THEORETICAL ISSUES
Conservative Empowerment and
the Gender of Nazism: Paradigms
of Power and Complicity in
German Women's History
Ralph M. Leck
Publication Information: Article Title: Theoretical Issues Conservative Empowerment and the Gender of Nazism: Paradigms of
Power and Complicity in German Women's History. Contributors: Ralph M. Leck - author. Journal Title: Journal of Women's History.
Volume: 12. Issue: 2. Publication Year: 2000.
The historians" debate of the 1980s about the Holocaust was a major event
in West German cultural history. Academic historians became public
intellectuals who debated questions of German citizens'guilt for the
Holocaust. After the heated exchange subsided, a new, but far less public,
debate about women and Nazism broke out between German women's
historian Gisela Bock and American historian of German women Claudia
Koonz. Were women victims or perpetrators of the Holocaust? Did German
feminists resist or accommodate the Nazis? In addressing Bock and Koonzs
answers to these questions, this essay challenges U.S. women's historians to
rethink the political consequences of "women's culture." The author employs
the distinction between cultural feminism and gender theory to differentiate
the approaches of Bock and Koonz. Of primary importance is understanding
how these perspectives have produced incompatible readings of history.
Finally, the article augments gender theory with the Foucauldian premise
that power is never merely repressive, in order to investigate patriarchy as a
form of women's empowerment.
In the mid-1980s, controversy about the origins of Nazism and the
Holocaust raged in West Germany. When the definitive anthology of the
debate -- the Historikerstreit, as it came to be known-appeared in 1987, it
seemed as though the debates had run their course. 1 They had not. Later
that year, a different but related debate erupted between German historian
of women Gisela Bock and American historian of German women Claudia
Koonz concerning the role of women in Nazism. Were German women
victims or perpetrators? What role did German feminists play in Hitler's rise
to power?
The answers Bock and Koonz provided to these crucial questions were
determined by their theoretical assumptions about how historians should
view women's roles in a patriarchal society. I wrote this article to familiarize
non-German women's historians with the debate and to offer-even to those
familiar with the controversy -- a comprehensive appraisal of the interpretive
implications of gendered interpretations of Nazism. I use Joan Wallach Scott
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Wallach Scott's essay "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis," in
which she made her groundbreaking distinction between cultural feminism
and gender theory, as my foundation. 2 The Bock-Koonz debate is thus
recast with an eye to understanding gender theory's historiographical effects
on perceptions of women's power, guilt, and complicity in the Third Reich.
The Surface Debate and Its Context
Claudia Koonz's Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi
Politics appeared in 1987, and was praised by such historians as Mary Nolan,
who called the book "a model of how to proceed" with a social history of
Nazism. 3 It might be assumed that other women's historians too would
enthusiastically embrace Koonz's text, for here was a text that rectified the
total absence of gender themes in the Historikerstreit.4 But, in fact, Koonz's
analysis was premised on claims that some feminist historians found
distasteful and inaccurate. The leading German women's historian of Nazism,
Gisela Bock, denounced Koonz's book with the vehemence of someone
whose worldview was under assault. Indeed, that was the case.
The lack of a "feminist" consensus in the ensuing debate between Koonz and
Bock signaled a theoretical impasse in feminist historiography. Since both
tended to forego grand theory, initially they were unable to conceptualize
the source of their dispute: an interpretive paradigm shift which,
coterminous to their debate, was heralded by the publication of Scott's
seminal Gender and the Politics of History. 5 Scott, and feminist philosophers
like Linda Alcoff, challenged the worldview of cultural feminists who
celebrated ontological conceptions of gender identity. 6 By the mid1980s,
cultural feminism had become a major strand of German historiography.
Such historians as Irene Stoehr and Elizabeth Meyer-Renschhausen argued
that "organized motherhood" within the German women's movement had
been an empowering response to misogyny and a powerful weapon for
combating patriarchy. 7 Critics of cultural feminism rejected this thesis and
gender theorists, especially, maintained that maternal ideology replicated
many patriarchal identities. Cultural feminists' predominant view of women
as victims of patriarchy was, in fact, being besieged by a social history of
women as actors -- even perpetrators.
To understand this challenge, we need to retrace the debate. Bock's review
of Mothers in the Fatherland, which appeared in 1989, opened with
recognition of the thematic narrowness of the public debates about Nazism.
"The 1980s brought to an international level a new interest in the research
of National Socialism . . . ; the debate about causes, responsibility
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and guilt, the historical and actual meaning of genocide led to the
Historikerstreit. Women and their history played no role in this debate. This
certainly is in part attributable to the sexual blindness of customary
historical scholarship." 8 One might presume, then, that Bock would embrace
Koonzs text with the intensity of a kindred spirit. After all, Mothers in the
Fatherland was a powerful retort to sexual blindness, and Koonz had moved
sexual politics from the margins to the interpretive center. However, Bock
was not pleased with the leading role Koonz attributed to women in the Nazi
drama. "At the grassroots of daily life, in a world populated by women, we
begin to discover how war and genocide happened. . . . [German women]
created the social side of tyranny," she argued. 9 Though Bock sought a
female protagonist, she could not endorse Koonz's script. Her response was
swift and clear: women were not the perpetrators of Nazi tyranny. German
women, on the contrary, were "particularly resistant to National Socialism."
10
Clearly, the debate about Nazism in Germany was not over. Koonz and
Bock continued it, with a new gender twist.
Bock sought to refute the claim that women were complicit in the Holocaust
by attacking Koonz's methodology. "A feminist ideology, that reduces
women's history to an attack on 'separate spheres,' is not an adequate
model for an analysis of mass murder." 11 The reason for its inadequacy was
that both victims and perpetrators shared separate spheres ideology.
Furthermore, Koonz's claims, according to Bock, were not persuasive given
the fact that 60 percent of Schutzstaffel (Adolph Hitler's security police, SS)
men and an even higher percentage of concentration camp personnel were
unmarried. For these brutal perpetrators of genocide, the family, as signified
by "domestic" women, did not represent the social side of tyranny.
Koonz's response to Bock's critique, which appeared in 1992, referenced
research challenging the contention that German women were mere victims
of Nazism. Recent scholarship indicates that, in some areas of Germany, a
higher percentage of the vote for Nazis came from women than men. Thus,
many German women were not resistant to Nazism. 12 But, by far, the most
contentious empirical debate centered on Nazi natal policy. In
Zwangssterilisation und Nationalsozialismus: Studien zur Rassenpolitik und
Frauenpolitik (Forced sterilization and national socialism: Studies of racial
and women's politics, 1986) and several related articles, Bock had claimed
that Nazism was antinatal and that the Nazi policies of compulsory
sterilization and abortion were the most important precursors to mass
murder and genocide. 13 According to Bock, the biocrats of Nazi body politics
had developed "a coherent policy combining sexism and racism." 14 Koonz
challenged Bock's antinatal thesis with evidence of a sharp increase in the
birthrate after 1933. Most important, Koonz was clear about the
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implications of Bock's conceptions of power and victimization: "In her
research concerning sterilization, Bock places archival sources in the
foreground to show women as the victims of sexism. Without
underestimating the effect of sterilization practices on women, I find no
proof of specific misogynist intentions among Nazi eugenicists to justify
Bock's assertion that the politics of sterilization was the result of the sexism
of Nazi leaders. In reality, the official portrayal of racial and genetic
'Minderwertigen' [less worthy ones] were, in the propaganda of race politics,
gender neutral." 15 According to Koonz, Bock's primary emphasis on sexism
rather than racism led to a presentation of all women as victims of
patriarchal Nazism. This necessarily obscured the racial differentiation of
victimization. The course of the debate, then, brought into relief divergent
conclusions concerning guilt and complicity.
