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Women Writers and Fascism: Reconstructing History. By Marie-Luise Gaettens. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1995. ix + 185 pages.

The fifty years since the end of World War II have been difficult ones for Germans: they have had to face the world and themselves concerning their beliefs and actions during the twelve National Socialist years; they were obliged to accept unconditional defeat in a major war, military occupation by foreign troops for numerous years, and a forty-year, brutal division of their country along a virtually impenetrable border; and finally, they have had to confront, both ideologically and practically, the upheaval of reunification--the forced merger of two radically different social systems, economic structures, and worldviews--with the concomitant fears and apprehensions of their immediate neighbors, as well as the larger world community, that Germany’s reputed authoritarianism might once again devolve into fascism. If ever a people were fraught with anxieties and tensions about its national identity, surely it is the Germans in the twentieth century.

Of the three psychic crises in Germany’s recent history, it is perhaps the first, coming to terms with the Nazi era (Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung), that has been the most difficult. Unlike Japan, however, where public silence about the war years has, until very recently, been comprehensive and nearly absolute, writers in Germany began almost immediately at the war’s end to bring painful topics before the public for discussion. In the fifties this effort was spearheaded by members of the Gruppe 47, a voluntary association of writers dedicated to a new, antifascist Germany. Some of this group’s members have garnered international recognition, especially but not only for their literary confrontations of the Nazi era: Guenter Grass, Heinrich Boell, and Siegfried Lenz, to name only three. If the fifty years since the war’s end have produced a rich literature about the Nazi era and the war, they have also produced scholarship about that literature, of which Marie-Luise Gaetten’s book is an example. Gaetten’s approach to the subject is unique in that she focusses on the concept of fascism in her analysis, and she expands our understanding of German fascism in particular by linking National Socialist practices with the postwar East-German totalitarian, or fascist, state. Gaettens constructs her argument, through a close reading of four German texts by women, that fascism is closely related to and dependent upon a patriarchal value system, and it is thus latent in every patriarchal society. Closely related is the argument that this fascism-patriarchy connection is laid bare only through feminist analysis, specifically in the feminist writing of history. To this end Gaettens views the authors and their narrators as historians instead of primarily as the tellers of stories or creators of literature.

Although Women Writers and Fascism is a book about German fascism(s), Gaettens begins with a lengthy discussion of Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas (1936). Her reasons are several: Woolf’s essay is, even today, one of the most perspicacious and well-argued analyses of the inherently gendered aspects of fascism; Woolf’s text demonstrates the extent to which that history is always a construction; and, finally, Three Guineas "offers a model of how women can read their history out of male-dominated discourses" (3). Gaettens’ own book has a dual focus: a reconstruction of women’s historical experiences (retrieving the past) and an investigation of gender within historical discourse (the texts’ metanarratives). Three Guineas’ clever and articulate narrator offers a paradigm for the feminist historians in the German texts that Gaettens examines. Woolf ‘s work proves especially useful in this project, because not only does she draw parallels between the family--which reproduces gendered subjects--and the fascist state, but she also clearly identifies the roles of nationalism, violence, and war ("one of the main enterprises through which men constitute themselves as historial subjects" 29) in fascist ideology. Although many scholars today know Woolf’s text well enough to quote it from memory, Gaettens’ reiterative summary of Three Guineas’s main points will not prove redundant because along the way she links Woolf’s ideas with those of theorists such as Walter Benjamin and Hayden White, and also with feminist critics such as Toril Moi, Linda Hutcheon and Teresa de Lauretis. She relies most heavily on Benjamin in this chapter, noting in particular the parallels between their concepts of progress: "Both critics are vitally shaped by the experience of fascism, which they do not see as an accident of history. Instead, for them it fits into the logic of progress that has been dominant in Western culture since the Enlightenment. Both use strikingly similar figures, Woolf ‘the procession of the sons of educated men’ and Benjamin ‘the triumphal procession,’ to point to the connection between progress, a notion of history as unfolding in linear time, and the violence that accompanies it" (32). In addition to providing a carefully delineated example of how a feminist reader can reinterpret male history, Gaettens also shows in this introductory chapter through the numerous contemporary theoretical parallels (Linda Hutcheon: "Those in power control history." 35), just how astute, how feminist and how progressive Virginia Woolf’s thought was.

