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Although the Holocaust and Nazi era emerged in the early postwar years as a topic in literature, film, and the media, scholarly research on the Third Reich was noticeably lacking until the 1960s. As Sybil Milton has noted, "Many scholars considered subjects [such as the Soviet Union, the world wars, and economic conditions] of greater significance and were uncomfortable with the barbarism of the Nazi period."¹ Research on the Nazi era, when it did appear, focused primarily on the activities of men, producing a scholarship in which women fell through "the historian's sieve, unclaimed by feminists and unnoticed by men," as Claudia Koonz observed (3).

Beginning in the late 1970s, however, a new kind of research--conducted for the most part by women scholars--began to appear which focused on women's activities and the roles they played throughout the Nazi years.² These studies dealt primarily with the activities of the mass of German women who were not victims, that is, they did not belong to one of the groups of women persecuted by the Nazis such as Jews, gypsies, prostitutes, or mental patients; rather they belonged to the "aryan" group of those "not persecuted" (nicht Verfolgte) as Lerke Gravenhorst, Hanna Lauterbach, and others have termed them.³

In the 1980s a literature painfully articulated by victims and survivors (Jews, communists, resistance fighters) began to appear alongside the scholarly studies.⁴ An interesting blurring of the separation between primary and secondary literature often occurred in this period due to an increased focus on oral history narratives; this has resulted in numerous scholarly books and articles based on eyewitness accounts either of victims, perpetrators, or both.⁵ Also important has been the continuous publication of a Nachkriegsgeneration-literature since the late 1970s, written by children "in search of" their Nazi parents. These texts range from Dörte von Westernhagen's Die Kinder der Täter (1987) and Peter Sichrovsky's Schuldig geboren (1986), both based on interviews, to a wealth of fictional and autobiographical literary texts such as Elisabeth Plessen's Mitteilung an den Adel (1976), Ruth Rehmann's Der Mann auf der Kanzel (1979), Barbara Bronnen's Die Tochter (1980), and Elisabeth Reichart’s Februarschatten (1984).⁶

Developing out of the massive and enduring silence that enshrouded Germany in the immediate postwar years, but also developing out of the insistent, breaking-of-the-silence literature by the "children of the perpetrators" (Westernhagen), research in the late 1980s and 1990s entered a new phase. At its center stands a theoretical debate over terminology, women's roles, and specifically the relationship of feminist scholarship (and scholars) to research on National Socialism.⁷ The initial impetus for this discussion came from several key publications representing different viewpoints. I single out here three of these works as representative, beginning with Gisela Bock's Zwangssterilisation im Nationalsozialismus. Studien zur Rassenpolitik und zur Frauenpolitik (Compulsory Sterilization in National Socialism. Studies on Racial Policies and Gender Policies), published in 1986. In Bock's view, the victimization of certain groups of women and of Jews emanates from the same ideology of "unfit life" (unwürdiges Leben): "Like Jews, [millions of non-Jewish, inferior women and men] were seen as 'ballast' and 'parasites' to the 'body' of Volk and race, though Jews were seen as threatening this body from the outside, and other inferior beings were seen as threatening it from the inside" (Racism 275-6). At the other pole, Claudia Koonz' Mothers in the Fatherland, published in the U.S. in 1987 clearly places the majority of German women in the category of perpetrators: "far from remaining untouched by Nazi evil, women operated at its very center" (6). Both of these positions have been criticized as has that of Christina Thürmer-Rohr, whose concept of co-perpetration (Mittäterschaft) in the early 1980s opposed the then-prevailing interpretation of women exclusively as victims. Many rounds of critique and counter-critique (within as well as between groups) have taken place both at conferences in Germany and in print, a number of which have been summarized in the collection of essays TöchterFragen NS-Frauen Geschichte.

One might usefully view this debate as a kind of "Historikerinnenstreit" (women historians' debate): like their male counterparts who participated in the so-called Historikerstreit (historians' debate), the women scholars involved are interested in socio-historical interpretations of the National Socialist era—but with some specifically feminist twists.⁸ Whereas the Historikerstreit focused on broad questions of historical interpretation, the women scholars’ debate has centered on three specific interrelated issues. The first concerns language and terminology, an example of which is Lerke Gravenhorst’s reluctance to use the term "Germans" (Deutsche), as she explains, "I prefer to speak of 'people in and from Germany' than of 'Germans.' I do it especially in regard to women, because the expression 'German women' has a Nazi connotation" (Nehmen wir 20).⁹ Secondly, crucial questions of categorization are reflected in the plethora of symbolically laden terms used to refer to women in the Nazi era: Täterin (perpetrator; Ebbinghaus, et al.), Mittäterin (co-perpetrator; Thürmer-Rohr), Mitbeteiligte (collaborator/co-participant; Brockhaus), Belastete (burdened/implicated; Westernhagen), Unpolitische/Ignorantin (apolitical, unknowing; Wiggershaus), Mitläuferin (supporter/hanger on; Westernhagen, et al.), Handlungskollektiv (collective action; Gravenhorst). The third issue explores differing interpretations of women's relativized guilt in the Nazi era, summarized in the question: which was the predominant factor in National Socialist ideology, racism or sexism? Furthermore, what does this ideological focus mean for women's "historical-moral consciousness" (Gravenhorst 20), a question that addresses particularly life in contemporary Germany and the issues of both personal and national responsibility.

