Abstract
In the public imaginary, the Third Reich remains very much a man’s world, dominated by a small group of perpetrators whose names are easily recalled. The women of the period, on the other hand, seem to be collectively remembered for their resilience in the aftermath of the war as Trümmerfrauen (rubble women) and as victims of war, expulsion and rape, or as the innocent, apolitical prey of a seductive Führerkult. Although common sense dictates that the crimes committed during the National Socialist period would not have been possible without the support of half the population, the perception of women as complicit in or as perpetrators of these crimes has not penetrated the collective memory of the period. This lacuna is not the result of a lack of evidence or research. Since the 1980s, historians such as Claudia Koonz, Mary Nolan, Elizabeth Heineman and Wendy Lower, among others, have investigated women’s roles and experiences in the Third Reich, and have convincingly shown that they were far more complex and contradictory than the victim label suggests. Nonetheless, this label persists to this day. Despite their well-documented roles in the military, concentration camps and the SS, female perpetrators remain largely underrepresented in exhibitions, museums and memorial sites, and public discourses continue to reproduce a highly gendered narrative of male Nazi perpetrators and female victims.
The question of why the image of women as victims has so enduringly imprinted itself onto the collective memory of the period, marks the starting point for Katherine Stone’s engaging study Women and National Socialism in Postwar German Literature. In her introduction, Stone outlines answers to this question, including the feminist perception of fascism as an expression of the patriarchy; the function of women in postwar society as moral purifiers and guardians of the nation; and the culturally entrenched incompatibility of femininity with violence and criminality. Stone then goes on to demonstrate how these cultural and societal functions and assumptions, coalescing around gender, memory and subjectivity, are reproduced and interrogated in postwar German-language novels written by women. Literature, in this context, is not treated as historical source material but as ‘reflections on the emotional and political stakes involved in confronting the full extent of women’s support for National Socialism and the Holocaust’ (p. 4), and is used to ascertain which aspects of female experience have entered German memory culture at various moments during the postwar period.
Covering texts from the years 1971 to 2007, Stone’s study is divided into two parts, each containing three chapters: Part I ‘The Gender of Fascism’ and Part II ‘Challenging the Victim-Perpetrator Binary’. This structure separates the corpus into texts written pre- and post-unification. The author thus mirrors an important turning point in the historiography on women in the Third Reich. For it was not until after unification that historians began to seriously challenge the conception of women as pure types – as either victims or perpetrators. Stone’s analysis uncovers a parallel trajectory in postwar writing: earlier texts ambivalently reproduce gendered narratives, while more recent texts tend to challenge and subvert the pure victim type. This observation speaks to the ability of fiction to adapt, reproduce and disseminate paradigm changes in cultural memory. In her six chronologically arranged chapters, Stone skilfully documents this literary potential. Each chapter focuses on the analysis of one core text, including canonical works such as Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina (1971) and Christa Wolf’s Kindheitsmuster (1976), as well as more recent engagements with the NS past, such as Tanja Dückers’s Himmelskörper (2003) and Jenny Erpenbeck’s Heimsuchung (2007). Stone uses these novels as jumping-off points to further explore the themes of gender, subjectivity and the dominant memory discourse in each contemporaneous context.
In lieu of a conclusion, Stone offers her reader an epilogue, which includes a detailed discussion of representations of female Nazi perpetrators. While this topic is certainly fertile enough to deserve its own monograph, Stone productively uses the selected examples, which include novels, plays and films, to complement her analysis up to this point, and thereby strengthens her conclusions that constructions of female identities play a crucial role in the collective memory of the NS period and that literature has an active part in constructing and deconstructing these identities. As a whole, Stone’s book is well written and compelling. The reader is equipped with a wealth of primary and secondary source material, not only on postwar literature but also on the postwar period and the mechanisms of collective and cultural memory. Stone offers an important contribution on the mammoth subject of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with past), which she has managed to cover from an enlightening and refreshing new angle.