A Spinnhaus of my Own
This text was originally published in German the second edition of literary magazine Edition Gossip in April 2025. It has been translated by me to be read in the course «Ars Sciendi» by Tonica Hunter at University of Applied Arts in Vienna. Published on this blog on my birthday in 2026.
I don't need a room of my own. I just need a spinning wheel, a loom and a small mattress next to it. My own spot in the Spinnhaus, as they used to call it, the place society used to get rid of the whores, the trannies, the poor women, before there were prisons. I’d sit there and spin and weave and spin and weave, until I’d be morally improved, as they’d say. Until I’d no longer be a lesbian, trans, and, above all: no longer hysterical. Till I’d keep my mouth shut — about the violence, the accusations, all of these bad and vulgar things they’re so scared of. Till I stopped telling stories at all, spin and weave, spin and weave.
In A Room of One’s Own, the feminist classic, Virginia Woolf tries to define what women need in order to write, in order to express themselves, to no longer keep their mouths shut. I tried reading the book, I even tried it twice, but the first time I quit during the Victorian lunch, the second time I quit at the salon dinner. Twenty pages in, I didn’t even reach the juicy parts, the hints of lesbianism or Shakespeare’s sister. Woolfs metaphors were too dry, too boring, too complicated and too often the protagonist talks to men about poetry. I try to avoid talking to cis men about anything that isn’t existential or necessary, and, I dare to say, metaphors probably aren’t that existential.
But A Room of One’s Own isn’t about men — it’s about writing. «A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction». And my privileged ass has got all of that, or at least enough of it. Unlike the women of Woolf’s time, I’m allowed to attend university and happily walk across the lawn in front of its historic grandeur, dissociating freely, no one cares. And I’ve got my own little apartment, a rice cooker and low-maintenance houseplants, and I haven’t had a panic attack because of money in a few years, even though I’ve been getting close recently. But I still can’t write fiction. I’ve tried, oh I have, I even went to Rotterdam on scholarship money and drank three or four matchas a day, living the millennial white girl oat milk dream, Iced Matcha Latta, zu spät beim Pilates, Küsschen links, Küsschen rechts, but, that’s just a gender affirmation thingy, I guess. So I got high on girlboss caffeine and wrote two or three pages a day, but it wasn’t fiction. All I wrote was the story of my abuse, again and again. Every day anew, sometimes POV, other times narrating the readers experience, I wrote in German, in English and even in that disgusting lyrical prose they teach at Literaturinstitut. I’ve written the story of my abuse thirty times, I’ve got a folder in the cloud and my head, both full of it, and all of them end the same: With me getting fucked, violated, destroyed, abused, desecrated; with me repressing, forgetting, drinking it away, das Licht ausgelöscht, my childhood frozen solid; it was a dark and stormy night, abuse, rape, incest, lost, it all turned black, the door got slammed, silenced, with a finger on my lips, mit einen fünfzig Jahre älteren Schwanz in meinem Mund.
To this day, I can’t imagine ever writing anything else but this story of my abuse. I might get a new room of my own, with more square meters and less part-time work, with more prize money and scholarships and a Dyson and maybe even a second room, a kitchen of my own — it won’t be enough. To be able to write fiction, I’ve got to rewrite the story of my abuse. I’ve got to spin my memories into coherent threads and weave a new narrative out of them, one that ends with me as a survivor, despite or because of the abuse, with it or through it, whatever, anything goes, as long as it becomes a part of me, a part of the story, not less but not even a tiny bit more.
So: Let’s reach for the sky, tear these thirty word files from the cloud down to the earth – go touch some grass. No more heaven or hell, no more fate or divine will, just a silly little story with me at the beginning and me at the end, nothing else but an I. Sounds like a god complex, I know, but it also sounds a bit like BPD, CPTSD, BP, OSDD, like fucking hysteria, and which letters we choose doesn’t really matter anymore, my therapist says my symptoms certainly are part of it. Everything is always part of the diagnostic criteria, and I am nothing more than the sum of my symptoms, not even a sum of inadequacies, but a collection of trauma responses and nothing is ever bigger than the sum of that. I’ll gladly explain my panic attacks through rape and my amnesia too, my suicidal fantasies, my clothing, my scars, that I decided to leave my home country and where I went thereafter, even how I love my girlfriend — all of it can be told coherently, as a story that begins with violence, that is told through it, and that ends in it.
