Gender & Histoty ISSN 0953-5233 Vo1.3 No.3 Autumn 1991

Feminist Debates about Women and National Socialism ATINA GROSSMANN

In 1989, Gisela Bock, one of the most prominent women’s historians in Germany, published a review of Claudia Koonz’s book, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family and Nazi Politics’ in Geschichte and GesellschaA, the major German language social history journal of which Bock is the sole female editor. She lashed out at her American colleague for having written an ‘historically useless’ and tendentious, even anti-feminist book.2 Besides taking Koonz to task for a range of putative factual error^,^ Bock excoriated her for imposing ‘collective guilt’ on all German women and positing ‘love as a source of hatred, motherhood as a source of death, female “difference” and “separate sphere“ as a source of massacres . . .‘.4

Why such a vituperative response which even by the rather sharper standards of German feminist and scholarly discourse, truly deserves the highly charged German description, ‘exterminatory’ (vernichtend)? Why did Koonz’s passionate and heavily researched (if indeed at points moralizing, overgeneralized and ambitious) book not only enrage Bock but touch a sore nerve among many German feminist historians?5 Koonz’s direct confrontation with issues of female agency and complicity in Nazism and the Holocaust poked right into an ongoing and painful German feminist debate about the degree to which women who lived in/under/through the Third Reich should be judged ‘victims’ or ‘perpetrators’ (Opfer or Tater).

Accusatory, and in its polarized either/or quality stereotypically German, this debate is also important and challenging. Issues of women‘s ‘guilt’ or responsibility are particularly salient for analyses of National Socialism. With the liquidation of conventional public sites of the political (parliament, political parties, trade unions, voluntary associations), much Nazi policy was directed at the appropriation and mobilization of the ostensibly private or reproductive arena where women had traditionally been situated and were perceived to have influence or even power. Arguments about women’s role therefore cannot be separated from other questions that preoccupy historians of modern Germany, such as the reactionary or radically modern nature of the regime, and the degree of continuity or rupture with the era before 1933

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and after 1945. Moreover, questions of gender are critical to an evaluation of the still unclear relationship between state social welfare and ‘racial’ hygiene measures directed predominantly toward ‘Aryans’ (such as marriage loans, sterilization and ’euthanasia’) and the extermination of ‘inferior aliens,’ particularly European Jewry.

Gisela Bock’s own densely detailed and pathbreaking study of coercive steri I i zati on, Zwangssterilisation im Nationalsozialismus. Studien zur Rassenpolitik und Frauenpolitik (1 986)6 argued compellingly that far from having oppressed and bribed women by ’a cult of motherhood’ and exhortations to improve the master race by raising the birth rate, the true novum of Nazi population policy was a profound anti-natalism which potentially victimized all women by threatening their (biological and social) maternal identity. She maintained that forced sterilization was not only chronologically prior but also conceptually necessary to mass murder and genocide. Working with a very different set of sources about Nazi and other middle-class and religious women’s organizations, Koonz on the other hand insisted that far from having been only victims of a brutally misogynist regime, most German women (like most German men), in a myriad of complex and ambivalent ways, collaborated with the regime. Not only had there been an active minority of militant female Nazis, but even those who weren’t, helped to stabilize a murderous regime precisely by their adherence to domestic and maternal values associated with a politically indifferent female separate sphere.

A new book interestingly entitled Daughters Ask (or Daughters’ Questions; the German TochterFragen implies both): National Socialist Women’s History documents a 1990 conference about ‘Participation and Resistance: The Problematization of National Socialism in recent Women’s Studies” and confirms that German feminists are waging their own version of a historians’ debate (Historikerstreit) about what constitutes a usable past. While the (male) historians’ debate about the nature and specificity of German National Socialism8 seems to have calmed down, German women scholars continue to struggle with the still restless issue of how to come to terms with their mothers’ and grandmothers’ place in the Nazi past. Is British historian Jill Stephenson correct, as Bock insists she is, in concluding that on the whole, German women were, ‘contrary to the popular view, peculiarly resistant to National Socialism . . .‘?g Or must German women own their ’negative legacy’ as T&hterFragen editor Lerke Gravenhorst puts it?lo What does one do with the legacy described by one woman whose father was in the SS and ’did his duty‘ in Dachau and the Warsaw Ghetto while:

My mother did not resist, she also did nothing which would suggest a conscious opposition to the National Socialist system. She also did not murder anybody. She only remained silent and determined certain parts of NS practical politics to be good and useful. The rest did not interest her, and she didn’t want to be involved . . . Those are our mothers!”

