Życie i pisanie (dla) wspólnoty: Käthe Schirmacher i Stefania Laudyn-Chrzanowska między feminizmem a nacjonalizmem
The self, community, and writing: Käthe Schirmacher and Stefania Laudyn-Chrzanowska between feminism and nationalism

Summary/Abstract: Two controversial women, a German and a Pole, are presented in this comparative study.Käthe Schirmacher and Stefania Laudyn-Chrzanowska were radical women’s rightsadvocates who became passionate nationalists. The article is an attempt at interpretingtheir lives and writings as a kind of self-narration and at the same time a narration ofcommunity (identity). As Carolyn Heilbrun puts it, a woman can write her life by tellingit in an autobiography, she can write it as a fictional narrative or write it “in advance byliving it”. Therefore, the paper focuses on both texts and (real) lives.Moreover, individual identity continuously intersects with group identity in thebiographies and narrations displayed here. For Schirmacher and Laudyn narrating the selfoften means narrating community: either narrating the imagined women’s communityor narrating the nation. Hence both authors challenge the model of an autonomousindividual narrating a single life.A further point of departure is the relationship between identity and interaction withother languages or national groups. It is not entirely coincidental that Schirmacher andLaudyn developed strongly nationalistic and anti-Semitic attitudes after having livedabroad for a long period of time. The first few years were marked by a deep belief in supra--national women’s organizations and women’s solidarity. Then a kind of “political solstice”took place (Schirmacher). Obviously, the radical change of views was due to a numberof factors but the everyday confrontation with “the other” intensified the awareness ofcultural boundaries and resulted in the sacralization of their own respective nations.The paper offers thus a double portrait of both activists as feminists and nationalists,and also, more or less deliberately, chronists of two different, though intertwined,‘imagined communities’.

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