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13 Work, Gender and Everyday Life: Reflections On Continuity, Normality and Agency in Twentieth-Century Germany
13 Work, Gender and Everyday Life: Reflections On Continuity, Normality and Agency in Twentieth-Century Germany
Until the mid-1970s the social history of the Third Reich was a terra
incognita. Since then it has become an extensively explored but highly
contested terrain. Everyday life in all its diversity and complexity has
been thickly described and redescribed. We have innumerable studies
of the changing nature of work and attitudes toward it, both official and
unofficial. Working-class sociability on and off the shopfloor, the leisure
activities of women and men, the changing face of village politics and
office interactions, the experiences of those who joined Nazi organisa-
tions and those who distanced themselves from them have all been
reconstructed. More recently the policies toward and experiences of
women as well as the Nazis' preoccupation with gender issues have
been investigated. While the initial body of work focused primarily on
the period from 1933-1939, more recent studies concentrate on the war
and immediate post-war era or span the years from the mid- and late
1920s to the mid-1930s.
The social history of Nazi Germany has been written primarily by
leftists, feminists, and proponents of Alltagsgeschichte or the history of
everyday life - three contentious and controversial groups. From its
inception, the social history of Nazi Germany, understood as history
from below, the history of the inarticulate and marginalised, the history
of that which was unpolitical or not traditionally considered political,
aimed to be methodologically unconventional, theoretically unortho-
dox, and politically provocative. From Tim Mason's pioneering study of
the working class in Nazi Germany, through diverse efforts to specify
the forms and meanings of opposition and collaboration, distancing and
participation by men and women, to explorations of economic and
social rationalisation, anti-feminism, and racism, from studies of the
home and the home front to examinations of the Eastern Front, the social
histories of the Third Reich have sparked vigorous debates.1
1
Specific works will be referred to below. For an overview of German social history see
311
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MARY NOLAN
What then, have been the main controversies and what balance - if
any - can we draw after two decades of research and dialogue? Let us
look first at the principle paradigms and issues which have structured
these debates and the main issues raised in them and then explore three
substantive themes in which these issues are intertwined and for which
different paradigms offer competing interpretations: work and the
working class; women and gender; and politics and everyday life.
The debates
Class, race, and gender, that trinity of analytical categories, have
structured approaches to the social history of Nazi Germany in ways
that have often been highly contentious and mutually exclusive.
Historians have argued for the primacy of class conflict or biological
politics or the oppression of women more often than they have explored
their interactions. The social history of Nazi Germany was initially
written by left scholars, who analysed Nazi Germany in terms of
fascism - and hence capitalism - and who privileged class relationships.
Mason's pioneering study of the working class and social policy in Nazi
Germany was followed by a host of studies which examined the
persistence of class and the manifestations of oppositional attitudes and
behaviours but also uncovered sources of integration, cooptation, and
collaboration with the regime and its many organisations.2 These
scholars were seeking, if not a usable past, at least one in which National
Socialism did not uniformly control all aspects of life and thought.
The primacy accorded to class was subsequently challenged from two
directions. Feminist historians in Germany and abroad not only un-
covered the history of women in Nazi Germany, but asserted the
centrality of gender concerns and of misogyny and anti-feminism in
Nazi ideology and policy.3 Scholars working first on Nazi medicine
Geoff Eley, Tabor History, Social History, Alltagsgeschichte: Experience, Culture and
Politics of the Everyday - a New Direction for German Social History7, Journal of Modern
History 61 (June 1989), pp. 297-343; Robert Fletcher, Journal of Modern History 60
(September 1988), pp. 557-68. For an introduction to the social history of National
socialism see Mary Nolan, The Historikerstreit and Social History", New German Critique,
44 (Spring/Summer 1988), pp. 51-80. For an introduction to studies of women and
gender in the Nazi Germany, see Eve Rosenhaft, "Women in Modern Germany', in
Modern Germany Reconsidered, 1870-1945, ed. by Gordon Martel (London, Routledge
1992), pp. 140-58.
2
The main works in English are Timothy W. Mason, Social Policy in the Third Reich
(Providence/Oxford, Berg 1993). This is a translation of his Sozialpolitik im Dritten Reich:
Arbeiterklasse und Volksgemeinschaft (Opladen, Westdeutscher Verlag 1977); Detlev
Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition and Racism in Everyday Life (New
Haven, Yale University Press 1987).
