8 - The Vulnerable Dwelling

Summary

This chapter argues that the National Socialist regime, despite its urge to penetrate and control all facets of individuals’ lives, did nevertheless also acknowledge and uphold certain notions of spatial and domestic privacy, if not always consistently. In order to explore this, the chapter examines the actions of the judiciary in relation to private space in different types of court cases. These cases include breaches of domestic peace; ‘treachery towards the state’ where utterances critical of the regime were made within the home; marital relations and marital conflicts within family law; and the law on tenancy. Overall, the chapter shows that National Socialism enabled those whom it deemed ‘desirable’ to enjoy a domestic life and to pursue private interests, but the degrees of privacy granted by the law were at no point guaranteed and were regarded as privileges that could be revoked.