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These differing perspectives have implications not only for German historians but for feminist theory and practice. The controversies about the pro- or anti-natalism of Nazi programs, and the ways in which ideals of maternalism and female difference facilitated or resisted Nazi ascendancy and consolidation (Gleichschaltung), contain finally an intense and intimate argument about motherhood and its role in women‘s lives. Claudia Koonz indicts women’s defense of and retreat into the separate space (Lebensraurn) of women’s organizations and the churches as contributing to the maintenance of ’a murderous state in the name of concerns they defined as motherly.’12 Bock suggests just the opposite. National Socialism was particularly pernicious for women precisely because it invaded that maternal sphere which she persists in romanticizing as having been women’s own. Provocatively she says that the National Socialist state ’by no means broke with birth control (Malthusianism) but institutionalized it’.I3

Despite the fact that one half of the approximately 400,000 involuntarily sterilized people were men, Bock sees women as the primary victims not only because 90% of the fatalities resulted from the more complicated female procedure, but because childlessness is more painful and severe for women than for men.14 In making this argument Bock structurally locates all women as victims because they were all disciplined and oppressed by the threat of forced abortion and sterilization if they did not live up to proper standards of social and physical fitness.I5 For Bock the crime of the Nazis was to deny women motherhood and to attack their motherly values; for Koonz it was to instrumentalize motherhood as a mobilizing tool.

Bock posits a straight line continuity from sterilization to euthanasia to genocide. As Dagmar Reese and Carola Sachse carefully point out in TochterFragen however, while it may be true as Bock says, that for the victims the difference between being killed and being allowed to continue living as a stigmatized sterilized person was only ‘relative‘,I6 it was also total, ’a difference about everything’.’’

There remains much disagreement and contradictory evidence about the actual impact of National Socialist policies on reproduction and the degree to which women were its beneficiaries.18 According to Bock, even ‘fit Aryan’ women did not benefit from pro-natalist programs, such as marriage loans, which were enacted in their name because the economic bonuses were delivered to their husbands and not directly to them. German historian Ute Frevert however, even more than Koonz, stresses the pro-natalist welfare state aspects of Nazi population policy. Citing a rising birth and marriage rate, a toughening of penalties on abortion, and the five million women who attended courses in household rnanagement,l9 she concludes that ‘The Nazis spared no expense in encouraging citizens to excel themselves at

The question of benefits is important because it connects to the issue of women’s support for the system and the particular role of mothers. Bock insists that even within the National Socialist women‘s organizations the

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majority of women, especially pregnant women, mothers and housewives, were more resistant than men to propaganda, including its racism.2’ Ute Frevert remarks that by 1939, ‘over one million of the approximately 3,300,000 women in the Frauenschaft and Frauenwerk . . . held some official position’22 and thereby presumably identified at least to some degree with the regime’s social and population policy goals. Multiple memoirs and oral recollections of ostracism from former friends and acquaintances by German-Jewish women (included in Koonz’s study but not discussed by either Bock or Frevert) also testify to, ’Aryan’ women’s willingness to accept racial dogma and measures.23 And deviating both from Koonz’s emphasis on separate spheres and Bock’s focus on victimization, Dagmar Reese proposes that the League of German Girls (BDM) was appealing precisely because it did not preach domestic and feminine virtues, but rather offered a sense of generational and Volk identity and opportunities for leadership. Girls and young women therefore were freed from familial restrictions at the same time that they were made more available for state and party influence.24