3
The state of debate and research can best be gleaned from two old and one recent
collection of essays. Mutterkreuz und Arbeitsbuch: Zur Geschichte der Frauen in der
Weimarer Republik und im Nationalsozialismus, ed. by Frauengruppe Faschismusfor-
312
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WORK, GENDER AND EVERYDAY LIFE IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY GERMANY
and Nazi doctors and then on biological politics more broadly came to
see Nazi Germany as a quintessential^ 'racial state', to borrow the title
of Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann's study of Nazi racism
and racial policies.4
Methodologically, the social histories of the Third Reich have been
eclectic. Some drew heavily on the 'new' working-class history of the
1960s and 1970s and were explicitly informed by contemporary neo-
Marxist debates about fascism. Others were concerned with the social
consequences of state policies and with the popular responses to them.
Still other works have been primarily informed by Alltagsgeschichte,
which seeks to reconstruct everyday life and uncover subjective experi-
ence. Some rely primarily on sources generated by the Nazi regime,
such as Gestapo reports, others on documents from firms and private
organisations, and still others from memoirs, letters, and oral histories.
Whatever categories, methodologies, and specific subject matter they
have chosen, the social historians of the Third Reich have grappled with
three broad problematics. The first involves issues of continuity and
discontinuity in twentieth-century German history. The second focuses
on agency and power, or, more pointedly, on the question of who was
an agent {Titter) and who a victim (Opfer) under National Socialism. The
third concerns the implications of normality, of everydayness, be it in
the factory, in the home or on the battle front, for understanding the
social history of the Third Reich, popular attitudes toward it, and its
place in German history.
German history is rife with debates about continuity from the
Kaiserreich to the Third Reich, from the Weimar Republic to National
Socialism, and from Nazi Germany to the Federal Republic and the
German Democratic Republic. Social history has intensified these
debates and injected new themes - work and social policy, economic
and social rationalisation, leisure activities and reading habits, fertility
patterns and family strategies.5 It has examined more traditional topics
- ideology, discourse, the army, and the shifting relationships between
schung (Frankfurt am M., Fischer 1981); When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar
and Nazi Germany, ed. by Renata Bridenthal, Atina Grossmann, Marion Kaplan (New
York, Monthly Review 1984); Tochterfragen: NS-Frauengeschichte, ed. Lerke Grevenhorst
and Carmen Tatschmurat (Freiburg i. Br., Kore 1990).
4
Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State. Germany 1933-1945
(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 1991); Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors
(New York, Basic Books 1986); Robert N. Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis
(Cambridge, Harvard University Press 1988); Paul J. Weindling, Health, Race and German
Politics between National Unification and Nazism 1870-1945 (Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press 1989).
5
In addition to the section on work below, see Anson Rabinbach, The Aesthetics of
Production in the Third Reich', Journal of Contemporary History 11:4 (1974), pp. 43-74;
Carola Sachse, Tilla Siegel, Hasso Spode and Wolfgang Spohn, Angst, Belohnung, Zucht
und Ordnung (Opladen, Westdeutscher Verlag 1982); Marie-Luise Recker, National-
sozialistische Sozialpolitik im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Munich, R. Oldenbourg 1985).
313
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MARY NOLAN
the public and the private - from the bottom up.6 Questions of
continuity and discontinuity have obvious implications for understand-
ing the nature of the varied regimes that have occupied the shifting
territory of twentieth-century Germany, for assessing the forces respon-
sible for their creation and perpetuation, and for evaluating the
relationships between state and society.7 Did 1933 and 1945 mark breaks
or were there significant continuities in elites and institutions, in social
policies and class structure, in cultures high and low? Do the continu-
ities discovered in the economic, social, and cultural realms imply that
Nazi Germany was in certain respects normal, unexceptional, even
uncontaminated by the regime's ideology and policies?
For social historians, issues of continuity and discontinuity have
frequently been debated in terms of modernity and tradition. To what
extent did the Third Reich initiate processes of modernisation, be they in
work organisation, wages, women's workforce participation, family
size and leisure activities? Or, to put the issue more precisely, how was
the relationship between the 'modern' and the 'traditional' in both
social life and in its conceptualisation in ideology and popular con-
sciousness renegotiated in the Nazi era? ('Modern' and 'traditional' are
admittedly elusive terms, but are preferable to 'modernisation', which
more strongly implies a coherence, a uniform rationality, and a
teleology that the combined, uneven, contradictory, and frequently
irrational developments of Nazi Germany - and not just Germany -
belie.8)
Social historians have frequently sought out manifestations of oppo-
sition or Resistenz, terms covering a range of behaviours and attitudes
lying between fundamental endorsement of the regime and wholesale
and active resistance (Widerstand) to it.9 They have listened for silenced
6
Major works include the multivolume Bayem in der NS Zeit, ed. by Martin Broszat, et al.
