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Popular Culture Review
Is it this effortless success in family, career, and love that draws women to
Lind’s books? In his article, Sill contends that it is and that women secretly wish
for an earlier “conservative-bourgeois life and hierarchy in which the woman,
sheltered from the adversities of external existence, had enough time, money,
and leisure to devote themselves to the pleasant side of life” (268).22 Lind’s
novels are comforting because the protagonist’s “professional career is not paid
for with isolation; sexual self-determination doesn’t harm a stable partnership;
divorce doesn’t lead into the vicious circle of poverty and isolation” (Sill 269).23
Piazena, in Freitag, also warns that the emancipatory message in Lind’s books is
deceiving, for as she reminds us, Lind’s plots do revolve around men, and her
protagonists spend an inordinate amount of time (for women who do not need
men, that is) looking for the right one.
Does the popularity of books such as these reflect the end of feminism? In
her article for Welt, “Au revoir, Beauvoir,” Gartner implies just this, drawing an
analogy between the feminism of the 70s and “jeans” and today’s feminism and
“leggings,” which she describes as the “universal threads of the outgoing, better
yet: already gone feminism.” She explains: “The enlightened, completely
emancipated, successful woman of the eighties peeled off her old protest jeans
and pulled on a pair of leggings,”24 implying that this woman now prefers
effortless comfort to the strenuous activity associated with the jeans. Piazena
concurs, stating that “determined feminism is out, the unbelievable lightness of
being” is in,25 and labeling today’s women’s movement “feminism light.” Lind’s
novels would seem to reflect this new kind of “feminism.” Her protagonists do
not have to try very hard to find success in life and love. They certainly do not
face the same social challenges as earlier generations of women who fought for
recognition and equal rights.
Even in the early 1990s, Angela Praesent, editor of Rowohlt’s women’s
book series neue fra u (new woman) noted it was as if “for reading women
everything that smacked of feminism” was embarrassing (50).26 Tanja Seelbach,
an editor for Fischer’s Woman in Society series, attributes the eventual demise
of both the Rowohlt series and Fischer’s series in the late 1990s and early 2000s
respectively to the absence of a women’s movement in Germany of the type that
was prevalent in the 1970s. That the Fischer series held on so long—lasting a
good six years longer than neue fra u which was shelved in 1997—may be in
part due to founder and editor Ingeborg Mues’s embracing the “new German
woman’s novel” of which Hera Lind is by far the best-known author. As Ohland
argues, Lind’s first novel, A Man f o r Every Tone, “finally took over from the
fighting seventies feminists in the renowned Fischer series ‘Women in Society’”
(27).27 Mues counters that the Woman in Society series was so successful
because it was flexible and included a mix of genres (11). She points out that
when the female reader changed, the series did too, publishing a new style of
literature that reflected the evolving interests and concerns of its audience.
According to Mues, today’s woman is more self-aware and better-versed in
equal rights, which calls for a new style of literature. Writes Mues,