Koonz: Between
Gender Feminism
Cultural
Feminism
and
The arrival of a gendered history of fascism gave new meaning to the
feminist dictum that the personal is political -- a meaning that was
methodologically opposed to Bock's cultural feminism. Scott had been quite
clear about the implications of gender theory for historians of difference. "By
insisting on fixed differences, . . . [cultural] feminists contribute to the kind
of history they want to oppose. Although they insist on the reevaluation of
the category 'female'. . ., they do not examine the binary opposition
[male/female] itself." 16 Scott had read early drafts of Mothers in the
Fatherland, and, therefore, it should not be surprising that Koonz"s
methodology also critiqued cultural feminism. Koonz contended that Bock
bracketed the male and female spheres of Nazi society in a way that gender
theory did not. "Bock confidently distinguishes between 'masculine' and
'feminine,' Nazi and anti-Nazi, powerful and helpless, victims and
perpetrators. It is particularly the sharpness of this polarized opposition that
my study disputes." 17 Koonz's examination of that male/female binary-as
mutually reinforcing rather than conflicting spheres of patriarchy -- produced
a new historiographical paradigm of power. The "female sphere" was no
longer a self-evident moral and cultural contraposition to the "male sphere."
Rather, Nazi patriarchy was interpreted as a shared, if sexually
differentiated, symbolic social order. From the perspective of gender theory,
then, "feminine" difference is no longer a critical antipode to "male" Nazi
culture. "Feminine" consciousness and Nazi family values depended upon the
male/ female binary and thereby affirmed, consciously or unwittingly, the
institutional and symbolic system of patriarchal difference. The broader
historiographical implications of gender theory derived from a renunciation
of two essential assumptions of cultural feminism: (1)
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women are not merely the victims of patriarchy, and (2) the politics of
difference are not necessarily antipatriarchal.
Mothers in the Fatherland stood at a crossroads between cultural feminism
and gender history. Koonz ' never relinquished the conclusion that Nazism
"carried a deeply anti-feminist message," which one may interpret as a
carryover from cultural feminism (more will be said about Nazism as
antifeminism below). 18 For now, we need to highlight the transposition of
the debate into another historiographical realm: German feminism. Koonz's
assertion that Nazism was antifeminist starkly contrasted her earlier
conclusion that "the National Socialist solution to the 'woman question'had
been prefigured in the goals of middle-class [German women's]
organizations." 19 What must be highlighted and explained is the
contradictory nature of these claims: (1) Nazism is antifeminist, and (2)
Nazism is a continuation of the mainstream German women's movement, a
movement most historians identify as feminist.
How do we explain Koonz's Manichean conclusions? To answer that question,
we need to understand Koonz's evolutionary journey away from cultural
feminism and toward gender theory. A prominent tendency of cultural
feminism was the celebration of women's separate experiences. Following
this logic, Koonz designated early Nazi women's leaders as "heroines" in the
1977 edition of Becoming Visible: Women in European History. 20 She was
particularly enthusiastic in her argument that female Nazi leaders controlled
their own feminine organizational sphere. However, Koonz's positive gloss on
female Nazi leaders eventually gave way to a more critical view of German
women's organizations. When the second edition of Becoming Visible
appeared in 1987, she excised the designation "heroines," a change that
symbolized the relative decline of cultural feminism. The praiseworthy
inflection was supplanted by an attempt to explain their female collaboration
as personal empowerment. Koonz asserted that "despite its overt opposition
to women's equality, the fascist vision of an ideal society incorporated the
notions of nineteenth-century women's rights advocates who envisioned a
strong society founded on separate but equal spheres." 21 What makes this
thesis so powerful is the volume of evidence that has been marshaled to
support it. German women's organizations did fortify patriarchy through
their support for conservative political parties. During the Weimar Republic,
the cultural feminist Bund Deutsche Frauenvereine (Confederation of
German Womens Associations, BDF) was overwhelmingly allied with political
conservatives and/or economic liberals: Deutschnationale Volkspartei
(German National People's Party, DNVP), Deutsche Demokratische Partei
(German Democratic Party, DDP), and Deutsche Volkspartei (German
People's Party, DVP). 22 While socialists and communists were patriarchal,
their ideologies at least con-151-
tained a rhetorical commitment to sexual equality. Thus, the historical
record supports Koonz's new interpretation of the legacy of German cultural
feminism.
Particularly through her analysis of Nazi language, Koonz made a case for
the complementariness of Nazism and German cultural. feminism. She
located a common discourse in Nazism and the German women's
movements, that is, Lebensraum (living space). 23 This shared discourse,
she demonstrated, contained a binary meaning. For middle-class women,
like those in the BDF, Lebensraum was a celebration of the political role of
the domestic sphere. Again, facts support Koonz's discursive interpretation.
Lebensraum ideology, indeed, reflected the politics of the BDF's constituent
organizations. By 1933, the Bund Deutscher Hausfrauen (Union of German
Housewives, BDH) was the largest member organization of the BDF,
numbering close to three hundred thousand members. 24 Its cultural goals
were, at least in part, economically determined. The BDF praised stay-athome motherhood as the cultural ideal -- one in which most working-class
women could never participate -- and set up agencies to police domestic
servants and ensure their distance from the Socialdemokratische Partei
Deutschland (German Social Democratic Party, SPD). In both Weimar
Germany and, later, Nazi society, the patriarchal cultural ideal of
Lebensraum (although Koonz never goes this far) empowered these women
with pride and social status.
Correspondingly, for the predominately male Nazi leadership, Lebensraum
was the conceptual centerpiece of a racist plan for imperialist expansion in
the East; Germany needed living space. The discourse of Lebensraum, then,
was an example of how patriarchy functioned in Nazi society: as a common
discursive regime with sexually differentiated but mutually reinforcing
political meanings. From this perspective, the leading women's organizations
in Germany were empowered, not victimized, by Nazism. Their discourse of
Lebensraum and ideology of motherhood participated in the Nazis' politics of
cultural superiority.
Bock rejected Koonz's discursive analysis, arguing that the politics of
Lebensraum and traditional family values were not unique to Nazism.
Rather, they were the values of most victims. Thus, concluded Bock, Koonz's
discursive articulation failed to distinguish between perpetrators and Victims.
25
Here, we see a major interpretive disjunction. While Bock sought a clear
delineation between victims and perpetrators, Koonz contended that such
clarity was neither possible nor desirable. She maintained, for instance, that
"many middle-class Jews . . . [would have] welcomed an authoritarian state
except for its anti-Semitism." 26 This critical interpretation of the victims is
extremely unusual in the historiography of Nazism. Koonz suggests that
victims could have held bigoted or ethnocentric views.
