»Violence accumulates in bodies and it is impossible to erase. It is still in there,« says a ten-year-old girl in the performance. An older woman adds: »Even the victim cannot believe in what happened to her, because it is so unbelievable that she becomes impossible to herself.«
Nothing demonstrates this better than the history of the exploitation of women through sexual slavery in Nazi Germany, which is still repressed in the collective consciousness. In forced labour camps and concentration camps, sex with prostitutes at camp brothels was the most elaborate form of motivating prisoners to better productivity. This kind of violence was never brought to light, it was never redressed. Women as a cost were forever erased from the collective memory of the Nazi death industry. Has anything changed since the times of Buchenwald?
Fascisms and nationalisms which are resurrected in Europe and all over the world are instrumentalizing the bodies of women and children again, and using them in a political war. Total supervision over the female body is the foundation of every nationalist populism.
Since the beginning of capital accumulation, the body of a woman was a brutally colonized resource. Women experienced a stronger alienation from their bodies, from their »work«, than what was ever felt by any workers. The cogs of capitalism and nationalism mesh and clench over the female body. In Jedem das Seine, Górnicka looks at the body as a place where fascism keeps regenerating.
In coproduction with Münchner Kammerspiele
Photo: David Baltzer