(Munich, R. Oldenbourg 1972-81); Sarah Gordon, Hitler, Germans and the 'Jewish
Question' (Princeton, Princeton University Press 1984); Ian Kershaw, Popular Opinion and
Political Dissent in the Third Reich, Bavaria 1933-1945 (Oxford, Oxford University Press
1984). For an introduction to the social history of the army see Omer Bartov, 'Soldiers,
Nazis, and War in the Third Reich', Journal of Modern History, 63 (March 1991), pp. 44-60.
7
For an introduction to the voluminous debates about continuity and German peculiar-
ity, see David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History (Oxford,
Oxford University Press 1984) and Hans-Ulrich Wehler, The German Empire (Leaming-
ton Spa/Dover, New Hampshire, Berg Press 1985). For an overview of recent works on
continuities and discontinuities from the Third Reich to the Federal Republic, see
Harold James, 'The Prehistory of the Federal Republic', Journal of Modern History 63
(March 1991), pp. 99-115.
8
For an introduction to debates on modernity and modernisation, see Nationalsozialismus
and Modernisierung, ed. by Michael Prinz and Rainer Zitelmann (Darmstadt, Wissen-
schaftliche Buchgesellschaft 1991). See also Detlev Peukert, The Weimar Republic: Crisis of
Classical Modernity (New York, Hill and Wang 1992).
9
Martin Broszat offers the most useful definition of these terms in 'Resistenz und
Widerstand: Eine Zwischenbilanz des Forschungsprojekts "Widerstand und Verfol-
314
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WORK, GENDER AND EVERYDAY LIFE IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY GERMANY
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MARY NOLAN
ities in the economic, social, and cultural realms across the period from
the 1920s to the 1950s and the 'normality', real and perceived, of many
aspects of Nazi society. They have reconstructed everyday life in all its
often mundane repetitiveness; they have uncovered long-term secular
trends that seem little influenced by Nazi policy even if they were either
masked or packaged in new Nazi ideology. It is abundantly clear from
oral testimonies that many Germans remember numerous aspects of life
in the Third Reich as normal, and they claim to have avoided participa-
tion and ideological contamination by escaping into a purportedly
unpolitical world of work or home or leisure. In both popular memory
and the conceptual vocabulary of many historians, the normal and the
unpolitical are seen as integrally related attributes. Precisely this
association is problematic, for representations in memory do not
necessarily reflect the reality of Nazi Germany. Historians must ask
whether people were unpolitical and therefore uncomplicitous or
whether all aspects of everyday life were politicised, blatantly or subtly?
Were the words and categories in which everyday life was constructed
and perceived tainted by the regime's antisemitism and racism, by its
sexism and homophobia, by its draconian work ethic and rabid
nationalism? Finally, how is one to weigh what is remembered as
normal - the 1930s and the war on the western front, as opposed to what
is repressed - the war on the eastern front and the Holocaust?
Other historians, who have sought to link the 1930s to the war years,
the occupied territories to the home front, have explored how abnormal
behaviour, i.e. racist and genocidal actions, came to be understood by
those engaged in them as normal. Historians of Nazi medicine have
traced the racialisation and radicalisation of eugenics and the reconcep-
tualisation of the task of the doctors from curing the individual to curing
the 'nation's body' (Volkskorper). These transformations were central to
the planning and execution of compulsory sterilisation, euthanasia, and
genocide, and to understanding the central role of doctors in them.14
Others, such as Gotz Aly and Susanne Heim, trace the work of
economists and statisticians, population experts and urban planners,
administrators and agronomists, arguing that they conceptualised and
participated in deportations, population transfers, massive and invol-
untary labour deployments and eventually genocide, seeing it as part of
the normal practice of rational economic and social modernisation.15
Historians of the German army and of the war on the eastern front, such
as Omar Bartov and Christopher Browning, have sought to explain why
extreme brutality and racism became normal practice on the eastern
14
See Lifton, The Nazi Doctors, and Proctor, Racial Hygiene.
15
Gotz Aly and Susanne Heim, Vordenker der Vernichtung: Auschwitz und die deutschen
Plane fiir eine neue europaische Ordnung (Frankfurt am M., Fischer 1993).