In a thoughtful contribution to the TochterFragen volume Reese and Sachse attempt to draw a kind of ‘balance sheet’ on these argument^.^^ They point out that women’s historians have been grappling with issues of ’participation and resistance’ at least since 1 976 when Annemarie Troger published a broadside accusing the (male) left of joining right-wing historians in formulating a stab in the back legend which blamed women’s votes and masochistic hysteria for having ‘brought Hitler to power.’26 On the other hand, it was also in Troger’s pioneering 1970s oral history project at the Institute for Comparative Research in Fascism of the Free University of Berlin, that young feminist researchers were fitst confronted by the depth of women’s happy memories of the Third Reich. They were taken aback by interviewees bursting into old League of German Girls songs, while remem- bering their youth movement days as a time of solidarity, adventure and empowerment. By now, a long list of publications dealing with women and National Socialism has been produced by scholars who were associated with the Berlin in~titute.~’

At the same time, numerous (mostly male) historians of ‘everyday life’ have blurred the lines between opposition and conformity in Nazi Germany. They have shown that most Germans were quite able to combine skepticism toward propaganda and grumbling about individual policies with basic support for the regime, admiration for the Fuhrer, and at best indifference to the fate of Jews and other persecuted groups such as Communists or foreign laborers.28 In their review of feminist controversies, Sachse and Reese plead for deconstructing as well the binary opposition of victim/perpetrator in women’s history to which they feel that both Koonz and Bock subscribe. Koonz’s narrative is dramatically framed by that paradigm, starting with her encounter with a still spry and unapologetic Gertrud Scholtz-Klink,

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the former Reich women’s leader (Fuhrerin) and mother of eleven, and concluding with a poignant conversation with an elderly Holocaust survivor.

Bock too follows the dyad in a very different way when she maintains that the tiny minority of women, including concentration camp guards, who could truly be charged as villains were ’mostly childless’ women workers and professionals. They were implicated not as mothers or housewives but by their work. Their complicity in racial politics was a result of careerist conformity which led them to aspire to upward mobility and a kind of equality with male killers.Z9 This notion that the evil women do derives from adaptation to male models is inspired by psychoanalyst Margarete Mitscherlich’s musings about ‘Anti-Semitism - A Male Disease?’.3o The same thesis is accommodated in Christina Thurmer Rohr’s concept of women as lesser co-conspirators (Mittaferschaff), whose crime lay not so much in what they actually did but in allowing themselves to be corrupted by the false rewards blandished by men and patriarchy. Here too, women are structurally situated as victims even as they are acting badly; the inescapable implication is that if women were not so dependent on men, they would not have supported such an awful ~ystem.~’ The political lesson of course i s that the only proper thing for subsequent generations of German women to do i s to dedicate themselves to the radically separatist (uncon- taminated) feminism that Bock sees Koonz as maligning.

Personal positionality is crucial to these disputes. Who i s doing the writing matters enormously. Koonz, the Midwestern American, was constantly confronted by the anxious burden of memory shared by Jewish colleagues and the elderly German-Jewish refugees and Holocaust survivors she befriended-and felt responsible to-in her then base of Worcester, Massachusetts. For all of Bock’s emphasis on ‘race’ she never addresses the relationship between Anti-Semitism, racial hygiene and genocide. Women historians in Germany carry another audience in their heads and hearts. Even as they wrestle with anger and pity for Nazi and/or soldier fathers, they stress their mothers’ and grandmothers’ fortitude under bombing raids and in flight with their young children from the advancing Red Army, and the energy of the sturdy Trummerfrauen tidying up the ruins of the bombed out cities. In many accounts, these women became a kind of female equivalent to the valiant soldiers on the Eastern front invoked in the Hisforikersfreif, suffering and brave but loyal and without connection to or responsibility for the atrocities committed on their behalf. Whereas Gravenhorst’s more judge- mental claim to a ‘negative legacy‘ is explicitly linked to her fate as the daughter of active Nazis, Reese and Sachse’s desire to posit a more ambivalent legacy is connected to their resentment at being subsumed in an undifferentiated German collective agency (Handlungskollekfiv Deufsch- land). They strenuously resist a geneology which mandates Nazi forebears for all German daughters.

