Gender, Patriarchy and Fascism in the Third Reich: The Response of Women Writers

Gender, Patriarchy and Fascism in the Third Reich is a unique collection of essays that brings together a variety of literary treatments by women - fiction, essay, autobiography, poetry - of Germany and Austria under National Socialism. The literary works discussed in this volume describe and interpret women's experiences during the Nazi era as well as the long-range effects of fascism and National Socialism on women's postwar lives. The authors discussed include Irmgard Keun, Luise Rinser, Doris Dauber, Virginia Woolf, Christa Wolf, Ruth Rehmann, Eva Zeller, Carola Stern, Christabel Bielenberg, Sarah Kirsch, Barbara Bronnen, Monika Kohler, Brigitte Schwaiger, and Elisabeth Reichart. The range of women's experiences reflected in these works is politically and geographically broad: from sympathizer to anti-Nazi activist, and from rural to urban, from exile to underground existence within Germany's borders.
Several common themes emerge that are not generally characteristic of men's works about the era. The most salient difference is the connection drawn - either overtly or implicitly - by many women writers between patriarchy and fascism, a theme that arises in all of the essays in this volume. Both the attraction of the Nazi program to many women and its insidious corruption of their moral sense are explored. The essays contribute to the ongoing discussion of the interrelationship between racism, sexism, and fascism within the German social structure of the time. Culpability, guilt, blame, and expiation are also common themes. The underlying subtext is violence, specifically the gradations of violence, ranging from the bittersweet power of paternal authority to the most overt form of organized violence - war.
This is the first collection that centers around women's literary treatments of the Third Peich. It represents an introduction to and overview of a relatively unknown body of literature - one which centers on women's own descriptions and interpretations of their experiences formulated as literary texts. For women writers, whose perspectives have traditionally been forced to the periphery of public discourse, being heard on the subject of the past means also having influence on the future. In this volume, it is the authors under discussion as well as the scholars who write about them who are interested in shaping the future by righting/writing the past, the former by describing the effects of patriarchy, gender oppression, and fascist policies on women's lives and on their experiences under National Socialism. and the latter by identifying the interconnections of these factors and locating the individual life experiences within a larger literary/historical framework.