Introduction

Summary

IN 2005, NIKLAS FRANK PUBLISHED a vitriolic act of narrative reckoning, Meine deutsche Mutter (My German Mother, 2005). Using family letters and diaries, he reconstructed the life of his mother, Brigitte Frank, the wife of Hitler's governor-general in Nazi-occupied Poland. The author excoriates his mother for her heartlessness, opportunism, and utter disinterest in the political iniquity that facilitated her lavish lifestyle. In the epilogue to his book, Frank broadens his gaze, venting his bile at an entire generation of German women:

Die Letzten leben noch unter uns. Grau oder weiß ihr Haar, sorgfältig onduliert, sauber das Gewand, modern im Stil, keine Oma will Oma sein. Hinter der auf jugendlich getrimmten Maske verbirgt sich die Hölle im Hirn: Sie haben geschwiegen. Sie schwammen wie Fettaugen auf dem Leid der Geknechteten. Sie ließen ihre Männer, Söhne und Väter Verbrechen verüben, haben ihnen zur Seite gestanden, haben nie erzählt, was sie gesehen, gewusst, als gerecht empfunden haben: den Tod von unzähligen unschuldigen Menschen.

[The last ones are still living among us, their hair gray or white, carefully styled, their dresses clean and modern: no grandmother wants to be a granny. Behind this mask, projecting youth, lurks the hell in their minds: they kept quiet. They swam like drops of grease on the suffering of the downtrodden. They allowed their men, sons, and husbands, to commit crimes, stood by them, never betrayed what they saw, what they knew, and what they found just: the death of countless innocent human beings.]

Frank impugns the images of women that populate the cultural memory of the Second World War. If women are not remembered primarily as victims of war, he asserts, they are imagined as post hoc redeemers of the nation, as the Trümmerfrauen (rubble women) who helped to rebuild Germany brick-by-brick. This book explores why women's complicity in the Third Reich struggled to capture the cultural imagination in the same way. Until the rise of social history in the 1960s, historical accounts of Nazism and its roots focused on men and totalitarian structures. The new approach to historiography shifted attention away from the traditional subjects of historical research (foreign and military policy) to everyday life in the Third Reich. At this time, National Socialism was broadly understood as “the ultimate in male chauvinism”—in ideology if not in practice.