At every point in these debates, the personally toxic issue of motherhood i s a powerful but undertheorized and suppressed presence. When Bock

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asserts that losing the capacity to have children is uniquely painful for women and that the women most compromised by Nazi horrors were childless and male identified, she comes curiously close to implying that non-mothers are not really women. For Koonz, women social workers, nurses and midwives espousing family protection and motherliness in the ‘caring professions’ were necessarily instrumental in identifying targets for both sterilization and euthana~ia.~~ Yet she also valorizes the family as a haven and source of strength for resisters and the persecuted. Challenging the ’male imitation’ thesis, Karin Windaus-Walzer, another contributor to TochterFragen, finds ‘authentic’ female guilt for anti-Semitism and Nazism in the fact that in the Third Reich ‘. . . the power of mothers also showed its ugly face.’33

Remarkably, the German feminist scholars represented in TochterFragen, most of them now in their forties and even fifties, still identify themselves exclusively as questioning daughters and never as responding mothers or possible mothers. In a long and tortured confessional about her struggle to come to terms with the Nazi enthusiasms of her parents, sociologist Lerke Gravenhorst whose professional specialty i s the study of the family, plumbs her development in social-psychoanalytical terms but never once alludes to any conflict about having or not having children of her own. Having finally broken through layers of repression to confront what she calls her ‘NS Problem’, the possibility of raising her own children remains a last unarticulated taboo.34 One cannot help wondering whether the obsessive back and forth between romanticization and demonization of motherhood, and the ambivalence towards forming families of their own, among many German feminists has something to do with an unworked through problem about the meaning of motherhood in the shadow of a horrific regime that so massively intervened in reproduction.

Somewhat ironically, the debate about how to interpret Nazi population politics and whether women should be classified primarily as culprits or victims has now spawned a new and related argument among feminist historians about the primacy of race or gender in Nazi policies. Indeed, both Bock and Koonz now apparently agree that the primary intention and goal of the Nazis was not to control or oppress women; they aimed above all to establish a new European order based on a hierarchy of racial fitness. Race rather than gender, racism rather than sexism, i s now deemed dominant. Aside from the continuing problem that the general category ’race’ tends to obscure the vast differences among groups labelled ‘racially unfit’ by the Nazis, as well as the specificity of anti-Semitism, the fact also remains that women as reproducers and nurturers stood willy nilly at the center of these ’bio-social’

It would seem more useful therefore to continue to stress the selectivity of Nazi population policy, and to ask how categories of race and gender were intertwined in Nazi rhetoric and practice as well as in the experience of everyday life. If certain ‘fit’ women were saturated with womanness and

Gender creeps back in as a critical category.

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others such as foreign workers, Jews and Gypsies were stripped of it,36 that racial selection was nevertheless performed in a gendered fashion. Nazi criteria for selection for death or work, concentration or extermination camp, were highly differentiated by nationality, age and gender.37 If the road to Auschwitz was organized according to the dictates of race and not gender politics, the stark fact remains that on the ramp in the death camps, men and women were separated, and women with small children or visibly pregnant were invariably marked for immediate extinction. Even at the most extreme point of racial policy-extermination in the gas chambers and crematoria- gender was still relevant, and indeed could make the difference between instant death and a chance at survival. This latest effort to privilege race as an explanatory category is a laudable reaction to the overemphasis on women as victims without agency but finally it seems as counterproductive and misleading as trying to understand women’s relationship to National Socialism by rigidly (and cleanly) dividing them into victims or perpetrators.

Notes

1. Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family and Nazi Politics (St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1987).