316
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WORK, GENDER AND EVERYDAY LIFE IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY GERMANY
front and why participation in killing Jews and Russian POWs and
civilians was considered routine.16 The normality at the heart of these
varied arguments is one of racism in high politics, intellectual and
expert thought, and everyday life.
The implications of continuity and normality have been at the heart of
bitter disagreements over whether National Socialism can be his-
toricised, a term covering three closely interconnected but nonetheless
separate issues. The first, and central, question involves the place of
Auschwitz in the historical reconstruction of the Third Reich. Should
Auschwitz be the central point to which all developments during the
Third Reich must refer or does that distort parts of the Nazi era which
can best be understood primarily with reference to non-Nazi traditions
and developments.17 A second issue involves whether the Nazi era is
capable of being understood historically, as Martin Broszat has argued,
or whether, as Dan Diner insists, Auschwitz is the central fact of Nazi
Germany and represents 'a no-man's-land of understanding, a black
box of explanation, a vacuum of extrahistorical significance, which
sucks up attempts at historiographical interpretation'.18 And if histori-
cal understanding is possible, can the historian of National Socialism
employ the same methods as the historian of any other era? Should s/he
abandon the distancing from the subject that has characterised most
work on the Third Reich?
A third dimension of the debates about historicisation involves the
place of National Socialism in twentieth-century German history. In the
Historikerstreit of the mid- and late 1980s, conservative historians, such
as Ernst Nolte, Michael Stunner, Klaus Hildebrandt, and Andreas
Hillgruber, sought to historicise and relativise National Socialism, to
acknowledge but minimise the Holocaust by comparing it to other
twentieth-century genocides. Nolte, going much further than his con-
servative colleagues, saw Auschwitz as an imitation of the Gulag and
argued that genocide was undertaken to ward off an 'asiatic deed' by
the Bolsheviks. These strategies contrast sharply with Broszat's insist-
ence that Auschwitz was unique, even if many aspects of the Third
Reich were uncontaminated by and explicable without reference to it. It
is even more distant from those who see the Holocaust as unique, even
16
Omer Bartov, Hitler's Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (New York, Oxford
University Press 1992); Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion
101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York, Harper Collins 1992).
17
Broszat, 'A Controversy about the Historicization of National Socialism' (see note 18),
p. 103 and Broszat, Tlaydoyer fur eine Historisierung des Nationalsozialismus',
Merkur 39:5 (May 1986), pp. 373-85.
18
Broszat, 'A Controversy about the Historicization of National Socialism'; Dan Diner,
'Between Aporia and Apology: On the Limits of Historicizing National Socialism', both
in Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust and the Historians' Debate, ed. by Peter Baldwin
(Boston, Beacon 1990), p. 144.
317
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WORK, GENDER AND EVERYDAY LIFE IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY GERMANY
most offensive aspects of the regime's ideology and politics - and what
the consequences of such actions were - the stabilisation of the regime
and the persecution of its many victims. In short, social historians and
women's historians must decide whether ambivalence and indifference
are to be categorised positively as Resistenz, negatively as complicity, or
as some complex and shifting combination of the two. Did people
tolerate and actively support antisemitism, racism, terror, and murder
from fear, from a desire to survive, from pre-Nazi prejudices, or from
ideological commitment to National Socialism? And how many moved
from the former camp to the latter?
In exploring agency and responsibility, some social historians have
even challenged prevailing definitions of victims and perpetrators. To
be sure, many categories of victims remain appallingly clearly defined -
Jews and Gypsies, Russians and Poles, 'asocials' and homosexuals, and
politically active Communists and Social Democrats. But what of
working-class men, or women of all classes? Both broad categories were
in various ways relegated to subordinate social and economic, and, in
the case of women, biological positions. Political persecution, wage
discrimination, repressive pronatalism, and exclusion from high poli-
tics persisted throughout the Third Reich. Yet, both women and
workers received benefits as well. Historians disagree about whether
they benefitted from just the welfare and recreational aspects of the
regime or also from participation in its multiple opportunities to exert
power and control over others.22 And how did such involvement affect
both people's consciousness and behaviour and the survival and
cumulative radicalisation of the regime?