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Certainly, many
homosexuals.27
Jewish
victims
shared
the
Nazis'
antipathy
for
It should be noted that Koonz's critique of cultural feminism did not derive
exclusively from her engagement with gender theory. Her selfproclaimed
egalitarian approach to feminist politics was also significant. In 1986, Koonz
asserted that egalitarian feminism, if it had been supported by the majority
of German women, would have rendered Weimar culture immune to Nazism
and proposed egalitarianism as the political antidote to Nazi separatism. 28
The next year, in an essay about fascism, she concluded, "particular social
policies will succeed in liberating women only in the context of institutions
that guarantee equality." 29 Koonz rejected the proposition that ontologies of
difference empower women and remained skeptical of Bock's implied
proposition that separate is equal, or superior. Bock, on the other hand,
sought to marginalize Koonzs assertion by upbraiding it as American "equal
rights feminism," but Bock never asked or answered a fundamental
question. 30 Is a sexually egalitarian Nazism imaginable?
In the end, Koonz's description of Nazi patriarchy as a social unity of
opposites -- "love as a source of hate, motherhood as a source of death,
Other-being and separate spheres as a cause of massacre" -- confounded
Bock, who referred to Koonz's analysis as irrational, contradictory, and
illogical. 31 This rejection of Koonz was connected to a broader denunciation
of gender history. Bock not only derided "gender history as men's history,"
but conflated gender theory, antifeminism, and "male-dominated
scholarship." 32 Bock's male-baiting may seem illogical given the fact that
gender theory was originated by women who continue to embrace it as a
strategy for women's emancipation and who thus see themselves as
feminists. However, it is quite consistent with the logic of cultural feminism
and its assumption that the instrumental male sphere stands in opposition to
a liberating female sphere. Bock's deprecation of gender theory, at a
minimum, indicates the historiographical presence of paradigmatic
incommensurability.
Is Nazism Antifeminist? Bock's Positionality
33
I argue above that Koonz's 1986 essay on separatism was something of a
historiographical breakthrough. She broke with interpretive orthodoxy by
posing two questions, the first explicit and the second implicit: (1) How did
the separatist vision of "German feminism" prefigure the National Socialists'
solution to the woman question? and (2) How were women empowered by
systems that were also patriarchal? The first question posits the similarity of
patriarchal conceptions of gender in German
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feminism and Nazi ideology. This linkage displaced a broad historiographical
orthodoxy that treated Nazism as antiwoman and antifeminist.
In addition to Bock, other leading historians have interpreted Nazi Germany
as antifeminist. Annette Kuhn maintains that "anti-feminism is the hidden
theoretical basis of German fascism." 34 David Schoenbaum described Nazi
antifeminism as "secondary racism. 35 A preeminent historian of women in
Wilhelmine Germany, Ann Taylor Allen, polemicized that "National Socialist
views of motherhood were distinctly anti-feminist." 36 What does
antifeminism mean? This question is not easy to answer because
antifeminism is rarely defined. Historians often use the term vaguely to
maintain that Nazi patriarchy was injurious to women. The implication is that
women could not have benefited from and did not support Nazism. The
problem with the appellation "antifeminist" is that it falls into the theoretical
trap of false consciousness. 37 Gender theory, by rejecting all essentialist
explanations of culture, exposes foundational theories of false consciousness
as fictions. 38 It also reveals the ways in which historians displace the
question of women's complicity by reducing women to victims. Allen and
Bock, for example, are willing to label "feminist" the BDF's strategies of
empowerment within and through patriarchal identities when those activities
facilitate a positive and celebratory history of German women. When this
strategy of empowerment is shown to buttress Nazi cultural politics,
however, Allen and Bock call the Nazis' similar politics of difference "antifeminist." 39 This apparent inconsistency is completely consistent with the
paradigmatic logic of cultural feminist historiography, which seeks a positive
gloss to the politics of difference.
The designation of Nazi social policy as antifeminist is particularly
problematic because it equates illiberalism, antimodernism, and patriarchy
with antiwoman policies. This categorical sleight of hand is to women's
history what the mistaken conflation. of liberalism and the bourgeoisie are to
German political history. Neither the German bourgeoisie nor the
mainstream German women's movement was politically liberal. With few
exceptions, the German bourgeoisie, irrespective of gender and party
appellations (the National Liberals, for example), opposed political equality
for workers and women. Because most Anglo-Americans equate feminism
with political equality, to describe the BDF as "feminist" -- as most historians
do -- conceals the fact that its largely middle -- and upper-class
constituencies, like the German bourgeoisie itself, were antiegalitarians who
opposed universal suffrage for women and the proletariat. Furthermore, to
apply the term antifeminist to Nazi culture allows one to ignore strong
continuities between pre-1933 mainstream German women's organizations
and the sexual politics of the Nazis. Suffice it to say, there is an important
politics of reception immanent in naming Nazi policies antifeminist, one
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that conceals linkages between the mainstream German women's movement
and Nazi culture.
The indeterminacy of feminism as a historical category implies the need to
analyze historiographical assumptions within specific historical and
geographical contexts. Bock's variant of "feminism" derived from her
German historical context. Historian Atina Grossmann likened Bock's
interpretive position to that of a German daughter who stresses "mother's
and grandmother's fortitude under bombing raids and in flight with their
young children from the advancing Red Army, and the energy of the sturdy
Trümmerfrauen [rubble women] tidying up the ruins of the bombed out
cities." 40 Bock's praise of women's suffering was, more importantly,
indicative of post-1945 gender relations in the Bundesrepublik Deutschland
(German Federal Republic, BRD). As scholar Robert Moeller has concluded,
"in the language of pronatalism, motherhood, the sanctity of family
relations, and the [BRD] state's attempts to shape these private
relationships, there. were striking continuities across the divide of 1945." 41
Bock's feminism symbolized the cultural assumptions of the BDF, Nazis, and
BRD, namely, a feminism that separates "female" and "male" characteristics.
For example, her 1984 essay "Wages for Housework as a Perspective of the
Women's Movement" reflected her political inclination to empower women in
their "natural" roles rather than challenging the validity of naturalized
identities. 42 This form of essentialist feminism might be labeled
'conservative empowerment feminism," because it seeks to empower women
while conserving patriarchal conceptions of gender identity.
Interestingly, Bock's essentialist feminism proved not to be a liability to the
historiography of Nazism. Bock's critique of Koonz, perhaps despite itself,
revealed the limits of the explanatory power of both gender theory and
feminist theory. The acceptance or rejection of separate spheres ideology is
an insufficient explanation of victimization, since victims and perpetrators
shared patriarchal assumptions. Bock also revealed that Koonz contradicted
herself in arguing (1) that motherhood ideology was the social side of
tyranny, and (2) that Nazism opposed traditional visions of motherhood and
the family. This inconsistency, I believe, marks the theoretical condition of
women's history in 1987. With one foot still in cultural feminism, Mothers in
the Fatherland portrayed the Nazis as having infiltrated the presumably
apolitical sphere of the traditional family. Conversely, situated at the center
of emerging gender historiography, Koonz recognized the theoretical
inadequacy of the public/private dichotomy. From her perspective, the
personal is always political (not unlike Marx's analysis of private property
and religion), and civil society is in a mutually constitutive relationship with
the state. Gender theory thus helped to displace the private/public
dichotomy that dominated the historiography of Nazism.
