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The question of German women’s roles in the Nazi era--victims, perpetrators, or something in between--catapults us directly into the middle of the "HistorikerInnen debate," that controversy over whether women were primarily victims of Nazi patriarchal, hysteria or whether they were perpetrators alongside men, enabling National Socialist policies and abetting the war effort. Based on extensive reading, I have come to the conclusion that the majority of German women would fall under the rubric of what Christina Thürmer-Rohr terms "Mittäterschaft," or "co-perpetration" (1). While many women were simultaneously victims and agents--their own postwar memories of National Socialism focus on victimhood--their actual roles during the Nazi era involved in many cases perpetration. By refining the concept of perpetration to co-perpetration one can, however, still acknowledge the virulent sexism inherent to National Socialist ideology as well as the implementation of policies which victimized women.

Although the question of roles is extremely vital, it is also somewhat tangential to my present interest. The women authors about whom I am currently writing all belong to the group Elizabeth Heinemann defines as "German women who were politically and racially acceptable to the [Nazi] regime" (2). Their levels of engagement with National Socialism vary, however, ranging from mere bystander to full and active perpetrator. In saying that the question of women’s roles is tangential, I mean that I am less interested in the historically authenticated roles themselves than in the way the authors have chosen to re-collect, re-construct, and re-present those roles--how they have made literature out of a very difficult, even painful, period of their lives. The question of roles is also marginalized in this discussion by the fact that the three authors I have chosen to discuss, Margarete Hannsmann, Carola Stern, and Renate Finckh, all self-identify as complicitous participants, if not outright perpetrators (3). As Carola Stern said in our interview: "I didn’t want to die without having said that I participated in it" (4). Stern, Finckh, and Hannsmann exhibit other commonalities: they were born within a five year period; they grew up in rural areas and in Nazi families; they were all active in the BDM (Hitler youth group for girls), including leadership roles; and they all published autobiographical works in the late 1970s to mid-80s that were successful, although not best-sellers, on the German market. Although they are linked through the autobiographical undertaking, they come to it from unique backgrounds: Stern had enjoyed a successful journalism career, and her only previous non-journalistic writing consisted of biographies; Hannsmann had established a reputation as a poet--this was only her second attempt at prose; and Finckh was a housewife whose only writing experience was the maintaining of a family diary.

Of initial interest is the nature of the texts these writers have produced: are they documentaries, autobiographies, or memoirs? Gore Vidal has distinguished between memoir and autobiography as follows: "A memoir is how one remembers one’s own life, while an autobiography is history, requiring research, dates, facts double-checked" (5). If we accept Vidal’s distinction, Hannsmann and Stern have written "memoiristic" autobiographies, while Finckh has produced what might be called an autobiographical memoir. There is clearly a "memoir"aspect in all of the works, that is, an effort to represent one’s own life, as well as the concomitant sense that it is important enough to merit telling. Equally strong is the impetus to contribute one’s life to the writing of a larger history, especially because these texts are not mere documentaries. Through the use of irony, chronological distortion, and the controlling presence of an insightful adult narrator, these texts gain a complexity which exceeds history. Psychologist Dan McAdams has emphasized the shaping powers of memories:

The unfolding drama of life is revealed more by the telling than by the actual events told. Stories are not merely "chronicles," like a secretary’s minutes of a meeting, written to report exactly what transpired and at what time. Stories are less about facts and more about meanings. In the subjective and embellished telling of the past, the past is constructed--history is made. (6)

Evelyn Cobley concurs, arguing that "objective" memory is impossible:

Finckh, Stern, and Hannsmann all seem aware of this subjectivity, but Stern and Hannsmann have done more of the "research" required by Gore Vidal’s definition to transform memoir into autobiography and autobiography into history. Stern interviewed family members, returned to the village where she grew up and talked to old friends and neighbors there, and finally, she "interviewed" her husband in sessions that became emotionally so intense that he complained she reminded him of his Nazi interrogators. Hannsmann relied more on written documents, including newspapers of the time, but especially on a suitcase full of personal documents of all sorts pertaining to her life: "My whole life--through bomb shelters, numerous apartments--I dragged along a small suitcase [of] school essays, diaries, calendars, and family letters, from which I have integrated extracts into this book" (Kind 17).

The very existence of this suitcase and the nature of its contents raise a crucial autobiographical issue: how does one narrate events forty years after they occurred? And a second, related question: how does one understand, and represent the person one was as a child and adolescent? Margarete Hannsmann writes about her suitcase: "There is only this choice: do I attempt to tell afresh what I find in the suitcase, to tone down through reformulation the pure, torturous kitsch of those days, of that period of my life--even give it style, or do I just present it the way I find it, how it is, how it was; truth [Wahr-heit], reality and literature, the object of numerous considerations, discussions, symposia, essays, complaints, and self-accusations. I choose the attempt to achieve a piece of literature after all by embedding truth in my story" (Kind 114-15). Carola Stern shares Hannsmann’s concern: in describing a scene in which her own behavior was less than admirable, she observed, "this experience has played a large role in my life, because one becomes so unsure of oneself. . . . In that respect it was very difficult to find the right tone toward myself." For Renate Finckh, who as a child and adolescent, was the most fervent Nazi adherent of the three writers, the difficulty of representing her youthful fanaticism has been extreme. In our interview she explained,

Carola Stern corroborates Finckh’s conundrum from her own writing experience: "Nothing is more incomprehensible than a lost/former enthusiasm." These three writers solve the problems of narrative perspective and identity, of structure and tone, in several commonly shared ways: first, they frame their autobiographical texts with counter-autobiographies, either explicit or implicit; secondly, their narrators maintain ongoing dialogues with their adolescent selves, in which the real construction of history takes place; and thirdly, they use various memory devices to construct bridges not only between the past and present, but also with the future.