Yet another difference between the two "gendered" debates has been numerous women scholars' insistence on personalization of their research in contrast to their male colleagues' formulation of the debate in largely theoretical realms. Lerke Gravenhorst and others have emphasized the importance of researchers identifying publicly their personal relationship to--and thus possible biases toward--National Socialism.¹⁰ In the title of the volume co-edited by Gravenhorst and Carmen Tatschmurat, TöchterFragen NS-Frauen Geschichte, the word "Töchter" refers not to the daughters of former National Socialists as "objects" of research, rather to the identity of the reseachers themselves, as prerequisite "subjects" of their scholarly inquiry.¹¹ Personalization of critical texts, an approach used effectively as early as the 1920s by Virgina Woolf, has been identified particularly with the Duke critics and more generally with new historicist readings, which, according to Anton Kaes, can be "unabashedly personal" (212).¹²

A final striking divergence between the men’s and women’s debates concerns their differing use of the historical concept of "continuity" (Kontinuität). In the Historikerstreit, this concept clearly represents a look backward to identify how the twelve years of National Socialism relate to earlier periods of German history. For many women scholars, by contrast, continuity concerns primarily the relationship of National Socialism to socio-political developments in Germany from 1945 forward to the present.¹³ Karin Haubrich and Lerke Gravenhorst, commenting on the error of decoupling the personal element from National Socialist research, remark that impersonal theorizing permits a separation from history--especially from National Socialist history--and reduces awareness of the parallels between the past and present (52). Dörte von Westernhagen, also interested in the postwar legacy of "guilty" parents to their inevitably "tainted" children, wonders what psychic traces Nazi crimes left on the persecutors, and what spiritual deformities this generation of parents unknowingly passed on to its children (87). She spells out the ways in which children of these parents were forced into a culpable complicity after 1945, noting that the parents' egos (Selbstgefühl) had been so shaken by the loss of the war and the revelations of war crimes, that their children had to help stabilize them. In order not to endanger their parents' caretaking abilities, the children learned not to probe vulnerable areas. Westernhagen believes that the adults' fear of their own weakness was all too justified. After all, they had seen in the Third Reich how the weak and helpless were destroyed; in many cases they had even participated in it. In their view, these sadistic expectations could easily be transmitted to the children (91).

The Germans whom both Gravenhorst and Westernhagen have in mind when they discuss the problem of a National Socialist legacy are the perpetrators. Westernhagen defines this group as "the guilty ones and participants of all shades," which includes "the masses ranging from enthusiastic supporters to those who cautiously approved" as well as "the group of rejectors, of spiritually distanced ones" (89). Gravenhorst, Windaus-Walser and others insist all-inclusively that perpetrator means everyone who was not persecuted. The use of labels to characterize groups of people who participated in varying degrees in National Socialism concerns ideological postwar issues which are much more profound than mere wrangling over terminology. Rather, the use of these designations signals both specific interpretations of the past and public negotiations of a national history. This negotiation is extremely important because the version that emerges will be used as the basis for governmental decisions on domestic and foreign policy, including the payment of war reparations; it will determine the content of school books; it will promote certain power relationships in the economy and society; and it will regulate official interactions with foreign countries.

In following this debate, one is led to the conclusion that the majority of German women would indeed more accurately belong in a category of perpetrator (Täterin) than in one of victim (Opfer). For to view women exclusively as victims of National Socialist sexism shields the largest group from responsibility and guilt. These are precisely the women about whom Claudia Koonz wrote in 1987, when she said they had fallen through the historian's sieve. Despite the criticism of Christina Thürmer-Rohr's concept of Mittäterschaft, to the effect that she concentrates too much on the "Mit," (Co-), i.e. on the context of patriarchy, rather than on "Täterschaft," (Perpetration), i.e. on women's active role and consequent guilt, I find her term the most accurate of those proposed.¹⁴ It reflects two simultaneously operative factors: on the one hand, women's active participation in National Socialism, and on the other, a patriarchal society and a National Socialist ideology, both of which were reductionist and hostile toward women. The emerging research on links between sexuality, violence, and war begun by Klaus Theweleit, Maria-Antonietta Macciocchi and others in the 1970s further supports Thürmer-Rohr's equal weighting of the "Mit" and the "Täterschaft" as far as women's roles in National Socialism are concerned.

For me it was literature rather than history per se that revealed the lacuna left by the mass of German women who had been subsumed into a purged "passive participation" (Mitläufertum). My 1979 interview with Ingeborg Drewitz in Berlin led to the discovery of a group of texts in which women were experimenting with various ways of saying "I was there; I was involved; thus I am guilty." This literature of Mittäterschaft become increasingly important because of its potential contribution both to public negotiations of history and to personal struggles with issues of responsibility and continuity. The literary works I read at this time clearly contributed to a new way of approaching an ostensibly historical topic—an approach that anticipated by several years new-historicist interpretations, in which "it is precisely the fictive, make-believe form of plays, novels, films, and poetry that allows for ambiguity, complexity, and contradiction. Fictions can suggest, manipulate, and toy with solutions that, outside the institution of literature, would be dismissed as impractical, miraculous, criminal, or insane" (Kaes 213).¹⁵ Autobiography in particular is a fascinating venue for history and literature to meet and explore not only facts but also a personal examination (Auseinandersetzung) of those facts. The woman writer in this literature plays an unusually arduous and multi-layered role: she stands interposed (as intermediary? as reporter? as interlocutor? as interpreter?) between historically-based, autobiographically-authenticated experience and its literary synthesis reified as cultural artifact.

I turn now to the ways in which several authors of autobiographical (Mit)Täterin literature (Zeller, Hannsmann, Wolf, Stern, Finckh, Maschmann) have dealt with the issues raised by historians and sociologists in the debate just described. In some respects these authors' works reflect concern with the same questions raised by academic scholars, but in others they go beyond the debate in treating subjects that have not yet been taken up by their historian and sociologist colleagues.

Of primary importance to all of these writers is the fact that participation in National Socialism was in no way neutral; rather, everyone was forced into making a public commitment either for or against it.¹⁶ Christabel Bielenberg remarks in The Past is Myself, "In a regime such as Hitler's, there could be no standing on the sidelines, but there were also no rules to the game; each to his own conscience" (98). Women writers who were co-perpetrators are located at different points along the continuum. At one extreme is Melita Maschmann who assumed a leadership role under the Nazis and underwent denazification after the war. After writing Fazit (1963, Sum Total), she changed her name, went to India and disappeared. Since then she has remained incommunicado, and according to her publisher, even her family is unaware of her whereabouts.¹⁷ At the same end of the continuum, but less extreme, are Renate Finckh and Carola Stern, both of whom were enthusiastic BDM (Bund deutscher Mädel; German Girls' Organization) group leaders and believers in National Socialism until the agonizing end, in Finckh's case, even after the war. In the middle of this perpetrator-continuum, one might place Margarete Hannsmann, who, although she was a Nazi adherent throughout seven years of BDM indoctrination, underwent an awakening and change of heart around the age of sixteen. At the other end of the scales are the other Mittäterinnen who were neither Nazi activists nor opponents, such as Eva Zeller, Christa Wolf, Ingeborg Drewitz, and Ruth Rehmann.

