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Frauen: German Women Recall the Third Reich, by Alison Owings. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993.

While in Germany conducting research for my dissertation in the late 1970s, I discovered an unfilled niche in literature on the Third Reich: the experiences and perspectives of women. Over the past twenty years, this lacuna has also been noted by other writers and scholars; in an attempt to address it, they have produced both creative works, such as Christa Wolf's early autobiographical novel Kindheitsmuster (1976, Patterns of Childhood), and scholarly studies such as historian Claudia Koonz's major contribution Mothers in the Fatherland (1986). Despite a wave of literary and scholarly publications on women and the Third Reich in the 1980s and 1990s, many aspects of the topic remain to be explored. Recent debates in German feminist circles over women's alleged victim status in the Nazi era (see L. Gravenhorst, ed., T"chterFragen: NS-Frauen-Geschichte, 1990) also suggest the need for further revisionist work on women's roles.

Alison Owings's book, Frauen, makes an important and timely contribution to this ongoing research. Certainly Owings is not the first to publish interviews with German women about their experiences in the Third Reich. Oral history researchers' interests in this topic have been diverse (see, for example, the work of Gerda Szepansky, Frauen leisten Widerstand, 1933-1945: Lebensgeschichten nach Interviews und Dokumenten (1983); idem, ed., Blitzm„del, Heldenmutter, Kriegerwitwe: Frauenleben im Zweiten Weltkrieg (1987); Angelika Ebbinghaus, ed., Opfer und T„terinnen: Frauenbiographien des Nationalsozialismus (1987); and Hanover sociologist Annemarie Tr"ger's extensive work with the oral history projects in Berlin (1978-80) and Hanover (1982). Frauen contributes to this interview-based literature most obviously because it is in English and therefore accessible to a larger American audience. A more subtle contribution is the unique manner in which Owings has dealt with the interview texts. Frauen is, in the first place, a collection of interviews about the Nazi era, but it is also very much a book about interviewing and about the way in which the author has collected, shaped, and interpreted her material.

Following in feminist footsteps, Owings flouts nearly every aspect of traditional interview paradigms (see H. Roberts, Doing Feminist Research) and does so with success: she repeats contacts with interviewees, accepts extensive hospitality from them, provides them information, and apparently establishes long-term friendships with several interviewees. Furthermore, she provides an elaborate context for each interview at the outset by describing the interviewees' homes, clothing, deportment and language, reminiscent of Claudia Koonz's similar "picturing" of her interview with Gertrud Scholtz-Klink at the beginning of Mothers in the Fatherland. Proceeding to the questions and answers, Owings weaves the verbatim excerpts selected from each interviewee into a flowing narrative based apparently on extensive paraphrasing. The author's own questions are also represented in paraphrased form, in third person, without quotation marks (in contrast to the interviewees' responses in quotation marks and first person):

She really learned of the gassings only after the war?

"I first learned about them after the war."

What else had she known, and when, and how? (110).

Despite occasional, disorienting pronoun "salads" of she and I, this stylistic approach generally results in an easy flow of text that is eminently more readable than the standard interview format. Owings has also done the work of interpreting the responses--a task often left to the reader in published interviews.

Oral-history specialists in folklore have in recent years focussed increasingly on oral narrative as performance (see Elizabeth C. Fine, The Folkore Text; From Performance to Print) and have marked texts with complex systems of symbols that reveal both paralinguistic features (vocal characterizers, voice qualifiers, articulation, emphasis, pitch, pauses) and kinesic features (combinations of body movements, facial expressions). Although Owings does not pursue the theoretical implications of the interviews as constructed performances, she does, like folklorists, "mark" the interview texts, not with symbols, but by means of various linguistic and textual devices. She notes whispers, rising or falling tone, sniffs, "aggrieved smirks," chuckles, laughter, and pauses, often moving beyond mere notation to interpretation: "After savoring her remark" or "she paused, noticeably struggling." To authenticate her material and engage the reader, the author leaves ja and nein untranslated and also includes repeated rhetorical tag words (ja?, nicht?, gel?), both of which are practices I find somewhat distracting, although I understand her intent. To the same purpose she creatively mimics German pronunciation (sexy becomes zexy 402), marks verbal emphasis through orthography (never becomes nevvvver 373), and translates numerous German idioms literally ("You simply cannot picture it," 429, and "The Volk, of course, ran along," 120). To German speakers the results of this latter practice are often quite jarring ("They did that that they could," 120), but I am not sure how non-German speakers would react.

Owings's journalistic style, which includes strings of short sentences, dramatic repetitions, alliteration, and word plays ("While her husband departed from his doorstep to his duty, German soldiers, looking 'thin and gaunt,' arrived from their duty to his doorstep," 208), enlivens the text, although some of her innovative language transgresses idiomatic usage ("His letters . . . singe with frustration," 252; "she emitted organization and no nonsense," 387; or "with varying morsels of impudence or despair," 469). Too, the author's strong penchant for alliteration seems at times to trivialize or undercut the seriousness of her subject matter: "beatific bequest," "ballyhooed birthright," "cauldron of contradictions," (xxv) "crates of cowardice" (469).

Owings is hardly self-effacing; rather, her presence informs the entire text through interpretive commentary, value judgments, and even observations on the mechanics of the interview ("The tape ran out," 277). I admire the way in which she has smoothly paraphrased large segments of the interviews to enhance readability--I think academics in various disciplines who work with interview materials could learn from her--but it is also in this area that I have some reservations. Although she has retained many simple German expressions in the original for their "flavor," she neglects to cite the original German for key responses. Provided only with paraphrases and English translations throughout the work, many scholarly readers will find themselves yearning for the German original upon which the author bases her interpretive comments. Further, the selection of interviewees seems to have been due largely to serendipity and felicitous contacts; the author seems not to have attempted a systematic or rigorously balanced representation of geographical region, class, political orientation, age, or role (victim, resister, perpetrator). Because of the circumstances under which the pre-unification DDR interviewees were identified (by the government), I think that those materials have been largely compromised--an issue which the author does not address. Finally, the criteria she used for selecting which interviews to include in Frauen are not explained, and I remain curious about Owings's choices of topics in individual interviews; the only topic that reappears in nearly all of the interviews is anti-Semitism.

Owings makes it clear, by including explanations of simple German words ("Doch is an intensified ja," 290), that she assumes her target audience to be totally unfamiliar with German. One could argue that Frauen, although published by a university press, is in fact not an academic book. Its journalistic style alone suggests a hybrid. Additionally, although Owings indicates in her introduction and in several footnotes that she is familiar with critical literature about women in the Nazi era, she chooses not to integrate this knowledge into her interpretive comments in the text. As the author herself observes, however, "If I were an anthropologist, historian, or psychoanalyst, the women would have been approached, edited, and/or analyzed differently. But I am not, and they were not" (xxxix). To ask this work to be more, or "other," is perhaps unjust. My several reservations notwithstanding, this book does contribute significantly to the growing literature on women in the Third Reich; the author's "secret interviewing technique" (484) has clearly proved itself fruitful by the sheer volume of oral material which the twenty-seven interviews in Frauen offer.

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Dr. Elaine Martin, emartin@woodsquad.as.ua.edu