He is proud to have encouraged many people: Alice Schwarzer Photo: Maximilian Mann/Laif
Alice Schwarzer is Germany’s best known, loudest and most important feminist. She sued “Stern” and worked for “Bild”. She turns eighty this Saturday.
It would be a mistake to attribute Alice Schwarzer’s aggressiveness to a lack of reflection. It would be so wrong to regard her penchant for humorous exaggeration as evidence of perhaps only a superficial commitment to the cause. The thing is called feminism, and it has been so watered down and overused as a label, fraud, and empty cartridge fit for debate that its core is sometimes only vaguely recognizable.
Schwarzer repeatedly expounds, and has been saying since 1977, when he founded the magazine “Emma” at the age of thirty-five, where emancipatory things should go. With her objectification radar finely tuned, she tracks down anything that might pose a threat to women in order to dissect and expose it: prostitution, religious fundamentalism, Paragraph 218, pornography, Helmut Newton photos, sexist magazine covers. The latter were such an impertinence to Schwarzer and nine of his campaign associates that, in 1978, they sued “Stern” editor-in-chief Henri Nannen and publisher Gruner + Jahr.