Simone de Beauvoir in the Munich Literature House

“Now I know everything about your boss’s vagina,” wrote the French writer François Mauriac in May 1949 to the editors of the magazine “Les Temps Modernes”. With the publication of the text “The Sexual Initiation of Woman” by Simone de Beauvoir, that’s what Mauriac meant by that, they had finally broken the boundaries of the repugnant. Even the first excerpts from her new book, which was to become world-famous as “The Second Sex”, had caused strained moans among men.

When de Beauvoir then also wrote about female sexuality with a hitherto unknown meticulousness, the anger now turned to hate: the female body, its stages of development, its lust, its pain, the first period, the first sex, the menopause and all To elevate the other things that one experiences as a woman to a philosophical subject is outrageous. A scandal.

Today, more than seventy years later, hardly anyone is still outraged about Beauvoir, and if so, then for different reasons than back then. But that probably has less to do with the fact that inequalities have been swept out of the world. The book fared like many classics: everyone knows it, can quote a sentence or two from it (“One is not born a woman, one becomes one”) and know roughly what it is about. But who really read them?

In order to counteract this slight dustiness of a work that has lost none of its topicality, the Munich Literature House has set up a new exhibition: “Simone de Beauvoir & The Second Sex”. If you are still missing arguments for the Christmas days with the in-laws because they think feminism is annoying and that everything is settled now, you can pick up a few more here: They come from Beauvoir himself. But they also come from many contemporary scientists and writers , who look at Beauvoir’s seventy-year-old positions through the eyes of today. Question them, sometimes criticize them.

The French feminist Benoîte Groult called “The Second Sex” “the Bible”. “Women owe her everything,” Elisabeth Badinter explained. The British author Sarah Bakewell recently wrote that de Beauvoir’s book is a fundamental work of modernity, comparable to those of Darwin, Freud, Marx. The project of discussing such a book in the form of an exhibition initially sounds as promising as the attempt to present the act of writing as a film. But this small Munich show comes very close to the scandalous work, its author and the history of its impact.

Already at the entrance, Simone de Beauvoir looks at you with her alert and demanding gaze from a passport photo. After that, she is first encountered as a bust made by her friend Alberto Giacometti around the time she was writing Le deuxième sexe. According to legend, it was he who gave her the first impetus. “Write about yourself,” Giacometti is said to have said to Simone, who was 40 at the time. Her partner Jean Paul Sartre, on the other hand, said something like: When you write about yourself, you must never forget that you are a woman.

A girl’s childhood

From then on, Simone de Beauvoir began to explore her life in this way: What was special about her childhood as a girl? How was it different from that of a boy? What ideas about herself and her place in the world had she been given? What could she expect as a woman, what could she dare, what not? The conclusion of this introspection, which Beauvoir peppered with an excursion through the history of woman (of the West), was sobering and eponymous: woman only existed in relation to man, as the other, the second, the deviation from the norm, the masculine . Criticism of Beauvoir’s position on biological sex and dual gender is addressed in the exhibition and a commentary asks how she sees today’s nonbinary concepts.

In her short story “La femme rompue”, many years after “The Second Sex”, Simone de Beauvoir wrote how a woman slowly and quietly slips into a state of bondage and only realizes it, if at all, when it is too late. It is presented here in a very nice edition, it was a collaboration with her sister, the painter Hélène de Beauvoir.

In general, one encounters many books, texts and photos in this show. And also a very nice film that Alice Schwarzer made with Simone de Beauvoir (the Cologne documentation center Frauen Media Turm, initiated by Schwarzer, was involved in the implementation of the exhibition, as was the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn). In that 1973 film, Beauvoir explained herself so that, as she put it, women “know who this woman giving advice is.”

Above all, however, this Munich immersion in a cult text that has been softened into the mainstream reminds us that emancipation and freedom have to be fought for again and again. And that one should face life as a woman like the French author faced the audience at the entrance to the exhibition: awake and demanding.