In her book Representing War, Evelyn Cobley emphasizes "form as the carrier of ideological meaning" (War 18), arguing that narrative structural choices carry ideological implications. Although she is writing about World War I texts, her observations pertain equally to World War II narratives, at least to the ones under discussion here. Stern, Finckh, and Hannsmann have all framed their texts with alternative or counter-texts which provide them a priori with a socio-historical contextualization. Carola Stern’s In den Netzen der Erinnerung [In the Nets of Memory, 1986] is a dual autobiography/biography in which she interweaves the narrative of her own Nazi childhood with the equally compelling narrative of her husband’s anti-fascist childhood and communist youth. The very structure of this work rebuts the arguments of those who claim National Socialism was forced upon an unwilling German populace. Stern’s text demonstrates, page for page, that there were choices to be made; each time she made a choice, her husband Heinz made a different one. Margarete Hannsmann’s Der helle Tag bricht an; ein Kind wird Nazi [The new day dawns; a child becomes a Nazi, 1982] also relies on a counter-text as frame, but it remains implicit unless one knows the genesis of the work. When her partner, the graphic artist HAP Grieshaber asked her to explain how she could possibly have been a Nazi adherent when he himself had been ardently anti-fascist, she uses the suitcase of documents to explain her life. Thus the ensuing autobiography was written in response to, in a sense against, the framing figure of the present-day lover as well as his earlier anti-fascist life experience. His questions, probings, and objections are implicit between the lines.

Unlike Stern and Hannsmann who look backward to the Nazi era for their counter-texts, Renate Finckh looks forward to a different totalitarian ideology. She initially wrote Mit uns zieht die neue Zeit [The new era begins with us, 1979] not for publication but for the edification of her eight children. The immediate impetus lay in three events linked to the year 1977: her son Ulrich had become a communist, and she believed he exhibited the same blind idealism that she herself had felt in her youth for National Socialism; a documentary film was shown in Germany in that year that purported to show how seductive National Socialism was, but had the opposite effect because it seduced the viewers anew; and finally 1977 was "the year of German terrorism." Finckh felt that the young perpetrators of these crimes could have been her own children. This future-oriented context, in which two types of misguided idealism are paralleled, also argues in favor of reading Finckh’s text as a memoir, if one expands Gore Vidal’s earlier definition (9). Noting that the word "memoir" has the same etymology as "memory," Evelyn Cobley writes, "The memoir as commemoration serves as a memorial, a monument, or memento to the dead and as a warning or reminder for the living" (War 8). The "dead" being commemorated in Finckh’s text, however, are not the war dead; rather, it is her own childhood and an irretrievable part of her own early identity that has "died." Fifteen years of her life must be negated, denied, and repressed out of existence. Just how traumatic such an erasure of one’s past is, has been shown through recent research by psychologist Daniel Schacter and his colleagues on the self-defining role of memory, which they summarize as: "our sense of ourselves depends crucially on the subjective experience of remembering our pasts" (34). At the age of twenty, Finckh’s protagonist Cornelia finally awakens to the brutal reality of National Socialism and begins a tentative identity quest: "I sought myself but couldn’t find myself. I found only guilt and shame. And sadness. Because it’s sad to lose oneself in such youthful years. Many experienced this. Many were dead. I was left over and was supposed to live. But how does one live after a youth like that?" (Mit uns 190). This perspective belongs to the more mature and insightful narrator who interprets and judges the protagonist’s youthful idealism.

In fact, the "dialogue" which the mature, adult narrator establishes with the protagonist provides a site for addressing issues such as guilt, responsibility, confession and the vagaries of memory. The authors rely on a panoply of traditional literary devices to maintain this dialogue: rhetorical questions, irony, anaphora, and an intruding narrator. The perspective of the narrator, distanced in time and thus enjoying the advantage of hindsight, suggests a dialogic relationship with the protagonist, engages the reader by calling for interpretation and judgment, and also calls into question the reliability and veracity of memory.

