Autor/Autorin
MH: I remain exemplary because it’s always the crux of storytelling. On the one hand, it’s what touches people, and you have to depict it somewhere, but at the same time I resist individualising too much (…). It is important to me to make it clear that this is a collective problem that individual women experience, but we must not get into individualising. Not when it comes to the problem of sexualised violence, because it is such a big collective issue and mainstream media like to put it on an individual level, both in terms of the perpetrator and the victim.
„The Beast of Belgium“ was the name given to Dutroux, who raped and murdered three or four women. (…) People in positions of responsibility like to blame this, the media and society like to focus on an individual who is called the „beast“ in order to distance themselves from it: „We have nothing to do with him!“, „There’s no way we’re that terrible!“. There are many myths surrounding the topic of rape and sexualised violence, all of which serve the sole purpose of distancing oneself. „We have nothing to do with it, neither from the victim’s side nor from the perpetrator’s side…“ This is why these individualisations are often dangerous, even if they are necessary to make certain things clear. But we should always point out the fundamental aspects of this violence.
IW: That’s interesting, because especially in the context of the discussion about remembrance and above all Holocaust remembrance, people always think that history should be individualised in order to bring history closer to the pupils.
MH : These are perhaps two different levels. (…) It is always a balancing act to tell individual stories, but to emphasise the collective nature of the crimes, the violence against women. So as not to get into this individual, humanitarian tear-jerker mode. But I believe that you can reach people, and perhaps children and young people in particular, by telling them very specific stories or having contemporary witnesses speak, and that this has a completely different effect than if you have to listen to a theoretical lecture or watch the terrible films from the Second World War. I think that contemporary witnesses or teaching staff should always make it clear that this is a person who is telling you that so and so many millions were killed, and so and so many Jews were killed, and so and so many women were raped.
The crux of the matter is that we have very poor data. In 2017, we still know very little about sexualised violence. And this also shows that it is not a political priority.
IW: So you would still say that after how many, 25 years you have been working in this field? I read about it in your book and the first studies that came from the USA, the Harvard study and so on. Would you still say today that sexualised violence has not yet become a problem in society?
MH : Not to the extent that we have good data, for example, that the consequences have really been researched. We also talk about transgenerational trauma, which I think is a very, very important topic in order to prevent this spiral of violence from continuing, but very little research has been done into it. And if you imagine that the last nationwide study on the incidence of sexualised violence in Germany was conducted in 2004, then that speaks for itself. Across Europe, the first study on this topic dates back to 2014. The question is always: how are the questions asked, which topics, what is the specific focus in each case? When I talk about a comprehensive, broad data situation, then we are only at the beginning.
IW: Mrs Hauser, I would like to start with your story. How did you actually come up with the topic and perhaps with a more personal question, if you don’t mind: what or who were your childhood heroes for courage and resistance and what supported you in getting so involved? What or who? Were there any heroes?
MH : Well, there weren’t any „heroes“ at all. If there were, then there were one or two „heroes“. Interestingly, I read Simone de Beauvoir very early on, partly because we read texts by Sartre and Beauvoir in French lessons – in Switzerland, French was taught relatively early on, which fascinated me a lot. I was also fascinated by her story of how she continued to write against all odds. And then this connection between theoretical thinking and practical expression in her novels, I really liked that. Apart from that, I haven’t seen too many women or men, at least not in my neighbourhood, who would have made good heroes or heroines.
IW: Was that the real trigger then?
MH : The trigger was that I simply experienced sexualised violence at an early age. I grew up in eastern Switzerland, my parents were labour migrants who left South Tyrol in the 1950s because there was simply no work in South Tyrol after the war and there was great poverty. They then found jobs in Switzerland and my sister and I grew up there. But we went to South Tyrol at least five or six times a year because my parents were very homesick and so we spent every long weekend, Whitsun, summer holidays anyway, in my parents‘ village, where all our relatives lived.
My maternal grandmother chose me early on as someone she could tell things to. I don’t know why that was. In any case, she had the feeling that she could confide in me. I was eleven or twelve years old at the time, which was actually far too early to tell someone about my own experiences of violence. I remember well how she took me for a walk to a certain hamlet where there was coffee and I got a great drink, a soft drink, which was never available otherwise, and she drank her coffee and she always told me about it on the way. Maybe she chose me because I kept travelling back to Switzerland, so I wasn’t always in her area and she felt she could unload better there.
In any case, I trained sensors for this topic very early on and subsequently always heard stories from women. When I was seventeen, I was on a volunteer placement in a kibbutz in Israel and two Auschwitz survivors, women, told me about their experiences of violence. While all my colleagues were sitting by the pool, I went to them every day and listened to their stories. Again, it was interesting why they chose me, because later the head of the kibbutz told me that they didn’t really want to speak German with anyone. I was from Switzerland, Italian, apparently a mixture that was far enough away from German.
It’s actually gone on like that until today. Recently, at a high-level UN conference, a UN woman came up to me and said: „I’ve never spoken to anyone about what I want to tell you now,“ and told me about her experience of violence. In other words, there are apparently no places where people can talk, few trusting spaces where women feel sufficiently protected to talk about it.
Women who make a career – whether at the UN, in ministries or in business – also seem to find it difficult to talk about what has happened to them, especially when it comes to sexualised violence. And that shows that it is quite different whether I report that I have been mugged and had my money stolen or my car broken into, or had a serious accident, it is quite different what impact sexualised violence has on a person. I deliberately say „on a person“ because we know that men and boys are also raped, which is an even more taboo subject in all societies. This silence is by no means a thing of the past. Whether I’m talking about highly patriarchal post-war areas, there it is an existential commandment of silence, women know very well that if they talk about it, they could be killed. But even in our supposedly highly developed industrialised countries, it is not easy for a woman to talk about it.
