Of Superbroads, Rented Men, and
Champagne Diets: Hera Lind
and the New German Women’s Novel
When I mentioned to a German colleague that I was writing about Hera
Lind and her bestselling The Superbroad {Das Superweib, 1994),1 she laughed
and said that although all the women she knew had read the book, few were
willing to admit it. This attitude towards Lind’s novels seems to be fairly
common. In his article on The Superbroad Oliver Sill writes of a similar
experience in a seminar he gave at a German university. Apparently almost
everyone had read Lind’s novel, but many were loath to admit it (257). As he
observes “only a very few were able to confess freely to having enjoyed the
novel” (257). This reluctance to admit to having read or enjoyed the book is
interesting, especially when considering that until 2000 Lind’s novels were
published as part of Fischer’s (a German publishing house) hugely successfid
and prestigious literary series Woman in Society {Frau in der Gesellschaft),
which, at least in its first 15 years, saw its mission as “the historical reappraisal
of the women’s movement” (Mues 10-11).' The 1994 Superbroad was certainly
published in the series, which published many books by and about women
during its 23 odd years of existence.
Sill’s female seminar participants and my academic friends may be wise to
hide their enthusiasm, however, for despite their huge popularity and the
respectability lent them by their inclusion in the “Woman in Society” series,
Lind’s novels have garnered much criticism. For example in a review for the
left-liberal weekly Freitag, critic Komelia Piazena asks how “literature that
sketches such a limited view of the world and a reality in which there is no
vision”4 can attract millions of predominantly female readers. Katharina
Rutschky of the more conservative Die Welt would like to know what happened
to “the political feminism of the seventies, when today, as if to mock its
analyses, the Lind books are published in a literary series that still bears the title
‘Woman in Society’.”5 In her 2000 study on emancipatory goals in popular
literature, Wiltrud Oelinger concurs, seeing in Lind’s books even an antiemancipatory message. She says of the figures in Lind’s novels that they reflect
nothing more than a “fashionable adaptation of the traditional woman’s role”
(158).6
Despite the dismissal by many critics as trivial, Lind’s novels A Man f o r
Eveiy Tone {Ein Mann f u r j e d e Tonart, 1989—film version, 1993); its sequel It
Doesn 't Take Much to Be a Woman {Frau zu sein bedarf es wenig, 1992); The
Superwife {Das Superweib, 1994— film version, 1996); The Magic Woman {Die
Zauberfrau, 1995); The Nest o f Broads {Das Weibernest, 1997—television
movie, 2001, sequel to Das Supet'weib); The Rented Man {Der gemietete Mann,