Memory plays a crucial role in any autobiography, but especially in those dealing with traumatic experiences and in those written after many intervening years. Psychologist Daniel Schacter’s ironically titled Searching for Memory (1996), succinctly summarizes research on memory for those outside the discipline. His chapters on autobiography and emotional memories are particularly useful for the study of narratives arising from and dealing with the Nazi era. We might begin with two of Schacter’s findings: "we have now come to believe that memory is not a single or unitary faculty of the mind, as was long assumed. Instead, it is composed of a variety of distinct and dissociable processes and systems" (Searching 5). Thus memory is not a place (i.e. static), rather it is a process (i.e. dynamic). Secondly:

Thus, we cannot retrieve an event from the past; we can only recall the way we experienced it. What are we to make,then, of the numerous authors who say that they "see" previous events in their minds and then write from this visual image? Renate Finckh’s book begins: "There, where the memory is hidden in the jungle of dark feelings, occasionally individual pictures light up in me. Small, frayed pictures. I can enter into them." According to Schacter, emotional memories are encoded differently than normal ones and result in so-called "flashbulb memories," which freeze "whatever happens at the moment when we learn of the shocking event" (Searching 195). The flashbulb memories resulting from the Nazi era would have involved not only learning of shocking events but also experiencing them. The authors’ tender years may have intensified the shock and thus the retained image. Schacter writes: "traumatic recollections are characterized by intense and absorbing visual imagery" (Searching 216). Hannsmann has vivid waking dreams of executions, Finckh sees pictures of people behind her closed eyelids who move in on her from all sides (Mit uns 164), and Stern notes that certain images have haunted her for years. Indeed, one of the strengths of these writers is their ability to convey stark visual images through words.

According to psychologists Martin Conway and David Rubin, there are three kinds of autobiographical knowledge: lifetime periods, general events, and individual episodes. The highest level of the hierarchy, lifetime periods, contains extended segments of life such as years or decades; general events includes composite or extended events over days, weeks or months; at the lowest level individual episodes measure seconds, minutes or hours. Recollecting one’s past involves combining bits of information from the three types of autobiographical knowledge (10). The information in "lifetime periods" is so general that it serves mainly as the framework for locating general events and individual episodes. Taken together, these three types of autobiographical knowledge result in our "life stories and personal myths" (Schacter, Searching 93).

But how do these kinds of autobiographical knowledge manifest themselves in literature? For many of the writers whom I have interviewed, including Finckh, Stern and Hannsmann, the process of remembering has been circular. They began by thinking--in some cases obsessively--about the twelve years of the Nazi era and what they meant to their later lives and identities; thus they began with the skeleton of a "lifetime period," which they then fleshed out with the general events of what daily life was like in the Nazi years as well as "event-specific knowledge" (Schacter, Searching 90) or individual episodes such as shocking or traumatic, humiliating or painful events. But the memory cycle did not stop here. In many cases the autobiography about the Nazi years engendered additional autobiographical volumes. When I interviewed Hannsmann the second time, she had written three volumes about other periods of her life, and Finckh has also written additional autobiographical works. The authors have thus been motivated to consider other lifetime periods from a new perspective, and, in the process they have become increasingly conscious of writing history

Adrienne Rich has said that one has "a choice to become consciously historical--that is, a person who tries for memory and connectedness against amnesia and nostalgia" (11). All three of these writers, by virtue of their autobiographical efforts, have chosen to become "consciously historical" according to Rich’s definition, but also to write "feminist history," as she describes it: "Feminist history is history charged with meaning. Feminist history charges us to know the past in order to consider what we want to conserve and what we want not to repeat or continue. To see patterns, connections. To draw strength: memory is nutriment, and seeds stored for centuries can still germinate" (Resisting 66-7).

In their autobiographical texts, Stern, Finckh, and Hannsmann confess their own guilt and remorse, but they also identify wider patterns and connections, and their political agenda constitutes a clear caveat against repeating the past in our common future.

ENDNOTES

(1) Christine Thuermer-Rohr, "Mittaeterschaft der Frau--Analyse zwischen Mitgefuehl and Kaelte," Studienschwerpunkt ‘Frauenforschung’: Mittaeterschaft und Entdeckungslust, Institut fuer Sozialpaedagogik der TU Berlin, 1989. See also ToechterFragen: NS-Frauen Geschichte, eds. Lerke Gravenhorst and Carmen Tatschmurat (Freiburg: Kore, 1990).

(2) Elizabeth Heinemann, "The Hour of Women: Memories of Germany’s ‘Crisis Years’ and West German National Identity," The American Historical Review 101:2 (1996): 359.

(3) It should be noted that Hannsmann differs, in that her protagonist undergoes an awakening and change of heart at the age of sixteen.

(4) Personal interview, Koeln, June 1988, unpublished, 2.

(5) Gore Vidal, Palimpsest: A Memoir (NY: Random House, 1995) 5, cited by Jane O’Reilly in "Life into Literature," Women’s Review of Books13:10-11 (1996): 19.

(6) Daniel P. McAdams, The Stories We Live By (NY: Morrow, 1993) 28, cited by Daniel Schacter in Searching for Memory, 93.

(7) Evelyn Cobley, Representing War (Toronto: U. Toronto Press, 1993) 15-16.

(8) Personal interview, Auch, France, May 1991, unpublished, 6.

(9) In our interview Finckh described her text as a "Gefuehlsdokument," a document of feelings or emotions.

(10) This research by Conway and Rubin is summarized in Schacter, 89-92.

(11) Adrienne Rich, "Resisting Amnesia: History and Personal Life," Ms. (March 1987): 66-7.

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