VA month ago, Kanon Verlag published “Oh Boy”, an anthology about masculinity. “18 courageous self-questions by influential authors of our time”, as the book description says, deal with various aspects of the topic. It’s about homosexuality, transition, loss, feelings and, in one of the lyrics, about male perpetration.
In “A Happy Person” Valentin Moritz, who is also one of the two editors of “Oh Boy”, describes “a transgression of physical, not just verbal, boundaries”. So how he touched a woman in a situation “where I could have guessed that she didn’t want it”. The person who is the subject next to the author himself – because he is the subject of great detail – has now spoken anonymously as “the woman who experienced sexualised violence through Valentin Moritz in May 2022”. She writes that she had already asked Moritz in writing in August 2022 not to process the incident in literary terms. He did it anyway.
Another assault
The question of the relationship between reality and fiction, the extent to which writers are allowed to use the stories of others, is a well-known question that has to be dealt with anew in each case. In “Oh Boy” the author Moritz writes: “I want to bear the consequences and learn to take responsibility. learn to apologize And in the future, make sure that something like this doesn’t happen again.”
It happened again, albeit on a different level. Because if a text about a lack of consent and encroachment against the will of the person concerned is published, the woman’s “no” is ignored a second time. “A debate book for everyone who thinks that it’s high time for a rethink,” as the cover says, must be measured by different standards than a novel.
How can perpetrators be addressed?
After calls for a boycott on social media, the publisher now regrets that a person recognizes himself “in this literary text”. A planned event at the Berlin International Literature Festival was cancelled. But he also writes that male perpetrators are part of the discourse. That’s correct. But how? There would have been options. A fictional text, for example, that is not based on a true event. Or an autobiographical text with the explicit consent of the victim, including his or her perspective.
The other authors of the anthology who also did not give their consent, although the matter weighs less heavily there, are. They, too, are now associated with the criticism, and their texts also appear in a different context. If neither the publisher nor the editor understand the problems of such an approach, they undermine the purpose of the entire project. Then it is the performative proof that basically nothing has changed.
#Debate #anthology #Boy