2. Gisela Bock, ’Die Frauen und der Nationalsozialismus: Bemerkungen zu einem Buch von Claudia Koonz,’ Geschichte und Gesellschah. Zeitschrih fur Historische Sozialwissenschah 15 (1989), pp. 563-579. An English language version appeared in Bulletin of the German Historical Institute, London II (1 9891, pp.16-24. All quotes are from the latter. On p. 21 Bock writes that Koonz’s ’conceptual framework which remains undefined . . . is not only historically useless, but does serious harm to the memory of the dead and the survivors.’

3. Koonz’s response to these allegations is forthcoming in Geschichte und Gesellschah.

4. Bulletin of the German Historical Institute, London, p. 16. 5. Koonz had trouble finding a German publisher for a German translation. A revised

German edition is forthcoming from the Kore Verlag in Freiburg. 6. Gisela Bock, Zwangssterilisation im Nationalsozialismus. Studien zur Rassenpolitik

und Frauenpolitik (Westdeutscher Verlag, Opladen, 1986). 7. Lerke Gravenhorst and Carmen Tatschmurat, eds., TijChterFragen. NS-Frauen

Geschichte (Kore, Verlag Traute Hensch, Freiburg i. Br., 1990). The conference held in Wurzburg was entitled, ‘Beteiligung und Widerstand. Thematisierungen des Nationalsozialismus in der neueren Frauenforschung.’

8. For a fine English langauge overview of the Historikerstreit see Peter Baldwin, ed., Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust and the Historians’ Debate (Beacon Press, Boston, 1990).

9. Jill Stephenson, The Nazi Organization of Women (Barnes and Noble, New York, London, 1981 1, p. 18.

10. Lerke Gravenhorst, ’Nehmen wir Nationalsozialismus und Auschwitz ausreichend als unser negatives Eigentum in anspruch? Zu Problemen im feministisch- sozialwissenschaftlichen Diskurs in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland’, in TochterFragen NS-Frauen Geschichte, pp. 17-38.

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1 1. Elly Geiger, “‘Die Geschichte Deutschlands ist meine Geschichte.” Personliche

12. Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland, p. 5. 1 3. Bock, Zwangssterilisation, p. 10. 14. Bock, Zwangssterilisation, p. 1 2. 15. Bock, Zwangssterilisation, esp. p. 457. 16. Bock, Zwangssterilisation, p. 381. 17. Reese and Sachse in TiichterFragen, pp. 90-93, esp. p. 93. For a detailed

discussion of the many twists and turns in Nazi race hygiene policy see Paul Weindling, Health, race and German politics between national unification and Nazism 1870- 1945, (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989).

18. Gisela Bock herself offered quite different evidence about the persecution of abortion and attempts to increase the fit population in her now classic article, ‘Racism and Sexism in Nazi Germany: Motherhood, Compulsory Sterilization, and the State’, in When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany, eds. Renate Bridenthal, Atina Grossmann, and Marion Kaplan (Monthly Review, New York, 1984),

19. Ute Frevert, Women in German History; From Bourgeois Emancipation to Sexual Liberation (Berg, Providence, 1989) pp. 233-4, citing Stephenson, Nazi Organization of Women, p. 165-6.

Anmerkungen’, in TbchterFragen, p. 347-8.

pp. 271 -296.

20. Frevert, Women in German History, p. 232. 2 1. Bock, Zwangssterilisation, p. 139. 22. Frevert, Women in German History, p. 242. 23. See Marion Kaplan, ‘Jewish Women in Nazi Germany: Daily Life, Daily Struggles,

1933-1939’, Feminist Studies 16, no. 3 (Fall 19901, pp. 579-606 and Koonz’s chapter on Jewish women in Mothers in the Fatherland.

24. Dagmar Reese, ’Emanzipation oder Vergesellxhaftung: Madchen im “Bund Deutscher Madel” ’, in Politische Formierung und soziale Erziehung im Nationalsozialismus, ed. Hans-Uwe Otto and Heinz Sunker (Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, 19911, pp. 203-225.

25. keese and Sachse, ‘Frauenforschung und Nationalsozialismus. Eine Bilanz’, in TijchterFragen, pp. 73- 106.

