Graphic Novel
Ulli Lust
Die Frau als Mensch. Am Anfang der Geschichte
[The Woman as Human Being. At the Dawn of History]
Translation Grant Programme
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The mystery of women in pre-history
Over a period of thousands of years the pre-historic era produced a strikingly large number of sculptural depictions of women such as the small sculpture known as the “Venus of the High Rock” that was discovered in the Swabian uplands, and dated from a period 35,000 to 40,000 years ago. The comic illustrator Ulli Lust has devoted her new book to this phenomenon and to the question of the role of women during the ice and stone ages.
The author begins her book with a seemingly everyday anecdote in which, in the course of a slideshow lecture, a male university professor is discussing depictions of animals and humans during the ice age. Then a member of the audience – in fact Ulli Lust herself, the book’s author – poses two crucial questions. First, she asks what proportion of these artefacts depict male figures as against female figures, and is given the answer: ‘approximately 1 to 100’, i.e. a far greater number of females. In her follow-up question she asks what the reasons were for this marked disproportion, and is given the answer that it was ‘due to the fact that men were more important than women’.
Perhaps this experience in 2014 was the initial trigger that inspired the author to create a graphic novel on a topic that she had already long since found interesting. Die Frau als Mensch — Am Anfang der Geschichte is the first of two volumes on the little-understood role of women in the prehistoric era. It focuses chiefly on the early history of modern humans, ‘homo sapiens’, roughly from the Later Palaeolithic era onwards, approximately 45,000 years ago.
Born in Austria in 1967, Ulli Lust has been creating comic books since the late 1990s. In 2000, while doing her degree course in Illustration at the Kunsthochschule Weißensee in Berlin, she joined with other now well-known comic artists such as Mawil and Jens Harder in founding the artists’ group Monogatari, and drew numerous short-form comics on a variety of subjects. Her first full-length graphic novel Heute ist der letzte Tag vom Rest deines Lebens (‘Today is the first day of the rest of your life’, 2012) about her lively early years in Italy, was praised by the critics, published in many different countries, and awarded numerous prizes. As well as producing another autobiographical comic book, Wie ich versuchte, ein guter Mensch zu sein (‘How I tried to become a better person’, 2017), which focused on her experiences as a young anarchist artist in Vienna and on her relationships with two different men, Lust also adapted Marcel Beyer’s novel Flughunde (‘Bats’, 2013), using grey-toned drawings to convey Beyer’s complex historical novel about an acoustician during the nazi period and his relationship to Joseph Goebbels, the nazi minister for propaganda.
In her new work Ulli Lust returns to documentary-style, essayistic types of comic illustration, and for this reason Die Frau als Mensch has frequently been described as a ‘non-fiction comic’. She repeatedly depicts scenes of a personal nature in which she herself appears as a character recording her own experiences: in addition to the above-mentioned lecture-theatre episode she also describes anecdotes from her childhood in Austria that reflect various gender-specific and regional practices and prejudices. Her initially rather puzzling use of the word ‘Mensch’ in the title of her book is one instance of this, and derives from the fact that in the dialect of Lower Austria the word (which in standard German usage means a ‘human being’ regardless of gender) is used specifically and sometimes disparagingly to refer to females.
However, the heart of the book consists of chapters which, based on archaeological discoveries and insights, deal with the lives of gatherers and female hunters in the last Ice Age. To this end Ulli Lust consulted innumerable academic articles and official reports on excavations in order to be able to offer a serious review of the topic intermingled with her own often feministically angled reflections and interpretations regarding particular finds, figurines and burials relating to early humans. She thereby manages in a variety of different ways to uncover something of the mysterious world of prehistoric women, venturing suppositions as to what their lives looked like and how significant their role in society was. In doing this she bases herself on the most recent research findings, and also compares the lives of early humans with the well-known lives and rituals of indigenous peoples of more modern times, in particular the Khoisan or ‘bush people’ of Namibia and Botswana, but also the Lakota of North America, the Canadian Ojibwe and a few others.
This approach leads to some astonishing findings that challenge the clichéd image of the Stone Age according to which brave men went out hunting while domesticated women stayed at home doing the cooking – an image that until recently has been widespread even in scholarly circles. The author takes the view that women, too, were frequently involved in hunting, and also took on the role of shamans proficient in medical and spiritual matters. A further chapter is devoted to menstruation. Ulli Lust shows that our modern, largely coy and mealy-mouthed approach to this subject stands in sharp contrast to that of primitive peoples, who treated the onset of menstruation as an event to be celebrated. Just as a boy became a man by killing an animal, so a girl’s first period and the rituals associated with it marked her transition to womanhood whereby she became capable of taking on important new roles that were of benefit to the community.
By these means some of Ulli Lust’s suppositions are rendered credible through sequences in the comic that are mostly delivered realistically but sometimes also in an amusingly cartoonish manner, whereas others remain purely speculative but altogether plausible. Die Frau als Mensch was awarded the German Non-fiction Book Prize by the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels, the umbrella organisation of the German Book Trade, the first time the prize had ever been given to a comic.
With this first part of her cultural history of early man with its focus on the role of women, Ulli Lust has produced a highly readable illustrated essay that skilfully uses the techniques of the comic to convey the current state of research, whilst also posing important questions about the behaviour patterns of early mankind. It is true that by the end we still don’t know for certain what the precise function and significance of the tiny female figurines were – were they representations of deities, were they the tools used by shamans in their rituals, were they children’s toys? – but nonetheless Ulli Lust has given us a rich plethora of stimuli to help us to reflect anew on our origins as human beings.
Translated by John Reddick
By Ralph Trommer
Ralph Trommer, Dipl. Animator, is a freelance writer and artist who is a regular contributor of reviews and articles on comics, graphic novels and films for a variety of media.