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Racial Patriarchy and Theological Patriarchy
One of the grave dangers of comparing the BDF to the Nazis is the
production of undifferentiated conceptions of patriarchy. The sexual codes of
Nazis and the BDF were patriarchal, but, similar to the concept of feminism,
patriarchy must be defined and contextualized. Koonz's thesis was that
traditional visions of gender contributed immensely to bringing the Nazis to
power. But she was also careful not to conflate totally the sexual politics of
the Nazis and the German women's movement. Only a differentiated
understanding of patriarchy can explain these incompatibilities.
After the Nazis came to power, they tried to institute their patriarchal vision
of society, the basis of which was not entirely compatible with traditional
versions of patriarchy. The foundation of Nazi sexual politics was the biology
of race. The Nazis supported abortion if it meant exterminating genetically
"inferior" fetuses. They also publicly approved of unwed motherhood as a
means of increasing "Aryan" births. The Third Reich's racial variant of
patriarchy was distinct from the theological strain of patriarchy that
predominated within the BDF. In stark contrast to the Nazis, theological
patriarchy inclined Christian members of the BDF to oppose abortion
entirely. Moreover, they rejected the legitimacy of outof-wedlock births, and,
therefore, did not support the Nazi unwed motherhood (Lebensborn)
program. Furthermore, supporters of theological patriarchy supported a
doctrinal rather than racial version of religious ethnocentrism. They
welcomed Jewish converts to Christianity and, in many cases, sought to
protect converts from persecution.
In spite of conflicts over abortion and unwed motherhood, the distinction
between racial patriarchy and theological patriarchy was not absolute.
Domestic ideology and heterosexism were shared elements of Nazi ideology
and the BDF worldview. Moreover, religious anti-Semitism was a cultural
sibling of the racial anti-Semitism of the Nazis. Nor should we lose sight of
the fact that Gertrud Bäumer, the most influential BDF leader, supported
Hitler's order to integrate the federation into the Nazi mass women's
organization, even though this meant the expulsion of Jewish members.
Thus, a nuanced understanding of patriarchy must acknowledge
incompatibilities and affinities at the same time.
Above all, the distinction between racial patriarchy and theological patriarchy
facilitates an analysis of degrees of continuity and discontinuity in post-1945
Germany. After 1945, racial patriarchy was discredited and the political
dominance of the Christian Democrats symbolized the hegemony of
theological patriarchy. By placing an anti-Nazi, Konrad Adenauer, at the
head of their party, the Christian Democrats convinced themselves that
they, too, were anti-Nazi. Just as cultural feminists ab-156-
solved female culpability by defining German women as victims, the
Christian Democrats embowered themselves from the question of Christian
culpability by projecting the victimization of Adenauer (and the martyrdom
of Christ) onto their own souls. Adenauer was an exception among Christians
who as a group displayed no trace of moral superiority during the Third
Reich. 43 Consequently, the affinities of racial patriarchy and theological
patriarchy, and their role as balusters of Nazi culture, were downplayed by
placing an anti-Nazi Christian at the helm of the ChristlichDemokratische
Union (Christian Democratic Union, CDU). 44 The lack of Christian selfcritique facilitated such important continuities across the chronological divide
of 1945 as the primacy of women's identity as mothers and the legal
victimization of homosexuals. 45
Conservative Empowerment Feminism:
Peculiarities of German History
The concept of conservative empowerment feminism enables us to answer
two crucial questions: (1) How are women empowered by political systems
that are also patriarchal? and (2) Why do some women support patriarchal
parties? If, as cultural feminists presume, patriarchy is a system of female
oppression by men, then it is illogical to suggest that women would fortify
patriarchy, thereby causing their own victimization. However, if patriarchy is
a sociosymbolic culture, then both men and women may fortify or resist it.
Those women who resist it would not necessarily share an identity of
sisterhood with those who support it.
Only from the perspective of a gendered analysis does it make sense to say
that women can and do support patriarchal culture as a means of
empowerment. Patriarchal empowerment comes at the expense of different
sexual systems (polygamy, homosexuality, equality, etc.). Feminists like
Bock are confounded by the critical conclusions of gender theory because
they imply an end to feminist identity politics. As cultural feminists, Bock
and, for example, Allen are willing to admit that women may be empowered
through their female roles. They are not willing to admit, however, that
affirmation or passive acceptance of those roles is always a political decision
about cultural empowerment and one that necessarily will be oppressive to
those marginalized by the Aryan/ Christian/heterosexist character of the
patriarchal, domestic Third Reich.
Escaping cultural feminist assumptions permits a new reading of German
women's history. Gender theory and the notion of conservative
empowerment allow us to perceive agency within patriarchy. Women have
never been merely victims of patriarchy. In Michel Foucault's critique of
psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, power is posited as productive and not simply
repressive: "the relationship between sex and power is not character-157-
ized by repression." 46 Histories of European women's movements confirm
that patriarchal culture is both productive and repressive. Most
nineteenthcentury women's organizations are examples of conservative
empowerment feminism. Cultural feminists, who were mostly from the
middle class, did not so much reject patriarchy as redefine it, primarily
through a redeployment of spiritual motherhood. 47 Therefore, although
inegalitarian, the parameters of patriarchal culture were not free-floating nor
was its meaning entirely fixed. Early German feminism was, for the most
part, both antiegalitarian and facilitative of women's empowerment. Since
cultural feminism affirmed the naturalized assumptions of a patriarchal
gender regime, conformity and empowerment were symbiotic not opposite.
Although historian Geoff Eley, in his review of Mothers in the Fatherland, did
not perceive the analogy, Koonzs text was every bit as revolutionary as The
Peculiarities of German History, which he coauthored with David Blackbourn.
48
Eley and Blackbourn's epochal revision of the Sonderweg thesis (German
historical exceptionalism) hinged on the understanding that mass socialist
and workers' movements institutionalized political liberalism. (Here, we
witness another paradox of designation: socialists were political liberals, if
economic illiberals, while groups like the National Liberals were political
illiberals.) Eley and Blackbourn reasoned that it made no sense to deny the
presence of a bourgeois political revolution in Germany if political illiberalism
best fortified bourgeois hegemony. The historical record denied the
connection between the bourgeoisie and political liberalism, they concluded.
In fact, the bourgeoisie's primary interest was economic liberalism, which
functioned quite well under conditions of political illiberalism.
Historian Nancy Reagin has developed a corollary epochal revision of Nazi
historiography and German women's history in her A German Women's
Movement: Class and Gender in Hanover, 1880-1933. 49 Similar to Eley and
Blackbourn, Reagin focused on the presence of a thriving bourgeoisie instead
of the absence of democracy in Hanover. In Wilhelmine society, in Weimar
Germany, and, later, with the Nazis, the appeal of patriarchy to bourgeois
women was the appeal of conservative empowerment and class privilege;
Hanover women's organizations, for instance, "adeptly used perceived
gender differences, rather than equal rights feminism, in setting and
pursuing their goals. . . . Leaders of the women's associations repeatedly
emphasized that they were not radical Emanzen ('libbers'), who sought
political reform. . . . The political context of these programs was subtle and
not overtly partisan. The overall goal was to further the embourgeoisment of
the German working class." 50 The panoptical policing of working-class
women undertaken by Hanoverian women's organizations and housewives'
associations was coded through the sexual
-158-
stereotype of patriarchy as apolitical and nonpartisan. Such practices were
hardly apolitical. Rather, these women embraced the politics of illiberalism,
sexual inequality, class privilege, antisocialism, heterosexism, and religious
ethnocentrism. Their worldview was fundamentally and overtly patriarchal.