These overlapping controversies about continuity, normality, and
agency, and about the place of the Third Reich in twentieth-century
German history, erupted with particular intensity during the Historiker-
streit of the mid- and late 1980s and then subsided in the early 1990s for
many reasons, not least because reunification dramatically altered the
political context which spawned them. In both East and West Germany
attention focused on coming to terms with the East's past. The
experience of the GDR complicates the trajectories of class politics,
workers' cultures, gender relationships, and social and political identi-
ties in twentieth-century Germany. It complicates the ongoing German
effort to define its national identity for the twenty-first century based on
its history in the twentieth. But it does not eliminate the need to reflect
on National Socialism. However repressive, depressing, and oppressive
the German Democratic Republic was, it was not a racist and genocidal
22
For a discussion of these 'Herrschaftsbetriebe', see Michael Geyer, The State in National
Socialist Germany', in Statemaking and Social Movements, ed. by Charles Bright and
Susan Harding (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press 1984), pp. 193-232.
319
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MARY NOLAN
regime like National Socialism, and it will not diminish the centrality of
the latter in twentieth-century German history.
23
Contrast, for example, Franz Neumann's Behemoth (New York, Harper Torch 1966) with
such works as Mason, Social Policy; Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany; Sachse et al., Angst;
and Alf Liidtke, Eigensinn: Fabrikalltag, Arbeitererfahrungen und Politik vom Kaiserreich bis
in den Faschismus (Hamburg, Ergebnisse 1993).
320
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WORK, GENDER AND EVERYDAY LIFE IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY GERMANY
hierarchies, and job training were transformed in fits and starts. These
transformations were clothed in varied combinations of traditional and
modern rhetoric, and were supported with varied degrees of enthusi-
asm by industry, the state, and, at times, even the workers' movements.
An exploration of economic and social rationalisation will shed light not
only on the fate of the German working class under Nazism, but also on
the broader themes of continuity, modernity and normality.
During the 1920s, economic and social rationalisation were enthusi-
astically endorsed by industrialists and trade unionists, engineers,
industrial sociologists and psychologists. Rationalisation was a slogan
for productivity and efficiency, for science and prosperity, for ill-
defined visions of modernity more broadly.24 It was an umbrella term
for the various means through which and levels on which this modern-
isation was to occur. Technological and organisational rationalisation
referred to those changes most directly effecting production. Concentra-
tion mechanisation, flow production, the assembly line, standardisa-
tion, and various Taylorist measures, such as time and motion studies,
fell under this rubric. Negative rationalisation was a euphemism for the
ruthless closing of inefficient plants. And human rationalisation (men-
schliche Rationalisierung) referred not only to industrial psychology,
personnel management, and vocational aptitude testing, but also to new
skill-training programmes and a new and comprehensive range of
company social and welfare policies, aimed both at tying workers to the
firm and at creating a new worker and new working-class family, suited
to the new rationalised work.25 The Weimar rationalisation campaign
was accompanied by an enthusiasm for Fordism, as the technical system
and economic ideology associated with the Ford Automobile Company
were called. The incompatible economic reform visions of industrialists
and trade union functionaries, of engineers and politicians, were
couched in terms of irreconcilable understandings of American econ-
24
For a discussion of the many meanings of this term and an analysis of the Weimar
rationalisation movement, see Mary Nolan, Visions of Modernity: American Business and
the Modernization of Germany (New York, Oxford University Press 1994).
25
Robert Brady, The Rationalization Movement in German Industry (Berkeley, University of
California 1933) remains the best survey of technical and economic rationalisation in
English, while the Handbuch der Rationalisierung published by the Reichskuratorium fiir
Wirtschaftlichkeit is the most comprehensive contemporary survey in German. For
Weimar rationalisation, see Thomas von Freyberg, Industrielle Rationalisierung in der
Weimarer Republik (Frankfurt, Campus 1989) and Heidrun Homburg, Rationalisierung
und Industriearbeit (Berlin, Haude and Spener 1991). Peter Hinrichs, Um die Seele des
Arbeiters: Arbeitspsychologie, Industrie- und Betriebssoziologie in Deutschland (Cologne,
Pahl-Rugenstein 1981) and Carola Sachse, Siemens, der Nationalsozialismus und die
moderne Familie. Eine Untersuchung zur sozialen Rationalisierung in Deutschland im 20.
Jahrhundert (Hamburg, Rasch und Rohring 1990) provide the best overviews of human
rationalisation.
321
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MARY NOLAN
was male, of course), in the middle ranks were less skilled German men
and, below them, women, and at the bottom the less efficient, purpor-
tedly racially inferior foreign workers. Outside the hierarchy, but
nonetheless central to its construction, were Jews on the one hand and
on the other, the unproductive, a diverse and quintessentially Nazi
category containing the 'asocials' and the 'eugenically unfit', the
'work-shy' and the undisciplined, the homeless and the handicapped.
