The Many Lives of Franz von der Trenck

Baron Franz von der Trenck might not now be a household name, but in the eighteenth century, he was notorious for the blood-curdling excesses of the soldiers under his command and an approach to war on behalf of Queen Empress Maria Theresa that appeared to defy the tenets of the age. As one biography described, “The thirty-eight year lifespan of the pandur general Franz Baron von der Trenck was a symphony of violence and death.” On the other side of the Prussian-Austrian conflict, Friedrich von der Trenck was iconic in different ways, with a career that careened from the military under Frederick II, to prison, and lastly to the guillotine in Paris. In service to their monarchs and in pursuit of personal advancement, security, and adventure, the Trenck cousins collided with each other at various points, demonstrating what it meant for nobles to be both architects and victims of fame, reputation, and slander. After Franz's death in prison, Friedrich, for his own reasons, had a hand in shaping the reputation of his cousin as a larger-than-life military man with an affinity for particular types of violence. However, Friedrich was not the only curator of Franz's legacy and others took part during and after Franz's life in the adulteration and appropriation of his life narrative. As a military man, Franz von der Trenck weaponized his own reputation, but its plasticity continued far after his death because he served as a stand-in for a variety of cultural inquiries, anxieties, and hopes beyond military practices and the laws of war. The subtexts of those narratives reveal particular cultural fault lines salient not just in the eighteenth century but also long after, including the constructed, imaginary boundary between the civilized and uncivilized in time and geography. Legends about Trenck drew on tropes about an uncivilized past through the ostensible space between a cultured European center and a wild Slavic or Turkic periphery. The boundary of civilization was not the only theme threaded through stories about Trenck. The nature of his violence was condemned by many and featured in his downfall, but there was also a subterranean admiration for a man who appeared to glorify war as an essential, formative masculine adventure and who romanticized the transgression of rape in war. Beginning with Friedrich and resonating still in twentieth-century nationalist iterations of Trenck is the idolization of a figure who seemed to transcend the petty morality or narrow-mindedness of those who judged him.

The Women Against Rape in War Collective’s protests against ANZAC Day in Sydney, 1983 and 1984

Non-refereed Memoir delivered at “Women Against Rape in War: Gallipoli to Coniston” Conference, UTS 29 August 2014

Ending Rape in War: How Far Have We Come?

The rape of women has for centuries been an endemic feature of war, yet perpetrators largely go unpunished. Women were sanctioned as the spoils of war in biblical times and more recently it has been claimed that it is more dangerous to be a woman than a soldier in modern conflict. Nevertheless, until the establishment of the ad hoc International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia – there was very little concern regarding the need to address the rape of women in conflict.This paper briefly maps historical attitudes towards rape in war, outlines some analyses and explanations of why rape in war occurs and finally turns more substantively to recent efforts by the international community to prosecute rape as a war crime and a crime against humanity. We argue, that while commendable in some ways, contemporary approaches to rape in war risk reinforcing aspects of women’s status which contribute to the targeting of women for rape and continue to displace women from the centre to the margins in debates and practices surrounding rape in both war and peace time. We conclude by arguing that criminal prosecutions alone are insufficient and that, if we are to end the rape of women and girls in war (and peace) we need a radical restructuring of gender relations across every sphere of social and political life.