But Reagin does not criticize these organizations' affirmation of patriarchy.
As a gender theorist, she has a more productive agenda. She does not
presume that patriarchy entails the absence of power for women but
demonstrates, on the contrary, that conservative empowerment was a
partisan strategy for bourgeois women, which worked until Social Democrats
initiated parliamentary democracy in 1920.
Reagin's research calls into question cultural feminists' tendency to celebrate
women's organizations as a separate culture. Prior to 1919, prominent
bourgeois German women's organizations relied heavily on municipal
governments to finance their charitable activities. These municipal
governments, elected through a restricted franchise and dominated by the
National Liberals, paid rents and created salaried positions for prominent
bourgeois Christian women. The interdependence of bourgeois women's
organizations, illiberal and rabidly antisocialist municipal governments, and
Protestant churches is proof of the theoretical insufficiency of the liberal and
feminist dichotomy of public and private. There was no strict division
between "public" municipal governments and "private" charity organizations
run primarily by the Deutsch-Evangelischer Frauenbund (German Protestant
Women's League, DEF). In sum, Reagin's research rejects the propositions
(1) that women's organizations were meaningfully separate from the public
politics of antidemocracy and class domination, and (2) that women's
organizations, including the "feminist" BDF, were antipatriarchal. Similar to
that of Eley and Blackbourn, Reagin's portrait of German women's
organizations established a different historical account. She supplanted the
narrative of Nazi illiberalism as antibourgeois with a class narrative that
illustrates important cultural continuities among the bourgeois culture of
pre-World War IIGermany, Weimar women's organizations, and Nazi
ideology.
Perhaps the most revolutionary consequence of a gender interpretation of
Nazism is that it renders much of the debate about electoral differences (sex
and party) inconsequential. If, for example, votes for the Zentrum (Catholic
Center Party) and the Bayerische Volkspartei (Bavarian People's Party, BVP)
affirmed a matrix of right-wing values largely homologous with Nazi values,
then electoral differences may cloak a more significant cultural identity. 51
Women's support for the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei
(National Socialist German Workers' Party, NSDAP) played a significant role
in bringing Hitler to power. But votes for such conservative parties as the
DNVP, which garnered substantial sup-159-
port from Protestant women, contributed to a right-wing, illiberal, sexist,
and elitist culture, one that facilitated the end of parliamentary democracy
and eventually Gleichschaltung (coordination of society under Nazi
administration). At a minimum, the alacrity with which Pope Pius XI signed
the Vatican's Concordat with Hitler -- within the first six months of the
NSDAP's ascension to power in 1933 -- indicates the compatibility of most
Catholic and Nazi values. 52 This agreement should solicit reflection on the
conclusion (common among political historians) that "before the Nazi seizure
of power in 1933, the Catholic Church had been a major opponent of
Nazism." 53 In fact, Zentrum's parliamentary support for the Enabling Act
(allowing Hitler dictatorial power to pass laws without reference to the
president or Parliament) was crucial in winning Hitler dictatorial power. What
social historians of Nazi society must explain is the relative ease with which
religious organizations and middle-class women's organizations integrated
themselves into the Nazi state. In the effort to explain this seemingly
painless assimilation, recent histories have focused on antiSemitism. Koonz's
research has demonstrated quite clearly that this cannot be the starting
point of explanation. The racial policies of the Third Reich were often the
most controversial, not the most easily affirmed. It was the culture and
values of patriarchy that were the most widely held. By linking these to the
more radical ideology of racial purity, the ideological extreme of racism was
domesticated.
Gender Theory: Scott's Failed Reconciliation
Reagin's scholarship is illustrative of an interpretive chasm that is far more
pronounced among historians of German women than among historians of
U.S. women. Most women's historians in the United States view politics of
difference and politics of equality as two valid means of women's
empowerment.
For
example,
in
both
"Deconstructing
EqualityVersusDifference" and an essay about French feminist Olympe de Gouges,
Scott not only reconciles theoretically equal rights feminism and cultural
feminism, but also affirms the politics of difference as a strategy of
empowerment. 54 Such affirmation of the politics of difference is problematic,
because it reverses the original basis of gender theory. In Scott's essay
"Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis" and in Linda Alcoff 's
essay "Cultural Feminism Versus Post-Structuralism: The Identity Crisis in
Feminist Theory", gender theory was constituted as a methodological
rejection of cultural feminism. 55 Alcoff even went so far as to suggest that
cultural feminism is really a stealthy form of misogyny.
It is almost as though Scott, having produced a fractured sisterhood, set out
to repair it. In subsequent essays, she revised her position and
-160-
added to her theorizing cultural feminism as a legitimate strategy of
empowerment. This volte-face was not necessarily contradictory, although it
is certainly confounding. Seen in its totality, Scott's theory of gender
rejected cultural feminism as a methodology but embraced it as a means of
gaining power. This is why such cultural feminists as Allen and such
historians of gender as Reagin both can legitimately claim Scott as their
theoretical godmother.
While Scott's reconciliation of equal rights feminism with cultural feminism
has reestablished a political sisterhood of sorts, Reagin's work symbolizes
the persistence of irreconcilability in the historiography of German women.
Most historians of German women have defined the BDF as feminist,
regardless of its political inegalitarianism. Reagin does not. While she
acknowledges that some leaders within the BDF were feminist (Minna Cauer
and Anita Augspurg, for instance), Reagin refuses to recognize the BDF as a
"feminist" organization because it "rejected political equality for all women."
56
Unlike Scott, then, Reagin's variant of gender theory rejects cultural
feminism not only as a methodology but also as a strategy of empowerment.
The sisterly reconciliation that Scott theoretically negotiated among AngloAmerican women's historians does not exist among historians of German
women.
Reagin's unwillingness to embrace the politics of difference as '"feminist"
derives from the political context of German women's history. Scholars of
German women's history tend to be partisans of either the middle-class
cultural feminism of the BDF or the egalitarian politics of the proletarian
women's movement. Reagin's work, whose subtitle refers to class and
gender, is egalitarian in its outlook and highly class-conscious. Here, gender
theory amplifies the class character of cultural feminism. The persistence of
deep interpretive divisions among historians of the German women's
movement replicates, then, the class realities underlying German history.
Indeed, attention to the significance of class can shed new light on the
immanent political meanings of the Bock-Koonz debate. In her critique of
Mothers in the Fatherland, Bock associated Koonz"s historiographical
assumptions with communist-feminist Klara Zetkin's "plea for equality" (
Gleichheit). 57 Bock also associated communist demands for equality with
the Gleichheit of Jewish men and women in death. 58 In so doing, she
linguistically linked communist and Holocaust Gleichheit. Wittingly or not, in
her discursive identification of communism and the Holocaust, she invoked
rhetorical strategies common among conservatives in the Historikerstreit.
German historians Andreas Hilgruber and Ernst Nolte too deployed
anticommunist arguments to justify German militarism and mass murder.