In the remaining chapters the author turns to four German texts, the first two of which are fictionalized autobiographies about the Nazi era. In both Ruth Rehmann’s Der Mann auf der Kanzel (The Man in the Pulpit) and Christa Wolf’s Kindheitsmuster (Patterns of Childhood), the historical events are shaped by an adult narrator’s perspective, and they are both framed by a trip back to the childhood town. Of the two texts Rehmann’s is certainly much less well known, both in Germany and in the United States. It was translated into English only in 1997, and in Germany Rehmann is virtually unknown compared to Wolf. Rehmann’s readership for this book has consisted primarily of feminists and protestant clergy. The explanation for the latter group is that in the book, she reconstructs the life of her father, a protestant minister, in an attempt to understand his lack of opposition to the fascists in the Third Reich. Like Virginia Woolf, Rehmann goes back to the 19th century to lay bare the authoritarian, antidemocratic roots of 20th-century German behaviors and beliefs. Like Woolf, Rehmann was also the "daughter of an educated man,"--in this case, the youngest somewhat indulged daughter. In our 1991 interview Rehmann said that her intense love for and identification with her father had made it difficult for her to indict him for his culpable role in the National Socialist era. One feels this intellectual-emotional tension throughout the work, a tension which Gaettens calls "the problematic of the daughter-father relationship" (68). Gaettens effectively uses Marcuse’s analysis of the patriarchal nature of Protestantism to elucidate Rehmann’s gendered struggle with her father, whose (divinely legitimated) rule cannot even be questioned. Max Weber (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism) provides the further link of subservience to authority, a tenet of Lutheran ethics, which explains the pastor-father’s enthusiasm for World War I and acceptance of World War II. And finally, Gaettens’ interpretation of Der Mann auf der Kanzel relies on Habermas’ ideas about the connections between personal and public history: "Our own life is linked inwardly, and not just by accidental circumstances, with that context of life in which Auschwitz was possible. Our form of existence is connected with the form of existence of our parents and grandparents by a mesh of family, local, political and intellectual traditions which is difficult to untangle--by an historical milieu, therefore, which in the first instance has made us what we are and who we are today" (71-2). The narrator as historian reveals that the adolescent daughter’s awakening sexuality creates a sense of guilt through which her judgment of her father must be filtered. The daughter’s sexuality vis-à-vis a fascist or not antifascist father is central in a number of autobiographical works about the Nazi era, of which Margarete Hannsmann’s Ein Kind wird Nazi is a notable example. For Rehmann (and for Gaettens), personal and political power relationships mirror one another: "the daughter’s emerging sexuality parallels the father’s physical and professional decline, which in turn parallels the decline of Germany during World War II" (70).

Like Rehmann who uses the dialogue between the narrator and her teenage leftist son as a framing device, Christa Wolf in Kindheitsmuster draws a parallel between her protagonist’s (Nelly) relationship with her daughter Lenka and another mother-daughter relationship, that of Nelly with her own mother, Charlotte. Gaettens focusses in this discussion particularly on the question of class, in this case the petite bourgeoisie, and on the socializing function of the family. Using Kristeva’s term "diagonal" to explain Charlotte’s non-alignment with National Socialism (84), she traces how Nelly is made into an ideal "German girl" (92). As in Rehmann’s book, sexuality constitutes an important theme in Kindheitsmuster. Specifically, sexuality is linked with both race ("signifiers dealing with sexuality were invested with racial meaning under National Socialism" 98) and gender ("In the construction of the German woman, controlled [beherrscht] and carnal [triebhaft] form a key opposition" 86). Gaettens discusses the "contamination" of the word normal by National Socialism and links concepts of normality to Foucault who wrote that "in modern societies power operates largely through normalization and . . . the offense against normality has become the key offense in modern societies" 105). Christa Wolf emphasizes, as does Virginia Woolf, the links between hierarchical families and larger (hierarchical) social institutions, but unlike Woolf, she underlines the importance of the protagonist’s role as a mother, and thus as a transmitter of history. According to Gaettens, Wolf believes that "women should actively use the nonsynchronism [Ernst Bloch, Ungleichzeitigkeit 84] of their history as a tool of resistance" (115). While the role of the narrator as feminist historian is overall less explicit in the discussion of Kindheitsmuster, it does emerge clearly in the juxtaposition of the narrator’s views with those of her brother, Lutz--an opposition that echoes Benjamin’s (and V. Woolf’s) critique of progress: "Lutz’s vision of history as a continuous movement toward technological progress endlessly perpetuates the master-slave relationship. In contrast, the sister assumes the perspective of the defeated" (113). This chapter concludes with a discussion--for which many readers will have been looking--of Christa Wolf’s political views, her blindness to the shortcoming of socialism, her identification with the GDR’s postwar identity, and what effect this socio-political orientation has on her role as feminist historian.