IW: Then, coming back to your childhood and youth, it wasn’t actually your experience as a migrant woman living in Switzerland, perhaps marginalised and experiencing injustice, but rather your own perception. It is often the case that if you experience injustice early on as a child or young person, you are then sensitive to the violation of human rights or human dignity. In your case, was it more the experience that was communicated to you?
MH: Well, I can already see three lines, the line of reports on sexualised violence, which I just talked about, then I see the line of my mother’s war experiences, first and foremost, and I see the discrimination against me as a South Tyrolean girl in Switzerland. It all came together in the end and made me very resistant at a very early age. These things came together, unconsciously of course.
During the Second World War, at the beginning of the 1940s, the South Tyroleans had to decide whether they wanted to stay in fascist Italy or go to fascist Nazi Germany. There were then the „Geher“ and the „Dableiber“. It’s also interesting to see the conflicts that arose after ’45, when the „those who had left“ returned, some of which have not really been dealt with collectively in a positive remembrance work in South Tyrol to this day. I experience this time and again in post-war areas, that those who were able to flee, who were granted asylum outside, and then go back again, what open wounds that ultimately means for those who had to stay. My grandfather on my mother’s side decided to leave. They then came to Lower Bavaria and of course my grandfather was immediately conscripted as a soldier and my grandmother sat there with the four children and ended up going through the whole war period. My mother often told me in my childhood about how she and her little brother were herding geese in a meadow and then the American low-flying planes came and dropped their load. The grandmother often didn’t know whether her children were still alive. I can also remember a report where she went down to the shelter during the attack, my grandmother with the other children, and my mother and her little brother hid on the way home and of course only returned to the flat after the attack, and how terrible it was for everyone because they didn’t know whether the others were still alive.
That’s something I see again and again on the ground, the deep psychological wounds this fear for others causes. These are traumatisations that don’t necessarily fit into any medical books, codes or legal regulations as to when such a traumatisation should be „healed“, so to speak. These really are lifelong processes and this is where experts and, above all, legislators have a lot to learn, namely that there is no zero-eight-fifteen coding, but that it is of course individually related to how a person can process what he or she has experienced. For children in particular, the deep fear of no longer being able to come home or that their mother may no longer be alive can leave lifelong scars.
These were the stories my mum told us. It was floating around as ‚trauma material‘ and today I would say that I experienced something transgenerationally that I didn’t know how to deal with or how to categorise. When I was eleven or twelve, I started to organise all the terrible illustrated books from the First and Second World Wars. I was enrolled in the libraries in the city of St. Gallen, church libraries, the city library, at school. There are illustrated books of wounded soldiers from the First World War, which are just awful. And nobody seemed to mind that I brought them home by the kilo. Today I think I wanted to get closer to the horror. I heard so much from my mum and only got unsatisfactory answers from my mum and dad when I looked deeper. It wasn’t dealt with at school either, especially as there was a different climate in Switzerland. I then became very involved with literature and books. At some point I stopped and put these things to one side, but they left a deep impression and gave me an idea of how destructive it all was. If my mother still tells me about it today, I thought as a girl, and still seems so agitated and upset, and that was so many years ago, at least twenty, then it must be something elementary in human experience. I knew that early on. That’s why I was interested in these topics from an early age.
Yes, and the discrimination in Switzerland, we were actually the real foreigners, i.e. white, spoke German, my father was, I found, over-assimilated at the time. I was very unjust about my parents‘ political behaviour because I read Jean Ziegler’s book Die Schweiz wäscht weißer early on, which was a relief for me to read a book like that, where a clever man writes things that I suspected were wrong in Switzerland. That a lot of things are propaganda, by propaganda I mean the great landscape, the super recreational value, all the things that Switzerland has made a lot of money with, starting with chocolate, that that’s not everything. I felt that something wasn’t right. So people like that and books like that were a relief for me, to know that I wasn’t crazy. It’s true that I had a strange hunch, even if I couldn’t have named things back then. I had something of a double life, one was the girl in Switzerland who went to school diligently, got super good grades for her parents, for her father, who had never been able to realise his life’s dreams because of his poverty and was now working hard at his job in Switzerland so that he could put up a house in South Tyrol. That was his typical migrant dream, but he was never able to do what he wanted to do professionally. I probably studied medicine for him too. In any case, I was always a diligent student until I became more and more rebellious and my parents no longer understood what was going on with me. And this Switzerland… I always found it more difficult to live there as a young person.
IW: Did you study in Switzerland?
MH: No, I studied in Innsbruck, which was a different kind of double standard. At the time, the editor-in-chief of the Tyrolean daily newspaper was still an ex-Nazi, which was common knowledge. There was still so much that hadn’t been dealt with, that you weren’t allowed to talk about. I then had two Nigerian fellow students and travelled around Innsbruck with them from time to time and we really experienced that once, as we were walking along the street, a bus driver with an empty bus, who probably wanted to go to the depot, stopped towards us and only at the last moment did I pull my friend aside and we jumped away. I don’t know what the bus driver was thinking, he would have been in a lot of trouble if something had happened.
IW: You travelled from Switzerland via Austria?
MH : That was a voluntary choice, because South Tyrol and Tyrol have cultural agreements that allow you to study there. For me, coming to Essen, to North Rhine-Westphalia, was also a certain relief. The women there were direct, it was my first job as a junior doctor and I loved it. The slang and the direct manner of the women there.
IW: I come from Bochum.
MH : Okay, then you know what I’m talking about.
IW: Yes.
MH : The fact that the pavement was pulled up at eighteen o’clock, that Essen was a dreadful city, etc., doesn’t matter. But the first few years as a junior doctor you don’t have time for anything anyway, because you only do shifts and night shifts and have to work a lot, so I didn’t realise that much.
IW: You also wrote in your book that it was difficult to get the job.
MH : Getting the job, it was a different time in general, when gynaecology assistant doctor positions were in high demand.
IW: So there was no political background to this because of your political commitment to women, was there?