Why would Bock associate Koonz's equal rights feminism with communism
when much of contemporary American feminism developed
-161-
as a rejection of residual patriarchy within the organizations of the New Left?
The reason for Bock's red-baiting is found in the historiography of German
women. The canonical English-language history of the German women's
movement is Richard J. Evans's The Feminist Movement in Germany, 18941933. 59 The English adjective "feminist" carries the assumption of a
universal sisterhood. The equivalent text in German is Barbara GrevenAschoff 's Die bürgerliche Frauenbewegung in Deutschland, 18941933. 60
The adjective "bourgeois" carries a class connotation that is absent from the
Anglo-American meaning of "feminist." In Bock's German cultural context,
the adjective "bourgeois" exists in a binary relationship to the term
"proletariat." In this world, to attack the BDF and insist on its cultural
connections to German fascism, as Koonz does, means, to Bock, that Koonz
identifies with a different women's movement: the one Zetkin chronicled in
Zur Geschichte der proletarischen Frauenbewegung Deutschlands (History of
German women workers' movement). 61 Of course, American equal rights
feminism has little in common with Zetkin's class politics. The fact that Bock
conflated the two indicates the persistence of class tensions in contemporary
German feminism. Koonz could not see the importance of Bock's red-baiting
or its parallel in the Historikerstreit because her work was not classconscious.
Beyond Sexual Identity? The Nazi Matrix of
Empowerment
Attention to the class character of women's politics in Germany is only one
means of conceiving of patriarchy as the empowerment of particular women
under Nazism. 62 Ultimately, Nazism must be defined as an ensemble or
matrix of values; a person's positionality, her/his particular experiential
reality, determined the priority of Nazism's various appeals., The multiple
appeal of Nazism derived from a weft of such hierarchical discourses as
heterosexism/homosexuality, German/foreign, Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft,
Christian/Jew-atheist, nationalism/ internationalism, patriarchy (male-female
difference) /equality, Überparteilichkeit (above party difference) /selfinterest, racial purity/ decadence, and order/disorder. With the matrix
concept, female guilt is no longer exclusively sex-based. Rather,
heterosexist, nationalist, racist, class, and religious elements of Nazi
ideology provided a shared politics of cultural superiority. One may place
undue emphasis on the patriarchal character of Nazism and forget that both
men and women participated in the cultural authorization of righteousness
and concomitant feelings of cultural superiority. Consequently, the category
"women," approached from either a feminist or gender frame of mind, is not
sufficient to determine women's identification with Na-162-
zism. 63 Women supporters of Nazism were attracted to and benefited from
ethnocentric identities that were not gender specific.
The matrix concept also reveals anti-Semitism's insufficiency as an
explanatory device. 64 An exclusively anti-Semitic interpretation of Nazism
often neglects the multiple symbolic meanings of "Jew" within Nazi ideology.
Anti-Semitism was not simply a precursor to the Holocaust; it was also a
heterogeneous politics of cultural containment and conservative
empowerment. In Nazi ideology, the Jew was simultaneously a greedy
capitalist, atheistic communist, urban intellectual, sexual pervert intent on
destroying the family, racial alien who threatened Aryan procreation, and
religious other. The Nazi construct "Jew" was made up of a symbolic layering
of ethnocentric subjectivities intent on the cultural containment of multiple
"others" as much as it was on the destruction of "Jewish bolshevism." The
polyvalent meaning of anti-Semitism reveals that Nazism's appeal was
multiple and complex. Nazi ideology was not an objective ideology that
possessed a universal meaning for all Germans. It was a form that could be
filled with various subjective contents. Therefore, a determination of the
appeal of Nazi ideology requires an individual assessment of what sociologist
Georg Simmel called the "psychological a priori" of historical meaning. 65 If
Nazism is viewed as a hydra of identities, then the question of guilt must be
preceded by a differentiated investigation of the mental frameworks of
experiences, for example, of which Nazism's faces solicited support in any
given case.
Nazi ideology was a potent mixture of various identities and policies
combining, like a chemical reaction, to create a toxic elixir authorizing racial
anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. Various banal ethnocentric identities
plowed the soil for the ideologically extreme doctrine of race and nourished
Hitler's willing executioners, not the other way around. Does the affirmation
of Nazism by women who felt empowered by patriarchal elements of Nazi
ideology comport with holding them guilty for the mass murder of Jews,
homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Communists, Slavs, and others? Is
support for the Nazis' affirmation of Christian motherhood tantamount to
personal participation in genocide? I think the answer in both cases is a
provisional no. The proviso, for example, stems from a need to take
responsibility for the role that Christian ideology and heterosexism played in
creating an uncritical and bigoted atmosphere of unwitting malevolence.
Conclusion
Diametrically opposed claims about the role of women in Nazi society were
the fulcrum of the Bock-Koonz debate. Cultural feminists like Bock
-163-
believed that the Nazi patriarchal regime victimized women. Koonz stood at
the threshold of an emerging gender theory, codified by Scott and Alcoff,
wherein German women were no longer exclusively seen as victims.
Gender theory facilitates a reexamination of questions of guilt in two ways:
(1) by positing patriarchy as a form of (conservative) women's
empowerment, and (2) by providing the theoretical foundation for a matrix
concept which theorizes the hydra-headed appeal of Nazism. Since the Nazi
patriarchal regime was connected to nonsexual forms of cultural superiority,
German women's affirmation of Nazi patriarchy does not amount to irrational
support of sexual inequality. It was the embrace of ethnocentric cultural
identities that empowered women by exalting their social status as mothers,
Germans, and Christians. To understand the appeal of the Nazi patriarchy to
women we need to reconstruct an individual psychological a priori, namely
the subjective meanings of Nazi ideology. This task cannot proceed without a
grasp of the relationship of Nazi patriarchy to other ethnocentric identities
that are not gender specific.
NOTES
1
Historikerstreit: Die Dokumentation der Kontroverse um die Einzigartigkeit der
nationalsozialistischen Judenvernichtung (Munich: Piper Verlag, 1987 ).
2
Joan Wallach Scott, "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis," in Gender and the
Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988 ), 28-52.
3
Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics (New
York: St. Martin's Press, 1986 ); and Mary Nolan, "The Historikerstreit and Social History,"
New German Critique 44 ( spring/ summer 1988 ): 51-80, quotation on 70.
4
See Lerke Gravenhorst and Carmen Tatschmurat, eds., Töchter-Fragen: NS-FrauenGeschichte (Freiburg, Germany: Kore, 1990 ). This volume represents an important shift
toward a more critical view of women's place in Nazi society. It also constitutes a
reconciliation between some German feminists and the Left. The self-conception of 1970s
German feminism was often anti-Left. The best examples of feminist antisocialism are
Mary Nolan, "Proletarischer Anti-Feminismus," in Frauen und Wissenschaft: Beiträge zur
Berliner Sommeruniversität für Frauen (Berlin: Courage Verlag, 1976 ), 356-77; and
Annemarie Tröger, "Dolchstoβlegende der Linken: Frauen haben Hitler an der Macht
gebracht," in ibid., 324-55. Tröger's rejection of women's culpability is consistent with
Bock's position. In fact, a Bock essay celebrating separatist culture appeared in the same
volume. In contrast to Bock, gender historians and socialists challenge -- although in
different ways -the idea that patriarchal culture entails equal domination of all women.