Helga Schubert’s Judasfrauen (Judas Women) represents a multi-layered attempt at historical reassessment. Schubert has created a genre-spanning form consisting of ten historical "cases" that she researched involving women who denounced people to the Nazis. Schubert calls her reconstructions "parables of betrayal" (122). Judasfrauen overlays NS-fascism with GDR fascism, because Schubert wrote the book before the 1989 revolution in East Germany. Her intention was to use texts about a previous (repressive) era to comment on present (repressive) conditions, a means of camouflage often used by writers under totalitarian regimes. The interest of this past-present parallel is, however, perhaps also the book’s downfall: although written before 1989, it was published only after the fall of the socialist regime, which undercut the purpose and necessity of the structure. The work of the feminist historian in this text, unlike the preceding texts, is more physical than intellectual: the search for historical documents, applying for permission to read the documents once located, dealing with archival authorities and numerous restrictions. The historian’s role compared with the power of the state apparatus which generates official history, is clearly that of "unofficial historian."

The concluding chapter about Monika Maron’s Stille Zeile 6 (Still Close 6) is extremely brief--only ten pages--but provides a tantalizing glimpse of yet another feminist historian’s role. Maron’s protagonist, Rosalind Polkowski, is now an academically-trained, "official" GDR historian. Gaettens outlines three possible positions for this historian: 1) Rosa works at a GDR research institute which requires totally assimilated speech; 2) she quits in protest and is thus reduced to silence; and 3) in taking a job to record the memoirs of a retired GDR official, she "engages in an active struggle with official history" (153). Gaettens also suggests a fourth position for a feminist historian, which remains necessarily somewhat nebulous, because it is by definition constantly in flux: "[it] is not really inside the narrative itself but instead the position of the author of the text as a whole because it incorporates the other positions . . . female subjectivity is not presented as something stable but is represented as something in process, forming itself out of the work on the historical discourses" (156-57). For all of the authors Gaettens discusses, but especially for Maron and Virginia Woolf, women can "escape the fatal violence that is at the core of patriarchal history" only if they can resist being made victims and simultaneously refuse to become victors. Christa Wolf writes in Kindheitsmuster, that "the rows of book spines in the libraries are no longer measured in yards, but in miles. In spite of everything, the war is still unexplained, insufficiently discussed . . . one feels a sort of omission in the writing, an avoidance of certain things which shake up the soul anew" (171). It seems clear that Gaettens intends her feminist historians to offer an alternative and to oppose the assumption of a linear history predicated on a masculinist world view in which the following would be considered natural and necessary: competition, aggression, dominance, discrimination against (racial, ethnic, gendered) others, violence, and war-as-virility-proving ground. In short they offer a reinterpretation of history that may "shake up the soul anew."

While the four texts the author has chosen to explore obviously share certain traits, she does not anticipate the question some readers will pose as to why she chose these texts as opposed to others that might seem as well suited to her analysis. This issue is all the more interesting since all of the German authors she discusses except Ruth Rehmann lived in the GDR (Maron ultimately emigrated to the West). Do women living under oppressive regimes make keener feminist historians? Are they more alert to the presence of fascist tendencies in patriarchal practices? Do they write with greater sensitivity and more subtlety because of censorship? On another topic, I found Gaettens’ comment at the close of her introduction intriguing: "I believe there is a connection between the way we are stuck in our current public debates about sexuality and Christa Wolf’s resigned assessment that managers and politicians will once again take over the business of making history, a business for which they always need a fatherland. This book is also . . . a protest against the tyranny of involuntrary childbearing [Gebaerzwang], and it represents my attempt to make sense of the connection between this tyranny and the political and discursive structures that always seem to accompany it" (6). I agree with the author that "fascism marks the intense politicization of sexuality and the body," and I would have welcomed a concluding chapter that would have made explicit that phenomenon in contemporary "fascisms." But perhaps this is the seed of Gaettens’ next book.

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