MH : No, no, that was not yet known at the time. „ medica mondiale “ only came much later.
IW: Okay, so it had nothing to do with that.
MH : No. I don’t know, I think I wrote around 200 applications back then and got 199 rejections. But that one was it.
IW: And did you then spend several years in the Ruhr area?
MH : I then worked as a junior doctor for three years until I decided to go to Bosnia. I did the first part of my specialist training in Essen. All the positions I had were always good places to learn a lot and to understand a lot about the misogyny that takes place in gynaecology. The first job I had was in South Tyrol in a regional hospital not far from my parents‘ village, where I did my „practical year“. There was still a head doctor with a really feudal demeanour. We had quite a few arguments there and he found it impossible that I, as a 25-year-old young doctor-to-be, had the audacity to talk back to him. He had never experienced that before. And he also criticised the way the women were treated. For example, I saw a mountain farmer come to us with severe lower abdominal pain and we diagnosed ovarian cancer relatively quickly, made it clear to her husband that she needed an operation immediately, and he said: „After the harvest!“ In other words, months passed and then she could only receive palliative care. She died the following spring.
That made me realise more and more how many levels women experience violence on. I also heard stories from women there, of sexualised violence, and I understood that the head physician, the senior physician and the other colleagues didn’t want to hear about it. They also marginalised me when I wanted to talk about it. This is an experience that I have had continuously, both during my specialist training at the University Hospital in Essen and later at Holweide Hospital in Cologne: that they didn’t really want to hear about the topic and didn’t want to hear about me as an ambassador either. On the one hand, the topics are too painful to deal with, and on the other hand, people want to keep everything far away from them, because if they knew, they would have to take responsibility and change something.
IW: Do something, exactly. It’s too painful because it’s too shameful or, I mean, it’s a structural problem that’s associated with it and needs very fundamental changes. On the one hand, there is the personal shame associated with it for those affected, who don’t speak themselves, and on the other hand, there is the structural problem, isn’t there?
MH : Firstly, there is the social problem. When women realise that they are supposed to keep quiet about it, even as girls, they know that if it happens to me, I have to keep it to myself. For example, Bosnian women who were supposed to act as witnesses at the war crimes tribunal in The Hague, we spoke to them both directly during the war and after the war and much later when we did a study on how women fared in court. It was very clear that they all wanted to speak. We didn’t notice much shame at all. I mean, of course there is this psychological problem of shame about an experience of violence, especially one that is so intimate, of not simply being able to talk about it if the „setting“ is not right. But these women, many years after the war, were very willing to talk, just as Bosnian women were from ’93 onwards, so that the world would know what was happening to them.
But they were told by their immediate environment, their family and the wider society that they should keep quiet about it. They themselves would have been very willing. And I think that’s something we need to take a much closer look at. We always talk about this shame, but maybe it’s society’s fault that women are made to feel so ashamed that they can’t talk about it. If we can create a different climate and take it out of this whole individualised thing, because we know that one in three to four women in a European country has experienced sexualised violence in the course of her life, the number is of course all the higher in a war zone.
If we know that so many women have experienced this, then we can count them in a room, but we can also count the men who are probably also perpetrators. And everyone has an interest in distancing themselves from the issue. But in the end it’s the survivors alone who pay the bill, who have to bury it inside themselves again instead of being able to let it out. Because we know that letting it out is the only way to start dealing with it. The woman herself should decide when. But I would push a little. There is a psychological process in the woman, and there is the social process of how she is treated. Ideally, the two come together. Namely, that it doesn’t arise in the first place that she is perhaps to blame. That the skirt was too short, why is she still going out in the evening… and, and, and. Unfortunately, these myths still exist. If this were not the case at all, but if the surrounding society were to approach the woman with an open ear and an open heart and a high level of empathy and say: „This is terrible what you have experienced, we will support you in dealing with it well and you are the same as before, you are my daughter, my wife, you are my sister…“, then this could be dealt with in a completely different way. In this respect, the psychological processing process and social behaviour are connected.
IW: I have worked intensively on the so-called „survivor syndrome“, as it is always called. It’s said that people don’t want to tell their own story out of feelings of shame and guilt, and also the supposed guilt complex of having survived. In my opinion, our society has told the survivors in retrospect: „Feel guilty.“ Because what they (the survivors) feel as guilt and shame can actually only be that it was done to them, they are not the ones who are „to blame“. They don’t even need to be ashamed, there is no reason to be ashamed. It is shame for the others who have done this, the violated human dignity. What you’re saying is very similar to projecting what affects you onto others and blaming them, isn’t it?
MH : Those two Auschwitz survivors on the kibbutz back then, I was very surprised when they told me: „Nobody wants to hear our story here on the kibbutz.“ And the kibbutz was created, the causality is very clear: „Nobody wants to hear our story. When a journalist comes from the USA, we are asked to report on Auschwitz. But around us it is taboo“. We talk about a kibbutz in Israel. And I heard this again and again later in working contexts with Israeli experts, that it is taboo. So either it is exaggerated, in this case our two Auschwitz survivors, or it is tabooed, people don’t want to hear anything more about it. And I say again, either because it is too painful or because people want to keep it far away, as you have just said. It is delegated to individuals, but no one looks at the social structures that are involved, that make such things possible in the first place. And that is a very important point in the case of sexualised violence, that something would only change fundamentally if our society had a different openness to this topic and did not instrumentalise it for suitable purposes. The media, for example. What was reported about the Kachelmann trial! And was there any justice for the woman? On the contrary!
Psychosocial ways of dealing with trauma have fallen into disrepute, into discredit. Through a certain sensationalism, the media manage to take this issue to a completely false level, where women then remain even more silent and feel even more isolated and alone, and are re-traumatised by the way the media deal with it. But the general population can sit back and say: „I really have nothing to do with this!“ We always see at the right political moments that raped women are instrumentalised for political purposes. And this can only happen if there is no broad social, normative agreement to condemn sexualised violence. You can be more certain that you will get justice in Germany for a material offence such as scratching a car than if a woman experiences sexualised violence.
