Women And National Socialism In Postwar German Literature

In recent years, historians have revealed the many ways in which German women supported National Socialism-as teachers, frontline auxiliaries, and nurses, as well as in political organizations. In mainstream culture, however, the women of the period are still predominantly depicted as the victims of a violent twentieth century whose atrocities were committed by men. They are frequently imagined as post hoc redeemers of the nation, as the "rubble women" who spiritually and literally rebuilt Germany. This book investigates why the question of women's complicity in the Third Reich has struggled to capture the historical imagination in the same way. It explores how female authors from across the political and generational spectrum (Ingeborg Bachmann, Christa Wolf, Elisabeth Plessen, Gisela Elsner, Tanja D ckers, Jenny Erpenbeck) conceptualize the role of women in the Third Reich. As well as offering innovative re-readings of celebrated works, this book provides instructive interpretations of lesser-known texts that nonetheless enrich our understanding of German memory culture. Katherine Stone is Assistant Professor in German Studies at the University of Warwick.

Beginning with an exploration of proto-Nazi literature in the late nineteenth century and pursuing later developments up to the arrival of fully fledged National Socialist literature, the author shows the Nazi reaction against big city decadence, Marxism and pacifism.

Beginning with the question of the role of the past in the shaping of a contemporary identity, this volumes spans three generations of German and Austrian writers and explores changes and shifts in the aesthetics of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past). The purpose of the book is to assess contemporary German literary representations of National Socialism in a wider context of these current debates. The contributors address questions arising from a shift over the last decade, triggered by a generation change-questions of personal and national identity in Germany and Austria, and the aesthetics of memory. One of the central questions that emerges in relation to the Hitler youth generation is that of biography, as examined through GÃ1/4nter Grass' and Martin Walser's conflicting views on the subject of National Socialism. Other themes explored here are the conflict between the post-war generations and the contributions of that conflict to (West)-German mentality, and the growing historical distance and its influence on the aesthetics of representation.

Examines women's life writing in order to shed light on female complicity in the Second World War and the Holocaust.

To discover how war can affect the status of women in industrial countries, Leila Rupp examines mobilization propaganda directed at women in Nazi Germany and the United States. Her book explores the relationship between ideology and policy, challenging the idea that wars improve the status of women by bringing them into new areas of activity. Using fresh sources for both Germany and the United States, Professor Rupp considers the images of women before and during the war, the role of propaganda in securing their support, and the ideal of feminine behavior in each country. Her analysis shows that propaganda was more intensive in the United States than in Germany, and that it figured in the success of American mobilization and the failure of the German campaign to enlist women's participation. The most important function of propaganda, however, consisted in adapting popular conceptions to economic need. The author finds that public images of women can adjust to wartime priorities without threatening traditional assumptions about social roles. The mode of adaptation, she suggests, helps to explain the lack of change in women's status in postwar society. Far-reaching in its implications for feminist studies, this book offers a new and fruitful approach to the social, economic, and political history of Germany and the United States. Originally published in 1978. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

"Entirely original. . . . All future texts on modern Germany will have to take on board the findings of this major study."--Volker Berghahn, author of Modern Germany

Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject History of Germany - National Socialism, World War II, grade: 2,1, University of Sunderland (School of Arts, Design, Media and Culture), language: English, abstract: Introduction “Women have the task of being beautiful and bringing children into the world, and this is by no means as coarse and old-fashioned as one might think.” The aims of the National Socialist women policy have not been as simple as Goebbels puts it in 1939. On the contrary, they were contradictory. Firstly, the regime wanted to reduce women to their biological function. Their central task was breeding. This procreation policy bore two major advantages: It helped the Nazis in pursuing their racial policy of purifying the Aryan race and it provided a means for a decrease in the mass unemployment, as married women were supposed to give up their jobs. Secondly, this family-orientated policy aimed at recording women and girls as party members and to organise them for this purpose in Frauenverbaende (women’s associations). A complete change of this policy took place by the outbreak of World War II and during the war years. ‘Total war’ forced the Nazis to abandon the domestic ideal for women; hence a total mobilization of female labour was attempted although this led to a contradiction within Nazi ideology. “The intention of the conservative revolution to return women to the home had to be subordinated to other ideological goals - industrial expansion and war preparation.” The following essay will examine the development of Nazi policy towards women and will, on the basis of primary sources, assess the experiences of women in the Third Reich from 1933 until 1945. [...]

The importance of gender as a category of analysis is now very widely accepted, but there has been a slowness to bring it to bear in general interpretative surveys of Nazi Germany. This new study aims to remedy the ommission, to reintroduce as actors on the historical stage that half of the German population who were female. This volume asks why such a sizeable proportion was ready to rally around a movement both blatantly anti-feminist and determined to exclude women from public life; how ordinary Germans translated Nazi beliefs into action; and what, other than gender, influenced their political choices between 1933 and 1945.