The writers' personal interpretations of this Mittäterschaft range from Carola Stern who said bluntly in our interview: "I didn't want to die without having said that I participated in it" to Eva Zeller who claims: "I still have my unassailable alibi of tender years" (Solange 186). With the exception of Maschmann, born in 1918 and thus already fifteen when the Nazis took power and twenty-eight at the war's end, all of the authors cited here were born between 1921 and 1929 and were thus children or adolescents throughout the Nazi period.¹⁸ Theoretically then they could all make use of Zeller’s alibi, but in fact, it is a point of contention not only for individual writers examining their own consciences, but also among various writers, since many have read each other's works. In our interview, Margarete Hannsmann identified the age at which she--here as her protagonist, Ulrike--awakened to the evil of National Socialism and rejected it: "She realizes that it is leading to an evil end, but she cannot see it yet at twelve, thirteen, or fourteen. At the age of fifteen it begins, and by sixteen she has understood." Hannsmann said that other women writers of her cohort remained true to Hitler throughout and even past adolescence, and she commented "I hold that against them. I said: You must have had a conscience. I had one at sixteen. Everyone must have had one. Everyone" (Interview).¹⁹

Even the authors who lean most heavily on their tender years as a justification, reveal moments of epiphany. At one point in our interview, for example, Eva Zeller reiterated the innocence of her protagonist "E" which she described as a state of "not yet able to know." But ten minutes later, she described in detail an experience of political awakening: "In the government work camp near Leipzig I became a 'victim' for the very first time. I was at the mercy of a woman, the camp director, who harassed me and had absolute power over me" (Interview). At the age of eighteen she began to think of the few people she knew who had suddenly disappeared. All at once she realized: "so that's how this happens. You have to experience it yourself. Until then it remains theoretical, abstract" (Interview). Even the seemingly incorrigible Cornelia in Finckh's Mit uns zieht die neue Zeit (The new era begins with us, 1979) admits that from a certain point on she knew the truth. When a schoolfriend says, nodding toward a group of assembled Jews, that they are being sent to Poland to be murdered, Cornelia shudders involuntarily and says, "From then on I knew" (155-56). Carola Stern reports that elderly men have stood up at the conclusion of her public readings and claimed, "we were at the front and we didn't know anything" (Interview). Her response is one of disbelief: "I cannot say to someone, 'You knew.' I'm amazed that I knew so much as a sixteen-year old girl, and they, as older officers didn't know a thing" (Interview).

Although these authors at one level simply describe both their belief in National Socialism and their participation in NS-organizations, they also try to explain and understand the phenomenon. Most of them identify the sources of their youthful enthusiasm: idealism, the sense of belonging to a new era of historic proportions, feelings of importance and usefulness, freedom and independence--especially from the home and family--and the experience of peer acceptance. Zeller, who repeatedly refers to her protagonist "E" as a Backfisch (teenage girl)--a term also used by Stern--gives much greater emphasis to the justification of youth than the other authors, still writing about it in her second autobiographical novel, Nein und Amen: "We were young. A sentence that means everyone of my generation has two lives, one before 1945 and one after. And the second life is a constant justification and correction of the first, setting straight misunderstandings and removing misrepresentations" (163). Zeller concludes by saying, "That an entire generation has to deny its youth is without precedent, because never has a youth been promised so much and given so little" (Nein 163). As this last sentence makes clear, Zeller assumes little personal responsibility for National Socialism, seeing it rather as something that happened to her and to her generation.²⁰ Although Carola Stern similarly said that National Socialism "happened to [her]" (Interview), she is more forthcoming than Zeller about her guilt: "I don't reproach myself that I wasn't in the resistance, because I didn't have that opportunity. I reproach myself because I failed as a human being" (Interview). She describes several instances in In den Netzen der Erinnerung (In the Nets of Memory, 1986) of personal "human failure" (menschliches Versagen), the most horrifying of which are scenes when she hears the screams of torture victims while working in a Hitler-youth center above the Gestapo headquarters and does nothing to intervene. Forty-two years later Stern writes of her protagonist, "The first time her humanity is tested, she fails. Instead of gaining insight, she loses vision. The memory tortures her. How sure can one be of oneself? (201). In our interview, Stern said it was one of the most difficult passages in the book to write and added that she cried while writing it.

All of the authors cited recall extremely painful memories of human failure. For Zeller, it is failure to interact humanely with a prisoner on a train because of her own overriding fear. Two police officers ask her to accompany an "Eastern European worker" (Ostarbeiterin) to the toilet; once there, the woman repeats, "You, woman, please," imploring her to take a slip of paper (Nein 232). Zeller describes the scene as a photograph, saying that after forty years, "the picture is completely overexposed" (Nein 233). Tormented by thoughts that "she should have touched the woman, her face, her shoulder" (Nein 233), she speculates on why she did not: "what one calls the prevailing relations--these prevailing relations are oppressive. In what way could I have changed them? Perhaps in that I might have patted the tear-stained face? When will I finally dare to know what I already know? Well at least I took the slip of paper. Put it in my mouth. A reflex reaction. The chained dogs outside the door." (Nein 233). Zeller frames this passage with reference to her pregnancy and the threat of the chained dogs outside the door as an exoneration of her cowardice--a justification belied by her confessional comment "When will I finally dare to know, what I already know?" For Hannsmann, human failure is recorded in a series of small observations. Using rhetorical questions to indicate interpretive indecision, the narrator notes that Ulrike enthusiastically participated in a book burning in Salzburg, and speculates on whether her later efforts to rescue banned books being readied for destruction are an act of compensation: "Could Ulrike have thought: atonement?" (227). For Finckh like Zeller, the test comes in the form of a personal, physical, albeit more violent confrontation. The farmer's wife for whom Cornelia works commands her to beat the Polish cowherd, saying "one cannot go easy on Poles. . . . A Pole is just like a swine" (147). She gathers her courage and strikes the boy with a stick, but his hate-filled look haunts her for days. The narrator concludes from this experience: "That's how I personally learned how quite ordinary people can become mutes and bullies (literally, beaters). Why not also murderers?" (148). The larger underlying question of what "quite ordinary people" are capable of doing--and under what conditions--has concerned numerous women writers.