IW: On the other hand, the women or survivors of such violence want to tell their own stories. It’s not as if they want to keep it inside themselves and don’t want to testify.
MH : It’s a rumour that women don’t want to talk, but of course, when they experience social reactions, they keep quiet. That’s the problem. I’ve witnessed this time and time again, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, every time the media were there and wanted to hear the most explosive stories. How they survived the IS violence, the stories should be reported. If possible with a face, you want to see the woman burst into tears, you want to see that the victim really is a real victim. If they distance themselves during the hearings, which they may have worked on for a long time with their therapist, so if they come across as cold, then the assessor can write: „Seems cold, not credible!“ So the problem always remains with the women, always with the survivors.
IW: Always with the victims…
MH: Always with the victims…
IW : But who have actually already mustered so much strength and vigour in the situation. So I have a hard time with the term ‚victim‘, which I think is always used lightly. It’s also a form of stigmatisation if you only ever talk about women as ‚victims‘!
MH: We don’t talk about the victims at all. It may be the right term when I’m talking about a trial. But we actually only talk about survivors in order to emphasise the women’s resources. It’s a completely different attitude when I talk about survivors. I recognise that she has her own history of resources and I don’t have this keyhole view of the rape events, as I did in 1993 when the Bosnian women were reported on. You actually only had a view of her violated private parts. I say that somewhat provocatively.
The fact that these women were mothers, family managers, professors, judges, housewives, pupils, students, in life before and in life after – life after was of course completely different – this holistic view of the person was missing. People only wanted to see this one thing, but at the same time they didn’t want to know how many women experience this violence across the board. It could be my sister, my friend, my aunt. What is actually going on here? What kind of society do we live in that it is apparently so easy for men to perpetrate violence? What is wrong with our society that we give survivors the stigma and say: „It’s your fault, you behaved in such and such a way!“ Instead of looking at the perpetrators, making laws so that there are good settings where women can testify. The impunity of sexualised violence really is a great indictment of our society. The number of men convicted of rape offences in Germany is far below ten percent (…). And it is not easy to report an offence in Germany. In this EU-wide study, which country do you think has the highest number of violent offences in Europe? That’s a rhetorical question, sometimes you can check people’s racism when you ask that.
IW: I don’t know.
MH : Men very often say: „Italy, Spain“. It’s Denmark.
IW: Denmark?
MH: Denmark! And not because Danish men rape more than German or Italian or Ukrainian men, but because the social atmosphere and the maturity of the institutions in Denmark on the subject is the highest. This means that the police are trained when women come to report. And because the women know that they will find a policewoman there who knows about re-traumatisation, who knows what kind of setting she has to create, more women go to the police or to counselling centres. And yet we have such a high level of violence there. That is very telling about our very violent societies.
IW: Is there an explanation for this? That it’s Denmark in particular?
MH : Yes, what I’ve just said, the explanation is that the police there are the most sensitised there, whereas in Ukraine, for example, the figures are minimal. But in Ukraine, if you go to the police station there, you might have to fear being raped again. Or in any case to be highly discriminated against, as a woman would think of coming here and saying that she had been raped by her husband. That is a contradiction in terms. For many people it still is. In other words, if there are no reports at all, it doesn’t mean that there is no violence in the country, but that no social work has been done there, that the relevant institutions are equipped with expertise.
IW: What could be done to empower these women and, above all, to change these structures? You founded the organisation „ medica mondiale „, went to many places and made a difference. But what can we do here and, above all, how can we make it clear that these women are not just victims, i.e. how can we give them a voice?
MH : That is something that we at „ medica mondiale “ try to do, to give women a voice. Through our publications, by talking about it in interviews, other organisations do that too, but I’m talking about our work on the ground. There was this hashtag „outcry“, and thousands of reactions came in within hours. In other words, the need to express yourself, especially in a protected virtual space, seems to be huge. And there are so many stories in there, so many outcries from men and boys, from women and girls, both about what they experienced, but above all about how society dealt with them afterwards. And how much new suffering and traumatisation this has caused them. And I’m talking about the highly developed German society.
In other words, we need spaces where we can talk about it, just as we would have needed spaces for the old German women who were raped at the end of the Second World War, for example. That was always a taboo subject in German post-war society. When we wanted to launch a campaign to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the war with the title „Time to speak“, because we had always received letters from old women, an old woman almost always stood up during the discussion and said: „I experienced what Mrs Hauser is talking about and I couldn’t talk about it for the rest of my life. Please continue your work so that Bosnian women don’t have to say that in fifty years‘ time.“ That was very, very touching, as it has naturally become less and less in recent years.
This „Time to Speak“ campaign was not supported by anyone. We asked various foundations in Germany whether they wanted to support us financially, but we received no support from anyone. The „House of History“ organised the exhibition „Flight and Expulsion“, and the topic was not supposed to be included. I had a real battle with the curator at the time to make sure that this topic was included. We then launched a small appeal in the Bonn and Cologne area, and there were quite a few letters from old German surviving women who sent their stories to the Bonner Generalanzeiger , the Kölner Stadtanzeiger , and said: „We went to this exhibition and of course hoped that our story would be included. And it was very painful to realise that we weren’t included.“ The curator tried to fob me off with the argument: „We didn’t want to re-traumatise the women.“
IW: That was the „Haus der Geschichte“ in Bonn?
MH: Yes, „We didn’t want to re-traumatise the women.“ In the discussion afterwards, I also understood: There wasn’t really anyone apart from us who really wanted the women to appear. There was a very touching woman in the women’s association in the Federation of Expellees who headed the women’s section there, Sybille Dreher, I can safely say that it was important to her that the women who could speak were not instrumentalised again. Your organisation, on the other hand, of course had its own interests, that’s quite clear. The curator and more left-wing circles, on the other hand, were very worried about revanchism if it was reported.
