About the work
“Der Ursprung der Liebe” (The Origin of Love) is based on the feminist non-fiction comic “Prins Charles känsla” (roughly “Prince Charles’ Feeling”) by the Swedish cartoonist and political scientist Liv Strömquist, published in 2010 by Ordfront Förlag in Stockholm. Katharina Erben’s German translation was published by avant-verlag in 2018. Several German-language stages have since adapted the comic, among them the Landestheater Tübingen in a version by the actress Insa Jebens, the Theater Oberhausen and the Staatstheater Nürnberg, where Sandra Fox and Dominik Günther turned it into a pop evening with live music.
Plot
Instead of a continuous plot, the comic offers twelve chapters that take apart love, sexuality and heterosexual relationships in the Western world. Strömquist sets myths such as that of the polyamorous goddess Frigg alongside the stories of real couples, from Prince Charles and Diana to Ronald and Nancy Reagan, and draws on sociology and psychoanalysis. She examines gender roles, emotional dependence and the claim to possess one’s partner, for instance in an ironic “World Cup of Caring for Men” featuring women who looked after their famous husbands into old age.
Cultural significance
The German edition was widely reviewed, among others by Der Spiegel, the taz, Missy Magazine and Deutschlandfunk Kultur, and in 2018 also appeared in a combined volume with “Der Ursprung der Welt”. Critics particularly highlighted the humour with which Strömquist combines academic theory, pop culture and mundane everyday examples; in Scandinavia she is among the best-known comics authors and a formative feminist voice.