One becomes acutely aware in reading prison diaries and concentration camp accounts of the fragility of civilization. Christa Wolf's protagonist, Nelly, as an eighteen-year old, discusses with her father the question "whether one can make an animal out of any person" (43). Her father tends to believe, yes, that it is possible, because he has seen too much in his life. The narrator's own daughter, Lenka, in turn finds her parents' explanation of the Nazi era incomprehensible: "how one could simultaneously have been there and not been there, the dreadful secret of people in this century" (42). Luise Rinser's Gefängnistagebuch (1946, A Woman’s Prison Journal, 1987), depicts prisoners' traumatization and provides a concrete and detailed description of the deliberate process of dehumanization she experienced:

Here in prison you turn out the very opposite of what you ought to become. You become anti-social. . . . You become familiar with a wicked, furtive hatred of your oppressors, you become a hypocrite, you learn to steal . . . You learn malicious revenge, you carry out a hundred petty acts of revenge, and gradually you lose your awareness of human dignity and turn into a beaten, malevolent, servile, dulled animal. . . . Only in prison do you get to know your evil instincts. (48-9).

Like Carola Stern, for whom describing the NS-torture scene reactivated the original agony and suffering, most of the women writers who fall into the co-perpetrator category, suffered both emotionally (Stern, Hannsmann, Rehmann) and physically (Wolf, Zeller) while writing about the Nazi era. The emotional and physical toll came from reliving brutal or anguishing experiences but also from the painful admission of one’s own acts of inhumanity or moral failure.

Although contemporary readers are drawn--through observations on universal human behavior, references to contemporary events, and devices such as rhetorical questions--into a dialogue with these texts, many of us, as members of the postwar generation, are distanced from the events by time, and American readers in particular are distanced by culture and geography as well. But the writers themselves do not have the advantage of such distancing; in fact the intervening years since their childhood have in many ways become an obstacle. Margarete Hannsmann clearly marks the problem of narrative perspective that is a decision all authors of autobiographical books about childhood must face: should she put on paper the "sheer, painful kitsch" (114) of those years as revealed by the carefully preserved papers in her old suitcase? Or should she retell the story in new words, control it through reformulation, and shape it stylistically? Zeller shares Hannsmann's concern, questioning whether it is permissable for her, armed as she is with her present consciousness, to describe how it was using her voice from the earlier times (Nein 14). Writers, unlike readers, are also subject to self-exposure, as Christa Wolf observes: "Woe to our time, which forces the writer to exhibit the wound of his own crime before he is allowed to describe other people's wounds (171). In order to be capable of writing anything at all, these writers, with the exception of Maschmann, all distance themselves by ascribing names to their protagonists: Zeller's "E" or "E-M," Finckh's Cornelia, Sterns's Eka, Wolf's Nelly, Drewitz' Gabriele, and Hannsmann's Ulrike, although authors such as Wolf and Hannsmann openly play with overlapping identities of author, narrator and protagonist. Hannsmann writes early in her book: "I, Margarete, who is named Ulrike here, so that it is easier for me to tell about myself." (16). Ruth Rehmann, whose Der Mann auf der Kanzel (The Man in the Pulpit, 1979) is clearly autobiographical but in terms of focus is essentially a "father book," refers to her protagonist simply as "the child."²¹ Considering herself a "self-conscious witness," she remarks that such witnesses have the problem of guilt being so close to them that it does not appear in a pure form, rather in opaque combinations that defy clear division. The more precisely one tries to cut, the more deeply and painfully one cuts into one's own flesh, and the more difficult the separation becomes not only between good and evil, but also between oneself and those in the Nazi era (181). The kind of guilt Rehmann refers to here parallels the guilty co-responsibility ascribed to families of alcoholics, who aid and abet the drinkers, shielding them from critical outside players (friends, neighbors, colleagues, the extended family) and from reality. This is precisely the collaborative role Rehmann's protagonist plays vis-à-vis her willfully ignorant pastor-father.

This was emphasized in a discussion with students, who vehemently rejected the conclusion of Rehmann's Der Mann auf der Kanzel. They objected because the author could not reach a decision about her father's culpability, thus rendering her guilty of the same failure of which she accused her father: she seemed unprepared to admit certain truths (in this case her father's guilt). In part though, the students were manifesting their own discomfort that the father's guilt was undecided, that there was no clear judgment from which the correct interpretation could be drawn. This is more than the usual discomfort and dismay caused by an open-ended text. Rather, a singularly intense, almost palpable, uneasiness arises both in reading about and writing about the Nazi era.

A tentative explanation for this phenomenon is suggested by the nature of prejudice itself. In the first of a three-part series on obesity published recently in the New York Times, Natalie Angier addressed the question of prejudice against obese people:

[M]any people of normal weight fear the fat person because obesity embodies in the most graphic way possible the terrible potential they see lurking in themselves. For many, a fat person variously symbolizes loss of control, a reversion to infantile desires, failure, self-loathing, sloth, passivity and gluttony. . . .'The fat person represents the part of us that has gone to seed, has morally disintegrated,' said Dr. Susan C. Wooley . . . And while many people manage to keep their anxieties and insecurities tucked safely inside, beyond the scrutiny of others, some see the fat as their own neuroses made flesh, forcing them to confront their own imperfections.

In the same way many of us--both readers and writers--experience anxiety and fear about the general loss of control and the moral disintegration which we associate with National Socialism. Marguerite Duras, writing about the war, cites the multilayered identification and anxiety of recognizing one’s own potential to torture: "Thérèse is me. The person who tortures is me. So also is the one who feels like making love to Ter, the member of the Militia. Me. I give you the torturer along with the rest of the texts" (115). An essential inexplicability--an irrationality--seems to underlie the Third Reich when it is reduced to questions of human potential and behavior.²² The darker topics which women writers collectively have addressed are in many cases interrelated: behaviors centered around the survival instinct, including dehumanization and bestiality; a militarist world view; fascist aspects of sexuality as they relate to dominance and aggression; racism; and an overall tolerance for violence.