IW: But the „Haus der Geschichte“ in Bonn is not necessarily considered to be „left-wing“.
MH : But I’ve always heard from left-leaning people that that was the big concern. In any case, the curator didn’t want to deal with the issue. We then fought hard for it and in the permanent exhibition in Berlin there is now a box where we have made available a diary of a surviving woman in Sütterlin script, in which she writes about what happened to her in May ’45.
But how do people talk about the violence perpetrated by the Wehrmacht and SS? In Bosnia, I heard a lot about violence and sexualised violence against partisan women. How is this topic even mentioned? More and more in research circles, I know that. There is a positive energy there, but it’s still far from mainstream . I was recently at an event in Munich where a very elderly gentleman actually said that the Wehrmacht should not be included in the topic.
IW: Of all things.
MH : The answer he got was clear, of course. So there is still this way of thinking and therefore many reasons to support any initiative that wants to combat forgetting. When it comes to sexualised violence, various things come together that are still socially inappropriate today because we still have highly patriarchal gender relations, even in a country like Germany. A lot has happened. We have a female chancellor, we have a female defence minister, we finally have a reform of paragraph 177 (sexual assault, rape), for which activists have fought for years and years and years, but we still have many unresolved problems. We still have gender stereotypes that prevent sexualised violence from being talked about appropriately.
IW: And when you talk about how it is instrumentalised, how the horror is used for certain purposes, how do you get out of this trap? Especially when dealing with the history of National Socialism, with concentration camp crimes and so on, we see that young people are annoyed and say: „Yes, I was in a concentration camp, yes, I was in Dachau, yes, I was at the Holocaust memorial…“ We have learnt the collective negative memory, which is also a dwelling on horror. How can you manage to incentivise young people to get involved in a positive way? How do you do that with stories like this?
MH : We were given a very, very big opportunity in 2015. When the refugees came to us, it was a great opportunity for the population in Germany. It doesn’t matter whether they were „organic Germans“ or people who had been here for a long time. I have images in my head of the Munich train station, when young people clapped and people were welcomed after the traumatic Balkan route and the traumatic things they had experienced beforehand. I am very sure that many of these young people had their parents‘ stories of flight in their heads, from their grandparents, who told them what it meant to leave everything behind and go on the run. I think a lot of them could relate to that.
We need this contact, we need personal contact. There is hardly a family in Germany that doesn’t have some stories of the First or Second World War as a narrative. And also crimes against women, you actually know who it happened to in the family, the knowledge is often there. We need to create a social atmosphere in which we can talk about it with respect and recognise the pain.
In our political human rights work towards Berlin, we have repeatedly asked ourselves why there has been such ignorance for 25 years about listening to us on the subject of sexualised war violence. At some point I realised that there were old politicians sitting there, but primarily men, of course, who could have something to do with the issue. We know the story of Gerhard Schröder, we know the story of Horst Köhler, and I was always surprised that this story wasn’t told even more. These are all stories of escape and we can assume with a high degree of probability that these boys were aware of rape at the time. Either in their own families or from neighbours and so on. This pain was deeply buried in the families. And the boys also had to bury it deeply. And later, as adult men, they didn’t seem to be able to reconnect with it.
Perhaps we really need a new generation of politicians who can tackle this issue differently. We are working with a UN resolution from the year 2000, Resolution 1325 (of 31 October 2000), which is very, very important for our political work in Germany and worldwide. Kofi Annan had it drawn up under pressure from activists worldwide. It sets out everything that is important for the protection and safety of women and girls in war zones and post-war areas. It is about protection, participation and prevention. All three areas are still extremely inadequate and the resolution is not really being implemented. For over twelve years, Germany has refused to draw up its own national action plan. This would have been mandatory if the resolution had been ratified. It was not until 2012 that the first action plan was drawn up, which we very much welcomed. Unfortunately, it still does not have its own budget, there are hardly any human resources in Berlin, and so on.
We are glad that this is finally being taken seriously and is moving forward, but as a women’s organisation we always have to be behind. We certainly have female politicians and a few male politicians who now support this. They are all from the younger generation who understand why it is so important to include these issues in German foreign and security policy. This is something that I have been trying to make clear in Berlin for 25 years: that our own policies have a massive impact on interventions on the ground and, for example, that the purely military intervention in Afghanistan over fifteen years has caused so much new traumatisation on the ground, has caused so much new damage and has ultimately left the women in the lurch. This military primacy was completely the wrong way to go. However, we did not make our concerns and the knowledge we had gathered since 1993 heard. Weapons cannot be used to establish human rights and certainly not women’s rights.
IW: Let me come back briefly to your point about how we can make a difference, that we should create spaces where people can talk to each other openly and respectfully, where they can tell each other their stories. I have often experienced that when it comes to this point, when it comes to the pain, it rarely gets to that point because the space is not so protected that it gets that far in the conversations, but it can also lead – especially with the topic of National Socialism – that if this pain was so great, it also leads to a turning away. How do you get out of this pain? On the one hand, by looking at the women or the survivors who have it themselves, and on the other hand, those who are open enough to face it and share it? I think it’s about sharing. How do you get people to make something positive out of it together? My concern is this dwelling on the pain. You have to get out of it somehow.
MH : Life can’t go on straight away when you’ve heard a story like that and it gets to you. And such stories of sexualised violence quickly become very close to women; there is hardly a woman who has not experienced some form of assault. Then something happens to us and we have to have a way of dealing with it. But then to transfer something into my life so that what I’ve heard makes sense, I have to make a commitment afterwards. In whatever way I do that. We have many, many opportunities. This can range from paying more attention at school, for example, if I’m a mum, to actually running my own projects. As there are now refugees living almost everywhere, I have many volunteering opportunities to get involved. I also want to bring this back into my life and connect it with German history.