As Germany moved from rearmament through Blitzkrieg to total war,
the number of foreign workers, voluntary or coerced, increased ex-
ponentially even though their presence violated the Nazi desire for a
racially homogeneous nation.52 By the summer of 1941 there were 3
million foreign workers, by the autumn of 1944 7.7 million. By 1944 over
one-quarter of all employees were foreigners; in the key sectors of
mining, construction, and metals, the figure was nearly one-third and in
agriculture almost one-half.53 If foreign workers could not be dispensed
with, in part because the regime was not willing to mobilise all
women,54 they could be classified by race, in a carefully graded
hierarchy that placed Danes on top and Russians on the bottom. Wages
and working conditions, food and housing, restrictions and punish-
ments became ever harsher as one moved down the racial hierarchy. In
factories and on farms, the invisible Leistungsunfdhige were replaced by
the ever present foreign worker, labelled inferior in race, efficiency and,
if female, still further discriminated against. Many German workers
moved into supervisory positions in this restructured workforce,
elevated both by new tasks and by the elaboration of categories
ostensibly inferior to themselves.
Racism and rationalisation were inextricably intertwined not only in
the Nazi economy at home but in Nazi plans to restructure Central and
Eastern Europe, economically and racially. Economists and population
planners, agronomists and statisticians, working for the Four-Year Plan
and a variety of other Nazi agencies, developed and implemented a
blueprint to 'modernise' the economies of Austria, Poland, and Russia
by eliminating inefficient productive units - many of which were Jewish
- and by solving the problem of overpopulation. The methods sanc-
52
See Ulrich Herbert, Fremdarbeiter: Politik und Praxis des 'Auslander-Einsatzes' in der
Kriegswirtschaft des Dritten Reiches (Berlin, Dietz 1989) for the debates about this at
various stages of the war. The book also contains a detailed history of the treatment of
foreign workers. An English summary of his findings appears in Herbert, A History of
Foreign Labor in Germany, 1880-1980 (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press 1990),
pp. 127-92.
53
Herbert, A History of Foreign Labor, pp. 155-6.
54
Drafting all women would not only violate the regime's ideological precepts, but more
importantly, might heighten male discontent and demoralisation, something Hitler
greatly feared because he believed that dissatisfied civilians had stabbed a potentially
victorious military in the back during World War I. Mason, Social Policy, pp. 19-40.
328
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MARY NOLAN
whether this changed over the course of the Third Reich. The Nazi
women's organisations, for example, were vast and among middle-
class women popular; their popularity came in part from imitating what
bourgeois feminist and religious women's organisations had previously
done, especially around social work and motherhood education. Simul-
taneously, the Nazi women's organisations exposed women much more
directly to the regime's eugenic and racial ideas.81 Women shared, albeit
very unequally, in the new leisure activities of the Strength Through Joy
organisation, and the League of German Girls offered young females an
appealing alternative to domestic drudgery and an opportunity to
develop skills.82 The regime did not just discipline and subordinate
women; it also bribed and benefitted them. It denied motherhood to
some women, even as it instrumentalised the idea of motherhood to
mobilise others.83
Women, especially middle-class ones who could avoid waged work,
sought to defend a separate women's sphere, a realm of domestic
comfort that was ostensibly uncontaminated by Nazi ideology and
policies. There is no simple way to assess the meaning and effects of
such actions. Some may have avoided employment out of dislike of the
regime, others from an aversion to waged labour. This avoidance of
waged work helped stabilise and legitimise the regime, by aiding
economic recovery before 1936, but contributed to the regime's labour
shortages and the workers' higher wages thereafter. The Nazis' refusal
to upset men by conscripting women undermined rearmament and
limited Nazi Germany's economic mobilisation for war prior to 1940 but
it also limited deprivations on the homefront and increased the regime's
popularity. The same complex of forces that protected ethnically
German women and men alike, however, led to the hyperexploitation of
foreign workers - female and male - within Germany after 1940.
Whether employed or not, ethnically German women were incorpor-
ated into the racial hierarchies that permeated and dominated wartime
Nazi Germany.
The meaning of women's everyday life for the fate of the regime is
also difficult to assess. Did women's traditional activities as mothers
and homemakers represent an escape into a neutral, genuinely private
sphere, or did Nazism eradicate any clear line between public and
private by its invasive practices and ideological mobilisation? Did a
retreat into domesticity - real or imagined - help create a refuge from
81
Koonz, Mothers, pp. 218, 252-62.