In our interviews, several authors mentioned the Nazi emphasis on spectacle with mass gatherings and torchlight parades, and they compared the mood, especially in the early years to a mardi gras (Karneval) atmosphere.²³ During such rallies and political gatherings heavy drinking occurred, many played hooky from work and school, and one increasingly had the sense of normal rules having been suspended. In Christa Wolf's Kassandra, Trojan King Priam tell his priestess daughter: "in war everything that would be valid in peacetime is countermanded" (97). For many, social ranks were also reversed: those who had been on the bottom rungs of society suddenly had authority over those who had previously been their social superiors. In a similar reversal, certain prohibited behaviors now obtained social sanction. Ruth Waldeck makes this point in a unique essay which "reads" Wolf's Kindheitsmuster not as literature or autobiography but as a socio-historical text.²⁴ Noting examples of "pleasure in cruelty," "violent fantasies," and "pleasure in viewing others’ suffering" in Kindheitsmuster, Waldeck bares the symbiotic relationship between National Socialist ideology and the world view of its adherents. She argues that the National Socialist rituals in which Nelly actively participated absorbed her conflicted feelings and unprocessed experiences like a giant mixing machine and reshaped them. According to Waldeck's interpretation, the impure and disgusting aspects of sexuality were transferred to the pimply Jewish boy so that Nelly could mature in purity as a member of the Hitler youth: "Nelly is indebted to National Socialism because she needs it. It guarantees her a conflict-free acting out of her raging desire and relief from her disturbing sexual impulses" (303).

In Kassandra, published seven years after Kindheitsmuster, Wolf pursues more intently and overtly the links between a militarist mentality, bestial behaviors, and sexual lust. Although these three factors merge in various configurations, Wolf ultimately locates them in a single Greek warrior whom she repeatedly identifies--imitating Homer's formulaic epithets-as "Achilles the beast." When Achilles desecrates the temple to murder the defenseless Troilos, Kassandra is a horrified witness: "How was this enemy approaching my brother? As a murderer? As a seducer? Was that even possible: desire to murder and desire to love in the same man?" (74). Kassandra reads in Achilles' face lust: "naked, gruesome lust," and concludes, "if that is possible, then anything is possible." Wolf taps into many readers' and writers' deepest anxieties by exploring both the violent underside of sexuality and the sexual underside of violence, especially of the organized and socially sanctioned violence called war.

Wolf has not been the first to identify these connections. Klaus Theweleit, who has been taken to task by numerous reviewers for his free-associative approach in the two-volume Männerphantasien (1977, 1978, Male Fantasies, 1987, 1989), explicitly draws the connection between sexuality and violence among the roving bands of Freikorps men after World War I, from which the Nazis drew their first members.²⁵ Despite possible methodological shortcomings, Theweleit has identified an important and insufficiently explored connection. He amasses 858 pages of verbal and visual images in support of his thesis which links male fear of female (sexual) engulfment with a deep lust for violence. Barbara Ehrenreich's lucid introduction to the English edition makes the reader's task somewhat easier by distilling out arguments basic to Theweleit's position. "As a theory of fascism," she writes, "Male Fantasies sets forth the jarring--and ultimately horrifying--proposition that the fascist is not doing 'something else,' but doing what he wants to do" (xi). In the chilling words of a Freikorpsman himself: "People told us that the War was over. That made us laugh. We ourselves are the War. Its flame burns strongly in us. It envelops our whole being and fascinates us with the enticing urge to destroy" (x). Theweleit's interpretation of war, and specifically the battlefield, as a male response to women's encroachments on traditional male territory is an argument Sandra Gilbert also puts forward in her essay about World War I, "Soldier's Heart." Similarly, Theweleit's identification of the sexual subtext of fascism has been explored by the Italian scholar Antonietta-Maria Macciocchi in revealing new ways that link not only sexuality with violence and war but also religion and cults of death.²⁶

For a number of women writers, fascism and sexuality are linked in the person of the father, giving rise early in their lives to what I term "father trouble." Eva Zeller’s father, her "beloved enemy" (Lieblingsfeind), hates Hitler but ironically duplicates the role of dictator within the structure of his own family. The narrator says that her father is "the lord over wives, children, colleagues, who are all supposed to worship him" (Nein 224).²⁷ His power rests partially in a sexual dominance which borders on terrorization. Living with his fourth wife, he still sends pornographic pictures to his first wife, and carries on numerous affairs. It turns out that at the same time he forced Eva's mother into an unwanted abortion, he impregnated her cousin, "the beautiful Ruth," who later committed suicide. This man may sound like a wholly unscrupulous social outcast, but we learn that quite the contrary, he is a respected pillar of society and a noted scholar; this of course raises the larger question of socially acceptable male behavior. If this contempt for women is accepted--perhaps even admired--peacetime behavior, what would one expect of such a man in a war situation? In Zeller's case the question remains unanswered since her father did not serve in the military, but Roger Cook, in his essay on the film Deutschland, bleiche Mutter suggests a possible answer: "In times of war, when society legitimizes the male warrior instincts, women are likely to become victims of such terror" (115).

Ulrike Knecht's father in Margarete Hannsmann's Der helle Tag bricht an; Ein Kind wird Nazi (1982, The New Day dawns; A Child becomes Nazi) manifests even more clearly the will to sexual dominance inherent to fascist ideology in his perverted relationship with his daughter. Hannsmann renames her hometown "Albheim" as a spinoff on Alptraum (nightmare), and in our interview she said forcefully, "My father was a devil." Gotthilf Knecht, his weakness already intimated in these names given him by his author-daughter (Gotthilf = God help, Knecht = servant), is a slightly built and severely crippled veteran of World War I, who can barely walk. He represents if anything the exact opposite of the Nazi ideal of manhood. By contrast, his pubescent daughter Ulrike is sexually precocious and extremely attractive to men of all ages.