26. Annemarie Troger, ’Die Dolchstosslegende der Linken: ”Frauen haben Hitler an die Macht gebracht” ’, in Gruppe Berliner Dozentinnen, eds., Frau und Wissenschafi. Beitrage zur Berliner Sommeruniversitat fur Frauen )uli 1976 (Courage Verlag, Berlin,

27. Besides Gisela Bock’s own work, see also, Frauengruppe Faschismusforschung, ed., Mutterkreuz und Arbeitsbuch: Zur Geschichte der Frauen in der Weimarer Republik und im Nationalsozialismus (Fischer, Frankfurt, 1981); Gabriele Czarnowski, Das Kontrollierte Paar Ehe- und Sexualpolitik im Nationalsozialismus (Deutscher Studien Verlag, Weinheim, 1991); Susanna Dammer, ‘Nationalsozialistische Frauenpolitik und soziale Arbeit’, in Soziale Arbeit und Faschismus: Volkspflege und Padagogik im Nationalsozialismus, 4 s . Hans-Uwe Otto and Heinz Sunker (Bielefeld, KT Verlag, 19861, pp. 269-287; Dagmar Reese, ’Straff aber nicht stramm - Herb, aber nicht derb’. Zur Vergesellschaftung von Madchen durch den Bund Deutscher Madel im sozialkulturellen Vergleich zweier Milieus (Weinheim, Basel, 1989); and Carola Sachse, Siemens, der Nationalsozialismus und die moderne Familie. Eine Untersuchung zur Sozialen Rationalisierung in Deutschland im 20. Jahrhundert (Rasch und Rohring, Hamburg, 1990).

28. For an excellent discussion of these debates, see Mary Nolan, ‘The Historikerstreit and Social History’, New German Critique 44 (Spring/Summer 19881, pp. 51 -80.

1976), pp. 324-355.

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29. Bock, Zwangssterilisation, p. 139. For a more nuanced discussion of women’s path up the career ladder during the Third Reich see Ursula Nienhaus’ fascinating article on women postal workers, ’Von der (0hn)Macht der Frauen. Postbeamtinnen 1933-1 945’ in ThchterFragen, pp. 193-21 0.

30. Margarete Mitscherlich, ’Antisemitismus - eine Mannerkrankheit?’, in Die friedfertige Frau (Fischer, Frankfurt, 19851, pp. 148-60.

31. See Christina Thurmer-Rohr, ’Aus der Tauschung in die Ent-Tauschung - Zur Mittaterschaft von Frauen’, Beitrage zur feministischen theorie und praxis, 8 (1 9831,

32. See also Angelika Ebbinghaus, ed., Opfer and Taterinnen. Frauenbiographien des Nationalsozialismus (Delphi Politik, Franz Greno Verlag, Nordlingen, 1987).

33. Karin Windaus-Walzer, ’Gnade der weiblichen Geburt? Zum Umgang der Frauenforschung mit Nationalsozialismus und Antisemitismus’, Feministische Studien, 6 (1988), p. 114. See also her article ‘Frauen im Nationalsozialismus. Eine Herausfor- derung fur feministische Theoriebildung’, in TiichterFragen, pp. 59-72.

34. Lerke Gravenhorst, ‘Die Wunde Nationalsozialismus und die Sozialwissenschaften als therapeutisches Milieu oder: Der lange Weg zu einem losenden Sprechen’, in TijchterFragen, pp. 371 -393.

35. Claudia Koonz uses this term, borrowed from Michel Foucault, in her new research work on the National Socialist Racial Political Office (Rassenpolitisches A m ) . See also her response to Bock‘s review in a forthcoming issue of Geschichte und Gesellschaft. Gisela Bock presented her thinking on the primacy of race at a conference on women and National Socialism at the Technical University Berlin, July 1990.

36. Denise Riley’s analysis in Am I That Name? Feminism and the Categov of “Women” in History (University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, 1988) i s extremely helpful in thinking through these questions.

37. Gudrun Schwarz, Die nationalsozialistischen Lager (Campus, Frankfurt, 1990).

pp. 1 1 -26.