Moreover, they understand patriarchy as a system that is not solely the creation of men.
5
Scott, Gender and the Politics of History.
-164-
Linda Alcoff, "Cultural Feminism Versus Post-Structuralism: The Identity Crisis in
Feminist Theory," Signs 13, no. 3 ( 1988 ): 405-36.
7
Irene Stoehr, 'Organisierte Mütterlichkeit". Zur Politik der deutschen Frauenbewegung um
1900, in Frauen sucheh ihre Geschichte: Historische Studien zum 19. und 20. Jahrhundert,
ed. Karin Hausen (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1983 ), 221-49; and Elizabeth MeyerRenschhausen, Weibliche Kultur und soziale Arbeit: Eine Geschichte der Frauenbewegung
am Beispiel Bremens, 1810-1927 (Cologne, Germany: Böhlau Verlag, 1989 ). See,
especially, Stoehr, "Organisierte Mütterlichkeit,"219-24.
8
Gisela Bock, "Die Frauen und der Nationalsozialismus: Bemerkungen zu einem Buch von
Claudia Koonz," Geschichte und Gesellschaft 15 ( 1989 ): 563-79, quotation on 563.
9
Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland, xxxv, xxxiii.
10 Bock, "Die Frauen und der Nationalsozialismus,"563. Bock borrowed the quote from Jill
Stephenson, The Nazi Organisation of Women (London: Croom Helm, 1981 ), 18. See also
Jill Stephenson, Women in Nazi Society (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1975 ). Stephenson's
research does not uniformly support Bock's position. Unlike Bock, Stephenson contends in
both texts that the Nazis initiated pronatal policies that were beneficial to (Aryan) mothers.
11 Bock, "'Die Frauen und der Nationalsozialismus,"577.
12 Helen L. Boak, "'Our Last Hope': Women's Votes for Hitler -- A Reappraisal," German
Studies Review 12, no. 2 ( 1989 ): 289-310.
13 Gisela Bock, Zwangssterilisation im Nationalsozialismus: Studien zur Rassenpolitik und
Frauenpolitik (Opladen, Germany: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1986 ). See also Gisela Bock,
"Antinatalism, Maternity, and Paternity in National Socialist Racism," in Maternity and
Gender Policies: Women and the Rise of the European Welfare States, 1880s-1950s, ed.
Gisela Bock and Pat Thane (London: Routledge, 1991 ), 213-34.
14 Gisela Bock, "Racism and Sexism in Nazi Germany: Motherhood, Compulsory
Sterilization, and the State," in When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi
Germany, ed. Renate Bridenthal, Atina Grossmann, and Marian A. Kaplan (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1984 ), 271-96, quotation on 277.
15 Claudia Koonz, "Erwiderung auf Gisela Bock's Rezension von Mothers in the Fatherland",
Geschichte und Gesellschaft 18 ( 1992 ): 394-99, quotation on 395.
16 Scott, "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,"40.
17 Koonz, "Erwiderung auf Gisela Bock's Rezension,"394.
18 Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland, xix.
19 Claudia Koonz, "Some Political Implications of Separatism: German Women between
Democracy and Nazism, 1928-1934," in Women in Culture and Politics: A Century of
Change, ed. Judith Friedlander et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986 ), 26985, quotation on 281.
-165-
Claudia Koonz, "Mothers in the Fatherland: Women in Nazi Germany," in Becoming
Visible: Women in European History, ed. Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1977 ), 445-73, quotation on 448.
21 Claudia Koonz, "The Fascist Solution to the Woman Question in Italy and Germany", in
Becoming Visible: Women in European History, 2d ed., ed. Renate Bridenthal , Claudia
Koonz, and Susan Mosher Stuard (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987 ), 499-534.
22 Richard J. Evans, The Feminist Movement in Germany, 1894-1933 (London: Sage, 1976 ),
242-45.
23 This discursive analysis is central to all of her work on fascism. See, especially, Claudia
Koonz, "The Competition for Women's Lebensraum," in When Biology Became Destiny,
199-236. See also Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland, 451, Koonz, "The Fascist
Solution,"517, and Koonz, "Some Implications of Separatism,"272.
24 Actually, there were two housewives' organizations: Reichverband der Deutschen
Hausfrauverein (Imperial Organization of German Housewives, RDH) and Verband
Landwirtschaftlicher Hausfrauenvereine (Federation of Royal Housewives Unions, VLH).
The former had two hundred thousand and the latter ninety thousand members by 1931.
Together, the housewives' associations comprised the largest constituency of the BDF. The
second largest, Frauengruppen des Gewerkschaftsbundes der Angestellten (Women's Group
of Trade Union Employees, FGA), had about one hundred thousand members. No other
member organization had more than fifty thousand members. Evans, Feminist Movement,
241-42.
25 Bock, "Die Frauen und der Nationalsozialismus,"574.
26 Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland, 360.
27 Orthodox rabbis have sought to keep homosexual victimization out of a Holocaust
memorial. See Robert Pela, "Taking the Triangle out of the Star," Advocate, 9 December
1997 , 45-46.
28 Koonz, "Some Political Implications of Separatism,"282.
29 Claudia Koonz, "Fascist Solution,"529.
30 Bock, "Die Frauen und der Nationalsozialismus,"565.
31 Ibid., 564.
32 Gisela Bock, "'Women's History and Gender History:Aspects of an International Debate,"
Gender and History 1, no. 1 ( 1989 ): 7-30, quotation on 17, Gisela Bock , "Challenging
Dichotomies: Perspectives on Women's. History," in Writing Women's History:
International Perspectives, ed. Karen Offen, Ruth Roach Pierson,, and Jane Rendall
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991 ): 1-23. For a different use of the term "men's
history, see Ute Frevert, "Männergeschichte oder die Suche nach der ersten Geschichte," in
Was ist Gesellschaftsgeschichte?: Positianen, Themen, Analysen, ed. Manfred Hettling et al.
(Munich. C. H. Beck, 1991 ), 31-43.
-166-
On the theory of positionality, see Alcoff, "Cultural Feminism Versus PostStructuralism,"
esp. 428-36. Similar to literary poststructuralism, positional theory proposes that identity is
never singular but always complex and multiple. However, unlike literary poststructuralism,
positional theory explains the sociological and historical grounds of multiplicity. In
attempting to construct the different positionalities of German women, Georg Simmel has
been my theoretical guide. Georg Simmel, "Der Fragmentcharacter des Lebens," Logos 6 (
1916 /1917 ): 29-40, and Georg Simmel, Grundfragen der Soziologie (Individuum und
Gesellschaft) (Berlin: G. J. Göschen Verlag, 1917 ).
34 Annette Kuhn, "Der Antifeminismus als verborgene Theoriebasis des deutschen
Faschismus," in Frauen und Faschismus in Europa: Der faschistische Körper, ed. Leonore
Siegele-Wenschkewitz and Gerda Stuchlik (Pfaffenweiler, Germany: Centaurus, 1990 ), 3850.
35 David Schoenbaum, Hitler's Social Revolution: Class and Status in Nazi Germany, 19331939 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1967 ),187.
36 Ann Taylor Allen, "Materialism in German Feminist Movements," Journal of Women's
History 5, no. 2 ( 1993 ): 99-103, quotation on 102.
