haneke does a great job translating faithfully the words on the page into images on the screen, there are moment in which he deviates from that rule of absolute faithfulness. Garnica’s contention is that those deviations are