The stark opposition of these two figures recalls the two photos from World War I which initially appeared on facing pages of Sandra Gilbert's essay "Soldier's Heart."²⁸ One depicts five healthy, smiling, robust, young women leaning in unconstrained "masculine" postures against a fence, and the other shows seven men seated stiffly in a line. All of the men are war amputees; this lineup of torsos in suits and ties is quite shocking visually. The extreme nature of this contrast is reproduced in the relationship of Ulrike Knecht to her father. The emasculated father, in love with his daughter and admiring but fearing her wildness, cannot accept the freedom (from him) that her developing sexuality represents. His attempts to contain and control her sexuality disintegrate into repeated scenarios of punishment in which he whips her with a cat-o-nine-tails. Sex, lust, pain, and domination become entangled in the whippings which always occur in the bathroom behind closed doors where she must voluntarily remove her underpants and present her buttocks. What ensues clearly indicates the twisted nature of this father/daughter relationship: she is obliged to request his forgiveness. In this perverse reversal, the victim is held guilty for her own victimization. As a result, Ulrike learns to associate sexual pleasure exclusively with pain and death; she experiences a single, recurring fantasy of sexual pleasure: an execution. When I asked Hannsmann whether she contemplated writing about her father again in the future, she replied, "I will not descend into this cellar again" (Interview).

The fear of female sexuality and the corresponding need to circumscribe and control it, as suggested by Theweleit, Macciocchi and others, and documented autobiographically by numerous women writers appears inherent to the fascist concept of manhood. The acting out of sexual desire in general represents disorderliness and a sense of being out of control--behaviors that would have undermined the National Socialist/fascist world view which brooked no challenge to its controlled ideology and carefully elaborated hierarchies of power. John Hubner gets at the heart of this fear when he writes in Bottom Feeders, his book about two pornographer brothers:

. . . there is something deeply subversive about the explicit display of sex. Sex strips away identities it takes a lifetime to build. A naked aroused man is not a brain surgeon or a university president or a Methodist bishop. He is an animal with an erection.²⁹

The leveling effect of sexual expression suggested here would obviously have been intolerable to men who subscribed to an ideology keen on establishing difference and maintaining myths of its own adherents' superiority. Gudrun Brockhaus, summarizing work done by Dorothea Schmidt, Margot Koman, Godele v. d. Decken, and others, opens another, as yet largely unexplored connection: a comparison of National Socialist-women's fantasies with those of men. She notes that this research exhibits in many places striking similarities to Theweleit's work on male fantasies, for example the mixing of sexuality and violence, the fascination with intoxication, and the fearful search for limits. Basing her interpretation on an essay by Luce d'Eramo, Brockhaus shows how an exaggerated warrior mythos (male) compensated National Socialist men for their total obedience (female) to the party; this explains the fascist public emphasis on a cult of virility.

Women writers like Zeller and Hannsmann have made an initial attempt to describe the fascism/sexuality link as it took shape in individual women's lives during the Nazi era. These efforts may potentially raise as many questions as they answer, particularly in light of recent research on the nature of desire. The act of questioning may, however, be subversive and revolutionary in and of itself--an interpretation suggested by the fact that this activity was so vehemently suppressed under National Socialism.³⁰ Melita Maschmann says of her adolescence, that just as they reached the age when they could have learned to think . . . the era began in which thinking was considered an activity of degenerate brains (83). In retrospect most of these writers would likely agree that thinking critically (questioning) constitutes the first step in the development of resistance. The asking of questions as a methodology is certainly not new, but in the present series of demystifying questions being posed by women about the Nazi era, two differences are noticeable: first, they are able to pose questions which have both the present and the future as their framework, i.e. an examination of the past in terms of a broad historical continuity, and second, rather than anticipate answers, the writers privilege the questions themselves. This reaction can be seen as a development from their adolescent experience of National Socialism, as Eva Zeller explains:

Even the best school in greater Germany could not teach one thing: independent thinking, which in practical terms would have meant asking questions, plying ourselves and our teachers with questions, questions that wanted more than ready-made answers. There were no questions, only answers upon answers. (Solange 240)

Disciplines such as history, sociology and literature have overlapped in the 1980s and 1990s in various areas of research on women in the Nazi era. This overlapping has been mutually enriching because of the different ways that similar questions have been addressed. Common concerns have centered on language, responsibility, guilt, morality, racism, sexism, and continuity. Future research on women in the Nazi era may develop most fruitfully in two directions: autobiography and memory. While autobiography provides an interdisciplinary context in which significant progress in thinking through the Nazi era can occur, progress on understanding the nature and function of memory is being made in fields as divergent as psychology, history, medicine and literature.

Scholars of oral history have noted the unusual "relationship between memory and the future," (Passerini 12) which reflects the concern of many scholars of the Nazi era with postwar continuity. Luisa Passerini notes that, "It is not by chance that the issue of generations, biological as well as political, and of transmission of memory between them is such a crucial one" (12). For the "middle generation," in the wake of societal collapse in 1945, "[a] sense of responsibility for their children, and the knowledge that half of their life still lay in front of them motivated them to seek for modes of continuity in their biographies and memories" (Passerini 12). Thus memory--its shortcomings, selectivity, unreliability--has become more important in the work of both social scientists (Tröger, et al.) and literary writers (Wolf, Zeller, Finckh). There is reason to believe that the public negotiation of memory has historically helped sustain patriarchal attitudes that reproduce fascism. But memory work is also crucial to personal reconciliation with a difficult past. In this respect, it is equally applicable to all of the writers discussed in this essay. It binds them, both to one another and to scholars of the Nazi era, in a mutual undertaking.

I would like to thank my colleagues, Ute Winston, Thomas Kovach, O. Kimball Armayor, and Richard Anderson for their various contributions to this essay.

This essay was originally presented as a paper entitled "Victim, Collaborator, Resister, Perpetrator? Women Writers Respond to National Socialism," at the Symposium, "German Women Writers from Weimar to the Present," at the University of Maryland, 25-28 February 1993. It has been reconceptualized and extensively rewritten to focus on the category of collaboration/perpetration.

