Obituary: Erika Runge: Say what is

Years ago, a former friend gave me a narrow yellow Suhrkamp volume: “Women. It was called “Attempts at Emancipation” and was written in 1969 by Erika Runge, who was completely unknown to me up to that point. In it, Runge interviewed women from a wide range of backgrounds, education and interests. Their answers – and the life stories that emerge in them – clearly illuminated the difference between supposed gender equality and the actual status of women in society (to this day). “So that you don’t forget the women in your work,” said the friend at the time. At that time, I was just beginning my research with marginalized people. An important clue. And I have been immersed in Runge’s books ever since.

A year before the “Women’s” book, what was probably the most important work by Runge, a television director born in Halle an der Saale in 1939, a doctor of philosophy, committed feminist and communist, appeared: With the “Bottrop Protocols” she shaped the term and practice of documentary literature as well as the “Oral History.” The term comes from English and is a historical method based on conversations with contemporary witnesses.

After studying and completing her doctorate in Munich, Runge worked as an assistant director at NDR and began her field research. The tape conversations conducted in Bottrop, which she wrote down while maintaining the linguistic style of the interviewees, were the basis for the eight almost word-for-word memoirs of people from the Ruhr area collected in the book. She wanted to present reality as it is, she said in retrospect – without distortion or judgment. The book thus became a key text for understanding the so-called little people – and at least as important as the voluminous work “The Misery of the World” by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who took a similar approach in the early 1990s.

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As a by-product of the “Bottrop Protocols”, the award-winning documentary film “Why is Mrs. B. Happy?” was created in 1968, for which Runge invited the miner’s widow, housewife and cleaner Maria Bürger, who was interviewed in the book, to act out her own life. Runge made film history by depicting the often contradictory reality of the proletarian woman. Since her other films were mainly produced for public television and are currently difficult to access, she became known primarily as a writer. Further socially critical reports followed; As a leftist, she also wrote for the Hamburg magazine “Konkret”.

Runge was acquainted with the director Rainer Werner Fassbinder and played a psychotherapist in his 1975 film “I just want you to love me.” From the mid-1990s, Erika Runge, who always evaded clear attributions, actually worked as a psychotherapist in Berlin and hardly appeared in public anymore. She died in Berlin on October 31st at the age of 84.

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