37 In the Marxist version of false consciousness, workers who do not support revolutionary
socialism are said to possess false consciousness. This assertion presumes two things: (1) an
objective basis for ethics (economic equality), and (2) an ideological absolution of
anticommunist workers. How are they absolved from supporting anticommunist politics?
Their conservative political decisions are explained as determinations of capitalist culture.
Feminist false consciousness functions similarly. It (1) presumes an objective foundation for
female solidarity and ethics (biology), and (2) absolves women of betraying that solidarity
by treating their pro-patriarchal predilections as either the social determinism of patriarchy
or as a resistance to patriarchy itself. In the latter case, "feminine" spheres, identities, and
values are conceptually positioned as antimale, as a counterforce to patriarchy.
38 See Hans-Jürgen Arendt, "Die 'Gleichschaltung' der bürgerlichen Frauenorganizationen in
Deutschland, 1933/34," Zeitschriftfiir Geschichtswissenschaft 17 ( July 1979 ): 615-27.
39 The theoretical tension between Allen and Koonz is not merely hypothetical. Allen's
Feminism and Motherhood is a self-conscious renunciation of Koonz's "predominantly
negative treatment" of German women's affirmation of a patriarchal domestic Reich. Ann
Taylor Allen, Feminism and Motherhood in Germany, 1800-1914 (New Brunswick, N.J.:
Rutgers University Press, 1991 ), 7.
40 Atina. Grossmann, "Feminist Debates about Women and National Socialism," Gender and
History 3, no. 3 ( 1991 ): 350-58, quotation on 354.
41 Robert G. Moeller, "'Reconstructing the Family in Reconstruction Germany: Women and
Social Policy in the Federal Republic, 1949-1955," Feminist Studies 15, no. 1 ( 1989 ): 13769, quotation on 169.
42 Gisela Bock, "Wages for Housework as a Perspective of the Women's Movement,"
-167-
Movement," in German Feminism: Readings in Politics and Literature, ed. Edith Ho shino
Altbach (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984 ), 246-50.
43 Of additional relevance is Doris Bergen's thesis that "sexism and a sharp division of gender
roles helped pave the way for racist antisemitism in the Church." See Doris L. Bergen,
Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1996 ), 68.
44 Alcide De Gasperi played a similar mnemonic role in post-war Italian politics. He spent the
war years in opposition to Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and became head of the
Christian Democrats after the war.
45 See Robert G. Moeller, Protecting Motherhood: Women and the Family in the Politics of
Postwar West Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993 ).
46 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley
(New York: Vintage Books, 1980 ), 8.
47 On the politics of spiritual motherhood during the Wilhelmine period, see Allen, Feminism
and Motherhood in Germany. On the role of Müttergeist (spiritual motherhood) in the
gender politics of National Socialism, see Kate Lacey, Feminine Frequencies: Gender,
German Radio, and the Public Sphere, 1923-1945 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan,
1996 ), 97-99.
48 Geoff Eley, "Review of Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics",
by Claudia Koonz, Signs 14, no. 1( 1989 ): 708-11, Geoff Eley and David Blackbourn , The
Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century
Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984 ).
49 Nancy Reagin, A German Women's Movement: Class and Gender in Hanover, 1880-1933
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press., 1995 ).
50 Ibid., 102, 97.
51 Voting for conservative parties was not necessarily a marker of antiNazism. For instance,
Nazi and Zentrum voters may have shared a range of values. None of the following texts
reference this possibility: Thomas Childers, The Nazi Voter: The Social Foundation of
Fascism in Germany, 1919-1933 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983 );
Jürgen W. Falter, "Die Wähler der NSDAP, 1928-1933: Sozialstruktur und parteipolitische
Herkunft," in Die nationalsozialistische Machtergreifung, ed. Wolfgang Michalka
(Paderborn, Germany: Schöningh, 1984 ): 47-59; or Richard F. Hamilton, Who Voted for
Hitler? (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982 ).
52 On 13 March 1933, Pope Pius XI praised Hitler's anticommunism. The Concordat was
signed 8 July 1933. Tim Kirk, The Longman Companion to Nazi Germany (New York:
Longman, 1995 ),127.
53 Jackson J. Spielvogel, Hitler and Nazi Germany: A History (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:
Prentice Hall, 1988 ), 111.
54 For a masterful application of this theory, see Joan Wallach Scott, "'French Feminism and
the Rights of 'Man': Olympe de Gouges's Declarations," History Workshop 28 ( autumn
1989 ): 1-21. In a different essay, Scott argues that feminist
-168-
studies should move beyond the dichotomy of difference versus egalitarianism. However,
she does not explain why German women's organizations were unable to do this. Joan
Wallach Scott, "Deconstructing Equality-Versus-Difference: Or, The Uses of Poststructural
Theory for Feminism," Feminist Studies 14, no. 1 ( 1988 ): 33-50.
55 For example, Alcoff argues that the essentialist politics of cultural feminism may solidify
"an important bulwark for sexist oppression. . . . Women have always been defined as a
subjugated difference within a binary opposition: man/ woman, culture/nature, positive
/negative, analytic/ intuitive. To assert an essential gender difference as cultural feminists do
is to reinvoke this oppositional structure . . . [which is] controlled by a misogynist
discourse." Linda Alcoff, "Cultural Feminism Versus Post-Structuralism,"414, 417, 423;
and Scott "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis."
56 Reagin, A German Women's Movement, 263.
57 Bock, "Die Frauen und der Nationalsocializmus,"570.
58 Ibid., 575.
59 Evans, Feminist Movement.
60 Barbara Greven-Aschoff, Die bürgerliche Frauenbewegung in Deutschland, 1894-1933
(Göttingen, Germany: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1981 ).
61 Klara Zetkin, Zur Geschichte der proletarischen Frauenbewegung Deutschlands (Frankfurt:
Verlag Marxistische Blätter, 1984 ).
62 Most working women affirmed motherhood ideology but were oppressed by their inability
to meet its ideal: stay-at-home motherhood. The Nazis did not organize middle- and upperclass women for work because Nazi cultural legitimacy derived from the conference of
special class rights. One of those was the right not to have to work outside the home. See
Leila f. Rupp, "'I Don't Call That Volksgemeinschaft': Women, Class, and the War in Nazi
Germany", in Women, War, and Revolution, ed. Carol R. Berkin and Clara Maria Lovett
(New York: Holmes & Meier, 1980 ), 37-53, and Leila J. Rupp, Mobilizing Women for
War: German and American Propaganda, 1939-1945 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1978 ).
63 Denise Riley, "Am I that Name?": Feminism and the Category of "Women" in History
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988 ). This text is perhaps the best
articulation of the incompatibility of gender theory, with its assumption of women's multiple
and differentiated positionalities, and "women" as a feminist category.
64 Two recent histories of the Holocaust focus narrowly on anti-Semitism. See John Weiss,
Ideology of Death: Why the Holocaust Happened in Germany (Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1996 );
and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the
Holocaust (New York: Knopf, 1996 ). Of the two, Weiss does a better job of analyzing the
overlap of anti-Semitism and other hatreds.
65 Georg Simmel, Die Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie: Eine erkenntnistheoretische
Studie (Leipzig, Germany: Duncker & Humblot, 1892 ), 2-4.
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