Storytelling and New Audiences

“Dramatic, witty, energetic” all terms used by reviewers to describe our play, "Women of Aktion", that would not normally be applied to an academic paper at a conference. The formal reviews also pick up on the rehabilitation of women’s voices and how the play works towards undoing the erasure of women’s roles in historic events. Creating “Women of Aktion” was always going to be ambitious. Before I was even involved in the project, Ingrid Sharp and Bent Architect had struggled to find the sources we needed to create the play, with many archivists and curators saying they were unaware of any such sources. It was Jude Wright who found Gertrud Voelcker’s memoirs and insisted to the archive in Kiel that they had them. Once I was hired to translate the memoirs and conduct further archival research, it quickly became apparent how difficult this project was. However, finding the women’s voices was actually one of the easier parts. The women are already there, hidden away in the history books as footnotes or unnamed eyewitnesses. With careful probing I was able to uncover lengthier memoirs and interviews which I could then translate to share with Bent Architect. The problem was how to bring these stories together. We had Gertrud Voelcker and Martha Riedl in Kiel, who I was not able to prove knew each other. Then we had other voices from Berlin, Rostock, Göttingen and Munich- women who would be entirely unknown to our audiences and who sometimes came from unfamiliar places. The more I researched, the more names and accounts I found. Very soon the problem was not finding the voices but that we had too many voices.

Bent Architect were brilliant. They identified some of the themes that ran through many of these stories and carefully selected accounts that reflected them. They kept the accounts of Gertrud and Martha in Kiel but carefully used Brechtian techniques to tell the audience that these women didn’t know each other in real life but for the sake of the play we were pretending they did. One theme that rang through many of the stories and came to life on stage was that of mothers and daughters. So many revolutionary women talked about being inspired by their mothers or motherly figures and Bent Architect captured this beautifully in scenes with Gertrud and her mother and Hilde Kramer in prison with her foster mother in Munich. A quotation from Kaethe Kollwitz about her devastation at the loss of her son Peter and how this motivated her to create anti-war activist art provided another perspective.

The play also showed the horrors of civilian life in Germany during the war. From food queues to violent mobs, a desperate population clamours for an end to the war. The play captured the hope when news of the Russian Revolution reached Germany, and how this built into the Kiel Uprising and ensuing revolution across Germany. The characters shout their excitement and break into song. This was one of my favourite aspects of developing this play. When I read historical sources, I can hear the voices speaking to me, sharing their hopes and visions. Archival work can be long and lonely as others’ do not share this excitement. With this play, the audience could finally hear what I hear, see what I see, when reading primary sources. Sitting in a crowd, sharing that experience with hundreds of others has been incredibly moving.

Both touring the play and speaking at academic conferences has shown how important this work is. Many historians do not realise that they are only looking at sources written by men and that this is skewing their perspective. At many conferences, the response has been an acknowledgement of how important this work is and how much more needs to be done. In Kiel, the museum’s exhibition continues to look at the revolution as a male experience. The uprising in Kiel was described but the sources were male eyewitness accounts or photos which depicted women but were labelled in a way that eradicated women from the story (e.g. “protest by deck and non-commissioned officers” or “a gathering of red sailors”). After the performance, many women spoke to me and said how grateful they were that these stories were finally being shared, that they could have a sense of their own history.

The play captured the importance of the women’s voices, as through the use of a looper pedal, the women’s names and key quotations filled the air. In their memoirs the women demand recognition for their work and now this was finally centre stage. As a historian, I can keep working to find these voices and develop publications to keep the clamour going but hopefully, those who saw the play will also be inspired to keep these voices alive.

By Corinne Painter