I think this is a very, very great opportunity and I reject the term „refugee crisis“! We are the crisis! Not the refugees. The refugees have done what a German mother and father would do, namely in Lebanon, where the UN has no more money – because the western industrialised countries are no longer paying – and I can see that my children are starving and my family has no prospects at all: Then I’ll take my children and move to where I think there are prospects. That’s what any mother or father would do. So they did something completely human. And then we started building fences and regulations and laws, the laws weren’t enough, and now we’re building fences, two layers, three layers, and people are still coming over the top, so that means we’ve done so much damage in the world with our policies.
We let international seed companies buy up entire regions in Africa, thereby destroying the livelihoods of very, very many small farmers and then we are surprised that they come and say: „Hello, we want to survive too!“ We can actually be surprised that we don’t have to pay for the destructive consequences of our actions over the last 150 years. Now it has started that refugees have also found their way to Europe, a small fraction. We shouldn’t be like this and think that the millions who have come to Germany are the downfall. If we look at the burden that African countries have to accommodate due to completely different numbers, then we should actually behave humbly and, above all, we should pursue a completely different policy. One that combats the causes of flight, which is what annoys me so much, that wasteful policies are being made and the causes of flight are not being analysed and combated. Because then we would no longer be able to export arms. Then we would have to develop a completely different climate policy, a completely different economic policy and so on. Something would change massively. When I talk to people at lectures, they all want something to change, they all know that things can’t go on like this. We have wealth at the expense of other people’s poverty. It’s actually pretty clear that at some point a fraction of those who no longer see a livelihood for themselves locally will come. How do we behave here now? Mrs Merkel’s words were very, very right, we could have made it if so many mistakes hadn’t been made again.
It was not structurally underpinned, where it was said with an open heart: „We can do it!“ Of course, the expertise and specialist knowledge would have had to be brought together and a completely different structural underpinning would have had to be created to ensure that people really do have homes here, can learn professions, are accepted and integrated. They won’t be able to do that if they have to live in derelict DIY stores for months on end without knowing when the hearing will even come. And women are once again experiencing violence. That’s another indictment of poverty. That they experience violence in the refugee camps, from fellow refugees, from security people, from German staff. It’s quite unbearable what’s happening, but for many people nothing is happening because the refugee camps are far away and they can actually carry on living as before.
IW: They said: „We can do it!“ and then the situation got worse and worse.
MH : If we look at these realities, these current realities, and by that I mean both what German foreign, security and defence policy is doing on the ground, as well as what we have experienced since 2015 in terms of how refugees are treated in this country, if we link all of this to the experiences of the First and Second World Wars, then of course we can’t avoid the pain. We can’t avoid it anyway. It’s there, the pain is in people. And looking at this pain is much safer for a society than suppressing it and not looking at it. But we have to create spaces for this, with adequate structures. That would be another task. Despite being one of the richest nations in the world, we haven’t even managed to provide enough counselling centres for our children and young people, who are slowly but surely turning off more and more. This school system is so destructive for many, there are always some who get through well, no question, but for many it is so destructive that they are getting sicker and sicker. I know that children wait months for a counselling appointment. What are we doing with our children and young people? What kind of policy are we creating? That we don’t see this as our top priority. Mr Schäuble wants the black zero. That is a crime against all those who experience violence here in this country and do not receive adequate care.
IW: Let me come back to the story of the individuals. We talked about this at the beginning, and you were able to think of two or three stories when we talked about resistance. If you now list all these negative aspects, the treatment of children, the treatment of women, the climate, everything we’ve talked about, what can the telling of these stories actually contribute? Can you think of any stories that you would say would be important to tell, to bring them into schools, to bring them into spaces where they can be dealt with respectfully?
MH: So these are stories that embody pain and anger in equal measure. The pain is always there because there is so much violence. But I see so much courage in women in particular. It could encourage others to behave differently in their life situations or to set out on the path. And setting out on the path always means looking at the inside, if we only ever stay on the outside, we don’t really move forward. But looking at the inside, and I know this from my own experience, is one of the most difficult and painful things, but also one of the most rewarding. Like a researcher, I set out to find out what all the disturbances in me are. Why do I have such limitations? What does this have to do with my biography? To take a closer look. But it takes courage.
So I can tell the story of Shirin, a young Afghan woman, which is quite dramatic, and which has to do with a lot of pain, but also with her strength, her courage, and that despite everything she has experienced, she will make her way in life. She was forced to marry a much older man by her parents in Afghanistan when she was fifteen. She then had to have children quickly, had a boy and a girl, but wanted to continue going to school. She was very inquisitive, very clever, and that’s when the problems started, in that her husband realised that he had someone at his side who he could not only rape and dispose of as he pleased, but that she was resisting and saying: „I want to go back to school!“, „I want to learn something again!“. Then he started hitting her and became very violent. When she talked back again, it was enough for him and he poured petrol on her and set her on fire. She was severely injured and was closer to death than life for weeks.
She was then taken to a burns clinic, where our partner organisation „medica Afghanistan“ also works, specifically there because this problem is just as serious in Afghanistan. There are psychologists, social workers and lawyers working in this clinic. Shirin received support from „medica“ counsellors there and has returned to life. She continued to experience unspeakable psychological violence, with her parents-in-law blaming her for what happened. The man was imprisoned at the instigation of the lawyers. However, he did not remain in custody for long because his family was able to buy his release. This family-in-law brought the children to the burns clinic in the first few days after Shirin was admitted there, and you can imagine what she looked like – pretty awful. The children ran out of the clinic screaming. That was the intention of the parents-in-law, who told the children: „Look, that’s what your mum looks like, she’s a really bad, evil woman!“ And the children turned their backs on her forever. That was her great torment, in addition to the physical pain, the humiliation she experienced, but also the knowledge that she would never get her children back.