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1. Milton discusses at greater length this research, which she says "can be classified in three ways: -Research conducted by historians in various European countries that chronicles their nations' suffering under German occupation. -Research focused on specific aspects of the Nazi regime--such as biographies of Hitler and other leading Nazis; the diplomatic, military, economic, and administrative history of Nazi Germany; and the electorate that voted for or against Hitler. . . . -Research on the Nazi crimes against the Jews" (A52).
2. I refer here to work by Jill Stephenson, Leila Rupp, Renate Bridenthal, Richard Evans, Rita Thalman, and others.
3. "Mit den 'nicht-verfolgten' meine ich alle Deutschen, die weder der Leib und Leben bedrohenden rassistischen, eugenischen oder homophoben Verfolgung im NS-Staat ausgesetzt waren, noch sich selbst durch Hilfe für die Bedrohten oder durch politischen Widerstand der Verfolgung aussetzten" (Hanna Lauterbach, "Verbrecherinnen" 141).
4. The bulk of this new literature fell into one of two categories: life stories of Jewish concentration camp survivors, and life stories of resistance fighters in the Nazi era, or of opponents of National Socialism (Gegnerinnen), who either were not part of an organized resistance movement or were involved peripherally through their families/husbands (Staden, Maltzan, Yorck von Wartenburg, Bielenberg). To name only a few of the survivor-authors: Lisa Scheuer, Isabella Leitner, Gisella Perl, Hanna Lévy-Hass. Accounts by women survivors of the Holocaust began to appear as early as the 1950s, including notable texts such as Gerda Klein's All But My Life 1957, Charlotte Delbo's Aucun de nous ne reviendra 1965 (also other works by Delbo spanning the sixties and seventies), and Fania Fenelon's Playing for Time 1977. The 1980s however saw an increase in both autobiographies/primary texts and scholarly work on Holocaust survivor narratives. For a discussion of the literary aspects of these texts see Marlene Heinemann, Gender and Destiny; Women Writers and the Holocaust. Of the many examples of accounts by resistance fighters, one could mention three, all of whom were communists: Lore Wolf, Anni Wadle, Lina Haag.
5. See for example, Zorn/Meyer 1984, Schüddekopf 1982, Ebbinghaus 1987, Tröger 1987, Szepansky 1983, 1986, Kerschbaumer 1980.
6. For a discussion of Rehmann's and Bronnen's novels, as well as of Monika Köhler's Die Früchte vom Machandelbaum, 1980, see Susan Figge's essay, "Fathers, Daughters, and the Nazi Past: Father Literature and Its (Resisting) Readers," and for a comparison of Reichart's two novels (Komm Über den See and Februarschatten) with Brigitte Schwaiger's Lange Abwesenheit (1982), see Maria-Regina Kecht's "Resisting Silence: Brigitte Schwaiger and Elisabeth Reichart Attempt to Confront the Past"; both essays are in Gender, Patriarchy and Fascism in the Third Reich, ed. Elaine Martin.
7. Lerke Gravenhorst dates this public discussion to 1986, summarizing important stages in Töchter Fragen NS-Frauen Geschichte: "Kristallisationspunkte der veränderten Aufmerksamkeit sind Tagungen ebenso wie Veröffentlichungen. Zu den hier relevanten Tagungen gehören die Soziologinnentage im Juni 1986 an der FU Berlin; eine Arbeitstagung in der Heimvolkshochschule Glienecke in Berlin 'Frauen als Opfer des Nationalsozialismus' 1989; und die Tutzinger Friedenstage an der Evangelischen Akademie Tutzing mit dem Seminar 'Zur Diskussion des Nationalsozialismus in der neueren Frauenforschung' (1989). Entsprechende Veröffentlichungen stammen u. a. von Angelika Ebbinghaus (1986), Dorothea Schmidt (1987), Karin Windaus-Walser (1988, 1989a), Frigga Haug (1988) und Annette Kuhn (1989)" ("Nehmen wir" 23, note).
8. Both historians and sociologists have participated in this discussion which has primarily taken place among "feministischen Intellektuellen und Wissenschaftlerinnen in und aus Deutschland" as Lerke Gravenhorst describes them ("Nehmen wir" 27). Some of the main contributors to the discussion to date have been Karin Windaus-Walser, Gisela Bock, Annette Kuhn, Lerke Gravenhorst, Frigga Haug, Claudia Koonz, Christina Thürmer-Rohr, Annemarie Tröger, Dorothea Schmidt, Marianne Lehker, and Angelika Ebbinghaus. The original Historikerstreit, a public debate held in Germany in 1986 and initially carried out in newspapers and magazines, concerned how National Socialism and its genocidal policies should be understood: as an aberration (Sonderweg thesis), or as an inevitability in German historical development (continuity thesis). For a lucid summary of the key players and positions within a historical context, see Geoff Eley, "Nazism, Politics and the Image of the Past: Thoughts on the West German Historikerstreit 1986-1987." Past and Present 121 (1988): 171-208. For the primary texts, see "Historikerstreit" Die Dokumentation der Kontroverse um die Einzigartigkeit der nationalsozialistischen Judenvernichtung, Munich: Piper, 1987.
9. All translations from the German in this essay are mine with the exception of Wolf's Kindheitsmuster and Luise Rinser's Gefängnistagebuch, for which I have used the translations indicated.
10. See also "Don't Forget: Fragments of a Negative Tradition," by Renate Siebert in Memory and Totalitarianism, ed. Luisa Passerini.
11. Other scholars have also attempted to address the personal aspects of scholarship, both individually and in experimental collaborative efforts. For example, the editors of Lingua Franca, who recently published excerpts of Alice Kaplan's memoir, French Lessons, noted that it "examines the way personal history feeds scholarly obsession. It is an intimate account of Kaplan's intellectual coming of age, an experiment in autobiography composed for the Duke University writing group in which she, along with English professors Cathy Davidson, Jane Tompkins, and Marianna Torgovnick, tried out subjective approaches to academic prose" (34). See Kaplan, "Out of the Past." For a summary of the Duke critics interested in "autobiographical scholarship," see "The I's have it; Duke's 'Moi' Critics Expose Themselves," by Adam Begley, Lingua Franca, March/April 1994: 54-9.
12. For a discussion of Virginia Woolf’s analysis of fascism in Three Guineas and its link with works by contemporary German women writers, see Women Writers and Fascism: Reconstructing History by Marie-Luise Gättens.