82
Hasso Spode, 'Arbeiterurlaub im Dritten Reich7, in Sachse et al., Angst, pp. 275-328;
Frevert, Women p. 242.
83
As Grossmann correctly points out, the issue of motherhood is central to this debate.
'Feminist Debates', pp. 354-5.
336
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WORK, GENDER AND EVERYDAY LIFE IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY GERMANY
the regime, or did retreat into that haven, like retreat into the workplace,
help stabilise the regime? Was it one factor among many that enabled
some individuals to ignore the crimes of the regime and others to
perpetrate them, as Koonz has argued?84 Or does that posit a collective
guilt that blurs genuine responsibility and precludes an historically
nuanced understanding of participation and distancing, of intention
and outcome? Explorations of everyday life, which unfortunately often
ignore gender, nonetheless suggest how we might answer such ques-
tions.
84
Koonz, Mothers, pp. 419-20.
85
More systematic comparisons with both Fascist Italy and the family and welfare
policies of other European countries are necessary before one could argue with
precision about which policies were unique and which were an extension of policies
adopted in other countries. Pro-natalism would be a good place to start.
337
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MARY NOLAN
regime.86 Recent works, however, suggest that the private was trans-
formed and politicised much more than memory acknowledges.
The private was impoverished and isolated on the one hand, but it
was penetrated by selected Nazi categories and ideas (although not by
the Nazi ideology wholesale) on the other hand.87 Anson Rabinbach's
study of reading habits in the Third Reich indicates one form of this
penetration. Women who were surveyed by Strength Through Joy
about how they preferred to spend their leisure time, stated unequivo-
cally their wish to read. This Lesehunger revealed a desire for nonpar-
ticipation in Nazi organisations, just as it showed an individualisation
of activities and the isolation of people in the private realm. But
Rabinbach's analysis of what was read uncovered just how many Nazi
ideas about race and gender, about the Volksgemeinschaft and the threats
to it, structured the ostensibly unpolitical fiction that was preferred.88
Heidi Gerstenberger's exploration of the public discourse around such
issues as the homeless, reveals that people adopted new Nazi social
science categories such as Nichtsesshafte in place of older, more picar-
esque ones, such as Landstreicher and in the process learned to see the
homeless as part of an inferior group of 'asocials'.89
Works on eugenics and sterilisation suggest how pervasive accept-
ance of Nazi 'racial science' was, and not just among the medical
profession.90 To be sure, there were innumerable protests against
individual sterilisation orders, but people did not object to the idea of
sterilisation as a solution to social problems or to the categories
considered for sterilisation; rather they questioned whether an individ-
ual in fact belonged to the category of, for example, the schizophrenic or
the handicapped. It is impossible to know whether this was done from
conviction or convenience, but in either case Nazi categories were
legitimated even as Individual exemptions were sought.91
Robert Gellately's study of the Gestapo revealed from a somewhat
different perspective the complex intertwining of public and private.
86
Die Jahre weiss man nicht. The recent oral history project of the former German
Democratic Republic uncovered similar memories of the family as an unpolitical
refuge. Lutz Niethammer, Alexander von Plato, and Dorothee Wierling, Die volk-
seigenen Erfahrungen. Eine Archaologie des Lebens in der Industrieprovinz der DDR (Berlin,
Rowohlt 1991).
87
Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany, pp. 209-23, 240.
88
Anson Rabinbach, 'The Reader, the Popular Novel and the Imperative to Participate:
Reflections on Public and Private Experience in the Third Reich', History and Memory 3:2
(Fall/Winter 1991), pp. 5-44.
89
Heidi Gerstenberger, 'Alltagsforschung und Faschismustheorie', in Normalitat oder
Normalisierung, p. 44.
90
Burleigh and Wippermann, Racial State, pp. 136-82; Proctor, Racial Hygiene, passim;
Weindling, Health, pp. 489-564.
91
For discussions of protests against sterilisation, see Bock, Zwangssterilisation and
Koonz, work in progress on the Rassenpolitisches Amt.
338
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MARY NOLAN
A growing body of research on both the home front and the Eastern
Front suggests that World War II marked a significant break in the
relationship of everyday life to the institutions and racial policies of the
regime. People's attitudes and behaviour on racial issues changed as
did the context in which they lived. If many people could distance
themselves from the regime's racial ideology and policies before 1940, it
was much harder to do so thereafter both because of foreign workers
within Germany and because of the antisemitic and racist policies of the
army and SS on the Eastern Front and in occupied Poland.