Not a single text in the cloud ends with an “I” — there’s always psychosis and perpetrator, rape, violence, cut, Ende, aus. Judith Herman, the GOAT of feminist trauma research, wrote, that we must construct a personal identity — one that neither denies the past nor is wholly consumed by it. So, trauma theory says that violence is a shitty ending and my sense of playwriting and my aesthetics agree. So I need to rewrite all of these stories, rewrite myself through them, for the sake of that healing era everyone oh so post-ironically evokes, so that I don’t become violent myself, so that I can finally write something else, a story of my own — but also because of feminism, obviously. Human history was written by the winners, usually by violent cis men, and I refuse to let a violent man tell my story too, as if he were the winner. I will tell my story myself. Il faut que la femme s'écrive, und wenn Medusa trotz allem lächeln kann, then so can I. You just watch me go (lol).
So I went to Ikea and I stole a little pinboard, a physical Pinterest board, and I started to put it all up there — the memory threads of the abuse, the role models from history and from the Spinnhaus, the whores, the trannies, the madwomen, all of the things I’ll spin a “me” out of, a ”me” that survives, an appropriate ending to all of these stories. There’s a drawing of my abuser, a poem I wrote at thirteen about the first incident. There’s Valerie Solanas, rape and revenge, but that’s just a fantasy of course, something out of the movies, don’t worry. There’s Philomela, the first woman to ever tell the story of her abuse. Her sister had been given to a king as a wife, but when the king saw Philomela, he got insanely turned on, and kidnapped and raped her, out of passion, it is said. She swore to tell the world about his actions and so he cut out her tongue — the OG non-disclosure agreement, today the boys are more subtle, they gaslight, they threaten lawsuits, they scream «cancel culture». But Philomela, a skilled weaver, wove a dress that depicted the story of her rape, sent it to her sister and the sister saw the truth spun into the fabric. She went on to rescue Philomela and then the sisters cut up the kings son and served it to him as a meal of revenge — and then the gods turned all of them into birds. Goals, not because of revenge, psychology says, that doesn’t help, sadly, rest in peace Valerie Solanas. Goals, because I, too, don’t want to be a rape victim at the end of my story, I’d prefer to be a nightingale, like Philomela became. Wenn ich ein Vöglein wär und auch zwei Flüglein hätt, dann, then I wouldn’t have to deal with any of this bullshit.
But the ending of my story needs to be an aesthetically pleasing one. And the nightingale thingy, that’s a bit too colorful for me, too much clean girl, its giving dimes square red scare christianity, and I won’t ever wear anything else than black. So next to Philomela I’ve put up Arachne, the greatest weaver in history, the woman who dared to challenge the goddess Athena to a weaving competition. Arachne wove a tapestry that depicted all the abuse and rape committed by the gods, a so-called outcall tapestry — an art form that sadly fell out of fashion. She depicted the violence of Zeus and Poseidon, the suffering of Medusa and Europa. And the goddess Athena was pissed, because of the accusations, hashtag notallgods, but also because Arachne’s tapestry was far more beautiful than hers could ever be. So she punished the weaving snitch by turning her into a spider, the first spider to ever walk the earth and from there on Arachne had to spin and weave and spin and weave for the rest of her days. And so do all her children, hundreds and thousands generations of spiders, hanging from their own threads, punished for daring to tell the stories of their abuse. Punished for telling a story that contradicts the stories of the gods, the stories of men. And so Arachne has been spinning and weaving and her children have been spinning and weaving, in the Spinnhaus, the trannies, the whores, the ones who don’t quite fit into society, the crazy exes, bitches be crazy, maybe even a little hysterical — but of course, you’re not allowed to say that anymore or you’ll end up right on an outcall tapestry. Spinning and weaving and spinning and weaving.
And on my little pinboard, between all of these stories, I’m spinning a story of my own, connecting threads from Solanas and Arachne and Philomela, connecting poetry and perpetrator, and in the middle of it all — there’s “me”, in lowercase. “me,” it says, hung on a single thread, just like all spiders hang from a single thread, the hangman’s knot turned into a web, you exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you. So — I’ll put a silly little spinning wheel in my silly little apartment, a Spinnhaus of my own. And someday, I trust, someday I’ll find the time and the strength to tell my story, to re-tell it, to re-tell it myself and then I’ll sit down in my Spinnhaus, sit down at the spinning wheel, beside Arachne, beside Philomela and beside all of the others, and I’ll spin and weave. I’ll spin and weave, until I’ve finally written the next chapter. Until all the threads are re-spun and it is no longer a story of violence, no longer ending with the abuse, but instead with a nightingale, even better: with a spider, with a Laughing Medusa. Until my last words are no longer symptoms, no longer words of trauma. Until I’ve told a story that begins with violence but ends with an «I», that ends with me. Spin and weave, spin and weave, in my silly little Spinnhaus, spin and weave, spin and weave, like Arachne, like Medusa, like Philomela. Spin and weave, spin and weave, towards an «I», towards a «me», towards myself.