13. The concept "Kontinuität" is also used by individual researchers in more specialized contexts which correspond to neither of these usages. For example, Dagmar Reese and Carola Sachse, in a critique of Gisela Bock's work on Sterilisationspolitik use "Kontinuität" to refer to conditions of women's employment which carried over from pre-Nazi (Weimar) years into the Nazi era (Reese/Sachse, "Frauenforschung" 94).
14. Lerke Gravenhorst argues: ". . . ich [halte] die Bewertung von 'Täterschaft' in dem Begriff für wichtiger als die Bewertung des 'Mit-', das wiederum für Christina Thürmer-Rohr im Mittelpunkt steht. Angesichts der NS-Untaten scheint mir doch das Wissen um 'Täterschaft' unmittelbar wichtiger zu sein als das Wissen um die Tatsache, daß es eine patriarchal strukturierte und abhängige Täterschaft, eben Mittäterschaft war," (Nehmen wir 30).
15. This belief that literature can transcend facts to render larger truths has existed in various forms for centuries. Aristotle writes in the Poetics: "The difference between a historian and a poet is not that one writes in prose and the other in verse . . . The real difference is this, that one tells what happened and the other what might happen. For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts." (VIII. 4-IX. 5), Loeb Classic Artistotle, v. 23, The Poetics, ed. W. Hamilton Fyfe, London/Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973.
16. Renate Finckh writes in Mit uns zieht die neue Zeit about the Jungmädelgruppe of which she is a leader: "Dienst hatte man Donnerstag und Samstag nachmittags, und er war für alle Pflicht. Wir hatten die Befugnis, ein Mädel, das dreimal unentschuldigt fernblieb, von der Polizei holen zu lassen" (118).
17. Personal communication of Lutz-W. Wolff, an editor at DTV in Munich, in May 1988.
18. Maschmann (b.1918), Hannsmann (b.1921), Rehmann (b.1922), Zeller (b.1923), Drewitz (b.1923), Stern (b.1925), Finckh (b.1926), Wolf (b.1929)
19. Hannsmann referred in her remarks here particularly to Carola Stern, Melita Maschmann, and Renate Finckh, all of whom remained believers in National Socialism until the final collapse of the Third Reich. Renate Finckh, in an interview with Heike Mundzeck, said: "Ich war damals 16 Jahre alt, also eigentlich schon ein junger Mensch, von dem man eigenes Nachdenken erwarten kann. Aber ich hatte bereits ein 'Ersatzgewissen' und ausreichende Ersatzargumente. Ich wollte und konnte nicht nachdenken. Ich sagte mir: Jetzt mögen viele schlimme Dinge passieren, aber das muß wohl so sein, wir haben Krieg und kämpfen für eine bessere Zukunft" (in Der Alltägliche Faschismus; Frauen im Dritten Reich, ed. Charles Schüddekopf, p.75).
20. Sociologist Annemarie Tröger's research, based on interviews with numerous women who lived through the Nazi era and World War II, reveals an interesting phenomenon that is pertinent here: "The notion of being a victim permeates nearly all the war accounts of the women interviewed. . . . The religious and popular symbol of the victim absolves the victim of responsibility and guilt. A victim of the war cannot be responsible for it. In the postwar German understanding, this notion is carried even further: as a victim one cannot be held responsible for fascism. This is certainly one reason that interviewees brought up the war as soon as the uncomfortable issue of National Socialism was raised in the interview. Suffering shields Germans from the threatening and guilt-provoking questions surrounding the issues of fascism, concentration camps, and the Nazis' treatment of Jews" (298-9).
21. See Susan Figge's work on father literature by daughters, for example her essay "Fathers, Daughters, and the Nazi Past: Father Literature and Its (Resisting) Readers," in Gender, Patriarchy and Fascism in the Third Reich, ed. by Elaine Martin.
22. Barbara Ehrenreich writes in her foreword to Theweleit's first volume of Male Fantasies: "In the sociological or Marxist worldview, fascist murder appears either as an instrumentality--the terrorist spectacle required to maintain absolute authority--or as an intrusion of the 'irrational,' which, for most social scientists, is also the unknowable. Then there are the psychoanalytic theories of fascism, which at least have the merit of addressing the 'irrational' as a subject of inquiry. The problem here is that, too often, fascism tends to become representational, symbolic" (xi).
23. In our interview (November 1986), Ingeborg Lauterstein, author of Vienna Girl and The Water Castle, represented Vienna following the Anschluß in these terms. She also used the image of a rock concert.
24. Waldeck describes her unique, non-literary perspective on Kindheitsmuster thus: "Mein Interesse richtet sich also nicht auf die Geschichte der Autorin als Individuum, sondern auf die in diesem Roman entfaltete gesellschaftlich bedeutsame Problematik: auf das Verhältnis von Nationalsozialismus und Weiblichkeit" (294).
25. See for example William Doty's review in the South Atlantic Review (53.2, 1988) in which he refers to volume 1 as "Theweleit's diffuse, disorganized tome," and concludes that his "own sympathies with the book, especially with its feminist and revisionist psychoanalytic perspectives, are not strong enough to overcome [his] dismay that so important a theme would be so carelessly presented."
26. See Macciocchi's essay "Female Sexuality in Fascist Ideology," and my own discussion of Macciocchi in "Autobiography, Gender, and the Third Reich," (especially pages 184-89) in Gender, Patriarchy and Fascism in the Third Reich, ed. Elaine Martin.
27. For a more detailed discussion of this father/daughter relationship, see my essay, "Patriarchy, Memory, and the Third Reich in the Autobiographical Novels of Eva Zeller," Women in German Yearbook, 6 (1991): 47-62.
28. Connecting visual and literary/linguistic images seems to have rich potential. Sybil Milton commented that, "most history books and courses . . . neglect recent research that focuses on new ways to utilize old sources. For example, I have studied photographs of the Holocaust to obtain new insights into the uses of propaganda and ideology in camouflaging persecution" (Re-examining).
29. Cited by D. Keith Mano in "Pornographers' Progress," his review of Bottom Feeders, New York Times Book Review, 14 February 1993, p. 13.
30. The use of questioning as a methodology is an important legacy of the Frankfurt School, as George Marcus and Michael Fischer summarize in Anthropology as Cultural Critique:

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