08.12.2025 – Dorothea Walzer

Auerbach Lecture | 08.12.2025 | 6 pm

Dorothea Walzer (German Literature, Bochum): Genossinnenschaft. Lu Märtens „soziale Ästhetik“

Programm

Abstract

This talk examines the concept of “social aesthetics” developed by the poet and cultural critic Lu Märten. Drawing on historical contexts such as arts and crafts reform, proletarian women’s movement, and Marxism, Märten develops a culturally, explicitly feminist perspective. While her call for “social motherhood,” for shaping everyday life aesthetically, and for “classless forms” intersects with contemporary debates on care work, it nonetheless moves decisively beyond them: by theorizing social reproduction from the radical standpoint of the woman worker and defining it as a form of “cooperativeness (Genossinnenschaft),” Märten shifts the focus from relations of care to collective processes of production and socialization. At the same time, she conceives social and cultural reproduction – initially in a romanticizing, later in a materialist vein – as a task of workers’ art education. Märten articulates this aesthetic and political program not only in theoretical writings but also in practice: with her polemics, songs and fairy tales, literary reportages, narrative fiction, drama, and autobiographical texts, she creates popular forms of literature.

The lecture will be held in German!