Heartbreaking, angry, touching, infinitely sad and yet funny they are – the indignant speeches of indignant women. Whether they are about the otherness of a woman with facial paralysis, about people on the run or about women's lives in old age, they require one thing above all from their speakers: the courage to talk about the unsaid, freely and without shame and in the end even in front of an audience.
Katharina Deschka
Editor at the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.
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For the second time, the Brückner-Kühner Foundation and S. Fischer Verlag have called on "all women" to give an ungiven speech. The topic was freely selectable. As in the previous year, the strong interest in 2022 was remarkable: This time, the jury was able to choose six speakers from almost one hundred entries. They spoke on 10 December in Kassel City Hall, Human Rights Day, which is also the birthday of the writer Christine Brückner.
Speeches for the weak and the unheard
On their monologues "If you had talked, Desdemona. Indifferent speeches of unspoken women" from 1983 refers to the title of the appeal. Brückner put her fictitious speeches in the mouths of some women and female characters of whom one would have liked to know what they would have had to say, such as Effi Briest, Katharina von Bora, Clytämnestra.
Thanks to the project launched two years ago, indignant women now have their say. The co-initiator of the project, Friederike Emmerling from S. Fischer Verlag, is not surprised that so many would follow the call. It is not a decidedly feminist project in the sense of a call to fight for equality, she says. Rather, everything that concerns society should be represented by the female perspective. The spectrum of topics is therefore wide, "everything that concerns us, such as discrimination, in whatever form is discussed". The speakers, who often reveal a lot about themselves, stood up for the weak, the unheard.
The new indignant speeches of indignant women have now been published by S. Fischer. "Don't say anything now, let me finish talking!" is the name of the anthology with 24 speeches that couldn't be more different. The book will be presented today, on International Women's Day, at the Frankfurt Museum of Communication. The evening is fully booked, the interest is huge. Anyone who buys the book is supporting a project that encourages women to speak up. She hopes, says Emmerling, that the appeal will reach even more women from different backgrounds: The call should be an encouragement addressed to every woman: "Tell me, say, I want to hear you!".