As we saw earlier, rationalisation and racism interacted to reshape
the structure of the working class and the organisation of factories and
farms in wartime Germany. This wartime experience reshaped the
consciousness of ethnically German workers. The presence of a large
number of foreign, and often slave labourers, working with Germans
but living in virtual apartheid, led German workers to reassess notions
of hierarchy and to question the permanence of the preexisting social
order.96 Nationality proved a more important basis for solidarity than
class, as the pervasive lack of concern shown by German workers
toward the foreigners in their midst showed.97 Workers, like the rest of
the population, came to accept the racial ordering of work as given, and
this racial ordering promoted passivity.98 After 1941 morale on the
home front was not notably high and the growing burdens of the war
economy were not shouldered enthusiastically, but they were not
resisted.99
Nor was there evidence of resistance on the Eastern Front, where the
overwhelming majority of German soldiers fought. As Mason con-
cluded, the army's morale was much higher than that of civilians;
German soldiers displayed 'enthusiasm, commitment and discipline ...
Making war seems to have been experienced as a more positive activity
than making munitions or mining coal'.100 Why this was so and what
this meant for the conduct of the war in the East has been the subject of
intensive research by historians of the Germany army.
From Christian Streit's indictment of the officer corps for actively
formulating the Commissar Order and annihilating Soviet POWs
through Omer Bartov's study of the brutal behaviour of three frontline
units to Theo Schulte's investigation of the actions of occupying forces
behind the front lines to Christopher Browning's reconstruction of the
96
Ulrich Herbert, 'Apartheid nebenan, Erinnerungen an die Fremdarbeiter im Ruhr-
gebiet', in Die Jahre weiss man nicht, pp. 233-67.
97
Herbert, 'Arbeiterschaft', p. 332.
98
Ulrich Herbert, 'Arbeiterschaft unter der NS-Diktatur', in Burgerliche Gesellschaft in
Deutschland, ed. Lutz Niethammer et al. (Frankfurt a.M., Fischer Taschenbuch 1990), p.
465. " Mason, 'Women in Nazi Germany', pp. 333-4.
100
Mason, 'Women in Nazi Germany, p. 334.
340
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MARY NOLAN
waged, that was crucial. As the war progressed those on the battlefront
as well as those on the homefront were surrounded by racist structures
and practices of domination. The many forms of Resistenz which had
proliferated in the 1930s seem to have all but ceased after 1940.
According to Michael Geyer:
. . . by 1942-43 it needed an extraordinary effort and strong
convictions to evade the emerging new society; for racism per-
meated every aspect of life in occupied Europe. It had ceased to be a
matter of individually embracing racist ideologies. Rather, it was
the established practice of social organization that was almost
impossible to evade.108
This argument captures the prevalence of racism as the governing and
structuring principle of wartime Germany, but it circumvents the issue
of agency, of motivation. Did individuals, in fact, embrace racist
ideologies?
Ulrich Herbert suggested that participation in conquest and occupa-
tion reinforced existing ideas of racial superiority (both Nazi and
pre-Nazi) in the population at large.109 Recently discovered correspon-
dence from soldiers on the Eastern Front lends support to this. It was not
merely that Wehrmacht officers on all levels preached antisemitism and
racism, that they deified Hitler and dehumanised the enemy. The
private correspondence of soldiers to their families and to their
co-workers in factories in Germany reproduced this political and racial
demonisation of the enemy. These letters contained repeated endorse-
ments of the regime's hatred of those perceived as inferior 'others' - be
they Jews, Poles, or Russians; they expressed unequivocal adulation for
Hitler, and promised to fight to the death for the cause.110 The line
between public rhetoric and private perception was blurred, and the
regime mobilised prevailing conceptions of masculinity and work for
ideological race war. As Liidtke concluded after reading many such
letters from blue- and white-collar workers:
many individuals perceived their masculinity in military terms and
images. To these people, their original claim to perform a 'clean' job
at home increasingly became linked to the efficient killing oper-
ations of the army. In the end, participation in the extermination of
'others' might appear to many as the ultimate fulfilment of those
cherished notions of 'German quality work'.111
108 109
Michael Geyer, The State', p. 218. Herbert, 'Arbeiterschaft', p. 353.
110
Bartov, Hitler's Army, pp. 145-52. Alf Liidtke, The Appeal of Exterminating "Others":
German Workers and the Limits of Resistance', Journal of Modern History 64,
Supplement (December 1992), pp. S46-S67.
111
Ludtke, The Appeal of Exterminating "Others",' pp. S66-S67.
342
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