Barbara Peveling Gewalt im Haus. Intime Formen der Dominanz
[Violence in the Home: Intimate Forms of Dominance]

At one point in Barbara Peveling’s socially engaged essay, we find a sentence that in its unremitting despair sums up the spirit and tone of this book: “The home as a social concept is the nuclear power plant of intimate violence and the open wound of our society.” Violence in the home, indeed all “intimate forms of dominance” is not merely a matter of research for the author, rather it is a lifelong subject or, in her words, an open wound. The ethnologist and journalist Peveling has dedicated a book to the violence she has personally experienced and suffered in her home; a book that oscillates between non-fiction and memoir; a book that offers insight into her subject: objective facts can only be presented within the context of  personal—indeed traumatic experiences as a whole are a reflection of the personal.

In this book, home is the location of personally experienced horror as well as a general, structural horror, so to speak. As a child, Peveling witnessed her father’s suicide in the home. She attributes this act to the toxic masculinity her father had suffered rather than enjoyed. She believes that her father‘s suicide at home, which in turn forced the family to clean up after him, ultimate proved to be a gesture of utter carelessness: female relatives are always responsible for taking “care.” Later on, as a young wife and mother, Peveling repeats in her own life the patterns of domestic, intimate dominance she had earlier experienced. There is her husband, who refuses to do family work because the constraints of his professional life prevent him from doing so, and there is his wife, who pushes her own professional desires as well as other ones to the side, while putting on a happy face. The much-cited problem of balancing work and family is a “mental load” for the wife—and only for her. But even the will to self-exploitation fails to protect her and her family from male verbal and occasionally physical violence. Time and again, the author torments herself with the question whether it needed to be that way. Is her willingness to acquiesce to her own misfortune proof of her own “bad choices,” or rather the objective conditions of violence that, since time immemorial, has prevailed in the home and affects everybody who lives there? Or both?

Peveling draws on a great deal of diverse materials to support her thesis of the house or “oikos” as origin of all familial evil. Ever since humankind became sedentary, the house has existed as the locus for the family to live and work. That said, whether it is a structural given that the woman in the home is a victim of patriarchy is at least debatable (although not in Peveling's case). As the male professional world grew more differentiated in the early modern period, and the workplace or business moved away from the home, the woman turned into the de facto master of the house and servants. The middle class nuclear family structure put the strict father as head of the house and family back in its place.

Yet, as Peveling points out, it is the patriarchal man who always appears unhappy in his own home, and this often results in violence. Only when a man genuinely declares household and family to be his own business, might there be a chance for the curse of male domestic violence to end. Peveling relates how perhaps too late, she finally ended her own experiences of domestic violence by leaving home and husband with her children. Does the home even have a future if it is so poisoned by violence? Wouldn’t it be better to put a concrete lid over it, as though it were a leaking nuclear power plant? Peveling’s book paints a picture of a new form of intimacy that could cure the wounds of heteronormative domesticity. After the wife and children move out, the angry man likely would be left alone and helpless in the home – an unsettling idea. Shouldn‘t men and women, parents and children, men and men, women and women, pacified, enlightened and detoxified, attempt to live together again, perhaps even in their own home?