She then moved back in with her parents, who took her back in, was able to get an education, got a position as a teacher for illiterate people at „Medica Afghanistan“ and was able to earn her own money, regain her dignity and develop self-confidence. With the help of a lawyer, she tried to get the children back. That was not possible. And at some point they also made it clear to her that this would not be the case in the foreseeable future, that she would get her children back. That was the moment for her when she said: „Then I have to leave!“ She continued to experience discrimination, her parents pressurised her to marry a man so that she would no longer be at home with them. The choice was pretty bad because she was now a burnt woman.
I got to know her when we organised a workshop in Kabul and the staff from all three „Medica“ locations came together for this workshop. She said right from the start that she really wanted to go because she wanted to get to know me. We had a very touching meeting. She still has a pretty burnt face, despite several operations that were more for vital functions than cosmetic ones, and yet you can see what a beautiful woman she must have been before, she has incredibly lively, bright eyes. We talked about these eyes. About our eyes. She impressed me very, very much and touched me deeply.
During our workshop, on one day, the male employees were also there, we have drivers, an IT specialist, etc., who are not usually present at this workshop, but on that one day they were able to be there. On that day, Shirin really wanted to read out a poem that she had written herself. It was very impressive. She lamented her suffering in a powerful voice and I was very impressed by the way the men cried. So it was touching. Once again, a lot has happened in the organisation to see what strength this young woman has. She was just over twenty and had already experienced everything you can experience in life. She then returned to her place.
The next thing I heard from her was that she had arrived in Germany. After realising that she had lost her children for good, she said: „Then I have to go to Germany. I can’t stay here any longer. I also don’t want to be forced to marry again by my parents. I can hardly defend myself, because who am I?“ She embarked on the arduous, dangerous, protracted and costly journey to Germany with another woman and actually made it here. She now lives in a city in northern Germany, is learning German and the last time we met, she told me: „Now I want to become a social worker, I hope I can do my training here and then also work with refugee women here, give them courage. I want to give something back from what „Medica Afghanistan“ has given me and to other people who have supported me on my journey. I want to give that back.“
IW: What a story!
MH : It’s a pretty crazy story that I simply don’t tell in the media, because otherwise I’ll be followed up because people want to know: „Where is she? Who is that?“ And I’m very worried, we know how the media will deal with it, and that’s why this is a framework where I can talk about it, but I already know that questions will come if I report it in the media myself, people will want to talk to her, but that’s absolutely inadmissible. Unless one day she gets to the point where she herself says: „Then I’ll do it“ or „I’ll write about it“.
IW: So how did she get here? By what route?
MH : Via the smuggling routes, the Balkan route. When I asked her: „What did you experience on the way?“, she said: „I’ll tell you about it in five years‘ time.“ Unspeakable. Women always pay with their bodies, for every new part of the journey. And I’m not just talking about fellow refugees, I’m talking about Serbian officials, Croatian officials, Hungarian officials, everyone along the way. Police, authorities, security guards, smugglers.
IW: Where do you think she got her strength from?
MH : A very, very good question.
IW : She was basically a child!
MH : She was a child, she still is now. 23 or something, 23, and with the loss of the two children!
IW : And the parents?!
MH : Her parents, they sold her, they forced her to marry the first time, she left her parents behind.
IW : Where does someone get these powers from?
MH : I was very impressed by the way she read this poem and those eyes, that glow on her face despite everything she’d been through. She also managed to find me, she really touched me.
IW: That was a gap for you too, wasn’t it?
MH : I had a gap there too, yes, yes, there were months in between. We didn’t have constant contact. But when I heard that she had ended up in the reception centre in Frankfurt, I thought, how long have I not heard from her?
MH : Shall I tell you another story? It’s more about impunity. A young woman in Kosovo who wanted to visit her brother in hospital in Pristina, that was in ’98, when the Serbian co-optation was in full swing. The hospital was already occupied by Serbs and she was raped there by a Serbian commander. She somehow managed to escape and returned to her home village, lived there very traumatised, and found out about „Medica Kosova“ through an attack on the pharmacy, then came to „Medica“ and received therapeutic support.
At some point, she received a call from The Hague saying that because the perpetrator was relatively high up in the hierarchy, she was an important key witness and that she should get ready for an interview. Someone from The Hague then came to see her, the white jeep was of course parked in front of her house, and the whole village already suspected that something special had happened to her in Pristina. The village had of course experienced war itself, but somehow they knew that something particularly bad had happened to her in Pristina.
She then testified about her whole story, because the perpetrator was higher-ranking, they were interested in her. And that’s why they called her from The Hague and told her to get ready, that she would fly to The Hague with a group of other women to give her testimony at the trial. She was naturally very excited, but thought that this was her chance to get out of Kosovo. She was offered the chance to get a new identity. She told her mother: „I’m leaving, forever,“ and prepared to leave. Then she heard nothing more from The Hague for months, months and months. At some point the time came, it was at least six months later, and she was taken on a plane from Pristina to The Hague in a group of several witnesses, and there were also perpetrators on that plane. That’s something I also experienced in Bosnia, that Bosnian witnesses had to fly to The Hague on the same plane as their perpetrators.
She then had a long wait in The Hague. In the meantime, she had a small child and married a man in her home town who she thought would treat her reasonably well because she had experienced a lot of discrimination in the town. After it became clear that she would probably testify in The Hague and that she had been raped in Pristina, they sprayed „Serbian whore“ on the wall of her house, for example. She could hardly leave the house without someone shouting something at her. To protect herself, she married this man and had a child with him. But it was clear to her that she would leave and wanted nothing more to do with her husband. It wasn’t a relationship that was anything more than protection.
So now she was in The Hague with the little child and it was only after we intervened that she was given a decent little flat because the months were dragging on again and she was in impossible collective accommodation with her child. After all, she was one of the most important witnesses, but fell into an increasingly severe depression. After many months, she then testified at the trial, only to be told that her testimony would not be taken for the trial.
