PARAGRAPH 218

Abstract

The analysis of the painting Paragraph 218 tries to reveal the essential, inspirative ideas behind the picturesque realization of Alice Lex Nerlinger. A careful reading of previous historizations of Marsha Meskimmon and Atina Grossmann helps to reconstruct the historic frame from which the painting came and exists, as well as the relation to the frame itself. For the above mentioned historians, Paragraph 218 is the sign of triumphal appearance of birth revived women during 1931, on a massiv, politically-motivated protests, organized to speak against the restriction and the imposition of free decising on sexuality and the reproductive women’s rights. In order to question and change this attitude, it was necessary to carry out thorough reconstruction of socio-political context. Having in mind the attitude of Rosi Braidotti on specified birth-coded configurations, as well as those of Gilles Deleuze on nonparallel evolving of subject entities and lasting process of creating the meaning, the analysis promoted a specific textual network, to be the only possible and correct approach to Paragraph 218. Accepting the attitude on non-parallel takings-over, the new historical based approach of analysis notices a series of conditioned, discursive situations, as those that emerged as the result of the strong conflict for ideological supremacy in political left wing, in Moscow, as well as in Berlin, i.e.accompaning aesthetical component in those conflicts. In Weimar case, the documentaristic poetics, being the privilege form of artistic creation, has its position inside the left-wing aesthetics (AIZ with the workers’ photography), but during the year 1931, Willy Munzenberg shaped its course in his own way, trying to make a dominance inside KPD. A subversive potential of „petit recit“, women’ issue is opposedto the dominant narrative; a repression caused by the consequences of Paragraph 218. The painting of Alice Lex Nerlinger, which was exhibited on the „Frauen in Not“ exhibition in October 1931, certifies on the specific autonomy of the artist, who was, however, close to the left-motivated artistic scene, whose specific compositional elements are organized as birth revived rensponse to all the theoretical and practical propositions, that were crucial for the creativity on the mentioned exhibition.