Another issue is that women don’t actually receive any justice at all because the issue of sexualised violence is often excluded from trials for a variety of reasons. For example, a deal is made between the court and the perpetrator that certain offences are removed and he then accepts other offences. And interestingly enough, several Bosnian and Serbian perpetrators, of whom I know, perhaps others as well, have insisted that the offence not appear in the indictment. After years of raping women, selling men and women on, organising that whole flats and camps were full of women who could be raped with impunity by their soldiers, it was apparently a greater stigma in their everyday lives back from the war to be charged with sexualised violence than for all the other crimes they had committed. In any case, she was only given a new identity under pressure and now lives in a Scandinavian country.
I haven’t heard from her for a very long time, we had a very, very good relationship, we met often in the early years and I think that „Medica“ was a way for her to survive back then. After all these experiences with these processes, she wrote me a farewell letter at some point and said: „I don’t want to have anything more to do with this former life and want to start again here in Scandinavia and thank you for everything, I’m starting something new now.“
IW: This experience you had at the court, I mean, there are witness protection programmes, aren’t there? You have set up a victims‘ fund, hasn’t that been institutionalised yet? Surely there should also be someone available from the UN?
MH : A lot has happened, we have also intervened a lot in favour of the new statute of the ICC, the permanent court. What I was just talking about was the ad hoc tribunal on the former Yugoslavia. A lot has certainly been learnt from it and the new Statute also takes into account criminal offences that were not considered before, there is talk of accessory prosecution and so on, the rights of witnesses. But very often the offence of sexualised violence was removed from the indictments. It was Carla Del Ponte, for example, who pushed for this, because I then have much longer trials. And the interest in The Hague was to bring the trials to a conclusion because it was clear that the number of years in which they could act was very limited.
A more recent example is the trial at Stuttgart Higher Regional Court against Ignace Murwanashyaka, the Congolese FDLR perpetrator, who controlled his rebels‘ military operations on the ground from Germany using a mobile phone. At this trial, one victim witness after another withdrew their testimony because they did not see that justice was being done to them. Of course, you have to create settings for such trials that are appropriate for the women. Where they are not re-traumatised, where they have therapeutic support throughout the trial, where they receive good preparation and, above all, where they are informed that they could bring a joint complaint.
Not a single Congolese victim witness knew that. So something went wrong that was actually foreseeable. Because certain things were not taken into account, you can’t just say, I’m going to whip a trial like this through – which is difficult enough, I realise that, legally a tightrope act – there have to be enough resources available. I think that’s a big problem for the justice system in Germany right now, and here too the question is what has political priority. There are far too few resources available to properly conduct such trials against war criminals, which is a huge undertaking. There are Germans sitting in court, in this case judges from Baden-Württemberg, public prosecutors, staff who have no idea of the situation on the ground and don’t speak the language. It was incredibly time-consuming and there were constant interruptions due to language and cultural problems. When I do processes like this, I naturally have to think about how I’m going to tackle these problems beforehand. That didn’t happen, which is why these women didn’t get justice in the end.
There should also be a debate in Germany among the population: „Do we want such trials?“ Especially because of German history. And if we want them, then we also need to be properly and adequately equipped. With the appropriate expertise and the right settings . Especially in order to do justice to the traumatised witnesses.
IW: This is actually a new version of what we experienced in the Nazi trials. There was no witness support there either. It was only Fritz Bauer who introduced this in the Frankfurt Ausschwitz trial. The fact that someone was even picked up from the airport. And then someone was with them after the trial, otherwise they would have been alone, there would have been no one there.
MH: As well as being picked up from the airport, I’m also talking about psychological counselling, of course. There are many other problems, such as informing the co-plaintiff, etc., all unresolved issues if you want to do justice to the fact that such trials are organised for the witnesses and their well-being and justice.
IW: What do you think is the significance of telling these stories?
MH: How can you touch? Our basic question, and activating, that’s the B of the A. It’s such a strange in-between mood in Germany. So much would have been possible in 2015. Now many of the volunteers are frustrated because the authorities are at a standstill, and, and, and. What a spirit there was in 2015! We should be able to repeat that, many are certainly in waiting positions. There are existential fears among many, whether justified or not, there are fears here, or even despondency among the authorities.
Where we have been working for 25 years, there is a completely different strength in these post-war areas, even though they are structurally in ruins, economically in ruins, there is a different strength there. It should be possible to transfer something. The refugees who have come here have all brought this strength with them.
IW: Perhaps the point is that when you get together with them, something happens because you are told these stories and then something is different.
MH : Definitely, that’s the case with contemporary witnesses from the Second World War, with contemporary witnesses from whatever context, and now with refugees. Not everyone can speak in this way, but many want to, and they could deal with it in a completely different way if you wanted to know something about them. They live in complete isolation, in DIY centres. And the Germans, with their despondency, also live in isolation. So I can’t really answer your question. What do we have to do? Or how can we do it?
But that’s what needs to be done, storytelling coffees, protected spaces, establishing communication in a completely different way that is good for both sides, that is important for both sides. And to get out of this arrogant German attitude that we give humanitarian aid. (…) Of course, there has to be a mindfulness in everything, a mindfulness of what it means for both sides, you don’t always have to accompany everything therapeutically, but you have to have people with you who understand, who can support, and at the same time we can be sure that everyone has built up extreme protective structures. You can trust that to a certain extent, from both sides.
But you also have to think about having someone in the room who can support you. But I’ve also found that if you create good settings where pain can be shown and let out, that’s something really special. If someone then goes into shock and breaks down, then you need professional help, no question, but that’s not the rule. The rule is rather that this is very relieving. That some of the pain can be shown and I can see in your eyes that you feel my pain. That’s really, really worth a lot. If it’s not an extreme situation.
IW: Thank you, I hope and wish that we can continue this conversation.
Film and camera: Jakob Gatzka (BUXUS FILMS)
Transcription: Antonia Samm
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